A fistful of strange Tales

by E.Van Johnson

Overview

Divided into sections with similar themes.
Strange tales; deals with how the mind often plays trick on us.
Tales from the village; were written in and about the village of Bowes in the Yorkshire Dales.
Northern tales; come mostly from my childhood being brought up during the war in the North of England.
Written just for fun; are a series of short tales that have no common theme.

Product Details

BN ID:	2940162113485
Publisher:	Evan Johnson
Publication date:	07/10/2018
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
File size:	300 KB

About the Author

About the author.

E.Van Johnson, or Van as prefers to be called, was born in Whitley Bay near Newcastle upon Tyne to an English mother and Greek Cypriot father. Unusually, he was baptised twice; once in the Greek Orthodox Church as Evangelos Iannous and in the Church of England as Evan Johnson.
Graduating from Naval College in 1955 he went to sea as a Navigating Officer and sailed the world visiting many out of the way places such as Borneo, the Pitcairn and Galapagos Islands.
He left the sea in the early 1960’s and earned his living as a singer/Guitarist meeting and played with many well- known musicians including Diz Disley and Stephan Grapelli; Robert Plant and Eric Clapton and appeared on several TV music shows of the day.
Unable to settle to shore life, he spent most of his summers as a lifeguard or skippering racing yachts by day and singing in coffee shops or hotels by night. Musicians were not well paid and he filled in doing film extra work and ended up as a stuntman on TV shows such as Ghost Squad, Emergency Ward Ten and Z Cars to name but a few. Later he joined the stunt team at Chamartine Studios in Madrid and worked on several films.
In 1964 he gained his Commercial Master Divers Certificate and spent the next thirty years working in the oil fields all over the world in places as far apart as Borneo and Brazil and New Zealand and Norway, diving to depths in excess of 750 feet, and with the advent of Saturation spent many days in decompression chambers.
Van began writing out of boredom in 1974. Being confined to a decompression chamber for 43 days and having read every book on the rig, he decided to write my own novel. It was a smugglers tale based in and around the North Sea Oilfields, it ran to 100,000 words and by his own admittance was a load of rubbish. A close family friend, Benita Brown who went on to become a well published author herself, suggested they join the Katherine Cookson Northern writers group, and a year later sold three plays for TV. Divorce and pressure of work overseas meant he stopped sending work out but kept jotting down ideas.
He retired to Mallorca in 2010 and decided to take up writing full time. Since then Van has had many articles published in the press and also published 10 novels, a collection of Short Stories and a book of Writing Tips which he uses when teaching creative writing.
Van now spends winters writing in Mallorca while spending much of the summer in his house in London.

Editorial Reviews

I loved the wide variety of subjects and the undercurrent of humour. Can't wait for the next one.

Amazon Kindle - Christine Cousins