50°45′N 1°32′W · Lymington, Hampshire · 1782

Smuggler.
Prisoner.
Spy.

The five-book Tom Johnstone series follows a real Georgian Channel smuggler from a Lymington quay to Napoleon's invasion camp, and on to the last job of his life.

Start with Book One See all five books
The Tom Johnstone Series · I
The Making of a Smuggler
Mark French

“History remembers its heroes loudly. Thomas Johnstone was never one of them.”

He surfaced only when a particular skill was needed and vanished again once it had been used: precisely the sort of man a government disowns in public and depends upon in private.

From the author's preface

The series

Five books. One life
told the way he'd tell it.

An old man by his own fireside, dictating everything to his daughter Janet, who writes it down and doesn't always let him get away with it.

I
The Making of a Smuggler
Mark French

Book One · Lymington, 1782 to 1798

The Making of a Smuggler

At ten, Tom Johnstone fakes a bowline on his uncle's boat and is caught inside a minute. By fifteen he's on a dark beach with his father, meeting a French lugger. By six and twenty he's carried one passenger too many across the Channel, and the Crown wants to know why. A boyhood on the Solent marshes, a gaol in Winchester, a cell in London, and a way out that will cost more than he can pay.

Read more about Book One → Kindle · [RELEASE DATE]
II
The Double Game
Mark French

Book Two · Flushing, London, Southwold, 1799 to 1804

The Double Game

An outlaw in exile on the Dutch coast becomes, with a pardon and a thousand pounds, an agent of the Crown. Then London: a fashionable house in Berkeley Square, a Dutch beauty society calls the Tulip, and debts of eleven thousand pounds. It ends in the Fleet Prison, a rope ladder in the dark, and twelve armed customs officers off Southwold who somehow agree to drink the King's health instead of fighting.

Kindle · [RELEASE DATE]
III
The Emperor's Pilot
Mark French

Book Three · Boulogne to Walcheren, 1804 to 1809

The Emperor's Pilot

As many as two hundred thousand men wait at Boulogne for a fair wind to England, and Napoleon wants the best Channel pilot alive to lead them across. Tom says yes. Then he spends a year working against the Emperor from inside his own camp, alongside an American inventor with a submarine to sell, until Flushing, a cell under military guard, and the fever-ridden expedition of 1809.

Kindle · [RELEASE DATE]
IV
The Fox's Den
Mark French

Book Four · The Solent, 1809 to 1812

The Fox's Den

The most famous smuggler on the south coast is given command of a revenue cutter and told to catch his old friends. Forged Bank of England notes are turning up from Poole to Chichester, and someone in Paris is printing them. The story Tom never finished telling, set down by the daughter he told it to.

Kindle · [RELEASE DATE]
V
The Last Job
Mark French

Book Five · St Helena, London, Paris, 1820 to 1830

The Last Job

A submarine built on the Thames to pluck Napoleon off St Helena. A dead king, a missing set of royal jewels, and a great blue diamond stolen from the French Crown thirty years before. And one last summons for an old smuggler who should know better than to answer it.

Kindle · [RELEASE DATE]

The real man

History where it survives. A considered guess where it doesn't.

Captain Thomas Johnstone (1772 to 1839) was real. He did escape the Fleet Prison on a rope ladder, tearing his thigh open on a lamp bracket on the way down. He did talk a boatload of armed customs men off Southwold into a day's truce. Napoleon did try to hire him. And by more than one account he was given a government pension for his part in the attack on Flushing in 1809.

What the record doesn't say is how any of it happened, who was with him, or what was said. Every book in the series ends with a plain note on what is documented, what is invented, and what sits in between.

1798
Arrested, gaoled, escaped
£11,000
His London debts
1821
The St Helena submarine plot
[Author photo]

About the author

Mark French

Mark first met Thomas Johnstone in the pages of someone else's novel, and couldn't put down the question it raised: who was the real man, and how had a life this extraordinary gone so nearly unrecorded? The Making of a Smuggler is his debut, and the first of five.

He lives in the Cotswolds with his partner and their three daughters, Winnie the fox red Labrador, two cats and a rabbit.

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