The Old Limey

Brigadier General Nigel Haversham is the closest thing imaginable to a geriatric James Bond: a worldly soldier, a truly impressive drinker, a connoisseur of the female form, and, as he turns sixty, soon to be propelled into a land as dangerous as Papua New Guinea.

But there's something else about General Nigel Haversham: an outmoded sense of honour that makes him a twenty-first-century Don Quixote. He's a beau sabreur when sabreurs have gone out of fashion, an Errol Flynn—minus the accusations of drug addiction, statutory rape, and spying for the Nazis, of course—in an age of Quentin Tarantinos.

And it is in a war against the Pulp Fiction generation that he finds himself, as he travels to the wilds of Southern California to find his missing goddaughter, who might very well have been kidnapped by an English scamp of a drug-dealing, Hollywood-abiding Tarantino-wannabe.

But that bad boy is about to meet his match. Aided by two native guides—known to the California cognoscenti as "beach babes"—and allied with other colourful characters to form his own rainbow coalition of reaction, Nigel engages in a brilliant campaign to restore the English way of life, honour, and Victorian values—in contemporary Los Angeles.

You've heard of Beverly Hills Cop? Meet Her Majesty's Beverly Hills Conqueror.

H.W.Crocker III's novel of comic chaos—of beach babes, Jamaican drug gangs, and an elderly British general, feuding, fighting, but not quite fornicating, in a mad and hilarious search-and-rescue operation—keeps the reader both tense with excitement an convulsed with laughter. It marks the debut of a truly welcome American—or perhaps transatlantic—comic novelist in the vein of John Kennedy Toole, George Macdonald Fraser, Kingsley Amis, Evelyn Waugh, and P.G. Wodehouse.

About the Author:
Educated in England and California, H.W. Crocker III has worked as a journalist, speechwriter for the governor of California, and book editor, and is the author of the bestselling Robert E. Lee on Leadership. He lives in Northern Virginia, midway between the California and English coasts.