Linda Davies and the Iranian Gunboats
Linda, her husband Rupert Wise, and Paul Shulton, an Australian friend were
sailing on a catamaran in the Persian Gulf when they were intercepted by two
Iranian gunboats and taken to Iran where they were held prisoner for 13 days.
They were finally released on 11 November 2005 after strenuous secret efforts
by the British Foreign Office and the Australian Government. For more
information see the reports below. This incident took place 16 months before
a group of 15 British sailors and Royal Marines were seized by Iranian
Revolutionary Guards in gunboats.
- Captured Britons
released in Iran
- BBC, 11 November 2005.
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"We set sail on a perfect summer's morning. Within hours we were in fear of
our lives" by Linda Wise.
- Daily Telegraph, 12 November 2005.
-
The banker with a CV out of a spy novel
- Daily Telegraph, 12 November 2005.
- Captive
trio's truth about their Iran drama is stranger than wife's
fiction
- Scotsman, 12 November 2005.
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Writer tells of Iran kidnap ordeal
- Western Mail, 12 November 2005.
-
Iran frees British couple after 13-day detention
- Guardian, November 11, 2005.
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Crime Writer Freed
- Daily Mirror, 12 November 2005.
- Australian
detained by Iran for 13 days
- ABC News, 12 November 2005.
- Straw "very
glad" British couple released by Iran
- Payvand's Iran News, November 11, 2005.
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- By coincidence sailing featured strongly in Linda's 5th novel,
Final Settlement, first published in Canada a few months earlier! An even stranger coincidence was that she had started work on a children's novel and had recently completed a chapter in which the parents of the main character were captured at sea! That book, Sea Djinn, was published in Dubai in November 2007.
Sea Djinn 
- A sea change
- An article about how Linda Davies came to write Sea Djinn and a review of the book, Khaleej Times, 14 December 2007.
- Gulfnews: Imagine!
- Daring and escape from reality is what drives Linda Davies' new work of fiction – Sea Djinn. A fine piece of prose, Suchitra Bajpai Chaudhary discovers that it is just the beginning ... Gulf News, December 13, 2007.
- Change of course
- If anyone is qualified to write a children's novel which includes a kidnap at sea, it is Dubai-based author Linda Davies.
Gulf News, November 23, 2007.
- Djinn tonic
- Be careful what you write. Two months into penning The Sea Djinn, her Dubai-set children’s novel involving the kidnap at sea of its hero’s parents, Linda Davies was kidnapped for real by the Iranian navy. She tells Mark Smith about fear, fiction and fantasy. Time Out Dubai, November 21 2007.
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- Sea Djinn should be available for order from a major British distributor some time in 2009.
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Books
A young derivatives trader suspected of fraud flees to
Peru only to find herself facing much greater unknown and unexpected perils.
The action ranges from the peaks of the banking world to the Andes, from the
financial jungle of the City of London to the real, Amazonian jungle, and
back again. A new edition has been published by Twenty
First Century Publishers.
A New England heiress whose life revolves around art and
sailing marries an architect whose mother, in her youth, had posed as a model
for many famous artists. Together they start to do up a ruined Scottish
castle but, after a near-fatal car accident, the young American woman loses
her memory. As she slowly recovers, she gradually becomes aware of what else
she is in danger of losing. The hardback came out in the UK in 2007 and is
available worldwide. The paperback had already been published in Canada.
Sarah Jensen, a brilliant and beautiful foreign exchange
dealer, becomes an undercover agent to investigate an apparently
straightforward case of insider trading and gets caught up in a much wider
international financial conspiracy affecting the operations of the central
banks of the G7 nations, which imperils her life.
The international diamond business forms a cover for the
activities of the secret services as two women, one an undercover agent and
former junkie, the other a venture capitalist, set out to trap a businessman
at the heart of a twisted maze of drug and arms smuggling by luring him into
a deal to raise finance for a mine to exploit a discovery of diamonds at a
remote location in Vietnam.
Rock and Roll meets banking when Sarah Jensen, the heroine
of Nest of Vipers, tries to negotiate the world's biggest Bowie bond issue as she trails one of the greatest
stars of the music business from his Rocky Mountain ranch to London via
Venice - and discovers that the $100 million deal at stake is the least of
the risks she is running.
Foreign Translations
Click on the links to the books above for information including details of
foreign language editions.
Lecture
Psychology of
Risk, Speculation and Fraud
Text of a speech at a conference on European Monetary
Union.
Quotations from the press and other media.
Bibliographic details and links to online book shops.
News and Future Books
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The Making of an Author
Click for Full
Biography
"The scope for crime was immense. I sat down one day
and wondered what would be the biggest, most spectacular crime that could
be committed. I tried to think like a criminal. How would I make a fortune?
How could I bridge the gap between the City and the world at large off
which it feeds?"
One afternoon, in July 1991, Linda Davies asked herself those questions and
they led her to think of the perfect crime and to start writing.
"I didn't want to write about a parochial insider
trading case. I wanted to show the links between governments and central
banks and the City, and the role that the intelligence services now have in
business and finance. The City is a perfect cover for spies."
The result was Nest of Vipers, a
novel whose main theme was confirmed by subsequent events, including the
revelation in February 2005 that 12 years earlier MI6 had provided the
British government with secret advance information about French interest rate
movements.
Following her successful debut, Linda travelled to Hong Kong and Vietnam
to do research for her second novel, Wilderness of
Mirrors, which deals not only with the intelligence services and the
financial world but also the diamond industry and the international drugs
trade.
While she was finishing writing the book her life took another sudden
change of course. She met Rupert Wise, a banker, and a few months later got
married and moved to Peru where the people they came into contact with ranged
from the political
leaders of the country to gunmen who fought a battle around their
house!
"Then the shooting got closer and closer. It reached
our garden and the alarm went off. I was terrified when Rupert grabbed his
pistol and went outside. I was charging around the house with a kitchen
knife, scared to death the gunmen were going to come through the glass
frontage of our modern house. I hugged the walls trying to avoid whatever
the hell was going on. I rang our bodyguard on the inter-com, but he did
not respond. As far as I was concerned, both he and my husband had been
shot."
Actually they survived, help arrived and the attackers were driven off. The
only lasting legacy of the experience is the inspiration it provided for one
of the key chapters of Into the Fire. Linda
and Rupert's other experiences of Peru, including much happier ones such as
as hiking the Inca Trail to
Machu Picchu, are also reflected in the book, which also deals with the
very different world of the derivatives market.
"There was nothing familiar of friendly about the
derivatives market. It could rip your guts out overnight, as it had done to
Barings, when a lone trader built up a derivatives loss of seven hundred
and forty million pounds, breaking the bank. Derivatives were the biggest,
most potentially lucrative, and destructive market in the world."
Quotation from Into the
Fire.
After three years in Peru Linda returned to London and wrote Something
Wild, the first novel to deal with the subject of Bowie bonds. It was
highly praised by
David Pullman, the American banker who was responsible for the original,
epoch making deal with David Bowie and most subsequent similar deals with
other stars.
At the end of 2004 Linda and her husband and family moved to Dubai. Her
fifth book, Final
Settlement came out in Britain in the spring of 2007. It came out in paperback in
Canada over a year earlier. A large part of it is set in the north of Scotland
(Linda was born in Scotland and loves the Highlands), and part is set on the
coast of New England, an area she has got to know well more recently.
A new development in her writing career was the publication of a novel for children, Sea Djinn
by the Dubai-based publisher Jerboa Books in November 2007. It is the first of a planned series of four books and is available from Magrudy's, the main bookseller in Dubai. It will also be available from one of the leading chains of book stores in Britain some time in 2009.
Linda Davies is the daughter of Professor Glyn Davies, the author of A
History of Money from Ancient Times to the Present Day, which is the
standard work in its field. For more information about Linda Davies including
links to other sites carrying interviews with her or articles about her, read
the full biography.
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