One of the founding fathers of Forged Truth, David’s work and influence appears in many places, but his most important works have always appeared under pseudonyms, until now that is. The Forged Truth project has finally persuaded him to allow his latest novel, ‘The Typewriterists’ to appear under his own name. You can read what he had to say about his novel here in a ‘Behind the Book’ interview with Forged Truth Publishing, and find it on Amazon here in both paperback and Kindle formats.
Quoted in a response to a question about the new publication, he said, “Modern publishing scares me. It isn’t doing much to promote either quality or art, and while they might not make money, those are the things I care about in writing. Against an industry obsessed with novelty, not content, Forged Truth was conceived as our collective attempt at an antidote.”
Full disclosure: way back when, at the end of the last century, Gollancz put out his earliest novels, The Chessmen and Fatal Climate, under the completely made up pen-name David Hood. These were thrillers that showed off a technological background he’s otherwise done his best to hide. ‘The Chessmen’ was described by The Daily Telegraph as a ‘contender for the best first crime novel of the year’, even though it wasn’t a crime novel. Foreign rights were duly sold. It made it into translation in several European markets.
His second, ‘Fatal Climate’, proved a profound piece of prophesy. Written in the middle of terrible droughts in 1998, it was predicated on the idea that Global Warming (comprehensively denied by government scientists at the time) was going to cause huge storms and unpredictable climatic events. Who knew? It was so ahead of its time, it didn’t make it into translation. As his agent said at the time, ‘It’s being printed but I wouldn’t say it’s been published.’ This also proved prophetic, as it foreshadowed the relationship David N Martin enjoys with conventional publishers today.
Over the years, his work has leaked out sporadically. He won the ‘Words With Jam’ Short Story Competition in 2018 and the Regional Prize in the Aurora Prize for Writing in 2023. In an early draft, ‘The Typewriterists’ was short listed in the Historical Novel Society’s First Chapters competition at the beginning of 2024. But he is probably better known in recent years for his work with emerging writers as a coach and mentor, his energetic writing workshops and for his support as a beta-reader to established authors such as Jacob Ross, whose book ‘The Bone Readers’ won the inaugural Jhalak Prize and made it into ‘Big Jubilee Read’ list of 70 books by Commonwealth authors.
