Having dabbled in retail, furniture, specialist coatings and then classic car and aircraft brokerage, back in the 1980's I finally settled on the electronics industry as a means of making an honest living. This change in career also unexpectedly offered me the opportunity to become more directly involved in classic aircraft and, with a good friend, we founded a restoration business in Hungary to exploit the available skilled labour pool and lower operating costs.

Constantly on the search for potential projects we were lucky enough to recover and purchase a variety of mostly wartime aircraft, many from the wastes of Karelia in Russia. Spitfires, Hurricanes, Messerschmitt Bf109s and several other  types were liberated, usually from the depths of frozen lakes and marshland, to eventually join my De Havilland Vampire and Chipmunk in the hangar awaiting their turn in the queue.

Sadly the restoration business succumbed to the financial crash and many of the projects were passed on, several eventually returning to airworthy status.

I was encouraged to write a book documenting the 40-odd years of dabbling with cars and aircraft chronicling the situations and people involved. My forced early retirement finally offered me the opportunity to sit down and write. Having completed this tome (a process I thoroughly enjoyed), I read through my masterpiece and rapidly came to the conclusion that it didn't make the grade.

As an avid reader of adventure fiction myself, I decided to use some of the stories and characters from the abandoned book as the basis for a work of fiction. Tom Stroud was thus born. I hope you enjoy his exploits through the series of books he features in.