Jack High

Forty years after the publication of the first When The Boat Comes In novel, Jack High picks up the story of Jack Ford and the Seaton family just as the Post-First World War boom begins to subside. Jack's boat has finally come in. It is 1925 and with ample wealth from a risky land deal, the ex-army Sergeant and Great War survivor has left the struggling Tyneside town of Gallowshield for London. On a night out in Soho, he rescues a man from a beating outside the 1917 Club. The man is former Cabinet Minister Charles Needham, an unlikely North-Eastern Labour MP. They become firm friends and ambitious Jack is introduced to the underground club scene of the Jazz Age where the grim horrors of war are long forgotten. The privileged few regard life with a sense of entitlement and their hedonistic pastimes of drink, drugs and sex, are ferociously pursued in these new nightspots around hidden London. Needham, a wealthy landowner, invites Ford to return with him to Gallowshield and Jack agrees because his former fiancée and the only woman he has ever loved, Jessie Ashton, still lives there. Jessie is a principled Socialist and Jack had been the love of her life until he betrayed her for another woman. On his return, Jack realises the old town is worse off now than when he left it. The post-war boom has given way to bust as economic stagnation hits manufacturing industry. Trade across Europe is at a standstill and the familiar diseases of unemployment and poverty are beginning to bite. He despises the town as he's always done, but still it manages to surprise him. By sheer chance he encounters a woman he had last seen in Murmansk in 1919. He'd smuggled Countess Irena Goliksyn onto a train bound for Finland to escape the Bolsheviks after the Russian Revolution. What on earth was she doing representing a Russian Trade Union delegation in a grimy old town like Gallowshield? As Jessie and her family become embroiled in the chicanery, Jack's best friend Matt faces the political backlash which could cost him his job and his home. What unfolds is a story of love, jealousy, revenge and subterfuge against a backdrop of privileged escapism, greed and addiction. The war to end all wars is over but the Old Order and the New World are on a collision course. When Jack's friends desperately cry for help, he needs all his resourcefulness, guile and determination to help them. But what's in it for Jack? 'Jack High - The fourth novel in the series - involves a brand-new storyline. It accounts for some of the missing years between Jack's rise to riches in the early 1920s and the Great Depression of the 1930s which were never covered in the hit BBC television series or the original books written by When The Boat Comes In creator, James Mitchell. The prolific author died in 2002 and Jack High was written by his son, former TV producer and journalist, Peter Mitchell.