From Bexhill beach to Sierra Leone: local author's new thriller

Bexhill-on-Sea author Charles William Wright has turned a lifetime of travel, unusual experiences and a deep interest for the card game of bridge into his new novel, The Vulnerable Game — a thriller which takes its readers from the familiar surroundings of Bexhill to the altogether different world of Sierra Leone in West Africa.

It is his second published book, although very different from his first. Some local readers may remember Wright On Bowls, which drew on his many years in the sport and sold around 400 copies. This time Wright has moved from bowls to fiction — and into a world of intelligence work, smuggling, diamonds, espionage and international intrigue.

Charles Wright was born in 1957 and educated at Winton House School and Hastings Grammar School. He has spent much of his life in and around Bexhill and Hastings, and sport has always played an important part in it. Football, bowls and more recently bridge have all featured prominently, while travelling and working overseas gave him an enduring interest in Africa and particularly Sierra Leone and Zambia, where his wife Chanda was born.

Those different strands eventually came together in The Vulnerable Game.

The central character is Gabriel Stock, a former Intelligence Corps linguist who has returned to what should be a relatively quiet life in Bexhill. He is intelligent, observant and an accomplished bridge player — qualities which prove useful when his past begins to catch up with him.

Gabriel's story moves between Bexhill and Sierra Leone, with excursions into a much wider world of intelligence operations, conflict diamonds, antiquities and organised crime. What begins quietly gradually develops into a story in which it becomes increasingly difficult to distinguish the innocent traveller or businessman from the smuggler, intelligence operative or mercenary.

Although the story is fictional, Wright wanted the settings to feel real — and local readers may have particular fun spotting some very familiar Bexhill names.

Restaurants 'Pebbles on the Beach' and 'Picasso' both receive favourable mentions, while the town's sporting and social life is woven into the story. Gullivers Bowls Club and the Bexhill Open feature, as do the Wilton and Bexhill Bridge Clubs. Even the Gullivers Social Backgammon Club, run by Rob Preston, finds its way into Gabriel Stock's world.

Perhaps the most important Bexhill location of all, however, is one which requires no introduction — the beach itself.

It appears numerous times in the novel, reflecting Wright's own affection for the seafront and his belief that Bexhill beach is one of the most beautiful places in the area simply to walk, think and watch the world go by. Against the darker elements of the story, Gabriel's walks along the beach provide moments of calm and normality before events once again draw him into a much more dangerous world.

That contrast is at the heart of the book. One moment the reader can be in recognisable Bexhill surroundings; not long afterwards the action may have moved thousands of miles away to West Africa.

Sierra Leone provides the other great backdrop to the novel — but here the story has a considerably darker edge.

Wright draws upon the country's recent history and the terrible legacy of its civil war: conflict diamonds, violence, mutilation, corruption and the shadowy figures who learned to profit from instability. There are echoes of Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness, not in portraying Sierra Leone or Africa itself as dark, but in exploring the darkness that can emerge in people when normal restraints disappear and greed, power and survival take their place.

In Conrad's story, a journey into the African interior becomes increasingly a journey into the human capacity for brutality. The Vulnerable Game explores something of that same moral territory. Behind Sierra Leone's extraordinary beauty and the warmth and resilience of its people lies the memory of a conflict in which some individuals crossed boundaries from which there was no easy return.

For Gabriel Stock, the real “dark interior” is therefore not a place on a map. It is the world he gradually enters — of conflict diamonds, mercenaries, smugglers and men whose respectable outward appearances conceal very different pasts.

Much of the African action takes place in and around Freetown, including Aberdeen and Lumley, but the story also ventures further into the country. Wright wanted to capture both sides of Sierra Leone: the beaches, heat, traffic, bars, humour and everyday life, but also the scars left by a brutal period in its recent history.

Bridge provides an unlikely counterpoint to this darker world. Wright took up the game comparatively recently, but quickly became fascinated by it. The title itself has a double meaning: “vulnerability” is an important part of bridge, but Gabriel Stock discovers that vulnerability away from the card table can have considerably more serious consequences.

At heart, The Vulnerable Game is a thriller about loyalty and betrayal, friendship and deception, and about the consequences of decisions made years earlier.

Writing a novel has been a very different experience for Wright from writing Wright On Bowls. With fiction you can take places and experiences you have known and ask that wonderful question: “What if?”

What if the apparently respectable man sitting opposite you at a bridge table had another life altogether? What if somebody you thought you knew had a past they had never revealed? And what if events beginning thousands of miles away eventually led straight back to Bexhill-on-Sea?

That is the world of The Vulnerable Game — an international thriller which moves between the tranquillity of the Sussex coast and the darker consequences of conflict in West Africa.

The Vulnerable Game by Charles William Wright is available to purchase from Amazon, priced at £12.99.