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Alec Abernathy

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Silver-haired Scribe

In the year 1947, Alec was born to two doting parents in the small Scottish town of Tamaglochley. Both of his parents had spent the war years working for the British secret service at a secret research and development base hidden away in the highlands, and when the bairn was born, both were keen to put the troubles of the past behind them and invest as much love as they had to offer in the new arrival.

The photograph shows Douglas and Mary Abernathy in 1945, 2 years before the birth of Alec.

Unfortunately, things did not go as planned, Douglas Abernathy dying in a plane accident over, ironically enough, Nova Scotia in 1951, and Mary Abernathy falling victim to a bizarre outbreak of bubonic plague which puzzled the authorities in 1953.

To be orphaned at such an early might have embittered some people, but not Alec Abernathy. The love he had received from his parents during those few short years of happiness proved enough to carry him right through the difficult teenage years and right into adulthood, leaving him a wonderfully well-adjusted human being, who is probably the favourite person of everyone who knows him.

For many years he followed in the footsteps of his technologically gifted parents, and indeed he made his fortune after developing a better method of capturing wild haggis as they roamed over the Scottish moors. The castle which he bought with the proceeds – this being the money-hungry 1980s – made him happy for a while, but he couldn’t help feeling that an ineffable something was missing from his life.

One day, listening to his radio, he accidentally strayed onto the BBC’s Radio 5 Live and heard tell of a promised land, far to the south, a land where the excitement never stopped, and where there was a gigantic bookshop at each end of the main street – that land was Birmingham.

That very moment, Alec resolved to sell his castle, move to a city centre apartment in the jewel of the Midlands, and finally begin work on the novels he had always dreamed of writing.

The first of those novels – Aardvark Attack! – was at one point apparently only a matter of months away from publication, and the initial response was so good that Silver Age Books were doing everything in their power to persuade him to stay with them for the sequel, provisionally entitled Aardvark Attack II: the Return of the Gods.

“It may have taken 54 years for them to arrive, but believe us, they have definitely been worth the wait!”

Or at least that is what we thought in the summer of 2002. In July 2003, for the sake of our readers, if no one else, we had to take the drastic step of cancelling Mr Abernathy’s contracts to write any novels for us. The dilatory approach he took to novel-writing was entirely at odds with the needs of a publisher as small as Silver Age Books, where cash is at a premium and pre-orders are holy gold-dust. However, Alec took our decision well, and this is how he responded.

“Dear friends and readers, the day when my Aardvark Attack was to be published is now long, long gone, and the publisher has been in contact, and not in the usual friendly pints of beer over a steak dinner way, but rather in the letter informing of the termination of contract sense. So to all those who were waiting for my novel to appear, I apologise. I simply did not have the heart to finish the story of my father. During my long, long life, I had told the tales of my father’s wartime exploits to many, many people. Often they scoffed. They simply did not believe that a giant aardvark had ever ravished England and Scotland, much less that it had originated at the South Pole. Until now I always dismissed their doubts as the cobwebs and spiders of unaired minds, but as I pressed ahead with my writing, their doubts assailed me, and I began to feel that if my father’s tales were not true, if they were just nonsense stories concocted to entertain a small child, I would be doing him a great disservice by holding him up to public ridicule. Thus, apprehension dragged at my determination, as another author once wrote, and I ultimately found myself reading the daily newspaper when I should have been writing. In these circumstances, I fully understand the publisher’s decision, though he has assured me that should I now approach him with a completed manuscript, he will be eager to publish. Farewell, then, readers. I apologise for the worlds you have lost today.”

Unwritten Novels

Aardvark Attack! (originally due 2002) Read a sample!

Aardvark Attack II: the Return of the Gods (originally due 2003)

Aardvark Attack III: the Aardvark of the Covenant (originally due 2004)