Product Description
This is a thriller and love story with a martial arts background. It is set in Brussels, Hong Kong and China between 1979 and 1981. There is action in Amsterdam, Brussels, Hamburg, Marseilles and Portugal in Part One and in Hong Kong in Part Two.
The central character is Julian de Lyon, a French-Chinese agent with a UN anti-slavery committee in Brussels. A former DEA agent and master of the ancient Korean Hwarang martial art he discovers an exclusive 'catalogue', the abduction to order of girls from society families around Europe. His English nephew Peter, and Peter's Belgian friends Daphne and Thérèse, become embroiled in the syndicate’s revenge. Daphne follows Julian to Portugal where he is seeking the truth of triad and his aristocratic wife’s involvement in the vice operation. Part One ends with a fight to the death with triad enforcers and rogue CIA agents in a mediaeval cliff top castle on Portugal's western Algarve. The author models the triad on Hong Kong’s 14K and the martial art on the generic Hwarang or Hwarangdo of Korea.
In Part Two, Julian returns to the Far East to face his past and the triad of his youth. With the support of British and American intelligence, the triad boss's son and a team of Julian's Korean martial arts pupils the triad is broken in a dramatic operation in the colony during Typhoon Joe of 1980. After a final attempt on his life by a Red Pole, Julian returns to China to revisit his family and then to Europe to Daphne and a final confrontation with his wife. The unexpected continues through the final pages.
The central character is Julian de Lyon, a French-Chinese agent with a UN anti-slavery committee in Brussels. A former DEA agent and master of the ancient Korean Hwarang martial art he discovers an exclusive 'catalogue', the abduction to order of girls from society families around Europe. His English nephew Peter, and Peter's Belgian friends Daphne and Thérèse, become embroiled in the syndicate’s revenge. Daphne follows Julian to Portugal where he is seeking the truth of triad and his aristocratic wife’s involvement in the vice operation. Part One ends with a fight to the death with triad enforcers and rogue CIA agents in a mediaeval cliff top castle on Portugal's western Algarve. The author models the triad on Hong Kong’s 14K and the martial art on the generic Hwarang or Hwarangdo of Korea.
In Part Two, Julian returns to the Far East to face his past and the triad of his youth. With the support of British and American intelligence, the triad boss's son and a team of Julian's Korean martial arts pupils the triad is broken in a dramatic operation in the colony during Typhoon Joe of 1980. After a final attempt on his life by a Red Pole, Julian returns to China to revisit his family and then to Europe to Daphne and a final confrontation with his wife. The unexpected continues through the final pages.
From the Author
The book evolved from my having lived in Brussels and worked all over Europe in the late Sixties as a young musician. Ten years later I returned for a weekend break from my business in the UK dominated sadly, by Punk Rock. This was to do some research to get the thriller going and two days turned into two years. I thought at the time I could write the sequel simultaneously.
Triad is set in about 1980 and the sequel was to be in 2000, soon after the hand-over of Hong Kong to China. The first part took much longer to complete because winning a national UK magazine photography prize in 1982 with a photograph I had taken in Canton on a two-month walkabout in Hong Kong and China, side-tracked me for a decade. This is not to mention getting married and doing other things including writing an encyclopaedia to be published at the millennium (but withdrawn by me late in 1999). Now I can't justify completing Revenge of the Triad until sales from the first book look as though they will fund a second round of trips to the Far East. I have been everywhere touched upon in Triad, except Korea and this worries me. You probably wouldn't know but it still worries me.
The original idea was sparked by one particular girl following the band from Germany to Spain in '69 but refusing to meet us in the South of France. Many girls who did the same as she, following musicians but turning to things far more dangerous when desperate, disappeared, she said. When I started looking into this in the 1980s, I was shocked at the statistics of youngsters going missing without trace around Europe. Conservative estimates were 50,000 annually.
Many of the characters and conversations in Triad are real, if out of context. The CIA and triad material is sourced from other experts. I couldn't contemplate original research with triads because they terrified me. The showdown in Hong Kong is therefore, hokum. The "catalogue" and aristocratic families supposedly involved in the abduction of young girls from society backgrounds is also fiction. Far too much of this book is real, however, and it was painful writing it.
My interest in martial arts comes from a girlfriend who packed a punch; to a year of Friday night kung-fu films at the Nags Head, Holloway, Odeon; to touring Sri Lanka with a Japanese cultural delegation. Here was some astonishing prowess, particularly master Nakamura who looked like Darth Vader in Kendo armour and commanded similar respect. He could cut through bamboo representing a human arm with a Samurai sword with such speed - one hundredth of a second - you couldn't see him move. Awesome, for someone who was 82 years old. There were other interesting asides on this tour including having tea with the later assassinated president, Jayawardene.
Julian was already partly modelled on a friend, sensei Jon Alexander, whom I haven't seen since the Eighties when he was caretaker of a block of flats in Lewisham, South London. I thought he might like the elevation and final "holiday" in the Seychelle Islands. Triad has a martial arts background but is primarily a love story between Julian and Daphne. There is a whole different set of circumstances here.
David G. Rose
Triad is set in about 1980 and the sequel was to be in 2000, soon after the hand-over of Hong Kong to China. The first part took much longer to complete because winning a national UK magazine photography prize in 1982 with a photograph I had taken in Canton on a two-month walkabout in Hong Kong and China, side-tracked me for a decade. This is not to mention getting married and doing other things including writing an encyclopaedia to be published at the millennium (but withdrawn by me late in 1999). Now I can't justify completing Revenge of the Triad until sales from the first book look as though they will fund a second round of trips to the Far East. I have been everywhere touched upon in Triad, except Korea and this worries me. You probably wouldn't know but it still worries me.
The original idea was sparked by one particular girl following the band from Germany to Spain in '69 but refusing to meet us in the South of France. Many girls who did the same as she, following musicians but turning to things far more dangerous when desperate, disappeared, she said. When I started looking into this in the 1980s, I was shocked at the statistics of youngsters going missing without trace around Europe. Conservative estimates were 50,000 annually.
Many of the characters and conversations in Triad are real, if out of context. The CIA and triad material is sourced from other experts. I couldn't contemplate original research with triads because they terrified me. The showdown in Hong Kong is therefore, hokum. The "catalogue" and aristocratic families supposedly involved in the abduction of young girls from society backgrounds is also fiction. Far too much of this book is real, however, and it was painful writing it.
My interest in martial arts comes from a girlfriend who packed a punch; to a year of Friday night kung-fu films at the Nags Head, Holloway, Odeon; to touring Sri Lanka with a Japanese cultural delegation. Here was some astonishing prowess, particularly master Nakamura who looked like Darth Vader in Kendo armour and commanded similar respect. He could cut through bamboo representing a human arm with a Samurai sword with such speed - one hundredth of a second - you couldn't see him move. Awesome, for someone who was 82 years old. There were other interesting asides on this tour including having tea with the later assassinated president, Jayawardene.
Julian was already partly modelled on a friend, sensei Jon Alexander, whom I haven't seen since the Eighties when he was caretaker of a block of flats in Lewisham, South London. I thought he might like the elevation and final "holiday" in the Seychelle Islands. Triad has a martial arts background but is primarily a love story between Julian and Daphne. There is a whole different set of circumstances here.
David G. Rose
