The Stack a Novel by RJ Dodd

The Stack

 

What exactly is The Stack?

 

In this instance it is a massive timber forest in Australia.

 

Why that name?

 

When my partner and I were researching the story we met a young man in  London who had lived on just such a place, his family owned a one million acre timber farm and they called it the Stack.

 

He  never went back there once he had left because he much preferred the bright lights of cities such as New York and London, which he could afford to enjoy as he was now a successful stockbroker, but the idea of such a large property stuck way out in the Aussie bushlands got our creative juices going and we began to research in earnest, including another trip out to Australia, never a hardship for either of us because it  is one of our favourite places and we have travelled extensively in that country.

 

So now we had a location,what to do with it...?

 

We had to create the story that would allow us to visit the location and fill it with characters who would want to live there.

 

That's where my grandfather came in. He was a young lad of 16 when he lied his way into the British Army that was engaged in that most vicious of recent bloody conflicts..  World War 0ne.

 

No doubt he was excited by the idea of travel, of being involved in some great and glorious adventure, where no one really got hurt or maimed, and all of his friends had volunteered. There was no such thing as TV News in those days so the ignorant stayed ignorant, they would not have seen 60,000 men being shot,killed, maimed in just one day on the battlefields.I fancy the enthusiasm of the worlds youth to enrol might have been a little dampened if they had. However, there he was, straight from a slum town where he had lived in a slum to being one of the heroes of the world..In a place called Gallipoli, a peninsula in Turkey.

 

Those in High Command decreed that this piece of land must be taken and held to suit their strategic purposes.It cost thousands of Allied and Turkish lives and will be rememberd as one of the major  errors,,among many others, of that gruesome four year encounter.

 

Grandfather had four brothers in that campaign, one was killed, one lost an eye,one lost a leg and the other one lost an arm,... grandad robbed a bank...of its gold...then he lost the gold in a desperate chase with the Turks who wanted it back.

As he tells the tale it got to a situation where he and his fellow robber, his best mate, could keep the gold and be shot  or get rid and live, obviously he chose the latter. Wise lad.  Or maybe not so wise..  he went on to France where he was gassed and spent the rest of his life struggling with the problems that created.

 

So now we had another element that we could use in building the base story line for The Stack.

 

It started life as a script, not unnaturally, as I am employed in the filming business, and it was read by a number of Producers who all liked the basic premise but who all passed on the grounds of the high cost of production..Historic, costumes, foreign locations, war, battle fleets,  aging characters..dadum dida..

So it is now a brand new novel in a shiny new jacket and is available on Amazon..see how we got on!!
RJ Dodd