JOHN MARQUIS

FLUSHING: A PEOPLE’S HISTORY is the story of the beautiful Cornish village where John Marquis lives with his wife, Joan. Focused on the families that fashioned the village’s fascinating past, this book tracks its development from the mid-17th century when Dutch engineers built the stone quays, through the packet ship era (1688-1855), and into modern times as a fishing community with strong agricultural links. Today a village of 700 people, Flushing is a popular tourist resort with a ferry link

BLOOD AND FIRE, the story of the 20th century’s most famous murder mystery, was acclaimed in the Wall Street Journal as one of the top five books in its genre. Former Harvard professor Edward Jay Epstein described it as a ‘superb reconstruction’ of a crime that rocked the world in the wartime summer of 1943. Sir Harry Oakes was the British Empire’s richest man when he was killed in bizarre circumstances in his Bahamas mansion. His playboy son-in-law was tried for his murder and acquitted.

PAPA DOC is the internationally acclaimed story of a spy trial in the voodoo land of Haiti during the brutal ‘reign’ of the tyrant Francois Duvalier. As a young political reporter in the Bahamas, John Marquis was sent to cover the three-week trial in Port-au-Prince, the Haitian capital, in the late summer of 1968. During this assignment, he managed to secure an interview in the National Palace with Papa Doc himself, becoming one of the very few journalists to get access to the president.

A hard-hitting appraisal of the modern Bahamas by the former editor of the nation's leading daily newspaper. Author Jonathan Mantle described it as 'jaw-droppingly direct' and 'hideously funny'.

A revealing portrait of the killer Sante Kimes, whose con-and-kill spree across America in the 1990s made her one of the most notorious criminals of her time. The author met her at a New York women's prison in 2011, two years before she died in her cell.

MY VERY GOOD FRIEND BERT LAWRENCE is a highly personal appraisal of D.H.Lawrence, the greatest English writer of the twentieth century. Marquis’s lifelong interest in Lawrence began when he was sent, as a young reporter on the Nottingham morning paper, The Guardian Journal, to interview the author’s schoolfriends in his birthplace, the mining town of Eastwood. He was shocked by the hostility he encountered, and hoped his article would help restore Lawrence’s name among his own people.

HARD PRESSED is an amusing and self-deprecating memoir of an ‘old style newsman’ who entered journalism as a 17-year-old apprentice and worked for newspapers and magazines for half a century. During that time, John Marquis was an award-winning investigative reporter, an international boxing writer, the London Sports Editor of a major newspaper group, a West Country weekly editor, a magazine publisher and Managing Editor of the Bahamas’ premier daily newspaper.