Few aspiring writers have the chance to put their unpublished manuscript into the hands of best-selling author Jeffrey Archer, and even fewer to get the master storyteller to give them specific advice about their work. But that's exactly what Mark Powell got after a friend of a friend gave Archer a copy of his first novel, Quantum Breach.
'I had an e-mail from him the next day telling me he found it gripping,' says the British author, who is based in Singapore.
'That was immensely flattering; one, that he'd bothered to read it, and second, that he actually liked it and gave me some advice. He suggested my characters were a bit too clean and needed to be muddied up a bit. Of course, I listened to him, why wouldn't I?'
Quantum Breach is set against the backdrop of the Lehman Brothers financial crisis, but is really a fast-paced action thriller set across Asia and the Middle East that draws straight from the world of espionage and military covert operations.
Its main protagonist, Mark McCabe, is a 45-year-old foreign exchange trader who used to work in the British Special Forces. McCabe finds himself reunited with a former Special Forces buddy, now an MI5 spook, who enlists him and his Singaporean assistant to uncover a suspected money-laundering plot within the bank in which they both work. The money trails lead to a terrorist cell known to McCabe from his own murky past.
First-time writers tend to write about what they know best and Powell is no different. In fact, his life reads like a novel: the 46-year-old is a trooper-turned-banker-turned-author. Powell joined the British armed forces' parachute regiment when he was 17, before moving on to the Special Air Service (SAS), the special forces regiment that works on intelligence gathering and counterterrorism, often covertly and behind enemy lines. After nine years of taking part in covert operations, many in some of the worst conflict zones in the world, Powell had enough and quit the military to start a second career, in financial systems design.