Moon Over Midnight is an all new fiction paperback coming soon
The story is set between October 1943 and March 1944, during Bomber Command's most intensive period. We follow the pilot, a twenty-something Canadian, as he flies from his base in the north east of England and experiences the air war in the skies over Germany; mission after mission, operating on shredded nerves and fuelled by a diet of cigarettes; alcohol and jam sandwiches. These last being one of the very few things that didn't freeze at high altitude.We also meet the members of the crew he takes on these deadly missions; sometimes just getting to the target is a feat in itself. They are hounded by flak, fighters and searchlights and we learn of the horrors they see thousands of feet above a burning city with failing engines and nothing but hope, fatigue and short tempers.Mixed in with all this there is humour too; coarse, sarcastic and petty... There is also trust and friendship, not to mention love and painful, unresolving loss. It is not pretty or glamorous story.
Why write Moon Over Midnight and what is it about?
After I finished writing The Carpetbagger, well towards the end of writing that book, I began to think I'd quite like to tarry a little longer in late Victorian England. I had an idea of a follow-up of sorts to TC but not a direct follow on. It needed to be a little different.
Without ruining the end of TC, for anyone who hasn't read it, I thought I'd take one of the characters and give them an afterlife, if you like. And that is what I did. Enter, The Wretched. The book just grew and grew. I can't remember how long it took to write but some of it was written in Vianden - a small town in Luxembourg where Victor Hugo lived for about ten years after he had fallen out or fallen foul of the French. I blame him for the book's massive 260,000 word count!
The problem with such a large book as The Wretched is keeping continuity and ensuring the narrative doesn't get bogged down. I think overall it holds together and reads quite well. It has had a couple of, not so much rewrites, as changes. In fact, only very recently did I give it what I hope is the final going over. As for a publication date...maybe early summer 2025 - before if possible.
This is a long winded way of getting round to how Moon Over Midnight came about. It's an idea I have been carrying around for some time - trying to decide how to go about writing it. I knew the beginning and ending, in rough outline. But it was that long bit in-between I needed to figure out. So, in-between finishing/editing/proofing The Wretched, I began Moon Over Midnight.
It sounds cliche but the story would not leave me alone and so, in a weird synchronous way, I began writing it last year around the time the story begins and finished it at the end of March (2025) at the same point the story ends. It spans just five or six months but that period of 1943 going into 1944, was one of Bomber Command's most intensive. In the end the book was a very quick, easy flowing write.
I know in recent years, decades it has been, shall we say politically fashionable(?) to decry those in Bomber Command, especially its chief Arthur Harris as war mongers or being guilty of war crimes. It is not something I explicitly address in the book but it is touched upon, obliquely if you like. Above all, I wanted to portray a realism of what it was like to go through mission after mission, bringing death and destruction, and how that impacted upon someone. Have I achieved that? I guess only the reader can answer.
What I will say, is everything that happens to the fictitious crew in Moon Over Midnight, actually happened. Nothing is made up. War at 18,000 feet or 20,000 feet is not pretty or glamorous. Nor is it any better on the ground, the receiving end.
I am hoping the book, only available as a paperback of around 60,000 words or 180-ish pages, will be up for purchase through this site sometime in May 2025. Soon! (Just waiting on the printer!) It will also be live as a purchasable paperback through Amazon and Lulu.com as print on demand, again in May.
Rachael Anne Long April 2025
