This website is a ten-minute linear read with links to my published books.
A contact page invites publicists, publishers, and astute agents to discuss representation and create a business plan. These are substantial new works needing a path to the market. You can access synopses and sample chapters by the links to their pages or dedicated websites.
Seeing the Last Supper for the First Time. (Art History and Biography).
By following Leonardo’s instructions to artists, the painting reveals 12 scenes charting the drift of the Church from the teaching of Jesus. The scenes begin with Jesus in contemplation (not manipulation) and the anomalous finger of Thomas, modelled on the artist in middle age. Thomas / Leonardo rebukes John who dubbed him the doubter and Peter in whose name the Church was founded.
The painting expresses and immortalises the Gnostic Gospels, not the New Testament.
There is fiction; there is fantasy; and there are things that no one else has seen.
Louise lives to get high and save animals. Escaping the gangs of Glasgow, she reaches the suppliers of the Colombia Cartel, the world’s largest criminal network now seized by Helena, the Mexican-American wife of the imprisoned Drug lord. The girls fall madly in love and plan a counterfeit vaccine for the poor. As the plan collapses in narco-killings Louise flees into hiding, this time to the Amazonian rainforest whose shamans’ knowledge of psycho-active drugs is far more advanced than western science. Now she sees what no white person has seen, but in an age of weaponised pathogens, her journals are stolen and her publisher is interdicted by MI6 and CIA for information that might be of use to an enemy.
Sequels: The Case of the Missing Civet Cat (the Chinese secret of SARS-CoV-2); The Return of the Llamas (restoring the sustainable, low-tech empire of the Aztecs); The American Dream (in which the CIA persuades Louise to update its 1960’s program of mind control and psychic powers).
Jack Lawson lives and works in Stirlingshire, Scotland with his wife and daughter. After graduating from Strathclyde University he wrote the first biography in English of the charismatic Danish composer, Carl Nielsen, Phaidon Press (1997).
In the following year an international publisher praised his debut novel Moonlit Messiah as “full of energy and imagination … but hard to pigeonhole and sell in numbers.” It was the the precursor of The Da Vinci Code which sold 100 million copies. Code was hastily written over the summer of 2002 in the same UK office by staff editors collaborating with and crediting Dan Brown. The fictional material was substantially and structurally similar to my 1998 plot, its twist and its ending; the premise; the five main characters, locations, language and artefacts.
For several years, in a state of shock, my writing career was suspended. I was advised by specialist lawyers and informally by Lord Justice Lloyd that I had a lucrative claim but the Society of Authors advised me against Court confrontation with premium American attorneys in unlimited costs and complexities.
Instead, I researched and wrote two sequels to my original story of the survival in Europe of the royal Davidic line. By 2002 most scholars had dismissed the idea of the wife of Jesus. In 2006, I stumbled on the powerful secret suppressed by the Church: the disciple whom Jesus loved, a mystery for two thousand years.
The Joseph Secret (2007) and Einstein’s Violin (2012) were self-published as I had no contacts with trusted publishers.
In Rome in 2013, an exhibition of the works of Leonardo pointed out that his Last Supper was unique in reinstating Judas with the other disciples. Suddenly I realised here is a message. It is a narrative painting. While painting the Last Supper, Leonardo was producing theatre and pageants for the Duke of Milan. By following Leonardo’s instructions to painters, I found 12 dramatic scenes depicting the drift of the Church from the teaching of Jesus. The key to the Last Supper is the Gnostic Gospels; it does not depict the New Testament. I then traced Leonardo’s membership of learned fraternities with access to books banned in Europe.
The Painter and the Carpenter: Leonardo’s Life-Sized Portrait of Jesus
Seeing the Last Supper for the First Time
This completed work unravels the secret lives of Leonardo, personal and professional. From many sources including his cryptic writings and symbolic paintings I have made many new connections. Perhaps surprisingly, Leonardo identified closely with Jesus, but dismissed the Church teaching of his deity and miracles.
The Secret of the Beloved Disciple (SBD) is the sequel which examines “that thing known to Judas alone … that plunged Heaven and Earth into confusion.” Moving on from Leonardo’s depiction of Judas being stabbed in the back, this book rewrites history from the fall of Jerusalem by revealing Constantine and the Roman Church as authors of a fake history concerning the life of Jesus.
The genre of SBD is history and theology. Painter Carpenter is biography (life and work) and art history. You need not share the artist’s esoteric view of Christianity, Hermetism, and the Gnostic Gospels but I think that you must now see it as the personal agenda of Leonardo’s religious paintings.
In 2020, I returned to my pleasure zone of action adventures when an overwhelming plot and character forced my hand. Greater Things is the story of Louise Templeton, a young woman (based on a real and undisguised person) protests against animal experiments and intoxicating the planet. The novel exposes the phoney war against drugs, and the artificial domains of mind-altering drugs, the criminal cartels, the pharmaceuticals’ marketing of addictive opiates, and ultimately to the isolated tribes of the Amazonian rainforest whose knowledge of psychoactive drugs is far more advanced than western science.
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