THE MAN WHO KNEW EVERYTHING (fiction, Capuchin Classics, May 2008, PB £5.99)
Introduction by Peregrine Worsthorne

Granville Jones is at the end of his life – ‘one of the greats of old-time Fleet Street’, once a famous world-roving correspondent, now self-exiled on an island Emirate in the Gulf, an old and forgotten man, long eclipsed by rising stars of television journalism. When the coup breaks it seems that Jones is the last to know.

As this story of the early 1950s unfolds, we learn of the great love affair that brought him to his island. Both that ancient love and the indissoluble bonds between Jones and the deposed Emir are caught up by the old man’s professional demon. We follow Jones, move by move, playing his endgame with the fragments of physical and mental powers still vouchsafed him.

The Man Who Knew Everything was originally published by Heinemann in 1988 as Deadline. In a new introduction for the Capuchin Classics imprint, Tom explains his determination to dissociate the novel from the BBC TV film of Deadline starring John Hurt and Imogen Stubbs, which he considers was grossly mangled in the editing.

In his Introduction to the new Capuchin Classics edition, Sir Peregrine Worsthorne describes 'this tale, worthy of Conrad, of Buchan' as 'the best book depicting the life in the Cold War years of, in that order, a gentleman-adventurer-foreign correspondent – values, manners, political and social prejudices, not to mention dress, drinks and ways with women.'

From reviews of Deadline -

‘Tom Stacey writes from the inside with a tense economy of the great days of Fleet Street’ Daily Telegraph

‘I picked it up one evening and stayed reading it until I finished, absolutely held’ Nina Bawden

‘Tom Stacey, a former correspondent of the Sunday Times, writes with verve and humour about a world he knows inside out. Moving, intense, profound, Tom Stacey’s prose is so crisp and light that you seem barely to skim along the surface, yet this is one of the most haunting novels I have read for years’ Residents Abroad

THE LIVING AND THE DYING (fiction, Macmillan 1976)

‘It is in the central character that Tom Stacey has put the mechanism that elevates this novel to the master class’ Irish Times

‘Tom Stacey’s second novel is uncommonly confident about love and death. Published 16 years after his first, its maturing has been worth waiting for: the orderly writing, robust intelligence and honesty are steadily enlivening’ The Times

A worldly, vigorous, successful married man discovers that he is dying. He immediately embarks on an intense love affair, all the while remaining committed to his wife and children. A dramatic love story set in London and Paris, it is both redemptive and metaphysical.

THE PANDEMONIUM (fiction, W H Allen 1980)

‘This remarkable novel is a concentrated and beautifully written study of the nature of love, spiritual and carnal. Stacey’s approach is through wonderfully detailed minutiae, observation of the people and of this “half Norse world belonging to the sea”’ Janice Elliott, Sunday Telegraph

Pandemonium breaks loose on the mainland of Britain. The total collapse of order that follows with alarming swiftness through strikes and panic in the major cities paralyses the country. This releases the profound chaos within Brother James who has secluded himself on a wild Hebridean island to devote himself to a life of the spirit. Previously married and the lover of another woman, in his reunion with his daughter he is wrenched from his carapace of spiritual reclusion.

THE WORM IN THE ROSE (fiction, Heinemann 1985)

‘Tom Stacey has surprisingly beaten Graham Greene on his own turf…extremely well written, this is a singularly exciting, compelling novel…Tom Stacey knows and understands the Arab world exceedingly well’ Washington Times

When the heir to a remote sheikhdom in the Gulf is killed in a shooting accident on the estate of his former school-friend the politician Timothy Lunt, ex-Fleet Street foreign correspondent Anthony Guise is sucked into a corrupt world of blackmail, betrayal and intrigue — and the ambitions of a group of slick Western expats. His self-appointed assignment takes him from the Welsh hills to the parched Arabian hinterland, into murky power politics and the dark places of the human heart.

DECLINE (fiction, Heinemann 1991)

‘A moral tale without moralizing, showing old values and new ones, it has a Henry James-like quality at once tender and brisk: no over-writing, no sentimentality, above all the ability to show, with the right artistic detachment, a complex reality that has no visible solutions’ Isabel Quigly, Financial Times

‘Stacey’s decision to combine the story of a family with that of a nation is recklessly ambitious, yet he somehow pulls it off…it is its range and complexity that makes DECLINE such an impressive novel’ Spectator

‘I write of father and son’ is how the author opens this novel, which is a classic story about English upper-class life and the changing values of our times. The patrician figure of the father, an industrial magnate, is a pillar of the community. Through the figure of his young son, emerging from Eton to take his place in the scheme of things, the cracks become visible and certainties shatter. Yet, at its deepest level, Decline is a story of redemptive hope.

THE BROTHERS M (fiction, Secker & Warburg 1960 ; France, Holland, USA 1961)

‘It must be a rare condition to know Africa as well as Tom Stacey, and to have shared as closely as he the burdens which the West can impose upon Africans. I can not think of another novel which gives such a long, minutely articulated dialogue between the black mind and the white’ Guardian

‘Africa, to Tom Stacey, is not only the white whale and magic mountain but the Marabar caves, the failure of our passage to India and more than India. But like Forster’s novel his admission of defeat is itself an advance. He gets closer to Africa than any English writer that I have read before’ Christopher Hill, Spectator

‘A stupendous first novel’ East African Standard

‘Not only an exciting and uncannily observed story, but gives an insight into the muddles of “emergent” Africa that few other books have attempted’ Nicholas Mosley, Time and Tide

‘Brilliant, sustained and persuasive’ New York Times

‘A great talent. This book is a very considerable achievement’ New Statesman

At Oxford two young scholars meet and become friends — one is an earnest, ambitious, solitary Canadian and the other a popular, charismatic, yet insecure Ugandan. As newcomers they assess European civilization; discuss their love affairs; struggle to find themselves and make sense of life. They are thrown together on a quest to the Ruwenzori Mountains which becomes a monstrous invasion of privacy. A tremendous conflict ensues, culminating in tragedy.

THE TWELFTH NIGHT OF RAMADAN (fiction, Heinemann 1983)
written under the pseudonym Kendal J. Peel

‘Sophisticated writing keeps it plausible to the end, and there’s an authentic nostrilful of dust, lust and corkscrew intrigue, and one fat mincing arms-dealer emanating rose-water and menace whom Ambler himself could hardly improve on’ Observer

‘Thrillers of this kind are really novels with a backbone’ Daily Telegraph

‘It keeps the reader in seat-edge suspense’ Asia Week

Lonely and dreaming in the Arabian night, a maverick Englishman heading a Saudi-based landscape gardening conceives an audacious and spectacular crime. Soon after, the new King of Saudi Arabia decides to challenge Israeli defiance over Palestine. A year later Holy War is declared. These two events, one intensely private and the other of global import, begin to fuse — a process facilitated by international arms-trader, Tarabzuli.

BODIES AND SOULS five stories (fiction, Heinemann 1989)

‘Tom Stacey’s men are the kind who used to be called “real men” - the sort who don’t eat quiche…To watch these stoical figures crumble as their worlds take on unforeseen shapes, shapes that turn their spruce manliness into a handicap, is a moving experience. People like these are seldom met in fiction and deserve a hearing’ Penny Perrick, Sunday Times

A failed businessman makes a strange pact with his femme fatale; a young Cotswolds landowner is lured to unexplored Africa; a Welsh sheep farmer is victim of a mysteriously blighted radioactive world; a holidaying MP serves out an ancient vengeance; a diplomat’s future hangs on the fate of a lawless Scot…In each case, life’s hidden depths well up to confront or devastate the ordered surface of existence.

SUMMONS TO RUWENZORI (non fiction, Secker & Warburg 1965)

‘This is a story where real life rivals Rider Haggard’ Guardian

‘Enthralling’ Edinburgh Evening News

Tom Stacey was 24 when he first crossed Africa to live with the Bakonzo tribe and travel the length of their Ruwenzori Mountains with Isaya Mukirane. Nine years later, Mukirane led a rebellion which Stacey had unwittingly helped to seed. The following year he was summoned by Prime Minister Milton Obote to try to help settle the revolt. This rare asignment and its poignant denouement is the basis of this unusual and remarkable traveller’s tale.

THE HOSTILE SUN (non fiction, Duckworth 1953)
awarded the John Llewellyn Rhys Memorial Prize

‘A work of exploration that adds to the font of human knowledge’ Guardian

‘Some of his observations must be of anthropological value, and all have much of general interest’ Daily Telegraph

Just turned 20, Tom Stacey tells the story of his journey into the Malayan jungle in 1950 where he lives with the disappearing Temiar aborigines. His curiosity is aroused by a rumour that a white archaeologist reported dead in 1943 is still living in the jungle, and he gets involved in an unexpected way with the tribe.

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