This book description was updated on the 1st March 2022 as Russian troops attacked Kyiv.Russia's brutal invasion of Ukraine has cemented the reputation of Leslie Watkins as an author who predicts the future. His 1978 best-seller Alternative 3, possibly the most plagiarised novel of the past 50 years, showed climate changes making this planet untenable. 'Suitable' people were taken to Mars to save the human race from extinction. That evacuation is being planned today.
In 1978 Watkins also published The Unexploded Man, another 'in-the-future book' showing world peace being threatened by Russia. The similarities to Putin's new war, including him putting Russia's nuclear might on high alert, are astonishing. Nearly half a century ago Watkins visualised a top Kremlin official outline a decision to attack smaller nearby states including the UK. Now, as the death-toll soars in Ukraine, Putin has warned other countries daring to interfere of 'consequences you have never seen'.
Watkins' fictional Kremlin man, Sokolov, takes the same line - sneering at a suggestion of the Americans responding in kind. They would fear Russia might escalate any nuclear war. He tells a subordinate: "Knowing there would be instant retaliation against Washington and New York? Never!." And similarly, Britain and France would also not act.
This is a different kind of war . . . a new cold war . . . where there is no front line, no rules of engagement and more treachery than ever imagined.
"If elected I will never, under any circumstances, use a nuclear weapon," promises the leader of the British Opposition and the people love him for it.
One person, journalist David Barnett, is a pawn, an unwilling victim of Russia's evil plan to win the peace . . . the key to what is going on. Barnett is The Unexploded Man.
Grimly topical ... Watkins writes tightly and tautly and his background has an all too authentic ring to it. Manchester Evening News.
Daily Record: Good suspense stuff. Daily Record.
A dazzling piece of narrative writing. Daily Mail.
A highly readable political thriller that is streets ahead of its competition by having that essential ingredient - style. Liverpool Daily Post.
A chilling story of the cold war. Daily Telegraph.
The basic plot and the action scenes could be turned into a fine dramatic film, in the hands of the right producer. Weekender USA.
Masterminding by the author keeps the pay-off a surprise right up to the end. Publishers' Weekly.
An imaginative fast-moving suspense tale that never loses its grip on the reader. Mineapolis Tribune.
Powerful writing here. Southern Evening Echo.
The Unexploded Man a Political Warfare Thriller described as fiction but then again . . .
About the Author: Welshman Leslie Watkins was acclaimed as a top Fleet Street journalist long before his first book was published in 1971. That was an attention-grabbing exploration of somnambulistic violence entitled The Sleepwalk Killers which, like some of his subsequent books was sparked by his newspaper assignments. Watkins's interest in the subject was aroused when he covered the 1961 murder trial of American airman Willis Boshears who had strangled his bed-mate, 20-year-old Jean Constable, at her home in Essex, UK. He was found not guilty because he had killed while fast asleep. His first novel The Killing of Idi Amin was inspired by his 1972 experiences in the crazed dictator's Uganda where he was covering a minor war. He was arrested at gunpoint and accused of being an anti-Amin spy, before being beaten up, imprisoned and threatened with execution. Background for his 1978 novel The Unexploded Man came from extensive interviews he had conducted for the Daily Mail with former inmates of Russia's notorious prison-hospitals - and with psychiatrists who had sought sanctuary in the West. He now lives quietly in New Zealand with his wife Kathleen, two dogs - Skipper and Suzi -and an elderly cat called Bundle.
