How a Radio Operator Became a Novelist

For fifty years, I have been listening to the world through a pair of headphones and a length of wire strung between poles.

Amateur radio — ham radio, to most people — is a pursuit that defies easy explanation. You build or buy equipment, raise an antenna, and then reach out across hundreds or thousands of miles to make contact with someone you have never met. The signal travels as a radio wave, bouncing off the ionosphere, degraded by distance and interference, and if everything is right, it arrives. Confirmation comes back. A contact is logged. The world is, for a moment, a little smaller.

The language of that world, for generations, was Morse code: dots and dashes, rhythmic and precise, capable of carrying information through conditions that defeat voice communication. I have been sending and receiving Morse for half a century. I think in it, sometimes. I hear it in the silence between other sounds.

When I began to imagine a novel set in 1914, I kept returning to a remarkable coincidence: I had spent fifty years with a technology that, in 1914, was brand new.

Wireless telegraphy — what we now call radio — arrived in naval warfare just in time for the First World War. Ships that had previously been isolated from the moment they left port could now communicate across hundreds of miles. Admiralties could direct their fleets in real time. Supply networks could be coordinated in secret — or so their operators hoped.

But what could be transmitted could also be intercepted.

The British were the first to understand this fully. Their naval intelligence operation, working from a facility called Room 40, began intercepting and decoding German wireless traffic almost from the first days of the war. The Germans maintained a supply network across the Pacific and Indian Oceans — a system of coaling stations and support ships operating out of neutral ports — and every message they sent was a potential gift to the enemy.

The Morse Chronicles takes its name from that convergence. The series centers on wireless intelligence, on the signals that navies send and the ones they do not know are being read. It is a world I understand not just from research, but from fifty years of listening.

The series is called the Morse Chronicles because everything in it flows through that code: orders, betrayals, warnings, and secrets. Dots and dashes. The language I have spoken all my life, in the middle of a war that changed everything.

The Morse Chronicles — coming soon.