ENDURANCE TEST: ‘Amongst my tasks was to carry out geophysical surveys. Here I am measuring the strength of the earth’s horizontal magnetic field using a specially-adapted theodolite. The site is inside the crater of the (extinct!) volcano called Deception Island,’ says Chris Todhunter

With his own life having seen its fair share of action – including being shot at and captured on the first day of the Falklands war – it’s not surprising Chris Todhunter’s first book is a pacy thriller. STEVEN RUSSELL reports

AMBASSADOR: A publicity shot showing Chris Todhunter, right, talking to geologists in HMS Endurance’s chart room

CHRIS Todhunter won’t ever forget the date he sat on a plane, fired up his laptop and started writing the opening chapter of his first book. He was flying to New York on business and it was a fruitful way of spending time in the air. “I had this vague idea that I wanted to write a story where the culmination was in my favourite bit of water of all: the Gulf of Corryvreckan. (It’s off the west coast of Scotland.) There would be fast boats and crashes and God knows what. I didn’t know any more than that, but I started it.

“The aeroplane, unknown to us passengers, had already turned round mid-Atlantic and we arrived back at Gatwick just after we were told that American airspace had been closed. It was 9/11, 2001.”

A decade later he has a copy of Maelstrom in his hand. The story opens with an ex-Navy man, Jack Ross, being beaten up in a rough corner of Glasgow. He’s stirred things up by poking his nose into places it wasn’t wanted, and it all seems to stem from an incident in Hong Kong six months earlier.

Weary of his high-level position with an international company, which saw him having to fly abroad at short notice – to the detriment of family life – he had sought dramatic change. It meant swapping a shoebox in Bracknell for the West Highlands of Scotland and the dream of a better life. But it all went badly wrong, and Jack and son Tom were soon fighting for their lives.

(N)ICE WORK: HMS Endurance ‘parked’ in the ice of Antarctica, with the ship’s company allowed off for some R&R – rest and relaxation

Chris Todhunter would simply adore it if Maelstrom caught the eye of a mainstream publisher and launched a new career as the writer of intelligent £6.99-or-so paperback thrillers. The 58-year-old, who lives near Stowmarket, has already completed a second tale: about a supertanker hi-jacked by Somali pirates. The hero is an MP, an ex-Parachute Regiment officer, and the tanker captain a constituent.

Chris’s stories contain elements drawn from his own experiences – his life has certainly been colourful, vibrant and adventurous – but he’s at pains to point out that characters such as Jack Ross are not carbon copies of his creator!

The son of an Anglican clergyman, Chris was born in west Cumberland – but within about 15 months was sailing to Australia on a £10 passage. “I think my father, having not moved outside Workington for his first 20 years, discovered there was a big wide world and he got itchy feet and wanderlust. He’d seen an advert in Church Times for clergy in the western Australian bush and said ‘Yes!’ Whether mum said it with quite the same enthusiasm, I doubt!”

His father would have four parishes in “cattle country” 150 or 200 miles outside Perth. For a lad with an older brother to show the way, rural Australia was an adventure playground. “There were no fences around our supposed gardens; they just edged onto the bush. We would go wandering off. There were some nasty lizards and snakes, but these were our friends! And we never wore shoes. Barely wore much more than pants. We had to wear sandals at school, so we would carry them and put them on when we got there – and then take them off when we went home.”

HEARTS AND MINDS: Chris Todhunter in the New Territories – Hong Kong, basically – parts of which could be reached only by sea. Sailors would carry out ‘community relations’. This might involve repairing generators defunct for months and improving water supplies. ‘The team would be under the (very loose) command of a junior officer, with a couple of engineers and the Leading Cook and the Leading Steward acting as interpreters’

Father had a burning desire to get his sons into an English choir school. The family came home as Chris headed towards his sixth birthday, spending 18 months in Aberdeenshire before moving to London. After school each Friday the brothers would go for singing lessons. “What a life for young boys who should have been running outside and playing cricket and football with the other street urchins! My god, did he make us work throughout the rest of the week at our practices. It would be an hour or more, and the belt and the buckle were involved sometimes. It was not a happy experience. But, anyway, it did the job.”

Chris won a place at St Paul’s Cathedral Choir School, boarding from the age of eight. Days were packed: two practices, usually; two services in the cathedral, and a full timetable of lessons. The 38 boys were lucky to get much free time.

Chris had always enjoyed reading – Ladybird Books were a childhood favourite – and stories helped shape his future. “The historical books probably got me going. They included soldiers, armies, explorers – all these things that fired the imagination of a young lad.”

After reading history at University College Durham he joined the Royal Navy in 1975. “I definitely didn’t want to go into an office, heading for a mortgage and 2.4 children! I wanted to go to sea.”

VIEW FROM THE BRIDGE: Chris Todhunter on the bridge of the coastal survey ship HMS Bulldog in 1983 or 1984, on the phone to the engine room, or captain

Chris specialised as a hydrographic surveyor – attracted by the fact it took him to far-flung parts for long periods of time. “I’d been brought up on Scott, Shackleton, Marco Polo; and this idea of going to remote places – exploring them, collecting scientific data – all that was my childhood come true.” He went to places such as Barbados, Venezuela, Brazil and west Africa. Then in the autumn of 1981 he joined HMS Endurance, the Royal Navy’s ice patrol ship. It took him to Antarctica. “The aim would be to go back to the exact positions where great explorers had made readings 70 or 80 years earlier and record the change. It was like a sort of hallowed activity, standing where Otto Nordenskjöld [a Swedish geologist] took his observations: romance, drama and fun all rolled up in one!”

Unfortunately, trouble was brewing around the corner, with covetous eyes being cast at the Falklands. Chris was among 11 sailors – engaged in surveying work – on East Falkland when Argentine forces invaded in 1982. Taking cover just outside the door of Government House in the first stand-off of the war, the lieutenant – along with his colleagues and a group of Royal Marines – came under sustained machine-gun fire and was captured. (And there, I’m afraid, I’m going to clam up. The full thrilling story should appear in EADT articles to mark the 30th anniversary of the war in April. Sorry!)

On a happier note, Chris had met wife-to-be Rosemary the previous year, on the voyage down. She was at the ship’s cocktail party at Madeira, the second port of call. Rosemary was living with her mother, who had moved there for health reasons.

Of course, naval life meant he was soon waving goodbye. “In those days we didn’t have emails or mobiles. Every port of call, I would post my letters and would receive a bundle from her. Our courtship was entirely by letter, and the occasional phone call,” says Chris. “When I was captured, and we were sent back to Brize Norton [the RAF base in Oxfordshire] I rang Rosemary and said ‘I’m all right!!’ ‘Yes . . . Any reason why you shouldn’t be?’” Basically, news of the invasion hadn’t fully emerged and she hadn’t realised he had been at the eye of a battle.

SHIPSHAPE: Chris Todhunter during his time with HMS Echo in 1979, after volunteering for hydrographic surveying. Here, he is Guard Commander, “hence the ‘liquorice legs’ (gunnery gaiters)”

When Chris got back to England in late August – Rosemary having returned to Richmond – he went round straight away and proposed.

They married at St Paul’s Cathedral in December, 1982 – the church he knew well from choir-school days. The dean had heard about Chris’s involvement in the conflict and wrote, saying “If you’ve got the time, pop round and tell me about the Falklands.” The sailor did – accompanied by his fiancee. “I spent 10 minutes telling him [about the war] and then the dean said ‘Why don’t you get married here?’”

After a week’s honeymoon, and Christmas leave, Chris returned to Chatham on January 1 and sailed the following evening. He was away for six months. “Poor old Rosemary. I wasn’t feeling too good about it, either!”

His next vessel was a coastal survey ship, HMS Bulldog, working mainly in the western approaches to Scotland and the Irish Sea. Closer to home . . . on paper. Catching the train to Richmond on a Friday, after a day’s work that might have started at 4am, would often see Chris falling asleep in his chair by evening.

HEARTS AND MINDS: Chris Todhunter in the New Territories – Hong Kong, basically – parts of which could be reached only by sea. Sailors would carry out ‘community relations’. This might involve repairing generators defunct for months and improving water supplies. ‘The team would be under the (very loose) command of a junior officer, with a couple of engineers and the Leading Cook and the Leading Steward acting as interpreters’

Sunday mornings brought a cloud of depression as he waited to leave at lunchtime to catch the train back. The pleasure of long periods in remote places had withered. In the autumn of 1984, after nine years, he left the Royal Navy . . . and qualified as a solicitor, specialising in marine and insurance work. The couple came to Suffolk in the late 1980s, settling in the Brockford/Mendlesham area because it was pleasant and had good connections. Chris commuted to London from Stowmarket – his office 10 minutes’ walk from Liverpool Street. “When we were in Richmond, I used to do the ‘drain’ and then walk from Bank, and it was a hellish journey. This was a lot better.”

When Chris was “kind of poached” by Cable & Wireless Marine, it brought an even shorter journey to its offices in Chelmsford. He would become director of legal services. In the early 2000s Cable & Wireless Marine was sold to a big American outfit. There was a real chance of a management buyout but, a long way down the road, the parent company announced it was selling the whole shooting match to a Far Eastern outfit. Chris didn’t really want to work for new owners he didn’t know, and decided to leave.

He’d also begun having difficulty speaking properly. No-one could find a reason for it. “I began to think that I couldn’t do my job in the way I wanted.” Their son – who had been born at Ipswich Hospital – was about to leave Old Buckenham Hall school, between Stowmarket and Sudbury. If the family wanted to change tack, now was the time. They bought a plot of land in the western Scotland region of Argyll, built a house and moved there in 2004.

“I was going to start a boating business, but my legs then began to go and I couldn’t leap about on a boat as I should,” says Chris. “Between us we started a B&B business and it worked extremely well.” Why Argyll? Chris loved it. He’d done a fair bit of naval work there “and for me it’s the finest coastline in the world bar none – and I’ve been to one or two places. I’d said to myself ‘One day, I’ll come back here and live.’” It was always a lifestyle up for review, though – Rosemary had actually established strong links in Suffolk – and they decided to return after about five years. It didn’t happen as quickly as it might – Lehman Brothers collapsed a week after they put the house on the market – but they moved to their current home near Stowmarket in 2010.

COLD-CALLING: In September, 1981, Chris Todhunter went to Chatham and joined HMS Endurance, which sailed that October for Antarctica

Most of Maelstrom was written in Argyll. Chris explains that he used to do a lot of long-distance travelling with Cable & Wireless Marine. “You wouldn’t want to work all the time on those flights, so you always picked up a few thrillers at the bookshop at the airport. And there would be the sleepless nights while your body caught up with jet-lag. I began to run out of books that were any good; that would hold my interest.

“Some of those that I rudely regarded as rubbish, other people probably enjoyed very much,” he laughs. “I would say ‘Do you know, I could do a hell of a lot better.’”

So, on that abortive journey from Gatwick, he set out to show it wasn’t idle talk. “I picked it up on other flights and wrote a bit more; and, of course, the early drafts were dire. But when we got up to Argyll, a couple of things happened. I was referred to a brilliant speech therapist who sorted out to a huge extent my speech. What I’d been doing was tensing everything up and she taught me that was entirely the wrong thing.” The problem actually had a neurological basis – an apparently-benign form of a motor neurone condition – “but it doesn’t come with Stephen Hawking brain power!” Chris also attended two or three creative writing courses. “Oh boy. That helped me rewrite the book in a form that people seemed to enjoy.”

Again, he acknowledges aspects of his own background in his principal character, but Jack Ross is most definitely not a cipher.

Mind you, Chris says he’s having the devil of a job convincing his brother in law, who suspects there simply must be something more to a one-night stand between Ross and colleague Lydia Fox. When she dispenses with her horn-rimmed glasses and dull grey trouser-suit – and transforms herself into an alluring woman “sinuous to the point of feline” – Jack’s resistance melts.

It’s not based on his own experience, grins the writer.

“You should see the people who went out on business trips with me: old and grizzled project managers. No attractive young women! No, I haven’t enjoyed a night of pleasure like that in Hong Kong – or any other town!”

n Maelstrom is £17.99. www.bookguild.co.uk