Author CK Brown discusses his new spy thriller, The Ban Affair, partly set in Tenby

A former banker with family ties to Tenby, where his mother still lives, has set part of his new spy thriller in the Pembrokeshire seaside town.
Chris Brown, who writes as CK Brown, has published The Ban Affair, the sequel to his debut The Z Affair, which sold thousands of copies worldwide and earned coverage in the Cambrian News.
The new novel follows Philip Trent, a working-class former soldier from Smethwick turned private detective, who is dragged back into the secret world he thought he’d left behind when a mysterious Hong Kong millionaire plots to trigger a third world war.
Trent’s hunt for answers takes him from Birmingham and the Black Country to Stoke-on-Trent, Tenby, London, Hong Kong, Budapest and Paris.
Chris, who is in his 70s, has lived in various parts of the country over the years before eventually settling in the countryside near Kinver, but he still has family ties to Tenby, where his mother lives.
“There have been working-class spies before, but they’re usually Cockney. I don’t think there’s been a Black Country one,” he said.
“I wanted to give him a normal working-class background. A lot of the things that go on around him are quite normal, going to the pub, taking the dog for a walk, those sorts of things, and then there’s this fantastical adventure on top of that.”
It was during lockdown that Chris first began writing what would eventually become The Z Affair.
“I started fiddling around with the first book in lockdown, just to fill the time,” he said. “When I retired, I finished it off and somebody said it wasn’t bad and that I should try to get it published, so I did. It keeps me busy during retirement and keeps the brain active.”
The books are set in the early 1970s, an era Chris remembers well and deliberately chose as the backdrop for Trent’s adventures.
“1971 was when I left school and started work, so I wanted to set it in an era that I probably have rose-tinted memories of,” he said. “I can still remember a lot of it and wanted to make it seem real, with the things that were on sale, the politics of the time and the world situation. Things were different then.”

A lifelong West Bromwich Albion supporter who first started going to matches with his father more than 65 years ago, Chris says supporting the Baggies is one of the few things he has in common with his fictional hero.
He is already writing a third Philip Trent novel, which will complete the trilogy.
An audiobook of The Ban Affair is also in production and has a particularly personal significance for Chris.
“Both my mother and my stepfather are blind now, so in a way this is for them because they obviously can’t read it at all,” he added.
The Ban Affair is published by Austin Macauley and is available now from Amazon and Waterstones.