Scoundrels!

The scandalous adventures of two elderly upper-crust soldiers began as a joke email to a Norfolk film-maker and ex marine, writes ROWAN MANTELL

- Rowan Mantell

DUNCAN CROWE didn’t set out to write a comic masterpiece. He didn’t even set out to write a book. He simply responded to an outrageous accusation from a friend masquerading as a grouchy 90-something Major.

Duncan emailed back, in the guise of a similarly disreputable, and deeply insulted, elderly Major. As the correspondence built, so did the adventures and accusations, escalating like a game of consequences from theft to embezzlement from a charity for orphans, to panda hunting with the last emperor of China and murder on Everest.

For months the two friends did not mention the email exchange.

“By then we’d written 60-70,000 words!” said Duncan. This was when they first realised they could turn the ever-expanding outraged, and outrageous, correspondence between Major Victor Montgomery Cornwall and Major Arthur St John Trevelyan into book.

And now Scoundrels, begun as a private joke, is available in bookshops across the country, has won rave reviews, and volume two of the trilogy is due out later this year.