Cada día hay menos gente que vivío en su propria carne la lucha por grupos de guerrilleros contra el regimen de Franco. Uno por uno, los testigos se van desapareciendo.

El libro “Historia de los maquis – Entre dos fuegos“ deja constancia del impacto terrible de aquella guerra desconocida en las sierras de Málaga y Granada en los años 40. Recoge el testimonio — apasionante, espeluznante y emocionante — de los campesinos de la Axarquía. Y también de los guerrilleros y de la Guardia Civil.

Ya el libro ha sido presentado y recibido con entusiasma en Andalucía. En las presentaciones ha explicado el autor, David Baird, experimentado periodista, como llegó a investigar el tema y por que cree que es importante no perder esta parte de la historia de España.

Comenta el escritor Ian Gibson en el prólogo: “Para muchos españoles el presente libro va a ser una revelación…es el resultado de muchos años de paciente indagación y de numerosas entrevistas, a veces muy dificiles de conseguir.”

Entre dos fuegos está disponible en inglés y en castellano. Tan grande es la demanda que ya ha sido necesario pedir una segunda impresión de las dos ediciones.

La edición en castellano (ISBN: 978-84-96968-68-4) ha sido publicada por Editorial Almuzara (www.editorialalmuzara.com). La edición en inglés ha sido publicada por Maroma Press.

MAROMA PRESS IS PLEASED to announce publication of a new edition of Between Two Fires — Guerrilla war in the Spanish sierras.  

Praised by historians and readers around the world, this book by David Baird is a poignant account how a Spanish village was trapped in a brutal guerrilla conflict — a conflict that was virtually unreported because of the strict censorship of the Franco regime.

Paul Preston, respected author of The Spanish Civil War 1936-1939 and many other books on recent Spanish history, says: “This superbly written book could not be  more timely.”
“A masterful job!” comments Mark Williams, author of A History of Spain. “Every kid growing up in southern Spain should be required to read this book to place his/her life in perspective. When all the travel articles and books are forgotten this book will be Baird’s ultimate legacy.”

Ian Gibson, author of acclaimed biographies of Lorca and Dalí, declares in his prologue: “There could be nobody better suited to tell this story than David Baird, and he has done so magnificently.”

Other tributes from writers and critics around the world include:

“Absolutely rivetting… a wonderfully evocative footnote to history presumably  experienced in many parts of Spain. I  can’t put it down…. a great piece of research, and a story beautifully told. It’s a joy to read.” —Phillip Grenard (Sydney)

“A great work. It should make a big contribution to the history of the Franco rule.” — Charles Snyder (Washington)

“Profoundly researched, deeply sympathetic to the subject  and compellingly written.” — Perrott Phillips (London)

“I am deeply impressed… There’s an interesting contrast made between the Spanish and French resistance, the one abandoned by the world while the other is idealised… It would be good if more people read this book to remind them how lucky they are to be alive now and not then. — Nicholas Inman (France)

“Yes, chick-peas, those little bullet-like beans which have to be soaked for days and boiled for hours so that finally you can add some flavouring and create a fine stew — fine that is if you like bullet-like beans.”

He claims that’s what he lived on most of the time when he and his wife first settled in a Spanish village. He describes his efforts to live “the simple life” in Sunny Side Up — The 21st century hits a Spanish village.

Hilarious, nostalgic and moving, his book inspired the Sunday Times of London to comment: “Recommended reading for anybody who ever wondered what happened to the ‘real Spain’.”

Anther angle on that ‘real Spain’ is contained in Between Two Fires, Baird’s book about the guerrilla war that raged in the 1940s.

Historian Paul Preston noted: “David Baird has painstakingly recreated the tragic yet heroic story…As exciting as any thriller, yet deeply moving, it deserves to be read by everyone concerned with the history of contemporary Spain.”

Journalist and hispanophile Philip Grenard found the book “Absolutely riveting. A wonderfully evocative footnote to history presumably  experienced in many parts of Spain.”

And British author Perrott Phillips commented: “Profoundly researched, deeply sympathetic to the subject  and compellingly written.”

Baird’s books of fiction have also won praise. Don’t Miss The Fiesta! managed to curdle the blood with its account of dramatic events in a remote village trying to come to terms with its guilty, blood-stained past.

His latest, Typhoon Season, is set in the Far East. “A tightly constructed thriller that moves along at a cracking pace and a very good example of genre fiction,” says Hong Kong’s Sunday Morning Post.

Vaudine England, writing in The Correspondent, magazine of the Hong Kong Foreign Correspondents’ Club, declared: “Baird’s fluent prose and pithy plot-making make a few points clearly, quickly and dramatically, with quite a bit of fun along the way…The cameos of Hong Kong people and situations show a genuine feel for the place. There is also sex and drugs and gruesome death and a plot twist that not everyone would have been able to predict.”

Former correspondent of The Times, Edward Owen, comments: “David Baird’s Typhoon Season brilliantly evokes life in Hong Kong in the lead-up to the 1997 Handover to China. Ruthless rivals try and stake out as much territory as they can in this thrilling novel, daringly based more on fact than fiction. This is a fast-moving, highly entertaining story, that should be read by anyone interested in Hong Kong and how China and the West spar with each other.”

Muammar al-Gaddafi was judged by a fellow Arab leader to have “a split personality, both evil”. He may indeed have been crazy, but it was the craziness of a desert fox.

Years back I encountered the Teacher-Leader when reporting on a conference of African leaders in Libya (records David Baird). The media scene was reminiscent of that in Evelyn Waugh’s Scoop and some of the leaders present could have qualified for bit parts in The Godfather.

Not the sort of people you would want to meet in a dark alley nor for that matter on a well-illuminated highway. And they were running countries!

But they had been feted in London and other capitals. Politicians had warmly shaken their bloodstained hands, eager to share in their mineral wealth or to conclude profitable trade deals.

One of the most sinister of these tyrants was Mengistu, the Ethiopian dictator dubbed “the black Stalin”.  As he swaggered about surrounded by armed guards, I swear that evil emanated from this poison dwarf. Easy to believe the rumour that he had personally executed Emperor Hailie Selassie.

Initially Mengistu headed a 97-member revolutionary council. But not for long. Half of them were soon in the cemetery  — and Mengistu allegedly pulled the trigger himself. When he finally fled into exile, he was welcomed in Zimbabwe by that other humanitarian, Mugabe.

Gaddafi swept around Tripoli in a large Chevrolet limousine, attended by a cohort of young female guards, all nubile, all poker-faced, and all wielding Kalashnikovs.

Getting an interview could be easy or impossible. A British TV crew had flown out specifically to talk to the Leader. After nothing happened for a week, they prepared to leave, but then came a message to go immediately to Gaddafi’s hq. There, as they started setting up their gear, in walked the man himself. He smiled and nodded, then left the room. And that was the last they saw of him.

When I mentioned to the British ambassador that I was planning to visit Benghazi and the interior, he went pale and virtually begged me to forget such an enterprise. Months later I learned why: the embassy was engaged in delicate negotiations to save a British businessman facing the death penalty for alleged spying.

Meanwhile, convoys of gleaming limousines bearing African presidents swept about Tripoli, attended by armed motor-cycle escorts. The press, housed in a cruise ship in the port, waited and speculated and waited.

The big conference never happened. Most African leaders, unable to stomach Gaddafi, boycotted it. So everybody went home.

They’re all there, along with a host of other colourful characters in David Baird’s book, Sunny Side Up – The 21st century hits a Spanish village, just relaunched under the Maroma Press imprint.

Expat reminiscences about life in Spain are two-a-penny, but this book stands out for one special reason. It gets under the skin of a rural Málaga community as it shifts from a medieval life style into the computer age.

“Baird’s ironic glance back over the past 30 years is recommended reading for anybody who has ever wondered what happened to ‘the real Spain’,” according to the Sunday Times.

Forget about romanticised, superficial views of life in the sun. This book looks at what really goes on behind those white walls and describes it with irony and affection.

There’s passion here, but there’s also pathos. There’s hilarity, there’s humour, but there’s also an insightful dissection of local ways, as well as a wicked glance at expatriate eccentricities.

It may read like fiction, but it’s all fact. It’s the Spain that Hemingway never saw and never wrote about.

David does not name the village hit by the 21st century, though he does admit that he has lived in an Andalusian village for more than 30 years.

He says he has changed many names, “to protect myself and to protect the guilty”.

Baird’s other books include fiction (Don’t Miss The Fiesta! and Typhoon Season), several travel books and Between Two Fires, a poignant account of the largely unreported guerrilla war in Spain in the 1940s.

Sunny Side Up is distributed by Maroma Press and is on sale through English bookshops in Spain and via the Internet.

The German edition, Leben im Pueblo, translated by Uwe W. Paulsen, is available from the publisher, Verlag Winfried Jenior, Lassallestr. 15, D-34119 Kassel, Germany. Tel.: 0561-7391621, Fax 0561-774148. E-Mail: Jenior@aol.com. Homepage: www.jenior.de

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Pick the wrong title — not difficult — and they pass by on the other side. A tricky business, as I realised when I finally typed “The End” on a work that I had been toiling over for months. For the life of me I could not come up with a neat, catchy title, writes David Baird.

So I conducted a worldwide survey of friends, colleagues, acquaintances. Some of them were quite bright folk. Yet most of the suggestions were sadly lacking in imagination.

The book was about escaping to the good life in a Spanish village. The so-called “simple life” can be fiendishly complicated, so it was light-hearted stuff but with a serious message underneath.

There have been scores of escapist books (you may have read “Driving over lemons” or “A year in Provence”), so something different was necessary. No oranges or lemons for a start. And no Provence.

And — emphasized three friends with some experience in the business, a bookseller, an editor and an author — no funny foreign words. They all agreed: “Don’t put a Spanish word in the title, even a simple word like ‘pueblo’, as English-speakers will be confused by it.”

They fell about when I offered my poetic suggestion “Are there butterflies in your pueblo?”

“What’s it mean?” they scoffed. “Too long anyway.”

How about “Garbanzos for breakfast”? “Ho, ho, ho! What are these garabanzos? Is it a cookbook?” They missed out on the cultural reference — garbanzos (chick peas) are what Spaniards eat when they’re really hard up.

Most of those surveyed exclaimed “Too bland”, “dated”, “too ordinary” and “not exciting” when I offered “We came to the village”.

Okay then, how about “Street of bitterness”? “Please!” they retorted. “Too sombre and downbeat. Depressing. Is it some sort of a joke?”

But they didn’t only scorn my ideas. They ridiculed their own. As more suggestions rained down, I got the impression that my advisers had all been hitting the vino.

A sample, with their comments:

Follow that mule! – So corny.

Brandy for  breakfast – Yawn, yet another escapist saga.

Pueblo experience – Dry, must be a sociology primer.

The grape escape – For wine connoisseurs?

Days of wine and whitewash – Not another Brit waxing lyrical.

South of mañana – Sounds like a rip-off from another title.

When the grapes are ripe – Oh no, more fruit.

By now a certain hysteria appeared to have taken over. The suggestions were becoming more ludicrous: Whitewash and olives, Your turn to mix the whitewash, The vintage years (another wine review!), Sunstruck, Cobbled together, Is there a Spaniard in the pueblo?, Don’t forget the fiesta, Everything under the sun, Vino and whitewash, The blossoms of spring, The sunshine life, The donkey that roared…

The donkey that roared?

Help! My head was spinning. Time to open a good bottle of red and re-read my manuscript. Sooner or later, inspiration must strike. And — you know what? — it did.

Final title:  Sunny Side Up — The 21st century hits a Spanish village. First published by Santana Books, now distributed by Maroma Press.

Read this article and others by David Baird at www.EzineArticles.com

Revelations of sordid phone-hacking have forced the Australian tycoon to close the world’s biggest-selling English-language newspaper, the News of the World.

But the Dirty Digger, as he has been dubbed, has a way of bouncing back. He graduated in the rough-and-tumble Aussie newspaper business. Way back in the 1960s, before Murdoch set out to take over the world, he learned a useful lesson in Australia’s Outback: don’t start a circulation war in the wrong place.

The scene was Mount Isa, a mining town lost in the red rock desert of northwest Queensland. Murdoch ran the only newspaper in town, the Mail. When the Mail supported a disastrous miners’ strike, the mining company decided to start its own paper.

An innocent, fresh off the boat, I joined the new paper, the North-West Star, writes David Baird. Unknowingly, I stepped into a frontier war zone.

Mount Isa is a trifle isolated. The nearest town of any size is Townsville, 600 miles away on the Pacific coast. Since temperatures often rise to around 120 degrees F, most Aussies shunned the place. But, attracted by the high wages, more than 50 nationalities toiled in The Isa.

Thanks to the arid climate, The Isa claimed to have Australia’s highest beer consumption per head. Not hard to believe if you visited one of the pubs. There I encountered a gang of hard-faced individuals boasting Schwarzenegger physiques — and they were just the barmaids!

Scores of husky miners, in singlets and shorts, swigged and sweated. To keep up with demand the barmaids filled 30 glasses at a time, using a hose.

Getting wind of the new paper, Murdoch flew in by private aircraft to encourage his staff. “Don’t worry! We’re going to win,” he reportedly told them. “I’ll stand by you.”

Soon, The Isa had two daily papers, hitting the streets seven days a week. When the first Star came out, miners — egged on by Murdoch employees — ritually burned the paper in one of the pubs and our reporters were threatened.

The Star, a modern, clean-looking product, assured readers that theirs was “a good town”. Sometimes it gave the impression we were living in a sort of tropical paradise. Hard to credit when red dust storms blew in. It was so dusty, said locals, that the crows flew backwards to keep the stuff out of their eyes.

In contrast to the sober Star, Murdoch’s Mail headlined sensational stories, apparently evolved in the pub. Then it alleged that local schoolgirls were on the game. That was too much. Offended readers gave up the Mail in droves.

The battle was costing Murdoch a fortune. No problem for Mount Isa Mines. It made huge profits from copper, lead, silver and zinc.

Abruptly the Digger announced that he was “rationalising” news services. The Mail closed immediately and out on the street went the faithful staff — as has now happened in London with the closing of the News of the World.

At first glance this engaging book is just a compelling tale of mystery and adventure: Scully, a degenerate British fraudster takes refuge in a remote Andalusian mountain village, bringing with him his baggage of regrets and sordid secrets. But he’s unaware of the mysteries the seemingly innocent village of Benamargo harbors. A hint: The name itself denotes bitterness.

On another level the book is a vibrant fictionalized account of the secret lives of so many real-life Spanish villages which—at the time the story is set, in the 1980s—were still largely trapped between the hammer of the Spanish Civil War and its aftermath, and the anvil of cruel medieval religious “obligations”.



Don’t Miss the Fiesta! is not only a formidable page-turner, but also an authoritative compendium of the ways and mores of Spain’s fast-disappearing rural societies. It’s like being taken on a tour of primitive Samoa by the great cultural anthropologist Margaret Mead.

Your guide is an expert who has personally discovered during years of study every nuance of a fascinating-if-little-known society. 
They are on familiar terms with its exterior manifestations and its most intimate secrets. 

The Benamargos of this world are populated by frank and simple people, cured in adversity and inured with the patience of the poor.

At the same time they are beset by ignorance and envy, religious fanaticism and hypocrisy. And an able manipulator with God on his side can turn these traits into toxic stew, as Scully discovers too late.

Though Spain is fast outgrowing many of these aspects of what they call “la España negra”, in some places many of them still endure. In fact, this book might be a bellwether for the flocks of innocent Brits who are at this very moment lemming their way south to start new lives in “the real Spain”.

On arriving in Benamargo, Scully, the wide boy, congratulates himself on his choice of bolthole, though noting how severely limited and deadly boring it is. Before the story is over, however, he will miss that boredom. He will have befriended a deceitful barman, met up with a particularly unsavory ghost from the past, fallen in love, been betrayed by his most trustworthy friend in the village and demonized by a fanatical priest and his cohort of shrouded and sanctimonious bully boys.

All of these experiences have produced a remarkable transformation in Scully, and just as he is about to meet a spectacular end the author produces a welcome deus ex machina which… But let’s not spoil it for you. There’s a fascinating book here to be read.

NOTE: Don’t miss The Fiesta! is on sale through bookshops, online and as an ebook from Smashwords (http://www.smashwords.com/books/view/15830).
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Maroma Press’s latest book, Typhoon Season, has received a glowing review from — appropriately enough — Hong Kong’s top  daily, the South China Morning Post. Respected writer and academic Douglas Kerr notes:  ”The plot is well crafted and is exceptionally well paced.” 

This is Kerr’s review:

There is a distinctly retro feeling to this novel, and not just because most of the action takes place in Hong Kong in 1980, a distant time when we all got by without mobile phones, reality TV, party politics and Lady Gaga.

What did we do all day? If this book is to be believed, life in Hong Kong in 1980 was lived at breakneck speed. This is a tightly constructed thriller that moves along at a cracking pace, one of those stories in which the hero gets threatened by the bad guys, arrested by the cops, consoled by the girlfriend, bamboozled by the mystery of the missing corpse, knocked unconscious, shot at and almost drowned, with barely time in between to change his shirt.

Typhoon Season is a very good example of genre fiction. It could be a set book for a course on the Hong Kong Thriller.

David Baird has cooked it up from a pretty complete set of the classic ingredients. The body fished out of the harbour, its face unrecognisable. The execution in Bangkok. The hapless American journalist who asks too many questions. His Chinese girlfriend, an innocent caught up in a game she doesn’t understand. The crooked lawyer, and his unhappy drunken expatriate wife. The intrepid ICAC man. The sinister tycoon and his murdered mistress. The rogue cop. The Cantonese martial-arts movie star with triad connections (surely not?). The cynical CIA operative, involved in drug trafficking between Hong Kong and Thailand.

Stew these together, and stir in a cocktail party in a mansion on the Peak, a massage parlour, the Pink Heaven Bar, a luxury cruiser, the taipan’s country villa, the Buddhist temple with its unworldly monk, the escape, the high-speed chase, the explosion. All this taking place, inevitably, in the typhoon season.

On the face of it, Typhoon Season looks as if it might have been assembled from the kit. But in spite of its fearless deployment of these stock properties of the genre, it is nonetheless a good book, and an enjoyable read because Baird knows what he is doing. First, he has the gift of storytelling. The plot is well crafted and is exceptionally well paced. We are given enough credible information to allow the characters to stand on their own feet. Dialogue is where thrillers often come to grief, but Baird has a good ear for speech.

There is just the occasional oriental hokum – I’m afraid there is a mystery key inscribed with the words “Reap harvest where lotus blooms” – but for most of the time the book resists the temptation of the exotic, and the Hong Kong scene is set credibly, if a bit nostalgically.

http://books.google.co.uk/books?printsec=frontcover&id=gm-IaqeMY-YC#v=onepage&q=&f=false

David Baird has worked around the world, from Fleet Street to Canada and Hong Kong. His other books include Sunny Side Up – the 21st century hits a Spanish village and Back Roads of Southern Spain (published by Santana Books). His books have also been published in German and Spanish.
Don’t Miss the Fiesta! is on sale at English-language bookshops in Spain. It can also be bought direct from the publishers, Maroma Press, on this site and from Amazon.co.uk. To save postage costs, buyers can also download it at http://www.smashwords.com/books/view/15830

Maroma Press also published Baird’s non-fiction book Between Two Fires. That well-researched account of the impact of a forgotten war waged by the anti-Franco guerrilla movement in the 1940s and 1950s won praise from historians Ian Gibson and Paul Preston.