Jule A. Miller

After a rather checkered college career I spent two years in the army and then returned to civilian life with a degree in chemistry, a wife and a plunge into ice cold reality: a place that was completely new to me. I found a job as a manufacturing process engineer with an aircraft company and spent the next thirty years working in the aerospace industry while what I really wanted to do was write. I wasn't sure what, but my job with first one and then another company gave me plenty of practice writing reports, then articles for technical journals (two of which won national awards), then sections in standard engineering reference works, until finally a publisher requested that I write a book on the management of advanced technology. The result was From an Idea to a Profit. A pretty dry subject, but the reviewers all agreed that I had made it as interesting and lively as possible.

But, as a lifetime sailor and C.S. Forrester fan, what I really wanted to write for all those years were novels of the sea. In 1992 I retired and moved with my wife Heide, who is also my editor and critic, to Nevis in the West Indies. Finally I had the time to actually write a sea story. The result was A Voyage Toward Vengeance. The first publisher to whom I submitted it published it.

Another book had been occupying my mind for years. It was the story of the destruction by its own management of the aircraft engine company where I had worked for many years. I wrote the first draft as a non-fiction case study on bad management, but could never get it to jell. So I tried it as a novel that went through about twenty-five drafts. My agent said that it was a hell of a story, and because of the sad plight of American manufacturing it was extremely topical, but as a novel it was just too long and complicated. Then he had a terrific suggestion: why didn't I write it as a non-fiction case study on bad management. This time, when I wrote the sad story of what has happened to many American manufacturing companies,it did jell. The result was Slippery Places: How the Delusions of Modern Management Destroyed an American Manufacturing Firm.

Next came another mystery novel: A Question of Closure. In the fall 1963 a young lady suddenly disappeared from the center of a small Connecticut town and was never seen again. For the next thirty-five years her mother,her best friend and her fiance each sought some way to cope with the perpetual anguish caused by her disappearance. Then her fiance, about to retire from the U.S. Army, returns to the town where it happened and asks all those old, anguished questions once again.

Then came a second novel of the sea. It is based on actual events and takes place in the opening months of World War Two when German U-boats sunk over 400 ships along the east coast of the United States, often almost within sight of the beach. The Navy and the Coast Guard were woefully short of suitable vessels to patrol the Eastern Sea Frontier, hunt U-Boats, and rescue survivors. Desperate times demanded desperate measures. Few measures were more desperate than sending hastily commandeered yachts offshore to locate submarines and rescue survivors, but that was actually done.

The regulations required USCG Ensign Nicholas Worth and his six man crew to take the fifty-four foot schooner yacht Tiger Lillie out into the North Atlantic in the winter of 1942. But, as the old Coast Guard axiom says, the regulations did not require them to come back. This book is entitled Voyages in Desperate Times is available as both a Kindle book and in hard cover.