Micheal Jecks and the Templar mysteries

Michael Jecks (born 1960, Surrey) is a writer of historical mystery novels. The son of an Actuary, and the fourth of four brothers, he worked in the computer industry before becoming a novelist full time in 1994 - a decision forced on him when he was fired from his last position. He, his wife, daughter and son now live in northern Dartmoor.

Jecks has written a series of novels featuring Sir Baldwin Furnshill, a former Knight Templar, and his friend Simon Puttock, Bailiff of Lydford Castle. More recently he has founded The Medieval Murderers, a speaking and entertainment group of historical writers including Bernard Knight, Ian Morson, Susanna Gregory, Phillip Gooden and CJ Sansom. The group has developed to collaborate on their own highly successful books written as linked novellas, each book with a consistent theme, under the brand of The Medieval Murderers.

A member of the Society of Authors and Royal Literary Society, Jecks was the Chairman of the Crime Writers' Association in 2004-2005. In 2005 he became a member of the Detection Club. From 1998 he organised the CWA Debut Dagger competition for two years, helping unpublished authors to win their first contracts (including Allan Guthrie, winner of the Theakston's Old Peculier Crime Novel of the Year 2007). He has judged the CWA/Ian Fleming Steel Dagger Award for three years.

Michael Jecks is a popular speaker at literary festivals and historical meetings, at which he talks with Ian Mortimer, the historian, as well as Medieval Murderers.

An enthusiastic shooter, walker, painter and homebrewer, Jecks will often be seen walking the moors with his Rhodesian Ridgeback and Bernese Mountain Dog, researching his novels in the landscape where they were originally conceived.

Jecks has a distant relative who goes by the same name and lives in Ainsdale, a village in Sefton, Merseyside, England.

Edward II, (25 April 1284 - 21 September 1327?) called Edward of Carnarvon, was King of England from 1307 until he was deposed in January 1327. He was the seventh Plantagenet king, in a line that began with the reign of Henry II. Interspersed between the strong reigns of his father Edward I and son Edward III, the reign of Edward II was disastrous for England, marked by incompetence, political squabbling, and military defeats. Although large in stature and powerfully built, he was more interested in light entertainment and simple pleasures than in the duties of governing.

Widely rumoured to have been either homosexual or bisexual, Edward nevertheless fathered at least five children by two women. He was unable to deny even the most grandiose favours to his male favourites (first a Gascon knight named Piers Gaveston, later a young English lord named Hugh Despenser) which led to constant political unrest and his eventual deposition.

Whereas Edward I had conquered all of Wales and the Scottish lowlands, and ruled them with an iron hand, the army of Edward II was devastatingly defeated at Bannockburn, freeing Scotland from English control and allowing Scottish forces to raid unchecked throughout the north of England.

In addition to these disasters, Edward II is remembered for his death in Berkeley Castle, allegedly by murder; and for being the first monarch to establish colleges in the universities of Oxford and Cambridge.