Dermod Judge

A Tangled Tale

This book is about the dangers of storytelling

When writer Pat Quinn decides to document the violent history of the gangs in his city, he intends to disguise it as fiction. This is to afford ‘deniability’ to the still living gang bosses who enjoy being interviewed about their ‘heroic’ past but who are wary of legal repercussions.

To write the history for a weekly newspaper column and to involve his readers, he creates a character called Tom Brown to be both the interviewer of the gang bosses and a participant in the described activities of long ago. This merging of make-believe and truth, of myth and legend, of the real and the imagined, of the past and the present is further complicated when an emboldened Tom Brown starts to impinge on Pat’s life in uncomfortable ways.

The gangs’ histories impact more and more on Pat when he and Tom Brown start to be blamed for past atrocities. He loses his girlfriend, his equanimity and almost his sanity when he begins to suspect that Tom Brown may not, indeed, be fictional.

Dermod Judge has been an advertising copywriter and creative director, a playwright, a screenwriter and a published writer since 2017. He was also a typographer, a designer, an actor, a filmmaker, a documentarist, a theatre critic, a broadcaster, and an international lecturer on scriptwriting and filmmaking. A Tangled Tale is his seventh published book.

Two Jam Jars for the Manor

Johnny has a passion for the movies and a dream of becoming a filmmaker. In Dublin in the 1950s, this seems impossible, especially when he is forced to leave school. However, he manages to attract several mentors with charm and defeat and win over his enemies with ingenuity.

The world which Johnny lives in - that of movie plots - is so romantic and safe that it acts as a shield for the rest of the sorely stressed family. His telling of the movie plots to his family turns into therapy for them. The clear-cut morality of “movieland” seems to be the only sure thing in their world of poverty, deceit and betrayal.

His relationship with the beautiful daughter of a rich Major is just one of the complications which conspire against him finishing his school and learning how to get involved in film-making.

Author Dermod Judge lives in Cape Town, South Africa and has been involved in story telling in theatre and film for a large proportion of his professional life, and has written over ten full length feature film scripts as well as twelve professionally produced stage and radio plays. Dermod has won a variety of local and international awards for his video making and was the Chair of the South African Scriptwriter’s Association for nine years in which he was awarded lifetime membership. Dermod published “Clash” (ISBN9781912083879) with Book Guild in September 2017.

Fatal Exposure

Photography has long been used to capture events. His finest photograph was to cause them.

When Derek takes an intimate photograph of his first love, he sets a sequence of events in motion that threatens them both.

When he displays the photograph in public, she loses her freedom and he stands to lose the love of his life. Kidnapped by an extremist group, she faces a forced marriage and total denial of the lifestyle in which she thrives.

To rescue her and redeem himself, Derek has to form an alliance with an unlikely source – the handsome rival for her love.

Dermod Judge has been an advertising copywriter and creative director, a playwright and a screenwriter. He was also a typographer, a designer, an actor, a filmmaker, a documentarist, a theatre critic, a broadcaster, and an international lecturer on scriptwriting and filmmaking. Fatal Exposure is his tenth published book with The Book Guild.

The Quest

A modern author, a member of a wealthy family, a decadent dynasty, a re-established king and a disillusioned knight look for meaning in the murderous tumult of medieval Europe.

The contemporary writer featured in the tale is commissioned to turn the century-spanning dairies of the noble Novak family into a book. To do so, he has to plumb the depths of debauchery, corruption and brutal wars in a medieval society that is struggling to define itself. He then falls in love with a noble woman and sees her killed by a villainous lordling.

His revenge is horrendous, and his subsequent mysterious death is wrapped up in his fatal return to the East in search of the strange, unearthly woman of long ago.

Dermod Judge has been an advertising copywriter and creative director, a playwright and a screenwriter. He was also a typographer, a designer, an actor, a filmmaker, a documentarist, a theatre critic, a broadcaster, and an international lecturer on scriptwriting and filmmaking. The Quest is his ninth published book with the Book Guild.

MacBride's Wars

Charting one of the most romantic and tragic love triangles of the early twentieth century

What Major John MacBride learns when leading the Irish Brigade in the Second Anglo-Boer War against the British Empire isn’t much help when fighting his estranged wife in the French courts. She is the beloved muse of Ireland’s leading poet and so charismatic that militant Irish nationalists think she is worth a platoon of heavy dragoons in Ireland’s fight for freedom.

Back in Ireland, MacBride’s involvement in that fight moves the same poet to say that he has transformed from a drunken, vainglorious lout to a major player in the ‘terrible beauty’ of the 1916 Easter Rising.

This is a rollicking story of a life-long struggle against an implacable foe with a tragic love story thrown in.

Dermod Judge is an Irish author currently living in Cape Town, South Africa. He’s had a varied career in storytelling across theatre and film – including in broadcasting, writing, designing, directing and filmmaking. Dermod is an international award-winning filmmaker, script editor and international lecturer on storytelling and filmmaking. He has already published three Irish-based novels with The Book Guild – Clash, Two Jam Jars for the Manor and Bopping in Ballymalloy. 

Dermod says, “After a lifetime in the media, most of it as a professional writer, I felt the need to write only books and this is my fourth. I have always considered the Anglo-Boer wars as the first freedom struggles of the modern era and deserving of much description and comment. The fact that many Irish patriots who took up arms directly against the British empire, gained their experience while fighting for the Boers in South Africa should be acknowledged.”

Lost on the Sea of Galilee

Jack Gillcrest is a skilful painter who succumbs to the dangerous attractions of art forgery, descending through increasingly challenging fakes to an active role in the art heist of the century. 

For all his skill in painting techniques, Jack Gillcrest realises that producing a genuine work of art is beyond him, despite his artistically talented girlfriend, Grania believing that he could be a successful painter in his own right. 

He allows himself to be coaxed into forging the work of some of the world’s great artists and is handsomely rewarded for it, but the stakes increase when Jack is persuaded to help steal two hundred million dollars’ worth of art from a museum in Boston. Among the spoil is a superb Rembrandt – Storm on the Sea of Galilee – which taxes Jack’s forging talent to its utmost. 

Can Jack forge a new future for himself? Or is this a heist too far?

Dermod Judge has been a designer, typographer, copywriter, creative director at one of South Africa’s largest advertising agencies, dramatist, actor, broadcaster, international award-winning filmmaker, film and stage director, scriptwriter and editor, and international lecturer on storytelling and filmmaking. Now he has written five books, published with the Book Guild, A Healing Place, which is non-fiction, and four novels; Clash,  Two Jam Jars for the Manor, Bopping in Ballymalloy and MacBride’s Wars.

A Healing Place

One man’s quest to finding his healing place!

Searching for a residence in nature which he can call his own, Dermod Judge finally finds his healing place where he will have respite from the quotidian pressures of life.

On his journey he reveals a unique insight into many aspects of the human condition with examples of writers, artists, architects and naturalists who, throughout the ages, sought ways to change things for the better.

Along the way, he delves into aspects of life which, all too often, need healing. From sin to unnatural divisions foisted upon the world. From the scarcity of water to intimidating cathedrals. From the challenges of white-water canoeing to the vicissitudes of cooking a full breakfast on an open fire without breaking any of the fried eggs.

Dermod Judge is an Irish author currently living in Cape Town, South Africa. He has had a long career in many branches of the media including design, typography, copy-writing, filmmaking, script writing and directing. He has been an international lecturer in story and filmmaking as well as a playwright, stage director and broadcaster. He is the author of Clash, Two Jam Jars for the Manor and Bopping Ballymalloy – all Irish-interest novels (published by Book Guild). This is his first non-fiction work. 

Bopping in Ballymalloy

It’s Ireland in the 1950s and they’re both running away, Curly from failure as a dancer in New York and Mary from the utter boredom of Ballymalloy in the West of Ireland.

Mary is seduced by his flashy car, his collection of great swing music and his style on and off the dance floor. She succumbs and to atone for the inevitable shame he has caused her, he has to give her the only thing she wants – entry into the unforgiving world he thought he’d left forever. He trains her as a jazz dancer and enters her into a competition that offers her a ticket out of town.

The book probes the lives of several inhabitants of Ballymalloy and reveals some funny desires, efforts and strivings. It also probes some horrifying goings on in the workhouses and the industrial schools to which were sent thousands of unwanted children by the church and the religious orders over the decades. Details of these tragic and often fatal stories are still emerging in modern Ireland. However, this story is set in a less complicated time, when America felt good about itself and was admired all over Western Europe. When American technology was supreme and when jazz and bop ruled the world.

Dermod Judge is an Irish author currently living in Cape Town, South Africa. He has had a varied career in storytelling across theatre and film – from broadcasting, writing, designing, directing and filmmaking. Dermod is an international award-winning filmmaker, script editor and international lecturer on storytelling and filmmaking. Lately he has returned to the writing of novels and published Clash (ISBN9781912083879) and Two Jam Jars for the Manor (ISBN 9781912083053) with The Book Guild in 2017, both of which were set in Ireland with Irish themes.

Clash

The first of two novels in a planned series, Clash is a fast paced sports thriller about an eccentric Irish millionaire who takes the fast and tough Irish sport of hurling and transforms it into a ruthless gladiatorial contest, spearheaded by a team he calls “The Danann”. John-Joe Crosby, a skilled traditional hurler from Kerry is swept up in this dangerous game and catapulted into a world in which the safety and even the lives of the players are not as important as the TV and internet ratings.

He falls in love with Kitty and both of them have to run for their lives when they discover proof of the millionaire’s graft and corruption associated with a new sports stadium in Dublin. When John-Joe helps form a hurling team to face the brutal Danann in a battle for the future of the game, it is not intended that he survive the match. Or that Kitty takes the evidence to the authorities.

Author Dermod Judge lives in Cape Town, South Africa and has been involved in story telling in theatre and film for a large proportion of his professional life, and has written over ten full length feature film scripts as well as twelve professionally produced stage and radio plays. Dermod has won a variety of local and international awards for his video making and was the Chair of the South African Scriptwriter’s Association for nine years in which he was awarded lifetime membership. The sport featured within the novel is one of the fastest ball games in the world - Irish hurling which has been played for centuries with a supple ash stick and a hard, leather ball.