A MAN has been found dead beneath the tower of Wimborne church.

Or at least, they have in the latest novel from Malcolm Angel, who runs the Wimborne Literary Festival and Gullivers Bookshop on the High Street.

The 74-year-old author is a very difficult person to nail down.

Born in Twickenham, he moved to Hamworthy at the age of 11.

There, he would meet and marry his wife, with whom he’d have two children.

After working in advertising, he moved to Wimborne and was elected mayor in 1988.

He used this position to lead a campaign in support of reopening the Tivoli Theatre, lobbying parliament and bringing together the community.

They were successful, and Malcolm went on to manage the venue.

Malcolm Angel runs the Wimborne Literary Festival.

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“It was tough,” he said. “I was doing 12 hour days for 10 years, but it was terrific.”

This experience partly inspired his latest novel, The Hidden Covenant.

It follows Michael Bannerman, an injured veteran who starts running a theatre but gets dragged back into the world of danger.

“He’s an ordinary guy,” Malcolm said. “He thinks theatre’s boring but it’s not, you do have to work around the clock.

“He’s an intelligent man, a physical man and is loyal to his friends.

“He’s in a position where one of his friends, stupidly, goes and looks for his brother and because of Bannerman’s contacts, he finds out that where he’s gone means he aint coming back again.”

The backbone of all Malcolm’s work is an exceptional level of research. The Hidden Covenant is no different.

In addition to its meticulously detailed settings, the story draws upon themes set by Wimborne in the early Middle Ages.

The novel places the town at the centre of the global narrative, as Malcolm argues, it was in the eighth century.

“Women have been written out of history, I believe in celebrating and not shackling them.

“The [town’s] monastery likely had the highest number of nuns.

“Wimborne was seen in Rome as a beacon of Christianity and learning.”

He’s particularly intrigued by Leoba, a Wimborne nun who became one of few women to be recognised as a saint.

With a statue in west Germany, she’s celebrated for evangelising the area’s heretics, with stories even suggesting she was present in the court of Charlemagne.

“Every town has a history,” the author said. “You’ve got to dig into it and find some interesting facts.

“I love research; if I say there’s a tree in south Georgia, there’s a tree in south Georgia.

“An awful lot of stuff in this book is fact, but I’ve linked it with fiction.

“The big stories in it have been on the border of fact and fiction for 1,000 years.”

Gullivers Bookshop, on the Wimborne High Street.

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And that’s the core strength of his work. He embraces magical realism, a device introduced by the great European Romantic artists and later developed by Latin American writers, and applies it to a gripping thriller story.

The thinking person’s Da Vinci Code, The Hidden Covenant excels at integrating complex literary techniques to a commercially successful genre.

“On television, the characters are big macho blokes who get women,” he said. “People aren’t like that.

“He doesn’t go around beating people up for the sake of it, he doesn’t sleep around, he’s just an ordinary bloke.”

The Hidden Covenant by Malcolm Angel is on sale at Gullivers Bookshop in Wimborne.