Tenacity Naval Toasts Blog Tour: Friday's Toast is to A Willing Foe and Sea-Room

Today I am excited to be kicking off the blog tour to celebrate the upcoming paperback release of J.S. Law's TENACITY which just so happens to have a quote inside from yours truly! It really is a thrilling read and the start to what I hope will be a fantastic series of books featuring Lieutenant Danielle Lewis. If you haven't read the book already then please check it out and you can read my review here. I hope you enjoy reading the post and make sure to follow the rest of the tour!

Suicide must be investigated.

Especially when a Royal Navy sailor kills himself on a nuclear submarine, only days after his wife's brutal murder.

Now Lieutenant Danielle Lewis, the Navy's finest Special Branch investigator, must interrogate the tight-knit, male crew of HMS Tenacity to determine if there's a link.

Isolated, and standing alone in the face of extreme hostility, Dan soon realises that she may have to choose between the truth and her own survival.

Justice must be served, but with a possible killer on board the pressure is rising and her time is running out...

NAVAL TOASTS BLOG TOUR: Friday’s Toast is to “A Willing Foe and Sea-Room”

by James Law

At mess dinners in the Royal Navy, immediately after the Loyal Toast of ‘The Queen’, the youngest officer present will normally offer the traditional drinking toast of that day. I’ve seen many young officers caught out by this, failing to have checked what the correct toast is, accidentally saying the wrong one, or being deliberately sabotaged by a thirsty friend (a bottle of Port is the normal fine for getting it wrong).

Each toast has a different meaning and the Royal Navy’s Friday toast is fairly self-explanatory. It toasts to the fact that we have “A Willing Foe and Sea Room”. Simply, someone game to fight us, and the room at sea to conduct our war and manoeuvres. It’s blood thirsty and steeped in tradition where captains and crews would earn their promotions with victories at sea. It’s one of my favourite toasts, not because I crave war! I really don’t, but because to me the idea behind it is true in real life and in fiction. To taste success, we have to overcome, and with every great hero, comes a willing foe and the space to fight them.

I think of Sherlock Holmes – who would he be without Moriarty? What would Batman do without the joker, Superman without Luther, Pan without Hook, Harry without Voldermort, Katniss without Snow. All of these stories that produce our great heroes and heroines rely on our characters to be able to push against something, to fight and improve themselves and to show their worth. Clarice Starling may have had a stellar career had she never met Lecter, but she did and he was what she needed to prove her true worth.

In Tenacity, I try to do the same with Dan Lewis, to test her and see how she copes and survives. I place her in a submarine, a completely alien environment to her, then shut the hatch. She’s locked in there and is made to feel alone. She’s an outsider, a police officer, a woman in a man’s world and I promise you, she has any number of willing foes, but at 200 metres beneath the ocean’s surface, on a Royal Navy nuclear submarine, there’s little room for manoeuvre and absolutely nowhere to run…