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PUBLICATIONS

Fiction

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1917—Empress Alexandria understands that the Bolsheviks will soon topple the Czar. She charges her godson, Kirik Pirogov, to carry the imperial crown of Catherine the Great and a cache of Romanov jewelry to a secret Czarist refuge in western China. Alexandra, determined to continue the direct line of the Romanov Dynasty, charges her youngest daughter, Grand Duchess Anastasia, to forsake Russia and seek refuge in a White Russian community in western China. ​ Kirik and Anastasia make the perilous journeys across Siberia via the Trans-Siberian Railroad. Their story is told against the background of revolution, their hardscrabble life in the Russian village, constant fear of the Soviet secret police, and unscrupulous treasure-hunters.
In the aftermath of the Italian-Abyssinia war of 1935-1936, the Fascists occupied Abyssinia with an iron-fist. Sofia Russo, an Italian archeologist, is a no-nonsense, courageous woman. She teams with Walter Gregory, an American intelligence agent, to smuggle Uranium 235 ore samples to a western democracy. Pursued by the Italian secret police and the Regia Aeronautica Italiana, the pair has a harrowing escape through the Abyssinian highlands and mountains. National Indie Excellence Awards Finalist for Action-Adventure!
Suffused throughout this conglomeration of novellas and short stories are lovers, blackguards, gallants, and wayfarers doing extraordinary things. A few of the characters are based on real people.
Giovanni Cosimo is a Christian knight who was captured during the Third Crusade and spent several years in a gruesome Muslim prison. The Pope ransoms the knight and charges him by a Holy Writ to find Prestor John and command this prince to return to the Church of Rome and pay tribute. For several centuries the legend of the chimerical Prestor John and his fabulous wealthy kingdom with magical powers intrigued the Church, kings, and scholars. The narrative recounts the decades-long adventures of the knight’s search for the mythical prince.

Fiction

St Catherine's Crown​

Abyssinia

Aviators, Adventurers,

and Assassins

Prestor John

It's January 1885 and Lars and Katja Neufeld, brother and sister, make a daring escape from Khartoum just before the Mahdi's Muslim army capture it and slaughter the Europeans and other infidels. Disguised as Arabs, the pair follows their father's detailed plan: they sail south in a twenty-foot ketch up the Blue Nile. Their goal is to find refuge in Abyssinia, a Christian nation, migrate to German Equatoria, and then sail to Bavaria, their father's home. Their perilous adventures en route include raging waters, venomous reptiles and aggressive crocodiles, and dangerous encounters with Muslim soldiers and slavers. ​ Khartoum was a finalist in the Writer's League of Texa' Manuscript Contest in 2013.

Khartoum

Amelia Earhart, the famed aviatrix, vanished somewhere in the south Pacific during her attempt to fly around-the-world in her specially modified Lockheed Electra, model 10E, in July 1937. "Lost at sea" is the official story. The U. S. Navy was not convinced. The Commander of the Office of Naval Intelligence tasked his operations officer, Commander Gregory Thompson, USN, with uncovering the details of Earhart’s disappearance. His extensive research engendered more questions about government involvement than hard evidence about her disappearance. Commander Thompson’s unclassified report is the basis for this roman à clef.

Amelia

During the chaos that was China in 1935, Randall Kendrick, a wealthy American collector of fine oriental art, and his savvy daughter, Ingrid, embark on an adventurous quest to purchase a cache of extremely rare Ming yellow porcelains. General Wu Pei-fu, the vicious warlord of Kansu Province, offers the porcelains for sale to the highest bidder. Traveling with Kendrick is the expatriate Australian photojournalist, Matt Drummond who focuses his eyes through his camera’s viewfinder and on Ingrid. Leading the Kendrick party is Wallace Chung, a suave young hustler who claims to have some connection with the warlord and first-hand knowledge about the porcelains. The Kendrick party travels in a private railroad coach bound for Kansu Province in western China. Soon they are caught in the maw of China’s interior strife: dueling warlords, bandit gangs, marauding militias, Communist cadres, and elements of Japan’s Kwangtung Army.

Ming Yellow

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Shanghai Express

Non-Fiction

Amelia Earhart, the famous aviatrix, disappeared on 2 July 1937 during her flight from Lae, New Guinea to Gardner island-2,223 nautical distant over the open Central Pacific Ocean. To date, no one has found a trace of Earhart or her airplane, a modified Lockheed Electra. Model 10. Nonetheless, over these past few decades, a cadre of aeronautical technicians, intelligence specialists, private professionals, journalists, and shameless charlatans have published numerous manuscripts purporting to solve the enigma of Amelia Earhart's last flight. These manuscripts are suffused with factual data, apocryphal speculation, and cockamamie fiction.

Amelia Earhart's Disappearance Explored in

Five Scenarios

Amelia Earhart the famed aviatrix, disappeared on 2 July 1937 somewhere in the Central Pacific. She was piloting her Lockheed Electra aircraft outbound from Lae, New Guinea en route to Howland Island. Her course was east bound over 2,230 nautical miles over open ocean. To this day her fate is unknown.

Amelia Earhart's Last Flight

In this monograph, Shelton explains the basic mathematical formulas that deal with photographic optics. He discusses the basic concepts of light. He displays the optical formulae in large, bright colors and discusses how to use them. Shelton solves sample problems and then tasks the reader to solve a problem dealing with that formula. He uses color illustrations to show the various optical concepts on which these formulas apply, such as f-number and aperture, depth-of-field, hyperfocal distance, circle of confusion, and achromatic lenses.

Fundamentals of Photographic Optics

This monograph is an insider’s perspective on the informational media industry. With over thirty-five years of experience, award-winning filmmaker S. Martin Shelton presents his astute views on the state of the profession and offers sage, constructive advice for the successful design and production of information motion-media. ​ This monograph is the winner in two categoraies of the Society for Technical Communication - 2004-2005 Southern California Spotlight Competition: • Best of Show • Distinguished Technical Communication Award in the Book category

Communicating Ideas with Film, Video, and Multimedia

Forgoing discussions of technology, Shelton instead concentrates on the communication principles that can motivate an audience to achieve a particular goal—a goal that must be realistic, worthwhile, and appropriate. His inventive approach coalesces theory of the media with its psychology, philosophy, analysis, history, and application. Written for a broad audience of professional informational and corporate filmmakers, film students, technical writers, and clients, it is an insider’s perspective on the informational media industry. With over thirty-five years of experience, award-winning filmmaker Shelton presents his astute views on the state of the profession and offers sage, constructive advice for the successful design and production of information motion-media. This valuable guide examines how to encode effectively information in motion media by using in-depth communication analysis and pertinent filmic design.

Motion Media and Communications

In this short monograph, Shelton highlights the protocols, the “do” and “don’t” as it were, of ghost-towning—visiting such sites and abandoned mining camps in the American West. His most important point is don’t be a blackguard. Leave these historical sites, non-renewable re-sources of our past as they are for future generations to visit. For over a century, the romantic mystique of gold rushes, gunfights, and saloons of the western town has captured popular imagination. Hollywood fantasy publicity engenders folks to visit these precious remnants of time gone by. Unfortunately, ghost towns are fragile resources vulnerable to the environment, artifact collectors, thieves, and vandals. Over the years, such scalawags have done incredible damage to our dwindling historic sites. Once a ghost town is gone, it is gone forever.

Ghost Towning for Fun, Adventure, and Discovery

The Avengers was a popular 1950s British television series featuring Patrick Macnee as the character John Steed and Diana Rigg as Emma Peel. Steed and Emma were agents for an unnamed secret intelligence agency—a spoof of the James Bond capers. The player’s sexual chemistry suffused throughout the episodes—with action left un-played and unsaid more often than not. In many of the shows, there were charmingly faint and sometime patently erotic innuendos: double entendres, roguish bon mots, and sensual play that spoke of carnal relations. In this concise monograph, Shelton explores these clues to form a plausible decision.

The Avengers: The Romance Between Emma Peel and John Steed

One of the least known operations in the Pacific Theatre in World War II was the United States Office of Strategic Services’ clandestine cooperation with Marxist Ho Chi Minh and his Communist Việt Minh in Vietnam. (The Office of Strategic Services, or OSS, was a precursor of the Central Intelligence Agency.) Ho was waging a losing guerilla war against the occupying Japanese army. ​ Ho’s agent in Kunming, China, told the OSS’s senior operative that Ho need assistance and that his cadres would fight side by side with the Americans in their campaign against imperial Japan. Soon after, OSS technical advisors infiltrated into Vietnam, bringing all manner of military gear, communication equipment, and medical supplies. Now well armed with U.S. weapons, Ho’s Việt Minh cadres significantly increased their guerrilla operations: sabotage, ambush, and assassination.

Ho Chi Minh and the OSS

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