Behind the Character - Pauline Rowson talks about her crime busting hero, Art Marvik

Former Royal Marine Commando, Special Boat Services Officer, Art Marvik is tough, highly trained, fearless, intelligent and fit.  Injuries inflicted while in combat have forced him to leave the Marines and seek a new life in Civvy Street. He thought he’d be able to adjust and carve out a new career for himself on the sea, but his first job as a private maritime security operative goes very wrong when the luxury motor cruiser he was travelling on and had been detailed to guard, gets attacked by pirates in the Indian Ocean, and Marvik finds himself with a bullet in his shoulder and the boat’s owner dead. He failed on his first mission in civilian life, and Silent Running, the first in the Marvik series, opens with him reeling from it. 

Soon though he is launched on a new and dangerous career working as an undercover investigator for the UK's National Intelligence Marine Squad (NIMS) headed by Detective Superintendent Philip Crowder. Marvik is aided in his investigations by his former Royal Marine colleague, communications, surveillance and IT expert, amputee, Shaun Strathen.

Marvik’s task is to go in to investigations comparatively cold with minimal information from Crowder even though Crowder knows more. But Marvik’s role is to ask questions, to stir up trouble, to provoke a killer into the open and to risk his life in doing so. Marvik is no stranger to staring death in the face.  He’s been doing it all his adult life. 

His biggest fear is being injured and incapacitated, being weak and having to rely on others. Fiercely independent and resilient since the age of seventeen when his parents - his mother a renowned marine archaeologist and his father an equally renowned oceanographer- were killed in a underwater explosion in the Straits of Malacca, Marvik’s family became the Marines.  Now that family has gone. He and Shaun Strathen are casualties of conflict. 

Marvik knows the sea intimately having spent much of his life on and under it. His missions for the National Intelligence Marine Squad (NIMS) take him across the Solent and along the south coast of England, forcing him out of isolation in his remote cottage on the Isle of Wight and as the missions increase so too the danger to him personally.  But Marvik is smart and tough. He can operate outside the law and does so because the job demands it. He’s not always right though. He makes mistakes, he misjudges people.  Sometimes the consequences are shocking and disturbing.


When an innocent girl gets killed, during Marvik’s second mission for NIMS (Dangerous Cargo) Marvik blames himself for not protecting her. Then a house fire almost claims his life and that of another girl, and Marvik believes it’s connected with the mission.  Only when Crowder drops the bombshell that Marvik’s parents’ deaths were not an accident but murder, does Marvik embark on a new mission and his most deadly one to date - to find the truth behind his parents deaths in 1997.






Lost Voyage is the third Art Marvik Mystery.  Marvik is surprised to receive an unexpected summons to meet Helen Shannon, the a woman he helped on his first mission (Silent Running). When a body is discovered in her flat, Marvik is convinced that Helen is being framed for murder, but why and by whom? Before he has a chance to follow it up, Detective Chief Superintendent Crowder, asks Marvik to investigate the disappearance of a salvage vessel, the Mary Jo, which went missing in 2003.  As Marvik delves into the past, it becomes clear that he faces a desperate battle to keep Helen and others safe from a ruthless assassin – one who will stop at nothing in order to protect the secret of the Mary Jo’s last voyage from ever being exposed.

The Art Marvik series has been hailed as 'having all the hallmarks of the Rowson brand - a troubled hero, the setting and atmosphere, the sailing and boats, interesting characters, and the intricate, complex plots.'

"Action fans need Marvik on their radar." Booklist


You can read about my other crime busting hero, DI Andy Horton here.

There are thirteen novels in the DI Andy Horton procedural crime series. Plus two standalone crime novels, In Cold Daylight and In For The Kill, and three Marvik MysteriesMarvik, Silent Running  Dangerous Cargo and Lost Voyage.