About me
V.B. John — Ship Captain | Author|
For eighteen years, I navigated the world’s oceans, rising from Deck Cadet to Captain aboard chemical tankers crossing every major sea lane on earth. The sea didn’t make me a writer. It gave me the one thing I actually needed: silence, and years of it, to build stories in my head long before I had the time to write them down.
I write Kerala Noir: thrillers rooted in the landscapes, moral weight, and quiet violence of Kerala. My detective series launched with Seven Little Monkeys (DC Books, 2022), introducing Richard Aston, a local boy who became Kerala’s most indispensable, if unlikeliest, detective. The series has sold over 4,000 copies in its original Malayalam edition through DC Books, Kerala’s leading literary publisher, and I remain humbled by how deeply readers have taken Richard Aston into their hearts. The second book in the series is forthcoming in late 2026.
I am a story architect. I build a narrative the way I once built a passage plan: structure first, and let the beauty follow.
I live in Newcastle, UK, and I’m still, in every book, finding my way back to Kerala, one page, one tide, at a time.
