About me...

Ever since I was a kid I couldn't decide if I wanted to be a treasure hunter or a spy. My favourite movies were (and still are) the James Bond and Indiana Jones series. I think it was probably inevitable I'd end up in this line of work.

I was always good with computers - something which got me and my friends into a bit of trouble in our teens. However, a great tutor at university spotted my talent for snooping around and she redirected my curiosity. I found poring over historical archives looking for inconsistencies and clues was almost as much fun as sneaking around in other people's computer networks. Thank you Prof Harrison - if it wasn't for you, I might well have ended up in jail!

After graduating I held down a couple of researcher and archivist jobs, but nothing I was doing was as much fun as my little side-projects: solving historical mysteries and trying to track down lost artifacts. So eventually I decided to give the treasure hunter / historical detective thing a go full-time.

I like to think of myself as a one-man A-Team. If you have a (historical) problem, and no-one else can help, maybe you can hire... ME!

Past projects:

In my relatively short career so far I've tracked down long-lost relatives, untangled convoluted inheritance claims, uncovered a horde of Anglo-Saxon coins, located a couple of WW1 shipwrecks, and found the only surviving copy of the missing volume of an early Encyclopedia.

As I've worked on these jobs, I've run into a bunch of secret codes and ciphers. I find these fascinating and I've written an article about some famous ciphers and how to crack them. You can read it here if you're interested.

Current projects:

I'm always interested in hearing about jobs, but I'm actually pretty busy at the moment in a project of my own - investigating a mystery dating from the end of WW2. I got engrossed in it after a researcher friend of mine stumbled across an intriguing diagram in the archives of the Warsaw Library. Thanks for the tip Alice - if it pays off, I promise not to forget who got me started on this crazy quest!