Historical fiction · Military history · Aviation
Spies, flying boats and the long road to war. Novels set in the Golden Age of Aviation, written by a retired intelligence officer with a 45-year career.
Eric Hoffer Award winner. Flying Boats & Spies took the 2011 Eric Hoffer Award for Legacy Fiction and was optioned for film by EmiMoon Productions.
Series · Six books & counting
Nick Grant is a headstrong teenager from a poor family in Alameda, California, during the Great Depression. He works at Pan American's seaplane base, trains as a Naval Aviation Cadet, and keeps crossing paths with Commander Miyazaki, a master of Japan's Black Dragon Society. The characters around him are mostly real people. So are the events. Nick is the one invention.
Book I
As the world edges closer to war, a mighty flying boat is readied for her first flight, and America's enemies will do anything to see it fail. A plucky young pilot is sent to tropical islands, first love, and the sights of murderous assassins.
Eric Hoffer Award
Book II
Pan American pioneers the 5,000-mile route from San Francisco to the Orient with its China Clipper flying boats, and Nick is in the middle of it. Walter J. Boyne called it "accurate, fast moving and filled with surprises."
Book III
Nick Grant's most dangerous mission yet. He risks everything to settle the score with the Black Dragon, Miyazaki.
Book IV
1936. Japanese intelligence teams up with Nazi Germany to steal Howard Hughes' H-1 racer. When the plan fails, the Black Dragons take a hostage and demand the plans, plus the Navy's Pacific War Plans, from Nick.
Book V
Japanese Naval Intelligence plots a revolt in American Samoa, a key refueling stop on Pan Am's new South Pacific route. Nick is ordered to find Miyazaki and report, but not to confront him. Revenge has other ideas.
Book VI
Grounded after an accident, Nick is recruited for a classified mission: unmask a Japanese-German operation to steal the Sikorsky S-42B's design, with Charles Lindbergh and Lady Clarissa "Valkyrie" Freeman-Pittsford in the mix.
Jamie is writing the seventh Nick Grant Adventure now. The books are written for young adults, and plenty of adult aviation fans read them too.
Fans gather in the Nick Grant Fans group on Facebook. More on the series at nickgrantadventures.com.
What readers and writers say
“Black Dragons Attack is a thrilling pre–World War II story. This series is addictive!”
Homer Hickam
NY Times bestselling author of Rocket Boys / October Sky
“China Clipper is a terrific read! It's accurate, fast moving and filled with surprises; perfect for young people interested in history and aviation.”
Walter J. Boyne
Bestselling author, former director of the National Air & Space Museum
“Flying Boats and Spies nails it! Jamie Dodson got it all right with a page-turning story that took to Pacific adventures that others only dream about.”
Austin Boyd
Navy pilot, award-winning novelist, author of the Mars Hill Classified trilogy
“The popular Nick Grant series continues with China Clipper, a fast-moving, fun tale of adventure, flying boats, spies, and the sea. I love this series!”
Homer Hickam
Author of Rocket Boys / October Sky
“Flying Boats & Spies is rollicking great fun!”
Ralph Peters
Author and TV commentator
“MISSION: SHANGHAI is a page turner you won't be able to put down.”
J. R. Hafer
Aviation writer and blogger
Series · World War Two alternate history
Late in the war, the Third Reich gambles on a Wunderwaffe stranger than any rocket: giant predatory ants, bred in a laboratory and landed on the coast of Maine. The fight to stop them falls to the people who guard the home front.
Book 1 · 2024
Nazi scientists turn mutant ants the size of steers into a weapon and release them on Swans Island, Maine. Islanders and Coast Guardsmen are left to fight for their lives against the engineered creatures.
Book 2 · Coming next
The breeding pair delivered by U-505 has become a colony, and its winged mating pairs are reaching the mainland, where America's war factories sit. Coast Guardsmen who survived the first outbreak are reinforced by a U.S. Army Ranger battalion and a Royal Navy prototype helicopter, and together they fight to keep a Nazi-engineered menace from overrunning the home front.
Nonfiction
Jamie's fiction rests on years of research into the flying boats and the men and women who flew them. Some of that research became a history of its own.
2018 · Schiffer Publishing
Pan American World Airways' Epic Flying Boat Era, 1929–1946
Co-written with Teresa Webber. The book goes back nine decades to aviation's most inventive era, with never-before-told accounts from Pan Am flight crews and passengers. It covers the romance, adventure and danger of early ocean flying, and the aircraft builders and terminals that made it possible.
On the writing desk
Memoir · co-written
A memoir about the Indigenous fighters who served alongside U.S. Special Forces during the Vietnam War.
Fiction
The seventh Nick Grant Adventure.
Magazine work
Jamie also writes for magazines alongside his books.
About the author
Jamie Dodson is a retired intelligence officer with a 45-year career who now writes full-time.
As an intelligence officer he served with Special Operations, Airborne Infantry, Air and Missile Defense, and Army Aviation units, and on assignments with U.S. allies. He has lived on three continents, in the Hawaiian Islands, and in many places across the United States.
His first novel, Flying Boats & Spies, came out from OnStage Publishing in 2008, won the Eric Hoffer Award, and was optioned for a motion picture by EmiMoon Productions. China Clipper followed in 2010 and MISSION: Shanghai in 2012. When OnStage closed in 2014, the rights returned to Jamie. The Ardent Writer Press published Book 4, Black Dragons Attack, in 2017, and Schiffer published Hunting the Wind in 2018. Since then he has self-published Samoan Clipper, Valkyrie Rising and Home Fires Burning.
He and his wife, Dr. Joan Dodson, have two grown sons, a daughter, two spoiled cats, and a 110-pound German shepherd "lap dog." They split their time between Madison, Alabama, and Portland, Maine.
Talks & press
Jamie gives illustrated talks on the flying boats of the interwar years, with his display models of the great airliners, and joins panels on the craft of writing.
Why flying boats appealed to early airlines, cargo haulers, explorers and the military, plus an introduction to the Nick Grant series and a display of airliner models.
A panel with local authors Beck McDowell, Les Johnson and Scott Oden to kick off National Novel Writing Month.
Feature on the Nick Grant series: “I thought it would make a great movie, something in the ‘Indiana Jones’ tradition but without the supernatural elements.”
A conversation about the series and the real history behind it. Listen
Invite Jamie to speak. Libraries, schools, book clubs, aviation museums and veterans' groups can get in touch about talks and signings.
Get in touchContact
For speaking requests, interviews, rights inquiries or a note from a reader, email Jamie directly.