About the Author. Raff Stuart joined the Army at age 15 and spent 31 years serving before leaving as a senior major to take up a career in the commercial public sectors as a CEO and management consultant. He is married with two grown children, two grandchildren and currently lives in Aberdeen. His hobbies include hill walking, sailing, painting, bird watching and travelling to exotic places to view the wildlife. A Personal Voyage of Discovery. People often ask me what caused me to write the Chronicles of Adam Black and I suppose it goes back to the distressing suicides of Army recruits at the depot at Deepcut a few years ago. In 1987 when I was a Major working in the Ministry of Defence I was tasked with producing a report on the number of deaths in the Army for the previous year and the reasons for those deaths. It made me focus on what I had gone through as a young soldier, which in turn led me to use Adam Black as a means to highlight the pressures we were under.