Aly Monroe. The Official Blog

Penny Pinching Pirates

2012-01-08T05:42:00.000-08:00

Yesterday I found out that my latest Peter Cotton novel, Icelight was being pirated. Flattering? I am not sure.

Publishing has long been a compacted cottage industry, by which I mean that multinationals aggregate a great many individual writers to look like one big umbrella with a logo on it. Experience of other industries suggests this model does not always work. Music, for example.

What does appear strange is the great divergence in demand. Very many people want to read – or have wanted to read – the Twilight Saga. Likewise the Harry Potter books. In my case, however, the pirates are now catering for what I can only describe with any politeness as a boutique interest. To be blunt, Peter Cotton has no theme park, nor film series.

No. We are talking here of penny pinching pirates.

My cynical husband has assured me that the meaning of ‘copyright’ has changed. It now indicates a right to copy.

Since my sales really do not justify a J K Rowling type legal team using a ‘watermark’ to trace buccaneers, he has come up with what he terms ‘an oblique response’ – namely the manufacture of pins and T-shirts. The pins will be ‘P’ for pirated. The T-shirts will bear legends like ‘I’ve been pirated.’ He suggests the margins would match royalties and invites suggestions.

I am a little surprised that the pirates have bothered. There is inclusive and there is swashbuckling. Not much swash here, I think. This is more like Scrooge than Jack Sparrow.

Twelfth Night - Noche de Reyes!

2012-01-05T07:24:00.000-08:00

Everyone is back at work in Britain, tinsel and Christmas trees tidied away, but in Spain, this is ‘Noche de Reyes’ the time for present giving, and the official end of Christmas. This year for the first time, my little grandson who lives in Spain was aware and excited about Santa coming (Santa duly did) and tonight eagerly awaits the Three Kings – los Reyes Magos.

Twelfth Night is of course the title of a Shakespeare play, so called because Shakespeare was commissioned to write a play for the celebration of the Epiphany – the twelfth and last day of Christmas. The play itself has nothing to do with Christmas or the Three Kings, but it has been one of my favourites for a very long time – deliciously funny and witty, and who could not be in love with Viola, the strong young heroine who (as do a number of Shakespeare’s heroines) dons men’s clothing to survive and speaks wonderful lines? When I was about 12 I had a Twelfth night party in which everyone had to assume the name of one of the characters of the play. It ended with us dismantling the Christmas tree. As a tradition, I have to say, it didn’t catch on.

This Christmas, record numbers of E-readers have found their way into people’s stockings. It was only to be expected, therefore, that downloads of ebooks would soar. According to some sources millions of ebooks have been purchased in the UK alone since Christmas. I will put to one side for the moment the Daily Mail’s characteristically measured report of the seemingly unstoppable rise in piracy, echoing what has happened in the music and film industry. One of the things that has struck me is the number of people who have been downloading classics (many of them free) and have announced that they are going to include them in their reading along with their habitual literary diet. For some, this is about trying something they have never read before; for others, revisiting well-loved books.

So, on ‘Noche de Reyes’, if you want a free ebook for your fine new e-reader, resist the temptation to download a pirated version. Instead, be adventurous. Find something surprising, that is new for you, unlike anything you normally read, among the classics legitimately available for free download. Or download an old favourite, to carry with you and dip into wherever you are.

I, of course, have downloaded Twelfth Night.

Words Beginning with P, like Prozac, Piracy, Plagiarism, Planet and Publicity

2011-12-21T04:31:00.000-08:00

This morning The Guardian reports what El Pais reported yesterday and some have tweeted: Spanish novelist stops writing novels because of piracy.

The Spanish have an unenviable record as some of the world’s leading download pirates. Behind this item of news is a recent judgement in which a young software designer called Pablo Soto was absolved in a trial brought by various publishers of music, film and books. Indeed the publishers had to pay all the costs. They have appealed.

But this is also a personal story. Lucia Etxebarria (1966) is the novelist involved. She came to fame in 1997 with a book called 'Amor, Curiosidad, Prozac y Dudas'. (Love, Curiosity, Prozac and Doubts).

By using Prozac in the title she was, of course, at least alluding to Elizabeth Wurzel’s 1994 novel 'Prozac Nation'.

According to the magazine Interviu, she did more than allude. In 2001 the magazine accused her of plagiarism in that book and in Estacion de Infierno where she had borrowed from Spanish poet Antonio Colina. In 2003, a court ruled that the magazine had reported ‘what was true'.

In 2006 Lucia settled out of court with the psychologist Jorge Castello who claimed she had used material from an article of his.

None of this changes that she does have talents, has been a considerable seller, has an honorary degree from the University of Aberdeen and, among other prizes, won the Premio Planeta in 2004. I have blogged on this ‘prize’ before. It is in fact an advance and is awarded in time for Christmas – it has been a tradition for years in Spain to give the winner as a present, usually to fathers. ‘Better than socks’ is the phrase.

What is interesting is the passions Lucia can raise. I checked on Wikipedia before writing this. The English version was temporariy nobbled. What in Spanish is 'escritor' (writer) was rendered as ‘plagiarist’ in English. She has been verbally assaulted by many pirates on the social networks. The vehemence and the hate are impressive.

The Spanish like to think their Indignados started the Occupy movement. Her critics are more than indignant. There are some as dumb as the girls in last summer’s English riots who thought small shopkeepers were ‘rich’. Others appear to be weighed down by the Generation X factor – there but for the cruelties of fate go I. Somewhere between stalkers and trolls they behave as if they own her.

But I suspect some of them feel betrayed, saw her as leading the way. No, I don’t think this is a novelist being hoist on her own petard. Yes, it appears her latest book (not in ebook) is not selling as well as previous productions. Actually that is a pretty common case. Spain has just acquired Amazon.es and there are signs that what has taken years in other countries is being implemented very fast. Javier Marias mentioned that a worried bookseller had told him that he had shifted just 12 copies of his best-selling novelist in 14 days.

So this is 'un toque de atencion'. A kind of ‘pay attention’. It’s about publicity more than piracy.

This blog is hardly Christmassy but I suppose it adds up to a stocking filler.

Have a Happy Christmas everyone!

Defrosting the Bird and Killing the Sprouts

2011-12-12T14:00:00.000-08:00

When I was young I remember an Italian visitor to our house describing British Christmas cooking as ‘defrosting the bird and killing the sprouts.’

Years later, when I lived in Spain the story was very different. Around the end of November, live turkeys would begin to appear on the verandas along the street as families fed them up in preparation for Noche Buena (Christmas Eve). About a week before Christmas I got into the lift with an eleven-year-old neighbour and asked her how their turkey was coming along. Nice and plump, she said. She seemed quite excited. Then she told me it would be killed the next day. Ah, I said. And who does that? She turned to me with a spine-chilling, gleam in her eye. ‘I do,’ she said. ‘I do it every year.’

I got out of the lift feeling quite disturbed. She was actually looking forward to the killing. I had no trouble gutting and jointing a bird, but would not fancy wringing its neck. Then I asked myself if we had all become too squeamish. The meat we eat must be killed. We are happy to eat it, but only if someone else kills it, preferably out of sight. Perhaps my young neighbour’s attitude was really more healthy. She was taking part in a matter-of-fact, life-death-food ritual.

My reflections on our relationship with blood and guts were rekindled soon after Christmas. We were in England spending a few days with relatives, when the doorbell rang. I opened it to find a neighbour holding up an, enormous, gleaming, salmon trout he had just caught. “For you!’ he said. My relative recoiled at the sight. The fish she normally bought from the local supermarket was rectangular shaped, frozen, wrapped in plastic, and came without bones. I sat her down in a comfortable chair and then went to the kitchen to deal with the neighbour’s generous gift.

When I took her a cup of tea next morning, I couldn’t help noticing, on her bed-side table, the lurid cover of the bloodthirsty crime novel she was reading.

Bertrand Russell said that he read murder stories to stop himself from murdering people, which seems a good reason. I sometimes wonder what became of my little Spanish neighbour. I do hope she developed a taste for crime fiction.

Lost Children Found

2011-12-04T02:39:00.000-08:00

Earlier this year I blogged about Spain’s ‘Robbed Children’. During the Franco regime and for some twenty years after his death in 1975, a large number of new born children were removed from their natural parents and ‘sold on’ to adoptive parents. Doctors and member of the Church were involved in this business and the real parents were told their child had died.

The BBC produced a documentary on the distress caused and showed it last October. (See my last blog post about this). Amongst the cases they followed was an American citizen living in Austin Texas called Randy Ryder. He is now forty but only found out his parents were not really his parents twelve or thirteen years ago. One of the difficulties for children seeking their real parents is that documents like birth certificates were systematically falsified. Adoptive parents were recorded as the biological parents.

The documentary followed him through DNA testing to see whether or not he was the lost brother that a family were trying to track down. The DNA test showed he was not.

It’s a tough set of circumstances and the DNA register set up to help is necessarily limited. Of the roughly 1,500 legal cases opened only 6 so far have resulted in a DNA match.

In today’s El Pais it is reported that Randy has now found his mother. There is a twist. For a start she is not Spanish but South African and now living in London. Nor was he ‘robbed’. For an aspiring, 25 year old actress in Malaga, his birth was inconvenient and she gave him up for adoption. They are going to meet soon.

I am certainly not going to judge anyone but will also say that over 200 of the cases have been ‘archivado’ – shelved – because the mothers were found to have collaborated in the sale of their children. That’s how things are.

El Pais however also gives a case in which a mother and daughter (who have chosen anonymity) have been reunited through the DNA register. At first the mother was both upset and incredulous. She had been told she had given birth to a stillborn son. Indeed, she refused to accept the results of a second DNA test. It wasn’t until she agreed to meet her daughter that she saw the person claiming to be her daughter looked pretty much like her other daughter.

It would be nice to say this rare success had immediately gone well. But the mother is now as it were grieving for the child she did not have for thirty seven years, while the same but now adult child helps her through confusion and distress. That’s also how things are.

Icelight - in Best Five Thrillers of 2011

2011-11-21T02:48:00.000-08:00

I have just heard that Icelight is number 2 in the Daily Telegraph's Best Five Thrillers of 2011.

Very nice news!

Apologies, Allies and Drop Caps

2011-11-17T10:12:00.000-08:00

Yesterday I was contacted by Nicholas Blincoe who kindly pointed out that in his ebook version of Washington Shadow my name was, in the table of contents, given as Ally. This is, I hope now was, the case on Amazon, Waterstones, Apple and so on.

More importantly there is a hiccup at the beginning of each chapter. It is ‘the drop cap problem’. In the printed book each chapter begins with a very large opening letter and continues in upper case for a couple of words.

This has not transferred to the e-version. In fact the first letter has gone up a line and the following letters are a line down, either headless or, in some cases providing a new word.

Thus and for example we have

OTTON

HEN

I got straight on to John Murray and they have got straight on to sorting out the problems. These apparently afflict The Maze of Cadiz as well as Washington Shadow.

I am told Icelight is fine.

My apologies to any readers who have wondered why I should be talking about hens – and thanks again to Nicholas Blincoe for pointing out the mistakes.

Writers are sent author’s copies of their work in print. I wonder if it wouldn’t also be a good idea for publishers to send the e-version as well?

Poppies

2011-11-14T06:10:00.000-08:00

My father-in-law clocked up 93 last Friday. Yes, he was born on Armistice Day, on 11-11 -1918. Had he been a girl he would have been called Irene. Irene means peace. I don’t know what the male equivalent is. He was called John.

Naturally we went over to see him and found him pretty well, though mildly amused by all the 11-11-11 cards.

He was more bemused by the poppy business, particularly as applied to the English football team’s insistence on wearing what turned out to be arm bands when they played Spain in a friendly match on November 11.

Like many of his generation, he is appalled by what he calls ‘the arm punching’ celebrations of present day millionaire footballers. ‘Arm-punching’ includes somersaults, group hugs and badge kissing.

May I be frank? I don’t think he has the slightest desire to shake John Terry’s hand.

On a wider level, he is also rather baffled by the poppy insistence. On graduating in 1939, he joined up three months before the declaration of war because he knew war was coming.

He considers himself very lucky, despite weighing six stone when he got out of Burma. His great friend John Wishart died on D-Day. My brother-in-law has Christopher as a second name for another dead friend.

But the thing about being 93 is that you get to consider a long life. And while WW2 was an absolute game changer that doesn’t mean you can’t think about it.

We gave him Max Hastings’ All Hell Broke Loose. His first reaction? ‘We’re beginning to bite the bullet’.

Now my father-in-law has thought for some time that the Russians beat the Germans and the USA beat the Japanese. The British, apart from a brave and rather lucky window, were fortunate to tag along.

But one of his standards is the deaths suffered. The Russians lost millions. The Germans lost about half that number. The British? However cruel this may sound, surprisingly few.

John Wishart, for example, had four years of doing nothing very much until D-Day. My father-in-law himself says he rarely experienced danger – he only found out relatively recently that the commanding officer who sent him and others into Burma was summarily relieved of his post while they were tackling unmapped terrain with neither adequate equipment nor medication. They were sent out in leather boots that rotted within days.

To a considerable extent, military mismanagement dominated the lives and deaths of the British troops. When my father-in-law got to Mumbai (then Bombay), the main preoccupation was whether anyone had thought to countermand the order to sail on to Japanese occupied Singapore. The ship ahead kept sailing and the Gordon Highlanders disembarked into captivity.

John Wishart really died. He stepped off a landing craft on D-Day and was mown down. And it’s partly out of respect for an old friend that my father in law thinks poppies have become as fatuous as ‘arm punching’.

Kerosene and Pink Diamonds.

2011-11-05T05:34:00.000-07:00

When I talked with Laura Wilson at the Electric Theatre in Guildford on October 22 we touched on the portrayal of history in film – mostly from the humble aspect of how people actually looked, moved and behaved in the 1940s and early 1950s.

I have fairly recently seen two films with a similar subject - a young woman agrees to ensnare an enemy official for what could be called a cause greater than her own physical and emotional well-being and even survival. The films are Black Book (2006) and Lust, Caution (2007). The first is set in Holland during WW2 and the second in Hong Kong and Shanghai during the Japanese occupation of China. Both end grimly, with multiple deaths.

Neither is a bad film, some of the performances are excellent. Tang Wei’s portrayal of her character in Ang Lee’s film is remarkable, nuanced and very brave.

But I want to concentrate on the look of the films. Let me put it this way - there are a lot of very good looking people, flawless teeth and a considerable expenditure and effort on stylish clothes and vehicles.

Now I have nothing against costume designers, art directors and careful lighting. But a stylish gleam does miss a lot that could inform the anguish and dilemmas the protagonists have to deal with. I don’t know how divine details are but they matter and I’d suggest, for this viewer anyway, that they are better rendered without too much prettification.

The Dutch film is not based on a book. Of course it is true that we all bring our own lives to reactions. One of my father’s closest friends was a Dutch mathematician. Aged seventeen when the Nazis invaded, his farmer parents were, of course, beside themselves with fear that he would be taken away to work camp or worse. The result was that he spent the ‘next two years dressed as girl or hiding in the woodpile.’ Of course it isn’t fair for me to ask the film makers to have this kind of very grim surrealism inform their work but I did find the sheer silk, well-cut trousers and slightly stressed new knitwear a distraction.

Lust, Caution is based on a short story by Eileen Chang. I kindled this up. Within a couple of pages there is the kind of passage that shows why words can outdo film images. It involves the hoarding of ‘Kerosene or pink diamonds’ – and reveals the world of collaborators’ wives in Shanghai as they play Mahjong. Kerosene was the highly inflammable fuel for lamps, heaters and, for the poor, cooking. It was dyed pink. It illustrates succinctly and precisely the unease of these women: they dread poverty and they need their wealth to be easily transportable and to keep its value.

Ang Lee is very respectful of his source. It may just be I am getting old. But movies simply don’t allow the same kind of appreciation of the world behind such a remark. Not of course when you are watching beautiful people exquisitely dressed and lit.

Still photographs work however. In the last day or so I have been looking at photographs published in some British newspapers. They come from an exhibition called “The Radical Camera: New York’s Photo League 1936 – 1951” at The Jewish Museum in New York from November 04 2011 – March 25 2012.

I have ‘borrowed’ one for this blog. It shows a film poster of a book I mention in the next Peter Cotton and has that wonderful boy and tyre. Yes, it’s a frame but it has all kinds of possibilities and stories.

My father’s tall Dutch friend grew his hair and wore a dress and hid in the woodpile, looking at the mathematical possibilities in curled woodlice. The last time I saw him he asked me what the British had against mixer taps or faucets. A little later he said his main memory of his time in the woodpile was smell. ‘I stank’ he said.

Perhaps that’s the problem. Films can stink but they can’t invoke smell. I don’t know the smell of kerosene but my husband remembers it well from his childhood in Africa.

London Book Award

2011-10-28T09:08:00.000-07:00

I heard yesterday that Icelight has been nominated for the London Book Award, short list to be announced in June. There is a review of the book on the London Festival Fringe website - click here -and also a short interview with me click here.

So far, fellow nominees are Jill Dawson for 'Lucky Bunny', and ~Amanda Coe for 'What they do in the Dark'. More will be added over the months.

Very nice to be nominated.

Goldsboro, Guildford and Period Teeth

2011-10-26T15:25:00.000-07:00

Last Friday morning I travelled down from Edinburgh to London by train. Waverley Station in Edinburgh is being revamped – black tunnels for passengers enlivened I suppose by a large hen party wearing small green antlers. Kings Cross has been a work in progress for so long I can’t remember when it wasn’t.

I had lunch with my lovely editor Kate Parkin from John Murray near Leicester Square because I had to go on to Goldsboro bookshop in Cecil Court. Great as always to see David Headley, who sat me down at one end of a table (the other end was occupied by R.J. Ellory who was signing copies of his latest book) and gave me a big pile of copies of Icelight, which are now all signed and dated and some lined.

Next stop was Guildford Festival on Saturday at the Electric Theatre. The Electric part comes from the previous use of the building, now converted into a friendly public space. I am never that keen to be on a stage in an armchair – too static and too far from the audience – but the session went very well. Peter Guttridge was the moderator, as always exceptionally well prepared and skilled. I’d met Peter before as he’d chaired a panel I was on at Crimefest a couple of years ago.

This was the first time I’d met Laura Wilson, winner of the Ellis Peters award a couple of years ago, who has recently published A Capital Crime. We had been put together because we had both used the post-war years of austerity and rationing as background.

Our conversation was easy and enjoyable. To a degree both of us write to show how we are where we are now because of reactions and actions then. It’s a living link.

We had lots of common points to discuss, including the use of real situations and real people, that both of us had characters who developed over a number of books, that we had both used childhood memories to inform our most recent novels, that we both used and valued films of the time and that we had both talked to people with a connection to what we were describing.

At the end, someone asked how we would feel about having our books adapted for television or film, and which actor we would like to play the part of our main characters. Neither of us came up with a name. Laura said any candidates she could think of were long dead, and she had a problem with perfect Hollywood white teeth for a D.I. in the nineteen forties.

As we talked of the possibilities of period dentistry, I remembered that after Washington Shadow came out, a reader wrote to tell me that in his mind, Katherine was played by Scarlett Johansonn. If only.

After the weekend, I found an appreciative email from a reader in Lancaster who had read the first two books and was about to start Icelight. He said he was awaiting the film version with Ralph Fiennes as Peter Cotton.

I did point out Cotton is 28 in 1947 and Ralph is a little older. Back in Guildford my sister told me the event had gone well. I believed her. She had bought Laura’s Stratton’s War.

Who Do You Think You Are? – The Spanish ‘Lost’ Babies

2011-10-17T01:48:00.001-07:00

Tomorrow, October 18, the BBC is showing a documentary on a subject I have already mentioned on this blog in May – the ghastly practice during the Franco regime, and possibly up to the nineties, of removing new-born children from ‘unsuitable’ mothers and selling them on to ‘approved’ parents. The mothers were told their child had died.

The present estimate for the number of times this was done is about 300,000. That’s 300,000 people of course, now with different names, sometimes in different countries. Doubtless there was a ‘moral’ justification – at least some of the mothers would have been ‘unwed’ - but it was also a business, carried out by members of the Spanish Church, doctors and adoption agencies - and money was involved.

There are some truly weird details. Some mothers were told the child had already been buried. Others got to accompany tiny coffins to the cemetery. Some of the coffins have now been found to contain small animal bones. What were the perpetrators thinking? Presumably some sort of undertaker really did put a rabbit in a coffin and seal it up.

Right now there are a lot of distressed people trying to match themselves up with the help of DNA analysis.

But what struck me as odd when I read recent reports was how long the business had continued. After all Franco died in 1975. Spanish democracy started a couple of years later and attitudes changed very fast.

Then I remembered something personal. In the seventies we tried to adopt a child in Spain. We already had a son. I had had a miscarriage. It occurred to us to adopt a girl. Advice around us was not favourable. ‘What if the girl had ‘bad blood?’ We paid no attention.

I was then called to fill in as a translator at a drug trial. In conversation with the President of the Court I learnt I could adopt tomorrow. There were 167 children waiting for adoption. I could have two if I liked. What about nationality? It simply wasn’t a problem. Why didn’t we go to the orphanage and pick one.

We then ran into a Franco period law. We were not old enough. We had to be 35. And that was that.

When I did hit 35 I remembered this. I then found out that, post Franco, I was too old to adopt. More to my point there were no children to adopt.

And that presumably is why the business continued. It simply adapted to new conditions and provided a service to those desperate to have a child at the expense of ‘unsuitable’ mothers.

Publication Day, Icelight

2011-10-14T02:41:00.000-07:00

Yesterday, flowers from my agent and two lovely online reviews heralded publication day for Icelight, as well as the news that four national newspapers are reviewing - date to be confirmed.

Next stop, Guildford Book Festival on 22nd together with Laura Wilson, talking about our books. If you're in the area, come along and see us.

You can read the reviews here:

http://www.milorambles.com/2011/10/13/icelight-peter-cotton-3-by-aly-monroe-book-review/

http://www.shotsmag.co.uk/book_reviews_view.aspx?BOOK_REVIEW_ID=364

Football – A Question of Culture

2011-10-12T05:09:00.001-07:00

I have to admit my interest in football (soccer) is next to nil but my interest in education is long standing.

Last night Spain played Scotland in the last qualifying match for the competition to be held in Poland and the Ukraine in 2012. The Spanish team won this as they have won each of their qualifying matches and Scotland failed to qualify.

Any personal interest of mine involved my two and a half year-old grandson. His Spanish father – his mother is half Scottish – thought this might be a good time to introduce him to football. On one side he had a point.

But the match set me thinking. 25 years ago both Spanish and Scottish teams were at the World Cup in Mexico. The Scots as usual did not get through the early stages. The Spanish did, but then ‘choked’. It was what they did. In every international competition Spain would hope and then crumble. In 1986 a Spain-Scotland match was not immediately a Spanish win.

How to explain the subsequent Spanish improvements and worsening Scottish inabilities? Actually, it’s not that difficult.

The Spanish school their players. I once heard one of the teachers explain that the young prospects were taught how to be polite, how to use a knife and fork if necessary, indeed taught everything they needed from financial savvy to how to give interviews.

At one level this is the Barcelona set-up in which young players are brought up on ‘la granja’ – the farm. It’s not Orwellian. And the training concentrates on the basics. Ball control, precise passing, moving to receive a pass, acquiring fast feet and, when needed, very fast ball. The other two important but simple lessons are a) - if you have the skills to keep the ball the other team don’t have it and b) - you really are part of a team.

Two examples. Yesterday Scottish players had difficulty ‘cushioning’ the ball on their chests. Instead the ball bounced off out of reach. This is basic. The other was when a player called Goodwillie blasted the ball into the crowd when a simple pass to another player would have been a tap in goal.

Awareness from the players that they are in a team is vital to Spanish success. It’s not that all the players are phenomenally talented. But they all know what to do and there are at least three players for every position.

In other words truly talented players (the Argentine Messi for example) come along rarely but considerable degrees of competence are available to any nation that bothers to learn from a system – and yes, improve on it.

Teamwork also removes some of the pressure on individuals. It seems to work.

Two Days to Publication Day for Icelight

2011-10-11T05:09:00.000-07:00

Just two days to go before the official publication day for Icelight - although it is already available on Amazon UK both as a hardback and on kindle.

If you live in the US, you will have to wait until December 15th before it is available on amazon.com - again both in hardback and kindle. but in the meantime, perhaps you might like to read how I met the "real" Peter Cotton - here.

I am working hard on 'Black Bear' -not long to go!

Less than two weeks to publication date for Icelight

2011-09-30T04:07:00.000-07:00

Less than two weeks to go to publication date.

Over on Shots Ezine - click here - you can read about how childhood memories of Purley, Croydon and London contributed to the setting and story of 'Icelight'

Over on Goodreads, more people - readers and writers - have joined our chat. To see what everyone is talking about, click here

Looters storm streets to get a copy of To Kill a Tsar

2011-09-29T04:12:00.000-07:00

Today is paperback publication day for To Kill a Tsar by Andrew Williams - Congratulations Andrew!

To see the effect it is having, click on this link

http://pic.twitter.com/NQY3Zvby

Andrew and I are chatting over on Good reads - see our initial chat in my previous post.

We have now been joined by novelists Elliott Hall and Laurence O'Brien, as well as a number of readers from both the UK and the US. To see how the conversation is developing, click here

The Role of History in the Making of Stories

2011-09-26T13:21:00.000-07:00

Over on Goodreads, Andrew Williams and I chat about The Role of History in the Making of Stories - and other things - and we will be available to chat and answer questions for the next few weeks. For those of you who are not on Goodreads, here is our chat. We'd love to hear your comments and answer any of your questions, so you can either do that by commenting here on this blog, or, if you are a member, join the group on Goodreads.

Andrew’s book The Poison Tide will be published in 2012. To Kill A Tsar is published in paperback on September 29th 2011.

My latest book, Icelight, the third in the Peter Cotton series, is published on October 13^th 2011. Black Bear will be published late in 2012.

Here is our chat:

Novelists Aly Monroe, author of The Maze of Cadiz, Washington Shadow and Icelight, and Andrew Williams, author of The Interrogator and To Kill a Tsar, chat about the role of history in the making of their stories. Both were shortlisted for the 2010 CWA Ellis Peters Historical Fiction Award

Aly: You told me your parents were history teachers. How much was history a part of your childhood, and how much does it give you your ideas?

Andrew: Lots and lots. I’ve always been fascinated by the past. Yes, my parents were history teachers and I think I could name the buildings of a medieval monastery by the time I was ten.

Aly: A bit of a history geek from an early age then?

Andrew: I did like football too. But all my stories draw on real people and events. Sometimes I change names, sometimes I don’t. Of course, I’m telling a story so I tinker with the facts, but I hate making mistakes with the history. I mean, I’m happy to repaint people and events just as long as I know why I’m doing it. If I am economical with the actualité you’ll find the reason in the historical note at the back of the book. I feel a responsibility to the history, and so do the writers I admire most. It’s a shocking cliché, I know, but truth is often – I would say ‘usually’ – stranger and more compelling that pure fiction, at least as a big backdrop.

By the way, I’m not sure I think of myself as a historical novelist, just a thriller writer who sets his stories in the recent past.

Aly: My case is a little different. My parents weren’t history teachers (though my father started out as a university teacher), but my grandparents on both sides were immigrants, and I think this may have influenced me in a number of ways – not only my interest in the recent past but also in half belonging to other places.

My books are set just within living memory. So the history part of what I write often begins with things I have heard directly from people who had experience of the time and events I’m writing about. This provides a springboard for research. This was the case with The Maze of Cadiz, when people in Spain talked to me of their experiences under the Franco regime. It was also the case for the initial idea of the Peter Cotton series - and the character of Peter Cotton himself.

Andrew: So what especially attracts you about the past rather than the present day for your stories?

Aly: I’m interested in how people are moulded by the particular time and place that they inhabit, and how they react to it. Readers have their own backgrounds and have lived, or more likely know people who have lived, through the time described. It’s more Grandpa than Cleopatra’s handmaiden because I like that living link. Asps are fine, but women using pencils to draw a false stocking seam on their wartime legs is also interesting, as is the knicker elastic problem post war.

What about you?

Andrew: I am interested in ordinary people’s lives in extraordinary times; in wars, periods of political upheaval or revolution, above all in conflict.

I have only a passing academic interest in the swords and sandals history of the distant past. I understand my characters because the world they inhabit isn’t so very different from mine. I can imagine my Great-Great Grandfather Jesse Williams following events in Russia in his newspaper. He might have read the reports of The Times’ correspondent in Petersburg, George Dobson. Well, when I was researching To Kill, I read Dobson’s dispatches too. All the sources necessary to flesh out the bones of the history are there. I have the context for the love, friendship, hope, despair, betrayal and grief that are common to all lives, and those are the things that interest me most. The recent past of my stories doesn’t seem such a foreign country. Not so foreign I can’t ask of myself and the reader: what would you do if you were hunted by the tsar’s secret police?

Aly: Where do the first seeds for your stories come from?

Andrew: A line in a book, an interview on the radio, a name on a website; something that captures my imagination and transports me back through history. With To Kill A Tsar it was an engraving on a friend’s wall of his Scots-Russian ancestor; it was a fascination with terrorist violence born of many years covering Northern Ireland; and it was a question: what would a comfortable British liberal do in an autocracy like tsarist Russia where peaceful protest for democracy might earn a summary sentence of twenty years in a Siberian camp? Can terrorist violence be justified in such a place and what would happen if, like the doctor hero of my story, those you are close to are planning to commit murder in the name of freedom?

Aly: The beginnings of a story for me usually come from things stored up in my mind – loose images or voices remembered, that become characters if you place them in a setting, concentrate and let them grow. That probably sounds a bit like organic gardening! The point is that it is not entirely a conscious process. You have to let the characters react to each other and to their context and circumstances. The history and the research are the more conscious part of the process.

For the first book, coming to Scotland after many years in Spain gave me a kind of distance and allowed me to listen again to some of those voices of Spanish people who had talked to me. That eventually led to The Maze of Cadiz. One of the main starting points for Peter Cotton himself was looking at family photos from the forties and realising that the people looking back at me were the same age – or younger than my children. It gave me an almost maternal feeling – and that gave me my period. The first seeds for Icelight came from childhood memories of my own – a freezing winter, a quiet suburban road, a shard of glass in a tree trunk, smeared with blood.

Henry James said you can never really do a historical novel. You're always writing about your own time. Do you agree?

Andrew: Up to a point, yes. It is an easy trap to fall into. All of us have read ‘historical’ novels that make almost no effort to capture the spirit of the time, and some are best sellers, so their authors must be giving their readers what they want. I do research the feelings and thoughts of my characters pretty exhaustively. I think it’s a little easier for me than the Tudor and Viking lot because I’m not excavating too deeply.

Some of the real people in To Kill A Tsar left their own accounts of the events I relate in my story. Actually, the historian faces the same dilemma of interpreting the past with the benefit of hindsight. But with the greatest of respect to Mr. Henry James, I think the best historians and novelists just about manage to pull it off: I do my best to learn from them.

Do you agree with James?

Aly: Absolutely. James was talking about doing justice to past. The longer the time, the less possibility of justice and the greater the impositions of a modern mind-set. It’s one of the reasons I write in the period I do. The underpinning of the Peter Cotton series is an examination of the post-war decline of Britain’s importance in the world as a colonial power, and a portrait of the time and place of each story. The chaotic and often incompetent or accidental nature of how things actually work that is shown in the books, is equally true today. Of course, in both Washington Shadow and Icelight there are evident chimes with the present economic crisis, but more importantly, the books show a version of how we got here.

Andrew: Do you plan the story before beginning a book? Do you stick to it?

Aly: One of the most enjoyable experiences of both writing and reading for me are the unexpected doors that open along the way. I don’t want to know everything I’m going to discover or exactly where the book is going before I begin.

I don’t begin with chapter by chapter plans. My plans are more in terms of key events or scenes that form the inner structure of the book – and that’s not only to do with the historical story. The final division into chapters is usually one of the last things I do – and it’s partly about the rhythm of the story. I also have different sections in each chapter – for the same reason.

So I do plan in broad terms, but as I’m working, I’m delighted when I discover or think of something I didn’t count on to begin with. Sometimes it’s a character who might have seemed insignificant at the first planning stage but grows and becomes more important. Some of these characters then go on to become significant characters in following books. This is the case with Ed Lowell, a Boston Brahmin in Icelight – he will have a significant role in Black Bear, the fourth Cotton book. And also Herbert Butterworth, the Chancery’s ‘archivist’ - in Washington Shadow. He will appear again in a much larger way in Black Bear.

What about you?

Andrew: I plan it very carefully. I used to write documentary scripts for the BBC. It was important to keep things tight because shooting and editing days cost a lot of money, so I always structured the story very carefully first. Old habits die hard and I do the same with a book – chapter by chapter. But once I begin to write, it changes; chapters, characters and storylines appear and disappear. Everyone has their own way of going about things. Some people write almost nothing down first – perhaps they don’t write history thrillers.

How much do things you discover along the way influence the direction of the story?

Aly: Actually, a lot. As I was writing and researching Washington Shadow, the sheer lack of comprehension on the part of the British government of what the negotiations for an American loan really involved and the desperation of the Keynes delegation, handling both London and Washington, as victors with a begging bowl struggling to remain players in the new world order, gradually came home to me and set the atmosphere of the book. And in plot terms, Tibbets’ role in the story did not come to me until I was some way into the writing.

And there was a real change in Icelight. In the first two books, I did not give speaking parts to real people. They were there, but as part of the setting. But when I was writing Icelight, some of the ghastly actions I discovered taken by certain people at the time made me decide to include them as speaking characters in the book, under different names. These things definitely influenced the push of the story.

Andrew: For me, the themes remain pretty much the same, but how I tease them out through the story changes a good deal. Some characters come to the fore, some fall off the page. I wasn’t entirely sure how To Kill would end until I got there. One strand of the story might have ended a number of different ways. A couple of friends felt the ending of The Interrogator should have been darker; I considered that very carefully at the time. I’m still not sure they aren’t right.

Aly: Can you imagine yourself writing a novel set in the present day?

Andrew: I would like to. I have an idea for a novel set in the 1990’s during the war in the former Yugoslavia. I made a couple of programmes on the conflict, and have been nurturing an idea for a story for almost ten years. The war in Bosnia is still the past, but edging closer to the present. First a spy thriller, The Poison Tide, telling the story of a secret service operation in Berlin and New York in 1915-16.

What about you?

Aly: It’s an interesting question. Why not? It’s a different kind of challenge. But I don’t feel that as a novelist I am necessarily the best commentator on current events, so it would be a different kind of novel. I do have some other books in store that have nothing to do with Peter Cotton, although when I look at them, they are also set in the recent past. But before that for me, the task is to finish Black Bear, which will take Peter Cotton back to the US. It’s a very different kind of book – and Cotton will find himself plunged in a situation experienced by the ‘real’ Peter Cotton (see ‘Beyond the Books’ on my website) – or at least that is what he told me.

The Poison Tide will be published in 2012. To Kill A Tsar is published in paperback on September 29th 2011.

Icelight is published on October 13^th 2011 and Black Bear will be published late in 2012.

Sound Effects and Locksmiths

2011-09-11T04:40:00.000-07:00

Recent articles about whether we want to hear sound effects when reading Ebooks made me feel uneasy, and I've been trying to work out what was bothering me.

When we read fiction, each one of us creates a mental impression – which has both visual and auditory elements, albeit tenuous, hovering on the edge of our perception – of the characters and the story. This is what makes reading a highly personal experience, and what makes it exciting. Reading is a solitary, outwardly quiet activity, but inwardly it is an act of imagination, the reader’s personal relationship and interaction with a written text and an author’s voice. Wouldn’t a soundtrack intrude on that process? Give us a someone else’s reactions to what we are reading before we have time to construct our own?

I’ve always been interested in the way film music can influence our response to a film. Many years ago I saw a television programme with André Previn giving us something of a master class on this. He was married to Mia Farrow at the time and to demonstrate his point, he had filmed a simple scene which consisted of Mia Farrow sitting at a table. She was still, and the expression on her face was completely neutral. We were shown this first without music, then with different musical accompaniment. What was striking was that, depending on the music, she looked happy, irritated, anxious or scared. We knew it was the same piece of film – but the different sound tracks were playing tricks on our eyes and our impressions. We were being presented with a series of ready-made interpretations of the scene.

During the years that I was a teacher, I noticed that the way young people recounted films they had seen or books they had read underwent a definite change. What later pupils gave over was a series of images (often with sound effects included) – but without the verbal ‘sutures of sense’ which, at least from a traditional point of view, give form, structure and time to a narrative. This meant that I was often no wiser as to what the story was ‘about’ – perhaps in fact, missing the point?

I noticed that this reflected the pacing of the films they were watching – one sensation following another without slowing it all down by going into the whys and hows of the story (as the books I am presently writing attempt to answer the whys and the hows, I find this particularly interesting). It also reflected the sound tracks of the films. Film music itself, at least popular film music, has changed over the decades. It now has much less ‘narrative shape’ and is constructed more around recurring riffs - also used (although I am no expert) in video games. What I find particularly interesting is the effect this might be having on our brains and our relationship with narrative. Does it mean, for example, that the synapses enabling us to relate cause and effect are not being developed in the same way? Is a new grammar of thought emerging – much more about sensation and juxtaposition than about cause and effect and context? And does this have an effect on people’s reactions to the world and their actions?

Of course, people are reading less than before. People receive information and entertainment in other ways. The reading experience is moving on from paper to other media. But just as the printed word revolutionised access to written material and also led to people having less retentive memories ( a necessary feature and bi-product of an oral tradition) , I suspect that the present changes we are witnessing will have a comparable effect on our brains, how we perceive things, and our interpretative faculties . Is this bad? Not necessarily – just different. But if we add a pre-prepared soundtrack to our reading, we are surely running the risk of cramping the development of our imagination. And that feels wrong.

It is about the value we place on reading. And the extent to which people are unaware they are being manipulated.

Recently I have been watching with some fascination my now two-year-old grandson’s relationship with stories and narrative. A lot of the new words and phrases he incorporates into his speech come from his favourite stories. But before he came to visit this summer with his parents, he had introduced us, via Skype, to his enthusiasm for the Jungle Book, acquired through viewing the Disney film version, and would enact and recount the scenes with great enthusiasm. So I decided to hunt down a hardback version of the book with illustrations, which I found, second-hand on Amazon. The book was nicely produced, but, I had to admit, the line drawings were not too much like the Disney images, so I was curious to see the reaction. It took him a couple of minutes as he turned the pages, but then his face lit up and he happily pointed out Baloo, Bagheera, Mowgli and Shere Khan.

You could say he’s lucky, of course. I live in a flat in Edinburgh. There is a flat below us and a flat above, and there is a common entrance. Yesterday evening, quite early, there was a loud bang. At that stage there was no narrative. A dog barked, some noise on the stairs.

Later that evening and this morning, some narrative was provided. A burglar of the ‘opportunist’ type broke into the main entrance. One lock gone. He tried our upstairs neighbours' flat. They were in, heard a scraping noise, but not more. A second lock spoiled. I don’t know why the burglar ignored us but he did. He went downstairs. Our downstairs neighbour heard scratching and as he went to the door it flew open and the burglar fell forward flat on his opportunistic face. He then fled. That’s three out of four locks broken, nothing stolen – and the police know who he is. I’m not sure why they call him an opportunist, but locksmiths on Sunday call-out must be doing well.

So last night I understood the sound effects. It’s the narrative that’s poor – and expensive.

Somehow I don’t think our opportunistic burglar has read the Jungle Book.

Read a taster of Icelight

2011-09-01T08:13:00.000-07:00

With the publication date of Icelight drawing closer (13 October), I'm gradually making changes to the website - www.alymonroe.com.

If you'd like to, you can read a Q&A about the book and an extract.

You will also find a link to the first advance review.

Look out for more additions in the next days.

ASLA Party Edinburgh Book Fest.

2011-08-28T05:20:00.000-07:00

This year I haven’t been to anything at the Edinburgh Book Festival - I’ve been following it from afar, partly due to various visits and other occupations - but last night I went to the party hosted by the Association of Scottish Literary Agents. In spite of the rainy evening there was a pretty good turnout (though some habitual faces missing - where was my acquaintance and fellow writer from Inverness, Erica Munro who I chat to every year at this party?). I have to admit that, as I was going in, I was relieved to see someone bearing a tray with glasses of wine rather than the cider of the previous year. A good move.

I had interesting chats with familiar and new faces too many to mention (learning along the way that the South Africans are preparing themselves to set up a tabloid press ... ), but including, Bob McDevett of Hachette Scotland, and author, agent and E-book expert extraordinaire Allan Guthrie. Interesting times – instructive and illuminating conversations with both of them. I also had a lovely long chat with agent and ASLA Secretary Lindsey Fraser, finally met Nicola Morgan, and was delighted to see that the talented Shona, formerly intern for my agent Maggie McKernan, is beginning to make her way in the publishing world. And of course, as ever, young Leo Gordon, son of Maggie, about to start secondary school at the Edinburgh Academy, handing round the plates of smoked salmon with panache, soaking up the info in the conversations, and(the only one being paid!) negotiating the price of his services with his mother. One to watch for the future.

I Confess

2011-08-23T03:16:00.000-07:00

I am rapidly becoming a fan of the Los Angeles Review of Books. It is, reportedly, the first major book review to be launched in the 21^st century. The site’s first post, The Death of the Book, by Ben Ehrenreich, heralded the start of what is in fact a celebration of the continuing life of books – and the serious consideration of books.

It was started by Tom Lutz, and American writer and literary critic, presently Professor of Creative Writing and Media and Cultural Studies at University of California Riverside, in response to the shrinking space allotted to book reviews in the newspapers, to challenge the New York-centric emphasis on the literary world in the US and to include the diversity of literature being produced beyond the boundaries of the NY publishing world.

What you can view now is the temporary site, but when the full website is launched later this year, it will include an array of multimedia content, embracing new technologies for delivering books and ‘fostering the conversation about books and culture’.

While recognising the excellent contribution made by online blogs, the LARB’s aim is to make good use of professional journalists and critics who have been casualties of the reduced newspaper space, and to produce a ‘curated’ site, including different reviews, opinions and viewpoints, of new, classic and forgotten works by famous and unknown contributors from all over the world. They ‘hope to be of national and international interest, and to cover the national and international book scene’.

What is particularly refreshing for me is the eclectic nature of the content and the even-handed seriousness and respect that is given to widely different material and genres.

So far on the site you can find content ranging from philosophy to noir fiction, from biography to comics, from Heinrich Böll to Keith Richards, from Buster Keaton to Simone Weil, from Ross Macdonald to Nancy Mitford, from David Foster Wallace to Stephen King, and covering books published by publishers as varied as Virago, Little Brown, Busted Flush Press, Yale university and Black Lizard.

See for yourself. You will certainly find something you are interested in if you look – and if you are as curious and open-minded as the LARB, you may come across something you didn’t even realise might attract you.

I read recently of something called the Heffington Post – a Daly Mail-backed and very belated response and alternative to the Huffington Post. No sign in Britain yet of anything as remotely energetic and inclusive as the LARB.

Eggs – Class and Genre

2011-08-04T03:43:00.000-07:00

Thanks to Donna Moore at Big Beat from Badsville for pointing me towards Philip Hensher’s piece in the Daily Telegraph on genre fiction, and for her subsequent reaction to it.

For what they are worth here are a couple of reflections from a grandmother who writes.

From time to time I meet up for coffee with another John Murray stablemate who lives in Edinburgh. Now there are very savvy writers who aim for a market. Rather more innocently we both began just writing a book and were later a mix of surprised, intrigued and just a little wary that both our novels had been classed as ‘thrillers’.

Genre left Aristotle a long time ago, certainly by the time bookshops started. Now there are as many genres in novels as types of pop music. There is a kind of marketing taxonomy. After a little research, I note my books get ‘thriller’, sometimes preceded by ‘war’, sometimes by ‘political’, but also contemporary fiction, general and literary, modern fiction, historical, crime and mystery – and others depending on where you’re looking.

I see that Philip Henshers’ latest novel King of the Badgers, published 31 March 2011, is variously described as campus comedy, social portraiture, black comedy and satire, contemporary fiction, and general and literary fiction.

At one level the classification is supposedly a guide to help possible readers. At another marketing people are not there to undersell. A little accuracy might help however – grand or misleading claims don’t encourage this reader.

The point is however that everything is now genre. Even ‘literary’. See above.

Of course, this being Britain, the genre system meshes in with the class system. Class has always been of inordinate interest in the UK. It attracts notice and can induce frothing at the mouth.

I don’t want to say that Mr Hensher was writing to annoy. He was writing to be talked about. In the same way, Martin Amis has a tendency to go public with a suggestion or two around publication time. If I remember, the last one was to put euthanasia booths at street corners.

Mr Hensher was also writing around the time of the ‘broadening’ of the Booker Long List. It’s called talking up, getting people’s interest, nominally at least, pointing towards books.

I am pretty sure some of the best-selling authors mentioned in such articles – Lee Child and Ian Rankin, for example, - know this very well and play their part. I am not suggesting for a moment that they are insincere. But they do get talked about.

Now I hesitate to call the genre debate a load of old eggs but the curate has been pretty busy and I am now calling time, for me anyway, on any more.

Or to put it another way, if this debate were a book, I’d have put it aside.

The Perils of Research

2011-07-30T04:17:00.000-07:00

One of the perils – or attractions of research – is being led off into something I did not know that has its own intrinsic interest.

Recently, purely for background, that may end up as a sentence in a finished book, I was looking into those who were not evacuated at Dunkirk but left ‘in the bag’ as the phrase was. This refers to the many thousands in the BEF (British Expeditionary Force) who spent the rest of the war in prisoner of war camps.

There is a youtube clip of the 51^st Highland Division’s victory march in Bremerhaven in May 1945, (click here) all drums and skirling bagpipes as they parade past Lieutenant General Sir Brian Horrocks. Many of these men had been prisoners of war only a short time before.

They have been overshadowed by what was made of Dunkirk, of course. What has been made of them – the forced winter march in early 1945 – has always stressed the heroic side of war.

These men deserved and deserve more.

Part of the reason I say this because I have only just learnt – perhaps I should have known before – that, according to my source, about 2,000 of the BEF ‘went over’ to the Germans in 1940. Naturally, this is not widely advertised.

I wonder however if any readers of this blog can point me towards more information on these men. What happened to them? Did any leave any accounts or diaries? I’d be grateful for any information on this.

Readers Get More Say.

2011-07-19T06:31:00.000-07:00

Some of the pleasures of a) writing of a past just within living memory and b) growing old and/or being a grandmother are the cross-checks available – things and attitudes do change. Whether they improve or not is part of the fun.

For example, I bought a second hand edition of Vladimir Nabokov’s letters in the Tottenham Court Road some years ago.

Among them is a short but indignant protest demanding that his name be removed from those advertised to appear at the Edinburgh Book Festival.

I don’t know who was responsible for publicizing that Nabokov would appear without first consulting him – the impression remains, however, that over fifty years ago, one author at least thought that the notion of a Book Festival in itself was an absurd imposition on an ideally intimate relationship between reader and text. The text mattered more than the writer.

To pretend otherwise, I suspect, struck Nabokov as a sop to ‘human interest’ and all kinds of horrors like gossip and gawking. Nabokov’s opinion of ‘human interest’ was not high; whose is right now? He was also rather down on those he considered ‘hacks’. The meaning of words moves on too, in some cases, from noun to verb.

Of a similar age but different temperament, the Argentinian writer Jorge Luis Borges put his attitude to the book-buying public another way. He claimed to find it difficult to conceive of a readership beyond the number 25. After that, things and faces started to blur and he was not sure who exactly was reading what he wrote.

These two writers have been dead for 34 and 25 years respectively. Hearing them speak now the time elapsed can seem longer. The surprise comes, I suppose, in their foreign but decidedly plummy English, and their confidence. Both only achieved fame relatively late in their lives.

We live in less confident times. Recently I spoke to a present-day writer, very shy but also very sharp-tongued, who complained that ‘These days we are all so wretchedly chummy. Writers have become votaries to very entitled consumers.’ He was really complaining that he spent so long ‘going to book festivals and pretending to be nice.’

I didn’t start publishing – I am certainly not famous – until late in my life. I am perhaps more grateful than confident as a consequence. And since my publicist, Lyndsey Ng of John Murray is presently trying to fix up some book festivals for me to attend around the publication of Icelight in October, I have to admit I have failed the Nabokov test. Abjectly.

There is something else however. The great Spanish painter Goya is famous for saying ‘Aún aprendo’ – I am still learning – when he was a very old exile in Bordeaux. I am not so old but I do like the feedback, even when it is not so complimentary, that book festivals provide. There is something quick and spontaneous about face to face meetings with people who have actually bought the words you have written. It’s something I find very helpful – and enjoyable.

The Passage of Time: Picasso and Cy Twombly

2011-07-07T06:53:00.001-07:00

The first time I actually heard someone say ‘my five year old could do that’ was in Cadiz, at an exhibition of Picasso etchings. At the time Picasso was, to some degree, being reintroduced into Spain. He had after all refused to allow his Guernica painting to return while Franco was still alive and the Franco regime had responded as might be expected, roughly ‘Great painter, Bad Spaniard.’

There was some interest to see what had been missed. Evidently some visitors to that exhibition thought not a lot. Intrigued I looked at what they thought a five year old could do.

The etching was from a small group done in 1951 called La Partida, according to the notes inspired by a comic strip of Walter Scott’s Ivanhoe. It is a medieval off to war and shows a knight on a horse, both in armour, accompanied by a page. Indeed the knight is more armour than person and the armour is vigorously rearranged into an absurd clank of pride and heraldry. The bit in the horse’s mouth imposes a kind of equine grin.

I could go on, but hope I have indicated enough to say I have never met a five year old, however delightful, who could do anything even remotely similar.

Of course, children change. I note from the many comments made on the late Cy Twombly’s work, that the phrase is now ‘Any six year old could do that.’

Leda and the Swan (at the top of this post) and Cycnus (above) both by Cy Twombly

Editing Reality

2011-06-29T04:41:00.000-07:00

On Sunday mornings I zip through the online press, British, Spanish and American, pausing, of course, if an item catches my eye.

Sometimes this is a catch-up – I had previously missed, for example, that Patrick Leigh Fermor had died.

And then there are my regulars, writers I check up on to see what they are saying each week. One of these is Javier Marías in El Pais. Given the lead time – the article is in the supplement – there can be an air of relatively short term memory recovery about the piece.

On June 11 Marías tackled the respective briefings and leaks in an upcoming legal case involving a recent head of the IMF. His title, La Historia Doblemente Increible, hardly needs translation. That’s doubly and that’s incredible.

I should make it clear that Marías does not prejudge, does not take one side over the other in the conflicting stories , though his vocabulary choice when writing of the accused is not sympathetic to the man.

What he does bring is a novelist’s eye to the stories being offered and points out how utterly unconvincing they both are.

There is Coleridge’s famous line about ‘the suspension of disbelief’. I’d guess that Marías is talking of the reports as such sensationally bad fiction that it is impossible to suspend any disbelief. An editor would be saying ‘Doesn’t add up’ or ‘Makes no sense’ – though here we are talking of a future legal reality and judgement, and their preparatory public spin.

One of the reasons I like his books is because Javier Marías brings such respect and care to the craft of fiction. Good fiction brings a degree of inner logic and a convincing measure of observation and perception to an invention we can recognize or, if very novel, learn to recognize.

The only physical newspaper I now read is the weekend edition of the Financial Times. Last weekend Jan Dalley interviewed Philip Roth and asked him about ‘the limits of fiction’. Mr Roth was not drawn.

Jorge Semprún – A country called Buchenwald

2011-06-09T00:30:00.000-07:00

Jorge Semprún who died on June 7 has received praise from both his countries, namely Spain and France.

He had two countries because of certain events last century. Born to a well-off family in Madrid in 1923 he was out of the country when the Spanish Civil War started, his father being Ambassador for the Republic in The Hague.

As a result he was educated mostly in France and was there when the Germans invaded. He joined the resistance and was arrested by the Gestapo in 1943 at the age of twenty.

He was sent to Buchenwald, tattooed with the number 44.904 and experienced conditions that he would later say explained why he was not quite French and not quite Spanish. The camp destroyed all the certainties he had been brought up with and made him renegotiate his ideas of what living meant. What kept him going was his youth and the existence of a camp library, ‘behind a fence, between two huts.’

On being liberated by two American-Jewish soldiers he returned to France. Spain was not an option.

In 1952 however he changed his name, or at least acquired papers and passport as one Federico Sanchez and joined the Communist Party in Spain. He was expelled in 1964, returned to being Jorge Semprún and living in France. By this time he had begun a wide-ranging career as a writer mostly in French.

As well as novels, memoirs and articles he wrote 15 film scripts including those for Costa Gavros’ Z and Resnais’ Stavisky.

Jorge Semprún’s elegance had a lot to do with his integrity. This caused some delightful if doomed episodes. In 1988 the Spanish Government invited him to be Minister of Culture. He was reasonably effective – he negotiated the von Thyssen legacy – but fatally honest and unpartisan. He lasted three years before his public criticism of some corruption had him removed.

Once again he returned to France. I am not going to talk about his qualities as a writer –the films in particular have dated – but I don’t think there are any doubts as to his qualities as a person. His experiences in Buchenwald made him espouse justice for others and to that he brought intelligence, charm and clear-eyed practicality.

Reading and Football

2011-06-01T06:29:00.000-07:00

Yesterday I trotted along to a book swap run by the Edinburgh Book Shop at Henderson’s in Hanover Street in Edinburgh.

The place was packed. There were two speakers: Sara Sheridan and Ian Rankin, who was kindly substituting for someone who hadn’t been able to come. That’s probably trading up but I don’t know who the original speaker was.

The idea is that, over a glass of wine, people pass on books they have bought specially for the event, and receive another they would like to read. I gave a Judge Dee book by Robert van Gulik, and received David Mitchell’s One Day. I’m not sure how many people had actually bought a book, rather than go to their shelves.

Conversation was various but I particularly remember a chat about FC Barcelona. For those who don’t know, Barcelona won the European Cup last Saturday and were rather impressive. Their trainer is the elegant Josep (Pep) Guardiola. He is a reader – not something closely associated with most football trainers in the United Kingdom. In Catalonia, as in other parts of Spain, it is traditional on April 23 to give someone a rose and a book.

I remember a footballer called Michel in Real Madrid saying that his greatest regret was that he had not studied as a boy and in consequence was the only member of the first team not have taken or be taking a degree.

Recently the Madrid version of Guardiola, the elegant, well-read Jorge Valdano (often referred to in Spain as the ‘philosopher of football’), has lost out to the ex-trainer of Chelsea. Those who read Spanish can consult writer Javier Marias’ articles for El Pais – there he gives vent to his disappointment that the club he grew up with has decided on a different tactic that he considers meaner, chippier and altogether less generous. It’s not just about winning, but winning with great skill, honest manners and the kind of intelligence that values these attributes as much as just winning.

Romantic? I hope not.

In Praise Of Adaptability

2011-05-28T15:05:00.000-07:00

My father loved books not only for their contents but also as objects. He loved the smell of new books. He could also love some productions that were so old the insects that had once lived in them were no more than stains – but the content, Erasmus’ In Praise of Folly, or Bacon’s Essays, for example, had to be strong enough to bear the ageing of the book. At one time he regularly used petals as book marks.

I never quite shared that enthusiasm for the book as an object, but yes, there are some beautiful, even sumptuous productions. One childhood favourite that I remember was a large illustrated edition of A Thousand and One Nights.

But when words alone are involved I only want something clear and clean to read.

Now, for my birthday, my very amiable children have given me a bottle of champagne – and a Kindle.

I have to say I love it. These days I like to set the size of the print. I’ve bought too many books with tiny print in the last few years. Often, if I'm using a reading lamp, I get a distracting shadow of the print on the next page behind the words I'm trying to pick out.

Now my reading can easily be held in one hand, is as clear as I like it and ‘turning’ a page dislodges no dust or paper scurf.

Reading about a book and downloading it within seconds is gratifyingly novel. Not having to use a book mark is also a sort of freedom.

Does the Kindle change the reading experience? I don’t think it does, though I will say I am enjoying the re-arrangement of the experience.

I’d even say, so far at least, that it brings me into a more obviously direct contact with the point of a book, its contents. I find I get into the book more quickly – there are less preambles, no distracting cover. Just you and the writer.

A Landmark - Innit?

2011-05-09T10:34:00.000-07:00

The news that innit has achieved the status of an acceptable Scrabble word made me pause this morning. Do I like it? Instinctively, no. Do I find its usage interesting? Definitely, yes. What is interesting about it is not so much that it has achieved recognition as a way of saying isn’t it?, but that it also serves for doesn’t it?, aren’t we?, won’t you? etc. In other words, it is the equivalent of the French n’est-ce pas?, the Spanish ¿verdad?, the German nicht wahr? and so on. In linguistic terms, surely a landmark moment?

For centuries, the English language has been undergoing a process of simplification – or if you like, streamlining. It’s ancestor, Anglo Saxon, was a highly inflected language – with lots of different word endings to denote tense, person and grammatical case – quite similar in that respect to Latin or modern German. Gradually, most of these endings have been shrugged off, leaving a few remnants – such as the ‘s’ in he/she plays as opposed to I/you/we/they play. English words today are a bit like plasticine – the same word, with no alterations or additions, can be used as a noun, a verb or an adjective, just by changing the order of the words in the sentence. This suppleness, together with its part Latinate, part Anglo-Saxon origin vocabulary, as well as more recent imports from other languages, makes for a marvellous range of possibilities. It has been an evolutionary process and, as I have said elsewhere in this blog, I believe in evolution.

Will I begin to use innit? I don’t think so. Am I in favour of encouraging children to speak correctly so that they can learn how to read more easily? Definitely.

At present, innit seems to be mainly used in the south of England by the young. Will it start to creep over boundaries and begin to be used more widely?

I will observe from a respectful distance and watch it flower or shrivel.

Lost Children, Lost Parents

2011-05-02T08:54:00.000-07:00

A few days ago Ernesto Sabato died. He was 99 years old, just a couple of months short of his century. He trained as a physicist but turned away from science and became a novelist and essayist. His novel The Tunnel, written in the forties, is probably his most famous, praised by, amongst others, Albert Camus and Graham Greene.

An Argentinian, of Italian and Albanian extraction, he later became more famous for what is usually referred to as The Sabato Report – an examination of the atrocities committed by the military dictatorship that collapsed after The Falklands War – or the Malvinas, as the Argentinians call the islands. He described this task as ‘a descent into hell’, but with scrupulous attention to detail he and others enumerated and detailed what they could.

Most people have heard of ‘los desaparecidos’ - literally the disappeared or ‘missing’ -, a word used to describe those that vanished, that is were killed, during the dictatorship. But today I want to talk of the children of the ‘disappeared’. They were often whisked away and adopted by ‘more suitable’ families. That is, families that supported the dictatorship.

In Argentina, events were so recent and raw that great efforts at reconciliation and examination were made to lay the dictatorship to rest. In Spain however a different approach was used. When Franco died in 1975 almost everybody was keen to move on, turn the page.

I am not recommending one approach or the other. The Argentinian dictatorship was relatively short and brutal. Franco’s was much longer. Either way, casualties and injustices persist. Some of these injustices are finally being faced.

For the entirety of the Franco regime, children were removed from ‘unsuitable’ parents to be ‘re-educated, and placed with 'suitable families’ for adoption - in return for money. As late as the early seventies sedated mothers gave birth to be told later the child had died and the body had already been disposed of. This was, with connivance of governmental and religious authorities, untrue. A month ago in a small town called Chiclana, near Cadiz, a meeting was held to inform those affected about the steps they should take to lodge a complaint with the investigating judge.

There are several hundred, possibly several thousand people in Spain, presently trying to establish contact with a child or parent. In Chiclana, and throughout the province of Cadiz, women of what the Spanish call humilde (humble) origin are coming to terms not just with the idea they were lied to, but also with trying to trace a person they thought was dead.

Easter Rice

2011-04-22T05:23:00.000-07:00

Today may be Hot Cross Bun day, but on Viernes Santo (Good Friday) in Spain, it’s traditional to eat Arroz con Leche (Rice with Milk). I have never liked rice pudding – really, not at all - but I was introduced to this when I lived in Cadiz and it is a totally different creature. There are many different versions, with different ratios of milk to rice and sugar, some with added egg yolks and some without. All have cinnamon as a star ingredient and can be eaten hot or cold.

The dish is supposed to be of Moorish origin (as are many Spanish recipes) - some versions include raisins and/or rose water, decorated with rose petals (no added egg yolks for this version) - but the version I like best was given to me by a friend from Malaga. It’s made with lemon and cinnamon, and for me is much nicer cold. It’s great for kids (makes a change from yoghourt), but it can also be used as a cool summer dessert, happily made in advance, when you have friends over. It looks good, too.

The following ingredients are approximate, depending on how liquid you like it and how sweet you like it. Slightly less rice to milk will be needed if you thicken with egg yolks:

Arroz con Leche

Ingredients

4 cups of full cream milk

¾ - 1 cup of round grain rice

Approx ¾ cup of white sugar (this depends on your taste – some recipes say as much as 1 ¼ cups)

The peeled rind of a small lemon (some recipes also include some orange peel)

A cinnamon stick.

To decorate: brown sugar mixed with powdered cinnamon (or rose petals, in the raisin and rose water version without egg yolks).

Method

Wash the rice and place in a saucepan together with the milk, the sugar, the lemon (and/or orange) rind and the cinnamon stick.

Cook gently over a low heat, stirring occasionally at first, increasing to constantly as the rice gradually cooks and absorbs the milk.

When it is practically cooked and becoming creamy, remove from the heat and leave to stand.

If preparing the raisin and rose water version, add these now, and remove the citrus peel and cinnamon stick. Pour into a dish/individual ramekins and decorate with rose petals

If preparing the lemon and egg yolk version, place three egg yolks in a cup. Stir well and mix in a little of the rice mixture, then add this to the pan and stir. Return to the heat (very low) and stir continuously until it becomes silky and thickened. Remove the pan from the heat and leave for approximately ten minutes. Take out the lemon rind and cinnamon stick and pour into a dish/ individual ramekins. Decorate with a mixture of brown sugar and cinnamon, sprinkled in a lattice across the surface.

Leave to chill – and eat.

The Alhambra-Pad

2011-04-19T01:26:00.000-07:00

“Libraries are the souls of memories” I recently came across this splendid if somewhat obscure quote in a paper called ‘Russian libraries, an indestructible part of national memory: A study guide for librarians’ by Victoria Spain from Hofstra University in New York.

I was reminded of this on Sunday, when I saw the TV Programme When the Moors Ruled in Europe by Bettany Hughes. For a large part of the programme she was in the Alhambra in Granada. I first visited the Alhambra in the late sixties when I was spending a term in Granada as part of my studies. Now visitors are severely rationed - because there have been so many visitors. But then you could wander freely around the rooms, sit in a stone window seat by a lattice window screen and listen to the sound of running water. It was a wonderfully calm, cool haven where we would go to escape from the baking heat of the city.

Apart from reminding me of this, Bettany Hughes also reminded me that the contents of the library were lost in 1499 when Cardinal Cisneros made a huge bonfire of Arabic manuscripts in an effort to obliterate all trace of the infidel. Thankfully he did leave the building standing, but destroyed a library of incalculably valuable documents in the name of the ‘true faith’. There are numerous examples of similar losses in history, some at the arrogant hands of ideologues, others through accident, indifference and negligence.

Of course, we all have personal libraries – which constitute our own personal histories - both physically and in our memories. A few years ago I had to clear my parents’ house. My father in particular had been a regular and enthusiastic book buyer from an early age. Apart from the crowded shelves, there were cupboards full of books, there were cases of books in the loft and even the garage had stacks of book-filled boxes. I couldn’t bring myself to throw them out or donate them to charity without going through them. They represented a life. It was a long job. Neither I nor my siblings could house them all. Some of the books had deteriorated badly, with brittle yellowed paper and spines, and had become unreadable. I made a note to buy replacements of some – after all, a book’s value is its content. Some, however, were irreplaceable because they were long out of print.

We took those we wanted to keep, our respective children filled some gaps in their own book collections, and a large number of boxes went to second hand book shops or charities. What was left was not burnt, but thrown away in sad black bags with the rubbish. And so a personal collection of books disintegrated and the memory of what they were and meant was on its way to being lost.

I am rather cheered by the thought that a lifetime’s reading can now be preserved on a Kindle or an iPad, well, a few Kindles and iPads.

Cardinal Cisneros would be furious.

Tweetering On The Edge

2011-04-06T05:07:00.000-07:00

I have often said that I wasn’t up for Twitter and Facebook. I have a website and a blog and am signed up to Goodreads (a bit sporadic and behind with the updating), which all take up time, so how is there time for anything else in between writing and editing? And do I really want to tweet? However, my media savvy daughter told me I was missing the point – and I’m sure she’s right. She recently opened a Twitter account and set up a Facebook author page for me, and presented me with the done deal. I’m really just getting used to the idea – tweetering on the edge, I suppose you could call it. (Click here and here to follow or ‘like’ me)

One of the undoubted attractions of Twitter actually answers one of my misgivings – the time factor. Five minutes to spare can be used to check on tweeting activity, and even tweet. Blogging is different - and serves a different purpose. Another thing is that just as you don’t have to conform to what might be termed ‘blog style’, you are in charge of what you do on twitter. You don’t have to go in for the ‘I’m now waiting at the bus stop’ kind of tweeting – which isn’t really me. And you don’t have to tweet all the time.

With the London Book Fair coming up (11-13 April), I was checking out their website and came across this, which is a discussion of authors and social networking, their different attitudes and the variety of ways they use them. It suggests that, given the increasingly limited resources and overworked publicity staff of publishers, authors have to take responsibility into their own hands for getting their name and work known, and social networks are an accessible and cheap way of doing this. I agree with this.

But I also came across these articles, here and here , which bring home how a site like twitter can be used to keep in touch with news about the authors, organisations and other people you are interested in – all in one place. And that is a definite attraction.

I am still learning – with interest.

Icelight - The Cover

2011-03-31T12:56:00.000-07:00

Here is the cover of the new Peter Cotton book now renamed.

Icelight - is now scheduled for publication in October.

We Read It Like This

2011-03-29T11:40:00.000-07:00

All parents and grandparents of babies and young children should check out a new blog called We Read It Like This. It takes a different approach from other children’s book websites and blogs by concentrating of the personal experience of reading very special books aloud. It’s well worth a look for the books it recommends – and it is beautifully written.

Icelight

2011-03-25T13:45:00.001-07:00

We now have a new title for Peter Cotton 3.

It is to be called Icelight. The cover is presently being corrected.

As soon as I receive a copy, I’ll put it up for all to see.

Do different titles affect the way people feel about a book?

There’s ‘Blacklight’ ... and then there’s ‘Black Light’.

2011-03-17T03:41:00.000-07:00

A confession – I had never heard of the SAW franchise. That’s another way of saying I don’t watch horror movies. In consequence I hadn’t heard of Marcus Dunstan and Patrick Melton who wrote four of the movies. And I was unaware of Stephen Romano who has joined with them in a book called Black Light to be published in the UK by Mullholland Books (Hodder) in time for Halloween this year.

Two of the authors are quoted as saying “Black Light is a novel about a private eye (Buck Carlsbad) who gets in deep with a bunch of ghosts on a high-tech bullet train”.

Of course I wish them well.

The only small problem is that, for some months now, John Murray have announced my next Cotton novel as Blacklight. John Murray and Hodder are in the same building and belong to the same company. Black Light is coming out first in the US.

So my Peter Cotton title has to be SAWn off, or ghost trained.

For the moment then we are back to calling it Cotton 3. As soon as the new title is fixed I’ll report.

Apolaustic – And Other Words

2011-02-16T03:44:00.000-08:00

One niggling business in editing is the sentence that just will not read right. There is nothing particularly wrong with the sentence. All its words are in good order, the sentiment is not complicated but a reader will trip on it. I include myself as one of those readers.

It can be down simply to how people see when they read. The word ‘inexpensive’, for example, should not end a sentence. In the run of reading, a lot of people, myself included, tend to see ‘expensive’. This is something well known to advertisers – ‘Not’ is a no-no in a slogan. ‘Not fattening’, for example. The opposite impression is left in the mind of a consumer.

I have had some relief from the necessary fiddle of editing because my husband recently gave me the Penguin collection of all five novels about Richard Hannay written by John Buchan.

The most famous of these is of course the first, The Thirty-Nine Steps. I had read two others, Greenmantle and The Three Hostages. The two I had not read were Mr Standfast and, the one I am going to mention here, The Island of Sheep.

In Chapter Six – Sundry Doings at Fosse – Richard Hannay calls in on MacGillivray and finds him reading Greek, ancient Greek that is. Though MacGillivray is in his rooms in Mount Street , he works at ‘the Yard’ (Scotland Yard). He refers to and translates from Herodotus and in his description of Lancelot Troth, the man Hannay is interested in says ‘- he leads the apolaustic life, and that’s an expensive thing nowadays.’

Vocabulary in those ‘nowadays’ was different from these ‘nowadays’. I think I’m on pretty safe ground in saying that not many thrillers published this year will include the word ‘apolaustic’ (devoted to pleasure). I have no idea how many high ranking officers at ‘the Yard’ now seek consolation and wisdom in the classics.

In any case I very much doubt that ‘apolaustic’ was in common usage in 1936 either, but presumably Buchan thought that his younger readers could always look it up in a dictionary.

No, I am not going to defend ‘apolaustic’ or say ignorance of its meaning will prevent a full and happy life. We get along reasonably well without it and not many of us want to suggest something short of hedonism but, as it turns out in the novel, the kind of enjoyment that involves having a six hundred ton yacht. I can think of other terms for a person like that.

It will happen to us all, of course with time, but one of the incidental pleasures of reading Buchan is the sometimes sniffy attitude of his hero Hannay. Forget the six hundred ton yacht, this is more from the first class lounge of an ocean liner:

“I pondered long over that letter. The first thing that struck me was that it was not written in Sandy’s usual fastidious style. It was frank journalism and must be meant to appeal to a particular audience.”

And I am particularly fond of “the most sumptuous of Lombard’s possessions” – referring to Mrs Lombard. “As a girl she must have been lovely, and she was still a handsome woman of the heavy Madonna type – a slightly over-coloured Madonna. Being accustomed to slim people…I thought her a little too ‘fair of flesh’, in the polite phrase of the ballads.”

Now in Washington Shadow, I let an African character give Buchan something of a going over, particularly as regards Prester John. Buchan could be and was, as someone has limply said, ‘as racist as his time.’

Buchan’s fluency of style and wide vocabulary are a saving grace? I admire them but that’s not my point here.

History is a tracing back to see how we are what we are. To deny the inconveniences of a text – as in the new, modern version of Huckleberry Finn, (see here and here) in which vocabulary and expressions from the original text were changed - is a mistake. It’s particularly a mistake in Mark Twain’s classic because it bowdlerizes the text of Twain’s irony.

It is even more patronizing to the reader than Buchan could be to some characters.

Getting Branded - ASLA day and John Murray Authors Party

2011-02-02T03:45:00.000-08:00

I’ve been very busy editing Blacklight recently – a consuming occupation - but in between, I have taken a couple of forays out from behind my laptop.

On Thursday (20 Jan) I attended a Professional Development Day: ‘Working as a Writer in the 21^st Century’, organised by ASLA (Association of Scottish Literary Agents), and held at Sandeman House, the home of the Scottish Booktrust in Edinburgh. I had taken part in an excellent ‘Web Workshop’ two years ago in London organised by my publisher for a small group of writers (just six of us), so I was interested to see what this one had to offer.

This was much bigger - there were about 60 people there – and covered more areas. Apart from the first talk on the new media by Julian Westaby from Creating Sparks, the day also included: a panel with representatives from Scottish publishers (Jan Rutherford from Birlinn and Polygon, and Jenny Todd from Canongate) and from a bookshop (Rosamund de la Hey, owner of The Main Street Trading Company in St. Boswells); an author panel with Barry Hutchison, Janet Paisley and Sara Sheridan, ‘discussing the merits, practicalities and impact of blogging, tweeting, linkedin, social web sites - and other income streams including ghost writing, copy writing etc, and finally a panel composed of Aly Barr (Creative Scotland), Alistair Moffat (BookNation and the Borders and Lennoxlove Book Festivals) and Caitrin Armstrong (Scottish Book Trust) on the different opportunities they offer authors.

A large part of the time was spent on how writers can use the new media to create awareness of their work and make contact with readers. Some of the authors there were very practised and media savvy, had websites, blogs, were on Facebook and/or Twitter and were expert on-liners. Others were still at the stage of thinking about it all. I consider myself to be somewhere in between. I have my website and my blog. I don’t do Facebook or Twitter, but have an author page on the reader networking site Goodreads. I’m not sure I would have time for anything more.

There were a number of interesting aspects for me that arose as I was talking to other writers. First is the question of what different writers aim for with their websites, and what people look for when they visit a writer’s website; the second is the question of the author’s ‘voice’. Obviously writing content for a website or a blog is not the same as writing a book, but Julian Westaby told us in his talk that ‘an author is a brand like any other’. From the shifting in seats and murmurs around me, this obviously made some writers decidedly uncomfortable. A ‘brand’ has the idea of creating an image – ‘manipulative’ muttered the person sitting beside me. ‘Just be yourself – you are your brand’ said someone else. ‘Which self?’ said another voice. The possibility of straying into philosophical notions of self hovered momentarily, - and marketing took over again.

A few days later, on 25 January, I went down to London to the John Murray Authors party held in their historic Albemarle Street house – the home and office of the original John Murray, publisher of many eminent names. The house is remarkable in itself as the room where the party was held has been preserved as it originally was, down to the paintings on the walls, the books on the shelves, the furniture and curtains – and the proof is there to see in a painting of the room including the first John Murray together with Byron and Walter Scott among others. An enjoyable evening, chatting to authors I knew and meeting others for the first time.

On my way out after the party I shook the hand of a slim, elegant elderly gentleman, who described himself as ‘the doorman for this evening’ – the present-day John Murray.

‘Princess Grace.’

2011-01-12T06:00:00.000-08:00

After a flu-flattened opening to 2011, I have been cheered up by learning that I can now resume my account of nine hours of tapes recorded in Guadalajara between 2005 and 2007 -(See blogs from July and August last year)- with the ‘original’ of Peter Cotton.

I am very grateful that the Spanish lawyers contacted me to tell me this and, through his step daughter, Caroline, have learnt that ‘things have been settled’.

Our sessions were always held in his study with its glass wall facing north. On the book-lined south wall, I noticed there was a panel for an oil portrait of his second wife Helen. This was rather a fashion in Spain – in case you did not know whose house you were in a portrait was there to remind you. The portraits usually flattered – an old-fashioned sort of photo-shop in oils. It was not simply a matter of regularizing the features within a likeness. I once talked to a portrait painter on the Costa del Sol – he said ‘the camera adds ten pounds, I can take off up to thirty.’ His earnings were fabulous. And he worked very quickly. He had drawn, in pastels, separate portraits of a mother and three daughters in the morning and worked on the mother’s oil painting in the afternoon. His fee would have bought a medium sized car.

‘We were married in April 1973 in Chelsea. We were second timers and rather wanted a quiet wedding. It was, but Helen’s uncle took umbrage that he had not been invited, so he invited us to Cannes where he lived and gave us this portrait as a wedding present. Helen always called it ‘my Princess Grace moment’ – meaning Grace Kelly, then living along the coast in Monaco, and something of a yardstick. The Côte d’Azur is the Costa del Sol of France.’

We considered the painting. It showed a strikingly cool lady wearing a green gown and a string of pearls and brought to mind cheesy old expressions like ‘alabaster skin’ and ‘golden hair’.

Since there were several photographs of Helen in the study, the contrast between the vivacity of the snaps and the flattery of the painting were marked.

‘Have you come across the Picasso/Dali divide?’ he asked.

I had. In Spain, very generally, politics did not just divide into left and right but Picasso and Dali.

‘Helen’s uncle behaved as if we had planned our wedding to coincide with Picasso’s death. He was determined to correct an impression that only he had. We kept it partly because her uncle sometimes visited us here and partly because I became quite fond of it. It was so far from her.’ He shrugged.

‘I think of it as art subverted to social aspiration. Some art reveals, some closes things off, presents an idealized front. The painting is worthless but it is worth something to me, mostly as a contrast to my own memories.’

Helen’s daughter Caroline has told me they don’t know what to do with it. ‘It’s like an aged piece of Angel Cake. I can’t help feeling my mother’s uncle was a sentimental misogynist. You know, the kind of man who uses words like ‘fragrant’ for some women and wants all to be lady-like and contained.’

‘

Winter Waterloo

2010-12-21T04:46:00.000-08:00

Last Sunday we celebrated my mother’s 90^th birthday. Given the weather in the UK, this turned out to be rather brave. We had to get from Edinburgh to Guildford – and then back. We were luckyish – some slight delays, walks in minus 8 temperatures due to lack of taxis. But our trains there and back were among the few not cancelled.

My brother and his partner tried to get the 20.30 Eurostar back to Paris on Sunday. They arrived at mid-day on Monday. On our way to King’s Cross we saw the queue waiting to get into St Pancras. From families with young children to elderly people, several thousand were being made to wait outside in sub-zero temperatures.

At King’s Cross we were frequently informed the weather was ‘inclement’ and that everything was being done for our ‘security and comfort.’ The ‘comfort’ part was notional. King’s Cross has been a very small station for generations – doubtless all this will change when the building work is finished.

The ‘security’ part was more obvious. The unfortunate police were out in force at St Pancras and they were keeping an eye on King’s Cross as well. My brother says potential passengers were each given a bottle of water and ‘a bag of chips’ at about 5.30 in the morning after the police had been called in and someone arrested and restrained for protesting at the lack of information and the order that everyone go out and through security again after someone else had left the building, apparently for a cigarette.

From Guildford the London train goes to Waterloo, named after a famous battle. The Duke of Wellington is supposed to have attributed his success to a lack of rigid planning or, more accurately, to tying a knot in a rope when it broke.

My suspicion (I am being nice) is that companies no longer do knots but summon the police, instead. Perfect storm patrol? I would hope the rail companies are charged for this service but suspect they simply add it on to fares. there is no Plan B. As they say at King's Cross, platform zero is to the left of platform one

I was also reminded of John Buchan’s career, based on cracks in the thin veneer of civilization. If Richard Hannay had tried to get a train on Monday 20^th December 2010, he’d definitely have died.

Snow Strikes

2010-12-07T04:54:00.000-08:00

I recently delivered the completed manuscript of Blacklight – Peter Cotton book number 3 – which is set in London in the long, freezing winter of 1946-7. Rationing was worse than during the war. The coal ran out. Water, whether in the Thames, water pipes, or outside loos, froze.

In what I hope was an entirely unrelated event, it began to snow here in Edinburgh. The first day, my ninety two year old father-in-law told me how calm and pristine it looked from his East Lothian window and that afternoon, he even ventured out in his walking boots, thick coat and balaclava helmet, stout cane in hand, for a short stroll in the quiet white.

The view from our front windows overlooks some gardens, which soon became filled with Lowry-like figures of children (schools all closed) tobogganing down the slope on what looked like brightly coloured plastic tea trays.

The next day I put on my own boots and went out to meet a Spanish girl, recently graduated as a vet, called Rocío, for lunch. I knew all her family years ago in Cadiz – where it almost never snows, being almost entirely surrounded by sea. I believe a few flakes fell in 1968. But I knew that her grandparents lived in Granada, so she would have seen snow before in the Sierra Nevada. ‘Yes, she said, ‘but I love this. It’s the first time I’ve seen falling snow!’ The tone of wonder in her voice took me back, and I remembered how Spanish parents in the south of Spain would, like the father of the protagonist in ‘A Hundred Years of Solitude’, make expeditions with their children so that they could ‘conocer el hielo’ – see ice and snow with their own eyes, as a wonder of the world.

Over the following days, in Edinburgh, the wonder creaked and froze. A note of disquiet began to creep into my father-in-law’s voice. ‘What if there is no food in the shops? What if there is a power cut?’

I reassured him as cheerfully as I could, feeling pleased that our local supermarket was in charge of delivering our weekly shop (and my father –in- law’s) – and pleased that (barring power cuts), heat and facilities such as indoor loos were commonplace now.

As soon as I put the phone down, the supermarket texted me to say that they had had to cancel my delivery due to the road conditions, and that I should reschedule my order. This I did, but it still left me with having to negotiate my way down a snow and black ice slope – past people trying to dig out their cars – to stock up while waiting for my delivery.

Rocío’s plane back to Spain was postponed due to the weather conditions at Edinburgh airport – but I hope this didn’t prevent her from taking back her ‘falling snow’ feeling to Cadiz.

She also had to contend with the air controllers’ strike in Spain. Thirty five years after his death, the Spanish government had recourse to a measure employed by Franco. They ‘militarized’ the strikers.

Port Sunlight

2010-11-25T06:30:00.000-08:00

I have been out of blog action finishing Blacklight, the third Peter Cotton book. The fourth is already started but I have to find a name for it.

So back a while, to the Ellis Peters Historical Award ceremony on the 4^th November. All very civilized and friendly. I had already felt, perhaps from the follow through from Wolf Hall, that it was going to be a Tudor year.

Delighted for Rory Clements and his artist wife Naomi that Revenger won. I had met Rory and Andrew Williams before since we are all John Murray writers. Andrew Taylor was, as always, generous and amiable and I met S J Parris (Stephanie Merritt) for the first time and instantly forgave her for being the same age as my elder daughter. C J Sansom, the runner-up, also with a Tudor book, couldn’t be there. I may be wrong but I think I heard the word flu.

Another reason I felt it was a Tudor year was because we were on the site of Bridewell Palace, Henry VIII’s residence after Westminster Palace burnt down in 1512 and where the papal delegation arrived to discuss the annulment of Henry’s marriage to Catherine of Aragon.

The reason I know this is because my father worked for many years in the old Unilever building and I remember visiting him along what felt like the dark passages of some Pharaoh’s tomb many years ago.

All that has gone. Inside the façade is a mercifully light filled structure. I went up in a glass lift with someone who said ‘Wasn’t all this built by someone who made soap?’ Not exactly. But there was something about all the glass that induced a sensation not of stepping on the past but of reflected ghosts. There is time and there is space repeatedly occupied and left.

Thanks to everyone there.

Don No

2010-10-30T01:26:00.000-07:00

Last Sunday, by chance, I saw a bit of the first James Bond film, Dr No, released forty-eight years ago in 1962. It was, of course, made before Bond became a franchise that multiplied and morphed. The makers were trying it out to see whether or not it would fly with consumers.

My interest was drawn as I realized that I was seeing in historical time, as it were, the film background to the American TV series Mad Men. It had not struck me before just how much the series protagonist, Don Draper, is a version of Sean Connery’s portrayal of Bond as a hard-boiled, long-zipped hero. It’s not just a question of the male hair applications, or the women poured into girdled moulds, but even, despite the difference in accents, down to some intonations.

Dr No links male tradition and female corsetry. Men bear and command; women pour, and just can’t help it if they like a pillar of strength. But it is an escapist fantasy - I was particularly fond of James Bond turning the radioactive level explosively up and then looking for the girl chained into a sloping Angelica position.

Unless you’re a fashionista, Mad Men is less escapist. I think of the series as skilful Balzac for today, but rising from time to time into a stylish existentialism and, just occasionally, into wonderfully scrappy bits that mean living people clash at indecorous, often unknowing levels of deference, self-respect, discomfort and resentment. From that point of view Mad Men is rather sophisticated. I understand the character of Peggy Olsen is, to some extent, based on the female founder of Cosmopolitan magazine. In other words, a boss is not a lover, but may be even more time-consuming and influential. Her narrative danger? Just a little too much of the Ad-woman’s pilgrim’s progress.

But what really struck me is that it is TV series like Mad Men, (and The Sopranos and The Wire) that lead the way in popular narrative terms. Written narrative, though it gradually assumed the cuts associated with film, is still not sharing that freedom and those possibilities.

It may be of course that the audience for written fiction feels happier with more traditional exposition and explanation, but it is probably more to do with the producers’ economic model.

Take, for example, last Wednesday’s episode (in the UK, that is.) in which Peggy casually mentions Margaret Mead. In a book, I suspect the author would need to add ‘the anthropologist’. And very likely ‘author of Coming of Age in Samoa’. The fact is, that by mentioning Margaret Mead, Peggy is misreading male irritation and confusion with a vending machine. She is about to get a crash course in ‘Mating in Manhattan’ and ‘The position of crude innuendo in the work place’, and finds out that solidarity amongst women can lead to being called a ‘humourless bitch’ by another female - the recipient of the original Margret Mead remark.

I am aware that some people, particularly of my mother’s generation, find Mad Men uncomfortable, or even unwatchable. It can seem a very sharp portrait of the extent to which conformity and decorum, and what was regarded as important, look, in retrospect, pointless and trivial and cruel.

Don Draper’s ex-wife, Betsy, would-be but failing model of the supported, supportive and fragrant trophy wife, described his date as ‘at least fifteen’ - reflecting her own emotional age rather than accusing her ex-husband of cradle snatching. ‘He has it all,’ she complained, with considerable envy.

The girl in question, poured exactly into the same hairdo and fashion sense as she is, is a younger clone of herself. With one exception. The young lady made Don ‘comfortable’ before trotting demurely and knowingly back to her dorm.

Yes, at one level it is excruciating. But I’d point to two justifications. It's scalpel sharp. And if anyone thinks this could not be applied to life now, they might like to think again before it’s too late.

Prizewinning

2010-10-17T14:38:00.000-07:00

My husband takes solace in the works of David Hume. He finds something reassuring in the great sceptic philosopher’s prose. It is true, of course, as Julian Baggini and others have pointed out, that Hume was pre-soundbite. My husband says the prose is nearly hypnotic, like hearing the click of a verbal abacus.

I tend more to hearing the civilized whirr of a privileged 18^th Century mind – never knowingly oversold, as it were.

Hume is famous on several counts. One is his remarkably brief autobiography, My Own Life. At just ten pages long it is, on one level, anti-Proust – at another, anti much detail at all, once a rigorous process of selection has been applied.

Hume’s life is a literary life. As one of the first, possibly the first, man of letters to make a living from

writing books (his histories sold more than his philosophical works) he describes what he calls the ‘vanity’

 involved in writing an autobiography:  ‘It is difficult for a man to speak long of himself without vanity;

therefore I shall be short.’

This is not all puff. Overegging it a little, he describes, his first work as having fallen ‘still-born’

from the press.

Hume, of course, was not given any literary awards – they are a more recent invention. And of course, they vary. The Nobel Prize, recently given to Mario Vargas Llosa, is big. The Booker, recently given to Howard Jacobsen, is big in Britain.

But there are others. And I have recently been nominated for the Ellis Peter Awards (along with five other writers, two of whom have already won the award before). The Ellis Peters awards are for historical – that is now minus at least 35 years – crime fiction.

My attitude is – I really am very grateful to be nominated at all.

But it has struck me that ‘history’ is a long time. I think my Washington Shadow is the most recent in terms of setting (1945) – three of the shortlisted books are set in Tudor times. All historical novels, of course, reflect the present to a greater or lesser degree. Whether they mention doublets or zoot suits, they all have an angle on now.

And I suppose what I am really saying is that I am increasingly conscious of why the past matters. The attitudes of the nineteen forties in Britain, what I will call the non-funding of sometimes admirable, sometimes over-ambitious things, sticks to us now. For the last sixty years Britain’s efforts to remain a world power but with a degree of social justice have proved … let’s call it expensive.

Good luck – I mean it – to the other short listed writers.

Shortlisted for Ellis Peters Historical Award

2010-10-11T13:31:00.000-07:00

I have heard today that Washington Shadow has been shortlisted for the CWA Ellis Peters Award, together with fellow John Murray writers Rory Clements (for Revenger) and Andrew Williams (for To Kill a Tsar), as well as S.J. Parris (for Heresy), C. J. Sansom (for Heartstone) and Andrew Taylor (for The Anatomy of Ghosts)

The results will be announced on 4^th November.

Hold

2010-10-05T08:35:00.000-07:00

Many years ago, on reading a poem by W B Yeats for school (see The Tower), something stuck. I became conscious the poet was complaining of age: he had ‘fantastical’ imagination, but what he lacked as an old man was stamina, the ability to hold and sustain the construct that turns imagination into the something people can read and share.

As I say, I made a note of this for future reference. Would I ever, I wondered, given my evident differences from a great poet, experience something similar? And when?

Blogreader, I may just have done so. I have been working hard on one hundred thousand words (Blacklight) and last Sunday, the effort to hold the whole book in mind resulted in, or rather collapsed into, a fantastic image – a vulture perched on an empty skull. I’d guess that image follows on from a sensation of dark, heavy wings at the back on my mind before the old scavenger took over.

It may even be a rather literal take on the word ‘deadline’.

However grandiose the image however, it was simply like the mind turning its own light off. Also known as working too long.

Sleep helped.

It did give me pause however – enough to write this, anyway. As I have said before, I do not read long books when I’m at this stage of writing. And I have been looking at The Original of Laura by Valdimir Nabokov.

Described on the cover as ‘a novel in fragments’, that is precisely what it is. It appears that Nabokov himself wanted it destroyed. I don’t want to get in to whether it should have been published or not. (It should not have been).

What it does show is Nabokov at the end of his life, being sporadically what we think of as ‘Nabokov’ – but it is really more a collection of notes, mnemonics and puzzles, and problems to do a lot of work on and develop.

Nabokov was also a considerable lepidopterist. Rather cruelly, The Original of Laura is like bits of a butterfly with too many legs, missing scales and misplaced antennae - almost a butterfly broken on the wheel before it had become a butterfly.

Romantic? No.

Right at the end of writing a book, even this modest writer is anxious not to lose the energy and stamina needed to make it enjoyable.

Less Is More

2010-09-26T04:09:00.000-07:00

On the advice of the marketing department, the title of my new Peter Cotton book, due out next spring, has been changed from ‘London Blacklight’ to Blacklight. Here is the cover.

The setting remains London, of course, but the word Blacklight is, I think, seen as strong enough to stand on its own. Indeed the London part probably weakened it, possibly confused it. There is geography and there is UV light.

At first I was unsure – I had used place in the two previous books, Cádiz and Washington. Didn’t this break the map and pin look to the series?

I was also thinking of helping the kind of reader like my grandmother who had difficulty remembering whether she had or had not read a book because mystery titles do have a tendency to blur. I have some of this myself. Though I have read a few books by Dick Francis I could not, given a list of titles, tell you which ones.

So it has come down to a question of priorities. And one book title at a time. Blacklight it is. Be confident. Less is more.

I haven’t dare mention that some people have said – ‘Do you mean backlight?’

Yes, marketing is pretty tricky.

Elephants and Mice

2010-09-09T08:29:00.001-07:00

There is an old story that elephants are afraid of mice. I suspect it is not the kind of tale that wins research money to test whether or not it is true. I can also imagine that mice, short-sighted creatures, might nonetheless pick up on something huge nearby, sometimes by shadow but mostly from the tremors running towards them through the earth from the placement of alarmingly large, heavy feet.

When writing, I tend to read books that come in short sections. Recently I have bought Ms Hempel Chronicles by Sarah Shun-lien Bynum, Vivaldi and the Number 3 by Ron Butlin, and Why Look at Animals? by John Berger.

This post concerns the very first section of John Berger’s book called A Mouse Story. It is preceded by some friendly drawings of mice by the author and it dates from 2009.

It involves ‘a man’ who has to cut off a ten centimeter slice of a loaf of bread each morning to remove the signs of mice meals. By accident, when looking for a file in the shed by the house, the man comes across a mouse trap made by a previous owner.

It is not a death-trap. It is a cage. One by one the man traps the mice and releases them at some distance from the house.

This was familiar to me. A few years ago my mother found mice in her living room. The rodent expert suggested her liking for chocolate might be the reason. John Berger is much more traditional in his story and uses cheese for bait. Our rodent expert – his name was Tim – said mice were not fond of cheese. He’d use After Eights but, given a choice, always went for Toblerone.

We too went for a humane – that is non-backbreaking – trap. I bought some Toblerone and every morning would transport a mouse past the pond and the hedged around compost heap, and release it into a field owned by a Dowager Duchess and from which, to my mother’s irritation, deer would break through and eat only yellow flowers.

I immediately recognized from John Berger’s descriptions the different behavior of the different mice. I missed out on two descriptions. Our trap being plastic, a mouse could not cling to any wire roof. And I never found nine babies had been born overnight.

I recognized the others though. There was ‘I don’t want to leave’. There were the immediate turners, to left or right. And then there was the mouse ‘the man’ christened ‘Alfredo’.

Our respective Alfredos took off like a kangaroo, leaping high in the air and appearing again two or three times well above the tufts of grass.

In the story, Alfredo is the penultimate mouse. The last mouse is a disappointment, just a scuttle, and the man understands he had been hoping to see another leaping prisoner attaining his dream of freedom.

I have to admit, I thought my Alfredo was invigorated more by fear. That opinion is also based on the number of what I will call pellets in the trap. That had to be washed out.

Audiobook of Washington Shadow

2010-09-01T04:06:00.000-07:00

The Audiobook of Washington Shadow, published by Isis, is out today. It is read, as was The Maze of Cadiz, by the excellent Jonathan Keeble, and is available direct from Isis.

I am looking forward to receiving my copies to hear how it sounds!

Dimensions of Fiction and Reality: Peter .. and Jane

2010-08-25T05:04:00.000-07:00

Our seventeen-month-old grandson lives in Madrid and, in between visits, we have been having regular Skype sessions, chatting, singing songs and playing games. His initial reaction to these sessions was intrigue. He began offering us toys or water through the computer screen and going into gales of laughter when we pretended to take them. On a recent visit with his parents – escaping from the heat of Madrid – he arrived and immediately initiated a game and requested songs that we had introduced on screen. He seemed to have no problem accepting that the flesh and blood version of his grandparents was the same as the image on his mother’s computer screen.

He’s at that language-sticky phase – delighted to find out that everyone and everything has a name. There are shapes and colours to this. Anything remotely round was put into the ‘ball’ category, anything green was a tree, and anything with wheels was a car.

Among his recent acquisitions were the first four of the Ladybird Key Words Reading books - with protagonists, for those that don’t remember, called Peter and Jane. I taught my children to read with these books (we were living in Spain at the time) and my daughter is thinking ahead. First produced in the sixties, they are brilliantly designed – following research into word frequency - using the commonest words in the English language, and a mixed method of repetition, look-and-say, context, and inbuilt phonic training – and they really work.

The first books had a distinctly fifties feel, but over the years the pictures were modernised. Jane’s attire was changed from prim dresses to jeans and a T-shirt, and the elderly absurdity of sentences such as ‘Peter climbs a tree while Jane looks on’ or ‘A woman likes a hat’ was also addressed.

One of these books immediately grabbed my grandson’s attention. The pictures were full of things he could put names to – ball, fish, tree, dog, water, jump, splash etc. He took to Jane immediately. Shortly before leaving to go back to Madrid, he was standing at the window looking out onto the gardens opposite. A girl with shoulder-length blond hair was playing with a dog. She looked remarkably like ... yes, you’ve got it. ‘Jane!’ said the little lad, pointing excitedly.

‘Ah,’ said his uncle. ‘The beginnings of an inquiry into the dimensions of fiction and reality.’

Nothing quite so grand – but probably more interesting. On a later visit to his other grandparents, he was introduced to a cow – a real one, not a plastic, one-inch-tall one. The cow did indeed go ‘mooo!’ but more like a foghorn than he was used to. He apparently achieved almost vertical movement into his mother’s arms and squinted a bit – I am guessing to bring the cow into less threatening focus.

And just in case anyone is wondering, Jane’s brother was never, ever, the inspiration for Peter Cotton.

Blogging Has its Drawbacks.

2010-08-11T08:57:00.000-07:00

I have, unintentionally I have to say, caused problems by blogging about a person who recently died and who provided some of the background to Peter Cotton.

A firm of lawyers, representing this person’s daughter, has contacted me. I was aware that he had been married twice. Indeed, I met him shortly after the death of his second wife in 2005.

I also mentioned how his step-daughter Caroline had put me in touch with him.

New information, however, means I have to stop these blogs about my meetings with him. I am not entirely sure why but, of course, I recognize that family matters can be very complicated, certainly until probate is settled.

As far as I understand, the person I have quoted had two children by his first marriage, a girl (b.1955) and a boy (b.1957). I have not heard from his son or his representatives. I do know that his first wife later remarried and lived in Capetown, South Africa, where she died, aged 64 in 1999.

It would appear that he left his estate in three equal parts, one of these being to his step-daughter. Since this is now being contested by what his daughter’s lawyers call his ‘natural children’ I am advised – how shall I put this? – to put a sock in it.

Sorry, but there it is.

Blogs will now deal with other matters.

RIP Peter Cotton - 4

2010-08-07T13:25:00.001-07:00

Recorded on the nine hours of tapes that I have of my conversation with the ‘original’ of Peter Cotton (1919-2010) are many of his opinions of and anecdotes about the Intelligence Services – and a number of what he called ‘considerations’.

In the first two books of the series, The Maze of Cadiz and Washington Shadow, I have not used a single phrase of his, nor anything that happened to him. It was a point of pride with me - as was using real historical characters, but strictly as background and atmosphere, not as people who stand up and speak and act directly in the books.

One of his ‘considerations’, however, made me change my mind for the third and fourth books in the Peter Cotton series. He asked me whether I was not being what he called ‘a little timid’.

Now, I have never properly understood people with political ambitions. This may because my own father was invited to stand in the 1951 election for the then Liberals, and accepted on the strict understanding that there was no possibility of him winning the seat. Since he had the wrong party in the wrong constituency, it was a pretty safe bet, but towards the end of his life he would say ‘I keep meeting old men who witter on about regretting missed opportunities. That’s not the point at all. It’s the dangers you escaped that should impress. The sheer relief in not being elected to Parliament is one of mine.’

The man in Guadalajara was even more direct: ‘Politics is plagued by very bad plotting and characters the author should have thought about more,’ he said. ‘Would-be heroes strut about, self-obsessed and demented, utterly unaware of their own limitations or with any grasp of political relativities or comparisons. Look at any list of would-be party leaders.’ He paused. ‘Have you actually met any politicians?’

As it happens I have met a few. There was the man who talked for hours about the slights he had received since junior school - an ex- Prime Minister. Another favourite was the man who always walked several steps ahead of his wife, she carrying the bags. That was before he became a minister. I have met a couple of pleasant politicians but they did not rise high, and the one who did was unable to persuade his superior to see sense.

In Guadalajara I was told about the doings of a Mr Fixit solicitor and an unpleasant MP, who both later became Lords. What I was told about them was accurate – and verifiable.

‘Do you really have to be so oblique?” he asked me, ‘When all this fantastic but real stuff is there for you?’

The short answer has turned out to be no. Both of these men appear in LONDON BLACKLIGHT, the third Peter Cotton book, though not quite under their own names.

And the fourth book? That will involve something that did happen to the man who talked to me for nine hours in Guadalajara in 2005. Or so he said.

Washington Shadow Paperback - Publication Day

2010-08-05T08:55:00.000-07:00

Today is publication day for the paperback of Washington Shadow.

Available now to buy on amazon.

The ‘Real’ Peter Cotton – 3: On Literary Violence

2010-08-01T04:07:00.000-07:00

During my second interview with the recently deceased ‘original’ for Peter Cotton, he was decidedly relaxed.

As before, we spoke in his large study near Guadalajara in Spain. I am not good at compass points but I did notice that the largest window - almost the whole wall - faced North, overlooking a wooded valley, so that the view, rather than the window was sunlit.

He told me that Sir Peter Russell – on his birth certificate and in several Javier Marias’ novels Peter Wheeler – was apparently pleased to have ‘a small taste of literary immortality, or at least of a version of himself surviving between book covers.’

He was still teasing me however. He also suggested that this result was every spy’s dream: ‘Along with the apparent modesty, I regret to tell you that in a number of agents I have encountered, there is a Hamlet-like insistence on preserving the mystery of themselves.’

‘In any case,’ he said, ‘while Sir Peter was a spy during WW2, he is also a most innovative and distinguished Hispanist. I was never an Hispanist of any sort and nobody really knows what Sir Peter did in the war. What I will bet on, however, is that his experiences encouraged and re-enforced the innovative side in him. There is a story that after he had suffered a motor-bike accident he was sent to Lochailort in the Scottish Highlands, and there beaten up by his own side to prepare him for withstanding torture. It’s the kind of experience that changes anyone’s view of the world.’

‘My own favourite story about him,’ he went on,’ is that at the end of the war he was supposed to have been instructed to get rid of an Indian agent, code-named Carbuncle. I think shoving him over the side of a ship was suggested. Or he might have been given liberty to choose his method. But he chose to handcuff himself to the man and when they arrived at Singapore, he uncuffed him and told him to eff off. That would be a saving grace, wouldn’t it?’

‘In Hispanic studies he is often termed ‘iconoclastic’. That’s a secondary effect of thinking clearly and upsetting some established views.’

‘But it’s hardly violence. I don’t think there is anyone of my generation who is not now some sort of pacifist.’

He looked up, rather sadly. ‘But if you want to write about an agent you are going to have to deal with violence. It is rather difficult to do. Far too many people are rather excited by it. They imagine it simplifies life, let’s them act, achieves a resolution.’

He smiled. ‘Mind you, he said, ‘that mystery stuff does screen all kinds of moral discomfort.’

RIP ‘Peter Cotton’-2: ‘I Do Hope I Can Help You’

2010-07-11T03:25:00.000-07:00

I had some intrigued reactions to my post last week about my meetings with the ‘real’ Peter Cotton – but they didn’t start particularly well. I had three long interviews with him in his house in Guadalajara. All quotes from him come courtesy not of a remarkable memory but a tape-recorder and nine hours of tapes.

Three steps down from the main floor he had a long, rather narrow, room, with two walls of glass and two, one punctured by the steps, book lined. At the beginning he thought I had come along to chat about what he later called ‘stuff for fantasists’ that is, books about a hero. When he found out that the protagonist I had in mind was ‘in intelligence, swimming as he could as the British Empire went down the drain,’ he kittled up. This was not, in fact, quite what I had said but I was happy to let him talk.

‘I don’t subscribe to the heroic generation stuff you keep seeing in obituaries,’ he said. ‘I have met some of those Second War heroes. They varied. At least two I met were quite unfit for later life. Most service people soon learnt they would have to be lucky to survive the stupidity of their own side. Those on that ship that kept going to Singapore, for example, after the Japanese had taken it because nobody had thought to countermand the order. They were unlucky.’

‘Perhaps it would be better if you thought of us as a disturbed generation – we grew up in the depression, had the war, in a sense did not get to grow up until we were in our late twenties.’

I was, of course, aware he was rather enjoying himself. “I am an old man and I get to talk frankly,’ he said with relish more than once.

He was equally blunt about Intelligence. ‘You will find it difficult to accept that it could have been quite that incompetent. I remember getting out of a cab in the sixties. On the radio The Rolling Stones were singing Satisfaction. Inside the Intelligence building, candidates for a job in the secret services were being asked to put the ranks of the British nobility in order. You know, Duke first, down to Baronet. This was after Philby and all the rest. The thing was, still is to some degree, utterly class ridden.’

‘In Intelligence work there is a large component of what is now called PR. Most of it is a sort of post event Dunkirk. You get a plucky miracle to overlay the very bad planning. The other parts, all the men that were ordered to surrender with the French, for example, like the entire 51^st division, go into the historical out-tray. And little mention is made of the six thousand troops bombed on a passenger ship. Some of them died you know jumping into the water in full kit. The jump was about eighty feet and if a man did not take off his helmet before hitting the water, his head come off with it when he did.’

He nodded. ‘The chaos is fairly simple, the brutality often accidental, keeping up morale takes over.’

At the end of the first session he asked me what I was going to call my protagonist. ‘Peter Cotton,’ I said.

‘Oh that’s quite good,’ he said. ‘I don’t know why but most of the Peters I have come across have tended to be awfully prim in one way, utter pricks in another and always prone to self-delusion, sometimes grandiose. In one way all involved in Intelligence are Peters.’

To be honest, I was not initially very encouraged. On my way back from Guadalajara to Madrid, I began to wonder if another visit would be such a good idea. It wasn’t until my husband asked me a couple of questions that I began to see something else. The questions were about the books on the shelves. And then I remembered one on the coffee table. It was part of Javier Marias’ trilogy. I flicked at it. In that trilogy the protagonist’s mentor is called Peter Wheeler, the real name of Sir Peter Russell, distinguished hispanist and Second World War spy.

‘The old bastard,’ I said. ‘Maybe this is who I have been looking for.’

Washington Shadow Paperback

2010-07-10T02:42:00.000-07:00

Less than a month to go before publication day (August 5th) for the paperback of Washington Shadow - available for pre-order from Amazon

For US readers, I'm pleased to say that amazon.com now has both paperbacks available for purchase (The Maze of Cadiz) and for pre-order (Washington Shadow).

R I P ‘Peter Cotton’

2010-07-04T04:27:00.000-07:00

I regret to say that the ‘real’ Peter Cotton – or an elegant flesh and bone version of my character - died on June 22^nd, 2010 in his house in Spain. He was 91 years old. I am indebted to his step-daughter Caroline for information of his last days and for her permission to quote the following:

“On June 10, he slipped in the shower and broke his left leg – ‘the one that hadn’t been broken before’ as he put it. It was a bad, multiple break, difficult to set and after a week in the excellent Spanish hospital he asked to go home. He was quite clear he was going to die. ‘I don’t know that it is a decision but I certainly feel I’ve had enough and it is time to go.’

We made him as comfortable as possible. He remained lucid, though he remarked that he felt rather ‘high’ from the painkillers. He died soundlessly after lunch, while having a nap, the kind of death most of us would like. As is normal in Spain the funeral was the next day. His body was cremated and his ashes will shortly join my mother’s in the trees above the house”

There is a biographical section on this website that keeps pace with the books. Here I wish to say how I came to know him and how he influenced the series.

I first met him in 2005. I was asked to voice-over what the Spanish mother of a victim of the Atocha bombings was saying for a documentary for US television. It was quite a production and I could not help noticing that there were a lot more people around than usual. There was even a confab of men in dark suits.

I already knew Caroline because she and her husband Alberto run the studio. They told me that ‘because of the sensitivity’ of the subject, everything and everybody was being observed ‘by officials of both governments’ – of Spain and the USA, that is.

Voice-over has a kind of short hand for instructions. Shortly before last Christmas I went along to a recording studio and was given the name ‘Margo’. This refers to the character of Margo Leadbetter in a British TV series called The Good Life, as played by Penelope Keith quite some years ago. Why shoppers in places like Inverness should want to be encouraged by a version of Margo and a famous (an unmet) male actor who really was in the series, is for the marketing people – I am guessing at some respectful sounding nostalgia. And, naturally, they wanted a toned down Margo. Imagine turning 25 on the central heating scale down to 20.

In Spain, my instructions took a long time, most of them unnecessary, while the men in dark suits thought about them.

While we waited, Caroline asked me what else I was doing and I told her of my plans for a series on the decline of the British Empire as experienced by a young spy, aged 25, in 1944. We were interrupted then by a Spaniard in a dark suit who asked for input to match the tone of the original voice. I gave him a Margo-type name in Spain and he instantly agreed. His next problem was that he did not know how to communicate what this meant. ‘Desolate dignity,’ I suggested. We tried a take. Nods, thumbs up.

It was then about five thirty, and some of the men in dark suits decided they had worked enough. The recording session was over.

It wasn’t until they had gone that we realized how much tension they had brought with them. Both Caroline and I got the giggles. This was slightly unfortunate because a dark suit came back in, but after he had gone Caroline suggested I meet her stepfather.

‘Desolate dignity just about sums him up since my mother died last year. Nobody is supposed to know this but we all do. He was a spook and started about the time your man did. I think you might find it interesting and it might cheer him up. At this time of year he lives near Guadalajara.’

Guadalajara should have a more extreme climate than it does. In fact it is relatively mild, the summers cooler than in Madrid, the autumn gentler and longer. About a week later, I went to a discreet but sizeable property set into the side of a valley and surrounded by trees.

There I was met by a tall, relaxed gentleman who did not look 86. We forget how much accents have changed. When he first spoke it was like hearing the male equivalent of Margo speak, a kind of time capsule.

It was only later when I saw and heard him speak Spanish that I realized his English accent was not quite as adrift as it sounded. There was a small cross-over, particularly at the vowels. There was also quite a crackle of irony.

‘I do hope I can help you,’ he said.

You Don’t Speak Spanish, Do You?

2010-06-22T10:16:00.000-07:00

Recently I watched Jim Jarmusch’s film The Limits of Control, an enigmatic, dream-like play on the adventure of a hitman. I liked it very much indeed. There are many allusions in the film – to John Boorman’s Point Blank, Jean- Pierre Melville films like Le Samourai and a lot more - and many jokes, such as the running matchbox McGuffin, where the main character – the Lone Man (none of the characters have a name) - receives a matchbox, reads the small note inside and then swallows it; at his next meeting he hands the empty box to the next person and receives another with a small note inside,
and so on. We never get to see the note, but he does get to throw away the last matchbox.

His recognition sign at the venue of each meeting is that he orders two small cups of espresso coffee; the password for the meeting is ‘Usted no habla español, ¿verdad?’ (see the title of this post).The shifts in the film are marked by the protagonist’s change of the colour of his clothes from one iridescent sharkskin suit to the next. There are three. One for Madrid, another for Seville and a third for the countryside, particularly Almeria.

But here I want to talk about one of the things that most struck me about the film: probably the best series of snapshots of Spain I have ever seen. It is pitch perfect - unsentimental, charming and accurate. In Madrid, Jarmusch uses the extraordinary Torres Blancas (White Towers, see first photo) by the architect Sáenz de Oiza, a block built in the late sixties of the so-called ‘organic’ school. The building is supposed to be some sort of socialised tree in reinforced concrete without pillars blocking the interior spaces. The problem is that the builder of the White Towers ran out of money before the white cladding could be put on. Age and traffic fumes have worked their dingy magic on the concrete so that it now resembles a tall cement factory, the kilns placed upright.

Another building Jarmusch uses in Madrid is the ‘Reina Sofia’ – the national art gallery containing works by Picasso and after. It is a restored and fairly austere palacio with modern adjuncts, now showing a little damp. Some of the paintings (Juan Gris, Tàpies) are apparently used to convey information to the protagonist.

His third main use of Madrid is a small square, which is even more restored now, but in the film is seen aspiring to the kind of public space folksiness municipalities everywhere favour. Naturally, there are some examples of graffiti on the walls.

The old quarter he uses in Seville is a marvel. Graffiti is everywhere and - one of the film’s best touches - so is the noise. I once read a report saying that, after Japan, Spain is the noisiest country in the world. If they say so. I’d say the Spanish are noisier. There is one scene where the protagonist lies down (he never sleeps), while the sounds of cooking, singing and speaking from the surrounding houses go on and on.

Then there are the images of the countryside. Several Spaniards have told me that Britain’s countryside is strange because it has no great stretches of land without people or with any sign of human influence. Parts of Spain are big enough and barren enough to show human activity simply as scars or stark impositions, and there are houses that look either abandoned or absurdly protected and small against the space around them.

And finally there is flamenco. Many years ago an old lady in Andalusia told me that she never heard flamenco as a child. It had risen ‘for the tourists’. White horses, black bulls, girls in Sevillana dresses, and flamenco. Tourist Board folklore. This is, of course, not entirely fair but I feel I have done my quota of listening to and seeing stamping feet and wailing voices.

Of course it depends who is performing.

One very old form of flamenco which is used in the film is the petenera – it is like ‘the Scottish Play’ of flamenco music, in that it is considered to bring bad luck. The password of Jim Jarmusch’s film, ‘Usted no habla español, ¿verdad?’ and the title of this, was apparently Mr Jarmusch’s case. But this is the flamenco form he asked for and got. It is quiet and beautifully done.

If you would like to listen to a version of it, you can click here. You will hear echoes of the 14^th century through the lute to La Celestina, the great novel by Fernando de Rojas.

As with the film, you will love it or hate it.

Amazon Is Not The ACME Corporation

2010-06-03T02:29:00.000-07:00

From time to time, writers leave their books and indulge in, sometimes furiously one-sided, spats. Wordsworth’s poetic injunction – tranquility – disappears as fast as the Road Runner in Loony Tunes cartoons.

Sometimes the difficulties of the job, a writer’s reaction to a particular set of them and to his or her relations with the buying public (see sales) and other writers and critics, goes public and postal.

Recent examples include Alain de Botton who responded vehemently (“I will hate you until the day I die”) to the writer of a poor review of his book The Pleasures and Sorrows of Work, and Orlando Figes (a rather wider self-placement.)

Some simply do not transcend. I don’t remember seeing Donna Leon’s remarks on Stieg Larsson’s work in Santander last year making it into English at all. That may have been because she was being interviewed rather than writing for herself, and because she was not speaking in Spanish but being translated into Spanish.

Today, the Scotsman reports an apparent spat between someone using the name Philip Kerr and Allan Massie. Massie is a novelist and reviewer of many years’ experience. One Philip Kerr is well-known for his Bernie Gunther novels. Possibly another Philip Kerr took the time to write an Amazon review of 813 words lambasting Massie’s latest book, on the Stuarts.

Outsiders (Allan Massie himself is quoted as saying he is ‘amused’) are thus faced with one of two problems. The first is that the real Philip Kerr has had his name usurped. The second is that a professional writer has reviewed another professional writer on Amazon.

While Figes also used Amazon’s review service to decry people he considered as his rivals, this doesn’t seem to be the case here. The review, now withdrawn, specifically mentions what the reviewer considers to be unfavourable reviews by Allan Massie of the reviewer’s last two books.

Naturally, the Scotsman prints excerpts of those two reviews of novels. They suggest a falling off from earlier books. That’s Allan Massie’s opinion. In the not very widely read Scotsman.

Point? Irritation, annoyance and even hurt happen. But doing something about it has a habit of making the doer into the Coyote – a much loved cartoon character but one who relies too much on explosive products from the Acme Corporation, and invariably blows himself up. Nothing too grand. He survives.

Meep meep.

Ludwig & Norbert

2010-05-28T10:27:00.000-07:00

Despite my intentions on April 29 (see previous post 'Northern Brightness') I have since succumbed, and read Sally’s in the Alley by Norbert Davis (The Rue Morgue Press). As I said then, apparently Wittgenstein was a fan of Norbert’s language, his humour, and his lack of sentimentality.

What this description doesn’t make clear is the extraordinary separation of the hard-boiled from the low-down in the book. According to Jack Adrian (pseudonym of Christopher Lowder), Norbert Davis’ “fatal flaw” was his ‘sense of humour’ - preventing him from being published more frequently.

That's not quite right. Sally’s in the Alley, at slightly short of forty thousand words, has a plot that is as consequential as that of an early Lubitsch film or even a Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers movie. It also has farcical elements of the Wrong Box variety – bodies get moved around; there are a couple of set pieces – a chase through an old Hollywood film set and a flash flood in the desert; and there are some contemporary references to WW2 – Goering gets a going-over and Doan, the private eye, uses the alias I Doanwashi when pretending to be a Japanese spy. He also uses the name H. Pocus.

Far more time is spent on Carstairs - a sort of canine Jeeves of immense size and usefulness in a pinch - than on most of the human characters. I’d hesitate to call him a precursor of Brian in Family Guy, but there is something there of a conventional moral sense (the only character who has one in the book) having to come to terms with being a dog.

The attraction for Wittgenstein? For most people language meets mathematics in logic. Take this passage:

‘Start at a town called Heliotrope.’
‘Where’s that?’
‘Either in California or Nevada.’
‘You said either?’ Doan asked.
‘Yes. The State of California is now suing the State of Nevada in the Supreme Court to compel Nevada to annex it. Nevada has started a countersuit to compel California to annex it.’
‘What’s the matter with the place?’
‘Just everything. ….’

I can see how such an exchange would appeal to someone who wrote ‘A serious and good philosophical work could be written consisting entirely of jokes.’

Though perhaps a better quote here from Wittgenstein, given what happens in Norbert’s story to Susan Sally (in a room, not in an alley) would be ‘Death is not an event in life.’

Tinned Pears

2010-05-12T09:06:00.000-07:00

Two Saturdays ago, 1918 met 2009, when my father-in-law met his fifth great-grandchild again. The meeting was amiable and involved quite a lot of ‘and the little one said roll over, roll over’, and the very amusing sound/word ‘oink’.

I mention this because of a recent conversation I had with a reader on the term ‘historical novel’.

Throughout the history of the novel, any number of writers, Henry James, for example, have believed that it is not possible to write historical novels with any claim to honesty or real accuracy. How can you seriously do justice to the people who were alive then? Isn’t what a novelist is producing a more or less wistful twist on motives, mores and attitudes for modern tastes?

To some extent I agree. But I am, certainly in theory, comfortable with that. The novel has been going long enough for, say, historical novels of the 19th Century and later, to tell us something about the time in which they were written, as well as the time they describe.

My own confidence levels and my history are not up to portraying the eighteenth, let alone the fifteenth century. Why? As John Updike put it, nothing disappears faster than motive. I can admire Hilary Mantel, but I can’t emulate her.

In any case, as I told my reader, I am not sure I do write historical novels. Period pieces perhaps? No. I write about the ample edges of living memory, because I want to trace the progress of a lot of the attitudes towards Empire and World War 2 as they have come down to us and remain with us.

I suggested ‘generational novel’ as a substitute. No, it is not terribly good. But it is probably snappier, if less accurate, than ‘after effects novel’.

After the birth of his first great grandchild in 2002, my father-in–law was persuaded by the baby’s father, my nephew, to write down some of his experiences in WW2. He did this in ‘real’ time. That is, he wrote down, day by matching day, what he had been doing in Burma in 1942, sixty years earlier. I haven’t read this account, which was kept safely for great-grandchild number one to read in the future, but I do know he walked about six hundred miles, cannot bear the smell of tinned pears – too reminiscent of the smell of dead refugee bodies –and that the account ended when he could no longer remember because he had contracted malaria and pneumonia. When they weighed him, after being carried by stretcher for the last part back to India, he was six stone. The doctors told him he should not look forward to a long life.

Let me put it this way. Every time I hear someone explain that something awful happened a long time ago, in 2003 or 2006, but things are now different, I think of pears in tins.

It may be – I don’t know – that the recent elections mean that the UK is finally coming to terms with a new role in the world, less imperial in both money and lives. It is certainly time.

Northern Brightness

2010-04-29T03:04:00.000-07:00

Among the delights of research are the incidental finds. Washington Shadow is set in 1945, at a time when John Maynard Keynes was in Washington trying to raise a loan to keep the British economy afloat after the end of Lend-Lease.

This is a quote from the philosopher Wittgenstein. ‘The one way in which the ending of Lend-lease really limits me is by producing a shortage of detective mags in this country. I can only hope Lord Keynes will make this quite clear in Washington’.

Now I already knew that his friend Bertrand Russell (he talked to Wittgenstein when Ludwig was doubting between aeronautics and philosophy) was a fan of murder stories – he claimed they helped him avoid committing his own – but I had missed Wittgenstein’s taste for hard-boiled fiction.

That is hard-boiled. Though he could praise Agatha Christie, Wittgenstein refused to read of a Catholic priest detective – Chesterton’s Father Brown. He wanted pulp fiction.
I was brought up with an appreciation for the American taste for witty lyrics (Cole Porter, Lorenz Hart and so on) , the Marx Brothers films, writers like S J Perlman, Damon Runyon and, of course, Hammett, Horace McCoy and James M Cain; I read a lot of these in the early eighties.

But I now have to confess that I missed the writer Wittgenstein liked most, Norbert Davis. Norbert apparently means Northern brightness, and was a break from the family tradition of Robert – the family were distantly related to Robert Burns. He did not live long. Diagnosed with cancer, Norbert Davis committed suicide in 1949 at the age of forty.

Right now I am writing – I keep away from reading at this stage – but I am looking forward to meeting Norbert later this year in The Mouse in the Mountain, Sally’s in the Alley, and Oh, Murderer Mine . Apparently Wittgenstein admired his use of language, his humour and his lack of sentimentality.

Happy to hear from those who have read him.

Peter Cotton - Cadiz, Washington … and London

2010-04-16T15:14:00.000-07:00

On Tuesday April 13, I signed a contract for another two Peter Cotton books with John Murray. Given that the verbal agreement dates back to January, I ignored any superstitious stuff (Martes Trece is the Spanish equivalent of Friday 13) and pressed ahead.

The two books are scheduled to be published around April 2011 and April 2012. There are some changes, most notably in length. I remember a previous post answering queries on how long my books were and saying I had been asked for seventy thousand words. The next two books will be longer - around a hundred thousand words.

I also mentioned having been asked if I was ever influenced by commercial pressures. Well, I am certainly influenced by the marketing department. In two ways. They wanted something ‘bigger’ and they thought that my original idea – of having Cotton properly start his colonial career in the next book (which would also have entailed jumping a few years) – was premature. I should stay closer to home for the moment.

This is by no means a complaint. In two days last October, I blocked out an entirely new book - one I would never have thought of but for the pressure and input I got from the publishers.

The next book, then - its working title is London Ice - takes place a year after Washington Shadow, during the very grim winter of 1946-47. It’s going well.

When The Third Man Met the Third Person

2010-04-07T03:12:00.000-07:00

I have been asked, a lot, why I picked the surname Cotton for the protagonist of my novels. It is not a signally heroic sort of name. No Spade, Laidlaw or Reacher. Nor is it the obvious name of an anti-hero.

Perhaps I should have made things clearer, because people have also said – ah, you mean he ‘cottons on’? Actually no, I didn’t have catching on in mind. Others have mentioned one of Peter Rabbit’s siblings – Cottontail. Kindly, they don’t mention Flopsy. But again, Beatrix Potter, so admirable in so many other contexts, was not in my mind.

By far the most interesting and unexpected take has been, courtesy of Andrew, of the excellent Edinburgh Bookshop, who asked if the name was an allusion or tribute to the actor Joseph Cotten, described apparently by Orson Welles as ‘the perfect in-film narrator’ (meaning first, that Joseph Cotten could speak clearly; second, that his acting style, certainly for the forties, was naturalistic on film and third, that he provides the viewer’s ‘in’ and thread to the story).

Welles and Cotten acted together several times – sometimes with Welles as director - but, most notably in the 1949 film The Third Man, screenplay by Graham Greene, directed by Carol Reed.

The short answer to Andrew’s question was no, there was certainly no conscious allusion – but it did set me thinking. I chose the surname Cotton because it seemed to me a good name for a third person narrative.

The Third Person 'he' or 'she' is less obviously subjective than First person 'I'. Yes, I am aware of Rashomon - Akira Kurosawa’s great film which appeared in 1950 - in which unreliable ‘I’ participant-witnesses put any sort of truth through self-interest and a prism.

But the kind of Third Person narrator that interested me can add a certain shadow (a little gleam as well) to objectivity, knowledge and selection. Graham Greene was one highly perceptive part of the cross-fertilisation between film and printed narrative.

To put Joseph Cotton’s character Holly Martins another way, the descendant of Joseph Conrad’s narrator Marlow, and F Scott Fitzgerald’s narrator Nick Carraway in The Great Gatsby, meets Christopher Isherwood’s pre-war ‘I am a camera’ on film.

Greene even has an unreliable witness called Kurtz - surely a reference to Conrad’s character in A Heart of Darkness. In post-war Vienna, Holly Martins, a pulp fiction writer, learns that morals, a confident viewpoint and even friendship are as disposable as the children being given adulterated penicillin.

The Third Man has a highly atmospheric noir look and over the shoulder camera tilts and dislocating angles. Yes, I may, as a child, have been over-impressed by the Cheshire Cat, but Orson Welles makes inimitable use of a smile when taking half a step out of the dark. Lime light with a difference.

The actual Third Man refers to someone who may or may not have been present when Harry Lime was (as Holly Martins finds out at the beginning of the film) hit and killed by a truck. The thing is, of course, that Harry Lime was not killed and has gone to ground rather than being in a box under it. The Third Man is never seen, a sort of shadow of knowledge - in cooking terms a thickener of a sauce or a binding agent. He is a possibility, a possible lead, a growing suspicion.

Getting the effect of the Third Man into the Third Person is not at all easy and I have taken some comfort from discovering that Graham Greene’s initial treatment-cum-novella underwent several changes when it became film. Some were market based – Martins and Harry Lime became Americans. Likewise with name changes - Rollo to Holly Martins. Not the name of a hero. Perhaps what surprised me most was to learn that the director’s final cut was to have a grim ending to the relatively hopeful one Greene proposed.

Finally, just to put this in perspective, I remember that in Greene’s Collected Essays, he recorded Beatrix Potter’s reaction to a review of his on her work. The review was pretty favourable. It mentioned her use of alliteration, her extraordinary economy of language, but it did stray into conjecture as to why she should be so good at portraying what all children knew: that some people are extraordinarily nasty. Greene may have said Jemima Puddleduck was on a par with Jane Austen’s Mrs Norris in Mansfield Park.

Miss Potter was unconvinced. On the whole, she said, she sharply deprecated the Freudian school of criticism.

Scarlett and Mia

2010-03-24T02:01:00.000-07:00

Recently, I received an email from a reader asking me about the origin of one of my characters in Washington Shadow. Writers are often asked questions like this - and they are not always easy to answer. Where do the characters come from? Out of your head, of course. But how?

In both The Maze of Cadiz and Washington Shadow, none of the speaking characters were based directly on real people. Some of my characters grew from a stray phrase, or a tone of voice heard long ago. Place these voices in your chosen setting and, if you give them time, they begin to grow. This does not mean that the characters take over - that’s wistful hokum, you are always in control - but as well as the conscious decisions you make as you build the character, there is an important subconscious process at work. Your mind makes links between the different experiences you have in your mental store.

Something similar happens to us as readers when we are presented with a character in a novel. We use our own personal store of memories and experience, and set about filling in the gaps and completing the character for ourselves.

This reminds me of a television programme I saw a long time ago, in which André Previn was talking about the important role of music in films, and how much it contributed to our impression of the images we were seeing. He illustrated this by showing a very brief scene he had filmed. A young woman is sitting at a table head down, and then looks up with a completely neutral expression. The woman was Mia Farrow, who he was married to at the time. This scene was shown first with no sound track, then twice more with different accompanying music as she looks up. Nothing else. The intriguing thing was that she definitely looked happy in one showing, then alarmed in the next. All that had actually changed was the musical accompaniment.

We have our own personal sound track of experience in our heads, which springs into action when we read. In one sense, the writer’s job is to give us the note from where to begin.

The result varies tremendously from reader to reader. An interesting development for me is that some readers apparently use actors for the characters. One reader told me that Katherine, in Washington Shadow, is played in his mind by Scarlett Johansson.

That is stardust!

Washington Shadow - Paperback Cover

2010-03-12T02:02:00.000-08:00

The paperback of Washington Shadow, is due out in August - in time for holiday reading!

This is the new cover to look out for.

The Maze of Cadiz Audiobook Review

2010-02-28T02:40:00.000-08:00

Another review of The Maze of Cadiz, this time for the audiobook, appeared in Saturday's Guardian.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2010/feb/27/audiobooks-bomber-war-horse

Very nice to get. My thanks to Jonathan Keeble for allowing audiobook listeners to enjoy it.

Siege Mentality - Open and Shut Genres

2010-02-17T03:10:00.000-08:00

Recently I wrote two blog posts on Javier Marías, a writer for whom words are (almost) everything.

This one involves Arturo Pérez Reverte, another Spanish writer, for whom, to round this out in a shorthand way, plot is (almost) everything. Although his historical research, particularly in technical matters, is extraordinarily thorough, and he has a great love of the Spanish language in the Golden Age, Pérez Reverte’s priority in his books is to move the story on, and the writing can skate on cliché and sometimes mangled syntax.

The two writers are about the same age, both are usually based in or near Madrid and, naturally, they are very good friends and have been so for a long time. Pérez Reverte is the Duke of Corso in Marías’ imaginary Kingdom of Redonda.

Presumably because they are such different writers, this mutual regard upsets certain commentators who get their limitations and principles mixed up and forget there is life outside books.

As a result, Marías is sometimes accused of writing in English though using Spanish, and Pérez Reverte often gets called ‘a good bad writer’. Both charges are beside any worthwhile point.

Many years ago, when I was studying for English Literature O' level, Professor Christopher Ricks brought out a book with a number of points for students to consider. One of these was that if a student were to write about Hamlet and Hitchock’s Vertigo as if they were strictly comparable, he or she might get into difficulties, most of them absurd.

He was right, of course. It may seem simple stuff, but it is often forgotten. Vertigo fails hopelessly as a verse play. That may be because it isn’t one and it had never crossed Hitchcock’s mind it should be. As Professor Ricks put it – the student has to have some grasp of the author’s intentions, priorities and aims.

Or again, one of my greatest difficulties in Spain was persuading students that the term ‘tragedy’ did not exclude humour in Hamlet. They knew ‘tragedy’ was grim. They found it difficult that a great writer like Shakespeare should have ignored Aristotle’s take on genre.

Recently a book of mine was reviewed with eight others by a Professor of Creative Writing. This very large bundle was very loosely tied with some generalizations about social concerns and the literary quality or otherwise of the books. Washington Shadow got away quite lightly – one of the cuter kittens in the sack about to be tossed off the bridge and into the river. None of the review struck me as an advert for the Professor’s Creative Writing advice because not one of the writers had signed up for the social concerns school; each one had begun with a different intention and none of us had foreseen that we would all meet up in the Professor’s airy overview.

Now, as it happens, I am not a big fan of Arturo Pérez Reverte’s books, but we read for all kinds of reasons – and the reason I will read his new book is Cádiz, where I once lived and where my first book is set.

For a time during the War of Independence or Napoleonic Wars, Cádiz was Spain. While the rest of the country was under French rule, Cádiz remained independent, if under siege. In March, Pérez Reverte will publish his new book El Asedio (The Siege) in Spain – seven hundred pages about this remarkable time.

In 1812, a new constitution was drawn up for Spain and for those countries that had been colonies. This constitution – colloquially called La Pepa – was a product of the Ilustración – or Enlightenment. It did away with an Absolute Monarch, feudal land laws and the Inquisition, and replaced the Old Regime with a new liberal arrangement without slavery, with education for women and with a form of international democracy.

Naturally, it didn’t have a chance of success but, just for a while, Cádiz looked like a dream of the future. Apparently this is the background rather than the subject of the book. There is a murder story, but I take Pérez Reverte at his word that it also involves a plot like a chess problem, artillery, and shifts in the wind, real and political.

I don’t know when the English translation will appear - but look out for it.

E-books and Musings on the Future

2010-02-13T03:34:00.000-08:00

Elliott Hall, author of the innovative and very well reviewed ("a knock-out debut") The First Stone (part of the Strange Trilogy), which is just out in paperback, has written an excellent account of the recent Amazon- Macmillan dispute, an appraisal of the whole E-book issue and possible implications for us all, in a series of three blog posts.

Interesting reading for all authors, editors and agents and anyone interested in the future of publishing and the book business in general.

Take a look:

http://elliott-hall.co.uk/blog/

Home Cooking

2010-02-10T08:41:00.000-08:00

When I first lived in Cadiz, people would invite me to their homes and, very often, I would find that they had gone out of their way to serve me something ‘from your country’ - to remind me of home. This was really very kind and touching, but the results were often unfortunate. I remember smiling gratefully as, at a New Year celebration, after a delicious meal of fish and seafood, I dutifully consumed yet another, very dry and unappetising version of what my hostess - really an excellent cook - imagined was ‘English’ apple pie. And then, instead of the delicious smelling coffee on the tray, I was proudly presented with a silver holder containing a glass of very pale brown, almost curdling warm milk - ‘English tea’. I included this rather disgusting liquid in The Maze of Cadiz, when Peter Cotton goes to visit Antoňita, the prostitute. Remembering something she has heard about strange English tea rituals, she serves it to him with slices of cucumber, which she holds up and places on his tongue ‘like a naughty communion wafer’.

But the results of these kind culinary efforts were not always unfortunate.

I was contacted one day by the president of the law courts and asked to stand in at short notice to interpret at a hearing for two rather silly and very frightened young American girls who had been taking a starry-eyed trip to Morocco, and allowed themselves to be charmed by two men into taking their van to Spain, where they would meet up with them a few days later. When they got off the ferry, the sniffer dogs did their stuff and the van was found to be packed with drugs - secreted in the roof, the doors and under the floor. Questioned by the investigating judge, the girls protested their innocence and said that they had been used. I remember them saying that their only previous brush with the police was when they had stolen a string of sausages from a butcher. Descriptions of the villains were taken down.

After the hearing, the President instructed someone to hand over my fee, and then, rather surprisingly, invited me and my husband to have dinner at his home to meet his family. We arrived on the appointed evening and were told that we would be served ‘rosbif’, because we were English. I’ve never been that fond of beef anyway, and my initial thought was ‘here we go again’ - but I couldn’t have been more wrong. As we sat down at the table together with his wife and very clever young daughter (now a lawyer herself), the smells wafting through the house were decidedly encouraging. The dinner, which had been prepared by their excellent cook, began with consommé and fino sherry. It was followed by hake in a delicate lemon sauce, and then the ‘rosbif’ - quite unlike any roast beef I had ever eaten in Britain. Sirloin or tenderloin, I can’t remember now, it had been rubbed with garlic, olive oil, fresh thyme and rosemary, then browned on a skillet and finished off in the oven. It was absolutely delicious - rare and melt- in-the mouth tender, with a wonderful aroma and flavour.

I was reminded of these things recently when reading Carolyn Burke’s biography of Lee Miller (Lee Miller: On Both Sides of the Camera). She had an altogether different way of catering for guests from other countries.

I was already familiar with many aspects of her life - surrealist muse, war correspondent, photographer - most famous for her Second World War photographs and those wonderful portraits of writers and artists in off-guard moments, like Picasso, of whom she made over a thousand portraits.

But one aspect of her life with which I was less familiar was her cooking. In later life, when she was married to Roland Penrose, she entertained an enviable procession of guests at Farley Farm in East Sussex, including Picasso, Max Ernst, Joan Miró, Henry Moore, Man Ray, and Antoni Tàpies, and she became something of a gourmet - and compulsive - cook. When Vogue published her piece entitled ‘The Most Unusual Recipes You Have Ever Seen’, she was hailed as having invented culinary surrealism. Her Mack Sennett cream pies were, apparently, cinematic and Dadaesque - ‘delicious to eat and fun to throw’, while her food paintings, such as ‘veal scallops encased in gold foil valentines, relish- stuffed lychees beside cherry tomatoes full of dark green mayonnaise’ were ‘as amusing to look at as they are delightful to eat.’

Joan Miró was a frequent visitor. But he was not served Spanish dishes to make him feel at home. Instead, Lee Miller served him her creation ‘Sesame Chicken for Miró’ - because 'I wanted to amuse him by giving him dishes unknown in Spain.’

I feel rather the same about that fabulous Rosbif.

Audio Rights for Washington Shadow

2010-01-27T08:45:00.000-08:00

As well as the large print rights, Isis have now acquired the Unabridged Audio Rights for Washington Shadow.

Inspector Proust

2010-01-18T13:37:00.000-08:00

At Christmas, my husband gave me the last part of Javier Marías’ three part novel Your Face Tomorrow, translated by Margaret Jull Costa.

I have now read the three volumes of the novel first in Spanish and then in English. As an editor said to me – ‘awfully good but an awful lot of words’.

And it is true. As Marías has aged, he has written very much longer. More to see, more to describe.

When younger he could almost be brief. A Man of Feeling – it always reminds me of Nabokov’s novel about a chess player – and All Souls – a mercilessly witty account of Oxford University - are both short, almost novellas.

In his mid-period, when he began to sell very well in Spanish speaking countries and Germany, and attract the attention of Impac librarians, he began to write longer books, but would inject a folletinesco or penny shocker element, beginning a novel with a bang.

In A Heart So White – yes, Javier Marias has a fondness for Shakespearian titles – the novel opens with a young woman rising from a dining table, going to a bathroom, and shooting herself. It also contains one of the funniest scenes in recent literature when someone not unlike Mrs Thatcher, and another person not unlike King Juan Carlos of Spain, begin a conversation instigated by a (mis-) translator simultaneously trying to seduce the other translator.

In Tomorrow in the Battle, Think of Me the narrator wakes up to find his partner in a love affair is dead beside him. Her 9 year old son is in the house and the narrator has, very quickly, to learn that he is an unknown, if sexually intimate, interloper in the rest of her life.

Marías has often used parallels from his own life – he did teach at Oxford, for example – and mixed real names in with invented people, but was most definitely not writing a roman à clef.

In Dark Back of Time he moved this on and wrote much longer still. And in Your Face Tomorrow, he makes use of real people and perhaps even words they really said.

Javier Marías has a point. His father Julián was a philosopher, and in real life was betrayed by a friend who turned on him, invented stories and reported him to Franco’s thugs. Julián Marías was briefly in prison, but escaped with his life and had to move his family to the US to be able to teach.

In the first part of the novel there is a wonderful section in which the narrator’s betrayed father argues that his son’s questions – the whys, why would a friend do this, did you have no inkling of what he was capable of, etc – do not help understanding but tend to bring the enquirer down to the bitterness, envy and fear of the betrayer.

For the son it’s not so simple because his mother’s life, his siblings and his own, have all been changed and to some extent twisted by someone who is just a name. Julián Marías never gave that name. In this book, Javier Marías has.

In a sense the book is a monument to his father – and to Sir Peter Russell, a hispanist and, during World War 2, a spy. Sir Peter was born with the surname Wheeler – the name he is given in the novel. Both died fairly recently.

But anyone who has seen Javier Marías gleefully pronounce the narrator’s surname Deza (Death-a) knows he has much more in mind.

Marías is frequently compared to Proust by reviewers. This refers to the quality of the fiction, and to an apparent discursiveness and sometimes long sentences. He can also sound pernickety, but that is only if you deny that we all speak different languages, even when we speak the same one. The comparison with Proust may also be because Marcel had the notion that writers translate the world for the reader.

There is that amusing story by Harold Nicolson of Proust asking him how his day had gone at the Versailles negotiations after World War I. Nicolson tried to respond briefly. Proust stopped him. ‘Begin at the beginning,’ he said. ‘What was your motor car and what was the driver wearing?’

There is some of that sense of detail in Your Face Tomorrow , a careful leisureliness – but it is of an insidious sort. It makes the shocks leap when they come.

You are warned, however. The first volume of the novel opens with a discussion of Miranda – the “anything you say, may be taken down and used against you” Miranda, rather than Prospero’s daughter in the Tempest. The extraordinary thing about the Miranda warning is that it implies words are truly dangerous and can betray you or be made to betray you.

Is Your Face Tomorrow a crime novel? No. Is it a spy thriller? No. That would not be fair. It is not a genre book. But it is about the dark arts of espionage, character reading, prediction of how people will react, misinformation, power, loyalty, betrayal and trust.

I found it almost hypnotic.

Large Print Rights- Washington Shadow

2010-01-10T10:17:00.000-08:00

Isis Publishing have just acquired the Large Print rights for Washington Shadow. I am intrigued to see what cover they will choose.

Fair's Fair, Very Rare - The Value of Translators

2010-01-05T13:26:00.000-08:00

A few days ago I saw a video of an interview with Javier Marías. The publication in English of the third part of his three part novel, Your Face Tomorrow, has finally seen widespread recognition of his very considerable talents.

It can take an extraordinarily long time for a fine writer to gain recognition in another language. If I remember correctly it took about twenty years for Gabriel García Márquez’ s A Hundred Years of Solitude to get through to a wide audience in the UK, much less time in the USA.

There are so many things to go wrong, of course. The very first of these is the translator. A great translator is as rare as a great writer. Like Gabriel Garcia Marquez with Gregory Rabassa, Marías has been blessed with Margaret Jull Costa.

It is simply not enough to be enthusiastic and conscientious. The saddest case I know concerns Alfredo Bryce Echenique. Author of Un Mundo para Julius (A World for Julius) and La Vida Exagerada de Martin Romaῇa, (The Exaggerated Life of Martin Romaῇa), it is unlikely you will have heard of him or enjoyed this wonderful Peruvian writer’s books. Why not?

Well, courtesy of an American University and a grant from, I think, a phosphate company, an English translation was made of Un Mundo para Julius. At one level there is absolutely nothing wrong with it. The language is correct, it reads like a conscientious labour of love and everything about the production is well-intentioned. But somehow, in English, a very fine book reads like a flat, dull book - and consequently, it has not reached the wide English speaking audience it deserves.

The reason is that academics are not always good writers. They don’t have that extraordinary combination of empathy and skill that transfers the delight of a book in one language to another. Marías knows. He has himself translated (very well indeed) the great Tristram Shandy into Spanish.

Note that direction, English to Spanish. Javier Marías speaks excellent English but does not translate his own books because he knows that Margaret Jull Costa does it better. Translators have to know themselves, and writers when to ask for rewriters. If I can put it like this – in the interview Javier Marías speaks confident, fluent English when answering questions; when he reads extracts from his book you can hear he is Spanish.

There is also, of course, the money side of things. Translators are shockingly badly paid. I have talked to a number of translators in Spain. They often get one month to translate. And it shows. I have been there when a scout turned down a book ‘because it is too well written’ , and would take more than a month to translate.

For decades, Spanish eyes have followed and translated what they see before them. This has led to some intriguing changes in Spanish syntax and vocabulary, reinforced by the dubbing of films (where the lips have to mouth different words but in time or sync.)

I was once asked to check over a film script of a blockbuster that had been translated by a very recent graduate who suspected that her grasp of American colloquialisms was deficient. The resulting script in Spanish wasn’t just gibberish, it actually changed the plot. Bruce Willis was saved but the poor girl’s fee was derisory, well below what it costs to live for a month. Clint Eastwood by the way is dubbed by a basso profundo in Spanish. Someone told me they preferred the dubbed Clint to the real Eastwood when he was interviewed on television.

Javier Marías is intelligent enough to think differently and has, I understand, a special arrangement with his translator to reflect what she means to his books in English. In 1998 he split the Impac prize (awarded for A Heart So White) with Margaret Jull Costa straight down the middle. Why? Because the readers had been reading his work in English written by her and he wanted to pay her tribute and due. Fair’s fair but just, right.

Mussel Soup

2009-12-27T08:40:00.000-08:00

I first ate mussels many years ago as a student in Granada, when a neighbour came over to prepare us a paella. While it was cooking we were given a tapa of fresh mussels, very simply prepared - just placed in a covered pan (if you like, with a dash of white wine), heated until the shells open (any that do not should be discarded), then eaten directly from the shells with a squeeze of lemon juice. They were absolutely delicious.

Excellent mussels are available from good fishmongers in many places in the UK but I think I’m right in saying that they are not widely prepared in British households - in spite of being extremely nutritious and pretty cheap. They must be very fresh and in their shells. I think they usually have a better texture when they are not too big. You will need to clean them before cooking - scrub and de-beard, then soak for a while in water with a dash of lemon juice to get out any grit.

Here are a couple of delicious, simple soups to try:

Mussel and Leek Soup

A Spanish friend often used to serve this at New Year - but you could also eat it cold on a hot summer day. It can be made the day before - keep the mussel meats to one side, and heat up before serving.

Ingredients (For four people)
1.5 kg mussels - only the freshest, from a good fishmonger
a splash of white wine
500 grams leeks
1 onion
a little olive oil
a pinch of flour
500 ml fish stock. If you want to make your own, salmon or monkfish heads are great for this. If you can’t be bothered, try a good delicatessen for a quality prepared stock.
a generous pinch of saffron (ground to a fine powder with a few grains of salt with a mortar and pestle)

Method
Wash the mussels, pull out beards.
Place in large pan with a dash of wine and heat, shaking frequently, until the shells open.
Pull any remaining beards, and remove the meat from all but 4. Set aside.
Drain the mussel liquor through a sieve and keep.

Chop leeks and onion and add to a pan with a little olive oil. Cook on a low heat for about 3 mins. Stir in the flour until smooth.
Gradually add the mussel liquor, remaining wine and fish stock to the pan, stir until smooth. Bring to simmering point and then add the powdered saffron.
Cook for a further 25 mins.
Whizz the soup with a blender.
Heat through.

Just before serving, add the mussel meats and the mussels in their shells. Some people also add a swirl of cream.

Mussel Soup with Tomato and Chilli

A different kind of mussel soup can be made by making a sofrito with onion, garlic, some chopped red chillies, a couple of chopped ripe tomatoes and a cup of chopped fresh basil leaves. Then add the white wine and fish stock. Simmer for about 30 minutes, add the mussels and cook, covered, for 2-3 mins, until the shells have opened.

Something For My Christmas Stocking

2009-12-21T09:31:00.000-08:00

Very nice to receive today, a cutting from The Mail on Sunday (December 6th) in which Simon Shaw, in his paperback reviews, says:

“Most promising newcomer this year was Aly Monroe, whose debut wartime thriller, The Maze of Cadiz is an atmospheric tour de force.”

Happy Christmas to all.

Of Gardeners and Butlers.

2009-12-20T10:23:00.000-08:00

About fifteen years ago, my husband came back from lunch with a publisher who had said he would be remiss in his job if he did not keep an eye on the business models used by pornographers – ‘because they are always the first to react to market conditions.’

Apparently the latest development in the business then was the death of the stars and the advent of ‘normal people’ as protagonists - what was called either ‘amateurism’ or ‘democratisation’. This was accompanied by a great expansion of what some call fetishes, others special interest groups, and marketing people term ‘genres’.

At the beginning I was, frankly, doubtful about all this. The use of the word ‘punters’ for book buyers struck me as more macho wistful than real, certainly in the mainstream of British publishing.

I was, of course, quite wrong. This argument - that where pornography points the rest follow - has now become commonplace. I remember reading a long article in the Guardian about it. More recently, the Financial Times had an alarmist report from the West Coast of the US, which said that even pornographers were struggling to survive with new technologies, and were experiencing the same problems that have afflicted music producers - how to make money when so much is freely available to download. There were other problems.

In his afterword to Lolita, Nabokov, suggests (remembering childhood fairy stories) that consumers of pornography needed what he called ‘sutures of sense’ so as not to feel cheated as they skip-read. He also suggested that pornographers were doomed to adding more and more characters and combinations. ‘In de Sade they call the gardener in.’

I suspect this argument shows Nabokov as an innocent moralist. Certainly this is no longer true. In the age of YouTube and YouPorn, no ‘sutures of sense’ are required. As I believe the director of the first Lara Croft film put it, ‘narrative is so last century.’

We might call this ‘instant effect’. I have to be careful using terms like shorthand – though shorthand descriptions have always existed. Lolita was after all first published, as Nabokov put it, ‘by a supplier of ‘one-handed literature’, before a mainstream publisher decided to cash in on scandal and greatness. In Spain, people sometimes referred to crime books as ‘el mayordomo’ – the butler.

I am not by nature censorious - certainly not when I have been charged with being akin to a pornographer myself.

Why? Genre, I was told, works on the same principles as old-fashioned (ie printed) pornography – ‘the manipulation of words to the satisfaction of the consumer’. The ‘consumer’ wants guaranteed satisfaction within narrow limits. P D James’ assertion that crime fiction is comparable to a sonnet shows that she does not know the difference between form and formula. And, to quote Nabokov again, ‘nobody wants to read a crime novel without any dialogue in it.’

In short, the crime reader wants consistency, a short cut to resolution or justice - usually of a conventional or atavistic sort that confirms and never challenges their presumptions and prejudices. Originality and curiosity are prohibited.

If you are reading this on this site you probably think the above case is, to put it politely, over stated. I was also told that I had ‘joined the herd. Romance was, Crime is – and there will be another shift in due course.’

I have to admit I found this stimulating. Apart from the obvious rejoinder - that this argument closes the arguer off behind dogmatic barricades and will probably leave him looking po-faced and wrong when future courses have taken their supple due - I found the argument too formulaic.

I will certainly not say that all crime books contribute to the well-being of humankind and advance our knowledge of human nature. But I would like to point out here - as I did at the time - that in Lolita, Nabokov had made use of ‘certain techniques’ – the confession, elderly pornographic novels – to spin a murder story of his own. Not his main intent? No. But he needed the readers’ familiarity with those conventions to work his magic. I also, probably unfairly, suggested that the genre-pornography argument given me was like accusing Nabokov of paedophilia, pseudo-taxonomy, and an inability to distinguish between real life and fiction. Hokum? You bet.

‘Bliss’ - which was Nabokov’s aim in writing - is a tall order, and varies from reader to reader. Ask a pornographer and he’ll probably say – you mean a happy ending? And for a pornographer, that is a balance sheet.

Yes, publishing involves money. Huge quantities of novels appear every year in the hope of acquiring some. And this hope is not just the publishers’ - some writers do find themselves, more or less planned, more or less willingly, in the grip of a formula to attempt to achieve this.

It may be that reflective, intrinsically slow prose will be twittered away, but I suspect that independent book stores and ‘boutique’ markets will persist for some time yet.

Honestly? If I could afford it I’d love to examine the possibilities in the new. (The e-books seem to me old mind set in a new technology – rather like early photographers slavishly referring to Old Master paintings.)

Finally, someone else has recently used the crime, thriller, spy genre for his own purposes: Javier Marías, who I have mentioned in earlier blog posts. I will be posting on him a little later.

In the meantime, have a supple and exciting Christmas and New Year.

Lionel Davidson (1922-2009)

2009-12-13T14:51:00.000-08:00

Last year (Sunday 30 November 2008) I wrote a blog on Lionel Davidson, pleased that Faber and Faber had brought out a collection of all eight of his books for adults published between 1960 and 1994.

Lionel Davidson died at the age of 87 on 21 October 2009. You can check the obituaries in the Guardian, Times and Daily Telegraph but here I’ll repeat that he was the youngest of nine children of a poor Polish-Jewish tailor (who died when he was two), that later, when the family moved from Hull to Streatham, he taught his Lithuanian-Jewish mother to read and that, on leaving school at fourteen, he got a job as an office boy at the Spectator and by the age of seventeen was writing syndicated features for the Morley Adams Group, including a column for children and advice to the lovelorn.

He served as a telegraphist in submarines during World War 2 (though he never used the experience directly), freelanced his way to Czechoslovakia in 1947 and later worked for the Keystone press agency and as fiction editor of John Bull Magazine. His first novel, The Night of Wenceslas – set in Prague – was published in 1960.

I should declare a tenuous connection. Lionel’s lovely brother Cyril and wife Kathleen were my family’s close friends. We’d see Lionel, his first wife Fay Jacobs and their two children on Boxing Day and later, when Lionel and family moved to Israel for about ten years, hear how they were getting on.

I always seem to have known that Lionel Davidson suffered from depression. The death of his wife Fay in 1988 did not help.

His second wife, however, the author Frances Ullman, encouraged him to write again. This was not easy. Lionel Davidson always said he did not enjoy writing. Working on films made him feel ‘like a road digger’, he finished novels feeling like the loser in a boxing match.

At one time, in a spectacular effort to solve writer’s block, he bought a lighthouse on Beachy Head. I don’t believe he ever moved in. The lighthouse is now apparently owned by the BBC.
What turned out to be his last book, Kolymsky Heights, was published in 1994, sixteen years after the seventh.

In memory of a writer who, after all, was in the business of entertainment, this may all seem a little grim. Far from it. This is a thank you note for the life of a charming, witty and inventive writer of excellent thrillers. Apart from also working on films, he wrote a number of children’s books under a pseudonym and his own name.

One last confession. My father always bought Lionel Davidson’s books when they came out and would give them as presents. This worked very well until The Chelsea Murders. An elderly recipient wrote back to say that she was not going to read the book because she had heard it was ‘pornographic’. (I believe there is an allusion Swinburne). But the kerfuffle meant I never did read that novel. I have just ordered it.