More Japanese crime

OK.  Here is another Japanese crime story - "Six Four" by Hideo Yokoyama - published in Japan in 2012, and in the UK in 2016.  This is more than a simple whodunit, giving as it does a picture of Japanese society and organisational structure.  The central character is Mikami, who is a former detective who has been transferred to the post of press director in a department that handles the police's relationship with the press.  The story is slow moving, especially at the beginning, and you wonder what the crime is going to be.  It mostly revolves around the mishandling by the police of an old kidnapping case which resulted in the child who was taken being killed and the perpetrator escaping.  The statute of limitations on the case is soon to pass, and one last effort appears to be taking place to solve it.
Mikami, whose own daughter has run away from home, is battling the press in order to control the release of information.  His relationship with the press breaks down and he is reviled by both the reporters and his superiors.  Then another kidnapping case happens, which appears at first to be a copycat of the old one.  Mikami, however, suspects there is a link between he two.
The picture given of the strict hierarchy of the police and its various departments, if true, is a scary and bewildering one to Westerners.  People lower down the hierarchy are regularly denigrated by their superiors, and have to adopt a servile attitude in return.  Internal feuding between departments is rife, and everyone is more concerned with power and progressing in the organisation to allow cases to be solved.  In addition the press seem to be a powerful force capable of cowing the police. No maverick loner detectives here as is common in Western crime (if not in real life in the West!).
Mikami does rise to the surface in the end, but the mire of a rampant press and organisational chaos in the police ranks still resists.  Read it, and get some insight into Japanese society.

Japanese crime

I have recently come across some crime stories written by Japanese authors.  I first read a book called "The Tokyo Zodiac Murders" by Soji Shimada and published in 1981. My impression was that this was one of the earliest Japanese crime stories, so I guess I was beginning at the right place.  Its format was very unusual - more of a puzzle than a story by Western reckoning.  It came with illustrations of crime scenes and other visual clues, and the reader was openly invited to work out who the murderer was.  You are even told that all the clues are present in order to solve the puzzle.  A sort of super Sudoku in a way!  I was intrigued.
My next excursion was a more recent novel, originally published in Japan in 1999, though it didn't appear in the UK until 2015.  It is "Journey Under the Midnight Sun" by Keigo Higashino.  This is in a more recognisable format to Western readers than Shimada's, with characterisations and complex story lines.  I confess I got a little lost with the Japanese names, confusing some characters.  But no more so than when I am reading some Scandi noir!  A little concentration and flicking back through pages is all that is required.  This novel is definitely in that category of 'unputdownable' reads.  Stretching over twenty years, it tells the tale of the murder of a pawnbroker, and the persistence of an Osaka police detective obsessed with solving this case.  The personal lives of those involved branch out from the original murder, and the book tells how they are affected by the incident.  It is still quite clue led, like its predecessor "The Tokyo Zodiac Murders", but is much more full of insight into the individuals concerned.  It's not so much a 'whodunit' than a how and why in the American tradition.  Read it for yourself.
Oh, and did I solve the puzzle of the "Tokyo Zodiac Murders"?  No, but then I was never any good at Sudoku either.

Hooptedoodle

I have been reading a lot of thrillers and crime stories recently, and several of them made me think of Elmore Leonard's sage advice about writing.

Elmore's rule number 10
Try to leave out the part that readers tend to skip.
A rule that came to mind in 1983. Think of what you skip reading a novel: thick paragraphs of prose you can see have too many words in them. What the writer is doing, he’s writing, perpetrating hooptedoodle, perhaps taking another shot at the weather, or has gone into the character’s head, and the reader either knows what the guy’s thinking or doesn’t care. I’ll bet you don’t skip dialogue.

I read Matt Hilton's "Rules of Honour" (Hodder, 2013) intrigued by the blurb on the front that said "If you like Jack Reacher, you will love Joe Hunter".  Now, I know from experience that an author does not control what the publisher puts on his or her book - my first Falconer book got compared favourably to Ellis Peters and I was embarrassed.  Hilton's character was good but didn't outshine Jack Reacher.  And often the narrative flow was impeded by hooptedoodle.  Towards the end of the story, there was a fist fight described in over ten pages.  I think Hilton is a martial arts expert, but it is fatal to overuse one's specialist knowledge.  The excitement of the ending died in those ten pages, and I skipped them.

I have also recently read Chris Pavone's "The Travelers".  That was a good read where I didn't know who was working for whom until the end.  Ah, the internecine world of the CIA and its adversaries.  Give it a go.

But the best find I have made recently is "Darktown" by Thomas Mullen (Little, Brown 2016).  It is a story, based on fact, of the first eight black police officers appointed to work in Atlanta.  The dire situation of black people in the South is harshly depicted with sharp directness.  Even the black police are shunned by their fellow white officers, and are not allowed to arrest a white man.  When the case of a murdered black girl is shelved by the police department, a couple of black officers and one rogue white officer are determined to follow through the matter.  In the case of this book, one of the blurbs is justified, it says "This page-turner reads like the best of James Ellroy"  It does.

Holy City: book review

What have I been reading recently?  An Argentinian novel actually.  I picked up Holy Land by Guillermo Orsi because, set in Buenos Aires, it seemed as if it was going to be a noirish, hard-bitten detective novel.  The start of an Argentine equivalent of Scandi-noir perhaps.  Argie-noir?  It turned out to be more than a detective novel though.  It is a political and social critique of Argentine society, wallowing in corruption at every level from criminal drug cartels through police who are not averse to kidnapping wealthy tourists, and ordinary citizens fighting for survival every way they know how.  Even the one honest cop – Walter Carroza – is not averse to handing out summary justice.

At first I revelled in this brilliant account of a once rich country reduced to penury and chaos by corrupt politicians.  But gradually I began to sink in the mire of greed, and lost track of who might be honest and who not.  You might say that this was the purpose of Orsi’s writing, and I agree to a point.  But the chaotic jumps from backstories to the present left me uncertain as to what point in time I was at.  And soon everything simply became confusing and somewhat irritating.  I ploughed through to the end and yet I remain uncertain whether this novel is brilliant or merely pretentious.  I leave it to you to decide where you stand.

Just one more point.  Perhaps the parallel universe concept carried through to the real world, because the book is promoted as being the winner of the Dashiell Hammett Prize in 2010.  I have looked at all the Hammett Award listings online and cannot find Orsi or Holy City mentioned.  Maybe someone can enlighten me.

Holy City by Guillermo Orsi, Quercus, 2012

New Year Reviews

The reprints of my last three Falconers with Ostara Publishing has been delayed slightly but should happen soon!  In the mean time, I thought I would write some reviews of books I have been reading.  They are not neccessarily new, but just books I have picked from the shelves at my local library.  Here are the first two.

The Templar Succession by Mario Reading (Corvus, 2016)

When I picked this up at the library, I thought it was probably one of those thrillers mixing all-action stuff with Dan Brown-style resurrection of a shadowy knightly order set on saving the world from destruction.  I was pleasantly surprised.  The Templar connection is a minimal one – the main protagonist, John Hart, has a Templar ancestor, but appears to have been given the nickname of Templar with a sense of irony.  But this is the third book in a series and I can’t vouch for the strength of the Templar connection in the others.

John Hart is a photojournalist, who in 1998 stumbles on a house in the Balkan Conflict which is used by violent Serbians to rape young Muslim women.  The group of soldiers is led by The Captain, who keeps one of the young women, Lumnije, for himself.  When Hart finds the house, the soldiers are not there and he persuades Lumnije and a few other women to escape with him.  The Captain returns and hunts the escapees down.  Only Hart and Lumnije finally escape.

In 2015, Hart’s world is turned upside-down when he finds himself caring for Lumnije’s daughter.  He is forced to embark on a journey to find the girl’s father – the rapist and war criminal, The Captain.  The reader is not spared any of the brutality of the Kosovan conflict, nor the effect is has upon those involved with it.  It is a compelling read that draws you onwards through brutality and almost inconceivable evil.  It has left me wanting to seek out the earlier two stories in the series, and read them too.

Moriarty by Anthony Horowitz (Orion, 2014)

Horowitz is of course an acclaimed author and writer of television series, including Midsomer Murders and Foyle’s War.  Here he takes up the baton of Arthur Conan Doyle and gives us a view of a Victorian world after the presumed death of Sherlock Holmes and his arch-rival Professor Moriarty.  In true Conan Doyle style, Horowitz writes in the persona of a Dr Watson-type protagonist called Frederick Chase.  We, the readers, are led to believe that all that is conveyed to us is true – in the same way that Conan Doyle’s stories grew in the public’s eyes to blur the edges of fiction and reality.

Chase, a Pinkerton agent, has come all the way from the USA in pursuit of Clarence Devereux – a fiend in the mould of Moriarty, and who appears to be filling the void in England left by Moriarty’s death.  He meets up with Inspector Athelney Jones from Scotland Yard and helps identify the body of Moriarty.  Sherlock Holmes’ body, of course, has disappeared.  On the body they find a cryptic message from Devereux to Moriarty, and so begins a journey through the darkest corners of London in a hunt to find the evil American.  Inspector Jones, once a stumbling policeman humiliated by the brilliance of Sherlock (in a Conan Doyle story), has now modelled himself on Holmes.  So we have Jones and Chase instead of Holmes and Watson.

There is, of course, a magnificent and unexpected twist.  But I will not tell you what that is.  You will have to read Moriarty for yourself.

Just a small update

I have heard from Ostara that they hope to publish those three Falconer titles in the Autumn.  Then all the Falconer novels will be available in one place - from Ostara Publishing.  I recently had an email from one of my fans (I do have some!) expressing confusion over the arrival of Saphira Le Veske in 'Ritual of Death'.  There is a reference to her meeting Falconer earlier, but the previous novel - 'Great Beast' - does not mention her.  I was glad to clear up the apparent anomoly.
You see, there was a real-time gap between the two novels and in the mean time I was writing stories that appeared in the Medieval Murderers' books.  I always kept chronologically accurate, and in the anthology called 'House of Shadows', published in 2007, there is the story of Saphira's first meeting with William at Bermondsey Abbey.  When I later wrote 'Ritual of Death', Saphira already figured in his life.  I guess I should have made it clearer with a reference to the incident in the MM story!
My time recently has been somewhat preoccupied with my am-dram pursuits.  I was directing the famous farce by Noel Coward, 'Blithe Spirit'.  It was hard work as Coward's dialogue is so precise and wordy - tough for the actors. But we came up with a good production in the end, and had 91% ticket sales.

The seance

FALCONER REPRINTS

I have now obtained all the rights for my Falconer books, so Ostara will be publishing the three titles formerly published by Severn House.  They are "Falconer and the Ritual of Death", "Falconer's Trial", and "Falconer and the Death of Kings".  Look out for them.
I am still working on the Malinferno/Pocket novel - whenever am-dram allows it.  I have recently played two small parts in a beautiful play called "A Little Like Drowning", written by Anthony Minghella the renowned film director.  A story of Italian immigrants to the UK in the 1920s, it follows the life of Alfredo through to the 1960s.  I play the part of his father - the patriarch of the Mare family - and also the part later of an Irish priest.  This requires being able to speak English with first an Italian accent (plus some Italian), and then with an Irish accent.  It has been a nice challenge.

Ashamed!

I can't believe I have left it so long since my last entry.  I can only say that my hobby has completely occupied my time.  Am-dram, you are a hard mistress.  And I have had some time away in Turkey and the Algarve.

Istanbul

Tavira - Algarve

All I can say is a belated Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year.
Since then I have been busy building a series of sets for The Stables theatre production of Jeeves and Wooster, which is now culminating in full houses of veery happy people.  So it's back to the drawing board for my two writing projects.  I am concentrating on the Regency couple of Joe Malinferno and Doll Pocket and the novel of their exploits that is called "The Hieroglyph Murders".  Some of the characters from my short stories of the pair will reappear and be expanded from their cameo roles in the stories that saw the light of day in the Medieval Murderers books, "King Arthur's Bones" and "Hill of Bones".  French Egyptologist Jean-Claude Casteix and his wooden leg will figure prominently as Joe and Doll figure out why those attempting to decipher hieroglyphics are suddenly dying.  The ill-fated but intriguing Queen Caroline will also put in an appearance or two, along with other real-life people such as Champollion, the eventual decipherer of the Egyptian symbols.  IN this story, he gets considerable assistance in that task from an unexpected source.
Lovers of Falconer should not be disappointed though. I still have another tale in the pipeline, and I will finish it too before long.  If am-dram doesn't get too much in the way.

Outcomes

Ah, there I was with last blog anticipating a new era in British politics post the General Election.  In the end it was all a complete let-down.  No slugging it out between Labour and Tory, no breakthrough by UKIP, no realignment of progressive parties to keep the Tories out.  No move towards PR as a result.  Same old Tory hierachy, now released (as we have already seen) to carry out it own extreme agenda irrespective of only getting 36% of the total vote.  I guess you can see where my sympathies lie!
Now we have a leadership contest for Labour that is creating real interest, and a man who has emerged from the 'loony left' to speak honestly and straightforwardly about issues that affect us all.  It's so refreshing that Jeremy Corbyn is clearly not in the mould of standard party hack that he is a tempting option to consider.  Some say he is unelectable as a Prime Minister - I say so what?  The next election is five years away, so in the mean time let's have Tory ideas tested against real left-wing opposition.
But I think I know in my heart that the norm will prevail, just as it did at the general election, and one of the other career politicians will come through.  But did you notice how Andy Burnham is now claiming he has never been part of the political establishment, or wrapped in the Westminster bubble? It's what I call the Corbyn effect.

On another tack completely, I recently read  a novel called "The Circle" by David Eggers.  It is the story of the takeover of society by an Internet company and its social media arm.  Some deride it as nonsense, but they mainly come from the rarified cyber world.  It does take current use of the Internet to an extreme, but it does show where it all could end up, if we are not careful.  Total absorbtion in social media networks, a life responding to Facebook and Twitter messages, the pressure to report everything we do in order to be seen to be sharing experiences.  The expunging of those who refuse to be online for their whole lives, with their every action and locale known by everyone.  All in the cause of sharing and being part of some insidious whole.  Read it - laugh in amusement, and growing horror.  I mean, do you really want a fridge that automatically orders more milk from a supermarket delivery service because it can't find any on its shelves?

Politics

Here we are in the middle of a general election campaign that promises to produce a very interesting result.  And yet I can't get worked up about it.  I think it's because I just want to get to the finishing line now.  I've had enough of politicians promising all sorts of goodies, if I vote for them.  It would seem we can have lower taxes, higher pensions, more funding of the NHS and also cut the deficit at the same time.  Amazing how this can all be done just before an election, but not for the five years before it, and probably not for the next five years after it.  I also saw the end of a Nigel Farage interview on TV yesterday, where he actually said that, if the government lowered taxes, there could be an uplift in the economy that meant more income would flow into the Exchequer.  He insisted it could happen.  Not a matter to base your budget strategy on though, is it?

I am currently involved in the next Stables production, which is "Anne Boleyn" by Howard Brenton.  It is full of the political scheming around Henry VIII's desire for a divorce from his first wife, so he can marry the fecund Anne.  While Anne is shown as fervently for bringing Protestantism to England out of religious conviction, Henry is persuaded by a very different motive.  Not only will he become Head of the Church and be able to approve his own divorce, all monastic revenues will accrue to him and not the Pope.  Taxes and money make the world go round, then as now.

The play is seen through the eyes of James I, and he makes a very perceptive comment at the end of the play.  One that is pertinent in the present day of ISIS and Fundamentalist Christianity.  He says "Why is it that all we do in the name of God is always exactly the same as what we need to do in our own self-interest?"

Think on.

I have had an email from a fan asking about my progress on the Georgian novel featuring Joe Malinferno and Doll Pocket.  It made me feel guilty about the lack of progress I have been amking on both it and the new Falconer book.  I confess I have not been writing much for the last three months, and now I must remedy that.  I am split between making headway with either book, and need to decide which one I will concentrate on first.  The Falconer has been begun, and calls me more urgently, whereas the Georgian book needs more research.  But research fascinates me more than the task of writing!  Maybe I can dovetail both together.
In the meantime, my am-dram hobby calls and I am going to direct "Blithe Spirit" by Noel Coward in July.  It is a perennial favourite in the theatre, and I shall be looking for fresh ideas to revive it for a new audience.

Turkey

OK.  This new Falconer I keep on talking about is set in Trebizond, which is now Trabzon in modern-day Turkey.  I could say my recent trip to Turkey has been for the purposes of research.  But it hasn't.  Lynda and I have spent two weeks in the opposite corner of Turkey on a walking holiday.  The first week we were in Torba, which is close to Bodrum on the Aegean coast of Turkey.  From Bodrum you can see the Greek island of Kos, and realise how odd the border is between the two countries.  Islands closer to the Turkish mainland and far from mainland Greece are Greek.  We were amazed by the remains at Ephesus of a major Greek city.

The countryside around is very like Cyprus, where we lived for seven years.  Turkish and Greek Cypriots lived closely together and shared culinary techniques and some words.  But all that was destroyed when the strife over Cyprus resulted in a Turkish invasion.  Forty years on, and the rift between Turkish and Greek Cypriots is still too huge for many on the island.
Our second week was spent close to Olu Deniz and Fethiye on the Mediterranean coast.  Once again, the walking was great, but the outstanding memory was of an abandoned village.  Kayakoy is the village on which Louis de Berniere based his novel "Birds without Wings".  It is the tragic story of Greeks and Turks in that region living side by side until the Turkish war of independence in the 1920s resulted in a mass exchange of peoples.  All the Turks living in Greece had to relocate to Turkey, and the Greeks living in Turkey had to relocate to Greece.  Despite the fact that Greeks had lived for generations in Kayakoy, they had to go.  The returning Turks who were relocated in Kayakoy could not settle down there and left.  The village stands deserted.
A Turkish guide took us round the village and told us personal stories of his family - how Greeks begged not to leave, and how arriving Turks yearned for their old life in Greece.  He is part of a movement to have the village stand as a memorial to peace and tolerance, and a monument to the stupidity of ideology and political expediency.

The Italian Job

I am in the process of signing a deal to publish my back catalogue of Falconer stories (and maybe the short Zuliani series) in Italy.  The publisher is Mondadori, who have a series of detective novels under the name of 'Il Giallo'.  This has a curious symmetry as the word means 'yellow' in Italian and derives from the background colour of the early editions.

My first publisher was Victor Gollancz, and though my books were too late for the treatment, early Gollancz crime and SF books were, of course, always published in a yellow cover.

I always recall as a young teenager (though the name was not used in my day) that I scoured the public library shelves for yellow spines as my primary means of book selection.  I was later very proud to become a Victor Gollancz author, though rather disappointed my crime stories would not be 'wrapped' in yellow!  There was some talk, I suppose in the late 90s, of reviving the yellow cover.  I think some Gollancz books did come out with a yellow spine.  But none of my titles.

Now, at last, I will be published in yellow.  I will keep you up date concerning the progress of my Italian editions.  If you want to read them in Italian, that is.

Chicago

I am breathing a sigh of relief.  The hectic time of directing "Taking Steps" is at last over.  Eight weeks of intensive rehearsals led to the opening of the play in Hastings, and eight performances at the Stables.  These were well received, and we had an average attendance of some 70%.  After a mere week's break, we were on a flight to the USA, and performances in Chicago Heights at The Drama Group.  I had been working on the set with the crew in the USA by email.  I liken it to building a set by remote control!  But it worked.  IN The Stables, we had a stage about 20ft wide.  In Chicago Heights, the width was almost 50ft, so we had to do some adjusting to stage positions.  Also, the audience was so close to the actors that we were afraid the fight scene would result in one of our actors plunging into the laps of the front row.  We did manage to avoid that, but with the stage on the same level as the two front rows, people coming in often walked acros the stage itself.  Very disconcerting.
Our hosts were the epitome of hospitality, taking us to and fro in the delightful suburb of Chicago Heights.  This involved taking each of us from our temporary home to the theatre, and after each show to a wonderful tavern at Flossmoor, as well as to a station to allow us to travel into Chicago itself.  They could not have been more accommodating, and generous.  Many a boozy hour was spent at the Flossmoor Tavern testing the 16 beers that were brewed on the premises.  My favourite was BAD (barrel aged Dubbel).  I am not sure what the specific gravity was, but two glasses were enough!  The shows went down a storm, and we even got a standing ovation one night.
Chcago is a wonderful city, set on the shores of Lake Michigan, with spectacular skyscrapers all around the central area.

I went up to the 103rd floor of the Willis Tower and stood in a glass box projecting out from the side of the building.  You can look down below your feet for over 1300ft to the street below.  Chicago also boasts several museums - the most impressive for me being the Art Institute, which housed many works of art from Europe.

The old town area - which is not very old, as Chicago burnt down in 1871 - has some very graceful houses.  And in the suburbs are areas where Frank Lloyd Wright plied his trade.  Ernest Hemingway also lived in the same suburb as a child.  The city is bursting with parks which host festivals.  I was lucky to get to see the Blues Festival, which was a completely free event.  The other jaunt which I must mention was a trip down part of Route 66 in Model A Fords organised by one of the Drama Group members.  That was quite a memorable event, ending up in Pontiac.

It was altogether a memorable two weeks, and lasting friendships were made.  The Drama Group of Chicago Heights comes over to Hastings in 2015.  But for now, I must get back into the groove and continue writing that new Falconer.

Ancestry

Doing genealogical research is a drug.  I cannot stop following up leads, even though the person I am researching may be the brother-in-law of the sister-in-law of my second cousin four times removed!  If the information is there, I must have it.  I am now tracking down hints provided by the Ancestry.com website on existing members of my family tree - all 3,000 of them (the hints, not the people).  I am disciplining myself to only get birth, marriage and death of remote relatives, but even so this will take months.
The lighter side of this research is that I find literary links.  So far, I have relatives called Walter Scott, William Faulkner, Thomas Hardy and Edward Lear.  Naturally, they are not the famous ones, and most of my relatives - including these - are generally labourers.  I come from a long line of agricultural labourers, interspersed with coal miners and iron workers.  The latter two occupations explain why my ancestors moved between Derbyshire and Yorkshire - where there were coal mines - and from the Forest of Dean to Derbyshire - to find jobs in iron works.  In fact I have many Welsh ancestors whose families slipped over the border from the Forest of Dean into Monmouthshire to work in Blaenavon and Abergavenny before trekking on to Derby.
Some adventurous souls emigrated to Canada, and some found work in the USA. Of course - in this anniversary year of the outbreak of World War One - it is sobering to find records of those young men who died in Flanders and other foreign fields.  Some of course left no direct ancestors, but a few married, had a child, and died soon afterwards.  I saw a Great War cemetery a couple of Christmases ago.

The impact then was tremendous, but the cold facts of an individual's death are just as great.  What a tragedy.

No excuse

I have no excuse for leaving it so long between blogs.  Except I do.  I was heavily involved in my other hobby of amateur dramatics.  I played the part of the drunken photographer, Henry Ormonroyd, in J B Priestley's "When We Are Married".  Take a look at some of the pictures on artypharty.com, Peter Mould's website.  Click on the relevant play and look for the red-faced man!  The play went down well, and we all got plenty of laughs - all for the right reasons.
And now I am embarking on directing an Alan Ayckbourn play called "Taking Steps".  We present it in May in Hastings, then take it in June to our sister drama group in Chicago Heights, USA.  These are Alan Ayckbourn’s words about the play.
“In the first act you take the audience by the hand and lead them across the floor.  In the second, you start to walk them up the wall.  And in the third act, you begin to walk them on the ceiling, so they end up hanging upside down saying ‘Hey, what am I doing?’”

I am working on some new books also - honest!  As well as the Georgian novel with Joe Malinferno and Doll Pocket, which will revolve around grave robbers and surgeons - I have an idea for continuing the Falconer series.  I know I had bade him farewell in book nine, but I feel another one coming on.  This one will be set in Trebizond, and William and Saphira are on their way to far-off Cathay.  It is a location I have used in the latest Medieval Murderers book "The Deadliest Sin", in a story told by their son David Falconer.  So, you see, there is more story to tell about them anyway.   I want to fill in the gaps, as it were.

I have also had some interest in my stories in Italy, so there is a chance that they may appear in Italian in the future.  There are some editions in German and French out there too, though they may only be available second-hand.

And there I must leave it, as I am soon to go to a rehearsal of "Taking Steps".  If you want to buy tickets for the show, go to stablestheatre.co.uk.

A New Year

Happy New Year, everyone who reads this blog...and to everyone else who doesn't!  Last year, my agent and friend, Dot Lumley died.  I sincerely hope better things will happen this year.  She was someone who kept me on the straight and narrow - from a writing perspective - and was always optimistic about my work.  Without her, some of the later Falconers would not have come about, so I have a lot to thank her for.  I am now beginning to plan out the full-length Georgian novel I have been thinking about.  Using my characters from short stories - Joe Malinferno and Doll Pocket - I will start what I hope might be a new series taking them through the events of the 1820s in England, and off to Egypt in pursuit of their interest in all things Egyptian.  The life of Giovanni Belzoni will be my guide to the times and the place.  A real-life (even larger-than-life) character, Belzoni was responsible for bringing some of the first artefacts to England from under the noses of the French in Egypt.  In return he was poorly treated, perhaps because he was not a gentleman, and a foreigner to boot.  He died in Africa, searching for Timbuktu.

This year heralds the arrival of the tenth Medieval Murderers book "The Deadliest Sin".  Tales of the Seven Deadly Sins are swapped by pilgrims in Norfolk, as they vie to claim the deadliest of them all.  Look out for it.  Plans are afoot for the next book.
That's the new year for me as a writer.  My enthusiasm for amateur drama will also take up some time, as I will be acting in a play at the Stables, Hastings in March, and directing in May.  I also have the trip to our 'sister' drama group in Chicago coming up in June.  Lots to look forward to in 2014.

Spain

It's a little while since I wrote anything, because my wife and I have been travelling independently in Andalucia.  It took up most of November, but we managed to see Malaga, Ronda, Seville, Cordoba and Granada.  I came away with several impressions of the area jangling in my head.  Unfortunately, one was of the effects of the recession on the poorer parts of Spain.  The North/South divide there is the opposite to England - the North is more prosperous, and the South poorer.  In all the major cities we visited we saw people begging on the streets.  They were not the usual homeless men encountered in the UK, but from my rough translations of the placards they held up, ordinary people who had fallen on hard times.  One woman we saw regularly on a corner in Granada held up a sign that said she had a mother and three children to support but could not find work.  In Cordoba we saw a husband and wife sitting on the street together begging for help.  But that was only one aspect of Andalucia.
The overwhelming impression was of a unique culture that is still vibrant and exciting.  The buildings we saw reflected the blending of Moorish, Islamic, and Christian history that identifies the region.  How exciting to walk into the Mesquita (Grand Mosque) in Cordoba and at first see the original layout of columns and arches that are typical of the Arabic culture that held sway for centuries.  And then to find in the centre of it all a Christian cathedral!  It looked as though it had been dropped into the middle of the mosque by some spaceship.  I know it's presence gave hints of the bloody conflict behind the Reconquista, but it also suggested the present-day feeling of two cultures blended together.  A small museum nearby attempted to explain the value of Arabic science, medicine and culture to the West.  Something I learned a lot about in my researches into medieval history. Also in Cordoba, we spent a relaxing two hours in a Turkish hammam wandering from cold room through warm room and pool to hot room and steamroom, with a massage thrown in.  Though I have to admit I only dipped a toe in the baths in the cold room! We also saw lots of Arabic courtyards preserved in private houses,where they exist alongside European styles of building.  It all felt like being amongst a people who took the best of both cultures and rejoiced in them.  And that is something to hold on to in a time when fundamentalism threatens us all.

China Mieville

I have just come across a new writer - to me that is.  China Mieville (excuse me, but I can't get the "e-acute" I require to spell his name properly) is already a multiple award winner in the genre of SciFi.  This does not even do him justice though, because his books defy being put in one genre.  In fact I read somewhere that he once set out to write a novel in each of many different genres.  What put me on to him was a recommendation to read "The City and the City".
This is a detective noir novel with a difference set in a divided city.  It could be reminiscent of Nicosia, or Berlin, or Belfast, but it is a deeper picture than those cities.  In China Mieville's book the city is not split in half geographically - it's two communities live cheek by jowl and totally intermingled.  How such existence has been made to succeed is that one community deliberately "unsees" the other.  Your next door neighbour may be from the other city, but you don't "see" him, and to go to his house you have to go through an immigration point in the centre of the two cities, at which point you are allowed to "see" the other city to your own.  This apparently satisfactory means of living together is strained when a murder takes place in one city, and the body is dumped in the other.
Mieville's books stretch the imagination, but uncannily still give a believable picture of the possible result of human stupidity (or is it ingenuity?).  I have just finished my second book of his - "Embassytown".  This novel examines the impact of human culture on a totally alien culture by means of a scifi setting.  It is a challenging read that portrays a completely different culture where the beings have two mouths and so speak in a way impossible for a human being.  Though twin ambassadors are created to overcome the problem of communication, things go terribly wrong as the Host (so called) become addicted - or corrupted - by contact with human speech.  The novel deals with language and its complexities - the Host speak Language, and cannot lie.  But once they become intrigued by the possibility of telling untruths, they are on the way to a crisis in their culture.
I am looking forward to reading more of his books, and his extraordinary imagination.  Try him yourself.

PLR

In the UK we have a government funded recompense scheme for authors whose books are borrowed from public libraries - Public Lending Right.  It's a small amount of money each year, but nonetheless welcome for all that.  The thing is, about a year ago, the present government decided it would be good publicity to get rid of all those useless quangos (quasi-autonomous, neo-governmental organisations) that spend taxpayers' money without being responsible to the electorate.  The trouble is that, despite the public's dislike of quangos, many of them carry out useful functions.  Like PLR.  It's a small unit in Stockton-on-Tees that performs efficiently and hands out money to authors on time every year according to figures estimated from samples of library loans.  The government ran a consultation exercise (so-called) which raised a lot of protest from authors, predictably to no avail.  The PLR organisation was to be subsumed into the British Library, and authors were left fearful of the consequences.  In a way we need not have worried, because PLR now tells us that, although now being part of the British Library, the office remains in Stockton-on-Tees and the staff remain the same.  No cuts then.  Which only goes to show the government's 'big idea' of cutting quangos was just smoke and mirrors.  I have no doubt that some organisations disappeared, some maybe had funding cuts, but I would bet most of them were simply hidden away in another organisation with the same funding and staffing.  Just to give the impression that the 'big idea' had been carried through.  Pull the other one, Mr Cameron.