A change in the air

With the last Falconer finished, I am now working on the next Medieval Murderers book - "The Seven Deadly Sins".  As I mentioned before, my sins are Greed and Gluttony and the book is set in 1348 during an outbreak of plague.  My two stories will be narrated by people associated with my two major characters, William Falconer and Nick Zuliani.  The first will be a tale involving Zuliani told by his granddaughter, Katie Valier.  Those of you who follow my stories will know she appeared in a short story called "A Fiery Death" that appeared in one of Mike Ashley's anthologies entitled "The Mammoth Book of Historical Crime Fiction" (check it out on my website).  And she is also in the latest Medieval Murderers book entitled "The False Virgin" due out in September 2013.  In those stories she was a young girl of 16, but now she is in her fifties and recalls a murder case she and Zuliani were involved with concerning the greed of bankers.  Yes, it happened in the fourteenth century too!
The gluttony story will probably be narrated by William Falconer's elderly son, who it emerges has encountered Nick Zuliani at some point in his past.  How will the story of murder involve gluttony?  You will have to wait until next year to find out.
On a personal level, I am just slogging through the bad weather here in England.  Though it has not been as bad in the south-east as the rest of the country.  The one highlight has been the fact that we have sold our villa in Cyprus.  Having lived there for seven years, my wife and I wanted to return to the UK.  Having the villa in Cyprus was a drag on our resources, and the market in Cyprus was poor for houses.  However, it is sold, and we are glad of it.  Flying back and forth to Cyprus every few months to tidy it up was a nuisance.  Sometimes I can miss the weather though.  The last time I returned from Cyprus, I flew from temperatures of 20C to a wet, grey 2C in England.  Roll on Spring.

An ending and a beginning

It's taken me some time to get back to writing in my blog.  I have been struggling with the final Falconer novel, which I had planned to finish by the end of September.  It took me to the end of December.  It was as though William Falconer himself did not want to 'die' (spoiler alert - he doesn't die in the book).  I write in a pretty tight fashion, such that I will never be able to write a 500-page blockbuster.  But when I completed the first draft of 'Falconer and the Rain of Blood' it was very short, so I had to work through expanding my ideas and descriptions.  I even added another layer of the story, bringing King Edward into it.  Finally, despite all his delaying tactics,Falconer's final story was completed.
I hope it will appear some time in the new year (2013), which reminds me to say Happy New Year to everyone.  Come on, I'm only two weeks late!  Another year has begun, and I have a couple of short stories to write for the Medieval Murderers' tenth book.  We were going to write tales based on the Ten Commandments, but it was thought that, though 'Thou shalt not kill.' was a fine theme for a story, it was too difficult to make something of 'Remember the Sabbath day to keep it holy.' and some others.  Much better to work on the Seven Deadly Sins, and I volunteered for Greed and Gluttony.  Don't ask me why.
I am also giving some thought to expanding my stories set in Regency England.  I do like the characters, Joe Malinferno and Doll Pocket, and the chance they give me to inject more humour into my stories.  So far they have only appeared in short stories in anthologies and in other Medieval Murderers books.  They deserve a full length run, I think.  I will pull together their story so far, and send them off to Egypt to uncover tombs and mummies.  More on that when I get time.
That's all the news to date, other than to mention that I am pursuing my hobby of amateur dramatics still.  Tomorrow I start to work on a production of 'Crown Matrimonial' that I am directing.  For those of you who don't know, it's a play about the abdication of Edward VIII which concentrates on the personal lives of Queen Mary and her sons David (Edward VIII) and Bertie (George VI) and the impact David's decision had on those around him.  If you are in Hastings in April, come along.  It's on at the Stables Theatre from 12 to 20 April and the website is www.stables-theatre.co.uk

Strands

Life has been a little busy of late, so I apologise for not writing anything until now.  I have managed to squeeze in a walking holiday in Gran Canaria, and a trip to my old haunts in Cornwall.  I have also started rehearsing for the Stables Theatre's production of  "A Christmas Carol".  I have several lines in the Chorus, and two small parts as Scrooge's headmaster, and a dealer in rags and second-hand goods called Old Joe.  This latter character is describes as grey-haired and seventy, so why did I get the part?  My great acting skills, I guess.
In between all this, I am still making my way towards the end of the last Falconer.  I seem reluctant to finish, but I am getting there.  Of course Falconer may still figure in the stories I write with the Medieval Murderers.  Who knows?  We have a contract for our tenth book due in 2014, and being the tenth it will be based on the Ten Commandments.  With five or maybe six of us writing, it means two stories each, especially with a prologue and an epilogue to write.  So there is ample scope for two of my regular characters to appear.Who will it be?
What I also have in mind is to write a full-length novel using my Regency characters, Joe Malinferno and Doll Pocket.  They are a little bit more fun to write about than either Falconer or Zuliani, and there's plenty of new historical facts to mine for stories.  Malinferno was imagined after my reading of the engineer and Egyptologist Giovanni Belzoni.  He was no 'toff' like most people involved in mining Egypt for relics at the time, but a simple working man with a background as a circus strong man.  He worked for the British Museum, figuring out how to move vast statues in impossible conditions, and was responsible for digging out Abu Simbel.  In the end he was badly treated by the establishment - I suspect because of his lowly origins.  I have only written short stories so far using Malinferno and Pocket, and want to expand their lives into full-length books.  Go to my website to discover the books where they have appeared.
Ah well, back to Falconer.

A K Benedict

I have just spent two weeks of evenings buried in the dark of a theatre.  My favourite pastime is amateur drama, and recently the theatre I am involved with had a blank space due to an illness of a member of the cast of a play in rehearsal.  It was decided to revive a production of "The 39 Steps", last put on a year ago, to fill the gap.  From a standing start to first night took just over a week, and I was working backstage changing the set.  It is an hilarious spoof of the film and book, and involves lots of quick scene changes, so I was very busy along with the rest of the crew.  All the many parts are played by only four actors, who worked their socks off to put on an amazing show.
One of the actors is also the author and composer A K Benedict.  We know her by her real first name, but as there is another author with the same name, she goes by the initials A K as a writer.  She has written a lot of great material, but her first full-length novel is due out Feb 2013 from Orion.  It's called "The Beauty of Murder".  Look out for it, buy it, read it and enjoy.

Uncanny coincidences

I will shortly be coming to the end of my first draft of the ninth William Falconer book.  The first one was published in 1994, but I started writing it long before that.  Perhaps as early as 1990.  So I have been living with William for 22 years, and for the life of me can't recall how I came about his name.  I think Falconer was just a wry comment on the fact he was going to be short-sighted, and William was an arbitrary choice.  Imagine my surprise then, when I was working on some family history and discovered that my great-great-great-great-grandfather was called William Faulkner!  OK, it's not quite Falconer, but it's close enough to raise the hairs on the back of my neck.
My ancestor William was not an Oxford master however.  He was a sawyer, who was born, lived and died in Derby.  His daughter Mary married a Stevens, and their daughter married a Brownhill (a family of people who ran narrowboats on the canals of England).  Their daughter married a Withey (another family of boat people), whose daughter married a Lear (not King Lear!), whose daughter was my mother.  I would love to hear from anyone who thinks they are related.  In the mean time, I ponder on the possibility that William Faulkner/Falconer had always been lurking in the back of my mind somehow, just waiting to come out.

Backing up

The weather is hot now, and I'm sweating.  Though the cause of my excessive perspiration is not only to do with the current heatwave.  Last Saturday night  put my computer into hibernation mode, and on Sunday morning  pressed the power button to no effect.  My computer had gone into permanent hibernation - more like a coma really.  I began to sweat when I realised my lackadaisical attitude to backing up my work had come back to bite me.  How long was it since I did a back-up?  Maybe two weeks in all, I thought.  Fortunately (in one sense), I had not done a lot of work on my books in those two weeks as we are in the midst of updating our kitchen.  However, there was a significant amount of work that could be lost.  I do make hand-written notes of what I have done, so that I can look back to where I am with the storyline, but the actual text might be inaccessible.  Well, it was inaccessible inside my non-functioning computer.
I did have a diversion to take my mind off all that possibly lost work on Sunday.  In Hastings, the Guinness world record for the number of 'pirates' all in one place was comprehensively beaten with a total of 14, 231 pirates on Pelham Beach.  And I was one of those pirates.

Pirate Day in Hastings is a remarkable and fun day.  Come along yourself next year, and dress up as a pirate!
On Monday morning, I took my computer down to the repair shop, and had a day of nail-biting worry, until I was told everything was OK, and the laptop was up and running again.  I now have resolved to back-up my work every evening.

Nick Zuliani

I have recently discovered that Nick Zuliani really exists!  For me, he is one of my main characters appearing in two novels and several short stories.  He began as follows.  My enthusiasm for Venice led me to want to create a character who lived in the medieval city, and who, like Marco Polo, travelled to the Far East.  There he would meet Kubilai Khan and became a solver of murders.  I made him a bit of a "wheeler-dealer", who got involved in all sorts of illegitimate business deals, and in the end was accused of murder himself.  This drove him from Venice, and he ended up in Xanadu, the summer palace of the Great Khan.
His name was made up from using the Italian first name Niccolo, which as he had an English mother, got shortened to Nick.  His surname was created in the following way.  There is a church in Venice called San Giuliano, which in Venetian dialect is called San Zulian.  At the time of writing the first novel, I was (and remain) a great admirer of Michael Dibdin's modern Venetian detective - Aurelio Zen.  So with a nod to that, I named my character Zuliani.  With such a random approach, I could not have imagined that I had landed on a real name! But recently, a fan in Italy (curiously with the same surname as myself) reported that a friend of her's was called Nick Zuliani.
I hope he forgives me for stealing his name.  My Nick Zuliani is a loveable rogue, and will appear again in the ninth Medieval Murderers anthology due in 2013.