A Different Sort of Mystery

I know, I know. What I’m about to say is at best ill-advised, and the sound you can hear is that of a whopping great stone crashing through my own glass house. When I go and inspect the damage I daresay I’ll find it more extensive than I thought, but I’m going to say it anyway.

I’ve read a lot of ordinary books recently.

Now the caveats. I’ve actually enjoyed them all. They’ve been well-written and their settings have been appealing. Their characters have been interesting. They’re just the type of book I’m aspiring to write myself, in fact. By ordinary I don’t mean bad. I just mean samey. And yes it’s the genre and yes it’s what readers want. I know all that. But.

Maybe it’s the heat that’s giving me a terrible sense of ennui. Maybe what I need is some sparkling wit and a Martini, rather than sitting on my own with a hot, grumpy cat and a glass of tepid Ribena. But suddenly I find I’m tired of reading all these crime novels and I want something different.

Fortunately help is at hand, in the shape of the latest crime novel by Ian Sansom. Sansom’s books are a bit light on crime, but they do have an original theme, a very jolly writing style (and a wit as dry as my non-existent Martini) and a cast of original and entertaining characters.

The concept is a series of murder mysteries set in the counties of England during the 1930s. The narrator, Stephen Sefton, is a veteran of the Spanish Civil War with all the traumas that involves, not to mention a penchant for some of the sleazier entertainments that London has to offer. His big break, if you can call it that, comes in the opening book where he becomes employed by the extraordinary Swanton Morley, an encyclopaedia of a man whose mission its to augment his phenomenal output of books and articles with a guide to each of the counties — each one researched and written in a week or so.

Essex Poison is the fourth of them, and the pattern is familiar. Sefton and Morley travel round in a Lagonda driven by Morley’s sassy and very modern daughter, Miriam, who’s way out of Sefton’s league and besieged by alternative suitors, while some of the more villainous characters from Sefton’s past are in pursuit for payment of his debts.

To date there have been murders in Norfolk, Devon and Westmorland, and now the caravan has alighted in Essex. At an oyster festival, a local dignitary dies. Was it poison?

In actual fact I didn’t really care what happened. (I did say it was light on the mystery.) It was fun, it was different, and there’s a serious underlying theme as Sefton struggles with his demons (to which, of course, his employer is totally oblivious).

I’ll go back to my ordinary mysteries. After all, they’re a well-tested genre and there are so many, so similar, because it works. But sometimes you want something different, and by the next time I’m in need of an alternative twist on crime, I hope the next book in the series will be out.

Me and the Ghosts of Mardale Green

The old field walls of Bowderthwaite
on the shores of Haweswater 

I love a good walk. I was down in the Lakes recently, and rather than go to the gym I got up early, packed my breakfast and headed off for a scenic walk. Just as I did for the walk I described in my last blog I picked Mardale, which happens to be where my current protagonist, Jude Satterthwaite goes to clear his head. 

This time, I chose to walk round the lake rather than head up the dale. It was hot, and the route is much flatter and there is, crucially, no bog, though there are other hazards. Haweswater as we see it isn’t entirely natural, but a larger lake resulting from the expansion of the original body of water following the building of a dam in the 1930s. 

The new reservoir flooded the village of Mardale Green, leaving us one of those drowned villages that are common across the UK and that occasionally reappear in times of drought.

The long-submerged walls and old bridge
emerge from the lake

As you may be aware, it’s been incredibly dry in the UK recently, and Cumbria’s lake levels have dropped dramatically. On an earlier visit, a lady I met on my walk informed me that we would soon be able to see the church tower, which we never will because the church, like every other building in the dale below the waterline, was demolished, though the village bridge does appear along with the footprint of its buildings. 

Even the ducks sink into the soft mud.
Maybe one day these will be fossil footprints.

The village hasn’t emerged yet, though its presence is slowly crystallising as the water level drops. For my walk I left the main footpaths and walked around to Riggindale, out of sight of the car park and much of the road. Once there I followed the shore back round until I ran into rocks and had to scramble up the bank and into the woods. 

If you look at old maps (you’ll find one here) then you can see where the old houses are. I spotted the ruins of Fieldhead and the skeleton of its bridge. On the other side of the lake, the remains of the farms of Goosemire and Grove Bridge were printed on the landscape. Ducks had left their footprints on the rapidly-drying mud, making fossils for the future. Most hauntingly, I could see the trees. Cut down before flooding, their stumps roots are still there, the soil washed away from under them so that they stood free on the rocky shore like stranded aliens. 

The line between the lucky and the unlucky -
trees above and below the new shore.

It was an amazing walk, made all the better for being so early in the morning that I met nobody. I doubt I’ll ever weave it into a story, because someone somewhere will have done that before, far more elegantly than I ever could. But it’ll be a long time before I forget that sunny early morning on the parched shores of Haweswater. 

Just me, a couple of sheep, several dozen ducks and the ghosts of Mardale Green.

The Problem of the Boggy Middle

I am writing the first draft of a novel and it is mince.

I write from a plan, much as I walk from a map and, like a walk, a story has many different options for getting from A to B.

This is a map of a walk I did the other day. It’s also one of the favourite walks of my protagonist, DCI Jude Satterthwaite, who likes a quick stroll to clear his head.

Jude, in solving a crime, knows the beginning and the end, as do I. It begins with a crime and it ends with an arrest. So it is with a walk. It begins at the car park and it ends at your destination, in this case, Blea Water. 

Unfortunately, things aren’t always so simple. You will see that this map has all sorts of possibilities — a positive spider’s web of wonderment. But when you get to the ground, your options are rather more limited. Because, bluntly, a lot of these routes that are marked on the map are utterly invisible on the ground, and the ones that are there have a nasty tendency to peter out in the middle of nowhere. 

In my walk, as in my writing, I have to make sudden sideways jumps to accommodate them. (Don’t worry. In draft 2 I’ll go back and sort them out.) In the meantime, at least I have two options. I'll pick one.

 But the big problem, dear reader, is marked in green. 

It’s a bog. And to get from A to B, from the crime to the arrest, from the beginning to the end, we have go through it. There is no way round. High road, low road. You end in the bog.

This is where I am right now. 

In a draft of — say — 75,000 words the first third is easy, and the last is easy. The middle third, known to writers as the saggy, or as I now call it, boggy, middle, is where all the things you need to do to get from A to B get shovelled in to a big heap, a random selection scenes. Get to the end of it. Sort it out later. 

I’m at 34,000 words right now, and I’m not so much heading through mud as jumping from tussock to tussock and hoping the next one I land on will bear my weight. It’s an energy-sapping experience but, I tell myself, it’ll be worth it. And when I finally finish it, I hope my readers enjoy the view. 

Oh, Amazon...

I feel I should take a view on the current issue that’s bothering a lot of indie (and non-indie) authors at the moment — the Great Amazon Review Robbery. In its latest crackdown on fake reviews, Amazon has taken to removing swathes of those that it deems to be in breach of its terms and conditions, and in so doing has taken out every review ever written by a large number of book bloggers or prolific reviewers.

I have some sympathy with Amazon on this, but do think they’re going about it the wrong way. The problem is not authors reading and reviewing one another’s books, asking their friends to review a book “if you enjoyed it” or sending copies to book bloggers in return for an honest review. These practices have been going on for as long as indie publishing has been around. They’re the only way that self-published authors, who don’t have PR departments to send their books to the major Sunday review supplements and wouldn’t be listened to if they did, can get their profile raised high enough for anyone to notice them. (Because Amazon loves reviews.)

There are so many things going on here that I can’t really grasp them, and in truth no-one knows what’s going on with Amazon. It seems to me that reviews which were previously deemed acceptable no longer are, which is bad enough in itself. What’s worse is that bloggers with years of reviews behind them are losing the lot.

Quite why people are losing reviews is a weird one. One of the criteria seems to be that “too many good reviews” aren’t deemed acceptable — but many reviewers, myself included, don’t give bad reviews. In my case, there are two reasons for this. The first is because I generally only choose books I think I’m going to enjoy reading. The second is that I don’t review books I don’t enjoy because I don’t want to give a bad review. Both of those, in my view, are perfectly legitimate.

I hope the brou-ha-ha over Reviewgate will give Amazon pause, and they’ll stop and think about the implications of it. As an author I’m not someone who obsesses about reviews. I don’t count them or keep track of them, but when I checked last week I did notice that my overall review rating had dropped with no new reviews added, implying that some of my reviews have dropped off. Since then (I did take a note at that point) I’ve lost three reviews on Amazon UK and my paltry total has dwindled further.

I read a lot and I don’t review a lot. Where I do make the effort, it’s because I enjoyed a book and a review will help an indie author (the JKRs of this world don’t need my reviews: they have enough). But these seems to be the reviews that Amazon is targeting — 4* or 5* reviews by authors of other authors.

I hope Amazon sorts this out, sooner rather than later, and focuses its efforts on the people who are scamming it out of serious amounts of money, but I’m not holding my breath. I the meantime, I’ll continue to review good books by indie authors, who I may or not know, but on my blog.

Loving Miss Moonshine

I’m sad to report that my Kindle has passed away. I’ve never been at the forefront of technology but I was early on the bandwagon with e-readers, so it was one of the first generation, with all its faults and foibles. I could forgive its clunky keyboard for the freedom it gave me to read, the ease of reading in bright light and the capability to make the type larger, which must have staved off my need for reading glasses by at least five years. 

The last book I read was a goodie. Short stories, no less, by a group of northern romance authors, some of who I know personally — something which was enough of a guarantee of quality. Miss Moonshine's Emporium of Happy Endings (subtitle: A feel-good collection of heartwarming stories) was just what I needed to help me wind down on holiday. 

The underlying premise is the mysterious and eccentric Miss Moonshine, who keeps a shop full of bric-a-brac in a Yorkshire town. Each story focuses on a different character and in each, Miss Moonshine’s intervention leads to a happy ending. All the authors know exactly what their readers are after and all of them write beautifully. Each individual tale was a joy. 

I should say that, while I loved the concept, I’d have liked a little more variation in the stories. A lot of them felt a little bit samey — girl down on her luck buys or is given something from Miss Moonshine’s shop and the happy ending ensues. The first two stories are historical — one Regency, one suffragette — but the remainder are all contemporary, which I felt left it slightly unbalanced. And it would have been good to have found a little variation in content, too. The last story makes reference to happy endings other than romance, such as a criminal being brought to justice, and one or two of those might have made the whole thing more, rather than very slightly less, than the sum of its parts. 

But that’s me being pernickety. As I’ve said before, they’re all beautifully written and some of them made me laugh out loud. Miss Moonshine runs as a constant through the book — not easily done in a group effort — and I’d love to see more from her. 

My conclusion? If that was the last book my Kindle had to offer me, it will have died happy. 

Buy Miss Moonshine here

Disclaimer:

I am not a book blogger, so I don’t have a review policy, but here’s full disclosure.

I have a lot of author friends and reviews help them. I read and enjoy their books. I support fellow authors and in future I will try and review more books. I’ll post on my blog rather than elsewhere. 

I review when the mood takes me. I won’t leave a bad review, but if I haven’t reviewed a book it doesn’t mean I don’t like it. I buy every book I review.

Happy reading! And if you would like to help fellow authors, feel free to share my reviews. 

An Update from the Dark Side

Dark deeds among the trees...

It’s been a while since I blogged, although as always my intentions were good. But the regular updates on my crime writing…they didn’t go well, did they?

Still, here I am. It’s eight months since I stared in the mirror and realised that despite what I thought I actually am a crime writer. And believe me, a lot has happened in that time. First up, I’ve validated  myself. I applied for membership of the Crime Writers’ Association and after a review of my published works they decided that, yes, I qualified. So it’s official. Even without having written what I thought of as a crime novel I was a crime writer. 

The next step was to write the book. I chose my setting — Cumbria. I chose my protagonists — DCI Jude Satterthwaite and his-newly-arrived sergeant, Ashleigh O’Halloran. I set up their back stories — he struggling it the balance between his job and his relationships, she still trying to break free from an unhappy marriage. Then came the plot, hinging on the discovery of a child’s body after a wildfire on a Cumbrian fell. 

It was easier than I thought. It’s probably because I still thinking of myself as primarily a romance writer, so that the shackles were off. I had fun. I experimented. I tried things I’d never tried before. I played with many points of view. I made characters do things that romance readers  would never forgive them for. I broke the chains of the romance genre and left a relationship unresolved. 

Book three is set in beautiful Grasmere.

I wrote the next book, about the murder of a centenarian in an old people’s home. I sent the first one off to make its way in the world and (as you may have seen elsewhere) it found itself an agent. I planned the third book, in which a controversial and outspoken US professor outrages all and sundry and doesn’t care who she offends — until it’s too late. I have ideas for books four, five and six.  

Quite where this series will go remains to be seen. I’ve been in the writing game long enough to know that there are no certainties. But I’m enjoying the ride, and at the very least it gives me the excuse to undertake research and to post some photographs of a beautiful part of the world. 

Introducing "Wildfire"

I don’t remember the exact date that I decided to write crime, although I’d been mulling over it for  long time before I first mentioned it on my blog, back in late September. (Back in late September? That’s…less than two months ago).

I’m pleased, if rather shocked, to be able to say that I now have the first draft of the opening novel in what I hope will be a series. My enthusiasm for the project rather overwhelmed me. Not only did I rush to draft one crime novel, but I also have ideas for two or three more, and I’m pretty certain how the stories of the main characters will develop over the series, too. Although I wouldn’t count on that, because characters have a habit of surprising you.

But it’s here, in initial draft form, at least — 67,500 words of error-strewn storytelling waiting for revisions and the for the bugs in the plot to be trapped and eliminated. Wildfire introduces us to DCI Jude Satterthwaite and his team as they struggle to find the identity — and the killer — of a body discovered in the burned-out shell of a ruined building following a grass fire on the shores of scenic Haweswater.

I won’t tell you too much, because no crime novel ever survives a spoiler. But I will say that I enjoyed writing it. I enjoyed the puzzle, deciding who the killer was and how s/he committed and covered up the crime. I enjoyed the intellectual exercise of researching how homicides really are investigated and then trying to turn this into something that’s acceptable to a reader without being totally untrue to the process.

Most of all, I enjoyed creating a new cast of characters. Killers are real people, just like their victims and the people who track them down. To understand the crime you need to know the criminal. I enjoyed getting to know them all. And I hope that, one day in the not too distant future, you’ll enjoy getting to know them, too.