I thought you were someone famous

I got an email this week from Jane Finnis saying how much she enjoyed Mad About The Boy? which was nice to hear.  She used – and I burgeoned with pride – the word “Unputdownable”.  That’s fairly good coming from Jane, as her own books, A Bitter Chill, Buried Too Deep and Get Out Or Die are pretty unputdownable too.  They’re mysteries set in Roman Yorkshire (no, the Centurions don’t say “Hey up!) and her heroine, Aurelia, is definitely someone you want to spend time with.  Incidentally, doesn’t the Roman name for York sound Northern?  (As in Eee By Gum Northern.)  Eboracum.  That’s Eee-Ber-Acum. 

Anyway, I can thoroughly recommend Jane’s books.  Another book I really enjoyed this week was Frederick Forsyth’s The Afghan.   It’s a cracking thriller that reads more like a documentary than fiction. Frederick Forsyth used to be a journalist and it shows. He’s never afraid to describe the technology or how a system works by addressing the reader directly, rather than wrap it up as dialogue or as a character’s thoughts. It’s an interesting nuts-and-bolts approach, where you can more or less see the rivets.   The subject of terrorism  is important, of course, but that alone isn’t enough to keep the reader gripped, as I was.  One thing Forsyth doesn’t do, though, is Character in the literary sense, which makes you wonder about that hoary old debate about Plot V. Character.  Obviously the characters in any novel can’t be merely names, otherwise you couldn’t care less about what happens to them but if a novel is character and nothing much else, I do find it a bit slow.

  There’s been a big debate on the Golden Age mystery website this week about Dorothy L Sayers with particular reference to Gaudy Night.   It must admit I find Gaudy Night a bit heavy going (and I like DLS very much) principally because there’s so much about the characters that the story gets side-lined.   I think my favourite of all the Wimsey books is Unnatural Death.  There the plot and the characters come together and drive the story forward with tremendous pace.  Miss Climpson is an absolute delight and enormous fun to read. The timing of Unnatural Death is great – the murder has to happen at a certain time otherwise it wouldn’t work at all and the scene when Peter twigs about the new Property Act is one of my all-time favourites.  One correspondent to the Golden Age debate said the DLS was a poor writer. Well, each to their own, of course, but there’s bits of Sayers I love precisely because they’re so well written.  Miss Climpson in Strong Poison, for instance, doing table-turning to get information from the nurse is a classic scene.  What I don’t find so enjoyable in the Wimsey stories is Harriet.  She’s fine in Strong Poison but after that, she doesn’t half take over.   The interesting thing is that if I met her, I like I’d like her very much but I’d rather spend the book time with Wimsey.

On a domestic note, I’ve just cooked the Sunday dinner.  It used to be eight for lunch and now, what with Helen at University and Elspeth working most Sundays, it’s more or less always six.  It’s weird how much quieter it all is.  Food; this isn’t a Sunday lunch recipe (that was roast lamb and rosemary from the garden) but a Saturday night favourite.  It takes no time at all and tastes wonderful.  Chicken breast with cream and mustard.  Simply combine a tub of single cream with a tablespoon of wholegrain mustard, heat slowly, then pour over the cooked chicken.  If you’re counting calories (and aren’t we all after Christmas!) then try natural yoghurt which will stand in for cream in most recipes. 

Cheers,

Dolores

 

 

I thought you were someone famous...

The first proofs came through for As If By Magic this week. These are the preliminarily enquiries from the totally efficient Imogen of questions and quibbles she’s noted before the book goes to the type-setters.

It’s fiddly, nit-picking sort of work and took me a very full day to sort it all out.  The questions vary from straightforward enquiries, such as did they have luminous clocks in 1923 (Yes: they were invented by a bloke called Hammer in 1908 and had radium glow-in-the-dark paint on the dial) to clearing up when Mr Nasty Villian was actually dispatched and What’s Where and how many floors a particular building has.

When the proper proofs of  “Magic” – the ones that look more or less like the printed book arrive – that’ll be another three or four full days. This is the “invisible” bit of writing, the bit that no-one ever thinks about.

Apparently about ten percent of Britons dream of becoming an author, which means, as there’s about 61 million people in Britain, that’s 6 million, one hundred thousand people who want to write for a living. (To hear my agent, Teresa Chris, talk, you’d think most of them sent their manuscripts to her.) Six million-odd is pretty serious competition.  If you’re reading this, perhaps you’d consider becoming a sportsman or woman, a pilot, an astronaut or an events organiser, which are the other dream jobs.  Please.  Because I have a sneaking suspicion that a fair few of the 6 million-odd thinks writing involves this:

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Whereas it’s a bit more like this.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

And the money’s sooooo much better in football.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

My doctor once brightly told me that her uncle had written a book – well, he hadn’t so much written it exactly, he’d had an idea and he’d “Sent it in”.  Who to?  Where to? I questioned wildly.  Oh, to a publishers.  And then what?  Well, surely, she said, with every appearance of reason, if they liked it, they’d get someone to write it.  They had people to do that, didn’t they?

 Er… No.

I broke my toe last night, and that was the fault of Literature.  (Books; I ask you.  You can’t trust the damn things. I spend my life with them and this is the reward.) I crashed into a book left lying in the hall by a random reader, all of which, after the tumult and the shouting died, so to speak, and I’d stopped hopping about, swearing, reminded me of Young Sarah Byng.  Do you know the poem?  It’s by Hillaire Belloc and is dead funny.  The title tells you more or less what’s going to happen: “Sarah Byng, who could not read and was tossed into a thorny hedge by a Bull.”

 Sarah, on her way home across the fields, comes to where,

 “A gate securely padlocked, stood, and by its side, a piece of wood, On which was painted plain and full, BEWARE THE VERY FURIOUS BULL.  Alas!  The young illiterate, went blindly forward to her fate, And ignorantly climbed the gate!” 

Sarah gets chased by the bull and tossed into a prickly hedge.  The moral of the story is that,

“The lesson was not lost upon The child, who since has always gone a long way round to keep away From signs, whatever they may say, and leaves a padlocked gate alone.  Moreover, she has wisely grown, Confirmed in her instinctive guess, That Literature breeds distress.”

And my toe proves it.

I thought you were someone famous

It was the lady in the library who said it: I’d been asked to talk to the local reading group and God knows who they thought they were getting – J.K. Rowling or Dan Brown or, at the very least, the author of Cloud Atlas. Anyway, they got me. She adjusted her glasses and looked at me incredulously. "But I know you!" she said accusingly. "I know you by sight, anyway. I’ve seen you in Tescos." (True: - as my family, including the various dogs and cats, won’t stop eating, I have to keep shopping. Sometimes I think I’m going to get charged rent if I go in much more.) She brandished the copy of Mad About The Boy? that the library had thoughtfully provided her with. "Did you write this?" I acknowledged my guilt. She sat down, looking at me warily, as if waiting for the real Dolores Gordon-Smith to pop up. "I thought you were someone famous."

You see, the problem was, that as I write about the 1920’s, she expected someone looking like this:

 

 

 

 

or this ......



 

 

 

 

 

 

and we'd have an afternoon like this ....



 

 

 

 

.... whereas, of course, it was tea and biscuits and chat – and me. What’s more, I’d Made It All Up. Well, yes, that’s fiction for you. Ask Agatha Christie how many murders she investigated and the answer is worryingly low. Terry Pratchett has never actually been to Ankh-Morpork and C.S. Lewis never found the way through the wardrobe. (Or, at least, I don’t think he did.) The trick with fiction is not so much as to write about what you know as to know about what you write.

What I wish I could make up is better weather. To anyone basking under an Australian sun or in some Tropic clime – congratulations, you lucky beggar. Peel another grape and think of me sitting under a thick grey sky in Manchester with the rain hissing down. You can see where an imagination comes in handy!

See you again and all the best,

Dolores