Plum and Ginger Jam

I’ve been making jam this week and it’s absolutely perfect for a last-minute Christmas present.  (Another perfect last-minute present is one of my books, but I’ll leave that up to you!  As well as a Christie for Christmas what about a Haldean for the Holidays…?)

Anyway, back to jam.  I made it in the microwave, and the actual jam-boiling process was dead easy.  It needs to be left to cool down overnight, but once it has cooled, all it needs is a pretty label and there you go!  I “tweaked” a recipe for plum jam, adding some ideas of my own and the result was brilliant.  It’s got an adult, sophisticated taste with real depth to it.  (I know this sounds like dopey food talk, but it’s true!)

The whole process takes about an hour, including chopping the fruit.

Don’t double up the quantities.  If you want more, do the process twice!

To make two one pound jars of plum jam, you’ll need:

2 lbs or 1 kilo of plums.

2  lemons

1½ lbs of jam sugar

1 “finger” from a fresh ginger root



A microwave.

A food processor

2 1lb (or thereabouts) jam jars

Greaseproof/waxed paper circles to go on top of the jam



My microwave is 800 watt (E) but I’m sure any microwave will do.  For a lower wattage you might have to boil the jam for longer, but if it passes the “crinkle” test (described lower down) the jam is done.

Jam sugar is available from supermarkets.  It’s got added pectin, which makes the jam set.

Before you start, sterilise the jars.  Put a little bit of water in both jars and give them a minute or so in the microwave.  Then take them out – carefully! – and put them in a warm oven on a low temperature to dry out and warm up.  If you’re using metal lids, put them in a saucepan and boil them for a little while to sterilise.

Put two saucers in the freezer.  This is to test the jam when it’s cooked and you need two in case the first try doesn’t work

Take the stones out of the plums.  You don’t have to take the skin off but you do need to remove the stones.  Chop the plums into quarters.

Peel the “finger” of the ginger root.  I used the back of my potato peeler, but a blunt knife will do it easily.  The peel slides off and your hands smell wonderful afterwards! Chop the peeled ginger into bits and put it in the food processor.

Peel the lemons and keep the bigger bits of the rind.  Chop the lemons, take out the pips, then whiz up the lemon bits and the ginger together in the food processor.

Put all the fruit, including the lemon rinds, into the microwave (uncovered) for about 6 minutes or so to warm up and start cooking.

Add the sugar and cook, uncovered, on High for 20 to 25 minutes.

Drop a little bit of jam on one of the chilled saucers and leave it to cool for half a minute or so.  If it’s cooked, then it should crinkle and stay separate when you run your finger through it.  Do be careful – boiling jam is very, very hot.  If it’s not done, give it a few more minutes.

Then fill up the warmed jars, discarding the lemon rinds.  Put the paper circles on the top, put the sterilised lids on and turn the jars upside-down for a minute to help the seal along.  Then turn them the right way up and leave them to cool where no one can touch them, as they will be very hot.    If you’re lucky, there’ll be some left over, so put it in a dish, leave it to set, make some toast and enjoy it!

I labelled my jars, packed them in a decorated box on a nest of hay, and they look terrific.  Happy Christmas, everyone!

Off The Record

If you'd like to know more about what lies behind the story of my latest book, OFF THE RECORD, I'm delighted to say that my good friend, Jane Finnis, has invited me as her guest on her blog today to talk about the story behind the story.  Go to www.janefinnis.com

While you're there, do take a look at Jane's books, too.  They're an excellent series of mysteries set in Ancient Roman Yorkshire.  The background is terrific and the stories are gripping. The heroine of all three books, Aurelia, is someone you'll enjoy spending time with.

The picture, by the way, is one I love, depicting  just how attractive and warm those early Radio Days of the world of OFF THE RECORD were.  It's amazing how deceptive a picture can be....

Rudolf Buns And Seeds

You’re looking at a Rudolf bun.  I made about three dozen of them for our church Christmas Fair yesterday and – I’m glad to say – every one of them found a youthful owner!  As you can see, Rudolf has the requisite red nose, which is either due to severe cold (it’s parky up in Finland) or (and this is, perhaps, the reason for Rudolf being shunned by his fellow reindeer) he’s been a bit too free with the Christmas drinks.  Either way, old Rudy makes a very nice bun.

The antlers are made out of toffee. The antlers were bigger, but my Dad dropped the bun and poor old Rudolf suffered a bit. If I was making more Rudolf buns, and especially in the industrial quantities I churned them out, I think I’d use chocolate mint sticks, as the antlers were easily the hardest part. I know reindeers shed their antlers, but , even without Dad's help, Rudy did it a bit too enthusiastically for my liking!  Daughter Jessica roped herself in a fellow deer herdsman and she ran a sort of reindeer antler production line, as I melted the toffee in the microwave and she made antler shapes on a glass worktop with a wooden spatula.

Melting toffee in the microwave is dead easy.  A few toffees melt down in about 30 seconds or so, but put them in a glass Pyrex dish. I melted the bottom out of my plastic bowl very early on in the proceedings!

Still, it was all in a good cause.  I like the Christmas Fair.  It used to be called a Sale of Work years ago, which sounds a bit more earnest than a “fair” but it was always good fun, in that way things are fun when people have genuinely put some effort into things.   I and my friend Liz once starred as Santa’s fairies!  There’s still plenty of home-made stuff to buy, amongst the donations of unwanted gift, old books, DVD's and CD's, such as puddings, cakes and jams but the real money-spinners are the raffles and tombolas, of course.  One cert of a money maker is the whisky raffle, where a ticket is drawn when 20 tickets are sold.  Each ticket costs a pound, the whisky (bought wholesale) is about £10 or £11 a bottle, so that’s about 10 quid profit, there’s a good chance of winning and everyone’s happy!

It’s also a chance to catch up with old friends.  Joe was there, who I haven’t seen for a time.  He’s getting on a bit and has recently been in hospital.  He regaled everyone who would listen, as people are apt to do, with waaaay too much detail about having a camera inserted where the sun doesn't shine and the problems therein.  The trouble is, he’s been eating Healthy Bread.   You know the type – it’s organic and wholemeal and full of seeds.  The doctor operating the camera didn’t like the seeds.  The seeds were still all too visible and obscured the lens.  “All I can see,” said the doctor in reproof, “are seeds.”

“Never mind the seeds,” said Joe.  “Have you found the budgie yet?”

More Harry Potter (with Star Wars relish)

As assiduous readers will know. I went to see the new Harry Potter film last week.  My pal Jane Finnis added a comment to the post which you can see by clicking on “comments”.  Read it? Go on, click on the comments.  Done it?  Fine.  You’ll understand what I’m talking about then.

I must admit that I’ve got a lot of sympathy with Jane’s point of view. There’s always a resistance when the world queues up and tells you absolutely positively without stopping that you have to see/read/buy/go to whatever it is NOW!

It’s that vague resentment of   being bossed about, I think. That  and a innate distrust of propaganda.  Surely, one reflects, I’ve lived this long without absolutely positively without stopping  seeing/reading/buying/going to this life-changing TV programme/film/book/chocolate fire-lighter/amazing gig.  How difficult is it not to continue just doing it?  Besides that, there’s a certain imperious in some sorts of advertising that just puts my back up.  EAT! says the banner of a chain of sandwich shops.  To which, being contrary, I always think, “No, dammit, I won’t.  So there.”

I remember when the first Star Wars film came out.  The hype in Britain was like nothing we’d ever experienced before.  We were bombarded with endless magazine articles, pictures and little plastic models.  It was more like being in on the birth of a new religion than merely a new film coming out.  It was so over the top that a new top had to be invented for it to go over.  I wasn’t that fussed about seeing the film but went along with a group of science-fictioney friends to The Empire, Leicester Square.

And wow.  Believe you me, when the utterly vast space cruiser flew overhead on the big screen and vanished into the back row, somewhere far above our heads, I was totally hooked.  Seeing Star Wars really was more than just seeing another film, no matter how good it was.  It suddenly made you free of a whole new raft of shared cultural references.  A grim boss could be referred to as Darth Vader, if you waited too long to be served in a bar, you could do the Jedi Mind trick (or pretend to, at any rate – how cool would the real thing be!) and say, “Use the Force, Luke!” and everyone would get the reference and laugh. Now, of course, those references are completely embedded. When Radio Four launched a new show which  asked celebs to try a new activity, it was called, without explanation, “I’ve never seen Star Wars”.

That’s what Harry Potter’s like.  When Peter Mandeleson was first sacked from the government (yes, he’s been back and forward ever such a lot of times since!) MP’s in the House of Commons dining-room were heard to rejoice that Voldemort had gone.  If you want to phone someone and can’t get through, it’s fairly commonplace to say you’ll “Send an owl” and everyone knows that we’re technically Muggles.

But… Star Wars was a mega budget film with jaw-dropping special effects. Harry Potter is (just) a book. (Books, I know but don’t quibble.)  And books, pre Harry, were on the way out.  Children, in particular, were thought to have given up on reading, dazzled by the sirens of computer games and TV.  By and large, children's books were about Issues or cartoon-types that talked endlessly about lavatories because toilets (apparently) made kids laugh. Grave academic studies told us that the attention span of the average child had dwindled to slightly less than that of a mentally defective mosquito and words on a page were just boring, innit?  I mean, like, they don’t move or nuffin.  I have, as I’ve mentioned before, there are five junior Gordon-Smiths.  On those golden weekends when a new Harry Potter book was published, the house was deathly quiet, full of five intensely reading children.  Well done, Harry.

Harry Potter

In common with most of the world I went to see the new Harry Potter film at the weekend.  Wow.  It looks fantastic and the acting is brilliant.  It’s hard to pick out the best bits, as it moves like greased lightning and is totally absorbing, but the part when the great snake, Nagini, hurls herself at the audience is a real shocker, then there’s the sheer look of the Ministry of Magic (black, shining and threatening) Snape walking confidently through iron gates which turn to smoke, and the heart-stopping chase as Voldemort and his Deatheaters chase Harry and Hagrid as they escape from Privet Drive.

The story of the Three Brothers where the Hallows come into the story is beautifully done, in a sort of Eastern European paper-cut-out cartoon.  It’s exactly right for that fairy-tale atmosphere.  However, one of the terrific bits of the book is when, after having heard the tale of the legendary Hallows, Harry, Ron and Hermione realise they actually have one of the hallows themselves, the Invisibility Cloak which Harry had owned ever since his first year at school.  The sadness of Luna’s disappearance and the mounting tension and sheer creepiness of her unexplained absence is missing from the film too.  However, you can’t have everything and there’s always the book to re-read.

Speaking of which, I’m sure someone somewhere (perhaps quite a lots of someones somewhere) will be grumbling about the amount of knowledge you have to bring to the film.  Well, yes you do.  If you’ve been living in a box for the last few years and have never heard of Harry Potter, don’t begin here!  It’ll be fairly baffling, so go back to the beginning and read/watch the Philosopher’s Stone.

It’s always hard, with such a well-loved book, to translate it to the screen, as you necessarily miss out on a great deal of the subtlety that makes the book so rewarding.  By and large, less is more, but with Harry Potter, more is actually more. The Deathly Hallows is a long book but you need that many words to make the world live.

And isn’t it interesting?  A book is so personal.  It’s one person with their imagination and a keyboard, conjuring up a world that will take hundreds of people to bring to life on the screen.

Having read and loved the book, it’s really hard to come away from the cinema when the story’s half-told.  I really wanted to carry on, to see the ending.  I was only glad I knew what happened!  Incidentally, if anyone wants to have a master-class in how to write action, read the battle of Hogwarts at the end of the Deathly Hallows.  Action is where film comes into it’s own, of course.  It’s far easier to see a punch than write about it, to show an explosion that to describe it and to keep action going over pages is really hard.  (I know!  Believe me, I know!)  But JK Rowling does it superbly well, so it’s an edge-of-your-seat read that simply keeps on going.

So book or film?  Ah, c’mon, do we really have to choose?  After all, we’ve got both to love!

Off The Record

My big news of the week is that my new book, Off The Record, is out.  My word, it looks good!  And, if you go onto the Books page of the website (use the neat little toolbar at the top) you can see it too.  And, should you fancy it, you can read the first chapter, as well.

It’s called Off The Record because I like bad puns.  Well, I think they’re good puns actually, but the family don’t agree.  Poor old Lucy lost the heel off her boot yesterday and was subjected to about five minutes incessant merriment to the tune of she might not have a heel, but she’s got sole, she’d put her foot in it, etcetera, etcetera.  Anyway, the pun in the title of Off The Record is because the story is woven round the hunt for a workable electrical sound-recording system in the early 1920’s, or, to put it another way, how to make a better gramophone.

Not only do I invent a better gramophone, I invent, with a wave of the pen (or computer keyboard) – this is like Grand Designs only cheaper - an entire Ideal Factory and Ideal Village run by the philanthropist, Charles Otterbourne, who manufactures record-players and, as you’d expect in any story that's got Jack in it, there’s some very rum goings-on in Mr Otterbourne’s life.

I really enjoyed dreaming up Mr Otterbourne’s Ideal Village (it’s all in chapter one – you can read this bit on the Books Page!).  My Dad grew up in the 1930’s in Welwyn Garden City, a new town built by one Ebenezer Howard in the 1920’s, and my Ideal Village is a version of Welwyn.  I know it’s difficult to think of someone called Ebenezer as having the milk of human kindness sloshing around inside him (he sounds like a grasping miser out of Dickens)  but Ebenezer sounds OK.  He had the radical idea that working people might like houses with bathrooms (gasp!) and gardens (double gasp!) and – now he was really spoiling folk – enough space.  This is when the average working class household lived squashed together in a sort of brick-built shed with a shared outdoor loo and a tin bath hung up in the yard.  To add to the idyll, my Granny kept chickens and had an apple tree.  He didn’t like the Demon Drink, though, did old Ebenezer, and every Sunday morning was marked by a procession of men strolling out of Paradise in search of a pub.

One other little nugget in Off The Record (and there are many, believe you me!) is the word Otorhinolaryngological. Can you credit it?  Don’t bother looking in the Oxford English Dictionary, because it’s not there.  It is, however, in the 1911 edition of the Encyclopaedia Britannica as a footnote to the article on soundwaves.  I giggled myself stupid when I came across that and just had to get it in.  In amongst the Ideal Homes, gramophones and unpronounceable words there’s an awful lot of skulduggery, corpses and impenetrable mysteries and poor old Jack (who has a chance to wear full evening dress – soooo mega cool!) has to do some serious brainwork, to say nothing of falling off the odd roof, before it all becomes clear and order is restored.

Newsflash!  Beth Kanell of Kingdom Books, Vermont (which is a long way from Welwyn Garden City!) emailed me to say that Off The Record features in the USA Library Journal under the title of What’s Hot For Spring 2011. (The American publication date for Off The Record is March 2011) Here’s the link.

http://blog.libraryjournal.com/prepubalert/2010/10/25/what-else-is-hot-spring-2011-mystery

If, however, you’re reading this in the Land Of The Free or elsewhere in the world than Britain and fancy getting hold of a copy of Off The Record now (and why not?) you could try The Book Depository, www.bookdepository.co.uk who have free postage worldwide.  There’s Amazon, too, of course, or you could demand it from the library (go on! Be imperious and demand it!) or, as they say, all good bookshops.

Kindle a row

Incidentally, there’s a huge row going on at the moment with Amazon’s Kindle, because publishers have upped the price of ebooks to the same price as the paper book.  This surely can’t be right.  A paper book is a real thing, an actual object, that needs no technology apart from a pair of eyes to read, and (perhaps) has some re-sale value.

However, not to be unduly lacking in commercial sense, can I point you in the direction of my ebook, Frankie’s Letter?  As I uploaded it to Amazon myself, I was able to choose the price (low! A bargain! Stunning value!) and, which was really nice, had total editorial control.  If you fancy taking a look, there’s a link to the first chapter on the “Books” page of this website which is totally free.

Bonfire Night

I watched an episode of Modern Family during the week (which was very funny) where the various characters all celebrated Halloween in their own way.  But, wow, the trouble they went to!

As anyone in Britain knows, Halloween has really taken off in recent years. A lot of people grumble in newspapers and magazines that we’re all slavishly following the Americans, where Halloween has always been big news. I know for a long time it always struck a faintly exotic note when various American TV shows – The Simpsons for instance – always had such a carry-on about Halloween.   When I was a kid, Halloween hardly impinged on our consciousness.  I remember bobbing for apples one year, but that was about it.  The dressing-up part, which we would have embraced enthusiastically, didn’t occur.  No, our big event – and it was massive – was Bonfire Night.

From September onwards, the 5^th of November dominated our thoughts.  We spent hours (literally) logging.  That meant going into the local woods and lugging back whatever fallen branches we could carry. Nature only provides so much, however – particularly as a load of other kids are also on the hunt – so we also knocking on doors, asking for wood for “The Bunty”.  (I don’t know why a bonfire was called a Bunty but it was.)  The bonfire was built up on the waste ground at the back of my friend Anne’s house where it was a tremendous source of pride.  Adults from the neighbouring houses would look with pride at our bonfire, and it was a rare Dad or older brother who didn’t want to be in on the construction.  They’d stand round in a manly way, discussing how the Bunty would burn.  We children had to make the guy, however, which was a collection of old rags in vaguely human shape.  Although we were mostly Catholics, I can’t remember ever being aware of a religious connotation, as we consigned poor old Guy Fawkes to the flames.

Bonfire Night means, of course, fireworks.  Now fireworks are expensive.  In this day and age, they simply get bought by parents (I’ve bought plenty of fireworks for the family) but way back then – this is in Northern England – the way to get fireworks was by a process known as cob-coaling.  Don’t ask me where the name comes from because I haven’t the faintest idea!  However, it was akin to Trick or Treating because it involved knocking on doors and then, when the grumbling householder answered, launching into cob-coaling songs.  I suppose, in a way, it was more like carol-singing than trick or treating. Now I can’t honestly say these were priceless gems of folk-poetry.  For instance;

Tramp, tramp, tramp, the boys are marching.  Who’s that knocking at the door? It’s little Mary-Anne with a candle in her hand and she’s going down the cellar for some coal-coal-coal.

The songs were handed down, in that mysterious way true folklore has, from one generation to another.  No parents were involved in this process!  Cob-coaling has more or less died out now, to be replaced by Trick or Treating.  Why?

Well, bonfires, as such, are more or less confined to public events now.  The back of a pub, the back of a scout hut, say, will host a bonfire together with traditional food such as meat-and-potato pie, parkin (a rich, treaclely, gingerery cake) roasted apples and potatoes roasted in the bonfire.  Nowadays these are usually wrapped in foil and look fairly edible, unlike the charred lumps we used to retrieve from the embers!  Safety has played a big part in moving bonfires from a private to an organised event, but, more than that, I think it’s the lack of waste ground. Common spaces at the back of houses have been turned into gardens and car-parks and Hitler’s attempts at the urban reorganization of Britain (ie bombsites) have been filled in, grassed over and built on.  It’s all much nicer, cleaner and better organised, but it’s hard not to feel a nostalgic twinge that the big shared private children’s secret of bonfire night is no more.

Halloween Party

I’m writing this on October 31st to the sound of fireworks and between the doorbell ringing with Trick or Treaters. I think it’s great, that at such a dismal time of year, there should suddenly be so many reasons to be outdoors. The Trick or Treaters I particularly like. They aren’t a nuisance, but simply little kids dressed up and usually shepherded by a parent. I think they look terrific! Lucy, who’s part of a Youth Library team, co-hosted a – get this – Rave From The Grave at the local library. That’s apple-bobbing, spooky stories, kids in various costumes with skulls, lots of sweets, a spooky quiz and a tour of the library cellars. If this had been a episode of Buffy The Vampire Slayer something would have happened in those cellars, but, in fact, everyone just went home at the end of the evening. There are many, many Halloween parties in fiction, but most of them seem to be American. One English Halloween party where things didn’t go according to plan (or did they? Cue sound effects: NA,NA, NA…..) is Agatha Christie’s Halloween Party where, of course, there’s a murder. The list of games she give for Halloween is interesting. There’s apple-bobbing, of course, cutting sixpence off a tumblerful of flour (a sort of homemade Jenga) and seeing your True Love’s face in a mirror. So far, so much fun, even if you end up a bit damp from the apple-bobbing. And then there’s Snapdragon. This last sounds to me as if it’s lucky the party-goers got away with a mere murder. Multiple burns and legalised arson sound the least you can expect. As AC describes it, there’s raisins burnt with brandy in a great dish and the idea is to pick one out. I ask you. Has anyone actually tried this so-called game? You might as well declare we’re going play at Nero Versus The Christians. I’m all for folklore and traditional pursuits, but I do draw the line at watching the old home go up in smoke because some kid wants a raisin. My own family essayed forth to various Halloween parties dressed up in various guises. I didn’t actually see Elspeth, as she’s in Glasgow (at Uni) but had a long discussion with her on the phone about the best way of attaching a (plastic) knife so it looked as if it had been stabbed through the heart. Jenny went for Zombies, but, predictably enough, the sort of Project Runway, Tyra Banks stylish sort of Zombie, Jessica had nifty black ears and a tail as Catwoman (as if there aren’t enough cats in the house already) Helen, home for the weekend, was a snow-leopard print Cavewoman, with matching Cavewoman handbag and accessories and Lucy was invited to a Masked Ball. I mean, gosh, talk about style! Gold dress, gold shoes and gold and white Venetian mask. Peter and I stayed home and watched TV. Sometimes life just isn’t fair….

Writers' Workshop

I tried something a bit different this week.  I’ve given talks in the local libraries a few times and they’ve always been very pleasant.  The usual format is that a reading group get together, having read one of more of my books, then I tootle along, talk about what goes into the writing of the opus in question, answer some questions and we all have a cup of tea and a couple of biscuits.  The last talk I did for a library was especially good, because Jane Finnis, who writes an excellent series of murder mysteries set in Ancient Roman Yorkshire, was there and we did the talk together.  However, the talk I gave this week was a little bit different…

The challenge was that, although it was sponsored by a local library, it was open to everyone and I couldn’t rely on any reading-group stalwarts to be there.  The other challenge (problem?  nightmare?) was that I had one and a half hours to fill.  Oh, geez.  I mean, I can rattle on about my books for quite a long time, but an hour and a half? I don’t think so.

So what, short of developing a severe case of Parson’s Throat or emigrating to Brazil, could I do?  The answer, when I thought of it, really appealed to me; let the audience do the work. A writers’ workshop, in fact.  Yup, that’s the trick.

At the start of the session I asked everyone to listen pretty carefully because they were going to have to turn into writers too.  Then I tackled the old chestnut of a question, the one that’s always asked;  “Where do you get your ideas from?”

For some reason – I never been able to figure out why – a lot of writers don’t like this one.  But surely, it’s a perfectly sensible question?  I mean, something has to start the process.  What, exactly?  Well, I imagine there’s a lot of different answers, but what works for me is to find an intriguing situation, something that tugs at my imagination.  How did the situation come about?  Who’s involved?  What happens next?  Those are all questions that send threads out, that lead onto the rest of the story.  My favourite example from my own books is the opening of As If By Magic (if you go onto the books page of this website and click on Magic, it’ll take you to the first chapter.  (Then, of course, maddened by curiosity, you’ll simply have to read the book!)

After talking about ideas for a while, everyone wrote an ambition they had on a scrap of paper, folded it up, and put it into a hat.  Then, just like raffle tickets, the papers were mixed up and everyone drew out an ambition.  They then chose a picture from a collection of photographs I’d brought with me.  The photos were a varied bunch – a ruined house, a railway station, a busy market, children playing, old houses etc.  This is taking a real shortcut to “Where do ideas come from” you see.  After all, if we simply waited for inspiration to strike, we’d probably still be there!

Then, armed with pictures and the “Ambition” everyone sat down to write the first few lines of a poem or short story.  People worked in pairs – it was a fun exercise after all – but what surprised me was that everyone, from a really mixed bunch of people,  flung themselves into it and really wanted to write.  The various pairs came and read their pieces at the end of the session and everyone got (of course) a round of applause and, from what was said, a great deal of satisfaction.  Result!

How’s your Ancient Egyptian?

Last Saturday Jenny, my techno-whizz 16 year-old, and myself hosted a Quiz Night at the local tennis club.

The tennis club is a bit of a family affair as my Dad (who clocks in at the grand age of 88) is the treasurer and, over the years, all the junior Gordon-Smiths have been to the Saturday morning tennis lessons.  Jenny’s techno-wizardry came into its own as, thanks to her, we were able to play a round of Historical Voices, recorded from t’internet.  It’s interesting see people’s faces; you announce that we’re going to hear recordings from the past and everyone looks apprehensive and slightly glum.  Play a bit of Winston Churchill (“This was their finest hour”) and a clip of the 1966 World Cup Final (“They think it’s all over – it is now!”) spiced up with Apollo 13 (“Huston, we’ve got a problem”) and John (“You cannot be serious!”) McEnroe carrying on and everyone starts laughing again.  The trick to having a successful quiz, I think, is to think about the questions so everyone there can have a stab at answering most of them.  In order to get a winner, ask subsidiary questions, such as “What year is it?” and so on.  One round was "Missing Worlds".  The idea is to read three words, all of which can be prefaced by another word to make a new word.  For example, Wall, Brigade and Ball can be prefaced by "Fire".

See how you do with these.  Answers at the bottom of the page!

Ship

Yard

Martial

Room

Take

Bill

Fishing

Blown

Paper

Land

Spring

Sail

And, if you’re in the quiz mood, here’s some questions.  Again, answers are at the bottom of the page.

1) What sport am I describing? The competition is a timed race and the fastest wins.

The competitors start their race from a single point but have different finishing lines.

Races are generally between 62 and 621 miles but in the United States races of up to 1,118 miles have been recorded.

During the race, the competitors face the real danger of death from being attacked by wild predators.

To compete in a race, the competitor must wear a permanent, unique numbered ring or band that is attached to their leg when they are about 5 days old.

2)   To the nearest thousand (!) how many islands make up Great Britain?  This does not include Ireland.

3)   What was the Ancient Egyptian word for cat?  (Go on!  Have a guess!)

Answers:

Missing Words:  1)Court  2) Double  3) Fly  4)Main

General Knowledge:  1) Pigeon Racing   2) 6,000. Great Britain (England, Scotland and Wales) has a total 6,289 islands, mostly in Scotland. Of these, 803 are large enough to have been 'digitised' with a coastline by map-makers.   3) The Egyptian hieroglyphics spell out the syllables Mee-ee-ow!

Real Life?

Somewhere on the internet this week, my email pal, the author Donna Fletcher Crow (find her at her website Deeds of Darkness, Deeds OF Light) raised the question of real life as an inspiration for fiction.  It’s an interesting question, as it seems to be self-evident that real life has to be a powerful resource.  After all, if, on the cover of a book,  you read “Based on a true story”  then it’s a real selling  point.  But….

Agatha Christie, in her introduction to The Body In The Library wrote:  “Staying one summer for a few days at a fashionable hotel by the seaside I observed a family at one of the tables in the dining-room; an elderly man, a cripple, in a wheeled chair, and with him was a family party of a younger generation.  Fortunately they left the next day so that my imagination could get to work unhampered by any kind of knowledge.  When people ask “Do you put real people in your books?” the answer is that, for me, it is quite impossible to write about anyone I know, or have ever spoken to, or indeed have even heard about!  For some reason it kills them for me stone dead.”

And d’you know, I know exactly what she means.  When Agatha Christie, or anyone else for that matter – including me - is constructing a tightly plotted book, it can seem a mechanical exercise.  X bumps off Y and Z comes along and uncovers the dark deed.  Then, off course, you’ve got the Red Herrings – let’s call them A,B and C – to add pleasant confusion to the outcome.  Naturally, no one wants to read (or write!) about letters of the alphabet, so X and Y and all the others have to acquire personalities.   But they have to be a particular sort of personality.   That shy, mousey girl with an intense nature has to be capable of being so intense that, given the right motivation, she can be a credible murderer.  That jolly friend-to–the world, cheerful Uncle Charlie, has to show the odd flash of temper or meanness to make us accept that he, too, could embrace crime.  These personalities aren’t simply bolted on but spring from the plot.  What sort of person, to put it another way, would do this sort of thing? That way, with plot and characters working together, the book  becomes a unified whole.  And, because the book has to hang together, extraneous  bits have to be edited out.  If a character has a deep interest in chemistry, say, or mediaeval needlework, then that had better come into the plot somehow or the reader will feel a real let-down.  Now real people have all sorts of random interests and various quirks that makes them them.  Also – I hope! – the vast majority of the people we know well  aren’t actually capable of slipping arsenic in the tea or sawing through the axle of a car.   And that’s why raw real life isn’t much help to a dedicated detective-story plotter.  Real life is far too untidy and doesn’t stack up.  Fiction – an art – does.  That’s one of the reasons why it’s so enjoyable to read!

Eighteen With A Custard Cream

It was my daughter Lucy’s eighteenth birthday this week.  I’m sure this will seem familiar to many mums, but when the dickens did little Lucy get to be 18?  I’m sure she wasn’t anything like that age last time I looked.  However, there it was.  And Lucy (with some justification) thought that steps should be taken to celebrate.  The trouble was that two of her friends were also 18 last week and the prime time slot of Saturday night had been taken, as was Friday, so that pushed us back to Thursday.

It went like a dream.  There’s something to be said for being the first in the line of the party-givers, because everyone is fresh and ready for it, whereas come Saturday night, a certain amount of party-droop has set in.

There’s more to giving a party than meets the eye.  You have to hire a room, hire a DJ and – of course – decorate the place.  We covered the tables with blue paper with gold stars, which looked nice, had blue and gold helium balloons and lots of decorations saying 18!!!  That, plus the disco lights, made it look great.  And, of course, there was the cake.  For as long as anyone can remember, Lucy’s favourite biscuit has been custard creams.  She can consume vast amounts of them (without putting on any extra pounds as far as I can make out) so, when it came to a theme for her cake, there was only one real candidate.

Enter the Custard Cream…



It was about two feet by eighteen (how appropriate!) inches and was a real hit.  It’s not really a big biscuit.  All the decoration was laboriously shaped out of icing and put on by yours truly.  It took hours. Was it worth it?  Of course it was.

And then there were the pizzas.  It’s a waste of time doing a “proper” buffet for a teenagers’ party.  Everyone’s dancing and far too busy to eat, but pizzas sounded like a good idea. So I ordered pizzas from the local take-away.  Now let me see… About 60 teenagers equals about 30 pizzas plus 20 pizza-sized garlic breads.  That’s about right, isn’t it?  Er, no.  Have you any idea how much room 50 pizza boxes takes up? As yet more pizza boxes arrived, I felt like Mickey Mouse in Fantasia doing the Sorcerer’s Apprentice.  You know, when he casts the spell and all the brushes and buckets come to life and he can’t turn it off.  Pizzas! shouted everyone enthusiastically and proceeded to ignore them in order to get on with dancing.  At the end of the evening, I stood by the door, giving them out like party bags.  Apparently there were a lot of teenagers eating pizza next day in college.  One of these days they’ll work out how to eat at the party but that’s when sober middle age strikes.  Hopefully that’s a long way off.  I’m still getting over the fact she’s eighteen.

Seeing the Pope

Jenny and Lucy went to see the Pope, which isn’t something you do every week.  I had to get them to the school gates for two in the morning (again, not something that I do often) for them to get down to Twickenham on the coach in time for the Big Assembly, as the mass-meeting with school-children and various educators was called.  It all went tickety-boo, apparently, and they’ve got various bags and books and little flags as mementoes.

We’ve all seen the Pope before, in what you might call his natural habitat of St Peter’s Square.  It was Easter Sunday morning, a couple of years ago and we’d gone on a coach trip to Italy.  (Leger Coaches; highly recommended.)  Spring in Italy! I said, selling the idea like mad to my nearest and dearest.  Goodness knows what I thought it’d be like – sort of springlike, I suppose – and waxed as lyrical as a tourist brochure.  Manchester to Rome? queried the partner of my joys and sorrows.  Isn’t that a bit of a long journey?  We’ll love it, I assured him.  Won’t it be interesting to actually drive through Europe.

Well, we were both right.  Blimey, Rome’s so far away, I don’t know how the Ancient Romans, who seem to pop up everywhere, every made it, let alone stroll round Britain as if they owned the place.  And they didn’t have coaches. Mind you, the weather in Ancient Mamucium must have made them feel at home.  I’ve never encountered so much rain in all my born days as we did in Italy in the spring.  It was like being underwater.  Molto agitato said the weatherman on the Italian TV.  (We nicknamed him Colonel Weather because, oddly to our eyes, he was dressed up in full air force uniform with a moustache Hercule Poirot would have a hissy fit over.)  Anyway, it molto agitatioed and then some.

Now, the thing about coach trips is that you chum up with the other passengers and one girl, Charlotte, we got on with like a house on fire.  Charlotte was Jewish and quickly cottoned on to the fact we were Catholics.  At this point, the fairly glamorous thirty-year old Charlotte turned into my mother.   “You must,” she said, organizing the Gordon-Smiths, “see the pope. You can’t come to Rome and not see the Pope.  You must,” she said firmly, “be longing to see the Pope.”  Well, I wasn’t conscious of longing exactly, but there we were on Easter Sunday morning in the huge crowds outside St Peter’s Square and there, in the very far distance, was the Pope.

Charlotte was thrilled.  As the rain beat down, all the Gordon-Smiths got wetter and wetter and our thoughts turned fondly in the direction of a café.  Coffee. Tea. Food.  Not raining.  So, much to Charlotte’s horror, we upped sticks and beetled off.  She scurried after us, a drenched but determined Jewish mentor, reminding us of our religious duties.  “At the very least,” she said, sounding more like my mother than ever,“you must go to Mass.”  So, we Charlotte behind, encouraging us on, she ushered us into a church and, duty done, we found a café. There, on a television screen, was coverage of the ceremony still proceeding a few hundred yards away, under a haze of water, with depressed blokes in wet hats with wet feathers in them were gathered round a wet Pope.  “I told you,” said Charlotte, pointing to the TV screen in triumph, “that you had to see the Pope.”  Cup of delicious Italian coffee in hand, I thought it was a pretty good compromise.

Home-made Chutney

Autumn, I’m afraid, is a coming in, as a medieval poet might say.  Or, as Keats phrased it, “Season of mists and mellow fruitfulness, close-bosomed friend of the maturing sun.”  I admit you’d have to look pretty damn hard to see any sun in Manchester recently – the mist element has been stressed rather a lot, also the pelting rain – but it did dry up long enough last weekend to let me pick the apples.

We’ve got two smallish apple trees, a Worcester Pearmain and a Granny Smiths and both trees have produced a bumper crop.

So what on earth do you do with zillions of apples?  Eat them, yes, I’d got as far as that myself, but there’s a limit to how many apples even a family our size can munch through.  So I turned to chutney.

Wow.  It’s gorgeous.  There’s something about home-made chutney that knocks any other sort of pickle into a cocked hat.  What you should do, according to the recipe, is leave the chutney in a cool dark cupboard for two to three months (and if that’s not handy for Christmas, I don’t know what is.)  The trouble is, it tastes so fantastic, we’ve been through two jars already, and, as it’s just crying out for a knock-your-socks-off cheddar to go with it, it’s not doing my diet any good.

Here’s the recipe if you want to give it a go.

1 pound of onions

4 pounds of apples

8 ounces of dried fruit

1 ounce of ginger

1 ounce of paprika

1 ounce of mixed spice

1 ounce of salt

1 and a half pounds of granulated sugar

A pint and a half of malt vinegar

Chop up the apples and the onions and put them into a big pan. The great thing about using up the apples in this way, is that you can use all the very tiny ones that will never be much good for eating.  I put them into the vinegar right away, and then they don’t start going brown and sad looking.  Add everything else, bring it to the boil and then let it simmer for three hours or so.  Give it a stir every so often.  You can tell it’s ready when it goes fairly thick and, if you draw a wooden spoon across the mixture, it leaves a channel that doesn’t immediately fill with liquid.

In the meantime, sterilize your jam-jars.  The easiest way of doing this is to put a titchy bit of cold water in the bottom and give each jar a minute in the microwave.  You’ll have to sterilize the  lids too, and the easiest way to do that is by boiling them in water for a while.  (Five minutes or so should do it.)  Then – carefully because they’re hot (der!) – put the jars in a warm oven to dry out.

Then put the chutney into the warm jars with a little greaseproof or waxed paper insert on top of the chutney.  That stops the metal in the lid reacting with the vinegar in the chutney.  Then wait two to three months… if you can!

The Importance of Being Bone Idle

Assiduous readers might have noticed (!) that I’ve recently published a book on Amazon’s Kindle.  Now, one of the ways that a basically idle writer can escape work (ie, the hard stuff where you sit down and actually make the stuff up) is by dickering about on a computer.  You know the sort of thing:  read the emails, reply to the emails, read all the emails on any lists you subscribe to (Crime Through Time and DorothyL in my case) reply to same, check the lyrics on Google of that song that you can’t place, and – and this is a real trap – check your ratings on Amazon.  Geesh, that takes time!  I can’t tell you how long you can nosy round Amazon, gently reassuring yourself it’s sort of work.  This is the sort of inner dialogue that goes on.

CONSCIENCE:         Well, here we are, bright and early, ready to start work, yes?

SELF:                          Let me just see what the rest of the world is up to, yes?

CONSCIENCE:         You could do some work first.

SELF:                          Whimper!  What if the editor’s emailed?  I can’t miss that, can I?

CONSCIENCE:            Okay, just check.  See?  There’s nothing there that can’t wait.

SELF:                          But… But… I need to see if anyone’s left a review on Amazon. (BRIGHTLY) I need to know about that, don’t I?

CONSCIENCE:            Do it later!

SELF:                          Now!  Want it now!  (IN DEFIANCE OF CONSCIENCE LOGS ONTO AMAZON)

CONSCIENCE:            (THWARTED, CONSCIENCE RETIRES INTO A CORNER AND SULKS.)

This is roughly the sort of thing that happens most mornings.  However, every so often, SELF scores the winning goal, so to speak.  You see, the thing about Amazon is that the ratings are updated every hour, and if some kindly-minded individual (or even small groups of same) has bought your book that’ll send your ratings soaring.  And if you don’t check your ratings NOW, as SELF would say, you’ll never know that for one brief shining moment, you’ve actually blipped on the Top Anything.  And yesterday morning, after CONSCIENCE and SELF had had their usual knock-down, drag-out fight, SELF proudly reported to CONSCIENCE that – wait for it – Frankie’s Letter was Number 76 in Kindle’s Action and Adventure category, Number 14 in Spy Stories and Tales of Intrigue (Incidentally, when was the last time you logged onto Amazon and thought, “D’you know what, I fancy a Tale of Intrigue” or, when the partner of your joys and sorrows says, “What are you reading?” reply “A Tale of Intrigue, darling.”? My other half would think I was bonkers) and Number 9 – Number 9! – in British Detectives.

SELF had a celebration.  CONSCIENCE has moodily admitted that SELF sometimes has a point.

Gone Fishin'

I suppose it started with Hugh Fearnley-Wittingstall, the floppy-haired and engaging cook and food enthusiast of TV’s River Cottage series. Week after week Hugh grows, hunts and finds ingredients for an always wonderful meal which he whips up on the beach, in a field, or on a boat in what always seems to be perfect weather with a bunch of really good mates.

In the recent series, Hugh was catching fish. He made it seem entrancing.  And the idea is, O Idle Viewer, that we couch potatoes can also pop down to Jersey for a bit of Sea Bream or up to Skye for a chance at the mackerel etc, etc.  (The episode where he ate a bit of jellyfish is not one I’m going to copy.)  But, jellyfish aside, it all looked wonderful.

And, d’you know, I’ve got a fishing rod.  To be honest, I’m not sure why.  I’ve spent various seaside holidays where we’ve succumbed to the lure of fishing trips, and then I've  been lumbered with doing something (like cleaning, scaling, gutting and cooking) to a mixed batch of finny denizens.  And, what with one thing and another, I’ve been led to reflect that seaside fish is better deep-fried and wrapped in newspaper with plenty of vinegar and a portion of chips.  But Hugh F-W made it look sooooo much fun.   “Can we,” said Helen, swivelling round from the couch where she’d potatoed, “go fishing?”

Now, there’s certain obstacles to be overcome; even the most passionate Mancunian will agree that Manchester is not lapped by the ocean waves. Or traversed by swiftly-flowing rivers (not that you’d want to eat out of, at any rate) or, indeed, the willow-fringed, grassy-banked, sparkling trout streams of my imagination.  So when I went to the local angling shop, and asked where I could go fishing, I wasn’t very surprised when the bloke behind the counter shrugged and said, “The canal.”

Oh, and I needed a rod-licence, too. And a landing-net. And bait?

Nothing, I said firmly, as he reached for the maggots, that’s minging.

Maggots are undeniably minging.

Plastic maggots, then?

Plastic maggots?

So, yeah, okay, I know it’s odd, but I spent £1.99 on a packet of plastic maggots.  They smell of pineapple which fish apparently find irresistible.  They like sweetcorn too, apparently. Where on earth do the fish get these advanced tastes from?  I can understand a fish in the Huddersfield Canal being switched on by the scent of old shopping trolleys and take-away cartons, but sweetcorn and pineapples?  Maybe they migrate…

So armed with niffy plastic maggots, sweetcorn, a rod licence, a net and a bit of hope, I stationed myself by the canal, baited the rod and waited.  Helen sat on the picnic rug and, sketch book in hand, whiled away the time until she could get busy with the landing-net.

Now before anyone wonders if they’ll shortly be called up upon to choose between flowers or a donation to charity, let me reassure you.  There is no way, ever, that I would eat anything out of that canal.  All I want to do is snare a fish, admire it, take its photograph and return it to its native element. This (see my thoughts on cleaning, scaling, gutting and cooking above) seems like a good deal to me. I’m not sure what the fish would think, but it might entertain some mordant thoughts on the nuttiness of human behaviour.

The fish tried.  They loved the sweetcorn.  They ate it off the hook and came back for more.  That rod is the most complicated way of giving a fish a healthy snack ever devised.  We re-baited the hook and tried again.  And again.  And then It Happened.  There was a massive tug at the line.  Now, there’s not just tiddlers in that canal.  There’s at least one twenty-pound pike and the way the rod bent double I could believe I’d got it.  The line must have stretched, because I reeled in and reeled in and still there was a terrific threshing in the murky waters.  “Reel it in, Mum!” yelled Helen.  “I’m doing it!” I said… And then Helen put the net in the water. Now she didn’t mean to hit the fish, but she did.  And broke the line. There was a clunk, a final tug and the fish was gone.  An irritated-looking shiny black back rose twice out of the water and that was it.  This never happened to Hugh Fearnley-Wittingstall.  Fishing on the telly is easy.

Frankie's Letter

Whisper it softly, but I think I’ve just published a book.  Yes, I know, it’s normally something anyone’s in two minds about, but this is an ebook, you see, and I’ve got nothing to hold in my hand.  You know when you go onto Amazon? Well, buried in the reviews and the ratings and all the general gubbins, there’s a bright little message saying words to the effect of, “Are you an author or publisher?  Then publish on Kindle!”

Now, I’ll be honest.  I’m not a Luddite, exactly, but I’d never really fancied ebooks all that much.  And then our Jenny celebrated her 16^th birthday with an ipad.  Wow.  I mean, seriously, wow.  It works like greased lightning and the books on it are amazing. Ebooks suddenly seemed like a really good idea.

So I thought okey-doke….  As it happens, I have a book – a book that I’m very fond of – that’s never seen the light of day. It’s called Frankie’s Letter – remember that title.  Make a note.  A note to the tune of, “Frankie’s Letter.  What an enthralling title for a book.  You know, I’d love to read a book called Frankie’s Letter.  Frankie’s Letter sounds terrific.  I wish I owned a book called Frankie’s Letter.”  Bounce up and down on the spot if you like – I’m not at all judgemental and, besides, it’ll entertain the kids and bewilder the cat.   Frankie’s Letter. It’s not a Jack Haldean but a complete new venture.  It’s a First World War spy thriller, which I thoroughly enjoyed researching and writing.  I’ve always wanted to write about the period of the First World War, but I didn’t want to write a war story as such.  The war was so immense and so shattering to the people in it, that simply telling a straight-forward war story seemed – well, irrelevant, somehow.  After all, with the world crashing round your ears, hunting out fingerprints and pondering long and hard about how deeply the parsley had sunk into the butter on a hot day or whatever seemed trivial.  I mean, I’m as fond of sunken parsley as the next person, so to speak, but the circumstances have to be right.

And then I got my big idea.  Yup, write about the war but write about the war from a distance.  I needed someone who was capable of acting on their own (as a hero who has to keep trotting off for orders is not very heroic!) who was affected by the war and, ideally, could affect the war too.  Hang on a mo.  What about a secret agent?  What indeed. And so Anthony Brooke was born.

He was and is a doctor, but, because of his fluency in German (Hey!  He’s my hero!  He can have whatever attributes that come in handy!) he gets swept up and sent of to Germany at the start of the war as an undercover agent.  All is well until another agent comes staggering into his room and, with his dying breath, tells Anthony there’s a spy in England who knows Big Stuff and, if Anthony reads Frankie’s letter, it’ll tell him all about it.  That’s the start and I think it’s pretty good, not to be overly modest about it. Anthony ends up back in Dear Old Blighty where there’s some very dodgy dealings going on, with beautiful, jewel-encrusted women, mysterious deaths, more spies (it was sort of “buy one, get one free in the spy shop” that day) grand country mansions, a spot of romance (see the jewel-encrusted woman above) and so on and so forth.  Ace.

So back to the Kindle process.  There’s a nice little message when you’ve finished uploading the book to say that for the next 48 hours your precious book is going to be “Previewed” (a sort of electronic limbo, I suppose) and then… Well, hopefully it’ll be on my Amazon page and everyone can get stuck in and start reading.  But it is odd about all this electronic stuff.  Somehow or other it’s hard to believe it’s real.  Fingers crossed.  Oh, and did I mention the title? Frankie’s Letter.

The gentle art of getting noticed

As you can see from the excited squeak of joy below about Killer Books, I was pretty pleased with things this week.  I seemed to spend so long chewing the carpet about not being published, that when it finally happened, I thought words to the effect of “Here we go!  It’s all plain sailing from now on.”  (As a matter of fact, I thought nothing nearly so coherent;  I thought, if you can dignify the process by the word “thought” “!!!@**” or perhaps “???” and even,“^&%!!” with a quick “$*&!!£!^^” thrown in for good measure.)

And, I must say, being published is a lot – so much - better than not being published but it does mean that there’s new challenges.  Publicity, for instance.  Now you know – because you’re obviously a well informed, thoughtful type of person – that my books are excellent.  Not only are they easy to read with gripping stories, they can, at a pinch, be used to prop up a wonky table, stop a sofa cushion from sagging, provide a really classy mouse mat, serve as a platform for a performing gerbil or act as a very small pillow.  However, not everyone knows that.

And that’s where publicity comes in.  When two or three writers are gathered together, it’s the subject that always crops up.  This isn’t personal, you understand.  I am typical of many and live for Art alone, but editors love sales.  It’s just altruistic kindness to them, you understand.  So what on earth, apart from shouting in the street, which will earn you nothing but censorious glances, can you do?  Well, there’s magazines, of course.  Writing Magazine is always a good bet, as they frequently carry stories about the newly-published. (I’d recommend Writing Magazine anyway as an excellent way to keep in touch with the writing world). Depending on how thin the news is,  local papers can be interested in a local author.  (Sometimes news in local papers can be very thin indeed; my favourite local paper headline is “Worksop Man Dies Of Natural Causes”). There’s local radio, too.  That’s sometimes iffy in its results, though.  I did two and a half hours once on local radio.  I thoroughly enjoyed it but I can’t say I had a huge listening public. Peter was away and my Dad, a keen tennis fan, was watching Andy Murray.  One man rang in to ask if we could stop talking and play more music and another texted to say that he hadn’t got one of the jokes.  Ah well, you can’t win ’em all…

The internet though…  For anyone of a certain age – and in this context that means anyone roughly over twenty – it’s incredible how easy it is to be in touch with someone a few thousand miles away.  When A Hundred Thousand Dragons came out, I emailed the independent bookshops in the USA to tell them about it.  The addresses are there on the internet.  Beth Kanell of Kingdom Books, Vermont, read the book and really liked it (Yo! Result!) and submitted a review to the monthly round-up of books promoted by the Independent Booksellers’ Association – and bingo!  Dragons is a Killer Book.

Killer Book Top Five!

Hey, everyone, get a load of this!   Beth Kanell, Kingdom Books, Waterford VT, http://www.kingdombks.com sent a review of A Hundred Thousand Dragons to the Independent Mystery Booksellers’ Association of America for their Killer Books monthly roundup.  Five out of over a hundred books are chosen – and Dragons is one of them! To see the Killer Books page, go to http://www.killerbooks.org.

You could have knocked me down with a very small feather!

Tote that barge...

It was Scotland for the family holiday this year.  Not all of Scotland, of course, as there is a limit to how much time you can spend enjoying yourself, but the bit between Inverness and Fort William.  Now, if you have a gander on a map, you’ll see that to get to Inverness to Fort William involves a bit of Scotland that’s even wetter than the fairly damp country which surrounds it.

It’s the Great Glen, where, a very long time ago, the top of Scotland bumped into the mainland and hung about with lots of water in the middle.  That’s Loch Ness, Loch Oich and Loch Lochy (I think whoever named Loch Lochy got bored with thinking up something different to come at the end of the word “Loch”).  The bits in between are filled in with the Caledonian Canal.

We hired a boat from Caley Cruisers, and there we were; six of us, aged from 87 (Dad) to Jenny (16) and various assorted in the middle.  The thing you’ve got to remember about hiring a boat – the really important thing to remember about hiring a boat – is that you drive the thing.  All by yourself. Yes, there’s a training film.  Yes, the bloke from the boatyard tells you what to do when you climb on board, but he gets off, you know, and  it’s your boat and you’re in Loch Ness and the wind is a bit fresh and the rain’s coming down and it’s not half choppy and should the boat be bouncing like that?

Jenny retired to lie face down on her bunk and think about life.  Elspeth ditto.  Aged parent did the crossword in the cabin, Lucy entertained herself by standing on deck saying things like, “Wow, that’s a big wave,” and Peter, skipper’s cap firmly on his head, drove the boat.  Peter, thank goodness, absolutely loved driving the boat.  Very politely, at times during the following week, he’d offer to surrender the wheel and we, just as politely, reassured him that no, it was fine, he could do it.

I’d taken a shed-load of books to read but by jingo, I needn’t have bothered.  For one thing, I didn’t have time. On a beach, you see, the scenery stays still but on a boat, especially somewhere as gorgeous as the Great Glen, the scenery keeps nipping past you.  Or vice-versa, but you know what I mean.

And then there’s the ropes. The  front and back (or, to dazzle you with technical jargon, the prow and stern)  of the boat have ropes which have to be thrown off, passed round bollards and secured back on the boat, untied, hauled in, coiled up and this happens a lot. Obviously you have to tie the boat up when settling down for the night, but going through a lock requires an awful lot of rope-handling.  (Ironically, there aren’t any locks on the Lochs but there are on the canal.)  And tote that barge?  Yup, when it’s a series of locks, the only practical way to get the boat through is to haul it.  Ol’ Man River…

Oddly enough, the scourge of Scotland – midges- didn’t bother us.  I’ve been eaten alive in Fort William before now and had stocked up with enough repellent to equip an Amazon expedition.  I think the word got round and the midges retired, knowing when they were beaten, and went to chew on someone else instead.

It stopped raining for a couple of days and the place looked like paradise.  I shed two of the four layers of clothing I was wearing and got out the fishing rod.  Ho hum.  No fish in Scotland was harmed during the making of this holiday.  I caught some pond weed, but that was about it.  The fish and chip shops, on the other hand did a roaring trade.  We didn’t encounter the weirdness of the deep-fried Mars Bar but Lucy developed a liking for chip-shop haggis and black pudding.  It resembles fried loofah or a very old depth-charge and the innards, when you dig into it, look like old-fashioned mattress flocking.  It’s as well she had it on holiday because, believe you me, that’s one thing I’m certainly not going to try at home.

The Wanderer

If you, O Assiduous Reader, look on the comments beneath last week’s blog, you’ll find an erudite little exchange between Jane Finnis and myself, where we bat lines from Anglo-Saxon poetry around.  I must say, I was pretty pleased with myself for coming up with  The Wanderer as the source of those half-forgotten lines.  It’s years since I’ve read it, but the image had stuck in my mind.

There’s been some interest in various types of Ancient Brits recently, with treasures unearthed from the Anglo-Saxons and a huge pot of Roman coins being dug up by a bloke with a metal detector and – perhaps most striking of all – the discovery that a type of human was living in the British Isles three quarters of a million years ago – in Happisburgh, Norfolk, to be precise - many thousands of years before anyone had imagined possible.

We can’t ever know what a hominin from the Early Pleistocene (as the scientists describe them) would have thought.  Maybe, “Why on earth did I move from Africa to Norfolk?”  and “This flint’s damn hard” and “Is there any mammoth left for tea?”

We do know, however, a dickens of a lot about Romans and Anglo-Saxons.  That’s because they left us, in addition to the archaeology, some striking literature.  It’s fascinating to read ancient literature because it’s the one form of time-travel that’s genuinely authentic.  The Wanderer, for instance, takes us into the mind of a man who is wandering homeless after the death of his Lord, his protector and provider for his household, in a Britain where Roman ruins are thought to be the work of giants, where wolves hunt through the crumbling cities.  The Wanderer, poor guy, is heart-broken by the loss of his Lord.  You don’t get anything about romantic love in Anglo-Saxon literature, but you do get men mourning for their companions-in-arms.  A man’s loyalty belonged to his group (I simply don’t know about women) not to his wife.  The shared hall, not the private house, is the heart of the group.

Do you remember – it used to be taught in schools at one time – how the Venerable Bede in 7 something or other, describes the insight the new teaching of Christianity brought?  Our life is, he says, like a sparrow who flies in from a bitter winter’s night, into the hall, with its feast and its fire and light and then out again, into the darkness of winter once more.  Christianity, says Bede, illuminates the darkness.  The message is clear and the depiction of the hall is unforgettable.

Like anyone who writes history, even recent history, I sometimes get asked how I go about research.  Well, for the 1920’s, I do it exactly as I would hope someone writing a novel set in the 10^th Century would; read the books.  Read about the period if you like – why not?  Read other novels set in the period – again, why not? If you’re writing about the hominins of the Early Pleistocene, you might have a few problems, but if they wrote it, read it.  To get the absolutely authentic taste of the period, you have to read what they wrote themselves.  And sometimes, as with The Wanderer, there might have a few surprises in store.

Lessons From A Gigantic Leg

If you’ve bought or borrowed a copy of my latest book, A Hundred Thousand Dragons, then, apart from earning my grateful thanks, you’ll know that printed in the front is the poem Ozymandias by Percy Bysshe Shelley.  Now, without giving too much away, the poem is there for a purpose.  I mean, it comes into the story. It’s far too much sweat for the Avid Reader to go chasing off after random pieces of poetry when reading a detective story, so I thought I’d print it in the front so, if moved to do so, the A.R. can simply flick to the front of the book.  It’s not just lugged in to give Dragons a bit of class, although I’ll have any bits of free class that are going! Just making life easier, don’t you know.  Always willing to please. All part of the service.



Ozymandias has always been a real favourite of mine.  It’s all mysterious and ancient and Egyptian in a sphinxandpyramidsandmummies sort of way, the spiritual precursor of all those hoaky old films where, having not troubled the general populace for millennia, the first thing any self-respecting mummy does on being dug up is wander around, inflicting grief on all in its path.  I can imagine the Poet Shelley punching the air, fighting off Coleridge, tripping up his mate Bryon and yelling, “Dibs on the old statue!” as he raced for his pen and muse.  Incidentally, The Poet Shelley is a phrase that cracks me up.  Jeeves often refers to The Poet Shelley as he attempts to broaden Bertie Wooster’s education.  On one occasion, Bertie, when closeted with the appallingly soppy Madeline Basset, says to her (he’s got the phrase from Jeeves) that his pal, Gussie, is “A sensitive plant”.  Madeline blinks at him and says, “You know your Shelley, Bertie.”  To which Bertie replies, “Oh? Am I?”

Anyway, back to Ozymandias.  You’d think, wouldn’t you, that with a theme as strong as that, you couldn’t go wrong.  The Poet Shelley certainly doesn’t.  Here’s his first few lines:

I met a traveller from an antique land
Who said: Two vast and trunkless legs of stone
Stand in the desert. Near them, on the sand,
Half sunk, a shattered visage lies, whose frown
And wrinkled lip, and sneer of cold command
Tell that its sculptor well those passions read

Magic!  But…  my pal Jane Finnis told me there was another poem called Ozymandias. This one’s by a bloke called Horace Smith. Smith was a friend of Shelley’s who had written his poem in competition with Shelley. It was published in the same magazine as Percy’s a month later.  And you can’t help thinking he was ill-advised. The title makes you think a bit, for a start: On A Stupendous Leg of Granite, Discovered Standing by Itself in the Deserts of Egypt, with the Inscription Inserted Below.

In Egypt's sandy silence, all alone,
Stands a gigantic Leg

I don’t know why, but legs are funny.  A Farewell to Arms?  Yup.  A Farewell to Legs?  I don’t think so.  Particularly as this particular Leg seems to double as a sun-dial:  the Leg (Horace is responsible for the capitals, not me)

which far off throws
The only shadow that the Desert knows:

And so the next line, the punch-line, lacks a bit:
"I am great OZYMANDIAS," saith the stone,
"The King of Kings; this mighty City shows
"The wonders of my hand." The City's gone,
Nought but the Leg remaining to disclose
The site of this forgotten Babylon.

To be fair to Horace, the second bit, where he looks forward to a science-fictiony post-apocalyptic London is all right:
We wonder, and some Hunter may express
Wonder like ours, when thro' the wilderness
Where London stood, holding the Wolf in chace,
He meets some fragments huge, and stops to guess
What powerful but unrecorded race
Once dwelt in that annihilated place

However, that’s rather taken us away from his Leg.  It’s a shame, but it’s true.  It’s not enough to have a brilliant story.  You’ve got to tell it right, too.

Take down more flags

Well, I’m depressed.  Good grief, the footy was awful.  We (me, Peter, Lucy and Dad) went up to the local pub to watch Ing-ger-land.  The sun was shining, the sky was blue etcetera, etcetera, the beer (Black Sheep) was good.  There was a big tent in the pub garden with a barbeque and, off to one side, a garden with swings for the children.  The place was packed and, despite all that had gone before, the atmosphere was terrific.  Oh dear.

It wasn’t that we were fighting the war all over again, which is always the grim possibility when playing Germany, it was that we weren’t fighting at all.  The atmosphere in the pub, which had been great at the beginning, got quieter and quieter as the dire display went on.  It was an honest relief when the full time whistle went and we could all pack up and go home.  So it’s down with all the flags and bunting that have decorated the houses and cars and back to watching other people play.

Arrrgh!  I’d really love to win the World Cup, if for no other reason than to stop people on the telly going on and on about 1966.  I mean, it’s so long ago, it’s embarrassing to have it constantly served up as the reminder of the last time (the only time) when Ing-ger-land managed to do it.  Still, it could (just) be worse;  we could be French; or Italian.  Or, for that matter, South Africa, who, having invited the world to their party, have to sit and watch it from the sidelines.

This isn’t any sort of excuse, but why on earth was there any doubt about Frank Lampard’s goal? Dammit, goals have been like hen's teeth in our matches so far.  We can't allow perfectly good ones to go AWOL like that.  And, just to drive the point home, in the Mexico-Argy match later on, the ref allowed the Argies a goal that clearly wasn’t.  In every other sport I can think of, there’s something called Technology. Why is it that football, which has millions pumped into it, hasn’t caught up?  Wimbledon has Hawkeye, cricket has a magic eye and rugby has the video ref.  It stops the ref looking like an idiot and puts the officials in the same boat as the millions watching on TV.  However, even if the Ing-ger-land squad had been replaced by a team of cybermen, it wouldn’t have made any difference in the end.

Talking of cybermen, I’m not half enjoying this latest series of Doctor Who.  The scripts are great, full of time-trickery and puzzles and the series finale was terrific.  Maybe we should get the Doctor on the football team.

The puzzle in the priory

I’ve had a right old “booky” week this week.  It started off with a really enjoyable afternoon on Monday when my pal, Jane Finnis, emerged from her Yorkshire lair, crossed the Pennines to the broad, sunlit uplands of Greater Manchester and joined me in a double-handed talk in Dukinfield library.  There was a really good turn-out and a very lively discussion.  Jane writes mysteries set in Roman Yorkshire (I know, I know – there wasn’t such an entity as Yorkshire in Roman times and Jane, a purist, winces every time I say it, but you know what I mean!) and I write about the 1920’s.  That’s a pretty wide historical span which the audience seemed to thoroughly enjoy talking about.  What have the Romans ever done for us? asked Monty Python’s Life of Brian. Given us lots to talk about, that’s what!

The second “booky” event was a party on Saturday evening to celebrate A Hundred Thousand Dragons coming out. It took place at the Priory, the local tennis club (Dad’s been a member of the club since 1940-something!) and it was a great evening.  The weather was perfect and the clubhouse, which had been looking at little bit down-at-heel, had been freshly decorated. They’d had a flood a couple of months ago which wrecked the floor; gloom.  The insurance kicked in; rejoice!

Daughter Helen and I had spent the previous couple of weeks thinking about suitable games for the evening.  It’s not really a “dancing” do but we did feel people needed something.  So we got eight different detective-story covers, including old favourites such as Paul Temple, Sexton Blake and Sherlock Holmes, made them into jigsaws and gave each table a jigsaw puzzle to solve.  The “game” element came from the fact that Helen and myself had mixed up all the pieces, so that everyone had to hunt their particular pieces off the other tables.  Quote of the night was Rob White saying, in a determined Scottish way to his neighbours as he nabbed a jigsaw piece of Death On The Nile, “That’s my camel!”

Peter wondered what to wear and plumped for a very smart blazer and flannels.  He read an extract from the first chapter, which takes place in Claridges, and gosh, did he look the part!

I can’t reproduce jigsaw puzzles (a computer screen is really awkward to cut up into bits!)  but we did have another game.  Helen put together the Jack Haldean (clue!) Detective Codeword.  Here it is, if you’d like to have a go.

The Jack Haldean Detective Codeword!

				12
11	23	17	9	6	16	20	5	13	16	2	5		19	23	16	2	11
				16										6		14
				23			12							15		25
	1	16	23	10	21	16	6	5	14	16	20			14		17
				3			17			26						6
				16		22	17	2	4	14	2	13		25		25
				18			5							18		14
	4	16	6	6	17	8	11		9	21	2	18	6	6	14	2
			13				9			17				6
10		3	18	11	11	3	16	2	7	6	14			16		3
18			20				18			3		7	17	18	11	17	20
5	16	4	4	14	2		20			14				20		9
20										11		4				18
16	23	24	15	18	9	9	16	6				15				25
7												20	17	17	11	14

A  B  C  D  E  F  G  H  I  J  K  L  M  N  O  P  Q  R  S  T  U  V  W  X  Y  Z

1	2	3	4	5	6	7	8	9	10	11	12	13
14	15	16	17	18	19	20	21	22	23	24	25	26

How to play:

Solve the codeword by filling the letters in with the corresponding numbers, and using the clues to work out what the words are.

All the words have a murder mystery theme – three of them are detectives, and five of them are weapons! Good luck…

Here's some clues to get you going.  Letter 1 is J, 4=G, 6=L, 12=B and 19=Z. (It's the name of an old police series, but you should be able to get it.)

Hands Across the Pond

As part of Crime Fiction Week, I’m very happy to have a guest today, Donna Fletcher Crow from the USA.  Donna and I have never met, but we came together through the wonders of email, as we answered one another’s messages on DorothyL, the mystery website and became firm, if electronic, friends. Donna has a new book out, the first in the Monastery Murders series, which I can heartily recommend.

My questions are in italics. So, Donna, over to you!

Thank you so much, Dolores, for inviting me here today to celebrate National Crime Fiction Week in the UK.  If I were a much stronger swimmer I could be there speaking in libraries, doing schools visits and holding book signings with English Crime Fiction writers this week. But realities and distances being what they are I’ll just sit here with a freshly brewed cup of my favorite Yorkshire Gold and wave my book at you.  I am truly delighted that Monarch Books has released A Very Private Grave, Book 1 in my Monastery Murders series, in time for Crime Fiction Week, so I truly feel like I’m celebrating with you.  I’ve been asking my UK readers to go into their nearest Waterstones and ask to see it.  Even if they aren’t going to buy it, it will help create interest.  And asking libraries to buy a book is also a great way to help authors you enjoy.

Donna, can you tell us a little about yourself? For instance, although A VERY PRIVATE GRAVE is a new venture, it’s not your first book, is it?

I’ve been writing all my life and publishing for about 35 years.  Coincidentally, in that time I have published about 35 books.  Most of them are novels dealing with English history in some way. One of my favorites is Glastonbury, The Novel of Christian England.  It’s a grail search epic that covers 1500 years of English history.  Lots of scope there for a history-lover.

One aspect of A VERY PRIVATE GRAVE that I particularly like is the observation of England. There’s a very strong sense of “place”. What appeals to you about England as a setting?

Oh, my goodness.  There isn’t much that doesn’t appeal to me.  I even like the rain.  I’ve often been asked  “why England?”  My instinct is to reply “What else is there?”  But that’s not particularly helpful. It’s just that I never wanted to write about anything else and even when I’m doing something like my Daughters of Courage series which is about Idaho pioneer families, using a lot of my own grandmothers’ stories, I still manage to get in our Scottish Fletcher the Warrior family stories and the story of my great, great grandmother who came to America when the textile mill she was running in Ireland burnt down.  So I guess it’s a roots thing.  And now our daughter is married to an Englishman, so we’ve come full circle.

Felicity Howard, the main character in A VERY PRIVATE GRAVE, is a young American living in Britain who is studying to be an Anglican minister. Felicity seems very “real”. Did you base her on anyone specific or did she just grow in your mind as you were writing the book?

Oh, yes, Felicity is very much based on our daughter Elizabeth.  Their backgrounds are just about identical.  But then it didn’t work very well at all using Elizabeth’s personality, so Felicity got to be very much her own person and is lots more fun to work with that way.  I will just say, though, that when Elizabeth emigrated and I was moaning about missing her I got no sympathy from my friends who would look at me and say, “Well, whose fault is it?”  Since I had taken her on research trips with me since she was 5 years old.

The first part of the action of A VERY PRIVATE GRAVE concerns a fairly brutal murder at the Anglican College of the Transfiguration in Yorkshire. Like Felicity, the centre seems very “real”. Is it based on a particular place? I feel sure there’s a story behind the story!

Dolores, you’re a very sharp reader.  Oh, yes, the College and Community of the Transfiguration is very heavily drawn from The College and Community of the Resurrection in Mirfield where, indeed, Elizabeth did study theology and wound up marrying a C of E priest.  I am a Companion of the Community.  I would be an oblate, but for CR one has to be a celibate male to be an oblate, so I didn’t exactly qualify.  I go there on retreats whenever I’m on your side of the Water.

A VERY PRIVATE GRAVE centres round the 5^th century saint, St Cuthbert, and the extraordinary account of what happened to his body after he died. Have you always been interested in St Cuthbert or was it an interest which arose as you were researching the book?

I first heard of St. Cuthbert when visiting Durham Cathedral in the mid-90’s.  I knew then I wanted to know more.  I got my chance when I took my own pilgrimage in the fall of 2001— actually taking one of the first planes to leave Boise after 9/11.  I visited 17 holy sites in England, Scotland and Wales and really got St. Cuthbert’s story as well as many others which I hope to tell in future Monastery Murders.

Following on from that question, there’s frequent flashbacks to the 600’s in the story. The detail is terrific! How did you go about re-creating that world?

Oh, thank you.  Other readers have mentioned liking those sections, too.  I was very worried about them because they move the reader away from the intensity of the thriller action, but I’m so glad they worked for you.  Maybe readers need a respite from the blood and mayhem.  But then, the Viking attacks and all that Cuthbert experienced weren’t exactly placid, either.  The detail, of course, is based on my being there and then trying to put my reader in the scene as well.

The action of A VERY PRIVATE GRAVE takes place in Northumberland and Cumberland with occasional excursions to the Scottish Borders. The area is very well-described with occasional references to how cold it is! Can you tell us what made you choose to set A VERY PRIVATE GRAVE here?

Once I’d chosen to tell Cuthbert’s story, I just had to follow along wherever he went.  I think that’s one reason I like writing history.  So much of it I don’t have to make up at all and I always feel that the real bits are the best.  Then I try to make the fictional parts seem real.

Although A VERY PRIVATE GRAVE is complete in itself, there’s obviously more to be written about Felicity! Can you give us some idea of how you see the series developing?

Well, obviously Felicity has a lot of sorting out and, I suppose, growing up to do.  She starts out thinking she knows everything and ends up realizing she doesn’t know anything and Antony tells her “I can’t think of a better place to start.”  But then, being Felicity, she never does anything by halves.  If you read the first chapter of A Darkly Hidden Truth, included in the back of private Grave, you’ll see that, having discovered that there is validity to a spiritual life, Felicity has decided to become a nun.  I think growing Felicity up will be lots of fun.

Sherlock Holmes and The Purloined Letter.

It is with a heavy heart I pick up my pen… You know, that’s such a good opening.  One of these days I’ll find a story to go with it.  It was in the summer of ’94, give ten or twelve years either side, and I was busy updating my website, www.mymatesbrighterthanme.com which title, for some reason, seems to afford Holmes vast amusement.

I was wearing my decorations.  No, I don’t mean medals. I have said before that the relationship between Holmes and myself was peculiar.  I even complained to him that he seemed think I was simply part of the furniture. However, I do think he’d taken his abstraction a little far when, in an idle moment, he scrubbed me down with wire-wool and sugar soap,  painted a fetching pattern of interlinked handcuffs all over me, topped it off with a coat of varnish and balanced a vase of chrysanthemums on my head.  I was distinctly worried when I found him with a book of fabric samples, yards of foam rubber, some nails and an upholstery hammer.

I was saved being transformed into a sofa, an ottoman or an armchair, however, by the entry of Mrs Hudson, our worthy housekeeper, into the room.  “Mr Holmes!” she said in ringing tones.  “I appeal to you!”

“Not a lot,” he said, knocking his pipe out carelessly on one of my surfaces.

“I have with me,” she continued, ignoring the fire that had broken out along my varnished exterior, “the most unhappy wretch that ever walked the Earth!”

She flung back the door and admitted a hideous hunchbacked creature.  Human, yes, but only just.  Its knuckles dragged along the floor and its eyes gleamed with a ghastly, malefic intelligence.  That there was some human feeling there however, I could not doubt, as it sprang for the fire extinguisher and played it about my surface.  Wiping the foam from my eyes, I could not resist a shudder as I looked at the vile abomination before us.

Holmes started to his feet, horror clearly etched on his finely-chiselled features.  “Mrs Hudson!  You know I abhor clichés.  I only deal with the bizarre, the fantastic, the recherché, the upper crust of crime, and yet you bring me A Fiend In Human Shape.  Any mere Inspector Lestrade could deal with a Fiend!  Take it to Scotland Yard at once!”

The Fiend burst into tears.  “Yes, yes, I admit it!  I am doomed to walk the earth as an out-worn plot device!  Forced to Lurk, to Loom, to be classed with a mere Hideous Thing or Mysterious Horror!  Forced never to finish a sentence without an exclamation mark!  And yet it was not always so! It began with a Purloined Letter!”

“Another cliché,” said Holmes, curling his finely chiselled lip.  (I must watch Holmes and that chisel; any moment now and he’ll think I’d look better as a chest-of-drawers.) “And that, I may add, by Edgar Allan Poe, a most inferior author.”

“Yes! Yes! Your words cut me to the quick!  And yet, Mr Holmes, could I but find the Purloined Letter, I would know happiness once more!”

“Have you looked under the bed?” I asked.  “That’s where I’d expect to find a Poe.”  Everyone ignored me, of course.  They always do, especially when I crack very old jokes. “Poe,” I explained.  “It’s another word for chamber-pot.  The guzunder, you know?  Because it guzunder the bed.”  Mrs Hudson carelessly rearranged my chrysanthemums, flung a lace table-cloth over my head and I was forced into silence.

The Fiend cast itself upon its knees and raised its hands in an imploring gesture. “Upon that Letter, Mr Holmes rests all my hopes!  Oh, if I could but find it!”

“It’s on the mantelpiece,” I said through the lace.  Everyone ignored me once more.  “In Edgar Allan Poe’s story, the Letter was on the mantelpiece.  Look on the mantelpiece.”

“I have searched high and low!” said the Fiend.  “If I could but find a clue!”

“Why not look on the mantelpiece, Mr Holmes?” asked Mrs Hudson.  “You’ve got some letters there.”

Holmes crossed to the mantelpiece.  He frequently amused himself by shooting a V.R. out of the wall and he displayed his best efforts under a portrait of Our Dear Queen, Victoria, as a humble patriotic gesture that should inflame the hearts of all Englishmen.  He picked up a handful of R’s and threw them to Mrs Hudson. She missed them, of course.

“Mrs Hudson,” said Holmes in quiet reproof.  “You’ve rolled your R’s.”

“I can’t help it.  It’s just the way I walk.”

“Give one to the Fiend,” he instructed curtly.

She stooped down – and Holmes was right, she did roll her - well, never mind. She picked up a letter and gave it to the Fiend.

The Fiend clasped the letter to its bosom and a remarkable transformation at once took place.

There was the sound of heavenly saxophone music (Baker Street, I believe) and what had once been the Fiend straightened up and became a handsome young fellow, just like the end of Beauty and The Beast, where I pinched this scene from.

“Hideous no longer,” muttered the erstwhile Fiend.  “How can I ever thank you, Mr Holmes? It’s such a relief to use question marks and have some variety in my punctuation. That one letter has made all the difference.  Now I’ve got my Purloined Letter back, I’m now longer a Fiend but a Friend in Human Shape.”