Danger In The Wind

As I said last week, I invited my old pal, Jane Finnis, to let us know something about her new book, DANGER IN THE WIND set in Isurium, Yorkshire, in the early years of Roman Britain.

Here's Jane



And here's the book:

And here's how Isurium  looks today.          



Image© Copyright Paul Buckingham and licensed for reuse under this Creative Commons Licence




Over to you, Jane!




Have you ever wondered what fellow-mystery-writers talk about on the phone? Anything and everything, of course. Dolores and I occasionally discuss our works-in-progress, which  results in some pretty bizarre conversations. Anyone hacking into our phones will have heard us chatting about pagan deities, Roman curses, and last year, while I was writing DANGER IN THE WIND, the subject was Roman forts...or lack of.

“I’ve got a problem, Dolores. I’m looking for a fort for a birthday party, and I can’t find just the right one.”

“A birthday party?”

“Oh yes, they did celebrate birthdays, and Aurelia has been invited to a cousin’s party. The cousin is married to an army officer who’s stationed at a military base. It must be small and unexciting, well away from serious fighting, apparently very safe (ha ha!) And not too far from York, otherwise the whole story will slow down because everyone will need too much time travelling there and back.”

“You can always make one up. The Romans built so many forts, and you must have a good feel for the kind of places they’d choose. Pick a likely spot and let your imagination rip.”

And that’s more or less what I did. About 20 miles north of York are the remains of a Roman town called Isurium, alongside and underneath the village of Aldborough. Today Aldborough is a peaceful, pleasant spot, with the river Ure running close by, and a museum displaying some of its Roman heritage. In 100 AD, I realised, it would be perfect for Aurelia to visit – except for one problem. Nobody so far has found a fort there. Civilian dwellings, yes…but not military.

Yet geography and common sense dictate it must have begun life as a military base. It’s one of a chain of Roman settlements running north from York, first established by the army to guard key points on the main military road to the frontier. Village quickly grew up around them, housing the soldiers’ families and the civilian workers who flocked in to try to part the men from their wages by selling everything from a good warm cloak to a good night out. When the forts were no longer needed they were abandoned, but the villages lived on.

Some haven’t left much trace now, but others, like Isurium, grew larger and grander, and the early buildings were simply pulled down and redeveloped. That’s what must have happened to the fort, and the first civilian houses. The interesting Roman remains there now – mosaics, coins, kitchenware, and more – date  from much later than 100 AD. Isurium in its heyday was a prosperous town with civic buildings, rich houses, and its own defensive walls. It became an administrative capital for the Brigantian tribe who populated most of Yorkshire, so it acquired the name Isurium Brigantum. But in Aurelia’s day it was plain Isurium, and nothing to write home about, unless you got entrapped in a mystery when you thought you were only visiting for a birthday party.

I hope archaeologists will do more digging at Isurium one day to look for evidence of life there before it became powerful and posh. Will what they find  prove that I guessed correctly when I imagined it had a fort? I don’t claim (as Aurelia does sometimes) that “I’m always right, it’s a well-known fact.” But I’d love to be right about this!

The US publishing date for DANGER IN THE WIND was December 2011 for hardback and paperback; in the UK the paperbacks are available from "any good bookshop and, of course, Jane's website, http://www.janefinnis.com

Paced Out

I’ve just got off the phone from my old pal, Jane Finnis, and I’m very pleased to say that she’s going to do a guest blog here next week about her new Roman mystery, Danger In The Wind.

I really enjoyed Danger In The Wind. The story cracks along, the characters are excellent and Jane’s got an ability to set the scene so you’re really pulled into the story. If you want to get a copy, go onto Jane’s website, http://www.janefinnis.com It’s also available from Amazon and on Kindle, too. For my money. it’s that sense of pace, of really wanting to know what happens next, that makes a book truly readable.

I’m not at all sure that it can be taught, but it probably can be caught, if you see what I mean, from reading enough yourself.  Even the books that you think don’t move very fast are worth thinking about, if only to ask yourself why it’s not working.  This doesn’t mean, by the way, that only all-action thrillers and baffling mysteries have pace.

Pride and Prejudice isn’t a mystery or a thriller, yet it reads like greased lightning.  To Kill A Mockingbird, another old favourite, is another book that, once picked up, is very hard to put down. When Scout sets out on her Halloween walk, we just know something’s going to happen. I think it’s got more to do with having one event follow another event naturally, so that even the surprises (such as Lydia’s elopement with Wickham) don’t seem bolted on, but occur naturally from the events so far and, granted what we’ve got to know about the characters, is a perfectly believable way for them to behave.

I think, by the way, that’s why “real” people and “real” events sometimes seem so utterly out of place in fiction.  Agatha Christie discusses this in the introduction to The Body In The Library. She was inspired by the sight of a well-off, healthy looking middle-aged man in a wheelchair she saw, surrounded by his family in a hotel.  She left the hotel before she could find out what the man and his family where like in real life, as the real people wouldn’t – couldn’t – fit into the story she had bubbling away.  They would have their own characters and concerns and they wouldn’t be at all the ones that Agatha Christie’s creations  needed to make the story work.

Pace doesn’t mean, as Bertie Wooster says somewhere that it should be like life, which is  just  one damn thing after another.  As all comedians and actors know, pace is a sense of timing, so a properly paced book has inbuilt pauses that allow you the chance to stop and savour what’s what.  For instance – I don’t want to give too much away until you’ve read Danger In The Wind – there’s a great “pause” moment when Aurielia wakes up from a dream and realises that the gravely voice of the scary lion she heard in her dream is actually the voice of the murderer…

When an author really pulls it off, then, as Jeremy Clarkson, that lover of all things fast and unexpectedly good literary critic said, the book becomes slightly more important than life itself.  Ok, so perhaps nothing’s that important, but you must have experienced that desire to simply read and keep on reading and to hell with the ironing.  Or washing.  Or feeding the cat.  Or any of the other daily inconveniences that are currently getting between you and finding out what happens to Dumbledore on top of the Astronomy Tower even when you know what happens to Dumbledore on top of the Astronomy Tower.  It’s not that this time it might be different (after all, you’re reading a book, not lost in a coma!) but this time you can see how beautifully it all fits into place.  And, wow, does it work!

Mind Reading

One of the nice things about Christmas is getting lots of new books.  What might be even nicer is getting the time to curl up and read them, but that’s another story!  One Crimble pressie from me to me was Jane Finnis’s new one, Danger In The Wind. Jane’s promised me a guest blog, so I won’t say too much more about it at the moment, other than it’s an absolute cracker, with a really good story and well worth adding to your reading list.

One of my other Christmas presents was Clive James’ new book Point of View, taken from the radio series. D’you know the series?  It’s replaced the old Letter From America slot on  Sunday mornings on BBC Radio 4 at quarter to nine.  If quarter to nine is too early, you can get in on iplayer and (usually) as a podcast.  I’ve been a fan of Clive James since the days he wrote hilarious TV criticisms for The Observer years ago.  I mean, part of the fun of watching Dallas was watching Dallas, if you see what I mean, but reading Clive James on watching Dallas was sublime.

You knew you had seen something funny; something that an intellectual French poet would instantly place in the Theatre of the Absurd.  But quite how funny and quite how absurd it was never really hit home until Clive James got to work on it.  What’s more, he had the gift of making you want to go back and watch more.  Whether this is a good thing or not, I’m not entirely sure, but I attribute my ownership of a mug which says, “I shot J.R.” that still lurks at the back of a drawer somewhere entirely to him.

He does a piece about the attacks on private life by the press  (you know, all the phone hacking and so on).  Here’s a quote: “Most of us are capable of grasping that if everyone could suddenly read everyone else’s thoughts then very few people would survive the subsequent massacre…. To live in society at all, we have to keep a reservoir of private thoughts, which, whether wisely or unwisely, we only share with intimates.  This sharing of private thoughts is called private life.”

I had that thought somewhere through one of the first showings of Star Trek, when Mr Spock had Captain Kirk or someone or other gripped in a mind-meld and I wouldn’t be surprised if Clive James had it too.  Basically, any normal person’s  thought would be, “Get your hand off my face,” seasoned with a few expletives and some mordant personal criticism.  However, it did occur to me that one of the place where you can actually move around in someone else’s mind, without incurring an unlooked for degree of violence, is in fiction.

Agatha Christie does this all the time when she’s scene-setting, so we get the same event described by different people with their different takes on it.  It’s a very effective, very quick way of establishing what’s going on and who it’s going on to.  Another neat little trick that involves mind-reading, is when an action is contemplated but not carried out.  I’ve done this a few times, as in, “Jack stopped just short of slamming the door.”  So you get all the emotion of him actually slamming the door without any of the consequences, plus he gets Brownie points for being so restrained.  Then again, having what he’s thinking flesh out what he’s actually saying takes the reader immediately into that privileged space that makes us true insiders.  And it’s fun to write.

Happy New Year!

There’s certain remarks which you just know are going to be said.  Such as, when it’s pouring with rain, “Lovely weather for ducks,”   and, when the phone rings at eleven at night, “Who’s that at this time?” and – another weather one = “Not bad for the time of year.”  Clichés all, yes, but after all, when the same sort of thing happens it’s unreasonable to ask for a freshly minted, witty  phrase to sum up the situation.  Besides that, there’s a sort of familiarity about clichés which makes people feel at home in the conversation.

The stock phrase for this time of year is, “Doesn’t the house look bare?”  And, yes it does.  The poor old Three Wise Men eventually arrive at the crib, have their (very) brief moment of glory, and then that’s it.  Decorations down, tree gone, tinsel away, the last mince pie eaten.  Because Christmas coincides with New Year, we could, perhaps, spare a thought for the old Roman god, Janus, who’s always looking in two directions, back to the old and forward to the new.  So the house looks different but sort of the same – just like a New Year - and we have a whole new year to think about.

So what’s new?  Well, the house seems not only bare but quiet.  Helen’s gone to Paris for six months, Elspeth’s back in Glasgow, Lucy’s been despatched to Leeds.  The amount of junk telly watched at chez Gordon-Smith has gone down dramatically (although I found myself watching Come Dine With Me so I can’t blame the kids for that)  I can get in the bathroom once more and work, which I’ve cheerfully ignored over Christmas, beckons.

The Three Wise Men, as it says in the gospel, “Go home by a different route.”   Admittedly, it was to avoid the psychopathic mass murderer Herod (the sort of character we all, hopefully, can avoid!) but coming home by a different route sounds a bit like what a new year’s all about.  I hope yours is good one!  Happy new year, everyone.