The Cuckoo's Called JK Rowling

A little while ago, I was delighted to be asked by the big Harry Potter fan website, Mugglenet Academia, to do a podcast about Harry Potter as detective fiction.  For anyone who, for some inexplicable reason missed it (I know, I know; the car needed washing, the cat needed feeding, the telly needed watching) or who wants to refresh their memories, here’s the link

http://www.mugglenet.com/academia/podcast.shtml

I’ll just go off and entertain myself for an hour while you listen.

OK? Nice to be back.  Anyway, as I was saying, the point I was making, as a massive fan of Agatha Christie et al, (and al’s a really nice guy when you get to know him) that deep beneath the wizarding skin of Mr Potter lies Hercule Poirot.  Think of it as finding your inner moustache.   Or, if you’re feeling inclined to be more a Miss Jane Marple, your inner knitting needles.  (Incidentally, did Miss Marple ever finish anything she knitted?  She always surrounded by balls of wool and, occasionally, when in the heat of explanation, will drop a stitch, but never seems to be able to bring herself to cast off.)

        

Well, now it can be told. And has been, lots.  Last weekend the news broke that in addition to writing The Casual Vacancy JKR has also written The Cuckoo’s Calling, a straightforward detective story. Naturally I nipped onto Amazon straight away and ordered a copy.  It arrived this morning and I can hardly wait to dive in.  It has a satisfying chunky feel and the set-up sounds classic (A troubled model falls to her death.  Her brother has doubts she committed suicide and calls in private investigator Cormoron (what is it with birds, I wonder) Strike...) As everyone knows by now, she wrote it under the pen-name of Robert Galbraith, apparently to see what would happen if she wrote a book with all the bally-hoo associated with writing as JKR.  I could wish she’d chosen a different pen-name; Dolores Gordon-Smith would’ve worked really well as a pen-name, for instance, but the saddest words of tongue and pen are only these, it might have been, so to speak, to add a bit of poetry and culture. 

She might – and did – want to remain anonymous, but I can’t help feeling that somebody somewhere knew Robert Galbraith was a mere figment of the imagination.  It was reviewed in the Daily Mail and The Times and that doesn’t happen by chance.  Mysterious, eh?  The plot thickens...

Mustn't Grumble

I’ve been away from the blog for a couple of  weeks – not from any sense of haughty disdain, but because various mishaps and ailments and what-have-yous have beset me.  First and foremost, was the internet playing up.  It’s amazing, isn’t it?  It’s not so long ago that t’internet, as Peter Kay would say, was a bit of a luxury, an addition, just one of those added bits of technology that made life more interesting - or awkward – for those who hadn’t grown up with it.  Then it became, without a great deal of fuss being made, utterly central to our lives.

What is irritating, of course, is when it is central to work and keeping in touch, to meet those (it’s a bit like meeting someone who won’t have a TV or doesn’t need to drive) who doesn’t use t’internet; for some obscure reason they pride themselves on not using it, as if we’re all bespectacled geeks, enslaved to a screen, whereas they get out and about and do – what?  Run marathons?  Read Tolstoy?  Build scale models of HMS Victory out of matchsticks?  Call me cynical, but I don’t think so...

Then there’s my tooth.  Ouch.  What is it with teeth?  Take your average brachiosaurus, sabre-tooth tiger or luckless cave-man and involve them in a tsunami, volcanic eruption, a meteor strike bigger than Deep Impact or just general, hideous death in a tar pit and their teeth will come up white and shiny and looking like something from a Colgate advert.  Left to their own devices, teeth clearly have the staying power of Jon Bon Jovi on his fifth encore and the metabolic rate of granite.  So why, when housed in a warm, comfortable gum and not called upon to do anything out of the ordinary, such as open metal bottle tops or chew leather – when, in fact. Mr Tooth gets brushed twice a day and even flossed occasionally, does AN Tooth suddenly decide enough’s enough and hand its cards in?

 Take my back tooth, for instance.  Although you can’t take my back tooth because the dentist has done that. There it was, minding its own business, not drawing attention to itself, not making a fuss or interfering with its neighbours, just standing quietly in the rear  – the Tooth version of a bass guitar player in a Seventies rock band, as you might say – when suddenly, without warning, it was chucking its weight about and sending All Dive signals to my central nervous system. 

Just attention seeking, you may think.  No, it’s an abscess, and it didn’t make the heart grow fonder.  How sharper than (the pain from) a serpent’s tooth is the tooth that’s got a ruddy abscess under it, as Shakespeare or someone probably said at some time or other.

There’s just a hole there now.  Memories.  That’s all.  And a pit, hole, void or gap that feels as if someone’s been doing deep-cast mining. 

Still, worse things happen at sea, mustn’t grumble, there’s often a crumpled leaf in a bed of roses, etc., etc., etc.  Which is why I’m not even going to mention how I managed to break my metatarsal bone and end up on crutches.  It was just one of those days, really.    

Verse or Worse

At a recent Brownies meeting (Brownies are junior Girl Guides) where I’m an apprentice leader, we armed the kids with clip-boards and question sheets so they could charge round asking questions of the grown ups in the room.  We steered clear of imponderables such as “What is the meaning of life?” (Besides, anyone who’s familiar with A Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy knows it’s 42) and Hard Sums as this was meant to be for fun.

One of the questions was “Recite a poem”.  I must admit I fell back on Baa Baa Black Sheep but it did make me think about poetry, as such.  Now, in the privacy of my own home, I must admit to a bit of poetry.  When all the kids were reposing themselves and it was time to get up, I would, if the mood struck me, weigh in with a bit of Omar Kyhayyam:

Awake, for morning in the bowl of night,

Has flung the stone that puts the stars to flight,

and Lo! (this is poetry. You can use words like Lo!) the hunter of the East has caught,

the Sultan’s turret in a noose of light.

It made me laugh and sometime made the kids laugh too.  It also led to some very odd looks when one of them would ask, in company, “Mum, what’s that poem you sometimes shout in the morning?” private declamation of verse being thought of as strange.

However, most of the time, I tend to talk in prose.  Unlike, I may say the characters in a Golden Age detective story, written in 1939, that I’ve just read.  The author had gone to Oxford and seemed determined to prove it. None of the characters seem to have a thought that someone else – a poet – hasn’t thought first.  Quotations pepper the text like birdseed and, should you miss them in the text, there’s quotations at the head of every chapter, too.  It’s all a bit much.

Did anyone ever really talk like this?  I like Lord Peter Wimsey but he's is far too addicted to poetry.  If I was Charles Parker, his far too patient side-kick, I’d be tempted to put a green baize cover on the man.  Harriet Vane’s no good; she encourages him and, what’s more, breaks into poetry herself.   However, at least Lord Peter gets on with catching villains There’s also  – to come more or less up to date –  a dickens of a lot of poetry in Star Trek, The Next Generation. The trouble is with excessive verse, it that it can’t half sound patronizing.  Either that, or the writer isn’t convinced of the value of their material and wants to beef it up, to fool the reader into thinking that what they’re reading is Literature.

Agatha Christie very, very occasionally used poetry.   Very, very occasionally, but usually if Poirot is quoting something, such a familiar phrase, he mangles it, so instead of feeling “All at sea” he feels “All at the seaside” which is funny and makes us feel all friendly towards him. It wasn’t that she didn’t know any poems or couldn’t afford a dictionary of quotations. it’s just that, like salt in cooking, she knew enough to use it sparingly.

Good old Agatha Christie.

 

 

 

Sherlock and Robert Goddard at Crimefest

It was Crimefest at Bristol last weekend, an excuse for lots and lots of crime writers and readers to get together with each other.

One star of the show was definitely Robert Goddard, who’s a very funny man and a very polished – but genuine – speaker.  I did like the way he described writing a bit of historical fiction.  In certain types of historical mysteries, the hero or heroine can’t set foot outside the door without describing everything they see in meticulous detail.  So, for example, if they cross a market, there’s jugglers juggling, jesters jesting, bears being baited, dwarves dwarfing, to say nothing of all the stall holders shouting odd phrases in Medieval at each other.  Scatter a few more boils, skin diseases and people with more severed limbs than we’re used to, and you have the average Medieval market.

On the other hand, when the hero or heroine of a book set nowadays crosses a market, it’s just a market.  Now, of course you can go to town on a modern market, with its many-coloured canopies and stall holders bellowing about their amazing products and the smell of bacon frying and sausages sizzling, jostlers jostling and the flocks of hopeful pigeons but, unless there’s a reason to – that is the H or H is actually looking for someone or something – why would you? Sometimes, he said, a market is just a market.

Exactly.

The other star turn was by Steven Moffat and Mark Gatiss of Dr Who/Sherlock fame and I loved the way they described the genesis of Sherlock.  They’re both dyed in the wool Conan Doyle fans and, in many discussions on many train journeys up and down to Cardiff, Dr Who’ing together, (and yes, the character of The Doctor owes a lot to Sherlock Holmes) decided that their favourite screen incarnation of the Great Detective was Basil Rathbone.  Now, the thing about the Basil Rathbone films was that they weren’t set in Victorian London, with foggy streets and rattling hansoms, but made Holmes and Watson contemporary.

Conan Doyle’s Holmes was edgy, cool, energetic and up to date, a scientist and a man of action.  Also – and this has been sadly overlooked in many recent screen adaptations – great fun to be with.  Why not, they reasoned, bring him slap up to date so as to do real justice to the character?  So they did.

Sterling stuff.

 

Frankie's Letter

Breaking news!  Amazon has dropped the prince of Frankie's Letter to £10.82! That's a real bargain!

What’s in a (detective’s) name?

In Jennings Goes To School by Anthony Buckeridge, Jennings and his friend, Derbyshire, are trying to think of a name for the detective hero of the story they want to write:

 

“First of all,” said Derbyshire, licking his pencil, “we’ve got to think of a name for the detective.”

“It ought to be something out of the ordinary,” said Jennings.

“What about Mr Nehemiah Bultitude? Or Mr Theophilus Goodbody if you like.”

“Oh, don’t be daft,” said Jennings.  “You can’t have detectives called things like that.  Anyone called Theophilus Goodbody would have to be a clergyman; they always are.  And if a chap’s a farmer, his name’s always Hayseed or Barleycorn, or if he’s a schoolmaster he’s Dr Whackem or something like that.  You’ve only got to look in the library and you’ll see all Dicken’s characters have name that suit them, like Pecksniff and Cheeryble and Cruncher and they live at places called Eatanswill.”

“But what I can’t see,” objected Derbyshire, “is how anyone knows what they’re going to be like before they’re born.  According to that, if you’ve got a name like Fuzziwig you could never be as bald as a coot however hard you tried and if your name’s Marlinspike Mainbrace, f’instance, you’ve just got to be a sailor, even if you don’t want to be.”

“Well, what sort of name do you have to be born with so’s you can be a great detective?”

The work of research yielded the information that, unless your surname consisted of a single syllable and your parents had been generous enough to give you a two-syllabled first name, you could never hope to succeed in the world of crime-detection.  Sherlock Holmes, Sexton Blake, Nelson Lee, Dixon Hawke, Falcon Swift, Ferrers Locke – all the best detectives were most careful to have the correct number of syllables to their names.

“What about Egbert Snope?” suggested Derbyshire.  “That sticks to the rules all right.”

“Yes, but it doesn’t sound right,” objected Jennings.

 

And there you have it; the name has to sound right and if it has the right number of syllables, that’s an added bonus.  The two boys eventually come up with “Flixton Slick – Super Sleuth” a perfect 1950’s name for the sort of character they create (this is the era of Paul Temple).  Hercule Poriot breaks the rules, but not if he’s called M. Poriot, as he often is.  Jane Marple?  Yep.  Lord Peter Wimsey?  Almost, especially if you think of “Lord” as a first name. Frank and Joe Hardy?  On the money.  Some detectives are individualistic enough to have a two syllabled first name and a single syllabled surname, like Father Brown, Nero Wolfe and Phillip Trent, but Douglas Adam’s Dick Gently and Terry Pratchett’s Sam Vimes stick to the pattern, as does John Rebus.

I first read Jennings Goes To School when I was about eight.  Thinking about Jack Haldean, it’s amazing how some things stay with you....

 

 

 

The Guilty Rasher

As I may have mentioned before, my aged parent (aka Dad) hit 90 last August and, like many another well-stricken in years, is prone to various ailments.  One such occurred on Saturday morning when he couldn’t get out of bed.  No drama, no crisis, he’s had this sort of thing before and needed antibiotics to buck him up again.  But, as it’s Saturday, his “real” doctor wasn’t there, so that meant a phone call to the emergency doctor at GoToDoc.

Fine.  The efficient young lady on the phone took down the detail and said someone would call me back. All I had to do was wait.

Fine.  All that doesn’t take long to write but it was now getting on for midday, I’d been up since about half seven and, what with one thing and another, hadn’t managed to get any breakfast.

Dad was reposing himself, so I decided to Take Steps.  One rummage in the fridge later and I had bacon, eggs and a couple of slices of bread.  Put those together with a frying-pan and breakfast (call it lunch if you’re looking at the clock) was in sight.

I should have remembered about that ruddy smoke alarm.  Dad even has a fridge magnet saying The Smoke Alarm’s Gone Off!  Dinner’s Ready!

It sounded like the day of judgement.

Dad woke up, said “?” and I jabbed a stick at the wretched thing to shut it off.

However, the smoke alarm had set off Dad’s monitoring device, a thing that looks a bit like the Millennium Falcon, which is linked to a warden service and it was making a dickens of a noise. Now how the Millennium Falcon works is that the warden at the other end telephones and checks what the problem is.

At that same moment, as I was all set to reassure the Warden, an extremely brisk woman from GoToDoc rang wanting to know all about Dad’s symptoms. She took me through a catechism of questions including “Has he any weight loss?” which, considering I’d said he was fine yesterday and the symptoms had come on that morning, seemed to require clairvoyance to order to answer properly.  She told me there was no need to worry – I knew that – with that underlying assumption that virtually all medical people seem to have, that, faced with a medical problem, the average member of the public goes off their trolley with anxiety whereas the medical profession cope. There would be, she said, a doctor calling within six hours.  Six hours? So that was Saturday down the pan, then, as I had to hang around to let the doctor in.

I stood by the Millennium Falcon for a bit longer, but no Warden rang, so I went back to my bacon and eggs, thoughtfully opening the back door to let the smoke (there wasn’t much) out.

At this point (I still hadn’t eaten anything) the two firemen in full gear, complete with oxygen tanks, came in the backdoor, calling, “Where’s the fire?”  Two more firemen came in the front door, everyone met in the kitchen and agreed there wasn’t a fire.

Then four policemen arrived and piled in to join the party, telling each other in loud voices that there wasn’t a fire.  Then the ambulance crew piled in, also telling one another there wasn’t a fire.  Apparently when the Millennium Falcon reports the smoke alarm’s gone off and no one answers the telephone (I was on the phone to the brisk woman talking about Dad’s weight loss or lack of it) everyone turns up to see what’s what.  I was half expected Air Sea Rescue to pop in.

I’m all for having men in uniform in the house, but I felt a bit of a pratt about the eggs and bacon.

To add to the fun, Dad’s regular carer and the Warden turned up.  They agreed there wasn’t a fire as well.

I explained about the smoke alarm and the phone call, everyone laughed merrily and departed, apart from the Paramedic from the ambulance.  “I might as well look at your father, as I’m here,” she said and I, thinking wistfully of the eggs and bacon I’d stuffed in the microwave, agreed.

He needs, I said helpfully, antibiotics.

She wasn’t overly thrilled by my offering a comment but, after a litany of questions, agreed that, yes, he did need antibiotics and, as the ambulance was there, they might as well take him up to hospital in it.

I’m not sure if the GoToDoc doctor would have suggested hospital.  I can’t help thinking they would have simply prescribed antibiotics as has happened in the past, but I wasn’t arguing.  That meant, of course, that instead of waiting the six hours for the doctor to call at the house, I now had the prospect of waiting all day in hospital. (Which is what happened.  It was eight hours later before I could go home).

“Do you,” said the paramedic as they piled Dad into the ambulance, want to travel with us?

“I’ll come in my own car,” I said.

After all that performance, there was no way I wasn’t eating those ruddy eggs and bacon.  But next time I’ll open the back door first.