Thirty Years!

Thirty years is a long time to be married.  Ask me.  I know.  When we celebrated our twenty-ninth wedding anniversary, Jessica declared that steps must be taken for our thirtieth.  Helen demurred.  No one, she said, celebrates their thirtieth.  Forty, yes.  Jessica disagreed.  After all, she said, by the time Mum and Dad get to their fortieth, they’ll be too old to enjoy it.  Yeah, right.  Watch this space, is all I can say!

So The Party was organised.  Jessica took charge and did a brilliant job, booking the hall, sending out the invitations, arranging the buffet, organising the DJ (our old mate, Keith) and his pal, Archie and keeping me and Peter firmly away from any knowledge whatsoever of the party, apart from telling us when we had to turn up.

And it was wonderful.  There were balloons and cakes and dancing and, best of all, lots and lots of friends who turned up for a really brilliant evening.  Elspeth did a fantastic presentation summing up what you can actually achieve in thirty years – watch it here on

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yyTaQJ2A0lk&feature=youtu.be

The title is "Dolores and Peter - This is your life!" and it was great to see what a warm reaction it got.

It was one of those evenings where you truly felt that it couldn’t have been better.  So, if you were there on Saturday – didn’t we have a good time!  And if you weren’t – well, I wish you’d been there.

Weirdly Great

Writing is a sedentary occupation.  That, in a way, is one of its chief attractions.  So why, when Jessica, my beloved eldest and very sporty daughter said, “Mum!  You need to come running!” I didn’t promptly run in the opposite direction, I don’t know. 

She took me running.

It was awful.

My legs hurt, my knees hurt and I breathed like a leaky bellows.

“It’ll be better next time!” said Jessica brightly. 

OMG, next time????

Now one of my shiny new toys this year was an iphone.  “Perfect!” said Jessica, taking the phone from my nerveless fingers.  “You can download a running app.”

From Couch to 5K.  Okay....

It starts off all right, I suppose, and is full of pleasantly affirmative messages, but to someone who thought that lycra was something that other people wore, it’s all very odd.

“You need,” said Jessica brightly, “a goal,” and promptly signed me and her poor father up for a 5K run.

And so last Sunday I walked, ran and walked some more round Heaton Park.  I’ve got a medal that says I’ve done a 5K and – weirdly – it feels great. 

“Now,” said Jessica, “let’s do a mud run....”

 

Caring about Agatha Christie

There was quite a lot of excitement generated on the internet this week by the news that mystery write Sophie Hannah has been commissioned to  write a new Agatha Christie novel, starring the incomparable Hercule Poirot.  Here’s a link to the story which appeared the Independent.

http://www.independent.co.uk/arts-entertainment/books/news/whodunnit-new-author-to-bring-agatha-christies-poirot-out-of-retirement-8797050.html

For the Harry Potter lovers amongst us, my friend, John Granger, made some interesting points about this news in his blog,

http://www.hogwartsprofessor.com/rowling-inc-to-follow-christie-estate-lead-and-commission-harry-potter-fan-fiction-under-its-own-trademark-brand/

All I really hope is that the new novel comes off properly.  There’s a real atmosphere about an Agatha Christie novel, an atmosphere as distinctive as Conan Doyle, Jane Austen or PG Wodehouse.  Like those authors, Agatha Christie’s style is easily parodied but, like those parodies, its very rare indeed that the genuine feel of the original is captured. 

So what’s so special about Agatha Christie?  The puzzles, of course.  First and foremost, the stories are clever.  The plots tie up, the loose ends are neatly knotted and the whole experience of reading the book gives a sense of completeness.  It can be (rather harshly) compared to a crossword puzzle but I think a far better comparison is a really good meal, where all the elements, from the table settings to the food, along with the perfectly picked wine, the right lighting and the warmth of the room, come together with great company to make a memorable, satisfying whole.  Whether that meal is round your own kitchen table with your family or in the Ritz hotel is fairly immaterial; a great meal is a great experience.

Couldn’t an Agatha Christie book be compared to a game of Cluedo? Not really; in Cluedo (Or, if you’re in America, Clue) three cards, the victim, the weapon, the location, are taken at random from the pack and put in a envelope.  It’s genuinely arbitrary.  This is not how AC works, and the reason she doesn’t work like that is her characters and her scene-setting.

Ah yes, her characters and scenes.  It’s a village, right?  And sort of stereotyped.  Well, only to a point.  There’s certainly a village feel to the books, as in it’s a place where people know who their neighbours are, even if the books aren’t set in an actual village.  We know enough about the characters to recognise them, to fill in the details for ourselves from our own experience.  And, when we get to the end and find out the murderer was X, we always feel that we should’ve known it was X all along.  Why? Because X’s character fits that of the murderer.  Right triumphs, evil is defeated, and along with it all, our curiosity has been slated. Our love of order, certainty and rationality is satisfied and, perhaps best of all, she’s never remotely pretentious.

    

What's in a name?

Editing a book, as I have been all week, is one of the really fun bits of writing. Actually making the stuff up is hard, but this part of the process is a lot easier.  It isn’t finished yet but (keep those fingers crossed) the end is in sight.  Editing is where you can add the finishing touches, fill up the pot holes, smooth everything out and make sure that it all hangs together. 

However, the perennial problem of titles is now upon me.  You’d think, wouldn’t you, that after the  effort of writing an entire book, to think of three or, at the most five, words would be easy-peasy.  Yes, but those few words have got to do so much; attract a reader, tell them something about the book and – just as importantly – not mislead them about what sort of book it is.

It’s amazing how hard it can be to come up with the right title.  It has to be pithy, memorable, relevant. A few words – maybe one word - that will jump out at the reader from the bookshop shelf and inspire them to part with hard-earned cash. Geez.

 Names are often a good bet and carry their own baggage of expectation. You don’t pick up Emma, for instance thinking she’s going to turn into Dracula. (Which would be confusing but fun.) Or it may reflect the book’s theme:  Pride and Prejudice or Death on the Nile.

In the heyday of the gothic novel, you could get away with titles such as Geralda, The Demon Nun, which could still be – just about – be used today. Joanna Polenipper, Female Horse Stealer, Foot-Pad, Smuggler, Prison Breaker and Murderer is probably too wordy for modern tastes but you’d be wrong in thinking that Joanna came to a bad end. At the end of the book, “Joanna was transported for her crimes, retrieved her character in Australia, married a rich settler and lived for many years respected and beloved by all who knew her.”

 If you found Joanna’s unexpected embrace of virtue unsettling, you’d probably be better sticking to another novel of the 1830’s, Lovel Castle, where the anxious author told his readers exactly what they were getting:  Lovel Castle, or The Rightful Heir Restored, a Gothic Tale Narrating how a Young Man, the supposed son of a Peasant, by a train of Unparalleled Circumstances, not only discovered who were his Real Parents, but that they came to Untimely Deaths; with his Adventures in the Haunted Apartment, Discovery of the Fatal Closet, and the Appearance of the Ghost of his murdered Father; relating also how the Murderer was brought to Justice, with his Confession and the restoration to the Injured Orphan of his title and estates.

They don’t write them like that any more.

The Cuckoo's Flown

Well, I’ve finished  The Cuckoo’s Calling and so, by now, have a great many other people, judging by the number of reviews on Amazon.  I’m surprised how many reviewers - crime fiction fans by their own account – praise the “unexpected twist” in the ending.  I don’t want to be a big spoil-sport, but the ending is hardly original.  Honestly.  I mean, it actually appears in the jokey lists drawn up in the heyday of Detective (as opposed to Crime) fiction as one of the things Not To Do, along with gems such as “Don’t have your villain one of a pair of identical twins” a nix on secret passages and putting the blame on that tired old stock figure, the sinister Chinaman. 

Another thing that various reviewers have been awed by is the occasional use of Latin and other quotations, pointing this up as evidence of great erudition.  Again, hold on.  Yes, yes,yes,yes, yes, of course JK Rowling is incredibly well read, but it’s also very well known that one of her favourite authors is Dorothy L Sayers and Dorothy L always has quotes in her chapter headings and throughout the books. To keep up with the amount of literature that Lord Peter has at his fingertips would require a medium-sized library.  It’s a hat-tip or homage and good fun. 

What is slightly more problematic for many reviewers is the band language.  It you took out all the F and C words, then it’d slim the book down by about 200 pages or thereabouts, but the characters in the story would undoubtedly talk like that in real life, so I’m not sure what the answer to that one is.   Offensive?  Not after the first few times particularly, as constant repetition dulls the shock value, but it’s a bit tedious to read, like any other frequently repeated word or phrase. 

One reviewer was worried about “Robert Galbraith” and his false biography, as an ex-soldier.  This, they pointed out, was a lie.  Well, so it is, but what surprised me was how many people evidently believed it before the truth came out.  There’s very little military detail in the book and (thank goodness) no graphic horror of mutilation, despite the hero, Comoran, having lost a leg in Afghanistan, or angst about  life under fire, but shedloads about life in the goldfish bowl of celebrity living.  Paparazzi are present like wasps at an August picnic and about as welcome.  Everyone is hounded wherever they go and the idea of privacy for the famous is a joke.  That sounds really unpleasant and very realistic.  All I know about life as a model comes from programmes such as Gok’s Fashion Fix, America’s Next Top Model and Project Runway but the world of fashion portrayed in the book sounds real enough.

There’s plenty of clues there, no we do know who the author is, as who wrote it;  Comoran is a non-magical Hagrid in size, strength and kindness, although he’s a lot sharper.  Familiar phrases, such as tears “leaking” crop up and death threats are sent on writing paper embellished with pictures of cute kittens, as if Dolores Umbridge had retired from the Ministry of Magic and set up a Writing Bureau (Threats R Us, perhaps?)

However, one thing – one massive thing – is missing; and that’s the gigantic, outrageous sense of sheer daftness and fun that pervaded the magical world.  There’s no Arthur Weasley collecting plugs, pink umbrellas, or tents that are bigger on the inside than the outside and furnished like a 1950’s flat with antimacassars and smelling of cats into the bargain.   Pity, really.  Because that sort of unique goofiness that JK Rowling made so believable and genuinely all her own, the thing she can do better than anyone else, probably is the magic that endeared Harry Potter to so many millions of readers. 

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.