A Hundred Thousand Dragons

The big news of my week is that copies of my new book, A Hundred Thousand Dragons turned up. Yo! Much Rejoicings! It’s actually published on the 27^th May.  I knew that, and didn’t think there was any reason why it shouldn’t be out by then, but it’s terrific to hold the actual book itself.  It all seems a lot more real, somehow, when you’ve got the “proper” book in your hand.

Dragons is a little bit different from Jack’s earlier adventures because Jack himself is the focus of the mystery.  In one way that seems like a dumb thing to say, because, off the top of your head, you’d think that the detective always has to be the hero, right? A “rule” of literature is – classic literature, that is – that the hero/heroine/main character has to be changed by their experiences by the end of the book.  Jane Austen’s Emma, Hamlet, David Copperfield etc. (insert a famous literary character of your choice here)  are all changed in some way.  Perhaps they’re older, sadder, wiser, married or dead, but they’re certainly changed.  It’s all very satisfying for the reader as we accompany Elizabeth Bennet, say, through her various vicissitudes and, as Oscar Wilde would say, in that wonderful two-edged way of his, “The good end happily and the bad unhappily.  That is what Fiction means.”

However, when it comes to serial characters, there’s a hitch.

Serial characters, such as Sherlock Holmes (and thanks to Dr Watson for his observations last week) Hercule Poirot, James Bond, Bertie Wooster, Richard Hannay and Fu Manchu have to be more or less whole and entire for their next excursion.

If Elizabeth Bennet decided to ditch Mr Darcy and have another go at the matrimonial stakes we’d think a) she was off her chump (especially if Colin Firth is Mr Darcy) and b) short-changed by Pride and Prejudice. Hercule Poirot dreamed of jacking in detection and growing vegetable marrows; Agatha Christie was far too fly to let him have his own way.  When he did escape to the country in The Murder of Roger Ackroyd? she gets him in back in line pretty sharply when the aforesaid Roger turns up  wearing a dagger in his neck.

I suppose the ultimate in Comeback Characters is Dracula.  He might be a pile of dust, Van Helsing might hang up his stake and relax about drawing the curtains in the evening, but we know that you can’t keep a good vampire down.  Somewhere, somehow, violins are shrieking a scary tune as blood drips on the dust… And Van Helsing has all the weary work to do again.

Serial characters can marry but being the spouse of a serial character tends to be a dodgy career move.  Bumping off Her Indoors is always an option (James Bond took this route) but spouses can be threatened, kidnapped or tread their own cloth-headed path, such as keeping the date with the one-eyed Mysterious Stranger down the fog-filled docks under the impression that it’s the partner of their joys and sorrows who has summoned them to the meeting.  Sherlock Holmes took a sterner view of women.  He permitted them to marry Watson but never took the plunge himself.

So how to square the circle?  In detective stories, desperately exciting things happen to other people and the detective gets drawn into the action that way. However, every so often, the character and the story come together so the detective is the story.  It can’t happen often, as there is a limit to how many life-changing events a protagonist, however willing, can go through without straining a reader’s credulity, but it can happen occasionally.  It happens in A Hundred Thousand Dragons – and I do hope you enjoy it!

The case of Bo-Peep and the missing sheep

This week, I’m glad to say, I’ve secured the services of a distinguished guest blogger, Dr J.H. Watston, M.D.

From the diary of Dr Watson

It is with a heavy heart I take up my pen – no, hang on, I think I’ll keep that line to use another time.  Here’s another opening line; I have never known my friend, Mr Sherlock Holmes, to be in better form than in the spring of 1894.

Yes, that’ll do.  It isn’t 1894, of course.   I only put that in to confuse the punters.  I had returned to Baker Street after my fourteenth marriage in a state of some ire (one of these days I’ll find a wife who can remember my first name) to update my website (www.mymatesbrighterthanme.com) a name that Holmes himself had suggested.

Holmes was in a good mood that day.  I knew he was feeling light-hearted when he suggested one of his jolliest games, the one where I stand against the wall and he picks out my outline in revolver bullets.  He has achieved several good likenesses of me in that way and the wounds take no time at all to heal.  He was just filling in the shading round my moustache when Mrs Hudson, our redoubtable landlady, burst into the room in a state of some agitation.

“Mr Holmes!” she cried, ushering in to the room a huge shepherdess.  “This is a friend of mine, Miss Little Bo-Peep.”

“Little?” asked Holmes, in his penetrating way.

“Get over it,” said the shepherdess, flexing her crook warningly.  “Anyone who’s called Sherlock shouldn’t make remarks about other people’s names.”

“I was entertaining Miss Bo-Peep in the kitchen,” explained Mrs Hudson.  “You know the sort of thing, sir.  I was balancing a cheese-grater on my nose and juggling pans as usual, but despite my best efforts, Miss Bo-Peep remained morose and distrait.”

At this point Miss Bo-Peep burst into tears. “It’s my sheep,” she explained.

“You’ve lost them?” asked Holmes.

Miss Bo-Peep nodded sadly.

“Good heavens!” I broke in, unable to restrain my admiration.  “You astound me, Holmes!”

“Why not try leaving the sheep alone, Miss Bo-Peep?” he asked, reaching for his violin.   Then, as the sound of a saxophone came from the street below, an expression of disgust marked his finely-chiselled features.  “Excuse me,” he said briefly.  “It’s that chap Gerry Rafferty again.”  And, walking to the window, he let off a fusillade of shots.  There was a yelp from below.  “It’s one of the problems of living on Baker Street,” he explained, shutting the window.  “If you leave your sheep alone, they will come home, and, unless I am much mistaken, they will be wagging their tails behind them.”

“But they haven’t come home!” wailed Bo-Peep.  She reached into her reticule  (which looked painful).“This is my only clue.” She drew out a knitted jersey. “It was left in the field.”

Holmes looked at it keenly.  “Ah-ah!  This explains everything, does it not, Watson?”

I shook my head, unable to follow the train of thought which was so evident to his keen mind.

“Have you, Miss Bo-Peep, seen a trampoline salesman in the neighbourhood?”

“Why, yes, Mr Holmes.”

“Find that trampoline salesman, Miss Bo-Peep, and you have solved your mystery.  Your sheep will be bouncing up and down on the trampoline.”

“Good heavens!” I broke in, unable to restrain my admiration.  “You astound me, Holmes!  But what is this villain’s fell purpose?”

“Elementary, my dear Watson,” said Holmes with a smile.  “The trampoline salesman is turning them all into woolly jumpers.”

Raise A Glass

I’m sorry to have been away for a while. My computer’s been playing up and, because it’s Easter, Justin, the local computer guru, has been strangely unobtainable. However, I love Easter.  The weather’s improved out of all recognition so – and this is probably bad for my figure – we can have the back door open and Barney and Lucky (canines) and Snooker, Minou and Arthur (felines) can come and go without all the carry-on of barking, scratching and meowing to get out followed by barking, scratching and meowing to get in.  Yours Truly seems to act as an animals’ janitor from October onwards to April or thereabouts. Not that means the animals in question are particularly pleased with life; when they’re in they want to be out and when they’re out they want to be in and when the door’s left open they fuss about the draught.

The other thing is that, now Lent’s over, I can drink red wine with a clear conscience once more.  I usually try and give it up for Lent, spurred on by the incredulity of my family that I can do any such thing (not that I’ve got a problem or anything, it’s just that I love the stuff).  This year my Lenten abstinence was pretty spotty, even by my elastic standards.  It wasn’t I gave it up particularly, but I did whinge about it.

However, what with books to write and decorating to do, to say nothing of the Other Half being away for large lumps of March, I thought I had enough to be going on with without giving the elbow to the true, the blushful hippocrene, with beaded bubbles winking at the rim, as Keats, who obviously liked a couple as well, called it.  Keats was spotted as toper, I recall, by the Monty Python bunch in their immortal words:  Aristotle, Aristotle was a bugger for the bottle and Keats was fond of a dram…

And then there’s eggs; lots and lots of choccy eggs.  I’m not that bothered about chocolate but I’d feel aggrieved if the celebration wasn’t marked with a certain amount of solidified cocoa-butter and the junior members of the family would feel as if the sky had fallen in.

Our Easter-egg giving had to be postponed – it’s usually first thing in the morning – as the Children’s Group at church was doing the Easter Garden and I was a prime mover.

A couple of years ago, moved by some obscure impulse or other, I decided that an Easter Garden would be nice.  Like any average guardian of the young, I spent years being covered in a mixture of PVA glue and water and clouds of flour as I made play-dough.  Once the taste for PVA glue gets into your system, it never really leaves.  I like making things and painting, and it’s always nice to have an excuse to do a bit. Anyway, a six-foot junk model of a more or less desert landscape backed up with a six-foot painting of a Jerusalem-ish place was the result, complete with miniature things, such as a spear (clay modelled on a skewer) and a Holy Grail (that’s a chalice, not Mary Magdalene!) and a little donkey nicked from the crib set.  The kids from the Children’s Group take it in turn to put the objects into the garden whilst other kids describe what’s going on to the congregation.  It always seems to work well, but it’s actually fairly loosely organized chaos.  Just like life, really.

Here’s what the completed garden looked like.  There’s another picture at the top of the blog.  It should be down here, but I got it in the wrong place – ah well! Now where’s my chocolate….

Paul Temple and the case of exuberant amounts of ironing

I’ve been having a right old session recently with Paul Temple. (I mean, phew, I wish!) Paul Temple, for those who don’t know, was the detective hero created by Francis Durbridge and blossomed into full flower in his radio incarnation as played by Peter Coke on BBC radio in the 1950’s. The series is available on audio and – such is the reality of life – I listen to the tapes whilst doing the ironing.

Now, a word about this ironing. There are five junior Gordon-Smiths, right? Jessica, the oldest is 23 and Jennifer, the youngest is 15. Helen, Elspeth and Lucy are scattered in between. They all love clothes. America’s Next Top Model is required viewing and the names of Jay Manuel and Tyra Banks are As Gods. Gok Wan, fashion guru of the underbudgeted, is quoted in hushed tones. (I’ve been spray-painting belts and shoes for years; Jennifer disapproved. Gok Wan does it and all of a sudden it’s the newest thing in cool!)

Anyway, lots of girls + keen interest in clothes = Ironing.

For me.

Lots and lots of ironing.

Now the other thing that I do, apart from putting a spanner in the works of the statistics of falling population, is write books. (I trust, by the way, that having finished As If By Magic you’re only reading this to fill in the time before A Hundred Thousand Dragons comes out in May.)

Paul Temple, the aforesaid hero above, also writes books. And there, unfortunately, the resemblance ends.

Paul has a flat in Mayfair, a car that makes the sexiest sort of Wrumm you’ve ever heard and a cheery chippy Cockney cove called Charlie at his beck and call. (Like most faithful retainers in this sort of fiction, Charlie is lammed over the head, opens parcels with bombs in them and is frequently tied up and left for dead in the kitchen and makes perfect meals and coffee without ever studying the Situations Vacant column in the evening paper.)

Paul’s other half, his wife, the glamorous if rather oddly named Steve, is also lammed over the head, opens parcels with bombs in them and is frequently tied up and left for dead in the kitchen etc, etc, but she also gets kidnapped and thrown off boats into the Thames and, quite frankly, the day seems lost if the crooks aren’t spraying the car she’s only just got out of (and how lucky is that!) with machine-gun bullets.

Her sole occupation, despite us being told that she’s a journalist, seems to be her propensity to be endangered to allow Paul the opportunity to worry about her. She fills in the odd moments when not escaping death by a whisker by buying hats. Is she happy? Insanely so, judging by the way she convulses with mirth at the slightest witticism from Paul.

Mind you, why shouldn’t she be? Because Paul Temple, as played by Peter Coke, has the most knee-wobbling voice that’s ever been on radio. Soooo silky. Even when he’s shouting remarks like, “Look out! He’s got a gun!” and well-meant advice such as, “Don’t pull that wire, Steve! It’s a bomb!” the chief emotion from Yours Truly is Cor!

All that and money as well. You never catch Steve – or Paul for that matter – worrying about the creases in a shirt. They live in world above ironing. As they swan from one night-club to another, their minds are on who pinched the Duchess’s emeralds, not doing the hoovering. It’s a question of “Where shall we go for dinner?” not “What shall we have for the tea?”. It’s a wonderful, wonderful world. And I’ve got a pile of ironing.

The yoghurt of despair

I don’t know if you’ve heard a creaking noise recently, but don’t worry if you have; it’s not an imminent earthquake – well, I suppose it could be, but you’ll probably know by now if Nature has decided to chuck her weight about.  The creaking I’m referring to is the low thrumming noise caused by my brain working.  I’ve been working out a new plot, you see.  Thoughts writhed like threshing snakes, synapses threaten to part under the strain, random post-it notes appeared above the cooker, and all seemed dark.  Wow.  Apart from the sheer tension of the thing, it  gives you such a dismal view of life.

You see, in normal, everyday life, I’m tolerant of cats, (even when they poop in the bedroom – see previous posts where I’ve mentioned this less than lovable habit!) pleasant to kids, regularly help old ladies across the street (whether they want to cross the road or not) a walker of dogs, a cooker of meals, and so on and so forth. I am, more or less, merely a vat or container for the milk of human kindness, a veritable shining light.  A spiritual boy scout, you might say.

But there’s a darker side.

You see, in my sort of books, I have to postulate (and, by gum, that hurts if you’re not expecting it, I can tell you, and the cream the doctor gave me doesn’t work at all!) about one, two or several people in whom the milk of human kindness hasn’t so much gone off but has turned into a solid green mass of bacterial lumps. They are possessed by the yoghurt of despair, the cheesecake of crime.

I mean, by and large, I like (see claim to Boy-Scoutness above) my fellow-citizens and think well of them. So why should a group of the aforesaid f.c.’s suddenly decide to throw caution to the winds and start sticking pointed implements into each other, reaching for sandbags and thinking the day’s lost if they haven’t had their quota of corpses?

The answer to that question is called A Plot, and thinking it up is blinking hard.  But I’ve got there.  On Friday, at five past three, came the sound like that of a Great Amen mixed with the overjoyed cackle of a hen who’s laid an egg, and I joined the ranks of humanity once more.  All I need now is for David Beckham to make a miracle recovery and for England to win at rugby, and peace, perfect peace, is mine.  I think a drink is called for!

Mother's Day

As I write this, it’s Sunday 14^th March which is Mother’s Day. As a fully paid up Mother, I rejoice.  I’m now the richer by one bottle of sherry (Tio Pepe) a tub of daffodils, some yellow and white daisy-type flowers and a small box of chocolates which are, even as I write, doing the rounds amongst the kids.  What I like about Mother’s Day is that is a little celebration without being too much, you know?  I mean, Christmas takes huge amounts of planning, but Mother’s Day just sort of happens.

Incidentally, you know (to go all churchy on you for a moment) that Our Lady is always shown as wearing a blue cloak?  I remember that used to puzzle me as a kid.  How did anyone know that was Our Lady’s favourite colour?  Did she ever fancy wearing green, say, or something nifty in orange?  I used to feel quite sorry for her, in a way, that she was bound to constant blue and imagined it was a kind of uniform.  They were some explanations; blue is the colour of heaven (blue skies) etc – but here in Manchester, the colour of the sky is, most often, murky grey or white-ish with blotchy bits which, if you painted it, would come up as watered-down Payne’s Grey.  Anyway, that’s all a load of cods.  The real answer to why Our Lady is shown as wearing blue is that, in medieval times, ultramarine was the most expensive, and therefore most highly-prized colour.  I owe this little insight to a fascinating book I’m reading about jewellery. And, I suppose, blue is the colour of a sunny day as well.

It was about five years ago now I was faced with organising a Mother’s Day Mass.  I had a load of random kids and no music.  Not that anyone minded particularly, because, as any Mum knows, what you want to see is your child do their thing.  So, to add rhythm, if not melody, we filled plastic bottles and tins with dried beans, added a couple of drums and a few bells, and let it rip.  It was all very satisfactory and made an agreeable amount of noise, but I was frustrated by the lack of real music.  I pondered about learning the piano.  Now what you really want to happen at this stage is like a scene from a Tom and Jerry cartoon I’ve got on video somewhere, where Tom goes from Lesson One – plink at the keyboard – through to Lesson Ten – plink, plink, plink, plink – to the next scene where he’s at Carnegie Hall, playing Tchaikovsky’s piano concerto.  I wish.  Anyway, we didn’t have room for a piano, so I picked up the guitar.  And now, although there are what you might call subtle but well-marked differences between me and Sergovia – or Eric Clapton, for that matter – I’m perfectly capable of holding my own when it comes to strumming and even do it in public.  And I don’t have to fill plastic bottles with beans anymore.

Happy Mother’s Day, everyone!

Lanky Night

I’m in the middle of the Lanky Night weekend.  Lanky Night is a sketch show put on at the local church hall, entirely written and presented by fellow denizens of my home town. I usually tell people I come from Greater Manchester and technically I live in Cheshire, but the heart and soul of the place is Lancashire, with old factories, mill-chimneys and the odd cobbled street.

It’s great to be involved in something like this.  There’s a rich vein in English fiction of home-spun shows, from Just William through Jane Austen, PG Wodehouse etc., etc. and Lanky Night is bang in the middle of that tradition. I remember an American friend once saying, in a bemused sort of way, looking at the State Opening of Parliament, that the English never seem happier when dressing up (particularly, if you’re a bloke, there’s tights involved!) and there’s more than a grain of truth in that.

Almost everyone’s heard of the ENSA entertainments of the Second World War, where some very starry stars travelled to entertain the troops in various foreign parts, but in the First World War, all the entertainment was entirely home-grown.  I think it’s not at all obvious which is the most enjoyable.  On the one hand, you’ve got trained professionals, doing their thing; on the other, you’ve got people you know, giving it a go, with various in-jokes and things that go wrong.  The stage bar fell over last night, and the audience were in stitches.

The audience, that beloved section of the population, number around the 100 mark for three nights, by the way – not too dusty!

Anyway, once again tonight, I don my dressing-gown and shower cap, pick up a zimmer frame and sing songs about being an O.A.P.  Then, one quick change later, I’m in a bikini pretending to be a synchronized swimmer at the local baths.  (Does anyone else remember how hilarious the real synchronised swimmers at the Olympics looked?  Terry Wogan summed it up by saying it was a medal for formation drowning!)  In the meantime, all about me, whirl a collection of old bags fighting over dresses, hats and drawers at the jumble sale,  (“I’ll buy these drawers for the old lady next door.  She’s incontinent, poor old soul.”  “What d’you mean, poor old soul? I’ve always wanted to go abroad.”) Two German parachutists invade the bar of the British Protection (that’s the real pub round the corner) where Ruby, the barmaid discusses her contribution to the war effort with Hank The Yank is discussed to the tune of Chatanooga Choo-Choo (“I was underneath the pylons, when I got my nylons”) before the Jermans call time.  Ruby attempts to phone the police.  “Nein, Nein, Nein, Fraulein!” calls the German.  “I know the number,” says Ruby.  “There’s no need to shout.”

And, perhaps best of all from my point of view, I get to be a Cow again.  I’m the front end.  Moo!