E Book, anyone?

Have you got a Kindle or e-reader?  The reason I’m asking is that Off The Record, Jack’s fifth adventure was published as an e-book on 1^st July.  Here’s a picture of Jack looking all suave on the cover.  I wish this was Harry Potter land (I wish it was anyway!) because then the cover would move and show Jack doing all sorts of exciting things, like jumping off roofs, tackling villains, dodging bullets and thinking furiously.  I’m not sure how you depict someone thinking furiously, as a matter of fact.  Rodin, of course, sculpted The Thinker in the nude (maybe he’d just got out of the bath) and Sherlock Holmes always put on a dressing-gown to think, but Jack remains fully clothed with his brain buzzing.

Anyway, Off The Record got a cracking review from the Historical Novels Society.  I’m not sure about the use of the word MacGuffin because, as I understand it, it was a term coined by Alfred Hitchcock to describe a fairly arbitrary object that the characters in a film charge round after, such as the diamond necklace or the secret cipher.  It’s desperately important but doesn’t, in itself change things.  Now I made my brain fizz with the all-singing, all-dancing recording machine in the book.  I’ve invented strings of fabulous emeralds without any bother, but I had to work at this ruddy gramophone!  I even (yes, I know, this is verging on the obsessive!) built myself a cat’s whiskers wireless just to see if I could.  Anyway, these are mere straws and I won’t pick them, so to speak with a really great review.  E book anyone?

Historical Novels Review, published by the Historical Novel Society (USA and UK) Issue 56, May 2011

Off The Record was Editor’s Choice

Recording tape and gramophones probably don’t sound like promising grounds for a novel, but in Off The Record the technology is the MacGuffin for a splendid mystery, a story so deftly put together I read it a second time to see how it worked.

The setting is 1920’s England.  The First World War still haunts people who are now enduring the fading of the British Empire, the crumbling of social tradition.

In the village of Stoke Horam, opinionated baronial Charles Otterbourne has a gramophone factory.  Nutty genius Alan Carrington comes to him with a revolutionary new idea for recording sound.  They meet but don’t mesh.  Soon bodies are showing up all over the place and detective story writer, Jack Haldean, who has captained several other novels by Gordon-Smith, comes in to make sense of it all.

Gordon-Smith’s writing is quick and sure; her characters emerge as real people within a few lines. The period dialog is especially good, colloquial with affectation and the historical detail, unobtrusive and precise, coveys a beautiful sense of the time before instant communication collapsed all our lives into a single moment.

Rereading the novel was a thorough pleasure.  The plot is seamlessly assembled; Gordon-Smith, a devotee of Agatha Christie, puts the truth always there in front of you, manipulating emphasis and expectations to keep it all a surprise.  The solution to the mystery, incorporating the technology that started everything off, ties up the whole story in a single satisfying knot.  Off The Record should appeal equally to lovers of historical fiction and detective novels and doubly to fans of both.

Cecelia Holland