Northwest Passages

Editing Made Ridiculously Simple (Part Two)

2011-01-08T10:27:00.012-08:00

The second part of my article discussing the ins and outs of editing, which originally appeared on Simon Marshall-Jones's Ramblings of a Tattooed Head blog. If you've ever wondered what the difference between substantive and line editing is, or what precisely a copy editor is looking for, or what an editor does (and doesn't) want to see at final proof stage, this is the article for you.

When we last saw editor Ellen Hartwell-Jones, the deadline for submissions to her anthology The Colossal Book of Fantastic Vampire Cat Stories had passed, and she had made her final selection of stories to be included. Ellen’s name will be on the cover of the book, preceded by “Edited by”; it’s her vision that has shaped the anthology, and the stories she’s chosen are the ones that best fit what she sees the finished work being as a whole. However, the fact that she’s accepted these stories doesn’t mean that her work is now done; far from it. The real work—the actual nuts and bolts of editing—is about to start.

There are three different types of editing: substantive, copy, and line. To make matters more difficult, there is considerable overlap between copy editing and line editing, and between line editing and proofreading. Ellen, as editor of the anthology, will do the substantive editing; depending on the publisher, she might do the copy and line editing as well, or these jobs could be performed by one or two other people. For the purposes of this article, I’ll assume that Ellen is doing all three.

First comes the substantive editing, which is where the editor works most closely with the author. As the phrase implies, substantive editing is the process whereby an editor goes through a submitted/accepted work and suggests potentially substantial changes, which might affect the structure, plot, characters, or tone of the story. This is where things can—possibly—get fraught, depending on how protective the author feels about her deathless prose. The writer has, at this point, completed her story; it is, she thinks, the best it can possibly be, and now someone is asking questions, or suggesting that something needs to be added or taken away or changed, or that this character’s actions need a bit more explaining, or that such-and-such an event needs to be moved backward or forward in the story.

It can be frustrating and/or annoying at this stage of the game: after all, if you’d thought that anything needed changing you’d have done it yourself, right? Well, not necessarily. As the writer, you’re sometimes too close to the story you’ve laboured over to see it clearly and objectively. There’s also the fact that you’re privy to all your own thought processes, so you know why you wrote this scene in this way, why a certain character acts the way he does, why a particular event occurs at that point in the story. You have all the connections in your head, and it all makes perfect sense. The trouble is that sometimes these connections don’t make it from your head onto the printed page. It’s perfectly obvious to you, because you know what you were thinking when you wrote the story. The reader doesn’t; he can only go by what’s down there on the page. He’s not privy to all the thoughts in your head, which is why substantive editing can be a real boon to a writer. The editor, as an objective third party standing in for the story’s eventual readers, can ask for clarification, suggest changes, deepen the characterisation. This isn’t to say that every suggestion an editor makes will be correct and needs to be immediately adapted, but a receptive writer will listen, and consider.

What happens if you don’t want to listen or consider; what if you think that your story is perfect as it stands? Good luck! No one’s saying you shouldn’t argue your corner; if you disagree with a proposed change, then by all means mount a defence. If the editor feels strongly that you don’t have a case, however, or if she’s presented a compelling argument for change and you won’t listen, then you might very well find your story being rejected rather than accepted, and could well end up on the editor’s private mental list of authors she doesn’t want to work with again.

Do editors have such lists? Not all of them, probably, and not formally; there’s no official blacklist of names which editors circulate amongst themselves. Still, the world of genre fiction is a relatively small one, and there’s ample opportunity for people to discuss these things. If an editor has worked with a writer who proved particularly difficult, to the point where the sight of another e-mail from that author makes the editor reach for the Advil even before she reads the message, then odds are the editor won’t want to repeat the experience. And the old adage is true: your reputation does precede you. Remember what I said in the first part of this article, about getting your story accepted being like a hurdles race, and not putting more hurdles in front of yourself than is necessary? If you, as a writer, have established a pattern of being abusive, difficult, or insulting, then up goes another hurdle which might well decrease your chances of being invited to submit to projects. Editors are only human, and like most humans they prefer to keep their contact with people who might cause unpleasantness in their lives to a minimum.

Now that the substantive edits have been discussed, and made where appropriate, Ellen Hartwell-Jones moves on to the copy and/or line editing. This is where your story is read through again, this time with an eye to correcting mistakes, inconsistencies, and anachronisms (JFK is referred to as having been assassinated in 1964; a character’s eyes are blue on page three and brown on page eleven; someone in a story set in 1974 mentions seeing the movie Star Wars); terminology (ensuring you’ve used the correct terms in referring to a specific field or activity); and timelines (making sure the dates mentioned in the course of the story add up, something not done in the Sherlock Holmes novel The Sign of the Four, in which Mary Morstan visits Baker Street on a September afternoon and produces a letter dated 7 July, which she says she has received in the post that day).

The next stage—although it’s often part and parcel of copy editing—is line editing. This is where our editor will be looking to ensure that the text flows properly, so she’ll be looking at sentence structure, proper use of grammar and punctuation, and such things as words or phrases or other stylistic tics of the author that are used too often (three paragraphs in a row beginning “And so he . . .”, a word repeated two or three times in the space of a single sentence, overuse of a piece of punctuation such as a semi-colon). This is also where she corrects any typos or spelling errors, and makes the whole thing conform to house style; that is, the style adopted by a publisher as regards grammar, typography, spelling, and other items.

House style isn’t always something authors can anticipate. A British or Canadian writer will write colour or neighbour or centre, and a publisher whose house style uses American spelling will change these to color and neighbor and center; similarly, an American writer who describes a car’s tires will find a British publisher changing that to tyres. If you use a serial, or Oxford, comma, when you write (“We went dining, dancing, and then to the beach to listen to the surf”) and the publisher doesn’t, then expect the line to read “We went dining, dancing and then to the beach to listen to the surf” when your story comes out. Some publishers use em dashes—like so—while others use them — thusly — with a space either side. Some use single quotes around dialogue, others use double quotes. House style is a fact of life, and there’s nothing you as a writer can do except go along with it (unless altering something in your text to conform to house style will ruin a vital plot point: if the solution of your mystery story hinges on the word “kerb” being spelled in the British style, then you’ll have to explain why it can’t be spelled “curb”, even though that’s the American publisher’s house spelling).

As I said, house style can’t always be anticipated; but what about all the other things turned up in copy and line editing? The fact that you wrote “just desserts” instead of “just deserts”; that your story, set in the future, mentions the American presidential election of 2014, even though the fixed four-year election cycle in the States means there’ll be presidential elections in 2012 and 2016, not 2014; that the hero walks across the room and opens the widow, not the window; that you write of a river being “dissected” by a bridge, rather than “bisected”; that you’ve established your vampire villain can’t tolerate silver, yet at the end of the book the hero is given a silver ring taken off the vampire’s hand, as a souvenir of the case; that you have the sun rising in the west? Yes, the editor spotted all these (well, no, she didn’t; the first four are all examples I can recall offhand that weren’t picked up in editing, and made it through to the published version; the last two were picked up prior to seeing print), and yes, that’s one of the reasons she’s there. It’s one of the most compelling arguments against publishing houses getting rid of editors, and against “editors” who do little more than compile an anthology, with no real skill or ability to edit in any meaningful sense (if an editor makes no edits whatsoever to your story, merely bangs it into a text file and sends it back to you to proof, ask yourself if your story was really that good that no changes needed to be made to it. If you’re honest with yourself, the answer will be “No”).

But—and this is a big “but”—it’s really up to the writer to go through his story and clear this up before it gets to an editor. You’ve had your story idea, you’ve written the tale, gone through it again to make sure it hangs together, and then wham, off it goes to an editor. But it’s to be hoped that you, as the author, did more than that before you printed it and put it in an envelope, or (more likely these days) attached it to an e-mail and sent it off. Few things make an editor’s heart sink faster than reading a submission chock-full of misspelled words, poor grammar, and erratic punctuation. If you didn’t care enough to fix all this before you sent it, then why should the editor? As an author, part of your job is to make sure that your finished story is as good as it can possibly be. Go through it as many times as it takes, getting rid of repeated words, fixing the grammar and punctuation, brushing it up and smoothing it off. While spellcheckers are fine after a fashion, they won’t tell you if it should be “complement” when you’ve typed “compliment”, or that you’ve used “there” instead of “their”. If you know that your grammar is a bit shaky or your spelling not up to par, or don’t know where to use a colon instead of a semi-colon, then get someone else who knows what they’re doing to read it through before you send your story off. And tell them to be honest, and critical. Nice as it is to pass your story off to someone to read and get a short but sweet “Great story, loved it!” back as a reply, that isn’t terribly helpful when it comes to polishing your work and making sure you’ve got as many of the kinks and errors out of it as possible.

Last, but certainly not least, comes the proofreading. This can, as I said, sometimes be combined by the editor with the job of line editing, although whereas line editors are also looking to change word order, syntax, grammar, and punctuation where necessary, the proofreader is looking almost strictly for misspellings, typographical errors, and missing words. By the time the proofreader gets to the text it has been set into the format in which it will ultimately appear, so correcting obvious mistakes are about the only alterations anyone wants at this stage, as extensive changes might throw out formatting or pagination. It’s for this reason that when Ellen Hartwell-Jones sends you the final page proofs of your story to read through, she does not want to see them come back with rewrites, additions, or deletions. The time for rewriting or editing your story has come and gone; she wants to know if you spotted any mistakes.

By this stage you will probably have been asked for a biographical note, a story note, or something combining the two. If you’re not sure what’s wanted, then ask. If the word count isn’t specified (your definition of “short” or “brief” may not agree with the editor’s), then make sure you establish an upper limit before you write your 2,000 word essay detailing the story’s background, genesis, development, and dénouement. This should go without saying, but make sure that if you comment on the story, you don’t put any spoilers in the note (prefacing such comments with a big bold SPOILER ALERT is generally frowned upon). These notes often precede the story, and no one will thank you for giving away a huge plot twist or key point in advance. Even if you know the note will be going after the story, or in a separate section at the back, spoilers are best avoided.

Which brings us—almost—to the end of the process, at least as far as writers are concerned; now it’s a question of sitting back and waiting until the finished book is available. One point of basic etiquette to remember, throughout the process, is to try to reply to editor’s e-mails as quickly and accurately as possible. Remember that she’s dealing with two-dozen or more other writers too, plus juggling the demands and queries of the publisher, any other editors and/or proofreaders, and possibly dealing with the cover art as well. The less chasing around and follow-up she has to do, the easier the entire process is for everyone.

When The Colossal Book of Fantastic Vampire Cat Stories is at last published, you might be asked to take part in some publicity for it, if circumstances allow. Some writers like to take a hands-off approach to publicising their work, preferring to let others do the job of marketing and promoting, but if you’re able to take part in a launch or signing or reading somewhere it’s very much appreciated, and usually a lot of fun. If nothing else, you get to meet with a group of other writers, and complain, like Edward Gorey’s Mr. Earbrass, about the unspeakable horrors of the literary life.

And so we take our leave of Ellen Hartwell-Jones, admiring the latest addition to her bookshelf, and wondering what her next project is going to be. Perhaps she already knows, and is drawing up a list of names of writers she’d like to invite to submit to it. If you’re fortunate enough to be on it, I hope my little guide helps you to clear away some of the hurdles. Good luck!

Okay, no more of that 'tied' nonsense

2011-01-03T22:57:00.002-08:00

And here we are, with tonight's NHL standings showing the Canucks firmly on top of the entire league by two points, and still with at least a game in hand on the three teams right behind them. As someone who hasn't been off the Canucks bandwagon since 1970, all I can say is that however long it lasts, it's a helluva ride.

We're Number One!

2011-01-03T11:52:00.001-08:00

As of right now, the Vancouver Canucks are number one overall in the NHL. I wanted to capture the moment. . . .

Editing Made Ridiculously Simple (Part One)

2011-01-03T11:16:00.006-08:00

I wrote the following post for Simon Marshall-Jones's Ramblings of a Tattooed Head blog, to try to explain the editing process to those who might not be entirely clear as to what goes on and why. Part Two of the post will follow in the next week.

When Simon suggested that I write a guest blog entry, I wasn’t sure quite what he wanted. I could, I said, write from a writer’s perspective; but I’d be equally at home writing as an editor. Simon immediately said that he thought something from an editor’s perspective would be just the ticket: 'I think a piece from someone on the other side of the table, so to speak, would be a great idea. I've concentrated so far on writers, but editors need their say as well.' So there you have it. If you enjoy what follows, then I’ll happily take the credit; if you don’t, it’s all Simon’s fault.

To tell you the truth, I’m rather pleased not to have to whitter on about writing. It’s a very personal and internal thing, writing, immensely interesting to the person doing it, but considerably less so to almost everyone else. You know how much blood you’ve shed getting those 739 perfect words down on paper in a given day, but anyone watching would merely have seen someone staring at a computer screen, furious bursts of tapping alternating with the dull click of the backspace key being deployed, heartfelt sighs, cursing, long periods of inactivity, the consumption of innumerable cups of coffee/tea/beer/whisky/water (delete where applicable), and the single sharp tap which indicates that a whole block of text has been deleted.

Editing, though: well, that’s a whole different kettle of fish (in some respects; the staring at a computer screen, occasional furious bursts of tapping, sighs, cursing, and consumption of liquids is about the same). First of all, the words editor (noun) and edit (verb) are often used very broadly, when in fact not all editors do the same thing, and there are different types of editing. Today I’m going to talk about the editor whose name is on the cover of the book; for the purposes of this piece I’m going to go with an anthology called The Colossal Book of Fantastic Vampire Cat Stories, edited by Ellen Hartwell-Jones, although a lot of comments will apply to magazines and their editors as well. The person whose name on the cover is preceded by the words 'Edited by' is the person whose vision shaped the anthology: she developed the guidelines (possibly with some input from the publisher); decided whether the anthology was open to general submissions or was by invitation only; invited those authors she wanted contributions from (in the latter case); read every submitted story; and, finally, decided which stories will make it into the finished anthology. Her work goes beyond all this—in some cases far beyond—but for today I’m going to limit myself to what I’ve detailed above.

The guidelines are—or should be—fairly straightforward, with the editor explaining exactly what type of story she’s looking for, and often what she’s not ('No zombies'). If the editor doesn’t want explicit sex or violence, this is where she’ll say so. Word count will be mentioned ('2,000 to 6,000 words' or 'up to 10,000 words'), as will payment details, the reading period or final deadline for submissions, what format the manuscript should be in, whether electronic submissions are okay or she’d prefer paper manuscripts sent by snail-mail, and sometimes what the response time is expected to be. If this is a sequel or follow-on to a previously published anthology—perhaps this is The Second Colossal Book of Fantastic Vampire Cat Stories—the editor might suggest you read the first volume, to get a good idea of just what sort of stories she’s looking for.

Now, the following piece of advice might sound as if it should be filed under 'B' for Bleeding Obvious, but here goes. Read the guidelines carefully and in full. Then read them again, and a third time for good measure. This ensures that you might well find the answer to a question you had after the first read-through, and that you know exactly what the editor is looking for, how it’s to be presented, and by what date (of course, if you still have a question, or need clarification about something, then by all means ask: better to do so at the beginning of the process than at the end). Unless you’ve received permission from the editor to, say, exceed the word limit, or get an extension to the deadline, or send your manuscript electronically when she specified snail-mail, then it’s simple: follow the guidelines.

Think of the process of getting your story accepted as a hurdles race. From the outset, there are a few hurdles in your way: how good is your story? how much competition do you have? how closely does your story fit with the guidelines? Every time you deviate from the guidelines, you’re needlessly putting another hurdle in your path, and potentially decreasing your chances. Submissions open on June the 1^st? Don’t send your story on May 20^th. Guidelines specify Times New Roman? Don’t use Arial. Words that are to be italicised in the final text should be underlined? Wean yourself away from Ctrl+I. Don’t know what Standard Manuscript Format is? Look it up.

I’m not saying that an editor will reject your story unread because it’s in the wrong font, or you’ve used italics when she’s specified underlining instead; but she wouldn’t be human if she didn’t think 'What a maroon', or some variant thereof, and wonder just how closely you read the guidelines, or how well you grasped them, and these thoughts won’t reflect well on you. And in the case of sending the story before the submission window opens, the editor won’t think 'Wow, he’s really eager, bet it’s a great story, I have to read it'; she’ll be thinking 'The idiot couldn’t even pay attention to a simple thing like when to send in the story' at the same time that she reaches for the Delete key.

On to who gets to submit. Open submissions are much loved by writers, for obvious reasons—everyone who wants to submit can give it their best shot, and has a chance—and not so greatly loved by editors, also for obvious reasons (everyone who wants to submit, can). Depending on any number of factors, an open submission policy can result in hundreds of stories flooding across an editor’s desk; and while it does mean that an unknown, or little-known, writer has a chance of cracking the Table of Contents of a major anthology, it also means that the editor will inevitably have to wade through dozens upon dozens of stories which are poorly written, or unsuitable, or both. It’s little wonder, then, that many editors opt to go the invite only route, limiting potential contributors to writers the editor knows, or whose work she knows, or who come highly recommended. It means that the editor can be more or less assured that the submissions she gets will be of a fairly high calibre, and also that she has an idea of who she’s going to be dealing with.

This does pop the lid open on a can of worms, the one that goes something like 'It’s a closed shop, it’s not what you know it’s who you know, it’s always the same people who get invited, how’s a newbie writer to get a foot in the door?' It’s true that an invite-only anthology is something of a closed shop, and that established writers whom the editor knows, whose work she likes, and with whom she’s worked well in the past, are likely going to be invited to submit. However, no editor can, or wants to, depend on the same small group of people time after time, and is usually keeping her eyes and ears open, looking for good new talent, or listening to word of mouth from people she trusts. If your writing is good, and you’re getting yourself published and your name known, then it’s safe to say that you will eventually get your foot in the door.

This is where magazines—whether physical or on-line—come into play. Magazines need to fill pages, and need to do this over and over again, which is why they encourage submissions from anyone who cares to send a story. As a stepping-stone to book publication, they’re almost always an essential first step, a way of getting your name out there in the first place. However, many magazines are looking for a very specific type of fiction, and it’s important to ensure that you know what they want. A magazine looking specifically for horror, for example—look, it says horror, there in the guidelines!—could be looking for horror as exemplified by James Herbert in Rats; in which case your delicate Victorian-set tale of psychological horror written as an homage to James (Henry, not M.R.) is likely to be rejected. I mentioned earlier the occasional request, by an anthology editor, that prospective authors look back at previous anthologies in the series (where applicable) to see what she’s looking for. This goes double in spades for magazines. When the guidelines suggest that authors not familiar with the magazine buy a copy or two, it’s not just because someone wants to shift a few back issues taking up space in the warehouse; they really are trying to do you a favour, so that you don’t waste their time (or yours). Hands up, everyone who thinks they know what sort of story Weird Tales is looking for; and keep your hands up if you’ve read an issue of the magazine since the current fiction editor, Ann VanderMeer, took over early in 2007.

So now the deadline for submissions has come and gone, and Ellen Hartwell-Jones is sitting with a pile of stories to consider. She’s probably been reading submissions as they come in, and has already informed some authors that their story isn’t suitable. Whether the work in question is an anthology or a magazine, the editor doesn’t have to go into detailed explanations as to why your story isn’t being accepted, and she certainly doesn’t have to critique your work; if you want a thorough critiquing of a story you’ve written, join a writers’ group (guaranteed way to annoy an editor: upon receiving a rejection notice, immediately contact her and ask if she has any suggestions as to how your story could be made better/more suitable/more saleable. If the editor thinks there’s something salvageable there, at least for the project she’s working on, she’ll say that upfront). There are any number of reasons why a story doesn’t get accepted, even leaving aside those works that simply aren’t very good, or aren’t at all what the editor is looking for. In the case of Ellen, looking for fantastic vampire cat stories, it could be that you’ve written a story in the classic vein of M. R. James, set in England between the Wars, and she’s inclining more towards contemporary tales, slightly edgier or more modern in terms of attitude or setting (or that’s the way the anthology is turning out), and your story will be out of place. You could have tipped more into fey whimsy than she’d like; if all the other tales selected are fairly hard-hitting, yours won’t fit. Maybe you wrote an absolutely kick-ass fantastic vampire cat story featuring time travel, but unfortunately for you someone else wrote a slightly more kick-ass fantastic vampire cat story featuring time travel. Space is at a premium in anthologies, and most editors are wary of taking two stories that are too similar. The space issue also means that the longer your submission is, the better it’s going to have to be. If an editor has 10,000 words left to fill, and it’s a choice between your 10,000 word tale and two 5,000 word tales of the same calibre, your story is going to be a tougher sell.

And now, sadly, we must take our leave of Ellen Hartwell-Jones, as she sits and considers the stories she has assembled for The Colossal Book of Fantastic Vampire Cat Stories. Her work is not yet over, not by a long chalk; there’s a heap of editing still to be done. But that will feature in another post; for now we’ll bid her farewell, as she raises a glass of the tipple of her choice, and perhaps sighs, just a little, as she thinks about what lies ahead.

The Memory Pool

2009-11-29T16:32:00.007-08:00

The ghost story world has always had more than its fair share of unknown—or barely remembered—authors; writers whose work in the genre was scattered through various magazines, or whose one or two collections had fallen out of print and were difficult, or expensive, or both, to find. From the early 1970s onwards editors such as Hugh Lamb, Richard Dalby, Mike Ashley, Jack Adrian, and Michel Parry went some way towards resurrecting the names of many of these authors, either through anthologies or through single-author collections (notably the short lived Equation Chillers series), and in the 1990s small presses such as Ghost Story Press, Tartarus, Ash-Tree, and others began reprinting scarce collections, and putting together 'complete' editions of an author's scattered works.

There are, of course, authors who have yet to be reprinted, in some cases because their work isn't very good (there's a reason some of these people have been forgotten), or because the authors in question weren't very prolific within the ghost story field (no one will be doing a 'complete' weird tales of Perceval Landon, because three stories do not a book make). However, a few authors have fallen through the net, one of whom is Thomas St. John Bartlett (1875–1909), whose sole collection, the posthumously published The Memory Pool and Others (Chatto & Windus, 1917), saw almost its entire run destroyed when the warehouse holding the book was destroyed during the last German airship raid of London during World War One, in June 1917. Bartlett languished in obscurity until Hugh Lamb resurrected him in 1972, but the lack of a 'complete' edition of his ghost stories has meant that Bartlett's reputation, never high to begin with, has remained below the radar of all but the most devoted aficionados of the weird tale.

When Glen Hirshberg and Pete Atkins approached me, earlier this year, with the astounding news that the rest of Bartlett's 'The Memory Pool' (previously only existing in the form of a fragment) had been found, I was thrilled; when they asked me to write the introduction to the first complete publication of the story, I was honoured and delighted. The result is a handsome booklet published by Earthling Publications as The Rolling Darkness Revue 2009—Bartlett: A Centenary Symposium, containing not only Bartlett's complete story (and my introduction to it), and bio/bibliographical information by Mike Ashley, E. F. Bleiler, and Gary Hoppenstand, but two further stories ('Intricate Green Figurines' by Pete, and 'The Nimble Men' by Glen) which take their cue from Bartlett's writing. It's to be hoped that some enterprising small press is able to prevail on the Bartlett estate to make not only the stories contained in The Memory Pool available to a new generation, but to release any unpublished stories it may hold. In the meantime, anyone wanting to sample Bartlett's work, and who doesn't have one of the handful of anthologies containing one of his stories, has a treat in store in this complete version of 'The Memory Pool'. It's long been a minor mystery as to why the publisher chose to title Bartlett's one collection after a story fragment; but as I say in my introduction, the complete story shows the author breaking new, fresh ground, with a confidence and maturity that makes it all the more tragic that his life was cut short in so dramatic a fashion. The handsome chapbook is available through Glen Hirshberg's website, and it would make an excellent stocking stuffer for the ghost story enthusiast in your life.

Speaking of Christmas, I see that Turner Classic Movies has scheduled eighteen Sherlock Holmes films to run consecutively from 5.00 pm PDT on Christmas Day. 'Holmes for the Holidays' is doubtless running as a tie-in to the Robert Downey, Jr./Jude Law film Sherlock Holmes, which opens on 25 December, but whatever the reason for the scheduling, it's nice to think that a new audience might be introduced to the classic Holmes films of Basil Rathbone and Nigel Bruce. Their two period adventures for Twentieth Century-Fox—1939's Hound of the Baskervilles and Adventures of Sherlock Holmes—kick off the programming, and eleven of the twelve Universal films (the only missing one is The Woman in Green) follow over the course of Boxing Day. Anyone who's read some of my earlier blog posts will know of my great fondness for these films, and I think it's safe to say that TCM will be playing softly in the background throughout at least some parts of Christmas Day and Boxing Day.

And still on a holiday note, let me say that at this time of year I thank goodness for online shopping. I became enamoured of mail-order shopping in 1997, when I had a three-month-old son and was living in a small town with, shall we say, limited shopping options. Tim is now twelve, and I'm a bit more mobile than I was in 1997, but the shopping options of Ashcroft have not increased in any meaningful way in the intervening years, and I've become a whole-hearted enthusiast of shopping electronically. The whole world is, quite literally, at my fingertips; so if you'll excuse me, I have to go and do some shopping. And I don't have to worry about finding a parking spot close to the door.

The Eagle Has Landed

2009-11-22T17:17:00.010-08:00

Yes, I know, I've been very quiet here lately, and that's not like me at all, but the truth is that there really hasn't been a lot to say apart from 'Northwest Passages comes out soon, I'm really excited.' Deciding - probably correctly - that a series of posts on this theme would soon grow tiring, I resolved to wait until I had something slightly more interesting to say, and now I do: 'Northwest Passages has been published, I'm really excited.'

Actually, that's not quite true. Excited? Heck, I'm thrilled beyond words. I saw it first at Borderlands Books in San Francisco on 28 October, when I took part in a mass signing at the store prior to the World Fantasy Convention in San Jose that weekend (many thanks to Alan Beatts and Jude Feldman for their kind invite). I walked in the door of Borderlands and there it was: my book, on a table with other books. Real books, by real writers. I picked up a copy and grinned, and Christopher snapped this picture, of me holding my collection for the first time. That's me in the red jacket, with Jude Feldman. Up to that point I'd seen an ARC of the book, but this was the first time I'd seen and held a copy of the collection, and it was a wonderful moment. Perhaps there are authors for whom the release of a book elicits little more than 'Ho hum, a book, how nice,' but I'm not amongst their number, and hope never to be.

Northwest Passages was available in the Dealers' Room at World Fantasy, and is now available through varied sources, including the Prime Books website (which also offers the deluxe, leatherbound edition, which comes with a chapbook featuring my first ghost story, 'Dead Man's Pears'), Amazon and its affiliates in Canada and the U.K., Barnes & Noble, and Chapters/Indigo. I'm hoping to have a signing at the Chapters branch in Kamloops sometime in the New Year. I should also mention that anyone who'd like a signed and/or inscribed copy can obtain one through me, as I have stocks available; feel free to contact me for details.

World Fantasy in San Jose was tremendous fun; it was wonderful to spend time with good friends, and to know that I'll see many of them again at the World Horror Convention in Brighton in March 2010. Ash-Tree Press will have six - count 'em, six - books debuting between now and then, by authors who will be at the convention: Larry Connolly, Steve Duffy, Paul Finch, Gary McMahon, Lisa Tuttle, and Simon Kurt Unsworth. We're planning a special launch/signing affair in Brighton, and look forward to a grand event. If you're going to be at WHC, set aside Friday 29 March from 2.00 to 3.00 pm!

I'm reminded that tomorrow - 23 November - marks the 46th anniversary of the broadcast of the first episode of Doctor Who ('An Unearthly Child'). I've come fairly recently to DW, thanks to Tim's devotion to the show, but even so, the sound of THAT theme song - in any of its iterations - makes me smile. Here's the opening ten minutes of that first show; hang in until 1.40 to catch a first glimpse of the TARDIS. All credit to composer Ron Grainer, and to Delia Derbyshire, who was responsible for the electronic realisation of Grainer's theme.

I've already blogged about my love of the Basil Rathbone/Nigel Bruce Sherlock Holmes films (fourteen in all, made between 1939 and 1946). I've seen them so many times that I know great chunks of the dialogue by heart, and as soon as the remastered films were made available on DVD I bought the set; but that doesn't diminish my pleasure at hearing the news that Turner Classic Movies will, on 25 and 26 December, be broadcasting eighteen Sherlock Holmes films back to back, including thirteen of the fourteen Rathbone/Bruce films. The missing one is The Woman in Green, and that's understandable, as it's one of the weaker films in the series. However, Pursuit to Algiers is widely held to be the nadir of the Universal series - a view with which I concur - and Woman in Green does boast the undoubted pleasure of Henry Daniell's Professor Moriarty. In his autobiography, Rathbone said that Daniell was the best of the three actors (George Zucco and Lionel Atwill being the other two) who played Moriarty to his Holmes, and if you watch this encounter between the two actors you'll find it hard to disagree. Not canonical, perhaps, but when the result is this fine it's hard to quibble. From where I sit typing these words, I can glance to my right and see, in the hallway, a framed original poster from this film, which I bought largely because it featured Daniell (second from the bottom on the left). I think it's safe to say that, come Boxing Day, TCM will be playing softly in the background, as the game is afoot once more.

Last but not least, I'm going to try to update this blog each week, every Sunday evening PST, writing about whatever strikes my fancy. Feel free to comment! And Steve - it's now Monday morning. Time for WURK. . . .

Writing News

2009-07-02T17:23:00.004-07:00

Things have been . . . busy here. Nothing unusual in that; but things are more than usually busy right now, and I'll be glad when the end of July comes and things stabilise. A bit. I hope. One of the July projects is working with a local teacher—the wonderful Debi Hamson—at a summer camp she's running; I'll be helping a group of children to write a book. I'm looking forward to it very much, and talked with Debi today about some of the details. We're both very excited about the possibilities. No, it won't be a ghost story. . . .

However, I have been able to do some writing, and am pleased to say that my story 'Flu Season' will be appearing in Subterranean Online, either late this year or early next. It's a subtly nasty story (I think), a bit different to what I usually write. Also appearing in Subterranean Online—in the Summer 2009 issue—is my review of John Harwood's The Séance. I thought that his first novel, 2005's The Ghost Writer, was excellent, and am pleased to say that his second novel more than fulfills the promise in his International Horror Guild Award-winning first book. I hope to have more reviews in SO; watch this space.

Another story, 'The Haunted House in Etobicoke', will be appearing in Exotic Gothic 3, edited by Danel Olson and published by Ash-Tree Press in fall 2009. It is, as the movies have it, 'based on a true story', a tale told me by my paternal grandmother about a reporter knocking on her door late in 1969, thinking that recent supernatural activities reported in the Toronto papers had taken place at my grandparents' house. They'd taken place—allegedly—at a house down the road, and when I visited my grandparents as a child I used to go and stand in front of the 'haunted' house, and wonder what secrets it concealed.

Yesterday—Canada Day (or Dominion Day, as it was known in my youth)—I received the news that my story 'Of the Origin of the Hound of the Baskervilles' will be appearing in Gaslight Grotesque, the sequel to last year's very well-received Gaslight Grimoire. The story was a good deal of fun to write, and I'm looking forward to this second volume of 'Dark Tales of Sherlock Holmes'.

Carry On Round the Horne with Hancock

2009-05-01T22:20:00.018-07:00

Last Christmas we gave Tim an iPod, and due to technical difficulties which, quite frankly, I don't understand, Tim couldn't upload anything to the device through his own computer. As I'd given Christopher an iPod the Christmas before, and he had quite a lot of music and audio files on his own computer, he simply uploaded it all to Tim's, which was fine with everyone. However, not long after the New Year, Tim was scrolling through his iPod library and discovered something called Round the Horne: specifically, dozens of episodes of the BBC radio series from the 1960s, which Christopher had transferred, by the miracle of modern technology, from a number of cassette tapes to his iPod.

We knew Tim had discovered the shows because he was going about the house convulsed with laughter, listening to them over and over and repeating huge chunks of dialogue to us at every opportunity. It's not hard to see what appealed; even forty years on the shows are fresh and funny, full of witty dialogue, wonderful recurring characters, memorable catchphrases, and the sort of skilled playing by veteran actors (in the picture above we have, from left to right, Hugh Paddick, Kenneth Williams, Kenneth Horne, Betty Marsden, and BBC announcer Douglas Smith) that one associates with classic British comedy. Before long Tim could pick out who was who, replicate accents and voices, even sing along with close harmony group the Fraser Hayes Four (who provided a serious musical interlude on each show; if you see Tim at World Fantasy in San Jose, ask him to do 'Alexander's Ragtime Band'). It wasn't long before Christopher pointed out that if Tim liked Round the Horne (which he obviously did), he'd probably also enjoy Hancock's Half Hour, a number of episodes of which were also on his iPod. . . .

And thus it was that Tim discovered Tony Hancock (l), ably supported by both Kenneth Williams and Sid James (r). Round the Horne maintained first place in his affections; but he enjoyed the Hancock episodes as well, and sought out a few of the television shows courtesy of YouTube. Kenneth Williams remained his favourite actor, and various of his Round the Horne creations - Gruntfuttock, Julian, Rambling Syd, Dr. Chou-En Ginsburg, M.A. (failed) - were heard about the house at all hours, and at the drop of a hat.

One night last week, while Christopher was a school board meeting, I thought that Tim would probably enjoy watching the 2000 movie Cor, Blimey!. Although the thrust (ooh, Matron!) of the film is the relationship between Sid James and Barbara Windsor, stars of the cheeky( and much loved) Carry On comedy films, Kenneth Williams (superbly played by Adam Godley) is one of the main supporting characters, and I wondered what Tim would make of seeing Williams (and James, to an extent) played by others in a film. The movie opens at Pinewood Studios in 1964, as a young dresser arrives for her first day on the job. In the studio she stops in front of framed pictures of the real Williams and James, which then change into photographs of the actors playing them in the film. 'The actor playing Sid James looks more like him than the actor playing Kenneth Williams does' said Tim critically; but as soon as the actors playing Williams and James appeared, he was transfixed (James is played in the film by Geoffrey Hutchings). 'He sounds just like Sid James!' said Tim approvingly, of Hutchings, and he said the same of Godley as Kenneth Williams. He hasn't yet seen any of the Carry On films, but I have a feeling it's only a matter of time.

Tonight we watched Kenneth Williams: Fantabulosa!, a 2006 TV movie about Williams's life, largely drawn from his diaries (published posthumously). It stars Michael Sheen as Williams, and is by turns hilarious and horrifying, showing as does an immensely gifted but intensely conflicted man whose death (due to an overdose of barbituates) in 1988 was probably suicide (although a merciful coroner returned an open verdict). Perhaps the highlight of the movie, for Tim, was a scene which shows a recording of an episode of Round the Horne; the look on his face was priceless as he realised what it was, and saw Stephen Critchlow (as Kenneth Horne), Guy Henry (as Hugh Paddick), and Sheen launch into a 'Julian and Sandy' skit ('That's really from one of the episodes!' said Tim in a whisper; compare the picture of Sheen and Henry above with the picture of Paddick and Williams at the top of the piece). By the end of the film, though - which ends (apart from a brief coda) with the final words of the final entry of Williams's diary, written on the day he died: 'Oh, what's the bloody point?' - Tim was thoughtful. 'He was a lonely man, wasn't he?' he said after; then, 'If I had a time machine, I'd like to go back and meet Kenneth Williams.' I don't know whether Williams would be pleased or not to know that he has a fan in someone who was born in another country, eleven years after he (Williams) died; I'd like to think he would be. I expect we'll be hearing a lot more Round the Horne in these parts; I console myself with the thought that there are a lot worse things Tim could be listening to. . . .

Got it Covered

2009-04-30T22:01:00.003-07:00

After a bit of lull between turning in the stories for Northwest Passages and doing the proofing, there's been a fair bit of action on the book front in recent days. First and foremost was my first look at the cover image, and to say that I was knocked out by it would be an understatement. I didn't really think that the final treatment would be an embossed skull dripping blood, but when I got my first look at the cover it exceeded all my expectations. Credit where it's due: the cover is the work of Stephen H. Segal, and I also want to thank Sean Wallace for letting me have some input into it, which I gather isn't always the case with authors and their book covers. Since I can't draw a straight line, my input was pretty much limited to 'Could the cabin be a little more prominent?' - and lo and behold, in the version you see at right, it is. Frustrated artists of the world, unite! I think it's elegant, restrained, and yet arresting, and strikes the perfect note. Even Tim - who at eleven is at that hard to impress age - was taken with it. 'It looks just like a real book!' he said; then gave me a big hug and said 'I'm so proud of you.' Which is really the best critical response I could hope to get. The book will be published in October, in an edition of 3000 hardcover copies and a smaller leather-bound, limited run, and will be premiering at the World Fantasy Convention in San Jose, California.

In other writing news, I was exceedingly pleased to learn last week that Subterranean Online has purchased one of my stories: 'Flu Season', which will appear in late 2009 / early 2010 (which is of course flu season, although I can't help thinking it's fairly timely at the moment). I've got another story under consideration with an editor, three more stories to write pretty sharpish for other markets, and an invite to sub to another anthology. So I'll have to keep those plot ideas coming for a little while yet.

And finally: watched the Vancouver Canucks in the opening game of round two of the Stanley Cup Playoffs tonight, defeating the Chicago Black Hawks 5 - 3 (after squandering a three goal lead in the third period). Note to the 'Nucks: don't do that again, guys. My nerves won't take it.

Another Week, Another Update

2009-04-12T20:26:00.017-07:00

I've read my share of introductions and forewords over the years, but in the last few months have been a bit more intimately involved with them, as it were. First off there was the matter of being the subject of an introduction, which was odd, to say the least (still can't get used to seeing myself referred to as 'Roden'). Hard on the heels of that came the writing of my first introduction, for Peter Bell's collection The Light of the World, due out later this year from Ex Occidente Press. Now I'm set to write another one, for Simon Kurt Unsworth's first collection, Black Dogs and Lost Places, due out in September from Ghostwriter Publications. I'm looking forward to the new assignment, and to Simon's collection, which I'm sure will be the first of many.

Not much to report on the Northwest Passages front, except that everything appears to be ticking along, and now it's a lot of hurry up and wait (I expect). I've had a few writers express a willingness to provide a cover blurb for the book, and here's the first one, from World Fantasy Award-winner Zoran Zivkovic, who writes 'Barbara Roden's first collection was a voyage of fascinating discoveries for me. I thoroughly enjoyed every story in it, every new territory. She is indeed a master storyteller.' And here's a snippet from the introduction, by Michael Dirda: 'Northwest Passages is Barbara Roden’s first collection, all but one of the stories having been written during the last three or four years. Yet, as I’ve emphasized, the collection avoids even the least hint of sameyness. One looks forward to each successive story with eagerness, never quite sure what to expect. Yet they all fit unobtrusively together as ten facets of a single and singularly elegant imagination.'

A note about the pictures: the top one, showing the road through the trees, was taken many years ago on the road up to one of the two cabins I describe in my story 'Northwest Passage'. The other one, probably taken at around the same time (c. 1980), shows the cabin in which, in the story, the two boys are living. Known as 'the Bowes cabin' (after the prospector who built it sometime around the Second World War), it's where we generally stayed on our trips to the area: no electricity, no heat (beyond what the fireplace and wood stove provided), and only cold running water piped out of a nearby spring, it was basic living at its most, well, basic. And yes, that's a skull on the wall, to the right of the door and the small window.

More Writing News

2009-04-09T17:35:00.003-07:00

Hard on the heels of hearing that John Joseph Adams will be reprinting my story 'Endless Night' in his vampire anthology By Blood We Live, I've heard from John that he's taking my story 'The Things That Shall Come Upon Them'—originally published in Gaslight Grimoire—for his reprint anthology The Improbable Adventures of Sherlock Holmes, due out from Night Shade later this year. There's information about it on the Night Shade site, but if you drop by Amazon.com you can get a look at the cover. I'm at work on two new Sherlock Holmes adventures; watch this space for further details.

I've had my first jacket blurb for Northwest Passages; World Fantasy Award-winner Zoran Zivkovic has written 'Barbara Roden's first collection was a voyage of fascinating discoveries for me. I thoroughly enjoyed every story in it, every new territory. She is indeed a master storyteller.'

Rejections, I've Had a Few . . .

2009-04-05T08:01:00.012-07:00

And so has any other writer who's sent his or her work off for consideration; one of the reasons why writing isn't for the thin-skinned. After all, you've slaved over your creation, made it the best you can, sent it off into the world convinced others will love it as much as you do, and the response is a letter informing you that your work does not meet the editor's requirements at this time (or something along those lines). On any list rating life's enjoyable experiences, getting a rejection letter would be nowhere near the top. The best you can do is learn from them: what was it about your work that didn't make it a fit for this particular editor or venue? Then you have to chalk it up to experience, file it away, and get on with something else.

I'm in the somewhat odd position of having to write rejection letters, something I discussed in a previous post here ('Editing Part One', March 2008). One thing I didn't touch on then was something I see fairly often in submissions, usually from beginner writers, or those not overly familiar with the genre. This is the dreaded Conveniently Discovered Missing Link, which ties up the loose ends and ambiguities of the tale with all the thoroughness and efficiency of a Boy Scout intent on getting his Knot-Tying badge. You'll know them when you see them: they usually come after a point where the story has naturally concluded, and take the form of a conveniently-discovered letter, or newspaper article, or diary, or written confession, which connects all the dots of the story in such a ruthlessly clinical manner that any sense of mystery or wonder shrivels and dies on the page before your very eyes. CDMLs are not, by the way, restricted to the ends of stories, although they grate more there; you often find them in the middle, at the point where the protagonist is trying to sort out what's going on, and makes a trip to the local library where—what do you know!—he or she discovers a wealth of old papers which explain all manner of previously inexplicable plot points. Another common CDML is the garrulous old neighbour who remembers the folks who used to live there, yes indeed, and a terrible story it was, too; got hushed up, didn't make it into the papers, but I recall every detail as if it were yesterday—come in and have a cup of tea and I'll tell you all about it. . . . For what it's worth, I was guilty of this myself in a story I completed recently, introducing a chatty neighbour who filled in a lot of blanks in the story for the somewhat clueless protagonist (thus ignoring my advice to others of 'trust the reader'). I liked the scene but wasn't entirely happy with it, and when a friend to whom I sent the story put his finger on what was wrong (thanks, Jim!) I knew what I had to do, and despatched the neighbour and her tale into that realm labelled 'seemed like a good idea at the time'.

Which brings me, rather neatly I think, to my recent writing. In addition to the story mentioned above (which is now complete), I've been working on another tale, this one set near Ashcroft, and involving a small piece of family history. It also tackles the idea of 'true' ghost stories, and what it is that makes so many of them unsatisfactory: it's all very well to read of someone being frightened in the night by a misty grey figure standing at the foot of the bed, but we want to know more than that. Who is the figure? Why does it return? What happens to it, and how? Think of how unsatisfactory a read Perceval Landon's 'Thurnley Abbey' would be if all we had of the story was the apparition showing up in the bedroom, without the buildup or any sort of explanation after. I'm trying to fill in enough background detail so that readers can make a stab at puzzling out what 'really' happened, while at the same time not over-explaining matters. Time will tell if I succeed in walking this fine line. On the cards after that are two more Holmes stories for different venues, and I'm looking forward to returning to that world where it is always 1895 (although someone needs to change the calendar, I think). First up, however, is a story for Exotic Gothic 3. After venturing to the Prairies and Antarctica for my first two EG stories, I'll be staying closer to home for the third one, which is set in British Columbia. It's a beautiful and mysterious part of the world, sadly underrepresented in weird fiction, and I'm trying to remedy that situation, one story at a time.

Teachers Who Inspire

2009-03-22T10:10:00.000-07:00

I'm sure we all have them: teachers who loom large in our memory, long after the classes are over, and we have made our ways in the world, and you'd think that the days of chalk boards and dreary afternoons and tests were a thing of the past. Yet every now and then I find myself thinking of teachers who made a difference, and four names come crowding to the forefront of my memory.

First off is Mrs. Martin, my grade one teacher at Harry Eburne Elementary (long since closed) in Richmond, B.C. Every student should have a grade one teacher as wise, warm, and kind as Mrs. Martin, who followed my progress through the school even after I left her class, and who must have seen something in me that wasn't apparent when I was six, because she presented me, before I left the school three years later, with a hardback copy of Madeline l'Engle's A Wrinkle in Time. It was, in retrospect, not necessarily a book you'd give to a nine-year-old, but it was a good choice, because I loved the book, and it opened up a whole new world of reading that wasn't even hinted at in the Nancy Drew titles I was then reading.

Next there is Mr. Hehn - first name Robert, I think, but I can't be sure - who was my grade five teacher at Hillcrest Elementary School in Victoria. He had a passion for English, and for language, and I will be forever in his debt because it was he who introduced me to Norton Juster's wondrous The Phantom Tollbooth, reading it to our class over a succession of afternoons, clearly delighting in the wordplay and the humour. He encouraged me to write a radio play for presentation to the class, the screenplay based on my then favourite TV show, Voyage to the Bottom of the Sea. The text of this play is now (perhaps mercifully) lost forever, but it was the first time a teacher had encouraged me to write something just because I wanted to, not because it was part of the class and would be marked. It was also Mr. Hehn who was responsible for our class doing a radio version of Conan Doyle's 'The Red-Headed League', and who promoted me to the part of Holmes when the girl originally cast in the part developed cold feet. Even though it was to be another two years before this particular seed took root, I trace my awareness of the Holmes stories back to my grade five year. When I moved to Ottawa the next year he wrote to me, several times, and while the letters are now lost, I well recall the delight of receiving them. Thank you.

Then there is Norm Claridge, my grade 9 and 10 Biology teacher at Hugh Boyd Junior Secondary School in Richmond. A less likely sciences student than me would be hard to find; but such was Mr. Claridge's passion for the subject, and his sense of humour, that he made even me fall in love with the subject matter, and understand it (the fact that he was wont to wander around the class with an iguana on his shoulder appealed to me; even then I appreciated the absurd). I spent many a happy lunch hour in his classroom, looking after the gerbils and snakes (not at the same time, of course), and to this day the smell of formaldehyde brings back happy memories. In addition to teaching the finer points of biology, he also instilled in his students the need for precision and detail, all of it conveyed with humour and passion. When I learned of his too-early death a few years ago I felt sorry for the students who would never have a chance to encounter his teaching, and was grateful that I'd known him.

Last - but certainly not least - is Mr. Harvey; Poona to those students brave enough to address him thus (he served in the British Army in Poona, India during World War II). He taught Literature at Steveston Senior Secondary School in Richmond during my grade 11 and 12 years, and I was more than happy to take the course, an elective: the students in it either had a burning passion for English Literature or were there because all the other courses for that block were full, and this was the only option. Poona introduced me to many of the delights of English literature, from the established classics (Shakespeare, the Cavalier poets, the Romantics) to less obvious highlights, such as the ghost fiction of A. J. Alan (he read us 'The Dream' and '17.45' during class; he was probably just about old enough to remember hearing them broadcast on the BBC in the late 1920s). He also encouraged me to go outside the box in my essays, cheerfully agreeing to let me write about, say, English detective/mystery fiction.

In 1981 I was able to go to England as part of a school trip, and Mr. Harvey was one of the guides. It was my first visit to England, and I was thrilled to be there; even more thrilled when, a few nights into the visit, Mr. Harvey took me and my friend Liz to see J. B. Priestley's play Dangerous Corners. In the interval he took us to the bar for drinks - I ordered a brandy, because I couldn't think what else to order (I was only 17, after all, and my knowledge of drinking came from movies and TV) - and then when the play was over he hailed a taxi outside the theatre and took us to Fortnum's Fountain for a late dinner: Welsh rarebit, tea, and chestnut meringues. It doesn't sound like much, but the surroundings, the elegance of the service, and the fact that it was so late in the evening all combined to make it a wonderful end to a truly magical night.

These days, I suppose, a male teacher taking two teenage female students to the theatre and then dinner - unchaperoned - would be little short of a scandal; at the very least, the teacher would be censured for lack of judgement. The record must state that Mr. Harvey was a perfect gentleman; if there was a hidden agenda to the evening then it remains so well and truly hidden that, almost thirty years later, I can't discern it. And I can't help feeling sorry for students who would be deprived of such a treat because - well, because it doesn't look right, or could be open to misinterpretation. That evening stands out as one of the best and most memorable in my life, and I thank Mr. Harvey for it.

Looking back over what I've written, I see that while all four of these individuals were fine teachers, so much of what I remember them for and what inspired me has little to do with the actual nuts and bolts of daily classroom life, and a good deal to do with them going above and beyond to identify my strengths, encourage me in my interests, and in so doing help me to become the person I am today. I was fortunate to have four such teachers, evenly spread throughout my school life; I can only hope that every student has at least one Mrs. Martin, Mr. Hehn, Mr. Claridge, or Poona, to inspire and guide them.

Traditionally Built

2009-03-16T18:49:00.006-07:00

I was a bit late coming to the international phenomenon which is Alexander McCall Smith's 'No. 1 Ladies' Detective Agency' series of novels; it began in 1998, with the publication of the eponymous novel, and I know that I registered the enthusiasm which greeted the first book and its two or three subsequent installments; so much so that when, on a trip to Vancouver, I saw that the first four titles were available at Book Warehouse on Granville Street I bought them. When I got home they disappeared onto my ever-increasing 'to be read' pile—which truth in advertising laws compel me to admit is really a bookcase—and there they stayed. Every now and then I would, in my quest for the next volume to read, allow my hand to hover over the first book; but then another title would clamour for attention, and I would pass on.

That changed in August 2006, when we took our usual trip to Nimpo Lake in the Chilcotin region of British Columbia. We've made the trek there every year for the last six or seven years, staying at Stewart's Lodge, a fishing resort on the shore of the lake. Most of the people who come to the area are serious fishermen, and the area is renowned for its fly-fishing; Nimpo Lake is said to be the float plane capital of the province, and every day there are dozens of flights in and out, ferrying people to outpost cabins on even more remote lakes that are only accessible by air. We do the odd bit of fishing, for the sake of appearance more than anything else, but for the most part we go there for peace and quiet, of which there is an abundance: no phone, no computer, no TV, no fax, just the cry of the loons, the crackle of the wood fire, and the chance to sit and read.

Every year Christopher and I each pack a box of books to Nimpo, taking far more than we can possibly read in the time allotted (typically ten days), but working on the basis that it's better to take too much than too little, especially when the lodge library offers little more than some Reader's Digest condensed novels and back issues of Field and Stream, and the nearest library or bookstore is several hours' drive away. In 2006 Smith's The No. 1 Ladies' Detective Agency was in my box of books, and after reading Andrew Greig's autobiographical Preferred Lies and Patricia Carlon's intense thriller The Running Woman, I was in the mood for something lighter. And thus it was that my hand fell on Smith's book, and this time it stayed, and I settled down to make the acquaintance of Mma Precious Ramotswe, the No. 1—indeed only—Lady Detective in Botswana.

Three hours later I emerged from the book, blinking into the early afternoon sunlight, vaguely surprised to find myself in the heart of British Columbia's back country. Smith had plunged me so immediately, so deeply, into the Botswana setting that it took me a few moments to realise that I was not in Gaborone (pronounced, I later found, Ha-bore-oh-nay) or the surrounding countryside. His was a fully realised world; and he was able to convey effortlessly—or so it seemed—the sights, the sounds, the smells, the life of a country about which I had previously known nothing. Smith was born in what is now Zimbabwe, but was then Rhodesia, and his love of Africa, and its people, rang true and clear on every page.

Nowhere is this more true than in the person of Mma Ramotswe herself (Mma—pronounced 'Mm-ah'—is a formal term of greeting or respect for a Batswana woman; for men the term is Rra, pronounced with a rolling 'r' and soft 'a'). Her father, Obed Ramotswe, has died (or is late, as a Batswana would say), and his daughter is now left to make her way in the world. Her father has left her a valuable herd of cattle—cows being a highly prized symbol of wealth and prosperity in Botswana—and Precious sells some of the cattle in order to start a new life in the capital city of Gaborone, where she decides to become the country's first, and only, lady detective. She takes Agatha Christie as an inspiration, sets up her shingle, hires a secretary (the formidable Mma Grace Makutsi, who is immensely proud of the fact that she graduated with 97%—the highest score ever—from the Botswana Secretarial College), and begins detecting.

As soon as I finished the book, I kicked myself that I hadn't brought the other titles that I had in the series with me, so impatient was I to read more about Mma Ramotswe and her world. Is there anything more frustrating to a book lover than knowing there are books you have and want to read, but can't get at? No matter; as soon as we got home I read the next three in quick succession, got myself up to date with the series at the first possible opportunity, and now buy each book as soon as it comes out. Yes, they're that addictive; and that good.

I should warn readers that anyone expecting traditional mysteries with lots of clues and red herrings, or action-packed adventures, may be disappointed. The No. 1 Ladies' Detective Agency novels are 'mysteries' in the same way that Jane Austen's books could be called 'romance novels'. Mysteries there are aplenty, but they are generally low-key affairs; Smith is more interested in his characters—what makes them tick, how they relate to others and to the world around them—and in the changing face of Botswana, a country that has, better than many other African nations, weathered the storm of independence and the modern world, but which faces problems of its own; the devastation wrought by AIDS is often referred to, with Smith depicting families torn apart by the disease, yet admiring the quiet courage and love of the many women who have taken in nieces, nephews, and grandchildren and raised them as their own. And in Mma Ramotswe he has created a truly wonderful character, someone who is wise and kind, knowing and just, but who has endured violence and heartache, anger and pain. She also has a sense of humour—and an appreciation of the ridiculous—which often comes to her rescue; a large woman, she prefers to describe herself as 'traditionally built', and frequently decries the tendency amongst young Batswana women to try to emulate Western fashion and starve themselves into an (in her eyes) unnatural, and un-African, thinness.

When I heard that the BBC was making a film of the first novel I was somewhat worried; but to my surprise and delight, the film of The No. 1 Ladies' Detective Agency was perfect in every way (the fact that the late Anthony Minghella co-wrote and directed the film should have told me that it would be good, if not great). Jill Scott and Anika Noni Rose were perfectly cast as Mma Ramotswe and Mma Makutsi respectively—I would never have guessed they were American, so good were their accents—and the supporting cast were uniformly excellent. Even better, in some ways, was to be able to see, at last, Botswana and its people, in all their colour and beauty. A six-part series, starring the same actors, has just premiered in Britain on the BBC, and debuts in North America on HBO starting on 29 March; I've seen the first episode, and it's every bit as good as the film. Lucian Msamati is excellent as Mr. J.L.B. Matekoni, proprietor of Tlokweng Road Speedy Motors and Mma Ramotswe's good friend; I can only hope that another wonderful recurring character in the book, Mma Silvia Potokwane, head of the children's home outside Gaborone, appears in the series. The picture shows (left to right) Anika Noni Rose, Jill Scott, and Lucian Msamati in the film.

'What does this have to do with ghost stories, or writing?' I hear you cry. Absolutely nothing. But in a world where the trivial and the ephemeral are esteemed and celebrated, where loud and vulgar trumps quiet and thoughtful, I wanted to call attention to the quiet and thoughtful. We need more of that in the world; and Alexander McCall Smith has given it to us. Many thanks, Mr. Smith.

Catching Up

2009-03-09T18:28:00.003-07:00

I've had a couple of people—who aren't even related to me—ask recently if I was going to be posting something to my blog soon, which is gratifying, even as it made me realise that I really didn't know what to write about, specifically ('Calls herself a writer,' I hear you grumble). The truth is that while I did manage to write a daily diary entry every day for more years than I care to remember, most of what goes into a diary isn't (be honest) what the world at large wants to read about ('Got up; v. cold this morning. Bertie brought me two cat toys and a napkin during the night. Cute. Five minutes scraping the ice off the van; why can't someone invent an ice scraper that actually works? Four more story submissions by e-mail today, one from someone who ignored the guidelines about sending an attachment, and pasted it into the e-mail. How does someone expect to be taken seriously as a writer when he can't follow a simple instruction? Coffee grinder seems to have packed it in; back to the old one. Thank goodness I didn't throw it away.' etc., etc.).

On the writing front, I've finished proofing my collection Northwest Passages, which is on target to be published this October by Prime Books. It was a rather odd experience, to sit down and read ten of my stories back to back; I noticed certain preoccupations and themes emerging in a way that they don't when you consider a story in isolation. However, I'm pleased with the diversity of the tales, and think that they hang together as a whole, and was pleasantly surprised to find that the two new stories—'Out and Back' and 'After'—stand up well with the others. 'Out and Back' was inspired by a website that was brought to my attention by my cousin Sean Lavery, who sends me links to weird and wonderful websites. One was to an abandoned amusement park—Chippewa Lake Park—in Ohio, and the pictures on the site immediately sparked my imagination. The park ran for a century, between 1878 and 1978; it was abandoned that year, and the midway rides were left in situ to rot away. Some time ago on this blog I wrote about the Pacific National Exhibition ('All the Fun of the Fair') and my annual trip there, as a child, with my father and brother. I loved the PNE, and to see a fun fair left the way Chippewa Park was left tore at my heart, and I knew I had to write about it somehow. Click here to see the pictures that inspired the story (scroll down for the pictures, and click on them to enlarge). Sadly, I saw on another site that some of the buildings—notably the Coaster station and the Bumper Cars building—have deteriorated even further, and the Bumper Cars building has now collapsed completely.

The other new story in the collection, 'After', is inspired by the Kent murder case of 1860, which shocked and fascinated Victorian England in equal measures: shocked because of the age of the victim and the ferocity of the crime (Francis Saville Kent, not quite four, was found dead with his throat cut, so viciously that the head was nearly severed from the body), and fascinated because the murder remained unsolved for five years, during which time the details of Kent household—which would be called dysfunctional today—were laid bare for all to see. I was familiar with the main facts of the Kent case because of the influence it had on Victorian detective fiction (Wilkie Collins, Charles Dickens, and Mary Elizabeth Braddon all drew on details of the case in their fiction), but last summer read Kate Summerscale's The Suspicions of Mr. Whicher, a book-length study of the case (which subsequently won the prestigious Samuel Johnson Award for non-fiction). Summerscale quotes extensively from a number of contemporary documents, and two statements attributed to Francis's half-sister Constance, sixteen at the time of the murder, intrigued me, as did the character of Constance herself. It was, in many ways, a very enjoyable story to write, told as it is in very Victorian language, yet owing a tremendous debt to James Hogg's wonderful The Private Memoirs and Confessions of a Justified Sinner, a favourite novel of mine. I wrote it during two very hot weeks in July of 2008, and in the course of researching what the church service would have been the Sunday before the murder—these things are very carefully laid out in The Book of Common Prayer—I came across a fact which, to my mind, has tremendous bearing on the events of a week later, but which has not, so far as I know, been commented on before. It was a hot Saturday morning when I stumbled on this discovery, and I confess I shivered when the full implications of it sank in. If you want to know more, you shall have to read the story. . . .

I have a few irons in the fire, story-wise; the only other news to report is that my story 'Endless Night', which first appeared in Exotic Gothic 2 (and which will be in Northwest Passages), has been chosen for inclusion in By Blood We Live, a reprint anthology of vampire stories being published by Night Shade Books in August 2009. I sent the story off for consideration last July, and it was a very pleasant surprise to get the good news from John Joseph Adams yesterday.

I recently wrote an introduction to The Light of the World and Other Stories by Peter Bell, to be published later this year by Ex Occidente Press. We've been very pleased to publish several of Peter's fine tales over the years, and I was honoured when he asked me to write the introduction for his first collection. Anyone who enjoys suspenseful, elegant, and assured tales of the supernatural in which the tension builds gradually but inexorably will want to get a copy of Peter's book.

Last but not least, Christopher and I have finished our introduction to a new Barnes & Noble reprint of the complete Sherlock Holmes stories by Arthur Conan Doyle. Tag team writing is an interesting sport; not for everyone, I suspect, but we've come up with a system that works for us, and it was enjoyable to be immersed once more in that world where it is always 1895, and the game is perpetually afoot. Would that our own world were so captivating.

Northwest Passages

2008-11-11T08:54:00.002-08:00

Now that the dust has settled on my forthcoming collection, I'm able to stand back and look at it at something like arm's length. There was a flurry of activity just before I headed off to World Fantasy in Calgary, but now I think that hurry up and wait best sums up the process. In a few weeks I expect I'll be settling down to proof the entire collection, and the prospect fills me with equal parts delight and dread: delight because it will mean the book is that much closer to actually being a book, and dread because I worry about what I'll think when I see ten of my stories one after the other. I'm also not looking forward to the actual proofing process: in part because I've done enough proofing over the years to know how mind-numbingly boring it is, and in part because I've already read each of the stories several times (in addition to having written them), and having to do it again isn't the most exciting prospect in the world. Still, if years of being an editor have taught me nothing else, they've taught me that you can never proofread something enough times; there's never a point where you can afford to think 'Ah well, no need to bother, what could possibly be wrong?'

For those who are interested, here's the line-up of stories; ten in all, two of them (totalling 16,000 words) written for the collection. Original publication for the eight reprints follows the title:

'The Appointed Time' (Supernatural Tales 9, 2005)
'Endless Night' (Exotic Gothic 2, 2008)
'The Palace' (At Ease With the Dead, 2007)
'The Wide, Wide Sea' (Exotic Gothic, 2007)
'The Brink of Eternity' (Poe, 2009)
'Tourist Trap' (Shadows and Silence, 2000)
'Northwest Passage' (Acquainted With the Night, 2004)
'The Hiding Place' (Strange Tales 2, 2007)

The two new stories are 'After', based on a real life murder case in England in 1860, and 'Out and Back', inspired by pictures of an abandoned amusement park. I've seen a preliminary cover design, but there's a still a long way to go on that front before I have an image I can post. The book will be published as a hardcover, with a certain number of deluxe leatherbound copies. I'm due to get sheets for signing for these sometime next summer, which means I have a few months in which to develop a more authoritative and properly authorial scrawl. Wish me luck!

Writing and other diversions

2008-10-26T22:16:00.002-07:00

Good news on the writing front: after going great guns early this summer, and getting two long new stories written, I hit a bad case of writer's block, and was beginning to despair of ever getting the final story for my forthcoming collection from Prime Books, Northwest Passages, started, let alone finished. Then inspiration struck, when I was looking at a website of photos taken at a deserted amusement park in Ohio, and the last story—entitled 'Out and Back'—was written, sent to Prime, and accepted. It thus joins another new story—'After', inspired by the Constance Kent murder case which shocked England in 1860—in the collection; the other eight stories are reprints of work that has appeared elsewhere, or which will appear elsewhere between now and next October, when the book comes out.

So that's a weight off my mind, and I can now enjoy the World Fantasy Convention in Calgary, which begins on Wednesday. I'm moderating a panel on 'Sidekicks Who Try To Steal the Show', manning the Ash-Tree dealer's table, participating in the mass signing on Friday night, doing at least one reading, and taking part in the launch for Gaslight Grimoire, to which I contributed a story (see previous posting). I also have two other stories debuting at WFC: 'Back Roads', in the new Ash-Tree anthology Shades of Darkness, and 'Endless Night' in Exotic Gothic 2, edited by Danel Olson for Ash-Tree.

More details on Northwest Passages will be forthcoming as they're available. At this stage, it's all very exciting; and rather strange, to be on this side of the writing/publishing process.

Gaslight Grimoire

2008-07-20T07:59:00.005-07:00

I've already mentioned Gaslight Grimoire: Fantastic Tales of Sherlock Holmes, coming in October 2008 from Edge Science Fiction. It ties in with the theme of this year's World Fantasy Convention in Calgary—'Mystery in Horror and Fantasy'—in that it features eleven new stories involving Sherlock Holmes and the supernatural, the uncanny, and the horrifying. Edited by J. R. Campbell and Charles Prepolec, the book has a splendid cover illustration by Timothy Lantz, and interior illustrations by Phil Cornell. It's the first time that I've seen a story of mine illustrated, and Cornell's piece for 'The Things That Shall Come Upon Them' is excellent. There's even a clue, for the keen-eyed among you who know your supernatural films, as to the identity of the character who drives the plot: look at the portrait hanging on the wall and see if you can work it out.

Co-editor Charles Prepolec has produced a book trailer for Gaslight Grimoire, which can be viewed here:

Lolcats

2008-06-08T21:17:00.005-07:00

Every now and again I come across a newsgroup where someone has posted a picture—usually of a cat—with a funny caption superimposed on it. I finally tumbled to the fact that they were known colloquially as 'Lolcats' (or Laugh out Loud cats, for those who don't speak Internet Acronym), and were from a site called (for reasons I've never investigated) I Can Has Cheezburger.

The site is updated with new pictures every day, and they're almost always good for a laugh (not to mention a treat for people who like pictures of cats). Here are some of my favourites:

more cat pictures

There are hundreds more; when you have a spare minute or two, drop by and have a laugh.

Creative writing

2008-05-23T20:15:00.004-07:00

I can't remember when I learned to love words, both reading them and using them. I do know that by the time I was in grade three I was using the weekly spelling assignment—use each of the ten assigned words in a sentence—to write, not a series of disconnected sentences, but a story of several pages, which incorporated the ten words (along with several hundred others); and doubtless there was more juvenilia which spilled from my pen during that time.

As I grew older, I began searching for ways to incorporate the writing of fiction into assignments that would normally have called for a more non-fictional approach. In grade six, when I had to read 'The Speckled Band' and turn in a piece of writing about it, I eschewed the essay format and instead wrote a one-act play entitled The Secret of Sherlock Holmes; in grade nine Geography I chose to create a fictional country called Basholme (from Basil [Rathbone] + Holmes, which gives an indication where my head was at, literary-wise, during those years), complete with cities, towns, rivers, lakes, a detailed (fictional) history, and even a few scraps of the language—Holmesian, of course—in order to create a national anthem, which I recall was 'Basholme lon sonvre' ('Basholme the Free'); and in grade ten, when we had to read John Wyndham's The Chrysalids, I submitted as my work on the story a chapter which continued the original novel beyond the ending Wyndham had set down.

In senior high there was more scope for what was labelled Creative Writing: an elective course which I enthusiastically took in grades eleven and twelve. I recall very little of these efforts, perhaps mercifully; yet the enjoyment which I had writing them, and the enthusiasm of my teachers, made me think that I had at least some talent with words.

I'd like to say that I spent the next fifteen years quietly writing away, filling notebook after notebook with stories and plots and ideas; but life has a habit of getting in the way. Livings must be earned, lives must be lived, and it never occurred to me that writing was something I could, or should, do. An exception came in 1989, when the Bootmakers of Toronto ran a Sherlock Holmes pastiche contest, and I decided to give it the old college try. I read a lot of Sherlockian pastiche at one time—some good, much of it indifferent, a handful actually bad—and while I recognised that I was not a natural hand at intricate plotting, I had a good ear for authentic period dialogue and descriptive passages not a million miles removed from those of Arthur Conan Doyle. Thus was 'The Adventure of the Suspect Servant' born, and I was pleased to hear, in January 1990, that it had won the contest. I thought little more about the story, until Mike Ashley, editor extraordinaire, contacted us in 1995 or thereabouts for help in tracking down some authors of Sherlockian pastiche. He was busy assembling the book which became The Mammoth Book of New Sherlock Holmes Stories, and I asked if I might send my own effort along. He said yes, and I did, and thus I made my first professional sale.

I had already written a short ghost story, 'Dead Man's Pears', which had appeared in All Hallows, the journal of the Ghost Story Society. When we began Ash-Tree Press, and I began editing All Hallows, I found myself immersed in the world of the ghost story to a greater extent than I had ever imagined, and found my authorial thoughts turning towards more ghost stories. I wrote another tale—'Tourist Trap'—for our anthology Shadows and Silence, and then another ghost story, 'The Appointed Time', which appeared in Supernatural Tales. So far, so small press; and then came the story that changed everything.

'Northwest Passage' was written for our third Ash-Tree anthology, Acquainted With the Night, at the behest of Christopher, who asked if I'd have a story for the antho. I'd been turning over the idea for the story for some time, and this was the spur I needed; the tale was written in three days, and was published in the anthology, and I was pleased that I'd finally been able to let the tale into the world. I really didn't expect much to happen, and was gratified to receive some very positive feedback: one reader in England wrote that he had never been to British Columbia, but when he read the story he could smell the pine needles, which I thought was a wonderful piece of praise. It was with growing astonishment that I saw the story take on a life of its own: a Stoker nomination, an International Horror Guild nomination, and then (unbelievably) a World Fantasy Award nomination. The news came on a sleepy Saturday morning, and I sat staring at the screen for some time, convinced it was a huge practical joke on someone's part ('Hey, she actually fell for it!'). I know there are those who feel that the words 'It's an honour just to be nominated' are somewhat hollow, a cliché trotted out for tired listeners, but in my case they were absolutely true: it was an honour to be nominated. Steven Millhauser, Gene Wolfe, Ursula le Guin, Stephen King, Peter Straub were nominated for World Fantasy Awards; Barbara Roden, of Ashcroft, British Columbia wasn't.

Then word came that the story had been picked up for two 'Year's Best' anthologies, and suddenly I had to face the fact that perhaps I might be a writer after all: not just someone who dabbled at it, but a real writer, someone who wrote stories that other people would ask for, want to publish (maybe even pay money for), and read. My fiction output, which until then had been glacial, sped up. I wrote a story for our fourth Ash-Tree anthology, At Ease With the Dead; I was asked, by editor Danel Olson, to write a story for Exotic Gothic; I had a story accepted for Strange Tales II from Tartarus Press; and other editors were suddenly asking me for tales. I wrote 'Association Copy' for Bound for Evil, and 'The Things That Shall Come Upon Them' for Gaslit Grimoire and 'The Brink of Eternity' for Poe, and was suddenly confronted with the fact that I really was a writer.

The next step, however, was by no means an easy one. I seemed to be gaining some reputation as a writer of short supernatural fiction; but short story collections are notoriously problematic, and there was the slight difficulty of whom to approach with the idea of a collection. One or two friends were encouraging me to pursue the idea, but I had no idea who, if anyone, would be interested. If I wrote straight horror, or science fiction, or fantasy, it would have been easier; but my stories were more in the way of classic supernatural fiction, a genre which doesn't precisely set publishers' hearts afire. One day, perhaps, I might have a body of work that would interest someone; but I didn't see it happening anytime soon.

Thus it was that when Sean Wallace of Prime Books approached me and said that he'd be interested in doing a collection of my tales, I was taken aback, to put it mildly. But he was quite serious; and thus it is that my first collection of short stories, Northwest Passages, will be appearing from Prime in Fall 2009, in an edition of 1500 hardback copies and 150 leatherbound, signed copies. The volume will collect together most of my short fiction to date, and contain some new material, which I must begin work on.

The idea that I will have a collection of fiction out next year is still sinking in. In some ways I can look back on my life, and writing career, and see the progression to this point; in other ways it's still a complete surprise. Not so to my dad, who predicted, twenty or so years ago, that I'd write a book by the time I was forty. All right, he was a little bit off; but what's five years between family members?

Editing, Part Two

2008-04-20T11:15:00.006-07:00

We've all had it, I'm sure: that feeling, when reading something, that we've read this before. Sometimes it's a case that the reader has re-discovered a work that he or she initially read many years earlier and had forgotten; sometimes it's an author taking a theme or plot or situation that another writer first thought of and turning it into something new. Authors occasionally do this with their own works: for example, Arthur Conan Doyle used the central plot device of 'The Red-Headed League' three times, in the initial story and later in 'The Stockbroker's Clerk' and 'The Three Garridebs'; M. R. James re-used the plot of 'The Mezzotint' in 'The Haunted Doll's-House'; and Agatha Christie utilised the same setting and basic characters in the novel Evil Under the Sun and the short story 'Triangle at Rhodes', albeit bringing each work to a very different conclusion.

The ghost story world is full of examples of authors who use the work of earlier writers to work their own variations on a theme. H. R. Wakefield's 'He Cometh and He Passeth By!' is an obvious nod to James's 'Casting the Runes'; Frank Belknap Long's 'Second Night Out' is Marion Crawford's 'The Upper Berth' all over again; L. T. C. Rolt admitted that his tale 'New Corner' was inspired by Wakefield's 'The Seventeenth Hole at Duncaster'; Edmund Crispin's 'St. Bartholomew's Eve' is James's 'Count Magnus' in another guise (the story also inspired Wakefield's 'The Sepulchre of Jasper Saracen'); E. F. Benson's 'The Bus Conductor' is a spin on Rose Champion de Crespigny's 'The Shears of Atropos' (which itself is based on a well-known 'true' tale told by Lord Dufferin); while Benson (with 'The Step') and Ruskin Bond ('A Face in the Night') are clearly borrowing from Lafcadio Hearn's 'Mujina'.

This leads us to slightly murkier waters. While in all these cases the later writer is clearly riffing off an earlier tale, and making no apologies for it, each author has managed to take the original work and infuse it with something new, something which makes the new story at once a recognisable tribute to an earlier work but something which stands on its own as a fine tale, without ever tipping over into plagiarism. Less clear-cut is another adaptation of Hearn's 'Mujina', which I first encountered in a book aimed at younger readers by Bernhardt J. Hurwood. Chilling Ghost Stories (1973) was presented as a collection of new stories, but one of the tales, 'The Thing', is clearly an unacknowledged swipe of Hearn's tale. And imagine my surprise when I first read Arthur Gray's Tedious Brief Tales of Granta and Gramarye and realised that although I had never, to the best of my knowledge, read any of Gray's stories, three of them were familiar. A little thought and a brief hunt through the bookshelves supplied the answer. 50 Great Horror Stories, edited by John Canning, purports to be a collection of tales which, according to the introduction, 'have in common the fact that they are either true, have been recorded in contemporary documents as fact, or have become such a prevailing folk myth as to suggest some evidence of actual occurrence'. However, three of the stories—all as by J. Wentworth Day—are retellings of tales written by Gray for Tedious Brief Tales. 'Sung to His Death by Dead Men' is a retelling of Gray's 'The True History of Anthony Fryar'; 'The Dead Killed Him In His Own Grave' is based on 'Thankfull Thomas'; and 'The Man Who Turned Into a Cat' is 'The Necromancer'. In all three cases Day introduces the story in the context of the present day and then gives us Gray's original, more or less verbatim, with no acknowledgement anywhere in the book that he has done so. I've encountered this same situation three times in my reading of stories submitted to All Hallows: works which are not merely tributes, or homages, or nods towards the work of another, but which are plagiarism, pure and simple, in which the author has tried to pass off the work of another as his own.

The first such instance I recall was a tale concerning a man who has the ability, when walking through a cemetery, of looking at the tombstones and seeing written there, beside or beneath the pious sentiments and uplifting remarks concerning the deceased, comments which more accurately—if angrily—reflect the true nature of whoever is buried there. When the man comes to the tombstone marking the grave of his recently deceased love, he reads 'She was cuckolding her fiancé and going to meet her lover when she caught a chill and died'. This is, of course, Guy de Maupassant's 'Was It a Dream?'; it had been rewritten in slightly more contemporary language, and re-set in America, but apart from that there were no changes to the original.

The second instance was a story concerning a man who goes to check over a holiday cottage he's thinking of renting, and encounters mysterious goings-on concerning a snowstorm, a surprise visitor, a car in the garage, a dead body, and a disappearing woman. I hadn't read very far before realising that it was A. J. Alan's 'My Adventure in Norfolk', again re-set in America and updated language-wise, but with none of the charm or humour of Alan's original. The third was a story concerning a man whose ancestral home is haunted by a weeping lady, who appears once a year and cannot be got rid of, until the homeowner hits on the plan of luring her outside into the freezing night, where she turns to ice, after which time she is stored in a refrigerated warehouse for all eternity. 'Ah,' you are all saying, 'it's John Kendrick Bangs's "The Water Ghost of Harrowby Hall" all over again.' Yes, indeed it is, but as with the Alan, without any of Bangs's humour; and once more, the story has been re-set in America. I sense a trend here.

In all three cases I wrote back to the author in question—none of whom were known to me—politely pointing out that the stories they had sent in were plagiarisms of quite famous stories. In no case did I receive a reply, which is hardly surprising: what on earth could the author say? But it would have been interesting to get a response, and find out why on earth someone would try something like this. It also makes me wonder if any of the authors tried submitting their stories to more general markets, where the editors were less likely to spot the similarities with the original works.

The bottom line is that there's a very fine divide between homage and plagiarism, and the wary editor has to be on guard. By all means, look to the work of past writers for ideas and inspiration; but when you sit down to write, it's probably best not to have the original work at your elbow as you type.

The Box of Delights

2008-04-12T23:36:00.026-07:00

You'll find them, I imagine, at auctions and flea markets and in consignment and charity shops: boxes of assorted goods, inexpensively priced, the contents a jumble of items which often have no clear relationship to each other. A silver spoon, a ceramic ornament, a set of coasters, wooden bookends, a pair of candlesticks, a paperweight: all of these things, at some time, meant something to a person who no longer wants or needs them or, more sadly, is no longer here to care what happens to items collected over a lifetime. What a wealth of information they could provide about someone who no longer has a voice; and what a wealth of information is lost because these items no longer have any meaning except as objects in and of themselves.

This morning Tim found a box of delights in the garage, while he was helping Christopher try to make some sense of a bank of shelves on which is stored files relating to our various publications, and multiple dustjackets for almost every book we've published. He proudly carried the box upstairs, and I opened it, and as I pulled each half-forgotten item out of its depths memories were stirred which began clamouring like eager children, each one trying to push to the front, and for a moment all I could do was stand still and let them wash over me before I tried to sort through them.

Here is a silver crown piece from 1890, displayed in a brass stand, and suddenly it is 1983 and I am standing in a tiny shop on Pulteney Bridge in Bath, hoping that I can find one from that magical Sherlockian year of 1895 but deciding that 1890 is close enough. On one side—which I find is called the obverse—is the head of an older Queen Victoria, and on the other—the reverse—is St George slaying the dragon (the coin depicted here isn't mine, but is a lovely view of the design). I have no idea what the coin is now worth, or even what I paid for it; I was simply enchanted with the idea, at age nineteen, of owning my very own crown, a coin which Sherlock Holmes himself might have handled. It probably has a certain monetary value, but to me the value is in the association: with Sherlock Holmes and that magical world of Victorian London, with that wonderful trip to England so many years ago, with the knowledge that it has passed through the hands of so many people.

And now out comes a paperweight, the hand-tinted picture inside faded to a palette of soft blues and greys: the White Tower of the Tower of London, and through the years a name comes swimming back to me, and I know without looking it up that the picture is taken from an illustration made by Wenceslaus Holler. Why has that name stayed with me through more than a quarter of a century, since that first visit to the Tower in 1981 when I was overwhelmed by

the majesty, the history, the beauty of that place? I, a seventeen-year-old from the west coast of Canada, had never in my life seen, or even imagined, anything like the Tower, and I wandered through it for as long as I dared before dashing to the gift shop, scooping up as many books and pamphlets as I could find, and running for the coach waiting to whisk us off to the next stop. That summer I painstakingly compiled a handwritten book about the Tower, culling information from my booklets, and drawing maps and plans and even a word search puzzle, which were carefully glued in place; and even now, so many years later, this fascination with the Tower remains, so that in any film set in London which shows the river around Tower Bridge I am scanning the edges of the shot, looking for the Tower, as anxious that it should still be there as those who clip the wings of the ravens who inhabit its grounds, lest the birds leave and the Tower, and the monarchy, fall.

I plunge in my hand, and out comes a shell, which I know is a cowrie, and with it comes a picture, vivid as if he were standing before me, of my maternal grandfather, John Grant. He and my grandmother used to vacation in Hawaii, on the island of Kauai, for several weeks each winter, and Grandpa would collect cowries from the rocks off the beach near where they stayed, and bury them in the garden, to be collected the following winter. It is a beautiful thing, smooth and sleek, black and brown and cream, and I remember our trip to Kauai in 1978, but most of all I remember Grandpa, his moustache tickling as he kissed me, the little song he would sing when, as a child, I stayed with him and Grandma at their house on Skaha Lake in the Okanagan Valley and we would watch the wind whip the lake: 'Every little wave has its white cap on'. From Grandpa Grant I inherited my love of the Old Country, of history, of tradition, and I miss him still, and wish he could have known Tim. And this leads me on to thoughts of his widow, Glenna Grant, my grandmother, who died two months ago, a week before her 99th birthday, and I remember a picture of her and Grandpa, taken on their wedding day, Grandma looking shy yet lovely, Grandpa pleased and proud, both of them impossibly young to me, who knew them only when they were already well into their fifties. And I look at the letter opener in the holder on the desk in front of me, with its leather handled embossed with the letters 'J. J. G.'—John Jenkins Grant—in Gothic script, and I think that Grandpa would be pleased to know that it is still being used.

Another paperweight, this one with a detail from J. M. W. Turner's 'The Fighting Temeraire'. A print of this painting hangs downstairs, and although the colours in the paperweight—like those of Holler's view of the Tower—are faded, they still retain a sense of Turner's vibrant colour. I first encountered the painting—a different detail of it—on the copy of my Penguin Classics edition of Wilkie Collins's The Moonstone, and purchased the print and had it framed on the strength of this acquaintance; yet nothing could prepare me for the shock of seeing it—Turner's actual painting—in the National Gallery in London in 1983. I had known its reproduction, its echo, for so long that seeing it in front of me in all its glory, knowing that Turner himself had touched that canvas, being able to drink it in as the artist had intended, was a revelation. Art became, at one leap, something alive and vital, passionate and dangerous, something that could touch the heart and soul.

And now—but what's this? A slice of something, a rock—no, a slice of brick, yellowed and pitted, and suddenly I am in the churchyard in Lucan, Ontario, for this is a slice of brick from the church where the Black Donnellys are buried, and of a sudden it is a hot late summer day in southern Ontario and I have asked my Uncle George if we can visit Lucan, so that I may see the scene of those terrible events of 1880, when members of the Donnelly clan were murdered by townsfolk who, guided either by righteous indignation or a thirst for blood—depending on whose version of events you choose to accept—sought redress for wrongs either real or imagined; at this distance it is hard to know whose story to believe. I had read two books on the subject, and wanted to see the scene for myself; perhaps I felt that if I visited Lucan I would know on which side the truth lay, but at that remove it was almost impossible to imagine such bloody vengeance in such a peaceful spot. The grave was there, though, as proof that it had happened, and a pile of discarded bricks beside the church demonstrated that life continues: the old must make way for the new, and perhaps it is best that this is so. But I took a brick from the pile, perhaps to ensure that the old was not forgotten, and Uncle George carved a piece from the end of it for me, and there it is, mute testimony to a tragedy.

A crudely carved wooden horse is next; and now we are closer to home than England or Kauai or Ontario, for on the base is written 'Souvenir, Cornwall Lookout'. The name will mean nothing to most people; yet Cornwall Mountain is something which I see every day from the front of our house, and while I cannot see the Lookout from where we live, I can see the cut in the mountain just below it, which as I write is filled with snow, despite the warm temperatures which make us think that Spring is now something more than an abstract concept. The horse was carved by someone who worked at the Lookout, when it was a forestry station manned every summer; the station is, as far as I know, still there, but is now only manned when conditions warrant it, which means that the road leading to the top of Cornwall—treacherous at the best of times, narrow and rutted and rocky—is no longer maintained, and has retreated into something wild, to be attempted only by the hardiest of souls. The view from the top, however, more than repays the trouble of getting there, and even on the hottest summer days it is a cool and tranquil place, carpeted in lush green and the soft colours of wild flowers, so that one almost expects Julie Andrews to appear, arms outspread, and begin singing.

Half-a-dozen disparate items, plucked from the box of delights. Anyone finding them together in a box at an auction would consider them an odd assortment with no rhyme or reason, no obvious clues linking them together. Yet they speak to me, evoke memories, serve as small markers of my life, tell a little about who I am and what I think; so I shall take them out of their box and place them where I can see them, so that they, and the recollections which come crowding on me as I look at them, can live again.

TCM's 31 Day-o-Ram

2008-02-24T15:31:00.004-08:00

This was on the Turner Classic Movies site, and I thought it was wonderful. Apparently it's based on an invention called the Panoram, an early video jukebox which played what were, in essence, the forerunners of music videos. Everything old is new again.

The 31 Day-o-Ram plays an assortment of opening and closing credit sequences, musical numbers, and theme tunes for a number of Oscar-nominated and -winning movies. Along with some obvious ones (the themes from Jaws and The Great Escape) there are some less obvious, but equally deserving, selections: listen to George Delerue's wonderful opening credits music for A Man For All Seasons (and spot a young, or youngish, Leo McKern), and then be dazzled by the exuberance of Gene Kelly and Donald O'Connor performing the 'Moses Supposes' number from Singin' in the Rain. And you don't even have to put a nickel in the jukebox!

My Brush With Oscar

2008-02-22T23:21:00.018-08:00

It's a long and winding road from English novelist R. F. Delderfield to my meeting with an Oscar winner; but bear with me. . . .

In the late 1970s and early 1980s there was a brief vogue, on British TV, for adaptations of the works of novelist R. F. Delderfield (1912–72). Several of his novels—typically sprawling epics encompassing several decades—were dramatised, and among these was his A Horseman Riding By trilogy (1978; although only the first two books were used for the TV series). It aired on PBS around 1980, and I was enthralled, so much so that I sought out the books and devoured them, thus beginning an admiration for Delderfield's work that holds strong to this day.

The main character of both book and series is Paul Craddock, played in the TV version by a young British actor—previously unknown to me—named Nigel Havers. In those pre-Internet days it was difficult to learn a good deal about actors, and all I knew, in the months after the series ended, was that Havers was featuring in a British film with the somewhat unpromising title Chariots of Fire. In spring 1981 the film was slated to open in Vancouver, and one rainy night I took my seventeen-year-old self down to the Captiol Six cinema on Granville Street to see it.

The Capitol Six—alas, no longer with us—contained, as the name implies, six cinemas. The main cinema, on the second floor, sat about 1200 people; two cinemas, on the third floor, accommodated about 600 each; and the fourth floor held three cinemas, each with seating for about 400 people. Chariots of Fire was on the third floor; hardly auspicious, but I was not daunted. I arrived while the previous showing was ending, and while I waited in the lobby I got my first taste of Vangelis's score; and it is not overstating the matter to say that I was hooked from that moment.

The film was wonderful, from start to finish. If I was disappointed that Havers's character—the fictitious Lord Andrew Lindsay—did not get the prominence I expected, I do not recall. I simply knew that this was a wonderful film, and over the next few weeks I saw it a half-dozen times. I bought the soundtrack album, and managed to wangle a large display poster for the film out of A&B Sound on Seymour Street when they were finished with it; the poster adorned my bedroom wall for some time, but was lost at some point, probably during a move. I also managed to get the press kit for the film—I still have this, thank goodness—from Golden Age Collectables on Granville Street, one of my regular stops on my trips to Vancouver when I was a teenager. The shop still exists, but is more devoted to comics now; during the 1980s it was a wonderful place to find movie posters, stills, and press kits, and several relics of visits there adorn the walls of our house to this day, including a wonderful three-sheet poster for the 1944 film version of And Then There Were None (in the downstairs hallway) and a lobby card for the 1959 Hound of the Baskervilles ('It's Ten Times The Terror In TECHNICOLOR!') which is to my left as I type.

The press kit—do film companies still produce these?—for Chariots of Fire contained a good deal of information about the film and the artists involved; there were pictures of those behind the camera, as well as in front of it, so I got to know what director Hugh Hudson and producer David Puttnam looked like. On Oscar night 1982 I was on tenterhooks, wondering how many awards Chariots—nominated for seven Oscars—would take home. I had baked a cake—decorated, to the best of my ability, with the Chariots logo—specially for the event, and as the night drew on I became increasinly anxious. Best Costumes, Best Soundtrack, Best Original Screenplay: all very well, but would it win Best Picture? When Warren Beatty won Best Director for Reds things looked a bit iffy; and then came the opening of the envelope: Best Picture, Chariots of Fire. The next few moments are a blur; but I distinctly remember my brother John saying 'Get her some oxygen, she's hyperventilating.' I was as pleased and proud as if I'd written and directed the movie myself; well, I was only eighteen, so perhaps can be excused.

Fast forward a year, to the spring of 1983. I had graduated high school two years earlier, but was tagging along as part of a SETS (Student Educational Travel Services) trip to England, France, and Holland. I had taken the trip in 1981, when I was in grade 12, and was being allowed to participate again largely, I think, because the teachers running it liked me and decided 'Why not?' As I was not one of the students I was allowed a certain amount of freedom, and found myself associating with the adults running the tour, particularly Mr Phillips—principal of a Richmond, B.C. high school—and his wife. On 28 March 1983 the three of us went to the theatre (Key For Two by John Chapman and Dave Freeman, starring Moira Lister, Patrick Cargill, Barbara Murray, and Glyn Houston—who, incidentally had a major role in the TV version of Horseman Riding By—at the Vaudeville Theatre), and afterwards we went to a late dinner at Fortnum's Fountain, the restaurant at Fortnum and Mason, the great shop on Piccadilly.

We were nearing the end of our meal when the door opened and two men walked in. It did not take me long to realise that one of the men was David Puttnam, whom I recognised from the press kit for Chariots of Fire, and whom I had last seen accepting the Best Picture Oscar as producer of that film. The men took their seats a few tables away from us, and for several minutes a war waged within my breast. I knew that David Puttnam, producer of one of my favourite films, was sat not twenty feet away from me: the question was, what to do about it? Should I go up to him and say—what, exactly? Perhaps he would be angry; perhaps he liked his privacy. And the man was eating dinner; he wouldn't want to be disturbed. Canadians are nothing if not polite, and I hesitated to approach him.

And yet—how many times in my life would this opportunity present itself? If I walked out the door without saying anything, would I kick myself for the rest of my life? Thus the battle raged, until Mr and Mrs Phillips indicated that it really was time we left. The decision was made. I stood up and approached the table.

Remember: I was a nineteen year old Canadian girl from the suburbs of Vancouver, in a foreign city, who had never met anyone remotely famous, let alone introduced herself to a stranger in a restaurant. Yet I heard myself saying, as from far away, 'Excuse me, are you David Puttnam?'

He turned and looked at me, and for a moment I thought No, it's a terrible mistake, it's not him at all, ohmigod. . . And then I heard 'Yes,' and I could breathe again, and I said 'I loved Chariots of Fire, I was thrilled when it won the Oscar', and he said kindly 'Yes, I was pleased too,' and I asked him for his autograph. Then an awkward moment ensued, as I realised I had nothing for him to sign, except my London Theatre Guide which I had picked up at at the play earlier that night. Any port in a storm; so I folded it out to a blank spot and he fished for a pen, and as he signed it I said 'I hope you don't mind me disturbing you,' and he laughed and said 'I've been waiting twenty years for this!'

When he had signed ('For Barb, Thank's [sic] for asking, David Puttnam') he motioned to the man sitting opposite him—who had been silent up until then—and said 'You should ask him for his autograph; he's much more famous than me.' By then I was in such a daze I doubt I would have recognised my own mother, and I looked at the man and said 'Hugh Hudson?' They both laughed, and David Puttnam said it was Bill Forsyth, and the other man signed my programme as well ('To Barb, from Bill Forsyth (NOT HUGH!)'), and . . . well, that was it, really, but when I left Fortnum's Fountain I was walking on air, and ever since that date, whenever David Puttnam's name has been mentioned, I say 'Hey, me and Dave, we're like that', and I remember that magical night in London a quarter-century ago (where has the time gone?) when I was this close to Oscar, and realise that if I had left the restaurant without asking I would indeed be kicking myself to this day.

Countdown to Oscar night

2008-02-17T19:30:00.003-08:00

The end of the Writers' Guild strike means that the Oscar broadcast will go ahead a week tonight, and for me that's cause for rejoicing. The strike has had no real impact on me—I watch very little television, and what I do watch tends to be fare that's unaffected by a strike, such as news, sports, and whatever's on Turner Classic Movies—but I was worried that it would affect the Oscars, one of the red letter days in my calendar. It's not that I set an awful lot of store by what the members of the Academy of Motion Pictures Arts and Sciences decide are the 'best' of a given year—this same group named The Greatest Show on Earth Best Picture over High Noon, after all—more that I enjoy seeing movies celebrated for one night of the year, an acknowledgement that this art form I love can throw up moments of heartbreaking sublimity, moments which link people throughout the world, can cause a smile, bring back a memory, make us nod our heads and think 'Yes, I remember' or 'Yes, I can imagine.'

A year ago I wrote the following to a friend, about books vs. movies, and on reflection it says so much about how I feel about films that I feel it's worth repeating here:

'Anyone can watch a movie; then again, anyone can read a book. It's what they're watching/reading, and what they take away from it, that counts, that can be hard, that can make you learn something, look at the world in a different way. There are movies—as there are books—that are as lasting and of as much consequence and nourishment as cotton candy; but then there are films that do what books can do: transport to us to another world, another place, another time, show us people and things we'd never otherwise see. You know how much I love books, and reading, and the written word; but I'd be happy to hold up films as diverse as Stagecoach, Citizen Kane, Brazil, A Man For All Seasons, Young Frankenstein, La Regle de Jeu, Swing Time, Topsy-Turvy, Jaws, The Life and Death of Colonel Blimp, Monty Python and the Holy Grail, Brief Encounter, and The Killing Fields and say "These are all great, important, thought-provoking works in their various way, that tell us about ourselves, our world, and our place in it." I'm not saying watch them instead of read books; watch them as well as read books (although not at the same time, obviously).

'I love to get stuck into a book—any kind of book, fiction, non-fiction, biography, whatever—that lets me see things, and do things (vicariously) that I'll never get to do. I'll never try to trek to the North Pole, or climb Everest; but when I read about those things I'm there, man-hauling a sledge over a pressure ridge, or negotiating the Khumbu Icefall. When I read a great work of fiction—by which I mean a work of fiction I'm enjoying, engrossed in, not necessarily an Approved Classic Of Established Literary Merit—I'm with the characters, feeling for them, cheering them on or watching, appalled (as the case may be). But movies can do that for me too. I can read a book about Sydney Schanberg's time in Cambodia, and his efforts to find his interpreter, Dith Pran, and have my heart in my mouth at the same time that I'm appalled by man's inhumanity to man and overjoyed by the love one person can have for another; and then I can watch the film, and have all those same feelings, and still ponder it afterwards, with the added feature that now I can picture the streets of Phnom Penh, see the bodies in the field as Pran stumbles on his hellish journey, and see the look on the faces of the two men at the end (I can't watch the last ten minutes of that film without it breaking my heart all over again). One experience isn't, I think, better than the other; they're different, but equally valid in their ways.

'Yes, the vast majority of films are simply something with which to pass a few idle hours; but then so are most books, when you get right down to it (although there are probably a few more books around that make you think than there are films, if only because the written word had a couple of thousand years' head start on celluloid). I cry when I finish reading Maurice Pagnol's Le Château de ma mère, and the narrator, now a grown man, reflects on the fates of those he loved ('Such is the life of man. A few joys, quickly obliterated by unforgettable sorrows. There is no need to tell the children so.'), and I cry at the end of It's A Wonderful Life, when George stands on the bridge and pleads to have his life back ('Please, God, let me live again.'). I'd hate to have to say one was better than the other, or choose between them; to me they're both worthy of study and comment, of being cherished.'

The best films, like the best books, allow us to see and experience things which we will never know, but can imagine; which is why, a week from tonight, I will be glued to the Oscar telecast, watching as an art form that I love is celebrated.

Editing, Part One-and-a-half

2008-02-03T21:28:00.000-08:00

In 1977, when we moved from Ottawa back to Richmond, B.C., I was somewhat amazed to find that what had been Lansdowne Race Track (as in horse racing) had become, in the four years since we had moved from Richmond, the site of a shopping mall, also named Lansdowne. One of the lynch-pins of the mall was a large branch of Woodwards department store (alas, no longer with us), and among the features of the store was a good-sized book section, overseen by a gracious lady by the name of Ellen Sacré.

It was only a few minutes, by bus, from where I lived, and I quickly became a habitué of the bookshop, spending countless enjoyable hours browsing the stock and talking to Ellen. In those far-off days, the only way to really keep in touch with what books were being published was to browse publishers' catalogues, of which Ellen had an endless supply, and I used to pore over them, noting down titles of interest and placing advance orders for particularly choice titles with Ellen.

In the four or five years that I spent hanging around the bookstore, I came to know Ellen fairly well, and she me; indeed, she used to point me out to customers, saying that I'd gone from reading Agatha Christie to Charles Dickens under her watch, as it were. She was the first grown-up—other than my parents and a couple of teachers—to take my reading seriously; and I remember that one day, when I was about seventeen or thereabouts, she said to me—for no reason that I could discern—'You should be an editor.'

I don't remember any more of the conversation than that: I have no idea what we were talking about that might have prompted such a remark, and in the years since I've occasionally wondered what it was that she saw in me, to inspire those words. So it strikes me, now, as a good time to say thank you, Ellen, for encouraging a book-struck youngster. If only everyone who loved books, and words, had such a mentor!

Editing, Part One

2008-02-03T16:29:00.000-08:00

I had occasion, a year or so ago, to travel 30 miles north of Ashcroft and spend the day at David Stoddart Secondary School in Clinton, B.C., where I spent time with four different classes, talking to the students (grades eight through twelve) on various aspects of writing, publishing, and editing, with one class devoted to the discussion of ghost stories in general and 'The Monkey's Paw' in particular.

It was a fascinating day, and in some ways the most interesting class was the one spent with the students who edit the school's newsletter. I took along, by way of exercise, a page from a story that I had accepted for All Hallows and had edited prior to its publication in the journal (for the purposes of the exercise I did not identify the author). I had had to do some work on the tale, so I took along the first page as it was originally submitted, added a few errors of my own, and handed a copy to each student, asking the class to edit as they saw fit; then I went through the page a line at a time, asking what, if anything, anyone had changed on that line and then explaining the reasons behind my own changes.

The teacher told me afterwards that the students had found it very illuminating and helpful. During the class itself I heard from the students that they found editing quite difficult: not so much the actual editing itself, as trying to explain to people who were, after all, their friends and classmates why they had edited their work. They felt a certain amount of embarrassment at having to do this, explaining that the author often felt hurt. I explained, in turn, that an editor's job is to make an author look good, and that their friends, far from being hurt, should be grateful.

There is, of course, more to editing than going through a story and making suggestions as to what an author might do differently, or pointing out errors; there is also the job of getting the stories together in the first place, so that there's something to go through and edit. I currently do this for All Hallows, the journal of the Ghost Story Society, and for Ash-Tree Press, usually when Christopher and I decide, in a moment of reckless abandon, that we're going to do another anthology. In this post I'll confine myself to All Hallows, and leave Ash-Tree editing for another time.

All Hallows is an open submissions market, which means that we'll accept stories from anyone who cares to send one in; you don't have to be a member of the GSS to submit. These days most submissions arrive by e-mail, as attachments in Word, which method of submitting is encouraged: partly because I get eight to ten submissions a week, which is not so many that I can't read them on screen, and partly because if I do accept a story it's much easier when I have an electronic file, and don't have to typeset it. As to formatting: as long as it's legible (no strange fonts or graphic embellishments, please) then it's fine.

Most people who submit a story, whether electronically or by mail, attach some kind of cover letter, which I rarely read except in a very cursory manner. If a writer has a few credits in the field, then that's good to know; but I don't need to know what he or she does for a living, or the synopsis of the story (it's amazing how many people feel a need to summarise the story in their cover letter); and if your previous writing credits include non-genre publications then I'm not really interested. The story is what matters.

Here I should say that every story that comes in to All Hallows gets a chance, by which I mean I start to read it with an objective eye and clear mind. However, it soon becomes obvious who hasn't read the guidelines (which are faithfully spelled out on the Ghost Story Society's website). If a story isn't supernatural, or contains a lot of sex or graphic violence, or is about vampires, then I'm not interested, and won't bother finishing it, as there's not much point (and the author was warned).

I reject far more stories than I accept: I'd say that the ratio is about seven or eight rejects to every one accepted, if that. The vast majority of the stories which get rejected aren't necessarily actively bad—although I have seen my share of stories that wouldn't have passed muster for a high school writing assignment—they're simply . . . instantly forgettable. The writing may be—usually is—competent, but the story leaves no lasting impression; there's nothing there that I haven't read a hundred times before. The worst of these are the stories that take a cliché of the genre—the building that the protagonist takes refuge in, but which has disappeared the next day when he or she returns, and turns out to have burned down a hundred years ago—and then does nothing new with it. These stories are usually written by people who are not members of the GSS, whose names I don't recognise from my reading in the genre, and who clearly have very little knowledge of the ghost story.

Occasionally I'll get a story submitted which is fairly predictable, but which I accept, usually because the story is told exceedingly well, contains interesting characters, and is short enough that the predictability doesn't weigh against it. In most cases, though, predictable stories get a polite 'Thanks, but no thanks' letter. I also occasionally get a story which is very good, but which simply isn't suitable (for whatever reason) for All Hallows. In those cases, I'll say this in my reply to the author, and encourage them to try the story with another publication, and will offer suggestions as to where he or she might send it.

And then there are the stories which are good, but which for some reason don't quite work. If I can put my finger on why I think it doesn't work I'll say this to the author, and offer what suggestions I can as to how he or she might make it work. I usually feel a bit awkward making comments of this sort, and qualify them by saying that I do not set myself up as some sort of guru of the ghost story. However, what I do bring to the table is an objective eye, and one that has read a lot of ghost stories over the years. Sometimes an author is too close to a story to be able to see it objectively: she or he knows precisely what was meant, but what's clear in an author's head doesn't always make it onto the printed page, and occasionally an editor can spot an awkward transition or a missing piece of the puzzle, and point this out. When I do this—when I see a story that has promise, but which I feel needs something more—I always make it clear that I'd be happy to see the story again, should the author choose to rework it; and on a gratifyingly large number of occasions I've had stories re-submitted with my suggested changes taken on board, and have accepted the stories. I should also mention that, my reservations about offering suggestions notwithstanding, a large number of authors have expressed their gratitude for my suggestions; so I expect I'm doing something right.

Once I've accepted a story for All Hallows the unspoken agreement is that it doesn't need any rewriting or changes, so when it comes time to edit the story for publication I'm looking to correct mistakes of spelling and grammar, and make the story conform to house style (which means, amongst other things, Canadian spelling and punctuation). Authors whose stories appear in All Hallows always see a proof copy before publication, although by the time I send out a proof I expect the author to do little more than note any errors and perhaps make a tweak here and there. Of the authors who seem to think that the proof stage is a chance to rewrite the tale—and this has happened more than once—I will say nothing, except to note that by the time the story is in proof form I've already spent anywhere up to an hour editing and formatting it, which is why I'm not very happy when you decide to change the main character's name, or rewrite the ending, or add a long section in the middle detailing exactly why the heroine is travelling to York.

My main peeves? Besides plots whose outcome is obvious from the second paragraph, these would be people who obviously have no idea what sort of stories All Hallows publishes; people who clearly haven't done their research (I remember one story in which a character travelled by train from London to Manchester—in 1789; and another in which a character living in Birmingham, England talked of visiting the seaside 'only a few miles away'); and people who clearly have very little idea of basic grammar, or spelling, or word usage. I sometimes read a story which would be a disgrace to a grade ten student and wonder what kind of writer could possibly think that this story was ready to send to an editor for possible publication.

All Hallows is not a paying market; but that doesn't mean it's not a professional one. Stories that have appeared in All Hallows have been chosen for inclusion in 'Year's Best' anthologies; they consistently receive Honourable Mentions in Year's Best Fantasy and Horror; the journal is seen by major editors in the field, and is sent to awards bodies for consideration for genre awards; at least one author has received a book deal because an editor saw a story of his in the journal and liked what he saw; and the magazine itself has won a special Stoker Award, an International Horror Guild Award, and been nominated for a World Fantasy Award. So as markets for ghost stories go, an author could do much worse.

The bottom line, with stories for All Hallows, is that I'm looking for well-written stories that will appeal to some 400 people who have, between them, read thousands upon thousands of ghost stories. I want engaging characters; an interesting plot; clean prose which shows the author is familiar with basic concepts of grammar, spelling, and usage; and that indefinable something which makes the story linger in the memory after the last page has been turned. I can't always put my finger on it; but I know it when I see it, which is why I approach each story submitted for All Hallows with an open mind. Long may those submissions continue; but please—read the guidelines first.

Fiction: The Appointed Time

2008-01-25T17:00:00.000-08:00

In 2005 my short story 'The Appointed Time' appeared in Supernatural Tales 9. The tale was originally submitted to the anthology Shelf Life: Fantastic Stories Celebrating Bookstores, which was published by DreamHaven Books in 2002 for the World Fantasy Convention in Minneapolis. The story did not, ultimately, make the cut; undaunted, I sent it to David Longhorn, who immediately accepted it but confessed that it would be some time before it could see print. Knowing what wait times in the small press are like, and knowing the quality of Supernatural Tales, I was more than happy to have found a good home for my tale.

As all issues of Supernatural Tales are sold out, and the story has not appeared elsewhere, I've decided to publish it here. Enjoy!

The Appointed Time

It is night in Lincoln’s Inn—perplexed and troublous valley of the shadow of the law, where suitors generally find but little day—and fat candles are snuffed out in offices, and clerks have rattled down the crazy wooden stairs, and dispersed. The bell that rings at nine o’clock, has ceased its doleful clangor about nothing; the gates are shut; and the night-porter, a solemn warder with a mighty power of sleep, keeps guard in his lodge.

Henry Anderson looked up from his book with a start. A noise had caught his ear; something outside the normal range of sounds that he had, after more than thirty years in the shop, come to know and expect and even, at times—especially lately—welcome. It was a thin, dusty sound, almost a sigh, and Henry glanced behind him, half-expecting to see a figure standing over his shoulder. Impossible; there had not been a customer in the shop for at least an hour, and he was all too aware that the apartment behind was painfully empty.

He kept his head up for another moment, listening. Around him stood row upon row of books, which seemed to be listening, too; holding their collective breath, watching, waiting, as if in anticipation of something which was hovering just outside Henry’s vision. As indeed it was, had Henry only known; had he, as he gazed about him, been able to see beyond the front wall, into the street, where a figure stood, wrapped in evening shadows, its whole attention fixed on the dim light spilling out of the door of the shop.

In the ordinary course of things, Henry would have had the shop closed and locked now, the lights extinguished; but he had become engrossed in his book, and lost track of time. This was by no means unusual with Henry, and on most evenings no harm would have come of it. But this was an evening unlike any other in his life, although he did not yet know it. And so, after assuring himself that all was well inside the shop, his head dipped irresistibly back down towards his book, and the light continued to shine out into the damp streets, a lone beacon in an otherwise dark stretch of shops. And outside the figure, after a moment of hesitation, drew nearer.

This was not the figure’s usual habitat; it was used to more garish surroundings, louder streets. Chance had taken it further afield than usual, and in this unaccustomed environment it was cautious, wary. But cold and hunger and other, darker needs spurred it on, drawing it inexorably, inevitably closer to Henry and his quiet, tidy world.

It is a close night, though the damp cold is searching too; and there is a laggard mist a little way up in the air. It is a fine steaming night to turn the slaughter-houses, the unwholesome trades, the sewerage, bad water, and burial grounds to account, and give the Registrar of Deaths some extra business.

The noise again, louder this time. Henry’s head jerked up, and he cocked it on one side, trying to determine what the sound was and where it came from. It had definitely sounded like a sigh; no mistaking it. It was followed by a silence which sounded expectant, as if awaiting some action on his part at which he could not guess.

Perhaps, thought Henry, it was time to start thinking about selling up and moving on. He had thought about it before; he and Mary had discussed it before she died, but lightly, as something that would not happen for a good many years yet. Then for some time he had not thought about very much of anything, selling the shop least of all. He had kept it going because not keeping it going had seemed unthinkable, another blow to the fabric of his life which would have been unbearable. Mary and the shop had been part of him for so long that to lose both would have been to lose every reason he had for getting up in the morning.

So he had clung to the shop, finding a kind of solace in the ordered rank of books in their neatly labelled sections. It had not always been thus. When he had first bought the shop, it had been little better than a junk-heap, a dispirited shambles of discarded, unwanted books, and he had had to spend a good deal of time patiently weeding out the multiple copies of battered paperbacks, their broken spines and chipped covers an affront to his notion of what books should be. Slowly he had built up a quietly successful bookstore, filled with the sorts of books he liked reading, all lovingly tended, neatly shelved, easily accessible. The shop itself attracted a loyal group of regular and semi-regular customers, who found a safe and companionable haven amongst the shelves and racks, a friendly and knowledgeable proprietor in Henry. ‘It’s Mary’s cookies people come for, really,’ he would say with a smile, and it was true that the plate of cookies put out every morning by the coffee machine had always been empty by day’s end, the crushed cushions on the comfortable armchairs bearing silent witness to those who had found a home there. The cookies were from a box now, but the customers still came.

Outside the rain continued to drizzle, stretching damp fingers along the sidewalk. The figure in the shadows shivered, and gazed greedily at the light from the shop. It drew nearer still, eyes fixed on the door. The sound of a car in a nearby street caused it to hesitate, and draw back from the light momentarily; and that pause bought Henry Anderson a few more moments of life.

‘It is a tainting sort of weather,’ says Mr Snagsby; ‘and I find it sinking to the spirits.’

‘By George! I find it gives me the horrors,’ returns Mr Weevle.

‘Then, you see, you live in a lonesome way, and in a lonesome room, with a black circumstance hanging over it,’ says Mr Snagsby, looking in past the other’s shoulder along the dark passage, and then falling back a step to look up at the house. ‘I couldn’t live in that room alone, as you do, sir. I should get so fidgetty and worried of an evening, sometimes, that I should be driven to come to the door, and stand here, sooner than sit there.’

The sound had become louder, as if uttered by someone—or something—that was gaining strength, rallying for one supreme effort. The cry—for it was a cry, no doubt of it—startled Henry so much that he pulled himself out of his chair with a suddenness that made the bones and joints in his legs and back protest at the effort. He walked around the desk and peered into the depths of the shop, while his mind tried and failed to analyse and define the exact nature of the sound. He was forced back to his first, instinctive thought: a cry, and of pain, too. No; not pain, exactly: the expectation of pain, as of someone who cried out in anticipation of a cruel blow.

He shook his head. Definitely time to start thinking seriously about selling up, moving out, going somewhere warmer and drier. He was getting too old to manage the shop on his own, and the trade was changing too fast for him to keep up. Every day, it seemed, people asked him when he was going to take his stock on-line, and he would shake his head and say ruefully, ‘Ah, well, you can’t teach an old dog new tricks.’ Now, standing in the familiar quiet of the shop, he shook his head again. ‘Old dog?’ he muttered under his breath. ‘Old dinosaur, more like. Hearing things, too. What would Mary say?’

And yet the thought of leaving the shop, turning it over to another person, closing the door behind him forever, was one that he persisted in putting off. There were too many memories bound up within the four walls, jostling for space on the shelves, surrounding every bookcase, each piece of furniture. The armchairs, now; they were not the height of fashion, never had been—‘But Mary, they’re comfortable,’ he had said when he brought them back, and she had surveyed them with a look, half-tolerant, half-exasperated. She had had the same look on her face every time Henry, faced with a need to create more space, had brought back another bookcase, discovered at a sale or in the dusty recesses of a used furniture shop. ‘If your goal was to not have any two bookcases in the shop matching, Henry,’ she had said once, ‘then you’ve certainly succeeded.’ But there was a smile on her face as she said it.

Henry smiled at the memory. Yes, the shop was full of memories, and he could smile at most of them. ‘If these walls—no, if these books could speak,’ he thought, ‘they could certainly tell a tale or two!’

He glanced out the front window, vaguely surprised to see how dark it was. Time to close up for the night; more than time, in fact. Lock the doors, turn out the lights, then go and make some dinner, listen to the news, read for a time. A night like any other. But this was not to be a night like any other.

Had he gone to the door even then, he might have been in time, for the figure outside was still hesitating in the shadows, and the sight of Henry at the door, pulling down the blinds, turning the lock, would have been enough to send it scuttling back into the darkness. But he paused, and stretched, trying to relieve the ache in his back; and he was lost.

‘Seems a Fate in it, don’t there?’ suggests the stationer.

‘There does.’

‘Just so,’ observes the stationer, with his confirmatory cough. ‘Quite a Fate in it. Quite a Fate.’

At the sound of the door opening and shutting, Henry turned so quickly that his back gave a more violent twinge than before, causing him to draw his breath in sharply. A swift glance took in the—no, not customer, this was no customer come late, this was Trouble with a capital T, right here in his shop. Be calm, think, think, think. . . .

‘Yes? What can I do for you?’ He tried to make his voice sound curt, no-nonsense, but Henry was not used to being curt, and his voice wavered slightly. The figure moved forward, and Henry could see it more clearly. A youngish man, unruly dark hair framing a sullen face, a cheap imitation leather jacket zipped up to his chin, one hand visible, the other balled up in a pocket, clutching—what? Henry realised he did not want to know.

‘What can you do for me? What can you do?’ said the other, as if seriously pondering the question. ‘I’ll tell you what you can do, old man—you can give me any money you’ve got, and quick, too, ’cause I don’t like having to ask for things more than once.’

Henry thought quickly, weighing his options. What options? said a voice in his head. Don’t try to be a hero. Give him what he wants and maybe he’ll leave. ‘All right, yes, money, by all means,’ he said, trying to keep the fear out of his voice. ‘I don’t have much, but you can take it all, yes . . .’ He moved to walk around the desk, and the other man stepped forward, closing the distance between them so suddenly that Henry pulled back.

‘No tricks, old man,’ whispered the intruder. ‘See? I don’t like tricks, and neither does my friend.’ He withdrew the hand that had been in his pocket, and Henry saw the gleam of a knife blade as it caught a ray of light from overhead. ‘Just move nice and slow.’

Henry nodded. ‘The cash—I keep it there.’ He gestured towards the desk.

‘Get it, then.’ The intruder’s eyes left Henry for a moment and swept around the shop. ‘Anyone else here?’

‘No. No one. I live by myself,’ said Henry, profoundly grateful—I’m sorry, Mary—that this was true.

‘Great. Get the money, then.’

‘Yes.’ Henry moved around behind the desk to the cash register and fumbled at the keys with fingers which seemed to have grown stiff and useless. How does this thing open . . . please, please . . . let it be all right, oh, let it be all right . . .

‘Come on, old man, stop jerking me around. I don’t have all day.’

‘No . . . yes, yes, I’m trying . . . just be a minute . . .’

‘I don’t have a minute!’ the other exploded, thrusting himself across the desk so that he was inches away from Henry’s trembling frame. ‘Aren’t you listening?’ He moved his hand so that the knife was between them. ‘I want that money now, old man, or I’ll use this!’ He grabbed Henry’s shirt, pulling him halfway across the desk; and Henry, feeling himself losing his balance, flailed his arms, trying to stop himself from falling. One of his hands caught the intruder’s arm; not a blow, not by any stretch, but unexpected, and feeling himself threatened the intruder lashed out, sending Henry reeling backwards, hands to his throat, staring uncomprehending at the redness which was covering them, covering his shirt, covering everything, even his eyes, which were straining into darkness, straining, trying to see, trying—and then there was silence, and Henry Anderson saw and heard no more.

Both sit silent, listening to the metal voices, near and distant, resounding from towers of various heights, in tones more various than their situations. When these at length cease, all seems more mysterious and quiet than before. One disagreeable result of whispering is, that it seems to evoke an atmosphere of silence, haunted by the ghosts of sound—strange cracks and tickings, the rustling of garments that have no substance in them, and the tread of dreadful feet, that would leave no mark on the sea-sand or the winter snow.

The intruder stood stock-still on his side of the desk, his chest heaving as with some great physical effort. He could see part of Henry’s body, lying on its side where it had fallen, and he watched it for any movement, any sign of life. But there was none. The job had been done well. The knife was still in his hand, and he gazed at it dispassionately. A box of tissues stood on a corner of the desk, and he took out a handful and wiped the blade off before placing the knife back in his pocket. He looked at the body again, his mind working as his breath came more easily and he found that he could think with something approaching clarity.

First he moved to the door, locking it and pulling down the blind, unconsciously carrying out the very actions which would have saved Henry’s life. Then he returned to the desk and stood looking round the shop thoughtfully. Various bays formed by the arrangement of bookshelves stretched down both walls, all neatly labelled with signs hanging above them describing the books to be found therein. In the middle of the shop were a few armchairs, surrounding a small table which contained a coffee maker and a plate of cookies. The intruder helped himself to a handful of cookies and made a more thorough survey of the shop.

A door at the back caught his eye, and he made his way towards it, alert and cautious. The old man had said there was no one else there, but you never knew . . . He opened the door carefully, and saw a short hallway leading to what appeared to be a kitchen. A staircase, its upper reaches in darkness, led to the next floor.

He remembered Henry’s words. I live by myself. The old man must have an apartment behind the shop, then! This was getting better and better. He’d be able to get the cash out of the register, have a good look round the apartment—there must be stuff worth taking from there, too—fix himself something to eat and drink, maybe even wait out the rain, before being on his way long before anyone discovered something wrong. What a stroke of luck!

A sound behind him in the shop made him jump, and he whirled around, knife at the ready.

Nothing.

He moved swiftly back towards the desk and looked at Henry. The body had not moved. The intruder turned his attention to the cash register, and in a matter of seconds had it open. He cleared out the contents, stuffing the money into his pockets, then looked to see if there was anything else worth having.

A book lay open on the desk. He flicked it shut and looked at the cover. Bleak House by Charles Dickens. The old man wouldn’t be reading that again anytime soon.

Another noise disturbed him; this one came from the back of the shop, and for a moment he thought that someone had come through the door from the apartment, for a shadow seemed to pass lightly into one of the bays. He moved along the shop and peered between the shelves. There was no one there.

More sound; this time from the front of the shop. The intruder whirled around, and again thought he saw a shadow pass into one of the bays, this one near the window. He narrowed his eyes, peering through the dim shop. Was it his imagination, or were the lights getting dimmer?

‘As to dead men, Tony,’ proceeds Mr Guppy, evading this proposal, ‘there have been dead men in most rooms.’

‘I know there have; but in most rooms you let them alone, and—and they let you alone,’ Tony answers.

Of course there was no one there when he reached the front of the shop. The front door was locked tight, and no one could have come in through the door at the back without being seen. The intruder shrugged his shoulders and tried to laugh. Crazy. Imagining things. That’s what it was. All these books, lined up, watching him, waiting . . .

Waiting! That was good. Waiting for what? He shook his head, then went back to the plate of cookies for another handful, as if to prove that he wasn’t afraid, there was nothing to be afraid of, just a dead guy behind the desk and he wasn’t going anywhere, wasn’t going to be calling for any help, there wasn’t even anyone to call except a load of books, and what help could they be? As if to prove his point he moved to the desk (although he was careful not to look too closely at Henry’s body) and picked up the copy of Bleak House, gazing at it with contempt for a moment before flinging it to the back of the shop, where it fell with a flutter and crash.

And, mingled with these sounds, a cry, as of pain.

The intruder’s head swivelled round, trying to locate the source of the cry. It sounded as if—this was crazy—as if it had come from the book. He moved through the shop towards the book, which was lying, face up, on the floor. He moved closer, almost against his will, looking to see if perhaps the book had hit something—a pet of some kind, was there an animal in the shop?—and touched the book gingerly, almost delicately, with his foot. It was just a book.

Mr Guppy takes the light. They go down, more dead than alive, and holding one another, push open the door of the back shop. The cat has retreated close to it, and stands snarling—not at them; at something on the ground, before the fire.

Another sound, behind him. He whirled around, eyes trying to adjust to the dimness—there must be something wrong with the lights—as a figure moved in front of the door and disappeared behind a bookshelf in a curious gliding motion. The intruder stared, heart pounding. The old man had said he was alone. How could anyone else be there? It wasn’t possible. There was no one else in the shop; just him and a dead man, and a load of old books. No one else.

A murmur came from behind him, halfway along the shop, in a bay labelled—he could barely make out the sign, so dark had it become—Literature. There was an answering murmur—or so it seemed to the intruder—from a bay on the other side of the shop, this one labelled Children’s. A dim memory stirred within him, and he was reminded of a time, impossibly long ago in what seemed another life, when he had played hide-and-seek, and had tried to track down those hiding by listening for the tell-tale signs of giggles and whispers. He could almost imagine people hiding behind the bookshelves, breath held, trying not to give themselves away, watching him to see what he would do.

‘Who’s there?’ he called out roughly. ‘Come on out, where I can see you. Come on!’

No answer. But there was movement. He could sense it, rather than see it, as if shadows were massing behind the shelves, dark clouds of movement, full of purpose. His head swivelled from side to side, trying to pin down the danger, define it, attack it. His hand clenched the knife, poised in front of him, ready to strike.

A small sigh behind him, at the back of the shop. He twisted round, every nerve alert, ready to face whoever—whatever—had come in.

They advance slowly, looking at all these things. The cat remains where they found her, still snarling at the something on the ground, before the fire and between the two chairs. What is it? Hold up the light?

It was a boy. The intruder could see little of him, apart from the fact that he looked thin and pale. He was holding something; a funny sort of broom. The old man’s grandkid, come downstairs to see what’s up. A wave of relief flashed through the man. A kid with a broom: pathetic. He could deal with this, no problem. He put the hand with the knife behind his back and adopted a sickly, wheedling tone.

‘Hey, kid, sorry you were bothered, okay? Me and your granddad were just talking about business; you know, business—nothing for you to worry about, so why don’t you just . . .’

The boy wasn’t listening to him; wasn’t even looking at him. He was looking at something else, something behind him. The intruder turned around, and stared in disbelief at the figures moving towards him. It couldn’t be . . . it wasn’t possible . . . it was just him and a dead man and a load of old books, for Christ’s sake . . . nothing else . . .

There was something wrong with them; something which his brain tried to comprehend even as he moved backwards, unaware of the figures advancing towards him from the back of the shop, led by the child with the broom. The clothing—they looked like figures from old movies, or from pictures in books.

Help, help, help! come into this house, for Heaven’s sake!

Plenty will come in, but none can help.

'The Appointed Time'

Original illustration by Phiz (Hablot K. Browne)

for chapter 32 of Bleak House by Charles Dickens

Repeat Viewings: Sleuth (1972)

2008-01-20T12:08:00.000-08:00

I'm sure everyone has them; films which he or she can watch over and over again, to the point where if you come across one of them on television while channel-surfing you will happily immerse yourself, no matter what stage the movie has got to. You simply can't resist. This can, of course, only happen with films you've seen so often that you find you know large chunks of dialogue off by heart; and much of the pleasure comes from this complete familiarity, allowing you to watch the corners of the screen, as it were, and revel in myriad details that will most likely escape the notice of anyone watching the film for the first time. Herewith the first in an irregular series discussing a few of my own repeat pleasures, in no particular order.

The first time I saw Sleuth (1972) it was on television, and I came in just before the halfway point. It didn't take me long to figure out that it's not a film that lends itself to this type of viewing, the first time you watch it; you need to be in your seat, paying attention, from the moment the lights go down. It manages to be several things at once: a clever murder mystery; a pastiche of a clever murder mystery; a 'twist' movie that has an endless supply of twists up its sleeve, none of which seem forced or contrived; and, underneath it all, a fairly serious look at the English class system, marriage, and the games we all play from day to day. No mean feat; and all credit to Anthony Shaffer, whose Edgar Award-winning play serves as the basis for the film (for which Shaffer wrote the screenplay). Indeed, Shaffer's Edgar Award managed to get itself cast in the film; you'll see it sitting on the mantelpiece in the stately home belonging to Andrew Wyke (Laurence Olivier), a writer of mystery novels featuring the detective St. John Lord Merridew, and who won the Edgar for a novel called The Jack Sprat Murders ('Ironically, for one who could eat no fat, he was murdered by an injection of concentrated cholesterol'.)

These words are spoken to Milo Tindle (Michael Caine), a much younger man who has been invited to Wyke's manor house deep in the Wiltshire countryside for reasons which are, at first, unclear, both to Tindle and the audience. Wyke is in the centre of a maze in the garden, dictating the denouement of his latest novel, Death by Double Fault, and it's with some difficulty that Tindle makes his way to the centre to join him: a taste of the games-playing which is to come. The pair make rather uneasy conversation, with the tweed-clad, avuncular, aristocratic Wyke clearly at an advantage over the rough around the edges Tindle, who appears nervous. The reason for this becomes clear when they enter the house, and Wyke says casually, 'I understand you wish to marry my wife.'

As conversation openers go, this one is hard to beat. Andrew's wife, Marguerite, has been having an affair with Milo; but it soon becomes clear that Wyke, far from being angry, appears rather relieved by this turn of events. Marguerite, it turns out, is an expensive woman to maintain, and Andrew has another iron in the fire ('Yes, Téa, the Finnish bird who runs the sauna in Salisbury,' says Milo, revealing that Andrew isn't the only one who's been keeping tabs). Andrew wants to be rid of Marguerite, but he needs to ensure that Milo—who runs two hairdressing shops—can afford to keep her in the style to which she has become accustomed, so that she doesn't come running back to Andrew after a few months. To that end, Andrew proposes a plan, beautiful in its simplicity even if it is criminal in nature ('Of course it's criminal,' he tells Milo, 'all good money-making schemes in England have to be these days'). He and Milo will stage a break in at Andrew's house, during the course of which Milo will 'steal' jewellery worth several hundred thousand pounds, along with their receipts, and sell them to a fence whom Andrew knows. Andrew, in the meantime, will file a claim with his insurance company and receive compensation for the 'theft'; so everyone will live happily ever after.

The 'theft' is duly staged and carried out, and then . . . well, at this point things take an unexpected turn, the first of many such twists throughout the rest of the film, which it would be unfair to reveal to anyone who hasn't seen the movie. Suffice it to say that what started out as a rather jovial caper becomes something much darker and nastier, with Shaffer—ably abetted by his cast—ratcheting up the stakes, and the tension, to almost unbearable levels, culminating in a final scene that is as shocking as it is perfectly fitting ('Be sure . . . and tell them . . . it was just . . . a bloody game').

This spirit of game-playing pervades the whole film. The men play verbal games—guarded at first, more openly as the film goes on—and Andrew's mansion is filled with games and puzzles of all types, from complicated ancient Egyptian board games to a half-finished jigsaw puzzle consisting entirely of white pieces. The house is also filled with automata of all types, and these figures act as a sort of chorus to the action. Benign, even playful, at first, their faces look increasingly sinister and judgmental as the film goes on, none more so than the life-size Jovial Jack Tar, the sailor, who claps his hands together and laughs at the press of a button. 'We have a wonderful relationship,' says Andrew; 'I make the jokes, and he laughs at them.' 'Even when they're not funny?' enquires Milo. 'Especially then,' replies Andrew.

For most of its running length Sleuth is essentially a two-hander, which means there's nowhere for the actors playing Andrew and Milo to hide: if either one isn't up to snuff, it will be glaringly obvious, particularly given Shaffer's dialogue, which often says one thing on the surface but means something else underneath. A seemingly friendly series of questions from Andrew about Milo's background, for instance, reveals deep-seated issues of class and racism in Andrew: subtly, as when Milo reveals that his father was an Italian who changed his last name from Tindolini, and who wanted to become English, to which Andrew murmurs in disbelief mixed with contempt, subtle emphasis on the first word, 'Become English'; overtly, as when Andrew snarls at Milo, 'You're just a jumped-up pantry boy who doesn't know his place!' Elsewhere we get the following exchanges:

Milo (bristling): You were being rude about the woman I'm in love with.

Andrew (smoothly): On the contrary, I was reminiscing about my wife.

Milo: It amounts to the same thing.

Andrew: Things mostly do, you know.

And

Mile: I thought marriage was the game.

Andrew: No, sex is the game; marriage the penalty. Round and round we jog to each futile anniversary. Pass 'Go'; collect 200 rows, 200 silences, 200 scars in the deep places.

And

Andrew: It's a good thing I'm pretty much an Olympic sexual athlete.

Milo: I suppose these days you're concentrating more on the sprints than the long distance stuff.

Andrew: Not so, dear boy! I could copulate for England at any distance.

Milo: Well, as they say in the Olympics, it's not the winning, it's the taking part that counts.

In 1972 Laurence Olivier was one of the Grand Old Men of film and theatre, and appears to have been born to play Andrew, smoothness itself on the outside but with a deep well of hatred and sadism inside. Michael Caine was, at the time, still establishing himself as a serious actor, and there appear to have been fears that he wouldn't be able to match up to Olivier. The fears proved groundless; Caine proved himself more than able to hold his own against the older man, particularly in the early scenes, where Milo spends a good deal of time reacting to Andrew before coming into his own in the second half. For an idea of some of the verbal sparring, here's a link to the original trailer from the film.

One of the dangers of transferring a play from stage to screen is the temptation to 'open up' the action and sets, travelling well beyond the constraints of what can be achieved in a theatre in order to give viewers lots to look at. In the case of Sleuth the filmmakers wisely chose to retain, for the most part, a single set; apart from the opening scene and two short later ones, all the action takes place inside Andrew's house, although whereas the stage play makes use of one room, the movie allows us to venture further into the house. The bulk of the action, however, takes place in the great room of Andrew's manor, and production designer Ken Adam and set designer John Jarvis ensure there is always something interesting to look at, either directly or out of the corner of the eye, and Oswald Morris's cinematography does full justice to their work. John Addison's Oscar-nominated score is a perfect accompaniment to the film, light and witty at the start, but becoming increasingly dark as the movie proceeds.

In 2007 the film was remade, with an all-star pedigree: screenplay by Harold Pinter, direction by Kenneth Branagh, Jude Law as Milo, and Michael Caine as Andrew. Pinter apparently did not see the film version, choosing to work from the stage play instead, from which he apparently retained only one line ('It's just a game') ; he also chose to play up the homosexual angle Shaffer brings up towards the end of the play, where Andrew begs Milo to forget Marguerite and come live with him instead, so they can continue playing games (Shaffer dropped this line from the film). I haven't seen the remake, which received reviews that could politely be called 'mixed' at best; but the original remains one of my favourite films, and one that can be watched time and again without ever becoming tiring.

Farewell Flashman

2008-01-19T18:59:00.001-08:00

I can't remember why, precisely, I picked up my first Flashman novel by George MacDonald Fraser, but the book is before me as I type: a Pan paperback from 1970, with a splendid cover illustration (one of several he did for this series) by John Rose. I suspect that I bought it in England in 1983, and memory suggests it was in a bookstore in Guildford, Surrey, for I remember starting to read it later in that trip, at a bed and breakfast in Penzance. Whatever the whys and wherefores, it was the beginning of a beautiful friendship, as I sought out first the other Flashman books—of which, by 1983, there were several—and then everything else by Fraser that I could find: The Pyrates, Mr American, Black Ajax, the McAuslan stories (about 'the dirtiest soldier in the army'), Fraser's Hollywood History of the World (still one of my favourite film books), The Candlemass Road and The Steel Bonnets (fiction and non-fiction, respectively, about the Scottish border reivers), and Quartered Safe Out Here, Fraser's recollections of 'the forgotten war' in Burma during World War II.

Fraser—who died on 2 January—was a long-time journalist who, in 1969, conceived of the idea of carrying on the adventures—or misadventures—of Harry Flashman, a character in Thomas Hughes's Tom Brown's Schooldays (1857) who relentlessly bullies the eponymous hero before being expelled for drunkenness. Flashman purported to be the first installment of 'The Flashman Papers', discovered in a sale room in 1965 and given to Fraser to 'edit' (to his delight, a number of American reviewers of Flashman mistook the volume for serious memoirs, as opposed to the fiction that it was). The first book starts at the point where, in Hughes's work, Flashy is expelled, and we are introduced to a swaggering, cocksure bully who has a generous streak of the cowardly running through him; indeed, one of the many delights of the Flashman books is the way in which Flashy's cowardice is so often mistaken for bravery, a misapprehension the much-decorated Flashman does nothing to contradict.

Over the course of the Flashman papers—twelve volumes in all—the eponymous 'hero' cut a swath through almost every war, crisis, or scandal of the mid- to late-nineteenth century, from the Charge of the Light Brigade to the Last Stand at Little Bighorn. One of the few major events of the period of which we do not have a complete record of Flashy's involvement is the American Civil War: we know, from hints in some of the other novels, that he worked, at various times, for both the Blue and the Gray, but the definitive account has, it appears, died with Flashman's creator. Throughout the books, Fraser displayed not only the sure touch of the fictioneer and comic writer, but the eye of a historian: the books are annotated with copious footnotes, and it's possible to pick up a solid grounding in genuine nineteenth century history by reading the Flashman chronicles.

While Flash Harry was, justly, Fraser's most celebrated creation, his other works are well worth seeking out, for he was far from a one book (or character) wonder. Flashy does crop up, briefly, in Mr American, a mostly serious novel about a mysterious American who arrives in late-Victorian London, and his father appears in Black Ajax, a fictionalised account of the life of American boxer Tom Molyneux, who was for a time the toast of Regency England. The McAuslan tales draw heavily from the author's time in the British army, post-WW II; The Candlemass Road is indebted to his researches into the Scottish border reivers; and The Pyrates is a warm-hearted, glorious romp through history as it should have been, the sort of adventure that Rafael Sabatini might well have dreamt of but never had the nerve to commit to paper, instantly recognisable to, and beloved by, anyone who has ever thrilled to the sight of Errol Flynn and Basil Rathbone trading barbed quips in Captain Blood. Fraser's account of his time in Burma during World War II, Quartered Safe Out Here, has been praised as one of the finest memoirs to come out of the Second World War, while his lavishly illustrated Hollywood History of World sought to prove that the film capital of the world, so often reviled for getting history wrong on celluloid, very often got it right, a point not lost on the author, who was responsible for several screenplays, including the James Bond film Octopussy, Richard Lester's The Three Musketeers and The Four Musketeers, and Force Ten from Navarone.

Indeed, Fraser's memoirs of his encounters with Hollywood form the best part of The Light's On At Signpost (2002), a collection of essays which is half movie reminiscences (very amusing and illuminating) and half Angry Old Man rants (rather less so, at least to this reader, although I have to respect the force of Fraser's beliefs and the right he has, in light of what he's seen and done, to express them). All of this means that I have one non-fiction book of Fraser's (The Steel Bonnets) and one fiction book (his last novel, The Reavers, published in Britain and Canada in October 2007 and in the States in April 2008) left to read before the well runs dry.

I've alluded to Fraser's skills as a comic writer, and the Flashman stories are surely one of the funniest series of novels to appear: Flashy (and his creator) have a ready wit, which neither is afraid to display (check all thoughts of political correctness at the door, although it must be said that Flashman is an equal opportunity offender, skewering everyone, regardless of race, gender, or religion). Fraser's humour is apparent in all his works: the McAuslan stories are grittily, earthily funny, as befits their Army background; The Pyrates is a slapstick romp; his memoir Quartered Safe Out Here is filled with the gallows humour of someone who was never sure if he or his companions would live to see another day; and even more serious novels, such as Black Ajax and Mr American, contain laugh-out-loud moments. No wonder no less a comic master than P. G. Wodehouse hailed the appearance of Flashman, calling it 'the goods' and writing 'If ever there was a time when I felt that watcher-of-the-skies-when-a-new planet stuff, it was when I read the first Flashman.'

Fraser and his wife worked, for a time, in Canada, and I lived in hope that we might, one day, find that Flash Harry was involved in the Great March West in 1873, when the Northwest Mounted Police (later the Royal Canadian Mounted Police) were established and sent into western Canada to bring a measure of law and order to the frontier. On 25 July 1995 Christopher wrote to Fraser, asking him if he would care to assume the position of President of the Arthur Conan Doyle Society, which Christopher founded, and whose first president, Julian
Symons, had recently died. Fraser's response, dated 28 July 1995, is thus:

'Dear Mr Roden,

'Thank you very much indeed for your kind letter, for the enclosures, especially that beautiful copy of "The Blood-Stone Tragedy", but most of all for the honour you do me inviting me to become president of the Arthur Conan Doyle Society. I am most grateful, believe me.

'If I decline, as I'm afraid I must, it is from no lack of sympathy with your views. Indeed, I share them. Recently I had the pleasure of writing an introduction to "The Lost World" for an anthology of adventure novels put out by my publishers, HarperCollins, and said what I have been saying for years: that Conan Doyle was far more than the author of Sherlock Holmes, and that Gerard, Challenger, and the historical novels are far superior to his detective stories. And I'm delighted that you are seeking out his lesser-known work; that is a splendid project.

'The trouble is, I am too enthusiastic a Doyle admirer to be, at the same time, a president in absentia. If I were to accept your generous invitation I should feel bound to try to do the job properly, and that would mean more writing, travelling, and general involvement with the Society than I could undertake. Also, I do believe that there must be other Doyle devotees who would make worthier presidents than I.

'Thank you again for thinking of me; that was most kind. May I wish you and the Society every success in all your projects to keep alive the works and memory of a great writer and a great man.'

Christopher replied on 8 August, and in this letter raised the question of Flashman's involvement in events of Canadian history, which received the following response:

'Flashman in Canada is a wonderful possibility. My wife and I worked as reporters in Regina, Saskatchewan, many years ago, and I had the good fortune to interview survivors of the famous Riel Rebellion, which might well make a good subject, but I'll have to look into it again.'

Alas, it was not to be; although Canadian humorist Eric Nicol gave us a partial solution in his Dickens of the Mounted, in which the titular hero (a real life son of Charles Dickens, who was shipped off to Canada and did become a Mountie, although with a somewhat less than lacklustre career) encounters Flashman, and comes to the conclusion that Sir Harry is a cad and a bounder.

When I heard that George MacDonald Fraser had died, I felt as if I had lost someone I knew: a favourite uncle, perhaps, whose moustaches tickled when he kissed you, and who told jokes that made you laugh, even as scandalised aunts and mothers made sounds of 'Hush!' His works will, I suspect, live on, particularly the Flashman chronicles; and perhaps it's just as well that he did not live to detail Flashy's participation in the Civil War. Sometimes less is more, and mysteries more satisfying than cold hard fact. Rest in peace, Mr Fraser; your literary legacy will assuredly live on.

The Literary Life

2008-01-19T11:00:00.000-08:00

'Ah, so you're blogging again,' said my husband Christopher, peering over my shoulder at the computer screen. 'What are you blogging about?'

'My writing,' I replied.

'Ah,' he said in mock disappointment, 'I thought you were going to talk about something interesting.'

And therein lies the rub. Writing is an intensely interesting activity for the person who does it, who hopes, in turn, that readers will be interested in the end result. Talking or writing about writing, however, can be slightly less enthralling for those on the receiving end than watching grass grow. In Edward Gorey's The Unstrung Harp; or, Mr Earbrass Writes a Novel, the eponymous hero muses, at one point, on 'the unspeakable horrors of the literary life', a line which almost certainly resonates with anyone who has ever stared at a typewriter and a blank sheet of paper, or a cursor flicking relentlessly on an otherwise white screen, but probably leaves others muttering 'What horrors? Try having to work for a living.'

Writing is largely cerebral, and a fairly lonely activity, which is one of the reasons, I think, that movies about writers or writing often have trouble making the activity cinematic, that is to say exciting for the viewer. There are, after all, only so many times that one can show the frustrated writer ripping a sheet of paper out of a typewriter, crumpling it into a ball, and throwing it into a (usually full to overflowing) wastepaper basket, and of course no way of showing the equivalent where computers are concerned (although the sight of a keyboard, yanked out of a processor and launched across the room, would certainly make for a vivid shot). Someone sitting at a keyboard, alternately staring into space, typing furiously, deleting just as furiously, typing some more, then wandering into the kitchen to see if, by chance, there's one more cup of coffee left in the pot is not the stuff of which gripping cinema is made. The recent film Atonement managed it quite well, I think, by conveying a sense that young Briony, who grows up to become a writer, writes not because she wants to but because she has to: it's a compulsion, in the face of which she is helpless, and her set face and rigid stance indicate that she derives as much pain as pleasure from the process, but cannot stop herself.

Don't worry, this blog is not going to turn into one long post about the literary life (horrific or otherwise); but the truth is that a few people have been kind enough to express interest in my writing, and when I look back over the last ten months I find myself mildly surprised to realise that I have been, by my lights, fairly prolific. In 2007 I had three stories accepted and published, starting with 'The Palace' in At Ease With the Dead (Ash-Tree Press), which was set in the troubled Downtown Eastside of Vancouver and dealt with one man's attempt to make reparation for a terrible wrong done in the past. That was followed by 'The Wide Wide Sea' in Exotic Gothic (Ash-Tree Press), a story set in the Canadian prairie at the turn of the last century, and based on something I read some time ago in Maclean's magazine about pioneer women who literally ran mad with terror at the vastness of the brave new world in which they found themselves. The third of my 2007 stories was 'The Hiding Place' in Strange Tales II (Tartarus Press), the idea for which came out of absolutely nowhere and took me rather by surprise, although I was pleased with the end result.

Three more of my stories have been accepted for publication, and will be out within the next twelve months or so. 'Association Copy' will be in Bound for Evil: Curious Tales of Books Gone Bad (Dead Letter Press, March 2008), a mammoth volume containing sixty-four stories about—well, the subtitle really says it all. My own contribution features an R. L. Stine-like author of horror stories for young adults, who sends one of his books to a former classmate, with not entirely happy results. In the fall of 2008 comes 'The Things That Shall Come Upon Them' in Gaslit Grimoire from Edge Science Fiction, being published to tie in with the World Fantasy Convention in Calgary. The theme of this year's convention is 'Mystery in Fantasy and Horror', and to that end Gaslit Grimoire features new adventures of Sherlock Holmes with a supernatural component to them. On the basis that two detectives are better than one, I took the opportunity to pair Holmes the rationalist with a contemporary detective who was, shall we say, slightly more open-minded when it came to the supernatural: Flaxman Low, the first psychic detective, and the brainchild of Hesketh Prichard, friend of Conan Doyle's. Aficionados of the work of M. R. James will also, I hope, enjoy the references in the story to one of James's most famous tales.

Finally, while in New York last week I had the welcome news that my story 'The Brink of Eternity' has been accepted for Poe (note to JZ: no exclamation point), an anthology of stories inspired by Edgar Allan Poe being edited by Ellen Datlow for Solaris, to be published in early 2009 to mark Poe's bicentennial. I'll post further details about this book as they become available.

What's in the future? I'm working on four stories for various publications, and hope to add to that total before the year is out; I also plan to post more regularly to this blog, on the basis that any kind of writing is good practice. To that end, time to end this post and get back to staring at a flashing cursor; although first I think I'll just wander into the kitchen to see if there's any more coffee in the pot. Ah, the literary life. . . .

Hit counter

2008-01-01T16:34:00.000-08:00

Free Counter

The Celluloid Holmes

2007-07-13T17:17:00.000-07:00

I first encountered Sherlock Holmes when I was around eight, and sad to say the relationship did not get off to a promising start. I was ill in bed, and my mother brought me home a book from the library which she thought might appeal, probably based on my interest in Nancy Drew and mysteries: a collection of stories about the great detective. I know I read one or two—'The Speckled Band' stuck in my head, as did 'Silver Blaze'—but they didn't make much of an impression. A year later I was involved in a radio play production of 'The Red-Headed League' for my grade five class, and was assigned the rather small role of Duncan Ross; but at the last minute the girl playing Holmes got a bad case of stage fright and begged for a smaller role, which request the teacher accommodated by having me switch roles with her. Even this was not enough to encourage me to seek out the stories; that had to wait a further two years, until grade seven, when our class was assigned 'The Speckled Band' to read and write about. My contribution was a stage play entitled The Secret of Sherlock Holmes, an unabashed rip-off of the plot of 'Speckled Band' with the surprise twist (spoiler alert!) that Holmes was actually in cahoots with the villain. The play was staged twice for the students of Emily Carr Middle School in Ottawa, with the author once more assuming the role of Holmes, after which the play was retired (although a copy does exist and is before me as I write, showing that I arrived at the title some years before Jeremy Paul did).

I don't know why—perhaps third time was indeed the charm—but I was hooked. I promptly went out and bought all the Holmes tales by Conan Doyle, and devoured them; but when they were done I wondered what to do. Fortunately, this was in 1976, when a Holmes revival was in full swing, and I soon realised there was a good deal of material out there about the great detective and his world. One intriguing fact, amongst many, was that there had been a large number of films made featuring Holmes, and I began to wonder how to go about finding them: a thing more easily wished for than accomplished in those far-off days before video, DVD, Netflix, and 300 channels of television.

One thing seemed to be agreed upon: that the best Holmes films made to date starred an actor named Basil Rathbone, and that the best of these was a version of The Hound of the Baskervilles made in 1939. All very well; but how to actually see it? Imagine my delight, then, when TV Guide for early December 1976 announced that the Rathbone Hound would be broadcast on CBS as their late movie on 14 December—starting at 12.30 a.m.

This was indeed a problem. In those pre-VCR days, a movie had to be viewed when it aired; and I was shrewd enough to realise that the chances of my parents letting a twelve-year-old stay up until 2.30 in the morning—on a school night—were slim. Still, nothing ventured, nothing gained, and the question was asked; and after some deliberation my parents, realising that, unlikely as it seemed, this was important to me, agreed on a compromise: I could go to bed early and wake myself up at 12.15, then go to bed as soon as the movie was over (and no complaining about being tired next morning).

I jumped at the chance, and thus it was that in mid-December 1976 I woke myself up, crept downstairs with only Tabitha the cat for company, and, in the glow of the lights on the Christmas tree in the family room, immersed myself in The Hound of the Baskervilles. It was probably my first 'grown up' film, my first black and white film, my first old film, and my first time staying up that late by myself, and I revelled in every second of it. As the images flickered out into the room I sat enraptured as the now familiar story played out, thrilling to the action. The clipping from TV Guide is before me as I write, and on the reverse, in my best grade seven handwriting, are the words 'Tabby came down with me and was startled when the hound was heard howling across the desolate moors as it did often. I loved the movie (so did Tabby).'

Thus began several love affairs: with staying up into the wee small hours, with old movies in general, and with the Rathbone/Bruce Holmes films in particular. Fortunately for me, a northern New York TV station began airing the Rathbone films late on Sunday nights shortly after that fateful December night, and my parents let me stay up to watch them (they began at the slightly more acceptable hour of 11.30 p.m.). Towards the end of the summer of 1977 we moved back to Vancouver, where I was overjoyed to see that ABC in Seattle was airing the Rathbone films on Monday evenings, again at 11.30 p.m., so I was able to continue to indulge my passion, even going to the extreme of using my trusty portable tape recorder to tape large sections of the films, which I listened to over and over and can still remember to this day (I was recently somewhat relieved to find out that I am not the only Sherlockian to have done this).

The Rathbone films—particularly the later, 'modernised' ones set during the Second World War—continue to divide Sherlockians to an extent. Rathbone's performance as Holmes is generally accepted as above criticism, but other aspects of the movies, particularly the (then) modern setting and Nigel Bruce's portrayal of Watson, continue to be a source of debate. As far as the WW II setting goes, my attitude is 'no harm done'; Conan Doyle had done much the same thing when he brought Holmes out of retirement to help the war effort in 1914, and if the detective could serve as a propaganda figure for one war, why not for another? Besides, as Kim Newman astutely pointed out a couple of years ago, the Second World War setting of these films is further away from us now than the Victorian period was in the 1940s, and thus the films have a period charm of their own which is almost as enchanting as that of the world where it is always 1895.

As for Bruce's portrayal of Watson: I'm on record as being an admirer of it. He may not be as strictly canonical as we might like, or are conditioned to after such fine Watsons as James Mason, David Burke, and Edward Hardwicke, but his is a warm portrayal, and there is a real affection between Rathbone and Bruce which convinces us these characters shared a deep and abiding friendship, even love, despite the fact that they inevitably get on each other's nerves. Besides, when you compare Bruce's portrayal of the good doctor with most of those which came before him, it quickly becomes apparent that Bruce was a huge step forward. His Watson displays courage and loyalty, and also a fair bit of intelligence; it is Watson, and not Holmes, who first deduces the solution of the mystery in The House of Fear, which is a major departure from previous Watsons, who look amazed when Holmes deduces what day of the week it is.

The Hound of the Baskervilles was such a success that the studio, Twentieth Century-Fox, immediately followed it up with another film the same year: The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes, which pitted Holmes against his arch-foe Professor Moriarty, memorably played by George Zucco ('smiling and smiling and being an absolute bounder', in the words of one critic). These two films were the only two set in the Victorian period (astonishingly, the Fox Hound was the first Holmes film to be set in the correct canonical era). After this Fox let the option to the character drop, and it was picked up by Universal, who made twelve contemporary films starring Rathbone and Bruce between 1942 and 1946.

Much has been written about these films, although the further we get from their making the more tenuous and scarce our actual links to them become. Imagine my amazement and delight, therefore, when a special guest was announced at the gala banquet we attended in Minneapolis last week for the 'Victorian Secrets and Edwardian Enigmas' Sherlock Holmes conference: Terry Kilburn, who, when he was twelve, appeared as Billy the Page in The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes. Although somewhat frail now at age eighty, Mr Kilburn was happy to meet with admirers, and Christopher took a picture of Tim and me with him to commemorate the occasion. A living link with the past, and with the Holmes films I have loved so much for more than three decades now.

Curiously, I could have had another link with the films, had my maternal grandfather not been such a gentleman. Years ago he recounted to me how he had been in Victoria, British Columbia during the Second World War and had, while sitting in the lobby of the venerable Empress Hotel, heard a familiar voice. Looking round, Grandpa immediately recognised the speaker as Nigel Bruce, with whose face and voice he was familiar. 'I didn't want to go up to him and say anything,' my grandfather said to me, 'as I didn't want to be rude and intrude; but if I had known then that one day my granddaughter would be such an admirer, I would have done.'

I still have my tape recordings of the Rathbone films somewhere, as well as LP recordings of them; but fortunately technology now allows me to watch them anytime I choose, courtesy of DVD. It's wonderful to have them available to watch at any time, in beautifully crisp prints; but somehow they don't look quite right unless viewed late at night when the house is still and the lights are off and everyone else is in bed. If only Tabby were still here to enjoy them with me, and hear the hound baying across the desolate moors once more!

All the Fun of the Fair

2007-07-13T14:30:00.000-07:00

When I was a child, one of the red letter days of the year was the annual Pacific National Exhibition, which was held for the last two weeks of August at Hastings Park in the eastern end of Vancouver. Every June, when the final report card came from school, there was a pass for a free child's admission enclosed, and it was a reminder to my brother and I (as if a reminder were needed) that the PNE was coming. (For years I assumed that we got these passes because our school was in Richmond, just south of Vancouver, and that the passes were confined to schools within easy reach of Vancouver; imagine my pleasant surprise and nostalgic delight when Tim got his last report card of his kindergarten year here in Ashcroft, 200 miles from Vancouver, five years ago, and a 'free admission' pass for the PNE fluttered out, a tradition that continues to this day.)

The PNE was my father's domain, and the night before our visit he would dust off the battered blue knapsack which, for 364 days of the year, hung on a nail in the laundry room. Next morning my mother would put in sandwiches (always egg salad, in my memory), and we would set off, by car to downtown Vancouver and thence by special PNE Express bus to the fairground. I suspect this served three purposes: free parking on a side street as opposed to paying for a lot near the PNE; no driving around searching for a place; and the buses deposited patrons at the end of the fairground furthest from the midway, which was of course the area that my brother and I most wanted to visit, and something that Dad always wanted to leave until he'd had a chance to look around.

We would pass through the turnstiles after relinquishing those treasured passes—Charlie must have felt something similar when he handed the golden ticket over to Willie Wonka—and then wait while Dad bought tickets for the prize draw ('Get your tickets here! Win a house, win a car!'). First stop was the Show Mart building, full of all manner of gadgets and items and cleaning products you didn't know existed, and certainly didn't realise you needed, and then next door to view exhibits built around that year's theme. The Show Mart building was fairly interesting, the theme exhibits less so (to John and me, at any rate), but we knew it was the price to be paid. Every time we emerged from the buildings, blinking into the sun, we would cast our eyes eastward towards the midway, from which faint screams could be heard even at that distance.

Then it was on to the Agrodome, bursting with animals of all sorts. The PNE was originally an agricultural fair, and the Agrodome was a reminder of these roots, full of earnest children exhibiting their 4-H animals, milking demonstrations, pig races, an incubator full of baby chicks you could hold in your hand (these were a favourite), and Jersey cows the colour of coffee with cream, and possessed of huge brown eyes that looked patient and gentle. We would usually sit in the stands in the arena and eat our egg sandwiches, watching a horse show of some kind, inhaling the clean scent of straw and sawdust and the less clean—but not, somehow, unpleasant—scent of animals, and then Dad would wipe his hands and we would emerge into the sun once more.

We were, by this time, close enough to the midway to be able to hear the happy screams quite clearly, and pick out details of the Wild Mouse. However, there were still the Modern Living building and the B.C. Pavilion to look through; probably my father's favourite part of the exhibition. The former contained exhibits of household gadgets of all kinds, and Dad would end up with handfuls of pamphlets and brochures and samples, all of which carefully went into the knapsack, never to be seen again. The B.C. Pavilion contained—in another nod to the PNE's agricultural roots—entries in the craft and food competitions: case after case full of jams, jellies, needlepoint, quilts, flowers, vegetables: if it could be grown or eaten or created by hand, it was there. The Pavilion also boasted the Challenger Relief Map, a source of endless fascination for John and me. It was actually built to house the map, the brainchild, and creation, of the Challenger family of Vancouver, who had decided to build a scale replica in relief of the province of British Columbia. What began as (I presume) a fairly modest project turned into the largest relief map in the world, according to The Guinness Book of World Records: measuring 75' by 82', it occupied the centre of the Pavilion, and could be viewed from three levels, while a motorised bridge ran from side to side on the lowest level and accommodated a guide and anyone who wanted to hover over the province. Mountains, lakes, rivers, and streams were all delineated, and placards indicated towns and cities. It was an amazing sight to see, but unfortunately is not currently on public view; the city of Vancouver, honouring a commitment to return some of the PNE site to a public park, tore down many of the buildings, including the B.C. Pavilion, several years ago, and the map has been in storage ever since.

When we left the Pavilion we were so close to the midway we could almost taste it. By this time we were in the midst of a row of vendors selling every kind of food known to man: Buckeye Root Beer (sold out of kegs) and Tom Thumb donuts were great favourites, and we would usually get some at this point, the root beer icy cold, the donuts small and sweet and still hot. We would usually take a turn at the Mad Artist booth, squeezing paint onto a rapidly rotating rectangle of coated board to produce psychedelic artwork, and then while Dad held our masterpieces gingerly by one corner while the paint dried, we would advance to the midway proper, but not before detouring to take in the lumberjack show adjacent to the midway, where we would thrill to demonstrations of log-rolling, axe throwing, wood-cutting, and pole climbing. The act always contained a clown scaling one of the poles and balancing precariously on top while the ringmaster tried to talk him down; just as he seemed about to start back to the ground he would overbalance and fall, to the shocked screams of onlookers, only to be caught by a safety rope he had surreptitiously fastened to himself, a never-ending source of thrills and delight to my brother and me.

By now my father must have realised that the inevitable could not be postponed a moment longer, and we would be on the midway. The noise! The smell! The heat! To this day, the smell of fried onions takes me back instantly to the midway of the PNE on a hot August day (I'm sure it rained on occasion, this being Vancouver, but in my mind it is always hot and sunny at the PNE). Dad would purchase tickets for the two of us, and we would be off to the rides, clambering on board one after the other, Dad a constant presence (usually at a considerable distance below us) leaning against the metal fencing surrounding whatever ride we were on, while we exulted in the speed, the height, the giddiness, the sheer joy of being young and (relatively) fearless.

Last week I was in Minneapolis, at the Mall of America, with Tim, who was going on some rides; and while leaning on a fence watching him, I wondered when I had become my Dad, standing by rides watching my child. I did not feel old, precisely, but rather sad, as the realisation struck that I would never again experience the joy of the fair the same way I did when I was a child, and the way Tim does now. Yet while the rides at Mall of America are state of the art, and bright and clean in a way the PNE rides never seemed to be, there did not seem to be the same joy about them that I remember from my childhood. Perhaps the setting had something to do with that, although I think it more likely that it was the warnings which leached some of the delight from the scene. Every ride was preceded with a cheery yet faintly menacing recorded warning to, in essence, do nothing but sit there. The Wave Rider swing warning cautioned riders not to try to kick the swing in front of them, and I was appalled: that was half the fun of the Wave Rider, and the reason I always tried to get a swing that was some distance from my brother! The Bumper Cars ride warning told riders to avoid head-on collisions, and really, if you're not going to crash into people head-on while you're on the Bumper Cars, what's the point? Even the carousel warned riders to stay seated until the ride stopped, and not to stand up on the pedals or try to change seats mid-ride.

After we had had our fill of rides at the PNE there was an opportunity to play a few games of chance—Whack-a-Mole became a great favourite—and make a trip through the Haunted House. As someone who has always loved ghosts and ghost stories, this was a place of shivery delight, now long gone. One year—I was eight or nine at the time—my father stopped by the booth where radio station CKNW was broadcasting from, as he knew Merv Meadows, the announcer on duty, and to our delight my brother and I were put on the air to talk about the fair. I can't remember precisely what I said, although when asked what my favourite part of the PNE was I announced without hesitation 'The Haunted House'.

By then it would be getting late, and the lights on the midway would be coming on, bathing everything in a glow that was magical. We would walk back towards the entrance and stop at the Food Building for dinner: more Buckeye Root Beer for my brother, fresh lemonade for me, and something deep fried or barbecued which always seemed to be the perfect food for that time and place. Then it was back out through the gates, after one last glance back to the midway, and on to the bus and home, the fair over for another year.

We moved from Vancouver in 1973, and when we returned in 1977 I resumed my PNE attendance; but it wasn't quite the same. It wasn't long before my brother and I were able to go by ourselves, or with friends, and it somehow lost something without Dad standing by the railings, waiting. For two years in the early 1980s my father was an assistant to PNE President Erwin Swangard, and I went down with him to the fair on a few of those days, arriving well before the crowds did. I found I had more interest in the exhibits than in the rides, although it was still fun to wander the midway, listening to the shrieks of riders and the patter of the carnies. In 1997, the year we moved from England back to British Columbia, I took Christopher to the PNE in what turned out to be its last year in its old incarnation. I was eight months pregnant, so couldn't go on any rides, but I could still enjoy the sights and sounds as much as ever; and the Buckeye Root Beer was still there, as cold and delicious as ever.

The PNE is still going at Hastings Park—2007 marks its 100th anniversary—but many of the landmarks from my childhood are gone. Most of the permanent buildings have been torn down and their sites returned to parkland; the Haunted House, as mentioned, has vanished; the Mad Artist booths are nowhere to be found; the Challenger Relief Map is in a storage facility somewhere; and the rides have grown more flashy and heart-stopping (although none of them can, in my opinion, hold a candle to the 1958 wooden roller coaster, still going strong and designated a 'Coaster Classic' by ACE, the American Coaster Enthusiasts). But the ticket sellers still call out 'Win a house, win a car!' with all the fervour of their predecessors, and the Tom Thumb donuts (now called Those Little Donuts, apparently because no one could remember what they were called and instead referred to buying some of 'those little donuts') are still hot and sweet, and the shrieks from the midway are as as enticing as ever, and I sometimes wish I could be Tim's age again and visiting the PNE for all the fun of the fair on a hot August day when school still seems a distant prospect and a Sno-Cone and cotton candy are the height of gastronomic delight.

Now if you'll excuse me, I must go: West Coast Amusements has rolled into town and set up a funfair down by the railway tracks in town, and I've promised Tim a trip. There'll be Sno-Cones and cotton candy, and rickety-looking rides that don't come with warnings before they judder to a start, and with luck the smell of fried onions. Can't wait!

Deep Water

2007-06-06T17:43:00.000-07:00

I had no idea that this documentary—released in the U.K. in December 2006—existed until a friend, knowing of my interest in the Donald Crowhurst tragedy, told me about it. The film has not been shown in North America—apart from at the Telluride Film Festival in the fall of 2006—nor is it available on North American DVD; but it is available on British (Region 2) DVD, and I promptly ordered a copy, which arrived yesterday. Thanks to our multi-system DVD player I was able to watch it, and was deeply impressed, as was Christopher. Even our nine-year-old son Tim watched the whole thing, and agreed afterwards that it was excellent: high praise indeed, considering that most children of his age would, I suspect, have to be paid a substantial sum before they watched almost any sort of documentary, at least outside school hours.

The filmmakers were able to draw on the audio tapes and films which Crowhurst took while he was on board the Teignmouth Electron, and which were found, intact, when the boat was recovered. There are also revealing and candid interviews with a number of people who were intimately connected with the drama, notably competitor Robin Knox-Johnston, Crowhurst's best friend Ron Winspear, Crowhurst's son Simon, and his widow, Claire, who is completely honest about the experience and clearly still saddened by the events of almost forty years ago, which she admits, in the press kit available on the film's web site, she thinks about several times a week even now. Effective use is made of excerpts from Crowhurst's logbooks, including the chilling 'It is the mercy' passage which I quote in a previous entry, and the final shots of the film will bring a lump to the throat of anyone with a pulse.

The filmmakers have resisted the urge to demonise anyone. Crowhurst may have been a deeply flawed man, but he is presented sympathetically, and presented in such a way that it is easy to see how at every step of the voyage he faced terrible choices, all of which led inevitably to death, or ruin, or public humiliation. In his position, faced with his choices, what would any of us do? Rodney Hallworth, Crowhurst's press agent, comes in for the most damning examination, and in a fascinating extra feature many of the journalists who were involved in covering the Golden Globe race try to determine how much culpability any of them had for what occurred. While there is some inevitable ducking for cover, at least one journalist confesses that he must, he feels, accept some responsibility for what happened to Crowhurst, and that he must live with that on his conscience for the rest of his life.

In addition to the film itself, there are a number of fascinating extras, including lengthy (five to ten minutes each) video features about the other eight competitors, all of which draw on archival footage and some of which feature new interviews with the participants, such as Knox-Johnston, or the widows of some of the competitors, such as Nigel Tetley's wife Eve and Bernard Moitessier's wife Françoise. It's interesting to note how Claire Crowhurst, Eve Tetley, and Françoise Moitessier—who are shown in the film, in footage from 1968, as the 'sea widows'—have all come to terms with those events of so long ago, and the inner voice which compelled their men to take part in an event which most sane people would consider suicidal. All three, in different ways, express the view that one must follow one's dreams, no matter the cost, and that however insane they may have appeared to outsiders, something in all three compelled them to do this thing, so that their wives could no more dream of stopping them than they could of flying.

Anyone interested in learning more about the Golden Globe race and the Crowhurst tragedy, from the perspective of many of those who were intimately connected with it, should make every effort to see Deep Water, a fascinating documentary which does a fine job of bringing a four-decades-old tragedy to vivid, and devastating, life.

Tunes You Could Hum

2007-06-03T17:16:00.000-07:00

In the 1972 film Sleuth (being remade as we speak) there's a scene at about the halfway point where the character of Andrew Wyke is making himself a late-night snack, while in the background Cole Porter music plays: 'Anything Goes', 'You Do Something To Me', and 'Just One Of Those Things'. He is interrupted by the unexpected, and unwelcome, intrusion of Inspector Doppler of the Wiltshire County Constabulary, come to ask a few awkward questions; but not before the policeman cocks an ear to the music and says appreciatively, 'Ah, those were the days, sir. Tunes you could hum.'

All of which preamble is by way of saying that I'm in complete agreement with Inspector Doppler (and Anthony Shaffer, who wrote the line, which incidentally doesn't appear in his original play script; according to the stage directions, Wyke is listening to Beethoven's 'Seventh Symphony' at this point in the proceedings). If Fred Astaire danced to it, or sang it, or both—even if he only could have danced to it or sung it—then I'm happy to listen to it until the cows come home, and for a considerable period thereafter. Imagine my delight, then, to discover that XM Satellite Radio, which we started to get a year ago, has a channel—number 4, called 'The Savoy Express'—dedicated to music from the 1940s, with forays back into the 1930s and even the late 1920s. Benny Goodman, Artie Shaw, Vaughan Munro, Bing Crosby and the Andrews Sisters, Glenn Miller, Billie Holliday, Margaret Whiting, Frank Sinatra, Doris Day, Judy Garland, Ella Fitzgerald, The Ink Spots, Duke Ellington, Betty Hutton, Johnny Mercer, Lena Horne: all are in constant play here, and it's the soundtrack by which my day is usually accompanied. No matter how harried or busy or complicated things get, just hearing—to name a few random favourites—'I've Got A Gal In Kalamazoo', 'I Love New York In June', 'Sing Sing Sing', 'Ev'ry Time We Say Goodbye', 'On the Atcheson, Topeka and Santa Fe', 'The Way You Look Tonight', 'Easy To Love', 'One For My Baby (and One More For the Road)', and 'The Lady is a Tramp' never fails to cheer me up. And when I look up from my computer, I'm greeted by the smiling face of Jimmy Stewart as Glenn Miller, in an 8.5 x 11 black-and-white photo signed by Mr Stewart himself: two favourites together.

There's something about these songs, with their lush arrangements, playful lyrics, leisurely instrumental introductions, and consummate professionalism that appeals to me. The lyrics might not be profound, but they're heartfelt and sincere; the singers might not always be as vocally proficient as one would like, but they knew how to sell a song; and the tunes have the wonderful merit, as Inspector Doppler noted, of being instantly hummable, as well as easily understood and catchy as all get out.

Nickelback? Franz Ferdinand? Justin Timberlake? Fergie? Carrie Underwood? I'm sure they're great. But if you'll excuse me, I have to go; Don Kennedy is hosting 'Big Band Jump' on The Savoy Express. 'I'll never smile again / Until I smile at you.'

It Is The Mercy

2007-06-03T13:39:00.001-07:00

In 1967, Englishman Francis Chichester sailed solo round the world in Gypsy Moth IV. He was not the first man to accomplish the feat, but his was the fastest such voyage yet recorded; and unlike others, who had stopped at several ports along the way for provisions and repairs, Chichester made only one stop en route, in Australia. His feat caught the imagination of the world; nowhere more than in England, still reeling under the blow of World War II, aware that its glory days as a world leader were behind it, and searching for a new hero. Chichester and his voyage caught the public imagination in England, and he joined a small, select group of men which included Robert Falcon Scott, Ernest Shackleton, Edmund Hillary, and Roger Bannister, all of whom had been crowned as heroes by the British people. When Chichester arrived in England the event was broadcast live on British television (amid speculation that after so long at sea his legs might give out when he went ashore; they didn't), he was greeted by 250,000 people lining the shore at Plymouth Hoe, he was knighted by Queen Elizabeth II, and he was lionised throughout the country and the world.

It was perhaps inevitable that others would try to emulate Chichester's accomplishment, although it was clearly not enough now merely (!) to sail single-handed around the world; the voyage must be done faster, and without any stops at all. The sailing fraternity was not slow to take up this challenge, and almost immediately several men began making plans to attempt the feat. The Sunday Times newspaper, which had sponsored Chichester's voyage, sensed the commercial possibilities inherent in the quest; but how to exploit them? Difficulties at once emerged. The nature of the men planning to take part meant that each was anxious to be 'the first', and potential competitors were busily planning their voyages and would be off as soon as they were ready. There was no question of participants hanging around to wait for others so that they could all set off with the boom of a starter's gun, so how to decide a winner? There was also the problem of persuading people to actually take part in an official race; what if someone declined to take part and simply set off on his own? After some deliberation, the ST got round these obstacles by announcing that there would be a five month window during which competitors could depart—from 1 June to 31 October 1968—and that anyone at all who decided to sail around the world solo without stopping, and who departed during this time period, would be part of the competition, whether they wanted to be or not. Participants were not allowed to put into any port, or receive any assistance from another boat or person. There would also be two prizes: the Golden Globe itself would go to the first person to complete the venture, while a prize of £5000 would go to the competitor who finished the race in the shortest period of time.

The rules, such as they were, meant that since anyone who departed during the stipulated time was taking part in the race, the Sunday Times had no control over who was part of the event, and could not, therefore, insist on assessing participants before they left for such basics as seamanship or mental stability; nor could the paper ensure that the participants' vessels were suited to the voyage, or that they were properly outfitted or supplied. Thus it was that Donald Crowhurst, whose knowledge, and practical experience, of sailing was minimal, whose boat was poorly designed (by himself) and built, and whose supplies were woefully lacking, was able to take part in the most gruelling sea race yet devised.

Hours before the 31 October deadline, Crowhurst set sail in his trimaran, the Teignmouth Electron. To say he was woefully unprepared would be an understatement. The ship-building process had been fraught, to say the least, and the boat was not properly finished; the trial run had been little short of a disaster; Crowhurst's much-vaunted (and self-designed) computerised running system was a jumble of wires that led nowhere; all was confusion aboard the boat; and vast quantities of supplies, including a bag of gifts from his wife, remained on the dock when Crowhurst finally sailed. The situation was so obviously desperate that a BBC-TV crew, there to film Crowhurst's departure, was quietly told by the man in charge—who sensed a tragedy in the making—to stop filming and help with the loading of the boat instead.

When Crowhurst set sail he was, like the other eight competitors, heading into the unknown. It is almost impossible, in these days of Global Positioning, instant messaging, faxes, computers, and the Internet, to appreciate what these men were facing. Their radio communication with anyone at all would be sporadic at best; they could go weeks without being able to send or receive a message. They would be calculating their position using chronometers and sextants, putting them closer to Cook, Ross, and Franklin then to sailors today, a mere generation later. The Sunday Times, which had not been able to vet competitors or their ships, was able to enforce the rule about no contact, so on the rare occasions when the men were close enough to another ship to retrieve a bundle of letters or newspapers from home, they were unable to receive even these small comforts. These men were, in essence, even more isolated and alone than Apollo astronauts, in a voyage that could last anywhere up to a year.

It takes a certain amount of mental stability and toughness to endure this sort of isolation; and it quickly became apparent to several of the competitors that this element would be the most difficult to endure. In the end, of the nine men who set out, only one completed the voyage successfully; and given the title of the book which heads this entry, it's not giving anything away to say that Donald Crowhurst was not that man. On 10 July 1969, the Royal Mail Vessel Picardy discovered the Teignmouth Electron floating, abandoned, in the mid-Atlantic, about 1800 miles from England. The vessel was quickly identified as that of Donald Crowhurst, taking part in the Golden Globe race, who at that point was supposed to be heading home in triumph, having completed the most gruelling portion of his trip; his sporadic radio accounts, while somewhat vague as to his precise location, had indicated that the novice sailor was defying the odds and looked set to become a hero when he returned to England. There was no sign of Crowhurst on the boat, however; the last logbook entry was dated 1 July, and while the boat was in some disarray, there was nothing to indicate a disaster. It was surmised that he had been swept overboard by some freak accident—perhaps a rogue wave—and after searching the area the Picardy departed for England, with the Teignmouth Electron hoisted on board.

It was a sobering end to what had been shaping up as a miraculous voyage, and Crowhurst looked set to be memorialised as a hero. However, when the Picardy arrived in England and the logbooks were examined, a very different, and deeply unsettling, story emerged. I will not spoil that story by going into further detail here. Suffice it to say that the account of it—immortalised by Nicholas Tomalin and Ron Hall in The Strange Last Voyage of Donald Crowhurst, first published in 1970 and recently reprinted (with a new introduction by Jonathan Raban) by McGraw Hill as part of its 'Sailor's Classics' series—is one of the most harrowing, and terrifying, books I have ever read. Tomalin and Hall's reconstruction of the events strikes me as flawless; it is almost as if one or both were there, on board, watching as Crowhurst descended into madness, a process which takes place before our eyes in the course of the book. By the time the story comes to its inevitable—but no less horrifying for that—conclusion, you will be drained, and hoping that this is the closest to true madness that you ever come. Near the end of his final entry, Crowhurst writes chillingly:

I will only resign this game
if you will agree that [on]
the next occasion that this
game is played it will be played
according to the
rules that are devised by
my great god who has
revealed at last to his son
not only the exact nature
of the reason for games but
has also revealed the truth of
the way of the ending of the
next game that

It is finished—

It is finished

IT IS THE MERCY

Like the narrator in 'Bartleby the Scrivener', when I consider these words I cannot adequately express the emotions which seize me. Those whom the gods destroy, they first drive mad, indeed.

The background of the Golden Globe race, and accounts of the other participants, are touched on in Tomalin and Hall's book, but it is, as the title suggests, mainly concerned with Crowhurst. Those who would like to find out more about the race as a whole, and the other competitors, are encouraged to seek out Peter Nichols's A Voyage For Madmen (Harper-Collins, 2001), which fills in many of the background details about the Golden Globe and the other competitors. Even without Crowhurst's presence, the race would have made for an electrifying account, and Nichols, who in addition to being a writer is a skilled sailor, has the literary and sea-going talents to ensure that his book is a page-turner from start to finish. The nine men who took part were very different in terms of temperament, seamanship, and motivation, and Nichols does a skilful job in assessing each one, and trying to find out why they did what they did. This is, as Nichols himself admits, an almost impossible question to answer; even those driven to attempt feats which most of us would consider life-threatening, foolhardy, and well-nigh impossible, in approximately equal measures, usually have no satisfactory answer, unless it's along the lines of George Mallory's response, when asked why he wanted to climb Mt Everest: 'Because it's there.'

Both The Strange Last Voyage of Donald Crowhurst and A Voyage for Madmen are highly recommended, in and of themselves and as complementary volumes. I'd even go so far as to say that these accounts of exploits on the high seas would make perfect summertime reading; unless, of course, you are planning a sea voyage of your own, in which case you might want to save them until you return home.

Murder Most Funny

2007-05-06T21:04:00.000-07:00

I have always been a reader of mystery and detective stories; I cut my teeth on Nancy Drew, thrilled to the adventures of The Three Investigators, discovered Sherlock Holmes at an early age, segued into Hercule Poirot and Miss Marple, and after that there was no looking back. Ngaio Marsh, Wilkie Collins, Dorothy L. Sayers, Edgar Allan Poe, Arthur Morrison, Edmund Crispin, Jacques Futrelle, Anthony Berkeley, Elizabeth George, sundry Victorian and Edwardian rivals of Arthur Conan Doyle: I read them all, and then some.

Of course, I could not hope to read everything in the field, and there came a time when I began to drift away from the mystery story and read other things. I rather lost touch with the genre in the late 1980s, which perhaps explains why I did not hear of British author Sarah Caudwell until within the last two years or so, when a friend began to mention that he thought I'd quite like her mysteries. Knowing that this friend had yet to steer me wrong as far as book recommendations went, I decided to take a look, and was able to pick up three of Caudwell's books on a trip to Seattle last year. Unfortunately, I was in the midst of World Fantasy Award reading and judging at the time, and the books, alas, had to go on what is referred to, somewhat wistfully and a touch erroneously, as my 'to be read shelf': wistful because I sometimes wonder if I'll ever get to them all, and erroneous because it's not so much a shelf as a small bookcase.

Last week, however, something—a feeling in the air, an alignment of stars, a touch of rheumatics, call it what you will—told me that the time was right, and I picked the first Caudwell novel, Thus Was Adonis Murdered, off the shelf and commenced to read. I must have been all of four pages in before I realised that here was something very good indeed, and I polished the book off over the course of two nights, then eagerly went on to the second and third books, finishing the third off last night. The good news is that there is more Caudwell yet to read; the bad news is that 'more', in this case, only amounts to one more title, because the author only wrote four books before dying in 2000 at the age of sixty-one.

Caudwell came from a distinguished family: her real name was Sarah Cockburn, her father was the writer Claud Cockburn, and her mother was actress and journalist Jean Ross, who is regarded as the original of the character Sally Bowles in Christopher Isherwood's Goodbye to Berlin. Caudwell (to use her pen name) graduated in Classics from Aberdeen University and read Law at St Anne's College, Oxford before being called to the Bar and practised as a barrister in Lincoln's Inn. It should therefore be no surprise that her books are as erudite as they are witty (and they are very witty indeed), and that she should have chosen to set her mysteries against a backdrop of a Chambers in Lincoln's Inn, inhabited by several young barristers who take turns acting as principals and chorus throughout the novels. There is the cool, calm, and competent Selena Jardine; Julia Larwood, brilliant when it comes to navigating the intricacies of the Finance Acts but decidedly hapless when it comes to navigating her way to a table without tripping over briefcases and spilling prawn salad on unfortunate patrons; the unflappable and incorruptible Desmond Ragwort; and the raffish Michael Cantrip, the sole Cantabrigian amongst a flock of Oxonians, who often sounds as if he had stumbled in from a particularly exuberant Wodehouse novel. Around these central characters hover Julia's Aunt Regina, who has had four husbands and yet retains an admirably clear view of life: 'It's true of course, as I suppose you know by now, that very good-looking men aren't to be trusted, but you must also remember that even quite ugly men often aren't to be trusted either. So in the end you might just as well enjoy yourself and be let down by the good-looking ones'; Timothy Shepherd, another barrister in the chambers who is often obligingly absent; Henry, the clerk, constantly trying (and failing) to maintain some semblance of order; Cantrip's Uncle Hereward, a formidable ex-Army officer who has an eye for a pretty girl, an endless fund of reminiscences, and a handy way with a gun; and Basil Ptarmigan, the smooth-tongued senior barrister.

And then, of course, there is Professor Hilary Tamar, a Fellow of St George's College, Oxford, Tutor in Legal History, amateur detective, and firm believer that Scholarship is the servant of Truth and can own no other allegiance. Hilary is considerably older than the others, and while it is mentioned that the Professor was once Timothy's tutor, no other explanation is given as to why Tamar has formed such a close bond with Selena, Julia, Cantrip, and Ragwort. Indeed, throughout the novels (which take a somewhat epistolary form and are narrated by Hilary) there is no clear indication of whether the Professor is male or female. In other hands this could turn into a cheap running gag or an irritating distraction; it's a tribute to Caudwell's skill—and the Professor's vividness as a character—that it's neither, and in the end it doesn't matter whether Hilary is a man or a woman: Professor Tamar is a wonderfully drawn character, and deserves to be amongst the best-known names in English detective fiction. That this is not the case is perhaps partly attributable to the fact that the four Tamar novels were written over a period of twenty years: Thus Was Adonis Murdered was published in 1980, The Shortest Way to Hades appeared in 1985, The Sirens Sang of Murder came out in 1989, and then there was a gap of more than a decade before the final book, The Sibyl in Her Grave, was published, posthumously, in 2000.

Those looking for a classic English murder mystery in the cosy style, with all the clues fairly distributed for the keen-eyed reader to spot, will not be disappointed in the Hilary Tamar novels; but they are much more than that. The central characters are engaging to a man or woman; there are liberal amounts of erudition and classical allusion; the language is never less than beautifully clear and wonderfully literate; the plots are intricate enough to satisfy the most demanding aficionado of the whodunit; and the settings are vividly depicted (Venice, Cyprus, the Channel Islands, and that most beloved of murder mystery locales, the English village, complete with map). As if all that were not enough, the books are wonderfully funny; be careful if you read this in a crowded room, lest you be overcome with a desire to quote large chunks aloud—if, that is, you can stop laughing long enough.

I have one more Professor Tamar novel (The Shortest Way to Hades) left to acquire and then read, although I will do so with the sad knowledge that once the last page has been turned there will be no more Sarah Caudwell books to read. When the fourth and final novel, The Sibyl in Her Grave, was published, Amanda Cross wrote of the characters, 'I hardly know whether to cry for joy at their return, or to weep for the finality of this bittersweet adventure.' At least the four books will always be there on the shelf; and while I don't often re-read books, I have a sneaking suspicion that I'll be dropping in to No. 62 New Square, Lincoln's Inn Fields, and then nipping off for a glass of Nierstein at The Corkscrew, once again, just to check up on Selena, Julia, Cantrip, Ragwort, and the wonderful Hilary.

Too Many Words

2007-04-29T08:20:00.000-07:00

An article on the Times online site details how Orion Books is slimming down some classics in order to make them more appealing to modern readers who are strapped for time, but still want to be able to say that they've read the originals. According to Malcolm Edwards of Orion, research confirmed that 'many regular readers think of the classics as long, slow and, to be frank, boring'. Presumably sensing a marketing opportunity, Orion realised that 'life is too short to read all the books you want to'; thus the decision to trim David Copperfield, The Mill on the Floss, Moby Dick, Anna Karenina, Vanity Fair, and Wives and Daughters by 30–40%, by eliminating words, sentences, paragraphs, and even whole chapters. As the above makes clear, it's not just readers' busy lives that Orion is concerned about; there's also the fact that the classics can, in their view, be somewhat on the difficult and boring side. The cuts have been made in an attempt to 'make the story and characters emerge', and make the books that much easier for poor twenty-first century readers to understand. Said Mr Edwards, 'Moby Dick must have been difficult in 1850—in 2007 it’s nigh-on impossible to make your way through it.'

Orion seems to be playing up the time—or lack of it—element more than the difficulty side, pitching their new editions as the perfect solution for those who want to appear well-read but simply don't have the time, in our busy modern world, to sit down and read every page of the originals. Oddly enough, I'd have a bit more sympathy if they played up the difficulty angle, because a good many classic books can, to a modern reader unfamiliar with the world depicted and the language used, be somewhat daunting. Here, though, I agree with Matthew Crockatt, a London bookseller who says, 'I’m afraid reading some of these books is hard work, which is why you have to develop as a reader. If people don’t have time to read Anna Karenina, then fine. But don’t read a shortened version and kid yourself it’s the real thing.'

Well said, Mr Crockatt. As readers, we all start off with books on the level of the 'Dick and Jane' titles that were still in use when I was in Grade One, and then graduate to progressively more difficult works as we work our way through school, until we're reading Macbeth in high school and (if the education system has done its job) understanding it. The trick—although it's hardly that, more common sense and a bit of work—is to build gradually, going from book to book until before you know it you're reading Our Mutual Friend and recognising that while the setting and language might be different to what we're used to, the characters and their reasons for acting the way they do aren't so very far removed from the people we see around us, and read about in the newspapers, each day. To use a sporting analogy, no one would advise an armchair athlete who wanted to run in a 10 kilometre event to just lace up a pair of trainers and go do it; instead, he or she would be advised to follow a programme which starts off slowly—running for one minute out of every five the first week, say—and then builds on that over the course of several weeks until, by the end of training, he or she is running the entire distance. In this way, a goal that seemed daunting, if not impossible, at the outset of training can be accomplished (of which I am living proof; I used such a programme, and was able to complete three 10K runs and even a half-marathon, a triumph of determination over innate physical ability if ever there was one. But I digress).

However, building one's way up to reading Moby Dick does take a fair bit of—and here's that word again—time, which, according to the well-meaning folk at Orion, is something of which we simply don't have enough. Their thoughts, apparently, are along the lines that if someone doesn't have time to read the unabridged version of Moby Dick, one certainly doesn't have time to do all the reading that will get him or her to the point where they can sit and read Melville's book. Here is where I start to get a bit cross. I can understand, and to a degree sympathise with, the point of view which says 'Such-and-such is long and difficult; not only do I not really understand it, it's a bit on the dull side, and I'm not enjoying it.' I'll read just about anything you care to put my way, doorstopper-sized classics included, but even I, moi qui vous parle, confess to having been somewhat bored by a few Approved Classics By Revered Authors that I've read (no names, no pack drill; but I can't think I'll ever be picking up Dickens's Barnaby Rudge again, at least not without a healthy financial incentive). Books are meant to be enjoyed; if you're not enjoying what you're reading, for whatever reason, put it down and go on to something else. But don't start whingeing about how you don't have time to sit down and read Wives and Daughters or David Copperfield. If something is important enough to you—whether it's reading a book or planting a garden or taking part in amateur theatricals or pick-up hockey games—you'll find the time to do it. How many of the people who claim they don't have time to read Vanity Fair will tell you, in the same breath, that they won't miss an episode of Lost or House or Desperate Housewives, or that they've made it to level 379 of some video game or other, or that now that baseball season is here they find they have a lot less spare time than they used to?

The bottom line is that those who want to read David Copperfield will read it; those who don't, or who don't feel they have the time, won't, and chopping 40% of Dickens's text is unlikely to make much difference to the latter group. The Orion 'compact' editions will doubtless make a bit of a splash for the short term; but in ten years or so I suspect that Dickens's unabridged version will still be readily available, while the Orion version will be long forgotten (the less than compelling cover illustration—see above—won't help much, either). For those who do pick up and read the abridged version: good for you. But don't try telling me you've read Charles Dickens's David Copperfield, or I shall be compelled to point out that no, you haven't, not really: you've read what someone else thinks Charles Dickens's David Copperfield should be, which is a very different matter; one that's as true as taxes is, and nothing, as Barkis points out, is truer than them. At least, Barkis points this out in the original; whether he continues to do so in the Orion version remains to be seen.

Miss Alice Merriwether's Long Lost Cakes

2007-04-19T23:30:00.000-07:00

While it's undoubtedly a boon—for those of us who live a good ways from the nearest bookstore—to be able to purchase books via the Internet, practicality's gain is often serendipity's loss. Online book sites are excellent—as long as you know precisely what you want. In a real bookstore, however, the customer is free to wander the aisles at will, pull this or that book off the shelf purely on the basis of a whim, read the jacket copy and perhaps a paragraph or two, and decide if this relationship is meant to be. It's pleasing to emerge from a bookstore with a book you went in knowing you wanted; it's even more pleasing to come out with a book that you had no idea existed.

Christopher discovered Barry Aitchison's Miss Alice Merriwether's Long Lost Cakes & Further Arcane Inducements to Wonder (Velluminous Press, 2006) on a table in a Barnes & Noble in New York this past January. I don't know what about the book particularly caught his eye; perhaps the eye on the cover caught him. At any rate, it was added to our purchases, and Christopher read it not long after we got home. Searching the shelves the other night for something to read, I spotted this title, and remembered that Christopher had enjoyed it; and having just finished it, I can say with some confidence that a good many people will enjoy Aitchison's romp, which is part-fantasy, part-science fiction, and part-small town comedy. It concerns the small midwestern town of Parcival—pop. 2800 or so—which, one Sunday evening, disappears off the face of the Earth. Unfortunately, no one—including the Parcivalians—notices this fact until Tuesday morning.

The finger of suspicion immediately points to mysterious newcomer Quentin C. Coriander, who arrived in Parcival one day without anyone seeing him: he was simply there, a part of the landscape, and accepted by the townsfolk as something of an odd duck, but essentially harmless. However, once Parcival and its inhabitants find themselves nowhere on Earth, people start disappearing, and Coriander displays a seemingly unwholesome interest in fresh-cooked meat—despite the considerable inducements of Miss Merriwether's spectacular cakes, made specially for him—the townsfolk decide that Something Must Be Done, although they're not quite sure what.

Aitchison—whose first novel this is—displays a sure touch, juggling a large cast of characters and telling the story in brief bites which tell just enough to move the plot along, but always leave you on tenterhooks, wanting to turn the pages faster to see how this particular plot strand develops. His observations of small-town life are spot on, and the book is laugh-out-loud funny in spots. Beware: it's the kind of book that you shouldn't read with other people in the room, or you'll spend a lot of time reading bits out to them while trying not to laugh too hard. You'll also develop a serious craving for baked goods, after reading the author's descriptions of some of Miss Alice's cakes. Aitchison has included recipes for some of Alice's creations; if anyone bakes up the non-poisonous version of the 'Gourmet Chocolate and Brandy Cream Cake', I'd be much obliged for a slice.

Boys' Own Books

2007-04-14T11:07:00.000-07:00

The Guardian recently reported the following:

'The runaway success of "The Dangerous Book for Boys" has inspired Penguin to start a list of "boy's own" classics. Six end-of-empire adventure tales are being given nostalgic covers, aimed squarely at the Father's Day market in June. They are: The Lost World by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle; She by H. Rider Haggard; The Prisoner of Zenda by Anthony Hope; The Riddle of the Sands by Erskine Childers; The Thirty-Nine Steps by John Buchan; and The Man Who Was Thursday by G. K. Chesterton. A dashing collection for any middle-aged boy's bookshelf.'

One commentator has pointed out that five of the six titles listed above were not originally aimed at boys; rather, they were intended for adults. Surely it should be four-and-a-half, for The Lost World is prefaced by a verse which reads:

'I have wrought my simple plan
If I bring one hour of joy
To the boy who's half a man
Or the man who's half a boy.'

Of course, quite where this leaves female readers is unclear, both regarding Conan Doyle's book and the six titles as a whole. Did ACD think that neither girls nor women would enjoy The Lost World? And do the folk at Penguin think that these books—with their emphasis on adventure, thrills, and derring-do—are more apt to strike a chord with men than with women? I've read three of the books on the list and enjoyed them thoroughly, and expect I would enjoy the other three equally as much; indeed, they're all on that ever-expanding list of books that I mean to get to before I shuffle off this mortal coil, and at the rate the list is growing I shall have to live well beyond my allotted three score and ten in order to fit them all in.

It does make me ponder, though, the difference between men and women when it comes to reading. All my life I've read widely and happily in a variety of genres. When I was younger I was as apt to pick up a Three Investigators book as a Nancy Drew, and these days I'll read Robert Goddard, John Buchan, and George MacDonald Fraser as readily as I will pick up books by Joanne Harris or Patricia Carlon. However, a quick look at the list of books I've read over the last three years shows that the vast majority are by men, and are probably aimed at a male market. The preponderance of books about the Arctic probably skews things to a certain extent: as a novel I read recently comments, relatively few women seem to be interested in, say, the Franklin Expedition, and I suspect more men than women have read Sebastian Junger's A Perfect Storm, Jon Krakauer's Under the Banner of Heaven, Eric Lomax's The Railway Man, and Andrew Greig's Summit Fever (all of which I would highly recommend; more of Greig in a future post).

The point is, however, that while many women undoubtedly pick up and enjoy books that are aimed at men, fewer men would consider reading anything that seemed, however vaguely, to be aimed at women. When I was reading Nancy Drew books I would have been happy to read Hardy Boys adventures as well, and probably would have had I not gone on to Conan Doyle and Agatha Christie at an early age; but how many boys who gobbled up the Hardy Boys books would have been equally comfortable reading Nancy Drew? Not many, I'd wager.

So I wish Penguin every success with their new line of classic 'boys' own' adventures; but I'd be interested to know how many women end up picking them up and enjoying them too. They'd certainly make as good a Mother's Day gift as a Father's Day gift, with the added advantage that they'll last longer than flowers, contain fewer calories than chocolates, and provide more enjoyment than an overpriced Mother's Day brunch at a crowded restaurant.

Road to the Stanley Cup: 1

2007-04-12T00:42:00.000-07:00

Eighty-two regular season hockey games have come and gone, and now the real fun begins: the Stanley Cup playoffs. Sixteen of the thirty teams in the league make it to round one, and the Vancouver Canucks—whose fortunes I've followed since they joined the league in 1970—are one of them. The first round pits the ’Nucks (3rd overall in the Western Conference) against the sixth place Dallas Stars, and game one started last night (11 April) at 7.00 pm PDT. It ended a few minutes ago on 12 April, around 12.30 am PDT, just a couple of minutes shy of the end of the fourth overtime period; it's now the sixth longest game in Stanley Cup playoff history. Sudden death overtime is bad enough; four periods of it is apt to have players and fans alike reaching for an oxygen mask. Fortunately the Canucks prevailed 5–4, so that's one game down, as many as twenty-seven to go (fingers crossed). I don't know if I can take too many more games like this one, though.

Recommended (Arctic) reading: Part One

2007-04-11T18:12:00.000-07:00

The interest that Dan Simmons's The Terror has stirred up regarding the Franklin Expedition has prompted a handful of people to ask me to recommend some good non-fiction books about it, as they want to read some more. Herewith a few books that might be best saved for summer reading, to cool you down when the temperatures rise.

ARCTIC EXPLORATION

The keystone work in this field is still Canadian historian Pierre Berton's The Arctic Grail: The Quest for the North West Passage and the North Pole, 1818–1909 (Random House), which gives an excellent overview of the subject. The dates weren't chosen randomly: 1818 was the year in which Franklin made his first foray into the north, and 1909 saw not one but two men claiming to be the first to reach the North Pole. The Franklin Expedition and the expeditions which went in search of it are covered extensively. Berton wasn't Canada's best known, and most popular, historian without good reason: The Arctic Grail is, like all his works, immensely readable, although an overview like this can only give a taste of some of the larger-than life personalities who were drawn to the Arctic.

THE FRANKLIN EXPEDITION

Two books cited by Simmons in his acknowledgements for The Terror are both excellent overviews of the Franklin Expedition in particular. Owen Beattie and John Geiger's Frozen in Time: The Fate of the Franklin Expedition (Bloomsbury/Graystone) details the exhumation, in 1984 and 1986, of three Franklin Expedition sailors who died early on in the voyage and were buried on remote Beechey Island. The sailors' bodies were remarkably well preserved, enabling Beattie and his team to carry out autopsies and analyses which showed far higher levels of lead in the sailors than is considered healthy, and gave rise to the theory—believed by some, debunked by others—that the lead used in the tins of food which the expedition relied on was one of the main causes of the tragedy. Be sure to get the revised edition, which includes an interesting foreword by Margaret Atwood, who discusses the influence that the Beattie expedition had on some of her own fiction.

Scott Cookman's Ice Blink: The Tragic Fate of Sir John Franklin's Lost Polar Expedition (Wiley) also fingers the tinned food as a culprit, but posits that it was botulism, not lead, which contaminated the food. Tinned food was an innovation in 1845, and many felt that it would alleviate that most dreaded of sailors' diseases, scurvy; but the processes necessary to ensure that the food was thoroughly cooked prior to the tins being sealed were not always in place, and the problem was compounded by the food freezing and then thawing over the course of the voyage, and not being heated properly prior to being consumed. The suspicion that the tinned food had something to do with the tragedy is borne out by the fact that the officers—who ate more of the tinned food (which was considered a delicacy) than the common seamen—suffered a disproportionate number of losses early in the expedition.

Ken McGoogan's Lady Franklin's Revenge: A True Story of Ambition, Obsession and the Remaking of Arctic History (HarperCollins) is a superb look at a remarkable woman, to whom the adjective 'indomitable' is applied with monotonous (but accurate) regularity. She was a woman who was far ahead of her time, and undoubtedly the driving force in the Franklin household: McGoogan paints a convincing portrait of a woman who lived vicariously through her husband, using his various appointments as a way to see and do things that would otherwise have been denied her. The volume focuses more on Lady Franklin than on her husband, and thus the Franklin Expedition is seen through the eyes of the woman who was left behind, and whose indomitable will sent governments scrambling to send expeditions in search of Franklin and his men. Ironically, more men were lost searching for Franklin than were lost on the expedition itself; their stories are as fascinating, and as fraught with tragedy, as Franklin's own, and will be the subject of another post.

One ordinary day with pictures

2007-04-10T16:44:00.000-07:00

Ah, the first tentative appearance of graphics on the blog! This can only mean that I'm starting to find my way round; either that, or I have far too much time on my hands (or both). Thanks to Christopher for sorting out the pictures and the Terror cover, which really is splendid, and far nicer than the cover of the British edition. Why publishers seem obsessed with having different covers for different markets leaves me puzzled, particularly when one of the designs is so much better than another. This photo shows Christopher (far right), our son Tim (centre), and me with Terror author Dan Simmons in Seattle in February of 2007; many thanks to John Pelan for taking the picture.

The photograph that accompanies my profile was taken in summer 2006, and bears, I think, a passing resemblance to a respected British actress. Some people are fortunate enough to look like Nicole Kidman or Catherine Zeta-Jones or Kate Winslet; if the resemblance is indeed there, I look like Penelope Wilton from, amongst other things, Shaun of the Dead. Ah well, it could be worse; I could look like that film's Nick Frost.

Here's another picture, taken in January 2007. I'd like to say that this shot was taken in front of a portion of our library, with me in my usual around-the-house garb, ready for a cosy night in, but truth in advertising laws compel me to admit that it was taken at the formal dinner of the Baker Street Irregulars in New York, and that this is not standard attire at the Roden household. We do have several bookcases that look almost as impressive, though, if not quite so tidy.

And here's one more, taken at the BSI dinner in New York in 2005. Not only am I standing with three distinguished gentlemen—from left Peter Straub, Michael Dirda, and Christopher Roden—but the picture was taken by another distinguished gent, Neil Gaiman.

Strange things done in the midnight sun

2007-04-09T17:58:00.000-07:00

I can't now remember when or why I first become interested in Arctic exploration. My father, who was a Royal Canadian Mountie for twenty-one years, gave me several books about the early days of the Force, and the two stories which fascinated me both took place in Northern Canada: the story of the Lost Patrol of 1910, which disappeared on what was supposed to be a routine trip between Fort McPherson and Dawson, and the saga of the Mad Trapper of Rat River (who was not a trapper, and almost certainly not mad, and didn't live in Rat River, but that's neither here nor there). The first true Arctic adventure I ever read about was the voyage of the R.C.M.P. vessel St Roch, the first ship to navigate the Northwest Passage from west to east; the ship itself is now at the Vancouver Maritime Museum, for anyone interested in paying a visit.

In the mid-1980s I became fascinated with an expedition to remote Beechey Island in the Arctic, to disinter and autopsy three men who died early on in the ill-fated Franklin Expedition. Since that time I have read many books dealing with Arctic and North Pole exploration in general, and the Franklin expedition—and the expeditions which it in turn inspired, many of which were pretty eventful in and of themselves—in particular, fascinated by these men who, time and again, braved incredible hardship and the constant threat of debilitating illness, or death, or both, in search of something which was either a figment of the imagination (the Open Polar Sea), unnavigable by ships of the time (the Northwest Passage), or a featureless spot on an expanse of ice that is of no practical or strategic use (the North Pole).

What drove these men? What forced them, time and again, to pit themselves against the elements, and sometimes each other, return to civilisation (if they were fortunate), and then do it again? The wives of some of these men called themselves 'ice widows', and it is hard to understand why they did what they did. After two or three winters iced in, battling rats, scurvy, starvation, and cold, you'd think that the men who made it safely home would kiss the ground and swear never to go near the Arctic again. Yet as soon as the Admiralty, or the American government, announced another Arctic expedition, these same men would be lined up, ready and eager to sign on.

I'm also a lifelong admirer (and occasional writer) of ghost and supernatural stories; so when I found that Dan Simmons had written a novel called The Terror, which combined the saga of the ill-fated Franklin Expedition with a supernatural element, I was almost counting the days until the novel came out. I picked it up in New York the week it was published, began reading it before I returned home, and finished it in three days once I was safely back; no mean feat when you consider that the novel is more than 750 pages long. To say I was impressed with the novel would be an understatement; it's one of the finest books I've read in some time, and I could wish that it had been published in 2005, as it would then have figured very high in my own shortlist as a World Fantasy Awards judge.

I don't often write reviews for All Hallows, the journal of the Ghost Story Society, which I edit—I prefer to leave that to other, more capable, hands—but I was inspired to review The Terror for the journal's pages; it will be appearing in the spring issue. Here it is, for those who can't wait.

THE TERROR by Dan Simmons

Little, Brown, 2007; 769pp; hbk; US$25.99/Cdn$32.99; ISBN 978-0-316-01744-2

Reviewed by Barbara Roden

On 26 July 1845, Sir John Franklin and the 128 men aboard HMS Erebus and HMS Terror sailed out of sight of the western world and entered the realm of legend. They were charged with discovering the fabled Northwest Passage, the northern sea route which was thought to link the Atlantic with the Pacific and which was the Holy Grail of northern Arctic explorers. To the man who discovered the Northwest Passage would accrue honour and glory beyond his wildest dreams; or, in this case, to the man who commanded the expedition which found it, for this was firmly Sir John Franklin’s show, known as ‘The Franklin Expedition’ before the ships had even set sail. On paper, Sir John may have seemed a likely candidate to lead the project—he had already led three Polar expeditions—but in hindsight his qualifications were less than stellar. None of his previous expeditions had been a success: indeed, his disastrous 1819 venture had led to Franklin being known throughout England as ‘the man who ate his boots’, a nod to the privations the group suffered (it now seems certain that others in the group ate something worse than their boots), and Franklin never entirely shook off his reputation of being a capable duffer who achieved the heights he did through connections and the influence of his indomitable second wife, Lady Jane Franklin, rather than through any innate ability or qualities of leadership.

For these we must look to the expedition’s second-in-command, Captain Francis Crozier, in charge of the Terror and a far more accomplished Polar explorer, sailor, and leader of men than Franklin could ever hope to be. Crozier, an Irish Presbyterian, had repeatedly seen other men—less qualified, but more ‘acceptable’—promoted over him, a point which festered; and while he was almost certainly looked on as the leader of the expedition by the men under him, it would have been Franklin who received the plaudits and attention, and whose name was forever attached to the expedition. A pity, that, for if it had been ‘the Crozier expedition’ it might well have had a very different and much less tragic outcome; in much the same way that if another real life drama involving cannibalism, which unfolded at almost precisely the same time, had been ‘the Reed party’ rather than ‘the Donner party’, tragedy might have been averted altogether.

Erebus and Terror had been outfitted as state of the art icebreakers, utilising the most up to date technology available at the time, including engines to drive the ships, with their specially reinforced hulls, through the ice. The ships were also provisioned with enough food to last them three years on full rations and up to five years on short rations, a luxury achieved through the use of that new innovation, tinned food, supplied by a provisioner named Goldner whose bid was so low, and promises regarding quality and delivery time so grandiose and optimistic, that warning flags should immediately have gone up. As it was, the provisions were delivered so late that the ships had to be largely unpacked so that the food could be stowed, and there was no time to inspect the provisions for quality, a factor which contributed greatly to the tragedy which was soon to unfold.

What we know about this tragedy firsthand is rather sketchy. As with a tragedy which occurred thirty years later, albeit in a very different setting—the massacre of General George Custer and his troops at Little Bighorn in 1876—there were no white survivors to tell the tale, and native accounts were contradictory or vague or both. It was not until 1848 that the first search parties set out in search of Franklin and his men, and the first traces of the ill-fated expedition were not discovered until 1854, when John Rae met with a party of Inuit who had relics which could only have come from Franklin’s party. The story they told was of a forlorn and desperate group of kabloonas—white men—who had staggered out of the north, leaving a trail of dead behind them, along with evidences of cannibalism. Rae took his findings back to England, where he was roundly denounced for suggesting that British sailors would eat their dead shipmates but in 1859 another search party found remains which showed unmistakable signs of cannibalism. This same party also discovered the only written record left behind by the expedition: a document stored in a cairn, which contained two messages, one written in 1847 indicating all was well and another written around the margin of the first a year later, stating that Franklin and more than twenty others were dead, and that the survivors were heading south. Ironically, the search teams looking for Franklin and his men succeeded where he had failed: not only was it established that there was no direct Northwest Passage—or none that could be traversed by ships of the day—but most of the remaining blanks on the map of the Arctic were filled in for once and all.

Another similarity which the Franklin expedition shares with the Custer tragedy is that the bulk of what we now know about the two events has only come about in the last two decades or so, using modern forensic techniques. In the case of Custer, a fire which raged across the Little Bighorn site enabled scientists to uncover a wealth of previously hidden evidence, and thus piece together exactly what happened. In the case of Franklin, a scientific team led by Dr Owen Beattie exhumed the remarkably preserved bodies of three early casualties of the Franklin expedition, buried on desolate Beechey Island near the start of the voyage, and discovered astonishingly high levels of lead in the men. This, in turn, led to an investigation of the tins of food taken on the voyage—abandoned tins from the Franklin Expedition may still be found in the Arctic—and the discovery that they were soldered with lead on the inside, thus allowing the lead to leach into the food over the course of the voyage. Writer Scott Cookman took this a step further in his book Ice Blink, showing that the provisioner, Goldner, not only failed to ensure that the tins were soldered completely, thereby allowing bacteria into the tins, but that the food was inadequately cooked prior to delivery, thus making sure that thriving colonies of bacteria were present in many of the tins.

Dan Simmons acknowledges his debt to Cookman’s volume at the end of The Terror, a masterful look at, and reimagining of, the expedition and what happened. It begins in 1847, at a point when Sir John Franklin is already dead, and then switches back and forth in time, now recounting the origins of the expedition and the histories of some of the men involved, now shifting to the present, when the men are already starting to show signs of that most dreaded of sailor’s diseases, scurvy. The ship’s medical crew know that for some reason fresh food—particularly lemon juice—is an effective antiscorbutic, but their lemon juice has lost its efficacy, and there is little fresh food to be had, the men relying more and more on Goldner’s tinned food, which they have little means to heat thoroughly. Thus the men are now dying of lead and food poisoning, neither of which would have been understood by the medical men. In addition, both Erebus and Terror have been frozen in the same spot for more than a year, with no hope of escape in sight; both ships are being relentlessly ground to pieces by the ever-moving ice packs; the temperature dips as low as -100º F., and the men have no way of getting or keeping warm, or of drying out their sodden, frozen layers of wool clothing; Franklin, their leader, is dead; the men realise that there is so little hope of rescue from outside parties that they might as well be on the moon; and when the food runs out they face the very real prospect of having to eat their dead.

For most novelists all this would be horror enough, and Simmons superbly evokes the despair and misery of the increasingly tortured survivors who, under Crozier’s lead, abandon their ships to the ice and set out on a journey across the frozen wastes which would have taxed even healthy men on full rations, and which takes its inevitable toll on the diseased and starving men. Some of the most horrific passages in the book detail exactly what happens to the human body when scurvy takes hold, or how best to dissect a human body so as to get at the flesh and fat, and Simmons brilliantly describes and evokes the tortuous passage of the men across the ever-shifting ice, man-hauling sledges which weigh more than half a ton each:

QUOTE

Somehow Des Voeux had kept them moving to the northeast, but every day the weather worsened, the pressure ridges grew closer together, the necessary deviations from their course became longer and more treacherous, and the sledge sustained serious damage in their Herculean struggle to haul and shove it over the jagged ice ridges. Two days were lost just repairing the sledge in the howl of wind and blowing snow.

The mate had decided to turn around on their fourteenth morning on the ice. With only one tent left, he gauged their chances of survival as low. They then tried to follow their own thirteen days of ruts back to the ships, but the ice was too active—shifting slabs, moving bergs within the pack ice, and new pressure ridges rising in front of them had obliterated their tracks. Des Voeux, the finest navigator on the Franklin Expedition except for Crozier, took theodolite and sextant readings in the few clear moments he found in the days and nights but ended up setting his course based mostly on dead reckoning. He told the men that he knew precisely where they were. He was sure, he later admitted to Fitzjames and Crozier, that he would miss the ships by twenty miles.

On their last night on the ice, the final tent ripped and they abandoned their sleeping bags and pressed on to the southwest blindly, man-hauling just to stay alive. They jettisoned their extra food and clothing, continued to man-haul the sledge only because they needed their water, shotguns, cartridges, and powder. Something large had been following them for their entire voyage. They could see it through the spindrift and fog and pelting hail. They could hear it circling them each endless night in the darkness.

END

And here we have—at last—the reason this book is being reviewed in All Hallows: the Thing on the Ice. It has been dogging the expedition since their first icy winter, and in the beginning the men view it as simply a large Arctic bear of the sort they have been encountering throughout the journey. However, the Thing rapidly proves to be more than a bear: it has certain physical similarities to, but is far larger than, even the largest polar bear, and possessed of a keen intelligence and the ability to materialise out of nowhere and disappear as suddenly. At first it confines itself to picking off men who are unfortunate enough to be on the ice on their own; but in one terrifying set-piece it gets into one of the ice-bound ships, leaving a trail of death and devastation which continues above decks, where Ice Master Thomas Blanky takes refuge in the spars and ropes and then tries to elude the creature among the pressure ridges and seracs on the ice, desperately searching for a space large enough to hide in yet small enough that the Thing cannot follow. Later, as the survivors press on by sledge, they are aware of the creature always following, yet the attacks cease—for a time. When they resume, it is with a ferocity that shakes the survivors to the core, as they wonder what will kill them first: the cold, starvation, the diseases wracking their bodies, or the malevolent creature dogging their trail. Following the committal to the deep of three of the party—or at least as much of their bodies as have been found—the surviving medical officer, Harry Goodsir, writes:

QUOTE

All of us, I believe, were Thinking that these words were a Eulogy and Farewell for each one of us. Up until this Day and the loss of Lieutenant Little’s boat with all his men—including the irreplaceable Mr Reid and the universally liked Mr Peglar—I suspect that many of us still thought that we might Live. Now we know that the odds of that had all but Disappeared.

The long awaited and Universally Cheered Open Water was a vicious Trap.

The Ice will not give us up.

And the creature from the ice will not allow us to leave.

END

The novel is written in a series of chapters told from the points of view of a large cast of characters, and it is to Simmons’s enormous credit that each of these men has an individual and distinct voice. From the bare facts known of these men—many of whom are, at this remove, merely names on a muster roll—he has created a series of fully-rounded characters, taking the barest of clues and hints and suppositions and spinning them into something wholly convincing. For example, Scott Cookman writes, in Ice Blink, that one of the bodies, that of a steward, was found years later with a pocketful of possessions, including a notebook belonging to Petty Officer Harry Peglar. Writes Cookman, ‘Peglar, starving, had either died on the march or been left at Erebus Bay and entrusted the book to the steward who, despite his own sufferings, tenderly carried it homeward, intent on delivering it to Peglar’s relatives.’ Simmons has expanded on this brief reference and the word ‘tenderly’ to build up a wholly convincing friendship, even love, between Peglar and Steward John Bridgens, whom he posits met on the voyage of the Beagle in 1831; these references to such contemporary people and things as Darwin, telegrams, and Poe (one brilliant section owes much to ‘The Masque of the Red Death’) remind us that while these men were stuck in a featureless landscape at the top of the world, life continued, however impossibly far away. Surgeon Harry Goodsir begins the book as a rather comical figure, inclined not to be taken seriously by anyone, yet over the course of the book he grows into a strong and dignified man who has earned the respect of the survivors. One by one Simmons does this with many of the characters, showing how extreme hardship brings out the best—or worst—in humans: characters who start out as seemingly honourable are shown to harbour a darkness within them which is even more terrifying than the malignancy of the creature stalking them, while other men, like Goodsir, rise to the occasion, and become, almost in spite of themselves, better. Nowhere is this more marked than in the case of Crozier, who begins the novel as a bitter man who is seldom sober, and who decides that when his private supply of whisky is exhausted he will take his own life, rather than face the horrors around him without the numbing effects of drink. By the time that moment arrives, however, Crozier finds that the flames of life and responsibility burn too fiercely for him to give up, and that the man he has become will not allow him to throw his life away while there remains a hope of survival. To that end he endures a nightmarish withdrawal scene which leads him to the brink of death, and also lays the seeds for the revelations of the book’s final 100 pages, where all the threads are drawn together into an ending which is as strangely beautiful, yet horrifying, as it is right.

Simmons has also managed brilliantly to work within the known facts of the expedition, finding explanations which fit logically and seamlessly into his interpretation of events to answer some of the anomalies which still puzzle Franklin experts. Why, for example, did the men abandon ship yet drag with them so many articles—Bibles, novels, writing desks, china—for which they had no practical use? Why was one of the sledge-mounted boats found, with two skeletons—one intact, one in pieces—miles away from where the survivors are known to have gone, and facing in the wrong direction, that is northwest towards the abandoned ships and not southeast towards their hope of escape? Why did the officers on board both ships suffer a disproportionately large number of casualties early in the expedition? And what of the reports of some Inuit that one of the men survived, and spent the rest of his life living in a native village? All of Simmons’s explanations fit perfectly, as does his only significant addition to the known cast of characters: an enigmatic Inuit woman known by the crew as Lady Silence, who many are soon convinced is a Jonah, or witch, and who may be in league with the Ice Creature.

The Terror is a superb book, and that comparatively rare beast, a historical novel which does not ring false at any point. It is also a terrifying novel of the supernatural, with more than a few echoes of Algernon Blackwood. Its length may seem daunting, but make sure that when you start reading it you have a few days clear: for once you pick it up, you will not want to stop until the story ends.

Dipping my toe in the water

2007-04-09T17:21:00.000-07:00

Blogs seem to be the new 'must have' accessory: like a cell phone, a Blackberry, and a Facebook page. I have a cell phone (which I seldom use), can't think I'd have any practical use for a Blackberry, and have no inclination whatever to start a Facebook page, so it looks as if blogging it will be. I've considered—and rejected—the idea of a blog in the past; so why should today be any different? To which my only answer is: why not? There's a wonderful passage in Isabel Colegate's The Shooting Party when a young child asks her grandfather why he is always writing in his 'big black notebook', to which the grandfather replies, 'It's my Game Book. Well, part of it is my Game Book. Part of it is my thoughts. It's not a bad idea to get into the habit of writing down one's thoughts. It saves one having to bother anyone else with them.'

So this will be a place for me to write down my thoughts: all those random musings, comments, questions, and general ideas to which I'm prone. I used to keep a diary, regularly, for many years, but have rather fallen out of the habit, so don't expect daily postings; rather, I'll jot down thoughts as they come to me, as long as they're thoughts which I think will be of some interest to others. I love books and films, and read a lot of the former and watch (or re-watch) a lot of the latter, so expect a fair few comments—even the occasional full-fledged review—on what I've been reading or watching lately, or books and films that I've enjoyed in the past.

Okay: let's get this show on the road!