Rob Kitchin's Blog, page 205

Real life calling

His eyes drifted slowly back into focus.

‘Hello?  Welcome back!’

‘What?’

‘From whatever story you’re writing in your head.’

‘What story?’

‘The fantasy you we’re just dreaming up.’

‘I wasn’t dreaming anything.’

‘You’re always cooking up something.  I was saying that we need to get milk.  And bread.’

He nods his head, his eyes starting to re-glaze over.

‘Rob!  This is real life.  It only happens once; you don’t get to re-live it.  You can replay or re-join whatever nonsense is going on in your head anytime.’

‘What?’

‘What’s for dinner? You’re making it.’

‘Dinner?’

‘Hello?  Real life calling Rob.’



A drabble is a story of exactly 100 words.

1000 up!

Close on the heels of the blog's third birthday another landmark has been reached.  The last post was the 1000th published on The View from the Blue House.  Of those posts, 317 are book reviews, 26 short stories and 50 drabbles.  You can explore those using the tabs above.  The rest are mostly observations and links.  Thanks to everyone who has stopped by to take a read and comment.  Much appreciated.  Hopefully you've gleamed something useful from the site. 

Review of The Rocksburg Railroad Murders by K. C. Constantine (Coronet Crime, 1972)

John Andrasko is found on a station platform late at night in Rocksburg, a small town in Pennsylvania.  He’d been heading to his work shift in a local steel plant when someone decided to beat him so badly he could only be identified by his wallet.  Mario Balzic, the local Chief of Police, has known Andrasko all his life.  He starts to investigate the death and is soon convinced he knows who the murderer is, but persuading the local district attorney and state troopers in the absence of any concrete evidence and the context of local rivalries is another matter.  Which is a cause of major anxiety as Balzic is certain that if he’s not apprehended he’ll kill again.

The Rocksburg Railroad Murders is the first of fifteen books in the Mario Balzic series.  The strengths of the book are the characterisation, dialogue and social scenes, the sense of place, and the all show and no tell style.  Constantine very good at creating clearly defined characters who are alive on the page and the social interactions between them are first rate, the dialogue spot on.  Indeed, the dialogue is what makes the book sparkle, with lively exchanges through authentic voices.  Constantine makes sure to thoroughly intertwine the social and work, providing a rounded view of Balzic’s world as a family man and local cop in a small community where he knows just about everyone.  And the story is full of insight into local law and order politics, the intricacies of the relationships between local, state and federal cops and the legal system, and has some interesting political swipes at U.S. law enforcement (at one point Balzic makes a well argued case against police officers being armed, for example).  Sometimes the plot perhaps focuses a little too much on Balzic and not on the mystery.  In fact, there’s not much mystery to the story and the plot relies on a couple of awkward plot devices, especially toward the end in order to create a dramatic conclusion.  But somehow that doesn’t really matter.  The star of the show is Balzic and it was a pleasure to spend time in his company.

First draft complete (thankfully)

Yesterday evening I finally completed first drafts of my 685 entries for the forthcoming Oxford Dictionary of Human Geography.  Each entry was either c.75-100 words, c.300 words or c.750 words.  Up until now, July has consisted of little else other than researching and writing definitions and explanation.  I'm now onto editing entries in response to feedback/edits from my two co-authors, and also editing/commenting on their entries.  The end is at last in sight.  Thankfully.  Taking a break from it next week when I hope to catch up on reading some fiction and sorting out the garden.  Time for a sup of beer ...

Review of The Barbed-Wire University: The Real Lives of Allied Prisoners of War in the Second World War by Midge Gillies (Aurum Press, 2011)

The Barbed-Wire University provides an overview of the lives of British prisoners of war in Europe and the Far East.  It’s strength is the insights it provides into the everyday lives and experiences of the prisoners, showing how they coped with being in captivity.  The book deliberately avoids the dramatic tales of escapers and instead concentrates on the mundane and banal - gardening, entertainment, sport, learning - as well as work details, camp conditions and contact with home.  At one level it is fascinating, using individual accounts to provide a rich description.  At another, it has a number of shortcomings that prevents the text from rising above an empiricist account. 

The principle problem of the book is that it describes the men’s lives largely outside any in-depth contextualisation of how camps were structured and organised both by the prisoners and guards or the inter-relationships between these groups.  Indeed, the guards and the structural organisation of camps are curiously absent in the text except for brief mentions.  There is very little about the social relations between men, the social structure, how regimes of regulation and punishment operated, the power dynamics operating, or even how the camps and work were temporally and spatially organized.  There is very little detail on how the allies organised their connections to prisoners beyond a short discussion of Red Cross parcels and it would have been good to get a better sense of how that was all organised and operated.  Instead, we get descriptions of football games or organising concerts or taking education courses which are interesting, but lack a real depth of analysis that frames and explains what was going on a deep social and psychological level. 

Second, given that the book covers a wide range of experiences and not just education, I took the main title to be synonymous with the idea of a ‘university of life’.  However, the subtitle is a little misleading.  The book almost exclusively relates to the lives of British prisoners of war, with the occasional mention of Dutch or Australian.  There is either no, or very little, discussion of Americans, Canadians, New Zealanders, Indians, Poles, French, Russian, etc.  How nationalities and ranks were treated and their experiences in captivity were very different.  Indeed, the book could have been strengthened by much more systematically comparing and contrasting the experiences of Allied prisoners, and with how Allied prisoners were treated vis-a-vis Axis prisoners.

Third, I found the structure of the book a little odd.  It’s divided into six parts.  Parts 1 and 3 concern Europe, parts 2 and 4 deal the Far East, and parts 5 and 6 relate to the closing of the war and repatriation, and after the war.  In the latter two cases, Europe and the Far East are dealt with together, comparing and contrasting the experiences.  That probably would have been a more effective way of dealing with the first four parts as well.  As it is, themes are repeated across all four parts and it’s left to the reader to do the work of comparison.  Moreover, it’s not really clear why there are two parts per continent as there’s no real differentiation in time or the logic of themes between them.  It all seems a little haphazard.  Rather than organise the book almost exclusively around activities, it would have been profitable to also have mixed in structures, organisation and social relations. 

Overall, an interesting account full of description and anecdote, but lacking any real depth of analysis as to how the camps operated as social systems that shaped the life that took place in them.

777: Seven sentences from page seven.

I was tagged at the weekend by Margot Kinberg to take part in the 777 challenge.  Writers are invited to share seven sentences from page seven, or page seventy-seven of their work in progress and then to pass the challenge on to seven other writers.

Here's the first part, seven sentences from page seven of Dark Light, which I confess I haven't worked on for months due to other commitments (like completing the dictionary).

It had soon become clear that experience had to be accompanied by an ability to write; that it wasn’t as simple as sitting at a keyboard and tapping out a couple of thousand words a day.  There were the issues of sentence construction, punctuation, grammar, prose, character development, plot, structure, and narrative flow.  

Delaney had anecdotes.  He had fragments of stories.  He had a jumble of stereotypical characters who spoke with flat, lifeless dialogue.  Locked in his head he had thirty years of experience of every crime on the statute books and the full circus of society.  What he didn’t have was a talent for the written word.


As for the second part, here are seven writers (no obligation folks).  Check out their websites and work: 

Gerard Brennan 
Susan Condon
Paul O'Brien
Ruby Barnes
Louise Phillips
RJ McDonnell
Sean Patrick Reardon

Sunday Service: I Hear Sirens on the Street by Adrian McKinty

In the past week I've won two fiction related competitions, neither for my writing!  First off, my suggested title of 'Both Barrels' was voted as the choice for for Shotgun Honey's first anthology.  Second, I guessed the page length for the edited proofs of Adrian McKinty's new book, I Hear Sirens on the Street, the second book in the DS Sean Duffy trilogy set in Belfast in the early 1980s.  Like many reviewers I gave the first book, The Cold, Cold Ground, a five star review, as I did Fifty Grand and Dead I Well May Be, so it's going to be a real pleasure to receive the final draft verions of I Hear Sirens (right) complete with doodles, editing notes, queries, etc. and to take an early read.

My posts this week
Third birthday
The lonely men
Both Barrels
Review of Shaman Pass by Stan Jones
The Clearing

The clearing

The undergrowth thins and I stumble into a clearing.  I’m soaked to the skin, wet jeans cold and clammy.  My naked arms, tapped together behind my back, itch from their encounters  with briars and nettles.  A voice shouts somewhere behind me, answered by another.  I stumble forwards, tripping on a root, landing heavily on my side at the edge of a dark pool.  Half of me wants to just lie here and wait.  The other half knows it would be a fatal mistake.  I struggle to my knees, then up onto my feet and set off back into the woods.


A drabble is a story of exactly 100 words

Review of Shaman Pass by Stan Jones (Soho Press, 2003)

‘Uncle Frosty’, a Inupiat mummy originally found in a cave in Shaman Pass, has been returned to Chukchi, Alaska, by the Smithsonian Institution.  Not everyone is happy that he will be displayed in the local museum rather than being left on the tundra in the traditional way after death.  Within a few hours he has been stolen along with an ancient ivory harpoon and amulet.  A day later Victor Solomon is found out on the ice sheet next to a fishing hole speared with the harpoon.  State Trooper Nathan Active, an Inupiat born locally but raised by white adoptive parents in Anchorage has the task of investigating the death.  The evidence seems to point a local indigenous rights activist, but it is clear that there is more to the case than meets the eye, the key to which is the identity of ‘Uncle Frosty’.

Shaman Pass is a fairly straightforward police procedural, but one given a nice twist through its setting and Nathan Active’s position as an outside insider.  Jones does a very good job of capturing the social relations and tensions of an Inupiat community interfacing with white culture and laws and of placing the reader in the landscape and creating a sense of place.  Active is a solid lead character and provides a nice pair of eyes through which to view the local community and its ways.  The writing is nicely paced and expressive and the plot for the most part works well.  The final third of the story, however, falls a little flat.  The mystery element is gone, replaced with more of a thriller-style conclusion and some sub-plots, such as Active’s relationship with his grandfather, are forgotten.  Overall, Shaman Pass was an enjoyable and engaging read and I’m looking forward to catching up with Trooper Active in the third book in the series, Frozen Sun.

 

Both Barrels

My suggested title - Both Barrels - has won the competition to be the title for Shotgun Honey's forthcoming anthology.  There is still two weeks in which to submit a short story (1-5,000 words) for possible inclusion, if you're interested.  Details can be found here.  I need to get my act together and draft something.  I could probably do with both barrels being placed at the back of my head to nudge things along.  I'm still working away at entries for the dictionary I'm writing.  Only ten more to go.  They're all meant to be c.750 words, but I should met the end of the month deadline for first drafts.  Hopefully I can squeeze a short story in as well.