Aly Monroe's Blog, page 2

Rank Truth

I am occasionally taxed because Peter Cotton is made an acting Lieutenant-Colonel in his twenties just after the end of World War 2.  This doesn’t happen now. No problem there.
What is a little curious is that some 21st Century readers believe that because they are incredulous, such a promotion at such a young age couldn’t have happened in 1945. It’s an extraordinarily confident opinion, sometimes aggressively expressed - but I’m afraid it is not backed by any research whatsoever.
 In World War 2 promotions could be astonishingly rapid. To name someone people may have heard of, the late professor and contentious politician Enoch Powell went from private soldier to Brigadier (a much higher rank than Lieutenant-Colonel) without ever seeing action. He became a Lieutenant-Colonel in 1942. Powell was nearly thirty then – but my point here is the rapidity of his promotion. Private, Corporal, Sergeant, 2nd Lieutenant, Lieutenant, Major, Lieutenant-Colonel, Colonel, Brigadier in six years. The only other man in the British army to do similar was Fitzroy Maclean.
But a relatively large number of people did become Lieutenant-Colonels in their twenties. If they continued in the army after the war, their rank was often reduced to Major.  War speeds things up. Peace slows them down.
In Peter Cotton’s case, he is embarrassed by his promotion but it is an intelligence/ diplomatic one, to give him a certain rank in Washington DC and enable him to do his job. People’s use of his title is a courtesy, sometimes with a little irony - and he does not use it himself.
The best I can do is to apologize for upsetting some readers’ views of what they think should be believable. But when forty is regarded by some nowadays as young, those doubters should just step back and think. Perhaps they should consider the other armed forces. Guy Gibson of Dambusters’ fame was a Wing-Commander (the equivalent of Lt-Col) at 23. Similarly there were Naval Commanders of that age.
So what can I say? Young men were asked to grow up very quickly in WW2 and to take on responsibilities and duties not associated with peacetime. Cotton’s father considers that his son’s generation has ‘missed out’ on growing up, have been put through a crash course but not prepared for life outside war.  I think he has a point when he calls them a sort of ‘lost generation’ – sometimes with, in times of peace - absurdly high ranks.

The Tipping Point

Originally published in 2010, Arturo Fontaine's novel La Vida Doble has now appeared in an excellent English translation (by Megan McDowell) under exactly the same title.
I don’t know that a more commercially driven publisher than Yale University Press would have allowed this but I have read that English readers can work out that ‘doble’ means double and have probably heard of ‘vida’ as life.
‘Double Life’ is very firmly set in the Chile of Salvador Allende and Pinochet and has – a good sign – managed to upset many with vested interests in their version of events. At one level it is the stuff of thrillers but, despite for example, an excellent account of an armed robbery in which a very short period of time is slowed down and heightened, it does not read like a thriller but something very much grimmer and more harrowing.
It is an exhaustive and careful account of people under unbearable pressure and particularly one person, then a young woman with a small daughter, now a woman dying of cancer and speaking in Sweden to a journalist. She has several names – Irene, Lorena, La Cubanita – given to her as aliases by others. She is a pawn but a pawn prone to self-justification, vanity, guilt and hopelessness.
The historical background to this is that a woman really did crack and moved from armed revolution in a left wing group to working for her torturers and indeed joining them.
The book begins with torture. The woman does not break when physically brutalised.  She is released. What she cannot resist three months later when her torturers have worked out who she is, is the threat to her five year old daughter. She recognises the moment she switches sides, transfers her loyalties and a perverse sort of love to the people who had treated her so badly.
Stockholm syndrome exists. Reading of a particularly brutal case of it may seem depressing. It may even shock. But there is an element here of a gruesome fairy tale of what happens to girls who need approval, want to be attractive, want to love and be on the right side of history. There is a funny scene in which the main character is sent to Paris and behaves like a groupie dropping her university degree to the floor like a paper napkin when she see the great Argentine novelist Julio Cortázar. In Chile, her side have the aspects of a cult – she does not know who anybody really is (for security they all have aliases). And the poor are tediously recalcitrant when it comes to armed revolution.   
Arturo Fontaine is a founding member of the Museum of Memory and Human Rights in Chile. La Vida Doble however is not limited to Chile. Similar brutality is happening now in maI don’t recommend this novel as a thriller – I do recommend it as a timeless account of what happens when extremism takes hold of the political process.
One of my deepest impressions of my time in Spain was the bafflement, the look of sheer incomprehension on the faces of the young when they learnt what their grandparents had done during the Spanish Civil War.  ‘And in the name of what?’ one disbelieving girl said.
La Vida Doble does not explain that – but it does explain the dynamics of what can happen anywhere. History can be a mincer. 

Some Events for 2014This year is shaping up to be busy. A...

Some Events for 2014
This year is shaping up to be busy. Apart from the new book I’m working on ( more of that later ...) I will be getting around the country, with events in London, Newcastle, York and Wales, among others. Here are some of the places where you can find me this year:
Wednesday 23 April, 2014, 6 – 7.30 pm – Morpeth Library I will be with Andrew Williams and William Ryan, discussing our latest books.
Monday 28 April, 2014, 7 pm -  Chiswick Library in London.  I’ll be there with Laura Wilson and Imogen Robertson – three women writers of historical fiction in conversation.
Tuesday 29 April, 2014, 7.30 pm – Leighton Buzzard Library Theatre. With Rory Clements and William Ryan. We’ll be chatting about Traitors, Conspirators and Secrets.
Saturday 3 May, 2014 (time to be confirmed) – Newcastle Lit and Phil: With John Lawton and Samantha Norman 
Thursday 22nd May – 7 pm –  Gateshead Central Library. I’ll be heading north again, with Andrew Williams and William Ryan, discussing our latest books.
21stJune - ‘Order and Chaos’ at the York Festival of IdeasThe 2014 York Festival of Ideas will run from 12 – 22 June and the theme running through the events this year will be ‘Order and Chaos’. I will be speaking on a panel for the festival focus day (Saturday 21st) on the genesis and development of detective, spy and thriller fiction. More details to follow shortly.
11 – 16 August 2014, Tŷ Newydd.
 Together with Andrew Williams, I will be tutoring the Crime Writing course organised by Literature Wales at Tŷ Newydd (guest writer Hanna Jameson).
I hope to see some of you!

New Agent.

As I said in an earlier post, my previous agent, Maggie McKernan, has returned to publishing, this time to Head of Zeus. She took up her post on November 20th.  I was in need of a new literary agent.
Last Wednesday, December 11th, I took a flight from Edinburgh to London. As has been much reported, there was a fog problem at Heathrow so, after a flight that ended up taking almost as long as a train trip, I arrived late for my appointment with Judith Murray of the literary agency Greene & Heaton.
I am delighted to say that Judith agreed to represent me and I am very happy to have joined her list of writers.
Anybody who has anything to do with the publishing world will have heard the word ‘subjective’. Sometimes it is something of an excuse. But authors and agents really do have to balance the subjective with the professional side to work well together. So when I was working out which agents to approach I sat down to compile a list. I was first struck by what could be called the recognisable things. That Judith represented Poppy Adams, for instance, an excellent writer whose The Behaviour of Moths (The Sister in the US) I thoroughly recommend, was one of the initial things that attracted my interest.
My editor Kate Parkin, now at Hodder, also drew up a list of possible agents for me.  We both had Judith on our respective lists.
And then it was a question of contact, talks, plans – and finally an enjoyable meeting over lunch. Some weeks do go well. The day before, on December 10, my younger daughter gave birth to a lovely little boy.
             

Girl Power

I always reply to readers who write me emails.  The reasons readers contact a writer vary a great deal, from suggesting a correction to a personal memory, from questions to, yes, some very kind words. Of course there have also been some complaints. Cotton is not a gentleman I was told and had treated a female character ungenerously.

Fair enough. After four books, however, I have been surprised to be taxed for my use of vocabulary. A reader has emailed me to protest about my using the word ‘girl’ or ‘girls’ twice to refer to female characters on the first page of  Washington Shadow,  the second Cotton book. This has prevented the reader from getting past that first page, for fear of being ‘ambushed by this belittling term’. The use of the word ‘girl’ - to describe a secretary - is ‘not acceptable in the 21st Century’.

As always, I replied, saying that I always try to take readers back into the atmosphere and attitudes of the period in which the books are set, and that Washington Shadow particularly deals with a number of issues: among them, the way women were treated - but also the way homosexuals were treated and the race relations in the US in 1945. These are things that we should not forget.
Of course I do appreciate that vocabulary is power. And that the words we use portray us. I am, of course, also conscious that our view of history is through our view of now.

But I write historical novels in an effort to see how we got here. I am aware that misogyny, racial hatred and homophobia continue, sometimes but by no means always less overtly but I am not convinced that efforts to rewrite the vocabulary of the past do the past - or us - justice.  

Agent Farewell

Last Sunday, October 20, I learnt that my agent, Maggie McKernan, was returning to publishing. She had been talking about this move for some time.

I can’t be entirely sure but I suspect the draw she feels is in seeing a book right through to the end of the publishing process. Bluntly agents make deals, editors oversee books. While agents give advice of course, many other people are involved when a book is edited and goes into production.

I wish Maggie every success as a once, and now again, editor.

Of course, I have to find another literary agent now - but I’m thinking about it.

Gulled

A few evenings ago, someone called us by telephone and identified herself as working on behalf of our local council (city hall). At present this is Edinburgh in Scotland. Like everyone else I dislike cold calls - but this turned out to be, to some degree, genuine - she worked for a market research company contracted by the council to interview local residents about council services.
My husband duly answered the questions - and soon got frustrated. The answers had to be couched in Strongly approve/Approve/ Tend to disapprove/ Disapprove form. At the very end he was allowed a twitter length use of his own words -’please speak slowly’.
The problem with this kind of interview is that it only passes for consultation. It is more about PR than useful change. He suspected the Council were, in effect, rigging their own reflection in an opinion poll.
One of Edinburgh’s main problems has been the effects of a hideously expensive and mismanaged tram scheme. For a couple of years now our previously quite quiet road has become a main road - a rerouting of traffic while the building works have gone on and on.  The original people responsible are out of office and Edinburgh now has a professional manager handling matters the democratically elected (and now unelected) councillors ‘did not have the skill-sets for’. I am not aware anyone has brought up how the capital costs of the system will actually be met. None of this was part of the telephone consultation. 
Perhaps consultation is the wrong word. In a year’s time Scotland will get another consultation in the form of a referendum - or a Yes/No choice between independence or not. Again my husband is not convinced. Whatever the result, he says, Scotland will get something called Devo-max - more devolved powers - on which nobody is being consulted.
His answers for the local council have been recorded and will be collated. So many per cent say this, so many that. Councillors will have a document and a text to refer to.
That’s one of the reasons I read. A text without texture and detail is misleading. One of the subjects brought up was ‘refuse collection.’ Nearly three weeks ago we were issued with a huge ‘gull-proof’ bag. It is made out of sacking, painted black and comes with velcro and flaps. The idea is that we put bags of refuse into the big bag and put it out at 6.45 on Tuesday evenings. (We used to have collections of Tuesdays and Fridays). These bags are designed to stop wildlife (gulls and crows mostly) ripping up the previous bags and scattering rubbish over the busy road.
We have, of course obeyed. We did receive a note that said that ‘after consultation’ this system had been adjudged the best. We weren’t consulted. Obviously nor were the refuse collectors.
Last week they sent a man ahead. He took the vulnerable bags out of the gull-proof bags and piled them in the road to make it easy for the lorry or refuse truck and the other collectors to work quickly. We did notice the workers have been issued with new red sweat shirts. In other words, a sweat shirt is no compensation for a system that makes work more difficult.

Now my husband is worried that his ‘consultation’ will be used for a change to a service yet to be identified. 

Time to Read

I think it was Jorge Luis Borges who pointed out the obvious – that writers begin as readers. I don’t know that he was alluding to Alice through the Looking Glass for the process that takes place, but I do know that writers have to spend a long time reading themselves – or at least, what they have written. How can this paragraph be improved? Do I really mean that?
I am not about to complain – but I have recently found some relief and a great deal of pleasure in spending a few days as reader, rather than writer wondering how a passage will read.
I recently went to Madrid for a few days. I did two things before I went. I loaded my Kindle with William Ryan’s ‘The Twelfth Department’, John Lawton’s ‘A Lily of the Field’, and Charles Cumming’s ‘A Foreign Country’. I also downloaded Wittgenstein’s ‘Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus’.
Then, in paperback format, I decided to deal with a few ‘nags’ – that is, books I wanted to catch up on, in this case, three writers I had somehow missed earlier: James Salter’s ‘A Sport and a Pastime’, Renata Adler’s ‘Speedboat’, and Paula Fox’s 'Desperate Characters'.
Let’s see. I was on panels with William Ryan, John Lawton and Charles Cumming at CrimeFest in May, and there was, of course, a natural curiosity to know more about what they write. I can thoroughly recommend William Ryan’s book – and at present am greatly enjoying ‘A Lily of the Field’ by John Lawton. I haven’t got to Charles Cumming – that awaits me next.
James Salter’s novel reminded me of Colette and has a number of technical devices – one, for example that leads to considerations of the writer-reader relationship. I’d call it a more insistent than coherent novel, but it had sufficient force to affect my current reading of Renata Adler’s ‘Speedboat’ – until her own way with a phrase stepped up. Paula Fox, like Charles Cumming, is next.
I have also sneaked some glimpses of Wittgenstein’s Tractatus. It has always reminded me of Beethoven’s Hammerklavier.
Yes, reader. I’ve been on holiday.
My 4-year-old grandson is delighted to have learnt how to put his head under the water surface of the swimming pool without spluttering.

He is currently most enamoured of the Big Friendly Giant.

Quiet Versus Life – Or Perhaps PR

I have been remiss about posting blogs recently. There are two main reasons. First, I’ve been working on Peter Cotton #5 – which actually continues straight on from Black Bear and is to be called ‘Needle Bearer’. Those who have read Black Bear will understand from the title where this is going. But I’ve also been working on a non-Peter Cotton book.
At CrimeFest in May I mentioned this second project, which, like the Peter Cotton series, is an ‘intelligence book’, but this time with a woman protagonist.  I think of her as my Mathematical Lady. She does not, like Vlasta Simenova in Lionel Davidson’s The Night of Wenceslas, have ‘bomb-like breasts’ –(see http://pastoffences.wordpress.com/2012/07/12/the-night-of-wenceslas/- and to be clear, apart from this line, Lionel Davidson is one of my favourite thriller writers, and highly recommended),  and neither does she have ‘nipples like bullets’ (I am indebted to Martin Walker, the moderator of the Cold War panel I was on at CrimeFest, for reminding me of this contribution to the extraordinary  identification in juvenile minds of sexual excitement with the violent and destructive explosions of warfare.) Outside the fantasies of 12-year-old boys, a lack of these characteristics is shared by slightly over 50% of the world’s population.
When I first began publishing my books, I was told by several people that my name wasn’t too bad because – I quote – it was not immediately ‘gender specific’. Now I don’t want to get into why Mary Anne Evans decided to write as George Eliot, but while I’ve been busy I have of course noticed several recent developments.
One of these is J.K.Rowling recasting herself as Robert Galbraith. Some people have reacted to the publication of the novel by suggesting that the cuckoo in the title of her book emphases a phenomenally popular writer’s role as such a bird in the crime and thriller nest. In terms of publicity or newspaper coverage Harry Potter trumps everything else. I was intrigued, however, to read – I have no idea how accurately this was reported – that in her quest for anonymity J.K. Rowling had submitted her book to other publishers. I have now read several times that an editor at Orion turned the book down because it was too ‘quiet’. Though it seems to me odd that a book that a book with a hero called Cormoran Strike could be described as ‘quiet’. I should explain that the word ‘quiet’ in publishers’ speak  is a no-no. ‘Quiet’ does not grab attention. ‘Quiet’ does not sell.
But Robert Galbraith is one thing. J.K.Rowling quite another. From that point of view, gender does not matter. But I wonder to what extent J.K.Rowling chose a male pseudonym not just to mislead but because she identified the genre as a male preserve, just as the more obviously named Chick-Lit is a female area.
I am aware, of course, that by mentioning J.K.Rowling I am potentially increasing the range of this blog post.

Event at Edinburgh Bookshop with Aly Monroe and Andrew Williams

On Thursday 13th June at 7.30 in the evening I will be at the Edinburgh Bookshop
219 Bruntsfield Place, Edinburgh, Scotland, Tel 0131 447 1917, together with author Andrew Williams. We will be reading, chatting about our books and answering questions. If you're in Edinburgh do pop in and see us.