David W. Robinson's Blog: Always Writing, page 57

The Merry, Merry Month of May

It’s May 1st and all I can say is “not a moment too soon.” I’m glad to see the back of April.

The weather here has been utterly appalling. A couple of days ago it was more like November than April. Add to that my variable health and United’s shabby performance over the month, where they took just 5 points from a possible 12, and virtually handed City the title, and you can probably guess I’m glad to be out of it.

Some things, however, went right, and I’m thinking particularly about the Blogging from A-Z Challenge. The target was 26 posts, each beginning with a different letter of the alphabet. I actually put up 42 posts (not all of them linked to the A-Z). It was great fun and I made a lot of new friends during the month.

Will I do it again next year? Probably. Unless I’m a billionaire author, but I;m not holding My breath on that one.

With the start of the new month, I’ve made some new decisions, too, the most momentous of which is my health is going to improve. I’m overweight but arthritis makes it difficult for me to exercise, so I’ve decided I will be swimming twice a week at our local pool.

I went along for the first time this morning. It’s four years since I last went swimming and boy, do I know about it. It’s not exercise; it’s torture. But they tell me it’ll get easier.

It better or there will be hell to pay.

For now it’s onward and upward. Crooked Cat will release Voices on the 10th of the month, The I-Spy Murders, the follow up to the Sanford 3rd Age Club Mystery The Filey Connection, is due out next month, and I’m working on the next Alex Croft title, sequel to The Handshaker, working title The Executioner.

Exciting times ahead: stay tuned for more developments.

Z is for Zippers

 

 

They say the every novel should have sex scenes, and most of mine do. The exception to that rule lies in the Sanford 3rd Age Club Mysteries. The mystery is central to the theme, and I don’t see what graphic sex scenes would add to them. So, when it comes to the Sanford 3rd Age Club Mysteries, zippers remained firmly closed.

It’s the hallmark of the cosy crime, and if you go through the Agatha Christie novels it’s mentioned only in passing. This is the 21st century and there are stronger allusions to sex in modern whodunits. Lesley Cookman’s Libby Serjeant, for example, quite enjoys the odd romp with her boyfriend.

In the same, way, Brenda Jump, too, likes to put it about a bit, and George Robson, another STAC member, considers himself a ladies’ man. Some of the crimes have sexual overtones, particularly in A Murder for Christmas, where Jennifer Hardy is painted as an academic tart. Alec and Julia Staines are not slow to hit the sack when they’re on an outing, and even if Les Tanner and Sylvia Goodson like to pretend their relationship is above board, every man and his wife knows they’re at it after lights out.

But that is as far as it goes. There’s no bodice ripping, no lusty grunts and moans, no mixing of coital fluids. When it comes to sex, the members of the Sanford 3rd Age Club do it behind locked doors.

***

The Filey Connection, first of the Sanford 3rd Age Club Mysteries, from Crooked {Cat} Books is available for the Kindle from Amazon UK and Amazon Worldwide and in all other formats from Smashwords

Spookies

Today is a break before the final post(s) in the A-Z Blog Challenge, so I’d like to introduce you (again) Spookies.

Spookies are a three handed mob of paranormal investigators who tend to get mixed up in crime capers as they go about their eerie business. The Lady Concepta Rand-Epping, known as Sceptre Rand leads the team, accompanied by ex-cop turned private investigator Pete Brennan and his wheeler-dealer pal, Kevin Keeley.

But they’re not three handed. They have a bit of help from the other side, and I don’t mean Channel 4. Sceptre’s butler, Albert Fishwick died on the first day of the Somme, July 1st, 1916 and ever since then, he’s been hanging around the Spirit Plane, keeping an eye on the Rand-Epping family, and he now acts as Sceptre’s spirit guide.

There are two full length novels and a 12,000 word short story in the Spookies collection, and now they’re all together in one giant volume exclusive to Amazon Kindle.

In A Spookies Compendium you’ll find

The Haunting at Melmerby Manor: 25,000 missing DVDs, one murdered thief, mobsters hell bent on rubbing Spookies out, all coming together in a haunted, moorland mansion.
The Man In Black: a school plagued by a poltergeist, a missing roadie, a bizarre religious sect and a battle between two Norse Gods, finds Spookies roped in to protect the lives of pop divas the Wicked Witches.
Haunted Market: It’s Christmas Eve and Spookies are standing night watch at Ashdale market, known to be haunted by at least one miserly old spirit. They get more then they bargained for when a couple of well-known villains also turn up.

Ghostly adventures with a line of dark humour running through them, A Spookies Compendium is exclusive to Amazon UK and Amazon Worldwide.

Y is for Young and Old

 

The generation gap. Does it really exist? Yes, but I think it’s mostly in the minds of the media and those who want to pay attention to it.

Obviously, there are differences between age groups. I listen to certain kinds of music, but I won’t entertain the stuff my children, all now in their 40s, listen to, and as for my grandchildren’s tastes… Let’s just say I don’t even understand most of it.

And yet there’s overlap. I have a great niece who is passionate about Shakespeare, and a granddaughter who laps up modern history from the time of the Great War. Most oldies wouldn’t expect it of young kids, would they?

There’s some reverse on this, too. I’m 62 years old, and so arthritic that I have difficulty walking, so break-dancing is out, but I have the same sense of humour I had when I was a kid. I’m just plain daft, and you know what? I don’t care. I love the Simpsons, I think Harry Potter was the greatest thing to hit literature and the big screen since Star Wars, about which I’m also fanatical. I follow football like some eight year old kid, and I will read anything, absolutely ANYTHING that raises a smile. I spend more time on Facebook than my grandkids, and much of that time I pass taking the piss.

It’s that overlap that I try to appeal to with my Sanford 3rd Age Club Mysteries. They’re safe. They don’t deal with serious ‘adult’ themes, and they’re written in simple English. They raise a smile on some pages, they raise an “oooh,” on others, but while the majority of my readers may be over 40, they’re simply not that exclusive.

They’re there to be enjoyed by young and old.

***

The Filey Connection, first of the Sanford 3rd Age Club Mysteries, from Crooked {Cat} Books is available for the Kindle from Amazon UK and Amazon Worldwide and in all other formats from Smashwords

You Are Under My Hypnotic Spell

A few years back I put up the early chapters of a novel on You Write On. It concerned an age-old puzzle: is it possible to have a hypnotised subject commit acts which would normally go against his/her moral standards?

The general consensus is no, but…

Backtracking a little, some 15 years earlier, when I was training as a hypnotherapist, I came across The Heidelberg Case, a tale from pre-war Germany which cast doubt on that assumption. I won’t go into great detail here but at the heart of the story was a hypnotist who sexually abused a young wife and along the way persuaded her to make six attempts on her husband’s life. It was only by good fortune that the husband survived. When those attempts failed, the hypnotist persuaded the young woman to commit suicide, and once again it was only the intervention of others that prevented her carrying out the command.

That story, allegedly a real incident, provided the catalyst for a novel, The Handshaker.

I put up the first 10,000 words on YWO. It came top of the list in January, 2007 (as far as I can recall) and won a pro critique. From there, Orion asked to have a look at the first 100 pages. They rejected it, and with hindsight, I could see why.

During those months when it was collecting reviews on YWO, most were praiseworthy, some were less in favour, but one was scathing. The reviewer castigated the piece as based on a false premise. Fair enough. He’s entitled to his opinion and I didn’t get into a debate, because I never do.

What I will say is first, the false premise, if indeed it was false, was not mine but that of psychiatrist, Dr H. E. Hammerschlag, in whose book, Hypnose und Verbrechen (translated into English in 1956 as Hypnotism and Crime) I first came across the tale.

The reviewer also ranted about the book after reading only the first 10,000 words. He knew nothing of the way the tale unfolded, nor the denouement.

He also forgot that it was a work of fiction.

Take, for example, my novel, Voices. Disembodied phantoms controlling others? Is it reality? Of course not. Does that lack of reality prevent readers enjoying the tale?  Of course not. Whenever we read anything, we employ suspension of disbelief. If we didn’t, we’d never tolerate another vampire, ghost, horror or sci-fi title again.

The Handshaker did not purport to be based on The Heidelberg Case. It was work of dark, speculative fiction, the kind of stuff I like to write. It has no more basis in reality than Voices.

After Orion rejected it, I analysed it, saw what was wrong and rewrote it. After several more rejections, I left it mouldering on my hard drive.

Then, last month, I dug it out, had a read through and decided that with a little more revision, it’s a worthy title. so I self-published it and it’s pickig up rave reviews.

The Handshaker has spent the last three months exclusive to Amazon Select, but it is now back on the general lists available for the Kindle from Amazon UK, Amazon Worldwide and in all e-formats (MOBI, EPUB, PDF, etc.) from Smashwords.

The Handshaker: He takes them, he uses them, he murders them.

X is for X the Unknown

 

It’s what all mysteries have in common. Where is the treasure? X marks the spot. Whodunit? Mr (or Ms) X. What is the answer to AxB÷C? X.

Every piece I write has an X. The unknown quantity/entity which the reader will learn as he goes along.

The remarkable thing is, that when I set out on a novel, I don’t always know the answer to X. I think I do, but frequently it changes as I go along, and very often, the job is finished before I finally learn the truth.

But there is another X the unknown for all authors, no matter how successful or otherwise. How will the great reading public greet the new book?

It’s a testing time, putting out a new work and watching the sales figures and chart positions, and you can never second-guess it. I believed A Halloween Homicide would be a winner; it wasn’t. I wasn’t so happy that A Murder for Christmas would succeed beyond the Yuletide period, but it carries on selling even in these warmer days of spring. I was absolutely certain when I self-published Voices that it would be a rampant success, but it was not, although I have hopes for the rewrite and reprint with Crooked Cat Publishing.

There again, if it was all that easy, it wouldn’t be worth doing.

***

The Filey Connection, first of the Sanford 3rd Age Club Mysteries, from Crooked {Cat} Books is available for the Kindle from Amazon UK and Amazon Worldwide and in all other formats from Smashwords

W is for West Yorkshire

 

I was born and raised in Leeds, which whilst not the county town of West Yorkshire, it is nevertheless the major city. It sits at the heart of what used to be the heavy engineering sector, where huge factories supplied the textile, mining and automotive industries.

During a lifetime of travelling, I obviously got to know my home area like the back of my hand. The air was permeated with the tang of fumes from the foundries and glassworks, lorries clogged the roads and the motorway network, bringing in the raw materials, taking out the finished products

Then there were the people.

They’re honest, speak as you find, folk. Hard working and hard playing men and women who really don’t give a hoot what other people think of them. Amongst them, you’ll also find the biggest, most bad-tempered whining old gits it could ever be your misfortune to meet… and Joe Murray is only one of them.

He’s broadly based on a man I met who, like Joe, ran a trucker’s café smack in the middle of a large industrial area. Rumour had it he was making money hand over fist, and yet his demeanour was never better than sour. He was rude with his customers, curt with his crew, and you felt as if he was offering you heaven on a bun when he threw a sausage butty at you.

When you got to the front of the queue, there was no, “how may I help you?” (Thank God).  Instead it was, “Whaddya want?” or “Stop buggering about and make your mind up.”

A classic from West Yorkshire.

***

The Filey Connection, first of the Sanford 3rd Age Club Mysteries, from Crooked {Cat} Books is available for the Kindle from Amazon UK and Amazon Worldwide and in all other formats from Smashwords

V is also for Voices

 

Take an ordinary man; say a teacher in a college. Put him through a terrifying experience; say a bomb attack. Have him survive that attack and then ask yourself, how bad is his trauma? Unless you’ve actually lived through such a traumatic event, all you can do is read up on accounts from real survivors, and use your imagination.

That constitutes the opening of Voices, but it not the premise of the novel. I wanted to take matters much further and put Chris Deacon through some serious hell.

Written under my pen name, David Shaw, at 110,000 words, it’s the longest novel I’ve ever produced, and the first draft was even longer. I cut huge sections of it in the editing process.

[image error]It’s a difficult book to classify. Yes, it’s a thriller. At the side of other events in the tale, the bombing is almost coincidental. Chris’s visions, his nightmares, his phantoms, and the voices in his head, push it towards the paranormal, but the ultimate denouement hints at sci-fi, and it could legitimately be described as psycho-horror.

I was off work with a broken ankle when I wrote the first 120,000-word draft in a little over a month. The finished article took almost two years. With my usual nit-picking self-criticism, I read it now and think, “I could have improved that section, I should have cut this paragraph,” and so on.

It’s one of my favourites because it encapsulates my favourite themes. An ordinary man in extraordinary circumstances, a mystery to be solved and a solution that is all the more appalling because, while it probably could not really happen, we know that there are other, more outrageous things going on in our world, about which we, the general public, are never told.

After unsuccessfully pitching several publishers, I eventually put the novel out myself on the Kindle. A couple of months ago, Crooked Cat accepted it for publication, and it’s due out on May 10th

I’m not going to give too much away, but here’s a short sample from the book. Having survived the attack, Chris has lost his hearing and he cannot speak. He communicates via a Nokia smartphone, and he is plagued by two phantoms; a solider he has named Colonel Gun and a tiny, terrifying dwarf whom he calls Egghead. Chris has already decided that they A & E hallucinations brought on by strong painkillers. In the following scene, he has been discharged from hospital several days after the bombing. There is a blaze of media attention, and his wife and son are taking him home…

With the press jostling, thrusting their cameras forward to get pictures, throwing out questions I could not hear, I began to panic again. Our minders opened the car doors. I tossed my crutch into the front seat, Jan climbed in the back and I eased my injured leg in.

Closing the door, I avoided the cameras by looking straight ahead through the windscreen. Egghead was less than twenty yards away, leaning against a “No Parking” sign.

Tony sped off. Some of the press hurried to their cars to follow. I tried to relax. How long before they would let me be? How long before these disturbing hallucinations stopped? How the hell had I become mixed up in this madness?

I saw Colonel Gun twice on the 15-minute journey home. He stood at a bus stop near Tesco and he was outside the Post Office as we climbed the hill out of town. Both times, we passed within yards of him, and he was as real to me as Jan and Tony. Both times, I was sure his eyes followed the progress of the car as we passed him. Both times, I forcibly suppressed my alarm in case it translated itself to my face and alerted my wife and son. After we drove by the Post Office, I turned to look back but he was gone.

“Drug induced hallucination,” I mouthed.

From the back seat, Jan nudged me and raised her eyebrows.

“Talking to myself,” I typed on the Nokia. “Just glad to be alive.”

Tony turned into the cul-de-sac where we lived and up ahead, on the right, was another press gang waiting outside our gates. Several police officers held them back, while Tony pulled into the kerb.

I wondered who had told them where I lived, but put the question aside. The papers have ways and means of getting information that make specialist investigators look like bumbling idiots groping in the dark. Jan would later tell me that they had been camped on the doorstep since Friday night and she had called the police before coming to the hospital to collect me.

I climbed out to the flash of cameras and more inaudible questioning. They pushed forward, the police pressed back. Cameras and microphones appeared on extended hands. Tony jammed his palm into one camera lens. I saw him mouth angry words at the offending photographer. I couldn’t hear, but I could imagine. A fearless and strapping prop-forward, Tony had inherited Jan’s irritable candour.

While the police kept the information-hungry wolves back, Tony helped me through the narrow passageway between the crowds. Behind us, my wife stopped to deal with the reporters, Tony made for the front door and I hurried in as fast as my injured leg would allow, desperate for the security of my home. I felt like a celebrity. Worse than that, I felt like a criminal.

Tony unlocked the door. I turned to watch my wife talking to the press, and there was Egghead again, perched on Glen Parks’ gate across the street.

Then it dawned on me that neither he nor Colonel Gun had anything to do with painkillers. I had taken none since six that morning and any effect they had on me would have worn off. An alternative explanation occurred to me right away. A terrorist attack and the military, as represented by Colonel Gun, went together, and Egghead was another word for brainy, like Brian Richmond. They were symptoms of post-traumatic stress.

Is he right? Are Colonel Gun and Egghead symptoms of post-traumatic stress? You’ll have to read the book to find out.

***

Voices is published by Crooked Cat Books on May 10th, 2012

V is for Vincent-Northam, Maureen

 

We’re getting close to the end of April and the 2012 Blogging from A-Z Challenge, and I’d like to take this post to pay tribute to a smashing lady who has been a much needed right arm to me in the production of all my work, not just the Sanford 3rd Age Club Mysteries.

Maureen Vincent-Northam is a Herefordshire lass, but some things can be forgiven. An experienced freelance writer, she is also a researcher and genealogist. That’s someone who researches family history. I’ve never needed anyone to research my family history. It’s all there in the criminal records files. (Note: this is known as a self-deprecating joke, and not to be taken seriously.)

Maureen is also an experienced editor and co-author (along with Lorraine Mace) of The Writer’s ABC Checklist, the only reference book I have near my work station. Coincidentally, Maureen also has  new book out; Trace Your roots, an excellent guide to genealogy

Enough of the plugs. My typing is appalling. I type quite fast. Upwards of 35 wpm, but I can produce more errors in 100 words than any British government can manage in five years. What’s worse, I’m a lazy proof-reader. Maureen puts those errors right before the manuscripts ever go to the Kindle, Smashwords or Crooked Cat Publishing.

Better than that, like me, Maureen is a whodunit aficionado. When checking the manuscripts for the line by line typos, she also checks the plots and characters. The result is that the Sanford 3rd Age Club Mysteries are watertight before they are published.

Obviously Maureen doesn’t work for free. Speaking as a Yorkshireman, this is the downside of the deal. We sons of the White Rose don’t like parting with money, but in this instance, while I grudgingly hand over the cash, I have to admit, I get value for money.

That’s not quite as good as free, but it’ll do.

You can find Maureen Vincent-Northam here

***

You can find Maureen’s latest book, Trace Your Roots on Amazon UK

***

The Filey Connection, first of the Sanford 3rd Age Club Mysteries, from Crooked {Cat} Books is available for the Kindle from Amazon UK and Amazon Worldwide and in all other formats from Smashwords

U is for Universal Appeal

 

Mysteries appeal to everyone in one shape or another. Show me the man who has all the answers and I’ll show you someone who is trying to fool the world, and usually failing, while definitely fooling himself.

All my work has an element of mystery to it. No matter what the genre, there is a mystery and one of the characters has to solve that mystery. It doesn’t matter if it takes several books, the mystery is still there to be solved.

This is especially true of the Sanford 3rd Age Club Mysteries, and as I’ve said before, despite the fact that they’re centred around a mob of crumblies partying away the rest of their lives, the books have universal appeal.

I seem to remember the  very first adult mystery novel I read was Agatha Christie’s And Then There Were None. A magnificent puzzle which had that remarkable ability to suspend disbelief from the first to last page. It was written for and populated exclusively with adults, and yet I was only about 12-years-old when I read it and it captured my imagination immediately. It was that universal appeal of the mystery novel.

I hesitate to compare my works with the great Ms Christie, but the same elements are there. What is the link between two deaths, 80 miles apart in The Filey Connection? How can the impossible killing be committed in The I-spy Murders? What is the significance of an old, missing penny in A Murder for Christmas?

The universal appeal of mystery.

***

The Filey Connection, first of the Sanford 3rd Age Club Mysteries, from Crooked {Cat} Books is available for the Kindle from Amazon UK and Amazon Worldwide and in all other formats from Smashwords