Tony Richards's Blog: 21st Century Holmes, page 8

SHERLOCK HOLMES IS FEELING LIKE A BRAND-NEW MAN

 Fans of the great detective might like to know that I've revamped all 4 of my books of modern-day Holmes stories on Amazon Kindle, with linked ToCs and new information about the humble author and his other books. You can find out more about the Immortal Holmes series here. And if you're a true blue Brit (cold, wet, and hacked-off, in other words) here the UK link.

TWO SURE THINGS

It's been a good long while -- college days, in fact -- since I wrote a regular film column. So I haven't had the chance to predict any Oscar nominations, in public at least, for quite a time. But I'm going to do so now.

The obvious one, already pegged as a sure thing by many, is Cate Blanchett in Blue Jasmine. Despite the ravings of the critics, I found the movie itself something of a let-down after the whimsical brilliance of Midnight in Paris, rather uneven and forced. But Blanchett's performance as a mentally ill woman is a revelation, a modern-day Blanche DuBois, almost wholly reliant on the waning kindness of people who ought not be strangers, but who are.

And then, just last night, I watched the DVD of Behind the Candelabra, the Liberace biopic. And, my Lord, did Michael Douglas shine! That guy's come a good long way since Streets of San Francisco, let me tell you, capturing perfectly an extremely strange man (with a stage show like that, how could he not be?) who was neither a good person nor a bad one, but merely a person wholly detached from the normal world, inhabiting a universe that existed only in his mind.

Both are brilliant. Both are surely going to make the shortlist for that little golden statuette. And if there's any justice in the word, then they'll both win.

OH, WHAT A LOVELY BAY!

I already sang the praises of Ibiza Town -- capital of the Balearic island of Ibiza -- in an earlier posting on this blog (A Sight for Tired Eyes, 8th May). But Louise and myself got the chance to return to the island for a four-day break just recently, and found ourselves in a great location, in the next bay along from the town. I just thought I'd share a couple of the views with you.

And here's what the place looked like at sunset.

ICE COLD IN THE CARIBBEAN

My first novel from a major publisher in 4 years - and my first stand-alone novel since 1995's Night Feast - is now available from Simon & Schuster/Pocket Star.
Tropic of Darkness is set mostly in Havana, Cuba, with the action shifting from the present day to the late Fifties, when the Mob virtually ran that city. In fact, the action starts with none other than Meyer Lansky stepping off a plane at Havana Airport, only to receive some rather strange and troubling news. Here's the book's back-cover blurb:

"Enter a dim-lit, sultry world full of the darkest secrets, where age-old legends come to life, dreams get mixed up with reality, and nothing save for death is truly as it seems.
Jack Gilliard is a man with a dark past, and he hasn’t been back to the United States for more than a decade. But when he washes up in Havana, Cuba, he finds himself being drawn into a business darker than he ever dared think. Ancient passions, ancient treacheries, an age-old curse, and the evils of his past are now consuming the present—and Jack is caught in the midst of it all. To survive, all he has to do is leave the country—a prospect much more difficult than anticipated. But the real question is: can Jack escape before the darkness claims him altogether?"
And the first review's an excellent one:

“The tension built well as the story progressed and kept me turning pages. All in all, Tropic of Darkness is a well-crafted tale, and well worth reading. I rate this work as Highly Recommended for adult readers” – The Monster Librarian.


Read an extract here.

Tropic of Darkness is available in a wide variety of different $1.99 ebook formats. Find out more here. 
A paperback version will be released in 2014.

REALITY RELOADED

My long-running website, richardsreality.com, has just been completely updated. There’s a better Photo Gallery, a massively expanded Art Gallery with over a dozen new paintings and drawings by M. Wayne Miller and Steve Upham, a new interview conducted by award-winning author Ed Gorman, a complete list of my available ebooks, both from major publishers and self-published, and news of my latest novels and collections.
Huge thanks to Marie O’Regan for putting it all together.
Why not take a look?

JUDGING A BOOK, Part Two

And this one's an absolute beaut. I've had some terrific artists provide covers for my books before, Steve Upham, Wayne Miller, Erin Wells, Paul Mudie, Paul  Lowe, all talked about in earlier postings in this very blog. But this one by James Perales is near perfect. It's for my supernatural horror novel Tropic of Darkness, due out on 16th September from Simon & Schuster/Pocket Star and largely set in Havana, Cuba. And what James has done is create a brand-new artistic sub-genre  ... let's call it 'Caribbean Gothic.' It's a great piece, and I hope that you agree. I'll be talking about the book itself a little later on.

JUDGING A BOOK, Part One

Towards the end of this year, Samhain Publishing, under the auspices of chief editor Don D'Auria, will be bringing out an ebook version of my 2005 supernatural novella Under the Ice. It's set in Helsinki, Finland, in the dead of winter, and features a revenant, which I suppose is just a fancy way of saying 'zombie.' That's all I'm telling you about the plot for now, but the terrific cover by Scott Carpenter has already been approved, and here it is.

I'M FINALLY ON SMASHWORDS!

 
People have been asking me -- on message boards and forums -- for quite a while now whether any of my self-published ebooks are available through anything else but Kindle. And the answer until this week has been NO. But now I've got two of my short story collections up on Smashwords. Dark Futures is a compendium of my sf/horror fusion tales, from the pages of The 3rd Alternative, Black Static and suchlike, with a cover by the excellent Steve Upham. Whereas The Immortal Sherlock Holmes: Volume I comprises four of my modern day Holmes stories, 'The Desert King' in Arizona, 'The Hidden Shore' in the Carribean, 'The Terror in the Park' in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia, and the Las Vegas based 'The House of Blood,' originally published in Gaslight Arcanum: Dark Tales of Sherlock Holmes. Both books have gone onto Smashwords' Premium Catalog, btw, and so they ought to be available on Kobo etc. fairly soon. You can find out more about them HERE.

NOT A CONSTANT READER, BUT A GOOD ONE

Some authors can write all day and then cheerfully read all evening. Others can't. And unfortunately, I'm very much afraid that I fall into the latter category. I can't properly concentrate on my own work while reading the work of other people.

Why? Well in my case, I'm afraid it's a matter of a thing called 'voice.' And I'll give you an example. I was working on one of my Raine's Landing supernatural thrillers. They're set in a fictional town of the same name in Massachusetts, and are mostly narrated by the central character, a certain Ross Devries. He's never left his hometown once in his life, because of a curse on the place. You get the general picture?

Anyway, I was working on a scene he was narrating one day. And the previous evening, I had been reading one of Charlaine Harris' Southern Vampire novels. And before I knew it, Ross's voice -- the voice of someone who's a lifelong northeast coast, New England man -- was ringing through my head with a very heavy Southern accent, redolent of fried turkey and grits. Hey, how 'bout them Salem witches, y'all. And I couldn't get rid of it all day. That's how much other people's work can sometimes affect me.

Honestly, it drives me nuts, because I love to read. Between projects, I do so as much as I can. I devour books when I'm vacationing, and half enjoy catching the flu, because it stops me working and allows me to get a little more reading in. But the point of all this is that I have now joined Goodreads. As you can tell from the scenario above, my personal reviews of books won't be too frequent, but I'll do it when I can. And I'd love to hear your opinions of both my and other writers' efforts. You can look me up right here.

A SIGHT FOR TIRED EYES

Even writers have it tough sometimes. It's been a pretty busy year so far. There've been the various edits of my new supernatural thriller -- TROPIC OF DARKNESS from Pocket Star/Gallery -- to deal with. I've a new horror novel on the boil. And to add insult to injury, I honestly thought that I was getting near to a final version of my fifth Raine's Landing novel -- SPEAK OF THE DEVIL -- only to realise it needs a couple more drafts at least before it's properly complete.

Ah, the joys of being a perfectionist!

Throw in an absolutely terrible British winter which has lasted right until the end of April, and by the middle of that month  I was absolutely drained and needed, very badly, to get away for a while.

A couple of days scootching around on the Internet and Louise had come up with an inexpensive one-week deal in, of all places, Ibiza. You know, hangout for hippies in the Sixties and Seventies, now the favoured destination for all-night clubbers. But we went for it.

We wound up in a nice hotel which was a little isolated and was, frankly, pretty quiet. Very early in the season, you see ...it had only just opened, and I doubt if a quarter of its rooms were occupied. But right outside the entrance was a bus stop, and in ten minutes you could get into the heart of the island's capital, Ibiza Town, and what a joy that was. The harbour was nice enough -- face it, they always are. But heading away from that, you come into the Old Town, all tall, gaily-painted old houses with wrought iron balconies, and leafy, cafe-lined squares. Absolutely charming. But the best was yet to come.

Past the Old Town is the mostly 16th Century walled  city of Ibiza Town, founded -- I think -- by Philip II of Spain. We're talking huge walls, massive fortifications, cannons at the top. To defend against whom? I'm not quite sure. Pirates? Corsairs? Even the Perfidious Brits?

You go in through the main entrance -- across a drawbridge, no less -- and suddenly realise that you've wound up somewhere very special. And it's not just the lovely old architecture. The whole of the walled city is built on the slopes of a very steep hill, so that the streets running acrosswise are normal lanes, but the streets running upward are not lanes at all but flights of stone stairs, hundreds of them, heading in every which direction. And the place is no museum -- people live there by the thousand. I could have wandered there for hours, and I generally did.

I hear that Luca in Italy is built along similar lines but, never having been there, I found Ibiza Town's walled city quite unique, a place of special magic. There's a lot more to that island than just clubbing.