Stephen Gallagher's Blog, page 26

A Criminal History

"We look into a world that is not our own, distanced by time, to find a timeless drama of fear and conflict. The historical panorama fascinates but it’s the crime, the crime that drives the tale." 

From my piece on the use of historical settings in crime novels and thrillers, written for The Weekly Lizard.

You can  read the whole thing here.

Anne Devereaux Jordan

Very sad to hear of the death of Anne Jordan. We corresponded over one of my early F&SF stories and met in person at one of the big Brighton SF conventions, where she executed one of the neatest party-crashing moves I've ever seen to get both of us into an editor's suite - the editor (Toby? From Macmillan? Memory falters, and keeps defaulting to 'Carvery') hadn't planned a party but the gestalt will seemed to be that he was going to host one, like it or not. As we walked down the corridor Anne locked eyes with me, grasped my arm to make an important conversational point, and spun us into the room right under the nose of the helpless and spluttering would-be gatekeeper.

(It was a brilliant party of its kind, as I recall. The next morning I heard that it had been infiltrated by three chancers, young local men not part of the convention, who hid in the wardrobe with the intention of emerging to steal when all went quiet. Upon discovery they fled, but were easy enough for the police to identify as one of them had no ears and a short haircut. His disguise consisted of clamping his hands over the sides of his head as he ran.)

Anne co-edited The Best Horror Stories from The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, which I'm guessing is what brought us to meet. A kindly, friendly, and well-remembered human being.

Free eBook Download - IN GETHSEMANE

In the years following the Great War, a skeptical conjuror and a spiritualist medium merge their interests to tour the regional lecture halls of the United Kingdom.


This eBook novella is a free download, offered to coincide with US paperback publication of The Bedlam Detective.

Set in the aftermath of the Great War, it follows the pairing of stage magician Will Goulston and spiritualist Frederick Kelly as they tour the lecture halls of provincial Britain.

"Mister Goulston will begin with a demonstration of spirit effects and fake mediumship. I can tell you now that he's very impressive."

Two of the four journalists present made notes, and the man from the Northern Telegraph said, "Can I ask Mister Goldston why he consents to appear on a bill with a practising medium, when he's declared all clairvoyants to be frauds and charlatans?"

"That's very simple," Goulston said, with a glance at Borthwick to be sure that the error over his name would not go uncorrected. "I'm here to catch Mister Kelly out."

"Have you done that, yet?"

"Perhaps tonight."

As far as the device at its heart is concerned, that came about when I heard of how, in the late 1970s, ideological opponents G Gordon Liddy and Timothy Leary partnered up to tour on the debating circuit. I thought of them berating each other's beliefs at every engagement and then checking unto the same hotel afterwards. I'd been looking for a form in which I could do something about the conflict of science and superstition that would allow for the kind of complexity that I felt it needed, and here it was on a plate. It was human, it was absurd, and yet it still made perfect sense.

Help yourself. No charge. One of the best things I ever wrote.

If you have a Kindle, click here and save the file to your hard drive.

If you have an iPad or other e-reader, click here and save the EPUB file.

To download a PDF, click here.

Or to receive the fil as an attachment, send an email to offers@bedlamdetective.com with the required format in the subject line.

And if you'd rather pay to receive it over Amazon's whispernet - there's no need to, but I realise that not everyone's happy moving files around - you can click here.

Click on one of the links above to get it free
Or buy from Amazon

Silent Witness - Legacy

Spoilers here if you haven't seen the episodes yet, but here are links to some of the material that provided inspiration, background detail or information for last week's story.


A producer who should have known better once accused me of 'letting the tail wag the dog' in my insistence on the importance of research. Story research is important for at least two reasons; it provides unexpected inspiration, and it reduces the chances of your being stupid at the top of your voice.

It's not about an obsession with minutiae. Detail is rarely interesting for its own sake. And you'll never get it perfect, nor should you; we're not in the business of reproducing reality.

But I've worked on a few science-based projects now (and we're not counting BUGS here, that was fantasy technology). I've learned a few things as I've gone along:
It's OK to compress and exaggerate process, but never to falsifyYou can use contentious notions, but don't embrace them - don't be a shill for bad science Connect your ideas into a rough structure and then lay them before experts before you go any furtherWhere they point to flaws, don't try to disagree - you've just been handed a gift in the form of realistic obstacles to your storyRemake your structure by what you've just learned These links don't represent the research. They're some of the elements that lodged in my mind, suggested the shape of a story, and began the research. A more comprehensive roundup would include the newspaper story of the man who took a loaded gun into an American ICU and kept staff and police at bay while he unplugged his infant son's life support and cradled him as he died.

The clipping's slipped away from me. The thought of it never will.
Broken Arrow cover-up in the UK?The army's abandoned village on Salisbury PlainUranium in drinking water - factsheetEffect of Heavy Metals on, and Handling by, the Kidney"This was Britain's worst-ever nuclear accident, but no one was evacuated, no iodine pills were distributed, work went on and most people were not even told about the fire."Are low-frequency environmental electromagnetic fields a health hazard?Camelford case coroner accuses water authority of gambling with 20,000 livesA medical look at plutonium"Furious parents in Fukushima have delivered a bag of radioactive playground earth to education officials in protest at moves to weaken nuclear safety standards in schools."

The Morning After

I've had a few nice notes and tweets in the wake of last week's broadcast including one from Chimera producer Nick Gillott, which prompted me to dig out this shot of the two of us way back when on that show's location in Kettlewell, Yorkshire.


Nick's on the left. How often do I have to say it, that mullet of mine will never get old.

Of all the general tweets, by which I mean the ones not addressed directly to me, I think my favourite would have to be this one:

@L****s Just watched a silent witness with mum #ActuallyDecent

Rare Beast Sighted

"That rare beast, a literary page-turner."


My advance copies of the US paperback arrived by Fedex this morning. Easy on the eye and silky to the touch. And that's just me, you should see the book.

On sale February 5th.

Legacy

...being the title of my Silent Witness story, the first part of which is showing on BBC1 at 9pm tonight. And no, it's not about wills or family squabbles. It's got explosions and stunts and sex, high crimes and buried secrets and decent people co-opted into sinister agendas.

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Pic shows Ed Stoppard as Lord James Embleton, and Emilia Fox as Nikki Alexander. Embleton's a science entrepreneur with a political peerage. It's enabled his appointment to a government role without election. He's an idealist, so good luck with that.

(I chose his name to honour British illustrator Ron Embleton, because I could.)

Part two tomorrow. There was a bit with a sheep, but that was cut.

I'll leave you to imagine.

The Legacy

...being the title of my Silent Witness story, the first part of which is showing on BBC1 at 9pm tonight. And no, it's not about wills or family squabbles. It's got explosions and stunts and sex, high crimes and buried secrets and decent people co-opted into sinister agendas.

[image error]

Pic shows Ed Stoppard as Lord James Embleton, and Emilia Fox as Nikki Alexander. Embleton's a science entrepreneur with a political peerage. It's enabled his appointment to a government role without election. He's an idealist, so good luck with that.

(I chose his name to honour British illustrator Ron Embleton, because I could.)

Part two tomorrow. There was a bit with a sheep, but that was cut.

I'll leave you to imagine.

Coming Soon

This eBook novella will be a free download, offered to coincide with paperback publication of The Bedlam Detective.

Details soon.

Here's an Offer

Of course I buy books online, everybody does. But I also can't pass by a bookshop, and with the good ones - those where there's more to the stock than the Top Ten airport reads and a wall of discounted remainders - it's almost impossible not to find something. Some book that you didn't know you wanted until you saw it.

You can, cynically, go home and order it online. That's always going to be a problem for the trade and I don't know what the answer is. But I do know this.

Look at any town centre. If there are no booksellers, it's dying. I don't mean a few shelves in charity shops, they don't count. I mean the real thing, whether it's new books or secondhand, where the person in charge knows something about what they're selling. It's not just an economic indicator, it's a social one. Like fish in a river, a town's bookshops are a sure indicator of its overall health.

So here's a proposal.

If you buy/bought your copy of The Kingdom of Bones from a bricks-and-mortar bookshop (you have to buy a copy from somewhere, it's the law), send a scan or photo of your book and receipt to webguy@stephengallagher.com. On publication day in May I'll choose three readers at random and send them signed copies of The Bedlam Detective UK paperback.

And yes, I realise that each book given away is a lost potential sale. Let's all shake our heads at the irony.