William Sutton's Blog, page 34
December 2, 2015
Devil Inspirations 3
Books that made my head buzz while writing Lawless & the #DevilofEustonSquare, & why.
The workmen’s train, London, a Pilgrimage, by Blanchard Jerrold, engraved by Gustave Dore. Steam trains at Gower Street station (now Euston Square); Part of the Metropolitan Railway, opened in 1863, out of copyright.
Non-Fiction Inspirations
Richard Trench & Ellis Hillman, London Under London
The seminal work on the many pipes and tunnels riddling London’s underbelly, this was what first gave me the idea to concoct an underground terrorist trauma.
Henry Mayhew, The London Underworld (edited by Quennell, selections from London Labour and the London Poor)
Interviews, observations, the odour of street life and cacophony of chatter: an unequalled record of street life and the unheard voices of the age. Stunning journalism.
Peter Ackroyd, Dickens
Reimagining the great writer as he experiences the city. Great for flavour and concerns of the age: Progress, Social Evils, the Great Struggle for Life.
Judith Flanders, The Victorian House
Social history of Victorian domesticity. Neatly exploits letters, diaries, journals and 19th-century novels.
Also worth a look:
Blanchard Jerrold and Gustave Dore, London: A Pilgrimage
Antony Clayton, Subterranean City
Christian Wolmar, The Subterranean Railway
Stephen Halliday, The Great Stink of London
Books I didn’t nick from (despite common ground) because I hadn’t found them
The Medical Detective: John Snow, Cholera and the Mystery of the Broad Street Pump Sandra Hempel
Peter Ackroyd, London Under
Dore again.
December 1, 2015
Kassassin-nation
How big do a band have to be to give away their drumsticks? On the trail of Kassassin St, from Pie & Vinyl to the Wedge, written for Star and Crescent, to begin my best of the year round-up.
Castle Road Festival, Record Store Day, April 2015.
Pie & Vinyl’s small but well-planned stage crowns the lively festival on this elegant street. My wife and I enjoyed Portsmouth-French groove combo Curl so much that we bought their CD. We were debating whether to hang around for the rest of the evening. There was this band Kassassin St coming up, who we’d sort of heard of but knew nothing about.
“What are you talking about?” said the bloke next to us. “Haven’t you seen Kassassin St? You can’t go now.”
He didn’t bother to explain the band’s appeal, his recommendation more convincing for such taciturnity. Half an hour later, we were fans.
https://soundcloud.com/kassassinstreet/to-be-young
There’s something magical about being right there with the band, especially when you’re being let into a secret. Right at the front, in the crowded street, we could see the band’s complicitous grins, the guitar pedal wizardry, the singer’s nonchalant assurance when they kick into a surefire stomper and the whole audience starts to bounce.
The songs are enough to hook you in. The whole audience joins in the “Doo-doo-doo” chorus of To Be Young. Everyone moves along with the stuttering rhythms and soaring chorus of recent release Radio Silence, and the jagged riff that kicks off Royal Handkerchief Ballet. Well-crafted lyrics. Sonic echoes of 80s and 90s pop bubbles through (Placebo, anyone? Talking Heads? Suede?) but with zesty slices of dance music dropped in to add extra fizz.
But it’s the band themselves that makes the gig special. Front man Rowan Bastable negotiates that fine line between self-deprecation and insouciance, between pose and bashfulness, with a teenage toss of the hair that disguises his accomplished stagecraft.
Drummer Nathan Hill seems to have his own fan club. With theatrical anticipation he raises his brows, points a drumstick at us, launches joyfully into the chorus, pulls it back for the verse. Come in, Ringo, you’re time is up. I’ve spotted Nathan walking round Southsea, headphones in, drumsticks in hand, living it just as fully as he does onstage. Nathan’s twin, Ryan, is on guitar, Andy Hurst on keyboards and Tom Wells holding it together on bass.
https://soundcloud.com/kassassinstreet/yeah-its-on
Victorious Festival, August.
Kassassin St graced the Castle Stage early in the day. I dragged all my friends along. At the unwholesome hour of lunchtime, they still managed to get us to dance. It was the Seaside stage at 6pm where they received their due plaudits, the fields filled full of fans old and new, all singing along as the song wound down into its angelic organ coda:
Welcome to the Royal Handkerchief Ballet.
Welcome to the Royal Handkerchief Ballet.
In the morning, I won’t leave you
Cause I’m your good friend.
Fresh crowds converted. New hearts conquered. “Better than The Darkness,” adjudged my friend Megan, as we summed up our top moments of the festival.
Wedgewood Rooms, 17 Oct.
Expectations running high, we trooped into the Wedge to see the boys return home in triumph. Support band Clay from Leeds were good musicians and exuded confidence; but somehow, for all their melodic tunes and soulful riffs, they never quite connected with the audience. They never held our gaze, and couldn’t win us over. That was left to the boys from Kassassin St.
Greeted with hometown roars, they responded with their own pleasure in returning from a hectic tour. (We bumped into Mr Bastable beforehand, chatting to friends. He was extremely polite, despite my unrestrained fan babbling.)
If radio silence is the key,
Do you receive me?
Do you receive me?
In the elegantly disturbing video, made by Jack Daly and James Sharp, the searing highs and lows of this song create an unnerving isolation for the girl, whose blank calm can’t avert the threat: “I’m in your room under your bed.” Live, though, the uplifting chords have us all raising our arms out toward the band.
They stomp through the big numbers, growing in confidence as the crowd grew more and more enamoured of them. The trademark maracas come out for Talk in Riddles, before the singer incurs the security guards’s wrath by coming out into the crowd. “Note to self,” he says, clambering back onstage, and mutters something abashed about mic leads always getting tangled in mosh pits.
New songs, old songs. The guitar and keyboards create the atmospherics in Mouthwash, while the bass underpins the whole mesh with a solid line. Scatterbrain begins to ramp up the energy again. Then they take it up a gear with the dancy trancy underpinning of Centre Straight Atom to set the whole room screaming.
My friends and I, reduced to fan-boy and fan-girl amazement, try to sweet-talk the security guard into grabbing us a setlist. More than his job is apparently worth. To the rescue comes bass player Tom Wells, who takes the setlist to get it signed by the band. He comes back not only with a bonus drumstick, but with the drummer, wide-eyed genius, Nathan Hill, who makes our evening by signing the drumstick and telling us how much he’s enjoyed himself.
It’s always exciting to discover a new band. To discover them at the end of your street gives you an extra sense of propriety, a vicarious pride and the pleasure of saying, I was there.
Where next for Kassassin St? They’re creeping on to radio setlists. Their live show is stomping. They’re the darlings of the south coast music cognoscenti, and rightly so. Upwards and onwards, boys. You’ve got the whole town behind you.
http://www.bbc.co.uk/music/records/n2jfgj
http://breakingmorewaves.blogspot.co....
http://www.bbc.co.uk/music/records/n2...
November 29, 2015
Devil Launch #3
My first novel Lawless & the Devil of Euston Square was relaunched thanks to @TitanBooks on Thursday 26 Nov.
A warm and charming audience enjoyed Devils on Horseback and Winter Pimms provided by hosts Blackwell’s in Portsmouth (thanks, Jo). My Q & A partner Diana Bretherick made everyone feel at home, and we enjoyed a good singalong along these lines:
Huge thanks are due to Phil Patterson, my agent, who has already sold this book twice in a few years (when it took me ten to sell it once).
Likewise to my editor, Miranda Jewess, of Titan Books, who not only accepted my finicky wish to re-edit some colons but went above and beyond in deploying her knowledge of Victorian style to improve it still further.
Thanks too to Rebecca Lea Williams, the mastermind of this map that I’m so pleased with I could yelp.
And to my niece Nina McIlwain for telling me I needed a list of characters. Other than that, the book remains the same.
A glittering array of writers were in attendance. To name a few:
AJ Noon, who opened up Day of the Dead brilliantly this year.
Ben Aitken, fresh from launching his unconventional travel book Dear Bill Bryson at Shakespeare and Co.
Tom Harris, who’s adding Victorian sweeps to his roster of teenage heroes in the Amber series.
Lynne E Blackwood, who’s launching the collection Closure next week.
Matt Wingett, whose Conan Doyle and the Mysterious World of Light is going to rock some rationalist notions.
Christine Lawrence, whose Caught in the Web I just read and loved.
Andy Prior, who will tell you about his nom de plume if you ask nicely.
Diana Bretherick, with whom I’ll be presenting Victorian Devils tomorrow evening at Portchester Library.
Thanks to the other writers and readers who popped in, on their way to the Portsmouth Writers Hub agents’ evening at Café Parisien. More nonsense about the book on the site soon.
Reviews Revisited
“Engaging, smart and witty – a highly alternative take on Victorian crime. Long live Lawless!”
– Paul Johnston
“William Sutton’s first novel is fine, extravagant and thoroughly enjoyable. It is an exuberant tale that offers no more than a nod to probability, and in this it somewhat resembles Boris Akunin’s Fandòrin novels. These have been international bestsellers, and there is no good reason why Sutton’s Worms of Euston Square shouldn’t also do very well. … The action moves with dizzying speed from the highest quarters in the land to the vilest slums and low dives of the teeming city … For this is a world enveloped in smoke and fog, where confusion reigns. Despite this, it is indeed, as becomes apparent, well-constructed, a cunning contrivance. What, after all, as Scott said, is the plot for, but to bring in fine things? And there are fine things here in abundance. We are told that William Sutton is now at work on another Campbell Lawless mystery. If he can maintain this standard of invention, this mastery of linguistic tone, he is on to a winner. Meanwhile one has the impression that this first novel was as enjoyable to write as it unquestionably is to read. We are told that William Sutton is now at work on another Campbell Lawless mystery. If he can maintain this standard of invention, this mastery of linguistic tone, he is on to a winner.”
– Alan Massie, The Scotsman
“A thoroughly enjoyable tale of terrorist agents at work in Victorian London.”
– Scottish Review of Books
“Prose and interweaving plots built like wrought-iron Victorian follies … Genuinely funny. This mix of social history and mid-Victorian Keystone Cops makes Sutton’s debut novel highly original and engaging. He has joyfully thrown himself into the mood, avoiding the leaden naturalism that would have been a more obvious option.”
– Michael Gardiner, Scotland on Sunday
“The success rate of Scots in London is impressive. Police recruit Campbell Lawless seems set to become another. Young Lawless is called to investigate the explosion of a hydraulic engine at Euston Square and from this is hurled deep into the city’s underworld – from music hall to industrial corporations, aided all the way by an endearingly intelligent set of street urchins. A first-rate piece of Victorian crime fiction.”
– The Herald
“This story is unlike any historical crime novel I’ve read before – it’s fascinating, witty and rather hilarious. Romping along at a jaunty pace, the story is filled with the sights, sounds and smells (and trust me, there are a lot of smells, many of them quite unpleasant!) of Victorian London, whisking you along for the ride.
Campbell Lawless is finding his feet in the detecting profession. He throws himself into his cases, determined to uncover the mysteries behind the ‘great spouts’ of water that spring up at strange locations across the city – outside the recently built Euston Station, at curtain call on a London stage to name a couple; why in a chain of seemingly impossible burglaries of wealthy houses little is taken, and who (and why) someone is stealing the workings of clocks.
Aided by super-smart Librarian, Ruth Villiers, Lawless works tirelessly to piece together the clues he finds, whilst staying on the right side of his rather grumpy boss, Wardle. In the course of his adventure, Lawless has encounters with the men behind the new underground system, newspaper editors, actresses, revolutionaries, and even a Prince. Each player in the story is a well-drawn and fabulously larger-than-life character.”
CrimeThrillerGirl
“Where the book really shines is in its evocation of Victorian London: a living, breathing, stinking beast of a city.”
– The Bookbag
Reviews from Goodreads.com
“I love the language used in this novel. Lawless is from Edinburgh and his Scottish twang is pitch perfect. The language of the streets is also an important aspect of Lawless’ first investigation. The Worms, a street gang not unlike Conan Doyle’s Baker Street Irregulars, have a patois all of their own. It’s almost as though you’re getting a mini-mystery every time one of them opens their mouth. There is a character called the Professor who I particularly liked. Personally I’ve always been a fan of the Victorian era, at an impressionable age I discovered George MacDonald Fraser and his disreputable anti-hero Flashman and I’ve been hooked ever since. I’ve always marvelled a bit at the pomp and ceremony of this particular time period. I just love the way people talk to one another, terribly proper and all that.”
– GoodReads
“The writing was exquisite to my untrained eye; I felt like I was in Victorian London. I have learned some marvellous insults too.”
– GoodReads
“There are so many great characters in this book, from all walks of life, and I have a feeling they will stay with me for a long time. My favourites by far were Worm and The Professor, a couple of street kids that Lawless uses as runners, I think they will always have a place in my heart.”
– GoodReads
“Lawless & The Devil is the first ARC I ever received as a reviewer. I requested it based on
a) the gorgeous cover,
b) the author’s name and
c) the fact that it was about Victorian crime fiction.
The premise didn’t hurt either. So I got it, realised that the release date was an age away and figured that I should read a couple of other ARCs instead. I really should have read this earlier or something. It was SO GOOD. I was staying at my friend’s place a couple of weeks ago and when I had to catch a bus to work in the morning, at 5 degree weather when it was windy as hell and pouring rain outside at the bus stop, I let my fingers turn blue so that I could keep reading. That’s how much I loved this book.
Firstly, I adore Campbell. He’s very matter-of-fact and methodical but he’s also very clearly got his heart in the right place. I love that he treats people with respect and honesty. It seems like such a little thing to ask for, but it’s surprising how few YA books have protagonists who are non-judgmental people. It’s not that Campbell is flawless, but he gives everything the benefit of the doubt and always has faith in people. His optimism is charming.”
– ElleLiterate
November 13, 2015
Highway to Devil Revisited
@TitanBooks are republishing my first novel Lawless & the Devil of Euston Square. Pop into Blackwell’s in Portsmouth, however briefly, any time between 5 – 6.30 Thursday 26 Nov, prior to the Portsmouth Writers Hub agents evening at Café Parisien.
I shall celebrate with songs, drawings and a glass of wine, before toddling along to Portsmouth Writers Hub. If you already have the book, get a festive copy for your aunt; if you hated it, get it for someone you don’t like.
November 1, 2015
Lawless’ Devilish Inspirations (modern novels)
In the run-up to republication of Lawless and the #DevilofEustonSquare, a look at the books that made my head buzz while writing.
Modern Novels
Paul Auster’s Leviathan
By making Ben Sachs so elusive, Auster builds him into a magnificent mystery man. The narrator admires and envies him; the reader feels conflicted. They say terrorism is never justified; what if it was?
Chuck Palahniuk Fight Club
Anarchic networks. A shadowy alter ego. How to subvert the system from its innards. I love the way we’re coopted into beliefs we never quite follow, everything whirling into an inexorable spiral of disaster.
Iain Banks ComplicityThey say murder is never justified. But what if the people deserved to die? What if you knew in detail how they’d screwed over employees, public, friends and family in every walk of life, and they thought they were untouchable? Don’t you think they deserved it, a bit?
From Auster, the previous patriotic monuments targeted by the homegrown terrorist:
The mighty Euston Arch
Wyld’s Great Globe
Brunel’s Thames Tunnel
From Palahniuk, using the mechanisms of Society and Progress to upend the system from within:
From Banks, the escalation of the illustrious brought low:
Marx, Hudson, the Railway King, Pearson, architect of the underground
Next up: the Victorians, the Reference Books, the Historical Novels
October 29, 2015
Delivering Your Daily Dread
Day of the Dead
A full house, again. Cabaret tables at front, last-comers squeezing in back rows. It’s exciting that the audience is finding this unusual performance: live literature, local talent, inimitable venue, not part of any festival.
Photos of the evening.
It was a great night: experienced performers alongside first-timers, several drawn into the fold through Tessa Ditner’s efforts with Portsmouth Writers Hub meetings and our ReAuthoring workshop with Greg Klerkx.
Audience were livelier than ever this year: more costumes, more chat, more interaction with performers. Books sold by Blackwell’s; charity skulls painted for local art project Community Fusion. A huge collaborative effort, and a show I’m proud of.
We’ll be back in Bookfest (now in Feb/March) with Valentine’s Day Massacre: “set aside lovey-dovey wine and chit-chat; choose beer, choose vengeance, choose rage.”
October 24, 2015
Skull-diggety-doo, it’s Day of the Dead’s Line-Up
Wed 28 Oct 2015. Square Tower, Broad Street, PO1 2JE. Tickets on the door or online.
We’ve got a great line-up of writers and musicians: tales ranging from insomnia to Armageddon, scalped heads and spooky fish. See you there.
6pm Doors. Refreshments. Books from Blackwell’s @booksellerjo. Skulls from Community Fusion project.
7pm Music and tales. Intro song familiar to Portsmouth Fairy Talers.
AJ Noon with a creepy Square Tower tale
Diana Bretherick veers from crime into dystopian fiction: Fragments
James Bicheno twists our minds with The Guide,
Edgy Young Adult novelist Tom D Harris: Bait
Poet Sue Spiers: Pentad
Prolific writer Justin MacCormack: Insomnia
Poet and performer Maggie Sawkins: Missive
Philip Jeays’ twisted chansons
8pm Interval: more books, drinks, skulls.
Jamie West: gorgeous melodic songwriting
VH Leslie, horror writer: a fishy tale
Alan Morris unnerves us with Fresh Meat
Jacqui Pack‘s evocative tale, The Last Days of Winter
Gareth Rees ponders the Kiss of Death
Christine Lawrence, with a haunting Square Tower tale
Radio KWG with atmospheric songs from The Road part II.
October 23, 2015
Devils’ Daughters and Colonial Travels
My literary evening began at Blackwell’s with Diana Bretherick‘s launch of The Devil’s Daughters, sequel to her crime debut City of Devils. Fascinating clash between the affable tone of Diana’s entertaining Q & A and the deadly undertones of her writing, as evidenced in the atmospheric first chapter.
I am looking forward to reading it.
On I went to the Square Tower to see Maggie Sawkins introduce Caribbean-British poet John Agard‘s new show, in which he rewrites the glorious history of Christopher Columbus’ voyages. With a thrill for language and mischief, he reminds of that the very word colonialism comes from Columbus. The most engaging parts of the show are probably where Agard’s eyes light up with fun, enacting the mosquito’s impact on humanity or singing in jazz standard style of the exchange of diseases between Old World and New.
Developed with award-winning director, Mark C. Hewitt with musical backing by Thomas Arnold, it is an unusual one-man show and I wish them well. I was also stunned to win a raffle (third prize) for the first time in my life, which saw me going home with these two unlikely bedfellows, wedding the Victorian age’s premier poet laureate with murderous 19 century Turin.
My Dog Sighs’ Skull (not actually his own skull, though)
Special announcement from our partners in deathliness, Lawn of the Dead: a skull customised by the renowned international artist @MyDogSighs. He finished his skull with a rust effect and a single one of his trademark eyes.
To have a chance of winning this beautiful skull, buy a raffle ticket at our Day of the Dead night:
Wed 28 Oct, Square Tower, Broad Street, PO1 2JE. £5 (£4 concession).
6pm Doors open. Refreshments, books, music, art. Fancy Dress optional.
7pm Stories and songs explore the macabre and mysterious.
These skulls will be available (if they haven’t been sold yet at Community Fusion):
Would you like to paint your own Day of the Dead skull? Then James Waterfield is holding a half-term workshop for adults and children, Weds 28 October, 1pm – 5pm Community Fusion Shop – Made With Hartt, 80 Elm Grove. Materials £2.50.
