It was just as well I opted for the easy 30 minutes – or more like 45 in the end – of the Society of Authors’ awards in Southwark Cathedral as a livestream. It would have been hard work mingling away in person, and it’s not as if I was up for any awards. Joanne Harris started the proceedings, and if she has any sense, then next year she will come with her own official whistler, to make people notice and to shut up. As it was, in the end someone did whistle, and there was some shutting up too.
And then it was Val McDermid’s turn to give a keynote speech, and she is a wise quine of crime who wanted the shortlisted authors to bask in the glory of being shortlisted. Winning isn’t everything, and this is worth remembering as you stand there, unprepared, thanking your cat instead of your agent. It took Val ten years to become an ‘overnight sensation.’
There were eleven prizes, and it took quite some time to go through them all, even at a fast trot. Not everyone was present, but there were enough to sprint forward, shake Val’s hand and pose for a photo. Someone sent her mother. I like mothers. And by the time Olaf Falafel won the Queen’s Knickers award, he ignored instructions not to speak, and mentioned that he was wearing a borrowed pair of the Queen’s knickers, just for the occasion. We didn’t get to see them.
After all that, they all had to return on stage for the group photo. And everyone was told to buy all the books.
It was nice to see, and nicer for me being at home. Had looked forward to watching the BSL interpreter, but he was hidden behind the Society’s address and other information…
The party was for two o’clock. Despite me working hard to achieve some sort of fashionable lateness and then adding some unforeseen issue near Haymarket, I still arrived at one minute past. I rang the doorbell and told my lovely host that ‘I am Swedish and therefore unable to arrive late’.
Luckily someone else had arrived before me.
The weather was typical for a Scottish summer, sunny, humid and far too warm. But there were bifold doors. I enjoy having a June birthday and I’m glad my host felt this was a good time too, so moved hers to be four months early. Probably so she could wear a midsummery dress, the day being Midsummer’s Day for this early arriver.
There were people I knew, people I’d sort of heard of, some other familiar faces and some real strangers. A good mix. As I said, my host is lovely, which will be why one guest had spent a hot day baking Christmas biscuits for her.
We chatted books and all that sort of thing, plus some other chat. It was nearly all girls, with one token boy. But Kirkie is used to that.
Won’t go into more detail, but have to admit that before I hailed my homeward pumpkin, I inadvertently stole Alex Nye’s piece of cake. It was just there. It, too, was lovely. I really didn’t mean to. I suppose I have just not had many social occasions for some years, and I forgot.
There was a woman reading outside the Golden Lion hotel. Reading is good, but not necessarily on a mobile phone in the middle of Stirling’s King Street. And then someone prodded me with a ‘prodder’ on the stairs up to the ballroom. I’m thinking they are getting ready for the crime writers in mid-September, 15th to 17th. Don’t miss it!
Having learned last year that I am actually allowed to sit down, I went and got myself a chair, borrowing from the ballroom set up for the event after the launch speeches. There was mingling, and then director Bob McDevitt introduced the new programme. He’d cut off his Covid hair. He welcomed the festival committee, finally together again. Mentioned sponsors and new venues. The library and Trinity church having joined the Albert Halls and the Golden Lion. And ‘we have serial killers.’ How could you resist?
I had noted the woman sporting hair like Marnie Riches – without being Marnie – and she turned out to be radio’s Nicola Meighan, the chair for the Ambrose Parry event. She was a most excellent chair, with excellent hair.
So was the chair I returned to the ballroom after use, on which I might have happened to put the teaspoon I found on ‘mine.’ Not to worry, the people who found it disposed of it more sensibly, and then they started chatting to me which was very nice of them. A piece of advice; if you start writing crime novels in retirement, having a chatty wife who strikes up conversations is really useful. AJ Liddle was a Bloody Scotland debut writer a few years ago, and has just published his third crime novel, all set in Georgia (the one in the east). He lived there for 15 years, so I’d say he knows it well. They had just returned from Shetland Noir, which had been very good. (Just to be on the safe side I checked that AJ had not been at school with the Resident IT Consultant. You never know.)
As I said Nicola was a great chair. She asked Ambrose – i.e. Marisa Haetzman and Chris Brookmyre – all the right questions, without them even seeming like questions. So, Marisa had never harboured ambitions to write at all, having seen what it was like when Chris did it. But after a masters in history of medicine about ten years ago, finding the birth of chloroform fascinating (I suppose for an anaesthetist it would be…), and wanting to read a book about Simpson who made the discovery, by having his family sit round the dinner table sniffing chloroform until they passed out; Chris pointed out that if it hasn’t been written, then you have to write it yourself.
‘You embrace the power of fiction’ and are allowed to make things up, as Nicola said. Marisa feels she is like a mentor to the two main characters, who are members of the Simpson household. Chris felt that if they found this interesting, then perhaps more people would. And it did give them something to talk about during the pandemic.
They wanted to write about a woman in medicine, which in 1853 wasn’t really a thing. It’s taken them four books to get to this point, and they said the new book Voices of the Dead is lighter, although it features dismemberment. They laughed.
Marisa feels like a protective mother to one of the characters. When she started writing about Raven he was much nicer, until Chris forced him to be darker. Chris knows to wait until Marisa is in a good mood before introducing an idea he’s had. It’s crucial that they write separately, and then they have meetings where Chris talks and Marisa makes notes. And then they edit in the same document and Marisa described sitting there seeing how her lovely sentence she was so proud of was deleted.
Education was seen as damaging to women in the 19th century, and middle class women were expected to marry. They have been accused of modern day feminism, but can prove that these ideas existed a long time ago. Marisa has realised it is easier to spread information through popular fiction, and has given up on wanting to write non-fiction. But she has a list should anyone need it…
This was a great event and a great start to Bloody Scotland. We have to wait three months for the rest, but an early look at the programme tells me it’s going to be worth it. I have eight things I want to see. (More if I had a time-turner.)
You can buy tickets now. Though Crime at the Coo is probably long gone.
And, well, tea. It was the Society of Authors’ afternoon tea session last Thursday, and Joanne Harris dutifully stuck to tea, while her interviewee Val McDermid glugged coffee in front of her Edinburgh shed. Joanne was in her own shed, I believe.
Val excused her non-tea coffee by saying it was at least orange, sourced from HMP, by which we have to assume there is a prison somewhere that deals coffee.
Apparently ‘writing is the weakest part of her writing’ and Val depends on coloured index cards. And you should be kind to yourself. When she was meant to start writing 1999 – the sequel to 1989 – Covid made her switch to writing Karen Pirie instead. A bit like the rest of us, there were things she didn’t feel like at the time.
Val read a piece from 1989, standing in her garden, with bird song and everything. It was about Lockerbie, and it’s odd how you are thrown back to a period in your past, as though it was yesterday.
She was always a singer, and she has a past in the debating club at Kirkcaldy High School. Her own reading began in the library, with the Chalet School books, before she discovered Agatha Christie, and it was Murder at the Vicarage versus the Bible. She was overjoyed on finding Christie had written more books. And also that being an author was a paying job. Although everyone around her laughed at her plans, until the first book.
Crime writers are, as we have discovered, very jolly. It’s all that gruesomeness you have to work your way through.
And among the questions was one of the best I’ve heard; ‘what is the little door in your shed for?’ Nothing, it seems. It’s just there.
The Society of Authors offered me two events last week. The second of which involved getting paper and pens and colouring implements together to make art with Sarah McIntyre. We were not children. I’d say the audience was adults only, but all dutifully sitting there with their art materials. Well, not me, of course. I’d not given it a thought.
But I do feel my notepad sketch of Pedro the mouse is all right. Somehow one gets more talented for drawing in the company of great drawers.
Sarah is the kind of woman who has a hairdryer on her desk. Obviously. It’s to remove any unwanted moisture from your art paper. Amazing how hair products are useful for arty stuff [says the child of someone who kept hairspray on her art trolley].
For this event Sarah was trying out some brand new pastels, which she normally doesn’t use. But water colours run off a flip chart, so… (I have a secret fondness for brand new pastels.)
She talked about her books with Philip Reeve, and showed us some of the most recent ones. There were a lot of boats. And the others also drew a mermouse. (I’d recently had a visiting mouse near my desk, so felt I wanted to keep my mice numbers down.)
I think I knew about the difference between tone and colour, but it’s an interesting question nevertheless. And thick paper is the way to go for better art. Sarah prefers illustrating to writing, but does like both. She got started when she was trying to escape from having to make art with planks of wood, which makes a lot of sense. Asked about her favourite illustrators Sarah listed a number I’d not really heard of; mostly people she’s worked with.
The coffee cooled while we were all drawing our Pedros, but then this wasn’t sold as an elevenses kind of event. It was hands-on art.
(And I’ll bet I’m the only one whose portrait Sarah has done!)
If you’re worried you missed the first event last week, don’t be. It’s still to come.
After Martin Edwards stated at Bloody Scotland last September that he prefers the word traditional, rather than cosy, I can see what he meant. In the acknowledgements of his Gallows Court novel, he says ‘this book represents a new departure for me as a novelist.’
I’ll say!
It starts nice and slow enough. You ‘understand’ that this will be about a feisty and intelligent rich young woman in London in 1930, going about solving crime, alongside young journalist Jacob Flint. But then you realise it’s not going to be that easy. That’s not at all what this story is.
In fact, once you ‘get past’ the bloody deaths, you realise – at least I did – that Rachel Savernake isn’t very nice. Jacob is fine, apart from his tendency to arrive everywhere before the corpse is cold, and you wonder how he himself will stay alive. Rachel will be fine, or so it seems, and she appears to have fingers in a lot of pies.
I could guess at a few things. Possibly I was aided to do this guessing. A bit like Jacob turning up at the scenes of the crimes. But honestly, this is one tangled web of unlikeable characters, most of whom manage to die pretty swiftly.
So not cosy.
But while you gasp and wait to see what will come next, you just read on and on. A real onion fryer.
I have no idea what made me buy this particular book. But I’m glad I did.
Although I would call it more of a sofa. (Just trying to be funny. And failing.)
Vaseem Khan has been elected chair of the CWA, those literary ‘crime fanatics’ famous for daggers and stuff. But in this photo Vaseem is seated on something larger than a chair. He has blogged about it, too. The chairing, not the seat as such. Or ‘his’ elephant.
I didn’t actually know what the CWA do. Now I’m more in awe of the whole thing, and almost feel as if I’d like to join too.
Last week I quoted the first sentence of Vaseem’s first novel – The Unexpected Inheritance of Inspector Chopra – and then I read all the other sentences too. It’s been nice, getting reacquainted with Baby Ganesh’s entry into a world of crime. I love him so much, even if he is a little naughty at times.
The Occasional Bookwitch 