To be honest, I’d never visualised Valhalla as being in Shetland. Not even in the northernmost part of those lovely islands. But why not? That is, if Danny Weston’s characters do find it.
And characters there are a lot of, in Postcards from Valhalla. No, maybe not lots. But the ones you get are larger than life type characters. Like the super-annoying Leon that teenager Viggo and his mum meet when travelling to Lerwick where they hope to find Viggo’s older brother Magnus, who has disappeared.
I told myself – through gritted teeth – that Danny put him there, so he’d be useful for something. Maybe Leon would suddenly turn likeable and trustworthy, or he’d be collateral for some ghastly end.
I obviously can’t tell you how this worked out. Suffice to say that the three of them traipse up and down Shetland – which consists of a very long stretch of islands. Jarlshof in the south and Yell and Unst at the opposite end, with Lerwick offering up some civilisation in the middle. And not once did they drive into any ditches. (Cough…)
Magnus turns out to have decided to go looking for Valhalla and Vikings, and possibly also for his and Viggo’s father who disappeared in much the same way five years earlier. Strange stuff happens. There are visions. And cake fridges in the middle of nowhere.
Helen Grant knows how to give you a traditional novel with a bit of a love story. You know, the kind you might have got from Mary Stewart back in the day, featuring a heroine, a man or two, some travelling, some mild peril and suspense. You know things will be fine in the end.
Jump Cut starts very nicely, except perhaps for Theda’s husband Max, who has died. I got vibes of Rebecca. But at least Theda doesn’t wake up inside a coffin, as was the case in Too Near the Dead. Although…
In order to try and forget Max’s death, Theda sets off for Scotland, where she has landed an interview with the very famous actress Mary Arden, 104 years old and a star of films from ninety years ago. Especially The Simulacrum, ‘the most famous lost movie in film history.’ Many have tried, but Theda is the one.
Makes you wonder, doesn’t it?
So here Theda is, in a mansion in Perthshire, away from it all, to find out what happened all those years ago. Are we sure we want to find out?
Admittedly, the price she has to pay for it is to tell Mary Arden all about her own marriage to Max. That’s not too much to ask, is it?
This is very much the kind of story where you have no idea whether the heroine will end up somewhere worse than hell, or if she will be able to walk away from it all, perhaps into the arms of some man.
And I am not going to help you. You can suffer just like I did. Or perhaps you thrive on this kind of thing? Whatever, Jump Cut is perfect. May you be blessed with strong nerves.
Luckily the stories got scarier as I went along. Gulp.
I started with Helen Grant’s, because she gave me this anthology of Dark Academia stories to read. And she’s scary, so I needed to get hers ‘out of the way.’ It’s terribly good, and it’s, well, it’s… well actually, you want to be careful how you go.
After such a beginning, with my heart in my throat, the stories were much more of the pleasant, but dark, kind, taking place in various educational settings. So I decided I quite liked them. You know, without getting too scared.
Towards the end, though, it all got more serious, leaving me in quite a state by the time I had read every story.
One, strangely enough, featured someone I know. I was taken aback to find Daniel Hahn potentially getting up to no good. Is it him? Did he donate money to be put in a book? Did the author pay him? Or is it a weird koinkidink? Whatever, I will now look at Daniel in a different light.
So with Helen Grant putting herself in her tale (I can tell, you know), that’s two friends going academically dark on me.
I thoroughly recommend this anthology, edited by Marie O’Regan and Paul Kane. I can even say that I’d be happy for them to do this kind of thing again. Might approach it without tea and scone next time, however.
‘The actor Terrence Hardiman, who terrified a generation of children in the titular role of the CBBC series The Demon Headmaster in the 1990s, has died aged 86.’ What does the Guardian mean? A generation of children? Yes, I dare say, but what about the parents? I was terrified too. Can’t have been the only one.
We always came home from school and put on the television with our post-educational snack. We usually enjoyed most things that were on. Did we enjoy The Demon Headmaster? I couldn’t say. We survived it.
Actually, I vaguely recall a Blue Peter interview with Terrence Hardiman, where although he still looked like the headmaster, he seemed quite nice. He might even have been a vegetarian. (I don’t know if this is a recommendation, but I took it as such.)
Many years later the Bookwitch read one of the books [by Gillian Cross]. It was set much later, and it sort of explained some of the horrors from the television series.
You’d be tempted to think that made it all right, but in actual fact, it was bloody terrifying. Still. Too. And being a book it didn’t have Terrence Hardiman in it, except in my visual memory of what the Demon Headmaster looked like. Those eyes!
But thank you Terrence, for what you did. It was Very Memorable.
Marcus Sedgwick died this morning. He was far too young to go, and I understand it was unexpected. Many very good books will now not be written.
I have a small bookcase near my bed, with some of my favourite books. There is more than one by Marcus, because you just had to like them.
When I first became aware of him and his writing, I was surprised to learn that he was taking Swedish lessons. I wrote to him to ask. Because that’s the kind of thing I did. And when I looked back on our correspondence today, I discovered that occasionally he wrote to me in Swedish, completely unprompted. (Maneter are jellyfish, and to the English-speaker they sound like man-eaters. This is something Marcus incorporated into an event, or two.)
Eight years ago I interviewed him on the day of his adult book launch for A Love Like Blood. It was a fun, but slightly traumatising, event for me. Mostly because of it happening on the 16th floor, and less because of the blood. But we sort of agreed on roller coasters.
I spent quite a bit of my Bloody Scotland weekend trying to hunt Elly Griffiths down. This entailed looking into bars; a thing I don’t normally do. I wanted her to sign a book, but by the time I had the book, Elly was nowhere to be found.
She was one of the crime writers taking part in Vaseem and Abir’s Red Hot Night of a Million Games. It was a very silly night, but a lot of fun, and it cheered both Daughter and me up. We’ll go next year too if it’s on. Daughter’s favourite was Luca Veste singing Hit Me Baby One More Time. Again. We got to wave our lit-up mobiles in the air and everything. Elly did some good moves with her maracas. Helen Fitzgerald played a convincing corpse on the floor. There was much cheating.
And when all’s said and done, it has very little to do with crime fiction, except that these authors are fun to spend time with.
In Houses From Hell, all I wanted to do was move the furniture on the stage around. Lovely, tartan armchairs, but Helen Grant, Lesley Thomson and Stuart Neville didn’t get to interact enough, because they were not seated in a convenient semi-circle. (Please take note!) Besides that, between you and me, they are quite creepy people. No, that’s not right. They have creepy interests and they put all sorts into their books. Helen even managed to scare her own husband.
When the programme for Bloody Scotland came I wanted to go to so many events. But I know my [lack of] strength, so decided to pace myself, and opted for four, thinking I could add to them later. When the time came, however, four seemed like really quite enough.
After many years of not meeting Martin Edwards in person, there was no way I was going to miss his Cosy Makes a Comeback event. I think of him as a cosy writer. And then he started off by saying he prefers traditional; not cosy. Conveniently enough both the other participants, Jonathan Whitelaw and S J Bennett, as well as the audience, were quick to adapt and the word traditional got a lot of airing. Big audience, too, so I have to say that we are many who like cosy crime. Pardon, traditional.
Hadn’t been sure how the death of the Queen was going to influence the discussion, seeing as S J’s detective actually is the Queen. But she has many plans, and always lets fictional characters do the actual deeds, so this may well continue working. Martin’s excellence at editing [other people’s] vintage crime got a mention, with very many of us being big fans and wanting to know that there will be more from the British Library. He’d initially expected to edit two. There are now over a hundred, so that clearly exceeded expectations.
At the cosy event (sorry!) I said hello to Lizzy Siddal, who I now recognised, and was introduced to her companion Marina Sofia. This turned out to be serendipitous since Marina bore down on me outside the room for the evening event about Detective Duos. We exchanged cards, the way civilised people do, and talked. A lot. For obvious reasons we were able to talk about funny foreigners. Marina is a publisher of translated crime. When Son arrived, in his role as translator of David Lagercrantz’s book, I introduced them, and it turned out they knew about each other already, and a lot more conversation took place.
The Detective Duos event was interesting, and I was pleased to finally come across Ayo Onatade who chaired it. Must have been aware of her for ten years at least. And I had thought it was her I saw down at the Albert Halls the previous night. It obviously was.
One day I’ll have to explain to David Lagercrantz about spoilers. Like not mentioning them too much at events… I liked new-to-me author Ajay Chowdhury, who is a Bloody Scotland-made success, having won a competition to write new crime. Having decided against buying his book before the event on the grounds that it was a hardback, I hurried out afterwards to hand over my money, and still make it to be first in the signing queue.
Simon Mason talked about his two DI R Wilkinses, and if I’d not already read and loved his book, I’d have bought that too. At the end Ayo put them all on the spot, and David agonised at great length before giving up on answering. (In case you want to know what it was about, I’m afraid I can’t remember.) When asked about their personal favourite detective duos, I was very pleased that Ajay chose Nero Wolfe and Archie Goodwin. Haven’t heard those names mentioned in a long time.
I then proceeded to confuse everyone by chatting to Simon and David at more or less the same time at the signing table, about different things in two different languages. I think maybe I won’t do that again. But it was nice to reminisce a little with Simon, and good to introduce myself as the mother of you-know-who to David, who got quite carried away. And he finally got to meet his translator. So I suppose that was all good.
Afterwards Son and Dodo and the Resident IT Consultant went for a beer somewhere. Probably not where I was looking for Elly. Instead I hugged an author and talked about cows with another while I waited outside on the pavement for Daughter to pick me up. It’s quite nice this, finding yourself right next to some favourite writers on the pavement (where many of them go to smoke. But not these two!).
As you may have guessed the cow conversation was with James Oswald, which in turn started Vaseem Khan on the Scots use of the word coo. I worked out later that they might have been on their way to Crime at the Coo. Talked elephants with Vaseem. Obviously. And said what fun we’d had the previous night. Soon after the hug Daughter turned up and she tried to invite him round for chilli. Vaseem turned us down very nicely. But we can try again next year.
So, as I said, you find a lot of authors milling about both in and out of the Golden Lion. And when the ticket table remained unstaffed for rather longer than it should have, Gordon Brown came to the rescue.
If that’s not a tempting – I mean, hellish – title for a Bloody Scotland event, I don’t know what is.
Lesley Thomson is new to me, but I hope she’s as scary as Helen Grant and Stuart Neville, who I imagine will manage to be suitably spooky. Actually, Stuart has generally come across as quite cuddly, so I’d say his The House of Ashes will probably be as blood-curdlingly menacing as befits this event.
Lesley’s The Companion sounds so friendly, and that makes me suspect the worst. She looks like a really sweet person too. But looks can deceive. Besides, looks don’t write novels.
I know this particularly well because Helen Grant has never been anything but kind, in that friendly way she has, but her books..! Her books! Too Near the Dead is pretty borderline as far as the romance of living right next to buried bodies goes. Imagine waking up to find you’re in a coffin. A closed coffin, at that. Not one of my favourite pastimes.
So, if you were to turn up at Bloody Scotland’s Houses From Hell event at six pm this Friday, 16th September, you can decide how you feel about coffins and other haunting aspects of seemingly innocent properties.
In Chris Priestley’s Freeze for Barrington Stoke, he tells the story of four teenagers (are they even that? Perhaps Y7, Y8?) who have had bad dreams the night before. Except they can’t remember what they were about. Maybe they had the same dream?
At school a supply teacher has come to talk about writing creepy stories. And suddenly the ideas seem to just flow, and all four of them agree to talk to the class about their particular, creepy ideas. And what about the strange girl who turns up late?
Maya, the main character, seems to really freak out during each reading, but no one else does.
Scary snowmen, scary ice, scary corpses from the nearby cemetery, and … You get the idea.
And then the four finally realise they did have the same bad dream, and they need to wake up! And, yeah…
Yeah, I know. Book covers don’t necessarily try to get you. But this new novel by Helen Grant, Too Near the Dead, out on July 1st, is a bit, well, you know, disturbing.
It could be you enjoy reading while keeping a firm grip of the seat of your chair. Or not sleeping at night. In which case you have a countdown of 24 days until the day.
I can’t be sure, but I think Tom Palmer might have been sitting on his desk. His fellow author Dan Smith sat next to the requisite bookshelves, and their Barrington Stoke ‘boss’ Ailsa Bathgate had shelves behind her desk.
Thursday evening’s event with Tom and Dan was a comfortable sort of affair, where a few friends sat around chatting about books and writing. It was well worth rearranging dinner plans for.
They talked dogs when Zoom opened its doors. I got the impression that someone had been so smitten by Tom’s dog in D-Day Dog that they had got themselves a dog… Not all dogs are the same and real ones are not like their fictional peers. Tom apologised, saying he didn’t know he was influencing anyone to get a dog. He made it up.
According to Ailsa, Tom has written something like 17 books for Barrington Stoke, while Dan is a relative newcomer with two, and a third on the way. Tom read us the first chapter from Arctic Star, and it was nice to hear his voice again.
Then Dan read from somewhere in the middle of his Beast of Harwood Forest, and as far as I’m concerned I never want to see those creepy dolls’ eyes hanging from the trees. Or was it the dolls that were hanging? Anyway, they had eyes. Dan writes for himself, both the adult and his younger self. He read us a letter he’d sent to his parents from boarding school at the age of seven, when he was very much into ghost stories.
Tom got the idea for Arctic Star from his wife, who used to work on the HMS Belfast. He also felt there’s very little children’s fiction about the navy. To make sure he gets his books right, he ‘tests them on children’ which tickled Dan’s sense of humour. Now that Tom’s own children are older, he sees things differently than when they were small.
He also asked Dan if he ever dissuades fans from buying one of his books if it’s aimed at a much older age. Tom apparently has done this, but maybe because they are about ‘real’ things. Whereas Dan’s books are made up, and children like creepy stuff, ‘being scared in a safe way’.
Dan likes writing dyslexia friendly books. It lets him skip the boring bits, as he put it. Now he finds he shortens his ‘normal’ fiction for another publisher as well. He enjoys reading Barrington Stokes books, too, and has a shelf for them.
Having been a late reader himself, Tom knows the importance of short chapters. His have been known to be one page long. As Dan agreed, children often ask how many chapters a book has, rather than how many pages.
The next books are another one from Dan set in Crooked Oak again, and Tom has plans for a girl in WWII. I can’t wait. While Dan doesn’t worry too much about getting his chapter one right, or so he said, Tom works at getting a James Bond style first chapter to catch the reader’s attention.
For inspiration Dan recommends walking in the woods, smelling it, and preferably being alone. (Not with those dolls’ eyes!) It’s not surprising he likes Stephen King. Tom was more for watching WWII films when he grew up, which he reckons is why he is obsessed with war stories. And he loves the research.
The Occasional Bookwitch 