DIARMID MACARTHUR 1957-2024

Diramid in the Garrick Club visiting Winnie the Pooh

We were extremely saddened by the news that our lovely crime writer, Diarmid MacArthur had died so suddenly. The news was completely unexpected and we were heartbroken to hear it. Our sympathies go to his wife and two daughters.

Diarmid was the first author to join Sparsile who had no previous connection to Lesley or Jim. Introduced by a mutual friend, we first met in the tea room of John Lewis’s in Glasgow’s Buchanan Galleries.

Diarmid, a tall, slim man with a narrow, closely-clipped beard, arrived looking every bit the sinister crime writer. Then he opened his jacket to reveal a Hawaiian shirt, broke into the widest of grins and turned into the loveable teddy bear we came to know and love.

Diarmid impressed us with his writing and the way he loved setting his books in and around his beloved Lochwinnoch, but most of all he impressed us with his love and encyclopaedic knowledge of the works of A. A. Milne. Who knew that the author of Winnie the Pooh also wrote crime novels? Diarmid did. He loved Milne’s clear expressive language, and he used that as a template for the plethora of witty, memorable characters that featured in his DCI McVicar and Barloch series.

Diarmid had just finished the second Barloch book TO FEED THE FIRE, and we were all looking forward to it coming out on September the 24th. Thankfully, the author edits were complete and Stephen Cashmore, our proofer and Jim Campbell, our marketing manager will step in to ensure that the book is completed on time.

We’re very sad that there will not be a third book in the series or a new detective character coming out of Lochwinnoch. But, if there is a writer’s heaven, we’re pretty sure that Diarmid is up there with his celestial word processor, inventing a new genre of angelic crime fiction. If anyone could do it, he could. There are many things we could go on to say about Diarmid, but THE END, will never be one of them.

Interview: Chopin and the art of artificial intelligence

 Sparsile interviewer:

What made you suddenly decide to change the cover for Chris Rush’s novel, Nocturne?

Mercat Design:

Up until recently we have been limited to using stock images to produce the covers.With a very small budget, we had to produce them in the cheapest way possible. But AI changed all that.

Sparsile interviewer:

And when did you decide artificial intelligence was the way to go?

Mercat Design:

We had been toying with the idea for a while, but we only really started using it in earnest after Christmas.

Sparsile interviewer:

So you just ask it for what you want and it produces a brilliant cover?

Mercat Design:

I wish. It’s a bit like asking a blind monkey with no hands and a recent lobotomy to understand what you are looking for.

Sparsile interviewer:

Really?

Mercat Design:

Really. It takes dozens and dozens of iterations to get AI to produce what you want for in detail.

Sparsile interviewer:

Can you explain more?

Mercat Design:

Well, try asking it for a man holding a wooden spoon and it comes back with a man with three arms which look like deformed spoons.

Sparsile interviewer:

Is there an art to talking to it?

Mercat Design:

Being very concise and not asking for too much in any one go. … Also rage.

Sparsile interviewer:

Rage helps with the design?

Mercat Design:

No, but it makes you feel a bit better after it produces a wooden spoon holding a mutant man or a perfectly formed man with a wooden spoon through his torso.

Sparsile interviewer:

So how did you use AI with the Nocturne cover?

Mercat Design:

This was a very interesting case. We had used a portrait of Chopin on our original cover, but it wasn’t the best quality and we were never really happy with it. It suddenly occurred to us to ask AI to produce a more realistic version of the artist. Something that would really pop.

Sparsile interviewer:

And AI came through for you?

Mercat Design:

After about 96 attempts, it came up with the perfect result.

Sparsile interviewer:

But you didn’t use it to produce the whole cover?

Mercat Design:

No. There was a limit to what our nerves could take. The covers still require a great deal of crafting. They look simple but, in fact, it takes hours to produce one to professional standards.

Sparsile interviewer:

So you don’t feel AI will replace you?

Mercat Design:

Not yet at least. It’s a very useful tool. A game changer for a small setup such as ourselves, but it’s not quite ready to take over the world.

Sparsile interviewer:

And what if AI turns evil?

Mercat Design:

It’s already evil. When it gave us a man with wooden spoons coming out his back, like a hedgehog, we began to suspect it was deliberately messing with us!

Visiting places made of bones

The Roman Catholic Church’s morbid fascination with bones knows no bounds. Neither does mine. I’ve looked for and found macabre bony consructs all the way from Prague to Lima and with generous helpings in Italy and France.

For a religion with such a glorious afterlife, with flying cherubim serenading angelically beautiful people whose alabaster skins are warmed by the pure light of God, it somehow can’t seem to forget the rotting flesh and yellowed bones beneath.

The first time I really came across this religious fetish was when I was visiting friends in the Czech Republic. One day we headed out for the Bone Church near Kutna Hora, about 50 km east of Prague.

Prague itself is straight out of a gothic fantasy and it’s easy to imagine golems stumbling clumsily through its medieval streets, arms outstretched and pursued by townsfolk with pitchforks taking a break from burning vampires and witches.

Indeed, some terrible, society-wide horror must have befallen the country in the old days. How else can you explain the food? Whatever apocalyptic event happened must have involved mass starvation for Czech cooking is about stodgy food that fills the stomach quickly and to hell with the taste! I mean unflavoured dumplings that are just boiled flour. What’s that about?

For the sake of balance, I’ll admit that Czech beer is really good. Also, the colossal Hapsburg palaces covering square kilometres of Prague and Vienna and Budapest are in pristine condition, as though they were abandoned only yesterday which, from an historical perspective, they essentially were when the 600-year-old empire vanished almost overnight just one hundred years ago. It’s like visiting ancient Rome except everything is perfectly intact.

The Hapsburgs were a strange bunch as exemplified by their treatment of animals. Leopold I had a penchant for having foxes wrapped up in blankets so a gang of dwarves could beat them to death with sticks. Rudolf II released cheetahs into the streets of Prague. Franz Ferdinand, whose own shooting was the catalyst for World War One and also the dissolution of the Hapsburg empire, is believed to have shot over 300,000 animals in his lifetime. His personal best being 2140 in a single day.

I think I might have shot him myself if I’d had the chance.

Anyway, we set out to the Bone Church leaving the city of Prague and its gingerbread edifices behind. The land around was generally flat, and after a fairly long drive and several wrong turns, even with a Czech speaker on board who could read the signposts, we found a long gentle hill leading up from Kutna Hora town centre. Somewhere up there was the village of Sedlec and its Bone Church.

After driving around a bit, we finally spotted its low double towers. We parked in a street of single storey buildings where I felt many eyes watching us through net curtains.

Entering the church, we passed a little alcove with all sorts of morbid memorabilia for sale. The only light came from a string of low wattage bulbs above wide stone steps leading down into the crypt.

Descending, the first thing I noticed was a white chandelier tipped with skulls where the candles should have been. Long bones hung from the arms of the chandelier like frills. Instead of a suspension from chains, it hung from a wild variety of interlinked bones. For decorative effect around its rim, stacks of sacral bones had been fanned out like feathered plumes.

For an instant, I felt dizzy and leaned back against the wall but instead of plaster felt bone under my hand. A line of skulls hung there, and below each were two crossed long bones like the design on a pirate flag. Jerking myself back upright disturbed the skull and bone motif and it rattled irritably.

The crypt had a tapering pillar that reached only half way to the ceiling. Each of its three sides had a vertical row of skulls, getting bigger as they got nearer the floor.

Looking around more carefully now, I noticed the bunting in the form of paper lanterns strung in many loops across the ceiling and all made from skulls.

Around the walls, streamers of arm bones hung like curtain pelmets.

So distracting were all these ghoulish decorations, that when I finally saw the four huge pyramids of skulls, it came as a surprise. Standing in each corner of the crypt, they were about four metres high with each layer of skulls resting on cross braces of countless thigh bones.

Getting closer to one pyramid, I saw a hole about a third of the way up. Out of this emerged a reddish light. Peering in was like looking into an oven, the sides made of human remains. This must be where the devil did his cooking.

The crypt has the density of ornamentation you would associate with a baroque Bavarian palace except that rather than being constructed from porcelain and mother of pearl and filigree, it’s made from human being.

The story goes that once upon a time this had been just a bog-standard old church that had stood there for centuries.  Then, in the thirteenth century, the King of Bohemia had sent an abbot from Sedlec to the Holy Land. The abbot had returned with holy dust which he sprinkled over the cemetery.

Just the proximity of this holy soil meant people wanted to be buried there. Too many for a single churchyard, so when that got full the older bones were displaced to a basement ossuary to make way for fresher material.

Over the following centuries, the build-up of bones from fifty thousand humans in the basement became something of an embarrassment and the elders were at a loss as to what to do. However, a local carpenter stepped forward and said “I have a great idea”.

The carpenter had an artistic bent and the result is the Bone Church. The place went from strength to strength and eventually even the coat of arms of the local aristocracy was constructed from human remains.

The Basilica of San Francisco in Lima in Peru is another bone-related delight. The catacombs contain deep pits full of the bones of twenty-five thousand skeletons, the top layers are again of skulls and thigh bones arranged in gay geometric designs. The skulls form the rims of a wheel design whilst the thigh bones make up the spokes.

Bones rise out of the plaster of the catacombs like morbid 3D frescoes.

The Capuchin Crypt in Rome is another good one.  In 1631 the Capuchin monks moved to this new location, dragging along 300 cartloads containing the bones of previous monks of the order.  Around 4000 of these skeletons were then used for decorative and architectural purposes.

You’ll find large archways made from skulls and sacrums, thrones draped with what looks like flowing fabric but is actually made from scapula on which lounge strangely underdeveloped skeletons, presumably those of children or late-term foetuses.

Some slightly fresher skeletons with desiccated flesh still adhering are left clothed in monks’ habitats (presumably to prevent shrivelled genitalia being displayed, not a problem with a pure skeleton). These are hung upright, their heads slumped down and their bodies surrounded by arches of sacrums. Next to these are hourglasses, the two funnels meeting at the waisted middle and again all made from human sacrums.

But these bony numbers are very small beer compared to the motherload of six million skeletons in the Paris Catacombs.

The tunnels that contain this ossuary are only part of a large network that connected all the quarries in Paris. Some of these were soon adapted to overcome the problem of too many people over too many centuries dying and being buried in the city. It had got to the point where there was no room left and the whole city was becoming unsanitary with bodies being buried too close to the surface, their fragrant, multi-coloured ichors flowing into wells and the basements of neighbouring houses whenever it rained.

To make space, lower lying corpses long since rotted down to skeletons were exhumed and stored in these subterranean charnel houses. There were so many of these skeletons that it took two years of nightly processions of black shrouded wagons to cart them all to the catacombs. There the bones were dumped higgledy-piggledy. However, under the direction of Louis-Etienne Hericart de Thury, director of Parisian mines back in 1810, these were stacked into patterns to makes hundreds of metres of high, thick walls made only of bones. To liven the place up, certain rooms were set aside for skeletal deformities found during this sepulchral art installation project.

The Catacombs, all 250km of them, have been used by the French Resistance and the Nazis, by the communards (who slaughtered some monarchists there) as well as film makers. Airbnb even managed to secure permission for overnight stays as part of a publicity stunt. They advertised it as the chance to spend the night in the world’s largest grave.

I find it reassuring that I’m not the only weirdo who is fascinated by this kind of thing.

In fact, Parisians have a name for people who secretly break into the catacombs from basements and other tunnels for the sake of performing clandestine rituals or just for a spooky laugh. They’re called cataphiles.

On entering the Catacombs, a sign says Arrete! C’est ici l’empire de la Mort (Stop! This is the empire of Death’).

And it’s not kidding.

You descend twenty metres below Paris and then set out on a 2km walk completely surrounded by bones in a tableau of death. There are electric lights but not many and the darkness is always edging in.

Though there is no smell of actual rot, damp plus bone has a funny odour all of its own.

As my wife and I made our way through, I was surprised to find a defibrillator hung on a column for ready access.

Too little, too late.

After a mind-boggling walk through unfathomable quantities of the symbols of death, I realised we were twenty metres underground and five hundred metres from the nearest exit. Hemmed in by the bones from six million human corpses, two questions occurred to me:

i) what if there was a power failure and we were plunged into absolute darkness?

ii) if this has happened to people before, did any of them ever subsequently graduate from the locked wards of their psychiatric hospitals?

Quite seriously, if I’d been plunged into the dark at that point, I think I really would have gone mad. The tunnels are curved and split in places, looping back into large chambers from which other tunnels branch off. How would you find your way out in the pitch black? All you’d have would be your sense of touch but what would you be touching? As an added bonus, in the total dark your eyes produce their own phantasms to add to any psychic residues from six million dead people.

There would be sounds of course- the sounds of other tourists whimpering and crying and screaming along the two kilometres of stygian tunnels.

I’m sure a merry time would be had by all.

I can see why places made of bones have a function. They remind us of our own mortality but, let’s face it, a cemetery does that just as well but without using visible human remains.  I can’t help coming to the conclusion that these places are macabre just for the sake of it. They’re basically off-colour circus attractions like PT Barnum’s pinheads or four-legged maidens. Except, somehow, they have the sanctity of the Catholic Church behind them.

Visiting these places is our way of flirting with true horror; a quick look then we can once again pretend death doesn’t exist and go back to our safe, comfortable lives.

However illusory those might be.

How Osama Bin Laden cured my irritable bowel syndrome

Everyone has a 9/11 story and this is mine.

I was in the States on a mission to buy an MRI machine and had been examining it at a company in Palo Alto in San Francisco. After that I was due to attend a course on another MRI system in Milwaukee.

This meant I had to change planes in Chicago, something I’d done many times before but for once I thought I would spend a couple of days there before taking the eighty-mile flight up to Milwaukee.

Chicago, the Windy City, lies on the southern shore of Lake Michigan. It’s called windy probably because of the freezing air that blows in off the Lake, though some claim the name comes from the city’s infamous windbag politicians.

Even in September it was starting to get a bit chilly but I spent a pleasant day walking along the Chicago River and going up the Sears Tower (the colloquial name, though actually called the Willis Tower) which was once the tallest building in the US, and indeed the world.

I retired to a crap hotel because I wasn’t on expenses for this layover part of the trip. The room only had a rubbish TV with colours so faded the picture looked almost black and white. Whilst watching this I fell asleep.

I awoke the next morning. The TV was still on and I was startled to see a plane fly into a skyscraper. This was on a local TV news station so I assumed it was showing the Sears Tower as it was the only really tall building around. Pulling back my curtains I saw the tower, still standing pristine in the clear blue air.

Finally, I realised I was watching the towers of the World Trade Centre in New York, one of which I’d been to the top of a few years before.

I kept looking from the TV screen to the Sears Tower. And, over the next hour or so, the Sears Tower once again became the tallest building in the US.

Everything was going to hell in a hand-basket but I was still due in Milwaukee later that day. The airspace across the US was shut down, with all flights to the country being diverted. Passengers on transatlantic flights were finding themselves being dumped down in places far icier than they’d budgeted for.

Perhaps I should have stayed put but I was, as usual, so focussed on the job I felt I still had to get to Milwaukee. The train was the obvious answer but the station nestled right under the Sears Tower. If it was the next target of whoever was doing this, then the station risked being buried under countless tons of rubble.

Stupidly, I grabbed my suitcase and dragged it across the city to the station. I got there just in time for soon the carriages filled with confused commuters sent home early lest the financial buildings in the city came under attack.

Once out of the city, the train whizzed by the McMansions that were just then becoming popular in the wealthy little commuter towns along the lake shore. This was in the days before smart phones so people were using their dumb cell phones to contact their spouses and asking them what the fuck was going on.

Milwaukee is an unremarkable town except for the fact that it was for quite a while the largest centre of brewing in the world. It was the home town of Miller, Pabst and Schlitz and was boosted to prominence when the Great Chicago Fire of 1871 put the kibosh on that city’s brewing industry.

At its height as the Beer Capital of the World, Milwaukee was producing over 30 million barrels of beer a year, almost every drop of which the rest of the world’s beer drinkers regarded as gassy, tasteless piss.

Once the train got me to Milwaukee, and now back on expenses, I stayed at an upmarket hotel a little out of the centre. So upmarket in fact that when the plane of President Bush (the father rather than the son) was forced to land in Milwaukee because of the emergency, this is where his staff put him, though I never even caught a glimpse of the man.

I sat in my room that evening watching the events of the day being endlessly replayed. I was hungry but felt guilty at the thought of going to a restaurant as it seemed almost disrespectful after the terrible thing that had happened.

But I hadn’t eaten at all that day and I really needed something so eventually I left the hotel to look for somewhere to grab something to eat.

Though the hotel was on a major highway surrounded by countryside, there was a little oasis of buildings, two of which were those barn-sized restaurants you often find in the States. I thought they would be closed but this proved untrue. I thought that even if they were open, they would be empty because people would be huddling together at home, too traumatised to eat out.

Wrong again. Both restaurants were heaving and indeed the first was full. The second had a single spare seat so they let me in. This was a sort of sports bar restaurant, again common in the US, with lines of huge TV screens along all four walls, usually showing different sporting events.

But now every single screen from a host of different TV stations was showing the horrors of the day; the planes crashing into the towers again and again like a recurring nightmare you can’t wake from.

Meanwhile a room full of American diners were chowing down in their usual unrestrained way, laughing and joking with each other.

It was bizarre and appalling. The only time the clatter of cutlery on plates and the munching of a couple of hundred or so mouths stopped was when President Bush (the son not the father this time) appeared on the screen to address the nation. The bar staff turned the sound up and everyone listened in respectful silence. When the President was finished, they got back to their meals.

The final straw for me came when the text on the screens first began to intimate that perhaps three hundred firefighters and police had perished when they rushed in to help the survivors, only to have the towers collapse on their heads.

I couldn’t see this have any effect on the customers who kept right on eating.

I’d been picking at my meal but now I abandoned it and left in disgust.

When I tell Americans this nowadays, and I do, they just don’t believe me. Nobody in the world can now doubt the anger this ignited in America, as all the military interventions and drone assassinations in the War on Terror have since shown.

I’ve tried to explain it away to myself. As a Brit who’d lived through many terrorist incidents arising from the problems in Northern Island, I was perhaps more sensitive to such things. That the Americans just weren’t used to terrorism, that perhaps they were somehow conflating what they saw on the TV screens with some cops and robbers TV show.

Or perhaps it was just delayed shock. Maybe it was such a big country that they didn’t quite empathise with people in faraway states (Milwaukee is about 900 miles from New York).

I don’t feel any of these explanations really hold water so I still don’t understand this strangely blunted response to such an unbelievably awful incident.

And US business was kind of like that too. I was visiting one of the biggest firms in the US, and indeed the world. This American company showed the profundity of its grief by holding a minute’s silence for all of its workers.

This was a few days later and during the workers’ lunch break so it was on their time not the company’s.

That was it. Otherwise, it was business as usual.

For this and other reasons I’d had quite enough of the States and wanted to get home. Trouble was, all flights were cancelled. Eventually some restarted so I went to the airport hoping for a ticket but it was chaos. British Airways were literally using a lottery to award people seats. I was lucky enough to win one.

Up to then I’d never been able to sleep while flying back across the Atlantic and couldn’t see how it would be any better this time.

As we were about to depart, the English Captain announced: “I realise you will all be very worried about what has been happening lately. The crew and I have carefully inspected the aircraft and I can assure you that you are all perfectly safe.”

He said this in such a calm and reassuring manner that I leaned back and relaxed, closing my eyes and falling asleep.

And I didn’t open them again until the wheels hit the runway at Heathrow.

The BA Captain earned his corn that day as far as this passenger is concerned.

So how did this cure my irritable bowel syndrome? I’d been plagued with a gnawing pain in my lower abdomen for years. I was pretty sure it was IBS but the doctors seemed to need convincing and subjected me to all sorts of investigations, the choicest of which was having what looked like a six-foot black metal snake wormed up my bottom.

After the blood tests, piss tests, x-rays and the less than gentle caresses of the snake, the doctor looked me in the eye and said: “It’s irritable bowel syndrome, there’s no cure, so you’ll just have to learn to live with it.”

Thanks a bunch!

So, I’d been in the US during the worst ever terrorist incident. I had been stressed to buggery (even without the administrations of the black snake), my diet had gone to pot, I was drinking alcohol like a fish drinks water and I wasn’t exercising.

A perfect recipe for exacerbating my IBS.

The funny thing was, however, that as I came to the end of my nightmarish stay in the US, I realised the pains in my abdomen had completely vanished. I hadn’t even noticed them going away.

I got back to the UK and resumed my running, my healthy diet, and once again stopped drinking like a fish.

And within a couple of weeks the pains came back. I may be no Hercule Poirot, but even I was smart enough to realise that something I did when things were normal was causing my IBS. By a process of elimination, I worked out that the culprit was All Bran, the breakfast cereal. I guess it’s just too fierce for my system.

I stopped eating it altogether, the pains went away again and I haven’t had a twinge in twenty years.

So, Osama Bin Laden really was instrumental in curing my irritable bowel syndrome, though I doubt that was his intention.

Why do we read?

Stories have been told since time immemorial. Some detailing real events, some ‘made up.’ In the beginning was the campfire, with oral tales told by elders. Then came written stories on clay tablets, papyrus and finally, books. It was a way to learn. About past lessons, about relationships, about advantageous behaviours that benefitted individuals and communities, and about the  consequences of social wrongdoing. Stories are more effective, less threatening than lectures on ‘How to’ or ‘How not to’ live. Stories can entertain, amuse,  and thrill. They offer escape. They are good for us. There is academic research that proves so.  

They reduce stress, a bonus needed more than ever in our rapidly changing world of political and ecological challenge. Science shows that reading fiction de-stresses, lowers BP and heart rates and has found evidence that reading two and a half hours a week can lengthen your life by two years. It’s thought this is because it ‘exercises’ large areas of your brain:  you live in written stories, imagination is necessary. TV or film stories are less beneficial, more passive experiences.  Actual physical books are also known to be better than electronic device stories in aiding sleep – and in being able to retain what you’ve read.

Crime stories in particular, have been popular since Edgar Allan Poe’s iconic Murder in the Rue Morgue in 1840. In 2020 Amazon sold almost $750 million dollars’ worth of crime, second only to Romance at $140. In the UK in 2018 at the London Book Fair, Neilsen showed crime book sales were overtaking romance in the UK - up almost 20% in 3 years. Women buy it most- especially true crime. It is also booming. It seems we can’t get enough of the details of how actual crimes were committed and how criminals were caught. And books by pathologists and forensic scientists like When the Dogs Don’t Bark by Prof Angela Gallop and All That Remains by Dame Sue Black were both best sellers. As much as 65% of the purchasers of true crime are women. Why the gender difference? No one yet knows…

But there’s been lots of research at universities here and across the Pond about why readers love Crime books. Theorists list several factors.

Puzzles. We like a puzzle, love guessing to find the truth (especially if proved right!)

Good Overcoming Evil. We love this, relish a villain’s comeuppance and justice being done.

Series. These are particularly popular. Seems readers like to repeatedly read the same characters solving crimes, often in the same atmospheric setting as previous books. While often denigrated as less worthy by critics and reviewers, formulaic series are in demand. In a bewildering world of thousands of titles, we do like a sort of guarantee of what we are getting.

Death. We are all fascinated apparently, by death. It can be considered a human obsession. Anthropological studies suggest we’ve always been drawn to blood/injury/deaths of necessity in order to understand what’s happened and how we can avoid it. Think how executions always drew crowds!

Authors have had their own ideas as to why crime literature is so popular.

PD James thinks we like analysing psychological subtleties and ambiguous morals. (I do…)

HRF Keating suggests crime books win by putting readers first: crime books entertain and are accessible. I agree. Like Caesar salad, literary books have their place in the scheme of things,  but like fish and chips, sometimes you just want a treat that doesn’t make you feel smug or think too much.

But why is crime so critically denigrated? I’ve heard Iain Rankin say he hates his ‘crime writer’ label. Some have suggested ‘running down’ the genre is akin to literary snobbery. The shortlists of the big prizes rarely feature crime stories, rather preferring titles showing innovation, inclusivity or stretching the novel form. Personally, I’ve found many prize-winning novels are a bit weird (sorry), replete with over analysis of thought and emotion and philosophising that stretches on for pages without any particular action. Might be clever, but personally, I have to be in the mood. If I want to relax and just be distracted from the stress of everyday life, Anne Tyler’s six page analysis of one conversation where nothing actually happens doesn’t do I for me.

But there is a complexity to crime novels if you analyse them. They are not all the same. For the crime novel has many forms, sub-genres. There’s the straight detective novel. They in turn can take different forms, starring say a drunken sot, a priest or a nosy old lady. Then there are Police Procedurals, with action based largely within police departments, though the formidable screenwriter Jed Mercurio (Line of Duty) says most portray quite a false picture of police methods which has perpetuated itself into a trope all of its own. Dramatic licence, I suppose. There’s Cosy Crime like MC Beaton, kind of crime for the squeamish as the gory details happen, so to speak, ‘off screen.’ Or try a  Serial Killer novel. Serial murderers can be classified by their  motives: thrill, power, elimination of victim for whatever deluded reason they imagine, or the psychotic visionary who justifies his/her actions. As I didn’t know this when I wrote Not The Deaths Imagined, I had a villain who was, in fact, a bit of all four.

One listed genre that puzzles me is Thriller/Mystery. How do you know when a mystery becomes a thriller- what degree of threat must you have? What criteria are used to decide want is thrilling? Tartan or Scandi Noir is easier, and a reminder that  setting can be  a character too.

So, modern crime writing has many forms. It’s history is a fascinating story in itself.  In Victorian times we had Gothic tales of murder, in the early twentieth century we had the  hard boiled macho action of  Dashiel Hammet, the thoughtful Raymond Chandler and the scientific Conan Doyle before an international element crept in with Alistair McLean and John Buchan. Today you have a vast choice of Scots crime from William  McIlvanney onwards - and multiple gripping screen versions to watch if you don’t necessarily, want to lengthen your life. For further reading see Tartan Noir, Len Wanner’s masterly treatise on Scottish Crime Fiction.

Finally, if you want to write crime, it seems you need an empathic hero, strong females nowadays (some romance is fine), lots of puzzles/red herrings, a decent detective back story (not just the worn trope of a troubled home life) and a satisfying end. Good  must triumph over Evil, however unfashionable it is in Creative Writing Classes where the literary trend is to leave an ambiguous end.

But one man’s meat is another’s poison (or dagger or gun or cliff to be pushed off). I read what I like!

The Ward 8 Book Club

by
Diarmid MacArthur

I often say that one of the best bits of fiction you will ever read is at the start of a novel - “all characters are fictitious and bear no resemblance to anyone, living or dead…!”

Aye, right.!

This blog is coming to you from Ward 8 at Paisley’s Royal Alexandra Hospital. It’s a rather inglorious story which I won’t bore you with. However, I am sharing a room with a bunch of guys about whom I could easily write a fascinating narrative!

The wee Paisley buddy with the pony tail, the tattoos, the tales of being beaten up, awaiting a triple bypass 

The big Irish ex-soldier, with a strong opinion on everything and who vapes out of the open window. 

The cheery wee guy who curses & swears as, with a smile, he sets the world to rights 

The bespectacled and slightly more respectable guy, brought in by helicopter, a good foil to the others. 

Yet, from their extensive (and disturbingly loud) conversations, one thing unites them. 

A passion for reading!

I was amazed as they rhymed off authors and books - fiction, fantasy, sci-fi…it was astonishing and, in fact, rather put me to shame as I don’t believe I’m nearly as well read as any of them are!

I do sometimes think, now that I’m a crime author myself, I find it more difficult to read other authors’ crime novels. After all, if I think they’re better than mine, I feel dispirited. If I think they’re worse than mine, I feel resentful! (Or is that just my ego, which my wife says is the size of a small planet? Personally, I think it’s just the size of a moon…)

Hopefully I’ll be out soon, my ailments capably cured by our wonderful NHS. And, whilst my current and next books are set in 1959/1960 Lochwinnoch (Barloch), I’m already planning another 

“The ward 8 book club”

“All characters are, of course, fictitious, etc…”

Anne Pettigrew talks about cosy crime.

Not the Life Imagined

1) You have written for The Herald and the medical press, so writing is not new to you. When

did you decide to make the leap into writing books?

I had written pieces of short fiction for fun but in retirement decided I finally had time for a novel. Finding there were few books about women in medicine except as pioneers or pathologists, I decided that my experience as a female medic from the seventies might provide  an interesting and unusual basis for a couple of novels.

2) Did you always want to write about cosy crime, and could you explain for our readers the

difference between cosy crime and other crime novels?

Like most embryo writers, my plan was to write a ‘literary’ novel of  merit ‘exposing the prejudice and misogyny suffered by female medics.’ Instead, unbidden, crimes crept into my writing, albeit ones with specific links to the medical ethics of trust, sexual propriety and duty of care. After winning the Spotlight Award from Bloody Scotland in 2019, I accepted the crime epithet. I always say we should remember not all crimes are murder (though my second book has plenty of those!) I think ‘Cosy Crime’ is a bit vague, but basically it’s a novel lacking the gore of Gerritson or the police procedural detail of  Rankin. Instead, ordinary people are caught up in extraordinary circumstances facing dilemmas and criminals. Humour and humanity are to the fore. Cosy Crime is entertainment, a book to be enjoyed with a glass of wine and a box of chocolates: no horror, some humour and a puzzle or two to keep you guessing.

3) As your profession is a doctor, this must have been a great help in researching your books?

Couldn’t have written them without my medical training!  Many of the incidents in the novels came from personal recall or from ex-classmates. The GMC tribunal scenes, for example, are accurate due to a friend who reached its lofty ranks- not from any appearance by my good self as a miscreant!   

4) Do you think you will continue writing about the N.H.S. or do you think you might try

something new?

There is much mileage still in NHS stories, but I do have other projects in mind. One is set in WW2 Cheshire. Gamekeeper’s daughter Emily attains riches and a South African diamond mine by the age of 30, but her path to advancement is no Catherine Cookson misery memoir. Cunning beyond belief, she will use any means to advance. (The psychology of successful murderers fascinates me!)

5) Any new book coming up that you might like to give us a sneak preview?

Ah, my lips are sealed.. . But I can reveal my 2024 cosy crime book explores the differences between medicine in the UK and the USA, apt at a time when our own free health service is deteriorating.  Two Glasgow University girls, Mhairi and Laura, spend summer 1971 in New Jersey. Apart from being flummoxed by cultural and language difficulties and distracted by wildly socialising with fellow  students (all male) they become embroiled in a web of malpractice, deceit and exploitation of poor patients. I was there myself in 1970, but I won’t be revealing which events are based on fact… Research has put me back in touch with old classmates who left our shores to make their fortunes overseas. A very different world to the NHS.

6) Who are some of your favourite authors?

An eclectic mix: serious stories for dark nights, frivolous delights for planes.

Novelists? Christopher Brookmyre (aka Ambrose Parry), wildly witty. Steig Larsson, master storyteller with big themes.  Joanne Harris, a synaesthete and it shows. Philippa Gregory for historical women. Stella Rimington and John Le Carre for espionage, Peter May, for page turning. Sebastian Faulks, great women characters. Andrea Camilleri for crazy Italian tales laced with sun, food and wine.

Biographies? The Moon’s a Balloon, David Niven. Becoming, Michelle Obama

Non-fiction? Guns, Germs and Steel by US professor Jared Diamond, an eye-opening read.

Two unsung novelists of the past? Taylor Caldwell, Dear and Glorious Physician (St Luke) and The Arm and The Darkness (Cardinal Richelieu) etc, rich, well-researched atmospheric novels. And John Verney, fifties author and gifted illustrator of prescient kid’s books with environmental themes like Friday’s Tunnel.

7) Do you plan each step of the writing process before you start or do you let the story “take

control” and follow its own path?

I’m largely a ‘pantser’ but do start with the setting (preferably somewhere I know well),  detailed biopics of  a few main characters, a couple of themes, and three central plots. Then it all falls apart when  the characters do ridiculous things like falling in love with one another, murdering a character I like before I’m ready or stupidly getting involved in hit and run (current WIP!)!

8) What is the best part about being an author?

Creating characters, worlds and settings to entertain readers. It’s fun for us too!

9) What important advice would you give to other authors?

Everyone has their own journey, but perhaps read Stephen King’s ‘On Writing’ and then just start. Taking classes at Uni or college and joining a Writers Group can be unbelievably helpful.

10) What do you hope readers will take away from this book?

Scotland didn’t swing in the Sixties. Discrimination against women and gay men was rife.

You need dedication to become a doctor. But sadly, you can’t trust them all …

THE BARD BLOGS ON

Hamlet opens with a question: ‘Who’s there?’ – which appears to invite various answers: a nervous sentry? A ghost? God? Or nobody and nothing, a universe empty of meaning? And moves on to the most famous question of all time: ‘To be or not to be’. And it’s not even clear what Hamlet himself means by that question; murder? revenge? suicide? playing a part? acting out a role on the stage of life? Unlike the empty universe, it’s a crowded stage, especially in Hamlet.

In a very different play – another time, another place – Sean O’Casey’s Juno and the Paycock, Captain Boyle reminisces to the chorus of his old buddy Joxer Daly: ‘An’ as it blowed an’ blowed, I ofen looked up at the sky, an’ assed meself the question – what is the stars, what is the stars?’ And Joxer drawls on: ‘Aw, ‘tis a darlin question, a daarlin question’. But neither of the two provides an answer to it.

Hamlet does. In a play crammed with questions without answers, he tells us exactly what the stars are: ‘a foul and pestilent congregation of vapours’. But that of course is only how he sees them in his weakened state of mental depression, or as they called it then, his melancholia. And as he happens to be talking to a couple of spies pretending to be friends, what he says may not reflect what he really feels but is part of his antic disposition. Alternatively his whole mad act may not be an act at all but the real thing, and the entire case breaks wide open.

So: what then are his real feelings for Ophelia? Does he have any? For his mother? For his father? Did Oedipus or Orestes get in the way? Or did he simply resent this warrior father who spent his time on campaigns, and who was known to have a temper? Horatio recalls how it showed itself when he broke up a summit meeting, got out his axe instead and started splitting skulls. ‘He smote the sledded Polacks on the ice’. Horatio saw it coming when he saw the frown.

What sort of a father was he really? Interestingly young Hamlet had no siblings – unusual in an age when kings bred prodigiously as well as scattering their maker’s image through the land – and the lone son was hardly cast in the same heroic mould. There’s fear there, not just love, and he imagines the king as more of an icon than a parent of flesh and blood, and a ghost-father rather than a real one. Maybe he was always more of a ghost than a loved and loving dad.

Love. Hamlet comes close to saying that he loves his friend Horatio – but the truth is that the most loving words he utters are spoken to the skull of a dead jester. ‘He hath borne me on his back a thousand times’. No piggy-backs from dad, then? Instead, ‘here hung those lips that I have kissed I know not how oft’. The lips of the court comedian. He made him laugh. But there’s never a hint of laughter in the old king’s repertoire. He wasn’t a fun dad. I said in my first blog that I’d had a difficult relationship with my own father, sometimes an absent father, mostly too close for comfort. It started me thinking about Hamlet’s filial feelings, and about whether he ever really loved anybody. He doesn’t even appear to love himself. The play may not offer answers but it does open up avenues for us into the questions of our relationships with our own parents.

Questions. The critic Harry Levin wrote a book entitled The Question of Hamlet. It was actually published in 1959, the year of my Shakespeare epiphany, when I first saw the film of Hamlet. Soon afterwards as an undergraduate I read Jacob Bronowski’s The Identity of Man, and although it’s not about Hamlet it has for me a huge bearing on it. Literature, Bronowski points out, is full of questions. Not answers – questions. O, what can ail thee, knight-at-arms? Who is Sylvia? What is she? O wha will shoe my bonny foot? Canst thou not minister to a mind diseased? And far from knowing the answers, we can’t even be sure of the meaning of the questions. What’s up exactly with this wandering knight? What’s the Sylvia mystery? What sort of cobbler does this naked-footed woman need? And how can a doctor cure mental illness?

The whole point of it is that the questions of literature are not so much rhetorical as unanswerable. They are perpetually open questions because the human dilemma is perpetually unresolved. Sometimes it’s not the form of the question that’s a surprise but its being a question at all. To be or not to be. Oh – never thought about it, at least not quite in that way. And yet it was Albert Camus who said that it was the most philosophical question of them all: to be or not to be. In other words, if you care to place that interpretation on it, is life worth living? By and even before the end of the play, Hamlet has decided no.

So what does Hamlet offer us then? What does literature offer us if not answers? What we are offered instead is an experience, at the end of which we don’t consider that one line of action has been proved right and another wrong. There is simply the eternal dilemma, in which we learn to be more human by identifying ourselves with others and finding their dilemmas in our own, and ours in theirs. What we may take away from Hamlet, for example, may be a little more self-knowledge, or at least self-awareness. That makes us more human. And this would be my definition of literature, indeed of all art. It provides us with an experience which makes us more human than we were before: before we read the book, heard the music, saw the painting or the play.

And what about the question of Ophelia? When I was a schoolboy and into Hamlet, I read a critic who described her as ‘a doll without intellect’. Even sixty years ago I resented that male-slanted simplistic slur. It made me think of all the women of past ages who were also supposedly dolls without intellect because that is what their lovers or husbands or parents or cultures wanted them to be. And the more I studied Hamlet, the more I thought: that’s what he wanted her to be, and that’s all he wanted her to be – it’s how he saw her. To him she wasn’t a real person, she was either a nun-figure or a whore-figure – he calls her both. He wasn’t much interested in the human reality that lay in between – or even in between her legs, in spite of his talk of ‘cuntrie matters’. Why? Because ultimately he was only really interested in himself. Even when the players came in he had to take over, give a big speech, tell them off for how they were acting, show them how it should be done.

A little harsh? Come on, I can hear you say, you’ve banged on about the human dilemma, and this poor guy was plunged into one hell of a dilemma. Right you are. Even so, I’d begun to doubt if Hamlet ever really loved her. So I thought: well, I’m going to make somebody love her, and it’s going to be Horatio, the one man in the play with no axe to grind – talking of axe-grinding ghosts, and sons who are haunted by them.

And I also thought that finally I’m going to make her see through everybody, and give her the words to express it, because in comparison with many other of Shakespeare’ spirited females, she’s been badly let down. Compare her with Juliet, Beatrice, Portia, Jessica, Hermia, Helena, Hippolyta, Rosalind, Viola, Olivia, Desdemona, Cleopatra, Lady Macbeth, Goneril, Regan, and Katherine the Shrew. They all say what they think, and they let their fathers, husbands, lovers and friends know about it. Ophelia is a nonentity by comparison, and only comes into her own when she goes out of her mind and all the usual social restraints on her are relaxed, or dissolved, and then to an extent she is allowed to speak her mind about men, for example, and how they behave towards women. And about sex. Anyway, I decided I wanted to give Ophelia a voice, and I’ve done it, letting, I would argue, the real Ophelia come out on stage. The hidden Ophelia comes out into the open, the repressed Ophelia emerges – and sings about bedstuff and cock, and lectures everybody on the symbolic meanings of herbs and flowers, - including, in her death-scene, long purples, phallic-shaped flowers complete with testicles, the purple orchid whose roots bear some resemblance to the most secretive part of the male anatomy – except  perhaps on ‘Naked Attraction’.

Enough for now. And enough from me. In my next blog I’ll let the real Bard have his say about Hamlet – which he does in my 2007 Shakespearean novel, WILL.

Christopher Rush

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LETTERS FROM ELSINORE

So now I’ve written a novelisation of Hamlet. Two questions arise: why? And when? The truth is that the questions are almost inseparable. But here goes. 

Picture if you will another Will - Will Shakespeare - stepping into the green room of the Globe Theatre with a manuscript clutched in his quill-stained fingers and saying to his partners, Ernie Wise style, ‘I’d like you to look at this play what I wrote.’  

And what would they have seen? A revenge tragedy. ‘Ah yes, the old Senecan stuff. Gorboduc had a good go at that - must have been forty years ago. And The Spanish Tragedy was a big-hitter, if a bit sensational and over the top. Kept the groundlings happy but not the critics. What’s so different about this ‘ere ‘amlet?’

What indeed? And one answer is that the revenger not only doesn’t take his revenge but seems innately unable to do so until, at the end of the longest play Shakespeare ever wrote, he does so almost as a reflex action, and because he’s nothing left to lose. In this sense it’s the most famous example of inaction in all of world drama. 

And yet on the other hand, it’s full of it – action. There’s adultery, incest, fratricide, regicide: nine fatalities in all, five by poison, applied in three different ways; death by duelling, execution, stabbing and drowning. There’s murder and suicide and pirates, there’s a sea-fight, a fight in a grave a stand-up comic’s skull, and a ghost that keeps popping up. On top of that there’s a travelling circus, a play within a play, raging speeches, breakdowns, tears behind the smiles, gags galore, an Oedipus Complex, an Orestes Complex, and some ‘cuntrie matters’, if you’ll excuse Hamlet’s French. And that’s just for starters, what with a war going on, and twenty thousand men going to their graves like beds, and fighting over a patch of land so small it won’t even be big enough to bury the casualties. And why? Because honour’s at the stake. It’s a play about principle. That suit you then? 

You betcha. James Bond doesn’t even have a look-in.  It suited the Globe guys down to the ground – and groundlings – and in or around the year 1600 Hamlet turned out to be a palpable hit and has been hitting the stage ever since, not to mention the big silver screen.

And yet and yet again – it’s been said by more than one writer that ever since it was written, Hamlet seems as if it’s trying to be a novel. And that’s one answer to the question of why I decided to do what the Bard would undoubtedly have done had he been writing today and not four and a half centuries ago, based on the principle that the choice and master spirits of any age are always attracted by the prevailing genre of their age, today being the age of the novel. Sadly I am not the Bard. But at least he gave me one hell of a start. 

This takes us to the ‘when’ question – and what brought me to penning my own novel version of Hamlet: ‘novel’, I hope, in both senses of the word. 

The impulse goes back to 1959, late in the year, when I had just turned 15, and had also just failed all of my end-of-term school exams, and was feeling pretty glum, mainly because I knew I had let my mother down. Her people were all fishermen in the east coast fishing village of St Monans, where I was born and bred, and she’d met my father when he was in the navy, so there was a strong chance I might follow in the family footsteps and go to sea.

My mother had other ideas. She wanted me to excel academically, and she was so delighted when I passed the Eleven-Plus exam, enabling me to follow an academic course at secondary school. But after three years and more it was obvious I was not making the grade. Why? I wasn’t applying myself, there were problems at home, to do with my father, and I think ultimately I was demoralised and just gave up. 

That, as I say, was at the end of 1959, when I entered my sixteenth year. Five years earlier in 1954 a twelve-inch black-and-white Bush television set had been wheeled in all its majesty into our living-room. 

It was switched on that night in 1959, and I happened to be sitting glumly in front of it, not watching it, but contemplating a life at sea, starting the next day, when suddenly a voice-over came on, announcing, ‘This is the tragedy - of a man- who could not make up his mind.’ It was the 1948 Laurence Olivier film of Hamlet. And I watched it. And I was riveted. Transfixed. I don’t think I’d even heard of Hamlet. I was pretty ignorant. We’d done a couple of Shakespeare plays at school – Twelfth Night and A Midsummer Night’s Dream, which I didn’t understand much and didn’t find remotely interesting. Yet here was perhaps the most complex and deeply-thought provoking play of all time. And it hit me like a double ton of bricks. I was smashed sideways. My life changed in those ninety minutes. 

Why? Maybe the time had come. There is a tide in the affairs of men/Which taken at the flood leads on to fortune./Omitted, all the voyage of their life/Is bound in shallows and in miseries. The time was right. Or I was right for it. My hour had come. Whatever. But all I know is that I suddenly grew up. On the spot. 

Of course still you look into the thing for reasons. There’s the famous scene, for example, in which Hamlet speaks the 4th soliloquy. ‘To be or not to be’, and in that 1948 film Olivier’s brooding face is seen contemplating what Shakespeare calls ‘a sea of troubles.’

It’s a metaphor, of course, for all life’s worries, but it resonated with me because we lived so close to the sea – it literally splashed our doorsteps – and because of the family troubles to do with my father. I used to go out on my own a lot as a child and walk along the lonely sea-shore projecting my own troubles onto the sea, or seeing them in the sea’s troubled face. It’s an illusion, of course, what scholars call ‘the pathetic fallacy’, where nature apparently reflects human feelings and situations. It doesn't. The sea isn’t troubled because the sea isn’t sentient, even if it often appears to be angry or calm or whatever. It’s you who are troubled, and if you have troubles you project them onto the sea. As I did. And so that night I was hooked. I was Hamlet. Or I knew, or felt I knew, what it felt like to be Hamlet. 

Just as the film finished my mother came in from her night’s work. And I said, ‘Mum, I don’t want to go to sea. I want to repeat my 4th Form, make up for my failure, and stay on at school and take my Certificate Exams.’  She was hesitant, for obvious reasons. My track record was against me. Apart from which at that point in our lives she was a single mum, a single earner, my father having been banished back down to Middlesbrough, his home-town. And we didn’t have much cash to spare. But I assured her that her boy could do better. And would do better. And wouldn’t let her down again. And the boy did do better, at school university, as a schoolmaster, and as a writer. 

And that’s one answer, I suppose, as to why 65 years later, I wrote my own version of the Hamlet story. 

Anything else? Any more immediate trigger? There was one – not so much a trigger as a blank shot. Three years ago a book came out called Hamnet, by an author called Maggie O’ Farrell. The names Hamnet and Hamlet were interchangeable in Shakespeare’s day, and the Bard had sadly lost his eleven-year-old son Hamnet, the twin brother of Judith. I pounced eagerly on the book, as I always do on any new Shakespearean publication. I was hoping to learn more about the playwright and about his son, the circumstances of whose death we know nothing about. I even wrote enthusiastically to the author. She never replied. Her agent said she was too busy with her next book. I wondered what it must be like to have an agent.

In the end however, in spite of the hype and ballyhoo surrounding the book, I felt let down. I had learned nothing new. What I did learn about was how mystically wonderfully wise women are. But I knew that already. I was married to one who died tragically young. And I am married to another. Women are wonderful. And should rule the world – if not their husbands! But what about poor old Shakespeare? And Hamnet/Hamlet? It was just a few years after his son’s death that the play bearing his name was first put on at the Globe. The drama is a kind of counter-reality to the death that had clearly affected him so much, and which I’d already written about in my novel Will. 

And there was one other thing. When Shakespeare was sixteen, a young girl called Katherine Hamlet was drowned in the Avon, whose treacherous currents took lives every year. Accident? Suicide? Was she pregnant? Let down by a lover? An inquest was held. The verdict was merciful – otherwise she’d have been buried in unconsecrated ground. She’d slipped and fallen in, they said. But the doubt had been there. And that doubt – and the girl’s name, like the dead son’s, found its way into the play, and into Ophelia’s watery willowy death. Shakespeare was fascinated by drowning, and by the sea’s imagined magical power to give up its dead and restore them to life, to bring twins together again, reunite brother and sister, such as Viola and the supposedly drowned Sebastian, of Twelfth night, written soon after Hamlet. 

Things were on Shakespeare’s mind. And on mine. Disappointment can lead to action. I couldn’t bring Hamnet back from the dead, as his father had done in his plays, and the latest book had done its best, but I could resurrect Ophelia - so I mused – give her the voice she never had in the play, where she is silenced, and sexually subjugated. It was time to unlock her from that grim, flinty farthingale, and those cruel corsets, and let her say what she had wanted to do with Hamlet, to tear their pleasures with rough strife – through the iron gates of life. She couldn’t, not in the play. The prince was on another planet. 

And so things came together. I’d published my first book forty years ago. I’d waited long enough. And Ophelia had waited four hundred years. And more. I took up my pen and wrote Letters From Elsinore. 

Christopher Rush

Interview with Willie Orr talking about his novel, Shiaba

1)  You graduated in Scottish History, was this a great help when researching your book?

 Invaluable. After graduating, I worked for Tom Devine on ‘The Great Highland Famine.’ In the course of the research in the Duke of Argyll’s archive, I discovered the letters and petition of the Shiaba people. This inspired a play written for Argyll Youth Theatre about Shiaba and that led to the book. It is a challenge to loosen the rigorous discipline of history and launch into creative writing.

2)  Are any of the locations in the book based on your time as a shepherd in the West Highlands?

 Yes. When I worked as a shepherd on Mull, I gathered sheep through the ruins of Shiaba and had my own croft at Saorphin just across from the township. Had I not known Shiaba, the letters in the Duke’s archive would not have meant so much. I know the Ross of Mull and Iona well. having lived and worked in both.

3) When you discovered the documents on Shiaba, while working on Sir Tom Devine’s “The      Great Highland Famine”, was this the point when you decided to write about the Scottish     potato famine or had it been a subject you had been interested in for some time? The discovery of the documents was moving experience, particularly the petition signed by old Neil MacDonald with his mark, and this inspired the play.

4)  You have had a varied career e.g. a shepherd, graduating from university and also teaching History at Oban High School, when did you decide to become an author?

 After graduating, I published my Masters as ‘Deer Forests, Landlords and Crofters’ but found I was drawn to creative writing and, while teaching, started writing short stories, several of which were published. At the same time  I was writing a column in the Scotsman and published a few review articles with the paper. Although I was writing, I never considered myself to be an author. It was not till I retired that I found time to embark on a novel. The first one, a novel on slavery, is still imprisoned in a memory stick, but the second was published as ‘Mick’, the story of a cruelly fostered boy, and Birlinn published ‘The Shepherd and the Morning Star’, a biography/autobiography.

5)  Will you be writing any more books on Scottish history, or will you be trying something new?

 I have just completed a novel set in Jamaica and London in the 18th century and am punting it round agents and publishers.

6)  Who are some of your favourite authors?

 Usually the ones I have just read. Colm McCann, Sara Collins, Delia Owens, Andrei Makine, Colm Toibin, William Trevor, Lisa McInerney.

7)   Do you plan each step of the writing process before you start or                do you let the story “take control” and follow its own path?

I start with a vague plan but often the plot alters radically as I proceed and often descends into complete anarchy. 

8) What is the best part about being an author?

I don’t think of myself as an author – a story teller, perhaps. It’s a wonderful experience to be able to create a character, to see them in your head, to hear them speak, to mourn when they die. I was moved when Catherine was left alone above the ruins of Shiaba but the words to express her grief (and mine) were never perfect. Maybe that’s the best part – searching for the words to express the emotions, chasing after an elusive perfection, a phantasm.

9)            What important advice would you give to other authors?
Never give up !

10)         What do you hope readers will take away from this book?
An insight into the lives of the people of the Ross during the Great Famine, the injustice of the system that favoured the rich above the poor and the strength and resilience of the women.

Interview with Christopher Rush talking about Letters from Elsinore

Letters from Elsinore

1) Your book is carrying on from the end of Shakespeare’s Hamlet. Was this a daunting prospect?

Yes and no. To dare to slip into Shakespeare’s shoes - what an act of audacity and hubris! But Hamlet is such a huge sea of troubles, there’s room for all of us to swim in it.

2) Have you always been fascinated with Shakespeare?

Since I was 15. I had failed all my exams and was about to leave school and go to sea. Then Olivier’s film of Hamlet came on our 12-inch black and white TV set. And the world changed.

3) Is Hamlet your favourite Shakespeare play?

Tragedy, comedy, history, psychology, theatre, hope, despair and death - nine deaths! It’s got everything. Coleridge said: “It is WE who are Hamlet.” We’re all in there.

4) Did that play a big part in your decision to write the book?

I taught the play for 30 years, but I think I’ve been waiting to write it since I was 15 - ever since that first film.

 5) What can we expect from you in the future?

More books! I have a few written but unpublished. And two more to follow - on the love-lives of John Donne and Thomas Hardy.

6) Who are some of your favourite authors?

Charles Dickens, Emily Bronte, R.L.S, George Orwell. As poets - Keats, Tennyson, Hardy, Larkin - dozens of others.

 7) Do you plan each step of the writing process before you start or do you let the story “take control” and follow its own path?

I prefer to have a plan, and usually it works out, but in the process the pen is sometimes mightier than the plan, and I try not to get in the way.

8) What is the best part about being an author?

Living in another world. Somebody once said that you only live twice. As an author you climb inside all sorts of skins, and you sit at the desk and live lots of lives. It can feel almost godlike - apart from the long hours!

9) What important advice would you give to other authors?

Don’t wait for inspiration. Tchaikovsky once said that inspiration does not come to the lazy. Keep at it. Writing is a craft.

10) What do you hope readers will take away from this book?

That there is no one simple truth. Shakespeare doesn’t try to teach you any lessons, other than that life is a complex business. There is a suspension of judgement about people, especially in Hamlet. I hope readers will come away from it knowing more about Hamlet than they did before, but also knowing that they will never know enough.

Proofreading and editing: what are the differences?

By Stephen Cashmore

You have finished your latest book, which for the purposes of this discussion we will say is a novel called Masterpiece – because of course, that’s what it is. We have all been there. Just as soon as you finish writing your book, or short story or whatever, you are perfectly sure that it is the best thing that has ever been written by anyone. Anywhere. Fact. Every word is perfectly judged; every sentence is perfectly weighted; the plot is supreme and the characters just leap off the page into life. You have read through Masterpiece a couple of times and corrected a handful of typos, but now you are sure that it is perfect.

Been there, done that, there ought to be a T-shirt.

Still, you remember hearing that at this stage every serious writer puts their work into a drawer for a while – for months, if they can stand the wait – to let the initial adrenaline-fuelled excitement of having finished die down a little. Perhaps even give the book to a beta reader, or a friend who you know will give an honest opinion, to get some early feedback on this brilliant book you have created. You are sure they will sing its praises, but still: better safe than sorry.

Two months later you retrieve Masterpiece from the folder on your PC where you temporarily archived it and happily start to read it again. You find a couple of grammatical mistakes in the first few pages. Ah well, minor stuff. The name of one of the characters mysteriously changes on page fifty. Oops; still, Find and Replace will correct that easily enough. You notice that another character is always talking ‘sullenly’ or ‘grumpily’ or ‘sulkily’ and it begins to grate on your nerves. Damn, you really ought to change or, better still, delete some of these.

Your PC makes a pinging noise and an email appears from your friend or beta reader. Dear You, it begins. Sorry for the delay, but I found it quite hard to finish your book. I quite liked the overall premise, but

You stop reading at this point. Sentences of the form ‘I quite liked this, but’ always went on to give chapter and verse to explain why the reader didn’t, in fact, like it. And you can see that this email goes on for quite a way. You might even have to scroll down to read it all, so it’s an unusually long email. Of course, one person’s view doesn’t necessarily mean much, but you are beginning to feel decidedly uneasy. Better get back to reading Masterpiece.

You start to notice a superfluity of other adverbs, many of them repeating. In fact, in at least three instances you notice that the dialogue itself is a repeat from a chapter or so ago. A lot happens in chapters eight and nine, but the reader only learns about it because one character tells another one all about it, over a cup of coffee. The phrase ‘show, not tell’ flits across your mind. Plus this was about the tenth time characters have met up over a cup of coffee to have a discussion. A major character is introduced about three-quarters of the way through – you remember you had to introduce her to fix a plot hole you had noticed two months ago – but her sudden appearance now looks rather odd, and you feel weirdly certain that a reader will think, ‘Aha, he invented Grace to fix the plot hole, but where was she for the previous nine chapters?’

And…

Suddenly you realise that Masterpiece, is not, in fact, a masterpiece. It needs quite a bit of work done to it. And you are not sure that you feel up to doing whatever is needed. Well, perhaps you could actually do it, but you are not completely sure what needs doing. You need some professional help and, luckily, there’s plenty of it out there. Here we will focus on the three main sources of help, and explain what they do and the differences between them:

·        developmental editors

·        copy-editors

·        proofreaders.

Development editors

Let’s assume the worst, that Masterpiece really is a complete muddled mess and needs a fundamental overhaul. It’s worth pointing out that the need for a developmental edit isn’t always as obvious as it’s turned out to be for Masterpiece. Ideally, a writer or a publisher ought always to ask a developmental editor to take a look through a manuscript, because their professional appraisal might throw up problems that neither writer nor agent or publisher realised were there.

However, this increasingly doesn’t happen, simply because of cost constraints. So we will just use the example of Masterpiece; a book that has clearly left the rails not just once but several times, and ask a developmental editor to give you some advice.

What does a developmental editor do?

Let’s start by saying that a developmental editor doesn’t look for grammatical errors, spelling mistakes or poor punctuation – the fiddly bits. The fiddly bits come later. Scott Norton, in his book Developmental Editing, says:

…developmental editing denotes significant structuring or restructuring of a manuscript’s discourse.

In other words, if you decide to employ a developmental editor, they will look at the big picture and ask questions such as:

·        Do the characters seem realistic?

·        Is the dialogue smooth and consistent between characters?

·        Is the plot coherent and sufficiently strong to carry the story?

·        Is the world-building or just general scene-setting believable?

And a whole lot more. You will end up with remarks and suggestions such as:

·        The Prologue isn’t needed. Small alterations would make it suitable for Chapter 1.

·        The Prologue sets up a scene which never subsequently takes place. Either the Prologue should be deleted, or the scene incorporated into the later parts of the text. Note that Prologues are going out of fashion nowadays.

·        Vince is not needed. You could usefully combine what he says and does with George, and do away with Vince altogether.

·        Why doesn’t Mei call the police immediately? This is a glaring omission that undermines the whole of the rest of the book.

·        Not much happens in Chapter 5. You could put its initial paragraphs at the end of Chapter 4 and its final paragraphs at the start of what is now Chapter 6, and delete most of the existing Chapter 5.

·        There is a lot of info-dumping, particularly in Chapters 3, 7 and 8. Remember to ‘Show, not Tell’. Examples attached.

·        After the climax in Chapter 12, the final two chapters are just characters talking to give you the chance to tie up loose ends. These loose ends should either be tied up as part of the climax, or simply left loose.

·        I attach a timeline of the events that take place in the book. You tell the events in green as flashbacks, but I do not see that this adds to the story. Suggest you just tell the story in linear fashion.

You get the idea. Developmental editors will take apart the structure of a book, dissect its characters, time flow, world-building, and deliver criticisms and suggestions for improvement. Tactfully, of course. I’m not being especially tactful in this blog post.

Copy-editing

Let’s assume you got a developmental editor to tell you all the things you need to do to improve Masterpiece, or that you plucked up courage and told yourself, with the help of your friend or beta reader. You put the improved version back into the archive folder and did something else for a couple of months.

If nothing else, this process makes you realise why it can take so long to get a book into shape, ready for submission to an agent or publisher. Four months have already gone by and you haven’t even got to copy-editing or proofreading yet. And that’s time on top of however long it took you to write Masterpiece in the first place.

But we digress. When you extract this second version of the book from the archive folder and read it through, you are pleasantly surprised at how much better it is. It all seems more real, somehow. But you still spot the occasional grammatical error; there are some spelling mistakes, many of which exist as a result of an over-enthusiastic Word spell-checker; and the punctuation occasionally goes wonky, especially in scenes that involve dialogue. A few other things occur to you: some words don’t feel right, and it might in fact be that they don’t mean quite what you thought they did. Still too many adverbs. You notice that at one point you have written He nodded his head, and reflect that, really, what else could he have nodded? Maybe there are other instances of this kind of spurious description?

A copy-editor will focus on the fiddly bits that a developmental editor will ignore – grammatical errors, spelling mistakes and poor punctuation. The Chartered Institute of Editors and Proofreaders (CIEP) writes on its website that copy-editing is

preparing the copy so it is ready for the next stage of the publishing process, usually in a digital version of the text. Tasks include ensuring grammar, punctuation and spelling are correct…

The definition goes on to explain how a copy-editor will leave instructions for a typesetter, which don’t apply to Masterpiece, because it’s not being fed through the traditional publishing process at this point. Incidentally, you can now see why a copy-editor is called a copy-editor. It’s because they edit the copy; the ‘copy’ is the original manuscript, in our example, the developmentally edited Masterpiece.

A good copy-editor will also point out those words that don’t seem right, and will flag up ambiguous or awkward sentences. You can discuss with a copy-editor just how far they can go in making changes. Those adverbs. You could ask the copy-editor to highlight or change or delete those that seem to be unnecessary or which ring the repetition bell. You could ask the copy-editor to look out for anything that you think it would be useful to look out for, although remember that the more you add to a remit, the longer it will take to complete, and so the more it will cost.

It's worth pointing out that it’s very hard to copy-edit your own book. This is for two reasons. First, you know what you have written and you know what it all means, and that is what you will read on the page, even to the extent of your brain filling in missing words or understanding what a paragraph means when everyone else would be completely baffled by it. Second, deep down you still think this is probably one of the best books ever written. You simply can’t abide the thought of making changes to your writing or, worse, actually deleting parts of it. No, you really need someone to take an impartial view; someone who knows what they are doing.

Let’s assume you find a decent copy-editor and ask them to:

·        check the usual suspects of grammatical errors, spelling mistakes, and incorrect punctuation;

·        point out awkward or ambiguous phrases or sentences; and

·        highlight adverbs that could usefully be changed or axed.

Let’s further assume that you get Masterpiece back with all this marked up for you, and you accept some 95% of the copy-editors changes and suggestions, and are feeling very pleased with yourself. Masterpiece is so much better than it was four months ago, when you thought it was the most perfect thing ever written.

What’s left?

Proofreading

Once a book has been copy-edited, it should be ready for publication, so the next stage is for it to be typeset. If you are self-publishing, this means you have to decide what book format you want to use, and this determines what the consequent page size has to be. You can play around with different typefaces to see what most pleases you. You might get someone else to do all this for you – there are plenty of people out there who are experts at this sort of thing. If you manage to go down the traditional publishing route, you can leave all these decisions to the publisher.

Either way, once the book is typeset, it should then be proofread. Why? For three reasons, the third of which is probably the most important.

·        No copy-editor is perfect. No copy-editor will guarantee to pick up 100% of errors and other infelicities in a manuscript. The proofreader should pick up about 90% of whatever the copy-editor might have missed, steering the final typeset version closer to perfection.

·        The typesetter might have made errors in the typesetting. One good example occurs in that perennial favourite The Hobbit (HarperCollins paperback edition, 2006), where the last page of the story (p351) has the header CHAPTER TITLE instead of THE LAST STAGE. *

·        The typesetting might have been done perfectly well, but introduced some layout bloopers. For example, the copy-editor might have changed

Tall and lean, the wizard’s reputation soon grew until he was a legend over the entire continent.

to

The wizard was tall and lean, and his reputation soon grew until he was a legend over the entire continent.

and then the typesetting rendered this as

The wizard was tall and lean, and his reputation soon grew until he was a leg-

end over the entire continent.

A proofreader will also look out for what are known as widows and orphans (a widow is where the last line of a paragraph appears at the top of the next page, and an orphan is where the first line of a paragraph or a heading appears at the foot of a page), and for other things such as paragraph indents disappearing, chapter headings being in the wrong font… and so on. The CIEP** defines proofreading as

reading and marking up the ‘proofs’ of a text to fix any problems in layout and design; errors introduced during typesetting; or mistakes missed during copyediting. It is the final stage before the text is released for publication, so the proofreader should not be looking to improve the writing style, layout or any other aspect of the text, and needs to take into account the effects of any changes they mark and how they will fit into the existing page layout.

So essentially a proofreader looks for the usual suspects, just like a copy-editor, but does it on the final, typeset version of the book. It’s now worth pointing out that proofreading your own book is even harder than copy-editing it. For goodness sake, you know what words are on the page; you wrote them. You could probably recite most of them off by heart. And that, of course, is the problem. You read what you know you meant to write, not necessarily what you have actually written.

Increasingly, copy-editing and proofreading are being conjoined and publishers expect both to be done at the same time, and independent authors try to do the same. But even if it has been decided that this is the way to go, don’t forget to work on the typeset version if possible, for the reasons just listed.

Summary

A developmental editor will suggest big, sweeping changes to your novel, most of which will seem horrible to you. But a good developmental editor can work wonders; they can turn average manuscripts into above-average manuscripts although, of course, they can’t do the writing for you. They can only make helpful suggestions. You have to implement them.

A copy-editor looks at the fiddly bits. A good copy-editor will get rid of almost all the grammatical, spelling and punctuation errors in the book, and will help by flagging up ambiguity or awkwardness in the detailed writing. And will flag up other possible problems if you ask them to.

A proofreader checks for grammatical, spelling and punctuation errors too, and also for various layout problems caused by the typesetting. A proofreader is often seen as the last guardian at the gate; once a proofread is done, the book is published and it’s too late then to spot and make any changes.

* For amusement, check out more published errors at http://cashmoreeditorial.com/errata.php

** If you decide you want to find a decent developmental editor, copy-editor or proofreader, you can do not better than check out the Directory at CIEP (https://www.ciep.uk/ )

How to admit you're a writer

Hello! My name is Diarmid – and I’m an author!

There, that wasn’t so difficult after all. In fact, it was really easy...and so it bloomin’ well should be!

You see, I am proud to be able to call myself an author – and so should you be. Now, maybe it’s easier for me; after all, I’ve been a gigging musician since I was fifteen; I played guitar in a little dance combo, along with Jim, a 30yr old trumpet player, Johnny, a 45yr old accordionist and Jazzer Broon, a sixty-something drummer who peered through Mr Magoo specs and possessed a love of pints and Drambuie before driving my younger self home (this stopped when he nearly drove us into an oncoming bus!).

Now, my friends, you may consider it difficult to stand up and announce “hey – I’m an author” but consider this; a fifteen year-old Diarmid playing in a band at the weekend, asked by his school mates on Monday morning “what’s your band called, then?” “em...the Gay Gordons...” (this was the seventies, remember!) Let me tell you, that took courage...

But back to being an author. Does the very term not conjure up an image of a tortured soul, pouring out his or her heart whilst ensconced in some dusty garret, writing an epic narrative, often accompanied by a bottle of whisky (okay, you got me there!) But why should that be the case? As an author, it’s very easy to hide away from the limelight, hiding behind a pseudonym, perhaps. Why? Why indeed! Just like music, I view writing as a performing art. It requires talent (of course it does; many people think that they could write a book – they often tell me so – but how many can actually sit down and string together 80,000 to 120,000 words in a cohesive and entertaining manner?) It requires plenty of hard work and dedication. It requires a vivid imagination (okay, you got me there – again!). Writing one single book is a great achievement, a remarkable accomplishment, of which each and every one of us authors should be extremely proud. So why not shout about it, why not tell everyone? The last band I played in, a 70’s pop rock band, was the most “musical” fun I have ever had. For playing a pub gig, we shared £150 but, quite honestly, we would have done the gig for nothing. A crowded pub, the audience quite literally dancing on the tables to our encore (Elton John – Saturday night’s all right for fighting) was a sight to behold, a huge ego boost, a total blast...I miss it greatly. Why shouldn’t being an author bring that same rush as derived from blasting out 70s hits to an adoring public (okay, I exaggerate, but you get the picture!)

So, dear fellow authors, never hide your light under a bushel (actually “no man, when he hath lighted a candle etc. etc. – St Luke, ch11 v33 – I know these things!**) Tell everyone what you’ve done; learn to enjoy standing up and talking about your writing, share the joy, encourage those who say that “they have a book in them.” Once you get past that initial stage fright, it’ll be a total blast! An oversized ego can, of course, be a dangerous thing but I truly believe that we all need to be a bit of a performer, even if only to get our name out there. After all, publishing is a tough old world and we all need every bit of publicity we can get. So do your own! Go out and talk – local book groups, Rotary meetings, Womens’ Guilds, all these organisations are crying out for interesting speakers. Practice by recording your talk on your phone – get friends and family to listen; try to talk without notes. Or simply make it up as you go along (I often do), make it funny, sad, sexy...and, of course, take questions from your audience! Oh, and be sure to take your books along!

I finish all my talks with this sentence, and I truly believe it!

“You know, ever since I was young I dreamed of being a rock star, but it seems that being an author is the new Rock ‘n’ Roll...”

So, my friends, my name is Diarmid and I’m an author – and so are you!

** I don’t, actually, I just checked the Oxford Dictionary of Quotations...!

An interview with David Frazer Wray

1.            When did you first realize you wanted to be a writer?

I really can’t remember. I must have been very young. Probably it goes back to writing essays at school, when I realized that I had a certain facility. People liked what I wrote. I drifted into journalism at university - although I never became a full-time journalist – and wrote my first novella and a few poems around the same time. None of which were published, of course, and rightly so.

2.            Where do you get your information or ideas for your books?

Ideas pop into my head all the time but they rarely stay there for very long. They generally get weeded out. The idea for “A Fool’s Pilgrimage” came from a fascination with the character of Falstaff. I was always frustrated when he was killed off in Henry V without making an appearance. Continuing his story was an intriguing idea, so I went with it.

3.            What do you think makes a good story?

That’s a very tricky question. I think you need strong characters and also a satisfying resolution. There’s nothing worse than being left hanging at the end of the story with a feeling of “Yes, and…?”. You also have to create a world that is immersive without bombarding the reader with detail. It’s tempting to add that the story should have a strong plot in the classical sense but I don’t think that is always so important – life is a series of episodes that flow into each other, without a definite beginning or end.

4.            How long does it take you to write a book?

In the case of “A Fool’s Pilgrimage” about 35 years, although I did take a few years’ break from time to time. On the other hand, I once wrote a short story in a couple of hours that ended up being broadcast on BBC radio. The short answer is that it takes as long as it takes. I’m a bit of a perfectionist even though my work is far from perfect. My wife has even suggested that I might be slightly autistic. I will just carry on revising and revising, tinkering and tinkering, until I’m reasonably happy with it.

5.            What do you like to do when you're not writing?

I like to read, take photographs, try to produce the next edition of the smallest international photography festival in the world, play guitar, build guitars, wander inanely around the Internet, pick mushrooms in the Norwegian forests, and cook.

6.            What was an early experience where you learned that language had power?

That was probably when I was at university. I had been elected editor of the college newspaper - in the absence of anyone else - and I immediately started to subvert it. In an effort to inject fresh ideas into a moribund institution I ran a syndicated article about Angela Davis, an Afro-American political activist. I was given a dressing down by a tutor and an extraordinary meeting of the students’ union was convened specifically to censure me. At which I refrained from speaking. You would have thought I had planted a bomb under King’s College.

7.            What kind of research do you do, and how long do you spend researching before beginning a book?

I’m pretty meticulous in my research. For “A Fool’s Pilgrimage” I spent several weeks in the library of Leiden University reading mostly French texts on life and ideas in the 15th century. Without wishing to sound like a literary method actor, I did actually start to live in that era. Other work has required less research because I’m already familiar with the subject or situation, but research is always ongoing.

8.            What did you edit out of this book?”

Roughly 25%, if you count from the first draft. There were things there that I loved to bits but which did not contribute much to the story beyond amusement. And I was not writing a sitcom. Sparsile encouraged me to take self-criticism to a higher level and the result was a much tighter story.

Goodbye Crandor

L. M. Affrossman

A little tribute to a big life

As you may, or may not, know, Crandor-Dark Lord of the Universe was Sparsile Books’ house bunny. A Dutch dwarf with the heart of a lion. He once stood up to Sparsile’s MD (six foot one in his socks) and threatened him with all twelve inches of his warrior soul.

This is not to imply that Crandor was a rodent given only to the violent pleasures of warfare. He was both a passionate and caring lover. After a brief dalliance with a fetish for latex, which manifested itself in a need to hump every party balloon which entered the household, Crandor grew weary of his girlfriends exploding at the height of passion and focussed his enthusiasm on the great love of his life, a nylon panda almost the same size as himself. What followed was a steamy love affair, which often led to Crandor somersaulting straight into his water dish at the height of ecstasy then shaking himself off with an I meant to do that expression. The relationship lasted to the very day he died when, despite being in pain, he attempted a last, unsuccessful bid for bliss.

On the whole, he had a very happy life. His only real problem seemed to be his inability to accept that he was a rabbit. Nothing on earth could persuade him to eat hay. If left to his own devices, he stole slices of pizza and entire packets of chocolate biscuits. And nothing made him happier than the knowledge that some stupid human had just lost their treat.

One of his other great joys was terrorizing cats. He made one particularly timid feline’s life a misery and enjoyed every moment of the torment. Torment naturally did not end with cats. He was fond of pretending to be a yoyo, which meant he would demand cuddles only to demand to put down only to demand that he immediately be picked up for more cuddling. This could go on for hours and was a particularly good game if the hapless human at hand looked even remotely busy.

He was a great traveller, in defiance of what is known about bunnies. A new location, with an especially delicious carpet to chew, was next to heaven in Crandor’s book.  But, most of all, he was an athletic sleeper, who couldn’t cross a sunbeam without collapsing, often needing to take an extra nap to recover from several hours of exhausting slumber.

There is a lesson to be learned from Crandor, and not simply that a stolen slice of pizza tastes better than one freely given. Live life to the full. Don’t waste a moment on regret. And if someone doesn’t give you the affection you feel you deserve, sink your teeth into their thigh.

Postscript:

When Crandor died, it was not a surprize. He had already exceeded the known maximum lifespan for his breed. In the last couple of days of his life he was a changed rabbit, who could neither eat nor drink. We did all the right things and all the wrong things. We took him to the vet, but then we paid for a ridiculously expensive test rather than have him put down. In the end we took him home knowing that his gut was blocked, and his chances of recovery were slim.

As the night wore on, his chances of recovery began looking increasingly anorexic until the moment came when he crawled under the chaise longue (where he had spent so many happy hours sleeping in sunbeams and chewing the silk cushions) and, after a short fit, he died. He just died.

In the hours that followed, I attempted bravery, but at the first possible opportunity I hid in the shower and wept into a towel helplessly, hopelessly and without dignity. My fur baby was gone. I would never hold him again or inhale his funny little musty scent. My carpets and my heart are full of holes.

I feel embarrassed to be so emotional over something that many people would have considered to be little more than dinner. But then I think of all the people who have told me that they hope that their loved ones aren’t too upset when they die. Well, I don’t agree. I hope when I die there is a room full of people sobbing their guts out, because grief is the measure of how deeply we are loved, and if anyone is as sorry that I have gone as I am over Crandor’s loss, then I will have lived.

The truth is...there ain`t no truth...!

by Diarmid MacArthur

I wonder how history will look back on our current predicament. Will it be called “The Great Lock-Down of 2020”? Or maybe “The Covid Crisis”? Who knows? More to the point, however, it will be interesting to see what the historical (and political) “spin” is in fifty years time. Many of us will live to see it (I`ll be 113!) and, of course, with hindsight being the exact science that it is, we will then discover exactly what we should have done and when, who was to blame, what went wrong, etc...won`t we?

Of course we won`t!

It seems that every day we are faced with a different set of “truths”. Different stories, different opinions, both medical and political, to the extent that it is hard to know what to believe. And, of course, that`s the beauty with fiction; you actually know that it isn`t true from the outset! But you still have to get some of your facts correct, otherwise the whole thing becomes unbelievable.

My first two (self-published) novels were a combination of West of Scotland crime and Science Fiction. Even without the benefit of an editor, I knew that, as far as the Sci-fi was concerned, I could pretty much write what I wanted. However, when it came to DI Archie Blue, I realised that I had to achieve a degree of accuracy, otherwise my readers would disbelieve the entire story.

Take, for example, the 2012 film “Battleship”...

The aliens have invaded Earth in giant, sea-going vessels; with vastly superior powers and technology, they plan to annihilate our Planet and they have completely destroyed a couple of modern, heavily-armed naval vessels. All well and good so far; scary, exciting, gripping...

Finally, the surviving naval personnel requisition the decommissioned WW2 Battleship, USS Missouri, a tourist attraction permanently berthed in Pearl Harbor (not “Harbour” - remember, it`s the US...) With a crew of about thirty, they manage to power up this mighty vessel and cast off, after having cut the massive anchor chains with an acetylene torch (really?) With a complement of weaponry, including fully-loaded machine guns and shells for the massive 16” turrets, in no time at all they attain their maximum speed of 33 knots and, with a bit of skill and a lot of luck, manage to save humanity! (remember, it`s the US...)

It`s great fun, a good ole` “kick-ass” American romp; but every time it comes to this last part, I shake my head in disbelief. There is no way that such a tourist attraction would (a) have any engine fuel, (b) have any form of live ammunition on board and (c)  be capable of reaching battle-stations and full cruising speed in less than an hour. It`s absolute nonsense! (remember, it`s the US...) However, I readily accept the arrival of the aliens, their technology and the threat to our world without question!

Strange indeed!

But is the truth sometimes stranger than fiction?

In my latest DCI McVicar novel, “Link to a Kill”, I include a rather gruesome killing, a slight adaptation of a real case as related to me by a serving Police officer. It forms a fairly important component of the story and, to be honest, I probably wouldn`t have thought of it by myself; yet the possibility exists that some readers may doubt that such an event could happen.

So, the truth is...there ain`t no truth; does that sound ever-so-slightly familiar?

“Grease” is a long-standing, family-favourite movie that we watched recently. Movie buffs may have realised that the title of my blog is a corruption of a line towards the end, where Danny Zuko, leader of the T-birds and Leo, leader of the rival Scorpions, go head-to-head in a car race. As they are about to set off, racing for possession of their opponent`s vehicle, Leo`s growled statement to Danny could just as easily apply to both the current situation and the writing of fiction.

“The rules are... there ain`t no rules...”

Of Books and Babies...

It is often said that “everyone has a book in them” and, perhaps it is true. We all have own stories, our family anecdotes, apocryphal or otherwise. But would they make a good book? Hmm...

My long-departed uncle was a GP in the Lake District and I remember my mother once asking him if the amusing and quirky story-lines that took place in the then-popular TV series, “Doctor in the House” were likely to have happened or were they purely fictional. His response was that each and every story could certainly have occurred to a Doctor at some point in their career but the likelihood of such amusing incidents taking place on a regular basis was unlikely to the point of impossibility. The writer would have drawn on the tales of colleagues, friends and the wider medical community in order to create an on-going and humorous (or should that be humerus?) TV series. Take Midsomer Murders, for example; are there actually any residents left alive by now...?

When people discover that I write, they will often respond with “Oh, I`m sure I could write a book...”

But do we really want everyone to be an author?

As a musician (latterly in a 70`s pop/rock covers band), my adoring fans (well, we all have an ego) would often remark that they wished that they played an instrument. My reply was always the same; musicians (as I have stated) have an ego and we need an audience to like us. If everyone was a musician, we would be performing to a room full of critics and that would never do...would it? Similarly with writing. Authors need readers just as readers need authors. I have to be honest, since I started writing I have become much more critical of other authors` work; I suppose it is just simple human nature; we want people to like our books and not to think that they could do better.

When this dreadful pandemic is over it will be interesting to see if there is a rise in writing and, of course, in reading – after all, with furlough, etc. many of us have had a lot of time on our hands (the garden`s looking great, by the way!). I had a conversation some time ago with Lesley, my publisher, about “the way ahead”. Going back a good few years, following the cinematic popularity of Tolkien`s works, there was an upsurge in fantasy writing. Similarly with JK Rowling`s Harry Potter; the enormous success of  “the boy who lived” created a big rise in books about magicians and mystical worlds. Even “Fifty Shades” engendered a wave of so-called “porn-fiction”. It seems that crime is heading that way too and that the market-place is becoming rather crowded; there are just too many “Rebuses and Taggarts” lurking in the shadows (although my character, DCI Grant McVicar, is far too imposing a figure to ever lurk...)

Will the next few years see a rise in a new genre? Global crisis, pandemics, lock-downs, conspiracy theories? I daresay we will find out in time.

But what of babies, you ask?

In 1977, there was a prolonged power outage in New York city. Nine months later there was, apparently, a large spike in the birth rate (or is that just another Urban Myth...?) It will be interesting to see what happens in the UK nine months from now.

New Parenting Book, anyone...?

SCHOOL SHOOTERS OLD AND NEW by Tom Campbell

During a brief, unenlightened, period we believed we could deal with the school shooter by condemning him. Now, of course, that approach is recognized as hopelessly naive. These days we have a much better means of banishing this monster from our midst: we simply ignore him.

One recent theory, bandied about even in academic circles, is that the school shooter is simply a glory hound out for recognition through notoriety and that the means of stopping him lies in depriving him of media coverage, denying him power through recognition. The phenomenon, starved of this vital attention, will simply wither and die. The Classroom Avenger will simply "go away".

Well, best of luck with that tactic. I'm tempted to sit back and watch as it fails miserably, but doing so would be at the cost of young lives, a commodity we squander all too often with this irresponsible thinking.

The assumption that these atrocities are motivated by mere vanity is a simplistic theory that shows how little we understand, or are prepared to understand, the torments and tortures wielded and experienced by our own young.

It's fairly obvious that our schools are under assault by two different types of killer. The first is the original "Avenger": a youngster driven by pain, rage or even outrage to lash out at a world they believe to be attacking them at a multitude of levels. This type of killer - still being created by education - brought school shootings into existence before they became fashionable. The second is the "Copycat Avenger": a product of the post-Columbine generation, who has grown up with the likes of Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold as cultural figures, heroes even. Historical precedent has shown these youngsters that letting rip with an assault rifle in class is not so much a method of airing your grievances as it is a fast track to immortality (the same, or similar thinking probably lies behind most copycat serial killers).

Doubtless, this is an oversimplification of what drives of the copycat avenger - indeed, even the most shallow, self-obsessed minds are reluctant to throw their lives away for vanity alone - but it does illustrate the essential difference between these youngsters and the originals that inspired them. The problem comes from confusing the motivations of the two and the means of dealing with them. Ignoring the copycat shooter might well diminish the number of killings in our schools but it will have no effect on the original avenger who is out for blood, not recognition.

So why is it such a popular theory?

Because it keeps our hands clean. If the Classroom Avenger is simply a monster seeking glorification then we have no culpability in his creation; we haven't allowed our schools to become battlegrounds of brutality where certain youngsters are so abused they come to see interaction with their peers and authority, as a state of war. We have always embraced the unspoken rule that evil, if it is to be confronted, must first be compartmentalized into an "evil" minority, and that the trail of blame should never lead back to our door. Suggesting that these atrocities might be the result of our society openly embracing attitudes as wrong and destructive as racism is a perspective no-one is prepared to explore.

The greatest challenge we face when trying to get to the root of school shootings lies in doing just that: confronting certain, uncomfortable facts about the "socially acceptable" brutality we allow to shape juvenile interaction in our schools. It's a truth not easily embraced, but we were making progress, at least for a while.

Sadly, the arrival of the copycat avenger has given us an opportunity to avoid facing this. Far from progressing, we are now slipping back into a dark age of ignorance that allows us the luxury of demonizing and ignoring all school shooters without bothering to understand what, and who, brought them into being.

Condemnation is not a valid tool of examination. Demonize cancer and you won't get to the heart of it. Neither is dismissal a true means of analysis and understanding. We are faced with a choice here. We can recognize these ugly truths about our own nature and address this at an educational level. Alternatively, we can accept this convenient and facile theory, and watch, mystified as the killings continue despite all measures brought to bear. I don't favour the latter theory, it will cost young lives, but then, as I said before, perhaps that's not too high a price to pay so long as we can all entertain this most comforting of illusions.

Hill-climbing in the age of lockdown

Ironically, cabin fever can drive some writers crazy. Sitting alone in a room is something they actively seek but that soon gets old when they’re made to do it.

For family reasons we went into social isolation several weeks before the official lockdown so we’ve had longer to go stir crazy. The following is an example of the slightly strange behaviour that may be coming your way.

It occurred to me that the perfect antidote to these present restrictions would be the freedom to climb a Munro, which is a mountain over 3000 feet.

I obviously can’t do that at the moment, so instead I decided to climb a Munro in my garden. I’m fortunate to have a very long and steep garden (though at 330 feet in length and 80 feet in height I’m considerably less fortunate when it comes to cutting the grass and trimming the hedges).  I calculated that if I walked up to the top of the garden and then back down, and repeated all that forty times over, I would have ascended and descended 3200 feet and walked almost exactly five miles.

Naturally, as any responsible hillwalker should, I informed by family of where I was going and when I should be expected back. My duty done, I then set out on this adventure to their bemused looks. My behaviour soon caught the attention of the neighbours who took to leaning out of their windows to watch the crazy man. Some apparently contemplated calling the police whilst all the children pointed and laughed.

The weather was good but, as everyone knows when climbing in the Highlands, one should always carry a backpack with rain gear, a compass and a sat phone in case of gales and snowstorms, as well emergency rations and a torch to signal the rescue helicopter. Weighed down by all this, I found the climbing difficult at first but I soon caught my second wind

The going was good until about 2500 feet when my progress slowed, no doubt due to the thinning air. Thankfully, I found a well-appointed bothy on the way up that supplied refreshing lager chilled from the fridge. The views were frankly rather repetitive but the air was bracing and it was good to feel I was out and about.

I returned in triumph to the still bemused looks of my family. I boasted how easy it had been because alternating up and down seemed much kinder on the legs than one long up and then one long down.

I went to bed a hero, albeit only within the confines of my own skull.

Nemesis caught up with me the next morning. The going may have seemed easier but the overall wear and tear was just the same or perhaps even worse. My legs seized up solid and I developed the gait of a centenarian who had led a determinedly dissolute life.

I returned to my writing room, beaten but unbowed though with a hint of trepidation. The lockdown has been extended and I’m a little worried about what I might find myself resorting to next.

A Dispensing Optician`s life of crime…

By Diarmid MacArthur FBDO

 “If we were absolutely certain of what lay ahead of us, what would we do? Would we stay at home, barricade the door and hide under the covers? But then, if we really did know, how could we possibly change it? Can we hope to change or to conquer fate…?”

So begins my first published crime novel, “Drown for your Sins”, a tale of murder, mystery and mayhem, overseen by the redoubtable West of Scotland detective DCI Grant McVicar and his assistant, DS Briony Quinn.

Fiction, yes; but, if you think about it, those words ring just as true as we set off for the practice, each and every day; do we ever really know what`s in store for us? Way back in 1992 I certainly didn`t realise that Joan, the tall, attractive red-headed locum who walked into Look Opticians that morning would later become my wife and the mother of our two wonderful teenage daughters! I didn`t know, a few years ago, that what started out as a normal morning would end up with a smashed front door, half a dozen stolen frames and with my jiu-jitsu-black-belted courier (Lawrence, you`re a star) on the pavement, with his arm around the neck of the thief (the Ezekiel choke, apparently) as we waited for the police to arrive!

Yes, everyday is a new day, a new challenge, a new opportunity. And, sometimes, such as the day of the shoplifter, it might have been better to stay at home, under the covers…the sad part is that once the excess on our glass insurance was applied and once I had replaced the courier`s ripped jacket and rewarded him for his actions, it would have been cheaper letting the thief walk away with the stolen frames.

But, just as in “Drown for your Sins”, justice was done!

In Practice, of course, we face fresh challenges every day, especially in Scotland. We now must triage patients presenting with eye complaints (usually referred from the GP or the pharmacist). We are expected to fit them in, often “there and then” (Well, if I go blind, it`ll be your fault…). It is our job to rise to these challenges, to help where we can; to take pride in what we do and to do it to the best of our ability. The reward is to go home at night with the feeling that it was a job well done.

In the old days (showing my age now) when Optometrists were “Ophthalmic Opticians”, eyecare professionals were mostly referred to simply as “the optician”. The public weren`t generally aware of the difference between “Ophthalmic” and “Dispensing” and DOs were frequently asked what their job entailed. My answers were always ready; a Dispensing Optician is an expert in lens choice, frame selection, fitting and adjusting of specs, repairs, frame buying, practice management; changing light bulbs, etc…

Nowadays, my response is, quite simply, “Public relations” and I believe that to be one of our primary responsibilities. We are “front of house”, we are the ones who carry out the day-to-day tasks and functions that often define our Practice. The smile, the chat, the banter; opening the door for patients, occasionally giving an elderly patient a lift home; problem solving; and, of course, dispensing, fitting, adjustment…and most of our patients leave the practice with a smile on their face!

We can be as knowledgeable as we like, about lenses, frame styling, adjustment, all the technical stuff. But, often, the lasting impression that a patient will take away is how they were treated, how they were made to feel. For us, the working day is our routine; for many patients, especially if they are older, alone or vulnerable, a visit to the optician might be a “big thing” and it is our responsibility to live up to their expectations, both in terms of professional services and in personal relations; we might be the only person they interface with that week, after all. A friendly word can go a very long way sometimes…

So, talking of words, with my obvious love of my job as a Dispensing Optician, why turn to crime fiction?

Well, it`s a long story…(sorry!) I have always written poetry; for birthdays, weddings, I can turn a limerick at the drop of a Leprechaun`s hat… then, a few years ago, I had the idea for a book that was an unusual mix of West of Scotland detective and Science Fiction! This proved to be a very hard genre to sell, especially to publishers, so I self-published my first two novels (Archie Blue sky and Keeper of Souls) which were well received. Then, late in 2018, I was approached by Sparsile Books (my publisher) who had read “Archie” and wanted me to become their crime fiction writer. “Sins” was launched in Waterstones in October of last year and has already had some excellent feedback. I have just finished the second one (now working on the second edit) and I have the plot outline for the third.

It wasn`t a difficult transition, to be honest. Having owned my practice since 1986 I have typed a great deal of correspondence over the years and, with my theory about “public relations”, communication in general forms a large part of what I do on a daily basis. Indeed, I think that communication is very much the key to a successful practice, both listening and speaking. My staff just roll their eyes as I embark on yet another conversation with a patient about writing/families/railways/music/guitars… the list is endless and it can often be extremely interesting and rewarding when a patient opens up and tells you their own story – some of which may just have found their way into print (but don`t tell anyone! After all “This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents are the result of the author`s imagination, etc, etc…)

Aye, write!

Will I give up the day job? Hmm…probably not just yet; anyway, where would I find all my characters…? However, at my book launch, I finished with this thought. I have been a musician since I was fifteen and always believed that, one day, I`d be a rock star; but maybe writing is the new Rock `n` Roll…

 And, just as a wee postscript…

I was writing this “disjointed jotting” whilst at work and I was chatting to a patient about long-closed Glasgow music venues (as you do – he worked in Glasgow`s legendary Apollo Theatre and has some great stories to tell). However, the conversation then went like this:-

`So, are you in for a sight test today?`

`No, I feel my right eye has been a bit funny since the operation. They took it out, scraped the back of it and, when they put it back in, I think it`s a wee bit bigger…`

You couldn`t write it…I rest my case!