VIEW FROM THE WOODS

FEAR OF FLYING? LET'S GET OFF THE GROUND FIRST

2012-01-11T10:54:00.003Z

Concorde's last flight

Yes, I know, fear of flying is irrational and flying by commercial airliner is statistically the safest mode of transportation there is. But no matter how many times I've heard it said, I still feel more comfortable climbing behind the wheel of 20 year old Jeep that could fall apart at any moment than buckling into a plane seat.

Pteromerhanophobia (the technical term) is really just a fear of relinquishing control. Most of us can't fly a plane and are forced to entrust our lives to two unseen pilots in the same way we have to trust a surgeon. Taking a flight is an act of faith in two human beings and a vast, complex machine. Glance around the cabin in the moments before take-off and you will see every third person with his or her eyes shut, and most of those that are reading are probably secretly praying, too. There are very few committed atheists aboard when the engines roar and a tube of metal 15 cms thick surges forward on its unstoppable trajectory to the skies. I would bet that even Richard Dawkins hedges his bets for a moment or two until the laws of physics assert themselves and hoist the metal hulk over the airport fence.

Take-off is the most dangerous part of the flight: more dangerous than landing due to the thousands of litres of kerosene in the fuel tanks in the wings and rear stabiliser. A relatively minor incident - in the case of Concorde, a stray piece of metal on the runway flipped up by the wheels which punctured the fuel tank - can cause a raging inferno. Aircraft tyres, which are subject to rigorous testing but enormous stresses, can blow causing a sudden sheer, tip and crash, resulting in - you guessed it - another boiling inferno.

And then there's the problem of undetected or overlooked technical faults ...

You may not know this, but all aircraft have a defect log which at any one time will carry details of any number of minor problems and niggles with the aircraft's many systems. It's up to the flight engineer and captain to decide whether flying the plane is safe and lawful. In a perfect world. all of us passengers would have online access to the defect log so we could make a choice whether to fly based on our own hysterical/rational responses as appropriate. But even if the aircraft is judged perfectly safe, we then have to rely on the pilots to carry out all the pre-flight checks rigorously. In August 2008, two Spanair pilots failed spectacularly to do this. It appears they simply ticked the boxes without bothering with a visual check (a strenuous glance over the shoulder) and set off down the runway with the flaps in the wrong configuration. Result:

Spanair Flight 5002

Even more chilling, is the fact that in this instance the Take Off Warning System did not automatically alert them to the fact that the plane was not fit for take-off. In the official report, no finding was made as to the reason for this computer failure, but the Spanish newspaper El Pais, ran an article alleging that the flight-computer had been corrupted with malware: http://bit.ly/bnGszQ. The theory is also explored here: http://on.msnbc.com/xi9jId.

So, the moral of the story is that even seasoned pilots can behave in the most ridiculously reckless fashion if circumstances conspire. They're human beings under pressure to get their job done, with families to get back to, and who suffer all the same distractions, anxieties and minor health problems that might leave them less than pin-point sharp as the rest of us. They are, statistically, the reason for most air accidents. Airbus, the giant European consortium founded in December 1970, which now builds roughly half the world's major airliners, realised this fact right at its inception. Over the intervening decades it has developed and refined electronic systems designed to minimise the risk of pilot error through clever use of computers. This has become known as 'fly by wire' though 'fly by computer' is a more accurate description. Statistically, the jury is out on whether computers are making a better fist of it than pilots. What is true, however, is that computers and humans tend to have different kinds of accidents - more of that in future posts.

To end on a positive note - if you do suffer from a fear of flying, close your eyes and start slowly counting to a 100 the moment you start to feel the aircraft start to accelerate along the runway. If you're still counting at 101 the most hazardous part of your journey is over. Sit back and wait for the gin and tonic to arrive. Cheers!

THE FLIGHT

2012-01-10T09:46:00.000Z

The Airbus A380 - Aviation miracle or Titanic of the skies?

I'll admit it - I'm something of an apprehensive flyer. This fact may not unconnected with several childhood experiences. A trip in a family friend's dodgy light-aircraft was the beginning of the phobia (when we arrived at Biggin Hill he was tinkering under the hood and fixing something with an old length of wire). Then there was a flight to Malaga during which one the engines failed, prompting gentle music to leak from the overhead speakers and the adult passengers to empty the drinks trolley. Lastly there was a turbulent return trip over the Alps which saw several people tossed from their seats while cabin crew sat ghostly white in their restraints, lips moving in silent prayer.

I try to be rational about travelling in undeniably reliable modern aircraft, but nearly always resort to a stiffener before climbing aboard. A Bloody Mary usually does it, but sometimes you need two, especially if you're faced with the possibility of a long, sobering wait at the departure gate. But although alcohol deadens the fear, it does seem to stimulate all the stored-away facts to the surface. As we taxi to the runway I'm reminding myself that most accidents occur within the first 100 seconds of that mighty roar of the engines throttling up, and that the tanks are full of explosive kerosene that in the event of a multiple tyre blowout or engine failure might erupt in a fiery mushroom cloud at several thousand degrees centigrade. And even if the old crate lifts off the ground one last time, what about the fact that air traffic control depends on (what I imagine to be) a dangerous mix of tired, stressed-out operatives and computer systems too complicated for any one individual to control?

Skudding fretfully through the low level turbulence and heading into the blinding blanket of cloud, I am inevitably recalling the catalogue of aviation disasters, the details of which I have absorbed through my pores over a lifetime. It's always the little things that go wrong and spiral into catastrophe. Accidents have been caused by things as banal as the wrong sized bolt being used to secure the windscreen. A lazy technician couldn't be bothered to climb down the ladder and walk ten feet to his box of nuts and bolts, so thought he would make do with the next size down. 3mm of metal = 29,000 of death plunge. Ugh! And sometimes it's sheer stupidity, like the Russian pilot who let his 13 year old son have a go at the controls: ten minutes later, all that was left was a smoking crater in a pine forest.

Unlike ocean liners, aircraft don't have lifeboats - wouldn't you love a parachute, just for comfort? - which makes the stories of their demise even more grimly compelling. We all like to imagine how we would cope in the five minutes or so between the captain's stoical final message and the moment of impact. Would we be calm or hysterical? Would we think selflessly of others or spend our last seconds screaming 'Why me?'

I could have taken one of those conquer your fear of flying courses, but I noted that they're mostly run by airlines with a keen interest in getting as many of us aloft as possible, so I passed on that and decided instead to inform myself by researching and writing a novel. THE FLIGHT is published on 2 February 2012, (special edition signed hardbacks available from www.goldsborobooks.com). I was lucky enough to find an airline pilot to guide and assist me who happens to have an enduring interest in air accidents. Fortunately, he isn't cursed with an imagination as active as mine, so somehow manages, stone cold sober, to spend his days transporting hundreds of men, women and children across the globe while in his idle moments he's presumably thinking about all the things that might go wrong.

Over the next couple of weeks I'll be blogging regularly about my research, air accidents, near-misses and mishaps, and the ways the aviation industry has sought to minimise risk. But for now I'll leave you with the opening paragraph of THE FLIGHT in the hope it tempts you back for more:

Ransome Airways Flight 189 to New York was one of seven-hundred and fifty-three scheduled to depart London's Heathrow that Sunday in early January. During peak times at the world's busiest international airport, one plane would take-off and another land every minute. There was little room for error either human or mechanical, still less in the uncertain realm where the two connected.

THE DOG THAT MADE ME A WRITER

2011-11-29T09:39:00.000Z

A little while ago I was asked to contribute to a magazine feature about what a dog has meant to you. I don't think the magazine ran it in the end (or they never told me if they did), so in honour of my current and former mutts, here it is:

It was the second biggest love affair of my life. I was a barrister trying to become a writer. Owning a dog would be the definitive statement that in future I would be working from home. And so my wife and I arrived at the animal sanctuary, where, amongst the unruly pack piling in and out of the owner’s caravan, was a small, unkempt ball of matted grey fur with coal eyes and a pink tongue that hung out in an expression of permanent eagerness. If he had walked on two legs he would have been an Ewok. He was small (ideal for a London flat), incredibly cute, but conveyed a certain quality of manly determination: I could see myself walking him through the park without embarrassment. And he hardly seemed to bark, I was told. Ha!

Mainwaring (christened by my brother) instantly took over my life. The barking, walking, feeding and the constant effort of anticipating his complex eccentricities – a hatred of motorbikes and wheelchairs chief among them – were all-consuming. But for several precious hours each day he would lie devotedly across my feet as I wrote, occasionally passing wind and reminding me to keep at it.

Mainwaring never liked London much, but in his final years we moved to Monmouthshire countryside where he lived out his days in dog paradise. When he died, I carved him a headstone which I pass each time I go down to my office. His successor, another Cairn, is called, inevitably, Wilson. He refuses to lie at my feet, but perhaps I no longer need my ego stroking. Cairns seem to know these things.

The Flight - published February 2012

2011-11-09T09:35:00.002Z

If you've a fear of flying, don't expect a cure from my next book, The Flight, published Feb 4, 2012. I've never been the most relaxed aircraft passenger in the world, and the more I learned about fly-by-wire technology, and the fact that modern pilots merely input data into computers which in turn pass it on the aircraft flight controls, the more intrigued I became by the phenomenal acts of faith involved - and of course with the potential for a very modern kind of disaster. With the help of a dedicated young airline pilot who guided my research (he also happens to be interested in air accidents), I came up with a new Jenny Cooper story that you might call a Titanic of the skies.

Chapter One of The Flight appears at the end of the paperback of The Redeemed (out 24 Nov 2011) and will be up on my website shortly. For the moment, here's the opening paragraph:

Ransome Airways Flight 189 to New York was one of seven hundred and fifty-three scheduled to depart from London Heathrow that Sunday in early January. During peak times at the world's busiest international airport, one plane would take off and another land every mintue. There was little room for error either human or mechanical - still less in the uncertain realm where the two connected.

THE REDEEMED - PAPERBACK OUT NOVEMBER 2011

2011-10-26T12:19:00.000+01:00

The newly styled paperback edition of The Redeemed is published on 24 November 2011.

At the heart of the story is a powerful charismatic mega-church that has become the scene of the kind of phenomena witnessed in charismatic churches all over the world. I've seen some of these things up close and witnessed people speaking in tongues. It intrigues me, but I'm left feeling that it's less to do with the Holy Spirit and more to do with a tendency among some to want to surrender conscious control.

You only have to look at phenomena like the Toronto Blessing to realise it's very real for those involved: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NQiK_hMVC2k, but hunt around a little bit and you soon find the search for phenomena becomes a desperate search for evidence of the supernatural at work in the world - the baby preacher is a prime example: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zALqMWimBbM. And it's not a phenomena limited to Christianity: Islam, Hinduism and all shades of shamanism and ancient religion have traditions of rapturous experiences.

Is there anything of substance here? I'm not going to be hubristic enough to say there is nothing at all beyond the physical realm, but what I've seen of these phenomena does bear a striking resemblance to a stage hypnotist show I was saw. Paul McKenna, the best in the business, called up audience members. Several hundred out of an audience of several thousand hurried to the stage. He put them through a few exercises that whittled them down to the twenty or so most suggestible. For over two hours these twenty remained hypnotised; completely at McKenna's beck and call. I spoke to some of their friends in the interval and was convinced it was no act. When they were told they were Elvis or that there was a lion in the room, they behaved just as you would expect. www.youtube.com/watch?v=8yQWI0wxcF0 It was funny but more than a little disturbing. I was left in no doubt that a sufficiently charismatic and confident personality - preacher or politician - will always find a willing constituency.

A Doctor At War (1995) Re-issued

2011-08-24T13:05:00.002+01:00

The first paid writing job I ever landed was to author an account of the wartime experiences of Colonel Martin Herford, the most decorated British doctor of World War II. It was done here and there while running to and fro betweent the criminal courts of London and the South East, but over the course of a few months I managed to both interview Colonel Herford several times and to sort through his fascinating and extensive collection of personal papers.

The resulting book, A Doctor At War, was published in 1995. The publisher, a small press, has long since gone out of business and the rights reverted to me. It seemed a shame to let it languish, especially as Colonel Herford was such an exceptional individual who deserved far more attention than he received during his lifetime. I'd like to re-issue in hard copy, but for the moment it's been re-issued in the Kindle at £1.86 or $3.00. http://amzn.to/qQeAjC

Here's the introduction to the new edition:

Now and again one has the privilege of meeting someone truly inspiring. I had such an encounter in 1995 with the then eighty-six year-old Colonel Martin Herford, the most decorated British doctor of World War Two. I was a twenty-seven year-old lawyer trying to become a writer of fiction, but as fate would have it, my first published work would be in the realm of non-fiction; through a series of coincidences I had landed the job of recording this remarkable man’s wartime experiences.

It’s fair to say that scarcely a month has passed in the intervening years in which I haven’t thought about what it must have been like for him to serve first in the Spanish Civil War, then in Finland, then in every major theatre of war right through to the liberation of Belsen. There can have been very few men who saw as much of the world’s biggest and most devastating conflict as Colonel Herford, and who emerged so philosophical and faithful to their principles. He was a living testament to the efficacy of Churchill’s famous maxim: ‘When you’re going through hell, keep going.’

At a time when ephemeral culture is finally showing signs of giving way to more sober and thoughtful perspectives, I feel we may need the stories of men like Colonel Herford more than ever: like the war-time years, those ahead promise to require inspired and outstanding individuals to subordinate their egos to vast group efforts. Virtue may once again have to suffice as its own reward.

The following pages are a simple account of Colonel Herford’s war written by a young man who scarcely appreciated the enormity of what he was setting down. But what I did understand even then was that the doctors, nurses and stretcher-bearers of the military are every bit as courageous as the front-line troops, and very seldom written about. The image of a team of medics tucked safely away in a hospital tent well behind lines is far from accurate. Very often the wounded were treated in the midst of battle with bullets flying and shells exploding all around. Were it not for the efforts of the thousands of Medical Officers and staff who accompanied the Allied armies throughout battles across three continents, the fatalities would undoubtedly have been far higher.

When it came to discussing his experiences, Colonel Herford proved to be a modest man with an admirable reserve typical of the wartime generation. Self-aggrandisement was definitely not his style. Consequently it wasn’t always easy to extract detail from him – especially that concerning his own acts of heroism - but thankfully he had an old leather suitcase full of diaries, letters, notes and official dispatches through which I sifted in an effort to distil the unembellished facts. I am glad to say he gave his full approval to the finished text.

When I cast back my mind nearly seventeen years I remember a man full of dogged but peaceful spirit. After dinner in his farmhouse on the Cornish coast, he led me outside and pointed out the constellations in a perfectly clear night sky. Despite all he had witnessed, he remained in awe of God’s infinite creation, and ever respectful of it.

August 2011

http://amzn.to/qQeAjC

Hay Festival 2011

2011-06-06T12:08:00.001+01:00

Just back the Hay Festival 2011 having spent a terrific week there. I was privileged to share a platform with novelists Philip Kerr and Christopher Brookmyre. We were gently interrogated by the softly spoken and thoroughly gentlemanly Marcel Berlins. For a newcomer to the Festival circuit, this was a wonderful introduction.

In recent years the Festival has grown from delightful to phenomenal. Bill Clinton called it a 'Woodstock of the mind', but Woodstock happened only once, this is an annual fixture which continues to draw the world's leading writers, scientists, philosophers, theologians and politicians (not too many of the latter, thankfully). The first lecture I attended invovled Sir John Scarlett, former head of MI6 discussing the authorised history of the first forty years of that organisation. He let us know that he had been a 'field agent', and indeed in charge of making sure that his fellow spies abided by the absolute rules of secrecy which extend to not even telling members of their own families what they do. I was mesmerised by his face projected onto the large screen behind him. It gave nothing of his inner workings away. There was nothing in the least sinister about it, in fact there was a rather endearing twinkle in his eyes, but I would go so far as to say that I have never observed such an unreadable face, which, I suppose, is what fitted him to be our chief spy.

Perhaps because I am currently writing on a scientific theme in Jenny Cooper's fifth outing, I saw a number of scientists speak. Russel Stannard, particle physicist and Anlglican lay preacher spoke extremely insightfully about the potential limits of scientific knowledge, his strongest point being that our perceptions are inevitably limited by the biology of our brains, which evolved for survival in the wild, not theoretical physics. Another religious physicist, Professor John Polkinghorne, tried to lead his audience into an understanding of the sub-atomic world, but admitted that really very little of it is understood, not least how particles can be in several places at once. His strongest point - one I always use against the mystics of this world - is that proceeding from the basis of knowledge is always the best method. Be open minded, but not so much that you'll believe anything. A Cambridge man, properly suited, Polkinghorne was delightfully abrupt with his meandering questioners from the audience, reminding me very much of one my more ferocious tutors at university.

Professor of Chemistry Peter Atkins had no truck with religious belief of any sort: it's all bunk to him, and worse, a dangerous distraction that threatens to disturb the purity of the scientific method, the one and only route to truth. I found his certainty strangely contradictory; he seemed to lack a degree of intellectual humility that had been so apparent in the physicists. Perhaps this is a function of the fact that his work is more practical than theirs? He tended to confirm my suspicion that those who protest the most against religious belief - Dawkins chief among them - are secretly terrified that their superior intellects might be subverted were they to succumb to a spiritual experience.

Rolf Heuer, the man in charge of the CERN Large Hadron Collider, did have the humility to say that his, the most expensive experiment in history (outside of the space programme) may fail, but that the search for knowledge free of all requirements to deliver a specific result was nevertheless worth six billion euros. Jon Snow, his interviewer, positioned himself as a layman with little understanding of the LHC, and in so doing misjudged his audience somewhat - people are extremely well informed and well read, not in the least bit ignorant. Heuer was excellent, but Snow should have read a little more and led him into a more complex debate.

I regret not having been able to get tickets to see the Archbishop of Canterbury Rowan Williams, or Julian Assange, founder of Wikileaks. I would like to have asked Williams precisely why, as head of the worldwide Anglican Church, he refuses to be drawn on any major issues of doctrine (is it too much to ask to know if he bleives in the virgin birth or the physical resurrection?), and Assange whether what started out as a bit of mischievous fun has spiralled out of control into something terrifying that ultimately threatens the future freedom of the internet.

Some newspaper articles (even written by people who were there) have described the festival as being held in a muddy Welsh field. Rubbish. The ground is hard as a rock - too dry for farmers - and the sun beat down on a tented city constructed to keep everyone dry when occasionally it rains.

The Festival proves that dumbed down as the media is, the thirst for knowledge is as intense as ever. At Hay you get to meet the writers and thinkers first-hand, to hear it from their own mouths and not through the filter of television. This is what people want. Expect to see a lot more of it in the future.

Latest Script

2011-04-13T17:18:00.001+01:00

In the few months between fninshing the fourth novel in the Jenny Cooper series (The Flight - published early 2012), and starting the next one, I've gone back to screen writing and written a spec movie script. Agents tell you not to - there are piles of scripts by brilliant writers gathering dust in offices across the world - but if a story grabs you, you have to write it.

I have a lifelong passion for the sport of boxing - it comes down the family line - and have always been fascinated by the late Georgian period, a time before the Victorians when Britain might just have teetered over into revolution and become something very different. A couple of years ago I had been researching the lives of black men and women in Britain at the time, intrigued by the fact that many former slaves had become successful businessmen, even substantial landowners (slavery within Britain was outlawed in 1770). I had in mind a young man who arrives from Jamaica and sets himself up in business, fighting his way to the top of the tree at great cost to his soul ...

This character makes a brief appearance in The Redeemed - he's 'The Sugar Man' in the oil painting in the lawyers' office - and one day I will write his story, but it was the story a real-life contemporary of his which I've sought to dramatise. It came from a chance meeting with a man named Jon Hurley, who amongst other things, is a wine expert and boxing historian. Jon told me about the famous Bristolian boxer, Tom Cribb, who was world heavyweight champion for many years from 1806. Two of his most famous fights were against a freed slave, Tom Molyneuex, who arrived in England in 1810 from America and propelled by some super-human force, made his way through the rough world of boxing to a title shot.

I won't give away what happened to Molyneux - it's all in the script - but he shook up the world to the extent that no other black man got a clear shot at the title for nearly another century. He was the first black sporting idol, and his bouts with Cribb were arguably the first ever international sporting events. For a man responsible for so many firsts, it's astonishing that his story isn't more widely known.

There's a copy of the script here: http://bit.ly/fn0NYP and a picture of the man himself circa 1811:

Religion, Mr Two-Guns and my Adventures in the Sex Trade

2011-04-05T14:23:00.002+01:00

Some wonderful early readers of my latest, The Redeemed, have emailed to ask why religion and dead a porn star? Where do these themes come from?

The porn star bit first ...

As a young barrister (courtroom attorney, for US readers), I had the dubious pleasure of being sent to represent a number of sex shop owners who were being charged with selling obscene material. Back in the 90s such prosecutions were commonplace. The Metropolitan Police's Obscene Publications Squad would raid one of Soho's seedier premises, throw all their video tapes and magazines into evidence bags and then spend the next few days in Bow Street Police Station working their way through them. They were very organised; they had specially printed sheets which they filled out as they watched every film. There were ten or twelve columns, each of which was headed with a description of a sex act deemed obscene. The dilligent officers then inserted a tick in each column next to the appropriate time-code.

A trial would then ensue in front of some po-faced magistrates, and lawyers would struggle to contain their embarrassment (and laughter) as a detective would calmly read through one such sheet after another in a flat monotone ... No magistrate has ever to my knowledge deemed anything showing more than an inch of flesh above the ankle to be other than likely 'to tend to deprave and corrupt', and therefore obscene.

Defendants who chose to take their chances in front of a Crown Court jury, however, increasingly had more luck. Perhaps because London juries were often comprised of the feckless and unemployed - i.e. people not smart enough to wriggle out of their jury summons and glad of the daily allowance - they tended to be rather more liberal. Juries would spend many steamy hours in their locked room watching titles such as 'Maximum Perversum', then emerge with a not-guilty verdict. By the late 90s and with the advent of the internet and all that it brought, securing a conviction for anything other than the most heinous images became an impossibility.
Public morals somehow changed, and with lightning speed.

All this was vaguely amusing to be part of, but frankly such cases felt tacky, and the people involved tackier still. The police were no better. They really were shifty looking men in raincoats, largely indistinguishable from the nervous office-worker types who flitted in and out of the pornographers' shops.

The 21st century has managed to give the burgeoning porn industry a veneer of glamour. The product has been packaged-up as safe, adult-only entertainment, harmless if consumed in moderation, all consensual and above-board. It's certainly big business, but the truth is that it involves a lot of very damaged people who find themselves wretchedly exploited at vulnerable times of their lives.

The character of Eva Donaldson in The Redeemed is based on an amalgam of women I have read about who got caught up in the porn business. Young, headstrong, in need of money and intoxicated by the sense of power and success that being a centre of attention (however sordid) brings. I've met some of the guys higher up the food chain - the ones who cross over into the world of respectable business, such as owning daily newspapers - and there is little compassion for those young people making their money by having sex in front of a camera. How can such men (and women) enjoy their wealth with a clear conscience? Beats me.

And as for religion ...

Religious themes have always fascinated me. Partly because I went to a cathedral school, and partly because I came from one of those counter-cultural families where there were always books on various Eastern religions and strange New Age philosophies lying around. Very early on, I become intrigued by the spiritual impulse and the different ways in which people pursued it.

Along the way I came across Evangelical Christians. I admit, there is something about fervent belief and the persuasive theatricality of some US preachers that I find strangely intoxicating. However, a few visits to British charismatic churches, Holy Trinity Brompton (the home of the Alpha Course) among them, led me to believe that there was more than spirituality going on there. Certainly, there was a genuine desire amongst worshippers to know God, but the arm-waving and simple repetitive worship songs reminded me strongly of the mesmeric chanting practised by Buddhists and Hindus to invoke an altered state of consciousness. On top of this, it's hard not to feel that there is, at least amongst some of the congregation, a large element of suppressed sexuality which is finding alternative expression in religious rapture. Standing in a church filled with middle class people with faces tilted upwards and their arms in the air, I felt uncomfortable - the experience was not unlike standing in a polite football crowd.

Another problem I developed with charismatic religion, is its lack of humility. You get people calling on the Holy Spirit to 'come down now and fill us up ...', as if it's the worshipper calling the shots. No, my kind of church, I decided, is a quiet, contemplative place that encourages thoughtful consideration of the mysteries without too much fuss and human emotion. And I cetainly don't believe in instant salvation: that's fast-food religion, nourishing for about as long as it takes you to drive out of the car park.

In recent years, my some-time screenwriting partner, ex-lawyer and ex-convict, James McIntyre (known to his friends and admirers as Jimmy Two-Guns), has sought to convert me to the Catholocism which brought about a transformation in his life. I resist, but am from time to time tempted. There's a majesty, certainty and continuity in the Roman Catholic Church which doesn't exist in other denominations, and of course a history tracking back to St Peter himself. Before coming up with the idea for The Redeemed I had become intrigued by what traditions as diverse as the orthodox catholic church and the protestant evangelicals thought of each other: both notionally part of the same faith, but so different in every aspect. I read extensively, talked to James, and came up with the character of Father Lucas Starr, the Jesuit noviate nearing the end of his 17 year training.

James would love me to 'swim the Tiber' as he puts it, but every time I'm tempted, something tugs me back to the liberatality of the Anglican church in which I grew up. It's wooliness and introvertedness frustrates me, and I loathe the modern renderings of the prayer book and Bible and the modern songs Pope Benedict so neatly described as 'inane ditties', but I do ultimatele feel vaguely reassured by it. It's sort of comfortable with its contradictions and gratifyingly immune to extremes.

My own spiritual search continues, but writing The Redeemed did answer a lot of questions and posed many more. Do let me know what you think - I'd love to continue this conversation.

Goldsboro Books

2011-04-02T13:19:00.000+01:00

Dave Headley, the dynamic owner of Goldsboro Books, hosted a terrific launch party for me on 31st March. One of the few British independent booksellers to be going from strength to strength, he's selling a special limited edition of The Redeemed and doing a brilliant job of promoting my series.

Goldsboro isn't only an unrivalled bokstore for collectors, especially those of crime fiction, the new premises also has a very fitting history - in the early 1960s it was the scene of a murder. I understand the murderer was caught and duly hanged in Pentonville Prison. I'm glad I didn't know that before the party, but owner Dave ( a former trainee priest) says he detects no unwelcome presence, in fact he spent many nights sleeping there when the shop was being renovated. If you're passing Cecil Court (just of Charing Cross Road, down near the Trafalgar Square end), drop in and see what you think ...

Hydro-powered books

2011-03-09T16:42:00.003Z

It looks a bit Heath Robinson, but in fact this is the water-powered turbine which since 2007 has powered our house, virtually exclusively. It's hooked up to the grid, so any power we don't use gets exported, which is about a third of it.

We're lucky enough to live in an old mill valley, and way back in the 1920s, the shell-shocked ex-military man who owned the house ran a hydro-electric turbine off the stream. Apparently the rig remained until the power grid arrived in the 1950s. After we bought the house I discovered the turbine room behind a wall in the garden. All the equipment had long since gone, but it got me determined to capture that energy running downhill and out in the river Wye.

It wasn't easy. The only guys I could find with any expertise were nice but a little flaky (Buddhists ...) and the whole thing took the best part of a year to install. We had to build an intake, then run a plastic pipe over 300 yards through a trench along the side of the valley before taking it downhill into the turbine. I become an amateur water engineer, and ever since have had a steady trickle of people coming to inspect and learn from my painful experiences. Little hyrdro generators are now starting to spring up across the country for the first time in fifty years.

For three years now we've been running off our own power, and I guess my books can claim to have been written entirely by renewable energy. My computers, printers, lights and phones all run off the stream, and at regular intervals throughout the working week I'm down with the turbine adjusting the flow, greasing the bearings and generally tinkering with this crude but precious bit of machinery.

We've got sites on our stream for a few water wheels, too, but I worry that if I had many more machines running I'd never get to my desk. It's a lot of fun, though, and appeals to the romantic in me.

The Redeemed 1st April Pornography, Sex, Evangelism and Death

2011-03-07T16:51:00.002Z

Lots of emails have been arriving in the past few weeks (I'm very grateful for the fact), from readers asking to know when the next book is coming out and what it's about. Well, publication date is April 1st 2011 in the UK and May 3rd in the USA. My first two books were published in January, but my publishers tell me April is a month with fewer books being published - all the better for getting noticed,

Without giving too much away, the central spine of the story concerns an investigation into the death of Eva Donaldson, a troubled young woman who achieved fame first as an actress in adult movies, and then as an Evangelical Christian and ardent anti-pornography campigner. The narrative takes us into the inner workings of the Mission Church of God, an American mega-church which has planted a branch in the city of Bristol which has exploded to a congregation of more than five thousand.

Why tell a story about the pornography business? When I was a young barrister, I had the dubious pleasure of representing the owners of a number of sex shops in Soho, central London, who were being prosecuted by the Obscene Publications Squad. Detectives would raid a store, empty it of stock, then retire to the police station to study it in detail before deciding whether it was obscene and therefore worthy of prosecution.

The British law of obscenity remains unchanged since it was framed in 1959. The Obscene Publications Act states that an item intended for publication or public exhibition is obscene 'if taken as a whole, [it is] such as to tend to deprave and corrupt persons who are likely, having regard to all relevant circumstances, to read, see or hear the matter contained or embodied in it'.

I always found the notion of 'deprave and corrupt' a sensible one. It seems to me to mean that something must be adjudged capable of altering a person's state of mind in a very negative and undesirable way. What is particularly interesting is that although the letter of the law hasn't changed for over fifty years, the application has altered radically. This was the legal test which was applied to Lady Chatterley's Lover - a book which today would scarcely raise an eyebrow - but which today seems to hold most internet pornography to be within acceptable bounds.

Back in the early 90s, any material involving couples having sex (as opposed to mere nude shots), was capable of being prosecuted, and indeed, juries would convict. Twenty years ago, the public felt that explicit images had a corrupting and depraving effect - in other words, they felt that having been exposed to such images, others might alter their behaviour in a negative manner as a result. Nowadays, I understand there are virtually no prosecutions for obscene publications depicting what might be termed consensual acts between adults. On a practical level, police time is taken up with investigating heinous pornography (such as that involving children) proliferating on the internet, but, it seems, public mores have changed radically in this area.

I'm going to stick my neck out and say we've gone way too far down the liberal road. No one wants to live in an oppressive society, but there again there will always necessarily be boundaries some will clamour to transgress no matter how liberal a society. Morality - religious and secular - developed to counter damaging baser instincts. A society which exercised total freedom would more than likely involve a lot of violence, ugliness and sexual exploitation. The question is merely one of where precisely to draw the line. In a decade we've developed a culture which not only tolerates pornography, but gorges on it, not only in its extreme forms, but also in advertising and popular television. At the same time, we've erected other compensatory taboos - all those things covered by political correctness - as if to assure ourselves that we haven't abaondoned the pursuit of virtue entirely.

I don't have a precise position, and in a sense it's a writer's job to observe and reflect, not to weigh in as a politician might, but I don't see the current morality lasting long. This tide has been in and out before, most notably in the 1820s (before Victoria), when Britain went suddenly, dramatically and for no discernible reason from a country in which the most grotesque and explicit cartoons featured in the public press, to one so buttoned-up the sight of a lady's ankle was enough to make men blush.

Eva Donaldson is a character I have plucked from a time in the near-future when I anticipate the wheel will start to turn. Probably there will be people like her who lead the anti-pornography movement, and indeed since writing the book I have spotted one or two written about on the internet. I'm fascinated to see how this particular cultural shift will play out. Already some British politicians are talking about ISPs being forced to stop sexual images reaching subscriber's homes if they so wish. I can see that gaining a lot of traction, especially as in economically straitened times we necessarily turn our gaze inwards.

As for the Mission Church of God, I'll meditate on that one shortly ...

Fixed

2011-02-26T11:05:00.000Z

The path lies clear again ...

Life's little obstacles ...

2011-02-22T19:14:00.000Z

Walking down the path to my office and found my way blocked by a fallen wall. Walls are always falling down around here - they've stood for two hundred years without mortar and the soil slowly shifts and eventually there's a collapse. It fills me with a strange sense of excitement ... I love rebuilding these things, lifting heavy stones, shovelling dirt, fitting it all together. All the stones were dug by hand out of the hillside behind that is now woods, but once was a quarry. But there's also the thought that perhaps my repair will stand for another two hundred years. Who will it be fixing it then? I know exactly who has maintained these walls for the last hundred years, and have an idea who it was in the hundred years before that. Maybe I'll carve my name and date on the back of one of them like the Victorian paper hangers used to do.

I'll post a picture when it's fixed.

A short story inspired by the hanging of Sarah Harriet Thomas

2011-01-26T12:58:00.000Z

ELIZA

The girl Eliza was among six prisoners to be hanged beside Bristol gaol. An eager crowd had gathered in the icy dawn, and the dignitaries at the scaffold were in fine humour, a flask of brandy being freely passed between them. Only the chaplain, a young and pale fellow, refused to taint his lips. William Cawden had no need to be present and should at that moment have been on the early stage bound for the Exeter assizes; but all the sack in Bristol – he felt sure he had drunk it to the last drop - had failed to purge her from his mind.

She had been a surly prisoner, and he, a lawyer reluctantly assigned to her defence for a single shilling, had suffered her rudeness and unwomanly cursing with more patience than she had deserved. The evidence leaving little doubt as to her guilt, he had advised her to admit to the facts but plead want of malice through insanity, trusting her soul to the court’s mercy. Cawden had known Mr Justice Dalton fifteen years and more, and never seen him hang a pretty girl where she could have been justly flogged or transported to Australia. But Eliza would have none of it. An intruder had murdered her mistress in her bed, she protested; the blood had stained her dress as she attempted to revive her; the knife on the stair was left by the fleeing felon; the neighbours’ accounts of her short temper and savage tongue were nothing but malicious slander.

Such was the force of her insistence that Cawden had given some credence to her story. She, a mere girl of seventeen, had, at moments, so influenced his mind as to make him believe that she spoke truthfully while five citizens, all of good character, lied against her under sacred oath. At first, Mr Justice Dalton had been inclined to leniency – his clerk had hinted as much – but Eliza would not smile at him or curtsey, and in her manner seemed to mock the solemn process of the court. Thus she caused the jury to conclude that the contempt in which she evidently held her own life must have extended to that of her employer. Had she met her judge’s eye but a single time in remorse, Cawden was certain he might have spared her, yet she did not. She remained steadfast to the truth, she said; and in so doing was the only honest person present.

Three days had passed since Dalton delivered sentence of death, and thoughts of her had caused Cawden much distraction from his work. She remained undimmed in spirit, the court gaoler informed him, shunning the chaplain and claiming her trial a parody of justice. Cawden had known such prisoners before, and in each case had seen them changed on the mornings of their doom. His mischief done, the devil fled at the scaffold steps, he had observed: God stood above the rope and it was a penitent that hanged.

A murmur passed through the assembly as the iron gates opened. Between the hats and bonnets obscuring his view, Cawden saw gaolers herding five shackled men, who shuffled barefoot on the frosty ground towards the scaffold steps. There was no sign of Eliza. For a moment he dared to wonder if Dalton had granted a reprieve, but then the screams came. They grew louder, their shrillness like a demon’s wail, subduing the spectators into uncertain silence. Four stout men, each grasping one of her frail limbs, carried her spitting and snarling from the prison courtyard in an effort that seemed to take all their strength. The governor’s anxious voice competed with the commotion: ‘Despatch her first’.

Cawden waited for the moment of calm, but Eliza’s convulsing and exclamations of innocence increased as they carried her up the steps and onto the boards. The ghost-faced chaplain approached making a sign of the cross in the air before him, but a thick hand pushed him back and another reached for the rope. All was confusion and noise more terrible than a surgeon’s ward until the men swiftly retreated and Eliza stood alone, fighting the noose as if she might bite herself free even as the trap fell open beneath her feet.

Some danced a while before life left them. Eliza was dead in an instant; and when they cut her down it took only one man to throw her body onto the cart. Cawden remained to see the others hang and noted that there were few cheers, and at the spectacle’s end only muted applause for the good offices of the hangman, Mr Brewer.

He watched the cart creak through the gaol gates and turned away with the crowd. He had done all in his power, had he not? He thought of calling on the girl’s mother to tell her of his suspicion that she was wrongly accused, but feared there would be gossip and a smear on his reputation. And besides, it was impractical: he had a stage to catch before the hour and cases to prepare. Tomorrow he would be taking the instructions of the Crown, prosecuting a horse thief and a sailor returned from sea who had smothered his wife's bastard child.

END

New Street Law - The missing episodes part two

2011-01-17T12:12:00.000Z

Here's a link to the second complete episode in the third series:
https://docs.google.com/viewer?a=v&pid=explorer&chrome=true&srcid=0B54DmifKUdlFYmU0Yzc1MzAtMTFiYi00MmU2LWJlOWMtNDJhM2UwOTNhOTZk&hl=en_GB

New Street Law - the missing episodes

2011-01-12T17:34:00.001Z

I've had a few emails asking what happens in New Street Law, the BBC 1 drama series, after the end of series two. In fact a whole series three was mapped out and two complete episodes written.
Here's a link to the first of those episodes, picking up after the cliff-hangar at the end of series two.
In my view, the scripts were just getting into their stride ...
https://docs.google.com/viewer?=v&pid=explorer&chrome=true&srcid=0B54DmifKUdlFYTE5MGE5YzAtOTQwNS00NGFlLTg5ZTEtYTAzMGFmMTJiZTc3&hl=en

A little short fiction

2010-11-05T14:53:00.000Z

Dexter’s Garden

Dexter had never been a poet, no, his writing, such as it was, had always been of an altogether more turgid kind. He had dreamt occasionally of attempting a novel or even a screenplay, but by the age of forty his published work consisted only of a handful of articles in professional journals, several intemperate (and later regretted) contributions to newspaper letter pages, and a chapter in a legal textbook so technical and verbose that even to read a single page caused seasoned practitioners physical pain.

His therapist (he’d seen several in his London years) had once suggested that perhaps the practice of law was the cause of his unhappiness, but Dexter had dismissed this with a shake of the head so firm and fierce that he could still precisely recall the motion and feel the rough texture of the therapist’s wicker armchair beneath his tensed fingers. He had wanted to be a lawyer since he was eleven years old, he had said, a barrister to be precise; it was his destiny. If only he had listened, he might have been spared the humiliation of losing the power of speech in court. The puzzled faces of the jury and the judge’s disapproving frown as Dexter clutched his papers in violently trembling hands remained the indelible background to his every waking thought. To have laboured so hard and to have failed so publicly, so spectacularly … There had been nothing for it but to leave the city altogether and to start a new life where no one would know of his shameful past.

In fact, so successful had he been in covering up his ‘incident’ that not even his wife knew what had happened that day. He had actually succeeded in convincing an intelligent woman that the sudden move to the country and his abandonment of ambition was all for the good of the family; that the children would cease to be pale and neurotic and he and Emma would have time to enjoy each other.

During the several months of adjustment to living in a new and tight-knit community which had initially greeted the incomers warily, Dexter had felt a fraud. While Emma cried herself to sleep convinced that the mothers at the new school all despised her, he had been tempted to drive into the night and plunge into a wooded ravine. Yet three summers later the children were thriving and he and Emma regularly shared a bottle of wine in the shade of the elder tree. They had two young dogs and a stream for them to splash in, an acre of lawn, a gazebo with an electricity supply, and a walled vegetable garden with espaliered apple and pear trees trained along a south-facing wall.

In most outward respects the relocation had been a success, but despite living in the heart of nature, Dexter had neither the time nor the inclination to enjoy it. Whenever he sat in the garden he saw only the weeds and unruly twigs protruding from shrubs. The lawn was full of moss, the paths infested with dandelions and the cost of maintaining the crumbling fabric of the old rectory was a source of constant worry. Work had not gone well. The local firm of solicitors who had so enthusiastically received a lawyer of his experience had let him go after only six months due to faltering finances. He was forced to take a lesser post in a city more than an hour’s drive away, and by the time he arrived home each evening he was tetchy, exhausted and in need of strong drink.

More galling than his professional backward-slide was the fact that a feeling of anxious dread that had been with him to a greater or lesser extent since childhood, had remained stubbornly undiminished by the beauty of his surroundings. With not a therapist of note within a twenty mile radius, Dexter began to feel painfully alone. And even if one were to be found, and even if he were able to conjure an excuse convincing enough to disguise his appointments from Emma, he felt that he had passed the age at which a case such as his remained worthy of understanding or sympathy. Had he been a therapist required to listen to a well-educated man describe the cramped and oppressive mental space in which he felt trapped and beyond which he could picture only an empty void, he would have felt nothing but contempt. Such a weakling should learn to curb his imagination and stop being so self-indulgent, he would have said; he should take a pill and get a hold of himself.

It was during a damp July, his fourth in the country, that a bumpy rash that resembled a nettle sting appeared on the outside of his calf. Having scratched it during his sleep Dexter woke to find it weeping. The wound, officially diagnosed as eczema, refused to heal. Dexter spent an increasingly uncomfortable week changing elaborate dressings every other hour, but clear fluid continued to flow from his leg like water from a spring, and on the sixth day the contagion spread, sweeping over his entire body. His face, arms, hands and torso became sore and dry, taking on the quality of parched desert. It was as if all the moisture from his skin was draining out through its lowest point.

Obliged on doctor’s orders to abandon his commuting until the eczema subsided, Dexter shuffled stoically to the gazebo each morning where he set up a makeshift office in which he struggled to draft leases for small commercial premises. As he swept the mouse droppings from the rust-bubbled surface of the folding table that served as his desk, he inwardly wept. A man who in his twenties and thirties had graced the Royal Courts of Justice and been considered a shoo-in for the High Court Bench, was consigned to a vermin-infested shack

The final indignity was having to endure the twice-weekly interruptions of Mr Davies, the gardener (‘inherited’ with the house) whose efforts on a Tuesday and Thursday morning failed to make any impression that Dexter could see. When it was time to stop for his break, the old man would quite unselfconsciously enter through the gazebo door and settle into the ancient deck-chair that Dexter had never got around to removing. While Dexter continued to tap at the computer, his cracked hands swaddled in bandages, Mr Davies would chatter about his other customers in the area then lapse into lengthy reminiscences about his former career as a farm worker. Dexter was subjected to his accounts of lambing in the winter of ’62 and of fighting the fires that destroyed whole fields of wheat in the drought of ’76, and to tales of wily stockmen whom he had seen make and lose fortunes at the market ring. There was no self-awareness in the man, Dexter would think to himself, how else could he be so insensitive as to interrupt a lawyer at his work?

Concerned that his limited money was not being well-spent, Dexter decided to replace Mr Davies with a younger, less intrusive gardener, but on the particular Thursday morning he had designated for the interview, the old man took him by surprise, tapping his door shortly after nine and requesting his advice on a legal matter. He and his wife lived in a tied cottage, he explained, and even though he had retired from the farm many years before, the lease entitled them to remain until the last one died. The issue was over his vegetable garden, a half-acre abutting the cottage that the farmer had always allowed him to cultivate, the produce originally having been counted in lieu of wages. Mr Davies and his wife had come to rely on their home-grown food, but the farmer was now demanding the land back; he had written a letter giving a month’s notice and had torn down the fence that separated it from the surrounding field during the night. Why he wanted it, Mr Davies had no idea. The land was of little use to him, and there were many other plots on the farm which lay neglected.

The story stirred a sense of injustice in Dexter and, temporarily forgetting his plan to dismiss his gardener, he visited the cottage and saw the problem at once. The beautifully tended rows of potatoes, beans and onions would produce more than enough for the old couple’s needs, and on closer questioning they admitted to making a few pennies from selling a pound of this or that at the gate. The farmer, he surmised, saw this as profit made at his expense. The lease was silent on the issue of market gardening and the sums involved would hardly cover the cost of a spade handle and a watering can, so Dexter advised them to reinstate the fence and to write to the farmer informing him that they asserted their right to the land. If he took them to court, Dexter confidently stated, he would find it a costly and futile endeavour. No judge with a spark of humanity could possibly decide against them.

To Dexter it was a simple matter of law with a correct and predictable conclusion, but to Mr Davies it seemed an insurmountable obstacle. He let the fence lie on the ground and didn’t like to write the letter, preferring to allow the farmer to come and claim his land if he dared. It was about human decency in his eyes. No amount of legal correspondence could repair a man’s character: it was between the farmer, his conscience and his maker. Dexter became increasingly frustrated with Mr Davies’ unwillingness to defend himself and offered to write the letter personally, to speak to the farmer man to man if necessary, but the old man insisted on pursuing his futile policy of wait and see.

The summer months passed and the farmer appeared to lose interest in the land, but as September approached with the promise of a fine harvest, the cooked plum tree that stood in the centre of the half-acre keeled over in a storm. Ever thrifty, Mr Davies cut it up for firewood. The next morning a letter arrived: the farmer accusing him of theft. Within the hour Mr Davies had emptied his woodshed of the plum logs and more, and stacked them neatly in the farmer’s yard. ‘I never gave it a thought,’ he told Dexter over his morning tea. ‘And he’d have let it lie there till it was no good to anyone.’

Dexter, who was still afflicted with eczema, felt more aggrieved by the accusation of theft than Mr Davies. What could have possessed the farmer to have accused a man who lived so frugally and without complaint of being a criminal? He couldn’t believe there was a more blameless individual walking God’s Earth. For the rest of the day he could barely concentrate on his leases; he was filled with a righteous anger he hadn’t known since his earliest days in practice. How dare the farmer defame such an innocent!

His blood refused to cool. The following Saturday evening he smothered his skin with ointment, wound fresh bandages around his leg and went for a walk along the footpath that crossed the farmer’s land. As he struggled down the rutted track he dared the landowner to show his face. He had a speech ready and rehearsed: he would give him chapter and verse of the law of agricultural holdings (he had memorised the statutes verbatim) before calling him a bully and a slanderer. He fairly sauntered past the prosperous farmhouse, straying off the path and trespassing into the field, but the farmer wisely stayed well hidden.

A little further on he arrived at the margin of the Davies’s plot and saw that since his previous visit it had become choked with grass and weeds. The bean-sticks were on the lean giving way under the weight of an unpicked crop; onions and shallots had shot to seed, slug-ravaged lettuce leaves drooped from foot-long stalks. Dexter ran to the cottage door and knocked repeatedly but there was no answer. He pressed his face to the kitchen window and saw only the cat sitting on the uneven flagstone floor, studiously licking its paws.

It wasn’t until Tuesday morning that Emma received a phone call from Mrs Davies saying that her husband wouldn’t be at work that day, or at all. Early on Saturday he had set out for a walk on the common and had suffered a heart attack. He had lingered in hospital over the weekend and passed peacefully with his family and a minister at his bedside on Sunday evening. She wanted Dexter to know how much her husband had appreciated all that he had done for them.

But Dexter had done nothing except consult a few textbooks and offer advice which wasn’t heeded. He went to the gazebo filled with grief and haunted by images of the dead man’s untended garden. As he sat over his work tears dripped onto his cracked and stinging cheeks. Fighting the sobs that were clogging his throat he tried to focus on a lease he was amending, but the words might have been written in a foreign tongue. Nothing made any sense, not the man’s death, nor the turn his own life had taken; and he wasn’t even afforded the dignity of hiding his misery beneath his skin. In desperation, Dexter lifted his tearful gaze and looked out through the grubby pane of glass at the shabby, unkempt trees and bushes that littered his own disordered plot of land.

Why did nothing work?

Why was there no discernible pattern to his existence?

Why was he being made to suffer so?

And as he watched the branches shift and sway in the wind, all nature oblivious to his suffering, he seemed to dissociate from his body. For a moment he hoped he was dying, and then, as he floated, he faintly heard a quiet and familiar voice whispering words that asked to be written down.

Come to my fecund garden,

Come to me there, my love,

You will find me under the willow,

‘Midst poppies and sweet foxglove.

You will find me among the roses,

In daisies and buttercups, dove,

You will find me in dart of swallow,

In the air that you breathe, my love.

Dexter reached for a piece of paper and scribbled in a barely legible hand:

You will find me entwined with the lily,

Riding dandelion feather and mist,

Ochred with pollen, tasting the nectar,

On the sward by the brook where we kissed.

Come to my fecund garden,

Come there at twilight and call,

Feel the breeze of my hand, the dew of my breath,

My spirit, still dancing, in all.

It was the first poem he had written since he was a small boy, but Mr Davies’ daughter read it aloud at her father’s funeral and in the churchyard afterwards people requested copies to remember their friend and neighbour by.

‘Where did that come from?’ Emma asked as they drove home, a little embarrassed by her husband the poet. Dexter had no idea, but thought he might like to go there again.

M R Hall 2010

Huddersfield Literary Lunch

2010-10-07T09:43:00.000+01:00

A very big thank you to the organisers of the Huddersfield Examiner's annual literary lunch held at the town's famous rugby league and football stadium on October 5th. Alongside fellow novelists Anne Cleeves, Sophie Hannah and Simon Brett I was privileged to talk to an enthusiastic crowd of book lovers. It's always heartening and more than a little inspiring to witness the enthusiasm for live literary events.

My colleagues all had entertaining stories to tell. After many years hard work and many novels, Anne Cleeves is finally seeing her books televised. She called it luck, but it's far from it - it's what her excellent work and all those years of toil merit. Sophie Hannah had all the enviable skills of a stand-up comic; she's a terrific performer as well as a great literary talent. If she's appearing at an event near you, make a date. Simon Brett has truly mastered his craft and manges to combine great humour and warmth with his crime fiction. The gift of making people laugh is one I particularly admire.

Lastly, a special thank you to all those who bought books, and if you feel moved to send me your thoughts, please do. Praise or not, it's all good to hear.

Lessons from Mr Leonard

2010-06-16T11:02:00.000+01:00

I was given Elmore Leonard's Ten Rules of Writing for my birthday. It's quite a publishing feat to package two pages worth of text in such a way as to fill a whole book, but I don't begrudge the greatest of crime writers another title on the shelf.

Elmore, now in his 80s (and still at the very top of his game), knows what he's talking about. Rules such as 'never use the word suddenly make perfect sense. Some make partial sense: 'never use adverbs to elaborate the word said' e.g. haughtily, menacingly, lovingly ... His argument is that the spirit of the adverb should be evoked by the dialogue and the prevailing action. It's a rule which comes from screen writing in which everything should be contained in the action, but sometimes in prose a phrase such as she said quietly is, in my view, perfectly acceptable.

I have to part company with Elmore on his rule which states that a writer should never resort to describing the weather. Fine if you're writing in Florida where the sun always shines, close to impossible in Wales where the weather is indivisible from the landscape and dictates one's choices every day. I always worry about what my characters are wearing - will they get wet wihtout a coat today? Will they need boots?

What Elmore is really saying is keep the action going and never hold it up with a lot of unnecessary words. True only up to a point. Sometimes you have to have the guts to put a little of your emotional self in the prose - it makes you vulnerable, potentially opens you to ridicule, but also opens up the possibility of a deeper connection with the reader. I'm glad Thomas Hardy and Laurie Lee didn't write to the maxim 'cut to the chase' .

Elmore's rules I think apply to a particular brand of action-led American fiction, but he's right to say that writing is about communicating a story, not self-indulgence. If you haven't read his books, you should try one. Get Shorty is a good place to start, particuarly admirable when you know it's the hippest of books that become a Hollywood blockbuster written by a man in his 70s.

http://www.amazon.co.uk/s/ref=nb_sb_noss?url=search-alias%3Daps&field-keywords=lmore+Leonard

The best of British television drama

2010-06-11T10:10:00.000+01:00

I was recently asked about my favourite British television drama. It's no accident that my all-time favourites were made in the era when television drama was still allowed to take risks, not with sex and violence, but with intimate exploration of charcter while at the same time exploring political themes. I hope to see that happen again soon. It seems that the country has to going through particualrly dark times for television drama to shine; the next few years might prove fruitful.

The best thriller serial ever written is Troy Kennedy-Martin's 'Edge of Darkness' (1985). A moving, stirring, beautiful six part story about a Yorkshire detective whose daughter is murdered as a result of her connection with an envirinmental group who have uncovered the truth about illegal plutomium prodution. Edge of Darkness remains the one and only environmental thriller to have been produced on British television. It won six BAFTAS (a stilll unmatched feat), and the writer (who sadly died last year) had to fight for every line of the script against BBC executives and script editors who were concerned that the occasional obscure references and (at the time) left-of-field themes, would confuse the audience. As it turned out, it was the fight of Troy's life, and worth every ounce of frustration. This series works on so many levels: it's a modern, apocalytic myth, and Troy intended it as such. For its prescience alone, it will, I think, remain unsurpassed.

The best crime serial is GF Newman's Law and Order (1968). This four-parter, shot in a dead-pan documentary style and without music, is a pure unobstructed window into the world of police corruption.
The most remarkable thing about this drama was that it was the first on British television to paint the police as dishonest, and arguably it remains the only one. (Nowadays 'balance' is a requirement written into the BBC's editorial guidelines, and this applies as much to drama as it does to factual prgramming. For every bad cop, there has to be a bad one). Questions were asked in the House of Commons after its broadcast, and the then Attorney General, Sir Michael Havers, wrote to the Director General of the BBC demanding that the programmes never be broadcast again. It took over thirty years for the ban to be overturned, and they were finally re-broadcast on BBC4 in 2009.

Both serials are availabe at Amazon. I can't recommend them highly enough.

NB: Don't confuse the original Edge of Darkness with the recent Mel Gibson movie remake. The film does not do the original justice.

http://www.amazon.co.uk/Edge-Darkness-Complete-bob-peck/dp/B00004CYR0/ref=sr_1_2?ie=UTF8&s=dvd&qid=1276247162&sr=1-2

http://www.amazon.co.uk/Law-Order-BBC-1978-DVD/dp/B0015083MQ/ref=sr_1_24?ie=UTF8&s=dvd&qid=1276247364&sr=1-24

Latstly, a few thoughts from another great television dramatist:

Holywell Library

2010-06-10T09:50:00.000+01:00

8th June 2010 I had the pleasure of talking to a very lively and interested crowd of readers in Holywell library, Flintshire, on the beautiful North Wales coast.

Having wondered how I could fill the 45 minute slot, I decided to tell the audience about my adventures in the criminal law and in the world of television and how they led me to take up writing novels. It was the first time I had really thought about that long journey myself, and I came away feeling very encouraged by my audience's response. One thing you don't get as a writer in television is any contact with your audience. Viewers tend to write to the actors to congratulate them on the script ... I never did work that out.

Talking to readers, many of them women, I am fascinated by the appetite for an insight into the darker side of life. The most unlikely people are thinking the most unlikely thoughts.

A big thank you to the team at the libray who organised it: Dot, Wenna, Cathy, Lynn and Julie. It was a great evening and I wish you success with all your future author events.