Bring Me Some Crime

The cheekily-named Morecambe & Vice revels in its tagline ‘Bring me Some Crime’. On its second outing this year, the festival of crime felt more assured and distinctive. As befitted the venue in the Winter Gardens on the seafront, it was compered by bouncy double-act Tom Fisher and Ben Cooper-Muir. Guest crimesmiths sat on sofas in front of the safety curtain and curtains billowed in empty theatre boxes high above. At least, I think they were empty…

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Ben & Tom

High above hung the once-gloriously decorated plaster ceiling and a warning notice WP_20180929_11_32_43_Prodeterred anyone from venturing upstairs to get a closer look. Warnings were a popular theme in Morecambe, what with quicksand and tides to catch the unwary. I took my toe-tag name badge and found a place amongst the cabaret-style seating. The audience seemed bigger than last year, perhaps 80 for each session and 200 or so overall.

As befits a concert hall, there was a showbiz theme, with panellists asked to reveal secret talents and then perform – singing, performance poetry and even fire-eating was on the bill. Chills were not only in the storylines but in the biting wind that brought horizontal rain in from the Irish Sea on the Sunday.

Every conference has its structure, but often panels are loosely wrapped opportunities to Plug My Book. M&V chose the approach of highly focussed subject talks. Four lawyers talked courtroom dramas, real and fictional. Four northern writers talked about their home turf. The item entitled ‘Crossing Sides’ featured four writers who worked in other genres; the point was made that romantic novels and crime novels can have rather similar narrative arcs.

A Crime Masterclass discussed flaws in crime novels and how to avoid them. One common theme was the need to establish basic truth within a novel to make it feel ‘realistic’, then make up the stuff essential to the plot. Fictional villages, obscure points of law and unlikely but possible twists can then follow. Sorry I can’t plug the names of the 50+ guests and speakers.

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Jake Arnott, Alex Reeve, Sarah Hilary, Mari Hannah and Paul Burston assert that Crime is Crime

Particularly interesting was the ‘Crime is Crime’ panel, addressing LBGT issues in crime novels. How gay characters were often limited to victims or villains, or perhaps as a token sidekick. Putting a gay or trans character as the lead investigator is a particular challenge, especially when not required as a plot driver.

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Elly Griffiths on the sofa with Peter Robinson

A study of Agatha Christie’ plays showed her to be the leading female playwright of all time. Capping the first day was a classic sofa interview of Peter Robinson by Elly Griffiths, including his not-always flattering thoughts on the TV adaptions of his DCI Banks novels.

wp_20180929_16_09_03_pro.jpgA walk along the seafront gave me the opportunity to strike a pose by the statue of Eric Morecambe. The photo gained more facebook ‘likes’ than any of my regular posts showing that to succeed on the internet, it helps to make an idiot of yourself.

 

 

WP cropOh, and we met Inspector Ted, abandoned bear turned crime-fighting mascot so internet-famous that local villains even recognise him when they are nicked.

Next year’s dates and programme are to be established but incredibly cheap advance tickets are already on sale.

@MorecambeVice

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My Voice it Made an Avalanche

Fiona Apple’s song ‘Container’ opens Showtime’s The Affair, which is in its 4th season.

My voice it made an avalanche/ and buried a man I never knew/

And when he died his widowed bride/ met your daddy and they made you.

The show itself riffs on that avalanche we can start by carelessly kicking a few stones. Serial blunderer Noah (Dominic West) falls in love with tragic waitress Alison (Ruth Wilson). The gravel starts a tumble into an impusive affair, divorces, babies, stunning success, stunning fall from grace, the destruction of careers and families, blackmail, perjury, disappearance, mental deterioration, stalking and death.

Maybe not the best advert for frustrated teachers chatting up waitresses.

Whilst series 1 was glued together by the romance and a vaguely crimey mystery set in bleakly beautiful  Montauk, it settled into more soapy territory in series 2 and 3. Like true soap characters, Noah, Alison and their erstwhile spouses Helen and Cole are predisposed to make bad choices. At times I’ve come to not caring anymore; sort yourselves out guys! It could have been happy(ish) ever after in series 1, certainly in series 2, but no this is TV dramaland. Nobody lives happily ever after.

There is quality in the well-crafted dialogue, character study and the superb cinematography. Daringly there are extended scenes filling a whole inter-advert block with a single conversation or therapy session. Best of all is that season one employs two strong POV: his and hers, and they are not telling the same story. In ‘his’ segments, Noah is frustrated and clumsy whilst Alison is the free spirit; a muse for the wannabe novellist. In ‘her’ segments, he’s the solid, assured one whilst she’s an ill-dressed emotional mess. If re-telling the same scene twice in one episode has its unsurprising aspects, it turns both our characters into unreliable narrators. People wear different clothes, drink different drinks, use different words. Perhaps it is too extreme played back -to – back but it represents the patchy way two people recall the same incident and modify it in their own minds. We, the viewer, don’t actually know where the truth lies.

The trick tires once S2 turns it into a four-way POV, and especially if we don’t care about that scene in take #1, to see it again with the swearing reversed or a bigger horse becomes hard work. However, it has certainly influenced my own writing of PoV characters. From Glint onwards I’m favouring the strong, limited, PoV that brings out a character’s thoughts and prejudices rather than allowing us into the head of every train guard and passer-by we meet.

And that avalanche of small decisions having dramatic consequences? A great starter for any mystery.

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Beneath the Sands of Time

Some of you will have seen shots of my time spent on the island of Alderney during July. It was probably the tenth time I’d been there to lead an excavation at the Nunnery, but time shifts and this year brought new experiences and new surprises.

Yes, that’s the view from my room!

The Nunnery itself has been reconfigured as a Field Centre, operating under the eagle eye of the Bird Observatory Warden (okay, that was a bad pun). We hope that bird-watchers and ringers will stay there in migration season, and heritage/natural history buffs in the high summer. I was the first resident of the almost-finished hostel, all on my own for the first night, up in the attic watching the sun rise over France when the oystercatchers and seagulls awoke me at 5am. It was of course mid-heatwave so there was no question of closing the windows. For a week I had no radio, no TV, no internet and not even a live phone signal; which was blissful when it wasn’t infuriatingly inconvenient.

Isabel and Dave mark the width of the original gate

Week one, I was progressively joined by more colleagues  and we started Trench 16 just inside the Nunnery gates. The sun reflected back off the Roman and Revolutionary-era stonework as we battled a giant fuscia then dug downwards to uncover the mystery of the Roman gate. There was a hint that it had been narrower than the modern one, and so it proved – by 800mm or so. It had no fancy quoins like the 18th century gate though – just an ordinary corner.

Mystery building from above

In the back of the trench was another section of the mystery building we’d seen in 2016, lurking just beneath the surface but cut through by the 1793 ‘coal store’ foundations. Loads of what looked like 18th century pantiles had to be shifted to have a look at the foot of the Roman wall – whether they came off the mystery building when it was destroyed I don’t know. Down in the same hole though were glazed ridge tiles peculiar to French churches. Maybe there was a ‘Nunnery’ at the Nunnery once, after all.

 

 

Tanya records the stone pavement

After I left for a break, things shifted gear. My colleague Phil de Jersey opened up two trenches in the field opposite, hoping to find more of the Iron Age burial ground we spotted last year. I was going to lead a group of school students to investigate a set of walls we’d also seen to check if they were Roman. As luck had it, Phil and Tanya found the Roman buildings first. Buried under a metre of windblown sand the walls still stood chest- high and in one trench was an impressive stone pavement.

 

 

The cross-walls emerge in Trench C; the Nunnery in the background

For Trench C, I chose a location indicated by a local dowser as being a likely junction of walling and my students quickly found it – again not far under the surface. Four walls met awkwardly, including one where a huge 85cm square slab made up the first course. As ever we were operating on a shoestring but help came from many quarters when we needed it, from landowners allowing the dig in the first place to that welcome excavator to fill the holes in at the end.

Some historic maps marked that area as ‘The Old Town’, although nothing remains above ground today. Since Victorian times there had been reports of odd Roman finds out on Longis common – a coin here, a skull there, ‘huge walls’ in imprecise locations. Now we had proof that all these disparate finds were linked. Some 100 metres separated Phil’s trench from mine – and once the other evidence is added in we have a picture of an entire Roman settlement buried under the sand-dunes of Longis. Several people used the phrase ‘Pompeii of the Channel Islands’ and I was the one who ended up being quoted using it. Apt in that we could have well-preserved Roman houses, streets and courtyards just beneath our feet; less apropropriate as the Roman town was probably long-abandoned before it was buried beneath a massive ‘sand blow’.

Alderney now has a unique and extensive site bigger than anything we have seen in the Channel Islands or adjacent French coasts. The benign sand preserves  bone, pottery and the metal objects we need to date and interpret the site.  The Common is not threatened by a new motorway or multistory car-park so is a perfect research site. And the views are great – eat your heart out Time Team!

It was my first dig where the sun shone every day for 3 weeks  and the rain held off until 30 mins after we closed the site that final Friday. We swam most days in the wide bay at Longis, Alderney’s natural harbour; probably the reason the Roman fort and settlement were put there in the first place. The sun went down glowing on 4th century stonework, black rabbits emerged from their burrows on the Common and we rinsed off the sands of time before picking one of Alderney’s pubs or bistros for dinner. A site tour and great media coverage sent a buzz through the island, capped by a final lecture. So we ended on a massive high, exhilarated by what our small team had found.

To find out more about the Nunnery and Longis Common digs, follow the facebook page ‘Alderney Nunnery’. We’ll be working on the finds and reviewing the evidence during the winter, and with luck will return again next year.

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From Book to Film

I’m one of those people who gnashes their teeth at historical travesties in movies, or novels for that matter, so I’ve held off seeing The Guernsey Literary & Potato Peel Pie Society until the initial excitement died down. The book raised some heckles in the island as the setting portrayed wasn’t ‘Guernsey’ enough. One handicap was the format of the book as an epistolary novel (told via letters), so struggling to establish a sense of place and missing idioms of local speech patterns as well as the Guernsey French which was still in common use during WW2. Less forgivable was the absence of ‘local’ names, easily researched, and I indeed gained the impression of a Scottish island rather than the one I knew well.

And that is the problem – I’m too close to the subject, as I am if the film features the Roman Empire, the Napoleonic Wars and indeed most other historic epochs I know anything about. I feared something like the Strike! spoof of the Yorkshire miners’ strike, produced by the Comic Strip, in which ‘Al Pacino’ starred as Arthur Scargill, the accents were cheekily American and there was a Hollywood happy ending.

TGL&PPPS looked lovely on film, the acting was spot-on and the script lively (again considering the book has little by way of true dialogue). Period detail in the costumes and the interiors seemed faultless. Empire gave it three stars, which is pretty typical of their reaction to modest period films such as Their Finest, also by Studio Canal.

Juliet arrives in Guernsey (Studio Canal)

The reaction of Guernsey friends to the film has been positive, sometimes surprised that justice has been done. It was a shame that no footage was shot in the island, but the film was produced on a very modest budget and the vast majority of people who watch it will never have been here.

 

Likewise the rest of the world will not know know very much about the German Occupation of 1940-45 as the dozens of books written about it have largely been small-press, self-published or had very limited circulation outside the islands. So the story is ‘new’ to most of the world, and to all intents and purposes Dorset serves well as ‘stunt double’ for the island itself. It was quite fun spotting the parts of Bristol docks where I was just last week doubling for Weymouth harbour. Yes of course the Dorset coast has the wrong geology, the wrong beaches, the wrong kind of cottages and is much more expansive than little Guernsey truly is, but what the Director Mike Newell has created might be termed a ‘Guernsey of the Mind’. There were even a couple of touches of Guernsey French in the background but the local accent was largely forgotten. The poster, incidentally, does feature a shot of Guernsey’s south coast.

I watched The Inn of the Sixth Happiness last week, in which tall blonde Ingrid Bergman with barely disguised Swedish accent played diminutive brunette Londoner Gladys Aylward, and Wales stood in for China. Now I’ve not been to north China so have no idea how much it resembles Wales. Most films take huge liberties with historical truths – Aylward actually founded the ‘Inn of the Eight Happiness’ and claimed never to have been kissed, contra the movie’s love sub-plot.

Most movies are not actually filmed where they are set. Spartacus was filmed in California, and the ‘Spaghetti westerns’ in Italy. The Last Samurai was filmed in New Zealand, Full Metal Jacket‘s Vietnam scenes were shot in London, Saving Private Ryan‘s Normandy is mostly  Ireland and Herefordshire and Eastern Europe is now the stand-in of choice for historic England in productions such as The Last Kingdom. Let’s not even talk about The Martian. So in the end, we shouldn’t be too precious. The book has sold 5 million copies, the film touched #2 in the box office charts and Guernsey’s tourism enquiries are spiking. Who’s to complain?

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Catch Flint While You Can

The current Endeavour Press editions of the five Jeffrey Flint books will only be available on Amazon until 8th March. The e-books and paperbacks will be taken offline thereafter pending further discussions. This follows the liquidation of Endeavour Press which has been covered elsewhere in the publishing media.

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Writing Space

Yes folks, I have a garret. My study is in the converted roof space  of our bungalow. When we first moved to Serenity we created a little room at the back, with dormer windows overlooking the garden and fields, and almost but not quite a view of the Atlantic. Sounds idyllic, but it was not the best place to write. For one thing, the evening sun came straight in, making it uncomfortably hot and too bright to see the computer screen. All that light would surely fade my books too.

So I moved across to the north side, where a chimney had been removed and a velux window popped into the roof to replace it. The sun never comes directly inside, but above me the sky is bright and I can push open the velux and listen to the birds. Mostly it is shady and quiet, with no distracting views and the perfect place to write.

One could tell it was my room the moment you stepped inside. The furniture is all black, originally self-assembly black ash from the late 80’s which I’ve carted around and re-assembled after every house move. It is held together now by inelegant large screws, wood glue and positive thinking. Two showcases for my collections were purpose-built to match.

Five book cases are squashed in here –  a stack of military history and ancient history dominates the room. My hardcore archaeology is in my museum office and my paperbacks are on the landing ‘library’ or over in the den. One shelf holds writer’s aids, dictionaries, a thesaurus and a bible. Below is a shelf of worrying titles concerning murder, forensics and various ways to kill people and then be found out afterwards. A steel filing cabinet holds paperwork, and a black set of drawers is so full of stuff they are reluctant to open any more. More spread into the corners of the room. I’mm sure you can imagine the random untidiness that creeps in.

What wall space is left, plus almost every surface, is covered in souvenirs of travel and random collecting. Native masks, a replica ‘Sting’, Great War medals and a couple of my framed book covers hang around the desk. My mother bought me a bust of Napoleon which sits by my elbow, and my sister bought me a cardboard robot as a joke present but he’s been a sentinel by my computer for a decade. Maybe 1,000 hand painted model soldiers of all periods of history stand in mirror-backed cabinets that double their ranks. Each reminds me of a day – or at least the year- when I painted it.

A pair of whiteboards carry the latest plot twists – but more of them anon. A leather firewood basket holds an assortment of cables, chargers and connectors, each with a different dinosaur on the plug to distinguish them; brontosaurus is for the mobile and so forth. A brass coal scuttle serves as a rubbish bin and never quite overflows.

Three computers are in use, sometimes at the same time. ‘Little Dell’ sits under the big black desk and is for my writing. Alongside is ‘Big Dell’, an older but hefty machine that is used purely for movie editing. As it isn’t connected to the internet and only carries four useful programs it doesn’t get clogged by constant updates or slowed by firewalls, so happily chugs onward despite still using Windows XP. Then there’s this machine (surprise!), my laptop, that sits on the bookcase next to Napoleon. I have a dicky back these days and have got used to standing up to work. Standing typing can be messy but it is a good place to do first drafts, emails, blogs and ‘waste time on the internet’.

Of course there are sundry heaps, and I have a shelf double-stacked with crime books I’m yet to read, but everyone has those, eh? Enough of the guided tour, it’s back to writing.

 

 

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New Year, New Novel

A New Year’s Day tradition for me has been to start a new novel, or kick-start one that has been slumbering as a few chapters in rough draft. A couple of hundred words will do.

This year I got ahead of myself. With the opening three or four chapters of ‘AW’ already in mind, I put down the first page three days ago.

NRT is done, as far as it can be before the next round of editorial comments come back. In the attached photo I am pondering potential titles for the book. Meantime the challenge is to write the follow-up. Not necessarily a sequel, mind. Who is saying that any of the lead characters survived? Perhaps their story arcs are complete.

What I’ve done is start plotting two follow-up books, using the same style and tone. Both are contemporary mysteries. Why two? Firstly because I have two ideas rattling around in my head that I want to explore. Also, although starting a story is easy, there is not always a middle to explore or a neat ending to be reached. Most real-world mysteries are solved extremely quickly or drag on for years in a mess of loose ends and inadequate evidence.

An author’s chat group ’10 Minute Novelists’ carried a story by one writer on how he uses whiteboards for plotting. To date I’d used ‘plot spiders’ scrawled on A4 paper, but this seemed like a great idea so whilst I was out Christmas shopping, I bought two.

The story with code name ‘AW’ hit a plot snag when I was two-thirds the way down that first page. A new whiteboard hung on my study wall is where I’m now planning my way around it. Perhaps the problem I hit as an author can simply be passed to the characters to solve? Meanwhile, I have both beginning and end in mind for the story code name ‘DC’  but need to think out a middle to tie both together.

So I’m daydreaming and doodling through post-Christmas television, starting to ‘remember’ the stories that have not been written yet. The chart on my whiteboard grows more complex, and I’ve opened two folders on my computers where the first ideas are taking root.

2018 is going to be an exciting year.

 

 

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Jason Joins A for Authors

a for a croppedIt is with great pleasure that I can announce that I have signed up with London Agency A for Authors. I am looking forward to working with Annette Crossland and Bill Goodall on a new mystery series. 2018 is going to be an exciting year.

With Annette Crossland

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Rubber Duck Moment

Okay, I admit it. My work-in-progress contains a rubber duck moment. Codename NRT, the novel has a very short timeframe. There is no chance to get to know the characters before they are plunged into the mystery on page 1. Thumbnails must suffice until enough pages have been peppered with hints and clues from their mode of dress, their speech, the background information they let free with and straight prose description. I’ve avoided ‘plot bricks’ as far as I can; those clumsy speeches where someone says ‘But Sally, you are my sister!’

Key pieces of a character’s history should fall out in natural dialogue, challenge and argument.  We as readers are new acquaintances of these people, and within the story come the subtle enquiries new acquaintances make – are you married, do you have any children? If not asked directly people often go for the opening, ‘So you actually worked for NASA?’ This explains the character’s hint of a Transatlantic accent and allows a lead in to how she ended up in the USA and why she came back. We already know she’s scarily smart. Police procedurals are allowed to be more blunt: ‘Exactly what is your relationship to the deceased?’

 Drink is great. In their cups, people often spill their life story. Not always in a coherent fashion, not always honestly and rarely in chronological order but it tumbles out. ‘I was drinking this stuff when I met him in that night club.’

 A point came in NRT where there were still many unanswered questions about character A. She keeps her own council, we never meet her friends or her family or her workmates; all these are usual vehicles for allowing us to expand our understanding of the person underneath. We often see a character at work, we see the interaction with Mum/Sister/Boyfriend and they naturally ask about her day, or remind her of some upcoming appointment. Not so with A. So I needed a rubber duck moment to allow her to open up, drop enough facts about her past to allow us to piece together the last clues to her motivation.

 The classic scene has our grizzled hero explain that the reason he’s hard-bitten and avoids company is because his father threw away his rubber duck when he was six. He never trusted anyone else again, never wanted to be a father himself, never cared for family. Movies often use this vehicle, some well, some clumsily. Unlike novels, a thriller only has moments to create thumbnail characters. Female thriller heroes/villains/femmes fatales often need such a moment to explain why their behaviour is abberant – an abusive relationship, a lost child, an ugly assault, bloody men obstructing their path to the top. By their nature males can often get away with violent, obsessive or antisocial behaviour without needing deep psychological analysis of how they got there.

 So two of my characters come together in bar, tired, jaded at the end of their tether. J is chatty, needing company. She gets very little out of A beyond single-line responses, but is enough for us to finally understand A’s life choices.

‘Do you want to call your people?’

‘I don’t have any people.’

‘Mum?’

‘Died having my sister.’

‘So you’ve a sister?’

‘She died too. It was very Victorian.’

Mother, sister and next her father are dealt with in a few words each. We already know why she quit NASA and are getting to understand how she came to work there in the first place. It is not purely a rubber duck moment though; by using the past, I lead into hints and undercurrents of what is to come. This woman has no family and no ties; but does she have a plan?

 

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A Festival of Crime

I’m just back from Crimefest, Bristol. It was my third Crimefest and the first time I’ve done the full Thursday to Sunday programme. Okay, maybe not honestly ‘full’ as I did abscond for a few sessions – hunting for gluten free snacks, in the main.

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Crime through the Millennia with Antonia Hodgson, Ruth Downie, Anthony Taylor, David Penney and Sharan Newman

Dozens of writers were speaking, and dozens more were among the 500+ attendees. It was the usual format, mainly panels of 3 or 4 writers plus a moderator, plus a few communal sessions such as the duet of Peter James and Martina Cole brought together by Peter Gutteridge. I avoid playing the fanboy at such events, merely smiling and saying hello when passing Lee Child in the hallway.

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Its All in the Mind …with B.A. Paris, Louise Candlish, Kate Rhodes, Elodie Harper and Dirk Kurbjuweit

Highlights are hard to pick but Kate Rhodes was the stand-out moderator in the session ‘Psychology, Obsession and Paranoia’, deftly pulling together the strands of twisted discussion launched by the (mainly) female panel to the (mainly) female audience. The W for Women panel discussed how well men could ‘write’ women, and women ‘write’ men. The financial crime panel pre-empted my own question on how to deal with financial crimes that are both complex and dull at the same time (skip the detail). Between panels Luke McCallin and I got thoroughly stuck into discussing thrillers set in the world wars, something I’ve toyed with but never delivered.

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with Christine Poulson and Kate Ellis

The social side was never far away. At dinner I was seated with ‘Queen of Gangland Crime’ Kimberley Chambers and some of her Harper Collins team. I also enjoyed a good catch-up with fellow archaeology-mystery writer Kate Ellis. To cap it all was a very silly game of ‘Sorry I haven’t a Cluedo’. Instead of a buzzer, panel members fired cap guns. You had to be there to appreciate it.

#Crimefest

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Desmond Bagley’s Blue Plaque

Thriller writer Desmond Bagley has been commemorated by a blue plaque by the gate of his former home at Castel House in Guernsey. Bagley died at an unfairly early age in 1983 in Guernsey, where he had made his home with his wife Joan.

 

He died just before I moved to the island, so I never met him but did grow to know Joan through the Sarnia Sword Club. Indeed my first (never published) ‘trainer’ novel was a Bagleyesque thriller, and Joan kindly talked the twenty-something me through some of the principles of thriller-writing including the advice to ‘make it up’ and not just ‘write what you know’. It is fitting that Joan is also commemorated on the plaque, as at times she combined the role of editor, critical friend and manager, and completed the final two novels for publication.

Desmond Bagley ( portrait by Graham Jackson)

Bagley was always one of the names I hoped one day to see commemorated once Guernsey’s Blue Plaque scheme had been launched, but I’m on the Panel and nominations have to come from the public; there also needs to be a sponsor in the wings and the owner of the house must approve. Fortunately all these things came together this year. Castel House has indeed been re-named Bagley Hall to mark the legacy.

 

 

 

The Plaque was unveiled by the Bailiff of Guernsey, Sir Richard Collas, on May 11th appropriately during the Literary Festival. Harper Collins have re-released the full list of sixteen Desmond Bagley thrillers during 2017, and were represented at the ceremony.

Sir Richard Collas, Bailiff of Guernsey with Philip Eastwood

Researcher Philip Eastwood has been compiling information on Bagley’s life and books, creating the blog www.thebagleybrief.com .  He has donated his research material to the Priaulx Library in Guernsey, which complements the archive that Joan donated to the Howard Gotlieb Archival Research Centre in Boston. Together with items on loan from Harper Collins these have been used to create a temporary display in St Peter Port’s Guille-Alles library which will run through May into June.

 

 

 

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Guernsey Literary Festival 2018

Another year, another Guernsey Literary Festival. On Thursday 10th May I’ll be introducing Duncan Barrett in the Festival Hub. Duncan is the author of a number of non-fiction books including GI Brides and Sugar Girls both based on first hand interviews. His latest project is Hitler’s British Isles, for which he spent three months in the Channel Islands interviewing survivors of the German Occupation 1940-1945 and their children.

 

 

It is a timely subject, considering that I’m typing this on Liberation Day; May 9th, the 73rd anniversary of the liberation of Guernsey.

The book is not yet published, so I’ve not had chance to read or review it, so I’m looking forward to talking to Duncan and hearing about his project in front of an audience of Guernsey Literary enthusiasts.

Duncan Barret at United Agents

Later we will be hearing Philip Eastwood talk about the life and legacy of Desmond Bagley, ahead of an exhibition at the Priaulx Library of books, objects and annotated manuscripts. Philip has been collating an archive of Bagley material, which will be deposited at the Priaulx, complementing the archive already established at the Howard Gotleib Archival Research Centre in Boston.

I’ve been working with Philip over the past few months to set up a blue plaque to Bagley and his wife Joan at their former home in Castel Hill – but that’s a story for another day.

The Bagley Brief

 

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The Twitter Campaign

So I’m trying something different, a Twitter Campaign. Mostly it is to test the water, see how effective it is. After all if the Russians can change the result of elections by mass tweeting, there must be some power in social media.

Although it was my sixth novel Glint of Light on Broken Glass was self-published, albeit at high spec by Matador and professionally edited. However it had little of the marketing push I’d expect from a mainstream publisher. It was planned as a slow-seller to local audiences and tourists, but there have been e-book and internet sales through Amazon so the interest is worth stoking.

Also of course we have the #GuernseyMovie released this month, and for a few weeks the G-word becomes more searchable. Other local writers, hotels, gin-makers and others are riding the publicity wave, contributing to a symbiotic promotion of their own products as well as the movie.

So I’m posting or re-posting a range of idiosyncratic images with snippets of text including lines from the book. I’ve taken the photographs myself, often at the appropriate location in Guernsey, then applied a little manipulation and cropping. Alongside this is a professional PR campaign running for a month, nudging people towards my partner website guernseynovel.com. Perhaps you’ve seen it? This is a true test-the-water exercise, as tweeting can be like whispering in a crowded room where everyone else is yelling.

Anyhow, Mr Putin, I’m sure you’d love Glint so if you could get your army of fembots to re-tweet this 20,000 times I’d be most happy.

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Anyone for Pie?

The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society is far and away the most successful novel set in Guernsey. Although there are easily two dozen works of fiction using the German Occupation of the islands as their background, this is the stand-out commercial hit. Curiously it was written by an American who had only made a single unplanned visit to Guernsey.

The book is the only novel by American author Mary Ann Shaffer. She made a brief stop in Guernsey in 1976 and became fog-bound at the airport; a familiar hazard to island residents. Browsing the bookshop, she learned about the German Occupation of 1940 to 1945. It was two decades before she finally began her Guernsey novel, and it was accepted for publication in 2006. Her health deteriorated, so the final editing was carried out by her niece Annie Barrows who was already a published children’s author. Mary Ann Shaffer died in 2008 before the book was published.

It is an ‘epistolary novel’, in that the story is told entirely through letters between the characters. In post-war 1946, English journalist Juliet Ashton strikes up a correspondence with islander Dawsey Adams one and becomes intrigued by the quaintly titled Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society. She travels to Guernsey to meet members of the society, and a story of love, tragedy and hope emerges against the background of an island people surviving almost five years of enemy occupation emerges. For the uninitiated, potato peel was used as ersatz pie crust when food began to run short. I have never tried it, but it was apparently rather nasty.

The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society was an immediate hit, especially in the USA. It spent 11 weeks in the New York Times bestseller list and reached the number 1 position on 2nd August 2009.

Reviews were favorable; The Times said “Every now and again, a book comes along that is simple yet effective, readable yet memorable. This is one such delight … It is a uniquely humane vision of inhumanity; one to lift even the most cynical of spirits”

To date it has sold over 5 million copies worldwide in over 30 territories and has proved particularly popular with book clubs. It was planned for me to interview Annie Barrows at the Guernsey Literary Festival, but scheduling clashes mean that it’s not to be.

A film adaption has been on the cards for a few years, with different directors and stars mooted. It finally takes form this spring, directed by Mike Newell, starring Lily James as English author Juliet Ashton and Michiel Huisman as islander Dawsey Adams. The film will be in cinemas from April 20th 2018, with a special Premiere taking place in Guernsey in addition to the World Premiere in London. It remains to be seen whether filmgoers also have the taste for pie.

 

 

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