I’m too busy with Christmas preparations to blog much just now, but I must bring you this breaking news.
Jammie dodgers, one of Britain’s favourite biscuits, (shortcake with a jam centre,) are to be re-named. The manufacturers are worried about the negative implications of “jammie” (undeservedly fortunate) and “dodger” (one who avoids work.) No decision has yet been made about a more politically correct alternative.
It’s on the BikiLeaks website, so it must be true.
I’m delighted to welcome Dolores Gordon-Smith and her fifth Jack Haldean mystery, OFF THE RECORD. It’s just out in Britain, published by Severn House, who will be publishing it in the States next March…but US fans who can’t wait that long can order it now from the UK, post free – see Dolores’ website for details. It’s already collecting good reviews, and the US’s Library Journal recently included it in their list of “what’s hot for Spring 2011.” Interestingly, they commented that it is “perhaps the only mystery in which a gramophone inspires bloodshed.”
I wonder if that’s so? Who better to ask than Dolores herself?
I’m not sure…but if it is the only mystery in which a gramophone inspires bloodshed, I’m baffled. Because the history of early recording is absolutely fascinating. Just think about it for a moment; a sound is utterly fleeting. It’s there and then gone. We’re so used to recorded voices, that it’s incredible to think that for most of history, our only source for speech is the written word.
Think of Hitler, for instance. (Go on, close your eyes and imagine Hitler!)
What did you think of? I’m willing to bet you thought of the Nuremberg Rallies. A black and white figure ranting and gesticulating, throwing down a challenge to the awe-struck crowd. Silence, and then a swell of noise as the crowd chants, Sieg Heil! repeated over and over again.
Now I’m a writer and love the written word, but you simply couldn’t capture that hypnotic, chilling effect unless you had the sound, to explain how thousands of decent Germans got swept up by hero-worship and idolatry. Contrast that with poor, puzzled, decent Neville Chamberlain, halting through his statement at quarter past eleven on September 3rd 1939.
Was Britain unprepared for war? You bet – and it’s all there in the voices.
It’s odd to think of the slightly comic image of a wind-up gramophone (with, perhaps, a little dog gazing into the horn as he listens to His Master’s Voice) as one of the most radical changes in the history of the world, but it is. And it started with a youngster (he was 30) fiddling about with tin-foil and magnets. His name was Thomas Edison. An unsung Danish genius, Valdemar Poulsen, invented tape recording in the 1890’s (he recorded onto fine wire and the sound was distorted) but the real hero was Emil Berliner, who in 1887 invented records and record players and the whole recording industry. Wow.
And records were king until radio came along. The BBC made its first broadcast in 1922 and, all of a sudden, a whole industry was in crisis.
Radio was cool. I’ve got a photo of my mother (she was born in 1922) as a very little girl, in a sweet sticky-out dress, wearing radio headphones. Her family were mill-workers and not remotely well-off, but they, like everyone else, wanted to “Listen in”. I built my own crystal radio, partly for fun, partly to see how it worked, and it’s amazing, as you stroke the “cat’s whisker” over the copper wire, to hear voices coming from the empty air. It’s a form of magic that simply pressing a button doesn’t evoke.
It’s no wonder that boring old records, with their tinny sound, were yesterday. The recording method, a straightforward acoustical system, hadn’t really changed since Edison’s day. Record manufacturers had to find a new system and the answer lay in electronics, which gave a richer, far more life-like sound.
That feeling of crisis, that desperate search, that “edge” if you will, is what’s behind the story of Off The Record. There was a fortune to be made by the first to invent a commercial electronic system and where there’s money there’s a motive. There’s also a mystery, intrigue, bodies and bafflement. With that wonderful ease enjoyed by writers, I built a whole Ideal Village and Factory where the story could start, to contrast Edwardian ease with the after-the-war urgency and there, in this veritable Eden, passions rise and bodies start to fall…
For more information about the Jack Haldean series and about Dolores herself, visit www.doloresgordon-smith.co.uk
My good friend Dolores Gordon-Smith will be here tomorrow to tell us about her fifth Jack Haldean mystery, OFF THE RECORD. (Isn’t it a particular pleasure when your good friends write good books?)
It’s the second Haldean novel to come out this year – I don’t know how she writes at that speed, but I’m delighted she does, because I like the Roaring Twenties setting enormously. Dolores captures the contrast between the glitter and glamour of 1920s Britain, (for the comfortably off part of the population anyway,) and the changes that were taking place in a society that had been altered for ever by the Great War.
And Jack is one of my favourite sleuths: an ex-air ace, the perfect brave and resourceful man-about-town, amusing, intelligent, and with a gentle and perceptive side to him that many of his contemporaries lacked. In that fantasy game that we mystery lovers sometimes play, “Which sleuth would you like to invite to dinner?” Jack would be a must-have for my dinner table!
The latest book is so new that I haven’t read it yet, but if it follows the other four in the Haldean series it’ll be a cracking good read, with ingenious plot twists and interesting characters. And OFF THE RECORD has a background that specially fascinates me: the gramophone record industry. I’ve been hooked on sound and sound recording all my life, starting with my first wind-up gramophone, then on through the golden age of radio in the late 1940s and 1950s, through tape recording…and I finished up working as a radio reporter for the BBC for many years. I’m still as fascinated as I ever was by voices, sounds, and music coming magically, wirelessly, out of the air, and by exactly how that magic is achieved.
I’ll close with a lovely image which, when Dolores showed it me, I couldn’t leave out. The iconic His Master’s Voice label. I remember playing records like that…my gramophone was slightly more up-do-date because it didn’t have a horn, but I still had to wind it up for each record, and make sure the needle didn’t need changing!
Join me tomorrow when we’ll find out why the 1920s was such an important era in sound production and reproduction…and why that makes it a wonderful setting for a mystery.
According to the media today, all of us in England are sunk in gloom because our bid to host the 2018 World Cup has failed. Devastated, we are; disappointed, cheated, gutted, disenchanted, frustrated…and a whole thesaurus full of other adjectives denoting feelings of despair and misery.
Well I’m not devastated. I’m delighted. Who wants the World Cup here? Not I.
For a start, England can’t afford it. Our economy is in a mess and we are having to cut back spending on important items like health services and policing. This is no time to be pouring money into building sports facilities which will mostly be dismantled or down-sized after the competition ends. And how can we afford to pay overtime bills so our reduced police force can take on the extra work of controlling crowds of violent fans? Because far too many followers of football use matches as an excuse to get roaring and fighting drunk. We have plenty of such hooligans here already; why import them from other nations?
I don’t follow football, so my feelings about it come, I confess, mostly from media coverage, and as I’ve already mentioned, you can’t believe everything that appears in the news programmes or on the sports pages. But by the sheer law of averages, some of it must be true. Footballers come across as spoilt brats who think they are something special and expect to be paid a fortune. Well, you might say, being a superb sportsman is a way for even the most disadvantaged lad to gain star status by playing the game he loves. True…so why, once they’ve climbed the greasy pole, do they spend all their time whingeing and greedily racing from club to club in search of ever more inflated pay…moving at a speed they rarely seem to manage on the field of play?
In fact, English football teams seem to consist almost entirely of foreign players. You’d think fans would be proud to have rich clubs that can buy the best in the world. Yet they are often heard to chant racist abuse at black players,…in between fighting, drinking, and planning the battles they’ll have after the match, preferably in some town centre where they can cause as much disruption and damage as possible.
World cup? No thanks. Include me out.
To use the only football phrases I know, (totally out of date now I expect,) I’m not sick as a parrot today. I’m over the moon.
