Guilty Consciences Anthology

Stand by for some BSP, folks…that’s Blatant Self-Promotion for the uninitiated.

For anyone who enjoys mystery short stories, the publication of an anthology of them is good news. If you’re an author lucky enough to have a story included in the collection, it’s wonderful.

GUILTY CONSCIENCES published by Severn House has just come out in the UK. (The US will be getting it in January 2012.) It contains 17 stories by members of Britain’s Crime Writers’ Association. One of them is mine.

So I’m happy…no, that doesn’t really cover it. I’m over the moon… chuffed to little mint-balls. And proud to find my tale in really excellent company.

The clever cover design shows you all our surnames, and the stories are, I’m sure, as varied as the contributors. I say “I’m sure” because the book is so new I haven’t read more than a couple of them yet. But the editor, Martin Edwards, has masterminded several of these CWA collections – it’s an annual production – and he always chooses a mixture, so there’s something there for every reader. Here’s what the publishers’ blurb has to say:

”A woman mislays her new husband . . . the lure of notoriety proves too tempting for a small-time antiques thief . . . A butler keeps a close eye on a beautiful chambermaid with a surprising secret . . .”

My story, ALL THAT GLISTERS, is set in the business jungle of present-day London. But there’s an important historical element, a gold treasure that…no, I can’t say too much here without committing a spoiler.

And just for once, I can give a categorical answer to the question I was pondering last week: where do my ideas come from? I got the idea for ALL THAT GLISTERS when I was fascinated to read about a real and remarkable gold artefact, two thousand-ish years old, in a museum in Ireland. Some day I intend to go and see it. Meanwhile I can  pay homage to it in a small way by including a fictitious item based on the real one. And much as I admire ancient golden treasures, speaking as a crimewriter the more rare and beautiful something is, the more likely it is to bring out the worst in people.

Find out more about the book on the Crime Writers’ Association website, http://thecwa.co.uk/. Order it from Amazon or of course from your favourite bookshop (it may help them if you quote the ISBN 978-0-7278-8024-6).

Happy reading!

Musing about muses

Yesterday I looked up the names of the nine Ancient Greek muses, which is the sort of thing you find yourself doing when you’re trying to solve a cryptic crossword. The clue pointed to a muse with a name five letters long, ending in –o.

Anyone who knows this name without reading further…give yourself a gold star. I didn’t; the only two I could remember unaided were Clio (the muse of history) and Terpsichore (dance and song.) When I found the complete list, I saw the one I wanted was Erato. She’s the muse of erotic poetry and (my list says) mimicry. An odd juxtaposition, that…but all the myths surrounding these goddesses are weird.

I’m sure you’re dying to know who the rest of them were –yes, of course you are. There’s Thaleia, the muse of comedy; Euterpe, lyric poetry; Calliope, epic poetry; Melpomene, tragedy; Urania, astronomy; and Polyhymnia, divine hymns and harmony.

It’s disappointing that none of them were responsible for prose writing, let alone mystery and detective fiction. Having our own muse would be useful for answering that Frequently Asked Question that confronts all mystery authors: “Where do you get your ideas?”

It’s a fair question, but I don’t find it easy to answer. I’d like to be able to reply, “Naturally I seek inspiration from Whodunnito, the muse of mystery stories.”

But no; as Victoria might have said, “We are not a-mused.”

Oh well, I’ll attempt a serious answer; a personal one of course, because all writers do things differently. For me, some ideas are so basic to a book that I have to sort them out before I start writing anything. I like to choose the location and the year of each of my books; Roman Britain wasn’t a homogenous whole, and I need to know the when and the where of my story exactly. And I like to have an idea of the main crime, who did it, how and why…in rough outline anyhow. This may all result from research, or brainstorming with friends, or just bashing the little grey cells to deliver something new and fresh.

Most details of story and characters will come when I’ve started writing, or at least working out the plot. I don’t like to plot in too much depth beforehand, I find that makes the writing itself too mechanical, so I rely on fresh ideas flowing into my head anywhere and any time, whether I’m pounding my keyboard, delving into books, surfing the Internet, listening to the day’s news…or out and about thinking of something else entirely.

The ones that arise by pure serendipity are the most unpredictable and the most fun. They can be triggered by anything at all: a flash of childhood memory perhaps, a phrase of music, or a brief snatch of conversation. Part of the plot of one Aurelia mystery came from two women I overheard on a train: one remarked, “It beats me why they’re so determined to buy that house, it’s nothing special,” and her friend laughed and answered, “Maybe they think there’s treasure buried in the garden.” Click! Flash-bang! Gotcha!

Yes, the world is full of ideas, which is why it’s so hard to pinpoint where they come from. Wouldn’t it be so much easier to offload the responsibility onto a muse?

Be careful what you wish for

Sorry I haven’t been around to blog lately.

I mentioned in my last post that I was off down to London. While there, I had a fall and broke my arm; yes, the right arm, wouldn’t you know, as I’m a right-handed person. The computer was a no-no for a while, along with quite a number of other activities.

And to add insult to injury, I never even got to the BBC celebration I mentioned last time. I was on my way there when the accident happened. Yes, really, not a drop had passed my lips. Maybe if it had, I’d have been so relaxed I wouldn’t have broken anything…or at least it wouldn’t have hurt quite so much.

I was taking a short cut through a car park near my hotel, and there was a chain across part of it, at ankle height and the same colour as the asphalt. I didn’t see it, and went base-over-apex. Result: two lovely black eyes, a bashed-up face, a front tooth missing, and a broken arm. As one of my family remarked, “You don’t do things by halves, do you?” Anyhow, while everyone else was partying and recording at the BBC, I was in hospital being patched up. They did a good job, and sent me home after three days.

I was in plaster for several weeks, and computing was at first impossible, and then a very painful ordeal which I could only stand for a few minutes a day. Now I’ve got rid of the cast, and the healing process is going fine – slow but sure – so I’m back on-line. What a relief! I may curse and complain about computers sometimes (don’t we all?) but I hated being literally unable to use one. My face is back to normal too, and my dentist is fixing a replacement tooth. (Her bank manager is probably the only person on the planet who has anything positive to say about my fall.)

The irony of all this is that it was my birthday a couple of weeks back, and I’d jokingly told friends earlier in the year that I intended to mark the occasion by being a complete slob for a day: sitting by a log fire eating chocolates and reading or watching tv. And that’s exactly what I ended up doing. I had a wonderfully lazy time, finishing with a very good Chinese takeaway in the evening and several glasses of plonk – purely medicinal, of course. Perfect…well, nearly.

So, in the words of the old proverb, be careful what you wish for. It might come true.