Dan Dare flies again

This lovely rocket-plane has sent me into several orbits of nostalgia. It’s ultra-modern, but doesn’t it look like everyone’s childhood notion of a space rocket…certainly mine, based on the 1950s comic-strip adventures of space hero Dan Dare.

I’ve always liked science fiction, and Colonel Dan Dare is to blame. I couldn’t get enough of his exploits in the 1950s, every week in the Eagle comic, and also dramatised on radio as ”Dan Dare, pilot of the Future”. He wasn’t on the BBC, but on the commercial station Radio Luxembourg, which broadcast every evening in English. It eventually became a purely pop station, beloved by all teenagers who found the BBC in the 1960s too staid; but in the 1950s it had radio quizzes and plays in among the records.

Dan Dare himself was played by British actor Noel Johnson, and every 15-minute episode ended with him, or his sidekicks Digby and Jocelyn, caught in some dreadful scrape, which they magically got out of the following night. Ah, more nostalgia…Radio Luxembourg, Station of the Stars, 208 meters on the medium wave. Anyone else remember?

Oh well, back to the present. This lovely 21st-century rocket-plane is Richard Branson’s Virgin Galactic, which Branson plans will go into space this year, with him in it. It had its first powered test flight this week over the Mojave desert. A jet-plane carried it almost ten miles aloft, then released it so it could use its own rocket to fly even higher; it climbed several thousand feet under its own power, broke the sound barrier, and finally glided back to safety on the ground. AOK…did Dan Dare say that? Probably not, he’d prefer “Jolly good show.” Everyone involved with the test said the new ship had passed an important milestone on its route into space.

Hundreds of would-be space tourists have already signed up to travel on Branson’s new craft when it’s in service. They’ll go high enough above the earth to see its curvature, and to feel the amazing sensation of being weightless. I’m green with envy – at two hundred thousand dollars a trip, it’s way too expensive for me. But I can dream, can’t I? One day, if I sell a million books, or a bunch of film rights, maybe I can scrape together the fare, and I’ll join that queue. Till then, I’ll watch with admiration as Richard Branson and his team turn science fiction into fact.

I wonder if any of them ever read Dan Dare stories when they were young?

St. George’s Day

St. George is England’s patron saint, and today is his Big Day, yet we English hardly notice the occasion, and certainly don’t celebrate it, unlike our neighbours in Wales, Scotland and Ireland, who mark their special saints’ days in style.

This lack of enthusiasm is said to be because of the English stiff-upper-lip culture of not getting too excited about things – which is rubbish, in my opinion. We can get excited about the Olympics, or a royal wedding, (or even football, they tell me…though this last leaves me cold, I have to confess.)

Well then, are we just too irreligious these days, or too lazy, to go bananas about a saint? Maybe we don’t think he’s good enough…though a knight who risked his life to rescue a damsel from a dragon seems pretty good to me.

Sadly, it’s too good to be true. The dragon-and-damsel part of George’s story is pure myth. The town terrorised by the evil dragon who demanded a human sacrifice every day…the king’s daughter due to be handed over to him…and George riding to the rescue, capturing the dragon and eventually killing it, having converted the whole town to Christianity…a great tale, but not the reason he was made a saint.

Mind you, his real life, what we know of it, had its own share of drama, and his courage and loyalty were outstanding. He was born in the third century of Christian parents in Cappadocia, (now part of Turkey but then a province of the Roman Empire.) He became a Roman army tribune, but when Emperor Diocletian began persecuting Christians, George resigned from the army in protest, and tore up Caesar’s order against the Christians. The Emperor was, not surprisingly, furious, and George was imprisoned and tortured, but refused to give up his Christian faith. He was executed, and his martyrdom led to his becoming a saint.

George was revered in Europe all through the Middle Ages, and miracles and myths gradually collected round him. Many people doubtless believed in dragons…but for the more sceptical, there was symbolism too, because the dragon was equated with the devil. Gradually George’s flag, the red cross on a white background, came to be regarded as an emblem of England, and by the time that he was made patron saint of the Order of the Garter by Edward 111 in the 1300s, the dragon-slaying exploit was the major part of his legend. He became truly part of English folklore…including giving his name and image to a good many “George and Dragon” pubs!

He’s still a powerful symbol in modern times. King George VI established the George Cross as a medal for “acts of the greatest heroism or of the most conspicuous courage in circumstances of extreme danger’, and its silver cross has the saint on it…slaying his dragon of course.

I’d say this is a patron saint to be proud of, whether in real life or in myth. But how can we English be persuaded to give him the kind of celebration he deserves on this day every year?

Thoughts on a funeral

There are two opposing views about today’s famous funeral in London. I can’t go along totally with either of them, and I don’t intend to get involved in political arguments about them here. So I’ll just quote from some famous epitaphs and leave the choice to you.

This is Requiem, by Robert Louis Stevenson:
Under  the wide and starry sky,
Dig the grave and let me lie.
Glad did I live and gladly die,
And I laid me down with a will.

This be the verse you grave for me:
Here he lies where he long’d to be;
Home is the sailor, home from sea,
And the hunter home from the hill.

But here is Hilaire Belloc’s Epitaph on the Politician Himself:
Here richly, with ridiculous display,
The politician’s corpse was laid away.
While all of his acquaintance sneered and slanged,
I wept, for I had longed to see him hanged.

Finally, Shakespeare had it right (doesn’t he usually?) with this:

Fear no more the heat o’ the sun;
Nor the furious winter’s rages,
Thou thy worldly task hast done,
Home art gone, and ta’en thy wages;
Golden lads and girls all must,
As chimney sweepers come to dust.

Another trio of great detectives

This is just a brief P.S. to my last post, which I ended by hoping there’d be more ebook collections of novels by different authors.

When I downloaded my copy of 3 GREAT FEMALE DETECTIVES I saw a note at the end of it mentioning another of Head of Zeus’ compilations – this one called 3 GREAT HISTORICAL MYSTERIES. This one includes Bruce Macbain’s ROMAN GAMES, together with ONE FOR SORROW by M. E. Mayer, and WINE OF VIOLENCE by Priscilla Royal. I know all these books and they’re real page-turners, or whatever is the proper expression for paperless electronic volumes!

Isn’t it nice when you hope for something…and find it has happened?

The female of the species…

It is a truth universally acknowledged, (hey, good opening line, I just thought of it!) that female sleuths are at least as clever and ruthless as male ones. Because as we all know, the female of the species is more deadly than the male…another good saying I just dreamed up.

OK, I’ll stop plagiarising the words of my betters, and get to the point. Which is to tell you about a new book that I’m proud to be part of: 3 GREAT FEMALE DETECTIVES. It’s an ebook bringing together a trio of magnificent sleuths all in one package.

There’s Cat DeLuca, the creation of K.J. Larsen, who runs a detective agency called Pants on Fire (fabulous name!) which claims that “We catch cheats and liars.” Her first adventure is LIAR, LIAR.

Then there’s Tai Randolph, created by Tina Whittle, who has just inherited a gunshop at the start of THE DANGEROUS EDGE OF THINGS. She thinks that’s her only problem…but she’s wrong. An uninvited corpse and a wayward brother are two of the others.

These formidable women both hale from the USA, like their authors. My Aurelia Marcella represents Britain – Roman Britain, to be specific. She wouldn’t have called herself a detective because they didn’t have such a job description then, but they had crimes to solve and people who took on the task of getting justice done, often quite reluctant amateurs like Aurelia, who’s an innkeeper most of the time.

3 GREAT FEMALE DETECTIVES is an ebook recently published by Head of Zeus in London, and before that, the books have all been published in different versions by Poisoned Pen Press in the USA.

This new compendium – is that the word for a sort of jumbo anthology? – adds a new dimension to each of our mysteries. First, by putting them cheek-by-jowl it allows readers to, (as we used to say at school,) “compare and contrast.” The three sleuths are at first sight as unlike as chalk, cheese, and china oranges…but what’s revealed when you delve deeper? What makes a great female detective? Here’s a chance to find out.

Second, this sort of compilation makes it really easy to discover good books you haven’t read yet. I’m a case in point; I’m downloading a copy myself this weekend, because I haven’t (shame on me!) read either of the other two books in the ensemble, and I’m looking forward to them very much. I’ll be reading them on my Nexus tablet which runs Android software, but the book is available not just in the right format for that, but also versions for kindles and iPads and several others.

Isn’t there a mind-boggling choice of electronic formats these days? That’s my major criticism of ebooks: they’re convenient, not expensive…but not standardised. Let’s hope that sometime soon common sense will break through and their publishers will arrange matters so that any e-reader can read any e-book.

Meanwhile, let’s have more of these several-books-in-one releases. I think they are br

The cutting edge of history

I learned something about the Ancient Romans today that I didn’t know before.

Oh, big deal, you’re saying to me. There’s a lot you don’t know about the Ancient Romans, not to mention everything else. A decrease in your ignorance is hardly headline news.

True enough. But what I found out interested me so much that I’m going to share it. If you know it already, give yourself a pat on the back and a beaker of Aurelia’s favourite Gaulish Red wine. (Best to perform these actions in sequence, not simultaneously.)

It was the Romans who first used modern-type scissors.

That’s the sort where the two blades are joined at a central point, and when you open the handles right out they make an X-shape. They can be small and neat, or big and tough — which we tend to call shears, but it’s the same design. We don’t, alas, know the name of the genius responsible for it, but there’s enough evidence to show that scissors were around by 100 or so AD in the Roman world.

There are other, older sorts of scissors, U-shaped, where the handles are joined together by some springy metal and you squeeze them to make the blades cut. They sound like hard work, but work they do, and they go back even further into history, possibly to a couple of thousand years BC in some parts of the world. The Romans used those also, and so did the northern European Celts, which means the Ancient Brits could have had them.

They didn’t all stop using them in 100 AD, but some recognisably modern X-shaped scissors were available from that time, which is when my innkeeper Aurelia Marcella was doing her sleuthing. They probably weren’t all that common, because very few have turned up in the archaeological evidence so far, or illustrated in wall-paintings or mosaics.

But they were around. So it’s possible that Aurelia could have known about them, or maybe her lover Quintus, who travelled much more widely, would have known. And now that I know, watch out for a pair turning up in my next book. I’m working on it now and I know just the place.

That’s why I love research so much. You never can tell what little nugget you’re going to unearth next. Until this morning, there I was thinking scissors were invented in the Middle Ages and didn’t become popular till after the Industrial Revolution. That last bit at least is true: the introduction of hardened steel meant that craftsmen began specialising in “fine scissors” in the 1760s – quite late on, historically speaking – and that’s when they became a must in every household.

They say you learn something new every day, and that’ll do me for today: an interesting fact that I can use in the next book…it couldn’t be better! Mind you, when I do include scissors in Aurelia’s world, I must remember to add a line or two in the historical note at the end to reassure readers that yes, truly, a Roman of her day could have encountered such a useful item.

Useful in several ways. For instance someone could do a murder with it…

The first in a great series

I’ve just finished reading A CLUBBABLE WOMAN by Reginald Hill. It’s his first novel about that “odd couple”, Dalziel and Pascoe, published originally in 1970. And it’s fascinating to see the beginning of what became one of the most popular of British mystery series.

The setting is Yorkshire, though the background isn’t as strongly Yorkshire as in later books. But the characters are strong all right. Superintendent Andy Dalziel is outspoken, coarse, ruthless, but sensitive on occasion and above all a brilliant detective. Peter Pascoe is a graduate, idealistic, liberal and very bright, but still quite naïve at this stage. They’re a fascinating combination, and – as in all the later books – the interaction between them gives depth and strength to the mysteries. In this first book, we watch Pascoe gradually moving from being appalled by his boss to feeling grudging respect for him, and even a hint of affection by the end.

The setting is a rugby club, where Dalziel feels at home; a former player, he knows everyone, and is aware of undercurrents among players past and present and their wives and girlfriends. When one of the wives is found beaten to death, he approaches the case from a position of knowledge, whereas Pascoe, who is still a sergeant, is the new boy, learning as he goes…about detection, and about his Superintendent.

I love this series and had read maybe ten of them before I found my way to Number One. That  made me realise how skilfully Hill has tackled the main problem of writing a series. How can you make each book stand alone and be enjoyable for itself without necessary reference to the others? After all you can’t expect readers to progress tidily through a sequence of novels, but you want them to read the lot eventually, no matter where they begin. This needs careful handling…I know because I face the same challenge.

The very fact that I happily read Hill’s books in no particular order shows how well he succeeds in this. And that’s in spite of the fact that he allows his characters to move on through their lives, book by book; they don’t remain stuck in a time-warp. I’ve met Dalziel and Pascoe at different stages: Pascoe with a wife and then a child, Dalziel divorced, then with a lady friend…and so on.

In each story I had just enough information about their situations to make things clear without becoming tedious. Back-stories are important, but they must be filtered in as sparingly as possible. I’ve discarded more than one mystery – no names, no pack-drill – on discovering I was expected to absorb large indigestible lumps of “the story so far” in order to understand the current tale. That’s not a fault I’ve ever found in the Dalziel and Pascoe series.

I’ve read that Hill intended A CLUBBABLE WOMAN to be a standalone novel at first, but that would have been a sad waste of two terrific characters. Even in this first book, he seems to know them so well and understand what makes them tick. Perhaps that’s why he decided to feature them again. I don’t know. But I’m extremely glad that he did.

What’s in a name…February?

It’s the simple-sounding questions that often catch you out, isn’t it?

Such as when someone asks: “Why is February called February?”

“Named after a Roman god, I expect,” someone else answers.

Then they look at me. “Jane, you know about Roman stuff. Was February named after a Roman god?”

“Er…very likely. I don’t know which one though.”

“You don’t know? But you’re a historian!”

“And like all true historians,” I answer, “if I don’t know a thing, I at least know where to look it up.”

A combination of books and the Internet gave me the answers, mostly from an essay by Plutarch, the Greek-born Roman writer who lived from 46 to 120 AD. All the Roman months, which gave us our familiar month-names, were either called after a deity – like January from Janus, June from Juno – or else, more boringly, named just for their numerical position in the calendar. September was the seventh month, October was number eight, and so on. Those numbers are out of sync now, but they made sense in the very early days, and I do mean early: the Romans dated the foundation of Rome to 753 BC. Back then they started their year in March, and their ancient calendar covered only 304 days, ten months. They knew a year was longer than that, they just didn’t bother to include the winter days as part of the sequence. Confusing? It must have been.

Eventually (still well inside the BC time zone) they realised how much better a twelve-month calendar would be, and tacked January and February onto the end of their existing one, using up the spare winter days. Only later still did things get switched round so that January became the first month of the new year. But the number-names were set in stone by then. Whoever said the Romans were logical?

When February was the last month of the year it acquired several festivals concerning the dead and ancestors, and on Feb 15^th a religious purification ritual called “februa”. Plutarch says that’s how the month got its name.

But that’s not quite the end of the story. “Februa” was almost certainly linked to a deity, (though Plutarch doesn’t say so,) called Februus, god of ritual purification and of the underworld. He was very ancient, but never made it into the Roman Pantheon Top Twenty in his own right; he got amalgamated with another and better-known underworld god, Pluto. However, it’s not a bad form of immortality to give your name to a month, even a gloomy one like February.

By the way if anyone asks me where March’s name originated, that’s much simpler. It comes from Mars, of course, god of war, and the Romans’ favourite chocolate-bar…

Dogs’ rules for humans

I’m just acting as messenger for this post. It really comes from our two cocker spaniels.

Copper is the red one (as his name implies,) a real show-type dog, although he came to us from a dog rescue, because he has a dramatic temperament that not everyone finds easy. Rosie doesn’t have Copper’s looks, but she does have a pedigree as long as your arm from a working spaniel strain – they’ve been bred as gundogs for years – and she’s sweet-natured and laid-back; as laid-back as any cocker spaniel ever is.

When I saw this list of doggy rules for humans, I laughed out loud because they could have been written by our two rascals, who would certainly want me to pass them on to you. Especially Rule 5 and Rule 9…

The right way to write

I’m not all that keen on laying down rules about writing. You know the sort of thing: “Ten golden rules every author must follow.” Hmmm…rules, as Lenin almost said, are like pie-crusts, made to be broken.

When people ask me if I have any writing tips, I find it very flattering, but I must begin my reply with a warning. I haven’t (obviously!) found the secret of mega-success. I’d love to think I could simply follow a list of do’s and don’ts to produce sure-fire best-sellers, with film companies competing for my rights while I’m alive, and universities fighting over my manuscripts after I’m gone. Wouldn’t we all?

But I do know the kind of books I want to write, and I’ve accumulated some guidelines – I’ll put it no stronger – that help me give my best shot. They may help others, so here goes:

1. Write about what interests you. Don’t be tempted by something that doesn’t, even though other people tell you it’s commercial, fashionable, “a sure winner.” With luck it may turn out to be any or all of the above, but only if you are interested and can make it interesting for your readers. Writing a novel is hard work and it can take years from creation to publication. If you’re bored at the start you’ll be brain-dead by the finish. Your prose will probably be dead too.

2. Once you begin on a novel, write regularly. I’m not saying every day; that would be nice, but may simply not be feasible because that pesky factor known as Real Life gets in the way. Work on it more than once a week. If you don’t keep up the momentum, you may lose interest, however fired-up you were when you started.

3. Have some kind of a plan, don’t just launch yourself into the wide blue yonder without any idea where the book is heading. How detailed the plan is depends on you; there isn’t a right way for everyone, you’ll find the method that’s best for you. Some authors prepare very full chapter-by-chapter plot outlines and stick to them; others (like me) just write a skeletal framework, a note or two about the beginning and the end and a few key items in between. Then as I write, the details emerge gradually and I go with the flow…but I do know where I‘m flowing to. I call this the Colin Dexter method, because he claims it’s how he wrote his Inspector Morse books: he says it’s like driving from London to Edinburgh without a road map. You know the general direction, and you’ll find the exact route as you go.

4.  Try and keep your writing fresh, with a newly-baked feeling about it; not stale or hackish. (My spell checker thinks I’ve invented a new word. But you know what I mean.)  Steer clear of obvious pitfalls: avoid clichés like the plague…OK, an old joke, but nonetheless true. Don’t slow down the action with pages of laborious description. Again I’ll use the B-word; if you read over yesterday’s creative output and it’s boring, don’t let it stand. We all have off-days, but we needn’t inflict them on our readers. Delete it and do better.

5. Don’t give up. However hard it is, however long it takes, if you have a book to write, persevere till it’s done. Whether it eventually gets published, whether it sells millions, that’s harder to predict. But if you’ve completed a first draft, you’ve achieved something important, and you can be proud to call yourself a writer. So stick at it. That’s the only truly unbreakable rule.