More November Book Reviews

Here's the next batch of November reviews added recently:

Author	Book Title
Jill McGown	Murder at the Old Vicarage
Thomas Ligotti	Songs of a Dead Dreamer and Grimscribe
David Hagerty	They Tell Me You Are Wicked
Alison Gaylin	Into The Dark
Tony Black	A Taste of Ashes
Mark Douglas Home	The Sea Detective
Jessica Cornwall	The Serpent Papers
G.J. Minett	The Hidden Legacy
Frances Fyfield	A Painted Smile
Ian Rankin	Even Dogs in the Wild
Jo Nesbo	Midnight Sun

Talking Artefacts of the Dead with Tony Black

Credit - Dan Phillips

Ayr doesn't have a Starbucks.

The birthplace of the poet Robert Burns has, however, come a long way from the days when the ploughman poet was the talk of the 'Auld Toun'.

No longer the bucolic little hamlet with the odd thatched roof to mark stops on the Burns' heritage tours, Ayr has grown up.

To say this was a surprise to me would be the understatement of my life. I grew up in Ayr. Sleepy old Ayr, 'where ne'er a toon surpasses for honest men and bonnie lasses' as our most famous resident noted.

It was, then, a place where weekenders flocked from Glasgow and the surrounds to take the prom' with an ice cream or a poke ay chips. It was sleepy, uneventful. And boring beyond belief to my teenage self; I couldn't wait to get out.

Edinburgh, Dublin and then Melbourne became stops on the extended escape route. I moved on, giving little thought to what I'd left behind. It was a shock then, on returning two years ago, to discover that the old home town did not look the same.

Ayr doesn't have a Starbucks. But it now has just about everything else - including a campaign to bring the coffee behemoth to the town; Ayr folk want it all now, everything they'd been denied for many a long year, and they're not backward about asking for it.

A by-product of this rush to modernity is some of the less welcome traits of a town on the up, with its eye on city status.

Ayr has all the problems it once had: rebellious teens drinking in the street, a scuffle after match-day, road rage in the supermarket car park. But, the Auld Toun also has some decidedly nastier social ills altogether.

The first thing that struck me on my return home was the massive increase in the visible markers of social problems. Beggars, comatose junkies lying in heaps in shop doorways, car windows smashed and the contents ravaged. In the big city these become the wallpaper to everyday life, you hardly notice them. But in Ayr ..?

The town had changed and not only on the surface. The crime being recorded in the local newspapers was of an altogether harder core, too. Gangland beatings; smuggling and drugs offences; post-office and jewellers raids and murder. As a crime writer, I took note.

When bad things happen in good places, as I knew from setting six crime novels in Edinburgh, an extra layer of intrigue is added to the mix. People don't expect the worst from such locations, and when it does occur, it hits hard.

The Irish crime writer, of whom I'm a huge fan, Ken Bruen put it in another way, when talking about the changes - post Celtic tiger - he'd noticed in his home town of Galway: "I wanted to wait until we had mean streets to set a novel in Galway, and boy, we had them now."

I can't say - as Ken did - that it was ever my ambition to set a novel in my home town. If you'd suggested the notion to me a few years back, I'd have found it laughable. But if you'd said the country I lived in would crash so dramatically and we'd be swept into austerity measures worse than the immediate post-war years, in the blink of an eye, I'd likely have laughed too.

That's the thing about seismic shifts, rarely do we see them coming. If we did, we'd batten down the hatches and prepare for them. At least get ready and try to ride them out in reasonable fashion; but when massive change happens so fast, all you can do is adapt and at best, interpret the new landscape.

Artefacts of the Dead opens with the discovery of a body. A banker has been impaled on a wooden spike near Ayr's communal waste ground. The spike has entered where the sun doesn't shine and exited, trailing blood and viscera, through the abdomen creating a scene that is both stark and shocking to residents of the Auld Toun.

As the investigation gets underway, what would once have been a high-profile case for the Glasgow murder squad, is kept in-house by an ambitious Chief Superintendent. That investigating officers are overstretched as it is doesn't seem to matter. There is, after all, DI Bob Valentine - an officer recuperating from a near-fatal stabbing to the heart - who can be brought back into the fold.

The murder investigation becomes Bob's last chance to re-establish himself. His spirit has

been broken by his stabbing, and the way his family has reacted to his near-death experience - but he now feels keenly how fragile life is.

Bob is a man ill at ease in the modern world, confused by what has happened to his town, on his watch, and plagued by a nagging guilt to make things better. The outside world has become an alien place to him; he feels a stranger in a strange land.

As the pressure, and the body count, mounts Bob begins to question his abilities. When the physical limitations of his recovery - and a weakened heart - lead to blackouts by day and sweat-soaked nightmares by night, he wonders if he has started to lose his mind.

The town of Ayr soon demands answers, a media frenzy threatens to have the case handed over to the Glasgow murder squad, but Bob's options are running out. The one hope he has of solving the case comes in the form of a tenuous lead to a similar, though unrelated, case from the past.

Can the earlier disappearance of the schoolgirl Janie Cooper provide the clues to solve the Ayr murders that are plaguing Bob's days and nights? He hopes so, because the little girl in the missing posters seems to be following him around - it might be the only way to recover his sanity.

Artefacts of the Dead is published by Black & White Publishing, price £7.99 and is available as paperback and eBook 14^th July.

For more info' visit: www.tonyblack.net   

Edinburgh Festival 2nd Report from Peter Guttridge

Sitting here in the yurt in Edinburgh listening on my iPod to Terry Reid. Yeah, I know – who he? One of the great soul voices. Made two fantastic albums – River and Seed of Memory (produced by Graham Nash) – with five great, great ballads alongside some more forgettable rock tracks. I saw him in 1971 at Sheffield Uni, supported by a certain Rod Stewart and The Small Faces. I was carrying a dead chicken in a plastic carrier bag at the time. Let’s not go there. Apparently, according to Wikipedia, I saw him at the Isle of Wight Festival a year earlier with the great guitarist, David Lindley (Tiki Torches at Twilight anybody?) but I have no memory of him there.
However, don’t get me started on who I did see there because this is a crime writing blog. The reason I mention the music I’m listening to is that I’ve been talking to GEORGE PELECANOS today by email, and he’s a music nut. (I was asking if he’d read my second novel in the Brighton trilogy and, if he liked it, say nice things but he’s stopped doing that. Damn.) And then I had a chat with IAN RANKIN over lunch and he’s still rebuilding the vinyl collection he sacrificed to CD by buying it all on vinyl again. Interesting notion. Where did I put all those Betamax videos?
DENISE MINA and STUART MCBRIDE are about to do their thing – on stage, I mean. Denise is in a Michelin man coat and very fetching red Ugg boots – she looks great except that we’re in the middle of a heat wave in Edinburgh and she’s sweltering. Of course, she lives in Glasgow – a totally different climate zone even though it’s only a 20 minute train ride away.
At lunch I was with the Scottish chapter of the Crime Writers’ Association, at their kind invitation, in a room on Princes Street with a spectacular view across to the castle. ALEX GRAY and LIN ANDERSON were on fine form, as were the Scottish crime-writing twins I’ve entirely forgotten the last name of (it’s been a long day) although I spoke most to MORNA, the twin who was sitting beside me. Of course, they did both go off to the toilet at one point so when they came back I could have been talking to her sister thereafter.
Alex and Lin are planning a Scottish crime writing festival, possibly based in Stirling. Good luck to them. I’m changing my name to McGuttridge. Shameless? I don’t know the meaning of the word.
In many ways the Edinburgh festival is a Scottish crime writers’ festival as everybody is here. Although PAUL JOHNSTON has given it a miss this year to have a holiday with his family. Lightweight.
I missed my mate QUINTIN JARDINE yesterday afternoon because I had my own events but I saw IAN RANKIN being interviewed by the aforementioned LIN. They are both Tweeters and on-stage checked in to see if anyone was tweeting about the event. Four people in the audience were. Hilarious.
Ian popped by at the lunch today, as I said, and Tweeted from the table. Never thought I’d write that sentence in my life. Check it out. (His tweet that is, not my sentence.)
Had a bracing time the other evening not with a crime writer but with SIR IAN BLAIR, former Commissioner of the Met, whose run in charge of London policing was blighted by the shooting of Jean Charles de Menezes. I liked him. He didn’t shirk the tough questions about that shooting and other real-life controversies but showed he knew a fair bit about crime fiction too (not to mention the real identity of Jack the Ripper).
He didn’t like the violence in the first STIEG LARSSON. That bloody Scandinavian comes up almost as much as DANBROWN used to when crime writers gather and I’ve scarcely met one who understands his success. I’ve heard a rumour that a certain ALI KARIM is also puzzled now about the fuss he originally made about it. Sanity returns to the world of crime fiction. Well, for the moment.
TONY BLACK, creator of Gus Drury, and GILLIAN GALBRAITH, the Alice Rice creator, were both on fine fettle in their joint event. And CHRIS BROOKMYRE got the bit between his teeth so much he went to do a stand-up set in the late night Spiegeltent.
S J PARRIS (in real life Stephanie Merritt, who I knew for email years when she held down a desk as deputy books editor of the Observer but never actually met until this week) was droll in describing her Tudor mystery novel, Heresy. And honest when she said her false moniker deliberately had the sound of C J SANSOM, whose Tudor Shardlake series is so successful.
And here’s a real life mystery. NICHOLAS PARSONS wandered through, looking as miserable as sin, before his main theatre event. I’ve heard from the mouths of several horses involved with Just A Minute, on BBC Radio 4, that he’s not altogether popular there. Why has no enterprising crime writer figured out a way for such a character’s fictional demise…?

Always Bet on Black

The Shots Gang are very happy when one of our contributors breaks out, which is exactly what Journalist Tony Black has done with his pitch black Gus Dury Detective series, now with the latest ‘Long Time Dead’ out shortly.

If you’ve not read Black, here’s an exclusive short story Tony published at the Rap Sheet which will give you a flavour and below is a teaser video for what he has in store for Gus Dury in ‘Long Time Dead’

An Idea for Crime Writers

Joining Mike Ripley on the crime-fiction tutorial beat, we see that the Tartan-Noir gang have also set up a service for future crime-writers.

Crime Writers Tony Black and Theakstons / Harrogate Award-Winner Allan Guthrie have teamed together to provide a service entitled The Ideas Space for budding and existing Crime Fiction Scribes. Though Tony and Allan are fronting this service, they have called in several renowned Scottish scribes to help.

Apart from Manuscript evaluation and critiquing, they have a workshop organized for 16th July 2010 so if you have a manuscript that needs dusting down and an opinion, or wish to fi9nd out why Scottish Crime Fiction is so popular – email the gang info@theideasspace.co.uk and tell them that Shots Ezine sent you [as Shots Readers qualify for a 15% discout on the 'early bird' rates for the July Workshop!]