Ian Parks was once memorably and rememberedly described as ‘the greatest love poet of his generation’, a phrase that never ceases to make me smile. While in real life he appears more like the gentlest and most softly-spoken of the Pirates of the Caribbean, I cannot help confusing his image with that of the chelonian Hugh Heffner, draped in young beauties naked beneath teasing fur wrappings.

Well he has well and truly slapped the smile off my face this time.

I have a theory that every artist is capable of one flawless work, one perfect expression of themselves. ‘LOVE POEMS’ is Ian’s epiphany, delivered more quietly than you can possibly imagine.

Whereas among the Hull Rumoured Cities circle T.F. Griffin armours his dejected heart under a carapace burnished to dazzle, Tony Flynn delivers intimate insights into a life tinged with kindly Catholicism, and Philip Larkin thrusts a double-stiletto simultaneously to both heart and head, Ian Parks modestly whispers his exquisite verse in precise awe of the ghosts of that which he transcribes.

His closest like among the poets who come to mind is Holly Roach whose ‘Plans to change and other fables’ proved a younger female version of Ian’s inimitably elegiac verse. Both are love poets and both seem almost to celebrate the shutting of the door over the ecstasy of an adventure newly embarked upon.

The difference between the two so far – beyond age and gender – is that Ian is also a master of public verse, the faithful alchemist of both trivial and tragic historical landmarks, one or two examples of which almost shockingly glide through here.

I hate to single out a single poem from ‘LOVE POEMS’ because they belong longingly together in one complete embrace, but creation is inevitably followed by desecration, and resists ….

Ghost

no answer satisfies.

at the bottom of a stair –

Or is it love returning

who loved us most?

Waking as dawn commences

 

 

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'Murder at Oakwood Grange'

Sherlock Holmes fans will love this. Written in the style of Conan Doyle, so well that the reader is not aware it isn’t one of his stories, the novel follows Sherlock and Doctor Watson as they take on a seemingly simple case of murder. However, it quickly becomes clear that this is anything but straightforward.

Doctor Watson narrates, and acts, as he helps the famous sleuth to track down clues in this complex crime mystery. Avril Field-Taylor has done her research and takes the reader on a journey which is so well constructed that it is like watching a film of events play out. Set in Devon, Hull and London, with Buckingham Palace playing a role, the story moves rapidly with the trains and Handsome cabs that propel the protagonists through the convoluted plot. The railway stations, backstreets, country houses and, of course, Baker Street, are all described so well that the reader feels at home with them.

The action brings in Mycroft, Sherlock’s brilliant but mysterious brother, the professionally jealous Lestrade from Scotland Yard, the Hellfire Club and Sherlock’s arch-enemy, Moriarty, in a plot which twists and turns without ever losing credibility. The damsel in distress is beautifully drawn and turns out to have more courage and good sense than initially expected, so that the reader really cares about her fate. Watson’s love and concern for Mary, his wife, is very well depicted. And Mrs Hudson gets an unexpected shock when Baker Street is attacked.

I won’t spoil your enjoyment by detailing the plot. This story moves apace and all the characters live so there are no stereotypes here. This will be enjoyed by all who love a good crime novel, a mystery, a problem-solver and an authentic historical setting. Sherlock Holmes fans will particularly enjoy this new adventure for their classic hero, in which the author has the voice of Watson as narrator exactly right. I picked this up, expecting to read it off and on over a few days but did not put it down again until I’d finished it. An exciting and absorbing tale, which I thoroughly recommend. (Stuart Aken).

 

 

To be released March 2010

'Broken Dreams'

Over the last couple of years, Nick Quantrill has made an enviable reputation for himself as a highly accomplished true-to-the-gospels (of St. Elmore Leonard and St. Raymond Chandler) crime fiction writer who reliably delivers precisely crafted plots, authentic hardboiled dialogue and classic PI fisticuffs action in tales suffused with an atmosphere of compounding tension which slices through the shifting dynamics and corkscrew effects of the narrative and where the characters will inevitably find themselves hanging upside down in their own story.

After many successful and celebrated shorter tales, Nick wrote the full-length e-book ‘Black & White’ which started out in leisurely fashion but soon got into its stride as a police procedural investigation of the dark fate of a body found in a dockside container. I particularly enjoyed the accompanying side-story of the relentless stress of the anti-heroic DS Coleman’s working life being exacerbated considerably by his wife’s undermining resentment of her husband’s all-hours, underpaid job (not a new theme, but tenderly done).

In his first paperback novel, published by the recently-established Caffeine Nights imprint, we get to catch DS Coleman from another angle, as an incidental character, while two new characters step to the fore - the private detective Joe Geraghty whose wife died during an arson attack two years previously, and the City of Hull itself.

Nick has a tremendous knack of making his prose sound like it is pounding the streets as he types but this time he has raised it to a pitch which is almost CCTV, where you can follow Joe Geraghty in telescopic close-up as his footsteps echo against the tarmac amid the faded after-life of the Hessle Road distributaries, in the sleazy town centre of casinos and massage parlours offset by the glistening St. Stephen’s Centre, and in the aspiring trendiness of the Newland Avenue bistro and bar zone. This book looks Hull, smells Hull, sounds Hull, and maybe even tastes Hull, meticulously rendered as it is in reams of flat, blunt, staccato, wry dialogue which dominate the text.

Whereas ‘Black & White’ tarried awhile to establish its premises, its successor ‘Broken Dreams’ fizzes and crackles from the first page as it outlines the puzzle to be solved – a murdered wife, a mysterious embezzlement and a missing daughter, soon to be supplemented by loads of other seedy and tragic goings-on. The side-story is much more lusty too this time as it tracks the increasingly affectionate relationship emerging between Joe, still seeking closure for the death of his wife, and his partner Don’s more than attractive daughter, Sarah, whom Joe will be required to invite to join him in a swingers’ club to assist him in his enquiries - something for Joe to get worked up about!

Between scenes of continual action and painstaking investigation Nick interweaves the thick atmospheric thread of the history of Hull itself and especially that of the shattered fishing industry once the raison d’être for the vibrant, tough and close-knit Hessle Road trawling community. To readers brought up with Hull folklore in each nipple, the stark realities of a trade classified as casual labour carrying with it no fringe benefits, no accident or redundancy compensation and sometimes not even any pay, and yet in its day representing the most dangerous and brutal industry in Britain, will come as no surprise. To foreigners from beyond the borders of the East Riding of Yorkshire these details will add an enthralling documentary underpinning to the story, enhancing its already earthy credibility.

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'Missio'

I loved it this book .

Loved the story, think it's great, but more than that I love the speech. It's the conversations which are so realistic, especially to people from 'up 'ere', as they say. I think most people in Hull could pick up this story and relate to it. Its great that a writer can finally capture the way of life and speech of our area. Having people in my family associated with going to sea all of their lives, it was a must-read for me, because I grew up hearing the stories and listening to them talk the talk.

Tim Roux has done a great job (again) and I really hope he starts to get the recognition he deserves because he is not just a writer who can write about one subject, he can write about anything. He finds a subject to write about which is always interesting, and truly brings it home to the reader, delivering a great story with believable characters living believable lives.

And his 'The Dance of the Pheasodile' was my favourite book of last year. (Danny Birch).

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'Pallister's Phoenix'

This is the third book I have read by Leslie Wilkie and I have to say that I could probably carry on slotting his books into my life forever. They are quirky and slyly wilful, and once I have picked one up I cannot rest until I have finished it, not because I am overtly driven on by either the plot or the characters, but the writing is so conversational that it is almost like sitting there talking with him late one night in a cosy hotel bar nursing a warming brandy.

‘Pallister’s Phoenix’ is about five men surviving the sinking of a trawler and the devastation of the Hull fishing industry as a whole. According to the plot, the Phoenix sank when it picked up a live mine in its trawl which proceeded to blow up both the boat and most of the crew. Ron Pallister was the deck hand on the Phoenix whose life was saved by four of his shipmates while he lay unconscious on a life raft, where they each lent him a piece of clothing to keep him warm and alive. Decades later, Ron wins the lottery and wants to thank them for their good deeds that day by helping them out financially should they need it, hiring private detective Alan Craven to track them down wherever he may find them.

So what did the trawlermen do for an occupation once there were no boats left sailing out of Hull? In my brother’s case he briefly joined a herring fleet operating off the South Coast of England but never found a truly satisfying job again. In the case of Ron’s shipmates here, they more often than not did a tour of duty in Australasia for a spell and made do with various alternative nautical pursuits as they came across them, legal or illegal. In all cases the outcomes proved somewhat downbeat.

I wouldn’t usually expect to recognise a 114 page novella as having been organically plotted, but somehow Leslie has managed to write one. I suppose that I am so used to the rigorous snakes and ladders no-loose-ends plots of commercial crime fiction that something whose structure is seemingly inspired by a jazz combo jamming session puzzles and seduces me in turn. The book is delivered in terse, concise, precise phrases (rather as the legendary Lord Denning used to deliver his judgments) which are interspersed with entertaining but decidedly tangential impromptu solos. These lengthy asides and serendipities are no doubt much more reflective of the real life of a professional investigator than neat, polished narratives, but they do have me scratching my head while thanking God that there is somebody around here who chooses not to obey the rules.

 

 

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'Seer's Moon'

'Seer’s Moon' is Karen Wolfe’s second fantasy novel centring on the unusual activities of Granny Beamish and her cronies. With its mixture of comic style and supernatural content, the book had me smiling, chuckling and laughing out loud; much to the consternation of my fellow travellers. The story, or at least the main thread, follows the fate of poor Kenneth who has inadvertently become a werewolf and is being chased by a sinister bounty hunter. Granny Beamish and her friends, family and associates, who have some sympathy with the vegetarian Kenneth and his harmless, if somewhat destructive, werewolf alter ego, do their best to prevent his capture and execution. The incompetent local police, an interfering busybody and a creepy, ambitious member of Granny’s Seer community all provide the necessary conflict. Meanwhile, Granny has to contend with the advances of her ex boyfriend, who jilted her, as he tries to win her back.

Seers, for those who are unsure, are members of a parallel community who use telepathy and certain types of magic; it isn’t wise for a normal human to mess with an accomplished Seer, especially one with the gifts possessed by Granny Beamish.

Karen Wolfe writes in a style of her own; colloquially and with a type of humour that touches my laughter muscles. This is a very English novel in many ways and some of the language and references may be lost on readers from outside. But there is so much that is universal in appeal that this association with Englishness acts as an enhancement, giving the book a quirky character that should appeal to readers of all nationalities. And, talking of ‘quirky’ this is the way her characters come across. All are individual, even the dogs, wolf, griffons and other animals, and especially the rampaging sheep. Her people have flaws as well as positive attributes and all of them are very human, sometimes touching and always hilarious, often in ways that completely escape the characters themselves.

If you are seeking enjoyment with the option of laughing and smiling whilst examining human frailty and strength, this is definitely for you. I thoroughly enjoyed it and happily recommend it. (Stuart Aken).

 

 

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In 'Torc of Moonlight', Linda Acaster gives us a book which is more than simply a damn good read. This well crafted paranormal romance leads the reader through mysteries that are only gradually revealed, frightening us along the route taken by the possessed lovers. She builds empathy for the central characters, putting us inside their minds to explain their motives, drives and fears, and shredding our hearts with their emotional experiences. That she handles the male point of view with as much skill and sympathy as that of the female says a great deal about this writer’s observational powers.

The story concerns a rugby-playing male student and the mysterious, beautiful and surprisingly tough history student he falls for. Her preoccupation with Celtic history and, specifically, the female spirits of sacred springs in North Yorkshire, underlines her very real concern for those she loves.

On a deeper level, though not intrusively, the novel deals with many themes. One that caught my imagination was the parallel of modern contact sports with ancient warrior ways. She portrays, with an understanding suggestive of her unlikely physical participation, the potential brutality of rugby. Her analogy shows how rule-breaking in sport renders the game less worthy and destroys team spirit. In the same way, her anti-hero, Ognirius, in his selfish pursuit of personal glory at the expense of his fellow countrymen, destroys trust and undermines the civilisation of his own time and that of the present day.

Detailed pictures of the city of Hull, its university, and the moorlands of North Yorkshire bring life to the setting of the novel without ever slowing the story. The plot moves, twists and turns to surprise, confuse and astound as it takes us through emotional, physical and spiritual conflicts to the inevitable denouement.

 

 

Currently available to order via Waterstones

The Unitary Authority Of Ersatz

You know when you are sitting there typing away at your new book and suddenly a million tons of waterfall cascade all over you and sweep you away, and there is nothing you can do to resist as you tumble mid-air among all those words and ideas, but you know that when you hit the pool  at the bottom, and should you survive, you will be handed a tick-box questionnaire by the publisher which asks you which categories your book fits into, and you cannot find ‘Alien Metaphysics’, or ‘Surreal Diagnostics‘ or even ‘Magical-Realism’ which is a recognised category but not by online book retailers.

Having worked in Waterstones in Hull for many years, Rich Sutherland must have known what was coming his way but his muse was blinding him, I am thoroughly delighted to say. A word of advice, Rich, as if you needed it, go for ‘Crime’, ‘Romance’, ‘Non-Fiction’ and ‘Domestic Pets’. While they may not be remotely relevant to your impressive output, they are the most popular categories and the worst you will get is a disappointed reader complaining “This isn’t at all like the last Agatha Christie I read.”

Which it isn’t. It isn’t even like the one before that. It isn’t like much really. To interpose myself for a second here, when I published ‘The Blue Food Revolution’ earlier this year, the first crit back said “I read it first for pleasure; now I am going to re-read it to try to understand it” (that technique is called ‘roaching’, by the way – using somebody else’s gig to promote your own product. What can I say? I started out fearless and have ended up shameless). Anyway, “I read it first for pleasure; now I am going to re-read it to try to understand it” is certainly true of my experience with ‘The Unitary Authority Of Ersatz’. I was grinning from ear to ear with the sheer surface refraction of the words, the ripples of humour, the insistent underlying playfulness. As I read it, I realised that there was a great deal more happening below that glittering surface but, for the time-being, that surface alone was enough to brighten my day. It was a bit as the conductor Sir Thomas Beecham (son of Beechams Powders) once observed “The English do not much care for music, but they love the sound it makes”. I was loving the sound Rich’s words were making regardless of whether I cared for what he was actually saying or not.

I don’t expect that anybody will ever fully understand what Rich has written here, maybe not even Rich himself, because this book is not limited to surface gloss by any means. It delivers a steady stream of sharp observations, each story being told in a different rhythm and style, before giving way to drama then poetry as alternative viable life forms in the City of Ersatz.

In ‘An Evening At Maths Manor’, Rich uses mathematical functions as stimuli to explore the different characters in attendance at a party. For instance, the Multiplys quickly go forth to search for a dark and secluded room, Master Radius turns out to be well known in many circles, and that brat Isosceles Triangle is decidedly unbalanced. Naturally, Ms. Infinity simply prattles on and on. And, as with all the best shaggy dogmas, this tale finishes up with a resounding Basil Brush Boom! Boom! punchline.

Which are my favourite tales? Dunno. I liked some of the poems too. Maybe ‘Baking Day’ which nods towards Roald Dahl.

 

 

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The Blue Food Revolution

Grandparents are known for the stories they tell. I remember listening to my grandfather Gerard as he told about his days as a boy in Deadwood, South Dakota, which were peopled with old Indians, gypsies, Calamity Jane and Wild Bill Hickock. I’ve listened to other grandparent tales, too, and written a few myself. But none quite like the tales Tim Roux heard from his grandparents. The stories he heard are the stuff of fairytales, legends and myths, full of strange happenings and strange people. They make my grandpa Gerard’s stories seem, well, rather boring, though Deadwood with its denizens was definitely more interesting than Tacoma and West Seattle, Washington were when I was a boy so long ago.

“This book is exclusively an account of my grandfather’s adventures which started …. when one day he mounted the train to London Waterloo from Reading. It was a journey he repeated every weekday at the same time, travelling into the capital to work at the Westminster Bank as it was in those days. However, today would be different.” And from that day, all the days were different. Very different.

Grandmother’s story, though different in detail, is as imaginative and bizarre as her husband’s. To read it, flip the book over and upside down, and there it is! It begins this way: “I was born in a small village up in the mountains. The village was called Paradise. It was a poor village because it was so high in the mountains and it was therefore difficult to trade any goods that the village produced, which were mostly milk and other dairy products, and a few artefacts made from brushwood or rock. My father was the richest man in the village … simply because … his family … (owned) the most cows.” From there, hold onto your hat, because grandma’s stories get stranger as they go.

 

 

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Non-fiction is more popular than fiction nowadays. Within fiction, 75% of sales are accounted for by romance, with crime fiction taking a big chunk of the rest, and chick-lit roaring up behind. All these segments are dominated by women authors writing, I would assume, for women readers, so I am not exactly a conspicuous feature of their target market.

While the categories may overlap, their differences can be explained by how they handle three key plot elements – gossip, romance and sex.

Chick-lit has all three dials up to the max – it usually has everything up to the max - with true romance as the final against-all-the-odds (given the portrayed emotional intelligence of the heroine) prize. Romance predictably takes romance first, sex bubbles under throughout but doesn’t get explicit (although Mills & Boon do have a racier imprint), and the gossip is in short supply which is a shame because otherwise the heroine might have made some wiser choices.

Crime fiction majors on gossip. That is virtually its sole purpose, to dish the dirt around a particularly gossip-worthy topic – murder most foul – and then to reveal the truth at the end, with a flourish, and in a room which comfortably accommodates fifteen suspects all praying not to be fingered. Sex is definitely taboo and romance only serves to point out impending murder victims or the identity of the murderer him or herself. Heroes and heroines have minimal personal luck in whodunits.

In this respect, Avril Field-Taylor’s ‘Dearly Ransomed Soul’ is an absolute classic whodunit. Set in the middle of a teeming music festival in the Peak District, Avril has assembled a cast of characters each of whom is capable of virtually anything. The heroine, Georgia Pattison, has a greater capacity for anything than most, especially when it comes to guzzling lemon drizzle cake, scones that melt in the mouth, lashings of whipped cream and jeroboams of white wine. She also likes dogs - her only missionary position.

The plot is as good as any. All whodunit plots are literally ludicrous – they are about playing games – their primary role being to tickle your brain in a crossword puzzle kind of way and to avoid you lodging an outraged complaint about the legitimacy of each of the scattered clues.

In terms of the relationship between the amateur sleuth and the police, whodunits can swing one of two ways. The central characters can become the police’s main confidants or they can snarl at each other, calling each other names, each vying to break the tape of the solution before the other. In ‘Dearly Ransomed Soul’, the author has gone for the chummy option. Georgia is graced with being Inspector Hamilton’s eyes and ears, and even her agent provocateur.

As you may have gathered, I have a bit of a down on whodunits and, indeed, I have a marked tendency to put them down about two chapters in and to leave them there spread-eagled on my side table before they are swept into my bookcase by a passing cleaner.

However, ‘Dearly Ransomed Soul’ has two strong cards to play. What raises it to something altogether more interesting than run-of-the-mill crime fiction is its rich musical background and its affection for most of its characters.

Musically it oozes the world of the professional classical singer which is one part mutually supportive, one part competitive and one part vituperative within a close set of people who circulate each other several times a year in different venues. I loved the musical aspects of the story, surprisingly recognised many of the pieces it described and thought that they added a unique atmosphere to the tale. Well, not quite unique – Inspector Morse loiters there too.

The fact that the book actually likes its characters is also refreshing. Usually every character in a whodunit becomes so compromised that you pray for them all to get either arrested or wiped out, but here you actually hope that nobody did it, that the stabbing and the immolation by petrol were merely incidental accidents, a clumsy trip over the step with a hat pin in one hand and a match and five litre can of inflammable substances in the other, nobody to blame.

I therefore enjoyed ‘Dearly Ransomed Soul’ a great deal more than most novels of its ilk and looked forward to reading it (I finished it off within a couple of days). However, the one thing I couldn’t quite get around was the romantic angle.

If Georgia was seriously in search of a man, my pet goldfish Tiddles is roaring around the neighbourhood on his mountain bike right about now. The plot told me that she was torn between two men but my (male) intuition told me that those two men would most likely find a great deal more action with each other. The plot also told me that Georgia was exceptionally beautiful and around thirty. Try as I might, I couldn’t place her as being anything less than knocking on forty-five with a lively intelligence and a sharp tongue.

That aside, this is a thoroughly enjoyable whodunit, surging with great classical music and serving up a real sense of the claustrophobia of the professionally competitive musical world. It left me with a warm feeling and a greedy desire to track down copious quantities of lemon drizzle cake.

 

 

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Breaking Faith

One of the great pleasures of reading indie authors is that they are often literary Luddites, exuberantly smashing the commercial frameworks imposed on their more industrially-produced cousins, replacing them with a more zestful, fresh, individual and – might I say – compelling approach to their work.

It is not that they do not recognise as well as anyone the existence of the rules and formulae drawn up to govern the structure, content and style of mainstream modern literature, it is just that they prefer to explore other creative options for the good of their, and our, souls. “Know what you should do then do as you like” was the moral guideline I was schooled in by my parents and it is the literary guideline of many indie authors too.

Let me declare straight off that Stuart Aken’s pointedly joyous ‘Breaking Faith’ is the output of such an independent and questing mind. However, if you like to slot books as automatically and systematically into standardised categories as the priapic photographer Leighton Longshaw likes to slot his …. no, no, I’ll come back to that later …. then this novel may pose you something of a challenge.

At first I thought it was some form of hybrid of Stella Gibbons’ ‘Cold Comfort Farm’, of Emily Brontë’s ‘Wuthering Heights’, of the Elle McPherson film ‘Sirens’, and of E.M. Forster’s ‘A Room With A View’ with its ringing closeted declaration that the only crime in love is for those who love each other to be forced apart, but halfway through the book I realised that it is something considerably more surprising – the unlikely revival of the Victorian high-moral literary melodrama. You might well quibble that the morals espoused by this work are not very Victorian, nor very moral, but I am sure that there was many a Victorian master of the house who retired to his study to indulge his taste for similarly stimulating reading material. It would definitely not be for the eyes of the women and the servants of the household though, and it would like as not come wrapped in deceptively bland packaging, which is how appropriately this book started out although it now sports a cover much closer to sex on legs. Indeed, if you want the briefest of summaries of the plot, that was it. Faith starts out in bland packaging and ends up as sex on legs.

To provide a more detailed resumé of the story, it revolves around the shamelessly libidinous Mr. Leighton Longshaw who enthusiastically and compulsively slots himself into the moist nether regions of his willing photographic models as plentiful opportunities arise. Then, for want of a Girl Friday, he hires the reputed village idiot, Faith, albeit one ready-furnished with a conversational vocabulary of around 100,000 words. Something, I cannot think what – call it male intuition – hints to him that there is more to this woman than meets the eye.

As in all the best moral works, the names of the characters say it all. Faith comes tarnished by the hell-fire religious bigotry of her father but, given a few determined applications of Silvo, is soon all burnished and wondrously bright. Her two sisters are called Hope and Charity. Hope, with heavy-handed (not to mention tasteless) irony is paralysed from the brain down as a result of a surgical misfortune although her abusive father hopes to revive her come what may. Charity is as charity does. She is supplied with seemingly inexhaustible resources and very few requirements for eligibility for hand-outs other than youthful masculine energy and good looks.

And the moral? I have a bit lost count of how many of the characters have spouted it now, so it is almost certainly that free sex is fun but that it has to be stirred through thoroughly with true love and steadfast, honest passion for it to be alchemised into a truly satisfying blend – not a bad moral really.

And not a bad book either. It will almost certainly contain enough pert nipples and lubricated crevices to please discerning customers – there is a passage where Leigh and Netta couple seven times in a night and I think we get all the balls and whistles on each and every one of them – and there is no debating that this is a huge page-turner, partly because it is well-written and partly because the characters are so appealingly fleshed-out in personality as well as in anatomy. Several reviewers both on the jacket and on Amazon state that this book is hard to put down and that was my experience too. At 343 dense large-format pages it is quite a weighty book but I read it effortlessly within two days. You will certainly race through the last few chapters as it makes an unexpected breakneck dash for the finishing line.

Whether this represents a realistic social depiction of an albeit niche 1970s English North Country lifestyle is another matter. Maybe it was discoverable in the Yorkshire Dales but it never reached the East Yorkshire Wolds that I ever stumbled across, although I believe that it put in the odd appearance in Holderness from the 1950s onwards. However realism, by definition, is not what moral tales are all about. They seek to point the way towards the ideal, and if some of the dialogue sounds like it has been drafted and voted upon as manifesto composites at the annual conference of the Socially Liberated Party, so be it.

 

 

In Leslie Wilkie’s novel ‘The Golden Gnome’ there were passages where you could almost feel the balmy Southern Seas streaming through your fingers as the boat scooted between the islands. Much of ‘Trade Winds’ is also structured around sea adventures but more as tales from the officers’ mess recalling incidents netted from professional working lives spent crossing the oceans of the world. You can easily imagine these yarns being traded around a table laden with drinks and fag packets as old sea dogs civilly while away their hours in each others’ sociable company.

Leslie was one such sea dog, or at least sea sparks, and the stories sound authentic even if they are predominantly fictitious. Many of them feature benign tricks of fate where good deeds or mere accident result in sudden windfalls of cash, romance or similarly unexpected pleasures. I don’t know if anything like this has ever happened to Leslie himself but it is a recurrent theme in both his short stories and his novels.

I have to confess that I am no great fan of short stories. I view them as being a bit like fairy cakes sitting in their rows on a baking tray – each one short of a fully-satisfying mouthful and yet containing far too much sugar. Every few pages you are confronted with new strangers, each with their own back-stories, leading inexorably to a carefully crafted ending with a cherry on top. While Leslie’s stories here last on average less than four pages, they are seamlessly and sometimes movingly told; they also provide a glimpse into the life of a jobbing mariner, so I’ll pass them off as petits fours instead.

To give a few examples, in ‘Lady Clare’ a man comes across a ship that has been impounded in a Cretian harbour for human trafficking which he used to work on as a trawlerman many years previously; in ‘The Dinosaur’, a Second Officer insists on maintaining traditional working practices in the face of modern technology, being vindicated when a tsunami ravages the ship; in ‘Goodbye Gloria, Hello Ben’, an over-egged cruise bus belonging to an African potentate comes to much the fate you might expect when being transferred ashore; and in ‘Follow The Brolly’, a man treating himself to an economy cruise finds himself on the wrong boat comforted in his confusion by a rich young divorcee.

 

 

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For King and Country

If you are strict enough with yourself to follow the injunction ‘never judge a book by its cover’, here in a positive way is where you might consider aiming yourself next.

The cover of ‘For King And Country’ is intended to suggest a standard romantic historical fiction by one of Mills & Boon’s more adept cousins.

Well, it isn’t.

Firstly, Annie Wilkinson’s writing style is delightful – not striking, but like lowering yourself into a welcoming warm soapy bath on a mouldy Autumn day, enticing you to settle back and relax. As the man said, if she were to re-write the telephone directory, I might well be tempted to read it.

Secondly, for most of the book the central character, Sally, has no interest in love whatsoever. She unintentionally attracts her suitors (or predators), but she is not looking for owt from them other than that they should go away and leave her in peace. She is an ordinary working class girl from the mining village of Annsdale Colliery (outside Newcastle) trying to earn her living loyally as a nurse by doing an irreproachable job, constantly fearful of stirring up trouble for herself which, God knows, was easy enough to come by in them days. She is depicted, in short, as an out-and-out good-hearted unsophisticate, an unexceptional wallflower who may have a bit of some’at about her but who is determined to keep it well hidden if she even suspects consciously that it exists at all. Annie Wilkinson excels at the characterisation of even the most minor of her characters – you can picture each one of them instantly without their being stereotypes – but it is noticeable that she leaves her main character as something of a blur, presumably because she really doesn’t have much of a character she is willing to live out until late into the plot.

The front cover bellows “The man she loves is the man she must betray”. Well, it is not so obvious that she loves him and whether or not she betrays him was always her choice although Annie is assiduous in delineating the social pressures on people to think a certain conventional way and to bow to certain publicly reiterated threats.

The other drop-your-jaw-to-the-floor claim from the cover is a Reading Evening Post reviewer’s declaration that “Bodice rippers don’t come more fiery than this”. The only ripping I heard was that of hospital bandages and I didn’t hear tell of any bodices either, although one may have slipped down a woman’s body unannounced (if not unnoticed) towards the end of the final chapter. I don’t know what that particular reviewer was imbibing down the Purple Turtle but it was certainly mind-altering and even more certainly confounding (although Simon & Schuster appear to have been happy enough to quote it).

While no bodices are ever ripped, there is a bit of fire involved to be sure, although I would describe them as embers more than flames. The book stresses throughout that the First World War represented the continuation of the class war by others means whereby the lower orders were murderously exploited by the financiers and politicians to their own invidious ends much as they were at any other time. You see the hierarchy in the hospital, you see the hierarchy in the trenches. You see the English political classes shamelessly destroying the reputation and lives of working class folk wherever they are.

I don’t envy Annie Wilkinson her task in this book. It is virtually impossible to write about the experience of the Great War in an unexpected way. We all know what happened. We all know that its events defy sane contemplation. There is not much new to report. In fact, the only shocking revelation I have heard in years appears in a short story written by Andy Wilson around Joe Solo’s song ‘White Feather’ where he alleges that conscientious objectors were arrested, conscripted and sent secretly to France where they received the final ultimatum either to fight for their country or to be executed by it.

Having said that, Annie weaves in continuing broad strands of painstakingly researched detail about the working life in a hospital in those times and how they treated the different ailments and injuries they came across. Personally, I was surprised by how much they understood about microbial infection and indeed by how sophisticated medicine was in general.

The one thing that confuses me in this deliberately unromanticised historical novel is just that, that Annie didn’t establish a compelling romantic dynamic from the start which she could easily have done. All books have lulls, and somewhere into the late middle section I was beginning to think “OK, so it’s all about whether she will fall for X or for Y, and who gives a damn because she doesn’t appear to?”. I think I would have preferred to be sitting there screaming “Don’t do it, girl. No, no, no you mustn’t. He’s a wrong ‘un, he’s a wrong ‘un I tell you.” As the advice goes, the more authors make their central characters suffer, the more we the readers like it. I can only assume that the reason she declined this approach was out of resolute integrity. Throughout she goes to significant lengths to avoid using cheap melodramatic tricks, those same tricks that her publishers are going to the same lengths to promote on the cover.

What I should have realised 250 pages in was that Annie, like the First World War generals themselves, was stockpiling arms and ammunition ready for the final assault which suddenly introduces a series of much more threatening and exciting developments.

Is this book worth reading? Well, it depends who you are, but if you are a general reader (rather than one truffle-hunting for the latest Anthony Trollope or Thomas Pynchon) I would say definitely. Will I read another Annie Wilkinson book (there are three predecessors)? Yes, I certainly shall.

 

 

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Seers

Ever since the publication of ‘The Philosopher’s Stone’, I have been troubled by a niggling concern. It doesn’t keep me awake at night but I do regularly accost strangers and ask them “Whatever happened to Harry Potter’s grandparents?”.

Harry Potter was a baby when his parents were killed. His parents look like they were in their twenties, max. thirties. He should have had four of them in this age of increasing longevity. Where did they all go? I don’t remember Hagrid telling Harry “’arry, that Voldemort killed your grandparents, you know”, although I may have missed that page among three thousand and some. Still, nobody has any grandparents in Harry Potter, except Longbottom, and his gran is just plain scary.

Few share my concerns and I usually get sent out to make a nice cup of Yorkshire Tea to stop me hassling the guests with bothersome questions.

I have now gleaned the answer. Out of pity, charity and a novelist’s curiosity, Karen Wolfe has invited them all to come and stay with her in North-East Yorkshire for an HP adventure all of their own, far saucier than the J.K. Rowling original too, skimpy red knickers ‘n’ all.

In her ‘Seers’, there are definite echoes of Harry Potter the Saga. A dark force, a woman this time, looms over the magical community intent on sucking out their juices to turn them into zombies in a quest for world domination, or at least for a considerably greater social influence over the lands that lie between the Humber and the Tyne. She has been spurned in love by Grandmaster Marikkson, and now everyone must pay. And, yes, in her evil megalomaniac plan she is aided by a Peter Pettigrew rat-like character called Larrimer Coy (whom she calls ‘Runt’) and she pleasurably threatens the unicorns with a life of suffering and abject subjugation. How bad is that?

Ranged against this relentless and seemingly invincible greatest-witch-of-her-generation-gone-bad, Dalsha, are a slightly difficult old bat called Granny Beamish who very much likes her cuppa and her home comforts but doesn’t always get them, a cackle of other old biddies, a stiff old stick of a Grandmaster, an impish forest ranger and a youngish Highmaster with a sweet disposition but an impractical mind – so it is obvious who will win.

I warmed to this book almost immediately when a traditional roof thatcher, Theoblod Gobber, stumbled onto the scene much concerned with Granny Beamish’s shot brortches, accompanied by his YTS assistant who had been so difficult to recruit that he had been forced to settle for a skinny girl who is allergic to straw, terrified of heights and who smokes like a chimney. In lesser hands, this portrait, leaked out gradually over a couple of pages, would have been just plain daft, but Karen tells it so well that it had me erupting into spontaneous giggles all the way home.

I soon found myself encouraging the children to play with friends in McDonalds for another hour, much to their surprise, so that I could carry on reading my book, this book. However, knowing that I would be writing this review, I found myself tripping over a new niggle to replace the old one – how should I categorise or characterise this extravagant slice of fun and drama?

I am sorry, but the best I can come up with is that it is like Tom Sharpe on his best form has taken over an episode of ‘The Last of the Summer Wine’ with Nora Batty as the lead zombie. If that doesn’t help, how about a recommendation that only human beings between the ages of 6 and 96 should consider reading this, give or take a year or two?

 

 

Click on picture to go to Deam Catcher Books

It has been sixteen years since then, sixteen years in which you get the impression from his new collection “The Mermaid Chair” he became disillusioned with the possibilities of the written word, although the opening poem “The Wireless” embarks with optimism, being the story of how his father struggled manfully, but in vain, with the new TV, even resorting to climbing onto the roof

“…….. like an angry Zeus,

brandishing the aerial

like lightning

in his massive hands …..”

before ceding the field

“to the wireless again,

I learned to love how words disclose

what does not correspond to anything.”

However, subsequent poems argue a contrary case – the inadequacy of the written word to describe the fullness of the soul: “Cosmology”, “Exalted States”, “Wound”, “The Ecstasy of St Teresa”, “Natural Worlds”, and “Love Poem” (silence). Indeed, there is much to be learnt within silence: “Sign” and “Seeing Voices”.

If I am reading this right, Tony unplugged himself from the anchor of his considerable art which nonetheless proved incapable of solving the problem, and moved onwards and upwards – specifically upwards:

Must darkness ever more abound?

A worm cries out from the edge

of creation – Forsaken

too? A voice in truth

against the odds – Beloved, though.

Tony’s earlier poems pinch you in the emotional groin after honeyed words. These are more cerebral, more questing, more eclectic somehow, and more random.

I am guessing here, but my hypothesis is that he virtually gave up writing except in odd moments of passion and compulsion. This is less biography and more archaeology – fragments to be pieced together.

There are many extraordinary poems here: “Fairy tale” which describes the consequences of the paternal suppression of independent thought; “The Scene of the Crime” where the shape of a departed lover is traced in the sand:

“Where you face was I score my name with a stick.”

….”Lectio Divina”, an exquisite poem which describes how Aberlard and Eloise poured over rare and sacred texts during the day, and over each other’s bodies at night; and “The Net”, a short piece on the beguiling, illusory nature of one last chance in a relationship.

And finally, the epiphany of the late birth of a child, and of a re-birth:

“……………….it seems

that somehow there will always be

one more note, half-imagined, just beyond

each last pause we had taken for the end.”

Welcome back, Tony – as if you ever truly left.

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"Radgepacket #1"

In fact, the “Radgepacket” series is doing for short stories what “The Slab” series is doing for contemporary poetry - bringing together bright, fresh and varied voices with edge, and both series are excellent.

Take “Choke”, the short story by Hull’s own Nick Boldock, performance poet for the Renegade Writers’ Group. His narrator picks up this enthusiastic bird in a bar, takes her home, and there she is impersonating the naked dead à la Marilyn Monroe. And, wouldn’t you guess, somebody calls round. Hate it when that happens. Great story if you like them painful.

Then there is the disturbing “Chop Him Up For Firewood” by Barrie Darke about an emotionally traumatic and violent reaction to a funeral, or Will Diamond’s “The Seven Sins of Santa” which describes an even more dramatic visit to the pub. In fact, pubs abound, turning up in Stephen Cooper’s “Dark Horses” and Ali Rutherford’s “Haikus and Heavy” about a group of jaw-busting poets with cruel initiation rites.

The counter-balance to all this “lads” stuff is provided by Jan Harris’ excellent “Gratitude Diary” whose soft ironic take on positive thinking stays beautifully and elegantly the subtle side of biting parody, Ragna Brent’s “The Lemon Pip” which should be read to every NCT birthing class, Darrell Iriving’s erotically playful “She Fancies Me”, and Danny King’s Raold Dahlesque “Harriets First Day”.

What’s left? Two twisty yarns: Ian Ayris’ “My Mate Tel” and Rod Glenn’s “Paranoid”, and something of an odd-one-out, Catherine Edmunds’ “Northern Lights”, a genuinely disturbing piece addressing schizophrenia.

 

 

Click on picture to go to Flux Gallery Press

Griffin’s opus requires work – a stiff brush and a strong paint-stripper.

Click on picture to go to Waterstones.com

 

 

Click on picture to go to Waterstones.com

 

 

Click on picture to go to Waterstones.com