Players - 9

Denise Childers was patient and meticulous, drawing out Randy Farrell on every point, making notes in a rounded hand. Summer prompted him to tell the story about how he had spotted Edie and her boyfriend in the shopping mall. Jerry Hill, leaning by the door with his arms folded across his chest, watched impassively. It took half an hour. At last Denise Childers closed her notebook and thanked Randy Farrell again, told him that the information he had given would greatly help the investigation.

She added casually, ‘By the way, is the name Joseph Kronenwetter familiar to you?’

‘Is he the guy that killed Edie?’

‘Have you ever heard the name before?’

Randy Farrell shook his head.

‘Did Edie ever mention it to you?’

Randy Farrell shook his head again. ‘She never mentioned this place, either. I don’t know what she was doing here.’

‘That’s something we’d very much like to find out too,’ Denise Childers said.

From his sentry position by the door, Jerry Hill said that he would take Summer and Randy Farrell to the hospital, get the chore of identifying the body out of the way. That was the word he used: chore. When Denise Childers gave him a sharp look, he said amiably, ‘You go ahead and write this up. I promise to take good care of them.’

As he drove Randy Farrell and Summer through the town in his cherry-red Dodge Ramcharger, Jerry Hill explained that Denise Childers was a good detective who liked to do things by the book, but sometimes the book got in the way of ordinary human decency. He, on the other hand, didn’t have a problem with letting them know about the latest developments in the case; in fact, he said, he considered it to be his Christian duty to enlighten them.

‘Denise spotted what she thought were marks made by some kind of shackle on one of the girl’s legs. When the ME confirmed her guess, all of a sudden we were looking at a potential kidnap/homicide. We started canvassing the area yesterday afternoon, and that’s when I had my lucky break,’ Jerry Hill said, smiling at Summer.

Randy Farrell said, ‘You found this guy. Kronenwetter.’

‘It’s better than that,’ Jerry Hill said. ‘Yesterday evening, I paid him a visit to ask him the questions we were asking everyone in the area. Mr Kronenwetter is known to us from various incidents involving trespass and poaching, and he’s done jail for assaulting a police officer. When I banged on the door of his shack, you can bet I had my pistol drawn and a couple of deputies at my back. The guy comes out reeking of whiskey, he’s shouting all kinds of wild nonsense, and he has a handgun stuck down the front of his pants. I arrested him for threatening a police officer, brought him in, booked him. When he went up before the judge for arraignment this morning, he was sent to the county jail for psychiatric evaluation, and around the same time we get a phone call telling us to take a look in his cellar. Which is where we found a set of leg-irons, the girl’s driver’s licence, her social security and library cards, her dress, and panties with blood on them that we’re gonna send off to Eugene for DNA typing.’

‘Son of a bitch,’ Randy Farrell said.

Summer, riding shotgun beside Jerry Hill, turned to Randy Farrell and said, ‘Are you all right hearing this?’

Randy Farrell ignored her, asked Jerry Hill who had made the phone call that fingered this creep, he’d like to shake their hand.

‘Some guy who didn’t leave his name,’ Jerry Hill said. ‘We figure a neighbour. Joe Kronenwetter pissed off just about everyone unfortunate enough to live close by him. We went straight to the county jail and explained to him exactly how much trouble he was in, asked him if he had anything to say for himself. He didn’t say a word, just kept shaking his head and moaning. He wouldn’t even talk to the public defender. We left him there to be evaluated by the shrink, and to think about just how much trouble he’s in. When the District Attorney has finished the paperwork we’ll bring him in and charge him and go around it again.’

‘Son of a bitch,’ Randy Farrell said again.

‘Don’t you worry, Randy, even if he keeps up the crazy-man act we have enough to put him away for a very long time.’ Jerry Hill aimed his grin at Summer. ‘So tell me, detective, you ever get this much excitement up in Portland?’

On Infodumping

Anonymous asks (regarding my post about novels as a vehicle for learning about stuff):

Why a minimum of infodumping? The infodumping is often quite enjoyable. (And on rare occasions from writers we won't name, the best part).

Well, liking most infodumps is certainly nothing to be ashamed - so unless you’re a character from an Italo Calvino novel, Anonymous, you don’t need to hide behind a pseudonym.

The only kind of infodump that’s rightly despised is the infamous dialogue form (‘As you know, Professor,’ a character will begin, and then tell the Professor what they both know). Other than that, the three main types of infodump that I recognise are all perfectly fine. There’s the catch-up or historical infodump, which summarises compresses events outside the main narrative (It was ten years before she saw her husband again - a time of immense change...). There’s the interiorised travelogue, which uses the character’s response to events or landscape to smuggle in information. And there’s the straight-no chaser unabashed infodump - a sentence, a paragraph, a page, that nakedly and often rhapsodically explains something.

I’ve used all three kinds of infodump in just about every novel I’ve written, and don’t intend to stop now, but I’m going to have to show some restraint this time around, for otherwise the whole damned book will be a kind of prose-poem landscape rapture about Saturn’s moons. And while they are as wonderful and wild and strange than anything ever imagined, I want to bring them to life by having my characters inhabit them, and then there’s the small matter of this big sprawling plot I have to fit in...

Farewell...

...Smart-1.

Players - 8

Cedar Falls was a sprawling town cut east to west by the Umpqua River and north to south by the cantilevered lanes of the I-5. Summer Ziegler followed the long curve of the freeway exit down to a four-lane boulevard lined with motels and gas stations, drove across a concrete bridge that spanned the sluggish river, and bumped over a single-track railroad that ran along the western edge of the town centre. The train station had been converted to a bank. There were several blocks of shops and restaurants and small businesses; houses straggled up the steep side of the river valley towards a bare crest crowned by radio, TV and microwave antennae.

The Macabee County Sheriff’s office occupied two floors of the town’s Justice Building, a four-storey slab of concrete and tinted glass that shared a block with the Macabee County Juvenile Correctional Facility, the city hall, and an imposing Greek Revival courthouse. The detectives’ bullpen was on the third floor, a long room cluttered with pairs of back-to-back desks and rows of filing cabinets. On one side, offices, interview rooms and holding cells; on the other, tall windows and a nice view across the town towards the river. This was where Summer Ziegler and Randy Farrell met Denise Childers, the detective in charge of the investigation into Edie Collier’s death. Denise Childers introduced them to her partner, Jerry Hill, told Randy Farrell that she was very sorry for his loss, and started to explain that although the Sheriff’s office in Macabee County didn’t have the resources of a big city like Portland, on the whole they managed pretty well.

Jerry Hill said, ‘What Denise is trying to tell you is that we turned this case from an accidental death to a kidnap/homicide and brought in the doer, all inside of twenty-four hours.’

Summer said, ‘Wait a minute. Someone kidnapped Edie Collier?’

Randy Farrell said, ‘You know who this guy is? You arrested him?’

He spoke so loudly that a woman working at a nearby photocopier turned to look at him.

‘Hold on there, Mr Farrell,’ Denise Childers said, shooting an annoyed look at Jerry Hill. ‘Let’s not get ahead of ourselves.’

‘If you arrested some creep for this, I think I have the right to know about it,’ Randy Farrell said.

‘All I can tell you is that we’ve arrested a man, but we haven’t charged him yet,’ Denise Childers said.

She was slightly built and in her early forties, wearing blue jeans and a suede jacket, shoulder-length auburne hair clipped back from her pale face. It was the kind of face, Summer thought, that looked out at you from Depression-era photographs of migrant workers, from earlier photographs of pioneer families posed in the doorways of their sod cabins. Careworn but tough. Determined and forthright.

Jerry Hill said, ‘The guy we like for this is a local boy. I arrested him yesterday over another matter, and this morning we came across some stuff that ties him to Edie Collier.’

A burly man in his forties, with a cap of dry blond hair and the hectic complexion of a dedicated drinker, Jerry Hill was wearing blue jeans too, with a blue short-sleeved shirt, and a burgundy-knit tie spotted with old grease stains. A Sig-Sauer .38 rode on his right hip. Summer felt overdressed in her grey pants suit, and her good black purse slung over her shoulder.

Randy Farrell said, ‘What kind of stuff?’

Denise Childers said, ‘I’m sorry, Mr Farrell, but we can’t go into that at this stage.’

Jerry Hill said, ‘We haven’t questioned him yet, which is why Denise is being so cautious, but believe you me, he’s square in the frame. He’s going down.’

Randy Farrell was bewildered and angry. Blood flushed his sallow cheeks at the hinges of his jaw. He said, ‘You knew that Edie was killed, you found the fucker that did it, and you didn’t tell me?’

‘I’m telling you now, aren’t I? And watch your language, sport,’ Jerry Hill said, smiling at Summer. ‘There are ladies present.’

‘How did you expect him to react?’ Summer said.

She’d taken an instant dislike to Denise Childers’s partner. Jerry Hill appeared to be the perfect example of the kind of macho old-school cop who made a lot of noise about having no time for political correctness or snotty-nosed college kids who believed they were better than police who’d learned their trade on the street, the kind who made sure that suspects banged their heads when they were put in the back of a car, who believed it was a fine joke to ask a female colleague how they were hanging.

Denise Childers said, ‘It was my call, Mr Farrell. I thought it would be better to speak to you about this in person. We’re just as anxious as you are to get at the truth, and I promise you that we are going to do our best by Edie. That’s why we’d appreciate it if we could talk to you about her.’

Jerry Hill said, ‘Just a little Q&A. A man like you, I’m sure you know the drill.’

‘Oh yeah,’ Randy Farrell said bitterly. ‘I know the drill.’

Summer said, ‘Remember that you’re here for Edie, Mr Farrell.’

Randy Farrell turned on her. ‘You knew that all along that she’d been murdered, didn’t you?’
‘I know as much about this as you.’

Summer had offered to help the investigation into Edie Collier’s death when she had talked to Denise Childers on the phone last night, suggested that she could try to track down the girl’s boyfriend, ask him what he thought she might have been doing in Cedar Falls. She’d been hoping that she could turn Ryland Nelsen’s errand into something meaty, something that would prove to the other detectives in the Robbery Unit that she had the right stuff, prove that she could do her job without someone looking over her shoulder, give her career a nice push. But that was blown out of the water now.

Learning The World

In another of his short essays about the novel, John Sutherland meditates on the role of the novel as a vehicle for instruction and ‘clueing-up’ in the ways of the world. He’s pretty sympathetic to science fiction, pointing out that it ‘has done as much for the factual scientific education of the average reader as all the educational reforms introduced since CP Snow’s 1959 polemic The Two Cultures lamented his fellow Britons’ epidemic ignorance of the second law of thermodynamics.’ And while I at first bridled at Sutherland’s suggestion that because a high proportion of Americans believe in X-File alien probings (how quickly SF authors get tired of being asked about UFOs), SF may have been responsible for ‘dumbing down the citizenry’, on reflection, he has a good point; after all, although SF writers aren’t responsible for the finer flights of fancy of flying saucer afficiendos, they did after all invent and propogate tropes about aliens and alien invasions. And worse than flying saucer fever, SF has produced a clutch of post-catastrophe novels that mendaciously suggest that plague, nuclear war or asteroid impact may be a beneficial winnowing of the dumb and undeserving, and that clever and resourceful people will flourish and bring in a Utopia. As if. (On the plus side, SF in the 1950s and 1960s definitely boosted interest in space travel; many people working for NASA were hooked by SF at an impressionable age.)

Whether or not novels instruct and enlighten the reader and make her a ‘better, or at least, better informed’ citizen (a lovely notion), they certainly allow the authors to indulge in their interests and obsessions. I had a lot of fun researching paleolithic art and theories of consciousness for Mind’s Eye, and delving into police procedures and the economies of massively multiplayer online role-playing games for Players. And right now I’m deeply immersed in the landscapes of Saturn’s moons, trying to figure out how to convey their strange and wonderful beauty with a minimum of infodumping.

Players - 7

Carl Kelley braced Pat Metcalf Wednesday lunchtime, when the security company manager arrived at the estate for his weekly inspection. Walking straight up to him, saying, ‘I want a word.’

'Make it quick. I’m running late.’

They were standing beside Metcalf’s black Range Rover in the parking lot by the gatehouse, with a view down the valley to the tall narrow vee of the dam and the lake spread behind it, the ruins of the old lodge and holiday cabins on one side, forest on the other. It was a warm, sunny day. A hawk was circling in the stark blue sky.

Carl said, ‘I’ll come straight to the point. I found one of your guys in the mansion last night, wandering around the trophy room.’

‘Yeah, Frank Wilson told me about that,’ Metcalf said. ‘He also told me you threatened him.’

‘He was pricing Mr Merrit’s possessions like an auctioneer. What are you going to do about it?’

‘He found the door open and checked it out. Why should I do anything?’

Pat Metcalf was a heavy-set man with an untidy mop of hair dyed blond, wearing a sport jacket over a white shirt and bolo tie. He’d been a senior detective in LAPD’s Vice Unit until he ended up on the wrong side of an assault charge after beating up a working girl and putting her in a coma because she wouldn’t give him a freebie. That had been ten years ago, but he still possessed a cop’s bullish arrogance and made it clear that he considered Carl to be some kind of untrustworthy freeloading lowlife. Saying in passing, ‘I’ve got your number, buddy.’ Or, ‘Don’t think I don’t know.’ Or, ‘You and me, anywhere, any time.’ Eye-fucking him with belligerent contempt. Daring him to try something.

Metcalf was giving Carl that look now. Carl gave it right back, saying, ‘Did you know that Frank Wilson has done time? I don’t suppose you do, or you wouldn’t have hired him.’

‘I interview a guy for a job, I can’t ask him was he ever arrested. That’s a straight violation of Federal law -- invasion of privacy. I can’t ask him if he’s ever been a mental patient either, or if he’s gay or has HIV.’

‘Frank Wilson is sporting a prison tattoo on his hand. He was definitely convicted for something,’ Carl said.

‘So?’

‘So that story about finding the door open was a load of bullshit.’

‘I told you, the guy got lost.’

‘Which reminds me of the other thing that bothers me. Here’s a bloke wandering around the trophy room, claiming to have wandered in through an open door. But why was the door open in the first place?’

‘Maybe there’s a problem with your system. If I were you, I’d get it fixed,’ Metcalf said, and made a move to go past Carl.

Carl said, ‘Either the system was broken, or Mr Frank Wilson got hold of a bracelet that allowed him entry into a part of the mansion where he had no business being. Maybe I should look into that.’

‘What do you want me to do? Fire his ass?’

‘That’s what I’d do.’

‘Yeah, but you don’t have to find halfway decent guards who’ll take wages that’re less than they can earn flipping burgers. And you know what? I’d rather employ someone who’s done jail than some crazy queer dripping with the virus.’

‘If all your employees are like him, maybe we’d better find another security company.’

‘If you’re not happy with the service my company provides, why don’t you raise the matter with Mr Merrit? Oh, but I bet you already ran to him with your paranoid little story, and he told you to forget about it. Is that why you’re sore?’

‘I’m pissed off because there’s been a breach in security and you aren’t taking it seriously.’

‘There hasn’t been any breach in security,’ Metcalf said with exaggerated patience, ‘so quit bothering me with this weak shit about conspiracy to rob or whatever. Stick to your own job, whatever the fuck it is, and keep your nose out of my business.’

Carl let the man walk past, then said to his back, ‘Who mentioned anything about a conspiracy?’

Unsurprisingly...

...Kim Newman and I didn’t win a Hugo for our little performance piece at last year’s Hugo award ceremony in Glasgow, but at least we lost out to one of the best episodes from the terrific first series Doctor Who; it’s been a while since a British TV show has been nominated for, let alone won, a Hugo, and the revived Doctor Who has been British TV at its best. Good to see, too, that Robert Charles Wilson won a Hugo for his novel Spin - a well-deserved tick mark for a fine, thoughtful and imaginative writer.

I wasn’t at Anaheim, and thanks to the time difference between the UK and California, I slept through the award ceremony. But I’ve been to enough of the things to know how it goes. The only sensible and sane reaction to having your work put on the short list for an award is to think how nice to be noticed, but of course I won’t win, not when when I’m up against relentless self-promotor X, the tremendously popular Y, or the unfairly talented Z. But if you attend the ceremony, you can’t help feeling, as the moment approaches, that perhaps you really do have a chance of winning - why else would you have put yourself through all this? Not that you tell anyone that you fancy your chances of course, knowing full well that hubris is a lightning conductor for fate, but despite the fact that the sensible part of your brain continues to list the cold hard reasons why you aren’t going to win, your serene self-belief continues to persist right up to the moment that the grinning envelope-opener announces that the award has gone to someone else. In fact, for a split-second, as X, Y, or Z leaps up and lopes for the stage, you exist in a parallel universe where you have won, but then applause for the winner collapses that still-born reality, and it’s time to congratulate the winner and find a stiff consolatory drink to calm your nerves. Having spared myself that ordeal, all I have to do is thank everyone who nominated and voted for us.

Exterminate!

Spare cash burning a hole in your pocket? Why not bid on this home-made robot with more than a passing resemblance to the croak-voiced enemies of Doctor Who?

Point And Click

Suggest a target for the Mars Orbiter Camera on board Mars Global Surveyor.


And here’s one of my favourite of all of the pictures beamed back from the still-functioning pair of Mars rovers. Not only because it was taken on my birthday last year, but also because sunset on Mars really makes you realise that it’s so very different from Earth.

(Note - the direct link to the picture turned out to be broken, but you can get to it via the NASA homepage by clicking on Larger Image.)

Players - 6

After they had set off again, Randy Farrell explained that he’d been diagnosed with liver cancer three years ago, the doctors had cut a tumour as big as a goose egg out of him. He’d gotten better, but four months ago the cancer had come back worse than ever, had spread to his bones and his pancreas. He didn’t have long to live, which was why he wanted to do right by Edie. Also, he said, he loved the girl as if she was one of his own. He’d been a son of a bitch when he was younger, beating up on his girlfriends, even beating his mother once, but marriage and helping to raise his stepdaughter had grounded him. He’d even quit drinking after his last stretch in the joint, but not before the damage had been done.

His confession was well rehearsed and laced with jargon he’d probably learned at Alcoholics Anonymous meetings and cancer support groups. But he seemed sincere, telling Summer that Edie had loved to read, English had been her best subject at school and she would have studied it in college if she hadn’t grown wild and gotten into trouble with the police. Telling her that Edie had loved a little black cat she called Edgar Allan Poe, that Edie had sewn her own clothes from patterns, and she had been a pretty good artist, too. Edie and her mother had never gotten along, Randy Farrell said, but he hoped he had been some help to her. When he’d seen her that one time after she ran off, she had been full of plans; he’d given her money to buy something smart so she could try to get back to school, train for an office job. Meanwhile, she’d been waitressing in a short-order place. The manager took a kickback straight from her basic pay because she’d been on probation and he could violate her back to jail any time he wanted, but she had been making that up on tips.

‘Everything was going right for her, except for that no-good boyfriend.’

‘Have you remembered anything more about him?’

Before driving to the Farrells’ house Summer had phoned around Portland’s five precincts in case Edie Collier’s boyfriend had reported her missing, but she’d had no luck.

Randy Farrell said, ‘I saw them together once, by accident. I was on the floor above them in the Lloyd Center, looking to buy something for Lucinda’s birthday. I saw Edie with some young guy outside the multiplex there.’

‘Did you get a good look at him?’

‘When I spotted them, like I said, I was on the floor above. By the time I had ridden down on the escalator, they’d split. Went to see a movie, I guess.’ Randy Farrell was quiet for a moment. Summer glanced at him in the rear-view mirror. He was looking at something inside his head and the corners of his mouth were turned down. Saying at last, ‘I just realized that was the last time I saw her.’

‘When was this?’

‘Two weeks ago to the day. I got Lucinda a crystal dolphin. She loves shit like that. Edie didn’t even send a card, I’m sorry to say.’

‘That was the only time you saw Edie’s boyfriend?’

‘If the guy she was with was her boyfriend, yeah.’

‘What did he look like?’

‘I didn’t really get to look at him.’

‘Well, was he white or black?’

‘White.’

‘How old would you say?’

‘I guess about Edie’s age. Maybe a little older, it’s hard to say.’

‘Edie was eighteen.’

‘Nineteen next month.’

‘So this boyfriend, Billy no-last-name, was eighteen or nineteen.’

‘Maybe a little older. I didn’t get a real good look.’

‘How tall was he?’

‘I was pretty far away.’

‘Taller than Edie? Shorter?’

‘Maybe a head taller. He had black hair, too, shoulder length.’

‘What he was wearing?’

‘Jeans, I think. Blue jeans. And a big plaid shirt, some kids wear them like a coat over their T-shirt? Like that. And he had a briefcase too. Apart from that, he looked like any of those kids who hang around Pioneer Square.’

‘What kind of briefcase?’

‘What do you mean?’

‘Was it metal or leather?’

Randy Farrell thought for a moment. ‘I guess it was more like one of those cases you carry those small computers in. You know, with a shoulder strap.’

‘A laptop computer case.’

‘I guess.’

‘Did you get a look at his face?’

‘I only saw him from behind.’

‘Shoulder-length black hair, blue jeans, a plaid shirt. And a computer case.’ It wasn’t much, but it was something. There couldn’t be too many street kids who lugged around a laptop computer - or, at least, its case.

Randy Farrell said, ‘Edie told me they were in love. She showed me this cheap ring he bought her. Way she talked you could see she thought he was Mr Wonderful, but don’t you guys say that in a murder case the first suspect is the one nearest the victim?’

‘I don’t have an opinion one way or another, Mr Farrell. It isn’t my case.’

Snakes On A Plane

Kim Newman has to see it on the day of release because there are no press shows; how could I resist the invitation to tag along? Along with the usual ads and trailers the presage the main feature, there’s one of those short films for Orange mobiles in which a star makes a pitch that’s derided by a committee of movie execs interested only in product placement. This time the star is Steven Seagal, and the piece is snappily directed and packed with sharp one-liners and neat parodies on action movie tropes. In short, it’s everything that the main feature aspires to be. The set-up is famously simple. Brutal Hawaiian gangster Eddie Kim wants to get rid of a witness (Wolf Creek’s Nathan Phillips) to his slaying of a public defender, and arranges for a big crate full of venomous snakes and equipped with a timer release to be placed on the 747 in which the witness, under the protection of Samuel L. Jackson’s FBI agent, is flying to Los Angeles. The snakes are released and people start dying as the 747 lumbers into a tropical storm. The mayhem on the plane is fine, there are some good jokes and shocks, air stewardess Julianna Margulies is a nice foil to Samuel L. Jackson’s cool, and of course there’s the famous line added after the webstorm of publicity. But the movie can’t make up its mind whether it’s a spam-in-a-cabin slasher or an Airplane!, the snakes, mostly very obviously CGI’d, are a pretty monotonous multi-headed enemy that doesn’t do much but snap and lunge, a promising sub-plot with a rogue snake farmer is dismissed too quickly, and the action sags for about twenty minutes before picking up for a slum-dunk ending. Snakes On A Plane doesn’t live up to its hype (what movie could?), but it could have been a lot worse than it is, and at ninety minutes it definitely doesn't outstay its welcome.

Here's Kim's pithier review.

Players - 5

It was a straight shot down the I-5, through the Willamette Valley to the beginning of Oregon’s banana belt. It started to rain soon after they set out, but forty miles south of Portland the sun broke through, lighting up a ragged chasm in the clouds, probing farmland on either side of the freeway with slanting fingers of light. Randy Farrell spent the first part of the trip zoned out in the back seat of the Police Bureau Taurus, waking only when Summer turned off the I-5 at Springfield for a pit stop at a Wendy’s. After picking over his plain burger and fries, he disappeared into the men’s room. Ten minutes later, Summer went to look for him and found him out back by a Dumpster, sucking on the last half-inch of a tightly rolled joint.

‘I’m licensed to use it,’ he said, giving her a defiant look. ‘It helps control the nausea I get after I eat. You don’t believe me, I have a registration card my doctor gave me.’

‘I don’t need to see your card, Mr Farrell. I’ll wait by the car until you’ve finished, but don’t be too long.’

After they had set off again, Randy Farrell explained that he’d been diagnosed with liver cancer three years ago, the doctors had cut a tumour as big as a goose egg out of him. He’d gotten better, but four months ago the cancer had come back worse than ever, had spread to his bones and his pancreas. He didn’t have long to live, which was why he wanted to do right by Edie. Also, he said, he loved the girl as if she was one of his own. He’d been a son of a bitch when he was younger, beating up on his girlfriends, even beating his mother once, but marriage and helping to raise his stepdaughter had grounded him. He’d even quit drinking after his last stretch in the joint, but not before the damage had been done.

His confession was well rehearsed and laced with jargon he’d probably learned at Alcoholics Anonymous meetings and cancer support groups. But he seemed sincere, telling Summer that Edie had loved to read, English had been her best subject at school and she would have studied it in college if she hadn’t grown wild and gotten into trouble with the police. Telling her that Edie had loved a little black cat she called Edgar Allan Poe, that Edie had sewn her own clothes from patterns, and she had been a pretty good artist, too. Edie and her mother had never gotten along, Randy Farrell said, but he hoped he had been some help to her. When he’d seen her that one time after she ran off, she had been full of plans; he’d given her money to buy something smart so she could try to get back to school, train for an office job. Meanwhile, she’d been waitressing in a short-order place. The manager took a kickback straight from her basic pay because she’d been on probation and he could violate her back to jail any time he wanted, but she had been making that up on tips.

‘Everything was going right for her, except for that no-good boyfriend.’

The Hearts of Conspiracy Theorists Everywhere Quicken

According to Sky News, NASA has lost the original footage of man's first steps on the moon.

Playlist

After seeing the picture of my office that I posted here, Fred Kiesche asked me about the CDs lined up above my computer - what are they, and do I listen to them while I work? Mostly, like the fat wedge of Steely Dan, they’re the overspill from the groaning shelves downstairs in the living room, leavened with a bunch of recent arrivals - stuff by The Handsome Family, Richmond Fontaine, Drive-By Truckers, Ali Farka Toure, Roy Harper, Lokua Kanza, reggae compilations... Pretty mainstream stuff, really (the racks of 1920s and 1930s American music are all downstairs).

I don’t listen to much music when I’m doing the first draft, but having familiar stuff on random play on the computer helps rhythm and flow of the endless redrafting (it has to be familiar stuff, so it works mostly on my back brain). The older I get, the less distraction I can tolerate.

Some of my novels have a soundtrack; some don’t. Players doesn’t, because I think that using musical preferences as a short-hand for characterization in thrillers is a bit of a tired cliche - and too often it’s a form of showing-off by the author too.* I suspect that if Summer Ziegler listens to anything, it would be jazz-lite solo singer stuff; she certainly doesn’t slump down in an easy chair at the end of the day and sip bonded bourbon while listening to Dock Boggs.

*I know, I know: I'm guilty of it in Whole Wide World, but the punk thing is supposed to be part of John's voice rather than a quirky character tic. Honest.

On the other hand, Cowboy Angels, which was partly inspired by the idea of the lost, weird America Greil Marcus wrote about in Lost Republic does have a soundtrack. Here it is (the songs on it are either name-checked or hinted at in the text, and appear in narrative order):

Man Gave Names To All The Animals - Bob Dylan
Hook And Line - Hatton Brothers
Acony Bell - Gillian Welch
Kentucky Avenue - Tom Waits
Who Knows Where the Time Goes - Fairport Convention
Wolf Among Wolves - Bonnie ‘Prince’ Billy
America - Simon & Garfunkel
Romance in Durango - Bob Dylan
Cold Cold Cold - The Handsome Family
Lost in the Flood - Bruce Springsteen
I See A Darkness - Johnny Cash
Slow Train Coming - Bob Dylan
I Dream A Highway - Gillian Welch
Train Song - Tom Waits

The McLuhan Test

Professor John Sutherland, in an article in the Guardian Review, passes on Marshall McLuhan’s simple but sage advice on how to decide whether or not a novel is worth buying. All you have to do is open the book at page 69 and read it; if you like that page, you’ll like the book.

In that spirit, here’s page 69 from the paperback edition of Mind’s Eye. I hope you like it. (More extracts from Players are in the pipeline, by the way, but I can't guarantee which will contain the material that will appear on page 69 of the finished book. )

5.

Harriet’s instructions took her to the edge of the London A-Z, to Enfield and a small café in the middle of a short row of shops hunched in the thunder and diesel wind of the A10's busy dual carriageway. Her handler, Jack Nicholl, had arranged the meeting with an MI5 agent, Susan Blackmore, and an informer in the Kurdish community. ‘She’ll be very protective of the guy,’ Jack Nicholl had said. ‘If anything looks funny to her, she’ll blow the meet and I won’t be able to fix you up with another. So be cool, and do everything she asks.’

Harriet allowed Susan Blackmore to pat her down in the café’s toilet. The MI5 agent searched Harriet’s handbag and confiscated her mobile phone for the duration.

‘If I see any sign that my man is going to be followed, I’ll call this off at once,’ she said.
‘I understand.’

‘And I’ll also call it off if I think someone is eavesdropping, using a video camera, or taking photographs.’

‘You don’t have to worry -- ’

‘And I will sit in while you talk with him. That’s not negotiable.’

‘Of course.’

Harriet bought two coffees and followed Susan Blackmore to a table outside the café. The MI5 agent was in her late twenties, only a year or two older than Harriet. She wore her mouse-brown hair in a ponytail pulled back

That Was Then, This Is Now

In these troubled times, when even toothpaste is a suspect substance, it’s far harder to practice do-it-your-self rocketry. How innocent we were, back then, in the Cold War, how innocent.

Rocket Boy

A little while after my tunnelling exploits, I discovered chemistry. One of my chemistry teachers had worked in an explosives research laboratory during the Second World War, and showed us how to make thermite, what happened when you dropped potassium metal into water, and why it isn’t a good idea to hit lead azide with a hammer. And in those days (back when there was still a space race), you could go to a chemist’s shop and buy strips of magnesium, hydrochloric and sulphuric acids, aluminium powder, both kinds of iron oxide . . .

And then there was the mix of a certain weedkiller (now outlawed) and sugar that formed a junior but potent version of thermite. With a length of guttering as a Fireball XL5 style launch pad, lightly modified plastic bottles, and my weedkiller/sugar mix, I was in the rocket business. Some of the rocket bottles flew a surprising distance; one certainly surprised me by shooting about a hundred feet into the air in a graceful arc that carried it over the brook into a trash pile in the yard of the blast furnace. Like Wernher von Braun, I had aimed for the stars, but hit a civilian target instead. Luckily the small fire that the burning rocket bottle started went out before I had to wade across the brook to deal with it. Even more luckily, I still have all my fingers and thumbs; the only souvenir of my rocketry experiments is a small oval scar at the base of my right thumb.

Talk Is Free

I had to turn off comments for a while because a spambot fell in love with this blog. I think it has gone somewhere else now, so comments are back on. If you're interested, that is.

Dig This

The story of the tunnelling exploits of the Hackney Mole reminds me of my brief childhood career of making trenches and tunnels that invariably collapsed after only a couple of feet. Although I was inspired by stories of British soldiers digging their way out of German prisoner-of-war camps, I failed to pay sufficient attention to the technical details of props and linings. Besides, it was easier to carve mazes out of the abundant stands of stinging nettles that grew under the apple and pear trees of our little orchard, or to build camps from sticks and willow branches on the tiny island in the wide shallow pond at the bottom of the disused lock.

I grew up in the third of a row of four Elizabethan cottages in the little community of Dudbridge, a couple of miles from the Cotswold town of Stroud. To the front we had a view of a factory; to one side was the factory’s sports ground and to the other, across a brook, a small blast furnace; and at the rear was the pond where the brook ran into the old disused canal, and the prospect of countryside beyond. The cottages were each no more than three rooms stacked one on the other with a kitchen and bathroom tacked onto the back, but the acre of gardens behind them were a generous playground, and at a very early age I was allowed to roam farther afield, and expend my considerable energy in the tracks and hollows and abandoned quarries of Selsley Common.

Children are natural guerrillas, and the many of the books I read as a child - Just William books, the adventures of the Swallows and Amazons, Wind in the Willows, and Lord of the Flies - acknowledged this. I hope there are equivalent adventures in contemporary children’s books, but the few I have read were either examples of urban realism dealing with ‘issues’, or full-blown fantasy. Are there any that treat children as creatures whose natural behaviour is much more like that of Ratty and Mole and Badger (there is no better example of a den than Badger’s home in the Wild Wood) than the contemporary idea of children as miniature, unfallen, unformed adults?

Going Underground

I moved to London ten years ago, and very nearly bought a ground-floor flat opposite a derelict house that was owned by the famous Hackney Mole. Oddly, the estate agent didn’t mention at the time that with only a little excavation I could have had access to the Mole’s underground empire.