A taste for blood

A couple of weeks ago I uploaded a few hundred words from one of the crime books I have on the stocks waiting to be published. It got a lot of good reaction and more page views than any other blog I've written.

So it seemed a good idea to give the world a taste of book two.

This is the prologue of War Games, but the main action takes place in and around my old stamping ground in the Borders and features my hero, a Falklands War veteran with a guilty secret and an unlikely talent. A girl has gone missing, but has she been kidnapped, as her industrialist father claims, or has she run away from an arranged marriage as her friends believe? When the police give up the hunt Assad Ali calls in the last resort after all the other last resorts have run out: a psychic investigator. But as the investigation develops Gurya Ali isn't the only teenager who's vanished. And when they start turning up dead it becomes clear he's in a race against time with a serial killer - a serial killer with a liking for gruesome trophies and an obsession with a Medieval hero.

Let me know what you think

War Games

Prologue

Jose Caracol was the first, but I wouldn’t find that out until much later. Jose was a street-savvy, sixteen-year-old Spaniard, but he was part-Tunisian, part-Gitano, which made him a one hundred per cent outsider. In the summer, he scraped a living fleecing the tourists who throng the concrete-canyoned resorts around Malaga, but in season he walked the dusty roads along the Guadalteba River looking for work as an olive picker to raise money for his much-extended and entirely undeserving gypsy family. No-one was able to figure out why he should be in the heat-scorched Andalucian hill village of Teba that Friday, August 25, when thousands of red-nosed guiris were asking to be shorn of their euros forty miles away down on the coast.

Not many guiris make it as far as Teba, because it’s a long and dusty drive on bad roads, through alternating rocky outcrops where only the buzzards and the vultures soar, and dull, characterless hillsides lined with regimented ranks of olive trees. The main reason tourists make the effort is to visit the Castillo de la Estrella - the Castle of the Stars – the ruin which has dominated Teba and its people since the Romans came to Spain more than two thousand years ago.

Local legend says that from the castle tower you could reach up and touch the heavens, but now you make the climb to look down on the village, which shines like a silver jewel on a plain of sun-baked red earth that stretches away towards the distant hills of the Sierra Ronda. Teba is pretty enough, in the white-walled, red-tiled Andalucian fashion. Its narrow streets will lead you to a couple of fine churches and a quiet village square. A mile to the south is the garganta – a precipitous gorge which attracts butterfly collectors and bird-spotters. And that’s about it. It’s not really a very interesting place to die in. Or to die for.  

 But looks can be deceptive. Seven hundred years ago that innocent plain below the castle echoed to the thunder of a thousand charging war horses. Men fought and cursed and died, and their blood stained the red earth of the plain redder still. The battle they fought has never really ended. Jose Caracol was one of its casualties. But, of course, he never knew that.

A farmer discovered the body close by a dirt roadway, in one of the narrow, rush-filled ditches that split the plain. Prudently, he decided to leave Jose just where he was. By the time the local police summoned their national counterparts up from Malaga the August sun had turned the corpse almost black. Still, it wasn’t difficult to work out how he’d died. Lieutenant Alvares, in charge of the investigation, studied the intensive pattern of knife wounds concentrated around the victim’s face, neck and chest, and wrote the word ‘frenzied’ in his black notebook. His interest was drawn to a particularly large gash in the left breast and his moustache twitched with distaste as he recognised the reason for it. ‘Cabrons,’ he muttered.

 A search of the dead boy’s clothing had already placed Jose’s identity card in his hand. When he studied the bony, dark-skinned face with its barely concealed sneer it was difficult to keep his interest from waning. He knew what he would find when he typed the name into the Malaga police computer system. A dozen – maybe many dozens – of arrests for theft and other petty crimes, a few short stays in youth prison. His view was confirmed when he questioned the shopkeepers and the villagers of Teba. Sure, we get gypsies around here. They’re pests – no-one actually used the word vermin, but it was there just the same - to be watched like the stray dogs that wait to steal from your kitchen. No, nobody remembered this particular gypsy.   

Lieutenant Alvares decided to stay overnight in Teba, for form’s sake. He – politely – asked his counterpart in the local police to identify any groups of gitanos in the surrounding area. Relationships between the two forces had to be conducted like the first tentative steps of the flamenco dancer; one at a time, and always with delicacy. He would question the gypsies the next morning, with the local officer at his side. The thought of the blank, uncooperative faces gave him a slight feeling of indigestion. He tried very hard to fight it, but in his mind he had already filed Jose Caracol as the victim of a turf war between two rival gitano clans. The only thing that disturbed this certainty was the mutilation done to the body. It seemed very – deliberate, yes that was the word – deliberate, compared to the savage nature of rest of the attack. It raised certain doubts that would stay with him for many weeks. But, no, these people, they were without morals, without conscience. He studied the thing the dead boy had clutched in his hand. Who was to know what messages they sent to each other in their crude un-Spanish way? Still, he would do his best to discover the killers. The location and the date didn’t strike him as significant, unless that it was, for Jose Caracol, the wrong place at the wrong time. He was right, but not in the way he thought. But he wouldn’t find that out until much later.

A Grand day out

Well, I survived the stag weekend more or less unscathed, though I can cheerfully say that the experience of a Saturday night out in Liverpool city centre will stand me in good stead the next time I write about Roman depravity and debauchery.

We started the day with an interesting trip from our waterfront hotel to the Grand National meeting at Aintree, courtesy of a Scouse taxi driver who had clearly decided that red lights and speed limits only applied to other people. Gambling and I tend to be mutually exclusive thanks to a salutary lesson during my misspent youth, and half a dozen losers only served to reinforce that. The fact that three of them were second by less than a head, and the one in the National by a literal whisker, made it all the more masochistic. But the pain of losing didn't detract from what was a fantastic experience. The Grand National is an epic event, and, the tragic equine losses notwithstanding, a truly magnificent sporting occasion, with genuine superstars in the saddle and under it.

Seventy thousand people packed the Aintree stands and bars and if there's a recession I can assure you it hasn't reached Merseyside. I've never been anywhere like it for conspicuous consumption by loud young men in never-before-worn suits, and girls in skirts so short they didn't actually qualify, wearing skyscraper heels and trying valiantly to negotiate four flights of stairs. The ladies of Liverpool certainly know how to glam up for the big day. Elegant ball gowns were all the rage, with upper works (as George McDonald Fraser's Flashman would say) proudly on show. I surveyed all this young fashion with a fatherly affection, thinking 'You may one day regret having your young man's name tatooed on your neck in letters an inch high, my dear' and that the man who persuaded women that spraying themselves with mottled orange paint and calling it a tan was a good idea is one of the business geniuses of our age.

The least said about the evening the better. Suffice to say that being bought a double is only a good thing if you're not drinking large glasses of red wine and that the aforesaid red wine and something called a Jaegerbomb don't mix all that well. Being of more mature years I didn't even bother trying to persuade the groom to dress in anything stupid, but much respect to the chap in the banana suit and the bearded young man disguised as Snow White, leading his reinforced squad of dwarves on the road to ruin.

Roll on the wedding!

Wha's like us!

We live, as they say, in interesting times. As we enter the two and a half year marathon debate on whether or not Scotland should be independent again, my thoughts turned to the good old days when Scotland was run by Scots - albeit French-speaking Scots whose relatives robbed and murdered their way to power

To put it bluntly, many of Scotland's rulers have been a dead loss, with the emphasis on dead.

Take the Stewarts.

James I - came to the throne after 18 years in English captivity. Murdered by rivals, including members of his own family. Didn't do his memory any favours by hiding in a sewer.

James the Second was blown up by his cannon

James II - crowned at the age of seven, spent most of his rule obsessed by destroying the rival Douglases. Blown up by his own cannon trying to get Roxburgh Castle back from the English.

James III - aged eight when he was crowned at Kelso Abbey. Annoyed just about everybody. Killed in a battle against his own son.

James IV - tried not to rile the English and ruled with a steady hand until he fell out with Henry VIII and nipped over the Tweed to Flodden to show him two fingers. Hacked to death with billhooks along with one bishop, two abbots, nine earls, fourteen lords and several thousand other people who didn't really matter much except to their relatives.

James V - seventeen months old when crowned. Kept himself busy fleecing the nation to build palaces and fathering nine illegitimate children. Died of fever after taking a bath in the Solway while his army was losing (there's a theme here) to the English.

Mary, Queen of Scots - dad passed away when she was six days old, husbands had a habit of dying on her. Bit of a schemer. Lost her head after annoying her rich English cousin, Liz.

So when people talk about the good old days, we shouldn't forget that in the couple of hundred years before the Union of the Crowns, everything in the garden was far from rosy. Scotland was riven by internal rivalries and run by vested interests who were happy to sell out to their bigger neighbours whenever it suited them. There's a lesson there somewhere, I'm just not sure what it is.

A walk near Bridge of Allan

It was a beautiful day in Bridge of Allan, the sun was shining and for once it was also warm. This, I reminded myself, is why you gave up being a wage slave. So I took a couple of hours off and headed for the hills.

I'd been walking for half an hour and seen a couple of buzzards and a veritable blizzard of Great Tits, but I was just thinking it was odd I hadn't seen a roe deer. Turned the next corner and there were six of them standing in the shadow of the old hill fort. Later I came across the skull of one that hadn't made it through the winter.

It also brought home the astonishing amount of damage last year's storms had done to the woods. Some parts looked like a World War One battlefield with trees down everywhere and the shattered splinters of some still upright.

Signed, sealed, but still to be delivered: my new book deal

A few weeks ago I wrote a blog about the joys of working in local newspapers that was based on a photograph I knew I had, but couldn't find. Well, I found it. As you can see I did not lie. We had joy, we had fun, we had seasons in the sun. The gent at the back is my friend Benjie, who went on to a career in the City. The guy at the front is me.

Of course, I needed an excuse to link it to this blog. Well, last week I finally signed a contract to write another five books for Transworld. Signing a books contract is always a great occasion. Not only does it vindicate what you've achieved in the past, it puts money in the bank. It doesn't make me a millionaire, far from it, but it does give me at least a couple of years of security to do what I enjoy doing most: writing books. This contract is to write another three historical novels featuring my hero, Valerius, which is a huge shot in the arm, because not only do I know him like a brother, the world he inhabits is fully formed in my head. There'll also be another two Jamie Saintclair thrillers, which is genuinely exciting and gets me out of sandals for a while.

I can remember every contract signing I've done. The first was in the summer of 2007 in a coffee shop near the Jenny Brown Associates office, which was then in Newington, just off the Meadows in Edinburgh. I sat with Stan in a coffee shop full of interesting people, and it was only when I put pen to paper that I realised I was probably the most interesting person there. The second time, we were in the Tun, a pub across the road from The Scotsman, and the contract changed my life, because the day I signed it sealed my decision to give up journalism and become a full time writer. The third was for my first two thrillers, and Stan produced it at the agency's summer party in a tent at the Edinburgh Book Festival. The latest, I signed at my dining room table. Not the most romantic of locations, but hugely significant, because it will take me up to my twelfth novel and by then royalties might not be something that only happen to other people.

It's odd that when I look at this picture now, I see a cheery chap on the cusp of a long and successful career in newspapers, on the brink of creating a happy family. Yet at the time I know he was angst-ridden and confused and feared he'd be trapped in his present job forever. He also worried he was fat. The one thing I guarantee, though, is that if you'd told him that in thirty years time he'd be where I am now, he'd have been a very happy young man.

Parallel lines

I think I've said before that I learned more history from historical novels than I ever did at school. One of the things I do remember is the history teacher telling us about the Black Hole of Calcutta, when over a hundred prisoners were locked away in an Indian prison cell four metres square and only twenty-odd of them survived the night. The only problem is that I always linked it to the wrong war. It happened in 1756, just before the Battle of Plassey, but for years I thought it was part of the Indian Mutiny.

In a way that's understandable, because the Mutiny is one of those conflicts that gives war a bad name, stuffed full of wanton savagery, military incompetence, corruption and double-dealing. It also, of course, spawned heroism, stoicism and sacrifice from civilian and soldier alike, and on both sides.

Two of the best novels on the Mutiny are JG Farrell's Siege of Krishnapur and George MacDonald Fraser's Flashman in the Great Game. Farrell's is a tightly corralled tale homing in on a single fictional event, while Fraser somehow manages to get his anti-hero to most of the major battles of that sprawling conflict that enveloped the cities of the north central plain. This week I finally got round to reading a third novel of the period.

I've always been a big fan of Julian Rathbone. He writes superbly crafted, often very funny books normally with a single main character involved in one of the world's great events. His hero is unscrupulous, and never dull, and the stories are prone to eccentric changes of direction that keep the reader guessing. What struck me about The Mutiny were the parallels with the Flashman book, in fact, the devious, philandering villain of Tom Brown's Schooldays even gets a mention. Rathbone skilfully pulls together the roots of the conflict, showing how religion, corruption and exploitation combined in an explosive mix whose potential for damage eluded the complacent rulers of the Raj. He solves the problem of the Mutiny's scale by telling the story from multiple points of view. Expectant mothers Sophie Hardcastle and Catherine Dixon show us Meerut, where the violence began, their children vanish, rescued from certain death by Lavanyah, Stephen Hardcastle's wetnurse. The children somehow reach Cawnpore, where the Indian girl is immediately ostracised, and endure the terrible siege and betrayal. For most of the book, Rathbone deliberately underplays the horrors inflicted on white and Asian alike, but in the massacre that follows Cawnpore the bloodshed is graphic and minutely described, an odd contrast to an event that Fraser conveyed in a single line. There are echoes of Flashman in Lieutenant Farquhar, the shadowy figure who slips with ease between enemy lines, and who along with William Raikes Hodson - assumed by some to be the original inspiration for Thomas Hughes's bullying schoolboy - takes the story to the sieges of Lucknow, Delhi and Jhansi. Like Fraser, Rathbone is probably kinder than she deserves to Lakshmi-bai, the Rani of Jhansi, one of the exotic female leaders of the revolt, but he perfectly captures the claustrophobic atmosphere of the British in India, imprisoned by a caste system almost as rigorous as those of the natives they despised, and the oddly muddled descent into horror of the Indian princes.

A walk on the wild side

Codeine, the Harris hawk: a born hunter

One of the things I enjoy about being a writer is getting the chance to research the odd things that your character might have to master. I have a plan for a series set in Medieval Scotland and one of the things my knightly hero will almost certainly be involved in is a hunt.

Falconry was hugely popular throughout the period, so I arranged to have a day out with Phoenix Falconry near Gleneagles. This was to be a proper hunt and I joined a party of five with four Harris Hawks on a chill Perthshire afternoon, and we headed out into the rough country behind the Orchil Lodge Fishery just down the road. The woods were full of pheasants, partridge and woodcock that were soon flushed out by the resident livewire black pointer. Just to be close to these birds is an absolute joy, but to see them in their natural element hunting in combinations of two three and four, sweeping through the trees at high speed after a swift and agile pheasant was truly exhilarating. The one thing which quickly became clear and which pleased me was that this was a genuine competition, and one in which the pheasants held all the aces. Time and again a bird would be flushed, the hawks would react, but the pheasant would be too quick for them. By the time we reached the open fields it was Prey 20, Hunters 0.

On we went to a rabbit warren in a nearby wood, and with the help of a ferret to get the rabbits out into the open, the hunt was on again. The rationale is that the animals the birds catch are the old, the slow and the injured; a kind of natural selection. A flurry of wings and three birds converged on the same rabbit in an incredible display of flying and teamwork. The handlers ensured the unfortunate rabbit was dispatched swiftly and the youngest of the hawks was allowed to eat his fill as a reward for his efforts and to strengthen the link between the hunt and the final reward.

Patience was essential - for everybody

Up close and personal with a true predator

Returning for her reward

Ready to hunt again

It was a fascinating day and a proper education. I felt no joy at the kill, but the hawks had done their job and there would at least be something for the castle pot, though I doubt my lord would have been pleased with a single coney!