Granite Noir Day 2

Day Two – patchy, this one! I missed the James Grieve and sundry pathologists talk this morning as I had to take people places, and I would have had to miss the end of it anyway as it finished in the Lemon Tree at eleven and I had to be in the library reporting for duty at eleven. So I trotted straight to the library instead.

This was a good event. Last year I struggled to see, and did not succeed in seeing, all the other Locals. This year we had a joint event with only one missing as she was doing her Lemon Tree reading at the time – actually we had two missing in the end as one failed to turn up. But the eight of us sat round the table in the green room nattering about each other’s writing and experiences, before we had to go and read out our stuff. There were maybe twenty or thirty in the audience which wasn’t bad as it was snowing quite heavily around 9.30 when people would have been heading out, and it was a non-ticketed event so they lost nothing by not showing up. All very different pieces of writing, which made for an entertaining hour.

Off to the Lemon Tree, then, and left my coat upstairs (best function of Authors’ Room – cloakroom) and went to buy some lunch in the bar. Only as I queued did I realise that there was an event about to start in the bar, a talk on Peterhead Prison to which I had not intended to go. But I found a seat near the back, tucked into lunch and settled down in the semidarkness – a chance to rest my eyes but the talk was far too interesting to fall asleep to, covering some notable offenders jailed there, dirty protests, riots quelled by the SAS, the origins of the prison and of the first state railway, a little line used to take prisoners between the prison, a local quarry, and the huge breakwater they built over decades at Peterhead Harbour.

Then it was back upstairs to the studio where we were again missing an author – John Lincoln could not attend. But C.M. Ewan and Susan Lotz were there, chaired by Jackie Collins. The conversation really flowed, to the extent that the chair could relax from time to time and part of the reason for the session, the use of pseudonyms by authors, was hardly touched on until audience questions began. C.M. Ewan had promised his wife he would give up writing if he had not had any success by the age of thirty, and when he was twenty-nine he put in a book for a competition sponsored by Susan Hill. Susan Hill rang him at work to tell him he had won – a week before his thirtieth birthday. Susan Lotz had stories to tell too about heroin addiction, living on the street in Paris, and fighting for justice in South Africa with the worst-dressed lawyer in Johannesburg – now her husband.

Then I had a bit of a gap – there were lots of overlapping events today so if you started on one set you were sort of stuck with it and it was hard to jump to the other set. But there was an interesting looking talk on at the Art Gallery from 4 to 5.30 which fitted in nicely, so I retrieved my coat, took a glass of the Authors’ Room’s really nice orange juice, and walked to the Art Gallery. Unfortunately the talk was fully booked, but I hadn’t really been into the Art Gallery since its recent refurbishment (used never to miss an exhibition), so I took the chance to look around. It has been partially rebuilt, and it’s very odd – you move from the very familiar to the totally strange and back, seeing well-known paintings in new settings and finding that the roof has been raised a whole new storey. Better lifts but worse stairs!

Anyway, 6p.m. saw us back in a busy Music Hall for another headline act – Stuart McBride interviewing Ben Aaronovitch. This was a little spoilt by some sound problem at the start – it was as if they were mumbling, but it did clear up and a very funny hour followed, where he roundly condemned BBC executives, followed by politicians; they nearly came to blows over the use of the Oxford comma; the ranking of Ace as possibly the worst Dr. Who assistant ever was debated; and Peter Grant was likened to a Weeble. There was also some discussion of role-playing games and the possibility of a Rivers of London / Call of Cthulhu blend – I heard one woman later in the street say, ‘I didn’t even understand some of the questions!’ The audience was quite a mixture of crime fiction fans and fantasy fans, and there was a huge queue for book signing afterwards. I didn’t stay, though I still want to know where he got the name Daniel Hossack from for one of his minor characters – I know, as I’ve said before, where my Daniel Hossack (Murray’s manservant) found his name!