Death of an Officer's Lady - now out!

No trace: good. No way of following her.



Lt. George Murray needs his brother Charles’ help. One of his fellow officers has not heard from his wife in Edinburgh for several weeks, and he’s worried. George would go himself but Charles is only in Fife and besides, George is waiting in Belgium while a small man named Bonaparte, newly back from Elba, decides whether or not to leave Paris and fight.

But what Charles Murray finds out in Edinburgh will not be straightforward, and in the end both brothers’ lives will be in danger, in more ways than one.




Thanks to Helen at ellieallatsea for the lovely cover, a bit of a step-up from the old ones! The book is currently on Kindle, Amazon print on demand and Smashwords - one or two technical hitches with Kobo but we're on our way! Hope you enjoy it - and I'd love to read any reviews wherever you buy it!

Mayfest

Spring greens!

Sometimes MayFest creeps up on me too fast and I do nothing, but this year I managed to be organised enough actually to book three events and drop in to a couple of others. The first event was Farm to Fork with the Kilted Chef, Craig Wilson. I’m not a watcher of cookery programmes, for the most part, but Craig has a column in our local magazine, The Leopard, and I’ve enjoyed his recipes – and in addition, this was a cause close to my heart, using local produce. A nutritionist from the university was on hand to tell us how the food was good for us (while we salivated), and there were also a couple of farmers, one of whom makes Ola oil, a great Aberdeenshire product. I fancy pursuing the Aberdeenshire Diet – like the Fife Diet, I think it should consist only of what is produced in our local county. Aberdeenshire includes Mackie’s, who make superlative ice cream, crisps and chocolate – surely this must be part of our local diet? (particularly the crisps).

I took the opportunity to pop into the festival’s food fair, and picked up some Ola oil, soap and hand cream, and some wonderful smoked haddock and hot smoked salmon.

Next slot was a quick reading by Helen Lynch, author of the short story collection The Elephant and the Polish Question. Helen teaches literature and creative writing at the university – as well as being a quarter of successful local all-female ceilidh band, Danse Macabre. Apart from the opening of The Elephant and the Polish Question, she read us parts of her current work-in-progress. She has recently published an academic work on Milton but up to now has not felt willing to try historical fiction – people in the past did not think like us because they did not write like us, and did not write like us because they did not think like us, she said. However, with this new short story she has ventured into the field, writing in seventeenth century prose. She was anxious that she might have rendered it completely incomprehensible, but I don’t think anyone in the audience had a problem with it – it flowed along in her usual colloquial, thought-provoking style.

This afternoon the wonderful poet Kathleen Jamie gave a reading of both her poetry and her prose.  I like her poetry very much but find her two prose collections, Sightlines and Findings, completely inspirational. Her descriptions of nature (particularly birds), travel amongst the Scottish islands, archaeology and ecology, and the messages she derives from them, make me want to paint and write and just be, with so many more layers than I seem to achieve in everyday life: she really makes you look twice and three times at the world around you and find new value in it. She also came across as a really nice, humorous person!

After that I popped back into the food hall only to find it transformed into a hands-on science festival with occasional craft stalls. I managed to find a kindly lady who showed me how to make a hairst (harvest) loop out of straw, weaving it into a ribboned plait that looks much more complicated than it is! No doubt Kathleen Jamie could derive a profound poem from a complex, simple, harvest ring where the ears of corn fan out amongst its own stalks, but I am a shallower person, and brought it home sheltered under my coat from the bucketing rain, to show it off on the bookcase.

Who needs to track changes?

Well, once upon a time there was a radio play. Nothing ever came of it, and no actors ever spoke its lines, so one day its author, who was putting together a collection of short stories and had always liked the plot, decided to rewrite it as a short story. So she started to rejig it, using track changes. The whole layout was of course designed to be a script, not a narrative, so there was a great deal of red ink over the screen, but of course she could hide that any time she liked - or so she thought.

But the demons lurking behind the track changes button knew otherwise, and no matter how well she thought she had hidden all that red ink, they had the power to make it resurface, with all its crossings out and italics, any time they liked - particularly when she cut and pasted the document into the larger document of the short story collection. It looked all right to her, but when she published it on Amazon ... then the demons chuckled, and reinstated all the nasty bits all through that short story!

So I apologise to the readers who were quick off the mark and bought Thrawn Thoughts and Blithe Bits! and thanks to Kath who pointed out the problem. It's now down until I have completely retyped the story in an uncontaminated document (of course it would be the longest one in the collection). If anyone who has bought the book would like a free PDF or other copy of that particular story, let me know!

Thrawn Thoughts and Blithe Bits

Here we are - off my To Do list at last! A collection of short stories, some featuring Scottish Georgian detective Murray of Letho, some not; some seen before, some not; some long, some very short. Find a whole new dimension to car theft, the life history of an unfortunate Victorian rebel, a problem with dragons and a problem with draugens, and what happens when you advertise that you’ve found someone’s leg.

It's just on Kindle for now, but should be out on Smashwords and Kobo soon. Hope you enjoy them!

Another day, another beach - and lots more wildife

After Saturday spent putting together a short story collection (a mixture of published or not, Murray or not), yesterday was spent at Torry Battery on the outskirts of Aberdeen.

If you want to live in a city but watch wildlife, Aberdeen is high on the list of candidates. You can see grey seals from the bus as you cross to Bridge of Don, the northern suburb; there are roe deer around the university, and foxes too: red squirrels encroach from the west on the urban grey population (hooray!), and a wide variety of birdlife including gulls, oystercatchers, the sparrowhawk on the conservatory roof, red kites on the outskirts (over Allotment Major, in fact), and so on and so on. If you want a fairly comprehensive safari, read Esther Woolfson's Field Notes from a Hidden City (http://www.amazon.co.uk/Field-Notes-Hidden-City-Nature/dp/1847082769/ref=sr_1_sc_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1431328430&sr=8-1-spell&keywords=fieldnotes+from+a+hidden+city), though as she lives in the West End she doesn't see the university foxes.

Torry, however, is the place to watch dolphins. From April to August, you can watch them nearly every day, if you're lucky, and yesterday we were lucky: herding fish, chasing the bowwaves of the oil rig supply ships, hurling themselves in the air like emergency punctuation marks, the black bottlenosed dolphins were everywhere. These northern bottlenoses are the biggest in the world, growing to fight the cold to four metres long. In the pod yesterday were two calves, one palest grey, but if you watch these creatures on a sunny day they are silver as they leap and curl.

Seals, too; eider ducks with their Kenneth Williams remarks; cormorants airing their wings; Arctic terns piercing the grey waves at tremendous speed; oystercatchers' urgent cries; larks calling above. Even the sun came out. We collected small seaweed samples for an RSPB survey, and were well satisfied with our day, glad to accept a lift back to the city to catch our bus home.

The First Murray of Letho Omnibus!

Now, don't go buying this if you have the first three books already, because that's what it is. But if you haven't, well, this is free on Amazon till Friday this week, and the bargain price of £4.99 otherwise! Only on Amazon until July, however.

This is an ebook containing Death in a Scarlet Gown, Knowledge of Sins Past and Service of the Heir: An Edinburgh Murder. So if you're missing just one of these, snap up the free copy this week!

Swinging through the trees (real and metaphorical)

Yesterday I completed a Tree Top Adventure with GoApe - not, shall we say, my usual thing, and if you had asked me as I stared up the length of the first rope ladder what I thought about it, I'd have said that I was contemplating how easy it would be to get my money back without losing too much face.

The website says ''You’ll enjoy two to three hours of fun and adventure. It’s a great way to get outdoors and try something a little bit unique. Our high ropes adventure experience takes one lush, green forest and a healthy dollop of stunning views. Then we add a smattering of tree top high wires, tricky crossings (using ladders, walkways, bridges and tunnels made of wood, rope and super-strong wire) and unforgettable zip wires. It’s a day out like no other."

Now, I'm all for outdoors and forests and stunning views, but I'd never even touched a zipwire before, and while heights have never particularly bothered me, I find as I get older that I have les and less faith in my own balance. The people I was with climb, now and again, and as I contemplated that ladder I wondered just how much I was going to be holding them back, letting them down, and generally giving them an excellent story in the pub later at my expense ...

We had a good little introduction and practice at using the harness, and the staff were friendly as well as exuding an air of competence (as well as youth and fitness - one of which I've lost and the other of which has for most of my life eluded me very successfully). Then I had my first, baby zipwire and we were off - not quite on our own, as a staff member was always somewhere around and we had whistles, but to be honest they were a long way below us most of the time!

Those rope ladders - well, I've never been able to climb ropes or do monkey bars, and watching people do chin-ups has always been a bit like watching someone walk on the moon, for me. I had to stop twice before I made it up the first one. The cargo nets were worse: I had to be hauled off the first one, and even though I was only traversing the second one, not climbing it, I have bruises deep into my forearms from hugging the ropes to me trying to stop letting go. I avoided the last cargo net, which was a shame, as by that time the sensation of hurling yourself off something and relying on your harness to save you was becoming just a touch addictive. I have to say that with the exception of the nets and ladders, I had a brilliant afternoon, and came down every zipwire laughing. I can't believe I did it all, and I feel three inches taller today. The only good story I was able to give my companions was that I managed to descend every zipwire backwards, and braked at the end not by running along, but by sliding on my bottom into thick piles of bark chippings, which had to be raked back into place after I had carved my ample furrow through them! But I am left with a lingering feeling that the red squirrels were laughing heartily at us ...

It was revenge, really: at the Highland Wildlife Park this week we were wandering along a boardwalk when our companion some distance in front of us sneezed. At the sound, a red squirrel shot vertically out of the undergrowth, as if our companion had sneezed down a pipe and the squirrel had been sitting over the other end of it. He sneezed again, and the same thing happened - but this time the squirrel scuttled off, unimpressed. A third sneeze sent it straight up a tree, as if blown there. This time it was us laughing at the squirrel.

Holidays are over now, though, and I am finding my way through the metaphorical trees, piecing together the pathways of Out of a Dark Reflection, the working title, at least, of the next Murray of Letho novel. It's set in Letho in the autumn of 1816, and begins with the violent death of an old woman in a cottage in the village. It's where it goes next that is tying my head in knots today. I plot for a few minutes, type furiously, then take a break doing something mindless like knitting for a few minutes more, letting the tangles untwist so that I can do the next little bit. This is the basic plan: it will look fairly thorough when it's done, but it will still change as I actually write the thing, as further ideas are caught up and included, and practical problems present themselves (he can't possibly be in the village at noon and home by ten past, for example, however neatly it fits the plot).

Well, better get on!