Writing market - Mystery Weekly Magazine

Here’s a paying market for writers of mysteries: Mystery Weekly Magazine.

The magazine is a labour of love for the husband and wife team of Publisher Charles F. Carter and Editor Kerry. The magazine website is http://www.mysteryweekly.com/ You can download a copy to your Kindle or get the paperback version from Amazon. You can submit stories via email.

In March Mystery Weekly Magazine was spotlighted in the American periodical, The Writer

Here’s an excerpt of that article, which just happens to mention my story due to appear later this year:

‘The Carters read submissions all year long, making detailed notes for writers who request feedback. They promote their authors widely, publishing excerpts and links to Mystery Weekly’s stories via email, the journal’s website, and social media.

‘One such author is writer and illustrator Nik Morton, whose story “The Very First Detective: The Killing Stone” will be published in the magazine’s Sherlock Holmes special issue, October 2018.

‘“It’s a prehistoric Holmes and Watson pastiche featuring Olmes and Otsun (Otsun is Olmes’s sidekick as well as being the clan’s medicine man),” Kerry explains. “Aside from being well-written, it has a unique setting, which makes it especially entertaining. We don’t get many submissions that cross genres, so any mysteries with fantasy, western, or speculative treatments definitely earn extra points.”’

https://www.writermag.com/2018/03/28/literary-spotlight-mystery-weekly/

Go for it!

He was Legend

The author Richard Matheson was born on today’s date in 1926.

His output was varied and prodigious. He wrote genre fiction, short stories and novels, screenplays and teleplays.

His 1954 novel I Am Legend has been adapted for the screen four times; his time-slip romance Bid Time Return, was filmed as Somewhere in Time with Christopher Reeve and Jane Seymour with evocative music by John Barry; The Shrinking Man and A Stir of Echoes, are two more sci-fi films from his works. 

He contributed to The Twilight Zone, Star Trek, Wanted Dead or Alive, Cheyenne, Have Gun Will Travel, and Lawman, among many other TV shows.   

As well as horror, fantasy and sci-fi, he wrote western novels, among them Journal of the Gun Years, The Gunfight, The Memoirs of Wild Bill Hickok, Shadow on the Sun and a collection of western tales, By the Gun.

Ever since reading I Am Legend in the 1960s, I was a fan of Matheson, and I have many of his books and collected short stories. He has been a huge influence on many writers and film directors.

The title of this blog seems apt, but it isn’t original; it was used as He is Legend as a celebration of his work by several genre authors, published in 2009.

He died on June 23, 2013, aged 87.

Spies and more spies

Last night BBC4 TV aired the final part of Andrew Marr’s series on genre paperback fiction – Sleuths, Spies and Sorcerers. (See my earlier blog here).

This time it was the turn of the spies.

We visited Berlin, the remnants of the Wall, the prison where betrayed agents were incarcerated and tortured physically and mentally, and glimpsed old images of traitors such as Blake and Philby. All grist to the mill for John Le Carré’s breakthrough novel The Spy Who came in from the Cold. An old interview revealed that he wasn’t surprised that no communists liked his spy tales!

Another interview was with Frederick Forsyth; we’re shown film clips from The Day of the Jackal, whose protagonist was not a spy but an assassin; the point was that both Le Carré and Forsyth, along with several other scribes of this genre had some background in intelligence work. One of the first of these was Somerset Maugham (notably Ashenden), who confessed that looking back on his fiction he found it difficult to separate fact from fiction in his work.

 Maugham's Ashenden

Perhaps too much attention was given to the (admittedly interesting) William Le Queux’ popular sensationalist novel The Invasion of 1910 (1906) regarding a fictional account of a German armed invasion of Britain. The furore following its publication prompted the setting up of a British secret intelligence department, The Secret Service Bureau headed by Mansfield Smith-Cumming in 1909.

Other interviewees were Stella Rimington, a former director general of MI5 and author of the MI5 officer Liz Carlyle books, author Charles Cumming who has written eight spy novels since 2001, an early snippet from Len Deighton, and William Boyd who wrote a new Bond novel, Solo (reviewed here.

Other authors who are examined include (inevitably) Ian Fleming, Gerald Seymour, John Buchan, Graham Greene, and Eric Ambler, with intriguing interpretations and motivations.

Quite rightly, Marr states that he is annoyed at the literary snobbery with regard to spy fiction and genre fiction in general. It’s as if being “popular” is anathema.

At their best, spy novels delve into the dark recesses of the human condition, examining the repercussions of betrayal, corruption and deceit. 

Despite the high-tech surveillance in the present, there is still a place for the human spy.

As in the earlier two episodes, there were bound to be some deserving authors omitted, among them Adam Hall (Elleston Trevor), author of the Quiller books, Erskine Childers (The Riddle of the Sands), Dennis Wheatley (Gregory Sallust novels), Helen MacInnes, Alan Furst, David Downing, Desmond Cory (Johnny Fedora series), Colin Forbes (Tweed series), John Gardner (Railton family series, Bond), and Craig Thomas (Aubrey & Hyde series), among others!

The programme is re-broadcast on BBC4 TV tomorrow, Wednesday evening. The series is also linked to the Open University - see here

where you can 'dig deeper into crime, fantasy and spy fiction'...

Book review - Halcyon Drift

Brian Stableford’s series of six books concerning star-pilot Grainger and his spaceship The Hooded Swan begins with this novel, Halcyon Drift (1972); they’re regarded as classics by the science fiction fraternity. Stableford has written in excess of seventy novels; yes, he’s prolific. I met his mother when she briefly attended a few of my writers’ circle meetings here in Spain. A brief review of his book Young Blood appears here

Stableford is a good writer who presents effective visuals with his prose: ‘Brown clouds move sullenly across the sulky face of the sky, washing the black mountain faces with hazy tears.’ (p7) Other examples from page 128: ‘Alien night is always a bad place to be.’ And ‘The horizon glowed white, surrounding us like a vast silvery ring set with a jewel-like flare at the point where the sun had vanished.’

The story begins with a prologue in the present tense, outlining the fact that Grainger has crashed his spaceship Javelin on an uninhabited rock, killing his partner, Lapthorn. So he’s alone.  The inhospitable place is plagued by winds, always blowing down the grave marker. Through his reminiscences, we get an insight into Grainger’s nomadic life with Lapthorn, trading and dealing from planet to planet, encountering fascinating and intriguing life-forms. Grainger is cynical: ‘A lot of spacemen are like me. Cold, emotionless men who don’t inherit any part of the worlds and the people that they see.’ (p13)  He reminisces about his friend Alachakh, a Khormon trader, whose life he saved once. That’s all he’s got, stranded on this rock for two years, waiting to die.

And then the wind starts to talk to him in his head. He isn’t going nuts: it’s an alien mind-parasite. It’s quite a lengthy prologue, ending with him being rescued by a passing ramrod ship, the Ella Marita. He gets away but he’s stuck with the mind-parasite – for life.

The rest of the tale is told in the usual past historic and it's inventive, in description and the alien life-forms, and in the leaps to a possible future: ‘I dialled through to the Illinois cybernet… a credit card, punched and banded, oozed out of a slot… I tapped out a query on the keyboard, asking how much the card was carrying…’ Bearing in mind this was written in 1972 or earlier: not bad. (I didn’t get my first credit card until 1987, when I was 39!)

There’s also irony and humour, to be enjoyed. Here’s the mind-parasite speaking in Grainger’s head: ‘I’m an expert on you, Grainger, and I’m learning more all the time. I’m right inside you. I’m with you every decision you take. I’m riding your every thought, and feeling everything you feel. This isn’t the most comfortable of minds to live in, my friend. I would appreciate it greatly if you could get it sorted out a little. Come to terms with yourself and the universe.’ (p34)

The nameless mind-parasite isn’t the only great invention in this story. Meet The Hooded Swan, a ship that can fly ‘like a bird. She’s jointed and musculated. She has the most complete and most sensitive nerve-net any mechanical device has ever had.…’ In fact, Grainger the pilot is connected to the nerve-system of the spaceship and feels what the craft feels; his body becomes part of the body of the ship. Grainger literally flies by feel.

One of the several inventions is the quite tragic Khormon race. When these people have filled their memories – nothing is ever forgotten – they have reached their end. As Alachakh says, ‘I wish I could forget a little and create some space, but I cannot. I am stuck in the day before yesterday. There can be no question of a long tomorrow, and I doubt the latter hours of today. Soon even the minute swill become painful to squeeze away into tight corners…” (p89) Another invention is the metamorphic life system Grainger encounters in his quest: ‘Our presence and progress would cause the plants which we touched unbearable pain.’ And: ‘… the feel of the furtive, glutinous chaos through which we moved. Myriads of tiny creatures were accidentally transferred from the plants to me, and I hoped none of them was adapted for chewing tough plastic.’ (p134)  

Grainger is hired to pilot The Hooded Swan and enter the Halcyon Drift in search of a spaceship that was lost in the drift eighty years ago; a distress signal has bleeped since then but due to the awesome peculiarities of the drift it hasn’t been located yet: ‘Drift space casually disobeys principles which are called laws in saner corners of the galaxy.’ (p97)

Perhaps the ending was a little rushed, but he was writing to fit into a specific format. How Grainger resolves his quest is intriguing – and moral, to boot. Needless to say, he survives to fly The Hooded Swan in another novel, and I’ll be reading all of the series.

'A necessity for any writer...'

An unexpected 5-star review popped up on Amazon COM today for my book Write a Western in 30 Days. It’s from an established author, George Snyder, who’s an award-winning writer of crime novels. He lives in California. Here’s his endorsement:

“As a writer about to move into the western genre, I found Nik Morton's book filled with valuable information. Easy to read and loaded with tips, including landscape description, weapons of the era, and types of horses. The book is a necessity for any writer thinking to turn out western stories, in 30 days or longer.”

Thank you, George Snyder! 

[A good number of reviewers have stated the book's useful to writers of any genre, not only westerns.]

I can recommend George Snyder's book Baja Bullets

A thriller in the first person, where the voice is authentic. Baylor Rumble is quite a character, tough, 47, accomplished seaman and fighter and can easily sustain a series.

It starts out with him taking two girls on a treasure hunt but turns sour when drugs are involved. There’s murder, castaway at sea for weeks, and revenge… Bay suffers at the hands of bad guys but always gets up for more – well, he would, wouldn’t he, since he’s narrating?  I found it reminiscent of the Travis McGee books by the late great John D MacDonald.

After the spilling of more blood, it ends, as promised, with Bay’s life changed forever. But with the promise of more adventures to come.

Snyder is another good writer, who knows his characters and has a good sense of pace and place and can visualize well for the reader.

You can find his books here: