EMPRESS - Book review

Prolific author Graham Masterton’s historical saga Empress was published in 1988. 

Beginning in the early 1890s, the book concerns the life and loves of Lucy Darling, a Texan girl who dreams of riches and castles. She helps her father Jack in the town’s general store, with few prospects of escaping this humdrum existence. Her childhood friend Jamie Cullen harbours unrequited love for her. ‘Handsome and gentle, but strong, too; and unselfish. She was conscious that she might not love him forever: that if he didn’t agree to stay with her now, she might not give him a second chance. Life was too exciting for second chances’ (p107). [She would rue that thought about second chances some years later...]

Her Uncle Casper, a spendthrift adventurer, visits the store, though he is not particularly welcome by her father. Yet Casper brings exotic stories about his failed business ventures that intrigue Lucy. Yet, before long she comes to hate Casper. ‘Hatred can cool; envy can be assuaged; but guilt never forgets, and guilt never forgives, and guilt eats the spirit like fire consumes flesh’ (p111). This is a striking allusion to the fate of Casper, which is a traumatic tragedy. The result is that Lucy finds herself inheriting undreamed-of wealth, which enables her to escape with her father to elite drawing-rooms of New York, where she soon becomes a success, despite her strange Texan manner of speaking. Though not everyone was enamoured of her: ‘Mrs Harris at the back of the crowd with a face like a prairie cyclone’ (p137) Indeed, Mrs Harris, being outshone by Lucy, didn’t take kindly to the teenager: ‘... and glared at Lucy with an expression that could have crushed glass’ (p142).

And into the mix arrives British MP Henry Carson who is swept off his feet by the impetuous Lucy. ‘Henry was so direct about his interest in her, and she had never come across such candour before, especially when it came to courting. Bob Wonderly had at least tried to offer her a pound of liver, by way of foreplay’ (p157). Henry was an inveterate traveller, and in his spare time wrote, though his book royalties were not much more than £34 the previous year – join the club, Henry, though that sum in the 1890s is a lot more in today’s money... Henry harbours a secret which he is reluctant to divulge; and she soon learned that ‘his greed for public duty was beyond her understanding’ (p409).

Masterton has created an engaging, wilful, selfish and strong character in Lucy.

There are humorous and sad moments, and three notable quite graphic sexual encounters: ‘He must have the highest collar I ever clapped eyes on’ (p128) ‘Life became one glittering carousel of shining carriages and chandeliers, and men whose collars were so high they had to stare at the ceiling all evening’ (p178).

There is plenty of conflict between the main characters and certain subsidiary people. There are some twists in the tale, and a surprise or two at the end. A satisfying read.

I read this book while undergoing chemotherapy and was amused to read about a journey that Lucy took along the Saline Rive (p343) when I was actually being infused with saline solution!

Editorial comments:

I don’t know whose decision it was to begin the book with a short sequence showing Lucy in India and then skipping to her younger days in Texas (possibly an editor?). But that short sequence ruins much of the subsequent anguish she suffers prior to finally getting to India; in effect it is a spoiler. Roughly the last 200 pages (of 648) are set in India – which is described with colour, feeling and loving detail.

‘... thought to herself...’ (p145) – This is used more than once and is tautological – ‘thought’ would do. You can’t think to anyone else, after all.

The above reference to high collars is repeated – amusing the first time, granted.

PLAYING WITH COBRAS - Book review

 

Craig Thomas’s ninth Patrick Hyde thriller (of ten) Playing with Cobras was published in 1993.

MI6 agent-in-place Phillip Cass is having an affair with Sereena, one of India’s screen goddesses who also happens to be the wife of Mr V.K. Sharmar, the prospective new Prime Minister. V.K. has a powerful brother Prakesh who is a dangerous ‘Mr Fixit’.  Cass discovers that the Sharmars have only been able to finance their rise to prominence by smuggling drugs on a grand scale. Instead of merely killing Cass, the Sharmars frame him for the murder of Sereena with the intention of embarrassing Britain. Peter Shelley has taken over from Aubrey as DG and recruits Hyde to return to the fold to investigate Cass’s case. Cass was planning on taking a holiday in Australia with his girlfriend Ros but feels compelled to intervene on Cass’s behalf since Cass has previously saved his life! Hyde soon appreciates that Cass is innocent but before he can further put further questions to his fellow agent, Cass disappears.

The thriller is predominantly about Hyde and Ros getting involved in locating Cass and getting him out of the country, while in the process acquiring evidence about Cass’s innocence and the Sharmars’ drug activities.

Throughout, Thomas provides a great deal of colour and visual descriptions to put you in the scene.

He has a knack with detailed observation, too: ‘The flight deck lay on its side – like the broken egg in the Bosch painting, he thought: his imagination affected as if by some nervous tic rather than horror at the scene (of the terrorist-caused airplane crash). It was hundreds of yards away, cordoned off, surrounded by the ants of the accident investigators and the police’ (p48).

There’s plenty of tension and close shaves and the pace never lets up.

This thriller has more than enough thrills to please fans of the genre.

Writing – research – fingerprints-01

Beloved of crime novelists and readers, fingerprints have figured in fiction for a considerable time. They still have a part to play, even though we now have DNA profiling.

For hundreds of years, a thumb-mark was often used as a signature, but little was made of its uniqueness with regard to criminology.

Fingerprint - Wikipedia commons

 

The ‘papillary ridges’ we know as fingerprints are formed during the fourth and fifth months of the development of the foetus in the womb, and no changes occur after birth, save in size. No two individual fingerprints are believed to be alike (observed by JCA Mayer in 1788.)

In 1858, William Herschel, a young administrator of a rural area in Bengal, India, used right-hand first and middle finger prints of workers as signatures on contracts and receipts; then he extended the practice to all legal documents in his area and finally gave orders for prints to be taken of all convicted criminals so that identity would not be questioned. Twenty-one years later, he retired from the Indian Civil Service, taking his collection of fingerprints with him to England.

In Japan Henry Faulds, while working in the Scottish Medical Mission, became interested in fingerprints in pottery and experimented to such an extent that he discovered that fingerprints retained their uniqueness no matter how the hands were treated (with pumice stone, sandpaper, emery dust and even Spanish fly). He took prints of all ten digits. He wrote to the British scientific journal Nature in 1880, stating that ‘bloody fingerprints or impression on clay, glass etc’ could be used for the scientific identification of criminals.’ He named the technique dactylography.

His letter gained little interest, save that Herschel countered that his use of fingerprints antedated Faulds’. Dactylography remained unrecognised until after Fauld’s death.

However, Herschel gained the support of Sir Francis Galton who studied countless fingerprints and arrived at four distinguishing types:

Those with no delta (a small triangular area where the ridges ran together); those with a delta to the right; those with a delta to the left; those with several deltas.

He published his results in his book Finger Prints in 1892.

And in India yet again assistant magistrate Edward Henry studied Herschel’s techniques, even visiting London and Galton on leave.  By 1897, still in India, he developed a workable system of classifying the prints of all ten fingers, identifying arches, tented arches, radial loops, ulnar loops, and whorls, as well as deltas. The government of Bengal established the first national fingerprint bureau in the world.

In 1901 Henry was recalled from India and was appointed assistant commissioner of the Metropolitan Police, in charge of the Criminal Investigation Department (CID). He swiftly set up a Fingerprint Department.

Noir Nation #3

NOIR NATION
International Crime Fiction #3

The India Issue

If you like crime fiction, then you might like this. Its 368 pages are value for money. The editor, Eddie Vega, says in his introduction, “Noir Nation is a search for beauty, dark and brutal. We can hear the initial call in these lines from W.B. Yeats’ masterful poem “Easter 1916”:
In the casual comedy;
He, too, has been changed in his turn,
Transformed utterly:
A terrible beauty is born.
“There is a turning away from the light and the banal, the casual comedy, and a turning to the murderous passions and dark depravities of human nature and transgressive political bodies. In real life, such turns result in death, disfigurement, and prison. In literature, we can live and relive the mechanics vicariously and safely through the prism of the imagination.”

With over 1.2 billion residents, India is not only the world’s most copious producer of crime pulp, it is also its hungriest consumer. Even in her chirpy feel-good Bollywood films, guns and gangsters vie with the singing and the dancing. Although the work of many Indian writers of crime noir are not to be found in fashionable bookstores—next to the hardcover books of Jhumpa Lahiri, Salmon Rushdie, and Vikram Seth—they are in much more popular spots: the stalls and book carts of A. H. Wheeler & Co. found among the 8,000 railway stations that serve India’s 25 million daily commuters, riding 71,000 miles of uneventful track. That is India’s open secret: crime novels stay close to their devouring readers. This needs commemorating. Hence Noir Nation No. 3: The India Issue—with stories that are dark, brutal, and beautiful to the eye that loves the shadows—where the dark angels flock.

Illustrated with stunning Mehndi tattoos, Noir Nation's India Issue contains over thirty entries from some of the very best literary crime fiction writers in the world, among them Suparn Verma, Samrat X, Yaeer Talker, Bianca Bellova, JJ Toner, Richard Godwin, Simon Rowe, Graham Wynd, David Siddell, and Meeah Cross-Williams; and ace contributions from emerging noir writers Alastair Keen, Terrence P. McCauley, Frauke Schuster, Ryan Gattis, Chelsea L. Clemmons, Gila Green, Paul Alexander, Carmen Tudor, and Anthony Pioppi; and established hard-boiled wunderkinds Jonathan Sturak, Ed Lynskey, Mark Mellon, Christopher L. Irvin, and Nik Korpon, The issue also includes essays on noir-related poetry, music, and the visual arts by Atar Hadari, Vicki Gundrum, and Robert Brunet and two works of classic noir: "The Turkish Brothel" by the late Cortright McMeel and "The Perfect Courtesan" by Kshemendra.

This issue is dedicated to the memory of Cortright McMeel (1971-2013),  ‘Co-founder of Noir Nation, visionary writer & publisher of dark tales, loving husband & father, luminary teacher of writing, literature, and life.’

Amazon.com e-book here

Amazon.co.uk e-book here

You can buy the paperback with all those gorgeous colours here post-free worldwide

Next up is #4, surprisingly. The Canadian Issue.

 

Ted Morton - a potted history

On this day in December 1911, my father Albert Edward Nicholson-Morton was born in Cheshire into a large family. He rarely spoke of his childhood, though once mentioned that at one time he had no shoes to wear.

He enlisted in the Cheshire 22 Regiment on 24 January, 1934. While in the army, he took up athletics and won a running medal in 1935. He was stationed in Whitley Bay for a number of months, where he met and married Florence Ross, daughter of Arthur Ross, the town’s main florist.  He was then posted to Northern Ireland, thence to North Africa, the Sudan, Khartoum as a senior NCO. He served in Malta, then Egypt and Palestine and was then sent on to India before the war, including the North West Frontier. In 1937, he ran the mile in 4mins 26 seconds in the Bombay District Athletics.

Dad (bottom, 2^nd from left) Bombay 1937

Dad climbing in Kasauhl, India

Onboard trooptrain, Sudan

The war was imminent and he was posted back to Sudan from there joined the landings in Sicily, where he was wounded in the shoulder by shrapnel. He saw friends and officers die, but rarely spoke of his experiences. When recovered, he joined the invasion of Italy and got as far as Rome

After the war, in 1946 he demobbed and trained as a painter and decorator and became an expert in this trade, in the days when DIY was virtually unheard of.

In July 1948 they adopted me, when I was a few weeks old.

Dad and infant me on the beach

Dad used to work away from home on various painting contracts, notably one of them being at Spadeadam, Cumbria when the UK worked on the Bluestreak missile, which was later aborted. He came home at weekends on his motorbike; I recalled sometimes in winter when he would be blue with cold on arrival. Eventually, he found a job on the council as a painter and decorator until he retired.

In the early 1970s, Mum and Dad bought a guest house near the sea-front of Whitley Bay, a dream they’d long held, and made a reasonable success of it, until she was taken by cancer at the age of 58.

Jen and I lived in Hampshire, as I was in the Navy, but Dad continued to live in the guest-house. After a number of lonely years, he remarried, to Kit, a local lady. When Kit died, we brought Dad south to a home (1996) and it seemed for the first time in my life I actually saw a lot of him. Yet still he would not reminisce about his time in the Army.

He died on 10 April, 2000 - 'he ran a good race'. If he’d lived until today, he’d be 102. Rest in peace, Dad.