Interview with author Nancy Jardine on her blog today

Author Nancy Jardine, who writes historical and contemporary novels, has kindly interviewed me on her blog today.

The interview can be read Here

Thank you, Nancy!

Nancy's e-books can be found on Amazon COM here

and her paperbacks on Amazon COM here

and both types on Amazon UK here

 

all published by Crooked Cat Publishing

 

Writing – research – Toxicology-01

No self-respecting crime writer would be without their guide to poisons – the so-called coward’s weapon.

The ancient Greeks called the herb monkshood or wolfsbane “stepmother’s poison”. The citizens of Imperial Rome were forbidden to grow it in their gardens. Yet poison usage was so common that the rich employed food tasters.

There are many known natural poisons, mostly of plant origin. Their attraction – besides their efficacy – was that they were undetectable in a dead body.

More recently the mineral arsenious oxide – arsenic – became readily available for poisoning rats and other vermin. It was the most common substance employed for murder, its faintly sweet taste not noticeable in food; the lethal effects were attributed to acute gastric disease.

In 1836 a simple and definite test for the presence of arsenic in a dead body finally became available, but to get to that point took several chemists several decades. In 1775 the Swedish chemist Carl Wilhelm Scheele discovered that when arsenious oxide was treated with nitric acid and zinc  granules, it became a poisonous gas (subsequently named arsine). Later, German chemist Johann Metzger showed that if arsenious oxide were heated with charcoal a mirror-like deposit would condense on a cold plate held over it; the element arsenic. In 1810 in Berlin Dr Valentine Rose extracted the stomach contents of a suspected victim of poisoning, dried the liquid to a white powder, and heated it with charcoal to obtain the characteristic mirror; thus the Metzger test proved sufficient evidence against a domestic servant who had poisoned several of her employers.

Then in 1832 an elderly English farmer, George Bodle, was alleged to have been poisoned by his grandson John. James Marsh, a former assistant to the eminent scientist Michael Faraday, was asked to demonstrate at the trial that Bodle’s coffee had contained arsenic. He did so, but the jury were not convinced so found the grandson not guilty. Frustrated, Marsh went back to Scheele’s initial discovery and developed the Marsh test – treating the suspect matter with sulfuric acid and zinc, he passed the arsine that was evolved through a narrow glass tube, which was heated over a short distance. The arsenic mirror formed further along the tube; any undecomposed gas was burned at the end of the tube and formed a second mirror on a porcelain plate. As little as 0.02 milligrams of arsenic could be detected in this manner, and in 1836 Marsh was awarded the Gold Medal of the Society of Arts for his technique.

 
The first forensic use of the Marsh test was made by Mathieu Orfila (1787-1853), a Spaniard. In later years, he wrote, ‘The central fact that struck me, that had never been perceived by anyone else … was that toxicology does not yet exist.’

Mateu Josep Bonaventura Orfila - Wikipedia commons

 
He published his first Treatise of General Toxicology in 1813. In 1819 he was appointed professor of medical jurisprudence at Paris University.
 
In 1840 Marie Lafarge, a 22-year-old was accused of murdering her husband. Prosecution declared that arsenic was found in the food, but not in the organs of the body. Orfila used the Marsh test and proved conclusively that the previous tests were botched. Furthermore, he stated; ‘I shall prove, first, that there is arsenic in the body of Lafarge, second that this arsenic comes neither from the reagents with which we worked nor from the earth surrounding the coffin, also that the arsenic we found is not the arsenic component that is naturally found in every human body.’ He did and Marie Lafarge was found guilty and sentenced to prison with hard labour.
 
More to follow in due course.

 

A week to go… and Vengeance will be mine

I know, it’s almost a steal from Mickey Spillane’s book title, Vengeance is Mine! (1950) – the third Mike Hammer novel. The exclamation mark is Spillane’s though it doesn't always appear on the cover.

And of course he borrowed it from the Bible – ‘Vengeance is mine, sayeth the Lord, and I will repay.’ (Romans 12:19)

Two other variations crop up in the good book:

‘To me belongeth vengeance, and recompense; their foot shall slide in due time: for the day of their calamity is at hand, and the things that shall come upon them make haste.’ (Deuteronomy 32:35)

And Hebrews 10:30 more or less reiterates Deuteronomy.

It’s a popular quotation employed as a book title, although I'd guess that in every case the vengeance isn’t left to God but to the books’ characters.

My book, Sudden Vengeance, published on 20 May by Crooked Cat Publishing gets its title from an Alexander Pope poem, Elegy to the Memory of an Unfortunate Lady (1717); he wrote: ‘On all the line a sudden vengeance waits, And frequent hearses shall besiege your gates.’ This poem also has the line, ‘Is it, in heav’n, a crime to love too well?’ which has cropped up a few times too, certainly as an earlier variant in Shakespeare’s Othello, Act 5, scene 2 – ‘loved not wisely, but too well…’

 

 

Here’s a quotation from Sudden Vengeance:

Joe Rothwell was known as a drunken bully throughout the entire neighbourhood of Spithead Estate. He was about five-ten in his rank-smelling socks, sported a perpetual five-o’clock shadow, and his belt-overhanging belly advertised his liking for Whitbread beer.

            Nobody usually looked into his dull brown eyes for more than a fleeting second, because he was prone to take offence, exclaiming, “What-you-starin’-at?” just before his fists flailed out. But if anyone had been brave or foolhardy enough to look into Joe Rothwell’s eyes, they would have glimpsed, deep within, a hurt and frightened child.

            Perhaps the elfin Irene had managed to fathom these depths when they were courting. Possibly he appealed to her mothering instinct, which in her plain timidity she interpreted as love. The unplanned pregnancy and her ex-boxer father precipitated their marriage and, shortly after the birth of their son, Justin, and the fatal brain-haemorrhage of Irene’s dad, Joe took to the bottle with a vengeance.

            From Justin’s birthday on, for the last eight years, Joe beat Irene for the slightest perceived transgression in his booze-fogged brain.

            Fortunately, their son avoided Joe’s violent outbursts, even though he often unwittingly caused them. Irene took the brunt intended for her child.

            Friends and neighbours pleaded with Irene to leave Joe. Yet it was easier said than done. Since she was seventeen, she’d been emotionally tied to him. The house was rented. She had no money of her own, no work experience, and no relatives to fall back upon. And she had an eight-year-old child to consider. She’d stick it out. Things might improve. But in her heart she feared one day soon he would kill her.

            Recovering consciousness, Joe felt dizzy, the blood rushing to his head. The pain in his skull made him nauseous. He opened his eyes and vomited, spluttering and spitting, the vile outpourings spreading all over his face and up his nose.

            Christ, I’m upside down!

            Coughing, squinting through wet lids, he realised his arms were tied behind his back. He shivered with the cold, which was not surprising as he was naked, suspended from a pedestrian overpass on the Spithead Estate.

            It was still night, the few streetlamps that had survived vandalism offering a weak yellow glow. Night. Now he remembered. He’d been stumbling home from the pub when a dark shape loomed up in front of him. Then blackness, nothing...

            His ankles ached with the weight of his body. One leg seemed numb. His heart hammered as he worried about his circulation. Didn’t gangrene set in or something if you–?

            “Hello, Joe.” On the grassy embankment alongside the flyover was the same black figure, arms folded, the trilby cocked over the brow, shadows concealing the face.

***

So, it would seem Irene had loved unwisely and too well. The black figure is a vigilante who doesn’t take kindly to wife-beaters. The book blurb reads:

When justice fails, a vigilante steps forward

In the broken Britain of today, faith in the police is faltering. Justice and fairness are flouted. Victims are not seen as hurt people but simply as statistics.

 
Paul’s family is but one example of those victims of unpunished criminals. In the English south coast town of Alverbank, many others are damaged and grieving. It cannot go on. There has to be a response, some way of fighting back.
 
A vigilante soon emerges and delivers rough justice, breaking the bones and cracking the heads of those guilty individuals who cause pain without remorse.
 
Who is the vigilante?  He – or she – is called the Black Knight. The police warn against taking ‘the law into your own hands’. But the press laud the vigilante’s efforts and respond: ‘What law?’
 
Will the Black Knight eventually cross the line and kill?
 
Paul and his family seem involved and they are going to suffer…
 
[This book is an improved reprint of A Sudden Vengeance Waits, previously out-of-print]
 
Please watch this space for further announcements about Sudden Vengeance (without the exclamation mark!)

Saturday Story - 'A Shared Experience'

A SHARED EXPERIENCE

  

Nik Morton

A story for Easter

 

My brethren once numbered in the millions.  But that was a long time ago.

Racial memory tells me of great apes who could swing through our forests from dawn until dusk for many days, seemingly without end. 

Now, though, there are no forests here, and no great apes.  Only desert. Our memory goes back even further than mankind's.  We trees share in each other's experiences, down the years, until perhaps the last tree is no more.

            The decimation of our kind began when men started to build ships.  The Phoenicians, the Greeks and Romans, the Turks, all amassed formidable fleets at the expense of our great forests in North Africa. 

Denuded of trees, the land degenerated into desert.

Through our worldwide network we have learned all of mankind's languages, though some of their naming-words are beyond our combined experience: it is a veritable Babel - that's a term from one of their great books.

Unlike we brethren of the green, mankind forgot how to commune through the ether; and they never harnessed a racial memory.  Instead they discovered the transmission of thoughts by written means, first on stone then papyrus and parchment and paper made from our wood.  This written medium enabled them to communicate from beyond the grave: they considered that these invented books were a kind of immortality. 

            And, inevitably, their hunger for printed words took its toll on our brethren too.

            I remember so much, as do we all.  Our lives do not stop when we are felled.  Our senses enter another, different phase, that is all.  We can still perceive through our pores, detecting sounds, smells, temperatures and even, sometimes, thoughts.  If fire takes one of us while we are rooted in the earth, then that tree is no more; but its experience of the world is not lost, its soul is within us all.

* 

The carpenter's hands were gentle, almost loving as he shaped a part of me into a baby's crib.  He was a gifted artisan and though I was shaved into many separate pieces I could not blame him: out of my natural perfection he carved another beautiful form.  A part of my life would share in the growth of another being, imbibing the infant's intellectual awakening.

Other parts of me were transported around the land of Galilee, bartered for and even sometimes fought over.  One beam that was me became soaked in a foolish man's blood: the stain seemed to sum up so much of our relationship with mankind. 

In exchange for the decimation of our millions we shared in new experiences and feelings.

            Another part of me encountered that same carpenter a number of years later.  His blood stained me too as he painfully struggled to carry me on his back up the hill to Golgotha. 

            Strangely, I ached, as did we all in his shared experience, as we sensed the carpenter's agony.

Yet there was no hate in him.  He was strong: I could feel a power capable of felling all our kind at an instant's thought.  But he was in control.  He knew what he was doing.  His purpose was steadfast, inspiring.

All my brethren in the vicinity swayed as the precursor of a storm whipped their leaves.  This was something we had never known before. 

Of all the multitudes of people who had impinged on our very old memory, none had affected us like this man.

When they crucified the carpenter, nailing his wrists into my wood, and his essence mingled with my own, I knew that no matter what privations our brethren suffered, we would survive and even flourish. 

A time would come when trees would be nurtured in their own habitat. 

It would take a long time in arriving, but it would come to pass.

            And I know one day I shall see that carpenter again.

 

***

Previously published in the Easter edition of the Costa TV Times, 2010.

Copyright Nik Morton, 2014.

***

My collection of Spanish themed crime short stories, Spanish Eye, is available from Crooked Cat Publishing.

 

Spanish Eye, which can be purchased post-free world-wide from here

and the Spanish Eye e-book bought from Amazon com here

or bought from Amazon co uk here

 

 

 

 

Book Review - The Beltane Choice

I’ve had a fascination for the period when the Britons were fighting the Romans since my school days. I enjoyed the adventures of Wulf the Briton – as can be seen here.

Wulf the Briton - excerpts from 1958 and 1959 (Express Weekly)

A long while back I bought and read Spartacus and Agrippa’s Daughter by Howard Fast and The Eagle and the Raven by Patricia Gedge, but, apart from a few forays about Boadicca, there didn’t seem that many books about the Britons.

Now, The Beltane Choice, the first in the Celtic Fervour series, published by Crooked Cat, has reignited my interest after all the intervening years.

The story is told from the point of view of Nara, eldest child of Callan, Chief of Tarras, a warrior princess of the Selgovae, and Lorcan, an enemy Brigante prince.

As this is an historical romance, when the two main characters meet up, the sparks fly, as you’d expect from strong personalities. The book is a pleasure to read, for Nancy Jardine is in full control of her characters throughout. Her descriptions are visual and sensual, leaving just enough to the imagination. For example: Their heated kiss outside had stirred his blood, his want of her remaining strained against his braccae…

When the time of the Beltane rites arrived, Nara needed to have chosen a lover, which posed a problem, since none of the men in her village appealed to her. Still, that decision seemed to have been snatched away from her when she became a captive of …, who noticed that: Her breathing almost normal, his captive’s head rose to look up at him. Her stare softened – no more than a blink – but it was filled with some reasoning he could not quite interpret. Exactly what she thought, he did not know, but found he liked that new regard, liked it much better than spitting ire at him as an angry cat.

I like her writing style very much. We seem to be there, with her characters, as the description is so vivid: The track snaked across the ridges of the highest hills, the going more difficult above the tree line where the barren terrain lay open to the sky god, Taranis. Random lumps of greywacks littered the surface… The research is never too heavy or intrusive; just right. …The sun, now breaking through the clouds, made the recent downpour sparkle on the verdant green below, the heathers above the tree line a contrasting vibrant purple. The varying browns of the roundhouse wattles and thatched roofs contrasted with the grey-white smoke gently drifting upwards.

The contrast between her own father and Lorcan’s father, Tully, is strong, and telling. While Callan, her father, seems to hate her, Tully sees so much to praise in her: “Your heart is large, and you shield your pain well. I say now, that warrior’s mark you wear was well worth the branding, for you have more courage in you than many a man I have come across. And they generally do not have your compassion.”

Like all good romances, there has to be conflict, not only with the ubiquitous Roman cohorts, but also with fellow Britons. Nara’s road to love is a rocky one, strewn with tears and disappointment. But she’s strong, believing that ‘Work is an answer to a bleeding heart…’

Perhaps the fighting scenes could have been more graphic, but then again this is a romance; indeed, the restraint may garner more readers. I for one was captivated by Nara and have already purchased the sequel, After Whorl: Bran Reborn.

A shorter version of this review will appear on Amazon etc.

 

 

Express delivery

Some time in 1958, during a rainy day at school, when we were kept indoors reading during the lunch break, I discovered a comic, Express Weekly. That weekend, I went to our local newsagent, Mr Beckman and ordered it. He hadn’t heard of it but promised it would be delivered on the next  Tuesday with our daily paper. When the day came, I rushed downstairs at the sound of the letterbox flapping and my excitement dissipated when I found instead a copy of the newspaper, The Daily Express. Happily, it was eventually sorted out and I received my weekly dose of Express Weekly on Tuesdays and The Eagle comic on Wednesdays.

The 'two greatest western strips' mentioned were Lone Ranger and Gun Law

My favourite character in Express Weekly was Wulf the Briton, drawn by R.S. Embleton. Ronald Sydney was born in 1930 and sadly died of a heart attack in 1988; his brother Gerald was born in 1941 and also became a superb artist, and his work can be seen in the books of the military publisher Osprey, for example.

Ron Embleton’s artwork is much sought-after.

 

Like many schoolboys, I was fascinated by the period of our history when the Romans occupied Britain. The Wulf stories seemed very accurate in their depiction of those times. Wulf’s adventures concluded in September 1960.

The Iron Age in Britain lasted for about 800 years – from 750BC until 43AD, when the Romans returned to occupy the country. During the pre-Roman period coinage was introduced and wheel-thrown pottered mastered. People became more aware of hygiene and personal appearance and were living in larger and more settled communities. The Romans, in their plain coloured togas, were surprised at the Britons’ brightly coloured trousers and cloaks, often in striped and checked patterns. Over the years of occupation, friendships and inter-marriage resulted and the Romans absorbed Britain as much as the Britons absorbed the culture of their conquerors.

If you want to see what an iron age farm looked like, you can visit Butser Ancient Farm in Gosport, Hampshire, UK. Their website is http://www.butserancientfarm.co.uk/

The late Bob Jenkins ran an interesting article about the Iron Age farm in the July 2003 issue of The Portsmouth Post.

Cover photo of Post's staff member Stacey by Mike Walker -

as Bob said, 'We took liberties with the choice of costume...!'