'Clever in conception and execution...'

My collection of short crime stories Spanish Eye has received a great review from American author Ron Scheer.

A glimpse can be gleaned here, but please consider popping over to Ron’s blog and read the whole thing - see below. (And while you’re there, browse his other blog entries, which all make fascinating and enlightening reading):

‘A recent resident (for part of a summer) of Madrid, who came to enjoy that city’s laid-back culture, I felt some pleasant déjà vu in the world of Morton’s stories which are peopled by the men and women I observed there on the leafy avenidas, in the busy neighborhood plazas, and among the fountains in the parks. The stories are often clever in their conception and execution. Reading them you get to enjoying Cazador's congenial, wise company.’

 

Many thanks, Ron!

http://buddiesinthesaddle.blogspot.com.es/2015/02/nik-morton-spanish-eye.html

 
SPANISH EYE

BLOOD OF THE DRAGON TREES

 

On the stage to Brokeback Mountain

Annie Proulx’ tragic story Brokeback Mountain about discrimination is to have its world premiere as an opera at the Teatro Real in Madrid from today until February 11.

 

Wyoming Stories, collected 1999

Proulx agreed to composer Charles Wuorinen’s project on the understanding that she could write the libretto. Gerard Mortier, the newly appointed general director of the New York City Opera got wind of this and commissioned the work and, when he suddenly left in 2008, took it with him to Madrid. Wuorinen began work on the opera in 2008 and completed it February 2012. The opera’s two acts are performed without an intermission.

Both author and composer wanted to emphasise the sense of threat and danger which seemed mitigated by the lush landscape scenes of the film.  Wuorinen visited Wyoming and says, ‘The mountains of Wyoming are very dangerous. People die, and so do animals, and the weather can turn violent all of a sudden.’ Yet he adds that the mountains also represent freedom for the characters.

The stage director, Belgian Ivo van Hove believes the opera will put a spotlight on places where being different is still cause for persecution. He quotes India, Russia, for example.

 

 

Jack Twist is played by tenor Tom Randle and Ennis Del Mar is baritone Daniel Okulitch.

www.teatro-real.com

Condensed from an article in El Pais, ‘Singing cowboys on the Madrid stage’ by Daniel Verdú.

FFB - Winter in Madrid

WINTER IN MADRID by C.J. Sansom

Sansom is not strong on good memorable book titles but he’s strong on writing style.

For too many decades, there was a ‘pact of forgetting’ concerning the Spanish Civil War atrocities, not least the forced abduction of thousands of children of Republicans; this book is dedicated to their memory.

Madrid, 1940. The Civil War is over and Spain is struggling to recover. While Hitler rampages throughout Europe, Franco maintains Spain’s neutrality though he and his government are on friendly terms with their fellow fascists.  The British government is understandably concerned about Franco abandoning neutrality. If he should allow the German army into Spain, they would immediately march on Gibraltar and use that stronghold to strangle Allied access to the Mediterranean.

Shell-shocked survivor of Dunkirk, Harry Brett volunteers to become a spy for the Secret Service. The spymasters believe that Harry might prove useful as he knows from his school-days a shady English businessman, Sandy Forsyth, who seems to have the ear of powerful men in Madrid. 

Bernie Piper is another of Harry’s old school acquaintances. Communist supporting Piper went missing during the war in 1937.  Bernie’s girlfriend Barbara Clare had been a Red Cross nurse but she’s now married to Forsyth and is barely coping with the children in the state orphanages.  Then Barbara discovers that Bernie might not be dead, but working in a secret labour camp in the mountains.

The scene is set for several character threads to be intertwined in the traumatised city; indeed, the city itself is almost a living, breathing character thanks to Sansom’s ability to evoke a place and time.

The walls of Madrid had ears after the war. Neighbour against neighbour. It only took a few words of denunciation to have you carted off to a labour camp or even shot.  Harry found love with the tragic Sofia, another victim of the war. He also helped Barbara search for her ex-lover Bernie while she deceived her husband Sandy. And Sandy was not above deception either. 

Every character, no matter how minor, rings true in this book. You feel what they feel. The action scenes are few but they’re depicted with great verve and you’re there with the protagonists, so vital is the writing.

Sansom captures the deprivation and ugliness of modern post-war urban living. It’s squalid and grim, especially in winter. This is an authoritative piece of writing, combining the elements of a thriller, a romance and an historical drama.  The political chicanery, the ideological imperatives and the treacherous double-crosses seem very believable in Sansom’s hands.

These 500-odd pages are turned very quickly because you want to know what happens next and the last few chapters are tense and suspenseful.  After any conflict, there are survivors and they carry the scars for the rest of their lives. The surviving characters in this book are scarred by politicians as much as the violent men with guns. Masterful writing. 

Note. Sansom has enjoyed success with his historical tales about Matthew Shardlake in Tudor times. Recently, he published his alternative history novel Dominion, set in 1952, with the Nazis in power in Britain.

***

 

The short story 'Grave Concerns' featured in the above Spanish Eye collection

is about the 'pact of forgetting' and its tragic consequences today

 

Spanish Eye paperback can be purchased post-free worldwide here

Kindle e-book from Amazon.co.uk here

Kindle e-book from Amazon.com here

 

 

 

 

Going South-2 - Going South To The Costa Blanca-2003

Yesterday, I offered a shortened article about our emigration from the UK to Spain December 2003. At landfall, we’d driven off the P&O Portsmouth-Spain ferry the Pride of Bilbao and headed out of the port area, Jen navigating from the AA route planner obtained off the Internet plus the Michelin map. 

Bilbao is dominated by the green slopes of the surrounding mountains, even beyond the high-rise buildings.  The city’s busy reinventing itself, its steel mills and shipyards being transformed into conference centres and luxury flats, and of course there’s the famous Guggenheim Museum (opened in 1997 and featured in the Bond movie The World is Not Enough) which has generated a tourism boom.  The city celebrated its 700^th anniversary and is worthy of an article in its own right.  We drove round the edge of sprawling Bilbao as the dark receded.

It’s strange how quickly you adapt to driving on the other side of the road – even with a right-hand drive car.  Reading the smaller numbers on the speedometer’s kph dial soon became second-nature.  We had no intention of falling foul of speed restrictions here – though there were very few speed cameras in evidence.

It was overcast and dull.  Not surprising, really, as the north of Spain gets more than its fair share of rain and is green most of the year as a result.  One motorway sign we came across was of a raining cloud and a ‘100’ kph limit – warning motorists to reduce speed from the standard 120 on this section when it rains.  As we climbed into the surrounding mountains it did start to rain.  Another motorway sign showed a huge snowflake, warning of possible snow.  We saw two snow-ploughs driving up an adjacent road.  (Less than four days later this journey would have been through heavy snow, these selfsame ploughs working overtime to keep roads clear).

We turned onto the A68 or E80 – many roads have a European number as well as a national one. 

The only toll booth we encountered in our 530-mile drive south was at Junction 3 where we picked up an entry ticket and would be charged further south.  We now met mist and low-lying cloud.  Our daughter Hannah rang on the mobile so we gave her a weather report as we drove through fog.  A ten minute stop at a service area exotically named Area de Quintanapalla where we enjoyed tortilla and coffee. 

A few years ago some Eurocrat busybodies tried to get the enormous black Osborne bull-silhouette advertisements taken down; a sensible compromise was arrived at whereby the company name would be removed but the bulls could stay since they were synonymous with the image of Spain.  We passed the first of five of these bulls on the Burgos southern bypass signposted Valladolid, Madrid and the second on the approach to the N1, the end of the motorway, and paid the toll. 

 

Burgos was the home of El Cid in the eleventh century and was the base two centuries later for Fernando el Santo to reconquer Murcia, Cordoba and Seville.  Fernando started the building of Burgos’s cathedral, one of the greatest in all Spain.

Still keen to find the sunshine we’d promised it, our trusty car climbed to one of the highest points in the Puerto de Somosierra area – 1440 metres - and met sleet and snow.  One of the tapes we played was Placido Domingo, singing the American Hymn from East of Eden, and the words held a little significance for us both: ‘I dreamed of Eden all my life and now … where  ever I go across the land I stand so proudly in the sun and say “I am home”’ – though the sun still had to make an appearance!

 
Now we joined the toll-free motorway M40, the Madrid western bypass and followed the signs for the Aeropuerto – not that we were considering flying out through lack of sun or anything, just following directions … Essentially, this ring-road round Madrid was clear for us though vehicles travelling in the other direction were at a standstill, echoing our beloved M25 no doubt. 

Eventually we turned onto the A3 for Valencia – the Avenida Mediterraneo - for a short while, joining the A31 and stayed with this road for some 176 kilometres following the signs to Albacete.  From a psychological standpoint, you feel you’re covering a lot of ground as the kilometres rather than miles count down on the road-signs.

 
Now – at last! - the land was filled with sunshine, the ploughed fields a deep russet colour contrasting with the green trees and cultivated hills.  Rise after rise displayed modern wind turbines, graceful against the blue skyline, like small armies frozen in time while on the march.  Here you could imagine a modern-day Don Quixote tilting at these windmills.

After 275 miles we filled up with CEPSA petrol and soon afterwards sighted two more bulls. 

 

At about 3:50pm we joined the N301 until we hit Albacete – the fifth bull was sighted at the junction for Albacete.  Because our car was fully laden we didn’t stop, but this small city is worth a visit.  It was called Al-Basit – the plain – by the Moors but apart from a few old back-streets it’s a modern city.  The museum is renowned for its archeological and ethnographical collection, including five small Roman dolls perfectly sculpted and jointed and an array of local Roman mosaics.  Like Toledo, Albacete is famous for its high-quality knives, an industry that can be traced back to the Moors.

We passed under the hill-top fortress of Chinchilla de Monte Aragon but didn’t linger for the view as we still had over 150 kilometers to go.  A short run down the N430 then onto the N330 for seventy-five km and we were in familiar territory, the Alicante region and arrived at 6:30pm as dusk turned into night.  We’d covered some 815km in ten hours, with stops.  It was a lot easier unloading than loading the car.  We’d arrived at our temporary residence, a base from where we would seek a permanent home under Spanish skies.

And just a week later on Christmas Day we were sitting with friends on the roof under those clear blue skies eating a traditional turkey meal with all the trimmings. 

 

[Note: Not every Christmas lunch can be eaten out, sometimes it's just a bit too cold; the nights are cold too. But the skies are usually gloriously clear blue! Then, petrol was about 81 cents a litre, now it's 1 euro 41 cents!]