Every so often I try to improve my mind (and maybe even my writing) by going to an online lecture. I went to one on audiobooks that explained how to make your own recordings. It was interesting and I did give it a go. It was fun and I ended up producing my very own audiobook of Dark Magic.
The lecturer suggested that everybody should read their books aloud as it was the best way of checking that they read well. There’s a lot in that, but it takes a long time.
I’ve taken the advice for the first couple of chapters of the next Burke book, Burke and the Lines of Torres Vedras. It is, if you like, one of the final bits of quality control before it is released on the world. (That means we’re very close to publication. You can start getting excited now.)
My reading is quite flat. I’m not sure it’s up to audiobook quality, but here it is. A sneak preview of the opening of my next book in a convenient audio format.
Let me know what you think. If you like it and you get in touch, I can send you a Spotify voucher for a free copy of the Dark Magic audio book.
My blog is called History and Books and Dance and Stuff so a historical fiction book about tango ticks pretty well all the boxes. And The Gods of Tango has quite a lot of Stuff too. In fact it’s a vast, sprawling work about tango and Buenos Aires and Italy and sexuality and those old tango perennials, love and death.
I can’t begin to discuss the plot, partly because there are twists and turns and I don’t want to spoil it for you and partly because the 384 packed pages defy synopsification. (Is that a word? It should be.)
What you need to know is that the story starts in 1913 with Leda arriving in Buenos Aires, leaving a narrow life in a village just outside Naples in search of opportunity in the New World. In the first of many shocks in the book, all her plans are thrown into disarray before she has even left the boat and she finds herself struggling to survive in a city that seems to teeter forever on the edge of madness.
It’s a story packed with characters, all so perfectly drawn that you never get lost, but one of the biggest, most important, characters is Buenos Aires itself and particularly San Telmo, a part of the city I feel particularly at home in. The danger, excitement and opportunity of the city is perfectly captured. It is overcrowded and filthy (even more so in 1913 than now). Yet, as today, it holds you. Leda knows that Buenos Aires destroys its children, yet she cannot bring herself to leave. A peaceful life in a small Italian village is no longer something she can settle for.
Leda falls in love with tango. The music, she thinks, can save her. And it does, though it means she must sacrifice everything. (No spoilers, but ‘everything’ isn’t too much of a stretch here.) She carves out a life in the violent world of tango. She is there as tango moves from the bars and the brothels to the dance halls and eventually the grand clubs and cabarets, even achieving an international respectability. But for Leda, it is always about the music of the people, starting with the rhythms brought from Africa with slavery. (The Gods of Tango is unusual in featuring a black bandoneon player whose grandfather was probably a slave. Argentina used to have a substantial black population but no one talks about that now.)
If you are interested in the history of tango (you’ve probably realised I am), then The Gods of Tango is worth reading just for its description of how and why the music developed through the Golden Age. But the book is much, much more than that. I’ve never read a book by a woman which understands so well the reality of being a man. And when she deals with different aspects of sexuality, she writes better than anyone else I have read, or ever expect to read.
De Robertis has won prizes and fellowships and is definitely a ‘literary author’, a label I am generally suspicious of. But this is someone who has earned their reputation through extraordinary hard work as well as an exceptional ability to write. Leda’s life in Italy was researched in Italy. De Robertis reached Italian emigration to Argentina and Afro-Argentinian history (an area which, as I’ve mentioned, is generally overlooked). She studied the violin as well as tango history and learned to dance. She has explored Buenos Aires today and developed a deep understanding of its history. And she writes fantastic prose. (I just said that, but I’m saying it again.)
I’m getting carried away. All I can say is that this is an astonishing book.
This is a straightforward supernatural horror story. It isn’t the sort of thing I would usually read, but the author contacted me and asked if I might be interested in reviewing it. I read the first couple of pages and found myself immediately drawn into the tale, so I agreed to take a look.
What made this story work for me was the detailed and credible scene-setting. Our hero is first shown at home with his wife and two kids. It’s very well written and you warm to all the characters. The approach reminds me of Spielberg’s classic movies. Before we meet the aliens, we spend time getting to know the main characters in their everyday normal lives.
Eventually, of course, we find the supernatural intruding when a mysterious mirror is delivered to the home in the middle of the night. Now we have a classic, ‘Don’t go alone to the haunted mansion’ moment. Obviously if you receive an old mirror with no indication of where it came from, the thing to do is to lock in in a shed until you can get the local priest to exorcise it. But no: they hang it on the wall.
Spooky things follow, rather nicely described. The loft is over-run by rabid racoons and other critters, huge poisonous spiders appear in the fuse box. The horror is real but it can all be explained away – and is. ‘No, you fools! Run now! Run for your lives!’ But, despite living with what is pretty obviously an interdimensional portal, everyone just goes along with normal life until the Truly Evil Thing comes to do what Truly Evil Things do.
I’m not giving details because Spoilers, but, in any case, it’s not immediately clear what the Truly Evil Thing is doing because the details are deliberately left vague. Vague is good in horror. The things you glimpse from the corners of your eyes are always scarier than the hi-res CGI creations that fill your vision.
Sadly, all horror stories have to have some sort of resolution. Here, this is mediated through a mysterious Native American who hops through time, putting an end to Truly Evil Things. For reasons of plot, the mysterious Native American can’t directly kill the Evil Things himself, but has to recruit others to act on his behalf. Fortunately our hero is an expert sniper (a detail already carefully set up in the story) and it is for him to do the actual killing and hence save his family.
At this point we are introduced to a powerful but secret group of people who assist the Native American. This is exciting but also somehow mundane. Our hero, up to then a wonderfully detailed three-dimensional character, is now reduced to a comic book hero. The Truly Evil Thing has to emerge from the shadows to be defeated and turns out to be something you might well have seen in one of the less memorable episodes of ‘Buffy the Vampire Slayer’.
I don’t blame the author for all this. It’s the rules of the genre which mean that, paradoxically, the climactic moments of action are always the least convincing, uninteresting parts of the book. In fact, Chris Coppel pulls it off because the amount of detail that we’ve had before we move into standard horror territory means that we are invested enough in the characters to ignore the hoariness of the horror tropes that Coppel has to deploy to make the plot work. That, as far as I’m concerned, is very impressive writing.
The story is clearly setting up for a series. I don’t think I’ll be back for more (it really isn’t the sort of thing I’d usually read) but, based on this opening story, I think the sequels could be rather good.
I am British and grew up in an age when telling people about your achievements was regarded as bragging and rather looked down on. Nowadays, attitudes have shifted. If you want to get on in the world, we are told you should adopt the American approach of making sure people know just how brilliant you are.
This doesn’t always work. Recently, I had a new follower on Twitter and, before I followed them back, I had a look at their feed. Basically, it consisted of adverts for their book. Literally. The same advert just repeated over and over again. That is not going to encourage anyone to buy the book.
On the other hand, last weekend I was at a party and my hostess thrust a microphone into my hand and asked me to read a paragraph or two from one of my books. It was a lovely gesture, particularly as many of the people there didn’t know me well and had no idea that I wrote. So I read my extract and everybody applauded and the party moved on. Only afterwards did I realise that I hadn’t mentioned the name of the book or where you could get it. It’s fair to say that when it comes to selling my work, I am not a marketing genius. It’s ironic, really, because my day job used to be in print marketing – and, in fairness, I was quite good at it.
I think it’s reasonable to suggest that I could promote my books quite a lot more before I move into the territory of Twitter bores who talk about nothing else. In fact I noticed when I last looked that I had managed more than twenty tweets and four days without mentioning my own books once, which is not good marketing.
So how do I promote my books?
My main vehicle for promoting my books is social media. Once upon a time, this used to mean Facebook. I have a Facebook author page (Tom Williams | Facebook) but Facebook have changed the way things work to the point where not that many people will see posts on your author page unless you cross Mr Zuckerberg’s palm with silver. If you want to use Facebook for promotion, you are really going to have to buy Facebook advertising. With the sort of budget I have available, I’ve not had any luck with Facebook adverts and I don’t think this is how I want to spend my money.
As Facebook became an increasingly ineffective way of talking to readers and potential readers, I moved to Twitter. (I’m @TomCW99.) It takes a long time to build up a useful presence on Twitter, but, once I had, I found Twitter a brilliant place to be. I was able to engage with other Twitter users and, whether coincidentally or not, sales of my books began to climb. Then came Elon Musk. Like most people I have seen a dramatic drop in engagement. Twitter has become vastly less useful as a way to promote my books.
As Twitter users increasingly abandon the platform, there has been a move to Mastodon. I’ve played with this myself. (I’m at @TCW@toot.community.) Mastodon doesn’t really seem to work as a place to promote your books, though.
Some authors are rushing off to TikTok, but I’ve never really believed that a 30 second video that will be viewed mostly by very young people is the best way to promote novels that will be read by people who are quite a lot older. Perhaps I should look harder at Instagram, but I’m getting to the limit of the number of social media I can learn.
What about just paying for ads on Amazon? I have tried this, with mixed results. It’s hard work, though. You need to be very careful how you set each campaign up and then monitor it to see if it is effective or if you have made a slip up. If you haven’t set it up quite correctly, you can find it costing much more than you had expected.
So where now? Well, if anyone asks me to read from my books in future, I’ll try to remember to mention the titles. And, until then, I’m going to be a bit more aggressive (or less ridiculously modest) in talking about my books in newsletters and on social media generally. And, when all else fails, I’m going to beg.
Is Lynn Bryant a Marvel fan? I ask because she seems to be basing her considerable literary output on the 19th century equivalent of the Marvel Universe: a Napoleonic Universe, so to speak.
The core stories are her Peninsular War Saga, which follows one regiment through that bloody conflict. There were some spin-off romances, in which various of the characters return to England and balance the bloodiness of their activities in Spain with some more tender moments. There are regular short story offerings that she gives away free. (The latest, for Valentine’s Day, is available here: An Unsuitable Arrangement.)
As a proud resident of the Isle of Man, Lynn was anxious to involve some Manx characters. Given that the place is an actual island, this inevitably meant a concentration on the Navy rather than the Army. Hence a new series, the Manxman, centring on the adventures of Hugh Kelly, captain of the Iris. Kelly has joined the main characters of the Napoleonic Universe, but as is the way with Marvel productions (surely just a matter of time before we see the film), Kelly’s adventures mean that he keeps meeting characters from elsewhere in Lynn’s substantial oeuvre. In Lynn’s latest book, This Bloody Shore, Hugh is assisting Spanish troops besieged in the coastal town of Tarragona. This gives her the opportunity to view the battle from the viewpoint of the troops on the ground as well as the sailors. We meet existing characters from the Peninsular War Saga as well as introducing some new people who will doubtless find their way into the land-based books in time.
There are an awful lot of characters with an awful lot of subplots, but keeping track is easy. I love the Manxman series, but I can’t get on with the Peninsula War saga. (It’s not you, Lynn, it’s me.) That meant that in this book I occasionally came across characters who most of the readers would already know but who were strangers to me. It completely wasn’t an issue. You’ll probably enjoy this book even more if you have read Lynn’s other output (particularly the first two Manxman stories) but it definitely works as a stand-alone.
One of the reasons that I don’t like the Peninsula War saga is that I have taken against the main female character. But in the Manxman series, Kelly’s wife, Roseen, is a joy. There’s a lot of time spent discussing their marriage and his growing family and I can see that this might annoy some readers, but I loved it. We also get to see Kelly’s lieutenant, Durrell, moving forward in his own romantic life. Let’s just say I’m very happy for him.
In yet another subplot, we find Kelly taking up the cause of abolitionism. It’s always a problem in books like this when you start to discuss attitudes to something like slavery, that we now regard as reprehensible but which seemed perfectly normal to many people at the time. It’s easy to become preachy and see everything through the distorting prism of 21st century attitudes. Lynn swerves this problem skilfully. The horrors of the slave trade and the efforts of the abolitionist movement are clearly presented, but we also meet people whose family money comes from slavery and who do not see themselves as monsters. It will be interesting to see how this plays out in future books.
So many characters and so many subplots does mean that the story becomes a little episodic, but Lynn’s writing – always a pleasure to read – keeps you going and eventually all the threads of the story are neatly drawn together to produce a very satisfying book.
It goes without saying that Lynn’s grasp of the historical details of the military campaign is always assured. The book does suffer from the lack of any maps. The geography of Tarragona is important and Lynn does do her best to paint a word picture of the place, but some of the detail slightly gets in the way of the writing and in the end I was reduced to looking the place up on Google. A map really would help. Even without it, though, this book is clearly a five star read.
