This week marks the culmination of the spooky season with Halloween on Monday.
When I was a child Halloween was not a big deal but nowadays, of course, it is huge. Every year, I read people complaining that it’s an American import although, of course, it isn’t. All Hallows Eve was a significant date even before the Pilgrims set sail to America. Over the centuries it was marked less in the UK than the USA (perhaps because, in the UK, Bonfire Night on 5 November became the main celebration of the season). In my lifetime the celebration of Halloween has grown more significant with a definite American element but still basically a celebration of the night when all the ghosties and ghoulies make their last great showing before being driven back to the dark places of the earth with the celebration of All Hallows.
While my local church campaigns against any celebration of Halloween because they associate it with devil worship, for most people it’s just a bit of fun and an opportunity to dress up and be silly. I’ll miss the skater Halloween party this year (I’m out of town) but I do enjoy it when I can get along. The costumes are amazing!
I’m marking Halloween by giving away my novella, Dark Magic, from today (Friday 28th) until 1 November. If you missed what I wrote about it at the beginning of the month, here’s what matters:
It’s still October and I want to keep blogging about books with a spooky supernatural theme, but I’ve only written three. This week, then, I’d like to turn to another brilliant writer of Urban Fantasy – Ben Aaronovitch.
A friend asked me if I had read Ben Aaronovitch’s Rivers of London. When I told him that I hadn’t, he said that Something Wicked reminded him of Aaronovitch’s book so I had a look at it on Amazon. What I saw made me very pleased I could honestly say I’d never read it, because there was definitely more than a passing similarity in the opening pages and I didn’t want people to say that I had copied his approach. It’s a humorous urban fantasy which combines a police procedural with things that you would never expect to see in Dixon of Dock Green. (Younger readers: ask your parents. Or Google it.)
When I read the whole book I thought it was wonderful. There are definite similarities to Something Wicked. Perhaps Aaronovitch’s familiarity with the supernatural (the story does suggest quite a lot of research) means that he read Something Wicked and then moved back through time to write Rivers of London. (Not an entirely original thought: I recommend Morley Roberts’ story The Anticipator.)
Like Something Wicked the story starts with the discovery of a body that has been the victim of an unusual murder. In this case it has been decapitated. There follows a lot of detail of police procedure but the appearance, fairly early on, of a ghost as a witness to the crime suggests that things are going to get very weird very quickly. While my detective finds himself working alongside Chief Inspector Pole, a vampire from the mysterious Section S, our hero here, Chief Inspector Nightingale, is a wizard working for Economic and Specialist Crime. Pole and Nightingale share a preference for working alone from their homes and both seem to take an unhealthy interest in mortuaries, but while Pole’s brief sticks to the vampiric, Nightingale covers all the ghosties and ghoulies London has to offer – and Aaronovitch’s research has turned up more strange things than Nightingale can shake his mysteriously powerful silver-topped cane at. To be honest I got a bit lost in the ghosts, the genii locorum, demons, revenants and assorted other phantasmagoria. It’s a complex plot (and the first of a long series) but it makes sense as you read along, though I must admit to waking up at 4.00 am worrying at some of the details. It doesn’t matter, really. Our narrator is a probationary constable whose natural curiosity and somewhat eclectic skill set was unappreciated by the Metropolitan Police generally but fits right in with Chief Inspector Nightingale. He’s a beautifully rounded character, whose constant amazement at the world he finds himself in massively helps us suspend our disbelief. “Of course he’s being possessed by a revenant,” I found myself saying. “Good heavens, man, isn’t it obvious?” And obvious it somehow became, however barking mad the characters, the plotline and the twisted logic. It’s helped by a wonderful sense of place, with lots of details of London geography that pin it firmly to reality (though how he managed to put Teddington Lock downstream of Richmond I have no idea – a careless copy editor, I suspect).
Above all the book is funny – often laugh-out-loud funny. It’s a wonderful mix of horror and humour and glorious British eccentricity at its best. I do recommend it.
I had the idea for Something Wicked years ago wandering around the cemeteries of Buenos Aires. It was intended as a single short book but I had people asking me to write another about the vampire detective, Chief Inspector Pole, and his human colleague, Chief Inspector Galbraith. I wanted to oblige but I had no ideas for a plot. Then the world of British politics provided inspiration. If there was a werewolf sitting in Parliament, would they be any worse than the humans there? Would we even notice?
The result was Eat the Poor, which sees Galbraith and Pole work together to solve a series of grisly murders across London. At its best, Urban Fantasy has a strong sense of place and I enjoyed exploring areas where I might leave a body or where a werewolf might prowl unseen in the city.
As in Something Wicked, the book combines traditional horror-story themes with sardonic glimpses of the practicalities of life (or non-life) for supernatural beings in 21st century Britain. The humour, given the subject matter and the political background it is set against, inevitably has satirical elements, but this is not an angry political novel. It is, first and foremost, a fun read with, as one reviewer said, “Just the right amount of black in its comedy.”
It’s still October, so I’m still blogging about my fantasy novels.
The second was Something Wicked. Something Wicked is a vampire/police procedural crossover. It is firmly tongue-in-cheek and, according to one reviewer, it is “frequently funny and clever”, which is not to say that it does not have its share of blood and horror. But these vampires are not the traditional creatures of darkness, hunting through the night to drain the blood of virgins. Instead, like regular people (or ‘Mortals’ as they think of us), they come in all shapes and sizes, from the perpetual student (“Jacob’s at least 110 years old. Still, they say you’re never too old to learn”) to the senior partner in a top law firm. Urbane and sophisticated (at least for the most part) they just want to be left alone, taking the odd sip of blood where it can do no harm. When things go wrong and a peer of the realm turns up drained and dead, the vampires send their own investigator to work alongside the Metropolitan Police to close the case before things get out of hand.
Brompton Cemetery
I had huge fun writing this story, taking all the standard vampire tropes and tweaking them to make a credible London subculture. Brompton Cemetery features heavily because after a visit it is difficult not to believe that there are creatures inhabiting some of the amazing sepulchres there. Tango also figures prominently. Partly this is because authors are always encouraged to ‘write what you know’ and I am passionate about the dance, but also because I have always associated tango – its social rituals and nocturnal lifestyle – with the Undead. My vampires love tango and humans who join in their dances can consider themselves privileged.
“Tango is, I think, a point at which your world and ours converge. The music speaks of great beauty and unbearable sorrow; of love and of death.”
Because I usually write historical novels, I tried to provide some historical context for my vampires, so we have visits to the world of Anglo-Saxon Britain, an interview with Charles II and a final solution to what actually happened to Princess Anastasia during the Russian Revolution.
So there you are: police procedural, vampire fantasy, an essay on tango and some history thrown in. What more could you ask for?
Something Wicked is available on Kindle at £2.99 or in paperback at £6.99.
Tomorrow, if you’re reading this the day that it was written, it will be October. The days are getting colder; the leaves are turning brown; the evenings are drawing in. It’s the time of year when we begin to gather round the fire (or would if we could afford to turn it on) and tell spooky stories.
It’s a good time, then, to remember that when I’m not writing historical fiction I have turned out the odd contemporary Urban Fantasy. The first of these was Dark Magic.
Dark Magic is a novella. It tells the story of two magic shows: the Maestros of Magic touring the country, playing provincial theatres, and the Carnival of Conjurors successful in the West End. When the Maestros learn that the Conjurors are using real magic – Black Magic – to do their tricks they decide that they must use their own, distinctly unmagical, stage skills to stop them.
I’ve spent far too much time hanging out with magicians and the story is based in the real world of stage magic and illusion but none of the magicians I know have made a deal with the devil.
There are some genuinely scary bits but the comments that come up most often on Amazon reviews suggest that you are more likely to die laughing than have nightmares.
Above all, the book is entertaining, with genuinely funny, although fairly dark moments.
I especially liked the author’s dark, sly sense of humour, this combined with the grisly incidents, made for a great escapist read.
Get ready to suspend your disbelief and enjoy this funny and macabre ride.
Dark Magic is just £1.99 on Kindle. I recorded the whole thing as an audiobook too: it’s available on Audible.
