It’s a funny time to be living through, isn’t it? On the one hand, there is so little going on, while on the other I seem to be overwhelmed by things that need doing. So here is what’s happening in my world.
I’m publishing my second contemporary urban fantasy book next week. Something Wicked is out on the 19th and is on pre-order now. (There will be a paperback edition very soon.) What’s Urban Fantasy? Well this one is set around Brompton Cemetery and it has vampires in. Does that help? It’s got quite a lot of tango in too, because I really like tango. (And so do vampires.)
Something Wicked is my first full-length contemporary book. I dipped my toe in the water last year with a novella, Dark Magic. I’ve recently released an audio version of that. It will be available on Audible shortly but until then you can already get it through Google Play, Apple and others. To celebrate that (and as a sort of warm-up act for Something Wicked) I’ve had the Kindle edition of Dark Magic on offer this week at 99p/99c. The offer goes on until early Monday morning if you still want to catch it. (Do. I’m reliably informed that people laugh. And get scared.)
Anyway, what with promoting Dark Magic and making final pre-launch tweaks to Something Wicked, there hasn’t been that much time to work on the next James Burke book. Well, next but one, actually, because the next one is already written and Burke in Ireland will be published on 19 March. That’s a darker side of James Burke and I’ll be interested to see what people make of it.
I do have to get a move on with my next story, though, because I know that there are people waiting to see what happens after the retreat from Talavera that ended Burke in the Peninsula. I don’t want to make any promises as we’re in the very early stages of sketching out the story, but it should involve an undercover mission into France and, if I can manage it, at least a passing encounter with the Empress Josephine. I do hope I can work her in, because she was a really interesting character. Burke has already been intimately involved with a queen and a princess (in Burke in the Land of Silver), relationships that the real James Burke probably had. I doubt he’ll get to sleep with an Empress but at this stage of the plotting, who knows?
I’m not done with promoting existing titles, though, because I’m taking back control (to coin a phrase) of the John Williamson stories. The success of the relaunched Burke series has made me realise that my books do better when I’m able to keep a closer eye on them. The three books (The White Rajah, Cawnpore and Coming Home) are no longer available on Kindle for the moment, but all three will be republished over the summer. That will mean more cover designs, more adverts and yet more struggling with formatting and cover templates, but if it means more readers, it will all be worthwhile.
So: a short blog post this week. Now you know what I’m up to, I hope you’ll forgive me.
What do you tell people about your latest book if you are generally known for writing historical fiction and this book is very different? I tell them it’s Contemporary Urban Fantasy. I’m honestly not sure if that’s even a thing, but this is contemporary, it is urban (very firmly rooted in West London) and it’s fantasy (it’s got vampires).
What you need to know is that it’s a police procedural/vampire mash-up and, because I love tango (and so, it seems, do vampires), it’s got a lot of tango in it.
So here’s the cover. It features Brompton Cemetery, a wonderfully atmospheric 19th century creation near Earl’s Court, and two of my favourite tango dancers, Alexandra Wood and Guillermo Torrens. (You can read more about Alexandra at http://alexandrawoodtango.blogspot.com/.)
Photos are my own. Design is by the very talented Dave Slaney.
If you’ve read Dark Magic you’ll have some idea what to expect. (And if you haven’t read Dark Magic it’s on sale at 99p/99c for a week from Monday.)
Something Wicked will be on sale on Kindle from Friday 19 February with a paperback edition following shortly. It is available on pre-order at https://www.amazon.co.uk/dp/B08W2CYS68. (And also on amazon.com)
*A peer of the realm dead in his study, his body drained of blood*
*A tango club where the Undead and the living dance together*
I seem to have built up a backlog of book reviews, so, having told you I’m cutting back, I’ve been forced bring back my Tuesday reviews, at least for this week, and maybe next, depending on how quickly I read. I have a cover reveal scheduled for Friday (look out for it!) and then a new book to talk about, so Deborah Swift’s latest gets its place today.
I’ve read a few of Ms Swift’s stories before, mainly set in the 17th century. She usually likes to spend quite a long time setting the scene before there is an lot of action on the page.
This story could hardly be more different. It’s set in German-occupied Norway in 1942 – practically contemporary compared with most of the other books of hers I’ve read, though this is her third book set around the Second World War. And we are thrown into the action practically from the first page when Astrid discovers her boyfriend sending radio messages to England.
Jorgen Nystrom is a radio operator for Milorg, the Norwegian Resistance. He has survived longer than most but now the Germans have tumbled him and they are waiting to arrest him on his return home, so Chapter 2 starts with his desperate escape with Germans firing at him as he flees.
We never find out how his cover was blown. (Perhaps the fact that Astrid stumbled in on him transmitting suggests he was getting a bit careless?) It doesn’t matter. Deborah Swift has done a lot of historical research on the Norwegian occupation, but no time is being wasted in scene-setting here. We are on the run with Jorgen, whose only chance of escape is to get the Shetland Bus: one of the fishing boats that run the unbelievably dangerous passage from the Shetlands to Norway, carrying arms and agents in one direction and refugees in the other.
We are now into a traditional war story, replete with the tropes of heroic escapes from villainous Nazis. Jorgen doesn’t have an easy time of it and if his desperate flight on cross-country skis touches on the edge of James Bondish implausibility, Swift does allow us to see him as vulnerable and even, worn down by hunger, cold and exhaustion, sometimes frail.
We have two main villains: an evil Nazi-sympathising policeman, Falk, and his agent, Brevik, a star skier who is sent to catch up with Jorgen, befriend him and penetrate the Shetland Bus network. Falk is a Nazi villain from central casting, “too short, too tubby and without the good looks that made men like Nystrom’s life so easy”. Brevik, though, is a much more interesting character. Lacking any political commitment or moral compass, he manages to fool everybody that he is a Resistance hero. I’d have liked the story to have made more of him. He is an excellent villain and I can’t help feeling that a lot of his potential is wasted.
Meanwhile, back in Oslo, Astrid is resisting the Nazis in a less dramatic but, for my money, much more heroic way. She is a teacher and when the occupying Germans insist on the Nazification of the educational system, she is one of the organisers of a school strike.
We see a lot of the casual violence of the Nazis, with hostages rounded up and shot in the street, teachers sent to labour camps in the far north of the country and the persecution of Jews. Astrid’s position is as dangerous as Jorgen’s and she doesn’t have the comradeship of Milorg to fall back on. In fact, her one contact in the Resistance makes it quite clear that when push comes to shove, she is on her own.
Eventually, with the Nazis trying to arrest her, and a Jewish father and daughter she has taken in to save them from deportation, Astrid, too feels she has no choice but to make a run for the Shetland Bus.
Will Jorgen make it to the Shetlands? Will Astrid escape too and meet him there? Wil their love triumph against the horror of the times they live in? I’d love to talk about this (there are some interesting twists and turns) but I’ve been accused of spoilers in the past, even when commenting on stuff that seemed blindingly obvious to me early in a story. So I’m not going to make any detailed comments on the plot. I will say that you are unlikely to be shocked by any of the twists, but they do keep things lively.
This book reminds me of the sort of war story I read as a child in the 1960s. It’s not the kind of thing I would usually read now, but I think it will appeal to people who like this traditional approach to WW2. It is a lot better than most because Swift has brought her historical writer’s approach, so the background in Norway is convincing with a wealth of detail that most people will be unfamiliar with. The Norwegian occupation is not something we are very aware of in the UK. We prefer our Resistance fighters French.
Given the solid research, it’s unfortunate that the publishers, Sapere, have, for some reason, hidden the historical note away behind the back matter. The true story of the teacher’s strike, in particular, deserves to be better known. Sadly, Swift’s story illustrates a painful truth: it is much more exciting to fight with guns and dodge enemies in the forest than it is to commit yourself to civil disobedience. In something that Swift has written to promote the book she quotes someone saying that the teachers who faced possible death in the labour camps reminded themselves that soldiers fighting the Nazis faced death every day in the same cause and, if the soldiers could take it, so could the civilians. I wish she had put these words in the mouth of one of her characters. As it is, skimming through the book as I wrote this review, I was struck by how many pages there are of derring-do and excitement compared to the pages about teaching the old curriculum in defiance of the ever-present danger of arrest by the Nazis. It’s understandable – writing extended passages about being cold and hungry and frightened but plugging along with teaching times tables to small children would be an enormous creative challenge. It’s sad, though, that as in real life it’s the men who get to be heroes while the women who plod away doing the right thing without support or recognition are just the ones who get left behind. That’s not Deborah Swift’s fault, but when we ask why so many people let Nazism happen, that’s a good part of the answer. All that is necessary for evil to triumph is for good men to play with their boy toys and leave the real resistance to the women.
So, how do I feel about The Lifeline? I feel it is good – though it could have been so much more. If you like war stories, you’ll enjoy it. If you want to know more about the occupation in a country the British were going to invade until the Germans got there first (a detail Swift, like most Brits, avoids mentioning), this is definitely worth a look. And if you are just looking for an adventure story with a dash of romance, you could do a lot worse. Swift is a fine writer and her prose will definitely keep you turning the pages.
Thank you to Sapere for providing a copy for review.
There’s a sort of game that historians play on Twitter. They keep track of the number of their followers by looking at events in the corresponding year. So yesterday my account (@TomCW99) racked up 1684 followers and I got quite excited because 1684 was the year that Robert Hooke invented the semaphore line.
Semaphores crop up in a couple of my books (or at least in the research I did for them).
I first came across a reference to semaphores when I was researching Napoleon’s escape from Elba. One of the French king’s bodyguards, Col Marie Antoine de Reiset wrote in his journal:
An astounding piece of news arrived yesterday. We learnt, by Telegraph, that Bonaparte had landed at Cannes, near Frejus.
The apparent anachronism is explained by the absence of the word ‘electric’ before ‘telegraph’. A check in the trusty Complete Oxford Dictionary (invaluable for historical novelists) gives the original meaning of the word ‘telegraph’ as: “An apparatus for transmitting messages to a distance, usually by signs of some kind.”
This was the idea that Hooke had presented to the Royal Society in 1684. He had intended it for military use, but his ideas were never put into practice. As so often nowadays, an idea that had been invented in Britain was left for another country to develop. Embarrassingly (given that we were about to go to war with them) the nation that did finally produce a workable semaphore system for military use was the French. In 1792, the engineer Claude Chappe developed the first successful optical telegraph. Eventually he and his brothers succeeded in covering France with a network of 556 stations stretching a total distance of 3,000 miles.
The British, though, were not far behind.
In Britain, semaphore was used to communicate between London and the fleet. (Note that the English tend to prefer the word ‘semaphore’ to ‘telegraph’ but they are the same thing.) Lines of semaphore towers were constructed. The first ran from London to Deal, Chatham and Sheerness and they were completed by the end of January 1796. The system was judged a great success – signals were said to have travelled from Dover to London, via Deal, in less than seven minutes. A line to Portsmouth, the home of the Navy, was completed in August 1796.
Chatley Heath Semaphore Tower
Semaphore can actually prove a remarkably efficient means of communication. Because of the importance of accurate time-keeping in navigation, it was important that the fleet had access to a reliable time signal and semaphore was used to mark the time at which the Time Ball was dropped at the Greenwich Observatory (marking one o’clock). By 1806, the semaphore line had been extended to Plymouth and the one o’clock signal was sent to the port there and acknowledged back to London in three minutes, an impressive achievement for a round trip of four hundred miles.
Meanwhile, in Portugal, the British were using a system of telegraphs developed by Sir Home Popham to communicate along their defensive forts in the lines of Torres Vedras (which will feature in a future James Burke book). Semaphore masts were installed at key points along the line s. The one shown here is a replica at Fort San Vicente.
The horizontal arms on the mast standing there today are not really long enough. When this was rigged up and working the arm would have stretched out as far as the five posts at the bottom. Ropes would have run from the arm to each of the five posts and balls mounted on these ropes would have carried the message. A model in the museum at the fort shows how it would have been set up.
The shorter arms on the modern reproduction are probably wise. There were problems with the original masts which could not bear the weight of the arms and which had to be replaced.
The system allows the masts to transmit one number at a time from one to 999. Each number corresponded to a word in a codebook enabling vital military messages to be transmitted very quickly. Anybody could see the signals but without the codebook they were meaningless.
Popham (never a man to fail to promote one of his ideas) convinced the Admiralty that his system was an improvement on the one they were using and, after trials with an experimental semaphore line between the Admiralty and Chatham in 1816, and its success helped to confirm the choice, Popham’s system was adopted.
The semaphore system was envisaged as a war-time measure, to be abandoned after the defeat of Napoleon and, indeed, it was run down as soon as he was sent to Elba. Napoleon’s escape, though, led to the system being restored to full effectiveness and it was then kept running until it was superseded by the electric telegraph.
The new-fangled electric telegraph had just started operating in India in 1857, just in time to feature briefly in my book about the Mutiny, Cawnpore. It was telegraph messages that warned the British as soon as the uprising started (the operator who sent the first message was killed for his pains) and without it, events may well have turned out differently and Cawnpore might have had a very different ending.
Acknowledgements
Photo credit: “Chatley Heath Semaphore Tower – geograph.org.uk – 18673” by Nigel Richardson. Licensed under CC BY-SA 2.0 via Wikimedia Commons – http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Chatley_Heath_Semaphore_Tower_-_geograph.org.uk_-_18673.jpg#/media/File:Chatley_Heath_Semaphore_Tower_-_geograph.org.uk_-_18673.jpg
If things like the way that semaphore was used in the Napoleonic Wars catch your interest, you might well enjoy my books about the adventures of James Burke. You won’t come across Popham’s telegraph just yet (the latest book features the battle of Talavera and Wellington’s retreat behind the lines of Torres Vedras, complete with semaphore masts, has yet to take place). You will, though, find a lot of other incidental detail about life at the time. All the James Burke books are available on Amazon both as e-books and in paperback. You can read more details about them on this website: click on ‘My books’ at the top of the page.
Cawnpore and the other books set in the age of the electric telegraph are currently unavailable. They will be republished over the summer.
There can be very few people who by now have not heard of or viewed Bridgerton, the Netflix series based on Julia Quinn’s book, The Duke and I. Some people love it and some people hate it, certainly everyone seems to have an opinion on it.
As someone who read the book several years ago, I was looking forward to seeing what it would look like on screen, and I have to say that I was not disappointed. Like the book, it was a light, frothy, escapist romance with an undercurrent of more serious and darker matter. It was certainly not an historically accurate representation of the period generally known as the Regency. I’m amazed that anyone expected it to be.
Reading the book was my first foray into the modern and mostly American authored genre of Regency romance; that is, stories set in a Regency-type England. These are stories that are not generally historically accurate but which reference enough details of the social life of the time to pass as accurate by readers who are not bothered by such things. As a historian, and someone who regards Georgette Heyer’s stories as the pinnacle of the Regency genre, I was at first shocked by the liberties taken by the author in her depiction of British upper class life in the early 19th century. Her characters had modern thoughts, expressed themselves in modern ways, even when bound by the conventions of the time. But importantly, I did not stop reading; the story drew me in with its humour, witty dialogue, and clever plot. Yes, I enjoyed it – so much so that I went on to read the others in the series.
Much as I enjoy tales that accurately reflect the period, I think that there is room for stories that have only a veneer of history. People, especially in these trying times, are seeking escapism in literature, films, and television programmes, and I for one, can’t see anything wrong in that. If escapism of this sort helps people cope with the challenges of everyday life, surely that’s a good thing?
Other criticisms about Bridgerton concern the casting, costumes, and hairstyles… and I haven’t even mentioned the sex! Yes, the casting was colour blind, depicting a black Queen Caroline and black members of the aristocracy, but what does it matter? It is a fantasy past being depicted. Besides, it always annoys me when people claim that there were no black people living in Britain in the early 19th century… of course there were. People of all ethnicities have lived here for centuries, although usually not as members of the aristocracy. One exception to this is heiress Dido Elizabeth Belle (1761-1804), natural daughter of Sir John Lindsay, who was brought up by Lindsay’s uncle, William Murray, 1st Earl of Mansfield. Although not fully accepted by society, Dido Elizabeth was brought up as part of this noble family.
Dido Elizabeth Belle from painting by David Martin
Back to the costumes…on screen they were colourful, flambuoyant, and constructed in fabrics probably not invented at the time the story is set. But again, what does it matter? They were a visual treat for the eye, conveying a sense of the styles of the time and not an accurate depiction.
I’ve even read a criticism of one of the sex scenes – where Lord Bridgerton is enjoying himself with a maid up against a tree – his rather nice bottom was on display, pumping up and down energetically. Not accurate, someone complained. His breeches wouldn’t need to come down, he would just unbutton the front falls to achieve congress. Yes, that’s right, but this is television and fantasy and titillation, so we get to see his bum.
Romance is so often denigrated, as if it’s something shameful or only for women. There aren’t as many complaints or snobbery about what I call ‘boys’ own’ stories, in which the hero defeats the villain, drives the fastest car, and the girls are always willing to jump into bed with him. Whenever the latest Bond film comes out, there is usually a flurry of fawning articles about the wonderful special effects and car chases. Why is it that when a romance fantasy aimed at women is released, there are snobbish and condescending articles about ‘bodice-rippers’ and historical accuracy? Double standards?
Well, I hope you might realise that I thoroughly enjoyed Bridgerton and I’m eagerly looking forward to the next series. If nothing else, it has generated interest and discussion about a genre of writing that I love. It’s not pretending to be history – it’s escapism, romance, and telling a good story. And for a short time, it took my mind off the dreadful state of the world today.
A Bachelor’s Pledge
If you enjoyed Bridgerton but might like to explore a more historically grounded (but still fun!) book set in the period, you might considerA Bachelor’s Pledge.
The woman who haunts his dreams
Secret agent Phil Cullen is upset when he discovers that the young woman he rescued from Mrs Newbody’s establishment has absconded from his housekeeper’s care without a word. Thinking he has been deceived, he resolves to forget about her… something easier said than done.
The man she wants to forget
Sophia Turner is horrified when she is duped into entering a notorious house of ill-repute. Then a handsome stranger comes to her aid. Desperate that no one learns of this scandalous episode, Sophia flees to the one friend she knows she can trust. With luck, she will never see her mysterious rescuer again.
But fate has other plans…
Months later, Phil is on the trail of an elusive French agent and Sophia is a respectable lady’s companion when fate again intervenes, taking their lives on a collision course.
Traitors, spies, and shameful family secrets – will these bring Sophia and Phil together… or drive them apart?
Heart-warming romance combined with action-filled adventure make this third book in Penny Hampson’s Gentleman Series a must-read for all lovers of classic Regency fiction.
Penny Hampson
Penny Hampson writes mysteries, and because she has a passion for history, you’ll find her stories also reflect that. A Gentleman’s Promise, a traditional Regency romance, was Penny’s debut novel, which was shortly followed by more in the same genre. Penny also enjoys writing contemporary mysteries with a hint of the paranormal, because where do ghosts come from but the past? The Unquiet Spirit, a spooky mystery/romance set in Cornwall, was published by Darkstroke in 2020.
Penny lives with her family in Oxfordshire, and when she is not writing, she enjoys reading, walking, swimming, and the odd gin and tonic (not all at the same time).
