So here it is! The cover for the latest in the series of books about James Burke.
Once again, I’m incredibly grateful to Dave Slaney for his fantastic design.
I’m also grateful to Robert Pocock, who runs Campaigns & Culture leading battlefield tours all over Europe. Robert knows an awful lot about the Peninsular War and is just one of the people who gave me valuable advice on the historical details of the British campaign. His completely unsolicited comment that it was “wonderful writing” (and that he had “really enjoyed it”, which we couldn’t fit on the cover) means that this cover is unique in the series so far in having an endorsement on it. I hope that praise from Robert will encourage sales but, honestly, I would put that on anyway because unsolicited praise always makes authors feel warm and fuzzy inside. (Please remember that when deciding whether or not it’s worth writing a review: it always is.)
The cover is also unique in the series in that we’ve taken liberties with the uniform shown. That’s a rifleman’s uniform – the famous green of the Rifles – and the Rifles do not feature in the story. But though the story does include a lot of detail of the battle of Talavera, it’s mostly about guerrilla warfare. The image of a rifleman lying on the ground and firing in what was considered by many senior officers of the time to be a distinctly un-military approach seemed appropriate for a book which features so much irregular warfare. In any case, those who have read Burke at Waterloo will know that William Brown does end up fighting in the uniform of the Rifles, so it is a liberty I was happy to take.
[EDIT: What I’m less happy about is that this is a post-Napoleonic uniform. People keep suggesting that I can get away with mistakes because people won’t notice. In this case it took less than five minutes for me to get this:
The Rifle soldier is post-Napoleonic. He isn’t using a Baker Rifle, and has a “bobble” on the Shako, rather than the plume, I think the Shako/Pack might be slightly different too. But a 1807-1815 Rifleman would have had different kit/weapon.
Dave Slaney and I will take a look at it, but it’s going to be tricky to correct in time for launch day.
No liberties have been taken with the map. It’s from 1775. The part of Spain that it shows isn’t featured in the book: it was chosen to look nice, rather than to navigate by. It’s a map of the Peninsula that would have been current during the Peninsular War and I’m impressed.
What of the book itself? It’s being published next Friday and should be available on pre-order early next week. You’ll be able to buy it on Kindle at £3.99 and in paperback at £6.99. Buy links will be posted here and on my Twitter account (@TomCW99) as soon as they are available.
Like all the Burke books, this is a stand-alone story. The books aren’t written in chronological order. If you’ve read the first one (Burke in the Land of Silver), this follows directly on from that. It’s 1809 and, on his return from South America, Burke is sent off again, this time to join the war being waged by Spanish guerrillas against the French. It’s not long before he’s fighting for his life, but which of the Spaniards can he trust?
Burke faces new adversaries and finds old allies in a dramatic adventure, set against the background of the bloody battle of Talavera.
It’s real history – but not the way you learned it in school.
I always used wonder why people like Bernard Cornwell wrote their books in such a strange order. Why does Richard Sharpe not start his adventures in India and then just stick with Wellington, fighting battle after battle until ending gloriously at Waterloo? Now I have my own Napoleonic hero, I realise what the difficulties are with this approach.
The first book I wrote about James Burke was Burke in the Land of Silver. This is based closely on the adventures of the real-life James Burke who was the inspiration behind the series. It starts with him leaving home, fighting with the French army, and then being recruited into British intelligence. This is almost by way of a preface (it’s the first chapter of the book) before we get to Burke’s actual activities as a spy in Argentina. Burke arrives in Argentina in 1805, over 10 years after he joined the British army. His adventures in Burke in the Land of Silver see him travelling between Europe and South America and he eventually leaves Argentina in 1809.
I’d always considered that Burke in the Land of Silver would be the first book in a series. If you’re writing a series set in the Napoleonic wars, having the second book starting after 1809 doesn’t leave you an awful lot of time to pack the rest in. When I came to write the second book, then, I went back to 1798 in the gap between Burke joining British military intelligence and setting off to Argentina. Burke is dispatched to Egypt where he (with a little bit of help from Nelson) foils Napoleon’s plans. Burke and the Bedouin first came out in 2014 so the publishers were quite keen that I write another book the following year to mark the 200th anniversary of the battle of Waterloo. It probably wasn’t that great an idea really, as when Burke at Waterloo appeared it was rather lost in the plethora of books celebrating the bicentenary.
Having got to the end of the Napoleonic wars in three books, I had lots of other ideas for Burke, but these inevitably meant going back out of chronological order. Hence the next one, Burke in the Peninsula, sees him joining the Army in Spain, just ahead of the battle of Talavera in 1809. In terms of the chronology of the books, it follows immediately after Burke in the Land of Silver. If you read the two one after the other, you have a continuous narrative.
After I finished writing Burke in the Peninsula, I cast around for other possible plot lines. A fellow historical novelist had been doing a lot of research on Wolfe Tone, the Irish Nationalist who was executed by the British after the 1798 rising. She had decided to not to pursue the idea of writing a book about him and suggested I might be interested. (Huge respect to Jane Jackson and I do recommend her books.) Reading into the period, I could see why a book about Wolfe Tone is a bit problematic: Irish nationalist hero he may be, but he really isn’t a very sympathetic person. However, the situation in Ireland in the run-up to the 1798 rebellion does offer an awful lot of plot possibilities and I ended up writing a story in which Wolfe Tone does indeed feature, though only as a comparatively minor character. Burke in Ireland (yes, there is a pattern developing in the titles) should come out toward the end of the year – in plenty of time for Christmas if you are already looking for gift opportunities.
Burke in Ireland is therefore the last (so far) of the Burke stories, though the main events take place earlier than those in any of the other books. The action all takes place after Burke’s adventures in the West Indies described in the first chapter of Burke in the Land of Silver but before any of the other stories. In fact, I’ve sneakily have him leave the West Indies a few months earlier than he really did just to get him to Ireland in time to fit in with the historical timetable of events there.
So there you are: just like Bernard Cornwell my stories are, chronologically speaking, all over the place. Still, he hasn’t done so badly out of the Sharpe series, so maybe emulating his approach may yet make me a bestseller.
A Word from our Sponsor
Speaking of bestseller status, I have had people ask if there are going to be any more Burke books. I’d quite like to do another one set in Spain. I went on a research trip there last year and would love to feature some of the places we visited, but the sad truth is that it takes me about a year to write one of these books and I can only justify it if I sell a reasonable number of them. Now I self-publish, I’m reading a lot about how to make money out of writing and one thing that I have learned is that, except for some well-known names, mainly writing in the Tudor period, straight historical fiction (as opposed to historical romance) is not a way to make a lot of cash.
It’s not helped by the fact that so many of my books seem to be available from pirate sites. I had thought that this couldn’t really be making much difference, but I find that I get a lot of interest in my blog (yes this one you’re reading now) and a lot of clicks on my book links, but not that many actual sales.
I’m afraid I know more and more people who are just giving up on writing quality fiction because the number of books that they sell does not seem to them to justify the effort that they put into it. None of us expect to make serious money out of writing. (Those who do are foolish and would be well advised to give up now.) In fact, if I were a commercial publisher, I don’t think that I would publish the Burke books myself. The way that the e-book market works there are a comparatively small number of books that take most of the sales. Not a lot of those are going to be Napoleonic era fiction and Cornwell has already cornered what market there is. But actually seeing real sales that indicate people might be reading your books is terribly important. Not a huge number but more than, say, will probably read this blog post.
If you enjoy my books (or my blog), it would make a huge difference to me if you would buy one of the books. All my books are on Kindle at £3.99 or less. You can see details of all of them on this site at http://tomwilliamsauthor.co.uk/my-books.
After the historical mysteries I reviewed last week, this week’s offering is another contemporary mystery story by Jorn Lier Horst. This is the third book of his featuring Norwegian detective William Wisting. (I had to check the first name: he’s always referred to as Wisting.) Fans will be getting familiar with him, his daughter Line and the unscrupulous cold case investigator, Adrian Stiller.
This is the most straightforward police procedural of the three. Sexual sadist Tom Kerr is taken out of prison to reveal where he has hidden the body of his last victim but he makes a dramatic escape, injuring several of the police in his escort. Line, the freelance TV reporter, is there to film the whole exercise for the police, hoping to use the film later in a documentary she is planning. (I’m still worrying about how journalistic ethics work in Norway.)
Wisting is tasked to find Kerr, but discovers that Stiller has other ideas: he wants Kerr free to lead them to his accomplice, the Other One, who was never caught. The plan goes wrong, Kerr escapes and Wisting is somehow blamed. (There’s some kind of administrative reason given, but I can’t help thinking that whoever agreed to let Kerr out without an armed escort in a country where police routinely carry weapons is surely more obviously to blame than Wisting.) Wisting, we are repeatedly told, feels guilt about the whole thing, but I’m never entirely convinced. Line remarks every now and then how Wisting seems old too, but there is remarkably little character development over the series, which seems a waste of some interesting characters. Everybody makes the same mistakes as usual. People trust Stiller to play straight when they should know by now that he always has his own agenda. Line finds herself alone with the killer again, which you’d think she’d be more careful about after last time.
There’s quite a complicated plot, but if, fairly early on, you find yourself thinking, “Hey, isn’t that a bit odd? Why do the police go along with that?” hold that thought and then you can feel smug at the end.
As in the previous books, Horst tries to use the story to explore notions of good and evil. One of the characters has written a dissertation on the nature of malevolence:
“.. it posed questions about whether malevolence was an animal instinct latent in all human beings. Whether this was what made a cat play with the mouse before finally taking its life, or why the bestial gladiator fights in their time could feed the enjoyment of the masses.”
In the end, though, there’s no deep psychological examination. The Other One is basically just evil.
“… he had sought out such cases in order to satisfy his own lust, his own desires.… He had built up a large portfolio of deviant photographs, kindling his personal fantasies. Then he had met Tom Kerr, and these fantasies began to be played out in real life. He was no longer an observer. He became the accomplice, the Other One.”
In summary, this reads well and is a solidly constructed police procedural, but not much more than that. If you are looking for solidly constructed police procedurals with a Scandi-noir edge you could do a lot worse than read this.
Before I started my WordPress site, I used to blog on a free site called ‘Blogger’. Google are revamping the site and I (mistakenly, it turns out) thought my posts might be archived and quite possibly lost. It’s made me look through my old posts to see if any of them deserve the rather wider audience that they could now get on WordPress. This one originally appeared as a guest post on Adrian Smith’s blog and I later posted it on Blogger back in 2014. This was when I had only one book to my name, The White Rajah. (You can buy it on Amazon HERE.)
The love that dare not write its name
It has always worried me that The White Rajah is often judged as a ‘gay book’ because the main character is gay. This issue keeps on coming up, so I’d like to reprint my blog post here so that I can share my thoughts with people who may not have seen it on Adrian Smith’s site.
When I was growing up, homosexuality was illegal. Most of the books discussed on this blog would have been considered obscene and publishing or owning them might well have exposed people to criminal action. Interestingly, some commentators consider that it is a passing reference to (heterosexual) sodomy in Lady Chatterley’s Lover that was one of the reasons for its prosecution.
Now, of course, we live in a more liberal and enlightened age. Anybody who wants to read about homosexual relationships will have no problems in finding books that cater for their interests. But I do wonder if we have, perhaps, not taken advantage of the hard-won freedoms of the gay community to make a more liberal publishing environment, but, rather, built a gay ghetto which is, in its way, as restrictive as anything that may have preceded it.When I set out to write my first novel, The White Rajah, I was not planning to write a “gay book”. I was writing about real historical character, James Brooke, the eponymous White Rajah. I think there is little doubt that he was inclined toward his own sex, though it’s not clear, in those days, whether he had an active sex life. I wanted the reader to be able to see Brooke through the eyes of someone who travels with him and shares his adventures. I therefore invented a lover for him, and it is John Williamson who tells his story.
As I wrote, the relationship between John Williamson and James Brooke became more important to the novel than I had expected, and I ended up with what I thought of as quite a powerful love story at the heart of what is, in the end, an otherwise straightforward historical novel.
Against all the odds, The White Rajah was represented by a very reputable agent who pitched it to four leading publishers. All of them rejected it. The consensus seemed to be that it was “too difficult” for a first novel by an unknown writer. Now that could be that, being a first novel, it just wasn’t that well-written. As it’s a first person account by a mid-19th century writer, it certainly uses longer sentences and a more challenging vocabulary than a lot of modern novels. But I couldn’t help feeling that part of the problem was that there is a distinct absence of female characters but there’s still sex.
I decided that I would like to see the book published before my dotage, so I sent it to JMS Books, who specialised in LGBT titles. They took it straight away, for which I remain very grateful. The trouble was that it was then seen as an LGBT book. Unfortunately it fails to satisfy a lot of LGBT readers, who complain that it does not have enough explicit sex scenes in it. Straight readers, on the other hand, seem much more interested in the sexual orientation of James Brooke than in any of his quite significant historical achievements.
What nobody seems happy with is the idea that you can write about somebody who has adventures, achieves quite remarkable things in his life, and has a satisfying romantic relationship, but who just happens to be gay. For both straight and gay readers, the sexual orientation of the main character becomes the point of the book.
I find this quite remarkable. Living in 21st-century London, I accept that I will have friends and colleagues with a diversity of sexual orientations. My favourite comedy club (now sadly closed) was a gay comedy club, but that didn’t mean that the audience was exclusively homosexual or that the jokes all related to gender issues. I liked drinking in a gay bar (also of late-lamented memory), because the ambience was more civilised than a lot of other bars and they sold the drinks I enjoy. When I first went in there, I was worried that I might not be welcome, but they were as happy to serve straights as gays and it was simply a very successful town-centre watering hole. If I’m out dancing, some couples embracing on the dance floor will not be the conventional male-female pairing. I was talking to a gay friend about this and he said that a few years ago straight men would be uncomfortable dancing with other men, but this has become so normal that it is no longer an issue for most people. It goes without saying that, particularly as I used to work in a “creative” industry, many of my colleagues were gay, although the business was a very mainstream publisher.
So when I work, drink, or socialise the sexual orientation of the people I am working, drinking, laughing or dancing with does not define what I am doing. Yet when I am reading, it seems that it does. I am either reading a “gay book” for gay people, which has to emphasise gay sexual behaviour or I am reading a “straight book” (or “book”) where everyone seems much happier if nobody is gay at all. (Often there’s a minor character who’s gay, so everyone else can demonstrate how liberal they are.) The distinction is particularly ironic as many of the writers of M/M fiction are heterosexual women, as are many of its readers.
It’s not just my personal paranoia. I was delighted when Foyles (one of London’s most prestigious bookshops) stocked my titles, but I was surprised to see that they were shelved in a department dedicated to GLBT literature.
Obviously, it’s a good thing that, after centuries of repression, gay people can write and read books that cater for them. A gay press was an essential part of the battle for equality. But is it still the best way forward? Or have gay readers and writers created a ghetto that is itself discriminatory and a sort of repression, all the more damaging for being self-inflicted?
Two short reviews this week, both of detective stories. The first is set in Victorian London, the second in Madrid in the run-up to the Spanish Civil War.
Death Comes But Twice
This is the second of David Field’s detective mysteries featuring the pathologist James Carlyle and the preacher Matthew West. The characters having been well established in the first book Field now has more opportunity to concentrate on the story, but for people who are new to the series the first chapter summarises all the important relationships quickly and efficiently
Carlyle is experimenting with the new-fangled idea of fingerprints and in the course of collecting samples he discovers that a corpse brought in to the morgue after a murder is apparently that of a man who Matthew West had seen hanged. How had the villain escaped death when West, in his pastoral role, had been present to see him dropped at Newgate? As a detective mystery, it is not up there with the best of Agatha Christie, but it’s a reasonable puzzle with a solution which does make sense. As far as the story is concerned, though, the significance of a mystery which involves a failed hanging is that it allows Field to discuss the mechanics of capital punishment and present arguments for its abolition. This provides the main subtext to the mystery element, though the developing romance between West and Carlyle’s daughter is another important thread.
Field is familiar with his period as demonstrated by an interesting historical note at the end of the book. There are no obvious errors that bring you out of the story and, while the characters are probably more liberal in their attitudes than the average Londoner of the time, their beliefs are credible given the social backgrounds that they come from.
If you enjoy Victorian murder mysteries this is a series that is definitely worth visiting.
A Murder of No Consequence
I picked this up as it was being promoted as a free offer on Amazon and I wanted to read a detective story. Depressingly often these free books seem to be somewhat overpriced and I read a few pages before giving up. This one, however, grabbed me from the opening lines.
“Madrid, that summer, was a city suffocating under a blanket of heat and a dark cloud of fear. Armed gangs roamed the streets like packs of rabid dogs. Shots cut through the night air; the rattle of machine-gun bullets punctuated the usual afternoon calm. Anarchists shot fascists, socialists killed communists. In the first week of July alone eleven young men were murdered for their political beliefs.”
We are in 1936 on the eve of the Spanish Civil War. It’s not a place or time I know much about (unless we’re moving over 100 years earlier and following Wellington as he marched through the peninsula). James Garcia Woods, though, obviously knows the period well. There’s a lot of historical detail about specific incidents during 1936, but what I found made the book for me was the sense of living in a society that is falling apart around you. Our hero, Inspector Ruiz, is an honest policeman, trying to do his job, solving the murder of a young woman. But the young woman was the mistress of a senior politician and policemen do not get to “just do their job” once politics are involved. Ruiz comes up against the realities of trying to enforce the law in a country where law and order are breaking down. We see the breakdown at every level: by reference to great political events, the continual interference by politicians in his investigation, and the way that the growing political divisions in the country come to intrude on the personal relationships and friendships of the characters.
The characterisation and back stories are almost all utterly convincing – the exception being the beautiful American student who is there, it seems, just to provide romantic interest and to give Ruiz an outsider to whom he can explain details of Spanish society that the reader cannot be expected to know.
In the end, dogged determination means Ruiz is able to solve the murder and achieve some kind of justice. It is, though, meaningless. A man who would have been shot out of hand in the political upheavals is, instead, to be executed for murder.
At one level, Ruiz’s crusade is utterly pointless, but at another it is vital. Ruiz represents the small man, a state functionary who holds to his principles and tries to do the right thing even when everything around him is collapsing.
I picked this up as a detective story, not as a historical novel, but it is, in fact, the very best kind of historical novel. The story makes sense only because of its historical context and we come to understand the history much better for seeing how it impinged on everyday life – even if everyday life here is a murder investigation. It’s also, I think, an important lesson in why historical fiction matters. These events were happening in a Western European nation less than a century ago. As we see our own political system becoming increasingly divided and politicians increasingly ready to interfere in the running of civil society, we need to be ready to learn from the lessons of history. These things can happen again and not just in Spain. What we need now is more men like Inspect Ruiz.
