So here it is! The cover for the rerelease of Burke and the Bedouin.
I’m really excited about this cover – the latest for me by Dave Slaney. And I’m delighted that people have already been tweeting to say they’re looking forward to seeing it. I hope they like it as much as I do.
The Eyes Have It
Some people were not overenthusiastic about this design because it features eyes. In the dim and distant past there was a sort of rule that you didn’t put eyes on book covers because they could be seen as rather threatening. Then somebody realised that humans are hard-wired to notice eyes so covers with eyes on them get a disproportionate amount of attention. They are (and I’ve tried so hard to avoid this phrase) more eye-catching. People may find them mildly disturbing but they do notice them and that’s the important thing. The result was a zillions of covers with eyes on. So many that there is even a Pinterest pin for ‘Eyes on the cover’ (and thanks to Amanda Merlos for putting that together).
Just some of the eyes on Amanda Merlos’ Pinterest pin
The result of this deluge of eyes was a reaction against eyes on covers, even though some original cover designs featuring eyes were critical as well as commercial successes. For example, the Smithsonian Magazine singles out Francis Cugat’s cover design for The Great Gatsby as “one of the more prominent literary symbols in American literature”.
I was tempted to have eyes as the unifying theme for all the covers on the Burke series, but it really didn’t work out. We went for maps in the end (a suggestion I first made to Accent, who were Burke’s original publisher and whose cover designs I thought were very impressive). Burke and the Bedouin was the only one that ended up with eyes. It’s a striking design and I hope you like it.
What’s inside the cover?
I’m relaunching Burke and the Bedouin as I spruce up the first three Burke books ahead of two new ones coming out later this year. (I wrote more about this earlier this week, so I won’t go into that again.) Burke and the Bedouin was the second book about James Burke and it was written purely as an entertainment. While Burke in the Land of Silver made a gentle nod towards the problems that arise when you send an army to ‘liberate’ people from their own government (Iraq was fresh in my mind while I was writing), there is no sub-text at all to Burke and the Bedouin. It’s designed purely as entertainment and, although the history (Napoleon’s invasion of Egypt and the defeat of his navy at the Battle of the Nile) is solidly factual, Burke’s adventures are total fantasy. There is a beautiful girl to be rescued, dastardly French spies to be defeated, and even a treasure to be found. Despite the bloodshed (and there’s a fair bit of that), it’s essentially fun. (One of my favourite Amazon reviews says, “In spite of the violence the book has a light air to it.”) It must have done something right: my royalty statements suggest it was the most commercially successful of the three Burke books.
Preparing this book for re-publication meant reading it for the first time since it was originally published in 2014. Re-reading old books can be a nightmare for a writer, but I must admit that I really enjoyed it. I had forgotten an awful lot of the plot and I was caught up in Burke’s adventures, trying to remember what happened next. And, though it’s always dangerous to admit to finding your own work amusing, I did enjoy passages like this, where the ever-reliable William Brown is summing up Burke’s plan to collect information from some French spies he has discovered:
‘So we meet up with our Arab friends, raid the camp, truss up the Froggies, have a nice little chat with them, and then head home.’
‘You have, as ever, William, summed up the situation in a nutshell. You should have been an officer.’
‘It’s the book learning, sir. I’m more a hit-them-in-the-goolies-and-run-away kind of bloke. I rely on officers like you to write it all up nice afterwards.’
Publication date
Burke and the Bedouinis now available in the same edition (with the same cover) in both the UK and North America (and, indeed, everywhere else). It’s being published on Kindle next Tuesday (14 July) with the paperback along soon after. You can pre-order the e-book now for £2.99: mybook.to/Bedouin.
I hope that by now you’ve noticed that Burke in the Land of Silver was republished in the middle of last month. If you haven’t already read it, please do. You can buy it on Kindle for just £2.99 or read it free on Kindle Unlimited. And it’s also available in paperback.
It’s got a shiny new cover but, apart from one word that was a terrible mistype, and, I think, a comma somewhere, it’s exactly the same as the edition published by Endeavour (now Lume Books) only a couple of years ago. So why the change?
Part of the reason is in the words “now Lume Books”. Endeavour didn’t do a bad job with my books and I hope Lume Books can do a good job in future. That’s why my books about John Williamson are still with them. But the upheavals that seemed to convulse so many small presses at the moment can lead to them taking their eyes off the ball and the results of that are potentially bad news for authors. In this rapidly-changing publishing environment, many writers feel safer if their babies are under their own control.
The John Williamson series is still published by Lume Books
This is particularly important for me right now. I’ve written two more books about James Burke since the original publication of Burke at Waterloo back in 2015 to mark the 200th anniversary of the battle and I’ve been waiting for the right time to publish them. I’ve decided that the right time is now. (This is partly because I’ve just resolved some rights issues that emphatically weren’t Endeavour’s fault but which have made me realise how vulnerable writers are once they’ve signed a publishing contract.) Both of these new books are now planned to come out later this year. But it’s a simple truth about publishing that if you have a series of books, they are best sold as a series with a consistent look and consistent marketing.
By taking control of my books again I have been able to produce covers that reflect the values I try to put into my writing and which are consistent across the whole series. I’ve probably spent rather more money on them than a publisher would have, because the books are naturally more important to me as the writer than they are to the publisher. I have to admit, too, that cost effectiveness wasn’t the first thing I looked for in cover design: it was covers that I could be personally very proud of. (And huge thanks to Dave Slaney for his wonderful interpretation of my somewhat garbled brief.)
The first three books are coming out with barely a month between them because the relaunch is mainly there to prepare the way for the two new ones. The second, Burke and the Bedouin will be published a week from today, just a month after the first. Like Burke in the Land of Silver, it has just one word changed and a few tweaks to punctuation. And, like Burke in the Land of Silver, it has a beautiful new cover by Dave Slaney. The cover reveal is this Friday. Call back then so that you can admire it.
As promised last week, I bring you more on Sir Home Riggs Popham, the man who took it upon himself to take an army to South America in 1806 on the grounds that there was a city worth invading and he had some spare men to invade it with. (It’s the incident that Burke in the Land of Silver revolves around.)
Popham’s exploits are so implausible that I don’t expect you to take my word for it, so here is proper historian (and historical novelist) Lynn Bryant to tell you more about the man. Take it away, Lynn. That’s ‘Weigh anchor and cast off’ in Popham’s world.
The mad but glorious world of Home Riggs Popham
During a recent interview on a Napoleonic history blog, I was asked if I had come across any real historical character that I would never write in fiction, because he would be too unbelievable. I didn’t have to stop to think about this one – Sir Home Popham, who features as the antagonist in both books in my Manxman series, was a real person, which is just as well because I would never have had the nerve to make him up.
Popham was a naval officer, a controversial figure during his own time, who is best remembered for the system of naval signalling that he designed in around 1800, which was eventually adopted as the Admiralty standard in 1812. There was a lot more to Popham, however, than a naval officer with a scientific bent. During his forty two years in the navy, he was a prisoner of the French, was accused of being a smuggler, was promoted at the request of the army, gained and then lost the favour of Tsar Paul of Russia, was investigated for fraud, became an MP, and was court martialled for an apparently unauthorised invasion of South America. That is not an exhaustive list of Popham’s activities.
Nelson’s famous message at Trafalgar used Popham’s flag code
So how did a younger son of an unremarkable family come to play such a significant role in political and international spheres in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth century? I suspect the key to Popham’s success lies in his usefulness. Popham was highly intelligent and a talented organiser, with a genius for logistics and this placed him in an excellent position to find favour not only with the navy, but with the army. During his career, he acquired a reputation for being the man to call on during joint operations and was frequently consulted in the planning of campaigns.
In 1794 Popham was appointed agent for transports at Ostend for the Flanders campaign. It was a job to which he was ideally suited and Popham made the most of it, winning the patronage of the Duke of York, who eventually wrote to the First Lord of the Admiralty requesting his promotion to post-captain. 1798 found him in Ostend during the invasion threat, and the following year he was sent to St Petersburg where he successfully persuaded Tsar Paul to provide troops for a proposed landing in the Netherlands. Later that year, Popham was once again in charge of an evacuation during the Helder campaign and while the expedition was unsuccessful, Popham came out of it with his reputation further enhanced. He was elected to Parliament in 1804 and sat for various constituencies until 1812.
The breadth of Popham’s assignments is astonishing and an apparently simple job often turned into something more complex. A straightforward command of a troop ship during the Egyptian campaign led to a commission by a secret committee of the East India Company to negotiate trade treaties with the sheriff of Mecca and other Arabian states as ambassador directly responsible to the governor-general of Bengal, Lord Wellesley. In 1804 he was involved in the extraordinary work of Robert Fulton in developing naval mines. And at the end of the year, he sailed as commodore and commander-in-chief of an expedition to take the Cape of Good Hope with a force under General Sir David Baird.
It should be no surprise by now, to find that with the Cape in British hands, Popham did not stick to his official orders to remain in Table Bay to guard against a possible French attack. Instead, he decided to take his forces to attack the River Plate in South America. There is no evidence that Popham had any authorisation for this invasion, but in 1806, he landed his troops near Buenos Aires. The city fell to English forces under Beresford, but this early success did not last, and in August the Spanish took back the city, imprisoned Beresford’s men and left Popham facing recall and a court martial.
Popham’s 1807 trial ended with an inevitable guilty verdict, but surprisingly he was let off with nothing worse than a reprimand, undoubtedly due to his friends in high places. Further postings followed; Popham was Captain of the Fleet during the Copenhagen campaign in 1807, and performed the same function although without the title, during the Walcheren campaign of 1809 when he was heavily involved in the planning of what turned out to be a disaster for the British forces.
Once again, Popham managed to negotiate the ensuing Parliamentary inquiry without formal censure, and with his reputation officially intact, but there is a sense that Popham was running out of friends. Prime Minister William Pitt died in 1806 and Lord Melville, Popham’s long-time patron, died in 1811. Melville’s son took over at the Admiralty in 1812 and Popham was sent to northern Spain to co-operate with the guerrillas and conduct a naval guerrilla warfare against the French in support of Wellington. He was highly successful at this, keeping an entire French army ‘distracted’, and capturing Santander.
Popham was keen to be sent back to Spain in 1813 to continue his work, but he was not. He was promoted to rear-admiral, but he was not employed on active service again, ending his days in a miserable posting as commander-in-chief in Jamaica, where he suffered from yellow fever, lost two of his children to illness and finally suffered a stroke. He died soon after his return to England in 1820.
So what went wrong for Popham? There is no doubt that along with his many talents, Popham had a genius for making enemies. Lord St Vincent, who was First Lord from 1801 to 1804 openly loathed him, and there are endless letters and memos from Popham describing his sense of persecution. Popham was also unpopular with many of his fellow naval officers. This may have stemmed from his early promotion to post-captain at the behest of the army, and there was a furious protest from several very senior captains in 1807 when Popham was appointed Captain of the Fleet ahead of them.
Popham was a relentless self-publicist. He was undoubtedly good at what he did, but his compulsive need to announce his successes in pamphlets, news reports and endless letters to the government and the Admiralty, seems to have infuriated even his supporters. Lord Wellington was genuinely pleased with Popham’s success in northern Spain in 1812 but was less impressed to find that Popham was sending direct reports to the English press and expressed it with typical Wellington candour in a letter to Lord Bathurst.
“It might have been as well also if Sir H Popham’s exultation upon the success of his operations in diverting the attention of the enemy from me had not been published. I mention this, because I know that the French act a good deal upon any information from our papers which they deem at all authentic.”
Wellington’s dispatches 12 Sept 1812
By the end of 1812, Popham’s career was in decline. His expertise in planning was offset by his tendency to oversell his schemes, and he was quick to abdicate responsibility when things went wrong, as in Walcheren. His reputation for financial irregularity may or may not have been deserved, but accusations dogged him throughout his career, and there was a sense of “no smoke without fire” which made him appear untrustworthy. Popham was an intelligent and inventive officer who punched above his weight in terms of influence at the heart of government foreign, military and naval policy for many years, but he could be arrogant, self-important and disastrously indiscreet. I suspect by 1813 he had simply run out of influential friends.
There is so much more that I’d like to know about Popham. There is one biography of him, A Damned Cunning Fellow: Eventful Life of Rear Admiral Sir Home Popham, by Hugh Popham, which was published in 1991, and Dr Jacqueline Reiter is currently working on a new study, and has been generous in sharing her insights as I grapple with my fictional version of Popham. Popham appears in both books in the Manxman series and makes a very brief cameo appearance in my new book, An Unmerciful Incursion which will be published on July 31st 2020. Popham is pure gold for a novelist, and I love writing him, so he will definitely return in all his glory in book four of the Manxman series, which is set during his 1812 campaign in northern Spain.
Lynn Bryant
Lynn (with me)
Lynn Bryant was born and raised in London’s East End. She studied History at University and had dreams of being a writer from a young age. Since this was clearly not something a working class girl made good could aspire to, she had a variety of careers including a librarian, NHS administrator, relationship counsellor, manager of an art gallery and running an Irish dance school before she realised that most of these were just as unlikely as being a writer and took the step of publishing her first book.
She now lives in the Isle of Man and is married to a man who understands technology, which saves her a job, and has two grown-up children and a Labrador. History is still a passion, with a particular enthusiasm for the Napoleonic era and the sixteenth century. When not writing she spoils her dog, reads anything that’s put in front of her and makes periodic and unsuccessful attempts to keep a tidy house.
Lynn Bryant is the author of the five books of the Peninsular War Saga, set in Wellington’s army, and the two books of the linked Manxman series, which follows the fortunes of a Manx navy captain.
I’m taking another break from plugging Burke in the Land of Silver (it’s really good, just buy it already) to give a bit of a lift to Graeme Cumming’s excellent Ravens Gathering.
When Graeme offered me a copy of this book I had to tell him it was not at all the sort of thing I usually read. It seemed churlish to refuse, though, so I loaded it onto my Kindle intending to give it a quick glance when I have absolutely nothing to do sometime around 2050.
I looked at the first page to make sure that the download had worked and I was drawn in almost immediately. Looking back, the prologue (yes, I know some people won’t read books with prologues but some of my own have a prologue, so get over yourselves) is one of the least satisfying bits of the book. When I first read it, though, all I was aware of was that the words flowed and the drama made me want to know what happened next. What more can you ask of a thriller?
I say “thriller” because it’s an exciting work of fiction without literary pretensions, but it’s difficult to stick it firmly into one genre. In the end, it’s a fantasy novel, but the fantasy elements are embedded in a lovingly created real-world setting. The whole story takes place in the village of Ravens Gathering, an isolated spot straight out of a horror movie. There is The Major Oak, a pub where the regulars have their own seats and the presence of strangers causes an immediate lull in the conversation. There is a village idiot and an ineffective vicar. There is a pub landlady who is a flirt and a post-office that is a hot-bed of gossip. All the characters are sketched with enough detail for us to remember them, despite the number of individuals featured.
Besides the central character, who is part of the mystery and touched by supernatural forces, making him too much of an archetype to be readily identified with, the story focusses on two incomers to the village: a failed property developer and his sexually voracious young wife. Despite the fact that there is much to despise about both of them, Cumming draws them as well-rounded and even sympathetic human beings and we come to care about them and their fate.
The detail of “everyday life” is carefully built up. When the police are involved, the book even moves in the direction of a police procedural crime novel until we are suddenly precipitated into a full-on fantasy which makes The Exorcist look a model of restraint. The thing is that by now we believe in the place and the people, so we are prepared to suspend our disbelief in an increasingly lunatic train of events that I’m not going to spoil the book by detailing.
If you are not generally in the market for fantasy adventures, but open-minded enough to give one a go, I strongly recommend this one. (But do feel free to buy a copy of Burke in the Land of Silver first.)
It’s been an exciting week, with the relaunch of the Burke series. Burke in the Land of Silver came out on Kindle last week, with the paperback following any day now. This means my blog has inevitably been ruthlessly focused on plugging my own books, but I’m taking a break today to write about another book that came out last week – Interviewing the Dead.
Interviewing the Dead is published by Sapere. I like Sapere books. They do a nice line in light historical fiction and, more importantly, they send me review copies. Interviewing the Dead is by David Field, the author of the Esther and Jack Enright series, a couple of which I’ve reviewed here before.
Field does a nice line in Victorian murder mysteries. I was at first a bit put off this one which seemed to be more fantasy than murder mystery: the dead walking among us, revenging themselves on Londoners because of the disturbing of a plague pit during the construction of the Aldgate Underground Station. (The station was opened in 1876: the London Underground system is a lot older than most people imagine.) It turns out, though, that I was simply taken in like the Victorian victims of this elaborate and deadly hoax. But how come honest men and women are seeing the dead rise from their graves?
It turns out that there is a totally rational explanation. Methodist preacher, Matthew West, teams up with Dr James Carlyle (a student of Dr Bell, the model for Sherlock Holmes) to help Detective Inspector Jennings solve the mystery. The plot allows a lot of fun contrasting the strictly scientific approach of Dr Carlyle with West’s more spiritual views on life. There’s a great deal of arguing about religion and the best ways to help London’s poor, which allows a bit of exploration of some of the social issues of the time. Carlyle’s daughter, Adelaide, provides the love interest. A strong, independent woman who assists her father in his lab work, she dabbles in politics and supports the suffragettes.
There are elements of liberal cliché in the approach to these social and political issues. The strong (but clearly lovable) independent 19th century woman struggling to make her way in a man’s world seems a fixture in books like this. I’m beginning to wish we could have just one heroine who only wants to run the house and have babies, not because these are admirable qualities but because they were, I think, quite common at the time. What with Adelaide wanting to go into politics and West’s sister trying to become a magazine illustrator, I think that the cutting edge of feminism is perhaps over-represented.
In the end, though, this isn’t a social history or a philosophical essay on the role of religion in late 19th century philanthropy: it’s a detective story and a pretty good one. There’s sufficient reference to social issues to embed it thoroughly in its time and Field has written enough Victorian detective stories to know his period. It reads well and the characters are sympathetic. If they sometimes seem caricatures of their “types” that is, I think, one of the difficulties of writing the first in any series. As readers (like the writer) become more familiar with them, there is room for growth and I expect they will become more rounded as the series goes on.
The plot is convincing (though perhaps more sophisticated than is entirely credible given the limitations of the villain when he is unmasked). Good triumphs; bad people get their just desserts; love may well find a way. In the end, what more can you ask for in a detective story?
