It’s just a week until the publication of the latest Galbraith & Pole adventure, Monsters in the Mist, with my Undead hero, so please forgive me for another post about vampires.
What do vampires mean to you?
Bela Lugosi as Dracula
The ultimate vampire, of course, is Dracula and the classic book about him is Bram Stoker’s novel. But if you want to write about vampires nowadays, you need to take a long, hard look at the myth. Can vampires really turn themselves into wolves or bats? Do the laws of physics not apply, so they throw no reflections and cannot be photographed? The vampires of the 19th century were truly supernatural beings, but nowadays there is so much that is almost magical about science that it seems better to make our vampires something that can at least partly be explained rationally.
My vampires like to fit in unnoticed around humans. They do, it’s true, avoid daylight – but many people nowadays live much of their lives in the dark With the aid of sunglasses and high factor sunscreen, vampires can get by. Many of them don’t like garlic, but who can blame them? Garlic certainly won’t kill them. Neither will most things, though a stake through the heart really is fatal – but so is a bullet.
My vampires hang out round Brompton Cemetery with its baroque sepulchres. Some even live there, but most prefer the comfort of regular houses. With money carefully invested over centuries, many can afford apartments in the nicer parts of Chelsea.
Brompton Cemetery
The whole ‘drinking blood’ thing can be problematic, but as illegal highs go, blood is quite easy to get hold of and it isn’t as if they don’t enjoy a good meal or a fine Scotch. They enjoy a lot of the finer things in life: if you have hundreds of years to develop your taste, you can become quite a connoisseur.
There are murderous vampires, of course, just as there are murderous humans. Given that the first Galbraith & Pole story, Something Wicked, is a twist on the police procedural genre, there has to be a murderous vampire or there wouldn’t be a story. But there are vampire policemen too, tidying up after the renegades like my vampire hero, Chief Inspector Pole.
If vampires were living among us, you’d think that somebody would have noticed something odd. And people do. But the government colludes with the vampires to cover things up. It’s convenient for governments to be owed favours by immortal beings who have been forced to learn how to move silently and undetected through the night and who can, when necessary, kill before vanishing away without trace.
What would happen if one of these vampires met a down-to-earth human policeman who was less than happy to keep their secret? How does a policeman solve a case when the chief suspect is a creature that no-one can know exists?
Meet Chief Inspector Galbraith and join him on a journey through a London nobody knew existed.
Something Wicked did not set the bestseller lists ablaze, but enough people liked it for me to produce a sequel, Eat the Poor, which has a definite satirical edge as Galbraith and Pole hunt down a werewolf with links to the world of Westminster.
With Monsters in the Mist, Galbraith and Pole have been taken out of their comfort zone as they investigate a killing on the mountains of mid-Wales. Could this be another werewolf or are there even darker forces afoot? It’s story that takes us from an isolated farm to the government research centre at Porton Down and an explosive climax at a secret military base just off the M4. Some of the locations are entirely fictitious, but they’re not the ones you’re thinking of.
Galbraith and Pole explore the world outside the M25 and you may never look at it quite the same way again.
Monsters in the Mist is on pre-order for Kindle (£3.99) at mybook.to/MonstersInTheMist. It’s also available in paperback from Thursday at £6.99.
Monsters in the Mist is the third of my books featuring Galbraith & Pole. It can be read as a stand-alone book, but it builds on the world established in the first two books. It certainly helps to have read the first in the series, Something Wicked.
Something Wicked explains how the vampire, Pole, came to be working with the Metropolitan Police, where he met Chief Inspector Galbraith and they worked together on their first murder investigation. Pole is not your conventional vampire. He lives in an elegant apartment in Chelsea were he enjoys cooking (often with garlic) and fine whisky. But he does avoid daylight and feeds on blood.
For the next five days, Something Wicked will be on offer for just 99p/cents. It’s quite a short book, so it gives you time to read it ahead of the publication of Monsters in the Mist on 27 October.
If you’re not sure about spending 99p, you can get an idea of the story because the opening is available free, read by me here:
“If you enjoy light, amusing and elegant humour and would relish the thrills and chills of the supernatural kind, the Something Wicked is definitely for you.”
“It has everything a good book needs: an engaging plot full of surprises, a critical portrayal of contemporary society, complex characters you identify with, and, most importantly: vampires!”
“A really great read! Who knew a story about vampires, detectives and tango could be so entertaining?!”
Monsters in the Mist is the third book I’ve written featuring Galbraith and Pole. Galbraith is an old-school London detective who finds himself working together with a vampire to solve some distinctly unusual crimes.
The first book in the series, Something Wicked, found them investigating a murder that had left a peer of the realm dead in his study, drained of all his blood. Obviously vampires were involved by why, after hundreds of years of hiding in plain sight, were they revealing themselves now? The investigation takes in a tango hall (vampires are big on tango) and night classes at Birkbeck College (vampires can hardly be expected to study during the day) before an explosive climax in Brompton Cemetery.
In the second book, Eat the Poor, a werewolf is attacking people on council estates across London. Is this a supernatural beast with a political agenda? Galbraith and Pole team up again to track down the killer, who, it seems is close to the heart of government.
In their latest adventure they are called in when a dismembered body is found on a Welsh moor. The urbane Chief Inspector Pole is well out of his comfort zone in rural mid Wales and Galbraith is almost equally uncomfortable so far away from London. Pole is unhappy, too at suggestions that there might be another werewolf on the loose. He is certain that there must be an alternative explanation for the killing but others are not so sure. This time their investigation takes them to a classified government research facility and a dramatic showdown in a secret military base.
The cover is another wonderful effort from Dave Slaney.
The Galbraith & Pole stories are not your conventional vampire tales. For a start Pole is hardly your conventional vampire. An enthusiastic cook (not that he needs to eat solid food), he loves garlic as well as tango. His Chelsea flat is an oasis of calm, where Galbraith finds himself Increasingly at home. It’s fair to say that these books do not take the genre too seriously.
Monsters in the Mist will be available in time for Halloween and can be pre-ordered now. Watch out for it: a police procedural with added bite.
Ever since I wrote Something Wicked, with its climax in Brompton Cemetery, I’ve enjoyed London graveyards and, of course, I’m always up for anything Napoleonic. Last weekend I was able to combine the two interests with a tour of Kensal Green Cemetery looking at tombs linked to the Napoleonic Wars, followed by a talk and demonstrations of musket fire and Regency dancing.
The first tomb we visited was that of the Brunel family.
We weren’t there to honour the memory of Isambard Kingdom Brunel whose work we had admired recently in Bristol. We were there to pay our respects to his father, Sir Marc Isambard Brunel.
Sir Marc was born in France but, as a Royalist, he had to flee the country during the reign of terror. He went to the USA, where he built a successful career as an engineer. When he learned, though, that the Royal Navy was handicapped in its fight against Napoleon by the difficulty in producing the 100,000 pulley blocks a year needed to supply its ships, Sir Marc travel to England with plans to develop machinery that would produce pulley blocks more efficiently than the handcrafted blocks made up until then. By 1808, his factory was producing 130,000 blocks per year, a significant contribution to the war effort. Later, when the condition of soldiers’ boots became a national scandal, Sir Marc developed machinery to produce higher quality boots. Given that soldiers had often been marching on boots which had literally fallen apart, this, too, contributed toward Britain’s military success.
There were a few other civilian graves, but most of those we saw were soldiers. Of most interest to me was the tomb of Sir John Waters. Waters was one of Wellington’s Exploring Officers in Spain, a noted linguist and a useful spy. Some of Burke’s adventures in Burke in the Peninsula are based on the real-life escapades of Sir John. He died in 1842, aged 68.
There were some splendid military graves marking the burial site of unknown soldiers and thus not included in our official tour, but the stones are too magnificent to ignore. I particularly liked this one.
No tour of a Victorian cemetery is complete without a visit to the catacombs. Sadly, the condition of the catacomb burials we saw at Kensal Green was not nearly as good as at Brompton Cemetery. Under the Dissenters Chapel, most of the catacombs (basically giant pigeon-holes) are empty with the few remaining coffins wrapped in polythene as the contents threaten to spill out and then tucked away behind a locked door.
After our tour of the graves, with fascinating anecdotes about the people buried there, we were given talks on the Napoleonic Wars generally and the Battle of Waterloo in particular. Then came a treat as we were presented with a demonstration of musket/rifle drill. (One musket and one rifle.) There were several impressively loud bangs and a great deal of white smoke.
Survivors faced a bayonet charge.
After the battle, a few brave souls joined in a demonstration of a waltz of the period. The modern waltz not yet being in fashion, we were treated to something that looked more like a country dance, complete with a caller to make sure people took the right steps. It looked quite unlike any dances I have seen in Jane Austen films, though I suspect it was closer to reality (or would have been once people had more time to practice).
The dancing was followed by a display of the kit carried by soldiers at Waterloo. The basic kit bag was less heavy than I had expected (considerably less heavy than a soldier carries nowadays) but that was without the water bottle and the canvas bag containing the day’s rations. The musket or rifle (depending on regiment) was very heavy, as was the cartridge box filled with lead balls
We were, of course, handling all this in the dry. There was no proper waterproof clothing and the greatcoats, made of wool, will have become steadily heavier if worn in the rain. Until quite late in the war, backpacks were rolled up with no protection against rain at the sides, so blankets, too, will have become soaked and heavy. When you remember that there were no tents for private soldiers and that they would shelter under their blankets, the weight of the packs after a wet night does not bear thinking about.
There was a waterproof cover for headgear. The man may be wretched and soaked, but his shako will always have looked smart. Officers of the Napoleonic era clearly knew what mattered.
There was also a waterproof cover for the firing mechanism of the gun – the black patch in the photo below.
Waterproofing for firing mechanism
Looking at all the items the soldier carried gave a vivid picture of the vicissitudes of military life. A demonstration of striking a flint (you can see flint and steel at the bottom centre of the picture below) showed it’s not nearly as easy as they make it look on TV. In fact, you can’t get a spark big enough to light wood, so you have to carry char-cloth (literally charred cloth) to get started. That’s what’s in the little round box sat above the flint and steel.
Getting a fire started was essential if you planned to eat. Your salt beef and biscuit were inedible until they had been boiled in water. At least by 1815 you had your own tin mess tin (on the left, next to the bag) rather than sharing a big metal kettle that had to by carried by each group of mess-mates.
No wonder that even a hundred years later, Christopher Robin’s nanny explained to him that “A soldier’s life is terrible hard.”
A Word from Our Sponsor
It was lovely to take a day off and go back to the world of Napoleonic history because I’ve been lately been lost in a more contemporary fictional world of vampires and policemen as I finish the latest Galbraith & Pole book, Monsters in the Mist. The final edits have been made and the formatting has been finished , so we are on schedule for publication at the end of October. Next week I’ll be revealing the cover and telling you a little about the book.
From 16 September, ‘Burke in Ireland’ will be just 99p on Kindle for five days. Sales of the Burke books have fallen off a little over summer so I decided to do a price promotion on one of them and, from an admittedly limited selection, this was the one readers came up with.
‘Burke in Ireland’ is quite a good place to start reading the series. Although the first book, ‘Burke in the Land of Silver’ begins with Burke’s experience in the French army before he even started fighting for the British, ‘Burke in Ireland’ tells the story of his first adventure in espionage. It’s so early that the trusty William Brown, who plays a major role in all the other books, only arrives in this one at the end.
‘Burke in Ireland’ is the darkest of all the Burke books, reflecting the fact that England’s military occupation was an uncomfortable period – one that reaches across the centuries to the Troubles and England’s longest ever military operation. The English rigged the courts and, if that failed, were happy to use torture and brutality to maintain control. French agents were actively spreading sedition and the English countered them with a network of spies of their own.
Burke, Irish by birth, is plunged headlong into this world of plots and counter-plots. He finds himself sympathising with many of the Nationalists but shocked by the thuggery of some of their leaders – a thuggery that he is soon caught up in as he seeks to penetrate their organisations.
The story centres on the breakout of Archibald Hamilton Rowan from Dublin’s Newgate prison in 1794. Hamilton’s escape combines face and tragedy in equal measure. It’s a story that is completely true, but difficult to believe. I give Burke a role in the escape which goes some way to making it more credible. Who knows? Perhaps British agents were involved which might explain how a rebel leader was able to just walk out of gaol and make his way to France (where the French promptly arrested him).
Burke’s experiences in Ireland go some way to explaining his cynicism later in his career. It’s an important story in his life and a fascinating glimpse into the history of Ireland. I hope you enjoy it.
I imagine that everybody who reads this blog has realised by now that I write historical fiction. What I think some people still don’t know is that I have a sideline in Urban Fantasy.
I enjoy writing Urban Fantasy. It takes more research than I had expected. Sometimes I need to consult 16th century French volumes about werewolves. Other times I’m checking maps of the Palace of Westminster or the type of weaponry favoured by Special Forces. It’s still massively easier than all the historical research that underlies the Burke series. The field trips, too, are much simpler. A visit to Brompton cemetery is much less demanding than a trip to Portugal, although Portugal was a more romantic place to have a holiday.
What exactly is Urban Fantasy? Basically, it’s fantasy stories, featuring such old-time favourites as vampires and werewolves, but set in realistic contemporary settings.
A vampire hero
I’m just finishing the third of my Galbraith & Pole books. These all feature a Metropolitan Police detective, Chief Inspector Galbraith, who has ended up partnering Chief Inspector Pole from the mysterious Section S. While Galbraith is very human, Pole is a vampire. To start with, Galbraith is uncomfortable working with the Undead, but gradually they become good friends. I like to think of the books as police procedurals with added bite.
Why a vampire? The idea came to me on a visit to Buenos Aires, a city distinguished by amazing cemeteries in which the dead rest in little houses that form busy streets. Buenos Aires is, of course, also famous for tango. Tango in South America is mainly a nocturnal activity and I found it easy to imagine the dead leaving their mausolea to dance. Tango songs often feature death and lost love, so I thought they would appeal to vampires.
Recoleta Cemetery, Buenos Aires
My beloved explained gently to me that English readers might struggle with a story set in a country and culture they didn’t know. Could I move my vampires to London, for example? So I came up with a vampire sub-culture based around Brompton Cemetery.
Brompton Cemetery, London
The idea of Urban Fantasy is to have your fantastical creatures firmly based in the real world. Could I make a credible 21st century vampire?
Creating vampires that could live among us involved I certain amount of tweaking of the vampire legend. Obviously my vampires can’t go out in daylight, although high factor sunscreen can extend their operating hours a little. They wouldn’t be vampires if they didn’t drink blood, but they really don’t need that much blood and the vampire subculture does have humans who get a kick out of making donations – or, at a pinch, there is animal blood. Like traditional vampire, it takes piercing the heart to kill them, although a stake is not necessary: a bullet will do the job just as well.
Chief Inspector Pole explains that many of the other attributes people ascribe to vampires are just myths. He enjoys garlic and it’s perfectly possible to take his photo.
Pole dislikes the term ‘vampire’, which he thinks has negative connotations. Instead, he prefers to speak of ‘the Others’, as opposed to the Mortals they live amongst. They are able to hide in plain sight because of a long-standing arrangement whereby they make their services available to the Crown in exchange for a blind eye being turned to their existence.
Pole used to be called Paole. Perhaps he is related to the historical vampire Arnold Paole, who lived in Serbia in the early 18th century and whose vampiric activities were the subject of an official report by the Austrian authorities. Who knows?
Do I believe in vampires? Let’s put it this way: in the tango clubs of London I meet people who seem to have been dancing for decades but who never show signs of aging. And I’ve never seen them out by daylight.
Monsters in the Mist
I’m just finishing the third Galbraith & Pole story, which finds them out of London, hunting a mysterious killer in rural mid-Wales. Both Galbraith and Pole are creatures of the city and entirely out of their comfort zone on open moorland with nothing to disturb the silence but sheep. There is something out on the hills, though: something that has killed once and may well kill again.
Our heroes’ search for the secret behind the monsters takes them to Porton Down, where scientists are pushing genetic research into dangerous areas. It ends in a bloody climax at a secret military base hidden at the end of a service road on the M4.
Porton Down is a real place as is the secret military base. In this crazy 21st century world, is it really the vampires that are the hardest thing to believe?
The Galbraith & Pole series
The first Galbraith & Pole book, Something Wicked, sees Pole working with Galbraith to track down rogue vampires who have killed a member of the House of Lords. There’s a lot of tango. (I told you that vampires like tango.)
The second book, Eat the Poor, asks, if your MP was a werewolf, would anybody notice.
Both books are available on Amazon as paperbacks or on Kindle.
Monsters in the Mist will be looking for beta readers in the next week or two. I’m hoping it will be ready in time for Halloween. That seems appropriate.
