They say that if you want to make God laugh, you should tell him your plans. I had some vague plans about using November blog posts to try to sell the odd book. Even with my attempts to cut back on blogging, I still post something almost every week and most of them are remarkably unconnected to the business of getting you to buy the stuff I write. So November should be nose-to-tail selling posts. Then I suddenly got my spot on the NHS waiting list to get a new elbow (details HERE if you’re interested) and my selling blogs skidded to an unscheduled stop.
So here we are in December and I hope that I still have time to encourage you to buy a friend one of my Galbraith & Pole books for Christmas.
Galbraith & Pole is my foray into Urban Fantasy. I didn’t even know what urban fantasy was until I started to write it. Apparently it’s fantasy stories (in my case featuring vampires, werewolves, and mad scientists doing exciting things with genetic modification) which are set in a realistic contemporary environment. If you’ve read Rivers of London, that’s the sort of thing I mean. (And if you haven’t, can I suggest that you should?)
I’ve written three Galbraith and Pole stories so far and I hope to write more. They are an awful lot less work than historical fiction (he said with feeling after nine months stuck in the world of 1812). I really enjoy doing them but, sadly, with only three they don’t have the visibility of the James Burke series. People who have discovered them seem to like them. Here are some comments on Amazon:
A cleverly-conceived, well-written and excellently plotted novel about murder, policing, vampires, and Tango… fresh, original, and hugely entertaining.
This is a fast paced good read … I shall never look at Brompton Cemetery in quite the same way again!
If a book can be too engaging and unputdownable, then this one is a great example of such a novel.
Fun and fast to read, with just the right amount of black in its comedy.
All three are available in paperback at £6.99. They make excellent Christmas gifts.
During covid (remember that?) one of my lockdown projects was to make an audiobook of my Urban Fantasy novella, Dark Magic. I was encouraged by a friend who is a professional voice actor but it was a very amateur effort, recorded under a desk with a duvet providing some basic soundproofing. The result was quite fun, but not really intended as a commercial exercise. Still, it’s available on Audible and Spotify and elsewhere. Spotify even sent me codes so I could give copies away but, because I wasn’t trying to actively promote it, I never did anything with them. I’ve got a lot left, gathering electronic dust in hyperspace.
But it’s coming up to Halloween and I’d like to give treats to anyone knocking on my virtual door. If you email me at tom (at) tomwilliamsauthor.co.uk, I’ll send you a code (until I run out). There’s no catch and I’ll not add you to a mailing list. (I once tried to run a mailing list but it seemed a lot of work for not much return.) There’s no warranty either. If the codes don’t work, that’s too bad (though I know some people have used them successfully).
If you like what you hear and you think you might enjoy the books, Dark Magic is available on Kindle and in paperback. You might also like to take a look at my Galbraith & Pole stories featuring the vampire detective Chief Inspector Pole.
Happy Halloween!
Header photos are from London’s Halloween skate. This year’s skate starts from Hyde Park Corner at 5.00pm on Saturday October 26th, weather permitting. Come and join the fun!
I saw a picture somewhere on social media posted by an author who is writing their first vampire book. I can’t find it now, but it showed a couple (presumably vampires) in a dance hold.
It will be fun if someone else produces a vampire tale featuring dancers with, let’s say, specialist dietary requirements, but I hope, dear readers, that you won’t forget that you saw it here first. My ‘Galbraith & Pole’ series (three so far, but there will be more) started with Something Wicked which features murder, mystery and tango.
They say you should write about what you know and I’m putting together this blog post between Monday night’s tango and Wednesday night’s tango with a couple more evenings of tango planned for the weekend. It’s fair to say that the references to tango in the book are well researched.
The idea of tango-dancing vampires came on one of my many visits to Buenos Aires, a city almost as famous for its spectacular cemeteries as for the celebrated dance. You seem to see so many more people after dark then are around in the day and, first thing in the morning, it’s easy to believe that the weary, somnambulant creatures propping themselves up on public transport are related to the Undead.
Buenos Aires street scene. Note that the dancers stay in the shadows
Chief Inspector Pole is not your typical vampire. He’s urbane and sophisticated and has been known to cook with garlic just to make a point. But mess with him and you can see a more ruthless side to his character. Fortunately, he uses his powers for good – mostly.
If you haven’t read my Urban Fantasy books before, give Something Wicked a go. It’s just £2.99 on Kindle.
Amazon reviews
Here are some of the things people have said about it on Amazon:
If you enjoy light, amusing and elegant humour and would relish the thrills and chills of the supernatural kind, then Something Wicked is definitely for you.
Cleverly-conceived, well-written and excellently plotted
I shall never look at Brompton Cemetery in quite the same way again!
A really great read! Who knew a story about vampires, detectives and tango could be so entertaining?!
On my blog last week, I mentioned my vampire policeman, Chief Inspector Pole. Most of you know me (if you know me at all) as a writer of historical fiction, but I also write Urban Fantasy. My Galbraith & Pole stories feature a vampire who works for the Metropolitan police.
As you will have realised, Chief Inspector Pole is not you average vampire. For this series, I tried to come up with a more 21st century take on vampires.
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 like to 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 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.
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?
Pole and his human colleague, Galbraith, have three adventures so far. They’ve tracked down murderous vampires in Brompton Cemetery, hunted a werewolf in Westminster, and even ventured out into the wilds of mid-Wales (well outside their comfort zone) when something strange is going on on the hillsides.
If you enjoy light, amusing and elegant humour and would relish the thrills and chills of the supernatural kind, then ‘Something Wicked’ is definitely for you.
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?!”
