There have been stories of vampires – or something very like vampires – for thousands of years. Modern ideas about vampires can be traced back to mediaeval times, with vampire myths being particularly popular in Eastern Europe. Vampires entered English fiction in the early 19th century, but really took off with the publication of Bram Stoker’s Dracula in 1897.
Given the long history of vampires and the different cultures that produced vampire stories, it’s hardly surprising that there are many different versions of the vampire myth. Since Dracula, though, there have been some recurring tropes. Vampires burn in daylight, they can be killed by fire, holy water, or a stake through the heart. They are driven off by garlic. They can take the form of bats or wolves. Not all the stories include all the attributes and, lately, writers have had fun in twisting and experimenting with the attributes of their vampires. My own vampire creation, Chief Inspector Pole, enjoys cooking with garlic and certainly can’t turn into a bat, but he is, if not immortal, very long lived and he needs to drink blood to stay healthy. These two attributes seem to be the bare minimum and almost all vampire stories stick with them.
Kirsten McKenzie’s vampires are very much in this modern tradition. They have lived hundreds of years and they have to feed on blood, but beyond that she has chosen to concentrate on some mythic elements of vampire existence and twist or ignore others. Garlic, for example, does not feature at all, and her vampires have no links to bats, but (perhaps in the wake of Game of Thrones) they do seem tied to ravens, which feature ominously throughout her story.
The Vampires of York Tower starts with a prologue set in 1793. I found it a bit confusing, but stick with it. All will be revealed over 200 years later.
We move to today (and there are some neat contemporary references scattered through the book). We’re in York Tower, an upmarket apartment block in New York City. There’s no strong feel of the city as most of the action takes place in the building. York Tower is its own little world. Bronzed windows filter the light. (Picking up any clues yet?) Round-the-clock security keeps residents safe, insulated from the outside world.
We see much of the story through the eyes of the two guards manning the front desk on the day shift. Will and Rufus are ex-cops, happy to be off the beat but taking their responsibilities for security at York Tower very seriously. They care about the tenants and they are sad when several of them die suddenly. But these are elderly people and there is no reason to be suspicious.
There are some strange things going on, though. A mysterious messenger, always making deliveries to the same room – a room that should be empty. There are unexplained power outages and inexplicable smells.
Something bites Will’s neck. Nothing so 19th century as the twin puncture marks of a traditional vampire. In fact, we never really find out how the bite was administered, but this doesn’t get in the way of a pacey story that carries you along with it. Will thinks it’s just an insect bite but soon he finds he loses his appetite, becoming thinner and almost literally wasting away. He thinks it’s cancer, but his sudden sensitivity to light and increasing desire for red meat might give the rest of us a clue as to the real problem.
We begin to meet more of the residents. There are a lot of them, but they are well-drawn and quite easy to keep track of. This becomes even easier as the story moves on and there are fewer and fewer of them. We also meet the Tower’s owner, Richard Blackwood. (I told you to pay attention to the prologue.)
The New York skyline glittered beyond the tinted windows of the York Tower penthouse, a view that had captivated Richard Blackwood for decades. But tonight, his attention was fixed on his wife, Elizabeth, as she stood on the terrace, her silk robe billowing in the evening breeze.
“My dear,” Richard called softly, “you shouldn’t be out there. The sun has barely set.”
I’ll say no more about the plot. At this point you could reasonably assume that you can work the rest of it out, but you’d be wrong. McKenzie’s tale is full of unexpected twists. The finale, a battle royal conducted, naturally, in darkness, brings the book to a thrilling and satisfying conclusion.
Since I started my own Galbraith & Pole vampire series, I’m naturally interested to see how other writers approach the subject. The Vampires of York Tower moves at the breakneck pace that you might associate with New York, while Galbraith & Pole is more attuned to the rhythm of London. The New York vampires also, predictably, have a much higher body count. The dramatic action allows little time for the quiet humour of Galbraith & Pole, but readers are unlikely to miss this as they hurry through the pages. I loved it. The ending does leave the door very slightly ajar for the possibility of a sequel. I’ll definitely read it if there is one.
Galbraith & Pole
If you enjoy vampire stories, do please give Galbraith & Pole a look. One of the characters in York Tower is a dancer “who had spent Sunday afternoons dancing the tango in the park”. I’d love to think this is a nod from McKenzie towards Chief Inspector Pole, who is a great tango enthusiast. It’s a wonderful hobby for a vampire as tango clubs famously operate mainly in the hours of darkness. When a girl is found stabbed through the neck with the stiletto heel of a tango shoe, Pole gets quite upset about it.
The first, tango inspired, Galbraith & Pole book, Something Wicked is just £2.99 on Kindle. (£6.99 in paperback). And look out for a FREE Valentine’s short story on this blog on 14 February.
(AI image of ravens from Microsoft Bing Image Creator)
Jacqueline Reiter fans (and there are many) will know that she has been working on her biography of Sir Home Popham for so long that I’m not sure that her subject (died 1820) wasn’t still alive when she started writing. Late last year, the book was finally published by Helion (in their ‘From Reason to Revolution’ series) and it has been well worth the wait.
Popham was an unlikely naval officer. He had intended to pursue a career in law but financial problems in his family meant that he had to abandon his studies and find paying employment in a hurry. Aged just under 16, he joined the crew of HMS Hyaena as a first-class volunteer under Captain Edward Thompson, who became a surrogate father to him.
Under Thompson, Popham flourished, but when Thompson died, in 1786, Popham lost a valuable patron and learned a vital lesson about the reality of naval life at the time: promotion depended as much (or more) on who you knew than on your professional skill. Popham’s life from then on was as much about gaining political backing for his professional progression as about his naval skill and knowledge. Fortunately he had family connections in the East India Company and, for a while, he abandoned the navy to trade on his own behalf in the Far East.
From then on, his life was a confusion of political manoeuvring, naval work and making money, either alongside his official position or in independent ventures. Reiter’s biography is therefore a tale of ducking and weaving that would leave Del Boy speechless in admiration. Some of Popham’s activities resulted in official praise for his contributions to Britain’s naval victories, some went horribly, horribly wrong. Some were dubiously legal and some, Reiter suggests, were straightforwardly criminal. Popham seems to have spent a disproportionate amount of his time at courts martial, where his early interest in law was deployed in defences of breathtaking audacity, sometimes allowing him to talk his way out of trouble and sometimes digging himself deeper into it. As his career progressed, he spent time ingratiating himself with politicians and served as an MP himself, occasionally making lengthy speeches to defend his actions when they had become so outrageous that they drew the attention of Parliament.
It can be a difficult story to follow. Popham was not always entirely honest and some of his more controversial actions were concealed in a storm of verbiage that has clearly kept Reiter trapped in the National Archives for weeks.
In a career filled with stand-out moments, Popham is probably best remembered for two things. He developed the navy’s flag codes, most famously used when Nelson told the fleet that he expected every man to do his duty, and he took it upon himself to invade Buenos Aires, on the grounds that he was supposed to be in Cape Town and BsAs was so nearby that it would have been rude not to.
I admit an interest here. Popham features in my first book about James Burke, Burke in the Land of Silver, when he is on that infamous South American escapade. Whether he was just being Popham and mounting an invasion off his own bat or whether he had secret orders either encouraging him or directly telling him to do it, is one of history’s mysteries. Reiter is pretty sure he was on his own. I have my doubts, and I think that there is evidence to support his claim. But I’m biased. In Burke in the Land of Silver, I blame the army for the expedition’s ultimate failure and I back Popham.
Blaming the army when anything went wrong was a favourite Popham tactic.
Popham was an expert in combined operations at a time when they were even more chaotic than they are now – and inter-service tensions mean that combined ops are often a nightmare. Walcheren (in the Netherlands), which Napoleonic War enthusiasts can get very excited about, was a historic debacle on a grand scale. Popham was heavily involved. When it was going well, he claimed to be the mastermind behind the entire thing. When it failed (with around 4,000 dead of disease any many others desperately ill), it was all the army’s fault. Fortunately for him, the army was headed by John Pitt, Earl of Chatham, the subject of a previous Reiter biography, The Late Lord. Chatham was everything that Popham was not: solid, dull, not gifted with a great imagination, prone to idleness and a man of honour and probity. He was horribly ill-prepared to cope with the opprobrium directed at him by Popham and the naval commander who blamed poor Chatham for everything. The Earl took the fall, but Popham’s career never really recovered.
John Pitt, Earl of Chatham
Sidelined by the navy, Popham was sent to Spain to harass French forces in coastal areas and provide secure supply lines to Wellington. He proved really good at this but, as so often, over-reached himself, interfering in areas where his assistance was neither required nor appreciated and often alienating the people he worked alongside. (His repeated insistence in referring to the guerillas fighting alongside the British as “brigands” did not go down well.)
Having annoyed almost everyone who mattered, Popham ended up carrying senior diplomats out to India (feeding them at his own expense and, according to Lord Moira, feeding them badly). His irritation was taken out on the crew, who were flogged unmercifully, even by the standards of the day, and came close to mutiny. It was not a happy voyage.
Finally made a Rear Admiral, Popham would have been well-advised to count himself lucky and keep a low profile but that was hardly his nature. Shuffled off to a receiving ship in the Thames, his job was to reduce naval stations to a peacetime establishment. Essentially he was ushering in an era of naval austerity, so spending £5,000 fitting up his state cabin was probably not a good move.
His next job was a posting to Jamaica, ostensibly a respectable post but Jamaica was, literally, where the War Office sent irritating commanders to die. Sadly, his son was the first to go, dead at 17, followed by his daughter who succumbed to yellow fever. Ill himself (he had a stroke while in Jamaica), he returned to England in 1820, dying two months after his arrival back at Spithead.
This breakneck overview of Popham’s career comes far from doing him justice. There’s no mention of his various diplomatic efforts, some straightforward, some strictly unofficial, and some verging on espionage. He was busy on the diplomatic front in the West Indies, Russia, the Red Sea, and India. Sometimes he was very successful – the Tsar made him a Knight of Malta – sometimes less so – his unilateral attempts to negotiate with the Pasha of Egypt caused serious political embarrassment.
His hydrographic surveys resulted in charts that gave the British navy an edge over less well-informed enemies that lasted for decades. His involvement with submarines and torpedoes might have done the same with naval technology but his ideas were, perhaps, a little too far ahead of his time.
Nor does this summary cover his actual war-fighting. He was seldom on board a vessel involved in battle but, when he was, he often performed well. His efforts at Copenhagen were also, according to Rieter, “a complete success”, although the controversy surrounding the campaign meant that he did not, perhaps, get the credit he deserved.
Destruction of Danish vessels at Copenhagen
Popham was, indeed, a “quicksilver captain”: mercurial, hard to pin down, potentially valuable, but very toxic. The British do not like people who can be described as ‘too clever by half’, particularly when they are not shy of advertising their notion of their own genius. Popham was almost a caricature of the arrogant little swot who gets on everybody’s nerves. The sheer breadth of his achievements, far from working in his favour, simply annoyed people and, because he was always active, for every great success there was a highly visible failure.
Reiter’s biography tries to do justice to a man whose remarkable life can hardly be summed up in 350-odd pages but she has done us all a great service by giving us a solidly researched and highly readable account of a figure who deserves the attention he has not really been given over the past couple of centuries.
Popham features in the first James Burke book, Burke in the Land of Silver. The story is closely based on the adventures of the real-life James Burke, whose espionage activities laid the groundwork for the British capture of Buenos Aires in 1806. (The fact that the British had a spy in Buenos Aires is one of the reasons I suspect that Popham’s adventure had official backing.) Popham does feature in the story where he is presented in a generally favourable light. Like Popham, I’m inclined to blame the army for the debacle that followed the successful invasion. Whoever you believe, it’s a rollicking good tale. Buckles are swashed, women — including a princess and a queen — are wooed (almost certainly historically accurately) and villains are defeated. Burke in the Land of Silver is available in paperback or on Kindle.
Picture credits:
Popham portrait by unknown artist. Public domain
‘The Glorious Conquest of Buenos Ayres by the British Forces, 27th June 1806’ Coloured woodcut, published by G Thompson, 1806. Copyright National Army Museum and reproduced with permission.
Full disclosure: Donald is a friend I used to go street-skating with. So when he wrote a book about a teenage street-skater who gets involved with a ghost, I sort of had to read it.
I’m glad I did because it’s a blast. Fifteen year-old Stephen is orphaned when his dad dies of a heart attack while Stephen is out skating, leaving his son racked with guilt. Stephen’s father’s will has made his aunt Teresa his guardian. Teresa lives in Paris, so Stephen moves in with her in her apartment filled with old books of magic, the memory of her dead lover, and the ghost of a young boy.
Teresa used to be a research scientist working in the field of subatomic particles. Hounam has fun with the idea that modern quantum theory makes about as much sense to most people as magic. Teresa thinks that she can use quantum physics to recreate ancient magic. She tells Stephen that she might be able to use magic to summon the ghost.
Who is the ghost? Can Teresa really perform magic? Why have two young boys vanished mysteriously, close to Teresa’s apartment? And is Stephen himself in danger?
The mix of magic, mystery, murder, and other things beginning with M makes a satisfying page-turner of a story but Hounam uses this as a framework to hang a coming-of-age story on. Stephen is learning some hard truths about love, family, and relationships in between skating the famous Pari Roller mass street skate and learning to slalom on his roller blades. Hounam’s enthusiasm for the Paris street skate scene shines through and would probably have me picturing it even if I hadn’t actually lived it with him when we were both old enough to know better.
The assorted digressions from the main plot (an aunt with an obsession with religion, some nice observations of the casual cruelty of older teenagers to younger peers with romantic inclinations, discussions of guilt and loss) raise this above your standard ghost/horror story. I enjoyed it a lot and I would recommend it to anyone who wants to read something out of the ordinary, even if they’ve never been on skates in their lives.
Operation Tulip is the third and final book in Deborah Swift’s World War 2 Secret Agent series. Our heroine, Nancy Callaghan, started the war with the SOE, as a cipher clerk at their offices in Baker Street. She went on, though, to become a field agent, working as a radio operator in occupied Holland.
Operation Tulip is essentially a spy thriller. I won’t detail the plot because of spoilers. I hope you’ll read it and enjoy it for yourself. It really is a very good read. Deborah Swift is one of those writers who can really hook you into a story and (very unusually for me) I twice nearly missed my stop while reading Operation Tulip on the Tube.
Swift not only tells a good yarn but packs in a lot of history. It’s fair to say that she doesn’t like the Nazis. This was once such a given that it seems odd to be remarking on it, but nowadays so many people are prepared to suggest that extreme right wing politics has something going for it that it is worth reminding ourselves what happened when Europe last decided to give fascism a go. Swift is unsparing in her descriptions of Nazi atrocities. As her historical note (well worth reading) points out, in the winter of 1944/5, when this story is set, more than 18,000 Dutch civilians starved to death with a further 980,000 classed as malnourished. In places, OperationTulip is not an easy read.
Given the amount of historical detail, I would have welcomed more about the relationship between the SS and the Gestapo. I suspect my interest in the details of the organisation of the Nazi party and its agencies is not widely shared but lots of people are interested and, given that both the SS and the Gestapo feature a lot in the story, I worried about the details of the relationship between the two. I would have liked more about this, even if Swift had felt it would have been better dealt with in her historical note.
Swift is such a good storyteller that even a subplot which sees her boyfriend mounting a one-man rescue operation across the allied frontline manages to carry you along, although here we are moving rapidly away from the nitty gritty detail of SOE operations into James Bond territory. It’s all terribly readable, though, and certainly adds even more excitement and tension to an already gripping story.
In summary, this is a thrilling spy story set against a historically detailed background. I enjoyed it Immensely and I’m sure many others will too.
Operation Tulip goes on sale on 10 September and is available to pre-order now.
I’ve not been doing much writing over the last few months which has at least meant that I’ve been able to catch up on some of my reading.
I’ve had Tipping the Velvet on my list of books I want to read for ages and now I’ve finally got round to it. There’s an Afterward by the author, Sarah Waters, where she complains that “like many first novels by inexperienced authors, it is baggy and over written.” I’m nervous about disagreeing with her so much – she wrote it, so you’d think she’d know – but this is just wrong. I loved this book on so many levels but the first thing to grab me, from the very first paragraph, was the sheer wonder of the writing. Sarah Waters can summon up a place, a feeling or a person with apparently effortless prose. And that’s before we get to the story.
According to Waters herself, it’s a romp. It’s also, of course an exploration and celebration of lesbian history and gloriously, obscenely, wonderfully filthy.
Besides the sex, there is lovingly indulgent praise of the joys of the Whitstable oyster, a brilliant evocation of the music hall of the 1890s, an exploration of East End life and the birth pangs of socialism and, ultimately, [SPOILER] a surrender to romantic love and the joys of domesticity.
It’s one of those wonderful books that is widely and lavishly prised and which turns out to be even better than its reputation.
