Authors Electric

  It’s been a busy few days. Last week we visited a couple of castles, Linlithgow Palace first, most famous for its connection to Mary, Queen of Scots. My wife has had a fascination with Mary for as long as I’ve known her and the castle has been closed for the past few years for renovation work, so it was good to finally get there and soak up the atmosphere. As an aside, we also popped into the church that sits alongside, both for the stunning architecture and stained glass windows, and, for myself, to have a close look at the pipe organ they have – I’ve heard it in recordings of Bach and Widor, so it was good to see it in the flesh. Thursday was another train ride, over the Forth Rail Bride, to Aberdour, and have a look around the castle and gardens. This one will be familiar to anyone who’s watched Outlander, as it features as the Benedictine Monastery in the first series. One of the parts that really got me was the room with the painted ceiling. Yes, it’s faint, and...

 A Scottish hero is celebrating his 20th anniversary of appearing in print this year. He has hunted for lost princes, skirmished at Stirling, and joined a clan gathering, driving himself there in his Whirry-Bang. He doesn't travel alone. He has his English friend, Rupert...     His rather posh looking lady friend, Jeannie...          And his young friend, Angus...     Off they go to Skye, and the Falkirk Wheel. They visit the great Scottish capital, Edinburgh, of course, and also the second city, Glasgow. At Glamis they meet a ghost, or think they do -- and what Scottish hero could fail to hunt for the Loch Ness Monster?  Hamish is, in fact, a haggis, his full name being Hamish McHaggis. We all know that haggisses really roam wild and free throughout the Highlands, only caught by the most  skilled of Highland trackers. I confess to a shameless plug here, because Hamish was created by my good friend, Linda Strachan, working in ...

The Sterkarm Handshake - Susan Price Last month I promised to tell you about the hardest, most strenuous piece of research I've ever undertaken for a book. It came about because, while writing The Sterkarm Handshake, I realised that the horses in the book might as well have been bikes. I spent most of my childhood around dogs, so I know how they behave and the dogs in the book were convincing enough. But not the horses. Yet The Sterkarm Handshake was partly set in the 16th Century, on the Scottish Borders, and the Sterkarms were supposed to be people whose lives were built around horses. They would have been riding, grooming, feeding, training horses every day. I needed to be more familiar with the beasts. So when I saw an advert for a residential riding school on the Scottish Borders, which promised to teach you to ride in a week, I booked up. On the first day I was introduced to my mount. He was a Northumberland cob, so quite close to the kind of horse that  rei...

Recently a friend brought a book for me to read. It had achieved the extraordinary feat of being enjoyed by every member of her rather scary book club, so naturally I was intrigued.  The book was O Caledonia , by Elspeth Barker. O Caledonia by Elspeth Barker Set in a bleak, harsh landscape of 1920s Scotland, it is a glittering gem of black, gothic humour, the like of which I have never come across before. All the rules of story creation are thrown out the window. The heroine, Janet, is an unlikeable, awkward, bookish girl who relates to animals better than to people, and whose selfish instincts make her difficult for the reader to sympathise with. Moreover, she’s killed off on page 1. Found, at the tender age of 16, clad in a black lace evening dress, stabbed to death at the foot of Auchnassaugh Castle’s great stone staircase.  Not what you’re meant to do as a writer because, well, why would anyone read on if the main character is already dead? What kind of mind writes a comin...

I’ve been following the news this month with interest. As a writer in Scotland, I’ve been watching the introduction of the new Hate Crime bill and the (predictable) results. If you’ve not seen the detail, basically, if you say or write something that someone perceives to be hateful, then they can report it (and you), with the maximum penalty being 7 years imprisonment. As you can imagine, writers across Scotland have been viewing this with some consternation. I myself write quite dark, gritty psychological crime, and as such, I’ve written characters that run the gamut of the seedier side of life – violent, racist misogynists tend to feature quite a lot in crime fiction. In fact, I’d argue that part of the purpose of crime fiction is to explore the more unsavoury elements of society, and see what makes them tick – is it nature, or nurture, or a combination of both? But writing characters like these doesn’t mean I agree with their views. I’ve written characters before ...

Edinburgh Castle For some reason lost in the mists of time, or possibly dating from the Scotland Act of 1998, the Scottish census is separate from the one carried out in the rest of the UK, and it is only just in progress as I write - I think the theoretical date was the 20th of March 2022, but there is some leeway about completing the form. I've noticed people complaining about it on Twitter and vowing not to fill it in at all, so it will be interesting to see if they complain more if someone from the census team comes round to their house to try and persuade them to take part, and even more if they are fined for not doing it. As someone whose family history research has benefitted a lot from looking at historic census records, I am fairly happy in principle to fill it in. I wonder how different people's occupations will be in a hundred years' time when researchers might be able to look at the census records of today. Ours are quite a bit different from the occupations men...

 It's almost exactly a year since I published an account of my family history - under my real name, of course. It would seem quite odd to write something like that under my pen-name, although now that I come to think of it, a fictitious family history might be more interesting! After doing research on and off for years, I had been meaning to write it up for some time, and it turned out that the best time to do it was just when there was lots of other stuff going on in my life as well as in my writing. Actually I found it oddly relaxing to write non-fiction for a change, though there was a narrative thread running through this book as it was really the story of how I did the research, and I told it in the order the research happened, i.e. back to front in terms of chronology. I published it on Amazon, both electronically and in print, not to sell it to others particularly but to let the rest of the family, and some fairly distant relatives I've met in the course of my research, ...

An acknowledgement right from the start. I owe the inspiration for this piece to our fellow AE member (and my good friend) Eden Baylee. All will be revealed in due course.   Lochnagar My theme is the Scots dialect (or bits of it, anyway). I’m English but have been fortunate enough to live in Scotland for most of my life. You’ll have seen the images of the place – gorgeous, accessible hills and glens, lochs and rivers – heard the magical names – Loch Ness, Glencoe, – and you probably have your own ideas, positive or otherwise, about it. My focus here is on just one aspect of it, one which I, even as a Sassenach, appreciate as much as, or perhaps even more than some Scots do themselves, their language. What better word, for example, to convey the exact feel and nature of a dreary, rainy overcast day than ‘dreich’? Or what better label for a stubborn woman or naughty girl than ‘Thrawn besom’? (When I checked the spelling of this in my dictionary I couldn’t resist copying the exa...

  *When this goes out on 20 th , I should be in the Lake District, the latest covid restrictions permitting. Who knows? Of the group of old friends we meet there every year, two are shielding and two are effectively in lockdown in Northumberland. If we get there at all, we could well be rattling round in the converted barn on our own and eating at home if the pubs and restaurants are shut. Still, we’ll be in a place we love; a place full of memories. The cover of my book Passing Places was developed from a favourite photograph Niall took some years ago – a view across Ullswater at the Glenridding end.   We don’t go in for heroic driving these days; we’ll have an overnight stop in delightful Sandbach on the way, and then grit our teeth for the horrors of the motorway, until we are past Preston and at some point the traffic eases dramatically, the landscape changes, we spot the first drystone walls and then look out for the heart-lifting first sight of the Howgills. I grew...