Authors Electric

I went to see a play last month, written by a local Suffolk author, Suzanne Hawkes, with my friend, Virginia Betts, in the lead role. Pat and Ron – Writers in Crime was an exploration of the friendship between American crime writer Patricia Highsmith… “I write thrillers!” she interjects with an exasperated drawl. …and fellow author Ronald Blyth. He was Suffolk born and bred and they met when she stayed in the county. The play was brilliantly written and acted and I found out much about two authors who I confess I’ve not read. However, the most surprising thing I learned that evening had nothing to do with their literary works, or character creations. I discovered that Patricia Highsmith collected snails. Maybe not too much of an odd fact on its own, but her penchant for these slimy creatures went even further as she used to keep them in her handbag with a head of lettuce when she went out and was even known to stick them inside her bra! She did have more usual writerly hab...

Today I’m being silly. My blog is the equivalent of an unexpected cream horn, or a Fruit Shrewsbury with a nice cup of tea, or a toasted cheese sandwich with home made chutney. Something which I trust will give you a warm glow and a bit of a chuckle in the face of increasingly worrying news on the world stage.     I can absolutely guarantee that you will not learn anything about writing technique or the Oxford Comma or marketing strategies for the self-published, or anything else about which we writers often pontificate. I am simply going to share some Funny Stuff with you.   You’re welcome. This blog is coming to you from the Palace of Creativity (see photo), my lovely writing studio in the garden. I share the Palace with an elderly armchair for visitors, a bookcase full of research volumes, whiteboards with my 'To Do' lists written upon them and two neat piles of boxes containing my books, The Diary of Isabella M Smugge and The Trials of Isabella M Smugge . Now the...

German ship losses WW1 I start this blog with two images and some disembodied faces . The first of the images are the roughcast concrete walls in the Laboe naval memorial on the Kieler Fiord.  There are two walls facing across the main chamber. They are slate-grey like an officer’s field uniform and crammed with the thick black outlines of sunken ships.  They record the Kaiserliche marine and K reigsmarine losses in two world wars. It was the diagrammatic aspect that I found chilling. It encouraged one to compare and contrast 11 U-Boote lost in the first war with 840 in the second. 46 Luftschiffe in the first, none in the second -- as if this was about technological change not human lives. The crammed outlines on the second wall were unforgettable. They represented 120,000 dead and missing men German ship losses WW2 Shipwrecks around the British Isles (all)  The second image may not exist. I imagine it is night and I can see the lights from a constant series of wreck b...

In the latter part of this strange summer my son Bertie and I have been working on a history of Waldringfield. A k a ‘Wunnerf’l’ as the Suffolk pronunciation has it – which the locals are quick to point out is almost indistinguishable from the correct way to say ‘wonderful’. ‘Wunnerf’l Wunnerf’l’ runs to 314 large and glossy pages with somewhere in the region of 618 photographs and is a tremendous achievement by the Waldringfield History Group -- and also by Bertie who was responsible for design and typesetting. At the outset, however, I wondered where we would ever reach our collective goal of publication by Michaelmas (Sept 29th).  The two pages of foreword entitled 'Wonderful Waldringfield' went through a larger number of politely argued re-writes than any other section of the book. Everyone had their view on what precisely constitutes the particular wonderfulness of this Suffolk village. The answer, of course, is the Deben. 'The River Deben means many things to many p...

The stepmother in Pebble is not a bad person. Her name is Lottie Livesey.  She’s sensitive and caring (if occasionally a little too determined to do what she believes to be right) and there is never any doubt that she loves her stepsons (Luke and Liam) just as much as she loves her daughters (Anna and Vicky). She’s also far too principled and clear-thinking to allow her deteriorating relationship with their father to lessen her concern for his boys. So, how to get her off the stage and allow them the freedom to get into jeopardy? The solution seemed delightfully simple…put her on it.  Lottie is a folk-singer whose career is beginning to take wings. In The Lion of Sole Bay I dispatched her to a recording studio in Italy to make her breakthrough album. I thought she’d earned a holiday after her grim time as an invisible, illegal, worker in the early volumes, living  in a shipping container somewhere half-finished in the Ipswich docklands. Three of the four chil...

"The curfew tolls the knell of passing day The lowing herd wind slowly o'er the lea, The ploughman homeward plods his weary way, And leaves the world to darkness and to me." Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard by Thomas Gray (1716-1771) Ramsholt Church by Jack Merriott (1901-1968) All Saints Church, Ramsholt,stands alone at the top of a low hill overlooking the River Deben. It may have been a watch point to give warning of invasions from the sea and it’s impossible to sail past in either direction without looking up at it and feeling recognition. My father’s ashes are in the churchyard and my mother plans to be buried there as well. Even Francis, non-Suffolk-born and a non-believer, has said he would choose Ramsholt to be his resting place. The church yard is unkempt and full of wild flowers, either blooming, delicate and colourful, or withering and dying, gently, in due season. The round tower has buttresses that make it appear oval. I wonder whether...

Claudia Myatt's new cover for A Ravelled Flag I knew it was going to be a successful outing as soon as I got the teacher's response to the weather forecast. It was mid-October and we'd planned to take her class of ten-year olds exploring alongside the River Stour in Suffolk. I'd warned her already that they might get wet feet by the end of the day but now I needed to tell her that we were also likely to encounter rain and strong winds. Not a hurricane, you understand, but gusts that might reach 40mph and possible heavy showers.She'll cancel, I thought to myself gloomily. I was part of the way through a project for the Essex Book Festival, working with schools in the Tendring Hundred area of Essex. My job was to talk about the stories in my Strong Winds series, then encourage the children to write adventures of their own. Each school wanted something slightly different. The headteacher of this school (herself a sailing enthusiast) suggested that the Y6 ...