Authors Electric

Katherine Roberts’s blog post a few days ago about the tyranny of social media struck a chord. Social media have changed our lives.  First Facebook, whose friend connections at least made sense. I mean, it’s just another way of connecting with friends you have in real life, isn’t it? (IRL if you will… see what I did there? Oh heavens, two deeply irritating social media cliches in one go. Sorry.) Oh, and their relations, who you may have met. And their in-laws, who you definitely haven’t. And then… crikey who are these totally strange friends from round the world I’ve never come across before? Photo by Leila Larochelle: https://www.pexels.com/photo/ white-and-brown-deer-standing-on-snow-10709569/ Then Twitter, which revolutionised everything. I remember when I first, tentatively, tweeted and followed other accounts. How amazing it was to connect with people I had absolutely nothing to do with and would never come across otherwise, not just in different parts of the UK but on d...

   L.A. Times Newroom 1963, the day JFK was shot Once again, I dwell in the alternate history of a work to which I keep returning. Maybe it's a novel, maybe a novella, maybe a string of stories I'm trying to unravel. Meanwhile, what we call reality looks more and more like science fiction or a Borges reality. Indulging fatalism and its first cousin cynicism might be easier at my advanced age but for family. My concerns are both abstract — for humankind and our furry friends and real for the younger hopeful members of the mixed heritage and gender choice clan to which I belong. As I write this we await the momentary arrival of little Nora, who will be my fourth great grandchild, expected baby of my granddaughter Fiona Reynolds in San Francisco.  Granddaughter Fiona & mom Alicia    More than ever, I see us handing a shabby future to little Nora when we could have done — nay, we have to do — so much better. I always took the works of Margaret Atwood, William...

Brahe's lost star tracker Happy new year! Time to reckon, to reflect and to resolve, or so they say. Not my strong points. My mind roils with riptides. I have to swim criss-cross if I'm to make it ashore. Don't expect any consistency here. Besides, as Emerson pointed out, it's overrated. "A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds," he wrote, "adored by little statesmen and philosophers and divines. Now we march into the third decade of the twenty-first century, too many out there goosestepping to the deadly drums of tyrannies past. You can't call this mess millennial anymore. No more excuses. With a precious few notable exceptions, this brave new century has been a big disappointment. Those of us who came of age in the last century expected so much more.  We see no magic-bullet cures for major diseases, only Big Pharma raking in obscene profits for incremental palliatives with terrifying side effects that announcers list i...

At the beginning of the nineties I started to receive phone calls and letters from people who wanted to write about abuses they had suffered in their childhoods. These were not people who had had the misfortune to be born in countries that were enduring brutal dictatorships, civil wars or ethnic cleansing campaigns, these were people who had been born and bought up in democratic, peacetime Britain , a country that prided itself on being civilised, with developed social welfare services. Their calls seemed to be cries for help and as I talked to them I became aware of just how much courage it had taken most of them to pick up the phone in the first place. These were people whose experiences did not lead them to expect to be listened to or believed but they had the courage to keep on trying to tell their stories. Many of the things they told me tore my heart out and I felt sure there would be a readership for them if I could just get them out into the bookshops. I ...

 Got your attention?   Spoiler alert. This is not really a post about detective fiction. It’s about having to be a detective in order to read fiction. An alternative (long) title might be: In this democratised world of fiction you can read any book you like as long as it’s not ‘Safety Last.’ It will not have escaped the notice of regular readers of this blog that I have been engaged in a collaborative venture with the writer known as Samuel Rutherford Crockett (1859-1914).  Because I have a bit of the detective in me naturally – ie, I’m keen on researching as deeply into something as I can – I  discovered that one of his daughters was also a published writer. (Julia Jones/Allingham Family bells ringing anyone?) Ruth Mary Rutherford Crockett (1888 -1957) wrote under the name Miss Rutherford Crockett, or simply Rutherford Crockett. This in itself provides search engines with something of an issue.  However, I managed to find that she was publish...