Authors Electric

However, not just big guns but little ones, antique ones, homegrown and foreign. Not just guns either, but swords, daggers and hand grenades. There is no limit to the places a crime writer will go to get a real feel for his or her book. Ensuring accuracy is crucial, or so I told myself as I found myself winding my way north to visit an armoury. I think my books are somewhat unique in that my Detective, DI Shona McKenzie, and her team run around the streets of Dundee with guns in their hands. This despite the fact the Scottish police are not armed. Never let the truth get in the way of a good story. Before you write to say I shouldn't do this, Police Scotland themselves told me I should.  So, back to the armoury. I, and several other crime writers, spent the afternoon getting to know about, and handle, weapons of all shapes and sizes. I was particularly enamoured by the hand grenade. This is not fully loaded I may add, in fact it wasn't loaded at all but it was real. In...

'HEAD AND TALES' by Susan Price: cover by Andrew Price           The first story in my new e-book collection of folk-legends, HEAD AND TALES, is ‘ The Boy and The Blacksmith’ .           In short, the story is of a blacksmith challenged to a trial of skill by the King’s goldsmith.  On his way to the trial, the blacksmith meets ‘a raggedy navvy-boy’, who tags along with him.           Before the king and court, the blacksmith makes mundane horse-shoes, a scythe blade and a ploughshare – which will, he claims, ‘feed people’.  The navvy-boy visits the goldsmith’s shop and reports that the goldsmith is making wondrous things – a living apple-tree, a living fish, a corn-wreath, all of gold.           With the boy’s help, the blacksmith creates an iron deer, which kills the gold tree; an iron o...