Short stories are brilliant

I’m travelling over the Pond today, guest blogging on Eric Mayer and Mary Reed’s Retiring Writers blog. Though we’ve never met face-to-face, thanks to the Internet we’ve become good friends over the years, and we share a love of reading and writing historical fiction, both long and short. Mary recently reviewed my new anthology, A PINCH OF PURE CUNNING, and now they’re allowing me to enthuse about the short-mystery form in general, and to bring news of a competition for unpublished mystery short stories. I think short mysteries are brilliant. Do you agree? If not, why not? Drop in and give us your two cents’ worth at
The Retiring Writers blog

Home thoughts – from home

April garden blossomsLockdown is treating us relatively kindly this Easter. Our garden is blooming, and the woods where I take my one permitted walk each day are a blaze of colour too, with birds going bananas on almost every tree. Yesterday it all reminded me of a favourite poem, Robert Browning’s “Home Thoughts from Abroad.” I remembered it from schooldays, and I recited it to myself and the dog (but I don’t think she was paying attention.) And I wondered: What would Mr. Browning make of our present weird situation?

 

Spring garden border“Oh to be in England now that April’s there.”
Would Robert Browning wish that now, with lockdown everywhere,
And troubles piled on troubles? Why yes, it’s my belief
He’d still recall the magic of the greening brushwood sheaf.
For the chaffinch sings on the orchard bough,
In England, now.
And after April, even though
There’s yet more grief,  Browning would know
You still can see the blossoms on the clover,
And hear the wise thrush sing his songs twice over,
To prove that still, in spite of everything,
You can’t lock down the spring.

Anyone know any Roman jokes?

We may have to be physically isolated just now, but thank the gods for the Internet. I reckon it’s time to share a smile or two. “Now is the time,” as the old saying has it, “for all good men to come to the aid of the party.” Does anyone else remember, as I do, bashing out that sentence time and again as a practice piece when learning to type? I was taught old-school touch typing and here I am to prove I can still do it…give or qake the occasional mistoke.

And now IS the time for all good people to come to the aid of each other and raise a smile. And as I’m hooked on Roman stuff, I’m asking: does anyone know any Roman jokes?

Here’s one for starters:
Where does Julius Caesar keep his armies?
Up his sleevies.

OK, OK…I still have to smile, and I thought it was the height of wit when I first heard it. Mind you, I was only nine years old at the time. In fact now I come to think of it, most of the Roman jokes that have lodged in my memory come from schooldays, where we all learned Latin as a matter of course, and they aren’t really originally Roman anyway. But they still raise a grin, for me anyway. Have my tastes improved at all? Read on, intrepid surfer, if you dare…

One or two at least purport to be in Latin. How about this bit of doggerel, which I discovered at the ripe old age of twelve? As you’ll know if you’ve encountered this antique ???gem in your own mis-spent youth, the trick is to read it out loud:

Caesar adsum iam forti,
Pompey aderat.
Caesar sic in omnibus,
Pompey sic in at.

I’m sure I must have read many adult examples of Roman jokes while researching for my Aurelia Marcella novels The Romans certainly had a sense of humour, and so I hope do my books. Why is it then that it’s mostly the silly ones that have stuck?

I do know one authentic original joke though, mentioned in Mary Beard’s book Laughter in Ancient Rome. I can’t remember it word for word, but here’s the gist:

A king on a royal progress through his kingdom spotted in the crowd a man who looked so like him that they could have been twins. He beckoned the stranger over. “How remarkably alike we are, my good man. Did your mother work at the Palace at some time?”

“No, Your Majesty, never. But my father did.”
Not bad, is it?

Here’s one more bit of silliness for anyone who’s still reading this:

An Ancient Briton walks into a Roman tavern and the barman won’t serve him. “You’re not properly dressed,”he says. “We expect our customers to at least wear a tunic, but all you’ve got on is a pair of sandals and a lot of blue skin paint. Get out of here now!”

“All right, I’ll go,” the Ancient Brit says sadly. “But won’t you just give me one for the woad?”

So you think you can do better? Prove it. Drop me a note tablet, or better still, a comment, with your own contribution.

And keep smiling!

A Crime Writer’s Christmas

On the first day of Christmas my true-love sent to me
A plot for a murder mys-tree.
On the second day of Christmas my true-love sent to me
Two eager sleuths in a plot for a murder mys-tree.
On the third day of Christmas…
Three bent cops, two eager sleuths, in a plot for a murder mys-tree.
On the fourth day of Christmas…
Four sudden deaths, three bent cops, two eager sleuths…
On the fifth day of Christmas my true-love sent to me
Five red herrings!

Right, let’s fast-forward to twelve before we all die of thirst.

On the twelfth day of Christmas my true-love sent to me
Twelve likely suspects,
Eleven deadly motives,
Ten baffled boffins,
Nine bloodstained letters,
Eight unknown poisons,
Seven secret ciphers,
Six guns a-smoking,
Five red herrings!
Four sudden deaths,
Three bent cops,
Two eager sleuths,
In a plot for a murder mys-tree.

That’s my next novel sorted, then!

Happy Saturnalia, everyone

However you spend your December holiday, enjoy! I send you all my very best wishes. If we were back in Roman times, we’d be marking the midwinter solstice with Saturnalia – a time of partying, gift-giving, and eating and drinking. In fact quite a lot like our modern Christmas. And we’ve passed the shortest day of the year, so the darkness will start to shorten now.

And here’s hoping for a happy and successful New Year for us all too. The Roman god Janus, with his two faces so he could look forward as well as backward, is a happy symbol for the turn of the year. 2018 has been good for me on the whole and I’m hoping for more good things in 2019. Among other projects, I’m planning to finish my next, much-delayed, Aurelia Marcella mystery…don’t laugh, I mean it this time. Call it my first New Year resolution!

See you in 2019!

National Poetry Day

Calooh! Callay! Hip hip hooray!
Today is National Poetry Day.
The pundits say one could do worse
Than pen a line or two of verse.
But if originality comes hard,
Then here’s another way to be a bard:
You just create a poem that combines
A mix of other poets’ deathless lines.

I wandered lonely as a cloud
That floats on high o’er vales and hills.
All mimsy were the borogoves,
Among those dark satanic mills.
The boy stood on the burning deck,
Beware the jabberwock, my son!
My love is like a red red rose,
Miss Joan Hunter-Dunn, Miss Joan Hunter-Dunn.
In Xanadu did Kubla Khan
A stately pleasure-dome decree.
There’s peace and holy quiet there,
And is there honey still for tea?

That’s twelve lines done. Stick two more on it
And there you go, a blooming sonnet!

Tarantulas, friends or foes?

Last week I made friends with a tarantula. Jane with tarantula

I’m not making it up, honest. I held a live tarantula in my two hands for several minutes, and survived to tell the tale. Richard and I were visiting Bugtopia, an unusual kind of zoo which specialises in creepy-crawlies of all sorts. From butterflies to scorpions, from centipedes to spiders, there’s a huge selection. Many of them, like the giant tropical butterflies, you can see free-range, in an enormous glasshouse full of plants; others are in cages on view in the warm jungle-type atmosphere. But the best thing, the reason we went, is that visitors can arrange to have hands-on contact with some of the creatures.

In a quiet, dim room, we were the only two visitors for a presentation by one of the zoo’s staff. She was knowledgeable and entertaining and definitely, I felt, a safe pair of hands. She brought several specimens out from their cages to meet us, starting with a couple of cockroaches, impeccably clean although in the wild they prefer dirty places where they can scavenge food remains. Then a stick insect who, unlike the sedentary specimens I remember from school, crawled up my jacket, apparently wondering if I’d make a good tree.

Jane and millipedeNext a millipede; cute and friendly; a relatively small one, who’d have made me a bracelet if she’d chosen to wind round my wrist. The largest millipedes can be as long as your forearm, and no prizes for guessing which animal has won a Guinness Book World Record for having the most legs of any creature on the planet. 750!

Tarantula close-upFinally came the tarantula. I’ll admit I was quite uneasy about this one. I remembered – do you? – that scene in the very first James Bond film, “Dr. No”, where Bond has a tarantula planted in his bed and has to lie still while it crawls up his body. But our spider turned out to be a peaceful pussy-cat. She was a Mexican Red Rump, though as she’s recently shed her skin she wasn’t showing any red. Our instructor passed her carefully to Richard, reassuring us that tarantulas don’t deserve their fearsome reputation. They do NOT kill people. Their bite is unpleasant and may be painful, but not deadly. They are reluctant to attack people anyhow, unless seriously threatened, preferring to escape if they can. If they can’t, they give a series of warning signals, lasting several minutes, indicating “Keep back, I’m a scary monster.” They rear up into a threatening position showing off their fangs; then many of them – including the one we met – follow that up by shooting off bristles from their backs towards their opponent. You wouldn’t want one in the eye, but it wouldn’t kill you, and neither would the weapon of last resort. the less-than-deadly bite.

Eventually I felt reassured enough to take our spider in my hands, watching her warily. She was as good as gold, calm, alert but barely moving. I think she was at ease. I definitely was. I felt I’d made a friend, not endured an enemy. And the whole experience was truly fascinating.

Of course, being a mystery writer, I’ve realised there’s a problem. (A fly in the ointment?) I’ve always assumed that if I ever needed a poisonous spider as a murder weapon in one of my stories, I’d just introduce a tarantula, no explanation necessary because everybody knows. Only in this case what “everybody knows” is wrong. So I’ll have to find another venomous arachnid. There seem to be several candidates: black widow spiders, brown widow ditto, Australian funnel web…how about a crime set in Sydney?

Hmmm. More research needed, I think. Though it absolutely won’t be hands-on!

Albert Einstein was right

Albert EinsteinOf course he was. I’m certain of it.

“Oh, and you’d know, would you?” I can just hear my sceptical friends mocking. “You, a writer of historical fiction, have the nerve to applaud a genius in physics, about which subject you understand…maybe enough to fit on a very small postcard and still leave room for your signature?”

Well, no, I don’t understand the higher reaches of physics. Even the lower reaches. But scientists who do understand consider Einstein a genius, and that’s good enough for me. More than a century ago he formulated theories about space and time, matter and energy; “Life, the Universe, and Everything,” to quote a different kind of genius. Many of Einstein’s ideas seemed fantastical at the time. Yet many have been proven and are now accepted as true; resulting in (among other things) the development of nuclear power, the discovery of cosmic black holes, and the proof of gravitational waves, which three physicists in the US have just got the Nobel prize for detecting.

And anyway I’m not talking about physics. I’m talking about something even more important.

Imagination.

Einstein wrote: “Imagination is more important than knowledge. For knowledge is limited to all we now know and understand, while imagination embraces the entire world, and all there ever will be to know and understand.”

I was bowled over when I first read these words, coming from one of the greatest scientists of all time. As a fiction writer, I know how essential imagination is; I’d call it one of my most important tools, to be used with care but very often. My novels, set in the long-ago era of Roman Britain, need to be rooted in fact, in “all we now know and understand”, but not limited to that. Our knowledge of Roman times is patchy, ranging from pretty good in some things to virtually non-existent in others. I study what facts are known, because I want to get the historical background right when I’m trying to describe what life was like for people living two thousand years ago. Then, when the trail of facts runs out, I need imagination.

Einstein’s words brought home to me that great scientists aren’t limited to “all we now know and understand” either. These days we’re encouraged to think of scientists as being somehow different from other workers: tied to facts, they construct theories that grow logically, step by step. fact by fact, making a framework like scaffolding supporting a building. So, we conclude, probably there isn’t room for imagination?

Some scientists may conform to this stereotype, but not Einstein. Part of his genius was that he was not limited. He was prepared to think outside the box, as we’d say now. He believed we all should be. And his words should be posted on the wall above every writer’s desk. Correction: posted in every place of work, from lab bench to shop counter, from assembly line to tractor cab, from mineshaft to kitchen to tv studio.

“Imagination is more important than knowledge.” Everywhere.