Various

[davidgillon]

Submitted my story "The Ship that Never Was" to the Derelict anthology (a couple of days ago, so not quite last minute). As I noted in the pitch letter, derelict stories are almost inevitably a combination of a sea story and a detective story, but adding a spy story element is a bit different. Some of you will have guessed from the title that I was riffing on "The Man Who Never Was".

Still haven't had any snow here, but we just had our first noticeably hard frost of the winter, with it not clearing from the roof tops until about 1PM.

I dashed around the garden like a mad thing for 15 minutes yesterday (didn't get out 'til 3:45 and it's dark by 4:15) picking up branches brought down by Storm Bella and completely filled the garden/recycling bin ahead of today's rubbish collection. Then found out later a) today's collection is happening Saturday, b) and they're not collecting the recycling bins.

I just answered the door to someone trying to deliver a parcel next door, only it's so long since I was out I couldn't find the front door key (turns out it was in my coat pocket) and he had to hand the package to me through the kitchen window.

I spent part of yesterday afternoon considering that a year ago I'd never have predicted being more interested in the parliamentary business coming after the Brexit Bill (the announcements on most of the country going into Tier 4 lockdown, plus what they were doing about schools), than in the Brexit Bill itself. I still think it's an utter disaster, but it comes a distinct second in comparison to Covid.

I'm going to be very pissed if my mother's second dose of the vaccine is delayed, because apparently in among the details of 'we can give the Oxford/AZ vaccine doses 12 weeks apart' was 'so we're also going to do that for anyone who hasn't had their second dose of the Pfizer vaccine, even though there's no medical evidence to say that will work'. https://www.theguardian.com/society/2020/dec/31/covid-vaccine-uk-doctors-criticise-rescheduling-of-second-doses

Recent Reading

T E Kinsey, Lady Hardcastle Investigates

Amazon has the ebooks for £0.99 so I thought I'd give them a try, and I really like them.

A Quiet Life in the Country

It's 1908 and the widowed Lady Emily Hardcastle and her lady's maid Florence 'Flo' Armstrong (our quietly lethal narrator) arrive in the sleepy Gloucestershire village of Littleton Cotterel, having rented a house newly built by a family friend who has had a change of plans and is staying out in India. It's rapidly clear that Lady Hardcastle and Flo don't have the typical Mistress-Maid relationship, dining together and being mutually sarcastic ('come, tiny servant', 'Fear not, aged employer'), and it soon becomes apparent that there's very little conventional about them, such as hints that the ditzy socialite would have had a first from Cambridge in Natural Sciences if Girton had been allowed to award degrees at the time, and that she and her tiny Welsh maid used to work for the Foreign Office, and as rather more than a diplomat's wife+maid. But, odd as they may be, they fit right into village society, getting on particularly well with Lady Gertie and Sir Hector, the local semi-impoverished landowners and ex-India hands.

So Lady Hardcastle is invited to the engagement party for Gertie and Hector's daughter, who is marrying the son of a well-established Bristol shipping family, and Flo is willingly loaned to help out the household staff. There's a band, and drinks, and dodgy guests, and a murder. So enter Inspector Sunderland of Bristol CID, who is pretty sharp. And he soon figures out that Lady Hardcastle and Flo are a sharp pair of eyes and ears for when he's not about. What he doesn't know is that Lady Hardcastle also has a second commission in relation to the party, and that the two are likely connected.

In the Market for Murder

When Gertie drags Lady Hardcastle and Flo out to the local cattle-market they're expecting a boring morning and maybe an okay lunch in the pub, not the excitement of one of the local farmers dropping dead face-first into his beef and mushroom pie. When it turns out that he was poisoned it seems like a job for Inspector Sunderland, but he's busy trying to unravel a bank-robbery plot, so deputizes Lady Hardcastle and Flo to investigate for him (I did find this a little unrealistic). Unfortunately (and traditionally) it turns out that the dead man was soundly hated by everyone who knew him, including his wife and son, so there's no shortage of suspects, nor of villagers leaping to conclusions about whodunnit.

Running in parallel with this are shennannigans among the local rugby club, for which Sir Hector is emeritus chairman. The team is having an unprecedented run of success and when it turns out that Lady Hardcastle's a fan and that Flo used to play wing for her local boy's team in the Valleys they're quickly adopted by the team. When the newly won trophy goes missing it's inevitable who Sir Hector should turn to for help, and just coincidentally the team is full of local farmers, aka the suspects in their other investigation.

On top of which there's a visiting psychic, nighttime disturbances by 'the spirits' at the local pub, where she's staying, and a new resident accused of murder by a ghostly apparition. This one is mostly down to Flo to investigate, given she grew up in the circus before her mother went back to the Valleys, and therefore knows all of the tricks of the trade.

Death Around the Bend

Lady Hardcastle and Flo are invited to a house-party being held by Edmond 'Fishy' Codrington, Ninth Earl of Riddlethorpe, who was one of her brother Harry's college chums. Fishy is launching his new motor racing team, so staying for the week alongside Harry, Emily and Flo are his business partner, his slimy racing driver, and his professional rival, the Austro-Hungarian Herr Kovacs (the obligatory sinister foreigner), while on the distaff side are Fishy's sister Lady Lavinia, and her friends the spiky Mrs Bellows and the meek Helen Titmus. Flo, of course, also gets to meet the belowstairs side of the household, including Mr Spinney, the amiable butler, Mrs McClellan, the coldly ferocious housekeeper, Morgan the mechanic/driver, and Evan, the lazy and arrogant footman, while she's sharing a room with Betty Buffrey, Mrs Bellows long-suffering lady's maid.

The launch party goes fine, but a race on Fishy's own household circuit between the male visitors (they toss a coin and the ladies will have to race second), ends in tragedy, with Fishy's unpleasant racing driver dead of a broken neck. An inspector calls, and quickly makes it clear he thinks the annoying toffs got what they deserved, and it was clearly an accidental death. Which is possibly a bit of a reach seeing as Morgan and Lady Hardcastle have already worked out one of his brake-cables was cut.

So with the police writing themselves out of the investigation, Lady Hardcastle and Flo are free to investigate, which is just as well when the murders start to escalate. But is it really all about Fishy's racing team?

And I'm now working on "A Picture of Murder", which I'm only a few pages into, but the author has clearly found himself a new reference book on Gloucestershire dialect and everyone is now calling everyone else 'my lover,".

Comments

[slashmarks]

The Lady Hardcastle books look very up my alley, thanks for the reviews!