John Wilcox Author

WILCOX ON THE VELDT

2012-01-20T05:36:00.000-08:00

Persisten bronchitis permitting, I fly out from London to Johannesburg on Tuesday to conduct on-the-spot research for Fonthill number nine, now firmly titled "FIRE ACROSS THE VELDT." This is, of course, set against the background of the second and best known Anglo-Boer War, the last of Queen Victoria's "Little Wars," although this one was certainly not so little.

The novel will be published by my new publishers Allison & Busby in January 20(hard back) with the paperback to follow in September of that year and the audio and large print versions due out somewhere in between.

As a previous blog refers, I have already begun writing the story but there comes a time when one has to visit the sites that one is describing to get the feel, the smell and the physical contours of the place to recreate it - even though it may have changed in 110 years. And that time has come for this book.

I have always tried to observe the factual chronology of my stories and I had a problem with this one. This lay in the fact that the first half of the Boer War, when the Brits took such a hiding from those "amateur soldiers," the Boer farmers, at Magersfontein, Colenso and Spion Kop, coincided with the Boxer Rebellion in China and I couldn't have Fonthill in both places.

But what seemed a problem turned into an advantage,for the second half of the conflict in South Africa, which coincided with the relief of Peking, turned out to be much more fascinating to me. As reinforcements poured into Cape Town from Britain and various parts of the Empire the tide of the conventional war turned and the Boers were defeated in set piece battles, losing their State capitals. The war seemed over and Field Marshal Roberts sailed for home, leaving General Kitchener to "tidy up."

K, however, sensed it wouldn't be that easy. The hard core of the Afrikan army took to the veldt, forming fast-moving units which lived rough and conducted guerrilla warfare against the extended British lines and outposts. Reading of Fonthill's exploits in China and knowing of his reputation as an irregular soldier, the General summons him to the Cape to help him "fight the Boers at their own game."

Fonthill can't resist the challenge. The trouble for me, however, was that the places where Fonthill and 352 Jenkins clash with the great Boer commando leaders - De Wet, Botha, Smuts et al - were mainly in remote regions of the Transvaal, the Orange Free State and the northern mountains of the Cape Colony, sites not always well described in the books of the period. So I must go and see for myself.

And if the clear air of the High Veldt doesn't defeat this lingering bronchitis, then I shall turn to drink.

Bloody bronchitis

2011-12-16T10:07:00.000-08:00

I have bronchitis. Now I know that this news is not up there on a par with the recent doings of the leaders of the European Union, nor even of the latest twist in Katie Price's love life. But, damnit, it has taken over my existence at the moment.

Any fool can have bronchitis, of course, but mine is PARTICULARLY INTERESTING and I feel I must share its fascinating details with you.

This is noisy bronchitis. Noisy, that is in two ways. There is the conventional rasping wheezing, coughing and expectoration (ordinary people spit; authors expectorate), which is so painful and debilitating. But my bronchitis has a very distinctive voice of its own, which emerges when I put my head on the pillow at night and desperately try to sleep.

You see, across my lungs and inside my chest there is coiled a serpent. It has two voices: an initial and constant bubbling kind of rasping murmur just to show you that it is there and and hates you. It is sufficient to keep you awake. Then, just when you think you might be drifting away, the second emerges.

This is when the serpent lifts its head from its coils and decides to strike. This is a manevolent hiss that precedes the slash upwards into the throat which brings on, suddenly and viciously, the bout of frenzied coughing.

Fanciful? Not at two a.m. it isn't, when you are all alone in the blackness
of the night and the terrors press in. Mind you, perhaps this is a form of bronchitis that only writers get. Creativity gone mad, do you think? Nah. Can't be. It's too real.

Swindon hears about Fonthill

2011-12-03T06:45:00.001-08:00

Those of you out there who follow the doings of Simon Fonthill, Jenkins, Alice and Co and who live within a spit or so of Swindon in North Wiltshire might care to know that I will be talking about them all at Highworth Library on Monday evening (5th Dec) at 7.30.

The talk is entitled "The Pitfalls and Pleasures of Writing Historical Fiction" but I will dig a bit into how these characters were created and developed. Everyone is welcome (no charge)and the address is Highworth Library, Brewery Street, Highworth, Swindon (just off the A419).

Do come and shout "Rubbish" from the back of the hall.

IMPERIAL ECHOES IN THE PLIGHT OF THOMAS COOK

2011-11-28T04:14:00.000-08:00

I am feeling distinctly sad about the Thomas Cook saga. You will know that the famous old company - Britain's second biggest tour operator - is virtually broke. It has net debts of £1billion, is said to be spending £30million a month and its share price has collapsed. It has gained a day or two of breathing space by negotiating a £200 million loan from its banks, so the word is that it will get through the crucial January holiday booking period. But its mid and long term future looks shaky.

I am sorry not because I depend upon the company for getting me about the planet, but because it played a not insignificant part in Britain's imperial history about which, some of you may have noticed, I rather like to write.

When, in 1896 Kitchener was planning his invasion of the Sudan to attack the Dervishes in Khartoum, way up river in the south, it was to Thomas Cook that he turned to take his supplies down the Nile to feed his advancing army. Without Cook's famous river steamers he would not have been able to fight the Mahdi's army at Omdurman two years later.

Sad that such a once important company is struggling in these hard times. Lord Kitchener of Khartoum must be turning in his watery grave.

FONTHILL RIDES AGAIN!

2011-11-18T03:35:00.000-08:00

These are the keyprints of a happy chap. Happy because my old mate Simon Fonthill is riding again. I have just left him at the end of Chapter One of the ninth Fonthill adventure, he having escaped the clutches of the famous Boer commando leader Christian de Wet, with Alice, Jenkins and their black tracker, Mzingeli, and boarded a British armoured train in the Orange Free State in late September 1900.

Yes. It's the Boer war - the second, because loyal readers will remember that Fonthill & Co fought in the first Anglo-Boer War, then called the Transvaal War, which ended in 'Last Stand on Majuba Hill.'

In fact, it should be admitted that the trio have been back for some time, having gone through the perils of the Boxer Rebellion in China in the eight novel, 'The War of the Dragon Lady,' which will hit the bookstalls in hard back in January and then in paperback the following September.

But for me I only know that the intrepid army scout - poor horseman, indifferent shot but inventive opponent of all enemies of Queen Victoria in so many of her 'little wars' of the last quarter of the nineteenth century - is alive again when I write about him. And it is good to have his company once more.

This novel (working title, which won't survive, is 'Commando!') is due out early in 2013. I am already saddle sore.

AH, THE POWER...!

2011-10-04T04:22:00.000-07:00

This blog doesn't usually wash its feet in the dirty water of politics - particularly those of another country. But it did recently bewail the rise of Rick Perry as favourite in the Republican race for nomination as US president, pointing out how unwise it was to tread in the footsteps of his Texam predecessor, the Great George W.

How satisfying, then, to read that Perry has now so quickly fallen away in the nomination stakes, following disclosures that as Texas Governor he lured subprime mortgage lenders to his state only to have to bail them out with $35 of taxpayers money.

Ah, the power of a blog! I really must see what I can do to bring down other despots: Mugabe, Putin, George Osborne, perhaps?

GEORGE W.BUSH - WHAT A HERO!

2011-09-06T09:52:00.000-07:00

Gloom and misery everywhere. The economies of Britain, the USA and the Eurozone are in deep trouble; the war in Afghanistan shows no sign of ending; Britain's MI5 is accused of complicity with America in the systematic torturing of terrorist suspects; thousands are awaiting sentencing following our recent riots; and President Obama's chances of re-election next year seem to be falling as fast as the stock markets.

Viewed from this side of the pond, the Republican party in the States seems to be in the ascendant. Desite the fact that no clear leader has emerged to take on the President next year, the right wing is chortling at the way it humbled Obama over the threat of a default on the nation's debts. Each of the putative Republican candidates seem to be jostling to appear more xenophobic than the rest. Tea cups are rattling all over the mid-West.

Now, would you believe it, the latest front-runner, Rick Perry, is Governor of Texas, he looks and sounds like his great forebear in the job, George W. Bush and he even wears cowboy boots!! To this lover of the USA, it seems as if the world has gone mad. May I, then, in the spirit of comradeship, beg the voters of the great US to consider recent history.

When George W. moved into the White House in 2001, the USA had a two trillion dollar budget surplus. It even looked as if the national debt of 5.7 trillion dollars could be eliminated by the end of the decade. It's worth reflecting what this other, older, cowboy-booted Texan then did.

He cut taxes, reducing annual revenues by 1.8 trillion dollars. He declared a war on terror and set up two military invasions far from American shores, financing them entirely by borrowing. The wars and consequent increases in defence spending added 1.5 trillion dollars to the national debt. At the same time, he looked on serenely as Wall Street and the American Banks over-lent, so precipitating the Western financial crisis.

By the time he left office, Bush had squandered Clinton's surplus and nearly doubled the size of the debt, adding more to it than any president in American history.

It would surely be an exaggeration to blame the man for all of the ills listed in my first paragraph. One person can't be responsible for all that, can he? Or can he? I acquit George W of causing the onset of winter and the arthritis in my right knee. But for most of the rest, there's a smell of Texan denim clinging to it all.

The American electorate should think on it.

A CYNICAL ASSASSINATION

2011-07-18T08:34:00.000-07:00

I never thought I would write these words, but here goes: I don't think that Rupert Murdoch should have closed down "The News of the World."

As an ex broadsheet journalist, I disliked the paper intensely and the recent revalations about telephone hacking and payments to the police merely confirmed my view that its news gathering was often unprincipled and its content usually cheap and poor journalistically. Shutting it down, however, seems to me to be a cynical attempt to divert attention from the projected BSkyB bid; throwing the paper to the pursuing wolves to save the occupants of the sledge.

As I understand it, the present staff of the newspaper are not accused of any wrongdoing. To throw them out of work, then, seems grossly unfair, even though Murdoch has stated that "most" of them are to be offered jobs elsewhere in his empire. And, crude and superficial as the NOTW's content always appeared to me, it was welcomed as an old friend into more homes in Britain than any other paper.

So I would have cleared out the stable but kept the horse alive - hunted down the original wrongdoers and those few who still existed in the newsroom and management corridors and passed them over to the investigating police. This old-established newspaper could have been scrubbed down and re-launched, keeping its title and most of its present staff and returning to honest news gathering, presented in vigorous tabloid style, and yes, studded with celebrity names for those who like that sort of tack.

The irony, of course, is that the sacrifice of the paper seems, on present evidence, to have been in vain. Murdoch has had to withdraw his bid for BSkyB in the face of public opposition, anyway.

His strategy now seems to be to lie low and hope that the fuss will die down so that he can make a renewed bid for control of the television channel later. Will it? Well, the old Aussie (though he gave up his nationality and became an American citizen just so that he could buy into American TV) remains a real live newsman with a flair for popular taste and opinion. He might just get away with it.

But he will have had the fright of his life. And a much loved piece of Sunday rubbish journalism will have disappeared from our week-end breakfast tables.

FONTHILL AND THE DRAGON LADY

2011-06-30T09:13:00.000-07:00

A breif confirmation to all fans of Simon Fonthill, 352 Jenkins and the feisty Alice, that the next and eighth Fonthill adventure featuring the three will be published next January 2012 (in hardback, then in paperback the following September) by new publishers Allison and Busby. It's titled THE WAR OF THE DRAGON LADY and is set in the year 1900 against the background of the Boxer Febellion in China.

Why "The Dragon Lady"? Well, Tzui Hsi, the Empress Dowager of China, was sitting on the Manchu Throne in Peking at the turn of the century, having deposed her nephew, the Emperor, when the Rebellion broke out. The Boxers were a cult of young, uneducated peasants who blamed the foreigners living in their country for most of its ills at this time - including the drought in North China which had dried up the wells, irrigation channels and rivers and blighted the rice drop. They took their revenge particularly on the Christian missionaries who populated the villages, brutally murdering men, women and children.

The threat from the Boxers - so called because of their love of martial arts, which paradoxically did not include boxing - would probably have petered out had not the Empress seen in their uprising an excuse to wipe out the influential foreign barbarians encamped in her Empire. So she surreptitiously encouraged the rebels and then aided them with her army.

A once beautiful, third grade concubine, she was a formidable woman in her mid sixties with a porcelain complexion and long, curved fingernails. She had survived years of scheming in the tortuous world of Manchu politics and now possessed total power. Her frequent use of the death penalty earned her the subriquet "Dragon Lady" and she sat back and watched with equanimity in 1900 as the Boxers and her own soldiers laid siege to the Ministers of the foreign powers and their families trapped in the Legation Quarter in the heart of Peking.

Into this cauldron rides Simon Fonthill, his wife Alice and their servant "352" Jenkins, on a visit to Alice's uncle, a British missionary. I reckon their adventures during the rebellion provides one of the best yet Fontill stories.

But then I would, wouldn't I?

GOOD ON YER, MR DAUNT!

2011-05-22T04:06:00.001-07:00

A word or two to welcome the best bit of news that has come my way for years from the embattled British bookselling scene: Waterstone's is going to be run by a bloke who says that each shop in the chain will from now on "feel like your local bookstore, not part of a chain."

The new Managing Director of the 296-branch company is James Daunt, a former investment banker (shucks, we can forgive him that now) who created the highly successful London mini-chain, Daunt Books, 21 years ago. These six shops bucked the misery trend for High Street bookselling, with their cosy interiors, well informed staff and a policy of not heavily discounting to combat the internet.

The Russian mogul, Alexander Mamut, who has bought Waterstone's from HMV, used to pop into Daunt's Holland Park bookshop. He liked what he saw and immediately installed the individualist to run Britain's largest bookselling chain. Now Daunt says that his policy in running the company will be to turn each outlet into "high quality local bookstores."

With E-books still only representing five per cent of the market, he says: "My belief is that physical bookshops within the community have a real future if they're good enough; they are a very important part of the intellectual fabric of our lives, just as libraries are. I would be extremely disappointed if we were to close any."

Daunt adds that Waterstone's will now have more books to sell, following the stock starvation caused in recent years by HMV's financial difficulties.

So a warm wet kiss of welcome and a firm handshake to this feller from this particular hardworkin' novelist, who is tired of hearing gloomy news from the bookselling business. Don't be daunted, Mr Daunt. Go for it, lad!

SECOND HAND WILCOX

2011-03-20T10:05:00.000-07:00

I have long known that there is a market out there for signed (but not dedicated!) first editions of my novels. Indeed, there are dealers who rush to buy the hardbacks as they come out and for whom I am more than happy to sign and write onto each title page a unique to them special line, such as "Meet Simon Fonthill," or "Charge the Guns."

On those rare occasions when I am suffering from Writer's Block (I am lucky that these really are rare moments - more than compensated, however, by my ever-present bad back and creaky knees), I go on-line and browse through Abebooks, the second hand book site, to see what my first editions are fetching on the market on that day.

At the moment, for instance, I see that PM Books, of St Clair Shores, MI, USA, is offering a signed first edition of my first novel "The Horns of the Buffalo" for £856.87. For an incomplete collection of my works, James N.Beal, of Toronto, Canada, is asking £951.87. This is all as thrilling, of course, as vicarious sex, in that I don't get a penny from these sales.

I am not, however, complaining about the existence of this strange and rather parasitic under-market. It is, after all, grist to the mill and hopefully does extend one's readership. But it has set me thinking about the new wave of electronic books and the lively debate about whether the Kindles will eventually lead to the demise of books as we know them.

I am left with one conclusion. These handy little readers must surely bring about the end of the signed, first edition trade. How can you sign a Kindle?

FAT OR WHAT?

2011-03-08T03:33:00.000-08:00

Just back from a brief holiday in the USA - it's most southern bit, Key West, which sticks out into the Carribean, or Gulf of Mexico, or the Atlantic Ocean, depending on which way you face. I've returned with a jumble of impressions, as I always do when I come home across the Atlantic: the high standard of living (well, I was on holiday....), the warmth and friendliness of most Americans, the banality of the television programmes, the fact that their cars are now just the same size as ours, and so on.

This time, however, the most abiding impression was of size. Everyone seemed so fat! Bottoms overhung bar stools like bags of wheat, middle age paunches seemed to start with college school kids and seven out of ten women seemed to have legs of mutton for upper arms. Hotel beds only came in two sizes: king and queen. It seems you were expected to be fat.

The reason was easy to find. Food served in restaurants comes in gigantic proportions, or so it seemed to these two pick-at-it--and-move-it-around-the-plate Limeys. And, of course, convenience food was the easy option everywhere. Just like...well, just like Britain, really.

Indulgence, however, is a well-engrained American habit. This was brought home to me in the pretentious over-priced hotel we stayed in on Miami Beach (designed by a Brit, I'm afraid). What do you think of this for a room service dish: "Beef with sweet potatoes and cranberries; or wild caught salmon with sweet potatoes and blueberries; or chicken with carrots, peas and apples; to go with beefy brown ale or Green Planet bottled water?"

Unexceptional I hear you cry. But for dogs.....?

Ah well. I guess we should bite our lips and remember The Marshall Plan.

2011-02-15T08:40:00.001-08:00

FONTHILL RIDES AGAIN

Allow me to use this (very) intermittent blog to announce that my long standing hero, Simon Fonthill, together with his feisty wife, Alice, and old comrade "352" Jenkins, have found new foster parents.

After seven novels published by Hodder Headline - and a brief interregnum while I wrote other things - the trio will reappear in 2012 under the banner of Allison & Busby, equally well established London publishers.

Two novels in the series have been commissioned. The first, with the working title of THE WAR OF THE DRAGON LADY, will be set against the Boxer uprising and seige of Peking in the China of 1900 and will be published in hardback in January of 2012, followed by the paperback (and audio and large print) versions some six months later. The second, tentatively titled COMMANDO, will follow with a similar timetable in 2013.

How on earth can the world wait....?!

PLAGIARISM

2010-11-13T09:35:00.000-08:00

I see that good old George W has published his memoirs. Did he, I wonder, write them himself? Or did he, like the Teapot Queen, get some minion to put his thoughts down on paper? We shall probably never know, but this question, burning as it is, is not what has driven me to create a rare blog. No, it is the ever present worry for an author that, somehow, in writing his story, he has committed plagiarism.

The question is prompted by the fact that the creators of Fela, the musical which has been wowing 'em on Broadway and which is shortly to open at London's National Theatre, are being sued by writer Carlos Moore for three million pounds. He claims that large chunks of his biography of the Nigerian muscician Fela Kuti were nicked in conceiving the musical.

The courts will have to decide whether the claim is true - ah yes, more money for the lawyers! - and the accusation of lifting "entire portions" of the book would, one would think, take the case out of the realms of accidential plagiarism. It is this area, however, which poses problems for the honest author, particularly the writer of historical fiction.

In thinking about the Fella case, my thoughts went back to my recent re-reading of the Kipling classic story Kim. It is, without a doubt, the best novel that the old Indian Hand ever wrote and, apart from its intrinsic value as a rattling good story, it paints a wonderfully vivid picture of the North West Frontier in the last quarter of the nineteenth century. As a result, I read it, along with many other books, when I was researching the period and the territory for my Fonthill novel, The Road to Kandahar.

Dipping into the old classic the other day my eye was caught by a simple but evocative Kipling phrase, "they rode above the bold birches that signalled, as though with a ruler, the end of the flora and fauna...." It sounded familiar. In fact, it sounded dreadfully familiar. Turning to the hard back version of Road, I found it reproduced on page 250, almost word for word.

Had I deliberately copied it from Kim? Surely not - even if the great novel was out of copyright and the Kipling Estate would have been rather unlikely to have sued. No. Somehow the phrase, exactly right for what Kipling was describing, had lodged in my mind and I had trotted it out, as, I thought, freshly burnished from my own imagination.

Perhaps we all do it subconsciously. I only hope that the creators of Fella have as innocent a defence...

"STARSHINE"

2010-09-08T08:57:00.000-07:00

I have just got rid of that monkey that has sat on my back for...ooh, decades, I guess. The little devil sat heavily there, for that long, whispering into my ear: "Write about the first world war, you wanker. You talk about it often enough. Write a bloody novel..."

So I have.

It's called STARSHINE and it's weighed in at just over 112,000 words. Not, of course, a novel in the Fonthill series - there are at least another two of these, set firstly in the Boxer Rebellion of China and, secondly, in the second Boer War, waiting to be written. No, this one is different and set firmly in what we used to call the Great War.

As I have described in earlier blogs, the experience in those muddy, bloody trenches of my father and his six brothers has haunted me for so long. But my thoughts stayed with Simon Fonthill in those "little wars" of Queen Victoria in the last quarter of the nineteenth century and I had to put those into words first. But now STARSHINE is born.

The title (it may be changed, of course) refers to the starshells that climbed into the skies at night above No Man's Land. For those soldiers who patrolled nocturnally in that dangerous ground between the trenches, the shells were a signal to freeze in case their light revealed them to the enemy machine gunners. For a time, then, those seconds when the lightshells broke and illuminated the battlefield brought the war to a halt. No one moved. For one of my two heroes, the highly sensitive Bertie Murphy, it was God intervening to stop the killing for just a few seconds.

The story switches between the back streets of Aston, Birmingham, where Polly waits for her two lovers to return, to the mud of the Somme and the dreaded Ypres Salient.

It now lies throbbing on the desk of my editor at Hodder Headline. It may die there - times are bad in the publishing industry. We shall see. But the monkey is off my back at last!

An autobiography yet....!

2010-05-17T12:40:00.000-07:00

Alas, I am a very infrequent blogger. My latest excuse is that I have been very heavy with child. My latest offspring has now been produced: a bouncing, bonny autobiography called 'BOMBS AND BETTY GRABLE.' It is produced by the small but beautifully rounded publishers in the Midlands of the UK called Brewin Books Ltd; it is a largish paperback and being given away at the ridiculous retail price of £12.95.

Why the hell should anyone want to read the story of my life? Good question and I'm glad I thought of it. Ah yes - the answer.

Well. it tells the story of a lad growing up in the back streets of Birmingham during the last war, dodging the German bombs but pledging his undying love for an iconic Betty Grable, and then succeeding as a journalist and businessman, before surviving the greatest tragedy of his life and then becoming a novelist.

I'd like to feel that it gives an insight to the war years and to the growth, earlier, of a great industrial city, but I am hopeful also that it's a tale of love, humour and personal struggle, with one or two fascinating characters emerging to make it not at all a 'me, me' book.

How on earth can you resist it? And it does give a damned good excuse for not having written a blog for two months or more!

Too Much Blood and Guts?

2010-03-03T03:19:00.000-08:00

Readers of this alas too infrequent blog will know that I have decided to make a temporary departure from the adventures of Simon Fonthill & Co in the Victorian wars of the late nineteenth century to write a different novel, set against the background of the first world war.

Much of the action will take place in the killing field that lay to the east of the little Belgian town of Ypres. For four years it was known simply as The Salient as the Allies (mainly British) faced - uphill - superior German forces. In an area of probably no more than six square miles, the shells rained down as first one side, then the other, gained territorial supremacy.

The result was that the battleground became a quagmire, with, often, the British front line consisting only of a series of water-filled craters linked only by a few yards of deep mud. The misery of fighting in these conditions was compounded by constant rifle and machine gun fire, of course, but the main horror was caused by the constant shell fire that fell from the heights held by the Germans.

My reading of eye witness accounts of these events has produced some terrifying anecdotes that seem to be almost beyond belief. An advancing Tommy, for instance, saw his comrade sliced horizontally in half by a razor sharp shell fragment and watched in terror as the disembodied legs of his pal continued to march on for at least five paces before folding and falling to the ground. Even more disturbing was the experience of a section, also advancing across No Man's Land, who skirted a shell-hole at the bottom of which was a British infantryman caught up to his waist in mud. As they watched, he struggled to free himself only to sink further into the slime. The tried and failed to rescue him and, as the mud advanced up his body, he pleaded with them to shoot him. But no-one could bring himself to do so and eventually, heads down, they were forced to leave him, his screams sounding even above the gun fire as they trudged away.

To include or reject these horror stories? I have always believed in basing stories of combat on fact, but this sort of fact does seem beyond belief and one doesn't want to be accused of over-writing - of pouring on the agony - something of which even that splendid writer Bernard Cornwell can be accused (his Agincourt made me wince).

Yet war has to be portrayed in all its inglory if a writer is true to himself and the period about which he writes. So these and other, similar incidents, are going in. What do you think?

THANKS

2010-02-09T04:13:00.000-08:00

Can I (mis)use my blog to thank those blog followers who have sent in messages of support, not only for these ramblings but also for the novels and who have not attached their e-mail addresses, thus preventing me from replying directly. So: cheers to Thomas Baxter, John Lister, Allan and Bruce Bisbery.

SIGN HERE PLEASE

2010-01-23T04:10:00.000-08:00

'A book signed is a book sold,' my publishers told me in the early days. Probably not true, just a bit of bull**** that was given out to new authors to get 'em to get out there and help sell their books. Anyway, I believed them and have always dutifully trotted along whenever asked to bookshops to sign my latest.

At first I dreaded it. What if nobody turned up? How would it be to sit there like a lemon under a large poster alongside a pile of hardbacks, only to be ignored (and probably pitied) by shoppers who hurried by on their way to purchase the latest Robert Harris?

Well, it did feel embarrassing, I must confess. But let me also confess - now I don't mind a bit.

The reasons are two fold. Firstly, now that I have become more established, there actually are dear, sweet readers who make a special journey just to buy the latest Fonthill and have me give a dedication under the title. So, usually, I no longer sit there on my own like some indoor version of those strange folk who paint themselves gold and stand all day stock still on street corners. I have company.

But even if I fail to move many books, I find myself enjoying the experience. And that's because people are SO friendly. Perhaps the British are losing some of their reserve, but I do find now that folk like to come and chat about books, even if they don't buy. As a result, I am able to bridge to some extent that awful gap that exists between the lonely author, bashing away at the computer on his own, and the punters out there who love books.

I have learned some, at least, of the likes, dislikes, prejudices and loyalties of readers and, while it might be going too far to say that this has influenced my work, I do feel that my outlook on writing has been informed.

So, if you do see me in Waterstones one day, sitting at the door like the proverbial lemon, do come and pass the time of day, even if you call me Mr Harris.

Mud and Bravery

2010-01-05T03:54:00.000-08:00

My novels in the Simon Fonthill series have all been set in the last quarter of the nineteenth century but I must confess that it is the first world war that has always haunted me. It was, perhaps, too vast a setting and also too well tramelled by other writers for me to venture into it. Yet that bloody conflict has hung over me and my family for as long as I can remember and left too many ghosts, all of them inviting me to step onto the capes that they trail in the mud.

Ghosts like my Uncle Alfred, who won the Victoria Cross near Armentieres; Uncle Ernest, an acting Regimental Sergeant Major at nineteen "because there was nobody else left," who was awarded the Distinguished Conduct Medal; and Uncle Bernard, who lost an eye and gained the Military Medal. My own father, Leonard Wilcox, went over the top as an infantry sergeant on the first morning of the Battle of the Somme and eventually died in 1945 of the wounds sustained that day. (Vanity always compels me to explain that although I am old I an not that ancient in that my father fought as a very young man but was comparatively old when I was born.)

So the time has come, I feel, to leave the red coats and pith helmets of "Queen Victoria's Little Wars" and accept the challenge of World War I. As a result, I leave at the end of the month for Belgium to tread the soil of what was, with Verdun, probably the most fought-over killing field in the whole of the war.

Of the million men killed in the Western Front in the Great War, a quarter of a million perished in the few square miles just to the east of the charming little textile town of Ypres, just across the border from France. The front line there bulged out and deflated regularly as counter attack followed attack for nearly four years. That bulge was commanded by the German guns on the ridges to the east of the town and there was no shelter nor escape from their shells. "The Salient," as it became known, became a graveyard and under its present day farms and woods lie the undiscovered bodies of some 40,000 men who fell and who died - many of them by drowning - in the mud.

The conflict seemed unending and included three major battles. The third of them, in 1917. was called Passchendaele. It was fought in rain that turned the trenches, shell holes and no-man's-land into a quagmire that sucked to their deaths men, mules and horses.

So it against this remarkable background that I intend to set my next novel - perhaps to lay
those family ghosts and, if I'm good enough, to pay them proper tribute. Fonthill and Co I must leave for a while as they cross the Zambesi into Matabeleland. I hope they will be back (the Boxer Rebellion maybe and then the second and best remembered Boer War?), but for the present it's a long long way to Passchendaele.

Ghosts at Christmas

2009-11-09T03:56:00.000-08:00

A huge gap since the last post. Sorry, but I've been busy on the day job: writing novels. But I have been impelled to return to blogging by the joyous news that Sarah Palin will have a new book out for Christmas. You remember Sarah? Aw come on, of course you do. She was the raunchy, moose-shooting Alaskan governor who ran as the Republican candidate for Vice President a year ago and was one of the main reasons why Obama walked into the White House so easily.

She resigned her governership and her book - "Going Rogue: an American Life," for which she trousered an advance of $1.25 million - will be published later this month. I read that it is already listed as No 1 on Amazon com. even before publication. Being a candidate for one of the most intellectually demanding jobs in America (and therefore the world), she wrote it herself, of course...? Hell no! It was ghosted. Presumably Sarah was too busy hunting moose.

All of this has drawn me into the great debate which is consuming the great and the good of the British publishing industry just now. Its subject can be summed up like this: why oh why is it that the best sellers lists at Christmas - and at other times in the year, for that matter - are topped by books carrying the names of celebrities who usually have not written them and even sometimes have not even read them?

I look forward with trepidation to Sarah being joined at the top of our best sellers this year by Jordan's new "novel," The Price of Silicone," and Wayne Rooney's "How to be a Father."
Like Palin's effort, of course, they will have been written by professional ghost writers, because the "authors" are not capable of telling their own story. As writers, they can't write.

Does it matter if this is what the public wants? That is the defence entered by the publishers who make money on these publications, of course. They have to give the reading public what it desires, they say, even if this involves a mild deception in that, despite the name of the "ghost" being carried on the cover, the readers may well believe that it is the celebrity herself who is putting the words and the opinions together.

But it does matter, particularly at this time of recession with publishers laying off writers in the middle and bottom of their earning lists. There is only so much money that can be given to authors in terms of advances, royalties and share of publishers' promotional budgets and with the celebrities demanding huge sums for books they don't write, it is the less well-known writers tenaciously building a following who will suffer.

The additional point being made by well established authors, good pro's at the top of their game who are not themselves in danger, is that publishers have a professional and sociological duty to maintain excellence in their lists and publishing these shallow reminiscences and even "novels" is certainly not doing that. It is going to be even more difficult for the next J.K. Rowlings to break through and tell their wonderful tales when publishers' already pressurised time and budgets are dominated by ghosted rubbish.

Sour grapes? You betchya! With seven novels and three books of non-fiction under my belt I reckon I have a right to be annoyed when amateurs jump the bread line queue. In fact, I am thinking of standing as a vice presidential candidate in the next US elections.

SELLING BOOKS

2009-07-22T10:48:00.000-07:00

To Cambridge last night to take part in a signingfest for some 6O authors at Heffers Bookshop. This event is organised annually by the dynamic Richard Reynolds, who runs the shop and who calls the evening "Bodies in the Bookshop."

This is obviously a play on words in that the joint is certainly heaving with people - from the trade (first edition dealers looking to buy) but also members of the public, happy to purchase and talk to their favourite authors. The title, however, also reflects the growing importance to the shop of crime fiction, where once academic works predominated on the shelves.

This year Cambridge is celebrating the 800 anniversary of the founding of the university. For much of that time (or so it seems) Heffers has been serving the dons and students of that venerable institution. Reynolds, however, has liberalised the buying policy of the shop and opened its shelves to contemporary, popular fiction. Why, the blessed man is even stocking a good selection of historical adventure novels, including the Simon Fonthill series!

More to the point, however, it was refreshing to talk to a retailer who did not bewail the effect on the traditional trade of Amazon and who is shrugging off the recession. "We are doing well," he says.

Last night saw the nineteenth "Bodies in the Bookshop" event and Reynolds now also stages a series of mini events during the year to stimulate business. The trade could do with more booksellers like him.

Dreams

2009-07-15T12:11:00.000-07:00

Psychiatrists wallow in them, introverts analyse them endlessly and creative people are supposed sometimes to gain inspiration from them ("Last night I dreamed that I went again to Manderley"). Yet my dreams are useless. No help at all.

You might expect that, when body and brain are at rest but that the old grey matter, at least, is receptive, then something, some little scrap, might be salvaged from the polycromatic adventures that it gets up to when on nocturnal walkabout that would help to free the writer's block. Some little touch that might suggest a plot twist.

Yet what am I to make of me being at the bottom of a deep canyon with, in the far distance, a speck-like aeroplane approaching and me being able to hear the conversation between pilot and co-pilot quite clearly, but unable to understand a word because it is conducted in gobbledegook? See what I mean? My dreams are no help at all. Never have been.

Perhaps a late night, large brandy. What do you think?

2009-06-22T03:16:00.000-07:00

KEEPING AT IT

The trouble with blogging, of course, is that you have to keep at it. And I am very much aware that the it to which I have not kept has been absent for some two and a half months now. The reason is that I have finished, polished and delivered the manuscripts of two books in that period: the latest Fonthill novel, THE SHANGANI PATROL, sent off as usual to Hodder Headline for publication (hardback) in January 2010 and then paperback the following September; and an autobiography, which under the title of BOMBS AND BETTY GRABLE winged its way to a different publisher, Brewin Books, and is destined to leap onto bookshelves next September.

So, with some 210,000 words knocking about my desk in that crowded two and a half months, there wasn't much time nor energy left for blogging. Yes, I know. It's a pathetic excuse and I just don't know how determined bloggers knock off their postings - and probably these days their twitterings, too - with their left hand while finishing novels with the other.
I need a bit of time to lie with my eyes closed and worry about the nation's debts.

The other problem is that the two genres demand different techniques in composing and styles in writing. Pace is important in writing historical adventure but far less so in recording the story of one's life. One of the glories of writing fiction is that the author plays God - he creates his own characters and has them act just as he wants them (although, if one is lucky, the protagonists in the story begin to develop a will of their own and to behave as their on-page personalities dictate, despite the wishes of the author). In a biography, of course, the facts are there and must be related more-or-less as they happened, so imposing constrictions on the story-teller and rachetting up the need to make the words dance a little as the tale unfolds.

I guess I should add that BOMBS AND BETTY GRABLE is not a conventional autobiography. I am no television personality with large breasts (though I do insist that my pectorals are as good, if not better than the next man's), nor have I the urgent need to share the agony of missing a goal in a penalty shoot out while playing for England. My story mainly falls into two sections: that of a small boy growing up in war-time in a large industrial city; and a tragedy that occurred much later in life that was not only the most devastating event of my years but also the most interesting. Linking the two was not easy.

So two very different books, demanding different approaches. SHANGANI takes Simon Fonthill, 352 Jenkins and Alice Griffith into King Lobengula's Matabeleland and Mashonaland with Cecil Rhodes's invading forces in the early 1890's, while BOMBS presents a series of personal reflections and reminiscences from the World War II and the late 1970's. As always, I shall be fascinated to hear what readers think of them, when they come onto bookshelves in a few months' time.

BOYS OWN PAPER: ANYONE EVER READ IT?

2009-03-29T09:17:00.000-07:00

For an author, one of the good things about book sales on Amazon is the opportunity to read what some readers think about your work. (One of the bad things is that one gets about a penny farthing for every book sold, but that is another story - and perhaps another blog.)

These reviews, of course, are from consumers who have actually bought the book and read it, rather than professional reviewers. Your real punters, in fact. Inevitably, then, the standard of criticism varies but, as with all these things, one takes the rough with the smooth.

There are some regulars who write about every new book and, in an amusing inversion, I now wait to see what they post with an eagerness that some of them, at least, seem to display in waiting to read the latest adventures of Simon Fonthill. The net is spread surprisingly wide: Arizona, Barcelona, Houston, Oxfordshire (from whence came a particularly thoughtful, if a touch ascerbic, review of "Last Stand at Majuba Hill" from C. Green), and even Andora, where I am regularly grateful for the idiosyncratic welcome given to each book by "A.D.B."

Nicholas Page, of Flintshire, U.K., however, has flicked a raw nerve in his review of the latest, "The Siege of Khartoum." It's a favourable notice, so I shouldn't complain. And I don't really. It's just that Nicholas - who has an M.A., by the way, and should know his stuff - picks up the old "Boys Own Paper" jibe, which always makes me wince. In fact, his review begins in a pastiche style that brings a smile, if a slightly forced one: " I say, chaps, bally well get down to your book shop and buy..." All was forgiven, however, when he ended, "...one of the best books in the series - and I have read them all." Thanks Nicholas. I think.

A review on the books pages of the U.K.'s Sunday Express for 'The Guns of El Kebir" was the first professional reference to this boys magazine, which was published, by the way, at the turn of the 19th and 20th centuries. This, too, was meant favourably but it raised with me the exact meaning of the reference. Does it mean, good, juvenile stuff for kids? (I write for adults). Is it merely alluding to the time about which I write, the last quarter of the of the eighteen hundreds, when the magazine was in its prime? Or is it a veiled criticism of the plots, which has the hero engaged in a series of Queen Victoria's "little wars?"

It would help if I could recall something about the magazine. I dimly remember finding one copy in a cupboard in my grandmother's house when I was about seven years old. The only thing I retain is the title of one of the stories: "From the Gutter to the Quarter Deck - The Story of a Lad of Grit." I am fairly sure I didn't read it, for I do recall wondering if Grit was a place in Yorkshire or Lancashire or was the tale about a statue that came to life...?

You will take the inference. I am uneasy about being linked to this kind of stuff - however kindly the reference is meant. Say that I have been influenced by Kipling, Rider Haggard or even G.H.Henty and I will blushingly acquiesce. But bloody old Boys Own Paper....! Is there anyone out there who has actually read a copy?

Getting Into It

2009-03-05T04:06:00.000-08:00

So, you are in a book shop, you are browsing along the shelves and you've found a book that interests you. The cover has attracted you and the title intrigued. The price is within budget and the author is already liked by you or, at least, is someone whom you've always felt you should read.

What makes you buy it or stick it back onto the shelf?

For me, it's the intro. No, not the blurb on the fly leaf, the quotes from reviews of previous books by the same author, or the "let me be your father/mother" picture of the poor mutt who has written the thing, but rather his/her first few words of the story. From that introduction (or intro, as we old newspaper hacks used to call the first sentence or paragraph), I feel I can usually judge whether I want to invest in the book.

As a result, I usually deploy a quite disproportionate time and effort in constructing the first paragraph of my novels. I suspect that that is quite true of most other authors too and I feel that I can usually tell those who don't. Certainly, some great intro's have become classical cliches, viz:

"It was the best of times, it was the worst of times"... A Tale of Two Cities (Dickens)

"Last night I dreamed I went again to Manderlay"... Rebecca (du Maurier)

"It is a truth universally acknowledged that a single
man in possession of a good fortune must be in want
of a wife"... Pride and Prejudice (Austen)

Of course I don't aspire to that greatness (and I think that the immortal Jane wouldn't get away with that sort of intro in these chick-lit days) but I try to discipline myself to begin each Fonthill story by putting the reader directly into the action. It doesn't always work. I couldn't really make it click in the opening to The Guns of El Kebir - you can't exactly slip in a bit of mouthwatering action at a breakfast table in Brecon - but I particularly liked the scene setting at the beginning of The Diamond Frontier and also for The Siege of Khartoum. But I may well be wrong.

Let me know what you think.

Turning the Pages...

2009-02-07T08:59:00.000-08:00

My apologies for the interruption in blog service. I decided to go to South Africa after all to research "Matabele," my next Simon Fonthill novel (still working title only - other options: "Black Blades," "Black Spears," "Matabele Rising," Matabele Crossing," and, in desperation, "Fred" or even "Thelma"). Funcked going into Zimbabwe, the old Matabeleland, because of the cholera threat so we sniffed around the borders of that country with Mpumalanga (Transvaal in old money) to get a feel for flora and fauna and then dug out further facts about Cecil John Rhodes in Cape Town. It turned out to be worth the trip after all, even if one of the ladies in the special books section of the National Library of South Africa had never heard of the great C.J !

So I guess here I am, back in the UK, still droning on about the value of research for a writer of historical fiction. In this context, I have to confess that the couple of days I spent in the basement of London Library before flying out were just as valuable - and a touch less expensive! - than the trip to the bottom of Africa. In every novel I had written, I have thanked the staff of this splendid institution but I cannot resist singing its praises again here.

Founded by Thomas Carlyle in 1841, it remains a private library mainly, I guess, for scholars and writers although, given a low waiting list, anyone can join if he/she can afford it. It is now, in fact, not inexpensive at just under £400 per annum, having just hoiked its membership fee to pay for a much needed extension to its present premises. But it remains worth every penny to me for two reasons.

Firstly, one can take out as many books as one likes and keep them for as long as one likes, subject to them not being required by other members. This is important in terms, not only of being able to have reference books at one's elbow during the writing, but also for the convenience of having them handy for help in answering editor's questions after the MS has been submitted. Secondly, unlike many conventional libraries, the L.L. has a precious collection of old books, many of them written in "my" period, the last quarter of the nineteenth century. This means that one can assimilate opinions and received wisdom of the time, but also receive an osmotical feel for the language of 1880's England, or wherever, even if only in literary form.

There is another, more abstract and personal pleasure, however, to be experienced by visiting this tall, thin building in St James's Square. For an ex-hack like myself, it is a thrill to be allowed to enter the basement and turn the pages of "The Times" of the day; not, mind you, a micro-fische copy but the actual pages, the news sheets of 1888, or whatever.

I write "news sheets" but the dear old Times presumably didn't want to shock its readers by using such a tabloid term. So the news pages were referred to as "Intelligence." Of course, it is hard work at first in wading through the slabs of copy: narrow columns, few cross headings and, certainly, no pictures or engravings. But one soon gets used to that. The problem for me in trying to find a reference to the invasion of Matabeleland by Rhodes's column of "pioneers," lay in the distraction provided by a series of fascinating little news (sorry, "Intelligence") snippets. For instance, under the heading "Singing On the March," a Mr Dallas asked the Secretary of State for Ireland in the House whether he was aware that the police engaged upon eviction duty on the Oliphant Estate, Donegal, on the 19th and 20th of June in 1890 sang "Glory, Glory Hallelujah" on their march back to their barracks every evening . The Minister replied that he found the practice to be perfectly respectable and saw no reason to change it.

Yes, I know. Small things for small minds, but they amused me. I must own that it became a pleasure for me merely to turn the pages of this solemn newspaper of long ago: heavy newsprint, creamy in colour and slightly pink for some reason at the edges. They slumped over and landed with a satisfying clunk on the page before. Ah, the simple pleasure of the researcher...!

Take cover!

2009-01-01T09:00:00.000-08:00

When I first began writing, I thought that content was by far the most important component of a book. The story, the words, were the thing, weren’t they? I took what I hope was an enlightened interest in the jackets of my books but did not worry too much if I felt that, perhaps, they fell a bit short of the mark. They were the responsibility of my publishers. They must know what they are doing.

And, of course, they did. The cover of “The Horns of the Buffalo,” my first novel, was produced with original art work, showing the young Fonthill thrusting his bayonet on the end of his accurately drawn Martini-Henry rifle at a Zulu over the mealie bags at Rorke’s Drift. The covers of the next three books in the series, however, reproduced paintings of the famous actions depicted in the story. They were good, strong reproductions, recording fragments of the battles…but reproductions for all that and, somehow, pictorial clichés. But I didn’t make a fuss. I was a writer, not a designer.

Then, blessedly, Headline decided that we needed a change. For the paperback edition of “The Guns of El Kebir,” the hardback cover of a Victorian painting was dropped and replaced by a stark symbol of a khaki coloured, cloth covered pith helmet, with a bullet tear in its front, against the background of a British trooper on a camel in the far distance, atop a sand dune. You could smell dust and the heat of the desert. The cover of “The Siege of Khartoum” is equally iconic: the face of a Mahdi Dervish – or is it Fonthill in disguise? – swathed in his headdress, with only the cruel eyes showing, while in the background a British redcoat kneels, his rifle at the ready. Too early to say what effect this cover has had, of course, but sales of the paperback “Guns” have undoubtedly leaped. Who said you can’t tell a book by its cover?

Digging into the past 3

2008-12-25T09:00:00.000-08:00

Reflecting on the problems thrown up by researching a new book has made me realise how very differently each country can preserve its militant past. The usual practice seems to be is that if you won, you preserve the battlefield; if you lost, you don’t - although, commercial considerations can alter that rule of thumb.

Take the battles of Crecy and Poitiers, for instance, in The Hundred Years War. I first went hunting for these sites some twenty five years ago. I eventually found Crecy, marked only by a small plaque, erected by the “Friends of Old French Windmills,” which announced diffidently that on this site stood a windmill that (and almost by the way) had been used by the English King Edward III as a command post during the battle of Crecy in 1346. On the same trip I finally pinned down the second battle to a small wood, a couple of miles south of Poitiers. Some twenty paces inside the wood a tiny, hand-painted sign nailed to a tree announced it to be “Le site de la Battalle de Poitiers, 1356.” The British had won both battles and, it seemed, the French weren’t over anxious to commemorate the encounters. Fair enough, but five years later, when I was researching for my book “Masters of Battle,” Crecy had been marked by the erection of a splendid, tall, timber viewing platform, showing the disposition of the two armies, set opposite floral reproductions of the two kings’ coats of arms. At Poitiers, however, even the sign had gone. The difference? Crecy was much nearer the soon-to-be-opened Channel tunnel, with its anticipated stream of English visitors.

A couple more examples from my diggings. The forest clearings where the American longwoodsmen gave the British redcoats a thorough beating at Saratoga in 1777 – so swinging the American War of Independence decisively towards the “rebels” – is beautifully
maintained. Old cannons show artillery emplacements and illuminated signs explain the depositions. (See “Masters of Battle.) Trying to find the site of the Battle of El Kebir in Egypt, however, where the British defeated the Egyptians to begin a 75-year occupation of the country, (“The Guns of El Kebir”) is an unrewarding business. There is no indication that this small village saw a turning point in Egypt’s history and nobody locally wanted to talk about it.
Now that Wembley has gone, what will be left to indicate to future generations where England defeated Germany so decisively to win the World Cup in 1966? We must, we really must, stir ourselves!

Digging into the past 2

2008-12-18T09:00:00.000-08:00

I blogged about the problems of researching in modern day Zimbabwe, but to my aid has come a splendid source. Dave Sutcliffe, a British born Rhodesian who now lives in South Africa, is a historian and a guide to what we British called the two Boer Wars. He was the man who led Betty and me on the 1,500 ft climb to the summit of Majuba Hill in afternoon temperatures of 32 degrees for my book, “Last Stand on Majuba Hill.” (I have always hated that word “Hill.” We found it a small mountain!)

I e-mailed him a couple of questions and so opened a Pandora’s Box of information back from him about the geography, wild life, flora and fauna of Zimbabwe, all put into the context of what it might have been like to march through the region in the late 1880’s: the river crossings, the mopani woodlands, the giant ant hills, the puff adders, the smell of cinnamon, the flies, the wild monkeys, the lions… He even sent me detailed maps of the country and I shall always remain grateful to him.

If any reader is contemplating a visit to the Boer War sites then I warmly recommend him as a guide. He is at: dave.sutcliffe@telkomsa.net

Anyone who writes history depends upon a variety of sources that he must plunder. But I still feel guilty and rather cowardly about starting “Matabele” without visiting Zimbabwe. Maybe I can get away with Dave’s help and, perhaps, a visit to the South African side of the Zambabwian border. So I guess I am still pondering…

Digging into the past 1

2008-12-11T05:50:00.000-08:00

Research. I am always being asked about it (see Q & A page) and, at the moment, the subject is sitting on my shoulder like Winston Churchill’s Black Dog. The next book in the Fonthill series is set in the late 1880’s in a then untamed part of northern South Africa at the birth of what became Rhodesia and later Zimbabwe. It is an historical event that gives me all I need for the background to a Fonthill novel: exploration into a comparatively unknown part of the Dark Continent, a cruel but multi-faceted native chief, a soaringly ambitious white entrepreneur and climax where white settlers fight brave black warriors. The very name of the territory – Matabeleland – sends a frisson through me. It is very much Fonthill territory.

I always like to visit the country that I write about, even though the people, the politics, the very terrain will have changed considerably since Fonthill set foot there. So this seventh novel in the series – due out early in 2010 – poses a problem. As I write, Zimbabwe is the last place in the world anyone would want to visit. The conditions for research are poor, moving around the country is difficult and it is clear that there is little left there to help me reconstruct the final battles that overthrew King Lobengula and allowed Cecil John Rhodes to establish his new colony. Now cholera has broken out there.

I am surrounded by books about the country, some of them valuably contemporaneous of the 1880’s and giving me the kind of detail that I need and love (“abomidable prices: beer four shillings a bottle, Boer brandy six shillings – worth about sixpence in the Cape”). But I need to get the smell and feel of the terrain if I am to persuade readers to accompany Fonthill, Jenkins and Alice on their epic journeys through Matabeland and Masonaland. How to get that without catching a plane to Harare? I am pondering….