FONTHILL AND THE DRAGON LADY

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!

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

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?

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.

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

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"

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!