Marigold Dark

This week I finally got round to pressing the big red button for my new novel Marigold Dark, a bleakly humorous detective novel eighteen months in the making. It's been a fun if gruelling ride bringing Marigold to life, largely due to the persistent efforts of my three year old twins, who seem to have developed an inbuilt radar system that blips to life the minute Daddy sneaks away to work on his computer. It's hard to write and edit well with one hand on the keyboard and the other occupied with various forms of toddler-mollification, but I got there in the end.

I've worked hard at this one. The initial idea for the novel - a shambolic drunk playing PI in his spare time and making a total balls of it - came a couple of years back, and since then I've spent my time tinkering with various edits and trying my best to form Marigold's story into a lively, coherent narrative with one eye on the page and the other on some imagined reader's reaction. If there's one piece of criticism I've taken on board from my previous efforts it's the need to grip one's reader and give them a reason to turn the page, and with that in mind I've done my best to score out the various digressions and irrelevant details of previous drafts, whittling the novel down as best I could into something fluid, sharp and - hopefully - entertaining. It's been a tricky process, and I've made sure to leave plenty of time between redrafts, time to spot the comic misfires, the plot contusions, those grey areas of character and place still in need of brightening.

As ever when assuming the role of author, editor and publisher, it can be hard to achieve a subjective distance from which to gauge one's efforts, and as such I'm grateful to three people for their feedback at various points along the way. My mother, for whom the novel 'took a while to get going'; my wife, who (rightly) balked at the crudity of some of Marigold's language; and friend and fellow author David Sellars, who pointed out that the gaps in my anti-hero's memory should not necessarily mean gaps in the reader's understanding. To all three - thank you for your suggestions; I acted on them all.

A final thanks to Daz Smith for helping me out once again with the cover. Daz has a way of instantly and imaginatively working a brief, and was instrumental in designing a cover that I hope will be as intriguing as it is unusual. I enjoyed stitching T.S.Eliot's Prufrock into the novel, an unintended consequence of having that 'raggedly clawed' thing on the cover. It suits Marigold to be thus, as I'm sure he would agree.

So wake up, Mr Dark - you've a case to solve, a daughter to save, an island to liberate. I wish you the very best of luck. If I refrain from reaching to raise a glass in honour of your publication it's only because I'm certain you'll have already got there first, spilt its contents down your chin and smashed it snarling against a wall. Fair enough; you've earned it.

Marigold Dark is available for purchase from Amazon HERE.

The Final Cut

Jersey's Branchage Film Festival staged a welcome return this year. It was great to see some literary-based events happening over the weekend, one of these being a writing competition organised by UK magazine Structo. Four writers (poets Linda Rose Parkes, Nicki Mesch, Juliette Hart and myself) had their work featured. As well as having our work featured in the Branchage program we took part in a Saturday morning reading, which was a lot of fun.

My short story The Final Cut - a Lovecraftian parody exploring the true meaning behind Jersey's branchage tradition (in which fines are issued for unruly roadside foliage) - is included below. Hopefully it's an enjoyable tale, though - with hindsight - one I'd advise against reading aloud with a hangover.

The Final Cut

The Branchage Festival must be stopped! Forgive me for dispensing with the usual email pleasantries dear Charles, but my state is animated – bordering on hysteria, if I’m honest – and I fear my time is short. Is it just fancy or can I detect the dread scent of clipped primrose in the air? Is that the faint snipping of gathering sheers I hear beyond my bedroom window? Oh god! But I must share my discoveries with you before it is too late. The island needs to know!

A façade, Charles, the lot of it! A festival of film, indeed! That the organisers of this damnable event should so stridently adopt that title for their masquerade, leering from behind the syllables of that bi-annual farce …they’re laughing at us, Charles! Waving it in our damned faces! Hiding in plain daylight!

You know, of course of my research into the true and hidden history of our island’s Branchage tradition, (roadside hedge trimming - pah!) of the practice’s links to the 17^th century fertility cult of Les Rasoirs de Dieu, They Of The Shorn Pubis, that secretive pagan sect who viewed all forms of overgrown shrubbery as a metaphor for Nature’s…

Oh I know you’ve laughed at my claims in the past, Charles – I can picture you laughing into your computer screen right now - but will you be laughing when they come for you? When you wake in the morning to discover your kitchen floor covered in mulberry clippings, having been forced through the letterbox by unseen midnight hands? When you return to your car to find the mud flaps neatly shorn to the metal by some silently spying blade?

No Charles, I am not laughing and no longer should you be, for they are among us, they are manifold and I tell you, I implore you, this festival must be stopped!

You’ll remember the tales I told you of the cult’s persecution towards the latter end of the nineteenth century, that the then Bailiff of Jersey W.H.Vernon swore publicly to put an end to ‘these troublesome bacchanals, with their midnight pagan witchery, their cliff top rituals and their sacrifices.’ Oh yes Charles, there were sacrifices – to Pan, Demeter, Tlalteutil…for they were indiscriminate in their prayer, and fearless too, raising burning pyres of shorn leaves and bushes gathered from local hedges in hellish homage to wild, bubbling Azathoth and his son Nyarlathotep – dear lord how my hands are trembling just to type their names!

It’s all there in the Jersey Archives, should one care to search, as I have been searching these past few years. The full history; how the lower orders of the sect were infiltrated, hunted down and banished into exile, with our sister island of Guernsey bearing grim host to the worst and the maddest; how in 1908 Bailiff Vernon carefully coded news of the sect’s eradication into his Christmas address to the House…it’s all there, in file and folder.

But Vernon lied, Charles! Knowingly or otherwise, the old man told an untruth! They had no more eradicated Les Rasoirs than they had travelled to the moon. The sect’s activities continued, albeit quietly, secretly, in cellars, caves and - once the Germans had left - bunkers. Numerous in their number were fine, upstanding members of the community, wealthy and respected islanders with the means and connections to shield their depravities from the eyes of the common man. The rural parishes were awash with Rasoir cultists, and it was only a matter of time before they began to infiltrate the island’s legislature.

Unsurprisingly our volunteer police force, or ‘Honoraries’ as they are colloquially termed, were particularly susceptible to Rasoir infiltration. More frightening still, I have found documents suggesting that by the start of the twentieth century the sect had already extended their influence to the very highest levels of our island’s governance, leading one to the spine-chilling notion that perhaps the ineffectuality of Vernon’s purge was due neither to simple lack of thoroughness and insight but that perhaps the Bailiff himself was…but no, this is not the time for conjecture and idle hypothesis – I must be brief, for the smell of freshly shorn foliage is growing stronger by the minute. Though I have just drawn the curtains against the moonlit fields outside and checked that my windows are shut still I swear I can hear the growing chitter of approaching secateurs – snip snip snip – oh God, I can hear them Charles! I can hear them! Time is short. But I must conclude this email and get it sent in the hope that you can convince someone in London to take action, that these past years’ work may yet come to something other than hopeless paranoia and fingernails chewed to the quick!

Of course the Branchage festival organisers will deny it all, they and their sect (for they are Rasoirs, Charles, all of them!); they’ve been denying it all for close to a century now, whilst all the while their fiendish cogs have been turning, turning…

As if the Loi Sur la Voirre of 1914 was anything other than an attempt to force their dark rituals into the public arena, meshing them into the very fabric of our daily existence! What a dance these satyric pipers have lead us on! Whereas in centuries past the act of trimming would have been performed by the Rasoirs’ shamen or branquers, at night, and at specially pre-arranged snipping sites (usually within proximity of the island’s dolmen rings), now they have us performing their sacred rites for them in the name of ‘roadside maintenance’! And if we should refuse we are fined, and forced to wield our strimmers or clippers or sheers in the name of their dark gods!

Yes, the mind can only marvel at the sheer audacity of these fiends, and at the level of infiltration that they have achieved (though I draw the line at the late Herve le Gaston’s outlandish claims that the origins of Les Rasoirs can be traced back to the Norman conquest, and that the very flag of Jersey itself contains a set of red shears across a white background, a notion I find too terrifying to even contemplate.)

Oh but they are nearly upon me! Behind the hellish snipping of those approaching secateurs – clearly audible now, (from below, as well as from outside!) - I hear a low chanting, and the rustle of what I can only assume are the garlands of clipped shrubbery that Les Rasoirs are reported to wear when engaged in some dread and sacred summoning...

I have had it coming, Charles! Ever since I took up took up my studies at the Jersey Archives – hanging over each slowly yielding text like some ancient listing oak, growing heavier in my horror – I have been spied upon and tracked. I’ve had my warnings, of course, numerous coded threats, two of which I believe I touched on earlier, and more.

Leaf clippings through the post. The burglary that so upset me last month, when I returned home to find my front door open and every set of scissors in the house laid out upon my pillow. The gardening magazines to which I have suddenly found myself subscribed. Untraceable phone calls in the dead of night, with nothing but a leisured metallic ‘snipping’ at the end of the line.

Relentless, Charles! They are relentless!

And then yesterday, the final straw. Having popped into a popular American fast food outlet in town – to find a sprig of freshly shorn hazel in my cheeseburger – in my pre-wrapped cheeseburger! – dear Charles, I realised then that my time was up, that I had peered too far into this particular hedgerow, and that something infinitely dark and baleful was rushing out at me from the leaves, that my doom was all but assured.

Charles! The Branchage Festival must be stopped. It is exactly one hundred years since the Loi Sur de Voirre was passed, since Les Rasoirs de Dieu made slaves of us all, and I harbour grave fears that this latest festival – purportedly a celebration of film, music and ‘arts’ – is little more than a cover for some dark and demonic celebration, the culmination of which will result in god knows…but wait…what…

They’re here! That snipping! As though the very air around me were being assailed by titan blades! That sweet and cloying smell of clipped foliage – it is grown hard to breath in here and I type with one hand over my nose – the chanting is growing –  stop them Charles, stop them by whatever means – you will know them by their beards – their beards! - oh but the very floor is giving way, the very reality around me is being shorn and sliced by invisible – I must – send

- - -

Rising Tides

Cheeky sod, the sea. One minute you’re staring into a rock pool with your wellies glistening and your net held high, the next you’re floating home. Got a way of coming at you, these rising tides of ours; of catching you unawares. The Channel Islands have one of the largest tidal tables in the world and when it turns, it turns, as any number of the tourists and locals who have found themselves waving cheerfully to shore from newly acquired homes of cut-off coastal rock will testify.

Seems like only yesterday that I was splashing round in a rock pool of my own. Having released my novel Coyote Jack as an e-book on Amazon back in April 2013 I’d spent several weeks exploring the brave new world of online publishing, working out how best to market my work. Anyone who has spent any time amidst the seemingly endless melee of blogs, promotion sites and book listing companies will tell you that it’s an wild and choppy ocean out there. At times it seems like the world and his mother have got novels for sale (hers is better than his, by the way), and at times I found myself smashed down by the sheer immensity of it all. Flailing around in my own little rock pool with the net stuck over my head and the bamboo stick stuck somewhere it had no right to be. Landlocked.

I’d seen passing reference to other local Channel Island writers in the local press; brave, fearless, handsome, modest writers like myself embracing the age of internet self-publishing, unafraid to put their fiction out there for public consumption. Surely there must be a place where they gathered? An online hub or community for the swapping of tales, the comparing of nets, the swapping of buckets? Which way, then, to Rockpoolers-R-Us?

To my surprise I found that there wasn’t one.

And so I set one up. Enter Channel Island Fiction, a small but perfectly proportioned Facebook group featuring a small group of independent poets and writers sharing work, smilies and encouragement. The original aim of the group was based upon Forster’s famous imperative, and for a few weeks only connecting is what we did. Venturing out from my rock pool (with bamboo stick mercifully retrieved) I began to scour the coast for local authors with work for sale, scooping up gems like A.P.Wolf’s Vagabond, Dina Andrew’s Tears in the Sand and Roy McCarthy’s Tess of Portelet Manor and ferrying them back to the group like some sandy-footed Gollum. Once there these titles were listed on the site for all with an interest in local authors to see, buy and more importantly read.

This element of the site continues, and it’s a real joy for me to scroll back over the past year’s postings and see quite how many self-published local titles we’ve managed to list. Equally satisfying are the connections that have been made – writers talking to writers, thoughts and advice being shared. I’m sure Mr Forster would approve.

Several months after the inception of the Facebook group it seemed only right that the C.I.Fiction writers gained somewhere to display their work, and after a welcome nudge from Guernsey author and all-round good guy Peter Lihou we set up www.cifiction.com. Aside from providing us with room to print short stories and poems from some of our writers (including some wonderful work from poets Catherine Helier and Jasmin Liron) the site allowed us to expand a little, and within a few months we’d collected links, information and photographs for an even wider range of Channel Island writers.

The tide had turned by this point, the white horses charging back to shore. Self-published Channel Island writers now had a place to go – to congregate, flaunt and paddle. And as the waters rose, so the impetus grew to do something more with the talent we had on offer. A published anthology, perhaps? A collection of C.I.Fiction members’ work? Why not?

I approached Peter Lihou with the idea in October 2013, and received a characteristically positive response. Better still, Peter offered to publish the anthology under the banner of his not-for-profit publishing company www.acclaimedbooks.com, set up in to promote and assist self-published writers. It was agreed early on that this would be a pan-island enterprise, and that we would attempt to gather work from across the Channel Islands (and we were so close! Sark and Herm, we have you in our sights…). Barring Eisteddfods the opportunities for local writers to strut their funky disco stuff have been lacking of late, and thus it seemed only fair that we spread the net wider and encouraged public submissions.

C.I.Fiction members were unanimous in their enthusiasm for the project. Off we went. Cue press releases, radio interviews, social media sweeps and promotional sky-writing (you probably missed that last one – bloody fog). Soon the entries were rolling in (more appropriate metaphors for ‘arriving in my inbox’ gratefully received) and within a few weeks we had the bulk of our anthology submitted and ready to go.

Several writers sent multiple submissions, not all of which were accepted. Everyone that did submit something has a piece in there, however (usually their best). And what a range we’ve ended up with! From David Sellars’ brutally creepy The Cat That Sleeps In My Bed to the subtly nuanced drama of Daff Noel’s Dirty Linen; from the Wordsworthian grandeur of F.A.Coury’s The Sea to the raucous bounce of Ian de la Mare’s Small Acts of Rebellion, this is an anthology as notable for its stylistic and thematic variations as it is for the geographical proximity of its contributors.

It’s been a slog at times - were emails written on paper then Peter Lihou and myself would be on our second stack by now - but it’s been worth it. I can’t thank Peter enough for his patience and the professionalism he’s brought to the project (copyright? What’s that? Oh yes), as well as for the re-formatting and general fiddlery he’s taken in his stride as we waded out toward completion.

We’ve made some friends on the way. I’m hugely grateful to Ian Rolls for allowing us to use his artwork on the cover and for persevering in his belief that handwritten cover text would work. It does. Thanks also to The Jersey Arts Trust, for giving us their support in the form of a grant allowing us to produce a limited print run. And finally a thank you to the Guernsey and Jersey branches of Women’s Refuge for the fantastic work they do, and to whom all proceeds made from the sale of this anthology will be going.

So there we go. It’s been such a busy time that I’ve only now just taken the time to look up from this all this anthologising and see that the waters have crept up on me. Like I said, it’s a cheeky sod, the sea. You don’t see it coming. There I was this time last year splashing round in my own little rock pool, and now here I am – that little speck over there – linked up to a whole load of other little pools and waving cheerily back to shore. Tide’s high; long may it continue to rise.

Channel Island Fiction

It's been a little over six months since I tentatively set up the Channel Island Fiction group on Facebook. My primary aim was to gather together independent authors like myself in order to provide support, friendship and...well...just somewhere to go and talk to other people insane enough to spend large chunks of their life typing words into a computer in the hope that someone out there will spend time sucking these words up into their brains via their eyes. People mad enough about writing, telling stories and making things with words to simply give it a go.

And I'm glad I did. The group's bloomed of late and our merry band of scribblers hit 2014 with an April anthology looming large. The idea is to promote our writers' work whilst inviting fellow Channel Islanders to submit stories or poems for consideration. There used to be a writing competition over here once a year, though this seems to have fallen by the pageside - our Anthology will hopefully go some way towards providing a spur for local authors to sharpen their keyboards and plug in their pens.

The facebook group can be accessed HERE whilst the main Channel Island Fiction website can be accessed RART YER. Got that?

Review: 'Invisible Fractures' by Catherine Helier

The majority of the poems in this collection deal with the emotional inner-scape of the poet; her doubts, fears and frustrations, her tense and often pain-filled relationships with the poems' unnamed others. Not that it's all doom and gloom - poems such as 'Patience' and 'My Puzzle Piece' offer snatches of optimism, even if this is largely bittersweet ('feeling pain makes me realise its real').

The poet here eschews obliqueness or over-elaborate metaphor in favour of a simplistic style suggestive of everyday thought patterns, of an individual's musings clipped clean into direct utterance. Symbols, when used, are simple, their meaning openly proffered - the sand in 'Fading Away,' the anaesthetising water in 'Comfortably Numb' - the poet intentionally shunning complexity in favour of the power of simple statement.

Despite the linguistic calm 'Invisible Fractures' crackles with a dark, glowering energy. Sensibly priced and well formatted, this is definitely worth a look.

Review: 'Vagabond' by A.P.Wolf

If there’s ever a time or place to be reading novels set in the muggy heat of the Malay archipelago then I’m guessing a drab and wet November in Jersey is probably it. I’d been effusively recommended this novel by a friend, and after only a couple of paragraphs it wasn’t hard to see why.

We join our narrator enjoying a solitary Naked Lunch style breakdown in a Singapore hotel room. The prose is florid, fast and funny, and packed with some wonderful turns of phrase. It's hard not to be instantly gripped by the sleazy heat of his surroundings, the prostitutes, gangsters and assorted wack-jobs in whose company we find ourselves. An elusive Boss is referred to - as is the sense that our narrator is in the middle of some serious strife - before we are transported back to the days of his equally wild, priapic and Tiger beer-drenched adolescence. It’s here that we stay (with occasional returns to his barracked future self), joining our teenage host for epic house-trashing parties, violent run-ins with the local Malays, cock-fights, riots, surrendered virginities, pubic crabs, shit, whiskey and death. In no particular order.

At times the descriptions borders on the incredible, but that’s just fine; the whole book is so entertaining and the narrative voice so engaging that I found myself simply handing myself over and enjoying the ride. There’s a narrative arc of sorts, with the novel culminating in a showdown with a cobra and the symbolic Samson-style shearing of our young vagabond’s locks (ironically at the same time as he becomes able to ejaculate), though the main impression I left the novel with was that of wanting more. 

At only one hundred and fifty pages Vagabond is a short read, yet its pages pulse with the filthy, beautiful vibrancy of life in the raw, featuring descriptions and dialogue that provide some genuine laugh out loud moments. This is top quality writing from a lively and unique voice; I can’t recommend it highly enough.

Review: 'Rachel's Shoe' by Peter Lihou

The German Occupation of the Channel Islands continues to provide rich narrative pickings for local authors, and in this novel by Guernseyman Peter Lihou we are once more transported back to occupied nineteen-forties waters. Our hero is young fisherman Tom le Breton, whom we first encounter deftly evading German patrols in his boat The Flying Fish. Within pages he takes shelter on nearby island Alderney, where he sets about helping a young Jewish girl - the

eponymous Rachel - escape from the labour camp in which she has been living,

Rachel's Shoe divides roughly into two sections, with the first half presenting a nautical adventure tale following Tom and his family as they attempt to conceal Rachel from the German occupying forces. Rachel's initial rescue from the camp - exploding mines and all - forms a suitably exciting introduction to the novel, and the subsequent development of her relationship with Tom forms a strong emotional thread leading us up to her eventual escape and the novel's first denouement.

Fast forward to the start of the seventies (via Rachel's Hollywoodesque return), where the now Mr and Mrs le Breton are attracting some unwelcome attention from a nefarious clique of Germans intent on securing shareholding rights to Rachel's parents' business, the existence of which Rachel has remained wholly unaware. It appears that the account details were hidden somewhere by Rachel's mother before her daughter was taken from her - but where?

Cue the shoe. It's a neat structural device, and one that binds the two parts of the novel tidily together. The shift from wartime adventure to a more modern thriller approach is a welcome one, and the concluding chapters succeed in energising the novel anew. The climax is suitably cathartic, with some well-handled character rounding of the villainous Freddy and his lackeys.

Lihou's style is solid and succinct; he writes with an admirable clarity of expression, and the roving narrative eye provides generous access to the thoughts and motivations of several of the novel's key players. Historical detail is accurate though light enough to avoid detracting from the interplay of characters and the pace of the plot as a whole.

Rachel's Shoe is in turn charming, touching and possessing a definite edge. I look forward to reading more from Lihou and would recommend the Guernseyman's work to anyone. (And that's coming from a Bean.)