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| Photo by Vicky Morris. |
First up, there's this really cool interview done last month, after my half of the Hive Writer's Day Workshop with the brilliant K.T. Davies. Louisa Rhodes, one of Hive's young writers, fed me questions about horror, writing and spaghetti, typed up my rambling responses and made them look reasonably intelligent. So here's the result. Louisa did a fantastic job, and was a pleasure to talk to.
The Feast Of All Souls has a new review, over at RisingShadow, in which Seregil of Rhiminee describes it as "one of the best horror novels I've read in recent years... entertaining, thrilling... ambitious and well-written. Excellent British horror fiction!"
Many thanks to RisingShadow, and to Seregil!
And finally... Simon Clark's anthology Sherlock Holmes's School For Detection is out now.
It's 1890. Sherlock Holmes and Doctor Watson
return to Baker Street after a night pursuing a vicious criminal.
Inspector Lestrade is waiting for Holmes with a proposition of national
importance.
Lestrade tells Holmes that a school of detection has been formed to train a new breed of modern investigators that will serve in Great Britain and the Empire. Most students will become police officers. Some, however, will become bodyguards and spies. Holmes begins instructing his decidedly curious assortment of students from home and abroad. He does so with his customary gusto and inventiveness.
Scotland Yard, in the main, allocates crimes to solve and Holmes mentors his students. Occasionally, he shadows them in disguise in order to assess or even directly test their abilities with creative scenarios he devises. Certain crimes investigated by the students might appear trivial, such as the re-positioning of an ornament atop a garden wall, yet it will transpire an assassin has moved the ornament to create good sightlines in order to commit murder with a sniper's rifle.
Other mysteries are considered outside the domain of the police. For example, the inexplicable disappearance of a stone gargoyle, which is linked to an ancient family curse. Or a man suffering from amnesia who discovers that not only has he acquired a secret life but also gained an implacable enemy, too. Holmes, with the ever- trustworthy Doctor Watson in his wake, is kept busy with his students' cases, ranging from minor to serious, sometimes rectifying their mistakes and saving them from a variety of disasters.
These eleven wonderful new adventures and intrigues include tales such as 'The Gargoyles of Killfellen House', 'Sherlock Holmes and the Four Kings of Sweden' and 'The Case of the Cannibal Club'.
Lestrade tells Holmes that a school of detection has been formed to train a new breed of modern investigators that will serve in Great Britain and the Empire. Most students will become police officers. Some, however, will become bodyguards and spies. Holmes begins instructing his decidedly curious assortment of students from home and abroad. He does so with his customary gusto and inventiveness.
Scotland Yard, in the main, allocates crimes to solve and Holmes mentors his students. Occasionally, he shadows them in disguise in order to assess or even directly test their abilities with creative scenarios he devises. Certain crimes investigated by the students might appear trivial, such as the re-positioning of an ornament atop a garden wall, yet it will transpire an assassin has moved the ornament to create good sightlines in order to commit murder with a sniper's rifle.
Other mysteries are considered outside the domain of the police. For example, the inexplicable disappearance of a stone gargoyle, which is linked to an ancient family curse. Or a man suffering from amnesia who discovers that not only has he acquired a secret life but also gained an implacable enemy, too. Holmes, with the ever- trustworthy Doctor Watson in his wake, is kept busy with his students' cases, ranging from minor to serious, sometimes rectifying their mistakes and saving them from a variety of disasters.
These eleven wonderful new adventures and intrigues include tales such as 'The Gargoyles of Killfellen House', 'Sherlock Holmes and the Four Kings of Sweden' and 'The Case of the Cannibal Club'.
The anthology also features my story The Adventure Of The Orkney Shark. Other contributors include Cate Garder, Paul Finch, Alison Littlewood, Carole Johnstone... and many, many more.
“There,”
said Blacksmith, pointing from an open starboard window.
“Where?”
Holmes and I ran to his side, peering out – but we had already
passed over the spot.
“Reduce
speed,” I told Church. “Mr Potter, bring us around. Mr Hunt,
maintain altitude.”
Slowly
the airship turned. It wasn’t a quick process; R.36 was six hundred
and seventy-five feet long from nose to tail, and almost eighty wide.
But in the end, she cruised back the way she had come, at a more
sedate pace.
“What
did you see, and where?” demanded Holmes. Blacksmith pointed to an
area of swirling water between two flat, tabular skerries.
“There,”
he said. “It does not move.”
“I
see nothing,” said Holmes.
“Nor
I,” I said. “Just rock, weed, barnacles…”
“Barnacles,
yes. There are none elsewhere on these shoals.”
He
was right, now I considered: for whatever reason, the tiny shellfish
didn’t appear on any visible part of the rocks and skerries. They
lay only in this one area, in a long wide cluster. As we drew closer,
I saw its outline was distorted by the water’s churning, but there
was something about the shape – a regularity, a symmetry.
The
barnacles had not grown here; they had grown somewhere – or on
something – else. Something that had spent a great deal of time in
other parts of the sea, more conducive to their survival.
Blacksmith
was right: I saw it now. A great mass, encrusted in barnacles and
weed, in the shape of a huge fish – a long teardrop body, but with
fins, almost like wings, jutting out from its sides, and another, a
thin sharp triangle, rising from its back. But it was larger than any
fish – four hundred feet, if it was an inch...
You can buy the anthology here.
