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| Photo by Vicky Morris. |
A few things to announce this week...
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'.
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.
The Adventure of the Orkney Shark is set in 1927. Lieutenant-Commander Noel Atherstone, recalled from retirement in Australia for the Imperial Airship Scheme, is given a top-secret mission: to assist Sherlock Holmes in investigating the mysterious disappearance of ships in the North Sea. Fishermen blame the gigantic and voracious Orkney Shark - but as Atherstone, Holmes and Holmes' reluctantly-acquired pupil Mr Blacksmith search the seas in airship R.36, they discover a threat far deadlier than any sea monster...
“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.
