All posts by greydogtales

John Linwood Grant writes occult detective and dark fantasy stories, in between running his beloved lurchers and baking far too many kinds of bread. Apart from that, he enjoys growing unusual fruit and reading rejection slips. He is six foot tall, ageing at an alarming rate, and has his own beard.

How Not to Be a Writer, Now with Added Lurcher

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Sir Arthur Conan Grant, acclaimed author of Sandra’s First Pony, explains…

Many people ask me what it’s like to be a writer. How do you cope with the constant praise, the sparkling reviews and all the money, they ask. And yet despite your busy and glamorous lifestyle, your dogs have such glossy coats – is that Pantene you use?

It’s always good to ask questions. I regularly question Twiglet, for example. “Where’s my bloody cup gone now?” I ask playfully, and “Why are you lying right across the doorway trying to kill me?” But as to writing…

Writers commonly believe that thousands, if not tens of thousands, of people are out there, just dying to read their books if only they could get them published. They are sure that there is a huge audience for their brilliant plot ideas and their devastating use of the English/Chinese/Icelandic language.

This is Not True. The world is a cold and hostile place (unless you have a lurcher to hold).

I believe, on the other hand, that no-one is especially bothered about what I write, or why. And that there’s no particular reason why anyone should want to sit through my literary output. This makes things much easier, because it is then clearly my job to do little more than the following:

1) Bludgeon everyone repeatedly with my stories until they groan and give in.
2) Trick them into buying my stuff by pretending to be their friend and an all-round Nice Chap.
3) Sound like a proper author with meaningful things to say, and separate those pesky intellectuals from their wallets.
4) Become popular enough in the media so that you buy my books but don’t read them.

All of the above will eventually make me money, even if you don’t enjoy what you buy. Or even open it. Money is useful. You can’t, for example, feed three large dogs on Morrison’s own-brand bargain baked beans for long before the house becomes completely uninhabitable. I tried this experiment, and I can assure you that about three hours was quite enough. We don’t even talk about the left-over chili con carne.

They say that the writer’s lifestyle is a lonely one. This is also Not True. My lifestyle is constantly interrupted by scam phone calls, e-mails asking me if my paved drive is big enough, people at the door wanting to tarmac my manhood, the family wanting to be fed and so on. Did Tolstoy constantly have to unblock the toilet whilst writing Pride and Prejudice? I think not.

But what about where the work is actually done? Some writers have a study, a retreat or even a cabin in the Lake District in which to concentrate on their work. I have two special places in the house for my creative endeavours. The first one is trapped at my computer desk, unable to take a break because the dogs have laid down under the wheels of my swivel chair (I’m terrified of running them over and ending up with thousands in vet’s bills).

The second place is lying on the floor with a longdog on top of my notepad, trying to push my glasses off. Neither of these positions is ideal. “Look,” I say, “Isn’t that a squirrel?” Then I hope that they all shoot off into the garden and leave me alone for long enough to write at least a paragraph.

After that, I usually go upstairs to consult a reference book, or check some period detail in a Victorian story. Not fooled by the squirrel trick for long, the dogs pile up after me, convinced that I am about to brush my hair and take them out. The crucial plot element which was about to come together is swept away in a tide of tangled leads and escaping poo bags, most of which float high across the street like little blue doves receiving their freedom (and that’s proper writing for you, Mr So-called Dickens!).

Of course, in line with Objective 2) above, I should admit that Django, Chilli and Twiglet are actually Equity-paid acting dogs, hired to make me seem like a jolly dog-loving person. They pose for pictures on the moors, lie on a sofa or two and then all go back to their trailer to play poker and drink bourbon. Chilli always wins, but I think she keeps a spare ace under her tongue.

So is writing satisfying? Well, I do enjoy those moments not talking about it, not doing it and not reading my rejection slips, so yes, it has its perks. In my spare time I also enjoy not fishing and not collecting stamps. This leaves me with many hours of relaxing past-times, such as re-plumbing the bathroom because I’m a writer and can’t afford to get someone qualified to do it. I now know more about olive nuts, copper piping and soldering than I do about semi-colons, so life isn’t all bad.

reprintcart2And there you have it, the exciting life of a writer, with added lurchers. Of course, there is always one final question which visitors to Grant Manor ask:

But Sir Arthur, do you have to have longdogs to become a really successful writer?

I’ll tell you the answer when my next cheque comes in…

Coming up on greydogtales in the next month or so:

Harry Potter: A Warning from History
Living Hell in the Swamplands of Southern Borneo
My Paranormal Life
Lurchers for Beginners: The Advanced Class

Consumer warning: Some of these entries may not be real

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At Last – CSI: Edinburgh

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OK, who can tell me what connects Silence of the Lambs with Edinburgh Old Town in the 1830s? Yes, the girl at the back, with the green hair and the switch-blade. No, sorry, it’s nothing to do with butchers this time. Not directly, anyway.

It’s the actor Brian Cox, of course.

So, that’s the end of another blog, and next time, we’ll…

What? You want to know why I asked? Oh, alright.

You see, I love Inspector McLevy. I think anyone who likes crime and detective stories, or police procedurals, would enjoy McLevy. He isn’t occult, psychic or any of those weird things you’ve come to expect from me. He’s a tough cop in a tough city. Rebus without a Saab.

And he was a real person, whose history I came across a while ago when I was looking for Victorian period detail. You know, like what brands of mobile phones they had in 1850, that sort of thing. I’m a meticulous writer.

James McLevy (1796-1875) was, by many accounts, the first proper police detective in Edinburgh, in the cheery old days of hanging and transportation.

Magistrate: Why did you steal that loaf of bread, you little vermin?
Street Urchin: ‘Cos I wanted to be a-feedin’ of them kangi-roos dahn under, guv’nor.
Magistrate: Oh God, just string him up anyway.

After time as a nightwatchman with the Edinburgh police, McLevy was given the rank of detective in 1833, and had a successful career which spanned thirty years and a reported 2,220 cases.

This might all have ended up as a minor historical note, except for two things:

1) McLevy wrote up his cases in a number of books from 1860 onwards, around his retirement. How much of what he recounts is true, we can’t tell, but they are not wildly exaggerated tales. They cover the ups and downs of policing Edinburgh Old Town, with its slums and theatres, cobblers and cut-throats. Dickens without the silly names, so to speak.

2) Actor/writer David Ashton decided to create a series of radio plays about McLevy’s fictionalised exploits. These are quite superbly done, terrific fun, and occasionally rather moving. There are TEN series of McLevy now, most of which can be tracked down via the wonderful web (Ashton has written four novels in the same vein, as well).

The real McLevy was a hard worker. He had an insight into criminology, employing stings and forensic techniques. He seems to have had a certain sympathy for the miscreants in his parish, and was not without mercy at times. Eventually he became well enough known to be consulted by parliament and social reformers on the subject of how to deal with criminality.

51NOiJnpXuL._SX330_BO1,204,203,200_Some claim that because he consulted the medical school of the University of Edinburgh, where Sir Arthur Conan Doyle later studied, he might have influenced Conan Doyle’s creation Sherlock Holmes. Pushing it a bit, maybe, but McLevy was better known back then. Conan Doyle might at least have considered some of the cases when constructing his own stories.

On the radio, Brian Cox gives what I believe is one of his best performances yet as Jamie McLevy, thief-taker in the Parish of Leith. He brings humour and humanity into what can be quite brutal tales, covering such diverse subjects as:

  • Revenge tragedies;
  • The horrors of the Crimean war;
  • Women’s rights;
  • Deadly rivalry between brothels, and
  • Victorian pornography.

Ashton’s McLevy is instantly accessible. Don’t think “Oh no, boring historical detective with archaic foibles.” He’s dedicated to his job, cranky and occasionally eccentric. He needs his coffee. He has a dry wit, and he eats too many sugary sweets.

The good Inspector (not as high a rank as it is now) has a love-hate relationship with Jean Brash (played by Siobhan Redmond), the owner of a body house, or brothel, called the Happy Land. I’m guessing that there is intended irony from Ashton here, as the real Happy Land was a tenement/slum area in Victorian Edinburgh.

The National Galleries of Scotland
The National Galleries of Scotland

If I wanted to sound really mock-academic, I could point out that it’s also referenced in an 1838 hymn:

There is a happy land, far, far away,
Where saints in glory stand, bright, bright as day

‘The Happy Land’ was therefore sometimes mentioned by spiritualists as where the souls of the departed would end up – if they were lucky.

Curiously, while James McLevy was an Irishman who came to Scotland as an immigrant in his teens, Brian Cox is himself a descendant of Irish immigrants to Scotland. A match born in… well, somewhere up there. David Ashton, for fun, plays Lieutenant Roach, McLevy’s superior.

The other notable character on the radio is Constable Mulholland, McLevy’s assistant, who spends his time getting exasperated with his Inspector, fishing, keeping bees and hitting people with a big stick. And he likes the ladies, but is not the luckiest of fellows. Mulholland is supposed to have been a real contemporary of McLevy’s, but I can’t prove that bit.

I’m always mithering on about occult detectives and period crime, so I look out for spooky references in everything I read or listen to. The radio series does have a subtle, unsettling element sometimes – odd presentiments, a sense of the violence and death which follows McLevy, and a prophetic vision or two from the locals – but the original James McLevy gives little shrift to spookiness. The best you get is the ending of The Cobbler’s Knife:

“This is the only dream-case in my book; and I’m not sorry for it, otherwise I might have glided into the supernatural, as others have done who have had more education than I, and are better able to separate the world of dreams from the stern world of realities.”

And to finish, you’ll have guessed the connections by now. If not…

The brilliant Brian Cox plays Inspector McLevy, but he also played Hannibal Lecter in the original 1986 movie Manhunter, the film adaptation of the book Red Dragon by Thomas Harris, who wrote Silence of the Lambs. In Manhunter, the lead FBI agent/profiler hunting Hannibal was played by William Petersen, who, of course, was Gil Grissom in CSI.

And none of the above are actually from Edinburgh.

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Abandon Hope, All Ye Who Dot Dot Dot

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The Discovery
By Sir Arthur Linwood Grant

Abigail Jessop stood by the window, the downward curve of her lips betraying her dismay. Not since her earliest ventures into the world of spiritualism had she felt such confusion.

“You were correct, Henry. I would not have believed it, had I not the evidence before me.”

Dodgson smiled. He looked at Abigail in her new dress of watered silk. The olive-green material seemed to shimmer, outlining her figure against the morning sunlight. It fitted perfectly.

“You see, Abigail.” he said, a certain triumph in his voice. “Just as I told you in the shop. You are a medium!”

End

That was Bad Pyschic Joke No. 43. More may follow.

Anyhow, I feel that it would be only polite at this point to interrupt our usual broadcast and say a proper hello to the large number of new listeners who are tuning in to greydogtales. So, er, hello.

It is a genuine pleasure to see you here, nicely scrubbed and turned out, ready for the struggle. As my old Nana used to say, who are all these people and where has my purse gone? But then she had a Sinclair C5 and a dog which constantly relieved itself behind the TV, so she had an excuse.

Authorcom

The author, accompanied by his loyal followers, defending his blog at York Assizes earlier this week

Some of you may have entered your e-mail addresses thinking that you were signing up to insurance, and that you would soon be receiving a free pen and carriage clock. While that might be my next promotional drive, I must spoil the bliss of ignorance by clarifying what we do here:

greydogtales brings you the best in occult detective, ghost and lurcher articles, with its own special twist of inaccuracy, on a regular basis.

You can expect one of these topics to turn up on greydogtales every four or five days. The frequency of posting depends not on my level of inspiration but on the ale stocked at the local supermarkets. Bargain offers of Old Speckled Hen or Marston’s Pedigree, for example, tend to increase the quantity of posts but decrease the quality.

I am, if you still need to know, an ageing Yorkshireman who, as I put it in a recent facebook post somewhere, can’t afford both tact and lurchers. You may find quite a bit of sarcasm going on. And as you’re new here, I want to point out that I do wear my heart on my sleeve sometimes. If I’m in a bad mood, I wear other people’s hearts as well, watching the rivulets of crimson trickle down between my arthritic fingers… nghh! Must find tablets…

This is the well-known author J Linseed Grant, after all, a man who is on his own in the house far too much.

Actually, I did have quite a lot of help when I started this blog, but my imaginary staff walked out on me soon after I changed the dosage. Writing is a solitary, irritating habit, like exploring one of your nostrils but with less chance of financial gain. I plan to expose the whole sordid business (the scribbling, not the nose-orientated stuff) in Writers for Beginners, coming later this month.

To round off this introduction, I would like to add more about lurchers and longdogs, the joys of canine companionship and so on. But I can’t because Django is whining to go walkies, and he’s already dug out one flowerbed today – seriously.

There. You can’t complain that I haven’t warned you.

The carriage clock is in the post.

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Flaxman Low: Ghost Wrecker

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I think it’s fair to say that if you are called Hesketh Vernon Hesketh-Prichard (1876-1922) and nicknamed ‘Hex’ at school, you ought to do something interesting with your life.

The fascinating HVH-P did not let anyone down. He hunted for (probably) extinct giant sloths in South America, helped counter German snipers on the Great War, played a mean game of cricket and explored the world. Through Trackless Labrador is one of his, for example, and he is supposed to have brought back some of the first reports of vodoun from the interior of Haiti. He could have been invented for the Boy’s Own Library.

And he loved his mum. At least, I presume he did, because with his mother Kate O’Brien Ryall Prichard, he wrote a series of occult detective stories. She also accompanied him on some of his travels, but that’s another matter.

The Flaxman Low adventures were attributed to E and H Heron, probably because the printers couldn’t fit both their full names on the covers. Published 1898-99, there were twelve stories in total, stories which brought his character onto the occult detective roll of honour. These tales are interesting, unusual and come with a twist of the new science of psychology (these are the 1890s, remember). But wait…

I had intended to write my usual gentle introductory ramble. Then I re-read the Heron family this summer, and realised that this stuff is, in fact, nuts. Enjoyable, but nuts.

The detective himself is “one of the leading scientists of the day”, whose real name is not disclosed. He is also an accomplished sportsman, and a record-breaking hammer-thrower, strong and lean with a high forehead, long neck and thin moustache. We learn this early on, which gets us all a-quiver and ready for the horrors.

And boy did I have trouble picking which horrors to feature here. So much gold in the river. I have rarely felt so dumbfounded when I put a book down. Here are two of Flaxman Low’s discoveries, to give you the idea:

  • A dead black servant found mouldering in a tiny cupboard in a Scottish manor house, after growing poisonous fungi, derived from deadly African spores, in there. Helpfully we are told: “how or why he made use of them are questions that can never be cleared up now”.
  • A ghost which eventually turns into a vampire which decides to inhabit the remains of an Egyptian mummy. As an extra, the ghost/vampire/mummy may have come originally from an ancient English barrow-mound. It’s like the entire Hammer Horror catalogue in twelve pages.

I do wish I had thought of these.

mummy2Flaxman Low the Man has a number of noble characteristics, apart from his high forehead.

Firstly, he attributes his findings to his advanced knowledge of psychology and study of psychic manifestations. When he can’t really answer someone’s question, he replies:

“Everybody who…. investigates the phenomena of spiritism will, sooner or later, meet in them some perplexing element, which is not to be explained by any of the ordinary theories. For reasons into which I need not now enter, this present case appears to me to be one of these.”

A wonderful paragraph, which in my own humbler stories would have been rendered thus:

Inspector Chiltern: What was that, then?
Henry: Haven’t the faintest, old chap.

Secondly, he decides for quite unknown reasons to put everyone in danger (except himself) by declaring halfway through most stories that he has pretty much solved the case but won’t give them the answer until lots more harm has been done. I felt very Miss Marple sometimes, even at the end:

“But Aunt Jane, you still haven’t explained how the one-armed werewolf which killed Colonel Smythe knew that the spectral squid would be blamed…”

Thirdly, he likes burning/shooting/knocking things down as a quick end to the matter. If he had been written with a touch more Indiana Jones, the stories would be perfect. I feel I have to commend to you the final scene with the barrow-wight/ghost/vampire/mummy, in which it is despatched by putting the bullet-riddled and beaten remains into a boat and giving them a Viking funeral. You couldn’t make this up – except the Heron family did.

To finish this piece I want to ruin one particular tale in more detail, to illustrate the general approach. The Story of the Spaniards, Hammersmith is the first Low appearance. It starts with the traditional motif of Flaxman Low being called in by a chum. The chum has inherited a house, and surprisingly, the house can’t be let for long because the tenants run away or shoot out the skirting boards (I’m serious). Financially embarrassed, the chum asks for help, and…

The story is wonderful, especially as it veers into Lovecraft before Lovecraft in its descriptions:

“The sensation he experienced as it moved was of some ponderous, pulpy body, not crawling or creeping, but spreading… then he became conscious of a pair of glassy eyes, with livid, everted lids, looking into his own… they were watery, like the eyes of a dead fish, and gleamed with a pale, internal lustre.”

This description follows the sighting of a bladder-like object regularly going into one of the rooms, but never to be found when pursued. “The bladder-like object may be the key to the mystery.” Low pronounces before any real investigation has started. There’s a detective for you.

After a simple experiment, Low decides (on thin evidence) that a leprous curmudgeon died in the house, and is haunting it. Flaxman Low has a novel solution – they pull the house down. In doing so they find a malformed skeleton “under the boarding at an angle of the landing”. Low reveals that the leper’s spirit has been intermittently animating its remains, at which point I knelt before Hesketh Vernon Hesketh Pritchard (and his mum) in awe.

You see, the bladder object was a bandaged, leprous foot, strangely visible when the rest of the body was not; marks on a landing deliberately strewn with sand (a common psychologist trick) were caused by walking sticks – lame ghost, apparently; the spirit had somehow become huge and pulpy despite animating a wrecked skeleton, and anyway, the leprous chap who could hardly move had for some reason hidden himself ingeniously under the landing floorboards before he died!

Wow. I so got it.

And there you have him, Flaxman Low, the occult detective with a difference. You have been warned…

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