How can it be March already? Maybe there’s a mathematical formula that can explain the correlation between my own advancing years and the increasing speed with which each brand new year hurtles towards its middle age.

March is a significant month for Paper Lanterns – its formal publication date falls on 15th of March, but the copies themselves have now been delivered to Novel Press and are ready to find themselves new homes on other people’s bookshelves. Look to your right, scroll down a little bit, and you’ll see how easy it is to get your copy! I’m also hoping that some of these might land in temporary accommodation in Hong Kong bookshops, as well as some Independent booksellers in the UK.

As I’ve said below, there have been hopeful signs of interest, and a couple of days ago I was delighted to open an email from the editor of the online Lamma-zine, wanting to know where he could buy a copy of my new novel so that he or one of his team could write a review. At first I’d assumed that he must have heard about my book from my sister or one of her friends, but no, it was Google Alerts which had led him to this site. Hurray for Google!

Other March events include the latest copy of Writing Magazine, inside which, on pages 30 and 31, is an article entitled “Make your book unputdownable’” by Crysse Morrison in her regular ‘Good Practice’ slot. This series of articles is well worth reading, but that’s not all – the sub title is, “Hook your reader with a glimpse of the action and conflict to come”, and its main focus for the examples it gives is the novel, Telling Liddy, by Anne Fine, the award winning author of numerous books for children and eight for adults, and my second novel, Paper Lanterns. How’s that for company for unknown author!

I was delighted when Crysse told me that she wanted to use some quotations from Paper Lanterns for this article. There they are, under the subheading, ‘Enticing trailers’. There are three intertwined story lines in my novel, and three key dates. The main action of the book is set in the present, but both 1971 and 1930 are highly significant as well. I’d changed the opening chapters several times before I settled on a short prologue set in 1971, giving hints of what will unfold later in the book.

I gradually realised that I needed another, earlier, clue to the events of 1930, and Crysse goes on to say: “But the initial hook of this novel is an atmospheric fragment of oriental mystery from a later chapter when Ann (the main character) begins to uncover family secrets that will slowly burn away all the previous certainties of her life:

Friday 8th April, 1930, Hong Kong
“…and I had the oddest sensation – as though my soul – my very self – was a bright flame that now was shrinking, leaning away from him as from a gust of wind. And into my mind came the image of how the Chinese protect a small flame of light from being extinguished and at the same time, beautify it, with a delicate construction of coloured paper.”

A March event that I’m particularly looking forward to, and involves my new baby (Paper Lanterns, of course!) will take place in a coffee shop in the middle of Birmingham on the last Tuesday of the month. But more of that later.

I arrived back in the UK on Sunday (in spite of snow at Birmingham airport delaying my departure from Schipol airport for over three hours.) The main purpose of my short trip to Hong Kong was to visit my mother, still going strong at the age of 93. She is staying with my sister on Lamma Island, the setting for a large part of my novel Paper Lanterns.

It was mere luck that I’d taken delivery of several copies of my book two days before I was due to fly out to Hong Kong. I couldn’t waste this chance of finding a home for my new novel in some of the book shops there. (This photo of me holding copies of my book was taken by my sister, in front of the same view that I’d used for the cover of the book itself.)

I soon discovered that my timing wasn’t all that brilliant when it came to marketing: this picture of the ferry pier on Lamma might give you a clue.

Those bright red globes and the strings of coloured flags are there to mark the Chinese New Year, an event that stretches over several days, during which, most businesses shut down. Not an auspicious week for arranging meetings!
But I was lucky after all, as the organiser of the prestigious Hong Kong Literary Festival was able to make time for me last Thursday morning, two days before I was due to return home. She was interested in my brand new publishing house, Novel Press, and very encouraging about the chances of my book in Hong Kong. She gave me several useful contacts: I made a few phone calls, sent a few emails and was invited by two of the three main bookshop chains to post them a copy of Paper Lanterns.

More exciting still, was the email I received from the third company, asking if I could meet with the manager the following afternoon. This publishing business is heady stuff! I arrived at the address, a large bookshop in the bustling shopping area of Kowloon, and focussed on the table displaying books with Chinese connections, both general interest and fiction. It didn’t seem an impossible dream that copies of Paper Lanterns might soon be lying among them, face up, waiting to be lifted from the pile and taken to the till.

A few minutes later, I was following a young sales assistant out of the bookshop door, and into the office part of the building, where I was ushered into the manager’s office, a charming and efficient young woman. She was particularly interested in the real-life love letters which provided the inspiration for a central section of the novel. I’ll explain more about these letters soon.

Bookshops in the UK usually tend to accept books on a sale-or-return basis, and it would be unlikely that a store would order more than one or two copies from an unknown author. When the books in question have to delivered from the other side of the globe, returning them to the publisher wouldn’t be a viable option. You can imagine my delight when the manager indicated that they might be able to accept 20 books to begin with!

Now I have to look into the cost of freight, yet one more step on the steep learning curve I’ve been treading since the inception of Novel Press.

Back to Chinese New Year for a moment - traditionally a time for giving plants and flowers. Huge crowds flock to Victoria Park in Central to select gifts for their families and friends from the Flower Market that lasts for several days, finishing on the night of the New Year’s Eve. But as you’ll see from this picture, there are also souvenirs on sale at stalls staffed by youngsters learning to develop an understanding of business.This is the year of the tiger, hence these tiger hats. In spite of the cold wind and rain, they never stopped smiling. If only we could have bottled this enthusiasm and good will!

Character, Plot and Place – three essential ingredients for a novel. I think I’d usually say that ‘Character’ is my priority, but today, ‘Place’ is on my mind. When I come to think of it, I tend to associate people with places where I see them most often.

Right now I’m in Hong Kong (as I mentioned in my post below) – more precisely, I’m on Lamma island, where the Ann, the main character in my book, Paper Lanterns, spends a week that changes her life. So it’s not surprising that I thought about Ann’s reaction to the island when I arrived there on Thursday afternoon:

“Now she’s close enough to see the long ferry pier jutting out into the still water of the bay, and the small flat-roofed houses nestling on the slope of the hill among tall trees. And there, on the near side of the pier, a tiny collection of wooden shacks on stilts, perched above the rocks on the shoreline, and behind these, a small inlet with a cluster of little boats.”

As I emerged onto the pier myself, I thought of Ann again, “ The first thing that strikes her is the row of bicycles that straddles the top bar of the railings on each side of the long, concrete pier.”

It’s the Chinese new year this weekend, and I was delighted to see the long line of bright red , tasselled paper lanterns swaying above the bikes in the breeze. There’s an air of excitement in the narrow main street of Yung Shue Wan, but it it looks as though the weather will be cooler than expected, and is likely to rain.

Still, at least I managed to get here – there was an hour or more when I thought we’d all have to go home again, while the plane full of passengers was waiting on the tarmac at Birmingham airport for our turn with the de-icer machine to clear the wings of the inch or so of snow that had just fallen. I’d not realized how disruptive even a centimeter of snow can be, when combined with zero temperatures. At least we won’t have snow and ice here.

In case you haven’t yet seen the cover of my book, I have to tell you that the lanterns on the cover are green, not red! The book will be on sale on this site next month, but meanwhile you can find out more about it here.

I’m often asked by readers of my first published novel, The Dangerous Sports Euthanasia Society, where I got the inspiration for my characters from, and I answer truthfully that they are all total inventions. And then I have to add that the disguise adopted by the main character, 75 year-old Agnes, was borrowed from a feisty septuagenarian I’d met in the gym, who always wore a baseball cap over her shoulder-length frizz of ginger hair. (If you haven’t read it yet, why not boorrow it from the libary, or buy it here, via Paypal!)

Yesterday morning I was sorting out the clothes for my trip to Hong Kong next Wednesday (more of that later!) while listening to Fi Glover on Saturday Live, and I was fascinated to hear about the inspiration for the Larkin family in The Darling Buds of May.

David Dell was eight when he and his 5 siblings were taken on his first ever holiday in a bulging bright blue van. He remembers stopping at the small village shop and the rare treat of being bought ice creams, but he hadn’t noticed the man staring at them from his car across the road, as one by one they emerged from the van.
Years later, it became clear that this man was H.E. Bates himself, observing the scene with a writer’s keen eye for detail: the description of this scene in his autobiography make this far more like fact than wishful supposition.

It was an oddly weird sensation for me as a listener, hearing David Dell explain how his entire family had been caught like butterflies and preserved between the pages of a book for generations to come. It must have been amazing for him when he came across that passage in H E Bates’ autobiography.

I’m always touched by real items from decades ago, such as letters or scribbled messages on the back of postcards. Gardening Husband is a keen collector of stamps and postcards from the Far East, but he usually doesn’t bother to read those messages. However, he does know that I’m more interested in the glimpses of real lives than the potential value of a rare picture or postage stamp, so when he came across a few letters and scraps of paper among a job lot of ephemera, he handed them to me.

At that time I was in the planning stage for a novel that would be mainly set in contemporary Hong Kong, a place I have visited several times because I have a sister who lives on Lamma, one of the outlying islands, and owns a beautiful shop in Central, selling antique oriental robes and other artefacts.

After reading these letters, written by an English woman in Canton in the early 1920s, and two other love letters four years earlier from a young Chinese girl to the same man, my brain went into overdrive. I didn’t know precisely how I would use these epistolic treasures, but of one thing I was sure: a significant section of the book would take place in the 20s or early 30s and the setting would be moved from Canton, to Hong Kong.

I’ll soon be posting more about these letters and how they feature in my new novel, Paper Lanterns . Meanwhile, I’ll be interested to hear about any other real-life material that other writers have transformed into fiction.

It’s still January, the double-faced month, so it’s not too late to mention books I’ve read in 2009 - especially a December book, and especially this one, which is so difficult to slot neatly into any category; neither one thing nor another, neither here nor there, and just when you think you’ve grasped its nature, it slips away, laughing: “A highly original and visual novel, brimming with delicious wit, The Milliner and the Phrenologist is a remarkable debut from Kay Syrad”

It’s written in a voice like no other that I’ve encountered in this or the last half of the previous century. Not that it’s archaic or old fashioned, though it is set in Victorian London. Quaint, perhaps, might be a better word, though that won’t do justice to its groundedness and other-worldliness, its frivolity and wisdom, ruthless honesty and tenderness. I was gripped from the first page to the last.

The characters are drawn with fine brush strokes, a few at a time, so that the reader can visualise their faces , gestures and clothing in minute detail, as they are gradually led to a fuller understanding of the inner workings of their minds.

Here is just one example, taken at random:

“As she was passing the tea rooms …she noticed John Motton sitting at one of the tables…He hadn’t seen her and she moved back slightly, so that she could watch him without being noticed. He was chewing what was probably some kind of meat sandwich, and it amused Alice to see his jaw bones moving in large regular circles. She could see his smooth temples becoming red and crinkly-veined, how his whiskery cheek hollowed and puffed…and Alice couldn’t take her eyes off him, for it seemed that he was never going to take a fresh bite.”

Here’s an extract of what’s said on the back cover:
“When Alice Heapy, an unusual and artistic young milliner, daringly sets up her own business, the mother of John Motton, eminent phrenologist, is amongst the first of her bourgeois and eccentric clients. Alice is intrigued by the phrenologist’s belief that he can determine his clients’ character and moral capacity by measuring their heads, whilst Motton is astonished at the power Alice’s poetic hats exert on the lives of his mother and her peculiar friends. But under each other’s exacting and increasingly hostile gaze, Alice and Motton begin to reveal—and, in desperation, attempt to conceal—their own characters.”

A few years ago, I’d been privileged to be in the same group as Kay for a series of monthly poetry seminars led by Mimi Khalvati, and although the other group members all produced good work, it was clear to me that Kay’s was an exceptional talent.

When I heard through the Cinnamon Press website that they were publishing Kay’s first novel, I was delighted for her, and impressed by the publishers for recognising and supporting this talent.

If you’re looking for a light, predictable holiday read, this book might not be for you. But if you want to wallow in delicious prose and enter a strange world whose characters will remain in your head and niggle away at you until you pick up the book and read it again, then I urge you to click on the link from Kay’s website, and buy it from Cinnamon Press.

Once you’ve read and enjoyed the book, that’s the time to use the link to Amazon and leave a review.

I’d love to hear your views if you do get hold of this book. And also if you have an unusual book to recommend.

BEFORE YOU READ ABOUT Looping the Loop with Free Harmony, Click here for my BOOK COVER DESIGN CHALLENGE

and give yourself the chance of winning a FREE copy of Paper Lanterns(CLOSING DATE: 31st December)

I’ve just experienced the weird (but rather nice) sensation of hearing my voice coming at me from my computer screen, and suddenly I’m back in the headquarters of Radio Wildfire, being interviewed by the presenter, Dave Reeves. I’m reading an extract from The Dangerous Sports Euthanasia Society, the part where Agnes Borrowdale, (‘75 years old, a week on Tuesday’) prevents Felix from throwing himself under a high speed train on New Street Station.

I shared the ‘live’ part of the broadcast, on Monday 7th December, with Adrian Johnson, the current Birmingham Poet Laureate, but although I had the pleasure of hearing him recite his poems, I wasn’t able to listen to myself and hear how I’d have sounded to the fans of Radio Wildfire, so it was a relief to find that I didn’t make a complete prat of myself (in spite of some hesitation and stumbling over a few words.)

I’m quite used to talking about my first novel, but this was the first time I’d been interviewed about Paper Lanterns so it took a bit longer to collect my thoughts. I have to say that I was enthralled just now when I was listening to two of the real-life love letters from China in the 1920s that inspired one of the main story threads in the novel. (I’ll post more information about these letters soon.)

Meanwhile, if you want to hear more of this broadcast, it’s now available here on the Loop.

The Loop is a non stop (24/7)transmission between the live monthly broadcasts, and it’s just been updated today, 23rd December. Once you’ve got the hang of how this works, it’s very easy to follow, especially as Dave has listed what you can expect to hear on each of the 12 tracks. If you miss anything, all you need to do is wait till it comes round again – (a bit like those baggage carousels at airports when you fail to recognise your own suitcase before it’s swallowed up by those dangling bits of rubber - but waiting on Radio Wildfire is a good deal more entertaining than watching the sluggish progress of other people’s luggage!)

So here’s the programme, and it’s part of the fun to identify which track you’ve landed on. It’s all good stuff, but make sure you listen out for tracks 6 and 9!

Tracks 1-3
Adrian Johnson Birmingham Poet Laureate reads…
All the Jam
Happy Birthday Brummie Floozy
Birmingham’s What?

Tracks 4-6
Office Party Roz Goddard (live)
Thank you letter Xmas 1969 (2008) Brendan Hawthorne with Nigel Self
Christine Coleman reads from The Dangerous Sports Euthanasia Society

Tracks 7-9
Twelve Days of Christmas, a story by Susan Hulse
A Poor Man’s Excuse Dave Reeves (live)
Christine Coleman talks about her forthcoming novel, Paper Lanterns

Tracks 10-12
Adrian Johnson talking about the National Storytelling Laureate and reading the poem Deep Mercia
Christmas Do Geoff Stevens
Let Your Little Light Shine (Trad spiritual) Free Harmony*

(* I liked this so much that I ordered the CD of Free Harmony from Chris Hoskin’s website (a bargain at £8.00)

BEFORE YOU READ ABOUT Radio Wildfire Live, Click here for my BOOK COVER DESIGN CHALLENGE and give yourself the chance of winning a FREE copy of Paper Lanterns(CLOSING DATE: 31st December)

I’ve been so busy replying to the numerous kind people who entered, that that this is the first new post for a couple of weeks

One of the many nice things about the Writers’ Conference I attended a couple of weeks ago, was the chance of catching up with former writing friends and making new ones. The only other Writing Conference I’d attended was a residential weekend in Winchester in June 2008. It was inspiring, informative and great fun, and it made me wonder why there was never anything like that in Birmingham. (Even the East Midlands seemed to have more going on for writers then those of us in the West)

That is, until Jonathan Davidson puts things right with his Writers’ Toolkit. James Walker, a writer from East Mids, has written an excellent report of that day – I’ve just spent time I haven’t really got to spare, browsing his own site. But then again, he’s saved me some of that time by expressing a lot of what I’d intended to say myself.

So now I can skip that and get to Dave Reeves, director and programmer of Radio Wildfire,a spoken word radio station that streams content 24 hours a day over the internet. It’s the LIVE transmission that is the really exciting part for me, as Dave has invited me to take part in this TOMORROW, Monday 7th December, between 8.00 and 10.00 pm UK time.

Dave has a great way with words – I’d sent him a few short paragraphs about my writing life, and here’s how he introduces his Monday evening guests: “A Laureate, a Plinther, and a mountain climbing Guinness drinker.” (that last phrase is the way he’s chosen to present me – it’s made me quite nostalgic for those far off days in Dublin)

The Laureate and Plinther is Adrian Johnson, “the current Birmingham Poet Laureate and a man with an enthusiasm for storytelling… Earlier this year he became a ‘plinther’ in Trafalgar Square, standing in the sunshine at 3pm on a Saturday - almost exactly 20 years from when the Poll Tax riot erupted on 31 March 1990.” He’s a great performer of his own poems, and from this YouTube video,it looks as though it’ll be a lively evening.

Here’s the more serious part of what Dave has written about me: “Christine Coleman’s first novel The Dangerous Sports Euthanasia Society came out in 2005. While that was mainly set in Birmingham and Sutton Coldfield, her forthcoming book, Paper Lanterns, was inspired by finding a cache of love letters written in China by two separate women to the same man.”

And there’ll be a lot more to squeeze into this couple of hours:
“Amongst the artists we’ll be playing from CD is Coventry based Chris Hoskins from her collection of monologues Relatively Speaking, and singing with the superb a’cappella trio Free Harmony. And there’ll be some of the sort of Christmas literary offerings that you’ll only get on Radio Wildfire as we look at office parties with Roz Goddard; Christmas presents with Brendan Hawthorne; and reinterpret a couple of well worn seasonal tales.”

And now I’d better go and sort out which extracts from my books the listeners might like to hear me reading on Monday evening

Yes, it IS the cover that I’ll be inviting people to judge, with a chance of winning one of five copies of my new novel, Paper Lanterns. (More about this below)

I’ve been learning a huge amount about the nitty gritty of publishing since Novel Press was dreamed into existence by our talented writing group. We met each other on the M.A. Writing course at Nottingham Trent University in the late nineties and a small group of us still meet regularly to critique each other’s ‘Work In Progress’.

I was lucky enough to have my novel,The Dangerous Sports Euthanasia Society, published by Transita. Unfortunately, after bringing out thirty-two novels in under two years, they had to pull back from publishing fiction, and focus on their other business, HowTo Books.

We began to realise that the state of publishing was even more restrictive than when my book was launched four years ago, and after much discussion we decided to retain our own authorial autonomy and start a publishing house, Novel Press. I won’t go into all that just now, because there’s more than enough material for several future posts, and at the moment, I want to focus on my new novel Paper Lanterns – or more precisely, on selecting on the best front cover for it. Click here for a sneak preview, written by Bookcrosser, Lyzzybee.

In her ‘ordinary life’, Liz has started a second career with her new Editing Service. She’s done a brilliant job, copy-editing Paper Lanterns. (more of that in a future post)

‘Don’t judge a book by its cover’ is supposed to be the accepted wisdom, but I must admit that if I’m presented with a range of books, cover-side up, it’s the cover that will entice my hand to reach out for it. Certainly, this is only the start: next, I tend to read the information on the back, and then flick through the first few pages, but if I hadn’t picked it up in the first place…

There’s lots more to be said about covers: the way they help to indicate genre is just the start of it. Beyond that, I’d never really given much thought to book covers in general. When Transita sent me the proposed cover for The Dangerous Sports Euthanasia Society, I loved it (even though the window was the wrong sort), and if I’d been asked to suggest an alternative idea, I wouldn’t have known what to say. When it came out in a large print version in 2008, I wasn’t at all keen on that cover.

When I was in charge of every stage of the process myself (with a little help from my fellow writers at Novel Press) I began to look at the question of the cover in a different light. We’d chosen Mousemat Design, because they’d produced a majority of the Transita covers.

My task was to supply Ian Hughes with enough information about my novel for him to create the perfect cover. A tall order indeed. You can read a short description on My Novel page, but I felt that he would need to know more about what I was hoping for.

Within a very short time, he had emailed me three possible versions and I was delighted to see that he was heading in the right direction. Then followed three further versions, and finally, a seventh.

The Cover Design Challenge for readers is simple:

1) Keep an eye on this website to see when I’ve managed to upload all versions of a possible front cover (or follow me on Twitter or Face Book for updates.)

2) When The Cover Design Challenge is ready to go, all you need to do is to read the extra information that I sent to the designer and will post on my site together with the pictures, and then:
3) Look at all these pictures and answer this simple question:

WHICH OF THESE POSSIBLE COVERS DO YOU THINK THE AUTHOR LIKES BEST?
I’ll be very interested in your comments, and although I’ve got my favourite, I might need to think again if enough people choose a different version.

Each entry will be given a number as they arrive, and five of these will be drawn at random. The lucky winners will be contacted and will be sent a free copy of Paper Lanterns when it is published early in 2010

In both of the talks that I’ve attended recently by writer, R.J. Ellory, I was fascinated to hear the way he describes three categories of novels. I realised that even if I hadn’t classified them so clearly before this, I recognised that this is actually how I view them too:

1: the ‘airport ones’ that you might take on holiday with you, or curl up at home with on a cold wet day. These are escapist entertainment, often following an established formula. They are quickly devoured, enjoyed, and as quickly forgotten. They do ‘what it says on the tin’ and serve a specific purpose. They are ‘give-away’ items that you can pass on to friends or charity shops without a qualm.

2: literary fiction, which is often described as ‘style over content’. These books might sometimes need a bit more thought and effort while you read them, but they will make a long-term impact on the reader, and will often be re-read quite soon, not because their plot has already been forgotten, but in order to savour the beautiful phrases and sentences and admire the sheer skill in the use of the English language. Each subsequent reading is likely to reveal more treasures.

3: a combination of 1 and 2 – beautiful and skilful use of language, but more commercial, with, perhaps, a more immediately accessible and gripping plot. R.J. Ellory aims at being in this category, and it is certainly where I’d have placed his novel, A Quiet Belief in Angels. (the only one I’ve read so far)

I was reminded again of these categories a couple of days ago, when I came across the link to this article on the on-line BookSeller: >“Chick lit offers fully rounded heroines for fully rounded women”. Apparently, >“the latest publishing phenomenon to sweep America, which has just arrived over here, features a new heroine: the young woman who is seriously overweight – and doesn’t care.”

I don’t tend to read Chic Lit myself, but I don’t think that has anything to do with the dress-size of its protagonists. It’s the formulaic plots that don’t hold much interest for me. (Having said that, I used to adore Georgette Heyer’s predictable Regency romances in my younger days, and their heroines were always beautiful, and they always won the dark, sardonic hero in the end.)

Nowadays, I prefer to feel that I’m learning something new from a novel, whichever category it might fall into. I’m currently nearing the end of a very enjoyable novel (on CD) Amenable Women, by Mavis Cheek. One of her themes is the importance (or not) of beauty for a woman, particularly how plain women are perceived in our culture now, and in Tudor times.

I was particularly interested that Mavis Cheek had chosen this as a key theme in her novel, because it also plays a part in my new novel, Paper Lanterns.

There seem to be a few themes in this particular post: categories/genres of novels; possibilities of lots of sub-divisions in each of the three I’ve named – and a whole lot more to say about what people are looking for when they pick up a novel.

I’ve briefly mentioned R J Ellory a couple of times since I first heard him speak at a gathering of Bookcrossers in September but never seemed to get time to write about his novel, A Quiet Belief in Angels.

I was about one third of the way into this book when I recommended it as the one to-be-read for our book group for this month.

In spite of (or rather, because of) having heard R.J.’s very entertaining talk a few weeks earlier, I was at the Library Theatre in the middle of Birmingham last night to hear him again, together with several members of my book group. What a raconteur! I’d wondered if this would be a repeat of what he’d said to the Bookcrossers, but in the hour and a half (excluding his reading from the first chapter of The Anniversary Man) almost all the material was different, and even when the same anecdotes were included, they sounded as fresh and lively as before.

On that first occasion, he started by explaining that he was going to answer questions, rather than give a talk, and I was amazed and impressed by the fluent way he delivered his answers, fascinating mini-essays in themselves. I hadn’t yet read any of his books at that stage, so I was interested to hear what he might say about A Quiet Belief in Angels. When the interviewer finally invited questions from the audience, there was little time left. (That’s my excuse for not having the courage to formulate my question.)

I’d caught a few minutes of BBC radio 4’s Mid-week and the conversation with David Wilson, talking about his forth coming book, A History of British Serial Killing

Having recently finished reading A Quiet Belief in Angels, which is ‘about’ serial killings of little girls, I was interested to hear Wilson presenting a different angle on this theme, and focussing on the victims, rather than the killer. The former are those who exist on margins of society, (the elderly, babies, children, runaways, gay men and prostitutes) and the latter, typically, are ‘weedy and seedy’. Wilson talks about the banality of evil, and last night, Ellory concurred with that view.

Wilson’s thesis appeared to be as follows: if we are fascinated by these types of killings, we should try to reduce the incidence of serial killers. For example, we need to challenge some of our culture’s attitudes , such as homophobia. We could also look at how we police the safety of prostitutes, and why it is that those in the same trade in Amsterdam do not fall victim to serial killers.

I would have liked to ask R.J. if he was familiar with David Wilson’s opinions on these and related topics, and if so, what were his views about these, and had they ever met each other? I’d imagine that they would have a lot in common.

I mentioned above what A Quiet Belief in Angels is ‘about’. I have to say that if this was the primary content of the novel, I wouldn’t have read it from cover to cover. As he had already explained, what interests him is the impact that the crimes have on the characters in the community where they are committed, and he has done this very effectively. The writing is beautiful and evocative, with a very strong sense of place, at times reminding me of Steinbeck, a writer mentioned several times by the main protagonist, Joseph Vaughan. I particularly enjoyed the child’s perspective of everything that went on around him in the early part of the novel, and then later, the way that his perceptions shift as he grows older and he understands more clearly how he and others have been shaped and changed by the terrible murders.

Having heard R.J. speak of his own long and arduous journey towards eventual publication, I guessed that he must have hugely enjoyed describing Joseph Vaughan’s instant success in finding a publisher for his first novel – something to smile at, before the next murder.

For me, one of the most horrifying sections in the novel, was the miscarriage of justice and the brutal regime endured by Joseph and the other prisoners during his long incarceration.

Thinking about this book now, a few weeks after I’d finished it, my mind focuses on numerous scenes and characters that seem so real that the murdered children are merely ghostly echoes. For this, I’m grateful. I don’t want them in my head.