photograph: Pauk

Looks harmless enough, doesn’t it?

But Solanum lycopersicum could cost you readers.

I got this the other day:

“I started reading Silk Road a couple of days back and was enjoying it very much, just as I had enjoyed one of your other books.

However, when I reached Page 164 I found these words: “…green fields planted with tomatoes and aubergines…” I don’t know about aubergines but I do know, as do most people, [my italics] that tomatoes were not introduced to European cuisine, let alone further east, until the 16th century …

photograph: Ronhjones
“This is a tomato and this is what I think of your book.”

Until I saw these words I had been impressed by the breadth and quality of your research but this is such a basic mistake that I just don’t feel I can read on – it’s not possible to enjoy an historical novel once one realizes that the facts can’t be trusted. I thought I’d point this out so that the mistake can be amended in future printings.”

So there you have it. The case for the prosecution rests.

I have admitted my guilt and have taken to my bare back with chains. I leave on pilgrimage to Santiago de Compostela within the week.

Unless …

Unless someone, somewhere, you know, needs to take some valium.

For example, I read a disturbing quote on Goodreads recently – (‘Ancient & Medieval Historical Fiction’ – if you like HF it’s a fantastic group)  – from an author whose book one of the members was reading.

 “ … he describes a character (a real historical person) travelling somewhere by bus or drinking a cup of tea. He worries that he, as a writer, is being disrespectful by just assuming that the character would have caught the bus and not the train. Or maybe in real life he hated tea and only drank coffee, and because the character is now dead he can’t put the record straight …”

(sigh)

Look, I don’t mind someone taking me to task for my prose, plot structure, characterization, pacing. I pay a lot of attention to these things, to my story-telling ability – because getting this right is my obligation to anyone who buys a book of mine.

photograph: flydime

As Bernard Cornwell said in a recent interview: “If you are wanting to write historical fiction I always say, you are not an historian. If you want to tell the world about the Henrician reformation, then write a history book but if you want an exciting story, then become a storyteller. Telling the story is the key.”

But I’d point out that Cornwell is meticulous in his research as well. As I always try to be. I don’t know how this one got through. I spent a year researching SILK ROAD, paying close attention – among many other subjects – to Tatar politics and dynastic succession after the death of Chinggis Khan, the Nestorian church, shamanism among the nomadic tribes of the steppes, Crusader politics, the topography of Shang-tu, (a city that long ago ceased to exist) … shall I go on? The list is endless. None of it was easy.

And I occasionally make mistakes.

Ken Follett, whose eleven hundred page epic The Pillars of the Earth has rightfully been lauded for its exhaustive historical research also contains … hush my mouth … errors.

photograph: flydime
“Okay Follett, we’re going to teach you not to know all about the history of hops, you bastard.’

For example, the many encounters across social classes depicted in the book are unlikely – as the nobility spoke Norman French and the lower classes didn’t. Sugar – which is mentioned several times – was not available in England then. A priory storeroom contained hops – but hops were not used for food production until centuries later.

(But as far as I can ascertain he was spot on about tomatoes – 1-0 to Ken vs me.)

Do these few errors negate the years of study, the mountains of research, that went into Follett’s astonishing book? According to Ms X – yes. Come on, Kenny baby, get your shirt off, we’ll go and self flagellate together.

What galls me most is that researching SILK ROAD nearly cost me my life.

Seriously.

Reaching the Mogao caves near Dunhuang, for example, meant renting a Chinese four wheel drive and a driver and taking a day’s drive into the mountains north of the Taklimakan in far western China.

Just as we got back to Dunhuang the steering rod broke and the car slewed off the road. Five minutes earlier we were driving along an escarpment; the slewing would not have been into a ditch but off a hair pin bend and down a five hundred metre cliff .

photograph: The Real Bear

Perhaps our fall would have been cushioned by that tomato field I saw at the bottom.

That research trip was some of the most uncomfortable traveling I’ve done in my life. I’ll tell you about it some time; the projectile vomiting, the three puppies and the two men sharing the sleeper bed above mine, all those forty eight hour bus journeys …

I didn’t list that as part of my bibliography or my sources. I love a bit of adventure. But I naively expect the trouble I go to will earn me just a little bit of leeway with vegetables.

Sorry – fruit.

But apparently not. You get one chance and one chance only with Ms X. And when you come to write that historical novel you’d better know your agriculture or you’re – well, history.

photograph: flydime
“I bet they couldn’t do this in the 13th century!!”

I have since asked my publishers to recall all unsold copies so they can be pulped but they seem strangely reluctant. My editor even had the gall to say: ‘Christ it’s only a freaking tomato!’

That’s not the attitude!!

I am now editing my upcoming novel, set in the time of Alexander, and rewriting it in the Thraco-Illyrian dialect spoken in Alexander’s native city of Pella in the fourth century BC.

Okay, no one will be able to read it. But it will be authentic.

And yes, I’ve checked and double checked;  not a single tomato between Macedon and the Jhellum River. The Empire is safe.  

(Unless the woman is naked, apparently. Sailors make up the best superstitions.)

But in the case of Violet Jessop, you’d have to say the old sea dogs have a point.

Violet started life as a landlubber, her parents were Irish sheep farmers living in Bahia Blanca in Argentine. Violet was a born survivor – three of her nine siblings did not live beyond infancy. She herself developed tuberculosis when she was a child and doctors said she would die.

But she didn’t. As events would later prove, Violet was pretty much unsinkable.

the Olympic and the Titanic – Violet sunk them both

When her father died, her mother took Violet and her family back to England. When Violet left school she joined the navy, to see the sea.

And what did she see?

Well, when she was 23, she sailed on the RMS Olympic as a stewardess. At that time the Olympic was the world’s largest luxury liner and was under the command of Captain Edward Smith.

Three months after Violet stepped on board, the Olympic collided with the cruiser HMS Hawke off the Isle of Wight.

The RN blamed the Olympic for the crash, but stopped short of blaming Jessop personally.

Violet’s there somewhere

Taking this as a warning, Violet decided to sail next on something unsinkable.

The Titanic.

She rubbed shoulders with Jack and Rose for just four days before her luck ran out again. After the ship hit the iceberg, Violet was ordered up on deck to set an example ‘to the foreign speaking people.’

The Irish?

She was ordered into lifeboat 16, and it was from there that she watched the Titanic go down, – all the while thinking: ‘there’s a great idea for a movie in this somewhere.’

“Who could possibly sink two White Star liners in a year?”

She was among those rescued the next morning by the Carpathia.

A lesser soul would have given up seafaring but Violet was made of sterner stuff. Besides, it was obvious where the problem lay.

The captain on the Olympic and the Titanic was Captain Edward Smith.

Clearly, he was the problem.

So Violet, confident her bad run was done, joined up on His Majesty’s Hospital Ship Brittania just in time for World War One – and you guessed it …

… it hit a mine in 1916 and sank in the Aegean in 1916.

the Brittanic’s survivors. Violet is the one holding a toothbrush

She grabbed her toothbrush from her cabin – she was an old hand at being sunk, and apparently she always said her toothbrush was the one thing she missed when the Titanic went down (the one thing??)

Despite being sucked under the water and striking her head on the ship’s keel she somehow surfaced and was rescued by a lifeboat.

Years later, when she complained to a doctor about headaches, it was discovered she had fractured her skull.

the actual iceberg that sank the Titanic. Note the guilty expression

Having gone down with the ship three times in five years a lesser soul might have looked for a job on dry land.

Not Violet.

She continued to work for the White Star and Red Star lines after the war. Neptune had done his best, and gave up trying to scuttle her.

She spent the next thirty years at sea without further mishap and made her last voyage when she was 63.

The unsinkable Violet Jessop lived to a grand old age of 84, finally foundering in 1971.

Some wags would have you believe she was finally buried at sea. Not true.

Violet was buried in Hartest, in Suffolk, England – fifty miles from the nearest harbour.

Since then the nearby town of Lourdes has grown into a major pilgrimage site for Catholics from all over the world.

A million people flock there every year.

At any one time the transient hotel population exceeds the number of residents by six to one.

Few people were convinced of Bernadette’s visions at the time; not even her own mother.

In fact no one else saw anything and five months later the visitations ended as abruptly as they began.

What swayed opinion at the time was a spring of water that appeared from a rock inside the cave; the water is now credited with miraculous powers of healing.

It is a curious story because ultimately Bernadette could not cure herself. She died in her thirties of tuberculosis of the bone, which ate away her right knee.

I went to Lourdes a few years ago. It is a picture postcard village nuzzling up to the skirts of the Pyrenees. Tendrils of mist cling to the lush valleys.

From the railway station, a single street lined with bright-painted cottages leads to the town, though the effect is spoiled by a Golden Arches.

The Rosary Basilica dominates the valley. It looks like something Walt Disney would have drawn. If it seems kitsch, then the souvenir shops are just downright offensive.

Everything comes with an apparition; there are apparition t-shirts, apparition key rings, apparition shot glasses, even glow-in-the-dark apparition rosary beads.

I am not kidding.

photograph: jean-noel lafargue

On the main street I am startled by a hologram of Jesus winking at me from a shop window among the apparition snow domes and apparition thermometers.

At one o’clock Mary appears briefly from an apparition cuckoo clock.

Praise the lord and pass the apparition.

I sit on an old stone wall by the Gave and am rather more moved by the sight of hundreds of wheelchairs and gurneys being wheeled towards the shrine from the hospitals on the far side of the river.

Once used as a pigsty, the cave seems almost sterile now.

The walls have been worn smooth by a million fingertips.

photograph: Emmanuel Brunner

I try to take it all in but a quick glimpse is all that I am allowed.

The force of the people shoving from behind carries me through the cave like an offshore rip.

More remarkable to me is the less-visited Museum of Miracles.

No less than 7,000 miracles have been claimed for Lourdes but only 66 have been recognized as such by the Church; their stories are enshrined here. The rules for having a miracle allowed by the Vatican are more complex than the offside rule in soccer so we won’t go into them here.

But the investigation of all claims by a highly qualified panel of physicians is rigorous.

Interesting fact; only 38 of these cases involved bathing in the Lourdes water, and six of those claiming miracles did not even go to Lourdes.

photograph: mcxurxo

The most recent miracle was reported by Jean-Pierre Bely, who was diagnosed with multiple sclerosis in 1972.

By 1987 he was totally incapacitated. His description of his healing is particularly telling:  “The Lord cured my heart first and then my body.”

Delirzia Cirolli discovered a tumour on her knee in 1976.

Doctors in Sicily told her she would die unless the leg was amputated.

After she visited Lourdes her condition continued to deteriorate. But she steadfastly refused medical treatment and continued to pray, even when she was told she was dying; but then quite suddenly her condition reversed itself.

She went on to become a nurse and have three children.

The most curious is miracle number fifty-four, Evasio Ganora, another Sicilian diagnosed with Hodgkin’s lymphoma and told by doctors he had only a few months to live.

He was taken to the waters in a wheelchair and there effected an almost instantaneous cure. Two years later he ran himself over with his own tractor and died.

Explain that one to me.

photograph: Hugo Brodder

I am intrigued by the story of Bernadette. These sixty six examples may not prove her authenticity, but they certainly demonstrate the awesome power of faith, regardless of religion.

Lourdes is testament to our belief in the possibility of the impossible.

Miracles clearly do happen, just not very often. That’s why they are miracles.

But the laws we live by say they shouldn’t happen at all. So how did those sixty-six do it?

Everyone will have a different answer.

How many of us allow for miracles or have had personal experience of one? Perhaps they are more common than we think. If nothing else, the visions of a child named Bernadette give us hope that in some mysterious way we are not alone.

‘The Song of Bernadette’: sung by Jennifer Warnes, the lyrics are by the inimitable Leonard Cohen.

‘Spectacular historical fiction blazing with intrigue, romance and dramatic action’

- Booklist

READ THE STORY OF CLEOPATRA

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I’m away for the next 3 weeks so there’s no newsletter this month – and I’m re-running the best of my very earliest posts that you may have missed. I hope you like them.

COLIN FALCONER

 Washington DC, at a Metro Station, on a cold January morning in 2007, this man with a violin played six Bach pieces for about 45 minutes. People rushed past on their way to work. After about 3 minutes, a middle-aged man noticed that there was a musician playing. He slowed his pace and stopped for a few seconds, and then he hurried on to meet his schedule. 

photo: Indiana University

About 4 minutes later: 

The violinist received his first dollar. A woman threw money in the hat and, without stopping, continued to walk.

A young man leaned against the wall to listen to him, then looked at his watch and started to walk again. 

At 10 minutes:

A 3-year old boy stopped, but his mother tugged him along hurriedly. This action was repeated by several other children, but every parent – without exception – forced their children to move on quickly.

He finished playing. He had collected $32.17 contributed by 27 of 1097 travellers. He collected $32.17 contributed by 27 of 1097 travellers. Just seven stopped to listen and only one recognized him.

The violinist was Joshua Bell, one of the greatest musicians in the world. 

 He had just played one of the most intricate pieces ever written, with a handcrafted 1713 Stradivarius violin worth $3.5 million dollars. Two days before, he had sold-out a theater in Boston where the seats averaged $100 each to sit and listen to him play exactly the same music.

This scenario was organized by the Washington Post as part of a social experiment about perception, taste and people’s priorities. 

The UK Sunday Times ran a similar experiment. 

 In 1971 VS Naipaul won the Booker Prize for ‘In a Free State’, his novel about displaced colonials on different continents. Dennis Potter, the TV dramatist of it at the time,  wrote: “Do not miss the exhilaration of catching one of our most accomplished writers reaching towards the full stretch of his talent.”

The Sunday Times sent out the opening chapter of ‘In a Free State’ to 20 London literary agents.

Only the names of the author and main characters were changed. 

Typical was the polite rejection from PFD, a major London literary agency, wrote: “Having considered your material, we do not feel, we are sorry to say, sufficiently enthusiastic or confident about it.”

How do we perceive quality? Would any of us recognize talent in an unexpected context? Do we find something worthwhile because it is good – or because others say it is?

Incidentally The Washington Post won a Pulitzer prize in the feature writing category for Gene Weingarten’s April 2007 story about this experiment. 

I wonder if he’d win it if it was published in the Bayou Bugle?

‘Spectacular historical fiction blazing with intrigue, romance and dramatic action’

- Booklist

READ THE STORY OF CLEOPATRA

OR SEE THE KINDLE VERSION HERE.

IT’S ALSO AVAILABLE ON BARNES AND NOBLE, KOBO AND APPLE.

If you enjoy my blog, why not sign up for the monthly newsletter?

You’ll get news of all latest releases and a chance to win free copies of some of my books. There’s no spamming guys – all you’ll get is one newsletter, once a month.

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I’m away for the next 3 weeks so there’s no newsletter this month – and I’m re-running the best of my very earliest posts that you may have missed. I hope you like them.

COLIN FALCONER

She once told my mother at a parent interview: “Your son is a complete dreamer. He’ll never amount to anything in this life.”

I still think that was a pretty harsh judgment on a seven year old. But she was right, of course, I was a dreamer.

It was my greatest asset.

It was about the time I first read Jules Verne’s Michael Strogoff. To get my hands on it, I had to endure a slobbery wet kiss from my Aunty Ivy, but I considered it well worth it.

By the end of that first afternoon, I was hooked on classic literature.

Every week my Aunty Ivy took the train down from London to visit with us in (what was then) rural Essex, bringing with her a collection of Classics Illustrated comics. She must have picked them up in the markets in London.

There were some Beanos and Victors mixed in, but I threw them out. My treasure was the cartoon versions of some of the world’s greatest literature.

I read all of Jules Verne in an afternoon.

And so began my love affair with literature. By the time I was eight I had read Moby Dick, Doctor Jekyl and Mister Hyde, The Moonstone, The Black Tulip and Ivanhoe, was familiar with most of the major works of Alexandre Dumas (Père), Mark Twain and William Wilkie Collins and had even read most of Homer’s Odyssey (although I never found out how it ended because the last page had been ripped out.)

I don’t think that back then Aunty Ivy knew she was giving me primers for my future career, for no one in my family had ever used their hands for doing anything other than making pies or fixing corner cupboards.

But those comic books were vital to me. I was an only child and though not particularly bookish – I was then, and still am, a sports tragic – it nurtured in me a thirst for great stories painted on broad canvas.

So Aunty Ivy did not just give me the gift of something to read when it was raining too hard to play football.

Classics Illustrated stirred my nascent imagination and at the same time gave me an undying thirst for travel and for adventure.

These little gems of comics also made me want to time travel, because many of the places I was reading about no longer existed.

The only way I could revisit them was to recreate them in my head. Imagining them onto a page was the next logical step.

When I left school the first thing I did, to the consternation of both my parents, was to go hitch-hiking around Europe.

After all, why go to university? I’d read The Iliad and everything Shakespeare ever wrote by the time I was eight.

What could there possibly be left to learn?

After Europe I headed down to Morocco, where me and my mate were the only white faces (then) wandering the Djema El-fna’a, the Place of the Dead, in Marrakech.

Not too long after that I found myself in the middle of a typhoon in the South Java Sea, and wandering the Golden Triangle of Burma, shaking hands with CIA agents and drug smugglers.

All thanks to Aunty Ivy and Classics Illustrated. Wherever she is in heaven, I hope the angels are making her a nice cup of tea.

‘Spectacular historical fiction blazing with intrigue, romance and dramatic action’

- Booklist

READ THE STORY OF CLEOPATRA

OR SEE THE KINDLE VERSION HERE.

IT’S ALSO AVAILABLE ON BARNES AND NOBLE, KOBO AND APPLE.

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I’m away for the next 3 weeks so there’s no newsletter this month – and I’m re-running the best of my very earliest posts that you may have missed. I hope you like them.

COLIN FALCONER

Napoléon Bonaparte will be remembered as one of history’s greatest generals; yet the one victory that seemed always to elude him was the battle for the affections of his own wife.

She was born Marie Josèphe Rose Tascher de La Pagerie, the daughter of a wealthy Creole sugar baron in Martinique.

But after hurricanes destroyed the family plantation, she was married off to the Vicomte de Beauharnais in Paris in October, 1779, in order to preserve the family fortune.

It was an unhappy marriage, but it produced two children, Eugène and Hortense.

During the Reign of Terror, in 1794, her husband was arrested as an aristocratic ‘suspect’ by the Jacobins; Joséphine herself was imprisoned a month later.

He was guillotined and she herself was only saved from the same fate by the timely overthrow of Robespierre, just one day before her scheduled execution.

As a widow with two children to support, she chose her lovers with her head rather than her heart.

She became mistress to several of France’s political and financial luminaries. But Joséphine was a shopper of the first rank and ran up enormous debts during her life.

In fact, when she met Napoléon it was rumored that her present lover, Paul Barras, was very happy for the other man to take her off his hands. He simply couldn’t afford her.

He had met his financial Waterloo.

At that time Bonaparte was a general and a rising star in France’s political firmament.

Napoléon’s siren – until then she had been known as Rose, Joséphine was the name Napoléon used – was an elegant and svelte chestnut haired beauty.

She rarely smiled though because of her one flaw – she had bad teeth.

Perhaps she ate too much sugar growing up on daddy’s farm.

His family stood against the match; after all, she was a widow with two children, and his mother and sisters were jealous of her sophistication and breeding.

But Napoléon ignored his family’s objections and he and Joséphine married on 9th March, 1796.

Two days later he left to lead the French army into Italy, sending her a constant stream of love letters while he was away.

“You to whom nature has given spirit, sweetness, and beauty, you who alone can move and rule my heart, you who know all too well the absolute empire you exercise over it!”

His letters still exist. But what about hers? Were they lost – or did she seldom write? It seems the latter is true.

While he conquered Italy she allowed herself to be conquered by a handsome Hussar officer, Hippolyte Charles. When Napoléon finally heard of her infidelity, during his Egyptian campaign, something must have died in him.

He took up with Pauline Bellisle Foures, a woman who became known as “Napoléon’s Cleopatra.” By now his letters home to Joséphine were no longer passionate.

After Pauline there was an endless line of mistresses, possibly intended as payback.

Then in 1804, Joséphine found him in bed with her lady-in-waiting. Apparently the lady couldn’t wait.

They were only reconciled through the efforts of his step-daughter, Hortense. He was reluctantly persuaded to remarry her, this time with full religious rites.

The following day she watched as her husband was crowned Emperor by the Pope in the Notre-Dame and was then herself crowned Empress of the French.

But six years later, when it became clear that Joséphine could not give him an heir, he had the marriage nullified on a technicality.

Two months later he ‘married a womb’, as he himself described it.

The womb in question was the Duchess of Parma.

But even after their separation Napoléon insisted Joséphine keep her titles. “It is my will that she retain the rank and title of Empress, and especially that she never doubt my sentiments, and that she ever hold me as her best and dearest friend.”

Joséphine retired to the Château de Malmaison, near Paris, where she continued to burn holes in even her husband’s deep pockets. Yet she remained on friendly terms with Napoléon up to her death in 1814.

During his exile Napoléon admitted to friends that he truly loved her ‘but I did not respect her.’

‘Not tonight, Joséphine.’

There is no evidence whatever that he ever spoke these words; the earliest reference is a music hall song sung by Ada Jones and Billy Murray in 1911.

But the greatest truth can rest in a lie; she was his one great love but he perhaps never forgot or forgave her affair with the hussar.

Could it be that France’s most tactically brilliant general was a romantic; and the woman he loved was a pragmatic?

If so, it was the irony of his life.

His last words as he lay on his death bed were: “France, the Army, the Head of the Army … Joséphine.”

‘Spectacular historical fiction blazing with intrigue, romance and dramatic action’

- Booklist

READ THE STORY OF CLEOPATRA

OR SEE THE KINDLE VERSION HERE.

IT’S ALSO AVAILABLE ON BARNES AND NOBLE, KOBO AND APPLE.

If you enjoy my blog, why not sign up for the monthly newsletter?

You’ll get news of all latest releases and a chance to win free copies of some of my books. There’s no spamming guys – all you’ll get is one newsletter, once a month.

Sign up for THE NEWSLETTER here!!!

I’m away for the next 3 weeks so there’s no newsletter this month – and I’m re-running the best of my very earliest posts that you may have missed. I hope you like them.

COLIN FALCONER

Christliches Medienmagazin pro

I have lost those I did not think I could live without; and there was a time when I was so burdened by a sense of guilt that I could barely function.

There were other moments when I have clung to that one last long shot that would bring about reprieve; then that fell over too.

I have known acute failure.

There have been times I looked in the shaving mirror and muttered: ‘You suck.’

But this is nowhere near as bad as it gets.

Whenever I am tempted to feel sorry for myself, or I feel like giving up, I take a look at this guy:

Nick was born with Tetra-amelia syndrome, a rare disorder that left him without all four limbs. He does however have two toes and a foot – he calls it his ‘flipper.’

As a child he was prevented from enrolling at a mainstream school because of his disability. When he was finally allowed entrance he was very badly bullied and struggled with loneliness and depression.

At 8 he contemplated suicide. At 10 he tried to drown himself in his bath.

But one day his mother showed him a newspaper article about someone else who had overcome a severe disability and he realized he wasn’t alone in his struggle.

Inspired, he learned to write using his only toes and even used to learn a computer keyboard. He then taught himself to get a glass of water, comb his hair, brush his teeth and shave.

By grade seven (11 years old) he was elected captain of the school.

At 17 he started his own non-profit organization, Life Without Limbs. At 21 he graduated with a double major in accounting and financial planning.

He now runs a new organization in California called Attitude is Altitude. He presents motivational speeches like this one to corporations, church congregations and schools right around the world.

He retains a wicked sense of humour. (“This boy came up to me and goes ‘WHAT HAPPENED!?’ I go, ‘CIGARETTES!’ “)

He likes to embrace his audience physically as well as emotionally: If you leave here without a hug, I’m going to run after you. And if you run fast, I’m gonna get someone to throw me at you.

I hope you, too, find some measure of inspiration in the life of Steve Vujitic.

In fact if you said I was in the way of the Wyrd, about two thousand years ago, it would have been a huge compliment.

It would mean I was – the contemporary word is enlightened – one with all things.

(I wish.)

Wyrd is an old English word – and the antecedent of our modern word weird, meaning strange or odd or freaky. These days it is mostly used in a pejorative sense.

Some scholars believe the word was deliberately corrupted by early Christian missionaries to discredit the ‘heathen’ religions of old Europe.

So what does it mean?

a distant cousin: photograph Darkone

The Wyrd, to the ancient tribes of Europe, was not a thing. It was a concept.

The Anglo Saxons believed everything was connected to everything else by thoughts, emotion, spirit; and by everything they meant trees, stones, animals. Everything.

Now before anyone scoffs at this; remember that what the ancients were describing was Quantum mechanics. It took the rest of us two thousand years to even start to grasp this idea.

The notion that we are related to all things is not as … well – wyrd … as it seems. It was recently discovered that there are only 30,000 active genes in human DNA and we share five of those genes with a banana. (I believe I share a lot more than that with Jim Beam Black Label. )

The Wyrd was something so deep and so pervasive and so central to the mystery of life that it was inexpressible. It was, if you prefer Star Wars parlance, The Force.

The best analogy is a vast multi-dimensional spider’s web. Each section of the web is a part of the whole, so the tiniest interference at the furthest point sets the entire web vibrating. (These days we call it chaos theory.)

Life, it now appears, is much more subtle and mysterious than we ever imagined – and the curious thing is that the Anglo Saxons appreciated this before the Romans came along.

Almost daily, a new discovery is made that draws into question our worldview about the nature of the Universe, the nature of man, and the nature of Nature.

We are re-learning what we already knew.

Each of us spends the first fifteen or twenty years of our lives suppressing our natural curiosity and consuming ‘knowledge.’ We are told this is the way things are. But it is not the way things are; the 21st century is going to be about discovering the way things aren’t.

Our universe may even turn out to be a multiverse, the paranormal may become normal and historical novelists writing about the Wyrd risk venturing into SF.

And if we really do live in an expanding universe it will at least explain where all my missing socks have gone.

Sir Isaac Newton

The Physics our grandfathers learned was heavily dependent on the works of Sir Isaac Newton. Newtonian Physics is neat, tidy, and certain.

You can calculate things, and know what to expect.

But the world is not totally governed by Newtonian physics.

Because inside an atom there is no certainty to anything, things exist in multiple states simultaneously and all outcomes are viable and do occur.

The Wyrd of the ancients also encapsulated an extremely sophisticated concept of time. Most of us – except Einstein and Quantum physicists – think of time as linear; a river rushing from our birth to our death carrying us inexorably with it.

But the Wyrd – ‘that which happens’ – is a fluid three dimensional matrix.

So the Wyrd is also Destiny; but not the “inexorable fate” of the ancient Greeks. It’s not an ending, it’s a continuum. We are living our destiny today, as we lived it yesterday and as we will live it tomorrow.

And so your destiny can be ‘worked,’ to some extent anyway.

seriously wyrd

Confused? Me, too.

But remember I’m not talking about quantum mechanics, I’m talking about paganism.

This is history.

This is life before the so-called Dark Ages.

So if anyone calls you weird, take it as a compliment.

They probably mean you’re extremely curious and a free thinker.

And if you do happen to uncover the secrets of this wyrd and unreliable universe – can you see if you can find my sock?

‘Spectacular historical fiction blazing with intrigue, romance and dramatic action’

- Booklist

READ THE STORY OF CLEOPATRA

OR SEE THE KINDLE VERSION HERE.

IT’S ALSO AVAILABLE ON BARNES AND NOBLE, KOBO AND APPLE.

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I’m away for the next 3 weeks so there’s no newsletter this month – and I’m re-running the best of my very earliest posts that you may have missed. I hope you like them.

COLIN FALCONER

On Wednesday, November 8, 1939, a 46 year old man left his office at Sportsman’s Park in Cicero, and drove away in a black 1939 Lincoln Zephyr coupe.

At the intersection of Ogden and Rockwell, a dark sedan roared up beside him and two men opened fire with shotguns.

He died instantly.

The dead man was Edward Joseph O’Hare:”Easy Eddie”

He had once been attorney and business partner to the notorious Al Capone, the murderous crime boss of Chicago, and he built a huge fortune on the association.

But in 1931 he decided to co-operate with the authorities at Capone’s trial for tax evasion.

There’s a fanciful theory that by turning informer he hoped to teach his son a lesson in morality; but it’s much more likely he did it to save his own skin. Easy Eddie’s entire life had been devoted to the main chance.

A week after his murder Capone was released from Alcatraz; several months later Frank Nitti, Al Capone’s second in command, married Ursula Sue Granata, O’Hare’s fiancée.

No one was ever charged with the crime.

O’Hare’s son, Edward “Butch” O’Hare, was 25 years old when his father was killed. ‘Easy’ had divorced his mother when Butch was thirteen, and Butch stayed behind in St Louis when his father moved to Chicago.

Six years later he graduated from the US Naval Academy at Annapolis, and the year his father died he had just started flight training at NAS Pensacola in Florida. In 1940 he was assigned to the USS Saratoga, to Fighter Squadron 3, later transferring to the Lexington.

On February 20, 1942. O’Hare and his wingman were the only U.S. Navy fighters in the air when a wave of Japanese bombers flew towards the Lexington in enemy-held waters north of New Ireland.

His wingman’s guns jammed so Butch became the aircraft carrier’s only protection.

Lieutenant O’Hare is second from the right in the front row

He attacked the nine Japanese Betty heavy bombers with just enough ammunition for 34 seconds of firing.

In the words of his citation: ‘…alone and unaided he repeatedly attacked this enemy formation, at close range in the face of intense combined machine gun and cannon fire … by his gallant and courageous action, his extremely skilful marksmanship in making the most of every shot of his limited amount of ammunition, he shot down 5 enemy bombers and severely damaged a sixth before they reached the bomb release point. As a result of his gallant action—one of the most daring, if not the most daring, single action in the history of combat aviation—he undoubtedly saved his carrier from serious damage or even loss.’

‘Butch’ in his F4F-3 Wildcat

With his ammunition expended, O’Hare returned to his carrier, and was fired on accidentally by a .50-caliber machine gun on the Lexington.

Once landed, Butch approached the gun platform and said to the embarrassed anti-aircraft gunner, “Son, if you don’t stop shooting at me when I’ve got my wheels down, I’m going to have to report you to the gunnery officer.”

For this action, O’Hare became the first naval aviator to receive the Medal of Honor.

A welcome parade in his hometown of St Louis was attended by 60,000 people.

‘Butch’ receives his Medal of Honor from President Roosevelt

He received further decorations in 1943 for his actions in battles near Marcus Island and Wake Island. But sadly, Butch did not survive the war; he was shot down on a night mission on November 26, 1943, near Tarawa. Neither his body nor his aircraft were ever found.

He was posthumously awarded the Navy Cross.

Four years after the war Chicago’s Orchard Depot Airport was renamed O’Hare International Airport in his honour. A training F4F Wildcat similar to the one flown by Butch is currently on display in Terminal 2.

I wrote this post not through historical interest, but for a good friend of mine; she is worried about her little boy.

When she found out about her ex husband’s criminal past – and criminal present – she thought that because he had his genes he was fated to grow up just like him.

But I don’t think that’s the way it works; my grandfather was a violent drunk and a bully. I have his genes. But I like to think I did not inherit any of his traits.

I believe we have a choice about the kind of man, or woman, we are going to be.

Our memories can be despised or celebrated; we can choose to be Capone’s right hand man or we can become the guy who puts their lives on the line for our friends and comrades, our cause and our country.

In the end I believe that the man or woman we see in the mirror every morning is our creation, and no one else is responsible.

Don’t you?

‘Spectacular historical fiction blazing with intrigue, romance and dramatic action’

- Booklist

READ THE STORY OF CLEOPATRA

OR SEE THE KINDLE VERSION HERE.

IT’S ALSO AVAILABLE ON BARNES AND NOBLE, KOBO AND APPLE.

If you enjoy my blog, why not sign up for the monthly newsletter?

You’ll get news of all latest releases and a chance to win free copies of some of my books. There’s no spamming guys – all you’ll get is one newsletter, once a month.

Sign up for THE NEWSLETTER here!!!

I’m away for the next 3 weeks so there’s no newsletter this month – and I’m re-running the best of my very earliest posts that you may have missed. I hope you like them.

COLIN FALCONER

It’s someone very well known.

Instantly recognizable as an adult, in fact.

I’ll give you a clue. It’s a he.

What do you think he became when he grew up – saint or sinner? Famous or notorious?

Write it down and check your answer later.

Writers are taught from the get-go to create believable motivations for their characters. Some teachers even recommend creating whole folios on our MC’s family of origin so that we understand them better.

A hero should have understandable flaws, I was told; and a villain has to have reasons for being bad so we can at least empathize. All very good advice.

But how does it hold up in real life?

Art, as Picasso said, is not the truth. It’s a lie that shows us the truth. So how does fiction stack up to reality?

So before I tell you who this baby is, try this on for size:

BC was born in a tenement slum. He was abandoned by his mother when he was 4. His father was away in the army so he was raised by a deranged aunt who used to beat him violently almost every day. When his father returned from the war he sexually abused him from the ages of ten to fifteen.

JD’s mother endured a difficult pregnancy but once born, he wanted for nothing. He was loved and adored. His mother kept a scrapbook, as many proud parents do, recording the events of his life; his first step, his first accident, his first tooth, his first haircut. He had a major hernia operation when he was six years old. His parents had an unhappy marriage and divorced when he was 18.

THE QUESTION – IF YOU WERE WRITING A BOOK – IS THIS: WHICH ONE OF THESE IS YOUR SERIAL KILLER??? 

The violently and sexually abused BC is actually the legendary Scottish comedian Billy Connolly.

The kid with the unremarkable upbringing is Jeffrey Dahmer, one of America’s worst serial murderers.

Interesting.

Why does one man defend himself from brutality with humour and courage; while the other, after a fairly ordinary childhood, becomes a loner who enjoys dissecting roadkill?

Is every character a product of their environment as my old writing teacher insisted – or are some born inherently evil, without that essential 21 grams?

Oh, and by the way the picture of the cute little kid. It’s Adolf Hitler, before he learned to talk.

If only he never had …