Greece

Well, we're back. I wouldn't recommend driving around Greece as a rest cure, but it was a lot of fun, and then we had a week in the islands to get over it.
As usual I was behind the camera most of the time so there isn't any decent picture of me I can put up here but here is the only bit of the Acropolis in Athens that isn't covered in scaffolding! As one American tourist I overheard remarked, "That is so classical!"
Only a short post today as I'm still getting things back together after the break but I may have more to say at the end of the week.

The Aztec costume is, I'm told, about finished - I'll post a picture of it next time I write.
As I'm going on holiday for a couple of weeks, it'll have to wait until I get back (unless I get really bored and find myself in an Internet Cafe. Unlikely). We're off to Greece; a week touring and looking at antiquities, followed by a week on an island.
The French historian Jacques Soustelle once remarked that a crowd of Aztecs would have looked like a crowd of Athenians, and I suppose there were some similarities: like the Athenians, the Mexica lived in what was essentially a city-state surrounded by other notionally independent city-states, in a mountainous country, and in classical times at least continual warfare was pretty much the norm. And they both favoured cloaks as the main garment for men, although I think Greek costume was less strictly prescribed than Aztec garb.
But I'm always a bit wary of comparisons between unrelated peoples. I've seen the Aztecs compared to the Romans (because of the way their armies were organised), the Japanese (fierce warriors who believed in fate and loved flowers and poetry), the Egyptians (pyramids!) etc etc. I've thought myself that there are interesting resemblances between Aztec and Tibetan culture; Tibetan Buddhists may be peaceful folk now but their iconography hints at a blood-curdlingly violent history. Nearly always, however, these comparisons don't stand up to any sort of scrutiny. Aztecs and Egyptians both built pyramids, but they weren't the same thing at all. Greek though, which so often is about drawing sharp distinctions between categories, is nothing like Aztec thought, which tends to emphasise the oneness of things. So I'm not sure you can use one culture to give you much insight into another.
I'm not going to try. I just intend to enjoy my holiday. Though the idea of setting a book in ancient Greece did occur to me at one time...

Aztec Costumes

We were delighted when my son announced that the Aztecs are his school history topic this term. At last! Some homework I can help him with! But our joy turned to gloom when he brought a piece of paper home with him. "School History Day": each class will dress up as people from their historical period for this term...
My wife fixed a baleful eye on me. "So what," she demanded, "did Aztecs wear?"
"Um... skirts and shifts for the girls, and the boys... a breechcloth and a short cloak, mostly."
"I am not sending him to school in a breechcloth!" I could see her point. It might have been worse, mind you: my son's nine, but if he'd been six, he'd get a scrap of cloth to wear over his shoulders and no underwear at all. I thought about it a bit further and suggested a warrior costume. This proved to be a mistake.
"He'd like to be an Eagle Warrior."
"Really?" I showed Sarah what an Eagle Warrior's costume looked like. Now, my wife is very resourceful: for a similar event last year she ran up a toga iraetexta - and if you think of Romans as sporting a sort of white cloak with a bit of purple edging, think again, it's much more complicated than that. But even she balked at trying to fabricate a helmet in the shape of a giant raptor's head. I showed her a picture of a jaguar warrior and she just blanched.
I suggested the two-captive warrior's field dress: a pair of red jim-jams and a conical cap would do for that at a pinch, but it didn't find favour. The best I could offer, it turned out, was the Aztec version of a stab vest, cotton armour with a skirt of feathers around it. (Or possibly strips of leather, according to Dr John Pohl).
"That'll do," my wife said. "I can make the skirt out of strips of card, and he's got an old tunic I can use."
"Er... well, it should be made of quilted cotton, really. Strictly speaking."
I was informed in no uncertain terms that the subject was now closed!

Happy New Year

New Year's resolution - predictably, to pay more attention to this blog. After all, having taken the trouble to set it up I may as well use to say something.
A few months ago I went to a seminar about how writers could make money out of the Internet. I don't know that it did me a lot of good - I still haven't got around to putting context-sensitive advertising links on my Web pages or writing to everyone I know to ask them to buy a pay-per-click link, far less writing the hundreds of pithy, well-informed articles that would justify asking anyone for a subscription. Still, the fact that I haven't made millions doing these things is probably just inertia on my part.
What I found more interesting was a comment from a writer at this seminar. People, he said, are interested in what writers do. They want to read about how you spend your days in the shed feeding the cat.
Really?
Well, apart from the fact that I don't have a shed (although I do have a cat), I don't know. I've never quite been able to see what is so fascinating about writers. Deep-sea divers, lion tamers and mercenaries, maybe, but writers? Of course many writers have led exciting lives that are worth reading about (which is presumably why they write about them) but as writers per se, all we do is drive a pen or a keyboard, and while it's fun to do sometimes it can hardly be exciting to watch.
Which probably has a lot to do with why this blog hasn't really taken off yet. I've been working on the assumption that what you want to read about is my writing. But I don't really want to write about my my writing, because that would be like doing the day's work all over again. I don't know if this is a common problem.
I shall change my approach, though. From now on, unless anything out of the ordinary occurs to me, I shall only write about what I do when I'm not writing.
It's just occurred to me that this will have the added advantage of enabling me to sustain the illusion that novels and stories really do come out nowhere and write themselves!

Good grief, did I last post on 16th November? Oh well. My excuse is that we've just exchanged contracts on our new house, which has been a bit of a distraction, and has rather put me off writing, blogging, responding to emails, and communicating with the rest of the human race generally.
In fact I thought it might be an opportune moment to say something about where I live, seeing that we won't be here much longer.
Unless you know London reasonably well you may not even have heard of Leytonstone. It's the kind of place people move away from. In fact no end of famous people seem to have been born here or passed through the place - King Harold II Godwinson and Alfred Hitchcock to name but two - but they didn't stay. (To the best of my knowledge the only celebrity we have now is Meera Syal, though I'm not absolutely sure she's still here). Still, I've been here 13 years, and all other things being equal would quite happily stay on. (Of course all other things aren't equal: we need a bigger house, better schools, and all the other things families apparently have to have to survive in the early 21st Century....) I'll be very sad to leave, and here are my 10 reasons why actually Leytonstone is a great place to live:
1. Fairly personal to me, I suppose, but if you write about an urban civilisation like Aztec Tenochtitlan, then you really have to live in a big city like London to get a feel for it.
2. We have better food. Indian, Bengali, Thai, Japanese, Nigerian, Caribbean, Chinese, you name it, it's all in walking distance, and most of them deliver... not to mention the Eel & Pie House!
3. You can get a bus, a tube or a train to anywhere, anytime. Where we're going they don't even run buses on a Sunday.
4. It's pretty safe. Of course there are gangs - they carve out territories according to postcodes, apparently, which is why you sometimes see "E11" or "E15" spray painted on walls. But they keep themselves to themselves and I don't know of anyone getting caught in the crossfire. I've been to small market towns in the shire counties and seen people openly dealing in drugs, but never run into it here.
5. It's a melting pot. Every wave of immigrants seems to hit Leyton and Leytonstone first, and they all seem to find a place easily enough. It can be unnerving, I suppose, but I find it exhilerating, not to mention enlightening. For instance I have talked to people who make their living dealing with "diversity" issues who have no idea that there is a significant number of South Africans working here now. Shows how much they know, when every shopkeeper in this part of London sells Boerwurst, Biltong and Bunny Chow!
We're going is pretty much stereotypical home counties suburbia. Boring. I'm already looking forward to the day when we can sell up and come back...

The Best Evidence

Research is a perennial topic whenever people talk about historical fiction (in fact it's easy to form the impression that it's the only topic, although it shouldn't be). I came across something today which prompted me to write this post, which is about the importance of thinking carefully about your sources.
Most of us take it for granted that primary source material is better than anything else and that secondary sources are unreliable. The way it was once put to me was: "Always go to your primary sources, because secondary sources are always wrong!"
Well, mostly...
I've been researching a new series to be set around the exploits of Robert Clive - "Clive of India". It's a fascinating but difficult business trying to switch from one period to another, but that's another story, or at least another post. Now, I knew there were slightly differing accounts of his escape from the French occupation of Madras (now named Chennai), but what I found today threw me completely.
I should explain that when the French seized the town in 1746 their commander, La Bourdonnais, negotiated very generous surrender terms with the settlement's Governor, in the course of which the British personnel gave their parole (ie, they promised not to escape or fight the French until they were exchanged for an equivalent number of French prisoners of war). La Bourdonnais however hadn't got the agreement of the French Governor-General in India, M. Dupleix, and the moment he took over the town he cancelled these terms and imposed much harsher ones of his own.
Now, all the accounts I've read so far agree that Clive, along with one or more of his colleagues, slipped out of Madras in November, after Dupleix's takeover, as they considered his actions made their paroles void. The main source for this seems to be a letter written many years later by Clive's widow (who of course wasn't in India and didn't even know Clive at the time). What I found today however was a letter by Clive himself, also written some years after the event, in which he says he made his escape at the beginning of October, when La Bouronnais was still in charge. A very small point but potentially important for my story.
Now, on the face of it, Clive's account ought to be pretty conclusive. After all, can you have better evidence for a person's movements than his own account of them? So once again the secondary sources must have got it wrong... Except for two things.
The first is that Clive is a notoriously unreliable witness. He wasn't given to telling outright lies, although he often exaggerated a bit, but there are instances where his memory for details simply let him down, and caused him to make mistakes even when the truth would have been more favourable to him (for example when giving evidence to Burgoyne's Select Committee in the 1770s).
The second is that it doesn't make sense. True, at least one officer, Ensign De Morgan, did escape from Madras before Dupleix took over - but that was in the chaos immediately following the French attack, and he had never surrendered in the first place. As Clive clearly didn't go then, he had no reason to do so later until the arrival of Dupleix's men at the very end of October, and every reason (under the laws of war as they were understood in those days) to stay put.
This is one case, therefore, where I think the primary source is actually wrong. It shows that all historical material has to be read very carefully, no matter where it comes from!

Reviews and Reviewers

The first review of my fourth book, "Tribute of Death", has been posted on the Website myshelf.com. Here is the link: www.myshelf.com/mystery/07/tributeofdeath.htm
And it is a very good review!
Does it matter, though?
Most of my reviews have been good, and I usually cull them for quotes that I can put on my website - as much so that I can find them all in one place as because I think people will read them all and be inspired to rush straight to Amazon and order my books. Of course I have had the odd bad one - maybe two or three in the course of five years, out of (I'm guessing) 30 or so altogether. Curiously, I find that I don't usually mind the bad ones so much. No book is perfect, and while I'm sure I'm as prone to self-deception as anyone, I do try to learn from criticism. Where the reviewer has a point I'm usually happy to acknowledge it. Even where I simply don't agree with him or her I can accept that not everyone likes anything, if I think the reviewer has been honest.
On the other hand, what do you do with those rare reviewers who are not honest - who either plainly haven't read the book, or have willfully misunderstood it, perhaps because they're running some agenda of their own?
I've only ever had one review like that. I won't say which book it was about, who the reviewer was, what he or she said or where the review appeared - only that it seemed to me to be a clear case of someone who had a preconceived idea of what my book was supposed to be about and hadn't allowed what was actually between the covers to influence the review at all!
So to repeat the question - what do you do then?
Then - and this is the only circumstance when I'd do this - you go through the review very carefully until you find the one comment in it that looks complimentary (if you take it out of context!) and you copy it on your website. Ha! Revenge!
Now I invite you too look at the Reviews page on my website and see if you can guess which one it was...