The massive two-volumes anthology will collect 21 new stories featuring the Great Detective and a small army of his unusual, eccentric and occult colleagues, from Carnacky to Hesselius to Van Helsing, and many more – including my very own Miss Valerie Trelawney, in The Adventure of the Manchester Mummies.
Because we all know that Holmes does not care for the supernatural, but there are cases when, if you eliminate the impossible, you still need the help of a specialist in things that go bump in the night.
The Kickstarter offers many perks and extras for those that will feel like putting a higher figure on the plate, in the form of a number of other collection of Holmesian apocrypha.
So, we got a suspect Coronavirus case in our region, and Piedmont is locking up with a “preventive quarantine”, while the population is panicking. Here in Astigianistans, schools will be closed until the 2nd of March, and the same apparently will be true for museums, cinemas and theatres all over the region. And we don’t know what next.
A few of my contacts talk about supermarkets being either empty, or being assaulted by shoppers eager to stock up before they lock themselves up in their homes.
And yesterday in a bar in Asti I heard a guy say “the only way to handle this” is to barricade ourselves up in our farmhouses, and shoot on sight anyone that comes closer.
Ten years ago, the N1H1 scare had a hundred times less impact, while being a lot more dangerous than Coronavirus. But back then we did not have political propaganda to whip up panic and meaningless (and frankly racist) reactions all over. Like, deserting Chinese restaurants or anything vaguely oriental – including “that supermarket where a lot of foreigners go”. Or, really, seriously advocating shooting on sight of potential zombies, with a straight face, in a public place, while the people around you nod and say they’ll check their shotguns.
So, now the question is… what would a writer do, in such a situation? OK, order a pizza for dinner, but then, what else…? Ah! Watch this space for news…
Last night I discovered I still suffer from vertigo, and I did so in the most baffling and yet safe way, by watching a movie – The Aeronauts, directed by Tom Harper, is streaming on Amazon Prime, and it’s a good, entertaining, suspenseful movie, and it gave me vertigo. Which I guess it’s a sign of how well-crafted the movie is.
Inspired by true events with a fair share of fiction thrown in, the movie takes place in 1862, and follows the balloon ascent of scientist James Glaisher (Eddie Redmayne) in the first expedition to explore the atmosphere. As the balloon climbs, Glaisher and his pilot, fairground aeronaut Amelia (Felicity Jones) face a number of unplanned for challenges.
Of the 200-and-odd books I read over four years while working on Hope & Glory, India– A History, by John Keay was the first stop. I had tried approaching the textbook for my brother’s course on History and Civilization of India and the Far East, but found it too massive, and written in a language unknown to the living. Keay’s book was fun, well documented, and it was in a language I understood. I had to start somewhere, and I started from there, and later I also read (and enjoyed) Keay’s book about the East India Company.
So now that I am doing a bit of in-depth background research for my work on the Frontier RPG, I decided to splurge on research books all of 10 euro: the price of a night out for a pizza at Casablanca’s, what passes for a night on the town here in our house. And half of my budget went for John Keay’s China, a History – that is a lot heftier than its Indian counterpart, but hopefully just as fun. Once again, my brother’s university books about Chinese history are there on the shelf, but what the heck, for starters I want something as user-friendly as possible.
I will also throw into the research pot another of Keay’s books that’s here on my shelf, his old but wonderful When Men and Mountains Meet: The Explorers of the Western Himalayas, 1820–75, because it’s certainly on topic.
The other half of my budget went for Abraham Eraly’s The Mughal Throne, that I had missed in my previous book haul when researching Hope & Glory. Amazon Italy has a few copies of the Italian translation, by a very high-end “serious” publisher, discounted to half price because they are a little worse for wear. This way, I got my copy for six bucks, including delivery, and the volume is perfectly fine (the white cover is a little dirty, but really, that’s not an issue for a reading copy).
Thus armed, I’ll spend the next four weeks reading and taking notes. So far I’ve played fast and loose with my Stories of the Frontier, but now it’s time to start doing things properly. And as I often repeat, I like doing research.
Having just finished Brian Murphy’s Flame and Crimson: a History of Sword-and-Sorcery, published in 2019 by Pulp Hero Press, I can now expand on my initial post of a few days back. I am doing this because I think this books deserves a wide circulation, and so we need to talk about it, and because I got wind of some less-than-positive opinions going around, and I’d like to address those, too.
So, for starters, let’s see what you get in the package.
My friend Hell (no, not his real name but yes, they really call him like that) is a fine writer and an excellent editor, and he is the sort that harbours very few (if any) romantic illusions about this writing business. Stealing a page from Quentin Tarantino, he often talks about “The Toilet Story”.
If you remember the movie Reservoir Dogs, one of the characters is an undercover cop, and he tells how he worked on creating his character before he started his job. The character-creation process involved inventing a story – in his case about a scary ten minutes in a public toilet – as part of his cover.
Well, pretend you’re Don Rickles… and tell a joke, all right? The things you gotta remember are the details. The details sell your story. This particular story takes place in a men’s room. You gotta know all the details–whether they got paper towels or a blower to dry your hands. You gotta know if the stalls ain’t got no doors or not. You gotta know if they got liquid soap or that pink, granulated shit… they used in high school.
My friend Hell says writers are like that – just like undercover cops, they all have a Toilet Story they tell when somebody asks them how they started, how they broke through, what’s their life like, where they get their ideas. It’s not the truth, because those that ask the question do not want the truth – they don’t want the painful fingers and the frustration, the rejection slips and the fear, the overdue bills and the instant noodles. They want romance – and so the writers, being adept at weaving lies for fun and profit, give them just that. A bit of romance, a bit of mystique, maybe a self-deprecating joke because underdog stories are fun, as long as they are romantic. Writers build their own legend, and they have their well-rehearsed scripts, that fit the readers’ expectations. The Toilet Story.
As sometimes happens, the mailman delivered this morning a packet that caused me to change my plans for the rest of the day – or the next two days probably. The packet being an Amazon bubble-wrap envelope containing a copy of Brian Murphy’s Flame and Crimson: a History of Sword-and-Sorcery, published in 2019 by Pulp Hero Press (as far as I know there is no ebook edition).
Karavansara 