Mirabilis - Year of Wonders

A fluid link

2012-01-17T15:55:00.004Z

Not quite a spoiler today, but a teaser. If you've seen Mirabilis season one, you'll know about the Roman paperweight Estelle found in the gardener's shed. (Which is the same place she got the shears she cuts her hair with, as a matter of fact. No Princess Leia granny buns for the Honourable Miss Meadowvane - she pretty much invented the messy-style emo haircut back in 1901.)

I first saw these strange fretwork globes being discussed on Time Team. Yes, they are real archaeological artifacts. You don't need to know that to enjoy our fantasy explanation of them, though, coming up in the Spring book. Fans of H G Wells and Doctor Who will not be disappointed. Now, that would only be a spoiler if I told you which characters actually get to use the full-size version...

Those unheard are sweeter

2012-01-11T09:36:00.003Z

Ever thought novels ought to have soundtracks? I have to admit, it's not something that ever occurs to me when absorbed in a good book, but I do occasionally use music as part of the writing process. On the site for her novel My Memories of a Future Life, my wife Roz has a series called "The Undercover Soundtrack" in which she talks to authors about the music they use to unlock the muse. In her own words:

"If a novel could have a soundtrack, what would it be? Writers often have a secret ur-score that helps them shape their world, understand their characters and unfold their story."

This week, Roz talks to fantasy author Katherine Langrish, acclaimed author of several fantasy novels for children and young adults, including the Troll Fell trilogy. For her latest book, Dark Angels (US title The Shadow Hunt*), Ms Langrish used the troubadour songs of southern France as part of the creative process; "I needed the plangent, plaintive music of the 12th century to understand my lead character's pain," she explains.

If you're interested in good fantasy literature and how it gets written, the interview is right here.

Odd btw that the US edition has a much more evocative title, but is marred by a cover that seems to have been taken from a Mills & Boon bodice ripper of the early 1950s. Don't look (via the Amazon US link above) unless you have a high tolerance for saccharine and chintz. The UK cover, which you can see here, is no Mozart symphony but at least I'd say it passes the old grey whistle test.

Comics on Kindle

2011-12-29T13:56:00.005Z

Following on from the preview of Mirabilis: Winter volume 2, here's news that should please anyone who found a Kindle under the Christmas tree. We've just re-released the Kindle mini-episodes collecting the first thirty pages of volume 1. If you're signed up for Amazon Prime you can borrow them anytime, but even if not you can grab the first two completely free tomorrow or Saturday.

Episode 1.1 is "Stung!" which first appeared in DFC #30 (the 2008 Christmas issue). Jack is about to face a duel to the death when he finds an ancient two-headed coin that's destined to change his life forever. Get "Stung!" from the Kindle Store US here and UK here.

Episode 1.2 is "The Door in the Water". Jack meets Gus for the first time - but it's in a dream, so maybe it doesn't count. And when he wakes up he goes witch-hunting, only it turns out the witch is the one with the killing jar. That's in the Kindle Store US here and UK here.

Episode 1.3, "The Wrong Side of Bedlam" sees Gus (that's Talisin of the Shining Brow to us) escaping from a padded cell, Jack trapped in a witch bottle, and the boffins of the Royal Mythological Society explaining what's in store now the green comet has reappeared. It's in the Kindle Store US here and UK here.

And if you don't have a Kindle, don't despair, because all of those early episodes are online right here.

Book Two sneak peek - part 5

2011-12-24T00:47:00.001Z

Here's the last page of the advance look inside Mirabilis Vol 2, which is on sale from Print Media Productions early in the New Year. You can find it on Amazon UK here and Amazon US here, and on the Book Depository (which is taking pre-orders) here.

If the listing says it's a paperback, ignore that - it's just Amazon playing silly buggers again. The book is in fact a gorgeous, beautifully printed hardcover just like Vol 1. Happy Christmas!

Book Two sneak peek - part 4

2011-12-22T00:02:00.000Z

Book Two sneak peek - part 3

2011-12-20T00:03:00.001Z

Book Two sneak peek - part 2

2011-12-18T00:04:00.001Z

Book Two sneak peek - part 1

2011-12-16T00:05:00.002Z

Today we begin our own Advent-ure (see what I did there?) as we count down to Christmas with a sneak peek at Mirabilis Volume Two, on sale next year. And if you just can't wait (or if you want to know exactly why Jack is talking to a brain in a jar) you still have time to grab yourself a copy of Volume One from Amazon US, the Book Depository or Amazon UK.

Boys' own

2011-12-15T10:18:00.004Z

My first publisher was the legendary Angela Sheehan at Grafton Books. In those days, I wrote choose-your-own type fantasy gamebooks, and every publisher wanted a series so I kept pretty busy. I worked with Philippa Dickinson at Corgi, Elizabeth Roy at Knight Books, Gill Evans at Mammoth, Mary Tapissier and Marion Lloyd at Pan Macmillan, and many more.

You can see the pattern. British kids’ and young adult publishing is run by women. There are no men. None. Well, there is the (also legendary) David Fickling, but there really is only one David Fickling!

It’s no mystery how this came about. Institutions that are run by men tend to appoint men, institutions run by women appoint women. So inevitably there’s a positive feedback loop that will take you one way or the other. And it wouldn’t matter, except that it used to be said that “boys don’t read” – which is almost perfectly analogous to the videogames industry truism of a few years back that “girls don’t play games”. That’s because female editors may not be the best people to judge what boys like, just as predominantly male game developers didn’t have much idea how to make games that girls would play.

(I once said to an editor that she could find out what kind of stories boys like by looking at the videogames they play. Her reply: “Oh, we did that once. Back when games were at their height.” To her, videogames were a passing fad.)

It is getting better. Kate Wilson at Nosy Crow (now, she really is legendary) took the radical step of actually asking boys what they like to read about. I was going to say it’s not rocket science, but actually rocket science turns out to be one of the very things they’re into – along with dinosaurs, robots, warfare, sport. Really, though, they just want stuff to happen. Less jaw-jaw. Boys did read Harry Potter – more boys, in fact, than girls – and when that juggernaut first gathered momentum, one publisher declared, “It seems like adventure is back in fashion with kids.” The fact is, of course, it never went out of fashion. It just wasn’t being published.

Having said all that, I don’t see fiction or games coming down along gender lines. Okay, there’s chick lit and movies like Mamma Mia – but, averse as I am to them, I have no more liking for over-testosteroned stuff like The Losers. What the average boy wants in a book is just the same as the average girl wants: a cracking story that makes you wonder and care what’s going to happen next. So it’s good for fiction that there’s been a move away from twee, leisurely, soft-concept stuff in favour of exhilarating, character-driven, high-stakes, high-concept storylines. We can pretty much thank J K Rowling and her editors for that.

And all of the above is a preamble to say that one of the best places to find that kind of fiction reviewed is the Book Zone. (“For boys” is added parenthetically, though these are books just as much for gutsy girls like Maria Jones in The Box of Delights.) As I often look at the Book Zone to find my next read, it was very nice to find Mirabilis Volume One reviewed there – and simply stunning to see that Mr Hartwell described it as one of his favourite books of the year. Leo and Nikos and I were reet made up by that, I can tell you.

Now, we had hoped that Mirabilis Volume Two would be out in time for Christmas, but the schedule has been thrown out by shipping times from the printers (in Bosnia – well, it’s a long way from there to the North Pole) and the fact that Leo has got sidetracked by some for-hire work, meaning that Volume Three has got pushed back to the autumn. But turning that around, the good news is there will be two new Mirabilis volumes next year (Volume Two early in the year, Volume Three in October). And you still have time to get Volume One before Christmas - at 25% off on the Book Depository with free delivery anywhere in the world. They must be using reindeer.

To make up for not getting the new book out for this Christmas, we’re going to be running a 5-page preview over the next week, starting tomorrow. This is the episode that, if The DFC had continued, was originally going to be called “Lock and Load”. Grab your torches and pitchforks! To the castle!

Get Estelle in your stocking this Christmas

2011-11-19T00:41:00.003Z

Amazon, I don't know. They're ever so convenient and all, but they do do some loopy things - and I can't imagine it'll get any better when they're the only bookstore in the world. The latest oddity is that they have removed the price and pre-ordering details from Mirabilis Volume 2. However, the Book Depository (which Amazon of course bought this summer) are listing the book, which they correctly state will be released in just 12 days. So ample time to order it for Christmas - but only if you live in the UK and go to the Book Depository website.

In an extra-strange wrinkle, Amazon US are listing the correct publication date (December 1st) but still haven't enabled pre-ordering - though perhaps that's just as well, as technically the hardbacks are only supposed to be available in the UK and Eire.

We're not the only title this has happened to. Amazon UK just de-listed Ed Brubaker's Criminal Vol 6: The Last of the Innocent and cancelled my long-standing order, saying, "Our supplier has informed us that this item is no longer available. This item has now been cancelled from your order." Yet there it is on Amazon US with a release date of December 21. Most peculiar, momma.

The UK comics resurgence

2011-11-03T21:02:00.003Z

Strip Magazine is here! The distribution snafus that bedevilled the scheduled launch last month are now all fixed, and you should be seeing it in your local comics store - and indeed on iTunes. All the details are over on the Print Media blog, but just before you scoot over there, let me mention the luscious mega-sized free Mirabilis poster and, if that's not enough to tempt you, how about awesome strips by P J Holden, John Ridgway, Michael Penick, John McCrea and other stellar names from the comics firmament. This is the kind of comic I loved as a kid - and nowadays too, come to that. Don't miss it.

Is that a dragon in your stocking..?

2011-11-01T09:21:00.005Z

If you've enjoyed the Royal Mythological Society epistolary short stories (eg here and here) wherein Dr Clattercut and Prof Bromfield reply to various fantastical events, you might be interested in the paperback edition. Intended as a little Christmas gift, this collects all fifty-odd stories in one neat little pocket-sized package, complete with that beautiful piece of iconic Mirabilis artwork by Martin.

You can get A Minotaur at the Savoy from the Book Depository, from Barnes & Noble, and of course from Amazon. Don't take any notice of Amazon's estimate of 5 to 8 weeks for delivery - they often do that with books printed through Lightning Source; order now and you'll get it in good time for Christmas - and look at those prices. Spiffing, eh what?

A bargain with Death

2011-10-31T09:40:00.004Z

It's that time of year again, when the veil between life and death is so thin that to stray off the path could easily take you on a detour via the otherworld. Martin and I cooked up this Warren-style short story "A Wrong Turning" a couple of years ago. Guy Wasserman has already suffered one bereavement, and when his car is forced off the main road, he finds Death waiting with an impossible offer: you, or your son. Find out if Guy can cheat Death here.

Look out!

2011-10-25T17:49:00.003+01:00

I'm interviewed on review site Paper Dragon Ink today, talking about Mirabilis but somehow managing to bring in Shotokan karate, pirates, videogames and photons. My thanks to Douglas Lentes, their editor in chief, for inviting me and asking a bunch of good questions. They've got lots of other good stuff too, from fantasy books to movies. There's even a girl in a chainmail bikini. Ahem.

"I'm just a bookseller and I want my corners"

2011-10-20T18:01:00.004+01:00

The future doesn’t look rosy for the big bookstores. Less than three out of every ten books sold last year were rung up on the tills of chain stores like Waterstone’s. And that’s print books. When you factor in the accelerating rise of digital books and comics, online book sales are whittling away at those meager profits that have so far kept booksellers on the high street. As the Economist put it recently:

“Publishers rely heavily on bookstores to bring new releases to customers’ attention and to steer them to books that they might not have considered buying. As stores close, the industry loses much more than a retail outlet. Publishers are increasingly trying to push books through online social networks. But [Brian Murray, chief executive of HarperCollins] says he hasn’t seen anything that replicates the experience of browsing a bookstore.”

So book publishers are getting squeezed? As an author, one of a group accustomed to being shoved around by the often rather bullying might of publishers, I might be expected to say cry me a river. Except that the river in question is Amazon, which owns the dominant e-reader, publishes its own books, runs a print-on-demand company widely used by small and self-publishers, and is pretty much uncontested in online book sales. That dearth of competition is bad for a lot of people, most especially the reading public.

Over the last few years, as online stores and supermarkets have chipped away at the dedicated retail bookstores, the high street browsing experience has diminished. Publishers respond with ghostwritten celebrity books and genre works of dubious quality. It is the mid-list, backed by editors with experience and gut feeling, where we traditionally find quality writing and interesting surprises. Strip that away and the future of fiction is pulp. But mid-list titles are the least likely to sell away from the high street. Online shopping pushes you ever-tighter into genre-based recommendations, supermarket shopping favors easily recognizable trash.

If bookstores close, how will publishers catch the passing trade? Tesco, a grocery company, have recently been trying an interesting experiment in South Korea. Faced with the problem of fewer stores than their competitors – and aware, as Mr Murray is, that people don’t shop so enthusiastically or so eclectically in front of a computer – Tesco put up display boards on the subway that replicated the look of grocery display cabinets. While waiting for their train, commuters can fill a virtual shopping trolley by scanning the QR codes of the products they like. Impulse buying has never been so painless.

Online stores so far have focused very much on a Microsoft (desk) rather than Apple (roving) model. Yet the exciting thing about where personal computing has been going in the last few years is that it’s out of the study and in your pocket. People like to shop out in the world, but they don’t like to lug heavy bags home. Imagine a world (it’s not far off) where the high street bookstores and comic shops have gone. Instead, at a much lower cost, publishers and booksellers put up posters and virtual bookshelves with QR codes that direct us to where we can browse, discuss and buy the books.

Publishers have done a little in this direction so far, but they don’t seem to grasp the full potential. One recent book poster on a London railway platform sported a QR code that directed customers to the book’s trailer on YouTube. Dumb, dumb, dumb. The moment I took out my phone to scan the code, the publisher should have been closing the deal – not directing me to yet more publicity material designed to hook my interest.

I’ll tell you who the QR selling model would benefit most: a would-be rival to Amazon like Britain’s Book Depository or Barnes & Noble in the USA. Currently Amazon have a Herculean grip on the Nemean lion of online book sales. But the online book market is set to more than double in size over the next ten years, so there’s a lot still to play for. Also, there really is no good reason for rivals to be scared of taking Amazon on. None of the technology involved is untried; all that is wanting is vision and ambition.

Admittedly those are not qualities often associated with book publishing, which in the last year or two has looked increasingly paralyzed by present shock. But booksellers are traditionally a nimbler breed. For the sake of the quality and variety of the books and comics we read as much as their price and availability, it’s time for the booksellers to get out there and pitch their QR-emblazoned virtual stalls in the high street space. Because that’s where the readers are in a mood to buy, whether it's a pint of milk or War & Peace.

"A strange dreamlike intrigue"

2011-10-17T08:04:00.003+01:00

"Mirabilis the magnificent" - that's what no less an authority than Lew Stringer said on his blog last week. Well, of course you wouldn't expect me and Leo to argue with that. Quite aside from Lew's overall assessment of the strip, he says some very perceptive things in a beautifully written critique that -- but why am I gassing on? You ought to pop over there right now and read it for yourself. Go on, shoo.

Still here? Oh, you want to know about that picture... All I'm saying is that Gus is away with the fairies in Mirabilis #10, on Leo's Wacom tablet for inking right now.

The Girl Who Took The Piss

2011-10-14T17:43:00.009+01:00

Spoilers ahead? You bet.

Writers are very often sedentary, even intellectual types. If we didn’t like the world inside our heads better than the one out there, why would we write? Okay, there are notable exceptions. Hemingway liked to fish. Shakespeare preferred being on stage. But I’m just saying there’s a type. Jeans and a sports jacket. Whisky not brandy. Men (and women) of letters are a tribe apart.

This can cause problems, because obviously readers like stories they can believe in, but often writers have unrealistic and pretty unbelievable ideas about how the world works. For example, I was watching a movie based on a Stieg Larsson book. Let me tell you how I’d escape from Colditz if the rules of reality were like in the movie. First I’d attack a guard. He may shoot me a couple of times, but as long as it’s just a handgun I’m okay. Then the guards would carry me out to the cemetery. Maybe the officer even guesses I’m not dead (he’s used handguns before) but he goes ahead and has me buried alive. Maybe a shallow grave, just two or three feet, as it’s all I deserve. He thinks I’m done for. The fool. What he doesn’t know: I have the lid off a coffee tin in my pocket, and I can use that to dig my way to the surface.

It’s a story, you say? It doesn’t have to be realistic? Well, see, it does – realistic within the rules of the world you’ve set up in your story, at least. Road Runner physics is not kosher with Newton, but we understand and accept how the cartoon world works. In a thriller, if you have your hero shot and then buried, the reader is going to be on the edge of their seat. How the hell is she going to get out of this? Maybe her phone..? Her journalist friend could find her by ringing it, locating the sound, and digging her up. But no, the answer is simpler than that: she’s Supergirl. You sap, for ever supposing there would be a clever solution.

You may feel inclined to forgive the poor writer for not knowing about guns and burials and stuff. Again, I can’t agree. Here is a simple experiment that would have told him what he needed to know. Go to a garden centre (as the characters do in the movie at one point, funnily enough) and pick up a bag of soil. Man, that’s heavy, right? Now lie on the ground and get a friend to load a couple of those bags on your chest. Another couple on your head, your arms, your stomach, your thighs, your ankles. Now sit up. You see? You didn’t even have to leave the comfort of your chair; the thought experiment is enough on its own. (Einstein figured out the whole of relativity using thought experiments, so I don’t think it’s too much to ask that a thriller writer might give it a go for the sake of a story.)

Of course, in The Girl Who Played With Fire, the soil isn’t in bags. The character is actually buried in a grave with two or three feet of soil packed on top of her. But wait – she has a cigarette case, thoughtfully given to her, not by Q, but by her girlfriend. So naturally she digs herself out of the grave.

Right, thought experiment number two. Imagine yourself under those fourteen or so bags of soil. And let’s suppose you are equipped with an oxygen tank. And haven’t got any bullets in you, ‘cause after all it was just a revolver and they only do flesh wounds. Okay, you have a trowel in your hand. Now what? You can’t lift your arm. Ah, so you start with a kind of rotating motion of the wrist, working the trowel around. Visualize that. Close your eyes, smell the damp soil, feel the weight. Focus on that hand with the trowel. What’s happening as you work it around?

You don’t need to be Einstein to figure out that you’ll dislodge a bit of soil and another bit will fall to take its place. On the surface, you wouldn’t even see the minute depression created as the soil settles in above where you’re moving the trowel. What you are actually doing here – the only thing you’ll be able to achieve – is shifting the soil so that it’s more compact than it was to begin with. And, without leverage, you’ll never get your arm to the point where you can actually dig upwards – never mind that the soil has nowhere to go, so you can’t create any kind of a hole anyway.

Moles do it? Yes they do. They take soil from in front of them and they pass it back and pack it behind them. They’ve had a few million years of evolution to help out with that, not only with body shape but with tolerance of carbon dioxide too. And that’s tunnelling. You take a mole, shoot it a couple of times, and bury it in your garden, and that sucker is not coming back.

Writers need to put some thought into their stories, because they are asking us to invest our time and our imagination in those stories, to believe what is happening to the characters and to care. Life and death decisions are made, for stakes higher than we see in everyday life, and for the story to thrill us the writer must keep the contract with the reader. They must play fair. Invent a Superman, but invent Kryptonite too – and then stick to your rules.

Here's William Goldman - a writer who always does the work so that his surprises and reversals suspend disbelief without actually burying it alive:

ANNIE
When I was growing up in Bakersfield, my favourite thing in the whole world was to go to the movies on Saturday afternoons for the Chapter Plays.

PAUL
Cliffhangers.

ANNIE
I know that, Mr. Man! They also called them serials. I'm not stupid ya know... Anyway, my favourite was Rocketman, and once it was a no-brakes chapter. The bad guy stuck him in a car on a mountain road and knocked him out and welded the door shut and tore out the brakes and started him to his death, and he woke up and tried to steer and tried to get out but the car went off a cliff before he could escape! And it crashed and burned and I was so upset and excited, and the next week, you better believe I was first in line. And they always start with the end of the last week. And there was Rocketman, trying to get out, and here comes the cliff, and just before the car went off the cliff, he jumped free! And all the kids cheered! But I didn't cheer. I stood right up and started shouting. This isn't what happened last week! Have you all got amnesia? They just cheated us! This isn't fair! HE DIDN'T GET OUT OF THE COCK-A-DOODIE CAR!

Reader, I married her

2011-09-28T15:03:00.005+01:00

It comes as a bit of a shock to find your wife has written the best novel of 2011.

Traditionally, fiction has divided into two camps. On the one hand we have literary or "contemporary" fiction, characterized by beautiful writing but often said to have no story. And then there's genre fiction, with a hot high concept to hook your interest and a series of reversals to keep you on the edge of your seat - but typically written with all the charm and elegance of a Haynes manual.

Virginia Woolf was vexed by ungainly prose styles. "Something tore," she said of such a book; "something scratched. A single word here and there flashed its torch in my eyes." Well, quite. But recently, reading a book where every phrase sparkled, I realized that the (very famous) author had given me no reason to turn the page. There was no problem facing the characters, no impending disaster that they would either triumph over or succumb to. If the craft of words was all I wanted, I would do better to read poetry.

Why should style matter? Try this:

Few things have been more beautiful than my note book on the Deist Controversy as it fell downward through the waters of the Mediterranean. It dived, like a piece of black slate, but opened soon, disclosing leaves of pale green, which quivered into blue. Now it had vanished, now it was a piece of magical india rubber stretching out to infinity, now it was a book again, but bigger than the book of all knowledge. It grew more fantastic as it reached the bottom, where a puff of sand welcomed it and obscured it from view. But it reappeared, quite sane though a little tremulous, lying decently open on its back, while unseen fingers fidgeted among its leaves.

That's E M Forster. Or this:

I took a large room, far up Broadway, in a huge old building whose upper stories had been wholly unoccupied for years, until I came. The place had long been given up to dust and cobwebs, to solitude and silence. I seemed groping among the tombs and invading the privacy of the dead, that first night I climbed up to my quarters. For the first time in my life a superstitious dread came over me; and as I turned a dark angle of the stairway and an invisible cobweb swung its lazy woof in my face and clung there, I shuddered as one who had encountered a phantom.

Mark Twain. Now contrast with:

The speeding vehicle clung to the road, squeezed down by the slip-stream of its speed over the flat-dish shape of its outlines.

Enough, already! Because if the writer cares so little for language - or at least, cares so little for his story that he didn't trouble over telling it well - then why should it be worth my time to read it? And I think it kinder to leave the writer in question anonymous, except to say you are unlikely to hear him mentioned in the same breath as Forster or Twain.

Read the first page of Lolita, or A Clockwork Orange, or To Have and Have Not, and you know you are in the hands of an author whose intelligence and insight will take you somewhere new. The journey will be worth your attention and it may change you. But over the last half of the twentieth century, good prose became a peacock's tail that grew so big as to obscure the beast itself. This allowed a new strain of style-only authors to evolve, with no story to tell but all the trappings of style necessary to pass themselves off as good writers, the way a hoverfly masquerades as a wasp.

Yet there's an interesting trend in modern literary fiction. There are definite signs that story is starting to matter again. Borrowing a little from genre writing, novels such as The Lovely Bones and The Time Traveler's Wife have blazed the trail. Between the extremes of geeky high concept and ethereal but aimless prose, we now have a hybrid: the compelling page-turner that is also beautifully written. Which, after all, is only what good fiction is supposed to be.

And so, back to Roz and that "best novel of the year". Of course, I'm partial. But not so much that I can't tell great writing when I see it. Hence the shock. I've been hearing about this book over the dinner table for the last five years. First the core concept: if (double underline that if) hypnosis can reveal past lives, what about future lives? Suppose you could be shown glimpses of an incarnation of yourself - your soul, whatever - in the future. What would that mean to the way you lived your life now?

Publishers loved the concept, but they wanted to Roz to take it off into the realms of genre. Murder, clues, a race against time: Dead Again in reverse. Crass? Of course, but I was right there adding my voice to theirs. A thriller with a reincarnation hook - sorry, preincarnation; what a gift to the bestseller racks. A career vista opened up of a new Roz Morris high concept genre title every year. It was the obvious way to take the idea, and exactly what Roz didn't want. She's already had that career, as a million-selling ghost writer. Now she's honed her craft and she wants to write fiction of genuine quality. Commendably, and in spite of the chorus of editors, agent and husband, she stuck to her guns. And My Memories Of A Future Life turns out be a work far more astonishingly original and more exquisitely written than anybody imagined - certainly including yours truly.

Roz released My Memories Of A Future Life originally on Kindle in several parts for 99 cents an episode, arguing that literary fiction can and should be compelling enough to bring readers back for more. After all, it worked for Dickens. Reviewers have talked about the surprise-&-delight factor - something that all novels ought to have, but which is rare enough nowadays to be worth remarking on. Even the readers who normally stick to genre have seen that Roz's literary treatment of the idea allows her to take it in unpredictable directions - because, wherever you think that preincarnation concept might go, I can guarantee you won't anticipate what Roz does with it.

Now, naturally you should take all that I say with a pinch of salt. But you don't have to take my word for it. The book is available in episodic ebook form for another month, and in paperback, and you can also hear Roz read the first four chapters in a podcast. All the details are on the book's website. It's not as a husband that you can trust me, but as an author and fellow reader.

The last Mirabilis daily...

2011-09-14T00:35:00.003+01:00

...for the time being, anyway. The first volume of Spring will go on sale in (appropriately) March next year. In the meantime, you can catch up on what happened in Winter with Print Media's gorgeous hardback edition, going for a pretty amazing price on Amazon. It's actually cheaper than the imported US trade paperbacks - and way more collectible - so grab it while the offer lasts:

"Long time with wadwos"

2011-09-13T00:29:00.001+01:00

One more snippet of Spring to come - and the return of a few more familiar faces.

"As if it never happened"

2011-09-12T00:27:00.001+01:00

Another sneak peek at season two tomorrow.

Hobbs Lane tube

2011-09-11T00:24:00.002+01:00

More tomorrow.

Super-sized

2011-09-10T00:22:00.002+01:00

The snack with bite, I guess.

Chomp

2011-09-09T00:19:00.002+01:00

You know when you've been evil-eyed...

"Railway lines up Mount Olympus"

2011-09-08T00:14:00.002+01:00

Tomorrow: watch out, the Kind Gentleman gets annoyed.

"A hypnogogic border country"

2011-09-07T00:12:00.002+01:00

More previews of season two tomorrow.

"The Goblin Market has come to town"

2011-09-06T00:01:00.002+01:00

The teeniest of sneak peeks at Mirabilis season two. More tomorrow.

"Everybody settle down"

2011-09-05T00:52:00.000+01:00

For the next ten days we'll be bringing you a spoiler-free sneak preview of Mirabilis season two. Dame Belchamy's British Museum lecture here also serves as a pretty good catch-up if you haven't read the story so far.

The first of the season two books is out in the UK next March from Print Media Productions - appropriately, as the action has jumped on a couple of months from the last book, and it's now the spring equinox. What about Jack and Estelle, you may wonder, who were last seen going under the sea at Rocket (sic) speed. Alive? Drowned? Ah, nothing is so clear-cut now the green comet has arrived.

Grab your popcorn and come back for another snippet tomorrow.

All-new Mirabilis

2011-09-04T21:09:00.003+01:00

Tomorrow and for ten days, Leo and Nikos and I will be bringing you a never-before-seen taster of season two, work on which is what has kept us so busy that we've barely had time to post anything recently. But now those pages are rolling off the production line and - oh my, they look fantastic. But don't take my word for it. Pop back tomorrow and see for yourself.

Eyes on the road

2011-08-31T01:01:00.005+01:00

I've had my head down the last week tweaking the various versions of the Binscombe Tales series (see previous post) which is why there's been a dearth of Mirabilis-related material lately. But the good news is that's going to be fixed in a major way very soon, as we'll be bringing you nearly two weeks' worth of daily Mirabilis strips as a trailer for the first Spring book due next year.

In the meantime, although the Binscombe Tales books don't go on sale till October, there's already a trailer for them too, in the form of a story called "Eyes" which you can view on BookBuzzr (below), or as a free EPUB here, or as a Kindle version here, or PDF here. I feel guilty for neglecting you, that must be what it is.

"Eyes" (also known as "It Has Been Said") is one of my favourite Binscombe Tales. And if it should put you in mind of a certain long-running horror movie franchise, be aware that the story was originally published by the Haunted Library over a decade before the cameras started rolling on the first in that series. And there are twenty-five other tales in the series, each with its own killer weird concept. If you like ghost stories, horror, modern fantasy and dark SF, you'll want to keep an eye out. Um, okay, maybe that's a poor choice of words, considering...

In a few days we'll be back with more news of the Mirabilis daily strip. Don't miss.

Weird tales of old England

2011-08-18T00:32:00.008+01:00

Leo and I do a whole bunch of work-for-hire jobs to finance the Mirabilis issues that are what we really care about. Because that's the life of a self-publishing comics team - not too dissimilar to bank robbers working in Starbucks to pay for the acetylene torches, I guess. But every so often we do at least get to work on something we're honestly passionate about. One such project is the Binscombe Tales series of weird tales that we're editing on behalf of Fabled Lands LLP.

My first encounter with the Binscombe Tales was in the late 1980s when John Whitbourn (a very old friend and fellow role-playing gamer) was one of several guests at a ghost story evening chez Morris. We had a nice dinner, a little fine wine, and settled down around the fire to entertain ourselves with some cosily spooky stories; an activity that mankind has only been doing for - what? - twenty thousand years and more.

Then John got up and produced the story he'd brought, the first (as it later turned out) of an ongoing series. As he read, a chill dark hand closed over the group. We were transported to a suburban street under dim street-lamps, hurrying past with just a nervous glance across the road at an ordinary but suddenly sinister bus shelter. With the final words, you could hear the sigh of long-held breath and we looked around at each other with that bright-eyed smile that says you know you've just had the bejasus scared out of you. Everyone that evening had come armed with a tale to tell, and there were talented, experienced writers there, to be sure, but there was no disputing who was the storytelling king of the fireside.

"Waiting for a Bus", the story that gave such a shudder to those dinner party guests who were privileged to hear it first, was picked as one of DAW's World's Best Fantasy Stories of the very next year. It has been widely anthologized since, as have other Binscombe Tales. Everyone who reads one of these stories will immediately recognize a fresh and authentic voice in English horror-SF-fantasy. And yet, until now, only a small cult readership has experienced the special delights, dreads and wonders of the Binscombe Tales series. Originally issued as limited-edition hardcovers thirteen years ago, the books are now out-of-print and fiercely sought by collectors.

These are stories in the tradition of Clarke's White Hart and Pratt & de Camp's Gavagan's Bar - themselves inspired, no doubt, by the tall tales of A J Alan and Dunsany's Jorkens yarns. John Whitbourn's stories are inventive, often whimsical, but unlike those earlier series there is a real bite to them. The Binscombe Tales will entertain you, but also they will unsettle you. Characters and relationships develop, usually not quite as you expect. The crackling fire and the convivial clink of glasses in the Duke of Argyll (the Binscombe local) often disguises a pitiless disregard of strangers' wellbeing. As a writer, John Whitbourn has bags of originality (check out his story "Hello Dolly", in the Fifth Book of After Midnight Stories, which happened to precede Amy Pond's domestic nightmares by well over a decade) and he is gifted with a compelling and engaging narrative voice; but it is that lacing of stark truth that, for me, elevates the Binscombe Tales out of genre into literature.

Well, connoisseurs of the uncanny, the outré, the darkly surreal and the just plain odd need look no further. In a few short months, Fabled Lands Publishing will issue the complete Binscombe Tales in a three-volume print edition and a set of Kindle chapbooks too. And in the process, Leo's and my comics "fighting fund" will be topped up with the wherewithal to see us safely through another three or four issues of Mirabilis. Doing well while doing good, I call that.

Another angle

2011-08-13T10:38:00.004+01:00

What I enjoy about writing comics is that it's like making a movie, only better. You get to work out some rough dialogue, then you position the characters in the scene, then you get to refine the dialogue. If it's not working you can move them around, try another angle, another turn of phrase. And they never wave a contract in your face and ask for overtime.

The only way that regular movie-making has the edge is in the editing. Since every scene change should ideally come at the end of a page, or anyway at the end of a tier of panels, it's the very devil if you suddenly decide you need to slot something else in.

By the time Leo gets to doing the pencil art, we’ve already worked out 99% of the direction of each scene. Occasionally we find that a particular shot or line of dialogue isn't working. At most this involves changing one or two panels at the pencils stage. (We work in "episodes" of 5-6 pages at a time. Considering there are typically 35 panels per episode, that's not a bad batting average.) And we've never yet had to completely change a panel after it went to inking - though Nikos does work the occasional miracle at the colouring stage when Leo and I overlooked something.

The process is versatile, but there are times when you have to kill a darling. This scene between Jack and the Kind Gentleman, for instance. I really liked the way Leo positioned the "camera" - it made for a great dramatic face-off. But we realized that the bestowing of the magic key wasn't getting enough prominence. That key is going to be important, not only in plot terms (it can open any lock, though it can't blow up a Cyberman) but because this is where the Kind Gentleman really starts to bind Jack to him, dispensing gifts for all the world like a traditional faerie king to his favoured mortal godson.

So Leo did a new version of the panel to put the emphasis on the key. The preceding panel is a wide establishing shot, so we didn’t actually need to show their relative position or setting again. But the earlier version did look nice. The beauty of a blog, of course, is that you don’t have to kill your darlings outright. You can lay them sleeping in their glass coffin, as here, and invite people in for a look.

This scene, incidentally, is from the start of Chapter Five, "The Darkest Hour", which is almost exactly halfway through season one: Winter.

Why we need comics we can care about

2011-08-06T19:07:00.006+01:00

Tom Brevoort, who is Marvel’s Senior VP of Publishing, recently spoke about the fundamental difference between the DC universe and the Marvel universe. As he sees it, the former takes an optimistic view of the world, the latter a pessimistic one. “Even something like Dark Knight Returns, which is gritty as hell, is at its heart about a heroic ideal, a larger-than-life figure who rises up to champion the city in its time of need.”

I’m not sure about this assertion – though, to be fair to Mr Brevoort, he’s a very smart guy and he did open with the caveat that it was too big a subject to talk about in one short post. As a kid, I turned to Marvel, not for pessimism, but for a more believable idea of what a hero was. I could see that Peter Parker’s heroism cost him more than Clark Kent’s ever did. He was a bigger hero. I didn’t need Aunt May to die to prove that, I just needed to believe that Peter was afraid she would.

In the Lee-Kirby-Ditko era, Marvel stood out because the stories took a deeper, more nuanced view of what it meant to be a hero. The regular guy behind the mask had problems like the rest of us. Courage had a cost. The Marvel universe was a dramatic canvas of love, secrets, misunderstandings, shame, emotional dilemmas. I’m not sure I’d call that universe pessimistic, just indifferent to human affairs. Marvel heroes didn’t get any helping hands from the storytellers.

Are today’s comics (and I’m not specifically thinking of Marvel) rooted in pessimism? Maybe. I don’t really follow superhero comics much, but I see that where once the most extreme stakes for the heroes were life and death, now they’re more often things like disfigurement and brain damage. Action has often been replaced with brutality, personal problems with politics, characterization with a stance on thinly disguised current issues.

Dilemmas in many of today’s comic books are no longer emotional but intellectual. Mutants, that’s like racism, right? And superhero registration, that’s the war on terror. Yeah, we all get it. My blank look is boredom, not confusion.

As I said, I’m not talking about just Marvel here. Comics are a shrinking market and yet the superheroes of the Silver Age are entertaining bigger audiences than ever before. The movies are watched by seventy million people while the comic books’ readership has dwindled to a diehard band of collectors and fanboys. Why is that?

Bambos Georgiou talks on his blog about some of the things that may have gone wrong with the comics market. You would think, after all, that comics as a medium should appeal to both book readers and moviegoers. That’s a pretty wide demographic. The problem is not in the medium but in the content. And we need to qualify that by adding that it’s specifically the US and UK that is facing this problem.

It isn’t a question of whether today’s comics are darker – look how dark Christopher Nolan’s Batman movies are. Comics are strangling themselves to death because most people don’t care a jot about the impersonal and somewhat abstract themes in these stories. Fanboys love that stuff but, thing is, fanboys are not really typical. And in a desperate attempt to inject the missing emotion, writers too often turn to sadism and plot complexity, delivering story punchlines that, if they arouse any emotion, deliver disgust and dismay rather than thrills.

Remember, I'm not saying all comic books are doing this. We still have some great ones that are about the people at the heart of the story. But overall it's a trend that has bedevilled the creators who grew up in the long shadow of Moore and Miller, who ape their style without getting even a hint of their substance. It's like a tyro novelist trying to be Hemingway without earning it. And it's a trend that's putting off new readers.

The majority of us connect with stories about characters whose concerns are personal, immediate, emotional, simple and relatable. Explore themes, sure – but personalize them. Blade Runner is not an issue-based examination of human identity; Roy Batty wants more life, fucker. And he ups and shows us what it is to be human.

I was in France recently. There you’ll see kids, teens and adults reading comics. The genres are as broad as in cinema or TV drama. The stories are gripping, and wildly popular like Harry Potter books or Sherlock Holmes movies. A ten-year-old picked up the first Mirabilis book. I thought it might be too old for her, but she read it through twice (the second time on her eleventh birthday, actually) and then demanded more. Teens and adults can enjoy that same story, perhaps seeing a little more in it than younger readers but without demanding characters’ eyes to be plucked out to make it “mature”.

I’ll give you a good analogy that shows how comic books could turn themselves around. A few years before J J Abrams’ Star Trek reboot, one of the show’s TV producers was talking about how maybe the ST franchise was just dying. And indeed it was dying – of worthiness, of sterility. Dying because it had made its issues bigger than its characters. To paraphrase The Onion, it was dying because of the heavy-handed messages about tolerance and the scenes set at long tables in which interstellar diplomacy is debated in endless detail.

The reboot made Star Trek once more about characters on a journey. We were with people we cared about as they faced huge challenges, They had to reach inside and discover the part of themselves that could meet such challenges. We saw them grow and change.

You tell a story like that, in any medium you like, and they will come.

Spidey - on the Mirabilis blog?

2011-08-04T08:00:00.000+01:00

Well, it's not so strange as you might think. The wall-crawler was my second favourite comic book character as a kid. (The first was Iron Man.) And here he is on the cover of the latest SFX Magazine showing off his classic-design web shooters in such an archetypal Romita Sr/Jim Mooney pose that I'm pretty much ready to start queuing already. And the magazine's feature on the new movie backs up the feeling that this is going to be a glorious return to the angsty alienated-teen origins of the character.

But that's not why I put the cover image of SFX #212 here. Well, you may ask, in that case is it SFX's news of Fringe season four? I'm a big fan, but no, that's not it. Nor the tantalizing peeks at Joss Whedon's Avengers movie - even though that on its own would be worth the cover price. And it's not even the Conan poster, awesome though that is too.

Nope, the reason we're talking about SFX is that this month's issue of the UK's premiere SF/fantasy movie magazine has a review of Mirabilis Winter volume one. A great review it is too, praising the "intriguing story" and rounding off with mention of the "audacious cliffhanger that will leave you desperate to find out what happens next, so let's hope that we aren't kept waiting too long for the second book." I hope so too, and if you still can't find the deluxe hardback edition of Mirabilis volume one in your local bookshop or on Amazon, I urge you to ask for it loud and clear.

In the meantime you can get hold of SFX very easily, either in print or digital form, via the link above. And if you're looking for the best in fantasy and science fiction coverage, not only of movies but games, books and comics too, it's the one to sling your webs at.

New version of the iPad app this week

2011-08-01T19:15:00.003+01:00

And now we wait. Not for long, though. Our resident iOS coding genius, Simon Cook, has just uploaded the new version of the Mirabilis iPad app, and the only delay is while Steve Jobs satisfies himself that all the cool extra features do full justice to both Apple and the Year of Wonders. Give him a couple of days and you should be seeing the fruit of Simon's labours up there in the App Store.

But what exactly are those extra features? Well, in addition to having much easier access to the in-app storefront and your collected issues, there's direct connection to Twitter, Facebook and email so you can tell your friends about the comics you're reading without even leaving the app. Also there are next issue screens and buttons, the menu bar now comes with auto-dismiss if you're not using it, and you can look at the Mirabilis Facebook group from inside the application too.

In the next update we should have a news feed straight on the storefront screen, maybe even with material from this blog, making the app even more of a complete comics-reading experience. But Simon deserves a rest, so we're going to hold on that until the next 6 issues (that's all of Mirabilis Spring part one) are ready to start sending your way in a couple of months. In the meantime, if you haven't caught up with the 8 issues of Mirabilis Winter yet, here's the full round-up:

#1: The World Turned Upside Down
Jack Ember joined the army to find adventure. But when a green comet heralds the dawn of a new century, Jack is destined to get more adventure than he bargained for – in the form of warmongering cabbages from Pluto, a witch who can command the weather, antique pistols that shoot hornets instead of bullets, and a two-headed coin whose toss could decide the fate of the world.

#2: The Wrong Side of Bedlam
Magic shows its dark side as Jack finds himself caught between two very untrustworthy mentors. Gus is a centuries-old wizard or an escaped madman – or possibly both – while the Kind Gentleman is the kind of faerie godfather who’ll grant three wishes you can’t refuse. To save his grandmother, Jack is forced to undertake a quest that will change his life forever.

#3: Standing on the Shoulders of Giants
Jack is on the outside looking in when Estelle stows away aboard the Orient Express and McNab comes spoiling for another duel. Steaming straight into a gruesome case involving severed heads and missing blood, Jack finds himself the prime murder suspect. And did we mention the four hundred foot baby?

#4: Fire and Sleet and Candlelight
Open graves, a brooding castle, and dead men walking in the woods… You know when you’ve broken down in Transylvania. McNab gets bitten by a carnivorous plant, Jack’s listening at keyholes, and Estelle gets her Goth on.

#5: The Darkest Hour
Jekyll plans to cut out Estelle's brain and use it to make her monsterpiece. Only Jack can save her, but he's a continent away – oh, and he’s dead. Grab your wolfsbane and stock up on silver bullets, because the full moon is up and things are looking hairy.

#6: Rhyme or Reason
Jack's behind bars, betrayed by his friend and framed for murder. Estelle's out at sea, locked in a box and surrounded by enemies. Meanwhile, the Auction of Marvels gets under way and the only hope of saving Gran is slipping away by the moment.

#7: A Ribbon Across the Sky
Time’s running out and Jack is forced to make some hard choices. With Simeon closing in, Jack and his foe have their final, fateful showdown beneath the sea.

#8: Saltwater and Ashes
Jack's in deep water. Mentallo's at the end of a rope. Dougy’s had enough of being one of the good guys. And Bodgkiss is back, and she’s bent on revenge. All this and airships too.

Two hundred pages of awesome fantasy action - can it really only be $12.93 for all that? Go on, treat yourself.

Mean little beasts, all shaggy with kelp

2011-07-30T16:31:00.007+01:00

Two more days remain of the under-a-dollar special offer on the Kindle edition of The Year of Wonders. The book comprises fifty fantasy vignettes in the form of correspondence sent from around the world to the Royal Mythological Society. Wondering what to do about a talking cow? Missing breakfast because fairies got at the milk? Turfed out of your local by pirates? Vexed by the problem of how to catalogue a chimera? Or at the mercy of the elements thanks to a levitating roof? Our boffins, armed with little practical experience but plenty of enthusiasm, are ready to advise on these and many other problems caused by the head-on collision of reality and fantasy. For example:

Dear Doctor Clattercut and Professor Bromfield

I would expect you to be familiar with our village, as it is famous in a small way for having a sunken twin a little way out to sea. When I was a girl, I could stand on the cliffs and, with the wind in the right direction, it was possible to hear the tolling of the submerged church bell coming up out of the waves.

Now that things are as they are, our submarine neighbours no longer content themselves with the occasional ringing of a bell. Walking my dog along the beach, as often as not I will encounter a group of mermaids riding there. Their manners are polite, but I think there is some teasing in their glance and their ponies are mean little beasts, all shaggy with kelp and very high and briny to the nose. You know the smell when the tide goes right out; it's like that.

My concern, however, is the mermaids’ effect on our village. Twice a week, or Wednesdays and Saturdays, they come and sit on the beach with trinkets to sell. And I know where they get those trinkets. One of them had an ivory pipe that I recognized. It belonged to my grandfather, who was drowned at sea on my first day at junior school.

Yours sincerely, Mabel Catchpole (Mrs), Dunwich

Dr Clattercut replies: An interesting case, Mrs Catchpole, and thank you for bringing it to our attention. I don’t know if I would consider what the mermaids are doing to be looting. Any knickknacks they find on the sea bed were, after all, irretrievably lost to us on dry land. One could argue they are performing a valuable service akin to marine salvage. Admittedly, however, there is a suggestion here of grave-robbing. What do you say, Bromfield?

Prof Bromfield: Hmm? Just thinking… Cabyll-ushteys, those sea ponies are called – that’s what they call them in the Isle of Man, anyway. They’re more than pesky. Get in trouble out swimming and they’ll drag you down and eat you up. All of you except the liver, funnily enough.

Dr Clattercut: I believe the Suffolk version is less outrightly murderous, though still a creature to be wary of. I was kicked by one while collecting trilobites at Aldeburgh two months ago and I still have a bruise. But just a moment – how do mermaids..?

Prof Bromfield: Side saddle, old chap.

You can get the complete Kindle book of Royal Mythological Society correspondence from Amazon US, Amazon Europe or Amazon UK, and if you want to look at a few more letters you could check out the free previews on MyEbook or fReado.

A magical glow

2011-07-27T14:48:00.004+01:00

Working on a comic book gives you a strange sense of multiple realities. I'm writing the first part of Mirabilis issue #12. Meanwhile Leo, fresh back from cycling around Norway, is inking the middle of #10. Mike Toris has just finished flatting #9. And before heading off on vacation, Nikos just had time to complete the coloring on his very first new Mirabilis page since he took time out to remaster the Thor Omnibus featuring Walt Simonson's standout run on that book. (Yeah, we're a little overawed about that, but fortunately Nikos and Mike aren't the sort to get big-headed.)

There's a big temptation to start showing off these glorious pages as they arrive back from Athens, but that would spoil the surprise. So here's one little peek at an awestruck London audience getting their first up close and personal experience of how the green comet will be changing their lives in Mirabilis: Spring.

And I will make thee beds of roses

2011-07-24T12:09:00.006+01:00

There's just one more week for you to get yourself a copy of the Kindle edition of The Year of Wonders at the special offer price of 99 cents - in the US here, in the UK here, and in mainland Europe here.

Recent discussion in these parts having been on the definition of fantasy, I should explain that there is a very broad range on display in these letters to the Royal Mythological Society. As the green comet's effect is to erase the line between the real and the imaginary, you will find every flavor of the fantastic from gods to goblins to green-skinned Martians. But my own favorites are the non-genre stories that slip between the cracks. Like this one.

Dear sirs

You have heard the expression “a whirlwind romance” and I can attest that courtship truly can spin a person quite dizzy. Only a year ago, I was in Sicily with more thought of collecting archaeological specimens than of collecting a husband. And yet there at a little tavern overlooking the bay, a man at the next table sketched my portrait on his napkin and I could see at once that his eyes had found something beautiful in my poor plain thirty-year-old face. I shaded my eyes from the sun to look up at him. And like a Mediterranean storm, there it was, gentlemen: love.

We were wed soon after at his family church near Palma di Montechiaro, but my husband’s father does not approve of his choice of career as a painter, so to avoid daily arguments - which in Sicily can take on the proportions of a pitched battle - we returned to set up home in England, at a country estate left me by my uncle.

The estate has extensive grounds, and at first I was surprised at my husband’s enthusiasm for an activity so staid as gardening. But he said that the gardens would be his new canvas, and indeed his art found full expression there. When he is angry, the flower beds are violent with dark reds and brooding purples. When he is amused, the topiary bushes strike funny poses that have me laughing too. And when he is sad, the shrubbery droops and I seem to notice far more weeping willows about the lawn than at other times.

A wife frequently is left to guess at her husband’s moods, for men do not talk of their feelings even if they are Sicilian. Therefore I have come to rely on the garden’s visual cues to help me better understand his feelings and support him as a dutiful wife should. In the last week, however, the garden has changed in a way I do not recognize. The flowers are in full bloom, a thousand of them, so that everywhere one looks is a riot of passionate bright colours like the most heartfelt Impressionist painting. I have spoken of this with my young cousin Amanda, who recently came to stay with us, but though she has struck up quite a friendship with my husband she too is at a loss to explain what it all may mean.

With your wide experience of supernatural matters, I wonder if you are able to illuminate this mystery. For some reason it vexes me greatly, though why I cannot tell.

Yours faithfully, Mrs Rachel Sindona, High Wycombe

Prof Bromfield replies: Dear lady, do not allow your cousin to outstay her welcome. I will say no more.

(Photo by Ozeye from Wikipedia.)

"The Beast with Five Fingers"

2011-07-22T07:59:00.000+01:00

William F Harvey was a doctor who wrote ghost stories. That is to say, he was a writer who cured sick people. A Quaker and a war hero, he died at the relatively young age of 52 and would now be entirely forgotten except for the movie based on his most famous story, "The Beast with Five Fingers". You may think you know the story - indeed, it has become a horror cliché - but this original yarn has something more, as you'd expect from Harvey, who was never one for straightforward genre fiction. His tales are crafted to unsettle the reader; in a quiet, understated way they challenge not only our faith in he laws of nature and the universe, but our fundamental belief in reason itself.

The best kind of fantasy, Forster tells us, "implies the supernatural but need not express it." Rather than busying itself with a literal business of elfin politics and whether dragonslaying regiments are loyal to demon kings - for in those stories you could substitute modern-day equivalents without rocking the boat one bit - true fantasy prises up the fingernails of logic, rattles the whole concept of a world that makes sense, and turns over rocks to reveal things we would rather not face. So put aside your preconceptions and look at this story with fresh eyes. Under the dry humor and the cold grue, you will find that Harvey has sprinkled another spice - no more than a pinch, but it flavors the piece strongly and makes it seem a universal warning. Not the beast with two backs, then, but

THE BEAST WITH FIVE FINGERS
The story, I suppose, begins with Adrian Borlsover, whom I met when I was a little boy and he an old man. My father had called to appeal for a subscription, and before he left, Mr. Borlsover laid his right hand in blessing on my head. I shall never forget the awe in which I gazed up at his face and realized for the first time that eyes might be dark and beautiful and shining and yet not able to see.

For Adrian Borlsover was blind.

He was an extraordinary man, who came of an eccentric stock. Borlsover sons for some reason always seemed to marry very ordinary women, which perhaps accounted for the fact that no Borlsover had been a genius and only one Borlsover had been mad. But they were great champions of little causes, generous patrons of odd sciences, founders of querulous sects, trustworthy guides to the bypath meadows of erudition.

Adrian was an authority on the fertilization of orchids. He had held at one time the family living at Borlsover Conyers, until a congenital weakness of the lungs obliged him to seek a less rigorous climate in the sunny south-west watering-place where I had seen him. Occasionally he would relieve one or other of the local clergy. My father described him as a fine preacher, who gave long and inspiring sermons from what many men would have considered unprofitable texts. "An excellent proof," he would add, "of the truth of the doctrine of direct verbal inspiration."

Adrian Borlsover was exceedingly clever with his hands. His penmanship was exquisite. He illustrated all his scientific papers, made his own woodcuts, and carved the reredos that is at present the chief feature of interest in the church at Borlsover Gonyers. He had an exceedingly clever knack in cutting silhouettes for young ladies and paper pigs and cows for little children, and made more than one complicated wind instrument of his own devising.

When he was fifty years old Adrian Borlsover lost his sight. In a wonderfully short time he adapted himself to the new conditions of life. He quickly learn to read Braille. So marvellous indeed was his sense of touch, that he was still able to maintain his interest in botany. The mere passing of his long supple fingers over a flower was sufficient means for its identification, though occasionally he would use his lips. I have found several letters of his among my father's correspondence; in no case was there anything to-show that he was afflicted with blindness, and this in spite of the fact that he exercised undue economy in the spacing of lines. Towards the close of his life Adrian Borlsover was credited with powers of touch that seemed almost uncanny. It has been said that he could tell at once the colour of a ribbon placed between his fingers. My father would neither confirm nor deny the story.

Adrian Borlsover was a bachelor. His elder brother, Charles, had married late in life, leaving one son, Eustace, who lived in the gloomy Georgian mansion at Borlsover Gonyers, where he could work undisturbed in collecting material for his great book on heredity.

Like his uncle, he was a remarkable man.

The Borlsovers had always been born naturalists, but Eustace possessed in a special degree the power of systematizing his knowledge. He had received his university education in Germany; and then, after post-graduate work in Vienna and Naples, had travelled for four years in South America, and the East, getting together a huge store of material for a new study into the processes of variation.

He lived alone at Borlsover Gonyers with Saunders, his secretary, a man who bore a somewhat dubious reputation in the district, but whose powers as a mathematician, combined with his business abilities, were invaluable to Eustace.

Uncle and nephew saw little of each other. The visits of Eustace were confined to a week in the summer or autumn—tedious weeks, that dragged almost as slowly as the bathchair in which the old man was drawn along the sunny seafront. In their way the two men were fond of each other) though their intimacy would, doubtless, have been greater had they shared the same religious views. Adrian held to the old-fashioned evangelical dogmas of his early manhood; his nephew for many years had been thinking of embracing Buddhism. Both men possessed, too, the reticence the Borlsovers had always shown, and which their enemies sometimes called hypocrisy. With Adrian it was a reticence as to the things he had left undone; but with Eustace it seemed that the curtain which he was so careful to leave undrawn hid something more than a half-empty chamber.

Two years before his death Adrian Borlsover developed, unknown to himself, the not uncommon power of automatic writing. Eustace made the discovery by accident, Adrian was sitting reading in bed, the forefinger of his left hand tracing the Braille characters, when his nephew noticed that a pencil the old man held in his right hand was moving slowly along the opposite page. He left his seat in the window and sat down beside the bed. The right had continued to move and now he could see plainly that they were letters and words which it was forming.

"Adrian Borlsover," wrote the hand, "Eustace Borlsover, Charles Borlsover, Francis Borlsover, Sigismund Borlsover, Adrian Borlsover, Eustace Borlsover, Saville Borlsover. B for Borlsover. Honesty is the Best Policy. Beautiful Belinda Borlsover."

"What curious nonsense!" said Eustace to himself.

"King George ascended the throne in 1760," wrote the hand. "Crowd, a noun of multitude; a collection of individuals. Adrian Borlsover, Eustace Borlsover."

"It seems to me," said his uncle, closing the book, "that you had much better make the most of the afternoon sunshine and take your walk now."

"I think perhaps I will," Eustace answered as he picked up the volume. "I won't go far, and when I come back I can read to you those articles inNature about which we were speaking."

He went along the promenade, but stopped at the first shelter and, seating himself in the corner best protected from the wind, he examined the book at leisure. Nearly every page was scored with a meaningless jumble of pencil-marks; rows of capital letters, short words, long words, complete sentences, copy-book tags. The whole thing, in fact, had the appearance of a copy-book, and, on a more careful scrutiny, Eustace thought that there was ample evidence to show that the handwriting at the beginning of the book, good though it was, was not nearly so good as the handwriting at the end.

He left his uncle at the end of October with a promise to return early in December. It seemed to him quite clear that the old man's power of automatic writing was developing rapidly, and for the first time he looked forward to a visit that would combine duty with interest.

But on his return he was at first disappointed. His uncle, he thought, looked older. He was listless, too, preferring others to read to him and dictating nearly all his letters. Not until the day before he left had Eustace an opportunity of observing Adrian Borlsover's new-found faculty.

The old man, propped up in bed with pillows, had sunk into a light sleep. His two hands lay on the coverlet, his left hand tightly clasping his right. Eustace took an empty manuscript-book and placed a pencil within reach of the fingers of the right hand. They snatched at it eagerly, then dropped the pencil to loose the left hand from its restraining grasp.

"Perhaps to prevent interference I had better hold that hand," said Eustace to himself, as he watched the pencil. Almost immediately it began to write :

"Blundering Borlsovers, unnecessarily unnatural, extraordinarily eccentric, culpably curious."

"Who are you?" asked Eustace in a low voice.

"Never you mind," wrote the hand of Adrian.

"Is it my uncle who is writing?"

"O my prophetic soul, mine uncle!"

"Is it anyone I know?"

"Silly Eustace, you'll see me very soon."

"When shall I see you?"

"When poor old Adrian's dead."

"Where shall I see you?"

"Where shall you not?"

Instead of speaking his next question, Eustace wrote it: "What is the time?"

The fingers dropped the pencil and moved three or four times across the paper. Then, picking up the pencil, they wrote: "Ten minutes before four. Put your book away, Eustace. Adrian mustn't find us working at this sort of thing. He doesn't know what to make of it, and I won't have poor old Adrian disturbed. Au revoir! Adrian Borlsover awoke with a start.

"I've been dreaming again," he said; "such queer dreams of leaguered cities and forgotten towns. You were mixed up in this one, Eustace, though I can't remember how. Eustace, I want to warn you. Don't walk in doubtful paths. Choose your friends well. Your poor grandfather. . ."

A fit of coughing put an end to what he was saying, but Eustace saw that the hand was still writing. He managed unnoticed to draw the book away. "I'll light the gas," he said, "and ring for tea."

On the other side of the bed-curtain he saw the last sentences that had been written.

"It's too late, Adrian," he read. "We're friends already, aren't we, Eustace Borlsover?"

On the following day Eustace left. He thought his uncle looked ill when he said goodbye, and the old man spoke despondently of the failure his life had been.

"Nonsense, uncle," said his nephew. "You have got over your difficulties in a way not one in a hundred thousand would have done. Everyone marvels at your splendid perseverance in teaching your hands to take the place of your lost sight. To me it's been a revelation of the possibilities of education."

"Education," said his uncle dreamily, as if the word had started a new train of thought. "Education is good so long as you know to whom and for what purpose you give it. But with the lower orders of men, the baser and more sordid spirits, I have grave doubts as to its results. Well, goodbye, Eustace; I may not see you again. You are a true Borlsover, with all the Borlsover faults. Marry, Eustace. Marry some good, sensible girl. And if by any chance I don't see you again, my will is at my solicitor's. I've not left you any legacy, because I know you're well provided for; but I thought you might like to have my books. Oh, and there's just one other thing. You know, before the end people often lose control over themselves and make absurd requests. Don't pay any attention to them, Eustace. Goodbye!" and he held out his hand. Eustace took it. It remained in his a fraction of a second longer than he had expected and gripped him with a virility that was surprising. There was, too, in its touch a subtle sense of intimacy.

"Why, uncle," he said, "I shall see you alive and well for many long years to come."

* * *

Two months later Adrian Borlsover died.

Eustace Borlsover was in Naples at the time. He read the obituary-notice in the Morning Post on the day announced for the funeral.

"Poor old fellow!" he said. "I wonder whether I shall find room for all his books."

The question occurred to him again with greater force when, three days later, he found himself standing in the library at Borlsover Gonyers, a huge room built for use and not for beauty in the year of Waterloo by a Borlsover who was an ardent admirer of the great Napoleon. It was arranged on the plan of many college libraries, with tall projecting bookcases forming deep recesses of dusty silence, fit graves for the old hates of forgotten controversy, the dead passions of forgotten lives. At the end of the room, behind the bust of some unknown eighteenth-century divine, an ugly iron corkscrew stair led to a shelf-lined gallery. Nearly every shelf was full.

"I must talk to Saunders about it," said Eustace. "I suppose that we shall have to have the billiard-room fitted up with bookcases."

The two men met for the first time after many weeks in the dining-room that evening.

"Hallo! " said Eustace, standing before the fire with his hands in his pockets. "How goes the world, Saunders? Why these dress togs?"

He himself was wearing an old shooting-jacket. He did not believe in mourning, as he had told his uncle on his last visit; and, though he usually went in for quiet-coloured ties, he wore this evening one of an ugly red, in order to shock Morton, the butler, and to make them thrash out the whole question of mourning for themselves in the servants' hall. Eustace was a true Borlsover.

"The world," said Saunders, "goes the same as usual, confoundedly slow. The dress togs are accounted for by an invitation from Captain Lockwood to bridge."

"How are you getting there?"

"There's something the matter with the car, so I've told Jackson to drive me round in the dogcart. Any objection?"

"Oh, dear me, no! We've had all things in common for far too many years for me to raise objections at this hour of the day."

"You'll find your correspondence in the library," went on Saunders. "Most of it I've seen to. There are a few private letters I haven't opened. There's also a box with a rat or something inside it that came by the evening post. Very likely it's the six-toed beast Terry was sending us to cross with the four-toed albino. I didn't look because I didn't want to mess up my things' but I should gather from the way it's jumping about that it's pretty hungry."

"Oh, I'll see to it," said Eustace, "while you and the captain earn an honest penny."

Dinner over and Saunders gone, Eustace went into the library. Though the fire had been lit, the room was by no means cheerful.

"We'll have all the lights on, at any rate," he said, as he turned the switches. "And, Morton," he added, when the butler brought the coffee, "get me a screwdriver or something to undo this box. Whatever the animal is, he's kicking up the deuce of a row. What is it? Why are you dawdling?"

"If you please, sir, when the postman brought it, he told me that they'd bored the holes in the lid at the post office. There were no breathing holes in the lid, sir, and they didn't want the animal to die. That is all, sir."

"It's culpably careless of the man, whoever he was," said Eustace, as he removed the screws, "packing an animal like this in a wooden box with no means of getting air. Confound it all! I meant to ask Morton to bring me a cage to put it in. Now I suppose I shall have to get one myself."

He placed a heavy book on the lid from which the screws had been removed, and went into the billiard-room. As he came back into the library with an empty cage in his hand, he heard the sound of something falling, and then of something scuttling along the floor.

"Bother it! The beast's got out. How in the world am I to find it again in this library?"

To search for it did indeed seem hopeless. He tried to follow the sound of the scuttling in one of the recesses, where the animal seemed to be running behind the books in the shelves; but it was impossible to locate it. Eustace resolved to go on quietly reading.

Very likely the animal might gain confidence and show itself. Saunders seemed to have dealt in his usual methodical manner with most of the correspondence. There were still the private letters.

What was that? Two sharp clicks and the lights in the hideous candelabras that hung from the ceiling suddenly went out.

"I wonder if something has gone wrong with the fuse," said Eustace, as he went to the switches by the door. Then he stopped. There was a noise at the other end of the room, as if something was crawling up the iron corkscrew stair.

"If it's gone into the gallery," he said, "well and good." He hastily turned on the lights, crossed the room, and climbed up the stair. But he could see nothing. His grandfather had placed a little gate at the top of the stair, so that children could run and romp in the gallery without fear of accident. This Eustace closed, and, having considerably narrowed the circle of his search, returned to his desk by the fire.

How gloomy the library was! There was no sense of intimacy about the room. The few busts that an .eighteenth-century Borlsover had brought back from the grand tour might have been in keeping in the old library. Here they seemed out of place. They made the room feel cold in spite of the heavy red damask curtain and great gilt cornices.

With a crash two heavy books fell from. the gallery to the floor; then, as Borlsover looked, another, and yet another.

"Very well. You'll starve for this, my beauty!" he said. "We'll do some little experiments on the metabolism of rats deprived of water. Go on! Chuck them down! I think I've got the upper hand."

He turned once more to his correspondence. The letter was from the family solicitor. It spoke of his uncle's death, and of the valuable collection of books that had been left to him in the will.

There was one request [he read] which certainly came as a surprise to me. As you know, Mr. Adrian Borlsover had left instructions that his body was to be buried in as simple a manner as possible at Eastbourne. He expressed a desire that there should be neither wreaths nor flowers of any kind, and hoped that his friends and relatives would not consider it necessary to wear mourning. The day before his death we received a letter cancelling these instructions. He wished the body to be embalmed (he gave us the address of the man we were to employ — Pennifer, Ludgate Hill), with orders that his right hand should be sent to you stating that it was at your special request. The other arrangements about the funeral remained unaltered.

"Good Lord," said Eustace, "what in the world was the old boy driving at? And what in the name of all that's holy is that?"

Someone was in the gallery. Someone had pulled the cord attached to one of the blinds, and it had rolled up with a snap. Someone must be in the gallery, for a second blind did the same. Someone must be walking round the gallery, for one after the other the blinds sprang up, letting in the moonlight.

"I haven't got to the bottom of this yet," said Eustace, "but I will do, before the night is very much older"; and he hurried up the corkscrew stair. He had just got to the top, when the lights went out a second time, and he heard again the scuttling along the floor. Quickly he stole on tiptoe in the dim moonshine in the direction of the noise, feeling, as he went, for one of the switches. His fingers touched the metal knob at last. He turned on the electric light.

About ten yards in front of him, crawling along the floor, was a man's hand. Eustace stared at it in utter amazement. It was moving quickly in the manner of a geometer caterpillar, the fingers humped up one moment, flattened out the next; the thumb appeared to give a crablike motion to the whole. While he was looking, too surprised to stir, the hand disappeared round the corner. Eustace ran forward. He no longer saw it, but he could hear it, as it squeezed its way behind the books on one of the shelves. A heavy volume had been displaced. There was a gap in the row of books, where it had got in. In his fear lest it should escape him again, he seized the first book that came to his hand and plugged it into the hole. Then, emptying two shelves of their contents, he took the wooden boards and propped them up in front to make his barrier doubly sure.

"I wish Saunders was back," he said; "one can't tackle this sort of thing alone."

It was after eleven, and there seemed little likelihood of Saunders returning before twelve. He did not dare to leave the shelf unwatched, even to run downstairs to ring the bell. Morton, the butler, often used to come round about eleven to see that the windows were fastened, but he might not come. Eustace was thoroughly unstrung. At last he heard steps down below.

"Morton!" he shouted. "Morton!"

"Sir?"

"Has Mr. Saunders got back yet?"

"Not yet, sir."

"Well, bring me some brandy, and hurry up about it. I'm up in the gallery, you duffer."

"Thanks," said Eustace, as he emptied the glass. "Don't go to bed yet, Morton. There are a lot of books that have fallen down by accident. Bring them up and put them back in their shelves."

Morton had never seen Borlsover in so talkative a mood as on that night.

"Here," said Eustace, when the books had been put back and dusted, "you might hold up these boards for me, Morton. That beast in the box got out, and I've been chasing it all over the place."

"I think I can hear it clawing at the books, sir. They're not valuable, I hope? I think that's the carriage, sir; I'll go and call Mr. Saunders."

It seemed to Eustace that he was away for five minutes, but it could hardly have been more than one, when he returned with Saunders. "All right, Morton, you can go now. I'm: up here, Saunders."

"What's all the row?" asked Saunders, as he lounged forward with his hands in his pockets. The luck had been with him all the evening. He was completely satisfied, both with himself and with Captain Lockwood's taste in wines.

"What's the matter? You look to me to be in an absolutely blue funk."

"That old devil of an uncle of mine," began Eustace—"Oh, I can't explain it all. It's his hand that's been playing Old Harry all the evening. But I've got it cornered behind these books. You've got to help me to catch it."

"What's up with you, Eustace? What's the game?"

"It's no game, you silly idiot! If you don't believe me, take out one of those books and put your hand in and feel."

"All right," said Saunders; "but wait till I've rolled up my sleeve. The accumulated dust of centuries, eh?" He took off his coat, knelt down, and thrust his arm along the shelf.

"There's something there right enough," he said. "It's got a funny, stumpy end to it, whatever it is, and nips like a crab. Ah! No, you don't!" He pulled his hand out in a flash. "Shove in a book quickly. Now it can't get out." "What was it?" asked Eustace.

"Something that wanted very much to get hold of me. I felt what seemed like a thumb and forefinger. Give me some brandy."

"How are we to get it out of there?"

"What about a landing-net?"

"No good. It would be too smart for us. I tell you, Saunders, it can cover the ground far faster than I can walk. But I think I see how we can manage it. The two books at the ends of the shelf are big ones, that go right back against the wall. The others are very thin. I'll take out one at a time, and you slide the rest along) until we have it squashed between the end two."

It certainly seemed to be the best plan. One by one as they took out the books, the space behind grew smaller and smaller. There was something in it that was certainly very much alive. Once they caught sight of fingers feeling for a way of escape. At last they had it pressed between the two big books.

"There's muscle there, if there isn't warm flesh and blood," said Saunders, as he held them together. "It seems to be a hand right enough, too. I suppose this is a sort of infectious hallucination. I've read about such cases before."

"Infectious fiddlesticks!" said Eustace, his face white with anger; "bring the thing downstairs. We'll get it back into the box."

It was not altogether easy, but they were successful at last.

"Drive in the screws," said Eustace; "we won't run any risks. Put the box in this old desk of mine. There's nothing in it that I want. Here's the key. Thank goodness there's nothing wrong with the lock."

"Quite a lively evening," said Saunders. "Now let's hear more about your uncle."

They sat up together until early morning. Saunders had no desire for sleep. Eustace was trying to explain and to forget; to conceal from himself a fear that he had never felt before—the fear of walking alone down the long corridor to his bedroom.

* * *

"Whatever it was," said Eustace to Saunders on the following morning, "I propose that we drop the subject. There's nothing to keep us here for the next ten days. We'll motor up to the Lakes and get some climbing."

"And see nobody all day, and sit bored to death with each other every night. Not for me, thanks. Why not run up to town? Run's the exact word in this case, isn't it? We're both in such a blessed funk. Pull yourself together, Eustace, and let's have another look at the hand."

"As you like," said Eustace; "there's the key."

They went into the library and opened the desk. The box was as they had left it on the previous night.

"What are you waiting for?" asked Eustace.

"I am waiting for you to volunteer to open the lid. However, since you seem to funk it, allow me. There doesn't seem to be the likelihood of any rumpus this morning at all events." He opened the lid and picked out the hand. "Cold?" asked Eustace.

"Tepid. A bit below blood heat by the feel. Soft and supple too. If it's the embalming, it's a sort of embalming I've never seen before. Is it your uncle's hand?"

"Oh yes, it's his all right," said Eustace. "I should know those long thin fingers anywhere. Put it back in the box, Saunders. Never mind about the screws. I'll lock the desk, so that there'll be no chance of its getting out. We'll compromise by motoring up to town for a week. If we can get off soon after lunch, we ought to be at Grantham or Stamford by night."

"Right," said Saunders, "and tomorrow—oh, well, by tomorrow we shall have forgotten all about this beastly thing."

If, when the morrow came, they had not forgotten, it was certainly true that at the end of the week they were able to tell a very vivid ghost story at the little supper Eustace gave on Hallowe'en.

"You don't want us to believe that it's true, Mr. Borlsover? How perfectly awful!"

"I'll take my oath on it, and so would Saunders here; wouldn't you, old chap?"

"Any number of oaths," said Saunders. "It was a long thin hand, you know, and it gripped me just like that."

"Don't, Mr. Saunders! Don't! How perfectly horrid! Now tell us another one, do! Only a really creepy one, please."

"Here's a pretty mess!" said Eustace on the following day, as he threw a letter across the table to Saunders. "It's your affair, though. Mrs. Merrit, if I understand it, gives a month's notice."

"Oh, that's quite absurd on Mrs. Merrit's part," replied Saunders. "She doesn't know what she's talking about. Let's see what she says."

Dear Sir [he read].
This is to let you know that I must give you a month's notice as from Tuesday, the 13th. For a long time I've felt the place too big for me; but when Jane Parfit and Emma Laidlaw go off with scarcely as much as an "If you please", after frightening the wits out of the other girls, so that they can't turn out a room by themselves or walk alone down the stairs for fear of treading on half-frozen toads or hearing it run along the passages at night, all I can say is that it's no place for me. So I must ask you, Mr. Borlsover, sir, to find a new housekeeper, that has no objection to large and lonely houses, which some people do say, not that I believe them for a minute, my poor mother always having been a Wesleyan, are haunted.

Yours faithfully,
ELIZABETH MERRIT

P.S.—I should be obliged if you would give my respects to Mr. Saunders. I hope that he won't run any risks with his cold.

"Saunders," said Eustace, "you've always had a wonderful way with you in dealing with servants. You mustn't let poor old Merrit go."

"Of course she shan't go," said Saunders. "She's probably only angling for a rise in salary. I'll write to her this morning."

"No. There's nothing like a personal interview. We've had enough of town. We'll go back tomorrow, and you must work your cold for all its worth. Don't forget that it's got on to the chest, and will require weeks of feeding up and nursing."

"All right, I think I can manage Mrs. Merrit."

But Mrs. Merrit was more obstinate than he had thought. She was very sorry to hear of Mr. Saunder's cold, and how he lay awake all night in London coughing; very sorry indeed. She'd change his room for him gladly and get the south room aired, and wouldn't he have a hot basin of bread and milk last thing at night? But she was afraid that she would have to leave at the end of the month. "Try her with an increase of salary," was the advice of Eustace. It was no use. Mrs. Merrit was obdurate, though she knew of a Mrs. Goddard, who had been housekeeper to Lord Gargrave, who might be glad to come at the salary mentioned.

"What's the matter with the servants, Morton?" asked Eustace that evening, when he brought the coffee into the library. "What's all this about Mrs. Merrit wanting to leave?"

"If you please, sir, I was going to mention it myself. I have a confession to make, sir. When I found your note, asking me to open that desk and take out the box with the rat, I broke the lock as you told me, and was glad to do it, because I could hear the animal in the box making a great noise, and I thought it wanted food. So I took out the box, sir, and got a cage, and was going to transfer it, when the animal got away."

"What in the world are you talking about? I never wrote any such note."

"Excuse me, sir; it was the note I picked up here on the floor on the day you and Mr. Saunders left. I have it in my pocket now."

It certainly seemed to be in Eustace's handwriting. It was written in pencil, and began somewhat abruptly.

"Get a hammer, Morton, " he read, "or some other tool and break open the lock in the old desk in the library. Take out the box that is inside. You need not do anything else. The lid is already open. Eustace Borlsover."

"And you opened the desk?"

"Yes, sir; and, as I was getting the cage ready, the animal hopped out."

"What animal?"

"The animal inside the box, sir."

"What did it look like?"

"Well, sir, I couldn't tell you," said Morton, nervously. "My back was turned, and it was half-way down the room when I looked up."

"What was its colour?" asked Saunders. "Black?"

"Oh no, sir; a greyish white. It crept along in a very funny way, sir. I don't think it had a tail."

"What did you do then?"

"I tried to catch it; but it was no use. So I set the rat-traps and kept the library shut. Then that girl, Emma Laidlaw, left the door open when she was cleaning, and I think it must have escaped."

"And you think it is the animal that's been frightening the maids?"

"Well, no, sir, not quite. They said it was—you'll excuse me, sir—a hand that they saw. Emma trod on it once at the bottom of the stairs. She thought then it was a half-frozen toad, only white. And then Parfit was washing up the dishes in the scullery. She wasn't thinking about anything in particular. It was close on dusk. She took her hands out of the water and was drying them absent-minded like on the roller towel, when she found she was drying someone else's hand as well, only colder than hers."

"What nonsense!" exclaimed Saunders.

"Exactly, sir; that's what I told her; but we couldn't get her to stop."

"You don't believe all this?" said Eustace, turning suddenly towards the butler. "Me, sir? Oh no, sir! I've not seen anything."

"Nor heard anything?"

"Well, sir, if you must know, the bells do ring at odd times, and there's nobody there when we go; and when we go round to draw the blinds of a night, as often as not somebody's been there before us. But, as I says to Mrs. Merrit, a young monkey might do wonderful things, and we all know that Mr. Borlsover has had some strange animals about the place."

"Very well, Morton, that will do."

"What do you make of it?" asked Saunders, when they were alone. "I mean of the letter he said you wrote."

"Oh, that's simple enough," said Eustace. "See the paper it's written on ? I stopped using that paper years ago, but there were a few odd sheets and envelopes left in the old desk. We never fastened up the lid of the box before locking it in. The hand got out, found a pencil, wrote this note, and shoved it through the crack on to the floor) where Morton found it. That's plain as daylight."

"But the hand couldn't write!"

"Couldn't it? You've not seen it do the things I've seen." And he told Saunders more of what had happened at Eastbourne.

"Well," said Saunders, "in that case we have at least an explanation of the legacy. It was the hand which wrote, unknown to your uncle, that letter to your solicitor bequeathing itself to you. Your uncle had no more to do with that request than I. In fact, it would seem that he had some idea of his automatic writing and feared it."

"Then if it's not my uncle, what is it?"

"I suppose some people might say that a disembodied spirit had got your uncle to educate and prepare a little body for it. Now it's got into that little body and is off on its own."

"Well, what are we to do?"

"We'll keep our eyes open," said Saunders, "and try to catch it. If we can't do that, we shall have to wait till the bally clockwork runs down. After all, if it's flesh and blood, it can't live for ever."

For two days nothing happened. Then Saunders saw it sliding down the banister in the hall. He was taken unawares and lost a full second before he started in pursuit, only to find that the thing had escaped him. Three days later Eustace, writing alone in the library at night, saw it sitting on an open book at the other end of the room. The fingers crept over the page, as if it were reading; but before he had time to get up from his seat, it had taken the alarm., and was pulling itself up the curtains. Eustace watched it grimly, as it hung on to the cornice with three fingers and flicked thumb and forefinger at him in an expression of scornful derision.

"I know what I'll do," he said. "If I only get it into the open, I'll set the dogs on to it." He spoke to Saunders of the suggestion.

"It's a jolly good idea," he said; "only we won't wait till we find it out of doors. We'll get the dogs. There are the two terriers and the under-keeper's Irish mongrel, that's on to rats like a flash. Your spaniel has not got spirit enough for this sort of game."

They brought the dogs into the house, and the keeper's Irish mongrel chewed up the slippers, and the terriers tripped up Morton, as he waited at table; but all three were welcome. Even false security is better than no security at all.

For a fortnight nothing happened. Then the hand was caught, not by the dogs, but by Mrs. Merrit's grey parrot. The bird was in the habit of periodically removing the pins that kept its seed- and water-tins in place, and of escaping through the holes in the side of the cage. When once at liberty, Peter would show no inclination to return, and would often be about the house for days. Now, after six consecutive weeks of captivity, Peter had again discovered a new way of unloosing his bolts and was at large, exploring the tapestried forests of the curtains and singing songs in praise of liberty from cornice and picture-rail.

"It's no use your trying to catch him," said Eustace to Mrs. Merrit, as she came into the study one afternoon towards dusk with a step-ladder. "You'd much better leave Peter alone. Starve him into surrender, Mrs. Merrit; and don't leave bananas and seed about for him to peck at when he fancies he's hungry. You're far too soft-hearted."

"Well, sir, I see he's right out of reach now on that picture-rail; so, if you wouldn't mind closing the door, sir, when you leave the room, I'll bring his cage in tonight and put some meat inside it. He's that fond of meat, though it does make him pull out his feathers to suck the quills. They do say that if you cook—"

"Never mind, Mrs. Merrit," said Eustace, who was busy writing; "that will do; I'll keep an eye on the bird."

For a short time there was silence in the room.

"Scratch poor Peter," said the bird. "Scratch poor old Peter!"

"Be quiet, you beastly bird!"

"Poor old Peter! Scratch poor Peter; do!"

"I'm more likely to wring your neck, if I get hold of you." He looked up at the picture-rail, and there was the hand, holding on to a hook with three fingers, and slowly scratching the head of the parrot with the fourth. Eustace ran to the bell and pressed it hard; then across to the window, which he closed with a bang. Frightened by the noise, the parrot shook its wings preparatory to flight, and, as it did so, the fingers of the hand got hold of it by the throat. There was a shrill scream, from Peter, as he fluttered across the room, wheeling round in circles that ever descended, borne down under the weight that clung to him. The bird dropped at last quite suddenly, and Eustace saw fingers and feathers rolled into an inextricable mass on the floor. The struggle abruptly ceased, as finger and thumb squeezed the neck; the bird's eyes rolled up to show the whites, and there was a faint, half-choked gurgle. But, before the fingers had time to loose their hold, Eustace had them in his own.

"Send Mr, Saunders here at once," he said to the maid who came in answer to the bell. "Tell him I want him immediately."

Then he went with the hand to the fire. There was a ragged gash across the back, where the bird's beak had torn it, but no blood oozed from the wound. He noted with disgust that the nails had grown long and discoloured.

"I'll burn the beastly thing," he said. But he could not burn it. He tried to throw it into the flames, but his own hands, as if impelled by some old primitive feeling, would not let him. And so Saunders found him, pale and irresolute, with the hand still clasped tightly in his fingers.

"I've got it at last," he said, in a tone of triumph.

"Good, let's have a look at it."

"Not when it's loose. Get me some nails and a hammer and a board of some sort."

"Can you hold it all right?"

"Yes, the thing's quite limp; tired out with throttling poor old Peter, I should say."

"And now," said Saunders, when he returned with the things, "what are we going to do?"

"Drive a nail through it first, so that it can't get away. Then we can take our time over examining it."

"Do it yourself," said Saunders. "I don't mind helping you with guinea-pigs occasionally, when there's something to be learned, partly because I don't fear a guinea-pig's revenge. This thing's different."

"Oh, my aunt!" he giggled hysterically, "look at it now." For the hand was writhing in agonized contortions, squirming and wriggling upon the nail like a worm upon the hook.

"Well," said Saunders, "you've done it now. I'll leave you to examine it."

"Don't go, in heaven's name! Cover it up, man; cover it up! Shove a cloth over it! Here! " and he pulled off the antimacassar from the back of a chair and wrapped the board in it. "Now get the keys from. my pocket and open the safe. Chuck the other things out. Oh, Lord, it's getting itself into frightful knots! Open it quick!" He threw the thing in and banged the door.

"We'll keep it there till it dies," he said. "May I burn in hell, if I ever open the door of that safe again."

* * *

Mrs. Merrit departed at the end of the month. Her successor, Mrs. Handyside, certainly was more successful in the management of the servants. Early in her rule she declared that she would stand no nonsense, and gossip soon withered and died.

"I shouldn't be surprised if Eustace married one of these days," said Saunders. "Well, I'm in no hurry for such an event. I know him far too well for the future Mrs. Borlsover to like me. It will be the same old story again; a long friendship slowly made—marriage—and a long friendship quickly forgotten."

But Eustace did not follow the advice of his uncle and marry. Old habits crept over and covered his new experience. He was, if anything, less morose, and showed a greater inclination to take his natural part in country society.

Then came the burglary. The men, it was said, broke into the house by way of the conservatory. It was really little more than an attempt, for they only succeeded in carrying away a few pieces of plate from. the pantry. The safe in the study was certainly found open and empty, but, as Mr. Borlsover informed the police inspector, he had kept nothing of value in it during the last six months.

"Then you're lucky in getting off so easily, sir," the man replied. "By the way they have gone about their business I should say they were experienced cracksmen. They must have caught the alarm when they were just beginning their evening's work."

"Yes," said Eustace, "I suppose I am lucky."

"I've no doubt," said the inspector, "that we shall be able to trace the men. I've said that they must have been old hands at the game. The way they got in and opened the safe shows that. But there's one little thing that puzzles me. One of them was careless enough not to wear gloves, and I'm bothered if I know what he was trying to do. I've traced his finger-marks on the new varnish on the window-sashes in every one of the downstairs rooms. They are very distinctive ones too."

"Right hand or left or both?" asked Eustace.

"Oh, right every time. That's the funny thing. He must have been a foolhardy fellow, and I rather think it was him that wrote that." He took out a slip of paper from his pocket. "That's what he wrote, sir: I've got out, Eustace Borlsover, but I'll be back before long. Some jailbird just escaped, I suppose. It will make it all the easier for us to trace him. Do you know the writing, sir?"

"No," said Eustace. "It's not the writing of any one I know."

"I'm not going to stay here any longer," said Eustace to Saunders at luncheon. "I've got on far better during the last six months than I expected, but I'm not going to run the risk of seeing that thing again. I shall go up to town this afternoon. Get Morton to put my things together, and join me with the car at Brighton on the day after tomorrow. And bring the proofs of those two papers with you. We'll run over them together." "How long are you going to be away?"

"I can't say for certain, but be prepared to stay for some time. We've stuck to work pretty closely through summer, and I for one need a holiday. I'll engage the rooms at Brighton. You'll find it best to break the journey at Hitchin. I'll wire to you there at the 'Crown' to tell you the Brighton address."

The house he chose at Brighton was in a terrace. He had been there before. It was kept by his old college gyp, a man of discreet silence, who was admirably partnered by an excellent cook. The rooms were on the first floor. The two bedrooms were at the back, and opened out of each other. "Mr. Saunders can have the smaller one, though it is the only one with a fireplace," he said. "I'll stick to the larger of the two, since it's got a bathroom adjoining. I wonder what time he'll arrive with the car."

Saunders came about seven, cold and cross and dirty.

"We'll light the fire in the dining-room," said Eustace, "and get Prince to unpack some of the things while we are at dinner. What were the roads like?"

"Rotten. Swimming with mud, and a beastly cold wind against us all day. And this is July. Dear Old England! " "Yes," said Eustace, "I think we might do worse than leave Old England for a few months." They turned in soon after twelve.

"You oughtn't to feel cold, Saunders," said Eustace, "when you can afford to sport a great fur-lined coat like this. You do yourself very well, all things considered. Look at those gloves, for instance. Who could possibly feel cold when wearing them?"

"They are far too clumsy, though, for driving. Try them on and see"; and he tossed them through the door on to Eustace's bed and went on with his unpacking. A minute later he heard a shrill cry of terror.

"Oh, Lord," he heard, "it's in the glove! Quick, Saunders, quick!" Then came a smacking thud. Eustace had thrown it from him.

"I've chucked it into the bathroom," he gasped; "it's hit the wall and fallen into the bath. Come now, if you want to help."

Saunders, with a lighted candle in his hand, looked over the edge of the bath. There it was, old and maimed, dumb and blind, with a ragged hole in the middle, crawling, staggering, trying to creep up the slippery sides, only to fall back helpless.

"Stay there," said Saunders, "I'll empty a collar-box or something, and we'll jam it in. It can't get out while I'm away."

"Yes, it can," shouted Eustace. "It's getting out now; it's climbing up the plug-chain.—No, you brute, you filthy brute, you don't!— Come back, Saunders; it's getting away from me. I can't hold it; it's all slippery. Curse its claws! Shut the window, you idiot! It's got out!" There was the sound of something dropping on to the hard flagstones below, and Eustace fell back fainting.

* * *

For a fortnight he was ill.

"I don't know what to make of it," the doctor said to Saunders. "I can only suppose that Mr. Borlsover has suffered some great emotional shock. You had better let me send someone to' help you nurse him. And by all means indulge that whim of his never to be left alone in the dark. I would keep a light burning all night, if I were you. But he must have more fresh air. It's perfectly absurd, this hatred of open windows."

Eustace would have no one with him but Saunders. "I don't want the other man," he said. "They'd smuggle it in somehow. I know they would."

"Don't worry about it, old chap. This sort of thing can't go on indefinitely. You know I saw it this time as well as you. It wasn't half so active. It won't go on living much longer, especially after that fall. I heard it hit the flags myself. As soon as you're a bit stronger, we'll leave this place, not bag and baggage, but with only the clothes on our back, so that it won't be able to hide anywhere. We'll escape it that way. We won't give any address, and we won't have any parcels sent after us. Cheer up, Eustace! You'll be well enough to leave in a day or two. The doctor says I can take you out in a chair tomorrow."

"What have I done?" asked Eustace. "Why does it come after me? I'm no worse than other men. I'm no worse than you, Saunders; you know I'm not. It was you who was at the bottom of that dirty business in San Diego, and that was fifteen years ago."

"It's not that, of course," said Saunders. "We are in the twentieth century, and even the parsons have dropped the idea of your old sins finding you out. Before you caught the hand in the library, it was filled with pure malevolence—to you and all mankind. After you spiked it through with that nail, it naturally forgot about other people and concentrated its attention on you. It was shut up in that safe, you know, for nearly six months. That gives plenty of time for thinking of revenge."

Eustace Borlsover would not leave his room, but he thought there might be something in Saunders's suggestion of a sudden departure from Brighton. He began rapidly to regain his strength. "We'll go on the 1st of September," he said.

* * *

The evening of August 31 was oppressively warm. Though at midday the windows had been wide open, they had been shut an hour or so before dusk. Mrs. Prince had long since ceased to wonder at the strange habits of the gentlemen on the first floor. Soon after their arrival she had been told to take down the heavy window curtains in the two bedrooms, and day by day the rooms had seemed to grow more bare. Nothing was left lying about.

"Mr. Borlsover doesn't like to have any place where dirt can collect," Saunders had said as an excuse. "He likes to see into all the corners of the room."

"Couldn't I open the window just a little?" he said to Eustace that evening. "We're simply roasting in here, you know."

"No, leave well alone. We're not a couple of boarding-school misses fresh from a course of hygiene lectures. Get the chess-board out." They sat down and played. At ten o'clock Mrs. Prince came to the door with a note.

"I am sorry I didn't bring it before," she said, "but it was left in the letter-box."

"Open it, Saunders, and see if it wants answering."

It was very brief. There was neither address nor signature.

"Will eleven o'clock tonight be suitable for our last appointment?"

"Who is it from?" asked Borlsover.

"It was meant for me," said Saunders. "There's no answer, Mrs. Prince," and he put the paper into his pocket.

"A dunning letter from a tailor; I suppose he must have got wind of our leaving."

It was a clever lie, and Eustace asked no more questions. They went on with their game.

On the landing outside Saunders could hear the grandfather's clock whispering the seconds, blurting out the quarter-hours.

"Check," said Eustace. The clock struck eleven. At the same time there was a gentle knocking on the door; it seemed to come from the bottom panel.

"Who's there?" asked Eustace. There was no answer. "Mrs. Prince, is that you?"

"She is up above," said Saunders; "I can hear her walking about the room."

"Then lock the door; bolt it too. Your move, Saunders." While Saunders sat with his eyes on the chess-board, Eustace walked over to the window and examined the fastenings. He did the same in Saunders's room, and the bathroom. There were no doors between the three rooms, or he would have shut and locked them. too.

"Now, Saunders," he said, "don't stay all night over your move. I've had time to smoke one cigarette already. It's bad to keep an invalid waiting. There's only one possible thing for you to do. What was that?"

"The ivy blowing against the window. There, it's your move now, Eustace."

"It wasn't the ivy, you idiot! It was someone tapping at the window"; and he pulled up the blind. On the outer side of the window, clinging to the sash, was the hand.

"What is it that it's holding?"

"It's a pocket-knife. It's going to try to open the window by pushing back the fastener with the blade."

"Well, let it try," said Eustace. "Those fasteners screw down; they can't be opened that way. Anyhow, we'll close the shutters. It's your move, Saunders. I've played."

But Saunders found it impossible to fix his attention on the game. He could not understand Eustace, who seemed all at once to have lost his fear.

"What do you say to some wine?" he asked. "You seem to be taking things coolly, but I don't mind confessing that I'm in a blessed funk."

"You've no need to be. There's nothing supernatural about that hand, Saunders. I mean, it seems to be governed by the laws of time and space. It's not the sort of thing that vanishes into thin air or slides through oaken doors. And since that's so, I defy it to get in here. We'll leave the place in the morning. I for one have bottomed the depths of fear. Fill your glass, man! The windows are all shuttered; the door is locked and bolted. Pledge me my Uncle Adrian! Drink, man! What are you waiting for?"

Saunders was standing with his glass half raised. "It can get in," he said hoarsely; "it can get in! We've forgotten. There's the fireplace in my bedroom. It will come down the chimney."

"Quick!" said Eustace, as he rushed into the other room; "we haven't a minute to lose. What can we do ? Light the fire, Saunders. Give me a match, quick!"

"They must be all in the other room. I'll get them."

"Hurry, man, for goodness' sake! Look in the bookcase! Look in the bathroom! Here, come and stand here; I'll look."

"Be quick!" shouted Saunders. "I can hear something!"

"Then plug a sheet from your bed up the chimney. No, here's a match!" He had found one at last, that had slipped into a crack in the floor.

"Is the fire laid? Good, but it may not burn. I know—the oil from that old reading-lamp and this cotton wool. Now the match, quick! Pull the sheet away, you fool! We don't want it now."

There was a great roar from the grate, as the flames shot up. Saunders had been a fraction of a second too late with the sheet. The oil had fallen on to it. It, too, was burning.

"The whole place will be on fire!" cried Eustace, as he tried to beat out the flames with a blanket. "It's no good ! I can't manage it. You must open the door, Saunders, and get help."

Saunders ran to the door and fumbled with the bolts. The key was stiff in the lock.

"Hurry," shouted Eustace, "or the heat will be too much for me,"

The key turned in the lock at last. For half a second Saunders stopped to look back. Afterwards he could never be quite sure as to what he had seen, but at the time he thought that something black and charred was creeping slowly, very slowly, from the mass of flames towards Eustace Borlsover. For a moment he thought of returning to his friend; but the noise and the smell of the burning sent him running down the passage, crying : "Fire! Fire! " He rushed to the telephone to summon help, and then back to the bathroom—he should have thought of that before—for water. As he burst into the bedroom there came a scream of terror which ended suddenly, and then the sound of a heavy fall.

* * *

This is the story which I heard on successive Saturday evenings from the senior mathematical master at a second-rate suburban school. For Saunders has had to earn a living in a way which other men might reckon less congenial than his old manner of life. I had mentioned by chance the name of Adrian Borlsover, and wondered at the time why he changed the conversation with such unusual abruptness. A week later Saunders began to tell me something of his own history; sordid enough, though shielded with a reserve I could well understand, for it had to cover not only his failings, but those of a dead friend. Of the final tragedy he was at first especially loath to speak; and it was only gradually that I was able to piece together the narrative of the preceding pages. Saunders was reluctant to draw any conclusions. At one time he thought that the fingered beast had been animated by the spirit of Sigismund Borlsover, a sinister eighteenth-century ancestor, who, according to legend, built and worshipped in the ugly pagan temple that overlooked the lake. At another time Saunders believed the spirit to belong to a man whom Eustace had once employed as a laboratory assistant, "a black-haired, spiteful little brute", he said, "who died cursing his doctor, because the fellow couldn't help him to live to settle some paltry score with Borlsover".

From the point of view of direct contemporary evidence, Saunders's story is practically uncorroborated. All the letters mentioned in the narrative were destroyed, with the exception of the last note which Eustace received, or rather which he would have received, had not Saunders intercepted it. That I have seen myself. The handwriting was thin and shaky, the handwriting of an old man. I remember the Greek "e" was used in "appointment". A little thing that amused me at the time was that Saunders seemed to keep the note pressed between the pages of his Bible.

I had seen Adrian Borlsover once. Saunders I learnt to know well. It was by chance, however, and not by design, that I met a third person of the story, Morton, the butler. Saunders and I were walking in the Zoological Gardens one Sunday afternoon, when he called my attention to an old man who was standing before the door of the Reptile House.

"Why, Morton," he said, clapping him on the back, "how is the world treating you?"

"Poorly, Mr. Saunders," said the old fellow, though his face lighted up at the greeting. "The winters drag terribly nowadays. There don't seem no summers or springs."

"You haven't found what you were looking for, I suppose?"

"No, sir, not yet; but I shall some day. I always told them that Mr. Borlsover kept some queer animals."

"And what is he looking for?" I asked, when we had parted from him.

"A beast with five fingers," said Saunders. "This afternoon, since he has been in the Reptile House, I suppose it will be a reptile with a hand. Next week it will be a monkey with practically no body. The poor old chap is a born materialist."

Merlin and the motor car

2011-07-18T10:15:00.001+01:00

A reminder today that you can get the Kindle edition of The Year of Wonders for $0.99 but only until the end of the month, at Amazon US here and UK here. The collected correspondence of the Royal Mythological Society comprises more than fifty fantasy tales involving such thorny issues as what to do with a miniature civilization discovered in an Oxford professor's rooms, whether to blow the Gjallerhorn on the Last Night of the Proms, and how to pot your husband if he should happen to turn into a plant. Or, as here, whether you should sell a used car to the court wizard of Logres...

Dear sirs

I don’t know how you feel about the motor car. I am a founder member of the Automobile Club of Great Britain, and during the summer we often get ourselves out for a bit of a race, all in fun really, with a pub lunch in the middle.

Yesterday, I was just in the first leg of a race from Wilmslow to Nottingham and I had a bit of trouble getting started, so I was at the rear. No sign of the others but their dust, and there at the side of the road as the dust cleared I saw a queer old duck who was waving at me to stop. You don’t know if he might not be in trouble, do you, in a case like that, so even though I didn’t like the look of him, I pulled over. You know that picture by William Blake of God? He looked a bit like that, only with a long robe and a staff.

Blow me down if the fellow didn’t offer to buy my motor car. Right there in the road, just as if he was asking a light for his pipe. He didn’t have a pipe, but you know what I mean. I’m in a rally, I told him; no time for tomfoolery. He had something to say about that, but I didn’t catch it because I was off on my way again.

But not for long. An official at the next checkpoint waved me down and gave a disqualification. Never mind what for; it wasn’t fair, that’s all. So I turned around, went off back down the road, and there’s the old chap with the beard. I’m still interested in that horseless carriage, he says, and this time he shows me a purse. I say a purse; it was more of a sack really, and bulging with jewels. Or perhaps it was my eyes that did the bulging.

It was only a couple of miles to walk home, and you don’t get shown a fistful of diamonds every day, so I drove the old chap to a cave that he pointed out. You don’t want to keep it in a damp place like that, I said. Drive right in, he says, and it’s his money, after all, so I put the lights on and down we went. I had my hand crank beside me; he seemed a frail old chap but you can’t be too careful. But when we got down to the cavern I could see he was on the square. The place was full of knights, the armoured sort, all sleeping in a circle – a hundred of them at least. And beside about three-quarters of the knights stood a horse, asleep on its feet as they do. But the rest of the knights all had a motor car parked at their head.

Seeing me taken a bit aback, the old fellow asked how many horsepower had my vehicle. Twelve hp, I tell him. There you are, he says, you can see why we’re modernizing. And for ten rubies as big as eggs I sold him my car. What do you think about that?

Yours faithfully, Edwin Laurie Esq., Alderley Edge

Dr Clattercut replies: I used sometimes to enjoy a ramble in the countryside, or perhaps a picnic, but the era of the motor car has spoiled all that. One might as well take a stroll across a battlefield in the middle of an artillery barrage.

Prof Bromfield: Oh, I don’t know. You’re such a stick-in-the-mud, Clattercut. If I were ten years younger, I think I might put on the leathers and a pair of goggles and give this rallying a go. Great fun. And the notion that, in England's hour of need, the Lord of Camelot and his knights will ride to lead us at the wheels of 12 hp Daimlers… Splendid!

"The Clock"

2011-07-15T23:42:00.005+01:00

William Fryer Harvey was a writer of quintessentially English weird tales. Usually one cannot pin his work down as ghost stories, or horror stories, so much as the sort of off-kilter yarn spun around the same time (the '20s and '30s) by John Collier or A J Alan, or earlier by Saki, or later by Rod Serling, that would so perfectly unsettle the reader precisely because there is never anything quite so substantial as a ghost there to put your finger on.

His most famous tale is "The Beast with Five Fingers", remembered today because it became a movie starring Peter Lorre. This story, "The Clock", is one of my favourites, a little masterpiece of understated unease:

THE CLOCK
by W. F. Harvey

I liked your description of the people at the pension. I can just picture that rather sinister Miss Cornelius, with her toupee and clinking bangles. I don't wonder you felt frightened that night when you found her sleepwalking in the corridor. But after all, why shouldn't she sleepwalk? As to the movements of the furniture in the lounge on the Sunday, you are, I suppose, in an earthquake zone, though an earthquake seems too big an explanation for the ringing of that little handbell on the mantelpiece. It's rather as if our parlour maid — another new one! — were to call a stray elephant to account for the teapot we found broken yesterday. You have at least, in Italy, escaped the eternal problem of maids.

Yes, my dear, I most certainly believe you. I have never had experiences quite like yours, but your mention of Miss Cornelius has reminded me of something rather similar that happened nearly twenty years ago, soon after I left school. I was staying with my aunt in Hampstead. You remember her, I expect; or, if not her, the poodle, Monsieur, that she used to make perform such pathetic tricks. There was another guest, whom I had never met before, a Mrs Caleb. She lived in Lewes and had been staying with my aunt for about a fortnight, recuperating after a series of domestic upheavals, which had culminated in her two servants leaving her at an hour's notice – without any reason, according to Mrs Caleb, but I wondered. I had never seen the maids; I had seen Mrs Caleb and, frankly, I disliked her. She left the same sort of impression on me as I gather your Miss Cornelius leaves on you — something queer and secretive; underground, if you can use the expression, rather than underhand. And I could feel in my body that she did not like me.

It was summer. Joan Denton — you remember her; her husband was killed in Gallipoli — had suggested that I should go down to spend the day with her. Her people had rented a little cottage some three miles out of Lewes. We arranged a day. It was gloriously fine for a wonder, and I had planned to leave that stuffy old Hampstead house before the old ladies were astir. But Mrs Caleb waylaid me in the hall, just as I was going out.

“I wonder,” she said, “I wonder if you could do me a small favour. If you do have any time to spare in Lewes — only if you do — would you be so kind as to call at my house? I left a little travelling-clock there in the hurry of parting. If it's not in the drawing-room, it will be in my bedroom or in one of the maids' bedrooms. I know I lent it to the cook, who was a poor riser, but I can't remember if she returned it. Would it be too much to ask? The house has been locked up for twelve days, but everything is in order. I have the keys here. The large one is for the garden gate, the small one for the front door.”

I could only accept, and she proceeded to tell me how I could find Ash Grove House.

“You will feel quite like a burglar,” she said. “But mind, it's only if you have time to spare.”

As a matter of fact I found myself glad of any excuse to kill time. Poor old Joan had been taken suddenly ill in the night — they feared appendicitis — and though her people were very kind and asked me to stay to lunch, I could see that I should only be in the way, and made Mrs Caleb's commission an excuse for an early departure.

I found Ash Grove without difficulty. It was a medium-sized red¬brick house, standing by itself in a high walled garden that bounded a narrow lane. A flagged path led from the gate to the front door, in front of which grew, not an ash, but a monkey-puzzle, that must have made the rooms unnecessarily gloomy. The side door, as I expected, was locked. The dining-room and drawing-room lay on either side of the hall and, as the windows of both were shuttered, I left the hall door open, and in the dim light looked round hurriedly for the clock, which, from what Mrs Caleb had said, I hardly expected to find in either of the downstairs rooms. It was neither on table nor mantelpiece. The rest of the furniture was carefully covered over with white dust-sheets. Then I went upstairs. But, before doing so, I closed the front door. I did in fact feel rather like a burglar, and I thought that if anyone did happen to see the front door open, I might have difficulty in explaining things.

Happily the upstairs windows were not shuttered. I made a hurried search of the principal bedrooms. They had been left in apple-pie order; nothing was out of place; but there was no sign of Mrs Caleb's clock. The impression that the house gave me — you know the sense of personality that a house conveys — was neither pleasing nor displeasing, but it was stuffy, stuffy from the absence of fresh air, with an additional stuffiness added, that seemed to come out from the hangings and quilts and antimacassars. The corridor, onto which the bedrooms I had examined opened, communicated with a smaller wing, an older part of the house, I imagined, which contained a box-room and the maids' sleeping-quarters. The last door that I unlocked (I should say that the doors of all the rooms were locked, and relocked by me after I had glanced inside them) contained the object of my search. Mrs Caleb's travelling-clock was on the mantelpiece, ticking away merrily.

That was how I thought of it at first. And then for the first time I realised that there was something wrong. The clock had no business to be ticking. The house had been shut up for twelve days. No one had come in to air it or to light fires. I remember how Mrs Caleb had told my aunt that if she left the keys with a neighbour, she was never sure who might get hold of them. And yet the clock was going.

I wondered if some vibration had set the mechanism in motion, and pulled out my watch to see the time. It was five minutes to one. The clock on the mantelpiece said four minutes to the hour. Then, without quite knowing why, I shut the door on to the landing, locked myself in, and again looked round the room. Nothing was out of place. The only thing that might have called for remark was that there appeared to be a slight indentation on the pillow and the bed; but the mattress was a feather mattress, and you know how difficult it is to make them perfectly smooth. You won't need to be told that I gave a hurried glance under the bed — do you remember your supposed burglar in Number Six at St Ursula's? — and then, and much more reluctantly, opened the doors of two horribly capacious cupboards, both happily empty, except for a framed text with its face to the wall.

By this time I really was frightened. The clock went ticking on. I had a horrible feeling that an alarm might go off at any moment, and the thought of being in that empty house was almost too much for me. However, I made an attempt to pull myself together. It might after all be a fourteen-day clock. If it were, then it would be almost run down. I could roughly find out how long the clock had been going by winding it up. I hesitated to put the matter to the test, but the uncertainty was too much for me. I took it out of its case and began to wind. I had scarcely turned the winding-screw twice when it stopped. The clock clearly was not running down; the hands had been set in motion probably only an hour or two before.

I felt cold and faint and, going to the window, threw up the sash, letting in the sweet, live air of the garden. I knew now that the house was queer, horribly queer. Could someone be living in the house? Was someone else in the house now? I thought that I had been in all the rooms, but had I? I had only just opened the bathroom door, and I had certainly not opened any cupboards, except those in the room in which I was.

Then, as I stood by the open window, wondering what I should do next and feeling that I just couldn't go down that corridor into the darkened hall to fumble at the latch of the front door with I don't know what behind me, I heard a noise. It was very faint at first, and seemed to be coming from the stairs. It was a curious noise—not the noise of anyone climbing up the stairs, but — you will laugh if this letter reaches you by a morning post — of something hopping up the stairs, like a very big bird would hop. I heard it on the landing; it stopped. Then there was a curious scratching noise against one of the bedroom doors, the sort of noise you can make with the nail of your little finger scratching polished wood. Whatever it was, was coming slowly down the corridor, scratching at the doors as it went. I could stand it no longer. Nightmare pictures of locked doors opening filled my brain. I took up the clock, wrapped it in my Macintosh, and dropped it out of the window on to a flower-bed. Then I managed to crawl out of the window and, getting a grip of the sill, ‘successfully negotiated’, as the journalists would say, ‘a twelve-foot drop.’ So much for our much abused Gym at St Ursula's. Picking up the Macintosh, I ran round to the front door and locked it. Then I felt I could breathe, but not until I was on the far side of the gate in the garden wall did I feel safe.

Then I remembered that the bedroom window was open. What was I to do? Wild horses wouldn't have dragged me into that house again unaccompanied. I made up my mind to go to the police station and tell them everything. I should be laughed at, of course, and they might easily refuse to believe my story of Mrs Caleb's commission. I had actually begun to walk down the lane in the direction of the town when I chanced to look back qt the house. The window that I had left open was shut.

No, my dear, I didn't see any face or anything dreadful like that... and, of course, it may have shut by itself. It was an ordinary sash-window, and you know they are often difficult to keep open.

And the rest? Why, there's really nothing more to tell. I didn't even see Mrs Caleb again. She had had some sort of fainting fit just before lunchtime, my aunt informed me on my return, and had had to go to bed. Next morning I travelled down to Cornwall to join mother and the children. I thought I had forgotten all about it, but when three years later Uncle Charles suggested giving me a travelling-clock for a twenty-first birthday present, I was foolish enough to prefer the alternative that he offered, a collected edition of the works of Thomas Carlyle.

How to put the reader on the edge of their seat

2011-07-13T13:05:00.004+01:00

The story’s hotting up. Your characters are in trouble. You pile on more and more things to make their lives difficult. But gradually it starts to dawn on you that these extra dangers aren’t making the story any more gripping. The hero is in a canoe, he’s lost the paddle, he can’t swim, and now the rapids are coming up. That ought to be exciting, surely? Aren’t you doing everything you’re supposed to? So why is your reader stifling a yawn?

“Out of the frying pan into the fire.” Notice that we don’t say, “In the frying pan with the heat steadily increasing.” You can’t ratchet up the tension simply by shovelling more problems onto your characters’ heads. When you do that, the reader just sees a string of obstacles that have to be dealt with and they project forward: “Okay, so once the hero has done A, found B, discovered C, it’s all over.”

Knowing that, the reader will relax. So you need to throw in something completely from left field: a plot point that leaves the reader’s head spinning: “Whoa, I didn’t see that one coming!” Oh yeah, you can bet the character wishes he was back in that frying pan now.

Your story has a threat. An alien mothership over the capital, say. The hero has a plan to deal with the threat; he’s going to fire himself out of a circus cannon up into the ship’s waste disposal tube. But if you want to keep your reader’s interest, that plan cannot work perfectly. Right at the climax, we have to see the hero faced with an unexpected twist. Something that blows his plan to shreds. And the more unexpected that twist, the better.

There’s also a bait-and-switch variant. Have the hero’s plan work just fine to deal with the main threat, but then throw in a new danger just when we caught our breath and were starting to climb down. The new threat is a surprise we couldn’t possibly prepare ourselves for – it comes out of the blue just when you thought it was all over.

Here’s an example from the movie of My Favorite Martian. Tim has to prevent a video of Uncle Martin being broadcast on TV, which would expose him as an alien. Martin can’t help because he’s literally going to pieces. Meanwhile, Martin’s spaceship, which is set to explode, has been shrunk to toy-size with Tim’s girlfriend on board and left in the garage, where the neighbour picks it up for a jumble sale. With a bit of fast-paced rompy action, all these chaotic problems are resolved: they get the video, Martin is reassembled, and they catch up to the neighbour’s car and retrieve the miniaturized spaceship. So far we’ve had a bit of fun, but everything got tied up pretty much as we expected. But then, just at the moment of triumph, the government agents who were chasing Martin and Tim turn up and zap them with a tranquilliser gun. Unconscious, they’re hauled off by the men in black to a remote army research base. And now we have no idea what’s going to happen next.

That’s an example of how to keep the reader guessing on the overall narrative. But, as we always say here, stories are fractal. The same techniques for escalating tension work on the level of an individual scene. There’s a good example of that in Red Chamber, a yet-to-be-published thriller by James Wallis and his extreme writing team.

In this scene, the hero, Tom, is a newspaper reporter who is on the run from the police. He needs to get on board a Tube train at Sloane Square but there are coppers on the platform. His first plan is to climb over the wall from the street, the Tube line being open to the air at that station. Of course that isn’t nearly difficult enough to impress the reader. But Tom also needs to get across to the further platform, which requires him to walk along a narrow iron conduit that runs above the tracks. (The conduit really is there at Sloane Square; it carries a river from one side of the station to the other.) It’s snowing, so the ironwork is slippery, and as an added complication Tom has to be careful not to dislodge any snow that would alert the policemen below. Reaching the other platform just as a train pulls in, he lowers himself down onto the roof of a carriage, intending to swing down inside as the doors are closing.

All of that sounds like nail-biting stuff, sure, but even so it’s still what role-playing gamers would call a “skill roll”. The reader knows that the writer can just decide if Tom pulls all this off. To get our pulse racing, we need to see him face a problem that we didn’t foresee. All this business about clambering around on frozen pipes has merely been a precursor to that, establishing that Tom is doing some really difficult and dangerous things so that we are feeling the stress along with him.

That was the frying pan; here comes the fire. Tom looks down and sees a copper right there on the platform beside the doors. So he can’t swing down into the carriage after all. Okay, he thinks, I’ll ride on the roof until we get to the next station. So he, and we, start to relax - but too soon, because as the train moves off, Tom sees there is only about a foot’s clearance on the tunnel ahead. Scrabbling backwards, he falls between two carriages and hangs onto the bellows between the carriages with his shoes just inches from the live rail. Then at the next station he climbs onto the platform and makes his getaway. And boy, do we feel he’s earned it.

Death and the maiden over

2011-07-10T12:27:00.013+01:00

Death, along with Jack Frost and the Moon and other entities of nature, in folktales appears in person - not the divine ruler of the realm of death, as in mythological stories, but the very embodied spirit of mortality. In Norwegian tales it's often a specific death, a given plague that is seen as an old woman going from village to village. Sometimes Death can be tricked - though usually not for long, and at great cost, for if folktales don't ultimately tell the starkest of truths then what are those stories for?

Italo Calvino was partial to Italian folktales, and the last story in his collection Fiabe Italiane is "Jump into my Sack", in which a crippled boy acquires a magic sack in which he briefly traps Death. There's no comeback, and he releases Death almost at once without prompting - just the sort of rough edge you expect in folktales.

Arthur Ransome's story "The Soldier and Death" is structurally much tidier. There the sack belongs to a Russian soldier who uses it to snare Death when she comes for the Tzar:

From that time on there was no dying in the world . There were births every day, and plenty of them, but nobody died. It was a poor time for doctors. And so it was for many years. Death had come to an end, and it was as if all men would live for ever. And all the time the little old woman, Death, tied up in a sack, unable to get about her business, was hanging from the top of a tall poplar tree away in the forest.

In time the soldier realizes the consequences of a world in which no-one dies, so he sets Death free. But she's thoroughly frightened and won't take him now, so he goes on to harrow Hell and finally meet a fate that is affecting, but far too authorial and elegant for me to believe that Ransome has presented this story just as he came across it in some woodland hut beside the samovar.

"The Soldier and Death" was published in 1920. Nineteen years later, the story put on new clothes in the form of On Borrowed Time, a movie with Lionel Barrymore as an old man who traps Death, now male, up an apple tree. He finally relents when his grandson falls trying to climb the tree and is paralyzed but unable to die. This version ends with Gramps and young Pud (sic) following Death up to a shining light in the sky. What can I say? Paul Osborn, the screenwriter, was perhaps not quite the storytelling genius Ransome was.

Early in 1962, in the pages of Amazing (Adult) Fantasy #9, Stan Lee and Steve Ditko revived the story as "The Man Who Captured Death" - a classic Lee/Ditko title, for sure. Death here looks like Bengt Ekerot and is caught in "an electronic ray". Beetles become immune to DDT and eat the crops; rats breed and infest the cities; antibiotics stop working; the incurably ill suffer but cannot die. So the old scientist who designed the ray turns it off: "You were right, grim one! No man may alter the mysterious scheme of things!" To which Death replies, "Thus has it ever been... Thus must it ever be..." Okay, still not on a par with Ransome. But it has Ditko drawing Death, and if anything could equal the dark brilliance of Russian folklore it's that.

Whether Death is stuck in a sack or a beam of light, good stories never die, especially when deadlines loom. And so we have a new spin on the story for television in the form of Torchwood: Miracle Day. I'm doubting that Death will actually be personified in this show, as that kind of concept belongs to fairytales and not to science fiction, but it will be interesting to see how the writers develop it. Because if Death is not a person, or at least a fantastic force of nature, then what process could systematically stop everyone dying throughout the world? In ten weeks we'll know.

In Mirabilis we have our own take on the story, "Death and the Maiden Over", in which Death arrives at Lord’s for the end of the cricket season. In a curious wager, he pads up and faces each of England’s fast bowlers. Until somebody can get him out, no-one in the world is to die. Finally, after a long afternoon that sees hospital wards filling up to capacity, W G Grace is called out of retirement and gets Death leg before wicket from his bath chair. Appropriate for a doctor, I think.

Do you want to climb the beanstalk?

2011-07-09T15:36:00.003+01:00

A decade ago, a phone was still just a device you used to call somebody up. Then people in games and television started to take an interest. After all, here's a little gizmo stuffed with electronics that people carry everywhere. The developers started to think of what kind of games you could play on that - a route to the holy grail of casual gaming, then only dreamed of. Television folk noted the way that audiences were engaging with shows like Big Brother, their interest piqued probably not so much by the opportunity to create new and interesting formats as by the chance to milk more money from the viewers.

Leo and I were working in that unmapped border country between games and TV. We got to go to lots of meetings and conferences where people would get excited by ARGs and ways of delivering content as a finger buffet across multiple media. Where there are no maps, dragomans grow sleek and fat. Nowadays you'll hear the word "convergence" less and the words "curate" and "transmedia" more; otherwise those conferences haven't much changed in the intervening ten years.

As Leo and I were not equipped with the lavish budget that broadcasters give to the people who jaw-jaw, we had to focus on rather more modest goals than setting up a citywide game funnelling attention towards a reality TV show. One of the technologies we looked at was WAP. Crude by the standards of a modern smartphone, the phones back then allowed text and very simple graphics. "Aha!" we thought. "Gamebooks."

We realized that the sub-sub-Tolkien brand of fantasy popularized in the gamebooks of the 1980s were not going to grab a broad, casual, all-ages market. Instead we focussed on various types of family entertainment. One of our projects was Tell Me A Story, a series of mother-&-me interactive stories on a phone. Say you miss the bus, it's raining, and you have to wait twenty minutes for the next one. Twenty minutes - that's a yawning infinite gulf of boredom to a preschool child. These WAP gamebooks gave you an interactive fairytale that you could read to your kids, helping them with the choices - none of which was ever a wrong choice, of course. The pleasure of interacting was to see where the story would spin off to.

You can see how one of our Tell Me A Story gamebooks would have worked over on the Fabled Lands blog. As fairytales are such archetypal story forms, and most of us learn our storytelling grammar from them, kicking in a bit of interactivity seems to make a lot of sense. Now that we're into the era of apps, I'm thinking that Leo and I ought really to get back to this project. Um, just as soon as we finish the remaining 540 pages of Mirabilis, that is.

A curious manifestation on the Strand

2011-07-08T07:30:00.000+01:00

As the green comet looms ever-nearer in the sky and the world gets stranger, the Fellows of the Royal Mythological Society (Cyril Clattercut and Bampton Bromfield; that's them above) are busy answering queries about extraterrestrial etiquette, fairy faux pas, and how to live with a minotaur next door. You can read their collected correspondence in The Year of Wonders on Kindle, which for this month only is priced at just 99 cents for more than fifty mini-stories like this:

Dear perfessors

I hope that you may help me with my Trouble and do not object to a letter from one as does not know you. I have the agreeable position of regular employment at a public house by the Strand, name of The Three Gypsies. My duties there in the main being the stabling of horses, polishing brasses, & co. I also do in the taprooms and some private bedrooms that are kept for travellers, though not so frequent as in former days, now that the coach stand is not there no more. In the morning I rake out the fires and carry the ashes in a pail, which I have been in the habit of tipping down the drain that is in the street near the entrance to the yard. Only the other morning I went out that way and saw what had the look of two sooty, or I should say ashen, footprints on the pavement outside. Scuffing at these with my foot had no effect to remove them, and thinking no more I went and poured the ashes down the drain as per usual. Then on the next day I found two bare feet standing there. Just the plain feet, you understand, and not with no body above them, the feet being grey and looking to my eye to be made of ashes. Subsequent to that, having visited the drain on my purpose some other times, the feet have now been joined by ankles and the lower part of the legs, that is the calf. Mr Bardley, him being the landlord, says not to be tipping the ashes that way no more, but I have become quite driven with Curiosity to find out what will come. Today I tipped out another pail of ashes and in the morrow I’m in expectation of a pair of knees. Do you gents think this is advisable, or is Mr Bardley right?

Yours, Joe Gammock, Raven Row E1

Dr Clattercut replies: Mr Gammock, I have no direct experience of exactly such a phenomenon as you describe, but I implore you to consider all the ways that it could turn out if you continue as you have. One does not have to be an avid reader of the works of Mr Bram Stoker to foresee something rather chilling. There are many bad endings to the story and few good ones.

Prof Bromfield: Hmm. You do not say as much in your letter, but I surmise that the pedal extremities in question are feminine, and reasonably shapely. For once I have to agree with Clattercut. If this goes on, Mr Gammock, I feel it could be a case of curiosity killing the cat.

Writing with pictures

2011-07-06T09:02:00.003+01:00

When early filmgoers saw the first close-ups on there on the big screen, many were baffled. “What is this giant face?” they wondered. And, “Why did you show a man looking horrified and then cut to a new image of a baby's pram bouncing down some steps? Is there supposed to be a connection?”

Cinematic storytelling. The grammar of moving images. It didn’t take long for audiences to learn the rules. Or to discover how they work, I should say, because visual grammar, like linguistic grammar, is wired into us as the way we process the world. The mark of good cinematic storytelling is that the meaning comes from the whole sequence of images. There is no “telling”. Each image is a single brick; it’s only the whole that has to look like a house.

One hundred and ten years on from the birth of cinema, everyone on the planet understands how to read a montage of images. So it surprises me that many people are unable to extract meaning from a comic story unless there are plenty of captions and word balloons (lots of text, in other words) to carry them along. Yet you can perfectly well read a classic sequence like the opening five pages of Spider-man #33 without looking at the words. Or look at this page of the Tintin story Black Island (analysed in depth here on Peter Richardson’s excellent Cloud 109 blog). You don’t need to speak one word of French to understand what’s going on.

Comics are not movies. But their great strength is that they can use visual grammar as well as linguistic grammar. The reason many people find it difficult to read a comic visually is, I think, because of the way they see comics. Rather than taking the comic as a montage of images and words combined to tell a story, those people think of the comic as a kind of illustrated novel. In books at primary school, you might have an image of a big guy in chains rising up from behind a gravestone to terrify a little kid, and the caption would read, “Magwitch surprises Pip in the churchyard”. If you come to a comic with that preconception, you won’t expect the pictures to tell the story, you’ll just expect them to illustrate what the words have already told you.

This may be a particular problem in the UK, where we have no mainstream tradition of comics storytelling and our movies are mostly like television drama (70% words, 30% images according to McKee) rather than cinema (vice versa). So British audiences are accustomed to having the words carry the story, and any images are just there as eye candy. Well, Britain is just one island (actually it’s around a thousand, including the Outer Hebrides, but only one and a half big ones) so it wouldn't matter that much if the British never get hip to comics. Europe, India, the USA, Japan and Korea add up to a pretty fair market to be going on with. Yet I do find it a shame that most of my British friends, unless they were reared on American comic books as I was, are not able to appreciate le neuvième art. So I can’t share my love of Sandman or Watchmen or B.P.R.D. with them, much less get their feedback on Mirabilis. Somehow I don’t see any UK government putting comics on the national curriculum, so homegrown comics may face the same kind of future as the UK film industry. Which would be a great pity.

From Paddington Station to the helium mines of Phobos

2011-07-04T08:00:00.000+01:00

It's the Fourth of July and there will be fireworks even here in London. To mark the occasion, Leo and I are knocking a whopping $4 off the price of the Kindle edition of The Year of Wonders for one month only. So that's fifty whimsical vignettes of green comety weirdness for just 99 cents.

The stories range from a mysterious giant hand found in a wood in Yorkshire to the best way to deal with a dragon that's taken a shine to the gold reserves of Fort Knox, and although it's hard to pick one that can be described as typical, this will give you a taste of what to expect:

Dear human savants

Following a motion of no confidence in the prime minister, I find that my Martian Party has enough seats in the House of Commons to form a new government in coalition with the Liberal Unionists. The only sticking point is that, as you may know, my prospective allies are committed to a very specific agenda. Their three-point plan entails establishing a minimum wage, giving women the vote, and maintaining the unity of the British Isles - whereas the Martian Party is pledged to subjugate the planet Earth, replace corn with red weed as the staple carbohydrate dietary supplement, and ship a million slaves to the helium mines of Phobos.

As a compromise, I have agreed to defer mass enslavement for the term of the current Parliament, concentrating instead on domestic transport policy as an area of common ground on which our two parties can agree. For example, to alleviate the growing problem of “rush hour” congestion at the major London rail terminuses, we propose loading commuters onto massive catapults which will fling them across the city to land in collection nets near to their place of work. We estimate this would save at least seventy thousand man-months of labour per year. However, some of our advisors believe that it will not be a popular measure and could lose us votes at the next election. What do you counsel?

Yours, the Right Honourable Xangovar the Merciless, OBE, c/o the Palace of Westminster

Prof Bromfield replies: It would be very popular with small boys. Unfortunately, they don’t have the vote. Might be a better world if they did, if you ask me.

Dr Clattercut: Oh yes. Because resolving international disputes with conkers matches is obviously the way to go. Pulling girls’ pigtails when they demand enfranchisement. Declaring the whole of January a national tobogganing holiday. Making marbles the official currency of the Bank of England…

Prof Bromfield: You think you’re being wittily scathing, Clattercut, but in fact you’re just proving my point. So that’s what I’d suggest, Mr – er, Xangovar: shake up the Cabinet a little. Bring in some schoolboys and artists and poets and whatnot. Be more radical with your reforms, if anything. This is the Year of Wonders, so what’s wrong with sprinkling a bit of magic on the tired old machinery of politics? Trust me, the electorate will thank you for it.

Dr Clattercut: Those that land in the nets, anyway.

You can get The Year of Wonders from the Amazon Kindle store in the UK and in the USA. But just till August, remember. Happy landings.

Storytelling with pictures

2011-07-02T14:51:00.015+01:00

Still on writing tips today, but this time specifically how to tell a story with just pictures. The starting point, surprise surprise, is no different from prose: you need to make an emotional connection with the reader. In novels we have voice as the primary and most powerful tool for this. British publisher David Fickling, creator of The DFC in which Mirabilis first appeared as well as the upcoming Phoenix comic, talks about a warmth that is to be found, in various guises, in the voice of all great kids' writers.

Not just kids' writers, in fact. Even when a writer like Graham Greene tells a story of corruption and genocide, or Nabokov invites us to share the viewpoint of a paedophile, what comes across in the narrative voice above all is humanity. Contrast that with supermarket crime novels, where brutal events are described with no trace of human feeling, like a sales rep describing the Holocaust. If the emotional connection between writer and reader is missing, the novel loses its grip. It becomes a mere Powerpoint presentation of plot. The author's voice is what encourages us to strip off the armour of disbelief, expose ourselves to the dangers of the journey, and come away changed by the experience.

In movies, the writer doesn't have that option. You can have tone (often emphasized by a narrator's voiceover) which quickly serves to assure us that Kiss Kiss Bang Bang, say, is not going to be The Salton Sea. Compare the original Blade Runner with the Director's Cut; simply by removing Deckard's voiceover, the tone is altered completely. But tone in a movie is not the same as voice in prose, and in the gap between the two you'll find the reason why movies must have their heroes saving cats and taking care to hit all the beats of the monomyth.

Comics, of course, are not a purely visual medium. The writer is typically more present in the finished work than any director in his movie. Look at Sandman or Swamp Thing. Those are literary works that strongly give the sense that Gaiman and Moore are storytellers speaking directly into our ear. Still more so in the Marvel comics of the Silver Age, where Stan Lee's voice ushered his readers through stories like the patter of a circus ringmaster.

That's not the only way to tell a story in comics, of course. I use no captions in Mirabilis except for Jack's inner thoughts, and those sparingly. I almost never use thought bubbles (unless projected by telepathic brains in jars) because I want the reader to come to these characters as in life or in a long-running TV show: befriending them over time. Still, the author's touch is not and should never be invisible; Hitchcock observes murders in a very different way from Carol Reed. Compare the first ten minutes of The Lady Vanishes and Night Train to Munich. Both were scripted by Launder & Gilliat, both feature Charters and Caldicott as key supporting characters, yet only the former has the warmth that David Fickling spoke of.

Stories are made up of scenes, and the same rules apply at every level. So let's look at an example of how to establish emotional connection using a series of images. This is cinema in its purest form: a sequence of uninflected images that acquire meaning through juxtaposition. And ironically, that pure visual storytelling is best seen these days in commercials. They're selling a product, sure, but they still need to make that direct emotional circuit into the audience's brains. It's all about story.

Take a look at the Virgin Atlantic commercial above. This has a group of Virgin's female cabin crew walking through the terminal attracting gawping looks from men. We see a guy dripping hot dog sauce on his shirt; another forgets all about his videogame. But notice that the commercial doesn’t open on a shot of the stewardesses. Instead, we see a man arriving at the airport. He gets out of the taxi talking on a mobile phone. He looks up, gradually loses interest in the call. The phone slips from his fingers. He sees something that's grabbed his attention, but what? Cut to a reverse shot, past his legs, as the phone breaks on the floor and we get glimpses of the stewardesses walking into shot – and only after that do we get a clear view of them walking towards us, a riot of colour and glamour amid the drab greys of the 1980s.

The commercial is constructed to use both suspense ("What is the man reacting to?") and empathy/identification ("See him? That's how you are meant to feel."). Starting on the stewardesses themselves would give us something to react to, but no viewpoint character to bring us within the story. Of course, we only specifically identify with the man on the phone for a few seconds, then we’re on to a series of loose identifications that gradually diffuse our point of view into the crowd. But in order to place us there as an onlooker in the crowd, the commercial starts off with a perfect little mini-story, complete with lead character, in order to corral our emotional response.

I feel I almost ought to apologize for using a commercial with such an egregious instance of the Male Gaze. There is undeniably a tone in this work, and it is nearer to the sales rep than to Graham Greene. But we can assume that it's male airline passengers whom the ad agency were targeting (apart from the little girl who sadly aspires only to be a honey in a tight red skirt) and, as an example of the visual storytelling craft, this shows perfect construction. But me, I still prefer Air Canada.

"Show don't tell" - the writing rule that causes most confusion

2011-07-01T13:57:00.010+01:00

My wife, though an author under her own name and a ghost writer with over one million books sold, also does a lot of literary consultancy, editing and story polishing. One day, looking over her shoulder as I brought her one of many morning cups of tea, I saw another editor’s notes that she’d been sent. The editor had been working on a short story and had come across this passage:

Gustav had rather quaint ideas about how a lady should behave. To please him, I took to using an ivory cigarette holder and insisting that my champagne be served in a coupe, not a flute.

The editor seized on this as a failure to “show not tell”, and gave an example of how to expand it into a 250-word scene in which Gustav first presses that cigarette holder on the narrator. And that advice was completely wrong. Because the writer had shown, and very elegantly too in only 35 words. The telling version of that passage would have gone something like this:

Gustav had rather quaint ideas about how a lady should behave. To please him, I began behaving in a more sophisticated way.

"I was very afraid." "I am in love." "He dressed elegantly." That's the kind of writing you expect to find on a post-it on the front of the fridge, not in a novel. But here the writer hadn't told. She'd actually used the real strength of prose, which makes it a more powerful storytelling medium than any other. Turning those 35 words into a scene not only created a distraction that derailed the chapter - no, much worse, it smells fake. We know that one person's influence on another is usually more subtle than that. It doesn't happen in the course of one scene, and storytellers only think in those terms because they are used to movies.

There are two writing rules that often, as here, get confused. “Show don't tell” is a corollary of Forster’s “Only connect!” (the most important rule of all) and it means that the writer shouldn’t just communicate a fact, but must also make us feel it. “The room was very big.” Well, “The room was as big as a cathedral nave” at least evokes a mental image, though possibly, “The room was so big that it made Jeff feel as if he were a child being led into a classroom for the first time” is better because more personal.

The other rule, which I suspect the editor who commented on that short story was thinking of, is “make a scene of it”. This is a lot less of a hard and fast rule. In There Will Be Blood, for example, we might expect a scene of Daniel Plainview dragging himself back to town after breaking his leg in the shaft where he’s just struck oil. Instead, Paul Thomas Anderson, the writer/director, just cuts straight to Plainview on a stretcher watching the men he’s hired tally up his newfound wealth.

You’ve got to be a little bit careful about breaking the “make a scene of it” rule. Audiences can be mistrustful of things that happen off-stage and that they only get to hear about later. It’s safe enough if the scene you’re skipping would only have covered routine details that the reader or viewer can fill in for themselves. For example, at the beginning of Mirabilis #3 (below, fullscreen it to read) we cut straight to Jack standing in front of the Eiffel Tower. You don't need to see him pack a bag in Battersea, go and get his ticket from the Royal Mythological Society, dash down to the south coast and catch a boat – all that is obvious. But if we’d missed out the earlier scene of Gus escaping from Bedlam and just referred to it in a later episode, you’d have wondered if the info was kosher. And quite right too.

Show not tell comes in when, for instance, Jack balks at shaking Gerard’s hand in issue 1. Or later, on the beach at Selsey, when he remembers himself as a child watching his parents go off in a boat. Hopefully you empathized more with Jack then than if he’d simply stated his feelings – though indeed, dialogue can show instead of tell:

"This is it."

"This is what?"

"If I take one more step it'll be the farthest away from home I've ever been."

(Frodo gives Sam a pat on the shoulder.)

"Come on, Sam."

The dialogue there is showing. It connects us with Sam even more effectively than a wide aerial shot of the two little fellows slogging across a big field, and certainly more than any factual statement of distance would have done.

My wife, by the way, has a thousand writing tips like these and she explains them a whole lot better. (I know, I know – but I’m a fiction writer. When it comes to talking about the rules of the craft I’m as articulate as Gort the robot.) Anyway, you can read more of Roz’s tips here.

Stories are gardens

2011-06-26T11:54:00.003+01:00

Stories are organic, but they're not single organisms like a tree, say. A story is more like a garden. You plant seeds and then as you walk through the garden those seeds are sprouting and growing and flowering all around - at, you hope, just the right moment.

One of the most obvious kinds of story seed is when you embed the germ of a plot idea early on so that the reader is prepped for it later. Ever seen a movie where the characters get bogged down in exposition in the last fifteen minutes? That's because the writer failed to plant all the seeds. At the end of a story you need to be thinking, "Oh my God, this is happening!" not "Wait - what's happening and why?"

A seed can also be planted to carry the burden of complex discussion of a theme that would interrupt the story if it had to be fully elaborated in dialogue. For example, in the Buffy episode "Crush" (ep 5:14) very early on we hear Willow explaining to Buffy and Tara that Quasimodo in The Hunchback of Notre Dame wasn't really a hero because his decisions were not taken as part of a moral compass: “He did good things for love of Esmerelda, but that doesn’t make a hero”. Later in the story, Buffy is arguing with Dawn about hanging out with a dangerous vampire like Spike. Dawn says, “You used to date Angel,” and Buffy says that’s different, Angel had a soul. To which Dawn replies: “And Spike has a chip. Same difference.”

Because of these seeds, when the climax arrives we’ve already covered the thematic question of what makes a hero: doing good things, or having good motives?

There are two kinds of story seeds. The first is at the basic level of craft. At the risk of mixing metaphors, those are the screws and washers that hold your story together. The second is a more subtle foreshadowing of things to come.

The two types are used well by Edna O’Brien in her BBC adaptation of her own short story Mrs Reinhardt. The main character, who is staying at a French rural hotel, has a valuable emerald necklace that she wears most of the time. She meets an American whom we suspect of stealing the necklace. However, at the end of the story we learn that it was not the American who took it, but one of the hotel maids.

There are two scenes that demonstrate the basic level of seed-planting. The first is in Mrs Reinhardt's bedroom where she is delightedly swinging a pillow, letting off steam because she thinks she's alone, when the maid comes in with breakfast and surprises her. Later, Mrs Reinhardt strays into the kitchen to find the maid and the other serving staff fooling around until the chef brings them to order.

So those two scenes do the basic craftwork: they tell us (1) that the maid has a key and could enter the room at any time, and also (2) that the maid may act all serious and deferential when on duty, but she is an individual who in private is frivolous and playful like any young girl.

But that's not all. In the second scene, O’Brien goes further and plants the higher level of seed. As the maid is going past her out of the kitchen, Mrs Reinhardt points at a plate of fruit and says, “May I?” and the maid says, “Of course, madame; they’re all hanging out there in the garden to be picked.” So that introduces, very subtly and in retrospect, the notion that the maid might regard things that are lying around as there for the taking.

Now, having pointed out how the story mechanism works there, I'm going to add a caveat. Analysis is not the same as synthesis. All these patterns, where to put the plot points... well, knowing the paradigm of a Mozart concerto, say, wouldn't mean that you or I could write one. Storytelling has to get into the bones, to the point that you do this kind of thing without thinking. You only notice it after you've done it. When Garth Marenghi says, "I often re-read my own stories to learn from them" it's intended as a joke. But so you should. It's analysis of your own work, even more than that of the masters, that will guide you in planting the seeds to make your story grow.

Farewell to Genial Gene

2011-06-25T12:43:00.009+01:00

The first new comic I bought had a classic Gene Colan cover: a dramatic up angle with just enough architectural detail to establish a sense of place but all the emphasis on the characters in muscular action pose.

I don’t know why I picked Daredevil. I’d been following Marvel characters in tattered old anthology books from the secondhand store across the road, all the stories out of order, covers scuffed white, and I already knew I liked Iron Man and Spider-Man best. But Daredevil had Colan’s art, and that was a revelation to me.

Ninepence on the counter and now I was a true collector. And immediately Gene Colan was the artist for me. I liked the openness of John Romita’s work, the gut-busting cartoony energy of Kirby, the clean precision of Don Heck, but Colan’s stuff was rawer and it was real. He could skimp on background detail, favoring tight shots that let him focus on the characters. But after all, the characters’ feelings and actions are what matter in a story. Lavishly depicted scenery in a comic book is like descriptive prose in a novel – you want just enough. And Colan knew exactly how much that was.

Take a guy hailing a cab in the rain. Kirby would give you a beautifully formalized fire hydrant and newspapers billowing soggily in the gutter. Ditko might give you a shot down on the whole street, with rain sluicing off gargoyles and the character dwarfed by the elements. Colan, though – he’d just show part of a building, the curb and the fuzzy headlights lights of the cab, all as sketchily under-detailed as possible, leaving the emphasis on the man raising his arm. And that line of action would be perfect – not the “model posed in the act” that most comics artists would give you, but a panel like a paparazzi shot catching a moment of action in a continuous movement.

That’s what Gene Colan had that other comics artists lacked. They’d dress a scene wonderfully, like a movie set, but Colan clothed it in reality. If he drew characters in a gym, you could smell the stale sweat. His New York sweltered in the summer and in the winter you could feel the bone-scooping cold. If he drew a ceiling collapsing, you felt the weight of the rubble. And most of all there was the constant sense of movement. His cars and trains sped by; his characters lunged and spun; emotions seemed as real as if the characters were in the room with you; a kick from Daredevil looked like it’d knock your teeth out.

Gene Colan died this week and the Silver Age of individual, idiosyncratic artistic talent like his slipped further away from us. But it gives us an excuse to briefly push aside the veil and bask in a ray of sunlight from those halcyon days. Thanks to digital comics, a lot of those great works are available again, and I advise anyone with a dream of working in comics to take an afternoon or two and really look at Gene Colan’s work from the late sixties through to the mid-seventies. We lived in the presence of genius then and we could buy it for ninepence a month. That’s something worth celebrating.

Also, imagine my delight, having read Daredevil #24 and gone back for more, when I discovered he was also drawing Iron Man!

Gene Colan September 1, 1926 to June 23, 2011

Fairies and foul play

2011-06-21T00:05:00.002+01:00

Here to mark Midsummer's Day is a little story I did for a packager who wanted it overnight before Bologna a few years back. The packager absolutely hated it, but the reasons she gave only made me like it all the more. When you write something in such a rush, you tend to be more unshakable in your confidence than when it's a piece you've agonized over for days or weeks.

Ostensibly it's nothing to do with the Year of Wonders, but I wonder... When the green comet's tail brushes Earth's atmosphere, everything that lives in the collective toybox of the imagination should be on the loose, so why not this mash-up between the worlds of Kenneth Grahame and Jack Vance?

The story is dedicated to my god-daughter, budding game designer Eliza Wallis, who is quite a fan of Noggin the Nog too, and therefore no stranger to a bit of gall and wormwood in among the peonies. Read it to your own kids if you don't mind them growing up a little strange - though no guarantees.

A Midsummer Night's Moustery

It was the kind of night in early summer when the moon gets as thin as an old penny and the stars are as bright as sparklers.

Homer the cottage mouse was just turning to the last page of his book when it came into his head that a piece of cheese would go down nicely.

Once he’d thought of it, he couldn’t read a word. Nothing would do until he got himself that bit of cheese. Homer banked up the fire, put the guard in front of the grate, and locked his front door – which was a little loose knot in the wainscoting.

As he set out across the kitchen floor, he saw that the fridge door was open. The light was on inside and he could hear somebody moving about. Inside the fridge!

Homer looked up to his favourite shelf, the one where the cheese was kept. When he saw who was there, he gave a little gasp of surprise.

“What are you doing?”

Virgil the field mouse gave a start and almost fell into the blancmange on the shelf below. He turned around holding a wedge of cheese almost as big as he was.

“Help me cut this cheese in two,” said Virgil, nimbly climbing down to where Homer was standing.

“Why?” Homer wanted to know. But he did it anyway. He always did what Virgil told him.

Virgil handed half the cheese to Homer. “Come on, we have to hurry.”

Homer followed Virgil outside and across the lawn. The grass had been cut recently, but even so it was hard to keep up with Virgil. He was so excited, he kept breaking into a run.

“Where are we going?” said Homer as they got to the field at the end of the garden. But all Virgil would say was that it was a surprise.

The corn stalks were so fat and stiff that it was like travelling through a forest of walking sticks. Homer, who rarely took much more exercise than a stroll to the larder, was soon out of breath. He was very glad when Virgil slowed down to tear a leaf off a dock plant.

Virgil gave half the leaf to Homer. “Tie it round the cheese.”

Soon they each had a little parcel of cheese, wrapped in a dock leaf and tied with a couple of blades of grass. Homer was a little disappointed. He had hoped the surprise involved having a bite of that cheese. It smelled so good!

“Perfect,” said Virgil. “Now we’ve each got a present.”

“A present?” said Homer, quite bewildered by now.

“Yes,” said Virgil. “A wedding present.” And he pushed aside the stalks of corn.

There, in a wide clearing in the middle of the field, stood the old fairy tree. It was glittering with lights of all colours. Troops of pixies, goblins, imps and sprites were coming from far and wide. There was music drifting through the warm night air, and the sounds of laughter from inside the tree told of a party in full swing.

But best of all, there were the most delicious smells of cooking. Pastries baking and parsnips roasting. Dumplings steaming. Pancakes frying. And sherbets and jellies and sugar-sprinkled cakes wafting such a sweet aroma that it was hard not to just bolt inside and scoff the lot.

The wedding banquet was all ready for the guests to tuck in. And they were invited!

* * *

Princess Thissaly was in her bed chamber near the top of the tree. She had just climbed out of a scented bath and was gazing out over the cornfield with a dreamy look in her eyes, taking no notice of the bustle all around her.

Some of her maids patted her dry with soft white towels. Other maids were laying out her bridal gown, brushing her long golden hair, sprinkling fairy dust on her skirts, and making cooing noises like a gaggle of pigeons.

Thissaly’s mother, Queen Araminta, had once been the most beautiful woman in Fairyland, so you can bet she had plenty to say about fashions, make-up and perfume.

“I think the essence of jasmine, dear,” she said, spraying her daughter from a gilded glass bottle. “Oh, how lovely you are! The prince will think a painting has come to life! He will say his most wonderful dream has come true!”

Princess Thissaly was hardly listening. As the maids pulled the dress on over her head, she thought about the note she had received only hours before. It had been brought by a bumblebee who, of course, couldn’t remember what the sender had looked like. Silly muddle-headed creature!

“If I can’t have you,” the note had read, “no man will.”

Well, that was all very flattering, but in an hour Thissaly would be wed to Prince Drawlight. So much for secret admirers!

* * *

Virgil and Homer had arrived at the foot of the tree. Everybody from far and wide was invited to the wedding, and everybody was wearing their best clothes and carrying a present.

“I hope fairies like cheese,” muttered Homer, wishing that he’d had time to trim his whiskers, comb his hair, brush his jacket and maybe tie a ribbon round his tail.

“Who doesn’t like cheese?” said Virgil. “Oops, watch out.”

He tugged Homer back out of the way just as a pumpkin coach rattled past drawn by a red squirrel. They caught a glimpse of a proud-looking young fairy fellow sitting inside. He wore an expression like the last prune in a dish.

“That’s the Duke of Hoit-de-Toit,” somebody said. “He doesn’t care whose toes he runs over.”

Inside the tree, the main hall was festooned with garlands of flowers that made the air smell sweet and heady. In the middle of the hall stood a floral arch. “The happy couple will walk through that arch at the end of the ceremony,” a pixie waiter said, handing them each a glass of rosehip punch.

“What lovely big presents you’ve brought,” said a pretty, dark-eyed fairy.

“Just a couple of things I pinched earlier,” piped up Virgil as she cast him a mischievous smile over her shoulder.

He nudged Homer in the ribs. “Don’t look so disapproving. Fairies like a dash of roguery, you know.”

“You don’t have to make us sound like a couple of gangsters, though!” grumbled Homer. He was a respectable mouse and he wanted people to know it.

* * *

Having greeted all the guests in person, Prince Drawlight was pacing up and down the fairy garden that filled the treetop. He felt quite queasy now that his wedding was less than an hour away.

“It’s odd,” he said to his best man, Spattershaw, “I feel like I had butterflies for lunch. I didn’t, did I?”

“It’s just your nerves,” said Spattershaw, looking at his pocket watch – which was the size, to you and me, of a sequin. “Once you’ve got the vows out of the way, slipped the ring on her finger, and planted a kiss on those sweet, strawberry lips – why, then you’ll be fine.”

“Oh, but then there’s my speech!” groaned the prince. “And King Usk will want to shake hands – he’s got a grip like a bad-tempered badger. And – oh no, Spattershaw! I’ll have to kiss my new mother-in-law!”

Spattershaw nodded grimly, as if to admit that was good cause to be nervous.

Prince Drawlight was patting his waistcoat pocket for the umpteenth time. Suddenly he stopped short, gave a croak of dismay, and went as white as a dandelion in the moonlight.

“Indigestion?” asked Spattershaw.

“Worse,” said Drawlight in a tiny, dismayed voice. “I’ve lost the ring!”

* * *

There were so many guests crowding in from outside that Homer had to stand on tiptoe to see to the back of the room. Thissaly’s fairy godmother waited there in front of a golden altar, ready to read a few words out of a big leather book whose covers lay so floppily in her hands that it looked as if she was holding a slumbering bat.

The guests were filing to their seats. Homer and Virgil squeezed in at the end of a pew. The babble of voices dulled to an expectant murmur as the musicians stopped tuning their instruments and began to play the first bars of the wedding march. Homer saw the bridesmaids peeping down the stairs, ready to signal the princess to come down.

Then suddenly Prince Drawlight rushed into the room. He was going so fast, and waving his arms so wildly, that several people later swore that his trousers were on fire.

“Stop the ceremony!” he cried. “Bar the doors! Nobody gets out!”

A big figure at the front lumbered to his feet. Homer guessed it was King Usk himself – the jewelled crown being a dead giveaway. Queen Araminta burst into tears. The King growled in a voice like a ton of gravel in a cement mixer: “What the deuce is going on, Drawlight?”

“There’s a thief among us,” shouted Prince Drawlight. “And he’s stolen the ring!”

Instantly there was uproar.

“Quiet!” said King Usk.

That got their attention. You could hear a pin drop.

A dark-eyed fairy in a slinky black dress stood up. “Your majesty,” she said in a loud, clear voice. “I know who stole the ring.”

“Well? Out with it,” thundered King Usk.

She turned. Homer shrank down in his seat and wished he could turn invisible as she pointed her finger straight at Virgil beside him.

“That’s him, the field mouse,” she said. “He was boasting to me about how he thieves for a living.”

Virgil opened his mouth to protest that he was innocent, that he wasn’t a thief. And even when he took the occasional crumb of cheese, which was pretty rarely, he usually made up for it by running little errands.

He was going to say that he was a law-abiding kind of mouse really. That, yes, he had taken the cheese from someone’s fridge. But the fridge practically belonged to his very good friend Homer, who was now sitting right beside him, and who would certainly vouch for him as a mouse of the most honest character.

And he was going to say that he most definitely had not taken the ring. He never saw the ring. He didn’t know what it looked like. And in any case, he had no use for rings – even though he was sure it was a very nice ring – and that wouldn’t they do better by looking for a jackdaw or magpie to pin the blame on?

But he didn’t say any of those things. His mouth just hung open and he looked at the terrifyingly fierce expression on King Usk’s face, and all the accusing faces staring at him, and all he said was:

“I’m stuffed, aren’t I?”

* * *

Virgil was carted off to a dungeon built into a big split gall on the side of the tree trunk. His gaoler looked like the kind of fairy who pushes maggots into apples and writes rude graffiti in the dew on bedroom windows.

“I used to be a tooth fairy,” said the gaoler, “but then they found me knocking children’s teeth out while they slept in order to meet my monthly quota. It all got a bit nasty. So now I keep criminals like you under lock and key.” He gave Virgil a look that mice usually only see on the faces of cats.

“What will happen to me if I’m found guilty?” asked Virgil, holding onto the bars of his cell.

The gaoler looked puzzled. “What do you mean, found guilty?”

“You know,” said Virgil. “At my trial.”

“What’s a trial?” said the gaoler.

“Oh dear,” said Virgil, “I’m getting a nasty feeling about fairy justice – mainly that there isn’t any. So what’s the penalty for theft?”

“Hanging or tickling.”

Virgil gave a sigh of relief. “Phew. I’ll go for tickling then. It doesn’t sound too bad.”

The gaoler pointed to a huge steel axe hanging on the wall. The blade looked sharp enough to open a knight’s armour like a can of sardines. “That’s ‘Tickler’.”

Virgil gave a gulp. “Oh dear, I am in a pickle. And a pickle with no cheese!”

Talking of cheese, at that moment Homer came down the dungeon steps carrying his parcel under his arm. “I just came to give this to the prisoner,” he said, holding the parcel between the bars of the cell. “I thought you might be peckish, Virgil.”

“Oh no, you don’t,” said the gaoler, pushing the parcel of cheese back into Homer’s hands. “I’m wise to those tricks. I’ll bet you put a hacksaw inside it so he can cut his way out.”

“What a good idea,” Homer whispered to Virgil when the gaoler turned away. “I wish I’d thought of it.”

“Listen, Homer,” said Virgil urgently. “You’ve got to get me out of here. At sunrise they’re going to see if I’m ticklish. Particularly around the neck.” He pointed at the axe.

“I’ll help any way I can,” said Homer. “But what can I do?”

“You’ve got to catch the real thief, Homer. It’s the only way to clear my name.”

* * *

Homer decided the best place to start would be with people who might have witnessed the crime. So he talked to Spattershaw, the prince’s best man.

“Come to think of it, I did see a suspicious sort of character in the garden,” said Spattershaw. “That was just before Drawlight noticed the ring was missing.”

“Suspicious? Male or female? What were they doing?” asked Homer.

“Yes. Dunno. Loitering,” said Spattershaw.

“You don’t know if they were male or female?” cried Homer. “Can you remember anything about them?”

Spattershaw nodded. “A tall head cosy.”

Homer blinked in astonishment. “A what?”

“Like a tea cosy upon the brow. A crown of woven locks. A nest for the pate. You know…”

“A wig!” realized Homer, remembering that fairies love riddles. “What colour?”

“Dawn herald, dusk glimmer, hue of blown cinders…” said Spattershaw. But Homer was already off to interview his next witness.

“Did you see a fairy in a tall red wig?” Homer asked a footman on the stairs.

“I can’t leave my post,” said the footman, staring straight ahead as if he was carved of wax. “But I did see somebody bustle past towards the kitchens.”

In the kitchens, Homer could get no sense out of the cook, who was shouting furiously about a missing cake. But a small serving girl told him that she saw a figure in a red wig wrap something before dashing out.

“Wrap it in what?” said Homer.

“In petal chains. In a rope of flowers.”

“That’s easy,” said Homer. “You mean the garlands decorating the table.”

He noticed one of the garlands was missing. A trail of petals led down the stairs…

In the cellars at the roots of the tree, Homer came across an apple-cheeked little sprite who was looking at a garland of daisies.

“Did you see who dropped that?”

“I did, sir,” said the sprite.

Homer was quite taken aback, as people didn’t usually call him ‘sir’. He supposed it had something to do with being a detective. It made him feel important.

“What’s in the parcel, sir?” asked the sprite, nodding towards the cheese Homer had under his arm.

“Er… never you mind, lad,” said Homer. “Did you see what the culprit did then?”

The sprite nodded. “Hid something, it looked like.”

Homer followed his gaze to the back of the cellar. “Where?”

“In the cooper’s egg.”

“You fairy folk do love your riddles, eh?”

“I can’t say it more plainly, sir. The wooden cradle of merriment. The sloshing box. The inn-keeper’s piggy bank.”

Homer’s eyes alighted on a big shape in the shadows. “A keg of ale!”

“If you must say so, sir,” grumbled the sprite, as if Homer had just spat on the floor or eaten ice cream with a soup spoon.

Homer tipped up the keg, but all it contained was beer. The ring was not there.

* * *

Homer found the butler, a tall fairy with spindly legs and an outraged face as if someone had stuck a pin in his bottom. He asked him if anyone had taken anything from the beer keg.

“Oh yes,” said the butler, smoothing his green silk waistcoat. “A figure lurking there in the darkness, waiting till the coast was clear, I dare say.”

“A thief, perhaps?”

“Very likely,” said the butler, nodding vigorously. “They took something small and glittery from the tap of the keg. It may have been a stolen item. Now I come to think of it, possibly a ring.”

“But you didn’t think to call for the guards?”

“I was about to,” protested the butler, looking doubly indignant, “but just then the prince started shouting, so I rushed upstairs and forgot all about it.”

Homer shook his head. “And what about the thief?”

“He – or perhaps it was a she; I didn’t have my spectacles on – looked for a new place to hide whatever it was. I noticed them go to the soot door, the fire cave, the throat of sparks and ashes.”

Homer was already at the chimney. He reached up inside. Perhaps a loose brick - ?

“Use the coal tweezers,” suggested the butler.

“Hmm?” said Homer, frowning.

“The long iron fingernails!” said the butler, pointing.

“You fairies and your kenning talk,” sighed Homer. But he took the tongs, reached up the chimney, and drew down – the missing ring!

* * *

Homer gathered everybody together. When Virgil had been brought up from the dungeon, and with guards standing at all the doors, he turned to the King and Queen.

“Your majesties – here is the ring!”

Everybody gasped.

“Virgil is innocent!” added Homer.

Another gasp.

“And the real thief is in this very room!” announced Homer.

There was no gasp this time. Everybody was out of puff. But an excitable goblin cried, “Ooh!”

King Usk glared at everybody – as he always did. But when he glared at Homer it was a glare of approval. “Go on, sir mouse,” he boomed. “Catch me a thief.”

Homer lined everybody up. Every single wedding guest, with no exception. And he walked along examining their fingernails. Whoever had hidden the ring up the chimney, he reasoned, couldn’t have avoided getting soot under their nails. And it would take hours of scrubbing to get rid of it.

The only trouble was, two of the guests had sooty fingernails. The Duke of Hoit-de-Toit and a pretty little bridesmaid called Ammernaddy.

“Please, sir, that’s not soot, it’s mascara,” explained Ammernaddy.

“I admit to having a dirty nose,” said the Duke of Hoit-de-Toit vainly. “That is the only place my fingers have been.”

Homer looked from one to the other.

“Which one did it?” Virgil hissed in his ear.

Homer felt everybody staring at him. He didn’t want to get it wrong. He liked being called ‘sir mouse’. And most of all, of course, he wanted to prove his friend was innocent.

Suddenly the answer came to him. “My lord Duke of Hoit-de-Toit,” he said, “I hereby arrest you for the theft of one wedding ring, which we’ll call exhibit A. Your grace doesn’t have to say anything – and really, if it’s a riddle I’d rather you didn’t – but anything you do say will probably lead to you being severely tickled.”

The Duke started to laugh.

“You haven’t seen ‘Tickler’,” said Virgil, and the way he said it took the smile off the Duke’s face as sure as cleaning a windowpane with vinegar.

“I admit it!” shouted the Duke. “I wanted to marry Thissaly, and with the ring gone I knew her wedding to Drawlight would be called off.” He ran to a window, threw it open, and struck a dramatic pose on the sill. “But you will never catch the artful Duke of Hoit-de-Toit.”

He leapt. A moment later, there was a muddy splat and a muffled cry of disgust.

“Oops. I told the servants to clear away that cowpat before the wedding started…” said Queen Araminta.

“How did you know it was him?” Virgil asked his friend. “Was it just a guess?”

“A guess!” sputtered Homer. “Of course not! I remembered that I needed tongs to get the ring. So whoever put it up the chimney needed a long reach, and Ammernaddy is no taller than I am.”

Virgil gave a low whistle. “Well, I call that plain brilliant.”

* * *

After that, the wedding went off without a hitch – except, of course, for the two young people who got hitched. They did everything the way it’s supposed to be done. They gazed longingly into each other’s eyes, they held hands throughout the banquet, they sighed sweet nothings, and afterwards they rode off on honeymoon in a little flying boat carried by doves.

The sun was just coming up by the time the party was over. Homer looked up into the paling sky and he could have sworn he saw the dawn light glinting off the princess’s ring, far, far off up among the clouds.

Half the wedding guests had just fallen over and gone to sleep where they lay. The Queen, well oiled with rosehip punch, was the last on the dance floor, boogying for all she was worth. The poor musicians had had to prop their eyes open with toothpicks, they were so tired. The King lay flat on his back snoring, and his snores were so loud that they shook the whole tree. It sounded like somebody had taken a buzz saw to the trunk.

“Well, I’ll bid you good morning,” said Virgil as they reached his front door. He lived in an old rusty oil can half-buried in the bank at the edge of the field.

Homer was so tired that all he could do was nod. He yawned as he trudged home across the field. Just as he reached the end of the garden, he heard Virgil yelling. He turned around.

“I just wanted to say,” called Virgil, “that you’re the best pal anyone could have!” And, with a wave, he disappeared into his oil can.

Even though he’d been up all night, Homer was too excited to go straight to bed. He flopped down in his armchair and looked at the cold ashes of the fire. What an extraordinary adventure it had been. Better than a dream!

Then he saw his book beside the chair. He’d been about to finish that when Virgil showed up. He picked up the book and gave a great big yawn.

“This will put me in the mood for bed,” he told himself.

But, you know, he was so exhausted that he fell asleep without reading the last page of his book. And it was a whodunit!

Tips from a master

2011-06-20T12:04:00.003+01:00

I just came across the Temple of the Seven Golden Camels blog, which I see is going to keep me happily absorbed for weeks.

Here's just one of many gems, a set of comic book guidelines by Carson Van Osten, renowned Disney artist. If you like the sample above, shoot on over for a treasure trove of other great creative tips.

More mouse action tomorrow.

The day I met a Dalek

2011-06-16T23:57:00.007+01:00

It wasn’t the winter of the Big Freeze, with its twenty foot snowdrifts and the sea turning to ice. That was the year before. But car heaters didn’t count for much in those days – not in our big old refrigerator-doored grey Wolseley, anyway. So it must have been very cold that January night. But discomfort doesn’t matter, of course, to a boy who’s going to meet a Dalek.

Television Centre burned with lights. It wasn’t three-quarters empty then. The curved face of the building made me think of opening the Tardis doors to find an alien city. There had only been half a dozen episodes of Doctor Who broadcast, but already most things made me think of the Tardis. The real raw London wind, as my dad led me across the BBC car park, was not so chilling as that low, mournful soughing in the boughs of a petrified forest. No hum of traffic thrilled like the radiophonic pulse of a Dalek control room. Six years old, and I already knew that my natural home was the world inside the head.

Daleks. It was as if I’d been waiting for them. Like they were an inevitable discovery, not something somebody had just dreamed up. And meeting one for real – that didn’t seem then, as it does to me now, like the most incredible and lucky privilege. It seemed like it was naturally bound to happen.

Dad was an electrical engineer and in early 1964 he was doing design work for the BBC. Not on Doctor Who itself – that really would have been proof of a benevolent god – but some complicated stage machinery for Billy Cotton. His friends in the workshops may have included Ray Cusick – not a name anybody knew back then, even though Terry Nation was already my J K Rowling.

“DAL to LEK,” said Dad as we crossed the cavernous workshop with its pitted green lino floor. “So that’s one volume to cover A to C and then another for the next nine letters?”

“But, Dad, it’s true. It said so in the paper.”

Beyond the shelves full of wire and brown boxes of rivets was a wide space between drill-lined workbenches. Sharp parings of aluminium littered the floor. A group of men in long beige work-coats waited for us there. They parted and I got my first glimpse of it. You just can’t add a Dalek to a real-life scene without causing a tingle at the back of the scalp, even back then when they’d had two or three appearances at most. Its presence behind the group made them seem for a moment like prisoners.

Dad and his friends went off to talk shop, leaving me with the Dalek. Maybe it was ten minutes, though it could have been hours and still not enough. I was never the kind of kid to go in like Flynn with a new toy. I probably walked around it dozens of times just brushing the surface with my fingers. Details remain sharp nearly fifty years later. The hemispheres down the side – bobbles, as I called them – are my first memory of light blue. Anything that I’d seen of that colour previously was overwritten. A neural map of my brain at that moment would have seen it glowing like the LHC, counting and memorizing the panels on the sides, the metal bands, the Perspex disks behind the eye. The lights – ping pong balls, I think – that flashed when the Dalek was speaking. The ball joints on which its limbs swivelled.

The eye itself, that was a gaze thrilling to meet. I knew the alien mind that lay behind it like my own. I had to look up to meet its eye, the same way a Dalek looked up at Thals and humans. It was part of the key to its psychology, that small hectoring thing ranting with tinny hysteria as it swung its eye-stalk up to scrutinize you.

The gauze grille around the head was easy to see through with the light behind it, making the casing look disturbingly hollow. I pulled at the sucker arm and it telescoped out and out. So far! A Dalek could reach out and grab you from right across a room.
It wouldn’t need to, though. Because there was the gun. What an artefact of absolute perfection. A design that expressed alien violence, cell-smashing radiation, extermination. A device that would flip you like a negative and leave you without a spark of life. Oh, I wanted one.

The adults came back and one of them lifted the top off. The casing divided below the torso, the head and arm section coming away to reveal a plain wooden interior with a little seat.

“You could sit inside it,” suggested Dad, but I didn’t want that. I preferred the Dalek interior that I saw in my mind’s eye: something small, vulnerable and fearful surrounded by electronics and armour, gazing out at the world through a screen. With a gun. With that gun.

“I’ll make you one,” said Dad as we drove home. I didn’t even need to tell him; he just knew. And fifty years later, I realize I was the luckiest boy ever.

Darkness is too easy

2011-06-11T18:30:00.009+01:00

Back when I was working in games I saw a lot of concept pitches. If you’re picturing the likes of Pikmin or Ico or LittleBigPlanet – well, that would’ve been a job to get in early for. Instead, what actually seemed the most common effusion of the collective unconscious was a succession of dark, edgy takes on something like Alice in Wonderland or The Wizard of Oz.

In these pitches, Alice/Dorothy had usually gone psycho, confined to a mental asylum, her family dead or abducted by stark horrors that had pursued her from Wonderland/Oz. And from there it’s a paint-by-numbers to decide what had become of the Tin Man (cyborg), Cowardly Lion (serial killer), Scarecrow (cyborg serial killer) and so on. Those same writers would even have pitched Dark Pooh if Disney weren’t standing guard over Hundred Acre Wood with a very big stick indeed.

The reason why that’s such a heart-sink is not because I don’t like stories with a bit of darkness. More than a bit, in fact. My fave comic of all time is Sandman. No wait, it’s Watchmen. No, maybe it’s Swamp Thing. Whatever – all of those had darkness but they had light, beauty and humanity too. And, in the case of Sandman, real sweetness.

But plain unadorned darkness is just too facile. My wife Roz used to ghostwrite a middle-grade action-adventure series for a brand name author. The heroes were mid-teen crime fighters but the readership was centered on 10-12 year olds, meaning that sex and violence were mostly just hinted at. Over dinner one evening, for fun, Roz and I envisaged a YA version of the series, revisiting the characters a couple of years on and going right into the abyss with them. The kid whose obsession with computer hacking had given him a dangerously detached view of justice. The one who achieved his dream of joining the army but quickly became traumatized by the realities of modern warfare. The rich one, who had hardened and become arrogant working for her father…

In a dark pit struggling to reach the light. It almost writes itself. Trouble is, that’s so easy to do. And nothing good in writing is accomplished with ease.

As well as being the lazy writer’s option, a story of unremitting darkness is tonally boring. It’s way harder to write hope and humor and humanity alongside the horrors – which is why I value TV shows like Buffy, Fringe and Doctor Who. Yet in comics these days we so often see the stories copying the least original videogames, with heroes constantly being maimed or disfigured or driven mad. And, trust me, relentless twentysomething angst is not the way for comics to tap back into a broad market.

The best of the horror comics have heroes who are surrounded by darkness but who haven’t got darkness in their souls: Hellboy, B.P.R.D., even (believe it or not) John Constantine. And the authors of those books don’t gratuitously wallow in the darkness of their stories; they remember they are telling underworld myths that must lead the heroes back to the surface world. Like Alice, emerging from the rabbit hole disturbed, enchanted, altered – a far more interesting fate than simply being forever scarred.

The page worth $10

2011-06-11T00:43:00.005+01:00

It was the name of a Ray Bradbury story too - okay, it was that to start with - but mainly it was a tiny, stuffy, absolutely brilliant science fiction bookshop tucked away in a maze of streets along of St Martin’s Lane. There was barely room to turn around between the shelves that were stuffed to bursting point with paperbacks from the US and copies of Galaxy, F&SF and Worlds of If. Every one of them priceless - and only seven shillings and sixpence.

It was there I discovered Coven 13, the Weird Tales of my generation for a brief, brief moment, but this isn’t a nostalgia trip. I want to talk about the value of giving stuff away. The value to the author, that is.

The shop was run by Derek ‘Bram’ Stokes, whose wife must’ve taken pity on a tubby schoolboy balancing a pile of books he could hardly see over, because she vanished out the back and returned with a load of stapled pages from SF magazines. The originals had got damaged in transit from the States, but they couldn’t bear to just throw them away so they'd salvaged the pages they could.

Okay, basically what I was being offered was a bunch of stories by the likes of Brunner and Moorcock and Pohl and Silverberg. For free. As long as I didn’t mind not having the covers. So, Moses, you want these tablets or not?

A few years ago, after moving to Surrey and then back to London, I was carrying boxes back into our renovated house when I came across that pile of salvaged stories. (Do I have hoarding issues? No no no, I sold my Stingray kit and my Corgi Aston Martin DB5 with box and secret code sheet.) Improvising a sofa out of cardboard boxes and the Ikea flatpacks I was supposed to be turning into bookshelves, I started reading “Wizard Ship” by F Haines Price, torn from the pages of Worlds of If for November 1968. And, you have to understand, this was from the days before Star Wars. SF was the real deal then - we even said it stood for ‘speculative fiction’ - and, despite its title, the story most definitely was not about sword-wielding heroes and mystical galactic princesses.

Anyway, just like that damned whodunit you find on holiday, the last page of the story was of course missing. After a gap of forty years, I could defer gratification no longer. Technology, though it withheld the flying cars and fusion drives we were promised, in the interim at least has given us eBay, so I only had to pay $10 and postage to see how the story ended. By curious coincidence, that's pretty much what 7s/6d would have inflated to over the four decades.

How does that sound as a sales model? You give away 99% of your story and people pay because, because… they just have to know. Okay, done just like that it mostly wouldn’t work. Too many other distractions, too many movies and books and music downloads demanding our time. But the idea of giving away the first third, say, of your story? That I like. If you’re gripped by what you’ve seen, you’ll want to read the rest. And if you aren’t - well, in that case we wouldn’t have done our job properly and we wouldn’t deserve your money, now, would we?

Comics 2.0

2011-06-09T12:32:00.002+01:00

Six months ago, when we launched the Mirabilis iPad app, we had only the vaguest idea about online stores like Graphic.ly and Comics+. We figured that getting our work out on them was just like putting it in Barnes & Noble as well as Borders.

Well, these are interesting times. There's a lot to learn, and it's fun having to learn it. Like seeing how the online comic stores are as much like fan clubs as they are places to browse and buy digital comics. I enjoy Graphic.ly boss Micah Baldwin's regular mail-outs, wherein it seems to me that he has picked up the mantle of Stan Lee's old Bullpen Bulletins that made Marvel not just the home of fabulous stories, but a great place to hang out too.

If you haven't encountered Graphic.ly yet, this update by Micah on the revamp they're doing this week ought to whet your appetite:

When we started Graphicly, our intent was always to create a place for people that love creating, sharing and discovering great stories.

Remember the first time you ever heard a great story? What was awesome about it is that someone shared the story with you. Story is not a solo activity.

We are taking a big step towards making story truly social and collaborative with the launch of our new site. There are the features you would expect: Profiles, Twitter and Facebook integration, amazing reader, solid search and a great store.

But, here is what is cool. Take the comics with you. Just like a YouTube video, you can now embed the comic wherever you want. Put it on your blog. Include it in a story.

Story has become truly shareable, and great content has become discoverable.

The jewel in the crown

2011-06-06T12:07:00.002+01:00

I'm just back from a week on the continent, where I sipped cocktails and watched polo matches and slept in the bed of a member of the British royal family. But never mind all that; it's another story. What made the homecoming a pleasure, despite the water torture of an English summer after the dazzling blue skies of France, was the waiting parcel of Dark Horse titles from Avalon Comics, formerly my local comics store on Lavender Hill but now a mail order business with a difference. (Try them, you won't be disappointed.)

Any visit to the Mignolaverse is a treat, but this package of titles really stood out. "Being Human" in Hellboy 54 is another quantum of perfection from the team of Mike Mignola and Richard Corben. We previously had "The Crooked Man", which must be one of the spookiest stories ever. And "Hellboy in Mexico", in which the big red boy took on a masked wrestler who was the avatar of an Aztec bat-god, followed by the deliriously Weird Tales-y "Sullivan's Reward". Mignola's writing seems to inspire Corben to attain the very pinnacle of his art; having Corben there to realize his imaginings spurs Mignola to create stories that really matter. And when you have those two guys working at the top of their game, it really doesn't get any better than that.

Another treat in the package was the latest outing for Sir Edward Grey, Witchfinder. The story itself in this case isn't anything special. Sir Edward himself is unconvincing as a character and, perhaps recognizing that, Mignola uses the story as a showcase for a bunch of new cowboy characters. It's like that old episode of Star Trek where Roddenberry was trying to set up a spy series spin-off. But any tiredness in the storytelling is more than redeemed by the art of comics legend John Severin, now pushing ninety and still able to conjure up atmosphere and drama with the best of them. It's actually the simpler touches that I like in Severin's art, like this:

But there's no denying that his action drawings have extraordinary power too:

Artist's legs need sponsoring for charity!

2011-06-06T11:25:00.000+01:00

Leo here again! I am casting my pen aside to jump on my bike and pedal 100 miles in a day on the 26th of June. If the green comet were in the heavens I would probably manage it on a penny farthing. I'm doing it in aid of the Force Cancer charity in Devon, England. It will involve hefting my old bones up Dartmoor and then Exmoor, both of which are rather hilly.

Please sponsor me at the link below. Thank you!

Ipad and Iphone users will not see the link above due to a disagreement between Mr. Jobs and the Adobe Corporation, but this link should work:

Hardback sighted on Ebay

2011-06-01T10:10:00.001+01:00

Leo here! Dave's away in France for a well earned break after writing the new issues #9 and #10 of Mirabilis for the Spring book. Here's a photo of the new splendid Mirabilis hardback (with a bit of a frame from issue #9 on my computer behind). I know there are those of you desperate to get your hands on it, and now you can.

Our publisher has been having dreadful trouble getting the copies from their print works in Bosnia to their base in Lancaster, England. Now a few advance copies have arrived and John Freeman, (our editor and proprietor of the Down the Tubes comic news blog) has made them available on Ebay as "buy it now", fixed price, while the usual distribution channels to Amazon and bookshops are put in place.

So, for you early birds, be the first to own Mirabilis in your town! Buy on Ebay Now!

People of quality do not queue

2011-05-26T17:06:00.005+01:00

As we crack on with the opening installments of Mirabilis season two, here's a look back to "Outside Looking In", the episode that appeared in the last issue of Random House's UK anthology comic, The DFC.

British kids' comics fans will be well aware by now that The DFC is returning - well, kind of - in the form of The Phoenix. But if you missed the earlier issues of Mirabilis, you now have plenty of options for catching up. We've got the trade paperback here, the Graphic.ly multi-platform version here, our new and improved Mirabilis iPad comics reader here, and any day now we'll be launching the whole of season one on iVerse Media's top-selling Comics+ app.

UK readers may want to hang on just another couple of weeks, though, as I'm reliably informed that the hardback edition from Print Media Productions has finally cleared UK customs and should be on sale very soon. And a thing of beauty it is too, so worth waiting for.

Green fingers

2011-05-24T18:02:00.002+01:00

Kind of a lazy post today, as I'm finishing up the script for Mirabilis #10 and, as each issue nears the end, you feel like you've thrown so many balls in the air that you have to keep checking none of them have stuck to the ceiling. This has been a particularly fun but challenging story to write, too, because Jack and Estelle have crossed a line in their relationship from which there's no going back. Oh well, you'll get to read all about it in the iPad reader in a couple of months. In the meantime, here's a new letter addressed to the Royal Mythological Society:

Dear sirs

Please help me; my husband has turned into a pot plant. He is a salesman for the ‘Num-Num’ relish company and spends half his life on the road. When he got back from his last trip I could see he was done in, and I felt quite guilty reminding him that he needed to cut down the bay tree that has taken over our tiny back garden.

He just stood there with the axe, saying, “How does a thing grow so big on just sunshine and water, when we have to work the long day just to find the rent and the price of a mutton chop?” He didn’t cut down the tree, I just found the axe lying on the grass, and indoors my Albert had flopped on the settee and stuck his feet in a tub of soil where I’d been going to sow some bulbs.

By the next morning he was a plant - I think a begonia, but can’t be sure as he hasn’t flowered yet. It hasn’t made a lot of difference around the house because he doesn’t say much as a rule. I’ve just been watering him from the teapot and leaving his paper for him to read. But I’m a bit worried because the cat sometimes goes about her business in my plant pots, and I don’t think Albert would like that.

Yours in concern, Mrs Beryl Gartside, Denham

Prof Bromfield replies: Num-Num relish, ah yes. Just the thing with a plate of sausages. Strong stuff, though. Clears the sinuses like curried mustard! Talking of curry, some of those bay leaves…

Dr Clattercut: Of course; right to the nub of the problem, as usual - or the “num” I might say in this instance. Leaving aside the culinary aspect of Mrs Gartside’s letter, I think we can say with some certainty that the transformation is unlikely to last beyond October as the effect of the green comet diminishes. In the interim, Mrs Gartside, I suggest a litter tray for the cat and regular repotting to ensure your husband doesn’t become root-bound.

Stories - how long is too long?

2011-05-17T20:56:00.006+01:00

How do you know when it’s time to bring the curtain down on your characters? I got to thinking about this because Kevin McGill of the edutainingly brilliant Guys Can Read was lamenting this week what a damp squib the Smallville finale turned out to be.

I haven’t seen many episodes of Smallville, but after ten seasons there are only two places a show can end up. Two different kinds of whimper that can supplant the bang of a timely end. One is when the show runs out of steam. You keep tuning in because you care about those characters, but you know they’re not going to be hitting balls out of the park ever again. Case in point: the final season of Babylon 5. That wasn’t Mr Straczynski’s fault, but it was still an exhausted winding down, best forgotten, of what had been at times the most exciting SF show on television.

Or the show can spiral into the sucking singularity that is narrowcasting. I’m a devoted Buffy fan, but I’m not sure that anyone could pick it up at the start of season seven and have any idea what was going on. I began to get a whiff of the narrowcasting bouquet this week with the Doctor Who fan discussions (in which I took part, got to admit that) about whether or not Rory is still an Auton. And if that means nothing to you – okay, you got it; that’s narrowcasting.

Stories have an end, even when they’re about characters we really love. You may not want to admit it, but your parents’ story ends when you leave home. After that it’s all reunion shows – usually “The One with the Cranberry Sauce”. And endless reunion shows are fine for real people whom you love, but in the case of fictional characters then it really is time to boot them off Reichenbach Falls.

The Norse gods had Ragnarok. The British Empire had World War Two. Beowulf had his dragon. The end dignifies what came before, and sometimes redeems it. Stories need endings. At the close of a well-crafted tale you should be sad to leave the characters – even the bad ‘uns – but you know it’s right. Their story is over. “I feel… cold,” says Captain Barbossa, and it’s such a brilliant culmination of everything that’s gone before that it ought to be the end. Only the magical might of Calypso and the million-dollar demands of Disney could undo so absolutely essential a demise.

Ongoing comic book sagas risk the calamity of too long a life more than most. Sandman is great because it built to a definite conclusion. If we properly cherish what we were given in Watchmen, we won't ask to read the ongoing adventures of Nite Owl and Silk Spectre. Conversely, at a full century of issues, even the freshness of 100 Bullets was starting to feel more than a little stretched out. Knowing when to take a last bow is the mark of an effective performer.

Because of this, Leo and I are resolved that Mirabilis will run to issue #40 and sufficit. After the green comet has gone and normal service is resumed with the beginning of the real year 1901, whatever happens to our characters after that is up to you. Gentle breath of yours must fill their sails - Shakespeare thereby acknowledging, as he threw aside his pen for good, that ultimately all great stories are merely enablers for the reader’s own imagination.

Front row seats, or up in the gods?

2011-05-09T18:33:00.006+01:00

About half way through the Thor movie, I started noticing the Dutch tilt. That’s where you cant the camera over at an angle, as in the trademark shot above from Carol Reed's The Third Man. It’s a trick that works great for creating unease, or even outright panic when you combine it with tracking in and out. (Optional corkscrewing is for mad zombie pics only.)

The best example I know comes near the end of Brief Encounter, where Celia Johnson seems almost to fall across the frame as she runs to the platform edge, completely out of control, propelled by destiny in the form of the skew-whiff gravity of the canted shot.

Thor has quite a lot of tilted shots, especially after Loki has taken over Asgard – which I don’t think is a spoiler. (You already knew that, right? He is the god of mischief.) I don’t want to put anyone off going to see it. It’s a good, fun movie and one of the best Marvel Comics adaptations so far. Now that I’ve pointed out the Dutch angles, you might notice how many there are. Or maybe you won’t. I’m probably a little over-tuned to looking for composition and framing since my day job involves sketching a lot of storyboards.

The point is that tilting the camera, like any technique for creating intensity in a shot, loses its bite if used too much. Same with low angles, short lenses, extreme close-ups, and constantly moving cameras. You have to pick your moment. It has to be when you really need to disturb the viewer or reader. And you need to have done the establishing work first; otherwise that sense of aggravation you’re building up won’t feed back into the story, it’ll all be directed at you.

“Ramp up [the intensity] too much and you get an incomprehensible jumble. In such cases, the intensity of the work as a whole can actually go down. After all, if every panel is turned up to full volume at all times, any hope of dramatic contrast is lost. […] It’s in the variation between panels that true dynamic effects are created.”
- Scott McCloud, Making Comics

The trade-off between camera tricks and solid establishing shots illustrates a dichotomy familiar to comic storytellers. Scott McCloud talks about the opposing poles of intensity and clarity in his book Making Comics. If you don’t own a copy, go to your local bookstore and look at pages 48-49, where he illustrates the point by rendering a sequence of panels several times over from different points on the clarity-intensity spectrum.

I’ve done the same thing in the single panel below. We have a scene where a boat is approaching an island. The low-angle shot would be my usual preference, not simply because it is more dramatic but because it locates the reader right in the story. On the other hand, turning the dial all the way over to full clarity, we get a seagull’s eye view. All is clear, serenely so.

Intensity doesn’t care about being serene. It’s all about the subjective view. In the climactic scene of Rear Window, as Raymond Burr comes to kill James Stewart, we don’t see one master shot. It’s all close-ups and jarring cuts. Because that’s how it feels if a guy is trying to throw you out of a window, said Hitchcock.

It helped that Hitch had the previous 100 minutes to establish the apartment where Stewart is holed up with a broken leg. Establishing shots can be as simple as those building exterior inserts that you get in TV comedies – the coffee shop, the apartment block. Television audiences like to know where they are at all times. And why not? Clarity was the first rule that Jim Shooter used to impress on new artists at Marvel:

“He always stressed that the essence of good storytelling was in the establishing. He had it almost down to a formula; every two or three pages he wanted to see a wide shot of where you were, so that the reader never has to stop and wonder. […] |He was, ‘Be specific, be strict.’”
- John Romita Jr talking about Jim Shooter, Artists on Comic Art

“The reader never has to stop and wonder.” Yes, that is important. But important too is that the reader is smack dab in the thick of things – not just observing the story but experiencing it. Too great an emphasis on clarity can feel a bit like you’re playing a Sims-style computer game: detached, intellectual, dispassionate. Arguably, a comic striving for absolute clarity would even present you with The Sims’ “chemistry set” interface of character needs and moods. You’d never need to stop and wonder, but – oh boy.

Of those thumbnail examples, which is better? The first thing I’d ask is what’s important to the story. In this case, the panel has to establish that the setting is a remote island. Is that clear from the first picture? Although the framing is more dramatic, probably not. The second version leaves the reader in no doubt. And because that clarity creates a sense of isolation out in the middle of the ocean, an emotion that feeds into the subsequent scenes, I’d come down in favour of that version of the shot.

If it were a movie, of course, I could have both. But in comics we have to kill a few more darlings in order to hit that page break.

Sometimes it doesn’t even come down to a trade-off. Think about your scene and you may find a way to frame it that is both lucid and involving. But more often it seems there is a law in the physics of storytelling that says the balance between clarity and intensity has to be a zero-sum game. It’s the trade-off between objectivity and subjectivity. Hitchcock says never to confuse an audience because when they’re confused they aren’t emoting. Despite the Rear Window example above, that seems like a clear vote in favor of clarity. On the other hand, what counts for Forster is not precision and logic but emotional engagement and intuition. Which is why he tells us: “Only connect!”

And you know what? They’re both right.

A glimpse in the crystal ball

2011-05-07T14:18:00.003+01:00

Now that Leo, Nikos and I are hitting our stride with the first issues of Mirabilis season two, there's a daily temptation to show what we're working on. The spring is here, the comet looms large in the sky, and magic isn't hiding in the shadows anymore. That means lots of spectacular locations and fabulous new characters. At the same time, I don't want to spoil the fun by showing too much too soon. It's the biggest dilemma since Sir Lancelot was dying to tell his best pal about the hot chick he'd just been banging.

As an entire page of the next issue has appeared on Facebook, I guess it's okay to trot out one little glimpse here. I say "trot out" mainly because of two of our new characters. That's Withers on the left and, on the right, Cannonbone. The fellow in the middle is an old acquaintance from Mirabilis: Winter, last seen climbing a rope into the wild blue yonder, while the lady shall remain anonymous for now.

In comics and movies it's pretty hard to make a centaur character like Withers work. The hindquarters are out of scale for everybody else in the scene, as you'll know if you've seen The Philosopher's Stone or The Lightning Thief, so I'm going to do a post on how we designed Withers with that in mind. But that's for another day.

Here you can see how our art process works from my thumbnails (below) to Leo's pencils (above). I obviously drew the girl on a whole other level from the other three. She's actually supposed to be sitting in front of them, not (as in my sketch) waist-deep in the ground. Luckily I have Leo to fix my mistakes!

App woes banished

2011-05-03T23:00:00.006+01:00

Our tech genius, Simon Cook, just got back from vacation and barely had time to throw off his coat and brew up a cuppa before he was hard at work fixing the hitch we had with version 1.1 of the iPad app.

Apparently it was a pesky one-line bug that meant the update didn't know where to find issues of the comic. But that's all fixed and the new version (which we're labeling 1.1.1) will be up this week. When you get it, you just have to Restore your back issues and they'll reappear like magic, as ably demonstrated in the photo above by the dashing Mr Fin Hartas, who is just back from orc-slaughtering and mead-carousing with Leo at the Dumnonni live action roleplaying weekend.

In a week or two we'll be announcing the publication schedule for issues #10 through #13. That's got rakshasa, robots, Bifrost, Babylonian sphinxes, fairytales as dark as Russian bread, and not one but - count 'em - two undersea kingdoms. And wait till you see Jack in his Hulk pants. All coming soon, so don't go away.

If you can't stand the heat...

2011-05-02T14:23:00.001+01:00

Now that the days are getting longer and warmer and the world is waking up, here's a letter from the RMS files for May 1901:

Dear Professor Bromfield and Doctor Clattercut

It gets to being quite warm here in the valleys at this time of year, and for several months in the summer I do without my old boiler altogether. Only this year, see, the boiler’s still going and the cottage is as hot as a greenhouse, and if you find this note rather smudged and hard to read, that will be the literal sweat of my brow, dripping onto the page even with all the windows open.

The way of it is, some little being has taken up residence in the boiler. He says he’s the spirit of the hearth and refuses to go out. If I don’t bring him coal, he gathers up other bits to burn when I am asleep. I have already lost an occasional table, my dad’s old writing desk and the breadboard.

I don’t like to mention it to Pastor Richards as he’d make an awful fuss of anything like this with a bit of a pagan whiff to it. And perhaps after all it is a sort of household god. You can’t be too careful, can you? But if only it wasn’t so blasted hot, you see.

Yours, Talfryn Jeavons, Kidwelly

Dr Clattercut replies: This type of creature - the genius loci, or spirit of a place - has been known since Roman times. They usually dwell in the chimney or fireplace and on the whole constitute a good bargain, as they protect the household and may even keep it spick and span, often for no more remuneration than a saucer of milk or a bit of cake.

Prof Bromfield: On balance, though, I think it’s safer to have no deity at all in your house. You never know when the damned thing will feel slighted. It may protect the house, after all, by deciding that you’re no longer a suitable resident.

Dr Clattercut: True, but I suspect that what Mr Jeavons has there is probably just a hob or brownie that has got into the boiler and decided to stay. They can be like squirrels and stray cats in that regard. A real household god usually starts its career as a ghost. At one time, builders used to sacrifice a lamb and put its body under the cornerstone in order to get the process started.

Prof Bromfield: Similar thing used to go on with new churchyards. Traditionally a stallion would be buried before any human graves went in. Then you get a hell horse, as they call it in Scandinavia - sort of a spectral guardian of the cemetery, if you like. It provides psychic protection in the same way that leaving a rabid dog running about in your garden will protect the house from burglars.

Dr Clattercut: At any rate, returning to the problem at hand: Mr Jeavons, if it is a brownie, all you need do is leave it a pot of ale. When it has become merry, fish it out of the boiler with iron tongs, demand that it tells you its true name, and then you will have complete command of it. Think of that; you will be able to set the precise temperature of your home merely by asking. I’d like to see modern technology achieve such a marvel.

Prof Bromfield: Hmm. If it is a true household deity, however, then the plan could backfire quite severely. And not in a metaphorical sense.

More questionable advice and curious correspondence from Clattercut and Bromfield here.

The dead travel fast

2011-04-30T16:45:00.001+01:00

Walpurgis Nacht in Germany and Eastern Europe is the time for witches and spectres to roam abroad. Halloween might seem a better time for that than May Eve, but the principle is the same. As seasons change, there’s the chance for unnatural things to slip between the cracks.

In the deleted opening chapter from Dracula, Harker has already sent his coachman away with the rash assertion that, “Walpurgis Nacht has nothing to do with Englishmen” when he finds himself outside a tomb in the woods near Munich:

"Walpurgis Night was when, according to the belief of millions of people, the devil was abroad - when the graves were opened and the dead came forth and walked. When all evil things of earth and air and water held revel. This very place the driver had specially shunned. This was the depopulated village of centuries ago. This was where the suicide lay; and this was the place where I was alone - unmanned, shivering with cold in a shroud of snow with a wild storm gathering again upon me!"

Chin up, Jonny boy. At least you’re not in Transylvania. Yet.

The images here come from Mirabilis episode sixteen (“The Dark Side”) back from the days when we were running in The DFC in 5-page episodes rather than the 25-page issues we have now. It was timed to appear in print in the week of Walpurgis Night (although in story chronology the action there is still only mid-January) but, of course, The DFC was already buried in unconsecrated ground by May 2009. Never mind - we kept right on going with all the crazed energy of one of Dracula's Szgany servitors and are now working on what would be episode forty-three in DFC reckoning.

Turning to a whole other continent of vampiric lore, here’s a little bit of bitey action with an Indian flavour that I wrote years ago for the bright young film-making team of Dermot Bolton (producer) and Dan Turner (director). Turn down the lights, draw your chair closer to the screen, and shiver at the story of A Dying Trade part 1 and part 2.

Where’s Mr Pointy when you need him?

Princes, kings and heroes

2011-04-29T00:14:00.004+01:00

“It’s usual in these stories,” David Fickling reminded me, “for the hero to be marked out by destiny. Often he’s a prince, for example.”

I didn’t want either Jack or Estelle to be predestined for greatness, preferring instead to explore the idea that the hour (or year, in this case) produces the man (and woman). On the other hand, I wanted Mirabilis to be commissioned for The DFC so I probably tried to get away with a noncommittal “Um.”

The heroes of fairytales are often royal, a shorthand for them being the sons of gods as they are in myths, because if you take a scion of royal blood and have him brought up in a woodsman’s hut you’ve got immediate rooting interest. The tension in such a gross disturbance of natural law means that the story practically tells itself, unfolding nicely until the lad sits at last on the throne that was always meant for him.

That seems too easy though. I would’ve preferred it if Arthur was not born to draw that sword, had been just a clever peasant who rose to the occasion. People who crown themselves, as Napoleon knew, create a more lasting myth. Likewise when Don Blake saw the inscription: “Whoever wields this hammer, if he be worthy, shall possess the power of Thor” it seemed to say that an ordinary man could achieve greatness. It was only later that we found out he’d been Thor all along.

Leaving aside the X-Men, for whom destiny was in the double helix, most of the old Marvel heroes had heroism thrust upon them and had to grow into the part. Peter Parker may have been the archetypal orphan, but there was nothing special about him until the spider bit his hand. That’s what I liked, but it seems from Wiki that they since retconned it:

Babylon 5 creator J. Michael Straczynski began writing The Amazing Spider-Man with #471. Two issues later, Peter Parker, now employed as a teacher at his old high school, meets the enigmatic Ezekiel, who possesses similar spider powers and suggests that Parker having gained such abilities might not have been a fluke - that Parker has a connection to a totemic spider spirit.

Totemic spider spirit..? Ugh. Just, ugh.

Princes in fairytales embody the archetypal hero in rejuvenated form. “His greatest virtue is intuition,” says J.E. Cirlot (A Dictionary of Symbols) and who can doubt it: Arthur knighting Leodegrance, Alexander taming Bucephalus, Luke deciding to just go with the Force. Each shows that, whatever wise gray heads may think, youth is stronger for not knowing what’s impossible.

Yet maybe the facile storytelling trick of having your hero royally born to greatness is wearing thin with today’s sophisticated audiences. Harry Potter, who appears at first to have everything including the birthmark, turns out merely to have been in the wrong place at the wrong time, his special seal of greatness being earned not by birth but by accident and the magic of a mother's love. Likewise Lyra in His Dark Materials - despite being a Moses-like foundling, and having the requisite exceptional upbringing, she is after all just an ordinary girl. Her personality, not her pedigree, is what makes her special.

That’s how I think of both Jack and Estelle: exceptional but no more exceptional than anyone else might be. You will find little nods throughout the Mirabilis story in the direction of a kind of kingship. I won’t give any spoilers here, except to say that they all tie in to the question of whether one can be born heroic or must struggle with one’s self-birth as a hero. Neither Jack nor Estelle has any midichlorians (bvv, again) in the blood, no royal birthmarks, no prophecy to make their greatness a simple matter of jumping through hoops. In the end, we're all princes if we want to be.