Being less expected than the Spanish Inquisition, let's start with the non-fiction history book: The Origins of the Anglo-Saxons by the late Jean Manco.
This is a fascinating book about the continental genesis of the people we know as the Anglo-Saxons both in terms of linguistically and genetically. Having had a career as a Building Historian, Manco switched to writing about prehistory and archaeogenetics.
This text follows the Blood of the Celts and is a well-written tome but not one for people who have absolutely no idea about the Anglo-Saxons or Y-DNA analysis of (male) Haplogoups. It seems to flip from being an erudite history of the people that later became the 'Anglo-Saxons' to complex scientific explanation of languages and the mixings of blood groups. I found some of the dates of origins given by Manco surprising but cannot argue from my inadequate knowledge. In some ways, it's almost like reading Tolkien where he hurls his characters headlong into utterly impossible and non-survivable battles only then to knock them out and find the giant eagles have saved them such are the changes of subject matter.
Manco actually references Tolkien, Pratchett and Cornwell for different reasons but notes how they all draw on the writings, storytelling skill and chronicles of the Norse to create they own worlds.
I enjoyed this book immensely because it was so broad in spectrum and actually read it from cover to cover; something I almost never do with academic works. It is just a shame that Jean Manco is not longer with us to write another.
The next book is one I picked up in the Eden Charity shop in Brampton, Cumbria. It's a Swedish crime drama called Midwinter Sacrifice by Mons Kallentoft.
Published in 2011, it was the first of a series centring around a single mother detective with a 13yr old daughter and everything that implies for the future. It probably grabbed my attention because of the word sacrifice. I ignored the comparisons to Larsson and Nesbo as that's the expected publisher hype.
As for a a crime drama, it struck me as if it was intended to be transferred straight to screen. There is an enormous amount of print space spent describing the various characters as if they are to be seen not imagined and the story itself drifts alongside. The murder of a local special needs male found hanging from a tree on the edge of a forest in the style of the Viking ritual of the Midwinter sacrifice starts off okay but doesn't really twist or turn as much as I would expect. The subsequent investigation and denouement are satisfactory but do seem to be incidental to the lives of the various characters involved. Then there is the constant portrayal of the location of the action - Linköping - as a dreary town in the middle of the Swedish plain south of Stockholm. Yet for all my lack of enthusiasm for this book, I did read it from cover to cover and never considered giving up on it. It would not, however, induce me to become a 'fan'. I may get the rest of the series from my local library (I know there's at least two) but won't buy them.
Finally, I am just about a third the way through The Sea Detective by Mark Douglas-Home. I didn't buy this book, my wife did as it is for a book group she's a member of. I just asked if I could read it because I had just finished Midwinter Sacrifice and found the idea of reading one of the two historical fiction novels I have at hand unappealing.
Anyway, this book was published in 2015, it tells is about an investigation into the discover of two severed feet from the same person washed up on either side of a fictional Scottish island. Well, I say that. I'm 108 pages in and so far there has only been one severed foot and the investigation hasn't actually got underway. It's all been about Indian child prostitution and guerrilla flower planting in Scotland so far! Still, the bits with the eco-activist have amused me when intended and the premise is promising.
I will, with any luck, finish this book this coming week.
And finally, I have been writing again. It's another crime story set in Cumbria with the same Police personnel (bar one, so far) and covers a more regular sort of crime story. I say that because there are echoes of a crime that happened on one of my refurbishment projects back in 1991. I remember it because it was around the time Freddie Mercury died - the 27th anniversary of which, by chance, is today (24th).
That crime did not involve a corpse as my story does but it was just as sinister in it's own way in that it was not far from the old BBC building in Wood Lane and was, I suppose, a foreshadowing of the whole Jimmy Saville affair. I'll say no more on that but to round off, my novella is currently just over 5,000 words and, staying true to Stephen King's belief that plots are for dullards, I have only the vaguest idea where it will end up...and an even vaguer idea of the title. It has a working title but I'm not publishing that. Absolutely not. It's way too weird.
Have a great weekend and see you soon.
