R.J. Lynch's Blog, page 13

Here’s a little trivia question:

 To whom does Mrs Avery give a weather forecast?

Enter your answer in the form below along with your name and email address and senders of the first five correct answers received will win a free paperback copy of Zappa’s Mam’s a Slapper

NOTE: We will email winners to ask for their address so that we can post the book to them, but email and snail mail addresses will not be retained.

This interview took place at the Indie Author Fair in Chorleywood last year. I’m delighted with the way Ingram have cut and presented it; the only objection I have is that they seem to have made my waistline look big and I can’t imagine how that happened :-)

Watch (and listen to) it here:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hTeWPYwP4kM&feature=youtu.be

A Just and Upright Man was shortlisted for the Historical Novel Society’s 2015 Indie Award. I was so pleased when I heard that and I really didn’t expect to go further — didn’t expect to win — because I could see from the shortlist that I was up against some stiff competition. There were some damn good books there by some damn fine writers.

And now I know that I haven’t won, and even though that was the result I expected — and even though I know I did really well just to get this far — I’m not going to pretend that there wasn’t just a touch of disappointment there, too. I’m a salesman, and you don’t survive 40+ years in that profession unless you’re competitive. I’d rather win than lose.

Today, though, I was Helen Hollick’s Tuesday Talk Guest and I’m so delighted with the way she’s turned it out that I feel good. You can read it here; it’s more than compensated for the earlier bad news.

English Historical Fiction Authors is a closed Facebook group for – well, it’s obvious, isn’t it? Although the members don’t have to be English, and I’d guess that more than half of them aren’t; the group is for people who are interested in historical fiction with an English setting. A question that came up today was that old favourite: you have the chance to throw a dinner party where you may invite three monarchs/rulers/leaders from any period of history, whether they’re Hatshepsut or King George III. Who do you invite and why?

This was my reply:

First, Barabbas, because he wasn’t simply a bandit; he was Bar Abbas, the Son of God, and people in the early years of the church would have understood what he represented: that the Jewish people were offered a choice between two sons of God, one of wh om taught freedom through peace while the other said you had to take it by violence and they made the wrong choice. I’d like to know how he feels about things two thousand years on.

Second, the Empress Makeda, who – well: “King Solomon violated the Empress Makeda, whom the ignorant call the Queen of Sheba. She was searching for his wisdom, but he was what he was and he jumped her. His own people were so disgusted by the way he treated her, the way he broke faith and his promise that they escorted her back to Abyssinia and they took the Ark of the Covenant with them. It sits where they left it, on the beach in the Ethiopian province of Eritrea.” It’s a good story, but I’d like to know how true it is, and who better than her to tell me?

And, finally, Thomas More. There are two completely opposing ideas of who and what he was and I’d like to look him in the eye while I heard his side of the argument.

It occurred to me afterwards that I’d better make sure I had plenty of booze available. No English wine, though – the dinner is meant to be enjoyable.

That bit about Solomon and the Empress Makeda, btw, is from my wip, When the Darkness Comes, which probably won’t be finished this year and couldn’t feature in English Historical Fiction Authors anyway because it’s set in the 21st century. Barabbas is there, too; he punches poor John Betjeman and knocks his teeth out. Not a nice man.

It’s 6.30 and I’m relaxing in my Heliopolis hotel room after a day showing Egypt’s largest road contractor how to make better, longer lasting bridge joints for less money. Relaxing in this case means reading the second book in the Beatrice Stubbs Boxed Set, which is turning out to be every bit as good as the first, while wondering which of the Fairmont restaurants I should grace for dinner. I am so glad to have discovered JJ Marsh; she’s taken her place at my writers’ top table. But I just came across this:

Beatrice allowed herself a small celebration. Exotic fruit, miso soup or a salmon bagel may well do wonders for the mind but on certain occasions nothing in the world can beat a bacon sandwich.

Yes. YES! No question about it. A bacon sandwich ­– yum, yum, pig’s bum. But wait – what’s this?

Large streaky rashers curling and spitting away in the pan. Two thick white slices warming in the toaster, a bottle of HP and the papers waiting on the table.

Thick white slices? No. No, woman, no. What are you thinking of? Two slices of Poilâne rye – the only thing. (If you really must, you can substitute Poilâne sourdough, in which case yes you will need to toast it, but ordinary white bread? Never!) (You don’t need to go to Paris for the bread; if you’re in Britain, Frenchclick.co.uk will deliver it right to your door). No butter. Spread one slice with mustard if that’s all you have (English – none of your foreign muck) but Bim’s Kitchen African Baobab Pepper Jam is better and then slather both slices with home made mayo. Sprinkle a small amount of celery salt on one side, lay the fried bacon (if you grill bacon you can bugger off right now) on one side, lay on top of it slices of ripe tomato you have already scattered with salt and black pepper, press the other slice on top, cut in half and eat.

That is a bacon sandwich. A bacon sandwich fit for the incomparable Beatrice Stubbs.

I pah on your white bread.

Okay, I admit it, I wrote the subject line that way because I love that word “BOGOF”. It’s a retailer’s way of saying, “Buy One, Get One Free” but saying it out loud to someone – “Bogoff!” – can be very satisfying. Childish foolery aside, I’m offering you a chance to read two paperbacks I think you’ll enjoy and save money. Order Zappa’s Mam’s a Slapper by John Lynch in paperback direct from this website and we will send you absolutely free a paperback of A Just and Upright Man by John Lynch’s alter ego, R J Lynch, absolutely free (normally retails at US$12.28 or £8.99). This offer is good for all purchases of Zappa’s Mam’s a Slapper from this website up to and including 28th February.

You prefer eBooks to paperbacks? No problem. Order Zappa’s Mam’s a Slapper here (you can have it in ePub or mobi format and we’ll send you A Just and Upright Man in the same format for no charge – this offer is also good from now till 28th February.

Don’t delay – bargains like this don’t come along every day.

Before sending a book to be typeset, if you know what’s good for you, you give it to a proof-reader to find all the things wrong with it – the repetitions, incongruities, inconsistencies and plain incorrect style. Before it goes to the proof-reader though, sensible writers use either a developmental editor or (and this amounts to the same thing) reliable beta readers. I had two developmental editors on Zappa’s Mam’s a Slapper and the book as finally published was a lot better than it might have been without them. Always, though, there are going to be some changes that you make at a developmental editor’s behest that you regret. One of my editors told me to remove almost everything that might seem to be a reflection of my own views. In some cases I have no regrets but I miss one or two things that are not in the final book. I’ve decided, therefore, to publish these outtakes as “offcuts”. This is the first. My editor persuaded me that the book was better off without it. I’d be interested to know whether you think she was right.

Here’s the passage that did not get into the published version:

Melanie bought a digital camera of her own. She already had a computer and now she loaded Photoshop onto it. She must have spent a few hundred quid, all told, although she got the educational rate for the software which is a lot cheaper than ordinary punters have to pay.

I was shocked when I found out what sort of pictures she wanted me to take.

Shocked and excited.

You just can’t tell about people, can you? I was talking to a guy, an Artistic Director on a magazine I’ve done work for who went through the Sixties, he was one of the ones they mean when they say, “If you can remember it you weren’t there” but he remembered it and I’d say he was there all right. Probably didn’t do the drugs some people did, which is how he kept hold of his memories. Anyway, he and I were having a coffee, talking through what I’d already shot and what he wanted out of me that day and I was listening fairly closely because by that time I was billing a few grand for a day’s shooting which is top dollar, believe me, big money for anyone and I never got so blasé I’d think that sort of money was nothing. And there was a girl passing on the pavement outside with the most beautiful long legs you ever saw and she was wearing a really short skirt, a micro-mini you could call it, to show them off. And Zak, the Artistic Director (I found out when he signed a contract that his name was George, but there you go), Zak was in reminiscent mood. He talked about mini skirts and what made them possible, how until the beginning of the sixties women wore suspender belts and they couldn’t wear really short skirts because there had to be room to cover the suspenders but then Pretty Polly Holdups came in, stockings that didn’t need suspenders because they kept themselves up but you still had the patch of bare leg at the top which was lovely to get your hand on, apparently, but then came tights and now a skirt could be as short as the girl or woman wanted it to be. And he said older people, those who were already adults before the Sixties started, if they saw a girl in a mini skirt they thought she was immoral, which is how they saw it then if an unmarried girl had sex, and they assumed anyone dressed like that would go to bed with anyone who asked her. But Zak said it wasn’t the skirts, they had nothing to do with it, it was the Pill, that’s what made the difference, and if you wanted to know whether a particular girl would or wouldn’t it was no good eyeing the length of her skirt, you had to ask her, which you might do with or without using actual words. ‘But it wasn’t the length of the skirt. That was a red herring. She might have a mini or she might have one trailing on the ground like her grandmother would have worn and it told you nothing. Except maybe whether she thought her legs were attractive. Mini or no mini, she’d either fuck you or she wouldn’t. ‘

We both agreed, though, that miniskirts were a Good Thing.

While I’m talking about Zak, something else he said that surprised me was that there was far less sex around in the Sixties than people imagine there was and certainly less than there is now. ‘People were still most likely to live in families. There was still shame attached to a girl having a baby when she wasn’t married. Some people had trial marriages, where you lived together for a while before you married to make sure you really were compatible. But they were considered very daring, most people didn’t do it and those who did still intended to get married in the end. And certainly before they had a child. You never hear the words “trial marriage” now. Do you?’

I said it sounded as though people were happier now, but Zak said I was confusing freedom with happiness, a mistake they’d been prone to make at the time. The people I’d grown up with, would I say most of them were happy? And of course when I thought about Chantal and my mother I had to say no. Zak said back then they hadn’t really known what they were doing. He said it was like Pandora’s Box, except that people were so ignorant now, so uneducated, that if you mentioned Pandora’s Box they’d think you were talking about the genitalia of some tart with a posh name. He talked like that a lot, long words like genitalia mixed in with what he called the demotic. And he said opening the box was one thing but shoving everything back in, that was something else again.

‘We thought the family, marriage, chastity, all that stuff was the morality the ruling classes imposed on the people but not on themselves. Because, let’s face it, the nobs didn’t follow the rules. Didn’t then, don’t now. Prince Charles told Diana if he did what she wanted he’d be the first Prince of Wales in history not to have a mistress. And he was right. So if they didn’t, why should we? You know what they say. If work was so wonderful, the rich would have stolen it. Everything was organised to keep power where power had always been and we were going to change that. Starting with sex. We were going to have sexual freedom. Restraint was harmful. Families damaged people. Jealousy destroyed lives, and if everyone was free to sleep with anyone, jealousy would disappear. The sexes would become equal. Contentment would reign. That’s what we thought. We were wrong. Look around you if you want proof. Fathering children and expecting someone else to take responsibility for them is the route to disaster.’ He looked closely at me. ‘It’s none of my business but, if I were guessing, I’d say you know all about that.’

I said, ‘Are you married, Zak?’

‘Certainly am. For the third time. But I’ve been with this one for twenty years.’

‘Would you call yourself happy?’

‘Happier than you, mate. That’s for dead sure. I’ve seen your pictures. I mean, you’re a great photographer, one of the best, don’t get me wrong. But happy? You? I think not.’

You can read more about Zappa’s Mam’s a Slapper here.

The Historical Novel Society announced the shortlist for its 2015 Indie Award on Friday, and included in the list is A Just and Upright Man . The winner will be announced and the award presented at the society’s annual conference in Denver, Colorado, in June.

I was stunned when I got the news. Of course you always hope to be recognised, and the book has had some very good reviews, but still it’s a surprise. To know that they started out with so many historical novels and, after they’d whittled them down to just nine, mine was still in there – it feels like a validation of all my hard work.

A Just and Upright Man is the first in the five-book James Blakiston series of historical romance/crime novels set in northeast England in the 1760s (with one set in the American colonies as revolution looms). So much historical fiction is written from the viewpoint of the rich and aristocratic, or at least the well-off. I wanted to write about the lives of the people at the bottom of the heap – the agricultural labourers, shepherds, cotton spinners and miners from whom I (and, in fact, almost everyone) am descended. You think at first that these people are invisible but when you sit for hours, day after day, (as I have) poring over the notebooks and other records kept by vicars and overseers of the poor – and, indeed, the courts – individuals start to emerge from the darkness and speak to you. I wanted to tell how their lives unfolded when enclosure took away their livelihood of the past two or three hundred years and to show that they, no less than the gentry, fell in love, married and had children; that they knew happiness and grief; that they mattered. The reviews I’ve been getting suggest that I’ve succeeded, which is rewarding in itself.

Poor Law, the second book in the series, should be with the proof-reader before the end of this month.

The book is available:

Here in ePub, pdf or mobi format

Here for Kindle

Or you can get it as a paperback (the price includes postage, wherever in the world you may be):




























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I’m writing a wedding scene. Weddings are great from the author’s point of view, for a variety of reasons. A wedding is usually the only time that that exact collection of people will ever be together in one place. Unexpected meetings can take place that would be very difficult to set up in any other way. And then, of course, there are the emotional currents that may be sparked by the nuptials of two people from different backgrounds.

In the scene I was writing, I was helped by factors I had already written into the plot. The bride may or may not once have slept with the groom’s cousin. Her mother disapproves of the groom’s family and believes that her daughter is marrying beneath herself. The bride and her mother have not seen her father for twenty years and he is about to astound them both by walking into the reception and demanding a glass of champagne. Then a fight breaks out.

I could see no reason why I could not make the fight seem authentic because I’ve actually seen fights break out at weddings. (Something I didn’t mention earlier is the tendency of guests to drink too much and then remember why it is that they don’t like some of their fellow guests).

But when I began to think of the fights I had seen, doubts crept in. I was staying one weekend (on business; I wasn’t there for pleasure although, as you will see, enjoyment came to me) at the Runnymede Hotel near Staines, West of London. The Runnymede is yards from the Thames which is canalised at that point; the only thing that separates hotel from river is a towpath. It was a sunny afternoon and I was on the towpath, leaning against the lock gate with a glass of beer in my hand watching the mallards and a solitary swan while inside the floor-to-ceiling glass doors I could see a wedding reception in progress. It was a posh wedding, or at least a moneyed one (they’re not necessarily the same thing). Some extremely expensive clobber and jewellery was on view. I became aware that the amount of movement inside the reception room was increasing rapidly when suddenly the doors burst open and a brawl flooded onto the towpath. Expensively dressed women were taking wild swings at other expensively dressed women; men in morning suits were punching seven bells out of each other. One by one, wedding guests were going involuntarily into the river. I saw one man who under normal circumstances I would imagine to be a significant presence in the world of Commerce and who stood well over six feet and weighed more than 200 pounds deal with three lesser opponents in this manner when a beautifully dressed girl aged about ten with a face of unimaginable sweetness punched him with such force in the one place where no man wants to be punched that he doubled up, retching, and was heaved easily into the Thames by a man standing by. The man and the sweet young girl high-fived each other before making once more for the safety of the hotel.

On another weekend I was staying at an hotel near Sunderland of which a tender Providence has erased the name from my memory. I do remember that a golf course was attached to it. On this occasion there were two wedding receptions and something caused ill feeling between them. Maybe one party was made up of Toon supporters and the other of Mackems – I have no way of knowing. Whatever the cause, the fight that rolled back and forth across the lobby was so fierce that furniture, vases and windows were smashed with abandon and the fun only stopped when the police arrived in force.

I was still thinking about these sources for my wedding scene when an old school friend who returned to the north-east a few years ago sent me by email a joke about an Irish wedding. (Am I going to tell it to you? I think not; if I were to list the best Irish jokes I’ve ever heard this one would not get into the top one thousand). I told him my stories and he responded with this:

There was one in this area a couple of weeks ago where the bride to be gave birth at Hexham Hospital,  then discharged herself and the baby immediately so they could all leap into a van headed for their wedding at Gretna Green.  The party then went to the Anglers Arms at Kielder village (very remote) where the groom “glassed” the best man and they all ended up in jail.

How accurate a rendition of the true story that may be I have no way of knowing but it does leave me a little depressed when I contemplate the scene I have to write. To be taken seriously, fiction must bear at least some relationship with what people see as fact. When weddings in real life give rise to this sort of thing, how is the poor author supposed to compete with reality?

Zappa’s Mam’s a Slapper has had some nice reviews, but I particularly liked this one on Amazon.com from Mr JJ Drabble, because he understood what I was doing and why I was doing it that way and you don’t always get that:

Five Stars

I have the opportunity to read few books these days, so I give little truck to efforts which don’t have the appeal to grab and hold me within the first couple of chapters. Zappa’s Mam’s a Slapper got its hooks in quickly and refused to let go. Billy (real name Zappa) tells his story in a manner that leaves the reader feeling as though they are sitting in a cafe while he unveils his life directly to them. In an unusual writing style, Lynch often has Billy expose the reader to a key fact from later in the story. On the first couple of occasions I thought “Whoa, that’s a spoiler! Don’t tell me that at this stage.” But it works. And rather than a string of spoilers it carries the story along in a series of rolling exposures and “ah-ha” explanations. Another interesting style is the use of very brief sentences peppered through the early story, tapering off to a more measured flow later as Billy’s life moves from the chaos of an existence with his shambolic family to a life driven more by his abilities. The early days of complete household anarchy and pointless bashings give way to Billy having his life controlled and “art directed” by others, most of whom have gains of their own to be made from his qualities and talents, albeit gains that also benefit Billy. The ending, although tragic, is rather satisfying and leaves the reader with sense of time well spent on the read. It was a three day book for me, and this is not a measure of brevity, but of its compelling nature. I see a movie here.