David Stuart Davies, a world authority on Sherlock Holmes, has loved the great detective since he was a boy. Here he investigates how Conan Doyle first created Holmes — and why he began to plot his own character’s death.
Wrapping herself around cables so as to sleep and brushing her teeth in cattle cars, Cynthia Rogerson rode freight from San Francisco to Salt Lake City. She reflects on how those journeys, and the strategies she developed to endure them, continue to shape her fiction.
Travel writer Helena Drysdale has observed death rites in Tibet, Madagascar and Romania. Undergoing radiotherapy, she experiences the surge of life and the risk-taking excitement that also drives her writing.
Deep in the enchanted forest, tucked between Europe and Asia, people have gathered for centuries: Dionysian revelers, Orphic mystics, fire worshippers, Stalinists, anarchists and animalists. Kapka Kassabova is there to witness a Catholic ritual. But the forest’s pagan ways keep intruding: saints blend with sun gods, and historical time gives ways to the romance of eternal return.
Over too many beers one night in Sweden, watching video footage of pristine wrecks beneath the Baltic Sea, Roy Bainton learned about an eccentric British sea captain, responsible, at the command of his submarine, for sinking many a German ship. Thus began an obsession with Francis Cromie, World War I soldier, sailor and very likely spy, with Bainton determined to honour the forgotten hero.
Dorothy Parker claimed the Bloomsbury set painted in circles, lived in squares and loved in triangles. Our own obsession with Bloomsbury, as Nicholas Murray points out, seems to spiral — in spite of their old school privilege and elitism. Does Bloomsbury merit our continuing regard? Or were they just a bunch of vocal, self-boosting toffs, whose artistry has been seriously overvalued?
A serendipitous find can bring a writer’s research to life, as Deborah Chancellor discovered when she inadvertently rented slave cabins in North Carolina while working on a book about black abolitionist Harriet Tubman. As a riposte to those who believe that Wikipedia is the beginning and end of research, she argues for the benefits of immersing yourself in your subject.
Do reader’s care about seasonal lists? Heavy-duty books for Autumn and fluffy reads for the beach? Not a bit, says Katharine Grant. There was a time when seasonal publishing was dictated by the barges arriving laden with books; but with cheap printing, the re-order, and e-book, publishing seasons have become like fashion seasons: micro-sized and consumer led.
Hollywood’s recipe of the hero’s journey is concentrate of Joseph Campbell diluted via the commercial wisdom of ‘story consultants’. But what if we put a heroine in the frame? Does the schema of desire, jeopardy, prize-wresting, and finally, homecoming still hold? Nicola Baldwin thinks the journey is even more important for women, who invariably forfeit something along the way.
In 1817 Thomas Lovell Beddoes, later poet, physician and depressive, was sent to Charterhouse school in London’s Smithfield, where the slaughterhouses, open sewers and catgut factories fed his morbid and ‘moony’ disposition. In the psycho-geography of Beddoes’s dark metropolitan imagination, Ian Thomson traces the sources of both his poetry and his despair.