It’s the pits for Rab Foster

 

© Literary Rebel, LLC

 

Rab Foster, the pseudonym under which I write fantasy fiction, has just had a story published in the magazine Savage Realms Monthly.  It’s entitled Pit of the Orybadak and is perhaps the bleakest, most violent and most despairing thing I’ve written as Rab Foster.  There’s a high body-count and although the hero Drayak Shathsprey (who’s appeared in several other of my published tales) makes it out alive, I put him through hell in this story.  No doubt the dark tone reflects the mood I was in when I wrote it, when I felt particularly fed up by events happening in the world and was losing my faith in humanity.

 

However, a kind reviewer on goodreads.com has described Pit of the Orybadak as “a harrowing tale of loss, survival, and monsters in the dark… a classic dark fantasy story.”  So, thank you for that, kind reviewer.

 

Pit of the Orybadak appears in Issue 25 of Savage Realms Monthly, which is the December 2023 edition and explains the image of the jovial barbarian wearing a Santa hat and brandishing a tankard of ale on its cover.  A slight delay in the publishing schedule meant that it didn’t become available until very recently.  You can purchase the paperback and kindle editions here.

 

And by the way, the issue also contains an interview with me, as Rab Foster, in which I identify my favourite sword-and-sorcery story ever.

The literary Bond revisited: Colonel Sun

 

© Vintage Publishing

 

Here’s the latest in a series of posts wherein I look at the original James Bond novels and short-story collections from the 1950s and 1960s.  This time, however, I’m looking at a Bond novel that wasn’t written by Ian Fleming.  It’s 1968’s Colonel Sun, by Kingsley Amis.  Why?  Well, I slagged off Amis’s The Old Devils (1986) on this blog a few months ago, and I feel a bit guilty about giving poor old Kingsley a (verbal) kicking then.  So here’s my take on Colonel Sun, which I believe is much better.

 

In some ways, the 21st century has been a difficult time for James Bond.  On the film front, the new century began with one of the worst Bond movies ever, 2002’s Die Another Day, an ignoble end to Pierce Brosnan’s tenure in the role.  And, though the franchise was steadied with the recruitment of Daniel Craig and a more serious, mature and sensitive approach to the character, trouble never felt far away.  See, for example, the long periods between productions – six years from Spectre (2015) to No Time to Die (2021) – and Craig’s well-publicised reluctance to play Bond again after Spectre.  And the fact that, in the most recent movie, the filmmakers took the unprecedented step of – MASSIVE SPOILER AHEAD! – killing him off at the end.

 

Plus, there’s been much talk in recent years about Bond’s ‘obsolescence’.  The thinking goes that as a privileged, white, stuck-up, sexist macho-man rooted in the early decades of the Cold War, Bond has become embarrassingly anachronistic in our more socially-aware era today.  Laurie Penny, for instance, said as much in a New Statesman article in 2015.  There’s a parallel argument that in the high-tech modern world Bond is obsolescent too.  This was even referred to in Spectre, when Bond is faced with a new, tech-obsessed superior called C (Andrew Scott).  C vows to “bring British intelligence out of the dark ages, into the light” and argues that “an agent in the field”, like 007, can’t “last long against all those drones and satellites.”

 

And yet, no matter how unfashionable Bond might be nowadays, you can’t deny that well-regarded modern writers are still keen to follow in Ian Fleming’s footsteps and have a go at writing new Bond novels.  These include Sebastian Foulkes (with 2008’s Devil May Care), Jeffery Deaver (with 2011’s Carte Blanche), William Boyd (with 2013’s Solo) and Anthony Horowitz (with 2015’s Trigger Mortis and 2018’s Forever and a Day).  Long before Foulkes, Deaver, Boyd and Horowitz got in on the act, though, another writer attempted to construct a novel around Fleming’s legendary superspy.

 

In 1968, just four years after Fleming’s death, Kingsley Amis wrote a Bond adventure called Colonel Sun and published it under the pseudonym Robert Markham.  By then, Amis was a big noise in British letters thanks to works like 1954’s Lucky Jim and 1960’s Take a Girl Like You.  I should say my 2015 Vintage Classics edition of Colonel Sun makes no mention of Robert Markham on its cover and advertises it unapologetically as a Kingsley Amis novel.  Anyway, before I offer my thoughts on Colonel Sun, here’s another spoilers warning.  There are lots of them ahead…

 

© Ian Fleming Publications

 

The novel is set a little while after the events of Fleming’s Bond swansong, The Man with the Golden Gun (1965), which Amis is rumoured to have polished up when Fleming died before he could revise it himself.  It begins with an audacious attempt by some unidentified villains to kidnap both Bond and his secret-service boss M.  They’re only half-successful.  M is abducted and whisked out of England, but Bond manages to elude his would-be abductors and is tasked with tracking M down.  He soon homes in on an island in the Aegean Sea.  There, M is being held by a Chinese officer, ‘Colonel Sun Liang-tan of the Special Activities Committee, People’s Liberation Army’.

 

The Colonel has a dastardly plan.  The Soviet Union is hosting a secret international conference in the area and Sun plans to destroy it and the delegates in a mortar attack, the blame for which will then be pinned on Britain.  Sun intends to make it look like one of the last mortars blew up accidentally, before firing, and leave Bond and M’s dead, but still identifiable, bodies in the wreckage.  Thus, China will benefit from the discrediting not only of the USSR for sloppy security, but also of the UK for warmongering.

 

To rescue M and thwart Sun’s scheme, Bond joins forces with a woman called Ariadne Alexandrou, a Greek communist who’s been working for the Soviets; and a Greek World War II veteran called Niko Litsas who, after fighting Nazis, fought communists during the 1946-49 Greek Civil War.  Amis discreetly skates over Britain’s sorry role in this episode of Greek history.  In 1944 the British government decided to back the anti-communist faction in Greece against the left-leaning one, even though the former faction contained many Nazi sympathisers and collaborators and the latter contained many partisans who’d fought for the Allies.  Despite their ideological differences, the trio bond – ouch – and are soon prowling the Aegean Sea in a vessel called The Altair whilst figuring a way of taking the fight to Sun and his many henchmen.

 

Amis’s plot is generic and a few things don’t make sense.  For example, why does Sun want to plant the elderly and normally deskbound M at the scene of the crime?  This is the literary M we’re talking about, not the feistier and more empowered cinematic version played by the likes of Judi Dench and Ralph Fiennes.  Wouldn’t it look more believable if the body of another, physically-able British agent was found there next to Bond’s?  It’s hard to see this as anything more than a perfunctory excuse for the novel’s main gimmick, the kidnapping of M.

 

But Colonel Sun is still good entertainment and feels more credible as a Bond novel than the other non-Fleming Bonds I’ve read.  For one thing, unlike the rather bland villains in most of the 21st century Bond-novels I mentioned above, Colonel Sun makes a memorable baddie.

 

© Methuen

 

Yes, he belongs to a long tradition of Oriental supervillains found in pulpy colonial adventure fiction – Sax Rohmer’s Fu Manchu books being the most notorious examples.  He’s not even the first bad guy in the Bond canon to follow this dubious blueprint, an honour that belongs to the titular character of Fleming’s Dr No (1957).  But Sun is splendidly eccentric.  He’s irritatingly polite and addresses friends and foes alike by their first names.  He also sees himself as an Anglophile: “Sun did not share his colleagues’ often-expressed contempt… for everything British.  He was fond of many aspects of their culture and considered it regrettable in some ways that that culture had such a short time left.”

 

Then there’s his penchant for torture.  Near the novel’s end, just before he lays into Bond with an array of kitchen utensils (‘knives, skewers, broom-straws’), he explains: “True sadism has nothing whatever to do with sex.  The intimacy I was referring to is moral and spiritual, the union of two souls in a rather mystical way.”  Later still, he surprises us when he confesses to Bond that “I didn’t feel like a god when I was torturing you back there.  I felt sick and guilty and ashamed.”

 

Admittedly, I could have done without the linguistic quirk that Amis gives him.  Thanks to his “quick ear and passionate desire to learn” English and a “total ignorance of the British dialect pattern”, he’s ended up with a bizarre accent combining the “tones of Manchester, Glasgow, Liverpool, Belfast, Newcastle, Cardiff and several sorts of London…”  As a result, every time Colonel Sun opens his mouth in the book, I imagine his voice sounding like an Artificial Intelligence one created from a dataset involving Liam Gallagher, Billy Connolly, Ringo Starr, Van Morrison, Jimmy Nail, Charlotte Church and Ray Winstone.

 

Colonel Sun also feels like a proper Bond novel because Kingsley Amis’s authorial voice doesn’t sound that different from Ian Fleming’s.  Putting it more crudely, it feels closer to the originals than the modern pastiches do because Amis was as much of a curmudgeonly snob as Fleming was.  By the 1960s, Bond’s rarefied world of Bentleys, dinner jackets and private members’ clubs were on their way out; and Amis bellyaches about it as you’d imagine Fleming would.  When Bond drives through some English farmland, he writes: “Places like this would last longest as memorials of what England had once been.  As if to contradict this idea, there appeared ahead of him a B.E.A. Trident newly taken off from London Airport, full of tourists bringing their fish-and-chip culture to the Spanish resorts, to Portugal’s lovely Algarve province, and now… as far as Morocco.”

 

Also activating Amis’s Licence to Grump is the prospect of the great, fish-and-chip-loving unwashed discovering the Greek islands.  Describing a waterfront, he observes: “At the near end were whitewashed cottages with blue or tan shutters and doors, then a grocery, a ship’s supplier, harbour offices, a tavérna with a faded green awning.  No neon, no cars, no souvenir shops.  Not yet.”

 

Still, some aspects of Colonel Sun are surprisingly liberal, considering Amis’s cranky right-wing politics.  Adriane, the book’s heroine, is resourceful and able to look after herself and Bond comes across as less of a sexist boor than one might expect.  Meanwhile, some Soviet characters are depicted sympathetically: for example, Gordienko, Moscow’s man in Athens, who believes Bond’s warnings that something fishy is afoot and will have bad consequences for both their countries; and Yermolov, the pragmatic, vodka-loving dignitary who at the end expresses the USSR’s gratitude to Bond for foiling Sun’s plan.  Indeed, Yermolov feels like a prototype for the tough but avuncular General Gogol, the KGB head played by Walter Gottel, who appeared in every Bond movie from The Spy Who Loved Me (1977) to The Living Daylights (1987).  In Colonel Sun, Yermolov even offers Bond the Order of the Red Banner; just as Gogol awards Roger Moore (‘Comrade Bond’) the Order of Lenin at the end of 1985’s A View to a Kill.

 

© Eon Productions

 

But before we assume that old Kingsley has gone all hippy-dippy and peace-and-love, we should bear in mind that the Soviets are the good guys here only comparatively – because the bad guys are the Chinese.  The novel even postulates that the West and the Soviet Union are on the brink of working together because of the increasing threat posed by China.  Richard Nixon’s jaunt to China in 1972 must have knocked that notion on the head.  Happily, by the time of the 1997 Bond movie Tomorrow Never Dies, which has Pierce Brosnan joining forces with Michelle Yeoh to take on Rupert Murdoch, sorry, an evil, fictional media mogul played by Jonathan Pryce, the Bond-verse had decided that the Chinese could be good guys too.

 

While Colonel Sun has never been filmed, it’s interesting how a few of its ideas have turned up in the Bond movies.  The kidnapping of M was a key plot element in 1999’s Tomorrow Never Dies, while a villain called Colonel Tan-Sun Moon features in Die Another Day.  And if Colonel Sun’s musings during the book’s climactic torture scene sound familiar – “Torture is easy, on a superficial level.  A man can watch himself being disembowelled and derive great horror from the experience, but it’s still going on at a distance…  a man lives inside his head.  That’s where the seed of his soul is…  So James, I’m going to penetrate to where you are.  To the inside of your head….” – it’s because they were used as dialogue in Spectre, during the scene where Christoph Waltz violates Daniel Craig’s skull using a torture device that looks like a dentist’s drill on a robotic tentacle.

 

In Spectre, Waltz’s character is revealed as being none other than Ernst Stavro Blofeld.  Having James Bond’s great arch-enemy borrow his best lines?  Colonel Sun would have been flattered.

 

© Eon Productions

Instagrammers at the gates of dawn

 

 

One nice thing about 2023 was that my partner and I managed to have a couple of international holidays for the first time since the start of the pandemic.  Here’s a dispatch about Bali, which we visited in June.  In it, your grumpy blogger makes a few uncomfortable discoveries about the nature of 21st century vacationing. 

 

Not having done much research about Bali beforehand, I knew little about Lempuyang Temple other than that it provided a spectacular view, especially at sunrise, and was on every visitor’s must-see list.  Two days after arriving in Bali, we embarked on our first tour and Lempuyang was the first thing on the schedule. The tour began at a fiendishly early hour. Our tour-guide collected us at four o’clock in the morning and we spent the next two hours in his vehicle, speeding along dark, mostly-empty roads to make sure we got to the temple early.

 

Just before six, we arrived at Lempuyang’s car-park, changed to a miniature, open-sided shuttle-bus, and were transported up to the temple’s reception area. We were given sarongs to wear, to comply with the place’s etiquette. Then we had to ascend a steep slope on foot to the temple proper. It wasn’t that long ago, we were told, that there was no shuttle-bus and visitors had to walk the whole way from the car-park, which would have been a slog.

 

 

We emerged onto a flat area that had at its back three stone staircases climbing to three doors.  Presumably, the stairs and doors led to the temple’s inner sanctum, which was out of bounds to visitors. They were extremely ornate.  The doors at the top, bathed in shimmering white light, were set in stone frames that resembled gothic pagodas.  But the most striking features were the stone dragon-heads flanking the staircases at the bottom.  Each had a lantern glowing within its jaws, so that crimson light seeped out through its fangs – though the straggles of stone in their maws looked less like fangs and more like the baleen of plankton-feeding whales.  In the pre-dawn darkness, the lanterns’ glow made the heads blurry and ephemeral. It was as if they weren’t made of stone, but of still-malleable lava.

 

At the other end of the area was a classical Balinese temple candi bentar (split) gate.  Its outer sides were steep and tiered, with decorous, upward-curling prongs, while its inner surfaces were vertical and blank. As the sky beyond changed colour from black to an ashy blue-grey, then to indigo, and then to a paler but smoky shade of blue, the sacred Balinese volcano Mount Agung became visible in the distance. The two sections of the gateway framed its rounded summit with perfect symmetry.  Alas, the view rapidly clouded over and the mountain vanished again.

 

 

On the area’s other two sides were lengths of roofing, held up by wooden columns, white lights shining along their edges. Sitting under these roofs were a growing number of tourists, half of them Westerners, half of them Asians, nearly everyone accompanied by Balinese guides.  We’d all come for a supposedly crucial part of the Balinese tourist experience – getting your photo taken in Lampuyang’s split gateway or, as it’s called, ‘the Gates of Heaven’.

 

Once the sun had risen, a crew of local guys started taking photos of each tourist, or couple, or group, while they posed between the Gates of Heaven.  Ideally, this would have been with Mount Agung as a backdrop, though by this point it was no longer visible.  I’d read complaints online from people who’d had to wait for hours until their turn to get photographed.  This explained the roofing.  Later in the day, with long queues, people would need shelter from the blazing Bali sun while they waited.

 

Our guide had whisked us there so early that we were number 12 in the queue.  We should only have to wait a few minutes, get a quick picture snapped of us, and then be on our way to the next place on our itinerary.  Right?  Wrong.  It wasn’t that straightforward. The subjects of the photos were allowed to strike a number of poses within the gates.  And many of them milked that.  They posed endlessly.  I suppose this was our first encounter with the culture of the Instagrammers and social-media ‘influencers’ who infest Bali these days and clog up the Internet with images, clips and accounts of their marvellously exotic, interesting and well-travelled lives.

 

Some cringy poses were struck.  I was particularly irked by one where the poser (in all senses of the term) would turn, show their back to the camera and point meaningfully towards Mount Agung in the distance – not that you could see it today, buried in the murk – as if they were an explorer who’d just discovered it.  Also annoying was a pose popular among couples.  He’d lean against one side of the gateway, she’d lean against the other, and both would look quizzically towards the camera.  As if to say: Ain’t we a kooky couple?  (Well, no…)  Or one where the person or people simply jumped.  They’d spring up and be pictured in mid-air with arms and legs splayed, looking like characters in a 1940s Warner Brothers cartoon being zapped by a powerful electrical shock.

 

To get your photographs, you handed your phone to the team of locals and they snapped you with its camera.  It was rather a cheat, incidentally, that the photographer took the pictures with the phone positioned above a horizontal mirror.  This created the impression that you and the gateway were standing at the edge of a pool of crystal-clear water, with a perfect reflection plunging beneath you.

 

Finally, our turn came.  As all the previous subjects had done the jumping thing, and the photographer was in the habit of shouting “Jump!” in the middle of each photo-shoot, I gave him a stony stare when I handed over my phone and intoned, “No jumping.”  So he took a few pictures and we struck a few affectionate poses within the gates – holding hands, embracing, nothing fancy. But he kept taking photos and kept telling us to strike new poses. We quickly ran out of ideas, and had to improvise, and ended up looking dorky.  What an ordeal.  This exhibitionism was not our cup of tea.  Of course, all the social-media butterflies who’d come had probably spent days beforehand planning, deciding on and rehearsing the many poses they were going to make.

 

 

That was the main business out of the way, thankfully.  Afterwards, we and our guide took a wander through the lower levels of the temple.  I thought the Gates of Heaven actually looked better from below.  They stood imposingly at the top of a grand flight of stone steps and above stone terraces adorned with clumps of ferns and clusters of white and red flowers.  More dragon-heads loomed here too.  A couple of chickens were making their way up the steps at the time, and I hoped some Instagrammer / influencer, narcissistically posing for photos in the gateway, would have their shots disrupted by the poultry sticking their heads over the threshold behind them.

 

As we descended the steep slope, to be picked up again by the shuttle-bus, the cloud obscuring Mount Agung furled itself into a long, white strand and revealed the volcano’s slopes and summit in their immense, pale-blue glory.

 

 

A treat awaited us.  Our next stop was a more rewarding tourist attraction: Tirta Gangga Royal Water Garden.

Rab Foster gets rebooted

 

© Schlock! Webzine

 

The second and final part of my short story The Boots of the Cat, which like all the fantasy fiction I write bears the penname of Rab Foster, can now be read in Volume 18, Issue 3 of the monthly ezine Schlock! WebzineThe Boots of the Cat describes the adventures, or misadventures, of four mercenaries who decide to execute a ‘heist’ after their fighting force, the Legion of Beasts, is sequestered in a wet, unwelcoming and snootily bourgeoisie city.

 

Its first instalment, which appeared last month, finished with the trope known as ‘the Bolivian Army ending’, which according to tvtropes.org “occurs when the main characters face insurmountable odds which, for once, they actually seem unable to surmount.  The trope is named for Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid – based on both the end of the movie, and the title characters’ real-life ending.  This trope usually leaves out the actual demise of the protagonists, ending just as they face the fire…”  For other examples of the Bolivian Army ending, see the final episode of Blake’s 7 (1978-81), the final episode of Blackadder Goes Forth (1989), and the fourth-last episode of Breaking Bad (2008-13) when Hank (Dean Norris) and Gomie (Steven Michael Quezada) find themselves facing Uncle Jack (Michael Bowen) and his army of gun-toting neo-Nazis.

 

Let’s hope, then, that readers tuning in for the second instalment of The Boots of the Cat aren’t disappointed.

 

During January 2024, Part 2 of The Boots of the Cat can be read here.  The main page of Schock! Webzine, Volume 18, Issue 3, bearing the image of Caravaggio’s Medusa (1596-97), is accessible here.

My 2023 writing round-up

 

© Aphelion

 

2023 was not a great year for me personally or professionally.  And for the sake of my sanity, I’d prefer not to think of what went on in the wider world during the past year.  Mind you, with Lord Sauron’s orange twin looking likely to retake the White House in November and all that could ensue from that – the USA plunging into authoritarianism, civil disorder and even civil war, the emboldening of other fascists around the world, Ukraine being handed over to Trump’s buddy and idol Vladimir Putin, the end of humanity’s chances to do anything to alleviate the unfolding climate catastrophe – I have a feeling 2023 might retrospectively seem a nice year compared to the one that’s coming.

 

But on the other hand, 2023 was a successful one in terms of my writing.  In fact, it was my best-ever year and I managed to have 15 short stories published.  Usually, in a year, about a dozen of my pieces of fiction make it into print.

 

Here’s a round-up of my stories that were published in 2023, with details of who published them, which pseudonym they were published under, and where you can find them.

 

As Jim Mountfield:

  • Jim Mountfield, the penname under which I write macabre fiction, made his first 2023 appearance at the start of January.  Temple Street, a cosmic-horror story involving strangely-animate shadows in the northern Sri Lankan city of Jaffna, was published in Schlock! Webzine Volume 17, Issue 6.  The issue can be purchased here.
  • March saw the publication of my story Wool – the first of three I had published in 2023 that were set on a farm in southern Scotland and informed by my experiences of living on one in my youth – in Issue 61 of The Sirens Call. This one had a futuristic setting and explored what livestock-farming might be like a few years from now.  Possibly better for ‘real’ animals.  Not good for the genetically-engineered, supposedly-mindless ones that take their place in the production of meat, wool and other animal products.  And fatal for human beings if those genetically-engineered surrogates decide to rebel one day.  Issue 61 can be downloaded here.
  • I wasn’t sure if my story The Lost Stones would ever see the light of day, as its ingredients could best be described as ‘eclectic’.  At worst, they could be described as ‘barmy’.  It featured a Rolling Stones cover band, the Lost Stones of the title.  It also incorporated some folklore from the Rif Mountains of Morocco.  And it was set in the northern Japanese city of Sapporo during its snowbound wintertime.  However, in May, The Lost Stones was accepted for the Long Fiction section of Aphelion.  Furthermore, the story was one of the Long Fiction editor’s best-of-the-year picks of 2023 and is featured again in the current December 2023 / January 2024 issue of Aphelion.  For the next month, it can be read here.

 

© The Sirens Call

 

  • Issue 63 of The Sirens Call, published in June, had a special theme – cryptids, which the Merriam-Webster dictionary defines as “an animal (such as Sasquatch or the Loch Ness Monster) that has been claimed to exist but never proven to exist.” I penned a short story about cryptids entitled The Watchers in the Forest, which made the cut.  Issue 63 can be downloaded here.
  • October 2023 was a bumper month for Jim Mountfield, as his name appeared on three short stories published in the run-up to Halloween. Actually, Halloween figured heavily in the first of these, The Turnip Thieves, about a Scottish hill farmer who takes umbrage at what he believes are kids from the local town stealing his ‘neeps’ (turnips) to make Halloween lanterns.  This being a scary story, the thieves aren’t really kids.  The Turnip Thieves was among the contents of Volume 17, Issue 15 of Schlock! Webzine, which can be purchased here.
  • Later that month, my story One for the Books was included in the anthology Nightmare Fuel: Mind Terrors 2023 from the publisher Cloaked Press.  One for the Books was a tale of madness set in a second-hand bookshop, the inspiration for which came from the real-life Armchair Books at 72-74 West Port in Edinburgh, which I remember as a place of wonderful clutter, chaos, nooks and crannies, and vertiginously-high shelves.  Nightmare Fuel: Mind Terrors 2023 can be obtained here.

 

© Cloaked Press

 

  • And another ‘farm-horror’ story, The Shelterbelt, made it to publication just before Halloween. As the title suggests, the story was about a belt of trees, adjacent to a farmstead, designed to protect it against the elements… and containing a dark secret.  The Shelterbelt was included in Issue 3 of Witch House, which can be downloaded here.
  • Finally on the Jim Mountfield front in 2023, November was when my story A Man about a Dog appeared in Issue 8 of The Stygian Lepus.  Superficially about a person with some inexplicable healing powers, it was really about how people mistreat dogs and, indeed, about how people mistreat other people.  Issue 8 can be accessed in the magazine’s back-catalogue section, here.

 

As Rab Foster:

  • In 2023, Rab Foster, the pseudonym I use when I write fantasy – and usually the sweaty, rowdy sub-genre of fantasy known as sword and sorcery – first surfaced in March.  This was when The Pyre of Larros, a tale inspired in part by the death of Queen Elizabeth II the previous year (and by how Britain reacted to her death), appeared in Issue 133 of Swords and Sorcery Magazine.  The story can now be read in the magazine’s archive, here.
  • And it was in Issue 138 of Swords and Sorcery Magazine, in July, that the next Rab Foster story was published.  The Gibbeting of Azmyre not only appeared in the same magazine as The Pyre of Larros but it featured the same main character – the mercenary swordsman Drayak Shathsprey, who this time gets involved in a plot to steal the corpse of an executed criminal from its gibbet in a snowy city-square.  The setting was inspired by the old-town area of Edinburgh, which at one time was a hub for the nefarious practice of bodysnatching.  Again, The Gibbeting of Azmyre is now in Sword and Sorcery Magazine’s archive.  You can read it here.
  • A different Rab Foster character, Cranna the Crimson, was featured in the story Vision of the Reaper. This was among the items selected for the Cloaked Press anthology Fall into Fantasy 2023, which appeared in September.  It pitted Cranna against some supernatural and sorcerous skulduggery happening in a giant wheatfield.  A copy of Fall into Fantasy 2023 can be obtained here.

 

© Cloaked Press

 

  • The first instalment of my two-part opus The Boots of the Cat appeared in Volume 18, Issue 2 of Schlock! Webzine at the beginning of December.  Describing the events set in motion by a vain mercenary, nicknamed the Cat, trying to retrieve his lost boots, this story was inspired by a famous fairy tale – but not, as you might expect, Puss in Boots.  To read this issue of Schlock! Webzine, buy it here.
  • And mid-December saw the arrival of Issue 8 of the magazine Whetstone, which contained my story The Ghost Village – described by the editor as straddling ‘the line between folk horror and sword and sorcery’, and owing a little of its premise to the Thai tradition of spirit houses. The issue can be downloaded here.

 

As Steve Cashel:

  • Steve Cashel, a pseudonym I’d last used in 2011, was resurrected in 2023.  His name appeared at the top of The Folkie, a violent story about some young, would-be gangsters and a mysterious old folk-musician whom they encounter in a dingy, central-Edinburgh pub.  The Folkie was published in November in Close 2 the Bone, an ezine devoted largely to crime fiction, and can be accessed here.

 

As Paul McAllister:

  • Meanwhile, Paul McAllister was a penname I really hadn’t used for a long time.  He’d last appeared in the mid-1990s and I’d never expected to exhume him.  However, when my story The Magician’s Assistant, based on some experiences I’d had as a kid in Northern Ireland in the 1970s, was included in the collection Winter Wonderland 2023: Bindweed Anthology in December, it seemed right to attribute it to Paul McAllister.  This was the sort of fiction I’d written under his name in the past.   To buy your copy of Winter Wonderland 2023: Bindweed Anthology, go to Amazon UK here or Amazon US here.

 

So, to recap.  2023 was a vintage year for my writing, even though the year sucked in all other respects.  Indeed, it seems the more successful my writing career gets, the more the world turns to shit.  Could these two things be causally related?

 

If that’s the case…  Well, sorry folks.  I’m going to keep on writing.  You’ll have to keep on suffering.

 

© Schlock! Webzine

Merry Christmas from Singapore

 

 

I don’t know if all Singaporeans love Christmas, but one thing’s for certain.  All Singaporean department stores love Christmas.  For instance, Tanglin Mall, which isn’t far from my workplace, has had a big Christmas tree up in front of its entrance since October.  That was before I’d even considered hanging up my orange, pumpkin-shaped fairy lights for Halloween.  Evidently, making a few extra bucks out of the festive season by starting it in mid-autumn was too good an opportunity to miss.

 

Meanwhile, the silvery monster of a Christmas tree pictured above this entry was to be found in the lobby of a much larger mall, Takashimaya.  (I’m absolutely not a fan of shopping centres, but Takashimaya has the saving grace of being home to Singapore’s best bookshop, Kinokuniya.)  When I was in there yesterday, I couldn’t believe the number of people who were swarming around the base of the tree, attempting to fit the thing into the backgrounds of their selfies.

 

Of course, the madness of celebrating Christmas in Singapore, or in any country that’s not far off the equator, is that on one hand you’re surrounded by Christmas cards and Christmas decorations featuring snow, icicles, frozen lakes, carol singers wrapped in overcoats and woollen hats, sleighs, reindeer, and a thousand other cold, wintery things.  While on the other hand, the temperature outside is in the thirties and the ground feels hot enough to fry an egg on.  This crazy incongruity was nicely captured by the committee at my local Hawkers’ Centre*, who this year decided to erect their Christmas tree beside a palm tree.

 

 

But anyway…  A very Merry Christmas and Happy New Year to you all.

 

* A Hawkers’ Centre is a complex packed with stalls where you can buy all manner of food and drink at affordable prices.  In fact, in expensive Singapore, Hawkers’ Centres are probably the only places were foodies can indulge themselves without also bankrupting themselves.  

Rab Foster does some ghostwriting

 

© Spiral Tower Press

 

Rab Foster, the pseudonym under which I write fantasy – and usually the sweaty sub-genre of fantasy known as sword-and-sorcery – fiction, has just had a second short story published this month.  Entitled The Ghost Village, it appears in issue 8 of the magazine Whetstone from Spiral Tower Press.

 

Described by editor Jason Ray Carney as straddling ‘the line between folk horror and sword and sorcery’, The Ghost Village was inspired by Thailand’s San Phra Phum or, as they’re known in English, Thai spirit houses.  These are the miniature buildings you see outside nearly every Thai home and business, held aloft like bird-tables on wooden pillars, fragranced by smouldering incense sticks and often garlanded with flowers.  Their raison d’être is to provide accommodation for the spirits residing on the premises and to keep those spirits contented, so that they don’t move into the human building and cause ghostly high-jinks there.

 

Once, when I was in the northern Thai city of Chiang Mai, I was passing a construction site.  An old building had just been demolished and a new one was about to be built there.  Nearly everything in the area had been flattened and a digger was prowling around, removing the last of the rubble.  But remaining untouched and intact in the middle of the site were a pair of spirit houses.  Apparently, it’s a bad idea to destroy spirit houses and render their inhabitants homeless.  So even Thai developers who wouldn’t think twice about bulldozering an old human property need to exercise caution in how they treat the miniature dwelling next door to it.

 

 

I had long wanted to write a creepy story about Thai spirit houses, but was wary of penning something that used Thai people’s religious beliefs and cultural practices for a cheap scare.  As someone who’s lived long-term in Asia and Africa, I find stories that have Westerners blundering into ‘exotic’ – shorthand for ‘less civilised’ – countries where they run foul of some local deity, myth or piece of folklore extremely patronising.  Basically, they steal a bit of someone else’s culture to use as a monster or some other source of horror.  So, it made sense to me to take the basic concept of spirit houses – flesh-and-blood people maintaining a second house where beings from the incorporeal world can reside – and put it in a fantasy context instead. Then I could build up my own mythology around it.  What I ended up with was Rab Foster’s latest published story, The Ghost Village. 

 

For more information about Whetstone magazine, click here.  And issue 8, which contains my story and a dozen other works of short fiction and poetry, can be downloaded here for free.

The return of Paul McAllister

 

© Bindweed Anthologies

 

My writing career has seen some unexpected pseudonymous comebacks in late 2023.  Last month, I revived the pseudonym Steve Cashel for a Scottish-set crime story entitled The Folkie, which was published in the online magazine Close 2 the Bone.  Steve Cashel was a penname I’d used a couple of times in the past, most recently in 2011, for short stories that were set in Scotland and had non-horrific and non-fantastical plots.

 

Now Winter Wonderland 2023, the latest in a series of biannual anthologies from Belfast’s Bindweed Magazine, features a short story of mine called The Magician’s Assistant and the name on it is another pseudonym I used in the past and didn’t expect to use again: Paul McAllister.

 

In fact, I only used Paul McAllister once and that was a long time ago indeed.  In the mid-1990s I had a short story called The Darkness Under the Earth published in issue 97 of the venerable Northern Irish literary magazine The Honest Ulsterman, or HU as it was sometimes abbreviated to.  I’d heard that the magazine folded in 2003, but apparently it’s been revived and is on the go again as an online publication.

 

© The Honest Ulsterman

 

I suspected that my real name, Ian Smith, was too boring and non-descript to stick at the top of a story.  Besides, the well-known Scottish writer Iain Crichton Smith, who wrote in both English and Gaelic, was still alive then.  I’d known Iain Crichton Smith slightly, as he’d been the writer-in-residence at Aberdeen University during the last two years I’d studied there, and wanted to spare him the embarrassment of having my work confused with his…  As The Darkness Under the Earth was set in Northern Ireland and was being submitted to a Northern Irish publication, I figured I should stick a vaguely Northern-Irish-sounding name on it and decided on Paul McAllister.

 

In fact, The Darkness Under the Earth was only the second piece of fiction I had published, and it was the first piece to appear in a magazine that paid its writers.  Not that The Honest Ulsterman paid them lavishly.  I received a cheque for five pounds.  Also, I was a bit put-out to discover that the editor had sneakily made the cheque payable to ‘Paul McAllister’, not ‘Ian Smith’, which made it impossible for me to cash.  That cheque now resides in a box somewhere as a historic artefact.

 

Seeing as The Magician’s Assistant was set in Northern Ireland, was a straightforward story based on a couple of incidents I remembered from my childhood there, and had none of the usual horror or fantasy shenanigans I normally write about, I thought when I submitted it to Bindweed Magazine it would be fun to dust down the name of Paul McAllister and attribute it to him.  And hey presto.  Paul McAllister is suddenly back in print.

 

Containing 163 pages of fiction and poetry described as ‘experimental, offbeat and one of a kind’, Winter Wonderland 2023: Bindweed Anthology can now be purchased as a paperback at Amazon US, UK and Canada.  For details of how to read it on Kindle, click here.

How Terrance left a stamp on me

 

From downthetubes.net

 

If you were to draw up a list of great children’s authors of the 20th century, you’d no doubt end up with names such as Roald Dahl, Alan Garner, Tove Jansson, Clive King, C.S. Lewis, Astrid Lindgren, A.A. Milne, Philip Pullman and Rosemary Sutcliffe.  But you probably wouldn’t think of including Terrance Dicks, who passed away in 2019 at the age of 84.

 

Dicks made his name on television as a scriptwriter and script editor.  He was involved in TV shows like The Avengers (1961-69), Moonbase 3 (1973), Space 1999 (1975-77) and much-maligned ITV soap opera Crossroads (1964-88), and also in a raft of TV adaptations of classic literary works that the BBC broadcast on Sunday evenings and included Great Expectations (1981), Beau Geste (1982), The Hound of the Baskervilles (1982), Oliver Twist (1985), David Copperfield (1986-87) and Vanity Fair (1987).  But his most famous TV work was with the BBC’s long-running science fiction / fantasy show Doctor Who, which kicked off in 1963 and has recently celebrated its 60th birthday with a series of TV specials featuring Scottish actor David Tennant, returning to the role of the Doctor after 13 years, and Rwandan-but-also-Scottish actor Ncuti Gatwa making his debut in the role too.

 

Yet I suspect it was as a writer of books, not TV shows, that Dicks left his greatest legacy.  For he had a huge but unsung influence on the reading habits of British kids during the 1970s and 1980s.

 

Dicks served as script editor on Doctor Who from 1970 to 1975, when the title character was played by Jon Pertwee as an imperious, cape-and-bowtie-wearing, vintage car-driving, karate-chopping man of action.  He also contributed the occasional script to the show during the tenures of Pertwee’s immediate predecessor (Patrick Troughton) and successors (Tom Baker and Peter Davison).  However, it’s for his role as novelist-in-chief for Target Books’ Doctor Who series that I believe Dicks is most important.  The Target series turned most of the Doctor Who TV adventures from the 1960s, 1970s and 1980s into neat, collectible paperbacks, with attractive and colourful covers that were often courtesy of fantasy-artist Chris Achilleos.

 

© Target Books / Estate of Chris Achilleos

 

Back then, the BBC seemed disinterested in repeating past episodes of Doctor Who.  And if you were a fan of the show, as I was, there were no such things as whole-season box sets, Internet streaming or BBC iplayers, or indeed, DVDs or even video cassette tapes, to allow you to catch up with missed episodes.  And you often missed them, because the show was broadcast early on Saturday evenings, and Saturday was a school-free day when you’d be out of the house doing stuff.  Plus, there were many episodes you hadn’t seen because they’d been broadcast before you were even born

 

It didn’t help that the BBC wiped many of the early episodes featuring the first two Doctors, William Hartnell and Patrick Troughton, assuming that the tapes served no financial or cultural function and only took up unnecessary space in their storerooms.  Considering how the BBC has made millions since then selling the show and its memorabilia to worldwide audiences, they must be really kicking themselves about destroying those episodes now.

 

So, in those days, if you were a ten-year-old wanting to experience past adventures with past Doctors, your only option was to buy the Target novelisations, the majority of which were penned by Dicks in his simple, no-nonsense, fast-moving prose.  Admittedly, I think their quality tailed off a bit in later years as demand for them increased, and the backlog of un-novelised adventures grew greater, forcing Dicks to churn them out at a faster rate, but some of the ones he wrote in the 1970s were great and, even without the TV show behind them, would have stood up as excellent children’s books in their own right: for example, The Auton Invasion (1974), The Abominable Snowmen (1974), The Terror of the Autons (1975), The Three Doctors (1975), The Genesis of the Daleks (1976) and The Talons of Weng-Chiang (1977).

 

The only problem with Dicks’ books was that they tended to make the stories seem much more spectacular on the page than how they’d appeared on the screen.  One of Dicks’ paragraphs, coupled with a child’s imagination, could conjure up incredible settings – teeming utopian cities, vast gladiatorial arenas and huge bustling spaceports.  Whereas on TV these were really poky little BBC studio-sets, bare and shaky and obviously low-budget.  Meanwhile, the immense alien deserts, wastelands and battlefields evoked by Dicks’ prose were invariably, on TV, a big quarry outside London where the show seemed to do 80% of its outdoor filming.  Years later, when you finally got to see those old TV episodes that you’d previously only known through reading the novelisations, they disappointingly looked a bit rubbish.

 

At ten years old, and as a budding writer, I decided to follow Dicks’ example and write my own Target Books Doctor Who novelisation.  I made up my own TV adventure in my head and then wrote it as a book, by hand, in a hundred-page jotter.  I even added my own black-and-white illustrations every dozen pages or so.  The cover (again drawn by me) showed a giant, gauntleted fist grabbing hold of planet Earth.  The book was called Bloodlust of the Sontarans.  The Sontarans were war-like, potato-headed aliens who at that point had appeared on the show a couple of times to menace Jon Pertwee and Tom Baker’s Doctors.  When it was relaunched in 2005, the Sontarans were reintroduced during the Doctor-ship of David Tennant and one of them, played by Dan Starkey, even became a semi-regular character while Matt Smith and Peter Capaldi occupied the lead role.

 

© Target Books / Estate of Chris Achilleos

 

Two years later, I decided to produce my second Doctor Who novelisation, and for this one I became positively hi-tech.  My parents had given me a typewriter for Christmas, so with that I banged out about 130 paperback-sized pages and then taped them together.  There were no illustrations in this volume, but I drew a colourful, hopefully Chris Achilleos-style cover showing Tom Baker getting his head fried by a futuristic brain-washing machine.  This I titled Destruction of the Daleks and, yes, it featured the show’s number-one villains, the demented, eye-stalked, kitchen-plunger-waving, Nazi pepperpots, the Daleks.  The premise of this novel was that the Daleks had started to be killed off by a newly evolved virus and were going to extreme lengths to locate a cure for it.  I was peeved when, several years later, the BBC seemed to nick my idea and used it as the basis for an official Doctor Who TV adventure, Resurrection of the Daleks, which starred Peter Davison as the fifth Doctor.  I should have sued.

 

As I said, I’m positive Dicks’ books got a lot of kids (who otherwise would have been glued to their TV sets all the time) reading, even if it was the TV connection that got them to open the books in the first place.  And as I’ve suggested in the previous two paragraphs, he was also a big influence on kids who wanted to become writers themselves.  Decades later I still write stuff, and get the occasional thing published, and when I use certain words I find myself reminded of Dicks, who originally showed me how to use those words in certain ways.  For example, ‘croak’ instead of ‘said’, to describe a raspy voice – that came from Dicks using it in reference to the Daleks, who regularly ‘croaked’ the word “Exterminate!”  Or ‘wheezing’ or ‘groaning’ to describe a particular type of sound, like the one made by the Doctor’s space / time-ship, the Tardis, when it was materialising or dematerialising.

 

I ended up with a row of colourful Target / Doctor Who novels on my bookshelf.  I assumed it was just me who was geeky enough to possess such a collection, but then one day in the late 1980s I happened to be in the Edinburgh flat of one Dougie Watt, whom I knew fairly well back then and who is now a novelist and historian.  I noticed a similar row of Target books on his bookshelves too.  However, as Doctor Who was definitely not considered cool in those days, and labelling yourself a Doctor Who fan was about as damaging to your street credibility as announcing that you took a shower once a month or your all-time favourite musical act was Rick Astley, I tactfully pretended I hadn’t noticed them and avoided Who-shaming my friend.

 

After being relaunched in the 21st century, Doctor Who has had many established writers of books, comics, television and films falling over themselves to write either TV-show episodes or spin-off novels for it: for instance, Dan Abnett, David Bishop, Eoin Colfer, Jenny Colgan, Frank Cottrell Boyce, Paul Cornell, Neil Cross, Richard Curtis, Neil Gaiman, Mark Gatiss, A.L. Kennedy, Jamie Mathieson, Michael Moorcock, Patrick Ness, Kim Newman, Simon Nye, Robert Shearman and Toby Whitehouse.  In addition, the three ‘showrunners’ who’ve helmed ‘Nu-Who’ so far, Russell T. Davies, Stephen Moffat and Chris Chibnall – Davies is currently back in charge – all made their names as writers originally.  So it’s a writers’ show through and through.  And I suspect that reading Terrance Dicks’ books back in their childhood helped a good number of those people find their calling as writers.

 

Meanwhile, Russell T. Davies, if you’re reading this and fancy commissioning a script for the next season of Doctor Who with the title Bloodlust of the Sontarans, give me a call.

 

© Target Books / Estate of Chris Achilleos

The gallus John Byrne

 

From National Galleries Scotland / © Estate of John Byrne

 

According to my well-worn copy of the Collins Pocket Scots Dictionary, the word ‘gallus’ means ‘self-confident, daring and often slightly cheeky or reckless.’  Furthermore: “In Glasgow, the word is often used approvingly to indicate that something is noticeably stylish or impressive…  The word was originally derogatory and often meant wild, rascally and deserving to be hanged from a gallows.”

 

So, self-confident, daring, cheeky, reckless, stylish, impressive, wild and rascally?  ‘Gallus’, then, is surely the ideal word to describe the work of John Byrne, the Scottish artist, playwright and screenwriter who died at the end of last month aged 83.

 

Byrne’s art was bright, bold and always good fun.  When depicting human subjects, which it usually did, it wasn’t afraid to tip into the realm of caricature.  I suppose he could be accused of being a little narcissistic, seeing as his most common subject for portraiture was himself – a retrospective of his work in 2022 exhibited no fewer than 42 self-portraits – but then again, if you’re an artist with an interest in the human visage, your own visage, the one that stares back at you from every mirror, is the most readily available material to work on.  Also, Byrne happily treated his own features to the same caricature he did with other subjects, and didn’t flinch from detailing the ravages of time as he passed from youth into middle and then old age.

 

I particularly like this grizzled and extravagantly moustached self-portrait, which has a skeleton attempting a Muay Thai-type kick against his forehead, presumably in response to the sizeable cigarette he’s smoking.  Incidentally, a nicotine yellowness seems to tinge his white whiskers in places.

 

From wooarts.com / © Estate of John Byrne

 

His sense of humour is also apparent in Red and Unread, a portrait of actress Tilda Swinton, who was his partner from 1990 to 2004.  At first sight, it looks like Swinton is dancing a hornpipe in a traditional sailor’s outfit.  Then you notice the large stack of papers her posterior is resting on and the much smaller stack below her right foot.  Byrne meant the big stack to represent the scripts she’d turned down during her career, and the little stack to represent the scripts she’d agreed to do.

 

From National Galleries Scotland / © Estate of John Byrne

 

I wonder how differently Byrne’s own career would have gone if a commission he received in the late 1960s had worked out.  His early work caught the eye of the Beatles and they asked him to create the cover of their next album, to be called A Doll’s House.  Alas, A Doll’s House eventually morphed into 1968’s The White Album and Byrne’s cover was set aside in favour of the famously plain, white one designed by Richard Hamilton and Paul McCartney.  At least, a dozen years later, Byrne’s composition was used on the cover of a Fab Four album, the 1980 compilation The Beatles Ballads.

 

From wooarts.com / © Estate of John Byrne

 

However, shortly afterwards, plenty of other album-work came Byrne’s way, thanks to the patronage of various Scottish musicians: Gerry Rafferty, both solo and with his band Stealers Wheel; Billy Connolly, who started off as a musician who did a little comedy between songs and ended up as a comedian who did a little music between routines; and Donovan.  I particularly like this cover for the eponymous 1969 album by the folk-rock band the Humblebums, a partnership between Rafferty and Connolly.  This contains the song Her Father Didn’t Like Me Anyway, which I mentioned in my previous post about Shane MacGowan.

 

© Transatlantic Records / © Estate of John Byrne

 

Actually, Billy Connolly was a subject who, over the years, would be depicted several times on Byrne’s canvases.  Just three months ago, a mural based on a painting Byrne made of a now bespectacled and white-haired Connolly, and placed on the end of a building in Glasgow’s Osbourne Street in honour of the comedian’s 75th birthday, made the headlines.  Developers want to build a new block of 270 students’ flats on the site and plan to cover up the much-loved mural.  Aye, students’ flats.  I’m sure they’ll look lovely.

 

From twitter.com/Lost Glasgow / © Estate of John Byrne

From arthur.io / © Estate of John Byrne

 

Like the Glaswegian artist and writer Alasdair Gray, Byrne was a man of letters as well as one of images and he wrote for the stage and screen.  Perhaps he got a taste for stage-writing while working as a designer for Scotland’s legendary 7:84 theatre company during the early 1970s.  His best-known plays were the Slab Boys trilogy, whose instalments were first performed in 1978, 1979 and 1982, based on Byrne’s experiences working in a carpet factory near his hometown of Paisley after he’d left school in the 1950s.  In 1979, the original Slab Boys also became an episode of the BBC’s Play for Today (1970-84) drama-anthology series, with Gerald Kelly, Joseph McKenna and Billy McColl as the titular slab boys relentlessly flinging jokes, patter and insults at each other in an effort to prevent their work – having to grind and mix colours in a factory basement – from driving them crazy with boredom.

 

For television, he penned 1987’s tragi-comedy series Tutti Frutti, which helped make a star of Robbie Coltrane.  Coltrane plays Danny McGlone, drafted in to sing for an aging Scottish rock ‘n’ roll band called the Majestics after their original singer, Danny’s older brother, dies in a car accident.  The Majestics are truly on their last legs, thanks to their delusional guitarist Vincent Driver (Maurice Roëves), who believes himself to be ‘the iron man of Scottish rock’ but whose personal life is a vicious shambles, and the uselessness of the band’s shifty manager Eddie Clockerty (Richard Wilson).

 

At least Danny finds solace with another new band-member, guitarist Suzy Kettles (played by an also-up-and-coming talent at the time, Emma Thomson).  As Danny gradually falls for Suzy, the Majestics go from bad to worse and to beyond worse, with in-fighting, humiliation, depression, knifings, suicide and dental violence – Danny ends up taking a drill to Suzy’s abusive ex-husband, who’s a dentist.  Despite the show’s darkness, Byrne’s witty writing makes it hilarious.  Tutti Frutti is surely the best thing BBC Scotland has ever produced.  Looking at the channel’s woeful output nowadays, it’s probably the best thing it ever will produce too.

 

© BBC / Estate of John Byrne

 

A Byrne-scripted follow-up to Tutti Frutti, 1989’s Your Cheatin’ Heart, wasn’t as well-received as the previous show, though it did acquaint him with its star, Tilda Swinton, who’d be his partner for the next 14 years.

 

Meanwhile, reading the obituaries for Byrne, I’ve only just discovered that he also wrote scripts for the comedy sketch show Scotch and Wry, which showcased the talents of comedian and actor Rikki Fulton and featured such memorable comic characters as insufferable and incompetent Glasgow traffic policeman Andy Ross, aka ‘Supercop’ (“Okay, Stirling!  Oot the car!”), and unremittingly miserable Church of Scotland minister the Reverend I.M. Jolly.  Scotch and Wry ran for two full seasons from 1978 to 79, its popularity then spawned a series of specials that were broadcast every New Year’s Eve until 1992, and it became a Scottish institution.

 

And no doubt this Hogmanay, I’ll be raising a glass to the memory of the creative powerhouse that was the gallus John Byrne.

 

From wooarts.com / © Estate of John Byrne