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Some archery with Jim Mountfield

 

© The Sirens Call

 

Underneath the Arches, a short horror story I wrote a long time ago, is among the 167 pieces of fiction and poetry that appear in the newly-published Winter 2023 / 2024 edition of the magazine The Sirens Call.  The story was inspired by the arched cavities along the western side of the graveyard behind the Church of St John the Evangelist, which stands at the junction of Princes Street and Lothian Road in central Edinburgh.  In August each year – Edinburgh Festival time – the church’s grounds become the home of an art, crafts and design fair.  Stalls set up shop in the area between the church and its graves of illustrious, well-heeled Edinburgh citizens of times past.  According to its Facebook account, this is now known as the West End Fair.

 

What caught my fancy when I first encountered the St John’s craft fair in the late 20th century was how those western arches, underneath Lothian Road, had been drafted into use too.  During August, they became mini-shops, out of which vendors sold their wares to the market’s customers.  Thus inspired, I wrote a macabre story about a young man who buys something from one of the arches and, inevitably, lives to regret it.  (Hint: the market is sited in a graveyard…  A place of the dead!)

 

When I was looking for something to submit to the latest edition of The Sirens Call, I stumbled across Underneath the Arches on my computer’s hard drive.  Talk about a blast from the past.  It’d obviously been written by a much younger version of myself, angsty, pretentious, and in thrall to Edgar Allan Poe (and, indeed, Franz Kafka).  Predictably, the story itself was pompous and overwrought, ridden with adjectives, adverbs, metaphors and similes.  I ended up cutting about 2000 words – 45 percent of its original length – out of it before I submitted it.

 

Reading it now, I have to say I wish I’d been even more stringent in my editing of it.  There’s a sentence at the end where the word ‘ridge’ is used twice, and I manage to use ‘seemed to’ three times in the opening paragraphs.  (Coincidentally, the editor of a different publication recently told me: “Mark Twain famously said; ‘Anytime you have the urge to write the word ‘just’, use ‘damn’ instead, that way your editor will remove it for you.’ The same is true of the phrase ‘seemed to’.”)

 

Anyway, no matter.  As usual with my horror stories, Underneath the Arches appears under the pseudonym Jim Mountfield.  And available for free, with all sorts of ghoulish goodies loaded into its 253 pages, the new issue of The Sirens Call is a rare bargain these days.  You can download it here.

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Some fleeting success for Rab Foster

 

© Swords and Sorcery Magazine

 

The January 2024 edition – Issue 144 – of Swords and Sorcery Magazine is now available online and it contains a new story by Rab Foster entitled The Fleet of Lamvula.  Rab Foster is the alias by which I write fantasy fiction and, by my calculations, The Fleet of Lamvula is the 20th piece of fiction I’ve had published under that name.

 

The first Rab Foster story to get into print was one called The Water Garden, which appeared in the now-defunct ezine Sorcerous Signals in 2010.  Back then, I thought fantasy – and particularly the sub-genre of it I enjoyed most, sword and sorcery – was something I might experiment with once or twice, but no more than that.  I certainly didn’t expect it to develop into a major strand of my writing, which it is today.  One thing that’s helped is the fact that there are a lot more outlets publishing sword and sorcery in 2024.  There seemed to be hardly any back then.  Let’s hope this happy situation continues.

 

The Fleet of Lamvula, to quote Swords and Sorcery Magazine’s new editorial, “is the tale of a band of mercenaries exploring a pirate fleet stranded on the bottom of a dried-up sea.”  The original idea for the story was an image of some explorers on camel-back crossing a psychedelically-coloured desert – the ‘dried-up sea’ angle hadn’t occurred to me yet – under a psychedelically-starry sky.  This image came to me one day while I was listening to the trippiest song of all time, 1970’s Planet Caravan by Black Sabbath.

 

Also shaping the story was the fact that I’m a sucker for ‘graveyards of lost ships’ stories.  Ships’ graveyards exist in real life, of course, but I find fantastical, fictional examples of them irresistible.  For instance, when I was 11 or 12, I thought the 1968 Hammer movie The Lost Continent, wherein a tramp steamer full of British character actors wanders into a Sargasso Sea ridden with marooned ships, monster crabs, monster octopi, carnivorous seaweed and the murderous descendants of Spanish Conquistadores, was the best thing ever.  The dreamy, Hammond-organ-heavy theme song by the Peddlers has a certain charm too.  I also love an outer-space variation on this trope, the episode Dragon’s Domain from the Gerry Anderson sci-fi TV series Space: 1999 (1975-77).  This had the crew of Moonbase Alpha stumbling across a sinister graveyard of lost spaceships, with a tentacled monstrosity lurking inside it.  Even when I was a kid, I knew Space: 1999 was a deeply silly show, but that episode still scared the crap out of me.

 

© Hammer Films / Seven Arts Productions

 

And one other source of inspiration for The Fleet of Lamvula was the film-work of one of my heroes, Ray Harryhausen…

 

For the next month, The Fleet of Lamvula can be read here, while the main page of Swords and Sorcery Magazine, Issue 144, is accessible here.

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Favourite Scots words, S – part 1

 

© Channel 4 Films / PolyGram Filmed Entertainment

 

Hot on the heels of my post about Robert Burns, here’s the latest in my series about favourite words in Scots, the language Burns wrote in.  Many Scots words begin with the letter ‘S’, so in this instalment I’m only going to list the first half of them.

 

Scaffy (n) – not, as you might expect, a scaffolder, but a streetcleaner or binman.

 

Scheme / Schemie (n) – a scheme is the Scottish word for a housing estate and schemie is the derogatory word for someone who lives on one.  One long-ago Saturday evening, while I was wandering around central Edinburgh, I went past a nightclub and was suddenly accosted by an upset young woman who demanded, “Dae I look like a schemie?”  Her supposed resemblance to a schemie was why the bouncer at the nightclub door had just turned her away.

 

Meanwhile, a much-quoted line from Irvine Welsh’s Trainspotting (1993) comes from Mark Renton when he turns up for a job interview: “They’d rather gie a merchant school old boy with severe brain damage a job in nuclear engineering than gie a schemie wi a Ph. D. a post as a cleaner in an abattoir.”

 

Scooby (n), as in ‘I havenae a Scooby’ – rhyming slang for ‘clue’.  Scooby refers to Scooby Doo, the famous American TV cartoon dog who first appeared in 1969, accompanying some ‘meddling kids’, without whose investigations many, many, many criminals “would have gotten away with it.”  I’ve seen arguments online about whether this started as Scottish rhyming slang and then spread to England, or started as Cockney rhyming slang and spread to Scotland.  But I’m sure I heard it in Scotland back in the 1980s, and it was appearing in Scottish newspapers in the 1990s, so its Caledonian pedigree is pretty venerable.

 

Scrieve (v) – to write.  Accordingly, a scriever is a writer.  “Just been doin’ a wee bit scrievin’ you know,” says Matt Craig, the main character and aspiring scriever in Archie Hind’s Glasgow-set novel The Dear Green Place (1966), which is as good an account of the trials and tribulations facing a working-class person trying to make a name as a writer, and a living from it, as Jack London’s better-known Martin Eden (1909).

 

© Corgi Books

 

Scunnered (adj) – sickened or disgusted.  During the 1980s and 1990s, this word was commonly used in Scotland on the mornings following general elections, when it became clear that a majority of people in Scotland had voted for the Labour Party and a majority of people in the south of England had voted for Maggie Thatcher’s Conservatives.  Guess who ended up ruling Scotland each time?  For a 21st-century variation on this, see the Brexit vote.

 

Sharn (n) – dung.  Yes, Dungeons & Dragons enthusiasts may know Sharn as a city that ‘towers atop a cliff above the mouth of the Dagger River in southern Breland’ in the fictional world of Eberron, but in Scots sharn refers to cow-shite.  That’s a warning to fantasy creators.  When you dream up names for your fantasy characters, creatures and places, be sure to check they don’t also mean something embarrassing in Scots.  Now please excuse me while I get back to writing my latest sword-and-sorcery epic wherein Glaikit the Barbarian rescues Princess Jobbie from the clutches of the Dark Lord Pishy-Breeks in the Kingdom of Boak.

 

Shauckle (v) – to shuffle along, barely raising your feet off the ground.

 

Sheuch (n) – a channel for removing wastewater, i.e., a gutter at the side of a street or a ditch at the side of a field. In William McIlvanney’s 1975 novel Docherty, the young hero Conn gets battered by his school’s headmaster for saying to him, “Ah fell an bumped ma heid in the sheuch.”  The fact that he doesn’t use the ‘correct’ word, gutter, is seen as ‘insolence’.  Early in the 20th century, when the events of Docherty take place, Scottish schoolkids would be punished for using Scots rather than the King’s English.  The only day in the year when Scots was acceptable in schools was January 25th, Robert Buns’ birthday, when they were made to recite the poetry of their national bard.

 

© Canongate Books Ltd

 

Incidentally, in Northern Ireland, where I spent my childhood, a sheuch seemed to be only a ditch.  My dad was a farmer and once or twice I heard him cry, “There’s a cow got stuck in the sheuch!”  And the North Channel – the strip of water above the Irish Sea that separates Scotland and Northern Ireland – was called ‘the Sheuch’ and the land-masses east and west of it termed ‘baith sides o’ the Sheuch.’

 

Shieling (n) – a hut or shelter for animals, usually out in the wilds and / or up in the hills.

 

Shilpit (adj) – thin, pale and weak-looking.

 

Shoogly (adj) – wobbly.  To hang on a shoogly peg means to be in dodgy, precarious or dire circumstances.  Since the arrival of the ineffectual and accident-prone Humza Yousaf as First Minister of Scotland, it’s fair to say the peg the electoral fortunes of the Scottish National Party hang on has been pretty shoogly.

 

Skean–dhu (n) – the Anglicised (or Scotticised) version of the Gaelic term sgian-duhb, meaning the ceremonial dagger that’s tucked behind the top of the hose in male Highland dress.  Considering the popularity of Highland dress at Scottish weddings, and the amount of alcohol consumed at them, it’s always surprised me that the country has avoided having a sky-high death-toll of wedding guests stabbed with skean-dhus in drunken altercations.

 

From wikipedia.org / © Stubborn Stag

 

Skelf (n) – a splinter.

 

Skelp (n / v) – to slap or a slap.  Skelps were often administered by parents and teachers to wayward kids back in the days, fondly remembered by the Daily Mail and Daily Express, when it was believed that assaulting children was good for them.

 

Skite (n / v) – also to strike someone or the blow thereof.  However, a skite is more likely to come from a sharp, stinging cane or stick than the open hand that delivers by a skelp.  Both are nicely onomatopoeic words, in their different ways.

 

Skoosh (n / v) – a squirt or spray of liquid.  A commonly heard exchange in Scottish pubs: “Dae ye want water in yer whisky?”  “Aye, but just a wee skoosh.”

 

Sleekit (adj) – according to the Merriam Webster dictionary, either ‘sleek’ and ‘smooth’ or ‘crafty’ and ‘deceitful’.  Presumably it was with the first meaning that this word got immortalised in a line of Robert Burns’ 1785 poem To a Mouse: “Wee, sleekit, cow’rin, tim’rous beastie…”  Nowadays, it’s used mainly with the ‘crafty’ and ‘deceitful’ application.  I can think of many politicians I’d describe as sleekit, but I won’t mention any names.

 

From members.parliament.uk

 

Smeddum (n) – in physical terms, a powder.  However, smeddum has also come to mean the kernel or essence of something, and presumably from that to mean its vigour, spirit, determination or grit too.  Robert Burns – him again – had the first meaning in mind when he wrote about ‘fell, red smeddum’, possibly referring to red precipitate of mercury, in his 1785 poem To a Louse.  Whereas Lewis Grassic Gibbon was thinking of smeddum’s spiritual denotation when he made it the title of his most famous short story, about a hard-working Scottish matriarch called Meg Menzies who takes no shit from anyone.  As Meg herself says: “It all depends if you’ve smeddum or not.”

 

Smirr (n) – a drizzly rain falling in small droplets.  This sad, ghostly word perfectly describes the sad, ghostly semi-rain that sometimes seems to envelop Scotland’s landscapes 365 days of the year.

 

Snaw (n) – snow.  Like snaw aff a dyke is a simile commonly used to describe something that disappears, or is disappearing, super-fast: for example, jobs for life, polar icecaps, cashiers in supermarkets, CD and DVD drives in laptops, Twitter’s credibility after Elon Musk took it over, and Liz Truss premierships.

 

© Canongate Books Ltd

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Seven reasons why Robert Burns still rocks

 

From wikipedia.org / © Ron Waller

 

This is a revised and expanded version of a piece I had published one January 25th in the Arts section of Concrete, the students’ newspaper at the University of East Anglia, where I did a Master’s Degree many years ago.

 

Tonight, whisky will be guzzled, haggis devoured, bagpipes blasted and Scots-language poetry recited with gusto at thousands of special suppers and get-togethers around the globe.  This is because today, January 25th, is the 265th anniversary of the birth of Robert Burns, Scotland’s national bard and one of its most popular contributions to international culture.

 

Why, more than two-and-a-half centuries after he died at the age of 37, is Robert Burns such big deal?  Here are some reasons.

 

One.  Burns was a champion of the common man.  Born in humble circumstances, as one of seven children to a farmer in Ayrshire, he was much more in tune with the ordinary masses than any of his literary contemporaries.  The American poet Waldo Emerson described him as the poet of ‘the poor, anxious, cheerful, working humanity’.  The fullest expression of his egalitarian instincts was the song A Man’s a Man for a’ That (1795), which was adopted as an anthem by the anti-slavery abolitionist movement.  That, however, highlights an uncomfortable fact…

 

In 1786, Burns came within a hair’s breadth of travelling to Jamaica and taking up a job-offer as a bookkeeper on a sugar plantation – run on slave labour.  Burns’ defenders argue that as a young man at the time, pre-fame, facing destitution, and desperate to get out of Scotland, he probably didn’t consider the hideous moral implications of the job he was about to undertake.  Also, by 1792, he seemed aware enough of slavery’s horrors to pen The Slave’s Lament, which begins: “It was in sweet Senegal that my foes did me enthral / For the lands of Virginia-ginia, O.“  But the issue is murkier still, because Burns’ authorship of The Slave’s Lament has been disputed.

 

Anyhow, later, socialists claimed Burns as one of their own.  A 1929 translation of his works into Russian sold a million copies and the Soviet Union honoured him with a commemorative stamp in 1954.  However, Burns obviously had appeal for capitalists too, for there are allegedly more statues of him in North America than of any other writer.

 

Two.  Burns was a songwriter too.  Indeed, if anything, he is more pervasive as a songwriter than as a poet.  In addition to A Man’s a Man…, he put Auld Lang Syne on paper in 1788 – which, by virtue of being belted out at New Year celebrations everywhere, is arguably the most universally-sung song in the world.  In Japan it is played at everything from high school graduation ceremonies to evening closing-time in department stores.

 

Three.  Burns wasn’t afraid to criticise the moral and religious mores of his time.  His contempt for the censorious regime of Scotland’s Presbyterian Church was expressed most famously in Holy Willie’s Prayer (1785), wherein a supposedly pious pillar of the church prays to God and unwittingly reveals himself as a scheming, bitter, drunken hypocrite.  Particularly pathetic are his pleas to be forgiven for his lechery, which has targeted ladies by the name of Meg (“And I’ll ne’er lift a lawless leg / Again upon her”) and ‘Leezie’s lass’ (“…that Friday I was fou / When I cam near her”).  John Betjeman was so impressed by the conceit that he borrowed it for his 1940s poem In Westminster Abbey.

 

Four.  Burns has a massive cult that keeps his memory alive.  The first Burns societies began to congregate in his honour in about 1800, four years after his death. In 1859, the first centenary of his birth, almost 900 events were staged – 60 of them taking place outside Britain and the US.  Today, Burns societies are to be found everywhere from Rio de Janeiro to Tokyo and from Winnipeg to Jakarta.

 

It’s claimed that the Russians have more such societies than even the Scots do.  Well, in the unlikely of event of Vladimir Putin sticking his head into a Burns supper this evening, I hope he’s regaled with Burns’ 1792 rewrite of the song Ye Jacobites by Name, whose anti-war lyrics include: “What makes heroic strife? / To whet th’ assassin’s knife / Or hunt a parent’s life, wi’ bluidy war?”

 

From wikipedia.org / © Melissa Highton

 

Burns suppers on January 25th are marked by lusty recitals of his greatest poems, speeches and copious consumption of whisky and haggis.  Praised as the ‘great chieftain o’ the puddin’ race’ in Burns’ Address to a Haggis (1786), haggis is surely the only offal-based foodstuff to have a piece of world-class literature written in its honour.  No other writer is commemorated by a yearly celebration on this scale.  Dublin’s James Joyce-themed Bloomsday on June 16th doesn’t come close.

 

Five.  Burns invented the concept of the doomed, decadent romantic poet.  Long before Byron and Shelley were painting the towns of Europe red and proving themselves mad, bad and dangerous to know, Burns had earned himself a mighty reputation for dissipation, both in the pub and in the bedchamber.  His love of strong drink is obvious in poems like John Barleycorn (1782) while his promiscuity led to him siring at least a dozen children with at least four different women – a common jibe at the time was that you could see his face in every pram on Edinburgh’s Princes Street.

 

Six.  Burns is controversial.  And no doubt the arguments that have raged about him over the centuries have helped keep his fame alive.  Much debate has centred on whether or not someone with Burns’ obvious character flaws deserves such veneration.  At the beginning of 2009, just before the 250th anniversary of his birth, right-wing Scottish historian Michael Fry caused a storm when he denounced Burns as a ‘racist misogynist drunk’ who didn’t deserve to be presented to people as a role model.  Fry sounded a bit like a rock-and-roll era parent expressing concern about the examples the likes of Jim Morrison, Sid Vicious, Liam Gallagher, Pete Docherty, Amy Winehouse, etc., set for young people.

 

Seven.  Burns’ work has had a considerable influence on the English language and on English-language culture.  Here are a few examples:

 

Proverbs:

  • The best laid plans of mice and men will go astray (‘The best-laid schemes o’ mice an’ men gang aft agley’ / from 1785’s To a Mouse).
  • To see ourselves as others see us (‘To see ousel’s as ithers see us’ / from 1786’s To a Louse).
  • There is no such uncertainty as a sure thing (attributed to Burns).

 

Phrases:

 

Burns-inspired titles:

  • John Steinbeck’s novel, Of Mice and Men (1937).
  • R. James’ short story, reckoned by some to be the greatest ghost story in English literature, O, Whistle and I’ll Come to you my Lad (1904) – which is also the title of a 1793 Burns poem.
  • Ken Loach’s film, Ae Fond Kiss (2004) – which is also the title of a 1791 Burns song.
  • The Vin Diesel car-chase / street-racing movie The Fast and the Furious (2001) – ‘fast and furious’ was a phrase Burns coined in Tam O’Shanter.

 

All right, with that that last example, the producers may not have been aware of the Robert Burns connection when they chose the title.

 

© National Trust for Scotland / Robert Burns Birthplace Museum

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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.

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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

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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.

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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! Webzine.  The 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.

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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

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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.