© Close to the Bone Publishing
Steve Cashel, the pseudonym I use when I write fiction set in Scotland and without any elements of the fantastic, has had a new story published in Close to the Bone Magazine. The magazine describes itself as “publishing weekly hard-hitting crime fiction since 2012”.
My story, entitled Last Laugh, doesn’t contain any crime that necessitates the involvement of the police force, detectives and / or private investigators. But it does concern behaviour that’s criminal in nature. It tells the tale of a man who suddenly finds himself reflecting on a boy he bullied in his schooldays, the bullying becoming more and more extreme until it got entirely out of hand. The story owes something to Good and Bad at Games, the 1983 British TV drama written by William Boyd and directed by Jack Gold, which was published with another of Boyd’s TV plays in a volume called School Ties in 1985.
Good and Bad at Games was based on Boyd’s experiences at the posh private school Gordonstoun, to which he was packed at the age of nine. Gordonstoun is famous for having helped to educate Prince Philip, the late Duke of Edinburgh, and his sons King Charles III, Prince Edward and Andrew Mountbatten-Windsor, the arsehole formerly known as ‘Prince’.
However, in Boyd’s introduction to School Ties, the author wrote that in his day the school was ”comparatively unknown and inexpensive, distinguished only by its remoteness (in the far north of Scotland), a reputation for its somewhat Spartan lifestyle (boys wore shorts throughout their school career) and the idiosyncrasies of the educational ethos of its founder, who thought a school could be run along principles laid down in Plato’s Republic.” Boyd also described being a small boy there, at the mercy of bigger boys, as being ”like a medieval peasant during the Hundred Years War. One never knew when another marauding army might march by, randomly distributing death and destruction.”
In a nod to Boyd, I made the imaginary posh school in Last Laugh a Scottish one, though in Edinburgh rather than the remote north. It takes both day-pupils, who are mostly Scottish, and boarders, who are mostly English, which doesn’t exactly enhance its social cohesion.
For now, Last Laugh can be read here, while you can access the home page of Close to the Bone Magazine here.
© Channel 4