Open Book

I'm on BBC Radio 4 at 16:00 Today (Sunday 17th June)

Literary London Special. How London has inspired writing and writers across the centuries.

Recorded in A Room for London, the creative / living space in the shape of a boat on top of the Queen Elizabeth Hall on the South Bank of the Thames, Open Book explores the impact the city has had on literature - from Chaucer and Dickens to Martin Amis and Peter Ackroyd; the themes it evokes and why it creates such a diverse backdrop to novels. Mariella Frostrup is joined by novelists who've all been charmed by London - Will Self, Amanda Craig, Dreda Say Mitchell and Ben Aaronovitch.

Although I've got to say describing Will Self as being charmed by London is a bit disingenuous. It was a really interesting experience and I'm hoping that they edit out the weird incoherent warbling sounds I make on occasion.

Forbidden Planet in 1 Weeks Time

When: Saturday 23 June 2012 16:00 - 17:00
Where: London Megastore, 179 Shaftesbury Avenue, London, WC2H 8JR
What: BEN AARONOVITCH will be signing the third novel in his superbly entertaining supernatural crime series WHISPERS UNDER GROUND at the Forbidden Planet London Megastore on Saturday 23rd June from 4 – 5pm. 
How: brought to you through the magic of real life.

And even more: I shall be reading from an exclusive short story 'The Home Crowd Advantage'

Guildford in 1 week!

An Evening with Ben Aaronovitch 
Another 'evening with' am I supposed to wear a jacket, a tie - will people want me to be witty? I've become so alarmed that I've started working up a routine.God knows what it's going to be like.

WATERSTONE'S GUILDFORD HIGH ST
Friday, 22 June 2012, 7:00PM
Tickets are £4 and available by visiting or calling the bookshop.

Meet one of our favourite authors, Ben Aaronovitch. The former Dr Who scriptwriter will be talking about the third book in his amazing fantasy-meets-crime series, WHISPERS UNDERGROUND, followed by a signing. If you can't make the event but would like a signed copy of any of Ben's books please get in touch and we will be happy to organise this for you.

Further details:	01483 536366

Character Songs: Lady Ty

Cecily Tyburn Thames

Piccadilly in 1 week time

An Evening with Ben Aaronovitch

They just told me I was to turn up and sign some books, nobody said anything about an evening.For that I need candles, cake, some wine at least....


WATERSTONE'S PICCADILLY
Thursday, 21 June 2012, 6:30PM
Tickets £5 / £3 Waterstones Loyalty Cardholders, available in store or via  events@piccadilly.waterstones.co.uk

The author of the Sunday Times best-selling ‘Rivers of London’ and ‘Moon over Soho’ & scriptwriter of several Doctor Who episodes, will be discussing the eagerly awaited next instalment in the adventures of rookie London copper turned magician Peter Grant ‘Whispers Under Ground’.

Further details: 020 7851 2400

Currently Reading...well not reading exactly....

...more using as a reference book and a source of inspiration.

At Home by Bill Bryson

This is the sort of usefully erudite books that tells you stuff you didn't know about ordinary things that you didn't know there was anything to know about. Every page should spark an idea from all but the most fanatic literary modernist. I particularly liked the deadliness of stairs, the shocking conclusion of the 1851 church survey in Britain(1) and the tangled history of the Great Exhibition.

City of Sin by Catherine Arnold

I haven't started this yet but I'm hoping it will set me off down the road to Southwark with the right amount of bear baiting, prostitution and substance abuse.

(1) It found that less than half the population had attended church at all and of those that did less than 20% went to an Anglican Church.

At Last The Truth! The Curiously Unavoidable Harry Potter

Last week I blogged about Magic Cops the TV concept that laid the foundations for Rivers of London but there were other projects that contributed to the final book. I say contributed but what I really mean is cannibalised because if there's one thing I hate more than celery it's a good bit of writing going to waste.

A habit I, and I suspect other writers(1), have is idly playing with ideas. Often you're on a bus or a train or a walk and you have an idea which you then prod or invert or try to hammer into the wrong shaped hole. Often your not planning to do anything serious with it it's a more a form of mental exercise(2). Occasionally one of these idle thoughts will join up with another idea or accrete substance in the same manner a small child accretes dirt and suspiciously old boiled sweets. One of these metaphorically sticky children started with the idea of 'what if there was a Comprehensive(3) version of Hogwarts(4)'. This project never even had a working title as such it always existed in my mind as...

The Harry Potter Goes To Comprehensive School...thingy

The basic story idea, such as it was, followed a posh guy, who I'm going to call James, whose father is done for embezzlement and is taken out of his posh life and forced to live in his granny's council flat in East London. Once there a social worker turns up and says he has to go to a special school which turns out to be a state day school catering to the magically gifted. You can tell this is a basic TV idea because it's made out of clichés bolted together.

What Magic School (well I've got to call it something) did generate were a number of ideas that made it into Rivers of London and Moon Over Soho.

The first concerns the social worker who arrives to tell James he has to go to school, I made her an authoritative Nigerian woman but because this was a story about magic I wanted to give her an unconventional background. That's when I decided that she was the spirit of a small river in Nigeria who had emigrated to the UK and having found the Thames abandoned by its native spirits had moved into that niche. The parallel to the many immigrant groups who moved into London and took over small businesses, corner shops and food outlets is obvious(5). She moved over into Magic Cops relatively unchanged but when I came to write her in the book she became a proper Mama Benz(6) -  grander and much more formidable. This was because in the book I wasn't constrained by casting limits (TV executives get nervous if there are more than 3 non-white characters in a series) and once you have Lady Ty, Fleet, Effra and Beverley Brook Mama herself becomes the matriarch of a large and powerful family.

More surprisingly was the effect on Nightingale's background. In Magic School the headmaster had once been the head of a posh boarding school where the British wizarding elite sent their sons to be raised to take their place in the magical establishment. Only World War Two had destroyed that generation and left him mourning a 'lost' Britain. Some of those characteristics were eventually blended into Nightingale's background and a scene where the Headmaster takes James to the old school, now defunct, and shows him the wall of the honoured dead turns up in Moon Over Soho.

Now some of you are thinking, Magic Cops, Magic School you were seriously on a magic jag back in 2005 but these were not the only speculative projects I was working on at the time. There was Arthur Returns in which King Arthur wakes up in modern times; A Lethal Education which was a putative YA project which could be best described as Len Deighton for kids; Burning Cross a thriller about a serial killer who targets the white elite in a Southern Town during the 1960s; Primate City Blues a short story that I swear I will get round to writing about a bug (think Starship Troopers) detective sent to investigate why a colony is getting weird; Owen the Librarian a swashbuckling fantasy in which our hero is kidnapped by flying pirates and used in their quest for a macguffin; Space Princess which was my attempt to cash in on Disney's obsession with high schools and teenage princesses(7) and finally The Nerd which was my autistic detective show.

On top of that there were all the other notions that bounced around in my brain during that period, some of it fruitful most of it... less so. And that brings us neatly to :- One of the questions in a recent German email interview I had recently was: What do you reply when people say that Constable Peter Grant was a Sherlock Homes in the costume of Harry Potter?

My answer to that question and questions of a similar ilk is: you guys need to get out more! Next week we shall have a look at where the ideas come from in an instalment I like to call: At Last The Truth! The Back Of The Lorry.

(1) You never know with writers though so it's best to add some caveats when making generalisations.

(2) That is to say 'procrastination'.
(3) A Comprehensive is a non selective state school and is where most British people go to school - although not all to the same school... that would silly... obviously.

(4) Inverting an idea like that is always a fun first thing to do it's like upending a shoplifter - you never know what's going to drop out of their pockets.

(5) When I was at school you went to the Chinese chippy, there were four within walking distance of my house and my favourite was the Sun Do who did chips covered in barbecue sauce. Last time I looked the chip shops were all run by Kurds but it might have changed again by now.

(6) Mama Benz is a West African term for successful market women and traders - the Benz part comes from their supposed penchant for buying Mercedes.
(7) My favourite line from that came near the end;
Teenage Protagonist: It's all right for you you're like Queen of the Galaxy.
Space Princess: The Empire's only three percent of the inhabited galaxy, that less than eleven hundred planets and barely sixty three trillion citizens. When are you people going to learn to put things in perspective.

Character Songs: Stephanopoulos

Detective Inspector Miriam Stephanopoulos

Website Update

I've had my website updated, it's been simplified to make updating easier and therefore more frequent. I've consolidated the blog to blogspot because I'm too lazy to port everything over. When you want to get back to the Folly you just follow the River Goddess.

At Last The Truth! Where the Story Really Starts

It is an epic tale of one man's quest to feed his family(1) and restart his career no matter what the odds. It all starts back in the far of days of 2005 when I still thought I had a career in scriptwriting(2). There will be spoilers for both Rivers of London and Moon Over Soho so if you're spoiler averse look away now....

Magic Cops - Does what it says on the tin.

Memory is the weirdest thing. For the longest time I thought that I'd got the initial idea from an early Sci Fi Channel promo for The Dresden Files TV series. But looking at my diary the other day I saw that I was working on the idea as far back as 2005. In fact I a couple of sample scenes written and the start of an outline blue tacked to my walls. Since the series didn't air until 2007 I've had to go rummaging around in the carelessly stuffed spare room of my memory and my best reconstruction is simply this...

Prime Suspect meets Ars Magica - now there's a pitch you couldn't make to a British producer. In this version Peter was a black woman with Jamaican parents but Lesley and Nightingale were pretty much how they ended up in the books. There was going to be a whole team of wizards in the classic ensemble cop show style including a new age witch and someone practising a Non-European tradition from China or India.

At one point I toyed with the the idea of Simone (Peter as was) discovering or, more precisely, being afflicted by an ancestral spirit - that bit was strongly influenced by Due South particularly the episode where Constable Fraser opens his cupboard to find that his dead father and a bunch of Native Canadian elders have taken it over as a sweat lodge. I liked that intrusion of the fantastic into the mundane - I also liked Fraser's matter-of-fact acceptance of the situation.

When I start a project I often find myself with a few scenes or sequences that are, for want of a better term, vivid. Moments of narrative in which I can almost see, taste and smell what's going on. It's easy enough to take a concept, turn it into a pitch and then mechanically spin it out into a plot but unless you have these brilliant beads to hang on that thread you can never be sure the book, series or film is going to live. Magic Cops had several such moments right from the start - some of which survived all the way to Rivers of London.

Moshi Moshi

Simone trying to take a witness statement from a ghost while guarding a crime scene. Not in Covent Garden, because producers hate central London locations, but in Worship Street near Liverpool Street Station. This scene, even down to the "Pisst, guv, I saw the whole thing," line was consistent all the way through to Rivers of London.

Another survivor was Nightingale 'recruiting' Simone in a Japanese restaurant - although the restaurant in question was the Moshi Moshi in Liverpool Street Station. 

You can't see it from the picture but the Moshi Moshi is essentially a Sushi Bar inside a transparent perspex box suspended ten metres above the platforms of Liverpool Street station. If you can imagine Paul McGann in there talking about ghosts and werewolves to a black Londoner with the 19th Century roof vaulting overhead while thousands of commuters stream past oblivious to the strangeness - then you can imagine why I thought that was a visually arresting scene(3).

While not a set piece another thing that survived all the way to Rivers of London was Lesley May as golden girl and apple of the police forces' eye. In fact not changing Lesley to male when I switched Simone would lead to some very interesting meta-thematic confusion amongst my editors and many of my readers. 

While Magic Cops is definitely the seed that led to Rivers of London its roots spread out further to another project which I will discuss in next week's exciting(4) instalment 'The Curiously Unavoidable Harry Potter.'

(1) Well just the Evil Monster Boy really but trust me - that was expensive enough.

(2) My career had been effectively dead since 1997 but it's amazing how far you can go on hope and a stubborn refusal to face reality. 
(3) If you can't then you're probably a gibbon.
(4) Well probably not exciting per se but interesting...to me at least.

Character Songs: Seawoll

Detective Chief Inspector Alexander Seawoll

Oh No My Ego Has Exploded!

I have become so brain numbingly, vastly, successfull-ish that I have been paid the ultimate accolade of having my pull quotes on the front cover of two, count them, two novels.

The first is this eyebending cover for Samit Basu's brilliant superhero fable Turbulence.

The second is the restrained minimalist cover for Paul Cornell's high octane supernatural police procedural London Falling.

Feed That Brain: The Land Where The Blues Began

If you want to eschew the superficial, avoid cliché, imbue authenticity into your work and, above all, write well - then it is vital to constantly fill your brain with new stuff. Sometimes you do this as part of organised research, sometimes just through the process of living in the world but, for me, the most fun is a proper non-fiction book. As in all things some books are more crunchy and nutritious than others so I thought I'd pick out my personal favourites.

The Land Where The Blues Began 
by Alan Lomax

There aren't that many folklorists who manage to generate an 800 page FBI file but Alan Lomax was never one to keep his mouth shut - even when the prevailing orthodoxy said he should. He spent a career finding and recording music - not to exploit it for his own ends but to preserve it for the future - and documenting the lives of the people that produced it.

The Land Where The Blues Began is Lomax's exploration of the Mississippi Delta and it's role in producing the most influential musical form of modern times(1). It's beauty as a brain feeding book is because it works at so many levels: -

As a general history of the blues - obviously - but also providing portraits of some of the extraordinary characters in and around the blue's scene. If you're writing fiction you can never read too many good descriptions of real people the more you are exposed to the human race in its astonishing variety the truer your fictional characters will be.

On top of that the book is a travelogue of the Mississippi Valley in the 1940s giving insights into the sights, smells, living conditions and social attitudes of the time. It was from this book that I first learnt about Beale Street and the Castle of Missing Men(2). It also gives a look, just for the icing on the cake, into the mindset of a southern born radical minded white man, his honesty as a reporter extending to his own reactions and habits of mind.

And it's quite short too and well written.


(1) It ain't jazz okay although that's probably the second most influential musical form of modern times.
(2) Beale Street is like a microcosm of Black American history in that you keep peeling away layers of indifference, racist historiography and downright suppression to find amazing stories - Robert Church anyone?

All Change for US Covers!

Del Rey have decided to release Whispers Under Ground with a new cover design and have informed me that future print runs of Midnight Riot and Moon Over Soho will have new covers as well. 

As you can see from the image to the left the new covers is a bit familiar. These covers have been very successful and I can see whyn Del Rey have adopted them but there's a secret pulp part of my soul that could have done with a bare midrift, or a tattoo, or a moody pair looking into the middle distance with expressions that suggest they're contemplating their next tax return.

Now I just have to persuade some one to change all the covers on the Goodreads site.

The City & The City & Those Other Places Who's Names Escapes Me

Medieval Novgorod

This Monday I sat down to a round table  discussion about London based urban fantasy with China Mieville, Suzanne McLeod and Kate Griffin.

Our talk turned, as all such conversations eventually do, to the comparative demographics of medieval cities. I threw, with misplaced confidence, some shaky and unsubstantiated figures around to hoots of derision from Suzanne and China and a raised eyebrow from Kate. 

To make amends I have spent whole minutes looking up data on the internet to get some figures which, if not necessarily accurate, at least sound vaguely plausible. 

London had an estimated population of 40,000 during the 14th Century, the next largest English city was York (12,100), followed by Bristol (10,000), Coventry (8,000) and Norwich (6,600)(1). By comparison modern Chipping Norton, until quite recently the UK's de facto capital, has a population of just under 6,000.

Paris, by comparison, was a mere 110,000 strong but I think we can put this down to Gallic exaggeration and say no more about it. Medieval Novgorod, which I had got into my head as much bigger is listed at only 30,000. 12th Century Constantinople had a population of 400,000 which is more like what I think of as a city. Baghdad had everyone beat in the high middle ages(2) by having a population of 1.2 million people. Chang'an during the Tang dynasty is said to be even bigger which is just typical of the Chinese and their competitive one-upmanship. Interestingly the larger cities of Medieval Nigeria are thought to have been in the 40-50,000 people range.

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Suzanne McLeod is famous for her spellcrackers.com series in which she attempts to stuff every single urban fantasy trope into London and then invent a stack of new and exciting tropes of her own. 

Her latest; The Shifting Price of Prey is out in June 12th in the UK. I have an advanced copy and you don't - so there!

China Mieville has been voted the SFF writer most likely to win a Man Booker prize(3). I was tempted, during the round table, to insert a plastic tube into his head and siphon off some of them brains.

He has a new YA out called Railsea which proves that what children really want is weird and terrifying.

Kate Griffin writes what I like to think of as transcendental urban fantasy in which she sets out to prove that not only are things not what they seem to be but even stranger you could think possible. I remember cursing as I shelved her books in my section at Waterstones - I really wish I'd thought of some of those ideas.

Her latest book in the Matthew Swift series (which started with A Madness of Angels) called The Minority Council is out now - so you have no excuse not to own a copy.

(1) Manchester at that time had a population of twelve and one half a goat.
(2) High as opposed to the Low or Stinking middle ages.
(3) Well voted by me anyway.