Simon Read's Blog

I find myself fully entrenched in my latest book project, The Case that Foiled Fabian: Murder and Witchcraft in Rural England. The manuscript is due on the publisher’s desk May 1. I noticed last night the book is already listed on the UK Amazon site, even though it won’t be out until June 2014. The product description reads:

On Wednesday 14 February 1945, the body of Charles Walton was discovered in the sleepy Warwickshire village of Lower Quinton, his torso pinned to the ground by a pitchfork that had been viciously driven through him. Walton, a life-long resident of Lower Quinton and a retired labourer, was believed by many to be a clairvoyant who could talk to birds and exercise control over animals. Indeed, with the vast majority of villagers believing that Walton’s death was carried out according to ritual witchcraft, such was his unusual past, the most famous police officer in Britain, Robert Fabian (Fabian of the Yard), was promptly dispatched by Scotland Yard to help solve this increasingly peculiar and foreboding mystery. Fabian was not a man prone to superstition and who had dealt with some of the most notorious killers of his time. However, there was something in the Walton murder that proved to be unnerving. Moreover, with all the clues continuing to point towards ritual witchcraft as the modus operandi and faced by a wall of silence from the villagers, Fabian faced, for the first time in his glittering career, the daunting prospect of failure. Renowned crime historian Simon Read will piece together the now-infamous events at Lower Quinton in an effort to provide an answer to the unrequited question: who killed Charles Walton, the victim of the last ritual witchcraft murder in Britain?

I’ll say it: I like being referred to as a “renowned crime historian.”

I should have the first draft done in another 10,000 words or so. I spent the holiday season in Britain, researching and taking photographs, and am quite happy with the way things are progressing. I have a feeling this will be my last book for quite a while, as—for the first time since I became a published author—I have no idea what I want to work on next. While I have a few ideas rattling around in the back of my head, none of them genuinely excite me. It’s a rather nerve-wracking thing to be bereft of ideas, for a writer can’t really write without them! That said, a break will do me good. Since 2005, I’ve written seven books (including the one I’m working on now) back-to-back. My brain and my carpal-tunneled fingers need a rest.

Turning the book in by the beginning of May means I won’t have to worry about writing over the summer. In addition to banging out books, I work a day job (unless you’re a major bestselling author, tapping at the keys doesn’t earn you enough to feed a family and pay the mortgage). This means I work on the books in the evenings after my wife and son have gone to bed. I’m actually looking forward to having time to crash on the sofa and watch movies—and, of course, catch up on my reading.

In other books news, there is now less than two months to go until the British publication of Human Game. I’m very happy to announce that Live Magazine, which is published in the Mail on Sunday (one of Britain’s major national newspapers) will be publishing a 2,500-word excerpt of the book just prior to the March 7 release. As frequent visitors to this site may already know, Human Game details the brutal, non-fiction aftermath of the events depicted in the classic film “The Great Escape.” The movie has always been popular in the UK and—until recently—always aired on television on Christmas day. I’m hoping this bodes well for the book’s UK performance.

My New Year’s resolution is to try and be more disciplined when it comes to the blog. My writing duties have cut into my blogging time, but I hope to be posting more regularly in the weeks ahead!

Until next time . . .

Whenever time allows, I’m sitting down with another Hemingway biography. This one, written by Michael Reynolds, spans Hemingway’s life from the 1930s to that fateful day in 1961 in Ketchum, Idaho. With my sincere apologies to those who admire his work, I’ve never been a fan of Hemingway’s novels. While his style is celebrated for its economy of language, I find it somewhat flat. Although I find his novels tedious (again, sorry), I think his short stories are fantastic.

Although the Reynolds book is proving to be a great read, it’s also a difficult one. The reason has nothing to do with the writing, which is excellent, but the fact one has to spend 600 pages in Hemingway’s company. The man was an insecure, petulant, boorish braggart who treated friends and loved ones, including his four wives, terribly. He presented to the world an image of ultra-masculinity—hunting, fishing, going to wars, fighting—but in private was as fragile as a wilting flower. He seems to have spent most of his time raging against critics who dared question his work, friends who aggrieved him even slightly, his publisher for not doing enough to promote his books, and other authors who challenged his dominance in the literary world.

Looking back, there is something vulgar in Hemingway’s need to kill every sort of animal. This, of course, may no doubt be a view that’s distilled through today’s conservation efforts. On an African safari in 1934, he pouted like a child whenever another member of his party killed a larger animal or scored a better shot. Even more dispicable was his penchant for exaggerating his war service. Injured as a Red Cross worker in Italy during the First World War, he later told people he led elite Italian troops in battle. Following his stint as a correspondent in World War II, he felt the need to lie about his adventures in France, claiming at one point to have killed 126 Germans. He burned through three marriages before meeting Mary Welsh, who stuck with him until the end. She gave up her career as a journalist to be with him, as “Papa” did not like women who did not make his priorities their own. As Mary wrote in her journal one evening:

He has been truculent, brutal, abusive, and extremely childish . . . Last night with six at table, I declined to bet with one of our guests on a pigeon shooting match . . . So Ernest denounced me several times as a “cobarde” (coward) . . . At table his favorite and frequent means of protesting any word, glance, gesture or food he doesn’t like is to put his full, freshly served plate on the floor. The other day he dumped the entire plate of bread and crackers on top of my plate . . . he has called me, and repeated the names . . . whore, bitch, liar, moron. On several occasions I have called him a shit . . . it looks like the disintegration of a personality to me.

It’s hard to fathom why someone would treat another person this way. Just because the guy was one of the most influential authors of the twentieth century doesn’t excuse him from treating his wife in such an atrocious manner. In the end, regardless of the man’s contribution to American letters, and to quote Harold Robbins, “Hemingway was a jerk.”

For Christmas, my very generous wife gave me a Kindle Fire. Her message was clear: “E-books are the future. Why clutter our house with more books, when you can download them on this incredibly nifty gizmo and free-up some much needed shelf space?”

While I’m certainly not a luddite, I am one who tends to romanticize the past and have long wished I lived in the 1920s or 1940s. In the twenties, it was fashionable to smoke and drink and hang out in Paris. In the forties, it was fashionable to smoke and drink and wear a fedora. There was, of course, WW2—but seeing as I’m a geek for history, that’s not necessarily a bad thing.

But, I digress . . . back to the Kindle Fire. The other night, I downloaded my first two books: Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness and Michael Morpurgo’s War Horse. I plan to read both when I fly to England next week. I’ve already read the first few pages—or is it screens?—of Darkness and found it to be an okay experience. For one who loves the physical feel of a book, however, and the act of turning the page, it is slightly odd. My day job requires that I sit for eight hours and stare at a computer screen. If I’m working on a book, then I stare at a screen all evening after I get home. That being the case, I don’t really want to stare at another screen when I read for enjoyment.

Don’t get me wrong: I’m willing to give the Kindle Fire a chance—and I do love the fact you can use it to stream movies. I’m just not sure it’ll ever become my preferred method of reading.

All this was driven home to me the other night as I casually browsed one of my bookshelves. I wasn’t looking for anything in particular—just looking. For no reason whatsoever, I pulled my copy of Stephen King’s Dreamcatcher from the shelf and randomly flipped through its pages. In the middle of the book, I came across four black-and-white photographs of my grandfather as a child.

One picture, taken in 1920 when he was five, shows and his two sisters posting in their old-fashioned swimsuits in a Blackpool portrait studio. It was a pleasant surprise stumbling across these images I hadn’t looked at in several years. This sort of thing can’t happen with an e-book. Books (the paper variety) are great companions. Between their pages they can hold mementos of your life, whether it’s photographs, an old love letter, or a faded theater ticket. They can be reminders of friends and family and special events. Fred Vargas’s The Night’s Foul Work will always be the book I read on my honeymoon in Maui. Between its pages is the receipt for the whale-watching tour my wife and I went on.

Growing up, my parents always gave me books for my birthday and Christmas. Without exception, they always wrote something on the inside cover, saying they couldn’t wait to read my first published book. They offered nothing but encouragement, and those books are now something I treasure. You can’t do that with an e-book. You physically keep certain books with you throughout your life because of the memories attached to them. Is it possible to be that sentimental about an e-book?

I don’t think so.

The past year has been spent working on the manuscript to my upcoming book, HUMAN GAME. If you’re a fan of the movie THE GREAT ESCAPE, you know how the film ends. For those of you not familiar with this Steve McQueen classic, here’s a brief synopsis: In Stalag Luft III, a prison camp for Allied airmen deep in the heart of Germany, a group of inmates decide to orchestrate the breakout of 250 prisoners.

Each escapee is equipped with fake travel documents, German money, rations, identity cards, civilian clothing, compasses, etc.

The men built three tunnels, codenamed “Tom,” “Dick,” and “Harry.” To avoid the camp’s underground microphones, vertical shafts to each tunnel were dug 30 feet down before horizontal digging commenced. Construction of the tunnels continued around the clock and required the requisitioning of nearly 1,219 knifes, 582 forks, 408 spoons, 246 water cans, 1,699 blankets, 192 bed covers, 161 pillow cases, 1,212 pillows, 655 straw mattresses, thirty-four chairs, the frames of 90 bunk beds, 3,424 towels, ten single tables, fifty-two twenty-man tables, more than 1,200 bed bolsters, nearly 1,400 beaded battens, seventy-six benches, 1,000 feet of electrical wiring and 600 feet of rope. Four thousand bed boards were used to shore-up the tunnels. Lights wired into the camp’s electrical supply provided illumination underground; air pumps made of discarded kitbags, empty powdered-milk tins, wood-framing, wire mesh and tar paper supplied fresh air to those doing the digging.

Let’s jump ahead in our narrative a bit . . . The escape took place on the night of March 24/25, 1944. In the event, only seventy-six airmen got away before a guard discovered the exit to Harry—the tunnel ultimately used in the escape. Three of those seventy-six made it safely back to England; the others were recaptured. Fifty were handed over the Gestapo, taken to desolate killing fields throughout Germany, and gunned down.

The movie ends with the execution of the fifty. HUMAN GAME picks up immediately thereafter and details the Royal Air Force’s hunt for the Gestapo gunmen. It took three years of researching and writing to complete, and is based primarily on the official records kept by the RAF’s Special Investigating Branch, which handled the investigation. The Caliber imprint of Penguin will release the book in October. I’ll post more details as they become available.