No More Crime (For Now) Thank-You.

 

I apologise in advance to all my writer friends who work in this genre, but I've had it with crime fiction. This is probably a temporary state of affairs, but I know what brought it on. A little while ago, a friend who often has similar tastes in books, recommended Fred Vargas's 'Commissaire Adamsberg' novels. I read one from the middle of the series, The Ghost Riders of Ordebec. I was captivated from the first few pages, and then I went back and read the whole series, obsessively, far into the night. 

Feeling absolutely bereft when I had finished - and I may even go back and read one or two of them again - I read Vargas's three 'Evangelists' novels. I wasn't quite so captivated by them, but I still liked them very much indeed, especially the last one: The Accordionist. 

Then, as you do, I went on Facebook and asked for recommendations for similarly captivating novels. They flooded in. 

And you know what? I haven't really liked any of them. 

One, I bought on Kindle, read several chapters, and then sent it back for a refund. It was much too violent for me. It began with a woman being tortured in graphic detail, and went on with the murderer fantasising about torturing and murdering the torturer. 

I tried again. I bought a couple more, read about fifty pages, and nearly died of boredom. I downloaded samples of various recommendations. Just couldn't get into them.

Fred Vargas, incidentally, is female, and the string of books I've started and discarded this week are all by men. Does that tell me something? Maybe. But I love Dickens, Thackeray, Trollope, E F Benson, China Mieville, James Joyce, Phil Rickman (especially his standalone paranormal books) and many many more. I'm nothing if not eclectic in my reading. And many of my favourite writers are men.

I need to move on. But partly, as the same friend who recommended Vargas pointed out today, it's that Adamsberg was a kind of watershed. The books were so original, the characters so vivid, the settings,  even the police station concerned, so wonderfully quirky and yet real, in the way that real life is so often bizarre and funny and strange, the plots so clever, and Adamsberg himself so engaging that everything else pales by comparison. There's a pedestrian, box ticking quality about so much of what I've been trying and failing to read. 

I wonder if it's the publishing industry itself? Maybe they're right, because all of these books had many glowing reviews. It wouldn't do if we all liked the same thing, would it? And people must be buying them, reading them, loving them. So who am I to complain?

But for the moment, I really have to give myself a break and find some other fiction to immerse myself in. I need somebody like Barbara Pym. Or Shirley Jackson. Or Rumer Godden (a recent discovery for me) or even - back to crime again - a Margery Allingham. 

Oh go on then. 
Any recommendations? 

Like a Puck to the Head: Ice Hockey Memories - and Ice Dancing

Village in the Snow,
by Alan Lees

I've just edited, polished and republished a new edition of a novel called Ice Dancing for Kindle - and there will be a paperback available before too long.

It's a story about Scottish village life. It's a very grown up love story with a heroine who is almost ten years older than the man she loves. (Why is that so unusual?) There's a dark side to it. But it's also a story about the beauty and skill and poetry of a sport that I've loved for a very long time.

There's a Canadian hockey song that talks about love being like a 'frozen puck to the head.' If you've never seen a hockey game, and never felt the size, weight and speed of a frozen ice hockey puck, that won't mean much to you. But once felt, never forgotten. Even when the puck occasionally flies over the protective plexi glass and connects with a spectator, it can be painful, and people are advised to keep their eye on it at all times. So not a bad way of describing the kind of love that comes out of nowhere and strikes like a bolt of lightning.

My own love affair with ice hockey began many years ago when I was a young woman teaching English to adults in Tampere, in Finland. I spent two very happy years there, and one of the first things we learned was that if you wanted to get the young engineers and other techies talking - which was our job, after all - you had only to ask them about ice hockey. We would have long conversations about the rules of the game and the state of play of the local teams. It was hard not to become involved, especially when these 'students' - who were essentially the same age as we were - invited us out to hockey games so that we could see just what they were talking about!

Cue forward some years and the UK saw a renaissance of interest in professional ice hockey, with the setting up of the so-called Superleague, involving several high calibre teams. This was a bit controversial in that these teams employed many ‘imported’, particularly Canadian, players, but it undeniably raised the standards of play for the spectators who had the privilege of watching some world class hockey on home ice. Plus the standard of coaching for young, aspiring British players, my own son included, was excellent and inspirational.

Although there are still teams throughout the UK, playing excellent, entertaining hockey, the Superleague lasted only from 1995 to 2003, after which it was disbanded and replaced with the Elite Hockey League. My own seasons spent as a ‘UK hockey mom’ inspired at least some of the background to the novel, a time I remember with a great deal of affection, not least because of the off-ice chat and laughter. Hockey was and remains a very inclusive sport. 

When I was writing Ice Dancing, though, it was another occasion I remembered. I had taken my son and his friend to a public skating session at our local ice arena, when a young man, casually dressed in jeans and a fleece, started moving gently over the ice in time to the music. Except that it was like no dancing on ice I had ever seen before. I never found out who he was, but I remember thinking that he might have been a hockey player, because most of them have the same grace as ice dancers and there was something about his movements that suggested hockey. Of course I wrote it as fiction.

'In the control box, someone had put on Too Lost In You, and lowered the lights just a little. It was strange. Other people were still skating, but he made them look clumsy. He skated gently and deftly around them and among them, not bothering them at all, making patterns on the ice in time to the music. He skated like a dream. He was showing off now. I knew fine he was showing off for me and everyone else, unable to resist the temptation of that music and those sexy words. After a while, people went to the side, just so they could watch him. The stewards stood with their arms folded, defensive and a bit jealous. Players didn’t usually do this. They normally kept themselves to themselves. But here was Joe, putting on a display for free. It wasn’t done.

And what Joe was doing, it wasn’t exactly dancing, but it was rhythmic and fluid and sometimes it was acrobatic. A man sitting behind me tapped me on the shoulder and said, ‘Now you know why they call him Sky Napier. Good, isn’t he?’ And I nodded but he was more than good. He was utterly and completely beautiful out there on the ice. The music was part of the magic, sensual and insistent. He seemed like nothing but movement. I could have watched him all day. A creature of ice and fire. Bright and enticing.'

Ice Dancing is entirely fictional, but there is a darker side of the sport - of all sports  - that is a part of the fabric of the novel. And on another topic, the wartime internment of Italians who had made their homes in Scotland for many years is a matter of shameful fact. Given the more recent experiences of the Windrush generation, it is one that has by no means been consigned to history.

All the same - this is mainly a book about an unexpected physical and mental attraction, the sheer, overwhelming joy of falling unwisely in love - and the sheer joy of ice hockey too! 

Picture by Skeeze on Pixabay