Alexandre Dumas – man of action

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Action sequences, Alexandre Dumas, Catherine de Médicis, Charles IX of France, French Wars of Religion, Henry of Navarre, Lionel Davidson, Marguerite de Valois, Raymond Chandler

He can write a mean story, that Alexandre Dumas.

Action scenes – they can be difficult to write, for some of us. How to construct them, how to keep them going? Raymond Chandler said that if you don’t know what should happen next in your story, have a man come into the room with a gun. Advice from the master.

Dumas père was another master. And could use his own version of Chandler’s Law to great effect! I’ve just read Dumas’ Marguerite de Valois (La Reine Margot in the original French). A gripping 460 pages of adventure, fighting, skulduggery, plotting, deception, murder, amours and heroism. When one dastardly plot has been foiled, that’s no problem, Dumas just starts another. One action scene follows another.

It’s set in the 16^th century Wars of Religion in France. It starts with the Massacre of St Bartholomew in August 1572, graphically related. Thousands of Protestants have come to Paris for the wedding of the Catholic King Charles IX’s sister Marguerite (she of the book’s title) to Henry, King of Navarre, the leader of the French Protestants. The wedding will, they think, start a period of religious peace. The wedding does indeed take place, but is immediately followed by a massacre of Protestants, instigated by the weirdo King Charles and the villainous Queen Mother Catherine de Médicis: the lowest estimate of those killed was 5,000.

The novel then shows us Henry of Navarre a virtual prisoner in the royal palace of the Louvre and relates his efforts to survive and escape numerous plots against his life. In this he is aided, remarkably, by his Queen Marguerite, despite his open passion for another woman (with whom he spends his wedding night). In the foreground of all this Dumas creates two heroes, young noble gentlemen (La Mole and Coconnas) who during the Massacre do their best to kill each other but who become the firmest of friends, friendship which proves itself in the most desperate of situations.

Other notable characters include King Charles’ jealous and unscrupulous younger brothers, a perfumer-cum-poisoner, an accomplished assassin, and the public executioner whom Coconnas befriends (most usefully, as it turns out). The novel has a splendid selection of the apparatus of adventure stories, such as secret passages, people hiding behind curtains in bedchambers, ingenious methods of poisoning people, a skeleton key, an oubliette, a dangerous boar-hunt, a torture-chamber, lovers climbing in through windows, etc, etc. Wonderful stuff.

One device I see in an exciting thriller I’m reading at the moment (The Night of Wenceslas, by Lionel Davidson, published in 1970) is to have the hero escape from one danger but then almost immediately to find that in fact he hasn’t escaped it … More danger looms: the sigh of relief is short-lived and is replaced by renewed alarm.

So careful plotting is called for. Or, if you haven’t done that, have a man come in with a gun.

Jane Austen’s Bad Hair Day

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Curling irons, Eavesdropping on Jane Austen's England, Hairdressing, Regency England

 

Sitting in the hairdresser’s recently, admiring a yummy mummy bedecked in foils like a silver hedgehog while having her hair colours done, I was reminded how little things have changed since Jane Austen’s day.

Here is Jane, writing to Cassandra in December 1798 about what a chore keeping one’s hair presentable could be:

‘I have made myself two or three caps to wear of evenings since I came home, and they save me a world of torment as to hair-dressing, which at present gives me no trouble beyond washing and brushing, for my long hair is always plaited up out of sight, and my short hair curls up well enough to want not papering. I have had it cut lately by Mr Butler.’ 

Without hair dryers, the washing of hair would have been a bore, especially in winter. Water for the process was something that, for Jane, probably came from a well, either in the house itself, or close by. With water having to be fetched in heavy iron-bound wooden buckets, and an imperial gallon weighing in the region of ten pounds, this was a laborious process, especially if there were no menservants available.

Jane would have owned curling tongs for her hair, in the way that we have hair straighteners, electric wands, or ceramic rotating irons today. It was customary to use curling papers, and then allow the hair to dry naturally, or to speed the process with an iron, heated by the fire. The latter method needed a steady hand and careful timing to avoid singeing the hair to an unsightly frizzle. One can imagine the fuss that would be created in a house full of fashion-conscious daughters on the day of a ball – Lydia Bennett would have been particularly impatient to be first in any queue.

No wonder the wearing of neat white caps was so popular for everyday – and we now know that under that cap of hers, Jane wore long plaits of hair, set off by the kiss curls around her face created by ‘Mr Butler’.

This fascinating snippet came from my researches in Roy and Lesley Adkins’s invaluable book: Eavesdropping on Jane Austen’s England – who were also responsible for my piece on Jane Austen’s Embarrassing Aunt (with her penchant for shoplifting) on this blog on 10 May 2016.

Research is such an enjoyable displacement activity!

 

 

 

 

Criminal Activities in Tunbridge Wells

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Antonia Hodgson, City of Masks, Death at Fountains Abbey, J D Sykes, Plague Land, The Butcher Bird, Waterstones

On Wednesday, 14 September, two successfully published authors of historical crime will be at Waterstones in Tunbridge Wells to talk about their latest books and the journey to their publication.

S D Sykes (see our post of July 7 about her Bloomsbury Press workshop : How to Write Historical Fiction and Get Published) will be discussing the latest adventure of her hero, Oswald, who was sent to a monastery at the age of seven, only to be called home at eighteen when his father and brothers succumbed to the Black Death. Finding himself the reluctant Lord of Somershill Manor – and wrestling with the aftermath of the plague, peasant unrest, and some infuriatingly troublesome female relatives – he discovers a talent for solving gruesome murders, in Plague Land and The Butcher Bird.

City of Masks is Oswald’s third adventure, which takes place when a pilgrimage to Venice finds him trapped under seige by the Hungarians. I have yet to read it, but look forward to following this endearingly diffident young man’s journey towards maturity.

The magnificent cover, I’m told, is The Relic of the True Cross by Gentile Bellini, which can be seen in Venice and is apparently HUGE.

 

As a complete contrast, Antonia Hodgson’s latest book, Death at Fountains Abbey, features a rakish Georgian antihero, Thomas Hawkins, who is employed secretly by Queen Caroline to uncover the blackmailing activities of a previous Chancellor of the Exchequer. (Let’s hope George Osborne doesn’t read it and get any ideas…) Hawkins, previously featured in The Devil in the Marshalsea and The Last Confessions of Thomas Hawkins, has a host of enemies and a long-lost daughter returning from the dead to ramp up the pace and atmosphere.

Tickets for what should be an enjoyable and informative evening are available now from Waterstones for the very reasonable sum of £3, which can be redeemed against the price of the books, if purchased.  I have mine already…

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

‘Shadows of Ladenbrooke Manor’

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autism, butterflies, Clevedon, Cotswolds, Melanie Dobson

In the posting in April https://ninevoices.wordpress.com/2016/04/12/2000-words-a-day/ I told of my chance meeting with the author Melanie Dobson and what I had learned of her writing discipline. I’ve now had a chance to read one of her books, Shadows of Ladenbrooke Manor.   As you can see from Melanie’s website (http://melaniedobson.com/books/shadows-of-ladenbrooke-manor/) it’s a romantic historical mystery.

It opens dramatically in 1954 with a great storm in the Bristol Channel, that smashes into the town of Clevedon and sweeps young Maggie out to sea. She is pregnant by a handsome French seaman who has promised to return, but hasn’t. She feels that drowning might be the answer – but she is rescued by dependable local journalist Walter Doyle.

It is difficult to summarise the storyline without giving away too much. It’s a story of generations and of patterns that recur down the generations – patterns like forbidden love. The story of Maggie and Walter and their family in the 1950s, ‘60s and ‘70s alternates with happenings in the present day, as Heather Toulson arrives from America to sort out her late father’s cottage. This is in the Cotswold village of Bibury, next to Ladenbrooke Manor. The Manor belongs to the Croft family, but has been deserted by them since the mysterious death in 1970 of Lord Croft’s heir Oliver, found dead in the River Coln.   Heather finds herself seeking out the truth about his death, and she also has shadows from her own past to cope with.

At first I had thought this type of story wasn’t really for me. But as I read it I found that I cared for the characters and I wanted to know what happened to them. This is especially true of Libby, Maggie’s daughter, a girl who grows up wholly absorbed in her own world, a world of colour and pictures, and who is never happier than when she is roaming the gardens of Ladenbrooke Manor, dancing with her friends the butterflies. Her portrayal, and that of her parents’ concerns for her and the problems she faces and causes, is beautiful and moving. I also came to admire the portrait of Walter Doyle, whose roles of husband and father are under unwanted strain.

The stories are cleverly interleaved, and the appearance and reappearance of secondary characters in the different stories shows careful plotting. I liked it. The author’s demanding writing discipline paid off!

The book is published in the US by Simon & Shuster. I’m not sure that Melanie Dobson’s books are published in Britain, but they are available on Amazon. ISBN 978-1-4767-4614-2