Cabinet of Curiosities by Charlotte Wightwick: Manuscripts, Magical and Remarkable

As its Halloween, it is almost obligatory that I should write about things that go bump in the night. This year, I’ve been enjoying my spooky fix via Sky’s Discovery of Witches – a TV series featuring witches, vampires and demons, based on the All Souls trilogy of books by Deborah Harkness. I first read – and greatly enjoyed - the books some years ago, and have to admit to rather mixed feelings about the TV series. The actors are generally great (although personally I’m not sure about all the casting choices!) and the cinematography and locations are beautiful. But, as is inevitable with any adaptation, they’ve had to leave things out, or at least not give them the prominence they receive in the novels.

In Harkness’ books, the Twilight-style romance is leavened with a real passion for history. The protagonist Diana has a non-magical career an academic historian, and her love for the subject – or rather, that of Harkness (herself a professional historian before she turned to novel-writing) really shines through. In particular, significant time and space within the novels is devoted to loving, meticulous descriptions of the illuminated manuscripts Diana studies (and which cause her such supernatural trouble – her discovery of a bewitched book kicks off the plot).

The only other place where I’ve read such bewitching (excuse the pun) yet accurate descriptions of medieval manuscripts is in Christopher de Hamel’s wonderful Meetings with Remarkable Manuscripts (if you’ve not yet read it, it is worth getting your hands on the hardback version for the beauty and quality of the reproductions.) Taking one manuscript per century between the C6th and C16th, de Hamel walks his readers through what it is like to see, feel, touch and smell the reality of these rare and precious objects, as well as explaining the historical and social conditions in which they were created. It is accessible, scholarly and passionate; beautiful and illuminating all at once, as perfect and jewelled as the manuscripts he describes. 

So, my item for the Cabinet of Curiosities this month? Definitely a medieval manuscript. But I’m torn. My personal favourite from de Hamel’s book is the fourteenth century Hours of Jeanne de Navarre, with its stunning and intricate gothic illuminations. But I do wonder if I might be allowed Diana’s fictional, magical Book of Life, explaining through alchemical imagery the origins and destinies of vampires, witches, demons and humans?

Well, it is Halloween, when the veil between the mundane and the magical is supposedly at its thinnest, so maybe, just maybe…

THE PIERCED HEART by Lynn Shepherd . A review by Adèle Geras

Lynn Shepherd has just sent me this piece she's written about THE PIERCED HEART....sorry it wasn't here in time for the first appearance of this post!

The Pierced Heart:

A sequel, a star, and a strange tale

by Lynn Shepherd

The Pierced Heart is my fourth novel, and the fourth to feature the Charles Maddoxes, my two 19^th-century private detectives. When I wrote my first book, Murder at Mansfield Park, way back in 2008, I had no idea of turning the idea of a ‘literary mystery’ into a series. It just seemed an enormously enjoyable ‘conceit’ to work with another great work of fiction, and give the reader the double pleasure of a satisfying murder, and the chance to revisit the world and words of the incomparable Jane Austen. But after Murder at Mansfield Park came out people started to say they’d love to see Maddox back, and in Dickens’ bicentenary year I sent his great-nephew, the younger Charles Maddox, to walk shoulder to shoulder with Dickens through Victorian London. Since then I have thrust sent him head-first into the emotional maelstrom which was the lives of the Shelleys in A Treacherous Likeness, and finally and most recently confronted him with his most fearsome foe of all, the Baron Von Reisenberg. Why so fearsome? Because this new book takes its inspiration from Bram Stoker’s Gothic classic, Dracula.

Vampires are, of course, the gift that keeps on giving – look at True Blood, or The Originals, or The Twilight Saga, or the latest Jonathan Rhys Meyers NBC series. The list goes ever one and on. And I’d like to think The Pierced Heart has its own contribution to make, not just by taking the Dracula story back to its literary roots, but by recasting the vampire theme in terms of the clash of science and superstition in the middle of the 19^th century.

And now we come to the rather strange tale of the novel’s fate in the UK.

I had a two-book deal in the UK for Tom-All-Alone’s and A Treacherous Likeness, and when that came to an end I felt my relationship with my publisher had run its natural course, and I wanted to move on. My agent loved The Pierced Heart, as did my US editor, so when it was sent out to UK publishers in the summer of 2013 I was in an optimistic frame of mind. As optimistic, in fact, as I had ever been since I took up this ego-bruising game. But even though two dozen or so houses looked at it, none of them said yes.

So what, you ask, is the problem? Is it a lack of coverage? No, I don’t think so, since Tom-All-Alone’s was a book of the year for both the Spectator and Sunday Express in 2012, the Daily Mail called A Treacherous Likeness “an absolute must”, and it was a historical novel of the year in the BBC History magazine list for 2013. Is it the quality of the writing? Again, I don’t think so – it’s had a wonderful quote on Twitter from Ian Rankin, no less, and a Kirkus star (“another tour de force from Shepherd”). There were some UK editors who just didn’t take to it, as there will always be, but other comments ranged from “this is very good stuff” to “read aloud on a long car journey and had the family hooked” to “a very enticing atmosphere of menace and mystery. All the elements one could possibly wish for in a novel of this scope.” 

All of which leads me to deduce, in a mixture of bewilderment and sad frustration, that the real problem here is that The Pierced Heart features the Maddoxes once more. I’ve made a huge effort to ensure the book can be read in its own right, with no knowledge of the preceding novels, but it’s the ‘sequel thing’ that seems to have been its downfall in the UK. But why? Why should that make the slightest difference to a publisher? Who cares what logo is on the spine, as long as it sells? 

In fact, you might even think (as I did, in my naïveté) that an established character would be an advantage, as much of the hard PR graft is already done. But apparently publishers don’t want to take on a series started elsewhere because they see themselves as ‘brands’. Now I may not know much about publishing, but I’ve worked in marketing and communications for over 15 years, and I know a brand when I see one. Brands are things people buy, so an author is a brand, if they’re successful enough, but the publisher is only ever the vehicle for that brand. And the proof of that contention is that no-one has ever bought a novel because they liked who published it. I don’t go onto Amazon or into WHSmith thinking ‘that last book from [insert publisher’s name] was really good, I think I’ll see what else they’ve done’ and I bet you don’t either. In fact, I doubt most people outside the industry could even tell you who publishes their favourite authors. Because surely the only thing that matters to readers – and has ever mattered - is the quality of the writing.

So what next for me? Perhaps a new direction next time - perhaps something that’s not historical. And maybe, just maybe, Charles Maddox could be back one day too, if I can find a UK publisher to take him on. After all, stranger things have happened…. 

UK readers can buy The Pierced Heart in sterling, from Amazon UK.

I've written about Lynn Shepherd's novels before on this blog and here is a link to my post about her book A Treacherous Likeness.

I am a big fan of her work, because what she does seems to be something especially designed to appeal both to fans of existing works of literature and also to lovers of a good thriller. She's created a detective called Charles Maddox (who will, I hope,  be played by Benedict Cumberbatch in any future screen adaptations) and Charles winds his way in and out of the world created by other works of literature. In Tom-all-alone's, he wound his way in and out of the events and characters of Bleak House. In A Treacherous Likeness, Shepherd wrote of  the comings and goings of the Shelley circle and especially the events surrounding the famous night when Frankenstein was conceived. 

It was obviously only a matter of time before she turned her attention to Dracula.  In The Pierced Heart, though, she goes one better. Not only is this a novel which addresses the matter of vampires, (very popular in the 19th century, as witness the illustration below)  it's also one that deals with many other interesting topics in a way which ups the entertainment value no end. 

Perhaps because vampires in various guises are now so popular, Shepherd adds something that's equally spooky and unsettling while being the antithesis of the supernatural: the scientific.  There's an author's note at the back of the book (which I urge you to read as I did at the very end so as not to spoil any of the fun you're going to have along the way, shivering and shaking...) in which she explains very thoroughly how scientific advances in the late 19th century fed into this story of  serial murder, bloodsucking, illusion, phantasmagoria and so forth.  

              (19th century vampire killing kit) 


The story starts with Charles, our hero, going to look at manuscripts on behalf of the Bodleian Library in a castle belonging to Baron Von Reisenberg. Even though we think we know precisely the kind of place we're going to see, and exactly what Von Reisenberg will be like,   Shepherd manages to make all she writes about seem both new and thrilling. Events, atmosphere, character are all conveyed so well that even the most jaded reader of Gothic will be excited. There are shocks, revelations, discoveries of a most gruesome sort and we are left reeling at the end of Part One.

Events then pass to the Journal of a young woman called Lucy.  The novel moves from her account of matters to what is happening to Charles.  His narrative takes place in London.  The Great Exhibition is on and is currently attracting thousands to look at the newest examples of scientific discovery. Meanwhile, the police are baffled by a  serial killer who rips the throat out of poor prostitutes....the stage is set for a non stop action packed eventful and thoroughly gory and sensational story of love, manipulation, sinister experiments, waxworks, graveyards, sea mists, darkness, illusion and of course, the folklore of vampires.

I do urge anyone who is interested in any aspect at all of magic, illusion,  mesmerism and of course the original Dracula, to read The Pierced Heart.  It's not published in this country (why on earth not, publishers? Beats me!) but you can get the US edition from Amazon. 

Interview About a Vampire and other Gothic Topics - Celia Rees

I've been thinking about all things Gothic. I am taking part in a panel event at the Lancaster Festival on 17th October with Cliff McNish, Chris Priestley and Dr Catherine Spooner from Lancaster University. I hope I pass muster.  By the time you read this it will already be over. Being asked to do something like that concentrates the mind. One has to think of something intelligent to say about what drives one's fiction and that involves delving down to find the roots of it.

I have visited the Gothic many times in my writing and it is through the Gothic that I began to write Historical Fiction. I can trace my fascination back to adolescence. When I was a teenager, I used to 'borrow' my brother's books. Most (if not all) would have been considered unsuitable reading, so I would 'borrow' in secret. When I think about it, nearly all my interests, from hard boiled American Crime Fiction to Ian Fleming, stem from these books. One of the books I purloined from under his bed was The Pan Book of Horror Stories.

I scared myself witless, but I was hooked.  The cover makes the book look lurid and trashy, but that's one of the things about Gothic, Dark Fantasy, or Speculative Fiction (posh words for Horror); quite often reputable, serious writers want to write in the genre and their stories are anything but trash. Inside the covers of this and the others in the series are stories by L. P. Hartley, C. S. Forester, Bram Stoker, Arthur Machen, M.R. James, Sheridan Le Fanu and Edgar Allan Poe. From there, I progressed to the works of Dennis Wheatley. Mr Wheatley is not quite in the same Literary League but as a teenager, that did not concern me. I devoured his novels voraciously.

I must have realised that Mr Wheatley's fiction left something to be desired because by the time I was seventeen, I was reading the classics of the genre: Bram Stoker's Dracula, Mary Shelley's Frankenstein and Mrs Radcliffe's The Mysteries of Udolpho.

I didn't think about writing this kind of fiction myself, or any kind of fiction for that matter, but all reading is reference, a conscious or unconscious resource lodged in the mind to be used at a later date.

I didn't become a writer until I was an adult. I was an English teacher in a secondary school when I began writing and it seemed natural to write for teenagers. Not just because I taught them and knew them, but I liked the same kind of fiction they did. Perhaps a part of me had never grown up. I began by writing crime thrillers. Then I saw Francis Ford Coppola's film,  Bram Stoker's Dracula. I came out of the cinema knowing that I wanted to write a book about a vampire. My current publisher didn't want me to do it, so I found a publisher who did.  I re-read Dracula. I'd last read it when I was seventeen.  I remember being seriously scared by it (and I don't scare easily) but I'd forgotten that it is entirely written as a series of 'found' documents: diaries, letters, reports of various sorts. This kind of metafictional device was what interested me now, that and how small, unsettling details scare people (if I was going to write in this genre, I had a craft to learn). I decided to set my vampire book, Blood Sinister, in two time frames: the Present and the 19th Century (crucially, before Dracula was written in 1897 and preferably about the time of the Ripper Murders - why stop at one gothic horror when one could have two?). The 19th Century episodes would be written in the form of a diary that would be discovered and read by a girl living now. A girl with a serious blood condition who is staying with her grandmother who just happens to live opposite Highgate Cemetery...

This was my first excursion into the Gothic and also my first serious attempt at writing historical fiction. I really enjoyed writing in both genre. I moved on from gothic 'horror' fiction but most of my subsequent fiction has been tinged with it because I still find it interesting. Witch Child dealt with witchcraft and witch persecution, transatlantic emigration and european interaction with native peoples but it is written in the form of a 'found' journal and has slightly more than a hint of potent and active folk magic. Pirates! has a diabolic villain in the form of Bartholome, the Brazilian, and his totemic ruby necklace.

I made a more thorough excursion into the realms of the Gothic when I was writing Sovay. I set the novel in 1794, the year Mrs Radcliffe published Udolpho.  Quite apart from the gothic excesses of the French Revolution and the city gothic of 18th Century London, I wanted my heroine to spend at least some of her time in a gothic abbey, Thursley, based on the fabulous Fonthill which was built by the wonderfully eccentric William Beckford who wrote gothic novels and was so stupendously wealthy that he built his very gothic pile to such exaggerated and monstrous proportions that the 300 ft tower fell down three times. I wanted her to undergo suitably gothic experiences there before escaping, as all truly gothic heroines do, so that she might wreak suitable revenge on her dastardly foe.

I have a feeling that whatever I am writing, the Gothic will be there somewhere. It is hard to escape  one's roots and the ideas and images that have always fed one's imagination and will continue to do so. The Gothic is part of history, just as history is part of the Gothic. 

Writing the (un)dead by Anne Rooney

Anne Rooney by Luki Sumner, House of Sharps

Our guest author for February is special in a new way. Anne Rooney has been helping behind the scenes since we started this blog last July. While not listed as one of us, she has performed the valuable role of Technical Support for the whole group, teaching us much and resolving our mistakes and muddles. And believe me, many of us were on a steep learning curve when we started!

So we were delighted to discover that, while not technically a historical novelist, Anne has been introducing some historical characters into her latest series - and a bizarre and fascinating mix they are!

About Anne:

Anne Rooney writes fiction and non-fiction for children and adult non-fiction on a bizarre range of topics. She has been a Royal Literary Fund Fellow for several years, and blogs as Stroppy Author. Anne lives in Cambridge with one-and-a-half daughters, a pig, two ferrets, a population of chickens that varies according to the appetite of the fox, a tortoise and possibly a turtle.

Over to Anne:

Thank you, History Girls, for inviting me to guest here. I'm not a real History Girl - I just lurk behind the scenes, bullying the electrons when things go wrong in a digital kind of way.

Although I haven't published a historical novel, I've dragged a few historical characters  into the twenty-first century to feature in my forthcoming vampire series (stifle that yawn, please; these are a very different kind of vampire).

A historical novelist writing about a real figure does a lot of research into the person's real life and times. But what if you want your historical figures still to be alive? You don't need to know just what they were like hundreds of years ago - you need to drag them kicking and screaming into the 21st century and look at what they would be like now. It's all very well to know how Samuel Pepys or Henry VII behaved then, but how would they be after they'd witnessed the First World War and the Space Race?

Take a step back. Vampires live a long time. Conventionally, they live forever. Mine don't exactly live forever, but because vampirism is a disease that eradicates telomere* shortening, they live for at least ten times as long as non-vampires. Diseases strike at random, so although many vampires are just routine folk, some are not. Amongst my vampire coterie I have [spoiler alert] Joseph-Ignace Guillotin, Louis Pasteur, Elvis Presley and Jack the Ripper. Jack the Ripper - well, I could do what I liked with him because no one knows who he was. But the others can't be made up.

Anton Raphael Mengs, self-portrait

That's not strictly true. I made up the character Ignace before I decided he was previously known as Joseph-Ignace Guillotin. I'd written the first book in the series and named the principal vampire Ignace. Then I was looking up Guillotin to see if he would fit into the second book, set in Paris, and discovered his second name was Ignace and I had sort of used him already. But I'd use the picture on the right while writing him. On the basis of this portrait, and not any information about the man (it's actually Anton Raphael Mengs, a painter born in Germany in 1728), I'd written a character who was slick, debonair, a bit of a rake, and - incidentally - the chief vampire of the western world. But by happy coincidence Ignace shared a name with Guillotin, and that's who he became.

Joseph Ignace-Guillotin

The task then became not to recreate Guillotin as he would have been in the late eighteenth century, but to develop him as he would be now, in 2012, if he were still alive. So we have a man who invented the guillotine and is a vampire. Why did he invent it (or refine it, actually, though he's generally credited with its invention)? The usual reason given is that he did it to make execution less painful. Why did he care? He needs a motivation. And here it is, all laid out ready in real history...

The mother of Marie Antoinette was Maria-Theresa of Austria. In 1755, Maria-Theresa sent her private physician, Gerard van Swieten, to investigate vampirism in Moravia. He (being a vampire, in my world) reported back that vampirism is a load of b******. So MT outlawed all those vampire-killing tactics people were using. This naturally led to a surge in the number of vampires, and something had to be done. That something was the French Revolution. (And you thought it was all about oppressed peasants and a broken system? LOL! That's what they wanted you to think!)

Guillotin's eyes and nose on Mengs

Because all his aristocratic vampire friends were being killed in rather unpleasant ways and he couldn't stop them dying, Guillotin invented (refined) a way of killing them that would be relatively painless - the guillotine. (Because we all know vampires can be beheaded, staked or burnt.) Indeed, three of the six articles he presented to the National Assembly serve the purposes of vampire dynasties extremely well:

• Article 4: No one shall reproach a citizen with any punishment imposed on one of his relatives. Such offenders shall be publicly reprimanded by a judge. [So you can't persecute the relatives of a vampire, assuming they are vampires, too - which they probably are]
• Article 5: The condemned person's property shall not be confiscated. [Vampires have built up enormous wealth over their centuries-long lives; vampire families are not about to hand it over to the state]
• Article 6: At the request of the family, the corpse of the condemned man shall be returned to them for burial and no reference to the nature of death shall be registered [goes without saying...no staking, and if they were not beheaded, it might be possible to fix them. And we don't want doctors looking too closely]

What can be extracted from his story to draw Guillotin as he would be now, if he'd continued to live? Well, he took credit for inventing something he only appropriated and improved, so that suggests a certain degree of self-importance, selfishness, opportunism, even arrogance. He has turned his not-inconsiderable intellect to the task of working out how to kill people with minimum pain. Though the aim is compassionate, the task is gruesome. Perhaps it takes a certain amount of detachment to tackle this problem? Perhaps it takes so much detachment that this character is rather lacking in empathy. And from this, I developed Ignace as he is now, two hundred years later.

Ignace is a psychopath. Using Simon Baron-Cohen's Zero Degrees of Empathy as a handbook to  psychopathy, I made him type zero-positive: someone whose psychopathy is not deliberately turned to harm, and often produces flashes of inventive, scientific or mathematical genius. The interest in solving the logical problem of how to kill people with minimal pain that he showed in the 18th century has become, in the 21st century, an obsession with discovering the scientific nature of vampirism. He runs a research centre in Russia; he is ruthless and some of his methods are less than ethical. But - like many psychopaths - he is superficially charming and sexually attractive. He seduces the Jack Wills model vampire when she is newly-turned vulnerable (and 350 years his junior). He excuses the awful things he does (such as buying slaves from the flesh markets of south-east Asia for his experiments) with a cool logic. He wrong-foots his wife into killing her lover to prove a point. And he keeps a very high profile prisoner in his castle for 800 years. (The prisoner's identity will be revealed in series 2, but HG readers will guess from the clues.)

So much for Joseph-Ignace Guillotin.

Louis Pasteur

Louis Pasteur is also a vampire, working in Ignace's research centre near Yakutsk. In life, Pasteur was a passionate scientist. He was so keen to find a vaccine to protect people against rabies that he sucked the saliva from the mouths of infected dogs with a pipette. I took this passion, and his portrait (right), and made a man who is jovial, compassionate, has a sense of humour and is fiercely intelligent. He is still dedicated to science, but he's a realist. He's found that he can't prove vampirism is a virus, and is biding his time, doing pointless experiments so that Ignace continues to fund his research while he hopes for inspiration or luck. Luck comes in the form of a young Iraqi refugee and Pasteur instantly recognises the boy's brilliance. Pasteur doesn't look very jovial in this photograph, but of course people didn't smile for photos in the 19th century.

Dmitri Ivanovsky

Another 19th century scientist I've recruited is Dmitri Ivanovsky, the Russian biologist who first identified viruses. The Dutch scientist Beijerinck is usually credited with the discovery of viruses - but he did eventually concede Ivanovsky's prior claim. So I made Ivanovsky a modest man who is kind and helpful, unassuming and self-effacing. He's also rather fragile - as he looks in this photo. Maybe he wasn't like that - maybe he was very cross that Beijerinck got the credit first off, and should have been motivated by bitterness. But I don't read Russian, and there don't seem to be any accounts of Ivanovsky's character in languages I do read, so I reckon he's fair game. He and Pasteur are foils to Ignace's ruthlessness.

There's nothing much historical to say about Jack the Ripper except what we can deduce from his crimes. I've made him a zero-negative psychopath following Baron-Cohen again, as that seems fairly consistent with what he did. My editor wanted him to be a ridiculous,  figure - more a John Christie - but that didn't seem in keeping with the accounts of his crimes. So he's tall, strong, rather handsome and very frightening. He's also calculating and ambitious. There will be more of him in the second series. He started as a minor character, but - appropriately - has claimed a larger part and won't be pushed away. I'm not brave enough to mess with him.

Elvis Presley

How would Elvis Presley be if he were alive now? For one thing, he works in a chip shop (in Eastbourne). We know that because Kirsty McColl said so ('There's a guy works down the chip shop swears he's Elvis'). He's still a talented musician; overweight, with a tacky hairstyle and too much hair dye. Elvis has only been a vampire since the 1970s, so there was no need to consider how his character would have matured and crystallised over centuries. But he's still dealing with his fate.

Elvis is very resentful of Ignace, who insisted he disappear with a fake death because an Elvis who didn't age or die would be a serious embarrassment. (Vampires who refuse to disappear with a fake death have to be disposed of. J.F. Kennedy is a prime example of this sort of stroppy vampire, addicted to success.)

I don't think there's anything quite comparable to keeping historical figures alive and functioning until the present. It's not like a time-slip or having someone wake from a coma, as they have experienced all the intervening years. There's no surprise at modern technology, no ignorance of the social and political scene. (Indeed, the vampires have all the time in the world, so they're rather good at keeping up with developments.) Instead it's a question of intensifying the normal maturing of characters - finding the key traits of a person and distilling them far beyond what would happen over a normal lifespan. It's a very unique kind of challenge - and thrilling. I think I'll be trawling history for people to drag out of the grave for a long time. Just off to polish my spade...

* telomere = a bit of spare chromosome at the end each chromosome. It doesn't code for anything useful, but each time a cell divides and the chromosomes reproduce, a bit is lost from the end of the chromosome. For most of our lives, it's a bit of useless telomere that's lost, but eventually the telomere is all gone and the useful part of the chromosome starts to be eroded. That's why old people go wrong easily - their chromosomes are getting cut off.

The first six Vampire Dawn titles are published in March 2012 by Ransom Publishing: Die Now or Live Forever; Drop Dead, Gorgeous; Life Sucks; Every Drop of Your Blood; Dead on Arrival; In Cold Blood. They are short, intended for readers who can't tackle a full-length novel. (Age 12+)

Follow Anne Rooney on Facebook or twitter: @annerooney. Follow the vampires, if you dare, on Facebook or twitter: @vampiredawn.
Websites: Anne Rooney; Vampire Dawn

February competition

Two History Girls have new books out now and we have some to offer as prizes.


To win one of three copies of Marie-Louise Jensen's The Girl in the Mask, answer this question:


"If you were a notorious 18th Century highwayman (or woman in disguise), what alias would you give yourself?"



To win one one five hardbacks of Katherine Roberts' Sword of Light, try this one:


"If Lord Avallach gave you one of his fairy horses, what would you name it?"


Leave your answers in Comments below, mixed in with comments on Anne Rooney's blogpost.


Closing date 7th March.As usual, only UK entrants. 

Bring out your dead! Or, a new kind of ghost-writer – Michelle Lovric

My subject in this Dickensian week is the ghosts of books past. But first we must take a detour into the construction industry.

Eighty per cent of the energy that a building will use over its lifetime has already been spent in its construction. Therefore architects and green-minded planners are now looking at refurbishing old urban buildings rather than demolishing them. City centres, it turns out, can be a better shade of green than the new so-called ‘green towns’. Moreover, in a city, the energy expended on lighting and infrastructure reaches a higher density of people. If you righteously inhabit a ‘green town’, you still have to get in your car and drive into a real dirty old town to work, shop or be entertained. (Even your cardboard coffin will have to be carried in a large petrol-guzzling vehicle to your green burial site.) If you live in a city centre, you can walk everywhere or use greenish public transport.

So how does this relate to books and publishing? And ghosts, for that matter? Well, in the rush for absolute novelty, I worry about the way many publishers forget their existing buried treasure. Why are so many fantastic books out of print? Why are so few relaunched? Or reprinted? How many authors are dropped at the first sign of sales becalming, with no questions asked about an ill-advised cover or a marketing non-event? Instead, some publishers are addicted to the Next Big Thing. Books are being put in their graves prematurely, in my opinion, and coffin lids are being nailed down on characters who are still breathing. The squirrel who forgets where his nuts are buried is likely to go hungry – some publishers could perhaps nourish their bottom lines if they remembered and dug up some of the valuable material they have ‘laid down’. I hasten to add that many publishers do keep their backlists alive, and all power to their elbows in this.

As an anthologist, I was always dismayed when publishers still claimed permission fees for extracts from books that had been out of print for more than fifty years. I could never be sure if these fees were precisely legal, or if the authors/estates would ever get a taste of them. But I did know that I’d be in time-wasting trouble if I didn’t pay them, so I did. And every time a publisher took my money for one of these forgotten books, I had a faint hope that some fresh, young, bibliocurious editor might descend to the cobwebbed vaults and view the mildewed file copy that (I hoped) they’d kept down there.

But what I really hoped was that the cub editor would think, ‘This is damned fine stuff. And still of interest. We should reprint this little masterpiece! It’s still just as good as it always was. One short life was not enough for it.’

And then we would see a return on a book’s energy – the writing, editing and designing: the eighty per cent of energy required in its original construction. Even if one or all three were tweaked a little to accommodate modern taste, and yes, that pernicious desire for something new, such books would still be greener than anything manufactured from scratch.

I’m not saying that new books should be banned. Quite the opposite. I want all deserving writers to be able to eat and buy a new pencil from time to time. No, what I am proposing is a new kind of ghost-writing: new books could be TWINNED with revivals of old, wonderful books on similar themes. The living authors could talk about the dead ones. The dead ones would talk, subliminally, to readers’ memories. Living and dead authors could go on virtual tours together.

Wouldn’t I love to be lit-twinned with Rhoda Broughton, or Augustus Sala? My latest, Talina in the Tower, is about a Venetian girl who turns into a cat in Victorian times. Therefore I’d love to twin it with the immortal (yet out of print) CATS: Their Points and Classification with Chapters on Feline Ailments and Their Remedies. How to Train for Performing Tricks, etc, by W. Gordon Stables, M.D., C.M., R.N.

The title belies the book’s lovely, arch tone, the irrepressible tendency towards anecdote and editorializing. He bemoans the shameful cat show classification ‘cats of no sex’, who are judged on weight alone. He has ideas for training cats to open and close doors, ring the doorbell and do somersaults on request. He tells horror stories of people who leave cats shut up in houses to starve to death while they go on holiday. Dr Stables has a great cat lexicon too. I have never seen it written before that cats say ‘Wurram’ – but they absolutely do. As for discipline, he admits that ‘there are times when even the most highly-trained cat will deviate from the paths of decency’. In this case, he unfashionably recommends a little bit of whalebone to switch the offender several times across the fore-paws or the tops only of the ears before turning her out of doors. Obviously I vehemently disagree with any corporal punishment for cats. All the better! Dr Stables and I can debate the matter with passion.

Then there’s the genial William Dean Howells, who lived in my own house in Venice at exactly the time that Talina in the Tower is set. His book, Venetian Life, is one of the most charming volumes written by a foreigner about the city. Venetian cats receive some honourable mentions. We’d have plenty to talk about, he and I.

So I’d be happy to go on tour with Dr Stables and Mr Dean Howells, answering questions about all things cat and all things Victorian Venice. I don’t believe the revived sales of their books would damage mine.

Does this sound like ‘Bring out your dead!’?

Is it a crazy idea?

And so was separating rubbish.

And so were energy-saving light bulbs.

And so were hyper-sexed thousand-year-old vampires.

So, no publisher-bashing comments please, as that’s not what this blog is about. Without publishers, there’d be no books at all. Much more interesting is this question: If you’re a writer, who would your writerly ghost-twin be? Who do you imagine opposite you in the Edinburgh yurt, swigging that last medicinal glass before your minder takes you up on stage? Or on that train to the school visit? Or sitting beside you signing at a bookshop?



Michelle Lovric’s website
Talina in the Tower is published by Orion Children’s Books

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