Witchcraft

THE WITCH’S DAUGHTER . . . Between the covers

The central characters of this powerful novel are Grand Duchess Militza Nikoleyevna, married to a cousin of Tsar Nicholas II, and her daughter Princess Nadezhda Petrovna. The background, as you might guess, is the decline and fall of the Romanovs, and two headed monster that was WW1 and the Russian Revolution.

The early pages set the tone. The catastrophic failures of the Russian Army, culminating with the Battle of Tannenberg, turn the world on its head for Russian citizens, be they of noble birth or peasant stock. Of course, at that time, the centre of the Imperial Universe was Petrograd, and we learn of the impact on those close to the Tsar’s court of the murder of Rasputin. Historians both professional and, like myself, amateur, have long pondered the great paradox that is Russia. Perhaps no other place on earth can provide such examples of great beauty in architecture and music, but also of the most bestial behaviour by human beings. One of the great ironies is that the place where the revolution burst into flames was a city literally built on a swamp, and costing the lives of 100,000 workers. They died to give Peter the Great access to The Baltic and – arguably – a pathway to make Russia a great international nation.

The Witch of the title is Militza. In her private thoughts she describes how she ‘created’ Rasputin. What are we to make of this? She muses:

“Maybe if she explained how she and her sister fashioned the Holy Satyr from wax, mixed it with dust from a poor man’s grave and the icon of Saint John the Baptist; how she moulded the creature, rolling and warming the wax in her hands; how she baptised it with the soul of an unborn child, the dried up foetus, miscarried by the grand Duchess Vladimir all those years ago; and how they’d called on the Four Winds and the koldun -the insatiable, unconscionable, licentious, duplicitous, covetous, impious, soused, drunk and self appointed Holy Man man from Siberia – Rasputin had come. Just as she had commanded.”

Nadezhda is also a paradox. Despite her scorn for her mother’s ‘sorcery’ she carries with her a bottle of water, allegedly from the frozen waters of the River Neva that melted around the corpse of Rasputin after he was hauled from its depths. While nursing an admirer, a young man called Nicholas Orlof, severely injured in the unrest, she falls back on the old wisdom of her mother. The author (left) allows us to make up our own minds as to the efficacy of the spells and incantations.

The novel doesn’t take sides politically, but I must confess I have a long standing sympathy for the Russian nobility, and it still angers me to read about the utter brutality of what happened on 16th/17th July 1918 in Yekaterinburg. Yes, Nicholas II was weak, and his regime presided over breathtaking inequality by modern standards, but his sins pale into insignificance when judged against those of Lenin, Stalin and, dare I say it, more recent rulers of Russia.

The author puts Nadezhda centre stage as revolution takes over the streets of Petrograd, and the Tsar’s soldiers commit atrocities in an attempt to emulate Canute and turn back an inexorable tide. She is drawn into the animal vigour of the protests, bread marches and the resounding choruses of The Marseillaise. Perhaps I am wrong to say this, but it reminds me of modern day youngsters from impeccable middle class backgrounds taking to the streets to demand the downfall of Israel, or attacking paintings to draw attention to climate change.

As we know, the Tsar’s abdication saved neither him nor his wife and children. Historians still argue over the apparent rejection, by King George V, of his cousin’s request for sanctuary. This book suggests that, even if it had been granted, the Tsar and family would never have made it to Britain unscathed. When Lenin returns in his sealed train, the gunpowder keg explodes:

“The Neva was thawing. There was an open stream some 20 yards wide alongside the banks while the centre still remained frozen. And along with the filth swirling through the streets and the slush came the rats and the rebels. No one was working. No one wanted to work. No one was being paid. It was anarchy. Nearly 2,000,000 had now deserted the front and they were loitering in the city with nothing to do. Starving, cold, penniless and angry, they were ripe for the plucking. All Lenin had to do was reach out and take them.”

And take them he did. Militza, Nadezhda and the remainder of the minor Romanovs escape to Crimea where they just about manage to survive until they are rescued by ships of the British navy. A few minutes on Google will reassure readers that Malitza, Nadezhda and Nicholas lived long lives, but each – of course – died thousands of miles away from Petrograd. Only the most rabid and bitter socialist would fail to be touched by the sheer horror of the destruction of the Russian aristocracy described here. Yes, many of them were vain, privileged, and oblivious to the social injustice endemic under Romanov rule. But they were human. Like Shylock, they were entitled to ask{
“ If you prick us, do we not bleed? If you tickle us, do we not laugh? If you poison us, do we not die?”
This novel is the result of astonishing historical research, but above all, it is a tale of human resilience, courage and that ineffable human quality immortalised by the words of St Paul, “But the greatest of these is love.” Published by Aria, the book is available now in all formats.

October 10, 2024 0

THE BURNING . . . Between the covers

The novel starts in London, March 2020 and, like millions of other people, the Mountford family are sitting watching the news, and there is only one item – The Lockdown. Stringent rules about association and movement have been imposed, but Tony Mountford is nothing if not a quick thinker. He and his family are lucky. They own a holiday cottage in the south of England, and he decides on the spur of the moment to pile everyone and everything into the car and head south. They avoid police patrols, and arrive safely at the cottage. Across Britain, and the rest of Europe, a million nightmares are being enacted as the Covid death toll rises, but for the Mountfords, their nightmare is only just beginning.

The cottage, although it has been brought up to date after a fashion, is ancient: it has a resident ghost, or other-worldly presence; when sensed, it has been entirely benign, to the extent that it is mentioned as a selling point in the advertising brochure. Some renters have even placed a ☹️in their Trip Advisor review, disappointed that it never appeared during their stay.

Something, however, has jarred and jolted the spiritual ambience of the old stones out of kilter, and a far more sinister manifestation has claimed the cottage. There is a dramatic moment when, while Tony and his wife Charlie are making love in front of the log burning stove, with the children all sound asleep upstairs, a spectral hand grips Charlie’s throat. Far more chilling, however, is the moment when eight year-old Alfie appears at the foot of the stairs one night and says:

“Daddy, there’s a man in my room.“

Without giving too much away, the Mountfords’ stay at the cottage doesn’t end well, and after a few months the property is back on the market. Gavin and Simon are a fairly wealthy gay couple and they become the new owners. They decide to gut the interior of the building, stripping it right back to beams, brick and stone and – as far as the local council planners will allow – fully modernise it. In the process they make two startling discoveries. They find a deep well beneath the house, but of greater significance is that the builders have unearthed steps leading down to what can only be described as some kind of a cell. It has bars on the door, through which something of the inside can be seen, but the door remains resolutely locked. Robert Derry has a profound understanding of the latent power of old buildings, ghosts or not, and he describes it beautifully:

“After all, the heavy wooden beams were once living breathing things, until some mediaeval carpenters had cut them down in their prime. Then as seasoned joists they’d been hoisted up to hang from finely crafted oak A-frames, each chiselled peg dovetailed into carved sockets like ancient teeth in an angled jawbone. Dead men, whose hands had once lovingly laboured to shape each broad blade that would one day bear a ton or two of hand-hewn reads. The same dead men that now lay their heads further up the lane; a yew lined root that leads to a secluded graveyard which has long since laid its single tracked secrets to rest.”

As Gavin researches the history of what they pair had hoped would be their ‘forever home’, it is clear that in the mid seventeenth century the house witnessed truly evil acts, and that trauma seems to have been absorbed into the very bricks and mortar. Someone – or something – seems trapped, angry and in pain, and will not leave Gavin and Simon in peace until it is freed. This is an excellent account of dark deeds from the past intruding into modern lives, and Robert Derry has written a very convincing and plausible ghost story, with several moments that are genuinely disturbing. The Burning is independently published, and is available now.

June 3, 2024 1

WHAT WILL BURN . . . Between the covers

As the title suggests, What Will Burn is all about fire. It begins with an old woman, badly beaten and then set alight. There are passages which hark back to the late sixteenth century, and describe the dreadful end of women who were accused of witchcraft and burnt at the stake. A man apparently spontaneously combusts as he sits in his basement flat. It ends with a grim parallel to those scenes when one of the book’s main characters, suffers a similar fate in a grim parody of those historical executions.

So, what has all this to do with James Oswald’s Edinburgh copper, Detective Chief Inspector Tony McLean? Or, to be more accurate, Detective Inspector McLean, as he returns to duty busted down a rank after a lengthy investigation into misconduct.

His ‘welcome back Tony” case is that of the agonising death of Cecily Slater, an elderly member of an aristocratic family, who has lived alone in a crumbling cottage in the woods above Edinburgh. Her charred remains have gone unnoticed for some time, until an estate worker who runs the odd errand for the old woman makes a grisly discovery.

McLean also becomes involved with a controversial campaign called Dad’s Army. They are not the avuncular dodderers from Walmington-on-Sea, but a group of embittered men who, for one reason or another, have been denied access to their children. They are led – and empowered – by a lawyer called Tommy Fielding, a man who who has a seemingly pathological hatred of women, and is undeterred by the fact that many of his clients have been separated from their children due to allegations of serious sexual abuse.

All good police procedural series need a repertory company of regular characters, and the Tony McLean books are no exception. There’s Grumpy Bob, guardian of the cold case records down in the basement, Detective Constable Janie Harrison – now Acting Detective Sergeant Harrison, the lugubrious Detective Constable ‘Lofty’ Blane. McLean himself is a fascinating character. Thanks to a legacy, he has the luxury of being financially independent of his job, but loves the work. He also has the mixed blessing of being someone who is sensitive to things paranormal, and beyond the ken of the Police Scotland operational handbook. Away from the station, there is the strange character of Madame Rose, a transexual psychic who can always be relied upon to provide a sense of things “not dreamt of in our philosophy”.Last but not least, there is Mrs McCutcheon’s cat. We never see the owner, but the moggie is a permanent resident in McLean’s house.

There is a new member of the cast in this novel, in the person of Chief Superintendent Gail Elmwood, freshly signed from the Metropolitan Police to head up Tony’s team. Let’s just say that she is not your conventional senior police officer.

As the reviewers’ cliché has it, the body count gets higher. Readers expecting a conventional solution to the criminal activity in What Will Burn will search in vain. James Oswald takes this book to a new level of dark imaginings, intrigue, human venality and sinister happenings which, if they don’t scare you, it perhaps means that you are in a persistent vegetative state. What Will Burn is published by Wildfire, and is out today, 18th February.

I am a confirmed and long-standing fan of the Tony McLean series. To read reviews of earlier novels, click here.

February 17, 2021 0

THE MEON HILL MURDER . . . Part three

The Spring of 1945 turned into summer in Lower Quinton. The barren hedges that Charles Walton had tended bore green buds. The war in Europe finally ended, and the wives, daughters, mothers and sisters who had not lost their men in the struggle against Hitler began to dream of the day when “We’ll Meet Again” would be a joyful reality rather than a sentimental song. More mundanely, the Warwickshire police were none the wiser as to who had hacked an old man to death on that fateful St Valentine’s Day. Robert Fabian had returned to London, and Alec Spooner had other cases to solve (although the Walton murder remained an obsession with him).

Just as the identity of Jack the Ripper will never be known, we will never know who killed Charles Walton, or why. As recently as 2014, the local BBC team for Coventry and Warwickshire examined the case, and sent some unfortunate trainee out there to quiz the locals. As you will see from the feature (click here) no-one was very keen to talk, any more than they were in the weeks and months after the murder.

Alfred Potter died in 1961, and whatever secrets he had went into the grave with him. The Firs farm was later demolished and was replaced by an expensive housing development. Talking of graves, the researcher will look in vain for the last resting place of Charles Walton, in St Swithin’s churchyard. It has been said that the headstone was removed to deter ghoulish sightseers, but like so much of this story, there is no hard evidence that this is the case. Walton’s meagre cottage has now been knocked through with two other adjoining properties to make a rural residence which, no doubt, is worth an eye-watering amount (below)

My view? The only thing that stands out like the proverbial sore thumb is the total collective silence – both contemporary and future – of the villagers of Lower Quinton. 1945 was not a time of continual distraction from electronic or digital media. Lower Quinton was not a bustling place, a transport hub, or somewhere used to endless strangers coming and going. Someone – and then by definition others in their circle – knew something, and the resultant omertà is almost as chilling as the murder itself. Thirty years later, Walton’s death was still providing copy for regional journalists and, although I have no evidence that Ron Harding – who penned this piece – was in any way involved with the murder, it still sounds as certain people – or their sons and daughters – at the heart of whatever made Lower Quinton tick, were still anxious for the world to move on and leave them to their secrets.

September 23, 2020 0

THE FAMILIARS . . . A launch to remember

AT THE APPROPRIATELY NAMED DEAD DOLLS HOUSE in Islington, the inventive folks at publishers Bonnier Zaffre launched Stacy Halls’ novel The Familiars with not so much a flourish as a brilliant visual fanfare.

The novel was at the centre of a vigorous bidding war and, having won it, Bonnier Zaffre celebrated in style. The book is set in seventeenth century Lancashire, and the drama plays out under the lowering and forbidding bulk of Pendle Hill. If that rings a bell, then so it should. The Pendle Witch Trials were a notorious example of superstition and bigotry overwhelming justice. Ten supposed witches were found guilty and executed by hanging.

Stacey Halls takes the real life character of Fleetwood Shuttleworth, still a teenager, yet mistress of the forbidding Gawthorpe Hall. Despite being only 17, she has suffered multiple miscarriages, but is pregnant again. When a young midwife, Alice Grey, promises her a safe delivery, the two women – from such contrasting backgrounds – are drawn into a dangerous social upheaval where a thoughtless word can lead to the scaffold.

Back to modern London. Francesca Russell, now Publicity Director at Bonnier Zaffre, has masterminded many a good book launch, and she and her colleagues were on song at The Dead Dolls House. We were able to mix our own witchy tinctures using a potent combination of various precious oils. I went for Frankincense with a dash of Patchouli. I managed to smear it everywhere and such was its potency that my wife was convinced that I had been somewhere less innocent than a book launch.

We were encouraged to give a nod to the novel’s title, and draw a picture of our own particular familiar, and pin it to a board for all to see. I decided to buck the trend towards foxes, cats and toads, and went for a fairly liberal interpretation of that modern icon, the spoilt and decidedly bratty Ms Peppa Pig.

The absolute highlight and masterstroke of the evening was, however, a brief dramatisation of a scene from the novel. Gemma Tubbs was austere and elegant as Fleetwood, while Amy Bullock, with her Vermeer-like simple beauty, brought Alice to life.

That’s the good news, and I have a copy of the novel. The bad news is that it isn’t out on general release until February 2019. Here’s wishing everyone a happy winter, and I hope you all survive another one. If you need an incentive to get through the long hours of cold, darkness and northern gloom, The Familiars should fit the bill. It will be published by Bonnier Zaffre and can be pre-ordered here.