I’ve got good news for those of you who read “The Body in the Snow” and warmed to my characters Bebe Bollinger and Beth Cooper. They are back and are hopefully coming to a kindle near you very soon.
This morning I came to
of the first draft, which means the plot and all the basics are finished and done with. I know now who did it and my 75,000 words are ready to be edited, test read and edited again, formatted and then released.
As my last blog post mentioned I’ve chosen a real life event as background:
This is an odd event with 42 countries presenting one song each and picking the winner in a very obscure and nerdy voting ceremony that has cult status on its own.
The contest has a tradition of over 60 years and has changed from pure chanson to more modern tunes. Main stream media tend not to take it too seriously but the combined TV audience around the globe is 1 billion people.
I’ve been a fan since the 80ies and so I guess it was inevitable that I would write such a novel at some point. I’ve attended one of those contests myself. In order to avoid any law suits I will need to change a lot of the details from the original draft. Having spent a few days reflecting on how to do this I had fortunately a few really good ideas and I’m looking forward to implementing those changes and rewrites.
The plot:
Bebe Bollinger still got her mind on a serious revival of her faded singing career. Since “The Body in the Snow” things have improved but there is always scope for bigger and better, and Bebe wants nothing less than the best.
Sometimes the best available is not the best overall. In show business compromises, persistence and luck are all required to make it big. A chance encounter on a cruise ship, death threats and amateurish but consistent attacks on Eurovision participants drag Bebe into the sphere of the competition that only the year before had been denied her.
Once again combining her talent for crime solving and her passion for music, Bebe joins the gathering of media, music professionals, hopeful newcomers and celebrities in Sweden, in tow her side-kick former police woman Elizabeth.
It’s been a while since I’ve written original materials and I had an absolute blast. I can’t wait to show it to beta readers and hear what they are thinking of it.
Watch this apce and have a happy Monday everyone.
My Review of The Body In The Snow: A Bebe Bollinger Murder Mystery (Bebe Bollinger Murder Mysteries Book 1) by Christoph Fischer #bookreview
Fading celebrity Bebe Bollinger is on the wrong side of fifty and dreaming of a return to the limelight. When a TV show offers the chance of a comeback, Bebe grabs it with both hands – not even a lazy agent, her embarrassing daughter, irritating neighbours or a catastrophic snowfall will derail her moment of glory. But when a body is found in her sleepy Welsh hamlet, scandal threatens. Detective Sergeant Beth Cooper has a string of unsolved cases to her name. Her girlfriend left her and she’s a fish out of water in rural West Wales. Things couldn’t get much worse – until the case of the Body in The Snow lands in her lap.
Can Beth solve the case and save her career and can Bebe make her comeback? All will be revealed in this light-hearted, cosy murder mystery by best-selling and award winning historical and crime fiction novelist Christoph Fischer.
A very enjoyable book. With a fantastic cast of characters plus humour, murder, romance this is a cracking mystery.
Living in the same Welsh hamlet we have Bebe, a retired singer trying to make a comeback, Ian, everyone’s helpful handyman, his snooty nosed wife Christine plus Dora, a divorcee. Barely tolerating each other in normal times, when the hamlet becomes snowbound tension begins to rise, more so when a body is found!
Then we have the troubled detective Beth on the scene to add to the mix. All of these characters are brought vividly to life and we find ourselves drawn in. Oh and did I mention Bebe’s daughter and boyfriend plus the murder victim ?
Plenty to keep you guessing with many twists and turns along the way as Beth tries to solve the case.
This is a really good murder mystery and definitely worth a read.
Once again, Christoph writes a riveting and driven story. Full of drama, plot twists and brilliant characters. This is now the fourth book I’ve read of his and it’s by no means the last.
I can’t wait to see more mysteries involving Bebe and Beth.
Highly recommended.
An excellent writer, Christoph Fischer, just ventured into the domain of the cozy mystery with The Body in the Snow. So of course I had to read the book!
The book has three distinct parts: the first is the crime, brief but graphically suggested.
The second is really what I’d call a chick lit piece because it describes the residents in three country cottages in Llangurrey in Wales, an idyllic but remote setting. It begins eight days before the crime and the reader is first introduced to the residents of the three cottages through the eyes of Bebe Bollinger – who will clearly be back in subsequent books since this is a Bebe Bollinger mystery. Bebe is an egocentric, past-her-prime chanteuse who awakens to a continuous heavy snowfall that has closed businesses and schools and all the area roads, cutting her and her neighbors off from the rest of civilization. Bebe is a hoot, in my opinion, so aware of her image that she doesn’t buy enough food to see her through the storm because she refused to be seen emptying shelves in the local market. I loved the image of her emerging from her house during the snow storm in her mink coat and fur Russian-style hat with high heel leather boots. Her main connection to the outside world is her daughter Helena, to whom she barely relates. One of her neighbors is Dora, ten years younger than Bebe, a stunning and colorful woman recently divorced from the scion of a wealthy, local family. The third set of neighbors are Ian and Christine. Ian is friendly and gregarious when his wife is not around; Christine is, to put it nicely, a bitch. She complains to her neighbors about all sort of things – putting their garbage bins out too early, parking to close to the space in front of her cottage. Roughly a third of the book is devoted to developing these characters in caustically humorous detail and exploring their relationships, which allows the reader to consider who might have done the crime, when the body in the snow is finally found.
The third part of the book begins when the body is identified as the wife of a man currently engaged in a public affair with Helena. He, Helena and the wife have visited Bebe at one time or other. But the body is found in front of Ian and Christine’s cottage, and the rest of the book is devoted to the investigation of Detective Sergeant Beth Cooper. Cooper is a gay alcoholic on the wrong side of thirty, who is given the case by her superior because he is convinced she is in a downward spiral – and this case will seal her fate. Her girlfriend has recently left her and things couldn’t get much worse, until she begins her investigation of the body in the snow.
In the midst of all this weaves Bebe’s attempted comeback to the music scene, the oddly toxic relationship of Ian and Christine, Helena’s in-her-mother’s-face relationship with her married boyfriend, and the flamboyant Dora, who had an argument with the victim.
I truly believed at one point that the duck out of water Cooper would be unable to solve this ‘who dunnit,’ a powerful statement to the convincing characterizations of the author. Tension and personality clashes add to the seemingly disconnected threads of the mystery. Thank heavens he ties it all up in convincing fashion!
For a first dip in the cozy field, this award-winning historical and crime fiction writer has taken the gold. I highly recommend this book for an intriguing and never boring read!
For my current work in progress I’ve chosen a real life event as background: The Eurovision Song Contest. I’ve attended one of those contests in 2013 and decided to pick that particular event as setting.
Image credit: TVLine
The question for me was whether to use the actual people and celebrities who were present and performed in the show as characters in my novel or not.
If you watch shows and programmes like “South Park”, “Ab Fab” and “Tracey Ullman” they all use known celebrities and poke fun at them. It seemed silly to make up countries and singers when using the real ones gives a much more realistic flavour and the opportunity for insider jokes.
So I’ve started contacting agents and managers of said people to ask formally for permission. Not that I thought they could refuse me, after all I’m offering a very benign portrayal of said celebrities, nothing like the kind of thing they are used to from some publicly screened comedy programmes.
Sadly I was refused permission by the people I’ve asked so far, which was surprising but of course is fair enough. I won’t to do this against their will and have to come up with alternative solutions. I’m just wondering how the TV shows get away with it, who I doubt have permission for some of the more outrageous and often even insulting programmes.
Use of celebrities in fiction and non-fiction is a wide field:
There are plenty of authorised and un-authorised biographies out there, papparazzi sell and publish photos of celebrities left right and centre against their will and many comedy shows imitate celebrities – so this refusal makes little sense.
I understand that using a celebrity is taking advantage of their status to sell my books.
Celebrities are brands, so they want to keep control over it.
I naturally respect the decision and see their point but it naggs me a little that TV Shows and newspapers get away with so much and Inot even with this little.
Shouldn’t libel, slander and defamation of character be the red line?
I’m not going to risk a law suit and instead take on the challange to change my stories to fit the legal framework. It might even be a blessing in disguise!
“The Yankee Years: Books 1 – 3” by Dianne Ascroft introduces Ruth Corey, a young woman in County Fermanagh, Northern Ireland in 1941, just as an American aircraft base is being secretly built in the area. Ruth’s boyfriend Harry is a journalist who seems to take a special interest in this secret endeavour. Her loyalties are tested when she realises that he might trade his knowledge about the plans, which could have huge repercussions for the course of the war.
The other two books in this omnibus edition deal with similar personal conflicts within the setting of WW2 in Northern Ireland.
Although published as three books, due to the length I’d describe this work more as three connected novellas or short stories. The historical and political facts are plentiful and make for some informative and very rewarding reading experience, with excellent background research and attention to detail. I chose this book because I knew little of this particular theatre of war and I was not disappointed. The stories are somewhat linear and focus more on the human aspects of war as well as on the romantic relationships portrayed. While I sometimes would have liked the historical aspects to take more centre stage to the romance parts, I found myself rather engaged in these books and enjoyed them to an extent that I rarely do with historical romances. Ashcroft has chosen some interesting and fascinating aspects of WW2 and should find grateful readers in those curious to know more about WW2 in Northern Ireland.
Dianne Ascroft biography:
Dianne Ascroft writes historical and contemporary fiction, often with an Irish connection. Her series The Yankee Years is a collection of Short Reads and novels set in World War II Northern Ireland. After the Allied troops arrived in this outlying part of Great Britain, life there would never be the same again. The series strives to bring those heady, fleeting years to life again, in thrilling and romantic tales of the era.
Her other writing includes a ghost tale inspired by the famous Northern Irish legend of the Coonian ghost, An Unbidden Visitor; a short story collection, Dancing Shadows, Tramping Hooves, and an historical novel, Hitler and Mars Bars.
Dianne lives on a small farm, in Northern Ireland, with her husband and an assortment of strong-willed animals. When she’s not writing, she enjoys walks in the countryside, evenings in front of her open fireplace and folk and traditional music.
The space race is back…along with Dior dresses, stiletto heels, secret agents, double dealers, smoky rooms and bullets meant just for you!
Get a load of this short excerpt:
Lily held in her hands Fedot’s translation of the Sputnik papers Pasha had squirreled away from his office in Moscow. In the spiritualist’s direct language, he distilled highlights of the emerging Soviet space program along with factoids of his own meant to help clarify the situation for Lily.
“1955 – In announcements made four days apart, the United States of America and the Soviet Union publicly state they will launch artificial Earth satellites by the end of the 1950s decade. This was the starting shot, as Tony Geiger might say, and was preceded by the pillage of the Nazi German V2 ballistic missile program after the war. Liquid-fueled rockets capable of flying long distances at high altitudes, they are the very…
In A Man Called Ove, Fredrik Backman writes about people who are at odds with modern rules, and he does so by ignoring, even flaunting, modern rules of writing. And it was glorious! Wonderful! He portrays people who don’t fit into society as it is presently constructed, so it makes sense he tears up the rules when writing about them. In this way he can tell the story of the old-fashioned Ove, for whom the rules are an undue burden, and the immigrant Parveneh, who recognizes the rules but for whom reality is a very flexible thing.
What are these rules of writing? Let me name a few. First, there’s the prohibition against using similes and metaphors. How did this start? From what I can tell, George Orwell said, don’t use similes. Now this has become orthodoxy. Backman deals with this by exchanging the word “like” with “as…
Here’s a truly entertaining and interesting blog. If you’re into wine or a good laugh, the wine wankers are the place to look.
Happy Blog birthday chaps!
Wow, what a journey. When we started this caper we had no idea that it would actually go anywhere at all. To be honest, this whole thing was never planned; it just came to be, we jumped aboard, and we’ve been riding the wave ever since. Even to this day we just let it take us wherever it is going. It’s the essence of The Wine Wankers.
Rosemary’s started college, and she’s decided not to tell anyone about her family. Rosemary is now an only child, but she used to have a sister the same age as her, and an older brother. Both are now gone – vanished from her life. There was something unique about Rosemary’s sister, Fern. You’ll have to find out for yourself what it is that makes her unhappy family unlike any other.
It took me a while to get into the story. The provocative opening scene and the beginning in the middle of a story put me off initially, but I knew what the book ultimately was about and therefor read on to the interesting bits.
SPOILER ALERT – I’m going to talk about something many reviewers leave out.
Because to do the book / audiobook justice one has to speak about the twist and it didn’t spoil it for me that I knew. One family member is a chimpanzee. In a behavioural experiment the family of the narrator took on a chimpanzee baby and raised it together with their children, effectively making them siblings.
The feelings of the family members towards the non-human member is well portrayed with a variety of reactions and attitudes: the scientist father who orchestrated the experiment being in stark contrast to his wife and son.
The book raises a lot of issues about animal welfare, socio-behavioural experiments, the damage done to both the humans and the chimpanzees and also a lot about family dynamics, about children acting out and how we all are beside ourselves.
The book is rich with much thought gone into it, and the characters throw in a lot of statistic and research information on these experiments, which completes that what one family experiment cannot include.
At times I felt torn, liking the factual information but not getting nto the characters. That came much later and then I understood the advantage of treating the subject as novel rather than a documentary.
There are a lot of loaded emotions, dramas, some heart-churning moments and much intellectual stimulus. I feel at times there was too much in this novel that distracted and that maybe the book had been more enjoyable if it had not tried to analyse and include all characters. The narrator analyses her brother, her friend, the chimpanzee sister, and quite late the mother’s viewpoint comes in via diaries.
This is undoubtedly a very impressive ‘must-read’ but be warned that it can also be demanding and overloaded.
It deserves all the praise it got but also some of the criticism.
Biography
Karen Joy Fowler (born February 7, 1950) is an American author of science fiction, fantasy, and literary fiction. Her work often centers on the nineteenth century, the lives of women, and alienation.
She is best known as the author of the best-selling novel The Jane Austen Book Club that was made into a movie of the same name.
Bio from Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia. Photo by Larry D. Moore [CC BY-SA 3.0 (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0) or GFDL (http://www.gnu.org/copyleft/fdl.html)%5D, via Wikimedia Commons.
A very entertaining, smoothly flowing narrative strand that illustrates the valley life of Lewis Davies, a likeable and honest young man whose life revolves around earning a living in deprived Wales, Rugby and sex.
Davies has a great voice that endears the reader even to the less gentlemanly aspects of his behaviour. His honesty is refreshing, the style often tongue-in-cheek, softening the blow of some harsher truths and realities within the novel.
Great descriptive and analytical writing without ever being too overloaded or busy.
Very enjoyable
Biography
Lewis Davies’s novels include Work, Sex and Rugby which won the World Book Day Award for Wales, Tree of Crows and My Piece of Happiness and he won the Rhys Davies short story competition for ‘Mr Roopratna’s Chocolate’. He was awarded the John Morgan Writing Award for work on the political travel book Freeways. He also published a selection of literary essays As I Was a Boy Fishing and recently a critically acclaimed selection of stories Love and Other Possibilities.
He has also worked extensively in Welsh theatre and has had six plays professionally produced – My Piece of Happiness, Without Leave, Spinning the Round Table, Football, Sex and Power at the Beau Rivage and most recently Supertramp, Sickert and Jack the Ripper which was performed at the Edinburgh Fringe Festival. He has also worked with the Kolcatta based Tin Can Theatre company. He has also written commissioned scripts for television, film and radio documentary.
His work for younger readers includes a series of children’s picture books available in both English and Welsh Tai and the Tremorfa Troll, developed with the illustrator Hayley Acreman.
From the author of The Palace of Curiosities and Vixen comes a bold new novel exploring questions of identity, sexual equality and how well we really know ourselves. Perfect for fans of Angela Carter, Sarah Waters and Erin Morgenstern.
Rich are the delights of late nineteenth-century Manchester for young siblings Edie and Gnome. They bicker, banter, shout and scream their way through the city’s streets, embracing its charms and dangers. But as the pair grow up, it is Gnome who revels in the night-time, while Edie wakes exhausted each morning, unable to quell a sickening sense of unease, with only a dim memory of the dark hours.
Confused and frustrated at living a half-life, she decides to take control, distancing herself from Gnome once and for all. But can she ever be free from someone who knows her better than she knows herself?
A dazzling and provocative novel of adventure and belonging, The Night Brother lures us to the furthermost boundaries of sexual and gender identity. With echoes of Orlando and Jekyll & Hyde, this is a story about the vital importance of being honest with yourself. Every part of yourself. After all, no-one likes to be kept in the dark.
At the moment it isn’t available in the US but it will be published next month (I think!).
Editorial Reviews
Praise for The Night Brother:
‘Rosie Garland writes in a tumble of poetry, desire and passion, as intriguing and delicious as the story she tells’ Stella Duffy
Praise for The Palace of Curiosities:
‘Garland’s lush prose is always a pleasure’ GUARDIAN
‘A jewel-box of a novel … Garland is a real literary talent: definitely an author to watch’ Sarah Waters
‘An alternately brutal and beautiful story about love and belonging in a vividly conveyed underworld, rich in carny phantasmagoria and lyrical romance’ METRO
‘Bewitching’ GOOD HOUSEKEEPING
‘Reminds me of Angela Carter’ Jenni Murray
Author Rosie Garland
About the Author
Rosie Garland is a novelist, poet, performer and singer with post-punk band The March Violets. An eclectic writer, she started out in spoken word, going on to garner praise as a performance poet. Her award-winning short stories, poems and essays have been widely anthologised, and her sixth poetry collection, As In Judy, is out now with Flapjack Press. She is the author of Vixen, a Green Carnation Prize nominee. Her debut novel, The Palace of Curiosities, won Book of the Year in the Co-op Respect Awards 2013 and was nominated for both The Desmond Elliott and the Polari First Book Prize. She lives in Manchester and is currently developing a new musical project, Time-Travelling Suffragettes.
Thanks to NetGalley and Harper Collins UK for providing me with an ARC of this book that I voluntarily chose to review.
Gender and gender identity are complex subjects and have always been, even at times when this was not openly acknowledged. Characters who change gender are not new (although not very common either): Virginia Wolf’s Orlando is perhaps one of the best known, and his/her fictional biography offers the reader a chance to observe historical events from the point of view of a character that is an outsider in more ways than one. Maria Aurèlia Capmany’s Quim/Quima uses another character that goes from male to female as a way to revisit the story of Catalonia, in an open homage to Woolf whom she addresses in a letter that serves as a prologue to her novel. Much more recently, Middlesex by Jeffrey Eugenides, a novel that deservedly won the Pulitzer Prize (and that I recommend wholeheartedly as I do the other two, although I don’t think Quim/Quima is easy to find other than in the original in Catalan), uses a similar plot device, although this time clearly addressing intersex and focusing more on the difficulties and struggles of living outside the gender norm (a subject the other two novels I mention don’t focus on).
What marks the difference between those books and The Night Brother is that rather than the main character living a part of his/her life as pertaining to a gender and, at some point, switching (similar to what happens in Kafka’s Metamorphosis although not quite as surreal), in this novel, the main character is both, male and female, and daily morphs from the one gender into the other, at least for a time. Edie is a woman (a girl when we meet her) who lives with her mother and grandmother in a pub in Manchester at the end of the XIX century, during the day, and at night she transforms into Herbert (or Gnome, as he prefers to be called), as if she were a shapeshifter creature of sorts, or a being from some paranormal genre (but that is not at all the feel of the novel). At the beginning of the novel Edie thinks of Gnome as her brother, always by her side, a wild creature who shares adventures with her (although we soon realise there is something peculiar about their relationship, as they seem to know what each other thinks without talking). Edie’s mother insists she is making Gnome up and is imagining things and although the girl tries hard to ignore it, unexplained things keep happening. At some point, she realises what the truth is (at least in part, as secrets are a big subject in this story) and discovers a way to keep her ‘brother’ at bay, although this comes at a heavy prize and it is difficult to maintain. Edie tries to live a discreet life and not get too close to people to avoid the risk of revealing her secret and that results in a sad and sombre life. When she becomes friendly with a gay co-worker and later becomes a suffragette, things get complicated and Gnome won’t stay put. I won’t discuss the plot in more detail to avoid giving any spoilers away.
The story is told in the first person from the points of view of Edie and Gnome (although Edie’s narration has more weight for reasons that soon become evident to readers) and a final chapter from the point of view of Abigail, one of the suffragettes. This style of narrative gives the reader a good sense of how different the perceptions of the two characters are, their behaviour, expressions, and what reactions they elicit from others. The novel excels at depicting the Manchester of the turn of the century, its buildings, its neighbourhoods, its businesses, the savoury and unsavoury areas, the social mores of the era, the secret places where those whose tastes did not fit in with society at large met, and the atmosphere of the city and the times. We have ladies from good families, blue collar characters, prostitutes, ruffians, street urchins, policemen, publicans and everything in between, all beautifully observed. For me, this is one of the strongest points of the novel, and although I only know the Manchester of modern times, I felt as if I was wandering its streets with the characters at the turn of the century. The Suffragist rallies and their repression are also shared in great detail, to the point where we are one of the fallen bodies about to be trampled over, in a scene difficult to forget.
As the novel is told in the first person from those two character’s perspectives, it is important that they come across as fully realised individuals. For me, Edie is the more convincing of the two. This is perhaps in part due to her having more space (and also probably because I am a woman and find it easier to get into her shoes) and that allows us to understand better what goes through her head. I don’t mean she is a particularly likeable character (she refuses to listen to reason, she is hard and tries to close her heart to others and she does bad things too), but she is easier to understand and she grows and evolves through the novel, becoming… Well, I’ll keep my peace. However, Gnome remains impulsive, childish at times, and seems not to have a thought beyond getting his revenge and satisfying his needs. He is not a well-rounded character, and as a depiction of masculinity I found it very limited —although it makes sense if we view the novel as an allegory that turns on its head the old view of the genders, with women being close to nature, earth, the moon, natural beings, slaves to their hormones and anatomy, and men who were the intellectual beings, rational, controlled, dominant, the sun, head over feelings— but he is a force of nature, although not very likeable either. Edie’s mother and grandmother are intriguing characters, with her mother being a great example of bad motherhood (not only for what she does and the way she treats Edie but for what she tries to do to sort her problems, an extreme but not false ‘treatment’ on offer at the time), while her grandmother is the voice of reason, and we eventually get to understand her circumstances well. Although the ending is perhaps a bit rushed, it is satisfying and its message of tolerance and acceptance of difference is a very welcome one.
I’ve seen this book described as magical realism and as an allegory and both concepts are fitting to a certain extent, although I suspect this is a book that will mean different things to different readers and its interpretations will probably tell us as much about the reader as about the writer (as should be the case). I recommend it to readers interested in historical fiction (particularly within a British setting) of the late XIX c /beginning of the XX c, those interested in novels that explore gender and gender identity issues in new ways and who don’t mind a touch of the unexpected, and to anybody intrigued to try a fairly original take on the subject. A word of warning: there is some sexual content (only one scene and not the most graphic I’ve read, but it is there) and there is violence, particularly in the scene of the repression of the Suffragist event.
This coming Tuesday – that’s July 25th – I’ve got a great beach read coming your way.
It’s titled, The Hungarian, and the best, though not least cumbersome way to describe it is to say it’s a historical spy thriller with elements of noir and a ghostly twist. In other words, if you like your thrillers romping, rollicking, dark and unorthodox…this is for you.
The story is a crazy ride through Cold War hotspots like Moscow, Prague, Bucharest, Transylvania, Greece and Iran and involves Sputnik, the space race, murder by salt poisoning, a Russian mystic, and a great roll in the hay inside an old, abandoned chapel.
And I want to offer Cold readers a sneak peek from the novel. But before you get reading, here’s a snapshot of the greater plot to give you some context:
While vacationing in Greece in 1956, Lily Tassos, the hard-partying daughter of…
![The Body In The Snow: A Bebe Bollinger Murder Mystery (Bebe Bollinger Murder Mysteries Book 1) by [Fischer, Christoph]](https://images-eu.ssl-images-amazon.com/images/I/51cPM-u983L.jpg)
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A very entertaining, smoothly flowing narrative strand that illustrates the valley life of Lewis Davies, a likeable and honest young man whose life revolves around earning a living in deprived Wales, Rugby and sex.
ls include Work, Sex and Rugby which won the World Book Day Award for Wales, Tree of Crows and My Piece of Happiness and he won the Rhys Davies short story competition for ‘Mr Roopratna’s Chocolate’. He was awarded the John Morgan Writing Award for work on the political travel book Freeways. He also published a selection of literary essays As I Was a Boy Fishing and recently a critically acclaimed selection of stories Love and Other Possibilities.
