Thanks to Random Things Tours for inviting me onto the blog tour and for my copy of this beautiful book for review – as always, opinions are entirely my own.
From the Publisher:
A dazzlingly illustrated collection presenting the extraordinary life stories of fourteen bright stars from Black British history, from Tudor England to modern Britain.
Brought to life through hand-painted illustrations by award-winning illustrator Angela Vives, this important and timely book from author and educator J. T. Williams brings the lives of fourteen shining stars from Black British History into the spotlight, celebrating their remarkable achievements and contributions to the arts, medicine, politics, sport and beyond.
Featuring a constellation of iconic individuals – including storytelling freedom fighter Mary Prince, football star and World War I soldier Walter Tull, and Notting Hill Carnival founder Claudia Jones – ‘Bright Stars of Black British History’ shines a light on the courage, resilience and talent of remarkable individuals who have left a lasting mark on our collective history.
It’s a brave author that takes a beloved character and creates a new story for them – and that’s exactly what Denise Mina has done here with Raymond Chandler’s famous private detective, Philip Marlowe.
Marlowe is mulling over a case that he’s closed that doesn’t feel right when he gets a summons to the sprawling Montgomery estate set high above Beverly Hills. The young heiress to the family fortune, Chrissie Montgomery, is missing and Marlowe is asked to find her. However, her elderly and dying father isn’t taking any chances – he’s hired another private detective who Marlowe knows well in order to set the rivals against each other in finding his daughter. As Marlowe gets nearer to the truth, a murder is committed and Marlowe has to consider whether Chrissie really is safest returning to her family.
Mmm, it’s starting to look like I have an obsession with poisoners! (I really don’t!)
I picked this up in Audible’s 2 for 1 sale after I had finished reading about the 20th century ‘teacup poisoner’, Graham Young, in Carol Ann Lee’s ‘A Passion for Poison’ (recommended – my review is here).
My stop is a guest post from Chris himself… details about the book and author follow Chris’s post below.
Comeback: Guest post
They say that the only thing better than writing a novel is having written one.
One of the best parts of having written a novel is getting feedback when other people have read it. It doesn’t always have to be good feedback (although that’s nice too); finding out what did work and what didn’t can be very useful during the drafting and editing process, which is why I appreciated people who agreed to beta read the novel over the years.
Sometimes of course you’ll get two diametrically opposed reactions – if this happens I tend to assume that I probably got it about right in the first place. After all, the old saying about not being able to please all of the people all of the time arose for a reason.
One unexpected piece of positive feedback I received on a number of occasions – not just for Comeback but also for other fiction I’d written over the years – was that I wrote women well.
This surprised me, as I wasn’t even aware that I should have been writing characters differently depending upon their gender. As far as I was concerned I had just been writing people. Furthermore my experience of the inner monologue of members of the human species was confined to what I’d been able to glean from my own experiences. You could almost say that I’d just been writing me, albeit different aspects of me, different people I could imagine being.
Maybe that’s why it worked – by just writing people rather than consciously writing men or women I was drawing on the common experience of being a person, which meant that whoever read it could relate to it in some way.
It is possible that this is an aspect of writing I’ve missed out on – deliberately putting the narrative in the head of someone I can’t relate to, a person who is so different from me I can’t help but write them as other. On the other hand the way I do write works for me, and it makes the characters more relatable to the reader then that’s good.
As it turned out the main characters in Comeback were women, and even though that does affect their experience of the world within the novel, that wasn’t why they were there. They just turned up when I started writing and their experiences shaped the novel itself. They were interesting.
Characters being interesting can mean any number of things. It can even mean being flawed, having your own personal strengths and weaknesses, your own inner demons to fight. It’s these complex things that make characters zip and which give them verisimilitude, whatever gender they are.
To misquote the alleged old Chinese curse “May you live with interesting characters.”
Returning to the subject of feedback, once the book has gone to print then there’s nothing more that can be done about it so the purpose of the feedback changes. Nevertheless it’s still one of the best bits of having written a book and I still appreciate it!
And that is another odd, exciting and unexpected thing – now that Comeback is “out there” then after all these years the narrative has finally solidified into its final form. It took almost exactly ten years from first typing The End to publication. As a confirmed pantser – or ‘archaeologist’ as I prefer to call it – it is as if I am finally seeing the story clearly after years of groping towards it. After years of existing solely (mostly) in my own head, illuminated only by my personal point of view, it is now in the open and lit from all angles.
Maybe this means that people will start to discover new things in it, things I hadn’t even been aware of. These means that the exhilarating process of discovery inherent in being a pantser / archaeologist actually continues well after the story has come onto being, which is another completely unexpected pleasure of having written a book.
Book Blurb:
Genie has everything – a BRIT award, a singing career, the attention of the press and Oliver Fox, a pretty boy who looks good on her arm.
Until he dies.
His death brings Genie’s long buried feelings bubbling to the surface. Her grief over the death of her lover Wendi who introduced her to this world. Her self doubt and fear that she will be exposed as a fraud.
How far is she prepared to go to fix things?
The afterlife isn’t the most comfortable of places for anyone who’s still alive, but Genie’s not going to take any crap from the dead – she’s got years of experience in the music business.
Sometimes going to Hell and back takes a lifetime…
About Chris Limb:
Chris is a writer based in UK, who has had a number of short stories published over the past few years, blogs on a regular basis and occasionally reviews books and audios for the British Fantasy Society.
Chris wrote a short pop memoir which was published in 2011 and went down well with its core-audience. It continues to sell at a steady rate to this day.
Chris also plays bass guitar and performs random acts of web and graphic design for a diverse selection of clients.
