Great crime fiction
On 17 April I’m launching my new book, Salt Lane. It’s a joint launch with books by two other amazing writers and friends, Elly Griffiths and Lesley Thomson.
It’ll be at Waterstones Brighton, 71-74 North St, Brighton BN1 1ZA, starting at 7.30 prompt. There will be wine and soft drinks.
Please come if you can. RSVP to jane@williamshaw.com
The fourth in the Breen and Tozer series, Sympathy for the Devil, will be published in the UK on February 22. Details of how to pre-order it:
… though if you really want to make me happy order it from my local bookshop City Books in Hove. If you want it signed, let them know and I can always nip out on the bike and sign it before they post it.
If anyone is looking to catch up on the series, you can buy the Breen and Tozer Omnibus, featuring the first three books, as an ebook:
Ten years ago I used to write a column for The Observer magazine called The Small Ads. As the name suggested, I trawled the classifieds looking for stories. The principle was very simple. At the heart of all narrative is change. When someone is placing a classified ad, they are changing in some small way. My task was to seek out the narrative. It was a lot of fun and the best columns ended up complied as book called Superhero For Hire. It confirmed my belief that, if you scratch the surface, everybody has a story to tell. And many of those stories are very strange indeed.
Occasionally, when I’m looking for a character, I look back at them in the Guardian’s archive. I was doing that this morning and came across this one below.
I have no memory at all of writing it. Reading it though, I’m quite pleased. Some of it is poignant, some of it very funny: You’d think the biggest problem would be jealousy. Actually, it’s time management.
(Disappointingly, online they don’t print the original adverts with the articles, as they did in the newspaper at the time… so you have to guess the context).
His girlfriend Amy’s been so busy this week Max hasn’t had much chance to tie her up. Last Thursday he spent the night at his other girlfriend Deborah’s, and they did a nice bondage scene there. Usually he gets to tie people up, oh … a couple of times a week.
Amy – or Mistress Matisse, to give her her professional name – is a dominatrix. She has been Max’s ‘primary’ partner. Deborah is his ‘secondary’; they’ve been seeing each other for three-and-a-half years, it’s a regular Thursday-night date. Aside from BDSM he’s into the ‘poly’ scene – polyamory, having more than one lover. Mistress Matisse is poly, too.
Bondage a couple of times a week is nice. That might include a little bit of bondage-lite, when you meet someone at a party or a bondage workshop and they go, ‘Can you show me how this feels?’ Sometimes he’s found himself tying people up four or five times a week, but that gets too much. It takes the edge off.
His fascination with ropes started in the Boy Scouts back in 1967. A wonderful training ground, says Max. For 30 years he sailed, too, which gave him a respect for rope. When it comes to bondage itself, he was a late bloomer. For 14 years he was happily married. Bondage was not part of the relationship.
Single again at 35, he was casting around. Bondage had always privately fascinated him. He’d seen the adverts at the back of magazines, but somehow didn’t believe anybody really did that. Then around 1990 he saw an advert about BDSM on a bulletin board. ‘Are you interested in getting together for bondage and kinky sex?’ He tore off the number; he kept it in his wallet a year before he had the courage to call it, but by then the line had been disconnected.
But that was a turning point, it was like he’d made up his mind. Some people in a fetish shop put him in touch with the Seattle BDSM community and he’s been tying people up ever since. He loves it. It’s more than sex. In fact, often it’s just play without sex at all. He’s a ‘top’; his partner Mistress Matisse is ‘switchy’; sometimes she likes to be ‘top’, sometimes ‘bottom’. He specialises in ‘suspension bondage’, elaborately trussing people so that they hang by ropes from hooks in a ceiling.
It’s about power and intimacy, he says. So much of our lives is about implicit power, it’s liberating to become explicit about it. And you have to build so much trust between people to be able to tie somebody up. You have to be honest.
Being poly is the same, he says. You have to replace control with trust. She wants to sleep with someone else? If I love her, how can I deny her that? You’d think the biggest problem would be jealousy. Actually, it’s time management.
It was Amy who encouraged him to start teaching bondage. Now he does exhibitions at the big erotica festivals – and once a month in Seattle leads workshops with curiously prosaic names: ‘Rope Bondage 101’, ‘Suspension You Can Use’, ‘When Someone You Know Is Switchy’.
He has to be cautious though – he’s a self-employed consultant; he’s not sure how clients would react. Funnily enough, the friends and relations who do know are more disturbed by the polyamory than the kinky part. People find that threatening. Like his ex-wife. They’re still friendly, and they meet every couple of months for dinner. He feels she doesn’t really understand that. Strangely, when they were married, it was her who had the secret affairs – he didn’t. In retrospect, he’s not sure if that was morality, or lack of imagination.
Every day, up and down the country, hundreds of people come together to discuss books, in front rooms, kitchens, libraries and pubs. Over the last three decades, the book group has become a massive cultural phenomenon. In sheer numbers of people taking part, it’s one of the biggest cultural activities taking place in the UK, but because it’s one that takes place in ad hoc groups, in private or among networks of friends, it’s something that goes under the radar.
Some are just groups of friends who want to share their love of reading; others are focused on particular genres like sci-fi, non fiction or Gay and Lesbian literature. And there are those with a sense of purpose, forging new communities from common interests; radical book groups, people that want to read diaspora literature, men’s reading circles.
I suspect that many of them have their own story to tell. So, once a fortnight, I’ve decided to eavesdrop on a different readers’ group. I’m going to hang out and chat, and find out a little about what makes these amazing groups tick – and listen to what they make of their latest read.
Listen
Here’s a rough mix of one episode that’s coming up:
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At the heart of Sympathy for the Devil, there’s a real-life spy exchange. In April 1964, a young, idealistic British lecturer visiting the Soviet Union with his wife Barbara stumbled into the arms of the Soviet intelligence services, the KGB. What exactly Gerald Brooke was doing in Russia remains a bit of a mystery, to me at least. All we know for sure was that he was carrying some anti-Soviet leaflets. He was arrested, charged with “subversive anti-Soviet activity on the territory of the Soviet Union” and sentenced to five years’ detention, including four years in the Soviet Union’s notorious labour camps.
The arrest of a British citizen was a huge embarrassment to the British government. To make matters worse, the public were outraged at the detention of an “innocent” citizen, especially when reports filtered back – deliberately fed by Soviet sources – that Brooke was in poor health. By 1969 Prime Minister Harold Wilson was under pressure to find a way to bring him home. And one of the MPs who was most vociferous in her calls to get Brooke repatriated was the strident young Margaret Thatcher, in whose Finchley constituency the lecturer and his wife lived.
Wilson’s opportunity came in the summer of 1969. Eight years earlier the British intelligence had captured the notorious Portland Spy Ring. For years, the Portland Spy Ring had paid and blackmailed naval officers to provide documents about the ships and weaponry. The documents were passed to a house in Ruislip, where the occupants, Morris and Lona Cohen, aka Peter and Helen Kroger, either transmitted or smuggled them back to the Soviet Union. Busting the ring was one of the biggest coups of British post-war counter-intelligence. The Soviets were remarkably loyal to their spies, and always keen to get them home. As a consequence the fifties and sixties were punctuated by several high-level spy exchanges – as celebrated in the Steven Spielberg movie Bridge of Spies. In 1962, the American pilot Gary Powers had been swapped for the KGB’s Rudold Abel. In 1964, MI6 spy Greville Wynne was traded for Gordon Lonsdale, the mastermind behind the Portland Spy ring. In 1969, the Soviets offered to exchange Gerald Brooke for Morris and Lona Cohen.
Desperate to get Brooke home, Harold Wilson agreed. But unlike all the other spy exchanges, this was a totally asymmetrical one. There were howls of protest against Wilson’s apparent weakness. He had capitulated to Soviet pressure, howled politicans and the press. The Cohens were major figures; Brooke was a nobody.
Or was he?
Researching Brooke, I came across one small article in The Sunday Times that hinted that Brooke was a far more heavyweight figure than British intelligence was admitting to. That was the spark that set my imagination going for Sympathy for The Devil. You’d have to read the book to find out what my own theory about Brooke is.
But after 1969, Gerald Brooke disappeared back to obscurity again. He was born in 1935, so would be in his 80s now.
I’m curious to know what happened to him. If anyone knows, please get in touch!
EDIT. I’ve had several readers get in touch to update me with news about Gerald Brooke – including former students. He is alive and well. Many thanks for those who contacted me.