New Year's Excitements and Writing Resolutions: 2014

Hello and welcome to 2014! A lot has changed since I wrote out my year's goals in January 2013.

Did I achieve any of them? Well . . . 

2013: the year that I ended up here

- I got an agent for my crime novel. In fact, Murder Most Unladylike, the first in my middle-grade murder mystery series featuring Daisy Wells and Hazel Wong, will be coming out in the UK in May this year (it'll be out in the US in spring 2015). So, you know, I'd say I pretty much ticked that one off.

- I also finished that other book I was writing. It's not Hazel and Daisy at all, but I like it, and one day (in the far, far future) I'm hoping that you might get to like it too.

- I certainly did not get 25% of the 1001 Books project read last year. I feel a bit bad about that. But I did have a few other things going on.

- I don't think I wrote something every day. I certainly didn't write fiction every day. Raymond Chandler would be ashamed of me (sorry, Raymond Chandler). But I wrote quite a lot, and I'm proud of a fair to middling amount of it, and I think that's probably all most writers can ever truthfully say.

- I did begin to plan my books before I wrote them! Sort of, anyway. In 2013 I discovered spreadsheets, and now I love them. I also got much better at cutting the boring bits and getting to the action. When I was revising Murder Most Unladylike, I took to muttering INCREASE THE PERIL! as I typed, and that was very helpful. Everyone loves a bit of peril.

- I did not manage to cut out the dogs from my writing. Nor did I get rid of the murder element in my plots. I'm realising that both might just be inevitable. I did not write any short stories, or enter any competitions. And I did not get a pet lion. But I do still have a pet bearded dragon . . .

-

And now, some new writing resolutions for 2014.

- I am going to finish Murder Most Unladylike 2, which at the moment is called Arsenic For Tea. I admit, this is less a resolution than a contractual obligation, but hey, whatever works. I am also going to make it a lot better than it is right now.

I shall mainly be channeling the work (though not the life) of this person

- When Arsenic for Tea has been finished, I am going to rework the Secret Project mentioned above, and see what happens to it.

- I am going to do school visits. And I am going to make them be awesome.

- I'm going to try again with that short story thing - I definitely want to write some, probably set in Hazel and Daisy's world.

- I'm going to try to keep reading as many different genres and types of book as possible. Now that I work with children's books as my day job, as well as being a children's writer, it can get difficult to step back and try new things, but I know that it's important. Plus, I love it.

- I also want to do more rereading. I need to remember that trying to read every book ever published is unachievable, and sometimes it is better to just pick up I Capture the Castle for the eleventh time.

- I want to help other writers achieve their goals. I'm part of the awesome Author Allsorts group, as well as SCBWI, and they're both fantastic support networks for UK children's and YA authors. But of course, they only work if writers do support each other, and work together - and that's what I want to do more of this year.

- And I want to champion children's and YA writing however I can. I want to celebrate the brilliant writers working today, and help spread the word about what fantastic children's books are out there.

-

And finally, on to (some of the very, very many) upcoming 2014 titles I'm currently getting extremely excited about. 

- On January 14th, Hollow City, the sequel to Miss Peregrine's School for Peculiar Children, will finally be published. I have been raving about Miss Peregrine - a crazy, creepy fantasy illustrated with terrifying found photos - since I read it last year, and I am beyond excited for this.

- In February there's a new Helen Oyeyemi book called Boy, Snow, Bird. I absolutely love Helen Oyeyemi (she wrote Mr Fox, a gorgeous take on the gruesome Mr Fox fairytale), and I would quite like to be her friend. But since I can't, I'll make do with reading her books.

- In March, Non Pratt's debut YA novel Trouble will be out. I am lucky enough to know a huge number of incredibly talented people who are all releasing books this year, and I am excited about every single one of them (Liz de Jager's Banished! Emma Pass's The Fearless! Katy Cannon's Love, Lies and Lemon Pies! So many others that if I listed them all this list would stretch to forever and potentially break the Internet!), but I got to read Trouble at proof stage and was absolutely delighted by it. It's so funny and sweet, and it manages to make the beaten-to-death teenage pregnancy plot point seem fresh and interesting. It's going to be a hit.

- March is also the publication month for my most anticipated non-fiction title: Did She Kill Him? by Kate Colquhoun. I love Victorian murders, the Maybrick mystery is fascinating, and Kate's Mr Briggs' Hat (about the first railway murder) was great. I can't wait for this.

- Lauren Beukes's The Shining Girls amazed me and freaked me out in equal measure last year, so I'm very excited about her new book, Broken Monsters, which publishes in May. It sounds a bit like sci-fi crime-novel Frankenstein meets The Island of Doctor Moreau, so obviously I will be reading it as soon as it comes out.

- In June, Leigh Bardugo's Grisha trilogy concludes with Ruin and Rising. Once again, I am restraining myself from simply listing every single one of the fantastic books that Orion will be publishing this year (Tess Sharpe's heartbreaking thriller Far From You, the cosmically brilliant new 5-8 series Pets from Space, and many equally worthy others), but this is just SO EXCITING that I have to talk about it. Concluding a series is obscenely difficult to get right, but Leigh's absolutely done it. I can't wait for you all to go absolutely nuts about this.

- In July, Rainbow Rowell's next novel Landline is out. I love Rainbow Rowell. Have I said that enough? Every one of her books is nuanced, thoughtful and absolutely beautiful - and also an amazing love story. I'm bouncing off the walls about this one.

- In August, Ali Smith's got a new one out: How To Both. Ali Smith never bothers with things like nouns or verbs, and a lot of her books don't entirely make sense, but I like her writing a lot, and so I'm very excited for this.

- September can only be the month of a NEW SARAH WATERS NOVEL. Oh my GOD. It's called The Paying Guests, but for all I care it could be called The Very Boring Book of Nothing Happening. It's written by Sarah Waters, and that means that I'll be buying it anyway.

And one final date for your calendars - in May 2014, my very own book, Murder Most Unladylike, will be available to buy from all good UK bookstores. Isn't that exciting? And weird? And amazing? I'm hoping to be able to share the UK cover with you very soon (I've seen roughs, and it's going to be wonderful), and I'm also hoping to run a giveaway on this blog when the proof copies are in - which, again, should be very soon! So stick around.

All in all, I've got a really good feeling about this year.

Review - Mr Briggs' Hat

In Litro news, my first blog of the year is up there, a review of the recent BBC Great Expectations.Which I liked, although I think I was feeling a bit post-Christmas grim when I wrote it. Be warned. Also, Writersdock has very kindly reblogged my review of Birdsong, which is especially relevant right now since the BBC is about to air their remake of that, too. It may be good. The book was a turd.

Anyway. Today my review is non-fiction, and also crime, which is my favourite sort of non-fiction (this probably doesn't imply good things about me). Here goes.

There is a railway bridge that runs right in front of my window. It's one of those heavy red brick ones with arches and built-in storage units (incidentally, the owners of the unit closest to me may have found the entrance to Narnia, judging by the astonishing number and range of goods and people that go in and out of there every morning). Commuter trains rattle across it for 20 hours a day, pleasantly lit up and sounding vaguely like the washing machine. It's a very nice view. I get to stare at the trains as they pass, and presumably the people in the trains get to stare at me staring blankly at a computer screen and drinking coffee. Sometimes they also get to see me putting on my tights.

My point is, what with that and the Tube, trains make up a large part of my urban day. It's strange to think that once upon a time 150 years ago trains were still a deeply unnatural and quite frightening imposition on Londoners' lives. Even stranger, for those of us used to watching babies and drunkards weaving their way up and down between carriages, is that trains used to be the ultimate locked room scenario. Until the late nineteenth century there were no connecting doors between carriages, just side doors that got locked between stations. Once you were shut in, there was really no way out, and you just had to cross your fingers and mightily hope that you were not sharing your space with a mad axe murderer.

Unfortunately for senior bank clerk Mr Thomas Briggs, that was more or less what happened to him. Poor Briggs, the subject of Kate Colquhoun's book Mr Briggs' Hat, has gone down in history for being the man with the dubious honour of being the first person to be murdered on a train in Britain.

The facts in his case are briefly these:

Just after 10pm on the 9th July 1864, two men trying to board a train carriage at Hackney Wick station in London discovered it empty but slathered in blood. The alarm was raised, and subsequent investigations found Mr Briggs lying upside down on the track between Bow and Hackney Wick, in a coma from which he never recovered. A more thorough search of the carriage and Mr Briggs revealed that he was missing both his watch and his hat. A hat was found under the carriage's seats, but, crucially, it did not belong to Mr Briggs.

SHIFTY FOREIGNER

With the sort of blugeoning fit-the-peg-in-the-hole certainty familiar to those familiar with the police and/or the Victorians, the detectives on the case worked their way via hat and watch to a 24-year-old tailor named Franz Muller, who was German and thus seemed shifty. The only problem was that by the time they were ready to make their arrest, Mr Muller was already en route to America.

I won't give you the details of the rest of the story, which involves intrigue, complex watch- and hat-swapping scenarios, a brilliantly slow high-speed sea chase across two continents and a lot of confusion, but I will say that Kate Colquhoun is quite right to give her book the subtitle 'A Sensational Account'. It's one of those true stories so interesting that it ought to be fiction, and Colquhoun tells it sensationally (with all the 1860s connotations of the word) and at speed. There's a lot of high colour and general jollity, and though Colquhoun obviously has done her research on the era and the case, she doesn't smother the reader with needless superior knowledge (which I like, on the whole, although I do wish she'd found out about quotation marks - as a temporary academic I feel strongly that italics are not how we quote).

There's such a lot of atmosphere and local colour that it can get oppressive sometimes - cockneys hawking haddock, pea soupers, rough waves, sweltering Upper East Side days and so on - but if you shove all that fog out of the way there's an interesting and surprisingly informative account of Britain and America in the mid 1860s lurking beneath it. There's also a fairly interesting and twisty mystery. I was expecting an open and shut case, but the more I read, the more doubt began to worm its way into me. Could there be other explanations? Could Muller's alibi be true? I don't know, and now it's bothering my brain.

I do find it odd that, at the end, after managing to question so much of the evidence against Muller, Colquhoun doesn't come down firmly on one side or the other over the question of his guilt. I think she thinks he didn't do it, or that it was sort of an accident, but she doesn't say, and it left me feeling slightly at a loose end. Sensation fiction is supposed to end with certainty, damn it, and the small matter of this being fact shouldn't prevent a good bit of editorial wrapping-up.

What we do hear is that the Briggs case heralded a new era in train safety, in that it made people realise for the first time that train safety might be a good idea. It also (and I know this from my own crime obsession) was the crime that spawned a thousand books. You can see the shadow of Mr Briggs in countless train-carriage murder mysteries, in hordes of respectable white-haired murder victims, in foreign suspects and thrilling chases and objects that manage to silently tell the story of the crime.

Not, of course, that this would be much consolation to Mr Briggs, or, if he was innocent, to Mr Muller. But it's all very interesting to think about, and Kate Colquhoun's presentation of the Briggs case is also a lot more fun to read than Love and Mr Lewisham was. Enjoyable stuff.

3 stars.