Books – Page 5 – Julie Anderson

Crime Fiction

Since Plague was published in September I have been working hard to promote it and it is only now, two months later, that I think I begin to realise that I am actually now considered to be a ‘crime writer’. Although I knew that crime was the most popular genre in the UK ( in the States it’s romance, apparently ) I was unprepared for the number of websites, festivals, clubs, societies and sub-sets of same devoted to crime fiction. I am just beginning to appreciate how many fans of crime writing there are ( for whom I am most grateful ) and just how knowledgeable and how much fun they are.

There are any number of crime fiction book clubs and I’ve joined several. I regularly engage with and post items on the Facebook page of one of the largest, the UK Crime Book Club, which has fourteen thousand members!

Next week I will be running a giveaway of a dozen signed, pre-publication copies of Plague exclusively for UKCFBC members in conjunction with an Author Chat, one of the regular features on that Facebook page in which crime fiction authors are interviewed and take live questions from members. ( You can find a link on the Events page of this website. )

Last Tuesday I was intrigued by the technology ( something called Be.Live ) when I recorded a short promo for that event and got familiar with how everything worked in preparation for my Chat. Past UKCFBC events include interviews with Ian Rankin, William Shaw and Elly Griffiths, so I’m in elevated company. I’m also looking forward to participating in the UKCFBC Pub Quiz ( Just Not In A Pub ).

UKCBC has also furnished me with a number of volunteers to test out the leaflet of the Book Walk for Plague, starting at Bond Street Tube Station and ending at the River Thames. Once its been tested I will make it available on this website for anyone who wants it. Unfortunately because of COVID any book walking is delayed.

I’ve also learned all sorts of interesting things. There is a current debate about the length of crime books, or example, many UKCBC members saying that they wouldn’t consider buying a book of less than 300 pages, which was a bit of a surprise, especially as Plague is only 288 pages! The good news, however, is that crime fiction lovers adore a series and Cassandra is scheduled to appear in at least two more books ( and possibly more ). I am pleased to say that readers are already asking me when the second is due out ( which keeps my publisher happy ).

I was also very surprised and extremely pleased to find Plague featured in this month’s edition of the Literary Review Crime Round-Up, even the literary establishment has to recognise the popularity of the genre. It has also been reviewed in The Yorkshire Times, Time & Leisure magazine and a number of other regional newspapers and regional radio stations ( you can find links to interviews and reviews on the Events page of this web-site ). No nationals so far, but I’m not complaining.

For more on Plague take a look at my earlier blogs, or follow the events coming up, which you can find on the Events page.

Book Shops and other excellent things

Books

It’s November – remember, remember – and the next lockdown has started in England. Not that it’s too draconian a lockdown, with schools and colleges continuing to function, as well as manufacturing industry and construction. Restaurants and other shops are allowed to open for takeaway only. This includes book shops and my local independent, Clapham Books (logo left), remains open for collection of orders, though not for browsing ( additional copies of Plague were delivered to them this morning, to replenish stocks ).

November is one of the busiest periods in the year for the book buying public, with Christmas close on the horizon and this is when book shops make a good proportion of their annual sales. This year many are struggling with the second lockdown, even if it isn’t as tight as the first one. So the estimable Holly Bourne, writer of YA fiction, has joined with Chris Riddell, political cartoonist for the Observer newspaper and author, to launch #SignforourBookshops an initiative designed to encourage people to buy books via their local book shop rather than through the corporate giants.

Authors (including me) agree to provide signed templates, designed by Chris Riddell, to their local book shop to paste inside that author’s books when they are sold. They also agree to post signed templates, with a message of the reader’s choice, to folk who email proof of purchase of a work by that author from an independent, physical book shop. I have set up the email account julieandersonbookplate@gmail.com specifically for this purpose. So if anyone reading this piece buys one of my books from an independent book shop, email me with proof of purchase, your address and chosen message and I’ll sign and supply a template (UK only I’m afraid, the cost of postage prohibits going international ). It is to be hoped that this nudges folk towards buying at their local independent, or even high street but physical, book shop. Mr Besos has a large enough fortune already and many of our small independents run on a shoestring. The initiative runs until the end of lockdown or 2nd December, whichever is later.

November also sees the recent launch of bookshop.org another attempt to challenge the overwhelming power of the big virtual sellers, which was reported upon in The Guardian newspaper and others. My publishers, Claret Press and Plague can be found thereon, as can I, under my old pen name J J Anderson, for my Al Andalus books and The Village.

Another excellent authorial initiative, one which I missed, is the Children in Need Book Auction. There are hundreds of books, of all types and genres, signed and donated by their authors ( some of them very famous indeed ). About £14,000 has already been raised already and the auction runs until next Friday, 13th November.

Also in November I’ll be chatting about Plague with Caroline Maston of the UK Crime Book Club, on Facebook at 7 p.m. on Sunday 29th November. This is in conjunction with a giveaway of a dozen signed pre-publication copies of Plague ( I still have some, thanks to Claret Press ). In return I ask that readers post a review on Goodreads, Amazon and/or social media. I hope that we get a good conversation going with UKCBC members. You can find more details and a link on the Events page of this website.

Then, of course, there’s always the writing. Oracle is with Claret Press at the moment so I’m taking the opportunity to think about the next book, Opera. I like this phase of a book, it’s so full of possibilities. In this one Cassandra returns to London, where she meets with some old friends. Of this, more later…

You can find the UK Crime Book Club on Facebook HERE

Myths and Legends

Books, Oracle

Oracle, the next book in the series following the adventures of Cassandra Fortune, is set in Delphi, Greece near the Temple of Apollo. When revising it recently I revisited some old favourites, the gods and goddesses of ancient Greece.

Like many children of my era, I absorbed details about Zeus and Hera, Athena and Apollo fairly early in life, along with the heroes, Heracles, Jason (with fleece) and all those at Troy ( thank you, Roger Lancelyn Green and, later, Ray Harryhausen ). I was briefly confused by the Roman equivalents, Venus usurping Aphrodite in my mind (mainly because I didn’t understand what both really signified i.e. sex, and Venus was an easier name ). Yet Jupiter and Juno remained in distinct second place to the Olympians, as being too pinkly domestic and toga-clad. Gods were supposed to be wild and strange. Narnia cemented my early classical training, with its fauns and dryads, satyrs and Bacchus, and it was the Greek version which remained forever dominant.

I subsequently went on to Odin and Thor, Osiris and Anubis and the Irish heroes ( courtesy of Rosemary Sutcliff ) like Cuchulain and Finn MacCool. Other characters from Celtic folklore, Beddgelert of Wales, the Scottish Kelpie and St Piran of Cornwall supplemented but didn’t detract from my own existing pantheon, which was further nourished by Mary Renault. I never lost the love of them and they led to Homer, Hesiod, Beowolf, the Icelandic Sagas and the Mabinogion.

Yet there are older gods of Greece – Gaia, Uranus and the Titans, twelve male and twelve female, including Chronos, Rhea and Oceanus. Votive offerings to Gaia, the primordial mother, have been found in Delphi, in the Corycian Cave above the Temple to Apollo from the Neolithic period (about 12,000 years ago). Gaia and her daughter, Themis, ruled at Delphi and there was a chapel to her there, though it was long ago absorbed into the larger Temple complex. As Nico, the museum employee in the novel, explains, in legend, the god Apollo arrived at Delphi to wrestle with the Python, the giant snake belonging to Gaia, and won; so he became the ruler of Delphi. It is thought that this represents a change of dominant culture as migrants, whom we now know as the Hellenes, came into Greece from the north. They eventually settled all of Greece and their gods were the Olympians.

Nonetheless the older gods continued to exist along side the new, as did their off-spring (unless they were thrown into the pit of Tartarus). These included some groups, or sets, of minor deities, like the Fates and the Furies. The latter trio, called the Erinye, were three women, often, especially in more modern times, portrayed with snakes for hair and flashing eyes, their hands dripping blood. The image, right, is of Clytemnestra attempting to wake the slumbering Furies to chase down Orestes in the Orestaia on a vase dating c.350 BCE. Delphi, it was believed, was the centre of the world and it is to the Temple of Apollo there that Orestes flees, calling upon the god to save him from the Furies.

I don’t know if the books which I read are still read today, I hope so, even as new games and films bring the ancient heroes and deities to life for another generation. This Pantheon is firmly anchored within western sensibilities. So much so that we even replicate the old jokes in new ways ( see image left ).

Oracle will be published in Spring 2021.

Location, location, location

Books, Plague

There are so many ways in which place is important to writers – we explored the subject in the first Clapham Book Festival back in 2016 ( see Place and the Writer ). One of the most common comments about Plague is that it is very much a London book, including as it does much about the city’s landscape, history and the forgotten subterranean world beneath it. The book certainly reminds those who have lived in or regularly visited London of a city they once knew ( I’ve received comments to this effect from other parts of the UK, from the US, from Australia and Malaysia, from Austria and from South Africa ). So it must be evocative.

The locations in the book range from an elegant Mayfair townhouse to an Elephant & Castle tower block. The Victorian streets of Clapham are home to my protagonist, while homeless character, Spikey Fullman haunts Shepherd’s Market, but bemoans the recent changes there as not conducive to a good night’s sleep. The venerable Palace of Westminster is a focal point, as are the streets close by – the Georgian terraces as well as the concrete civil service buildings. There are vistas from and of towers and high rises as well as the scenes beneath the earth and the main players walk all the major Westminster thoroughfares between Whitehall, the Embankment and St James, Bond Street and Pimlico.

One point to make about Plague is how far it has travelled, only six weeks into its published life. I have received snapshots of it on the Isle of Skye, in deepest Dorset, in the flatlands of East Anglia and in various parts of the north of England. I have yet to see it in Wales, Scotland or Northern Ireland (though I know it has been read there, because I have seen reviews on Goodreads and Amazon from readers who live there). Plague has also travelled internationally, from the lawn of a Normandy chateau (left) to a Californian balcony over-looking San Francisco Bay (above), from an American Naval Base to a tapas bar in Jerez (admittedly, that one, below, was with me).

Nonetheless, I was surprised to learn that my publishers, Claret Press, has entered the novel for the Ondaatje Prize. This award from the Royal Society of Literature is for a work of fiction, non-fiction or poetry, evoking the spirit of a place. The 2019 winner, Aida Edemariam, who wrote The Wife’s Tale, appeared at the Clapham Book Festival that year in conversation with Michele Roberts. My book is commercial fiction and, while there’s nothing wrong with that, it is, after all, what Dickens would have claimed to write, I wonder if it’s really the sort of book the prize judges will be looking for. More promising, maybe, are entries in the Crime Writers Association Daggers, including the John Creasy (New Blood) Dagger and the Ian Fleming Steel Dagger. Watch this space, as they say in cliche-land.

I, meanwhile, am busy writing the sequel (earlier this week while awaiting a late flight at Sevilla airport, see left, which prompted the thoughts for this article ). Oracle takes place in a very different location to London, at an isolated cultural centre half-way up Mount Parnassus in Greece, close to the ancient site of the Temple of Apollo at Delphi. It is a place both very dramatic and beautiful and is timeless. Its location is central to the novel, not just to the plot, but that’s because place is very important to me as a writer.

If you’re interested in the locations of Plague why not read about the Plague Book-Walk at Walking a book, walking a river The Bookwalk continues…. With an address like that you must be very wealthy Bookwalk Out-takes

Plague in Clapham

Books, Plague

One area which features in Plague but which was not covered by our recent bookwalk is SW4, or Clapham, where I happen to live. It is here that the heroine, Cassandra Fortune, has her flat, where she lives with her cat, Spiggott. Like so much of Clapham this would have been built by Victorian and Edwardian pattern builders, so named because they used a template, or several, when constructing street after street during the nineteenth century and into the twentieth. I have placed the flat in a fictitious road within the little maze of roads off Clapham Common South Side, where the buildings are often elegant purpose built maisonettes.

One of the good things about living in Clapham – and there are many – is that most of the streets are leafy, retaining their trees even after the ridiculous insurance company purges of the early part of this century. Cassie’s road is a ‘tree-lined street of Victorian terraces’. She has roses growing up the side of her bay window at the front and a small garden, mostly side return, at the back, with raised beds and french doors from the bedroom and the kitchen leading out on to it ( maybe something like this, right ). It is over the back fence that her neighbour hands her the roses and gift which have been delivered on Sunday morning in the novel.

Another of the aforementioned good things is Clapham Common, which sits in the middle of the Clapham area. It is a photograph of the Common and the ferris wheel of a travelling circus encamped there which alerts Cassie to a newspaper photographer having been snooping around. The photograph left was taken on 1st October 2020.

Clapham Common is also one of the three Clapham Tube stations, the others being Clapham South and Clapham North (and we have the Junction too, we’re well connected – this is beginning to sound like an advert for Clapham). At each of them are circular, pillbox style structures which mark the presence of the deep shelters, constructed during the second World War to house civilians during air raids. There were originally ten of these planned across London, though only eight were ever sunk, three of them in Clapham close to the Northern line. Cassie notes the one next to Clapham Common tube station as Daljit, Sergeant Patel, drives her to the Golden Square crime scene. The image above is of the deep shelter at Clapham South, which was used, in the 1950s, to house those migrants arriving from Empire on the HMS Windrush and other similar, later, ships.

Clapham is not, of course, the only part of south London which has a part in Plague, even if most of the action takes place in Westminster. The second victim is found at a London Underground depot off London Road in Lambeth and his high rise flat, in Elephant and Castle, is where Cassie and Detective Inspector Andrew Rowlands go to interview his grieving, pregnant partner. It is from her twelfth floor windows that they see this panorama. ‘Northwards sunlight sparkled on the Shard and the towers of the City and, to the east, the chunky skyscrapers of Canary Wharf jostled for space on the Isle of Dogs. To the south east Cassie could see Crystal Palace Hill rising, bedecked by strings of terraced streets, to the high transmitter mast at its summit.’

For more about Plague and London try Walking a Book, Walking a River The Book Walk Continues ‘With an address like that, you must be very wealthy’ Book Walk Out-takes

Plague On Tour

Books, Plague

First a Book Walk for Plague, now a Book Tour!

The Plague Book walk was a real walk, though largely done for publicity purposes and, it seems, it may have gained an after life of its own. The photo-montages have generated interest and the video is still in production. What’s more, London Walks, the guided walks company, is suggesting that I conduct real, guided walks of the book for members of the paying public. Footprints of London is doing one such of the locations in Blood & Sugar by Laura Shepherd-Robinson as part of a Literary Festival, and that book’s set in the past. So it must be possible to do one about Plague, which, after all, is set in contemporary London. I have already written a Plaguewalk leaflet which will, once it’s been tested, be posted on this web-site.

I might begin with a virtual walk – I went on one such at the weekend around parts of Kensington, at the invitation of David Tucker, its guide, who wears his comprehensive knowledge of London and his erudition lightly. It was great fun. Watch this space for developments.

The Plague Book Tour, or, more correctly, Blog Tour, will be underway before then, running from 28th September to 9th October. Organised by crime/horror specialist damppebbles.com, it includes a book blogger a day for twelve days, reading, reviewing and, I hope, discussing Plague on social media. Anyone who follows #booktwitter or #bookstagram will recognise some, if not all, of the names of the book bloggers involved. I’m looking forward to seeing what Karen, David and Maria, Angi, Sharron, IG, Nicola, Emma, Maddy, Sharon, Vikkie, Chelle and Lesley think about Plague and its cast of characters. Starts Monday.

Yes, they are mostly female, but I have had some amazing reviews from male readers already (check out Amazon or Goodreads), as well as some wonderful endorsements from fellow crime and thriller writers, like V.B.Grey, and crime specialists like Jacky Collins, aka ‘Dr Noir’. People like the book!

Of course, a traditional ‘book tour’ of book shops and reading groups isn’t possible because of COVID, but, these days, folk are so social media focussed that a ‘blog tour’ would probably have happened in any event. This one certainly ranges across the country in terms of where the bloggers are actually located. From the Isle of Skye to Kent and from East Anglia to the West Country. That would have been a book tour and a half! I would have made some interesting train journeys.

E-space is where most of the advertising will be focussed too, though there isn’t very much of that. Claret Press isn’t an admirer of Amazon ads, nor those of Facebook, having used them, without any great success, in the past. So we’re going with tightly focused ads, using specialist agencies, via twitter. The usual journals, like the Crime Writers Association ‘Case Notes’ and Newsletter will, we hope, also attract the attention of crime fiction loving readers.

For more about Plague and especially the Book Walk why not try Walking a book, walking a river The book walk continues With an address like that…

Algorithm Agony

Books, Plague

I am a debut published author, hooray! My book is getting five star reviews, hooray! Some fellow writers (who really know what they’re doing) have said very nice things about my book, hooray! The publicity strategy is kicking in and the interviews, blog tour, advertising is falling into place, hooray!

BUT, and it’s a big but, Amazon, one of the two big online retailers of books, is showing my title as ‘Temporarily Out of Stock’. All that publicity, all those reviews and, when the potential reader goes to the Amazon site, it seems that they can’t buy a paperback copy of the book.

Now the first thing to say is that they can! As the ‘New’ and ‘Used’ options show – the Amazon messages are contradictory – click ‘Buy’ and a purchaser is taken to the usual screens. The book is available. Yet I fear that the immediate message – that it is not – will mean that many potential purchasers are dissuaded from buying it. I am a new author after all, this is my first crime thriller, I don’t have a track record to rely on, why take a chance on someone whose new book isn’t even in stock?

My newness turns out to be part of the problem. The other, big part, is a result of COVID ( ironic for a book entitled ‘Plague’ ). As my previous post, Publication Day!! said, September has been a bumper month for book releases, because all those books which would have been released in spring but were deferred because of COVID are now coming out. Yet Amazon, the largest online book retailer, has only so many warehouses (though they are building more). So the warehouses are full and there are yet more books. How do they decide which books should be kept in stock?

First, they decide that no book should be stored in these over-crowded warehouse for more than 48 hours, so only the quick sellers will find house room ( a tough, if logical, commercial decision ). Second, Amazon turn to their tried and trusted method of making decisions about products – an algorithm. The algorithm is predictive and it determines which books are likely to sell quickly i.e. for which there is greatest demand.

Which is where my being a debut novelist counts against Plague. I’m not an established name, with legions of fans awaiting my book’s release, nor a well-known celebrity who commands name recognition and therefore drives sales. My publisher, Claret Press, is a small indie, which doesn’t have the budget for a massive sales pitch and stormtrooper publicists and this counts against Plague too. The clever algorithm is never going to choose to stock Plague over many of those other books. So ‘Temporarily Out of Stock’ appears, even though the book is available.

This is the algorithmic Catch-22. However popular my book might be, it’s never going to get the chance to become so. It’s new and by an unknown author and, however hard I, and Claret Press, work, it’s unlikely to impress that algorithm.

BUT all is not lost! The ebook is still shown as available, so people can buy that, at least. One can also get this message out MY BOOK IS AVAILABLE WHATEVER AMAZON SAYS. People are buying the paperback. It’s there to be bought.

Mine is not, of course, the only book in this Catch-22, there are lots of others. There is, apparently, a meeting next Tuesday between small publishers and Amazon to try and sort this out. Watch this space. In the meanwhile, please tell everyone you know who might enjoy a snappy and topical crime thriller to BUY THIS BOOK. One thing the algorithm recognises is sales.

Publication Day!!

Books, Plague

Yes, it’s happening today, 15th September! And I’m getting some excellent feedback and reviews! So pleased, after all the hard work.

Not, perhaps, the best month to publish as it turns out – there were 600 books published on September 3rd alone! Many were deferred from earlier in the year, the ‘Spring release’, if you will, because of COVID. Writers publishing this year are already being affectionately referred to as ‘Plague Authors’.

There will be no launch party or even an in-person signing – COVID prevents. Instead, having just returned from Spain, I am, very appropriately given the title of my book, in quarantine.

There is however, a reason why ‘Plague’ is being published now, specifically on 15th September. Not because September is an amazing month, even if it is, (my birthday is in September) or because it’s equinoctal, or because it’s the ‘Autumn release’ as far as publishers are concerned, out in time for Christmas. Rather because September is when the events of the novel take place. September 2020 was the original timing.

Since the arrival of COVID, however, references to 2020 have been removed. Were ‘Plague’ to be taking place now I would have to do a major rewrite to incorporate COVID and some, at least, of the events of the novel almost certainly wouldn’t take place. Given that the editing phase of the book was concluded in April, when we had just entered lock down and no one knew what was going to happen, this wasn’t an option. Hence the removal of the year.

September is still the month, however, because the plot is month specific. Usually, the Houses of Parliament rise in July for the summer recess and return in late August/early September, but only for a short while, as, traditionally, the Party Conferences take place in October, so everything closes down again a month or so after it opened up. It is in this narrow window of less than a month that the events of ‘Plague’ take place.

This year they returned on 1st September but will not close as usual. Like all physical gatherings, even relatively small ones (the ‘rule of six’) the conferences have been cancelled and activity will take place online. Given the imminent shenanigans in the Palace of Westminster in regard to the UK Internal Markets Bill, they may not take place at all. The current Parliamentary schedule currently shows PMQs and Private Members Bills proceeding throughout October, but little else.

In the novel it is the imminent early closure of the Palace, for the Conferences, (and major works) which sets the time limit for solving the case. The first arrest is made for a crime committed on 10th September and the day – and night – of 15th has a particular significance (early readers of the book will know this). Hence the publication date of 15th September.

Unfortunately, COVID has derailed all attempts to, roughly, synchronise the events of the novel with the Parliamentary timetable. Admittedly, this is a very minor inconvenience compared to other impacts of COVID, so I can’t really complain. The best laid plans…

‘Plague’ is published TODAY, on 15th September for reasons now largely redundant. Get your copy here.

Bookwalk Out-takes

Books, History, Plague

The recent Bookwalk for Plague has already been the subject of posts here, but these include only a small percentage of photographs taken. We made several digressions and diversions during the day to take photographs of things we liked (which was partly why it was so much fun to do). These reflect the various enthusiasms of myself and my fellow walker, Helen.

First up – bricks. The Victorians were great decorators in brick, something I’ve had several conversations about recently because we’ve just had a face lift for our Victorian house. I now know more about bricks than I ever thought was possible, largely courtesy of David Fairbrother, who oversaw the work, a man who truly loves bricks. On our walk we encountered some excellent examples of Victorian brickwork, like that announcing Grosvenor Works or the decoration on the buildings at the top of Great Smith Street, or, see left, the brickwork on the Marlborough Head public house, North Audley Street (readers of the novel will recognise that street name). The young woman working there was surprised and, I think, rather charmed, by our fruitless search for any indicator that there were Roman baths nearby.

Second, statues of admirable people. There were lots of those – from William Tyndale to Sir Joseph Bazalgette (who has already appeared in the Bookwalk blog ) via a whole procession in Embankment Gardens. Given limited space here, that of Millicent Fawcett in Parliament Square will represent them all. She holds aloft her uplifting message ‘Courage calls to courage everywhere’.

Third, idiosyncratic peculiarities, based, broadly, around the subject matter of the book. So, a Stop Works sign propped in a doorway of the Norman Shaw buildings on the Embankment ( a former home of the Metropolitan Police and work place of one of the victims in the novel, where he is helping to refurbish the building ). Colourful chains at the construction site on Davies Street by Bond Street Underground Station, site of the first discovered crime, against said victim. The vaulted roof of the arches through which one passes from Horseguards Parade into Whitehall (which appears to be numbered, something I’ve not noticed before) and the receding arches within the arches, through which the protesters pass before harassing my heroine.

One of the most eye-catching was what must be one of the smallest public houses in London. Not, perhaps the smallest that, I believe, is The Dove in Hammersmith, but pretty small nonetheless. We found the four-storey Coach and Horses on the edge of Mayfair, it is still a working pub ( though we didn’t enter, either this or the Marlborough Head, just in case you’re wondering, we were committed book walkers ). Besides, the No Entry sign outside could have put us off. Other unusual architecture spotted includes Sothebys’ warehouse, found down a back street and what looked like a closed up market hall in Davies Mews.

If you follow me on Facebook you will already know that we finally succumbed to the temptation of a chilled pint of beer, at Cask, a craft beer emporium in Tachbrook Street, Pimlico. So, for those who care about such things, rest assured that your walkers were eventually refreshed and, yes, I’ve noticed that two of these photographs are of hostelries!

For more on the Book walk see Walking a book, walking a river The Book Walk continues and ‘With an address like that you must be very wealthy’

‘Plague’ (Claret Press, 2020) is available for pre-order on Amazon HERE. It is published on 15th September.

Stranger than Fiction II

Books, History, Plague

So this article is a sequel. I’ve already written about how the plot of ‘Plague’ has coincided with real life, but, astonishingly, the coincidences keep coming!

There is the recent, real, discovery of hundreds of bodies, skeletons, in a lost medieval sacristy belonging to Westminster Abbey as reported in The Guardian at the weekend. Not, I know, the same as the discovery of a plague pit, with or without modern corpses, but startling nonetheless and an example of how the land around and beneath Westminster, or Thorney Island, still has secrets to divulge. Just as it does in the novel.

But an even closer correlation between ‘Plague’ and what is happening now might be what I can only call the procurement scandals. In the novel large government contracts, worth several billion pounds, are being tendered and, as one of the characters says ‘…the contracts aren’t being awarded in the usual way.’ It’s corruption – the contracts are being given to companies run by associates and accomplices of the villains, who also make money on the stock exchange as the shares of those companies rise in value. At least in the book the companies in question have the relevant expertise and a track record in providing the types of services being tendered for.

In real life, however, we see huge contracts being awarded to companies with little or no experience or expertise in the field of activity required, but which do have close ties to various individuals in government. The Good Law Project, together with Every Doctor, are pursuing judicial review of the procurement of PPE from three companies, one specialising in pest control, one a confectionery wholesaler and one an opaque private fund owned via a tax haven. The PPE – face masks – sold by the last of these companies, Ayanda Capital, under a contract worth £252m, was found to be unsuitable for use in the NHS (and untested). Yet at least this contract was publicly tendered. The contracts granted to Public First, a company with close ties to Michael Gove and Dominic Cummings, seem not to have been tendered at all and The Good Law Project and a number of non-Tory MPs are seeking judicial review of the awarding of them. They have also begun proceedings against Michael Gove in regard to one of these contracts. Contrary to government regulations, the contracts themselves have not been published (once granted, contracts are required to be published within thirty days).

As the same ‘Plague’ character, a journalist, says ‘There’s a smell attaching to it. Lots of money involved.’ My main character Cassie is, of course, working on minor procurement contracts at the start of the novel, but she has no enthusiasm for the work. As a former senior civil servant I sympathise with those who are having to deal with the situation now, knowing that the correct procedures aren’t being followed. It seems that Ministers are hiding behind COVID and emergency powers to hand large sums of money to preferred bidders, regardless of said bidders ability to deliver the contracts.