Sugar and Spice by Saffina Desforges

This is the first novel by one of the heroines of self publishing, Saffina Desforges who hails from England.

Set in England, the backdrop is the disappearance and murder of young girls. A hue and cry goes out. The tabloids bay for blood, the police are under pressure. The usual suspects, literally, are rounded and hounded. One in particular, a convicted paedophile with insight into his condition, gives help, understanding  and succour to the mother of one of the victims, to the chagrin of her partner.

There are several strands of narrative which are expertly and seamlessly sewn and woven together which coalesce with aplomb at the end – which I shan’t give away.  One of the strands is a family man who seeks private treatment from a leftfield private clinic for his burgeoning feelings he has towards children.

I’ve personally never read this subject before in any work of fiction and this does break a dark but new ground and one well worth exploring. I shuddered while reading this strand. I admit to being shocked at first and I wondered where on earth it would lead.

It led me to the very end of the book which I read inside three days flat – a fast feat for this blog. Sugar and Spice is not just a piece of well written, well paced, heart stopping crime fiction but has been built on a bedrock of detailed and in-depth research.

 This research, which I understand was years in the doing, has resulted in dressing the characters, plot and storyline in robes of depth and credibility. Empathy even. Empathy is a much bandied about word but to ascribe empathy to a character who, according to popular culture, is a monster, takes great skill and literary dexterity in negotiating some very precarious literary paths.

Do it too well, one would suspect the novel of having its own questionable agenda. Do it badly and the novel becomes a populist one dimensional foghorn from which one would learn nothing.

This novel is neither for the reasons I’ve given above. Given the subject matter, this is no mean feat. Considering how well Saffina has pulled this off, one can only imagine what her other and future works would be like assuming she tackles less controversial subjects.

But I dont want her to retreat into the warm beds of literary safety. In this largely post-taboo world, whatever taboos that remain happen to be uber-taboos, taboos that dare not speak even their names. That is not to say that piercing the membranes of ignorance with the spears of literature equates to giving sympathy to them or being the thin end of the wedge.

Empathy and understanding is the spirit of awareness and education and exposition. Considering the de facto heavy moral responsibility the novelist has when venturing into the Terra Incognitas of unexplored taboo-laden subject matter, Saffina has understandably, written more exposition that would be needed or required in other crime novels but for this venture into a highly controversial area, it is very much needed for imparting of cold fact and information without equivocation or ambiguity.,

This book has no doubt, ruffled a few feathers  and made a few people uncomfortable but it’s been done in an bold, gracious and extremely well written and responsible manner with no forays in salaciousness or sensationalism.

Dare I say this is a ground breaking novel which I believe will be spoken off in many years to come? How many books can I say that off in recent times?

I commend this book and have given it 5/5 on Amazon.

Available for Kindle and Nook.

Sugar and Spice by Saffina Desforges

This is the first novel by one of the heroines of self publishing, Saffina Desforges who hails from England.

Set in England, the backdrop is the disappearance and murder of young girls. A hue and cry goes out. The tabloids bay for blood, the police are under pressure. The usual suspects, literally, are rounded and hounded. One in particular, a convicted paedophile with insight into his condition, gives help, understanding  and succour to the mother of one of the victims, to the chagrin of her partner.

There are several strands of narrative which are expertly and seamlessly sewn and woven together which coalesce with aplomb at the end – which I shan’t give away.  One of the strands is a family man who seeks private treatment from a leftfield private clinic for his burgeoning feelings he has towards children.

I’ve personally never read this subject before in any work of fiction and this does break a dark but new ground and one well worth exploring. I shuddered while reading this strand. I admit to being shocked at first and I wondered where on earth it would lead.

It led me to the very end of the book which I read inside three days flat – a fast feat for this blog. Sugar and Spice is not just a piece of well written, well paced, heart stopping crime fiction but has been built on a bedrock of detailed and in-depth research.

 This research, which I understand was years in the doing, has resulted in dressing the characters, plot and storyline in robes of depth and credibility. Empathy even. Empathy is a much bandied about word but to ascribe empathy to a character who, according to popular culture, is a monster, takes great skill and literary dexterity in negotiating some very precarious literary paths.

Do it too well, one would suspect the novel of having its own questionable agenda. Do it badly and the novel becomes a populist one dimensional foghorn from which one would learn nothing.

This novel is neither for the reasons I’ve given above. Given the subject matter, this is no mean feat. Considering how well Saffina has pulled this off, one can only imagine what her other and future works would be like assuming she tackles less controversial subjects.

But I dont want her to retreat into the warm beds of literary safety. In this largely post-taboo world, whatever taboos that remain happen to be uber-taboos, taboos that dare not speak even their names. That is not to say that piercing the membranes of ignorance with the spears of literature equates to giving sympathy to them or being the thin end of the wedge.

Empathy and understanding is the spirit of awareness and education and exposition. Considering the de facto heavy moral responsibility the novelist has when venturing into the Terra Incognitas of unexplored taboo-laden subject matter, Saffina has understandably, written more exposition that would be needed or required in other crime novels but for this venture into a highly controversial area, it is very much needed for imparting of cold fact and information without equivocation or ambiguity.,

This book has no doubt, ruffled a few feathers  and made a few people uncomfortable but it’s been done in an bold, gracious and extremely well written and responsible manner with no forays in salaciousness or sensationalism.

Dare I say this is a ground breaking novel which I believe will be spoken off in many years to come? How many books can I say that off in recent times?

I commend this book and have given it 5/5 on Amazon.

Available for Kindle and Nook.

Theakston Crime Fest 2011

I'm so looking forward to this and yet, despite the detailed programme, I can't really imagine what it would be like to be in the midst of it - a wonderful position to be in. I've booked my flights from Belfast at the very criminal time of 7am on the outward leg but since the first event of the festival doesnt take place until 8pm, I'll have some decent shut-eye before then.

Harrogate - venue of the 1982 Eurovision song contest did you know. I remember because I was a strange child with very few distractions in those sepia tingled halcyon days of 3 television channels and when we really did give a shit about who won the Eurovision.

If anyone out there in blog and twitter lands are going, it would be good to meet up to discuss where we're at with our writing and also go 'urgh, you're nothing like as handsome/beautiful in your photo' after the second glass of red.... 

I'm putting together the final touches of my plot to my second novel. I can't say too much about my first novel as its currently with an agent as I'm tring to get a conventional book deal with it  - best not to spook it or tempt fate but all I can say is that it's a crime novel set in Chicago.

The next one however is set in Dublin where the main protaganist is ex Garda (Police) private eye, born in Northern Ireland and with a neurotic family background. I'm also putting together a collection of short stories for ebook-only sales sometime between May-July 2011.

The Tenant - By Roland Torpor

Written in 1964, this book has since been adapted for the eponymous motion picture directed by Roman Polanski in 1976. You will not find this book under the Horror section – yet it's one of the most blood chilling books I've read. Set in suburban Paris, it tells the story of a young man who moves into an apartment which is being rented by a young lady who lies dying in hospital. It is assumed she will die which indeed she does. The young man, Trelkovsky is subsumed surreptitiously into a Kafka-meets-Camus world where slowly and bizarrely, his identity and very sense of self melts and morphs into that of another. The pillars of the law and medicine are off no help to the helpless Trelkovsky as he vainly battles to keep himself sane within what is a self contained world of pettiness, spite, lies and illusion ; veritable webs that are woven slowly all around him that both trap and entice him.

 Horror and existentialism aside, the book does give a little glimpse into the socio economic world of France and perhaps most of western Europe. The apartment block is owned by one man. We always hear about how our continental neighbours rent and not have the Anglo-Saxon-Celtic obsession with home ownership. Yes, someone up the chain owns the title deeds and it seems they're all in the hands of a few. Also, the characters we meet do not work in what we consider highly paid jobs yet they can afford to rent their own apartments and believe me, the French know how to build apartments. They're not the jerry-built lego-meets-studwall-flimsiness we know and loathe in UK/Ireland. They're the real solid deal. They're like solid one-level houses that live in the air. Also, everyone seems to afford to eat out all the time. Renter do seem to have better protection and rights that they do in the UK/Ireland however – all except for our hero Trelkovsky who really could have done with some legal and paranormal advice but alas, he sacrificed himself for our own yen to be chilled in that evergreen 'thank feck that not's me, my life isn't bad after all' school of why-we-like-to-be-scared.

 A great read and thoroughly recommended

• The Tenant, translated by Francis K. Price, Centipede Press, 2010, ISBN 9781933618074

Marc Almond and Jeremy Reed at Wilton's Music Hall, London : March 12th 2011

We snaked our way in the dark and dim, winding and wet laneways and alleys from Tower Hill tube station, up past St Katherine's Dock and down the infamous Cable Street and then down Grace's Alley to reach our destination. The streets were desolate except for a couple of guys who shouted across the road

 
'Are you from round here'?

Well I wasn't but I wished I was so I said something like 'No but can I help?'
"Do you know where Wilton's is?"

I smiled and replied 'Marc Almond?"

Icebreaker or what!

That warm feeling of finding fellow traveller rushed back to all of us and the four of us all walked together to Wilton's, floating on our verbal exchanges of mutual fandom and admiration for, who is, Britain's and even arguably, the world's greatest living torch singer.

We reached Wilton's Music Hall. Have you ever seen the movie the Queen of the Damned, the movie that a hybrid of the Anne Rice novels The Vampire Lestat and Queen of the Damned itself? Remember the vampire bar, the Admiral's Arms that was set in a very lonely derelict corner of the decaying docklands? Well, that's exactly the setting and mood of Wilton's Music Hall (http://www.wiltons.org.uk). It really is in the arse of nowhere but like all gems, best found and never forgotten when found in the junkyard and not the jewellers. The music hall is on the site of a Victorian sailor’s pub and the interior put me in mind of a derelict church – with a bar.

Supporting Marc Almond was the wonderful poet Jeremy Reed (http://www.jeremyreed.co.uk) who performed with his trip-hop accompaniment/partner The Ginger Light. I had never seen or heard such an imaginative manner of the performance and portrayal of poetry – and I have been to quite a few poetry evenings let me tell you but for some reason, I can't actually remember any of them. This is something I doubt I'd ever say about Jeremy Reed however. Born in Jersey and formerly an acolyte and under the patronage of Francis Bacon no less than, he has been described as the David Bowie of the poetry world. A former winner of the Somerset Maugham Prize for Poetry, he has written over 40 books of poetry and literary criticism. He cut a dash on stage, black beret, and red scarf and every so often would scatter silver glitter over his head like confetti. The music would not have been out of place in a Future Sound of London CD. It was atmospheric and sending and was set to the wonderful Soho poem Nifty Jim.

 A treasure of a cultural find and Jeremy Reed is certainly a seam of culture I will be mining and seeking out for a long time to come.

And then the main act, Marc Almond himself. The audience, a veritable mixture of Gutterhearts and Cellmates (a true fan-gang never dies, we merely lie in wait for the next gig), trendies, Goths, untrendies and ultrafashionable peacocks gave Mr Almond a rapturous reception. The set was an acoustic affair, piano, guitar, harp (played by the wonderful Baby D, ex Anthony and the Johnsons ) of Marc's solo work plus a few well chosen covers too. Very few if any of the songs on the set list would be that well known but only to aficionados but aficionados we all were. No Tainted Love in sight but we didn't mind. I won't bore you with song titles of songs that you may not know. Sometimes the fourth wall was broken by Marc coming down from the stage and performing up and down the aisles. He did say that he felt overwhelmed by the acute reverence he was getting from the audience hence the assuaging of heavy vibes by being physically present in the midst of said worshippers.

 
God, if you are reading my blog, take note. It worked wonders for Marc Almond.

 
What really electrified the audience was Marc's acappellas of self penned Soho songs that sounded almost like folk songs. In fact, I did think they were folk songs but the lyrics belied that illusion. Lyrics of 'Billy Fury' and 'Jukeboxes' are not the stuff of Fairport Convention. I later found out that these were written and recorded only recently and are only available on CD as part of Jeremy Reed's poetry anthology Piccadilly Bongo. Songs such as Eros and Eye, Soho so Long brought shivers to many a timber in the audience's spines.

 
The evening ended with a standing ovation and an encore of the seminal Marc Bolan classic Hot Love which went down like a firestorm.

 
An amazing, enigmatic, beautiful, imagination-firing evening of delight and discovery. The whole evening lasted over 3 hours and I wanted every second to flow like frozen treacle. I was sorry that it ended but the art, in combination with the venue was a potent fusion ; an alloy of art itself.

If you want to post a link to a website directly from iPhone's Safari browser, just follow the instructions below courtesy of http://www.atebits.com/___?javascript:window.location='tweetie:'+window.location

Tweetie Bookmarklet

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Name your bookmarklet something cool, like "Post with Tweetie", save it in your "Bookmarks" folder. Then tap Save.

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Tap the Bookmarks button at the bottom of the screen.

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Book Review : Snakes and Earrings by Hitomi Kanehara

To outrageously paraquote (there I go again, coining new words.  The language is simply not big enough for me I’m afraid), a rather famous Liverpudlian, discovery of gems is what happens when you are planning on buying other books. The other day I was in my favourite bookstore in Ireland, No Alibis http://www.noalibis.com/ in Belfast, scouring the shelves for slabs of hardboiled detective fiction to feed my insatiable lust for all things noir and crime related, my eyes landed on a thin little book that was sitting prim and proper but seemingly ignored on one of those plastic stands on the shelf nearest the window. Snakes and Earrings by the Japanese author, Hitomi Kanehara.
To my shame, I tend to be conservative when it comes to crime literature. The lion share of my reading is set in the Anglophone world of the United States, Ireland or the UK but I thought I’d stretch my self-imposed limitations and take a chance on Snakes and Ladders.

And I am very glad I took that chance. Set in the countercultural underworld of Tokyo, we meet a nineteen year old Lui, a young lady  who embarks on a relationship with Ama, a boy she meets at a bar. Lui belongs to the Barby-girl subculture with an penchant for body piercing, although she repeatedly eschews the association throughout the book. Ama is the exact opposite, dressing in black, netted, sleeveless tops a la ‘gangster’ wear and with more than a shock of dyed red hair. And yes, I almost forgot, he has a forked tongue. Not in the Fianna Fail politician (For my international audience, Fianna Fail are the outgoing party of government in Ireland. Imagine Berlusconi but without the girls or unintended humour) sense of the meaning but in the physical body morphing sense. The fellow actually has a forked tongue; split like a serpent’s according to bifurcation techniques involved fishing lines and piercings.

Ama however, is a lost soul, in need of love. He and Lui become lovers and she moves into his apartment after deciding to embark on having her tongue split as well as a sign of her commitment. Through Ama, she meets Shiba-san, a talented tattoo artist but with a scarily wide range of idiosyncratic sexual peccadilloes and psychoses. Lui falls under his spell and decides to get a tattoo of a Kirin¸a mythological dragon, that would cover almost her entire back.
While out walking with Ama, they are accosted by a small group of well dressed young men. Ama, taking offence, starts a fight. All but one of the young men run for it and Ama beats the lone ranger up in a very prolonged and vicious manner before  being dragged off by Lui as they make a run for it while the sound of police sirens come perilously near. They escape and their lives resume their normal pace but shortly after, Lui hears a radio news report off a murder of a young man and that the police wish to question another young man with red hair.

Remember, this is Japan and not Roscommon so the number of people with red hair is thin on the ground. Lui forces Ama to let her bleach his hair under the pretence that she wants him to change his gangster image. At no point does she tell him about the police report. Not for the first time in the book, Ama’s fragile psychological state is alluded to and protected. She also tells him to eschew his sleeveless tops for long-sleeves to cover his tattoos.

In the meantime, Lui’s relationship with Shiban-san intensifies and becomes physical. He tells her that he would like to kill her and their sex becomes increasingly passionate, bordering on the abusive. I use this term deliberately instead of S&M. S&M implies a situation of completely unassailable consent amongst its participants whereas Lui gives the sense of acceding to Shiba-san’s demands out of fear. We learn that he is rather well built in contrast to Lui’s increasing slight frame. She fears Shiba-san but she freely visits him. The sense of her bewitchment or free association is tantalisingly ambiguous.

In parallel to her encounters with Shiba-san, Lui descends into alcoholism and anorexia, albeit of the high functional type. Ama tries to control this and locks up her booze and feeds her. While objecting to this, she accedes to his wishes and goes along with Ama’s need to play the paternalist. Is Lui in control by choosing to be controlled thus putting the controller off-guard for the time when she decides not to be controlled? I get this feeling from her and because of this, she is the epitome of what is the post-modern feminist i.e. dressing and behaving in a way that would make past generations of feminists apoplectic with rage, but doing so on her own terms.

Later, Ama disappears. Lui becomes ever more anxious and reports him missing. We learn that despite the intensity of her relationship with Ama, she doesn’t know his real name. Even Shiba-san expresses bemusement at this but Lui says she didn’t dig around in his life. This is telling. Theirs was a relationship based on the superficiality and vacuousness of physical appearance, fashion and the insubstantiality of their pop-culture belief system in what constitutes love.  Soon after,  Ama  is found dead, murdered having been brutally tortured and raped. Lui strongly suspects Shiba-san’s involvement. He is not only bisexual but has fantasized about killing a partner in coitus. However this does not repel Lui. Far from it, I sense she feels she is keeping Ama alive by fucking his murderer. This alludes to the ancient myth that is held almost universally, of something of the essence, the soul of the dead being subsumed by those who kill or consume eat it.

At the end of the book, Lui experiences what I believe to be an epiphany, a realisation of the torpor, superficial and the grub of her life. She looks in the mirror, opens her mouth and describes the state of her tongue, which is in an advanced progress towards the final splitting procedure.
“Was this really what I had been chasing after? A useless,  empty hole surrounded by raw flesh that glistened with spittle”.

This is more than likely a metaphor for her womanhood, her sense of what is left of her if everything is scraped away

Snakes and Earrings is a rather short book, just 118 pages in all. It’s more of a novella than a novel but who cares.  It occupies a world which coexists with us all but is at a remove, almost like that of ghosts. Tattoo parlours are common-place and are almost prosetylising. How many of us walk past the parlours and stare inside at a world so close yet subculturally, distant. We are intrigued, we are bemused. Some of us dabble our insipid toes into the exotic waters of the tattoo and succomb to the needle whose needle drips with ink as it quivers and drips while approaching our skin. Even the language of getting a tattoo for the first time is that of sexual discovery and experiment. It's the venue of 'you first, you first' as we push each other shyly towards the parlour door. Yet, bravery and self discovery is a lonely path we walk, its soundtrack the crescendo and quickening tempo of our very own palpitating hearts. 

The author had a story to tell and told it in a stark, pared-down narrative that never veered into the bleak landscape of disassociation or literary utilitarianism. How much of this is down to the process of translation, I don’t know but the style works and the story is lean, lithe and fit. It’s set a cultural world which the author seems to be very familiar with and is at a remove from our stereotype of what constitutes Japan. We only see the stereotype of the salary-man and the geisha for it is easier to consume and digest foreign cultures in bite-size pieces that are shaped like cartoons but culture, any culture, is far from simple. They are complex yet subtle, obvious yet subliminal. Foreign, yet familiar.
I highly recommend this book.

Snakes and Earrings is written by Hitomi Kanehara and is published by Random House.
ISBN  978-0-099-48367-0

Welcome to my entree into the blogosphere. My name is Patrick Martin and I am a crime fiction writer. I live in Belfast, Ireland and I have just completed my first novel Black Champagne, set in Chicago, USA, a town I have frequented many times over the years. While I try to get Black Champagne published, I am starting work on a second novel and also, some online projects such as my first ever Twitter novel whose first chapters (or should that be chaptweets if I be bold to coin a phrase).