Col. Mustard Update

  We had barely sat down before a tall thin man appeared. He was elegantly dressed. He had a moustache, and his black hair was perfectly combed.
  “Good evening,” he said with an elegant accent. “My name is Richard. I shall be looking after you this evening.”
  To my relief, he did not look down his nose at me. In fact, he made us feel quite comfortable.
  “I love your accent,” said Linda. “Where are you from?”
  “England, ma’am. London actually. May I interest you in an aperitif ?”

There is more to report about the Lord Lucan case.

If you’re wondering what the heck I’m on about, then you must not have read the post I made here two years ago. That is where I acknowledged that I had made the real-life Lord Lucan a character in my work of fiction, Lautaro’s Spear, set in 1980, six years after the man’s disappearance. Partly to help define one of my characters and partly just to amuse myself—and maybe also as a bit of foreshadowing that my protagonist would one day mysteriously go missing—I included a brief walk-on for a minor character, a waiter, who would be strangely recognizable to those familiar with a particular criminal case from the 1970s in Britain.

The reason for my previous post on the long missing aristocrat was an article in The Times of London providing some previously unknown (to me anyway) information.

To recap, Lord Lucan vanished without a trace a half-century ago this month, immediately after his children’s nanny and his wife were both attacked with a lead pipe in the family home in fashionable Belgravia, London. Lady Lucan survived, but the nanny, Sandra Rivett, died. The borrowed car Lucan had been driving was found abandoned in the port town of Newhaven, East Sussex, prompting speculation he had drowned himself in the harbor. He left letters protesting his innocence, saying that he had actually intervened in an attack on his estranged wife by another man, who then fled. A coroner’s inquest subsequently found Lord Lucan guilty of Rivett’s murder, making him the first member of the House of Lords to be named a murderer since 1760. He has never been found and an official death certificate for him was issued in 2016.

The new information I got two years ago was that, when the Ford Corsair he had been driving was found in Newhaven, it contained three cards from a game of Cluedo owned by the lord. Specifically, they were Colonel Mustard, the lead pipe, and the hall. Additionally, there was an alleged sighting of the fugitive at a party in Portugal. Most interesting, though, was the report that a facial recognition expert, using AI photo analysis, had claimed to have made a 100-percent match between photographs of Lord Lucan and an 87-year-old pensioner in Australia.

The latest wrinkle in the story comes courtesy of a recent three-part documentary on BBC television. While it acknowledged that most people think Lord Lucan is dead, an passionate exception to that consensus comes from a builder from Hampshire. Adopted in infancy, he never had any interest in tracking down his biological parents, but upon his adoptive mother’s death, he learned that his mother was the tragic Sandra Rivett. That led to an obsessive quest, lasting 17 years so far, to find the missing Lord Lucan who, he is certain, was still alive. With the aid of a former investigative journalist, he has followed leads to such far-flung places as Mozambique, South Africa, and yes, Australia. The saga continues, seemingly with no end in sight.

No one else’s fascination with the case is as personal as the murder victim’s son, but plenty of others have been intrigued with the case. It was an Irish Times article seven years ago that caught my attention and led to my including a fictionalized version of the lord in my novel.

“Some reports suggest that he was fed to Aspinall’s tigers after he shot himself,” it said. “Others are convinced that he escaped; reported sightings of the missing peer are legion. Lucan has been spotted waitering in San Francisco, managing a clothes shop in South Africa, living in a neo-Nazi colony in Paraguay, and living as a hippy musician called Jungly Barry in Goa.”

Waitering in San Francisco, you say?

It was a bit of whimsy on my part, but now I too have found myself forever linked in a minor, odd way to that gruesome, tragic event.

Arthur Clock

  He looked up and down the street. He settled on a bar down on the next corner. It was called El Águila.
  “I’ll meet you in front of that bar in the morning. But not too early. Say, ten o’clock.”
  —Maximilian and Carlotta Are Dead, chapter 15 (“A Night at the Plaza”)

Somewhat belatedly, I received a lovely gift a few weeks ago. The occasion was either Christmas or my birthday or both—the two are kind of synonymous in my case—and when I say belated, I don’t just mean it was meant for this past December. It was ordered by my nieces and nephew a year or two before that. I forget which because, though I had been notified way back when it was ordered, there was subsequently an extended delay in the shipping and I had long since forgotten about it. It was designed and produced as a Kickstarter project, and as a I know from my own experience, those things can often take longer, sometimes much longer, than advertised.

It was thus a complete surprise when my gift showed up unexpectedly at my door. Fortunately, seeing the name of the item jarred my memory, and I knew who had sent it. What I couldn’t do was say the item’s name out loud.

The name of this very cool thing is the Author Clock. That doesn’t seem as though it should be so difficult to say, but for the life of me every time I go to enunciate it, it comes out as “Arthur Clarke.” I guess that makes some kind of sense, seeing as how Arthur C. Clark was an author (2001: A Space Odyssey and Childhood’s End prominent among his novels), but it’s still a strange impediment.

The Author Clock was an incredibly thoughtful gift for all kinds of reasons, not least of which is that it must mean that my brother’s kids actually consider me some kind of writer.

The design is simple. It resembles a tablet like an iPad with a white, non-backlit screen framed in tasteful wood. Once set up using your Wi‑Fi-connected phone or other device, it displays every 60 seconds a different literary quote which includes the current time. The quotes have been crowd-sourced, and they’ve managed to find at least one for each of the 1,440 minutes in a day. The battery can be recharged through its USB‑C, and the clock can be set to update at less frequent intervals in order to prolong times between charging. (Minute-by-minute updates so far in my experience require a recharge every few days.)

 The main disadvantage is that, if you have it sitting on your desk, it can be hard to get any work done because you just want to sit there and watch for the next quote. What book will it be from? Will they have really found a passage mentioning 3:57 a.m.? Who knew so many novels included such specific times?

My fascination with the clock has got me wondering about times mentioned in my own books. How often in my six novels had I mentioned a specific time? I did a quick check.

Sure enough, in the very first chapter of my very first book (Maximilian and Carlotta Are Dead) when Lonnie McKay shows up to drag Dallas Green off on an ill-advised adventure in Mexico…

  He didn’t kill the engine. He just sat out there revving it up. He knew that I would hear it and go on out there. I pulled on a tee-shirt and went out. It was almost ten o’clock and time that I should be getting to bed. I was kind of pissed at him for showing up this late when he knew I had to work in the morning.

Most of my mentions of time tend to be on the hour and thus probably not highly prized by the Author Clock folks. In a later chapter Dallas does some nervous clock watching at a bar called El Águila waiting for Lonnie to come back, but he tends to check the time on the hour. Dallas often happens to be waiting for people. In the sequel Lautaro’s Spear, he finds himself waiting for Valérie Destandau…

  When he returned with my drink, I looked at my watch again. She was now twenty minutes late. I pulled out the scrap of paper and double-checked the name of the place and the address. She had also written the time. It said “20.00” which I was pretty sure meant eight o’clock.

The fantasy novels mention specific times much less than the Dallas books, although there are at least a couple references to “the stroke of midnight.” And there’s this bit from Last of the Tuath Dé in which Koschei tells young Peter a story about the plot to kill the Mad Monk…

  “So that was when Prince Felix and the others decided the Mad Monk must be stopped. They invited him to the Moika Palace for tea and cakes at midnight. That’s in St. Petersburg, you know. The cakes had been laced with cyanide. As was the Madeira wine. In case the cakes didn’t do the job.”

So this is one more thing to be thinking about as I write. Maybe if I include lots of obscure time references, I will get mentioned by Arthur, I mean, the Author Clock.

Me and My Demons

How do you like the family portrait that now adorns the top of this page?

Yes, that is myself sitting at the keyboard, no doubt diligently writing away on the next literary masterpiece. I have to say the picture flatters me. It’s now clear that I should have always been an animated character.

I’m surrounded by none other than the renowned Demon Hunter Orpheus (a.k.a. Septimus Bridge), the renowned actual demon Astaroth (a.k.a. The Fiend), and the last two Demon Hunters in the world (as far as we know) Izanami (a.k.a. Chiharu Ito) and Sapphire (a.k.a. Lola Blumquist). You will know them all from reading The Curse of Septimus Bridge and its sequel Last of the Tuath Dé. I like how the human beings are looking vaguely impatient, as if they can’t wait to see what ordeals they are going to be put through next. Meanwhile, The Fiend appears over-eager, as if he’s the one who’s going to have all the fun. All the while, I seem to be cracking a wee bit under all the pressure.

The artwork is by Tamlyn Zawalich, the same talented illustrator who produced the images for the covers of the two Demon Hunters books. It was organized as a birthday surprise by my wonderful friend Dayle, who is not only responsible for making my books read as coherently as they do but who saves my bacon with fixes, corrections and suggestions and who encourages every possible drop of quality in the final drafts.

My friend Michael once suggested that I should turn the Sapphire/Izanami tales into a graphic novel. I was immediately open to the idea, and I’m even more so now.

Maybe, though, we need to extend the saga a bit more first. If you agree, then I have good news. Writing has begun on the sequel to the sequel. I’m only on Chapter 1, but that’s where I always begin.

There has been a longer break than usual (about a year and a half) between the publication of my last book and starting the next one. I had a couple of other projects in between as well as a couple of film festivals to attend, and then it was the distracting Christmas season which, where I live, always seems to run from late October to mid-January. This is the time of year when I usually get most of my serious writing done—even more so when there is pandemic along with government-mandated lockdowns in effect.

There is no lockdown in effect at the moment, but we did have a couple of storms. Last weekend these islands were buffeted by two named storms, Isha and Jocelyn, within a three-day period with us being located in the red zone for the former. We were without electricity for a night and a day, and with phones’ and other gadgets’ batteries running down, I was eventually left without the internet but still had a fully charged laptop to work with. There was actually nothing else I could do except make things up in my head and type them out. It was as though the universe forced me to start the next book.

So yes, the next book is definitely a continuation of (addition to? complement of?) the world of Septimus, Sapphire, Izanami and all the other characters in my own little fantasy world (see illustration above). My other ideas for books—including a story set entirely in Ireland and even also possibly one that returns to the world of Dallas Green—are still out there, but they will wait and gestate a while longer.

So, where does the story—actually multiple stories—go from where we left off at the end of Last of the Tuath Dé? I have an outline, but experience suggests many things could change by the time I’ve finished fleshing it all out. Some of the familiar characters will be back, and there will also be new characters.

So, where does the story go? Let’s find out together.