Bright and breezy and c-c-c-cold.

Here’s to 2012, anyway. Who knows what it’ll bring, but I hope it’s a good and happy year for all you out there.

So, last weekend I spent quite a few hours trundling back and forth across the North Sea in a ship.  I found it all a somewhat science fictional experience, if looked at the right way.

There was the mildly tacky hedonism of the hordes of exuberant young folk, of all European nationalities, surging from bar to bar to buffet in search of slightly transgressive pleasures (i.e. smoking, drinking and … well, we all know what the number one priority of young folk of a certain age is, right?).  Something slightly decadent about the whole scene, especially since we were all imprisoned in this enormous floating machine.  A bit like something from the twilight of a creatively spent world.

And the actual twilight produced its own strange visions.

A sky crossed by the trails of aircraft, with great ships jostling on the horizon:

and forests of turbines, beyond the sight of land:

Then Holland greets you with this vision of industrial architecture and steam plumes, like a better-lit version of Bladerunner:

But it was those offshore turbines that gave the most eerie impression.  Engineering marvels that seem to belong in some big budget movie rather than the mundane world.

Conclusions?  I have none, except that our day to day lives contain strangeness we should perhaps stop and stare at more often.  Oh, and that we live in a present that would look like the fever dream – perhaps even nightmare – of a diseased mind to the vast majority of humanity that lived and died before any of us were born.  Oh the second, and offshore wind farms: love ‘em or loathe ‘em, they’re undeniably … striking.

In 1710, the Library of the Faculty of Advocates in Edinburgh was granted the right to claim, from its publisher, a copy of every book published in Great Britain.  So for three hundred years it, along with a select few other institutions, has been steadily, remorsely amassing a vast, almost unimaginable compendium of the written word.  It became the National Library of Scotland, and in 1956 took up its present abode behind an admittedly somewhat forbidding facade on George IV Bridge (a bridge that, by convenient coincidence, does get a mention or two in The Edinburgh Dead, since it was being built at the time of the novel).

Behind that unshowy exterior lies a world of wonder and dreams. It is the manual, analogue internet, and a place, I think, in may ways far richer and deeper and more intoxicating than the digital version that rules our lives now. There are no hyperlinks to guide you, no Google to impose its presumptive structures upon your wanderings. You have to do the work yourself. Hold the books in your hands; read not short, snappy summaries but page after page of considered text; follow trails through quotations and references and indexes. Map out your own exploration, and do it slowly, with care and reflection.

That modest doorway is the portal to centuries of human thought upon every conceiveable subect. The NLS currently holds over 14 million printed items in their collections. 14 million. And it is freely available to anyone with the inclination and cause to investigate it. What a thing. What a wondrous, wonderful thing.

Within, beyond the obligatory cafe (which does rather good tea, by the way – the diligent researcher must know where his restorative refreshments are going to come from) and cloakroom and exhibition space, a relatively modest stairway leads us up towards the light, towards the doors of the reading room.

That’s the doors there, and I took my camera no further, because snooping around in there taking photos seemed unlikely to be welcomed. So we’ll have to make do with this little snapshot I pinched from the NLS’ own website.

The Reading Room’s a modest space – demure – unlike the cavernous, crowded reading rooms of the British Library in London. Always busyish, but never overcrowded. Wonderfully quiet, of course, save for the tip-tap of fingers upon laptops and the occasional cough from the assembled readers.

Who are a diverse lot, as befits the clientele of a national library. Students and academics, of course, but amateur researchers too, hobbyists and genealogists, writers and readers of all sorts. Each one of them in his or her own world, immersed in the mental space created by printed words upon a page; words that have been brought forth from the vast, unseen storage spaces that reside in that same building or other sites around the city like some titanic literary iceberg whose merest, random tip is each day brought forth into the light by the specific requests of those visiting the library.

And while you wait for the books you have requested to be produced for your perusal, you can browse the shelves, where an eclectic selection of stuff awaits your curiosity. That’s where I found the old proceedings and records of the Society of Antiquaries of Scotland, which – like George IV Bridge – can be found within the pages of The Edinburgh Dead. The Society was founded way back in 1780, and is still going today, which makes it almost, but not quite, as venerable an institution as the National Library of Scotland.

Above the door of the NLS, obvious to all as they depart, is a map that says as much as any words can about how deeply into the past go the foundations of the building.  It shows Edinburgh as it was three hundred years ago, when the seeds of the National Library were sown.  The city – and the world – may have transformed around it, but the idea that the Library embodies and fulfils is still there, unchanged.  And a jolly good idea it is too.

Previous instalments of The Edinburgh Dead photo-trailer:

Duddingston Loch

The Arthur’s Seat Coffins

Guarding the Dead

Weaponry

So, What’s a Close, Then?

Edinburgh has one of the most spectacular and beautiful geographies – both natural and man-made – of any British city (actually I’m bending over backwards to appear less partisan than I am, there; truth is, it’s head and shoulders above all its competitors in that department).   But the Old Town, the ancient heart of the city, has an intimate, intricate, dark geography that is not exactly spectacular, but no less fascinating for that.

An aside: How can you tell when a city is ancient?  Well, Edinburgh has a New Town as well as an Old.  The New Town dates back almost 250 years.  That’s what counts as New in Edinburgh.

Anyway, back to the Old Town.  Here is what part of it looked like, very roughly around the time of The Edinburgh Dead:

A multitude of narrow streets projecting from one long, central thoroughfare that runs up the rising ridge from the Palace of Holyrood to the famous Castle.  What you can’t tell from that bird’s eye view is that all those narrow streets are not only narrow, but deep.

Centuries ago, the good folk of Edinburgh were modest pioneers of the skyscraper.  Nobody wanted to build outside the city walls, for fear of someone (well, let’s be honest – not someone; the English, that’s who) coming along and trashing everything.  So everyone kept living and building inside that tightly-defined limit, and they built higher and higher.  The result is the dark geography that still characterises the Old Town: narrow, straight alleyways sunk down beneath soaring tenements.  Places where sunlight hardly ever reaches.

Each one of these alleyways has it’s own name, more often than not a piece of deep history.  That one above is Fleshmarket Close, for example, because once – long ago – the Old Town’s meat market was down at the foot of it.  They are almost all called something-or-other Close, or sometimes Such-and such Wynd.

Here is the entrance to Borthwick’s Close:

Inviting?  Let’s venture down it a little way …

Places like this are where, until the late 18th and early 19th centuries, the vast majority of Edinburgh’s inhabitants – rich and poor alike – lived.  Packed in, piled one atop one another.

At least until the rich tired of the intimacy, the filth, the intensity of it all, and decided to build themselves a grand, spacious New Town.  By the time of The Edinburgh Dead, many of the great and the good had moved out of the Old Town, but thousands of people still lived and died there, the patterns of their lives shaped by these architecural canyons.

Borthwick’s Close has an important part to play in The Edinburgh Dead.  At its foot, in a watery dawn, a body is found curled up on the doorstep of a shuttered whisky shop.  So there you are: a character portrait in photos.

Previous instalments of The Edinburgh Dead photo-trailer:

Duddingston Loch

The Arthur’s Seat Coffins

Guarding the Dead

Weaponry

This is a Land Pattern musket:

It’s a weapon I didn’t know anything in particular about until I started researching the book, but the more I read about it the more interested I became.  Like a lot of guns, I find a certain appealing, utilitarian grace in its design.  (Even as I find an ugliness in its purpose).  What really got me interested, though, was its nickname.  An enormous number of different versions of the Land Pattern were produced for use by the British armed forces in the 18th and 19th centuries, and many of them were known by those who used them as Brown Bess.  As someone observes in The Edinburgh Dead: ‘a soft, almost companionable, name for something that had spat such storms of smoke and fire and lead and spilled such torrents of blood the world over.’

The Brown Bess was, in some ways, the ferocious midwife to the birth of the British Empire.  More directly relevant to The Edinburgh Dead, as will become clear, she was at the side of thousands of British soldiers fighting in the brutally extended Napoleonic Wars that ravaged Europe in the early years of the 19th century.

This is a briquet, a French sabre:

A blade of the sort carried into battle by the French soldiers striving to fulfil Napoleon’s imperial ambitions.  Guns of one sort or another had been the dominant force on the battlefield for a very long time by the start of the 19th century, yet there was still a place for the devices of horribly intimate slaughter.  I can only guess that people could still find a use for swords of one sort or another mainly because the reload time for many of the firearms then in use was such that not all killing could easily be done at a distance.  But still, even the muzzle-loading flintlock Brown Bess shown above could apparently be reloaded by a skilled operator remarkably quickly: three or four shots a minute was evidently possible.

This is a French flintlock pistol of the time:

Pretty, no?  Strange how such gruesomely-intentioned equipment can appear so elegant.  Why the emphasis on French weapons, you might wonder.  Well, The Edinburgh Dead‘s central character – Adam Quire – is a veteran of the Napoleonic Wars.  At the time the novel is set, he lives still with the physical, psychological and material legacy of that conflict.  It casts a faint shadow over much of what happens in the book, and that includes the weaponry that appears in the story.  Each one of the three weapons pictured here features somehow, so this really is a very literal photo-trailer.

And I’ll add one more image, by way of a less specific hint.  Not strictly a weapon, but an important player in the action of The Edinburgh Dead.  You don’t need me to tell you what this is:

Previous instalments of The Edinburgh Dead photo-trailer:

Duddingston Loch

The Arthur’s Seat Coffins

Guarding the Dead

An Unexpected Visitor

Putting out food for the little birds in the garden means occasionally being graced by the presence of a bigger bird, come to eat the little ones.  Poor chap missed out this time, but was kind enough to hang around for quite a while – no doubt bemoaning his misfortune – and pose for pictures.

Beach and Barbecue Weather

It was hot, hot, hot at the weekend.  In the photo above we see the unbounded enthusiasm of the Scots for a nice beach in good weather.  If you can see past the seething hordes of beach-goers, you might just be able to make out a lovely view.  Actually it did get more populated later, but it was nice not to have to share it with many folk for a while.  Did have a barbecue, later, but you’ll just have to take my word for that, since I’ve no photographic evidence.

An Expected, but Very Welcome, Delivery

A box of author’s copies of The Edinburgh Dead.  It’ll be in bookstores in just a few weeks now.  Others can make their own minds up about the contents, but looks-wise, I’m a big fan of this.  It’s a sleek and good-looking beast, very nicely put together by the Orbit team.

On the subject of others making up their own minds about the contents, some kind words have been said about the book recently.  They’ve been said in paper-and-ink form rather than on online, so sadly I can’t link to them directly and you’ll just have to believe me when I say that they were along these lines:

Publishers Weekly said: “Ruckley ventures successfully into the gothic with this horrific thriller … atmospheric descriptions help sustain the menacing mood.”

RT Magazine said, amongst other nice things: “this frightening tale of taking scientific enlightenment much too far is enhanced by strong, sharp prose and a lively pace, making it difficult to stop turning the pages.”

Jolly good.  Always a relief when you hear that someone out there in the big wide world likes your book …

Graveyards as fortresses. Not for fear of the rising dead, but – as a character in The Edinburgh Dead puts it – for the protection of the dead against the avaricious living.  Corpses had value in 18th and 19th century Edinburgh, as educational material for the city’s famous medical schools.   The bodysnatchers (or, as they were more dramatically known, the resurrectionists) emptied graves at night.  Yes, if you died in Edinburgh in 1828, when The Edinburgh Dead is set, and left a reasonably presentable corpse, there was a chance your mortal remains would be surreptitiously dug up, bagged, sold to an anatomist, possibly pickled, and then displayed and dissected for the edification of medical students.  The good folk of the city, not unreasonably, thought that more than a little uncalled for.  They took steps to deter the nocturnal corpse-thiefs.

They built and manned watchtowers in their cemeteries. (The one shown above is at Duddingston – a location that’s featured in this photo-trailer before).

They set cages about the graves of their loved ones.

They even resorted to massive, impenetrable iron coffins.

It could all easily be an array of defences against the undead, inspired by superstitious fear of revenants clawing their way out of the soil.  What’s more unsettling, though?  Those fantastical notions, or the truth: that men thought nothing of digging up their recently deceased fellows and selling them for dissection, and that respected – indeed internationally lauded – teachers of medicine found the imperatives of their calling so pressing that they thought it an acceptable way of obtaining cadavers for their anatomy lessons?

Previous instalments of The Edinburgh Dead photo-trailer:

The Arthur’s Seat Coffins

Duddingston Loch

A fine looking fellow, whatever his moniker.  He’s currently calling the Cairn O’Mohr winery home.  I’m not sure they even know he’s an ent, to be honest, and I didn’t mention it, in case he preferred to remain incognito.

Actually, I do have something else to report, but I suspect it’s of more interest to me than anyone else: best sighting I’ve ever had of a wild otter, paddling about in the River Earn one lunchtime.  I say best sighting – it was only a couple of seconds, but that’s still better than I’ve ever managed before, as far as I can remember.  Still, never mind all that.  Ent!

In the run up to August publication of The Edinburgh Dead, I’ve been thinking of doing something similar, but different.  It’s a book that offers rich potential for footnotage.  Being the faintly obsessive sort I am, it’s very tempting to offer a detailed breakdown of which bits of the book are historically accurate, which are not and which fall somewhere in between (I’ll bet you there’d be those greatly surprised at some of the stuff I didn’t have to make up, because Edinburgh’s history offered details easily odd and unpleasant enough for a writer of dark fiction).

I may give in to the temptation to attempt some sort of historical compare and contrast exercise here on the website eventually – we’ll have to see – but in the meantime, as publication draws near, I thought I’d use the next month or two for a slightly different exercise.

Welcome therefore, to the first instalment of a sort of photo-trailer for The Edinburgh Dead.  There will be no major specific spoilers in these occasional posts, but there may be hints.  Foreshadowings.  Possibly even red herrings, but only if I’m feeling particularly mean and out of sorts.

So, we’ll begin with something pretty.  Duddingston Loch.

A modestly wild wetland lying beside Duddingston village, which was long ago absorbed by Edinburgh’s urban sprawl (there’re some notably run-down bits of the city lying just to the south of it).  It’s a nature reserve now, has been for a long time, and only a smallish section of its bank is easily accessible to the public, but on a the right day it’s a lovely, peaceful oasis of green calm.  There’s not many cities can match Edinburgh for semi-wild and dramatic green spaces (I mean, we’ve got an extinct volcano dominating the whole eastern half of the city), and Duddingston Loch is a part of that claim to fame.

But the place is not just about tranquility and wildlife.  It’s got it’s history, too.  A couple of hundred years ago, when the climate was evidently more conducive to such things, it was the place for Edinburgh’s folk to go for a spot of skating and curling, when the long, dark winter got cold enough to lock the place up in ice.  Nowadays, of course, people are no doubt told to stay off the ice for fearing of fatal misfortune, and to be honest it’s  pretty rare for there to be thick enough ice that anyone but a complete idiot to think some skating would be a good idea.  Back in the day, though, it was all the rage, as one of Scotland’s more famous paintings shows:

That – as I wouldn’t blame anyone for not knowing – is ‘Reverend Robert Walker (1755-1808) Skating on Duddingston Loch’ by Sir Henry Raeburn.  To digress into ungenerous scepticism for a moment, I’ve never really got why people seem so fond of this painting.  I don’t particularly like it.  Bit dull, if you ask me.  But then, you could accomodate my knowledge of art in a thimble.  Maybe a teacup.

A slightly more interesting snippet of Dudidngston Loch’s history (to my mind, anyway): way back in the 18th century, a mysterious hoard was dredged up from the loch.  Weapons and other artefacts something like 3000 years old.  A little bit of magic to reflect upon, as you sit today on its grassy banks, enjoying the view: a thousand years before the Romans came to Britain, or Christ was born, way back in the dark, numinous past, people of the Bronze Age stood at perhaps the very same spot and for reasons we can never know – magical or mundane – they consigned to the waters a whole load of what must have been to them quite precious metal.  And three millennia later, a rather uptight-looking reverend in black coat and hat went skating on the ice above those very waters.  Funny old world.

What does all this have to do with The Edinburgh Dead?  Well, I’m not saying, of course.  Except that Duddingston Loch’s in the book.  Our hero pays it a visit, and for reasons that have nothing whatever to do with skating.

I think for the next instalment in this photo-trailer, maybe something a little less pretty is called for …

The birds – poor fluffy little birdikins – gather in disconsolate groups to bemoan the closure of the world.  There is an eerie silence, save the occasional crunch and rumble of a 4×4 patrolling roads that are more like skiing pistes.  It’s a fraught kind of peace.  Residents keep themselves busy bombarding the local council with demands for snowploughs, gritters, skis for those poor postmen and their waste collection colleagues.

And now and again the sun breaks through and the world is as beautiful as anything I’ve ever seen: great undulating mounds of gleaming, powdery snow; icicles – proper, clear stalactites of pure ice – adorn every gutter.  It’s snowing again now, as I type, but without the conviction of recent days and nights.  Forecasters say it’s just about done with us for now.  But it’s going to get colder, not warmer, so what’s already fallen isn’t likely to be thawing any time soon.  The wintry fantasia is going to be with us for a while yet.

I fear for the postman, if he does arrive at the door of some particularly desperate, deprived house, its residents driven mad by their enforced seclusion.  Hunger and cold do terrible things to a person, and a plump-looking postman might be just the nourishment they need.