Blog tour - Interview on Bookish Rantings

As of March, there's a blog tour underway for A Hangman for Ghost, and an interview with myself has landed on the Bookish Rantings blog.

See the Author Interview for A Hangman for Ghosts here.

Bookish rantings says that: "If you love a good mystery and historical fiction is your jam, this might be the next book you want to add to your TBR." [That's your To Be Read list.]

A new review and the executioner's call for Google+

First the good news, as they say.

I'm grateful to Peppermint Ph.D. for a glowing review of A Hangman for Ghosts. What's intriguing to a writer about this review is the list of "Historical 'stuff' I've Been Googling." It's a pleasure to see the nuggets of historical detail one scatters, large and small, being picked up by a reader.

Now, my normal response to a review such as this, among other things, would be to click the G+ button, which adds a "like" to your stream on the Google+ social network. Google+, however, as many of us will know, is condemned, and the executioner is little moved by the small and active communities among writers and others that found a home there.

I should assure readers that Blogger, and Displaced Pieces, are going nowhere, but the option to share and +1 posts on Google+, as well as any Google+ comments coming back to the blog, will be deleted as of February 4.

If you are a follower of my work through Google+, please keep coming back to Displaced Pieces, and the excellent network of blogs around historical and mystery fiction.

The System – and two more reviews

One of the questions that emerge in the course of A Hangman for Ghosts, and a question that also preoccupied Dickens, most notably in Bleak House, is whether social systems represent and embody human intentions, or inevitably come to supersede them.

The legal system and its demands gives rise to the system of transportation. Transportation necessitates the penal system, and yet piece by piece the penal colony generates its own systems: magistrates, constables, free-convicts, settlement, commerce, trade, and land transfer, until the colony becomes its own state. Human beings in the story are subject to the system, and yet from the top and the bottom they also seek to subvert it, and bend it to their ends, both moral and immoral.

This is one of Carver's greatest tests: even as hangman, does he rely on the system to evade his past and give his life structure, however cruel? And later, as he takes up the magistrate's cause, is he twisting the system to his own ends even as he advances in it? Is he able to maintain his integrity, even as he discovers how the system can be both abused and perpetrate abuses?

Perhaps this question, along with the others, was part of the interest for these two generous reviews for A Hangman for Ghosts.

Yvonne, from A Darn Good Read:
https://adarngoodread.blogspot.com/2018/07/book-review-hangman-for-ghosts-by-andrei-baltakmens.html

Stephanie, from 100 Pages A Day:
https://stephaniesbookreviews.weebly.com/blog-tours/a-hangman-for-ghosts#comments

A Hangman for Ghosts - early reviews

The blog has been a little quiet of late, although I'm shocked to see how long ago the last post was. To stir things up, here are two early reviews for A Hangman for Ghosts.

Without editorializing too much on these independent reviews, phrases that include "vivid", "compelling" and "page turner", or comparisons with the 19-century masters, are exactly what the author looks for.

Foreword Reviews

A Hangman for Ghosts
Andrei Baltakmens

Top Five Books (Jul 1, 2018) Softcover $15.99 (288pp) 978-1-938938-28-3

MYSTERY

Set in the roiling, corrupt world of an 1829 prison colony, Andrei Baltakmens’s A Hangman for Ghosts is a historical mystery that brings regency-era Australia to life.

Gabriel Carver, the hangman of Sydney, is dark, lonely figure. Soaked in rum and regret, Carver becomes an unlikely detective when a woman from his past is accused of murder. As Carver follows the clues through Sydney’s underbelly, he encounters a cast of bleakly Dickensian characters, from whistling streetwalkers to baby-faced policemen. As he works to solve the murder, the mystery of Carver’s own origins unravels as well. With rich historical details that evoke Australia’s early colonial days, this is a wonderful, traditional novel.

A Hangman For Ghosts is Baltakmens’s second novel. With a PhD in English literature with a focus on Dickens, he’s well versed in his subject, but the Sydney that Carver stalks through is neither dry nor academic. Baltakmens depicts a filthy, unpredictable, densely populated society where transported convicts mix with sailors and “fallen women.” Descriptions have a dreamlike quality, as though seen through antique glass: a woman is “too bright, fatally bright, for her skirts were on fire, a river of flame in the dark.”

The novel does lean a bit on the Dickensian tradition, and some chapters feel repetitive, as though serialized; however, the mystery’s thread keeps spinning at a satisfying pace. Folding in vivid details, bright characters, and compelling dialogue, the story is a page-turner, a savory treat to be devoured.

This delightfully grim historical mystery is true to Dickens’s style, and holds on to its secrets with tight, clammy fists. CLAIRE FOSTER (July/August 2018)

Disclosure: This article is not an endorsement, but a review. The author of this book provided free copies of the book to have their book reviewed by a professional reviewer. No fee was paid by the author for this review. Foreword Reviews only recommends books that we love. Foreword Magazine, Inc. is disclosing this in accordance with the Federal Trade Commission’s 16 CFR, Part 255.

A link to the review is coming soon. Already online, is an equally positive review from Kirkus reviews.

Kirkus Reviews

https://www.kirkusreviews.com/book-reviews/andrei-baltakmens/hangman-for-ghosts/

My favourite line in this review:

Baltakmens (The Raven’s Seal, 2012), echoing the voices of 19th-century masters like Conrad and Melville, combines adventure and mystery in a high-stakes tale of class, morality, and justice.

On genre fiction

Some remarks by the inestimable M. John Harrison on his blog propose that in the crowded market of genre writing, which ranges from fantasy and science fiction to mystery, history, horror, and crime, our writer's consciousness that we are writing within a genre (and presumably to a formula) leads us to strive too hard:

Why are genre writers so desperate to convince? Treat ’em mean keep ’em keen seems to be lost advice. The result is chapter after opening chapter of needy, to which the experienced reader is only going to react with contempt.

Readers, asserts Harrison,

know the weakness of your position. They’ve passed the groaning tables at the front of the shop. They’ve heard all your desperate lines.... What else can you show them? Even as they ask they’re walking on by, looking for someone who knows the product but has the dignity not to oversell it. 

The point has resonance. The commercial genres make for crowded shelves. Some writers are so attached to replicating what most succeeds in the genre (I'm thinking of epic fantasy) that they come only to replicate the experience they believe the reader most wants: the fantastical becomes routine. But other mysteries, like detection, seem to satisfy only in the reiteration of certain stages and tropes: the murder, the investigation, the reveal.

I've been tinkering for a long time with what might be called the fluid boundary between genre fiction and literature. What can you achieve within the bounds of genre, and what are the limits? Can a detective's story also read like a novel? Can a novel enclose a mystery without losing its other qualities? It's important to bear in mind that literary fiction, as defined by an emphasis on complex characterization, on realistic settings and action, on aesthetic language, is itself a genre, with only a marginal claim on preeminence.

What is the writing problem here? If it's a problem with writing to the formula, of adhering too closely to the conventions in the hope that recognition will equal sales in a saturated marketplace, then that's a worthy and valid challenge. But I wonder about the bigger question: I was once asked what happens when the detective becomes "novelistic"? Would the mystery seize to function or capture our interest if, for example, if the detective became a fully rounded character, no longer bound to the principle of investigation? What if, for example, we only cared about Commander Dalgliesh for his poetry?

But I think the question only holds if we valorize some quality of the literary genre as superior to the qualities of other genres, and seek that to the exclusion of others, which leads us into the same formulaic round as before. So Harrison's answer, knowing the product and not overselling it, keeping ourselves open to the challenge of writing well while quietly acknowledging whatever conventions we choose, is at once our answer and our first task.

And so, for what it's worth, here are the first lines of A Hangman for Ghosts:

A woman was shrieking in the cells when the hangman and the surgeon met inside the gate of old Sydney Gaol.

We need to talk about Conrad

Clive James's recent essay on re-reading Joseph Conrad reminds me of a writer I have not read consistently for over a decade, but whose work, like Dickens', has a persistent influence. I have on my shelves a rather fine hard-bound collection of Conrad's major works: the best of which, not counting the superb Heart of Darkness, are Lord Jim and Nostromo.

As James points out, Conrad's work anticipates with startling clarity the grand terrors of the modern world: revolution and totalitarianism, political violence, terrorism, and the disorder we see presently from Africa to the Middle-east and beyond. Whereas Dickens turned his fiercest satire on his contemporaries, Conrad focused his irony on colonialism and what we might class as issues of globalization, the open, shifting world of the seafarer.

It strikes me that Conrad anticipated so much: in Nostromo the "material interest" in the great silver mine that dominates the novel and drives the central conflict could stand as a precursor to our  corrupting material interest in fossil fuels, the toxic treasure trove of the Middle-east. As Mrs. Gould realizes at the end of the novel,  the colonial intervention, even when idealistic and successful, is also a form of oppression: "She saw the San Tome mountain hanging over the Campo, over the whole land, feared, hated, wealthy; more soulless than any tyrant, more pitiless and autocratic than any government; ready to crush innumerable lives in the expansion of its greatness." This is a strange prescience into Western interventions: as these material interests bring both wealth and "development", they also corrupt the best moral intentions, sowing the seeds of resistance and revolution, and pitiless conflict, in return.

Conrad's ability to wed the action and danger of a thriller to substantial moral scope and purpose, to show without judging, to examine evil as well as good without flinching or hedging, is a heavy challenge for any writer. In his characters we often see how idealism, the illusion which we create to sustain our sense of self, also leaves us blind to the fatal realities of ourselves and others. It's certainly time to revisit Conrad and remind ourselves just how precise his insights were.

Leafing through Nostromo, I realized that several characters in A Hangman for Ghosts share names with characters in that novel. This was entirely unconscious, but the background to this murder mystery is a colonial venture, and the protagonist is a fallen idealist. I hope the reader will of course see one or two Dickensian ghosts in the story, but I wonder now how the spirit of Conrad inhabits the novel as well.

Everywhere you go, you always take the weather with you

This is an intriguing review, of a book on the role of the weather in English arts and literature. I've always had a soft spot for literary atmosphere, from Dickens's fog and mud onwards. Readers of The Raven's Seal will know that winter and summer, snow, shine, and cloud, all have a role in that novel also. It's easy to mock the pathetic fallacy in fiction, but I find myself falling back on what you might call the soft pathetic fallacy. Setting, tone, atmosphere count heavily for a reader's sense of immersion, and weather bears on us and alters mood and perception in a singularly direct, sensory way. This is a vital tool in the descriptive writer's toolkit.

Of course, not every funeral takes place in the rain, and lovers don't always meet in storms or sunshine, but in A Hangman for Ghosts, the weight of the antipodean summer stands in for the oppressive machinery of the prison colony administration, while the bright light of the sun only serves to make the shadows of murder darker.

The last mystery

When the mystery is resolved, what remains? Maybe the the fact that we are all mysteries to ourselves, and that character is the one clue we can never follow to its conclusion.

(A cryptic post to celebrate the conclusion of the first draft of A Hangman for Ghosts.)

First and last

I started writing the last chapter of A Hangman for Ghosts. But given that the last chapter of a murder mystery is necessarily that first one that the author devised, and that the rest of the writing process is selectively concealing and revealing the nature of this chapter, does this mean that I really started writing this chapter first, and it has simply taken the longest to finish?

Mystery and stupidity

This is an odd topic for a longish post, but as the end of the first draft of A Hangman for Ghosts draws near, as an ambiguous detective hunts down the conclusion of an intricate and ambivalent case, I've had cause to consider the nature of stupidity, as a theme of the novel and in society.

By stupidity, I don't mean simple, individual foolishness, but consistent, willed idiocy in grave matters of public life, from the spectacular boorishness of a New Zealand talk-radio host attacking a respected writer for disloyalty to – of all things – the government; to the exceptional callousness of the Australian Prime Minister, who refuses to prevent the further brutalisation of children held in detention and instead moves to change the subject; to rewriting the charter of a respected university to diminish truth and enquiry, to – most dangerous of all – admitting the reality of global climate change while not recognising the human cause.

In many of these cases, from the cruelty of Mr Abbott to putting humanity and the planet at risk, there is an element of harm, as cruelty and stupidity go hand in hand, even as there is also a violent disrespect for persons and their good sense in the other instances. Of course, folly, bigotry, self-interest, and deceit are nothing new – unsurprising, in fact – but what is worrying is that this stupidity has become naked and shameless, that there is no attempt to reason or persuade, only a bald assertion that should be as embarrassing to the speaker as it is irritating to the audience. Was there not a time when political leaders, rightly or wrongly, would at least attempt to persuade us of their case, on whatever grounds?

How is this related to mystery? Because I think that in a good mystery there is a satisfaction in the discovery that truth can be found, that the detective, whether a private individual or an official, can use reason and observation and imagination to track down the real facts of the matter. In this way, the mystery narrative schools us or engages us in a certain kind of thinking. By the same token, the dark forces the detective might confront, malice and crime, are aligned with stupidity as well as the fog of circumstance. Hence, in A Hangman for Ghosts, in the harsh environment of the Australian penal colony or on the doorstep of the empire, my reluctant investigator, an outsider even in exile, must confront official stupidity as well as the complexity of the crime, because this kind of stupidity is about preserving the order of the system rather than justice.

Which brings me back, from another direction, to my first point. Just as propaganda in a totalitarian society is not about reality but bullying and demeaning the subject, official stupidity is not about the facts or even reasons, but about muddying the waters, creating confusion in the hopes that confusion seeds doubt, not to sway the majority by argument but to target the wavering few by obfuscation. As such, stupidity is the great red herring, the concealer, the distraction from who is guilty.

Eleanor Catton was subjected to a stupid personal attack because she demurred, mildly, to act as a cheerleader for a New Zealand government she thought at odds with her values. The response to her in some media shows that on the contrary, her writer's role as critic, conscience, and doubter is even more vital.

History, fiction, revelance

It's interesting, if disconcerting, to find oneself living in a state of Australia under an administration which seems intent on resurrecting regressive notions in criminal law that were part of the eighteenth century background to The Raven's Seal, or even my new work.

A writer is always on the hunt for new ideas, but this shows me that ideas of crime, law and punishment are always in flux, and that historical attitudes can find currency, and relevance, today. Hence historical fiction is not always about the dead past but instead a dialog between past and present, the character of ourselves as we were and as we are now. Sometimes, the past in fiction illuminates, as we glimpse of ourselves in the historical mist.

For example, the eighteenth century of The Raven's Seal was a period of great economic growth and upheaval: in many ways the foundation and apex of modern capitalism. But the cost of this growth was massive and growing inequality, a broad process of dispossession – an issue more than familiar to us today. In this case, as the few gain extraordinary wealth and the many lose prosperity and stability, I wanted to ask who the real criminals were: where was the invisible hand moving like a pick-pocket's, who could guide it, and who really grew wealthy at the expense of others? This mystery persists with us today, although the causes and policies that contribute to it are not particularly opaque, only the solution. What stands out from the eighteenth century experience is that though the markets are a game, they are by no means a neutral game: those who get to set the rules come to disproportionately reap the prizes, and at the same time label their play by the illusory name "fairness". In the case of The Raven's Seal, the codes of crime and punishment, privilege and service, were part of these rules.

We still live with the legacy and attitudes of the deep eighteenth century. In A Hangman for Ghosts, I'm interested in the "System" as a notion and a mystery, and the system of penal transportation which transplanted whole blocks of the "criminal classes" from one land to another. The task is to weave the story of crime and discovery around it. But as a character notes in The Raven's Seal, if you want to find who's guilty, first ask: "who profits?".

Working out the mystery

For 2014, work continues on my new mystery, A Hangman for Ghosts. A mystery is really two stories: the story of a crime, its consequences and the discovery of the truth of that crime, and the concealed story of what led to the crime, its causes, motives, who is guilty, and why. The investigator leads in the first story to discover the second.

A mystery writer guesses the end, but I for one don't always know what lies between the discovery of the crime and the finding of the criminal. In a sense, I'm writing to work out what happens, and what has happened. And so A Hangman for Ghosts has sometimes intrigued and baffled me, and taken me in unexpected directions as much as the difficult and secretive protagonist. But I'm halfway there, or more, and begin to see it emerging.

In the meantime, here's what I know:

A Hangman for Ghosts

“To escape this place entirely we would need to destroy our memories – we would require a slaughter-man for memory, a hangman for ghosts.”

Sydney, New South Wales, 1829
When a series of brutal murders shake even the penal colony, officials look to the hated executioner, Gabriel Carver, a felon who purchased his own reprieve by turning against his fellow prisoners, for answers. But the sardonic Carver has an aptitude for brutal truths – if not self-preservation – and his dogged search for the truth will lead back to the prison hulks, his own dark path, and into the corrupt heart of the Empire and a shocking reversal.

The past is a dusty window

Working on A Hangman for Ghosts, I'm put in mind of the strangeness of historical fiction. All histories carry particular views; all stories strive to make you see, but how can we make that picture seem complete and compelling?

A Hangman for Ghosts opens on the outermost bounds of the Empire: the prison colony in New South Wales which eventually became the city of Sydney, Australia. Anyone interested in this history knows Robert Hughes's magisterial The Fatal Shore, but Hughes's vivid history of the convict period is a story of administrative cruelty, of transportation, exile and suffering, dispossession, forced labour, hangings and the lash. Grace Karskens, in her new history of Sydney, The Colony, tells the same story quite differently. She focuses on the material development of the colony, the landscape, the story of convicts, emancipists, administrators and settlers who strove to adjust, survive and prosper, and set the foundations of a new nation in a strange landscape.

As a writer working on an historical mystery, I need to drag a story out of this research, to form these different views into one narrative. I want to imagine early Sydney, understand its topography, its bustling, conflicted society, its gaols, barracks, pubs and gallows, its farms and roads and grand houses in their own light, as a lived experience. But the past is a dusty window: we swipe at the pane, we see shapes, motion, flashes of light, activity, human drama unfolding and flowing, but always dim and strange and a little distant.

Worldbuilding and the maker's hand

Worldbuilding has been on my mind recently, following the AULLA Conference at The University of Queensland, this item on the '7 Deadly Sins of Worldbuilding' on io9.com, and my own efforts at shaping the world of my new novel, A Hangman for Ghosts.

Writers of speculative fiction are often positioned at the forefront of worldbuilding, encouraged to consider everything from consistency to tactile detail. The late Iain M. Banks was a masterful world builder because his worlds were vibrant, present and sturdy, and he could shift between them effortlessly. The Raven's Seal was also an effort in world-building for me, because the city and its society had characteristics that were critical to the mystery, but the true pleasure as a writer was to animate that world and make it feel like a lived experience rather than a static stage-set.

But as I argued recently in a paper at AULLA, I've come to suspect that worldbuilding in conformance to elaborate rules of procedure and solely in service of verisimilitude is in danger of making fictional worlds dull, prosaic, uninteresting even. Invented worlds can never be complete, and trying to catalogue all their features and account for all their internal mechanisms is a mere technical chore. The economy of Airenchester can't be found in micro-economics. The prison colony of A Hangman for Ghosts is not merely an administrative relic. Worlds come alive when we see them not as constructs, but as metaphors, figures, characters. This is something that Iain M. Banks understood implicitly, and this is what drew me to the complexities and wonder of worldbuilding in the first place.