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Smashwords sale March 2024(Dennis Drayton)

Books for $0.99!

Slavishly copying and pasting the Smashwords official copy and graphic:

Hello, Readers!

We are fast approaching Read an Ebook Week, a week that encourages readers to pick up the digital device of their choice and download a new book to read.

I’m excited to announce that my books, Low Season and The Adversary, will be available as part of a promotion on Smashwords to celebrate 2024 Read an Ebook Week!

Ebook week is March 3, 2024 to March 10, 2024.

This is a chance to get my books, along with books from many other great authors, at a discount so you can get right to reading.

You will find the promo here starting on March 3, so save the link:
https://www.smashwords.com/ebookweek

If you wouldn’t mind taking part in promoting this celebration of Ebooks and reading, please feel free to share this promo with your friends and family. Just forward this email to anyone who would love a chance to find their next favo(u)rite book and, as the name suggests, read an ebook!

Thank you for your help and support!

Happy reading!

Participating in Smashwords Sale (Dennis Drayton)

Hello, Readers!

I’m excited to announce that my books The Adversaryand Low Season, will be available as part of a promotion on Smashwords for the month of July as part of their Annual Summer/Winter Sale! This is a chance to get my book, along with books from many other great authors, at a discount so you can get right to reading.

You will find the promo here starting on July 1, so save the link: https://smashwords.com/shelves/promos

Books We Like: Dennis Drayton on Slow Horses

“Slow Horses” is the first book in Slough House series by Mick Herron, which has been in the news and mentioned by various authors as well as being recently released as a TV series.

The central conceit is that the British security services have their own special office for Constructive Dismissal. A special office where incompetent and or embarrassing or disgraced secret police agents are given the full treatment of boring office life, with insulting bullshit office jobs so menial and meaningless that they will become so insulted or disheartened that they resign, saving the service the bother of firing them through due process or having to pay them a pension or go through an employment tribunal for unfair dismissal. This is a brilliant idea, very nicely done. The first thing that struck me about the first half of the novel was a kind of timelessness and not all in a totally good way. Sixties spies like Harry Palmer and Quiller could probably be sent into exile at Slough House and they would be at home,. Because despite the fact that mobile phones and computers are mentioned and used, there was an almost Sixties-to-Eighties vibe to the whole story atmosphere. Perhaps Herron started writing the book a very long time ago and never quite eradicated the outdated setting. Also not helping in the first book is the young agent called River, whose son-of-hippy backstory was already anachronistic when the book came out. Wittily Gen-X and all that, but a darling that should have been murdered. But overall, the book entertains. The characters were strong, for the most part. A couple were boring and any time they took centre stage I couldn’t wait for the book to get on. Also, there was a young Anglo-Pakistani guy who appears fairly late in the book as a kidnap victim and he has the payoff at the end of the book. It was a slightly odd choice to introduce somebody who became a pivotal character so late in a book. Also, he is an unengaging personality to begin with and is hard to stick with until he has his Character Growth in the final stages. Overall, Jackson Lamb, the main snotty spy is a very entertaining character but the reality of jumped tracks a tiny bit because while everyone else seems to be a Security Service (MI5) operative, Lamb is definitely SIS and despite having read many British spy novels, I don’t remember anybody who got seconded from one to the other. Perhaps in Mick Herron’s Always The Eighties with Gen-X humour parallel universe. Small enough quibble. And the end was brought home very nicely. The wrap-up seemed to be full of holes and it was hard to grasp how it all worked out and whether it was believable as presented. But I admired the way that he had set things up from about halfway through the book so marks for execution. In some ways, Herron seems to be a writer’s writer.

Books we Like: Dennis Drayon re-reads Gavin Lyall’s “The Secret Servant”

I originally read “The Secret Servant” shortly after it came out. It seemed breezy enough although I didn’t like the (spoiler alert) cannibalism part. This time, I found George and Agnes cartoonish but acceptable and noticed the tragic aspect of Maxim more fully. Although I also noticed how occasionally he said something snarky which seemed out of character and would have been better coming from one of the other two. Agnes is probably a bit too much on top of George. Lovely vignettes of the other senior civil servants, who are underused. Possibly not really meant to be “Yes Minister” with guns but it ended up that way, as a caricature. A sharply observed one but nonetheless…

As always with Lyall, there are great descriptions and a strong sense of place. Obscure mews in London comes alive, castles in Luxemburg and odd out of the way country villages, and crumbling coach turned motoring hotels. 

And as nearly as often, a pivotal character who just didn’t make enough sense nearly ruins the book. Just as the nutty big game hunter spoiled “The Most Dangerous Game”, so for me Charles Farthing the Yorkshire near-pensioner spoils this book, with his incomprehensibly motivated campaign against Professor Tyler. Also like “The Most Dangerous Game”,  “The Secret Servant” is jam-packed with incidents. There is a whole thirty pages of a Long Range Desert Group Mission in World War Two which contains battles enough to fill a war novel of the time. And in the contemporary timeline, there is a  grenade-ing, a shootout, a second and third shootouts, a sex scene, a riot, a bomb, a fourth shootout, a firebombing, hand to hand combat and in the end it seemed to be bursting at the seams and a little underdeveloped. This time around, Mr Lyall seemed a bit uneasy with his material. There are third-person head-hoppings and sudden cinematic pull-backs to shady characters not necessarily seen by the viewpoint characters. I remember that he seemed much more assured in “The Conduct of Major Maxim” although  I  have only read the start of that again and this time it struck me as being more in the style of the later Smiley books with many different character viewpoints.

Another oddity of “The Secret Servant” is a certain vagueness in the time setting. It might be happening in the early 1970s and not the early 80’s as you would expect on the surface, because World War Two is often spoken of as having happened thirty and not thirty-five to forty years before as would be the arithmetic if it was set at the time the book was published.

Authors We Like—Christopher Nugent re-reads Agatha Christie

I have a soft spot for Agatha Christie. Our life-spans only overlap by about 12 years, and she started publishing when most of my grandparents were still small children, so she is hardly a contemporary writer. And she is regarded a little ambiguously now, a popular writer of an earlier era, and like many of the greats, now so familiar that her influence seems almost like reverse plagiarism. I’ve never been any good with Whodunnits, and part of the pleasure of reading back in the last few weeks (The ABC Murders, The Mysterious Affair at Styles, Poirot Investigates and The Murder on The Links) was the haziness of thirty-some years of distance from the first time reading and having very vague idea that All Was Not As it Seems, without really getting much a nudge and I was just as useless with the clues as previously. I would never have been a huge consumer of Christie, not of whodunnits in general, being more a thriller reader. Bear in mind my reactions here a mostly as a reader rather than as a rival writer 🙂

The ABC Murders

I was totally foxed. I vaguely remembered that Mr ABC was probably not the murderer. I had totally forgotten that Captain Hastings had moved to South America and wondered vaguely why his wife hadnt come back to England with him. The book is slick and fast and very practiced and the explanation was as usual a bit far-fetched. But then thrillers dont exactly cling to realism that much either so I cant throw stones. One thing that did strike me as it did when I first read it many years ago, is that there were a couple of times when Christie forgot that she was writing as a man and wrote Hastings too feminine. As before, I couldnt put my finger on this and will have fun tracking down the offending passages. As usual the badinage between Hastings and Poirot is the most enjoyable part of the book (You should be in a nudist colony Poirot says, rather shockingly for the time, when Hastings says he doesnt really notice what people are wearing)

The Mysterious Affair At Styles

A totally astonishing performance for a young pharmacy assistant with only a couple of sock-drawer novels under her belt. Was it really her first effort at a whodunnit? It is a very accomplished novel. I couldn’t follow the clues again. A few things stand out, in his first appearance, Hercule Poirot is described as being an old gentleman already with a limp, which is remarkable as he will be crime-busting from 1917 or so up to about 1975 if I remember correctly. However this is a problem a lot of authors of popular series have and don’t solve (no pun intended) very successfully. Spencer is frozen as a very fit forty-something despite having been in the Korean war, and Elvis Cole and Joe Pike similarly never aged beyond about 1986.

We never do find out how he knows Arthur Hastings, or what exactly he was in the Belgian police (presumably in a part of Belgium overrun by the Germans as he is a refugee in the English countryside). This doesn’t matter exactly right here, but in a long running series it could really have been fleshed out at some stage.

Interestingly in this book Hastings is plain Mr Hastings, no rank, despite the fact that WWI is raging in the background and you would have thought that he would be flashing his rank around to show that he wasn’t a profiteer or Conshie (ok Conshie is probably a WWII term for conscientious objector but the question as to why most of the other men of military age in the book don’t have to justify their non-combat status either, its a bit weird. Maybe people were just so sick of The Great War that they didn’t mind at the time, and that later on it became important for Hastings to have a rank.) Here, Hastings as narrator is pitch perfect as the stuffy block-headed male he should be, obtuse to clues and susceptible to romantic notions about beautiful ladies. He seems to have been insurance before the war and seems to be about thirty, which makes him a surprisingly young friend for Poirot who is presumably over 65. For now.

Presumably my lack of cultural background on the Whodunnit and English Edwardian country house high-society life are both telling against me here, but some of the social nuances were probably totally lost on me. Was the house-keeper/companion rather mannish and would this have been suggestive at the time, enough to help throw off any possible alliance with her cousin the murderer, while suggesting a motive for her having developed an otherwise unlikely dislike of him?

And was it really believable that there were no matches in the house for destroying incriminating letters but there was petrol for cars? The Germans were sinking all the oil tankers, but the match factories would have been on land.

Anyway, straight away from the off, the main enjoyment for me was the interaction between Hastings and Poirot, immediately the pattern and patter of the block-headed would-be sleuth and his bantering mentor is established, I haven’t read Holmes for a while but I suspect Hastings of being dimmer and less humble than poor Doctor Watson.

Poirot Investigates

An agreeable collection of short stories, fast fun to read, not too demanding, simpler and after a while even a Hastings-like dumb-bell like myself gets into the rhythm and vague recollections of long ago reading and the common structure of most of the ‘mysteries’ make them easy enough to guess. But the banter between Poirot and Hastings makes it all rattle along very enjoyably.

The Murder on the Links

I hardly remembered reading this one at all, and certainly not it being hard work. Certainly the weakest of the early novels I think, the plot is far-fetched in its convolutions and Hastings is dimmer and almost insufferable as a narrator and everything seems to be drawn out to the requisite length, it could have been thirty or more pages shorter, something you will not have seen me say about Styles. In fact, I found myself wondering as I closed the book, was it actually an early work than Styles, only published later? I found Hastings a little less convincing as well as irritating. And Poirot was so rejuvenated that he climbed a tree at the end of the book to attempt to stop a murder. Nice going for a over 65 guy with a bad leg don’t you think? What a writer might forget in the heat of the moment eh. Still some interestingly modern stuff – vigorous woman murderer, not afraid of physical violence, and a plucky female acrobat also. How the murderer ends up accidentally dead handily avoids certain tidying up, and everybody has botox-stiff upper lips as they dont even turn a hair at this turn of events. Eve3n as cosy mysteries go, this was all a little too cosy, As was the queue of people willing to volunteer to confess to the murder and risk a sentence of death by beheading in france, Again the Poirot -Hastings banter was the joy of the book.

Apparently AC in later life grew very tired of Poirot – this was probably because with Hastings off in South America or whatever, there was no suitable foil for Poirot and instead of altering his character to accommodate this change of circumstance and dynamic, she continued to make him insufferable and tired of the joke, which of course was no longer a joke anyway without Hastings. Hamlet without the prince and all that.

I haven’t read much of Miss Marple and would be keen to move on to reading her.

Authors We Like: Dennis Drayton re-reads Gavin Lyall

 

I have been re-reading Gavin Lyall’s books over the last couple of months. The pace has picked up in the last few weeks when I noticed that many of them were being re-published as e-books. Partly due to illness, I had the ‘opportunity’ to pick up the pace even further, and so in the last month I have read “The Most Dangerous Game”, “The Secret Servant” and “Uncle Target”. A couple of years ago I bought a second-hand copy of “Blame The Dead” (my favourite Gavin Lyall book) and a new paperback of “Midnight Plus One” (previously my next favourite).

I would have read these books originally in the early to mid-nineteen eighties when I was a college student. He was one of my favourite authors, coming somewhere between Jack Higgins and Alistair MacLean in my all time Top Three Thriller writers. Leslie Charteris and Captain W.E. Johns would have filled out the Top Five, but that is two more posts for another day.

In those days they seemed tough and intelligent thrillers with a sarcastic or even ironic sense of humour and a good pace.

Most likely I have a very different perspective now, as time and culture and I have all rolled on since the early eighties, when the later books were almost contemporary and the earlier ones still seemed recent. The early books now read like historical novels.

Also, the flaws in the novels seem to stick out more than the virtues for me now, probably due to reading them at a more leisurely pace and perhaps a higher standard in contemporary thriller writing.

I intend to go through the books individually and try to start with why I thought they were great stories and point out the flaws in the second parts.

I will dispose of “Uncle Target” first, as I said above I read them while I was at university and had learned to read very quickly and much fiction I read at the time made very little impression on me.  At the half-way point of “Uncle Target” I realised parts of the story seemed very familiar and that I must have read it before but had almost entirely forgotten the story and had wiped the fact and act of reading it from my mind. Perhaps although it is very well executed, it just doesn’t have the spark of  the other books.

I haven’t re-read “The Conduct of Major Maxim” or “The Crocus List,” as  I didn’t like them much at the time, although they would even then have seem better executed than “The Secret Servant”

Reading his other books,  the humour or tone hasn’t aged that well.  “The Most Dangerous Game” he gets away with it because it is so much in character for the narrator, but, with  “Midnight Plus One”  I was thinking “how 1950’s” which I didn’t even notice back in the day. Perhaps my own sense of humour has evolved in meantime. The sense of humour of Cord in “Blame The Dead” also seemed to match the tone of the character and book perfectly so that still stands high in my regard.

Another striking observation even from the first time I read them was his re-use of recurring motifs (hard to call them self-plagiarisms the way Jack Higgins does it) — rock-jawed men have brass bullet casings crunch under their heels, people are shot with high velocity light calibre bullets and survive, and they notice old cars with divided windscreens in different books.  this still strikes me more as attention to detail and unconscious self-repetition as opposed to being a flaw.

Overall, I have enjoyed the re-read, and perhaps learned a little bit about writing in the process.

Stuff The Cat: an email conversation between Dennis Drayton and Harry Brooks

Usually we don’t do writing articles, but Dennis is on fire at the moment due to reading what he considers to be bad books and wants to warn off other writers. He has recruited his friend and fellow author Harry Brooks to be the straight man. So without further ado we present:

“Stuff the Cat: an email conversation between Dennis Drayton and Harry Brooks”

Dennis: I say stuff the cat.
Harry: Excuse me?
Dennis: You’ve heard of the book “Save the Cat”?
Harry: Yes its an introductory book for screenwriters, isn’t it?
Dennis: Yes, I recommend people look up “Never mind the cat, save yourself” for one temperate approach. There’s lots of fun to be had with click-bait type blogs with titles like “Why All This Year’s Movies Are the same” which usually totally over-state the problem, like “OMG this summers block busters all have a beginning, middle and end — they are *all* the freaking same!!!”
Harry: But that’s not what you mean, right.
<cricket sounds>

Harry:  Dennis, Right?
Dennis: Er, Right. I confess to being provocative but wanting to make a more serious point. Movies are not novels. (see next blog posting!) It’s a different aesthetic and idiom, and I just worry that the good parts of books will be lost in the process of over-studying movies and television. I admire what Blake Snyder – the author of “Save The Cat”  — has done — the web site and book have established a fun and relatively simple vocabulary for talking about stories. That’s the good bit.

Harry: Can I say something?
Dennis: S’what you’re here for. Go on.
Harry: It’s called Forget The Cat, Save Yourself. Considering the topic, I would suggest calling it Beat the Cat, but that might upset the animal lovers in our audience. Anyway, I’m rambling somewhat. I agree, writing to a template can stifle creativity and lull the reader into a breakfast cereal experience; everything will taste the same. Each book should be a new experience for the reader, not just the story, but the actual reading of it. If everything sits where you expect it to be, it’s like driving the same route every day; you miss the fifty foot Ronald McDonald on the overpass and wonder why your car is covered in Egg McMuffin.
Dennis: I see…I think. Anyway, we are starting to ramble. I think the take-away is this: rules are good, and training wheels are excellent, and we do all owe a debt to Blake Snyder for giving writers a new set of tools for thinking about writing, but it is not a substitute for thinking.

Get me somebody like Tom Cruise: Why a novel is not a bad movie treatment

Admin again: We don’t usually do writing articles, but Dennis is incandescent at the moment after reading some stuff that really set him off. In this second (and we kind of hope final) installment, he discusses why a book is not a movie and why this matters to him as a reader.

Writing is fighting, people. And a terrible sickness stalks the land. Moonlighting movie folks writing ‘novels’ as they like to think of them. This we got to stop.
I recently read the first three pages or so of a thriller. Which turned out to be written by an indie movie maker (spoiler alerts follow — of my reading adventure). I didn’t know this until afterwards, when I looked up the author. Before that I gave up on page 4 or 5. The reading went as follows:
page 1 started the book with an interesting and thrilling scenario, the viewpoint character stumbles on wartime invasion. Promising start, I was hooked. Page 2, not so good, events jump around. But the viewpoint character is an injured recently invalided soldier with PTSD and so maybe it’s meant to be incoherent. Page 3 hmmm view point character is killed by an enemy in very unlikely if not  impossible circumstance.
Page 4.  the Protagonist introduced as “Brad, early forties …” At this point I was so astonished I addressed the author directly over my e-reader: You don’t know what age the guy is, and you’re the author? Get real man!
Page 5. Old flame of protagonist is introduced, she fills in back story “Brad, as you know we both married other people…blah blah blah for a page” It wasn’t quite that badly written but close.
Me to author — how about you stop using dialogue to pretend you are showing and not telling and just bloody well *tell* us, you writing as the damn narrator and leave the poor characters without this embarrassing clunky fake dialogue? Ruining my evening of reading man!
When I discovered that Nameless Author is actually a movie guy, all was explained — the Brad, early forties leaves the casting open — except this is a novel not a screenplay proposal — he is maybe under the impression that a novel is a rough draft of a screen play, with a bit of narrative and description  in place of screen directions. Now I’ve only read a couple of extracts of screen-plays and they are very definitely not * not* novels or anything remotely like a novel.
Please for the love of John Malkovich, would movie people stop trying to pass off failed movie scripts as novels? Pretty please?

Get me somebody like Tom Cruise: Why a novel is not a bad movie treatment

Admin again: We don’t usually do writing articles, but Dennis is incandescent at the moment after reading some stuff that really set him off. In this second (and we kind of hope final) installment, he discusses why a book is not a movie and why this matters to him as a reader.

Writing is fighting, people. And a terrible sickness stalks the land. Moonlighting movie folks writing ‘novels’ as they like to think of them. This we got to stop.
I recently read the first three pages or so of a thriller. Which turned out to be written by an indie movie maker (spoiler alerts follow — of my reading adventure). I didn’t know this until afterwards, when I looked up the author. Before that I gave up on page 4 or 5. The reading went as follows:
page 1 started the book with an interesting and thrilling scenario, the viewpoint character stumbles on wartime invasion. Promising start, I was hooked. Page 2, not so good, events jump around. But the viewpoint character is an injured recently invalided soldier with PTSD and so maybe it’s meant to be incoherent. Page 3 hmmm view point character is killed by an enemy in very unlikely if not  impossible circumstance.
Page 4.  the Protagonist introduced as “Brad, early forties …” At this point I was so astonished I addressed the author directly over my e-reader: You don’t know what age the guy is, and you’re the author? Get real man!
Page 5. Old flame of protagonist is introduced, she fills in back story “Brad, as you know we both married other people…blah blah blah for a page” It wasn’t quite that badly written but close.
Me to author — how about you stop using dialogue to pretend you are showing and not telling and just bloody well *tell* us, you writing as the damn narrator and leave the poor characters without this embarrassing clunky fake dialogue? Ruining my evening of reading man!
When I discovered that Nameless Author is actually a movie guy, all was explained — the Brad, early forties leaves the casting open — except this is a novel not a screenplay proposal — he is maybe under the impression that a novel is a rough draft of a screen play, with a bit of narrative and description  in place of screen directions. Now I’ve only read a couple of extracts of screen-plays and they are very definitely not * not* novels or anything remotely like a novel.
Please for the love of John Malkovich, would movie people stop trying to pass off failed movie scripts as novels? Pretty please?

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