interesting – Life of Cri.me

Woman of the Dead – Bernhard Aichner

Posted on April 18, 2015April 18, 2015 by J

How far would you go to avenge the one you love?

Blum has a secret buried deep in her past. She thought she’d left the past behind. But then Mark, the man she loves, dies. His death looks like a hit-and-run. It isn’t a hit-and-run. Mark has been killed by the men he was investigating. And then, suddenly, Blum rediscovers what she’s capable of…

” A highly entertaining read…”

Some people really know how to do their job when it comes to attracting your attention to a book, and so when I saw some of the ‘blurb’ for Woman of the Dead I just had to pick it up….

“Kill Bill meets Dexter via The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo”

It turned out to be an apt description for what I found to be a highly entertaining read.

Blum is an intriguing character, beginning as a warm, kind-hearted and loving wife and mother, despite the harshness of her childhood, and her actions of the past. She is an accomplished business woman running her own funeral home, happy and settled with her policeman husband Mark and their two daughters.

When Mark is killed in front of her eyes she is devastated. It is only when she discovers the ‘off the books’ investigation he was undertaking, amongst the papers in his study that she begins to believe that the accident was in fact murder. Then after beginning to investigate the crime Mark was looking into, she uses her skills, knowledge and the tools of her trade as an undertaker to exact brutal, bloody and violent revenge on those who were responsible.

I loved the pace of the story, and the way that not all things go to plan for Blum, forcing her to not only re-evaluate her actions and decisions, but also the repercussions to herself and her family. There are some vile and horrible characters to discover with some extreme language to accompany them, and many of whom you would rather see brought to justice, and yet at the same time you are always backing Blum.

If you want a break away from the usual gritty crime reads, or just fancy trying something different, Woman Of The Dead is ideal for that. It’s also the first in a trilogy, and I’m sure, like me, many of you will be keen to see what happens to Blum next.

Articles, Blog Touring, Guest Posts

Anthony Quinn:- The nuances of using fact to create fiction

Posted on November 18, 2014June 15, 2015 by J

Anthony Quinn, author of critically acclaimed debut novel Disappeared, returns with his new novel, The Blood-Dimmed Tide, the first in a series of three historical novels set in Ireland during WWI and the War of Independence. Here he talks to LifeOfCri.me about the nuances of using fact to create fiction.

I’m very much a believer in writing first and researching later. The danger of writing historical fiction is that as a writer you run the risk of disappearing down a wormhole into another era, never making it back with a clear-cut, compelling tale to relate. I’ve been obsessed with WB Yeats and the Sligo setting for years, and in writing The Blood Dimmed Tide the temptation was to succumb to excess and include a rich tapestry of historical minutia.

However, writing historical fiction, especially a mystery story, should be like steering a boat with a leak in high seas. Many loved items have to be chucked overboard with every page you write. Amusing anecdotes and fascinating details that don’t animate your principal characters and move the plot along have to be discarded with impunity.

For this reason, I resorted to thumbing through Yeats’ biographies only when there was a gap in the plot that desperately needed filling, or a scene that required fleshing out with something concrete. That sense of urgency which comes with keeping the literary boat from capsizing at all costs is a protection against procrastination and getting lost in the past.

Another great challenge in writing The Blood Dimmed Tide was remaining faithful to the historical record of Yeats and his life-long muse Maud Gonne. I was uneasy with the idea that I was possibly doing them a great disservice by entangling them in a plot involving occult societies, spies, smugglers and corrupt policemen.

However, Yeats has been much derided for his ‘creepy’ obsession with the supernatural, and his interest in the magical powers that might be acquired through esoteric knowledge has alarmed many literary critics over the years. It eased my conscience to think that I was at least portraying this side of his character sympathetically. This was what I promised WB Yeats at the start of writing The Blood Dimmed Tide. Whether or not I delivered is another matter.

I hope I am saved by the fact that many of Yeats’ friends found him unknowable. Irish writer Sean O’Faolain famously said of him: “There was no Yeats. I watched him invent himself.” In that sense, he is impossible to capture within the covers of a biography, which is a great problem for his biographers, but a golden opportunity for a novelist.

Yeats will always remain an enigma. He was one of a group of extraordinary and mesmerising figures that made London at the turn of the century an emporium of exotic cults and psychic societies. He was the closest thing we have to a supernatural sleuth, always seeking answers, always probing the evidence before him, always odd and unpredictable in his behaviour – which I hope makes him the perfect hero for a mystery story, especially one that involves ghosts, spies, smugglers and corrupt policemen.