Local MP Engulfed in Crime

Beverley and Holderness MP, Graham Stuart, out shopping for a birthday present for a friend was taken unawares when he found himself surrounded by crime writers in WHS Books in Beverley, East Yorkshire this morning.

Award-winning crime writer, Penny Grubb, was there signing a copy of her latest novel The Jawbone Gang for another local award-winner, ValWood, whose historical sagas regularly hit the best-seller lists.  Before long the shop was crowded, and unluckily for Mr Stuart, the crowd was awash with local writers: Linda Acaster (paranormal romance); Stuart Aken, prolific writer and prize-winner in several genres; Madeleine Macdonald, novelist and regular columnist in the Yorkshire Post; Avril Field-Taylor (more crime); Karen Wolfe (comic fantasy); SylviaEdwards, Sylvia Broady and I hope I haven’t forgotten anyone.

This was not good news for an MP out shopping for a birthday present because writers are facing a lot of threats at the moment and have strong views on the importance of libraries and of valuing the creative industries, but to be fair to Graham Stuart he seemed happy to stay and talk on the various issues. 

And he left with a copy of The Jawbone Gang which I feel showed perfect judgement in respect of birthday present selection.  Although honesty compels me to note that from one or two things he let slip, I suspect our local MP’s friend would have chosen a book more directly concerned with the finer technical aspects of the internal combustion engine.  Let’s hope they both become converts to local crime.

L-R: Liz Smith and Yvonne Needham, senior academics from Hull University; Stuart Aken, Penny Grubb, Linda Acaster, Madeleine Macdonald.  Photo: Valerie Allison

An Amazing April

This is the jungle from the big cats' perspective

And this from ours:

No rain equals no mud so the hens are laying clean eggs

And there are nests all over the garden, including a wren in here only visible to those who know where to look

and a dopey dove sitting on this egg out in plain sight.

How she'll keep an unruly chick in such a poor excuse for a nest, I don't know.

The pond is almost dry

but the lilac is out in style

Onward and upward into May.

A crocus fest at Lilac Tree

Including white ones with halos. I’ve never seen anything like it. It isn’t the camera. Or if it is, it’s my eyes too.

The snowdrop battalion still marches down the garden

But crocuses – or croci if you prefer – are out in all colours.

It’s not just snowdrops and crocus. The winter pansies are holding their own

Along with these things – the ones whose name I can never remember – something-anthemum I think.

The daffodils are poised too.

We are not free of the threat of snow which would not be good news, yet they come back in greater numbers every year so maybe we shouldn’t worry.

How to add a sequence of numbers at lightning speed

The usual starting place is to add the numbers from 1 to 100. This is a good one to demonstrate the technique.

Imagine you were to write out all the numbers from zero to 100 in a long line.

0 ... 1 ... 2 ... 3 ... ... 98 ... 99 ... 100

Then underneath these, write the same sequence backwards – 100 down to zero.

100 ... 99 ... 98 ... ... 3 ... 2 ... 1 ... 0

Now you have 1 to 100 written twice (with a couple of zeros) so if you add all this lot together, you will have double the answer you want.

Each pair of numbers (0 + 100, 1 + 99, 2 + 98 etc) adds up to 100.

There are 101 pairs. I.e. 101 lots of 100, which is a simple sum. 100 times 101 is 10100.
Divide by 2 to get the answer you are looking for, which is 5050.

Generally, the sum of any sequence of whole numbers from 1 to x is
x (x + 1) / 2

If you don’t want to start at 1, then it’s not so simple, but I’m not going into that here.

Torc of Moonlight by Linda Acaster

My rating: 5 of 5 stars


The contemporary story is of students Nick Blaketon and Alice Linwood who meet as undergraduates at Hull University. Very different but drawn together. It’s what is behind the reason they’re drawn together that gives this book its amazing twist. The predatory lecturer and his past have a role to play and also a story from a whole lot further back. Linda Acaster gets inside the head of her characters in a way that not many authors manage, so that as a reader you revel in their triumphs, and are crushed by their despair. A compelling tale where the interwoven stories pick you up at the start and rush you along to the end.



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Bulldog Sheila or the Gang by T F W Hickey

My rating: 5 of 5 stars


This is a personal 5* because this book meant so much to me when I was 8 years old. Written as a children's adventure, it's something I can still read today (very occasionally, but it holds memories of childhood for me). It's the story of Sheila whose parents go away and leave her in the care of her aunt. Almost at once, sinister things start to happen. With over 200 pages it looks as though it should be a daunting read for any child but the ones I know who have read it have found it unputdownable. Bulldog refers to the fictional Bulldog Drummond idolised by heroine Sheila who wants to be as brave and resourceful as he is. I was never a huge fan of the Bulldog Drummond books myself and do not think they have travelled across the decades. I couldn't read them nowadays. The style of Bulldog Sheila or the Gang is light and easy and in many ways hasn't dated. However, it was published in 1936 and reflects the attitudes of the day in ways that can be quite disconcerting. But mainly it is a brilliant adventure story.



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West End Girls by Barbara Tate

My rating: 5 of 5 stars

An incredible tale that almost didn't make it to publication. Barbara Tate tells the story of her time as a prostitute's maid in Soho. This is easy reading and it's for the story itself that I rate it. Her draft was much longer, so I'm told - more the story of Soho in those years than her own and May's story which she thought wouldn't interest anyone.

On several levels it's an amazing tale - the story itself and the insight it gives into Soho at the time and when she revisited years later; how she came to be there at all; how the book came to be blocked when she first tried for publication (that story is added at the end).

She went on to have a very successful career as an artist, coming back to her manuscript in later life. It should be a tragedy she didn't live to see the book in print, and yet it isn't. The real pity is that she didn't publish earlier and have the time to write more about her life.

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