celticman's blog

A foreword by Jim Al-Khali inform the reader this is the third book in which leading scientist and engineers are interviewed and their responses recorded for Radio 4. Few of us are going to shout at the radio (or its contemporary equivalent) about the origins of our universe but when it comes to viruses and Covid-19, in particular, conspiracy theorist think they know better than the experts here. I always go with whatever Father Ted thinks...

Michael Murpurgo wrote this collection of five short-stories over forty years ago. He requested the reader read them in the order presented. A story within a story, which is quite a neat trick. Murpurgo is most famous for War Horse . Book, stage-play (with an animated cloth horse) and film. I haven’t read it but did watch the film that elevated him into the elite group (less than five percent) of writers that can make a comfortable living from...

https://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episode/m002f2ry/saint-omer https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Saint_Omer_(film) Saint Omer is about infanticide. Not a promising premise for a film. But it won a stack of awards. Writer and director Alice Diop comes from a documentary background. Saint Omer, the film’s title is also a place name. Based on the real-life trial of Fabienne Kabou, who was convicted in 2016 of drowning her 15-month-old daughter in the...

https://www.channel4.com/programmes/old-boys https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_film_adaptations_of_Cyrano_de_Bergerac Old Boys isn’t listed in the Wikipedia of film adaptations of Cyrano de Bergerac. I vaguely recall the Gérard Depardieu version. Back in the nineties, the French leading actor was making the jump to Hollywood. That was before he started moaning about taxes and got a special dispensation from another lead man, Putin, which...

C.J.Cooke is a Creative Writing tutor at the University of Glasgow. We’re back to that debate about whether you can teach creative writing? No matter. I read the debut novel of a Creative Writing tutor from the same university a few years back. It was, as you’d expect, proficient but dead on the page. I doubted if she didn’t have a doctorate and credit in the bank of an esteemed University behind her, she wouldn’t have been picked out of the...

Satu Rämö has written a trilogy of books featuring Icelandic police detective Hildur Runarsdottir. Hildur did her police training in Reykjavik, the world’s most Northern capital, population around 200 000, but much prefers the quieter life in her hometown Isafjurour, where she’s a child protection officer but expected to chip in and do everything from traffic control to getting involved in domestics. Hildur is well up for it. She’s described as...

Award-winning Scottish author, Denise Mina, gets to play gumshoe in a Philip Marlowe Mystery. She’s a hired hand, in the same way that Marlowe’s a hired hound. Marlowe’s a man’s man that likes to drink and have a dame on his arm. He takes all kinds of cases but he’s got a code and a line that won’t be crossed. He’ll do the right thing and money be damned. A heatwave in LA makes everybody cranky. But that’s not what’s bothering Marlowe. Something...

Callum McSorley’s Squeaky Clean won the McIlvanney Prize and had the kind of reception any debut novelist would sell his granny for and would fling in his grandad as a freebie. Job done. You’re number 1. But here’s the rub, you need to write something else, pronto. People walk into doors. Open the fridge and put their shoes inside instead of the milk (I’m making that bit up. Never done that—yet). Why not write the same book and call it something...

Blood Roses is the first in a quartet of books which feature Jan Kalisz. He’s a detective investigating a serial killer. So far so mundane. You know the type. Psychopathic killers. They have their own reason for killing, which relies on a tautology. Their reason for killing is because they’re psychopathic killers. What makes it different isn’t Douglas Jackson’s undoubted talent, but the timeline. It’s 1939 and the Germans have just invaded...

Start with the bad news. Flipper is dead. He drowned himself (or herself) in a small pool of water. He couldn’t take the isolation. Humans aren’t good at isolating either. We call it loneliness. You remember Flipper ? Saturday morning telly. It was a bit like Poirot but without the moustache or French accent. Flipper whistled to say ‘there’s the body over there.’ Or he’d rescue somebody. That seems improbable. But Kevin was relatively lucky. He...