An unusual word!

Sunday Snippet!

A most interesting thing happened at The Aboyne Highland Games yesterday. It wasn't that I heard some excellent Pipe Bands outside our marquee. It wasn't that I had brilliant chats with customers who bought my books, and with others who chatted about Scottish history though didn't buy! There was one lady, I'm guessing in her early-to-mid seventies who stopped by my table. She browsed the selection of books with a fairly serious expression but on seeing The Taexali Game a huge smile wreathed her face.

She pointed to a copy and told me that she came from 'Taexali country' - pronouncing the word as in TIE-ZA-LEE with a heavy emphasis on the LEE. This is almost the same way I was told the Latin pronunciation would be. No-one to date has ever been able to pronounce the word so that was a big surprise. She went on to tell me it was her older sister who used to tell her that coming from the Peterhead area was Taexali Country. You can maybe guess what research I'll be doing this afternoon.

Why would older folks from that north-east corner of Aberdeenshire refer to their home area as being Taexali?

The first reference to the word Taexali that I ever came across was when I was researching the name of the Celtic tribes of Aberdeenshire and I learned that the Taexali tribe covered a very large geographical area. This was a good number of years ago, but it was only since researching as a novelist since 2011 that I realised the Taexali name came from the map work of Ptolemy- Claudius Ptolemaeus.

Ptolemy is credited for recording the tribal names of large parts of the island of Britannia. The original maps of Ptolemy's manuscripts are lost and copies only date from the thirteenth century. The most well known one to me is the one shown here - a fifteenth century copy.

But knowing that doesn't help me to find out why my customer (Yes, she bought a copy) knew that she was from Taexali country.

Updates to follow if I find out anything.

Slainthe!

images from Wikimedia Commons

#Aye. Ken it wis like this... with William Sutton

series image- Dunkeld Cathedral 

My Friday blog series continues...

where guest authors are invited to share a post with us about the historical background to their writing.

Today, I welcome William Sutton who transports us to Victorian London and from the sound of what comes below, to its exceedingly seedy underbelly!

Victorian Britain was a favourite subject of mine when I did my BA Arts course with the Open University many years ago, and it was also a favourite era to teach to my Primary Seven classes. There were always so many things to find out about, and to explore. A slightly anodised version, of course, was given to those primary school 11-12 year-olds, and it's likely that I covered little of what occurs in William's very enticing series, but it's an era I'm itching to get on and write about when my Celtic Fervour Series is finished .(Some WIPs set in Victorian Scotland are languishing in the 'still to be done' files)

William Sutton

However, I'll let William introduce us to the particular aspects of Victorian London that he loves to write about. Welcome to my blog, William. Please give us the background to your Campbell Lawless Series. (That really is a fabulous author photo!)

The Campbell Lawless mysteries are set in the 1860s, based in London, with excursions to the provinces. Lawless is a Scot, escaping his watchmaker’s apprenticeship in Edinburgh. His role as outside is crucial. He casts fresh eyes on this city we think we know, allowing us glimpses behind the smog and slag heaps, inside the hansom cabs and night houses.

The whole series digs beneath the surface of what we know of London. The first novel Lawless and the Devil of Euston Square explores the amazing developments of the 1860s: the Metropolitan underground, the London sewers preventing cholera, new power and communications from the telegraph to pneumatic trains to hydraulic lifts. Intertwined with this high-power technology are stories of love and loyalty, betrayal and loss.

Initially Lawless is naïve, and perhaps too trusting. This makes him appealing and wins him friends, high and low; but he’s vulnerable to manipulation, from above and below until he learns to puzzle behind these darker cogs and machinations. He encounters a series of real-life characters in his investigations: engineer Joseph Bazalgette and Prince Albert, with cameos for Dickens, Marx. And London’s progress is real, with the building of the Metropolitan Line (world’s first underground train), the sewers, and an extraordinary hydraulic power network.

He’s assisted in his investigations by a gang of urchins, the Worms of Euston Square. When Alan Massie reviewed the book in The Scotsman, he liked this “gang of waifs and strays who owe something to Conan Doyle's ‘Baker Street Irregulars’ and perhaps even more to the ‘Gorbals DieHards’ of John Buchan.”

Lawless is also assisted by Miss Ruth Villiers, a feisty librarian at the British Museum. With her self-sufficient lifestyle, outshining the detective in research acumen, her initials are a nod to Wilkie Collins’ Rachel Verinder in The Moonstone.

In Lawless and the Flowers of Sin, they investigate a different kind of underworld. I enjoyed making use of Jon Camden Hotten’s Slang Dictionary. “One of the joys of the novel is the language employed by Worm and his friends, part authentic Victorian slang, part thieves' cant, and part – I rather think – invented.”

This second book was chosen among both The Mail on Sunday’s and the Morning Star’s Books of the Year 2016.

I also drew on the mysterious Walter’s erotic memoir My Secret Life, exploring a side of Victorian life not usually written about. We whitewash the underbelly of London with cheery images of dancing chimney sweeps and cheerful tarts. But what really happened in the dark outings of Robert Louis Stevenson’s The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde? I steal that classic’s extraordinary structure to explore crimes straight out of Operation Yew Tree. The Morning Star said “It’s a marvellous read but be warned — the subject matter is harrowing and the author shows his readers little mercy.”

The latest book, Lawless and the House of Electricity, published in the UK last year (and US paperback imminent), is the most unabashedly historical.

It’s a country house novel, exploring tensions between upstairs and downstairs, between industry and leisure, between public and private lives. We follow the urchin Molly down the rabbit hole of a governess’s job into this new world, hobnobbing with lords and ladies. She falls in love with the children and staff, the house and grounds of Roxbury House (based on Cragside in Northumberland). Yet amidst the pastoral idyll, the Earl conducts mysterious electrical experiments, with consequences both for his international arms company and his grief-stricken family.

Meanwhile, Lawless it at work hunting down the perpetrators of terrorism in industrial heartlands across the country. Who could orchestrate fires, bombs, and crashes so widely, striking at the heart of Britain’s defensive network, while the French are plotting invasion?

To play Lawless on screen? James McAvoy.

You can find more about William Sutton at:

Titan Books

william-sutton.co.uk

Amazon Author Page

Goodreads
Twitter @WilliamGeorgeQ

Soundcloud 

Thank you for visiting today, William. My very best wishes with the Campbell Lawless series. I'm sure it'll give the reader an entertaining, and perhaps also challenging, perspective on Victorian London!

(BTW- James McAvoy would be brilliant, I think, and that's even before I read your series. I could be a little biased, of course, because I'm also a Glaswegian from similar roots!)

Slainthe! 

NEWS. #OcelotPress is live!

#ThursdayThoughts.. on an announcement! 

I've seen the #ThursdayThoughts hashtag on Twitter, and have even used it sometimes, but today it's perfect because I'm announcing the launch of a brand new website that's really important to me. 

I've mentioned Ocelot Press on my other social media outlets, and here on this blog regarding the recent re-publication of my Celtic Fervour Series of historical fiction via the collective of authors named Ocelot Press.

I'm thrilled today to declare that Ocelot Press now have a fabulous and shiny new website. You can browse our new website HERE to find out about all  of the other excellent authors who make up the collective. Find out which novels are currently available and what's coming soon.  

Ocelot Press is a small independent group of authors (previously and currently) published by Crooked Cat Books. Our aim is to provide support to each other with editing, publishing and marketing our novels, whilst retaining our independence and control as authors.   

Click the website link above to follow us online and share with your friends, particularly those who might enjoy our historical fiction. Please also like and share us on Facebook  and Twitter .

Meanwhile, Agricola's Bane, Book 4 of my Celtic Fervour series is one step further along the road to publishing. Look out for further news on that soon!

The sun is shining and it's a fabulous temperature for sitting outside in the shade with a book. It's so convenient that currently my Kindle pile is quite large again. 

Slainthe!