It’s always a hoot – and this year was no exception. I hesitate to say that it was all the usual suspects, but there they were – Laura Wilson who faultlessly organised the whole shebang, Val McDermid who first set it all up, Natasha Cooper who can do no wrong , Mark Billingham (getting an award, of course), the on-page terrifying Stuart MacBride down from the bothy, Laura Lippman over from Baltimore, Simon Kernick up from town, writers, agents, publishers and pr people all over the place. And that was just the first night party.
Five of us at least kept our heads clear for the Friday panel, Digging UpThe Past – with Mark Mills in the chair and doing a darn good job. He floored me by remembering my last stage performance at university, playing Abelard in Abelard and Heloise. I haven’t thought about it in years, but of course Abelard ended where Yashim began, as a eunuch. How I roared on stage as the knife came down! That’s good acting for you.
Fascinating panel – Ariana Franklin and Caro Peacock with their immaculately researched mediaeval mysteries and Giles Brandreth with Oscar Wilde as his sleuth. All of them very funny and revealing, so I imagine the huge audience enjoyed the hour as much as I did.
I wish I could have stayed on: so many good panels and specials, but I had to thunder south to another festival – one I could take my children to, in a tent. In Harrogate there’s no messing about under canvas; it’s more in the bar.
Archive for the ‘Uncategorized’ Category
Harrogate Crime Writing Festival
July 28, 2009The Page 69 Test
March 30, 2009I’ve posted my thoughts about Page 69 – supposedly representative of the novel as a whole, according to a theory, if it is one, proposed by Marshall McLuhan – on this site. It’s run by an engaging fellow called Marshal, too. Marshal Zeringue.
http://americareads.blogspot.com/2009/03/pg-69-jason-goodwins-bellini-card.html
US and Canadian reviews
March 23, 2009In The Globe & Mail, Margaret Cannon writes:
Jason Goodwin won an Edgar for The Janissary Tree, his first novel set in 19th-century Istanbul, featuring the eunuch, cook and investigator Yashim. It was a brilliant debut, followed by the equally fine The Snake Stone, but in The Bellini Card, Goodwin and Yashim really hit their stride.
There’s a sultan and a Bellini portrait, and the plot takes Yashim and his friend Palewski to Venice in all its slightly sultry, slightly tawdry glory. There is a murder, of course, and the suspects include faded aristocrats and a mysterious and very beautiful contessa. If you want to completely escape the chilly, dreary modern world, this is the book to take you away.
New in – this from Carol Memmott writing in USA Today:
Jason Goodwin’s series starring a eunuch detective serving the Ottoman Empire’s sultan is as much literary novel and historical fiction as it is a mystery. In The Bellini Card: Investigator Yashim Goes to Venice (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 288 pp., $25), the eunuch Yashim and his friend Stanislaw Palewski, a Polish diplomat, tackle the assignment of discovering whether a rumored portrait of Mehmet the Conqueror by the painter Gentile Bellini exists and, if so, to buy it for the sultan. The investigation takes these clever, endearing detectives to Venice, where lucky readers are transported to a fascinating period in Venetian history.
And here’s the review from National Geographic’s Traveler magazine:
A Venetian Journey by Don George
Bringing a contemporary city to life in words is an extraordinary enough challenge. But bringing a mid-19th-century city to life is infinitely more challenging. Edgar Award-winning mystery writer Jason Goodwin overcomes the challenge with vigor and grace in The Bellini Card, his third in a series of historical mysteries featuring the eunuch investigator Yashim, who serves the Ottoman court in 19th-century Istanbul. In this new book Yashim journeys to Venice at the behest of the new sultan to search for a legendary portrait of Mehmet the Conqueror, painted by Gentile Bellini. From its fast-paced dialogue to its interlacing political and social intrigues to its atmospheric depictions of Venetian life, The Bellini Card presents a riveting and revealing journey in time and space.
Yashim in America
March 2, 2009
Speaking of covers… here’s the US edition, out in hardback on March 3rd – tomorrow!
In The Bellini Card Yashim’s old friend Palewski, the Polish ambassador in Istanbul, goes to Venice on the trail of a lost portrait of Mehmed II.
For safety’s sake he presents himself as an American dealer, buying Old Masters for millionaires across the Atlantic. Why? Because nobody in 1840 Venice really knew what an American might be like.
Popi Eletro dreams of selling his Canalettos to a land of timber and furs. Count Barbieri, on the other hand, believes that New York might be the modern Venice: ‘It takes a wealthy and energetic commercial city to spawn rich men,’ he says, ‘who then vie with each other to call out what is beautiful.’
Dangerous ground for them, of course.
For anyone browsing from the US or Holland, feel free to go back to my posts in April 2008, when I began this blog to coincide with the UK publication. The Janissary Tree came out first – by a matter of days – in the USA, but the rift in schedules has widened since then. I’m not sure why, exactly. For The Evil Eye next year, it’ll be simultaneous.
That was my request. Sometimes it’s better to have more time. You can fill it, of course, with everything but writing. Gardening and cooking and having friends around. Children, always. Moving house. Walking on a beach. And don’t forget worrying as an occupation.
The Sand-Reckoner’s Diagram
February 10, 2009For Patty and others, who’d like to follow the action more closely…
This diagram, which figures so prominently in The Bellini Card, is an eight-pointed star inside a square. The above illustration comes from a Japanese website and it is, as far as know, the only illustration of the Sand-Reckoner’s diagram online.
The idea that it was used as a fencing diagram, governing positions and strokes, was put to me in Hampshire some years ago. It has been on my mind ever since, not least because of its delightful name: I was glad to unpack it for The BelliniCard.
Judging a Book by its Cover III
February 5, 2009
Here’s the new Faber paperback cover, as promised. I think it’s great – and so, I’m glad to say, do the Waterstone’s bookshop people.
Over the past few weeks some really amazing artwork has come in – covers for The Snake Stone done by my publishers in Korea and Denmark and Russia. Also the Icelandic version of The Janissary Tree. I’ll have to get my eldest son to post them here, along with the other 38 or so covers around the world; but that’s already two books, so at least 76 covers. All of them individual, striking, different. Which goes to show that everyone’s vision is unique. And that, in turn, suggests that we are the product of our histories. Vive la difference!
Wake Up! It’s 1840!
January 13, 2009I know, I know, who wants a blog that falls asleep for a couple of months? All I can say is that we need to live in the world, too – and get down to some hard writing when the winter festivities are cleared away…
Thanks to the delightful people who have written to say how much they enjoy the Yashim stories. Thanks too to Faber, who have come up with another cover for The Bellini Card, for the paperback edition which will be out this Spring. It’s a move away from the fruity orientalism of the Ventura artworks, which I really liked, and I’ll post it here asap. Promise.
Meanwhile the forthcoming US edition really goes to show what a difference close line-editing can make to an author’s pride, at the very least. And with that, I have to ackowledge my enormous debt to Enrico Basaglio, who read The Bellini Card for fun and made a note of all my mistakes… He’s a true Venetian, so he knows what’s what. I can’t thank him enough.
Back soon. In the meantime, here’s a piece I wrote for the FT on researching Venice:
http://www.ft.com/cms/s/2/b916dd3e-d6c7-11dd-9bf7-000077b07658.html
Bouchercon II
October 16, 2008One question that kept popping up in Baltimore: when does The Bellini Card come out in the US?
Simple: next March. It’s got a gorgeous cover – I just saw it last week in NYC – and it is spotlessly proofed, too. The catalogue says:
INSPECTOR YASHIM TRAVELS TO VENICE IN THE LATEST INSTALLMENT OF EDGAR AWARD–WINNING AUTHOR JASON GOODWIN’S CAPTIVATING SERIES
Istanbul, 1840: the new sultan, Abdulmecid, has heard a rumor
that Bellini’s vanished masterpiece—a portrait of Mehmed the
Conqueror—may have resurfaced in Venice. Yashim, our eunuch
detective, is promptly sent to investigate, but—aware that the
sultan’s advisers are against any extravagant repurchase of the
painting—decides to deploy his disempowered Polish ambassa-
dor friend, Palewski, to visit Venice in his stead. Palewski arrives
in disguise in down-at-the-heel Venice, where a killer is at large,
as dealers, faded aristocrats, and other unknown factions seek to
uncover the whereabouts of the missing Bellini.
But is it the Bellini itself that endangers all, or something asso-
ciated with its original loss? And how is it that all of the killer’s
victims are somehow tied to the alluring Contessa d’Aspi d’Istria?
Will the Austrians unmask Palewski, or will the killer find him first?
Only Yashim can uncover the truth to the manifold mysteries.
Jason Goodwin’s first Yashim mystery, The Janissary Tree, brought
home the Edgar Award for Best Novel. His second, The Snake Stone,
more than lived up to expectations. In The New York Times Book
Review, Marilyn Stasio hailed it as “a magic carpet ride to the most
exotic place on earth.” Now, in The Bellini Card, Jason Goodwin
takes us back into his “intelligent, gorgeous and evocative” (In-
dependent on Sunday) world, as dazzling as a hall of mirrors and
utterly compelling.
In the meantime, there’s the paperback of The Snake Stone, just out from Picador.
Bouchercon I
October 16, 2008Now I realise what Peter James was doing, tapping away quietly at his laptop in the Chesapeake Lounge: blogging. At the time I thought he must be working on his next book. I lack the facilities, but I’m home now and here goes.
For mystery writers and fans – not to mention agents, publishers, booksellers and editors – this is the Big Festival. There must have been more than 600 of us; authors on discussion panels running simultaneously throughout the day, book signings, lunches, suppers, parties and a slow descent toward the bar, like sand in an hour glass. By Sunday we were all hoarse. It was damn good fun.
Mark Billingham was the MC – and who better? A first rate writer who is also very very funny, he was there with his lovely wife, Clare – his agent, Sarah Lutyens, is an old friend and we went out to dinner at Mo’s, a seafood restaurant recommended by the hotel concierge. Not a touristy place, just a homely restaurant where locals like to eat, she assured us, while picking up the phone to summon the Mo’s Restaurant shuttle bus to come to the hotel. It was fine. I had lobster. I think it was frozen and shipped down from Maine.
Another night I ate out at the Black Olive with Stanley Trollip, one half of the Michael Stanley writing partnership; we sat at a pavement table in the quiet cobbled street in Fell’s Point and later roamed the district with the irrepressible Andrew Gulli (of Strand Magazine) and Peter James. There were a thousand bars, each catering to a different crowd – redneck, lesbian, bookish, juvenile, you name it. We couldn’t find one for us, so instead we went to inspect a house where Andrew had noticed an old man sitting immobile in front of a computer. The body was gone, and the lights were doused, so we could only assume foul play. I can’t imagine why.
It was important to get out of the hotel complex now and then; I saw the incomparable Walter’s Collection, where I inspected, among other things, some truly grisly Flemish 16th century momento mori – skulls, and a tiny boxwood Death with bones rattling and worms already at work on his trailing flesh. Then over to the Lexington Market for a round of quahog clams at a stand-up oyster shack: the real thing, folks. The largest, wettest and chewiest shellfish I’ve ever had. Fabulous.
Rob and Barbara Peters took me to the aquarium – the National Collection of fish, if you please – where we gawped at sharks at close range. And to complete the Baltimore boost, there was Rebecca Hoffburger’s American Visionary Art Museum that topped my bill: a moving, amusing, instantly accessible collection of ‘outsider’ art, things done with love, passion, obsessive compulsive disorders and sweet vision by people who fell into their medium almost by divine intervention. A twelve foot model of the Lusitania done with toothpicks. A pontiac cheerily embellished with blue medicine bottles, all over, except for a shrine in the boot which included an accordion. Automata. A figure of Elvis carved in the lead of a carpenter’s pencil. Sculptures of wound wool, each containing a stolen item, done by a kleptomaniac woman with Down’s Syndrome. A robot family, complete with dog, fashioned out of old hoovers, colanders and car parts, bleeping and nodding their heads. A very happy place, and an outstanding museum never to be missed by anyone.
That was outside the Convention; inside was even weirder, as you can imagine. Alison Gaylin had a girl vomit on her shoes and nobody so much as waived her bill. Arnaldur Idradason was on my panel, explaining how hard it was to write police procedurals in Iceland where the murder rate is one in twenty five years (though that may change if the Rejkyavik mob ever get their hands on the crooks who landed them in their current mess)…
Like buses – two come along at once
September 9, 2008Coincidence? Accident? Or merely the working out of the Zeitgeist?
I’ve seen this happen often. Oddly, it’s the one area of human affairs through which novelists must tread with caution: coincidence only works in real life.
