I’ve spent a lot of time recently polishing the next book, The Butcher Bird. Aside from a final read through, I think it is finished and I’m about to kick off the production process. More news here when it is available.

Before New Year, I did a lot of preparatory work on the next book after The Butcher Bird and now need to get back into the world waiting to be created, from which I have so far only received teasing postcards. It looks like 1930s Edinburgh, but not quite. A lot of my preparation has been dumping ideas into notebooks and sifting through them for what works and what doesn’t, trying to mindmap the elements and how they relate to each other. I’ve been through this process once and need to repeat it to get to the essence of the story. At present I’m in the happy position of having too much material but, less happily, it doesn’t entirely cohere. Some may eventually become other stories, but first things first.

More smoke, vicar?

Being the 1930s, there is a lot of tobacco about. I decided some time ago that my protagonist would be a pipe smoker and, in a nod to JRR Tolkien and CS Lewis, would likely smoke Three Nuns (“None Nicer”). This led me down an enjoyable rabbit hole of investigating pipes, tobacco and tobacciana, including the differences between the two versions of Three Nuns available in the 1930s. However it also led me into the strange, niche subculture of pipe smokers on YouTube, and this has been a delight, albeit and admittedly an eccentric delight.

The  pipe-smoking world of YouTube has many facets. There are men (always men) discussing and reviewing the essentials of their passion in knowing terms, often with the barely-suppressed intensity of the obsessed. There are also lengthy videos on the restoration of old pipes and the making of new ones and a number of people growing and blending their own tobacco. There are discussions of storing and cellaring tobacco to allow it to mature. Very often, though not inevitably, these men are wearing waistcoats (vests to Americans) and I have observed one or two elaborate moustaches.

There is a tendency amongst some of the American YouTubers towards a faux Britishness, an affectation not shared by the British creators who seem often to be in their shed musing on St Bruno (ready rubbed or flake? There’s a question) and the Condor moments of their yesterdays. And there is one to whom I have subscribed, Rev. Dr. Malcolm Guite, a poet and retired clergyman, who often posts videos of himself, rumpled like an unshaken duvet, reading from his own or others’ writing – notably Tolkien – while sipping malt whisky and puffing on one of his impressive collection of Peterson pipes, pausing from time to time to wheeze. I have embedded a link to him reading Tolkien on Ents and Entwives below.

Childhood

Guite triggered a flashback of our house in 1960’s Derby. Dad smoked a pipe then and I remember loads of empty Player’s Whiskey Flake tins around the house along with Benson and Hedges Mellow Virginia. Dad had two bent-stem pipes, one smooth, one rusticated, and I suspect they were Petersons. I have no idea what happened to them, though I do have one of his other pipes in a box in the shed – a small Westgate Standard, made in France, the stem bitten through. I have a notion now to find some old pipes and attempt to restore them, then place them on my desk while writing to put me into the world of my protagonist. I daresay eBay would be the only source now (unless you know differently.)

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One thing that I like to do when preparing to write is to read good writers and good books in the hope that something will rub off on me by some kind of literary osmosis. I have just begun a reread of Susanna Clarke’s Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell, which I haven’t read since it was published. It beguiled me then and it is working its magic again now. The BBC adaptation is good but barely scratches the surface of the stories told in the novel, including those told in the footnotes that run parallel to the main text. Aside from technical virtuosity, Clarke is very dark and very funny, her mordant, deadpan humour shining through.

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