The Long Wait is Over Dangerous Destiny has Arrived

These are strange times, and I'm having to adapt to living in isolation in the same way as everyone else. But at least I have my imaginary friends to keep me company. They talk to me and live in my imagination, and then I write them down and share them with you. Sometimes I think my characters are more real to me than other people, although they don't always do what I want them to. And they astonish me by what they say.

So, for the past year, I've been living with my suffragette characters and, with a great deal of trepidation, I've launched them out into the wide world. I wonder how they'll fare there? Will my readers like them as much as I do? Or will they wave them away with a disparaging gesture? Time will tell.

No doubt you've guessed by now that my new historical murder-mystery 'Dangerous Destiny: A Suffragette Mystery' is now available to buy. It's out in paperback and Kindle, and in view of the strange times we live in, I've done something I've never done before. I've made the Kindle version available for Kindle Unlimited, which means that if you subscribe, you can read it for free. Otherwise, it's the same price as the others £3.99 in the UK and whatever that converts to in the US.

Here is a view of the cover, designed by Cathy Helms of Avalon Graphics. She does a great job.

The story is a combination of coming of age with a murder-mystery at its heart. It's a story about three suffragettes who come together to try to solve the mystery of who is killing suffragettes in Dundee, Scotland. They are frustrated because the police are doing nothing to investigate the murders, taking the view that suffragettes are a nuisance and society would be better without them.
First we have Kirsty, a naïve young girl with a secret in her past, who is trying to break free from her controlling family. Then we have Ethel, trying to escape her vicious and abusive father. Martha, a seasoned suffragette, takes them under her wing and introduces them to women's suffrage.
Of course, they run into danger before everything is solved. And in the process, we find out whether Kirsty and Ethel will break their family bonds and forge a new destiny for themselves.

You can find the Kindle version by clicking HERE.
And the paperback version by clicking HERE. 
If you are in the US, just change the .co.uk part of the link to .com

There will be no physical launch for this book at Waterstones, and I'll miss meeting all my lovely readers and supporters. So, now I need to get back to my lonely isolation but, hopefully, there will be some imaginary friends waiting for me. I do hope you have some imaginary friends as well and if you don't, I'd be delighted to share mine with you.

Take care.

Chris

Website
Amazon Author page

Is the World ready for Death of a Doxy? The great launch is today

Hang out the flags, summon the marching band, and bring on the dancing girls – Death of a Doxy has been unleashed on an unsuspecting world. It’s taken a year of hard graft but book launch day has finally arrived and to celebrate its arrival I’m offering an introductory bargain price on the Kindle eBook for the first few days. But it ends on Friday 9 February so if you want a bargain you’d better be quick.

 Death of a Doxy is set in Dundee, Scotland, in 1919, and features Kirsty Campbell, Dundee's first policewoman. In this book, which is the third in the series, Kirsty is investigating the murder of Lily, one of the girls in Big Aggie's house of pleasure. As the only policewoman in Dundee, Kirsty struggles to be accepted and she is keen to prove herself by cracking the case.

Not for the first time, Kirsty disagrees with her senior officer, DI Jamie Brewster. He is convinced Big Aggie killed Lily, but Kirsty believes the case to be more complicated than it appears on the surface and embarks on her own investigation.

To find the killer, she must unravel Lily's secrets and the deeper she delves into Lily's past, the more secrets she uncovers. But it is only when her own life is in danger that she learns others hide secrets too and will do anything to prevent exposure.

It is a tortuous trail where Kirsty faces danger before the mystery is solved.

Read the first chapter here:

Death of a Doxy

Chapter 1

Splotches of blood combined with other stains created a grim kaleidoscope of colour on the faded blue mattress.

He had meant to save her, not kill her. But her depravity overwhelmed him when she mocked him and laughed in his face.

Bile burned his throat and he leaned over the box sink in front of the window waiting for the pain to pass. Outside, footsteps on the landing caused him to draw back and he slid into a shadowy corner of the room, his hand tightening on the poker which he still clutched. When the sound disappeared he returned to the sink, turned the tap, bent over, and swilled water around his mouth. The burning sensation faded. He closed his eyes and leaned his head on the cool glass of the window in the vain hope the scene behind him would disappear and everything would be the same as when he entered the room less than half an hour ago.

An image of her flashed through his mind. Innocent blue eyes; now so knowing. Hair, golden as daffodils on a spring morning, streaming behind her in the breeze; now dull and lank. Skin, translucent in the sunshine; now caked in thick face paint.

Where had that innocent young girl gone?

He opened his eyes and turned to survey the room. A dingy place containing nothing more than a rickety wardrobe, a bed, one chair, and a table holding a guttering oil lamp. The last embers of a fire glowed in the black grate of the fireplace which spilled ash over the floor. And on the mantelpiece, a candle dripped wax into a saucer.

But the thing that held his eyes more than anything else was the body which sprawled on the mattress before him, beaten and bloodied, and no longer recognizable as the girl he remembered. His hand loosened on the poker which clattered onto the wooden floorboards to lie in a widening pool of blood.

Unaware he had been holding his breath, it now whispered out from between his lips, and the anger that consumed him was replaced by exhilaration rushing through his body, reviving him, exciting him.

He had saved her, although not in the way he intended. He could see now. This way was better. It was the only way to eradicate the depraved life she led. But he couldn’t leave her like this, with her clothing in disarray. No, that wouldn’t do. He would make her respectable, lay her out before her body stiffened, and arrange her dress to provide her with a modesty she hadn’t experienced for a long time.

Her limbs moved easily under his tender hands. He rolled her onto her back and straightened her legs, smoothing the dress over them. Next, he crossed her hands over her chest and arranged her blood-soaked hair over her shoulders.

Pleased with his work he carried the poker to the sink and rinsed her blood from it. Then, taking one last look at the scene in front of him, he left the room, closing and locking the door behind him.

At the bottom of the stairs, he sidled around the final corner and hurried across the backlands behind the tenement. This was an area of grass, weeds and rubbish which serviced the tenements that bordered it. The place where the tenants kept their bins and hung their washing on ropes to dry. He slipped through a close at the other side of this waste ground, opposite the building he’d left, and emerged onto the street. After taking a circuitous route and keeping to side streets he eventually reached Magdalen Green. From there it was a short walk to where the River Tay flowed to meet the North Sea. With one last look around to make sure no one observed him, he raised his arm and threw the poker into the water.

He smiled to himself as he walked homeward. His job was done.

Chris Longmuir

Kindle eBook

Paperback

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Amazon Author Page

Centenary of the Silvertown Explosion

This month is the centenary of the Silvertown explosion which provides a dramatic opening to my latest Kirsty Campbell mystery, Devil’s Porridge. In this book, I have mixed fact and fiction to fashion a story guaranteed to keep readers turning the pages.

On Friday 19th January 1917, at 6.52 pm, a massive explosion destroyed the Brunner-Mond munitions factory and destroyed most of Silvertown. This explosion has been described as the biggest explosion ever to have taken place in London.

Silvertown, in the east end of London, was an industrial area on the north bank of the River Thames, opposite the Greenwich Peninsula, and south of the Victoria Docks.

The Brunner-Mond factory at Silvertown was an old established chemical works which had been adapted, at the start of the First World War, to manufacture TNT (trinitrotoluene) a highly explosive substance.

The explosion occurred after a fire broke out in the melt room shortly after the workers had finished work for the weekend. It destroyed the factory and obliterated a large part of Silvertown. It is recorded that the sound of the blast could be heard as far away as Sussex, and red-hot lumps of metal rained down on other areas, starting fires wherever they landed. A gas holder, across the river on the Greenwich Peninsula, was hit and shot 8 million cubic feet of gas into the sky in a massive fireball. This gas holder was in the area now occupied by the Millennium Dome.

A local reporter, writing in the Stratford Express, wrote: “The whole heavens were lit in awful splendour. A fiery glow seemed to have come over the dark and miserable January evening, and objects which a few minutes before had been blotted out in the intense darkness were silhouetted against the sky.”

It is estimated that between 60,000 to 70,000 properties were damaged, 73 people were killed, and over 400 were injured. The toll would have been even greater had the explosion occurred during working hours.

Rumours were rife about the cause of the explosion. Some thought it was a Zeppelin attack, some said it was sabotage, but these were ruled out and the cause was confirmed as an accident.

But, of course, an accident doesn’t make for gripping fiction, and Devil’s Porridge is not a history book, it’s a murder mystery story. One of the knacks of writing historical fiction is the ability to blend facts into the fiction, perhaps twisting them a little, without distorting the historical reality. So, in Devil’s Porridge, the explosion is the result of sabotage with a murder thrown in for good measure.

Similarly, I touch on other historical facts for the back story, like the invasion of Belgium by the Germans in 1914, the German spy network operating from Rotterdam, MI5, King George and Queen Mary’s visit to Gretna in 1917, the Easter Rising in Ireland, and the imprisonment and ultimate release of the Irish revolutionaries from Frongoch. And, of course, Kirsty Campbell is one of the pioneering policewomen of the time.

I enjoyed the historical research for this book and although fictional elements have been woven into the facts, for example, there was no assassination attempt on the King, at least as far as the history books tell us, I trust this will not spoil the story for the historians amongst my readers.

Chris Longmuir

My website: https://www.chrislongmuir.co.uk/

Amazon author page UK

Amazon author page US

Devil’s Porridge: the munitionettes who risked their lives to make it

My new murder mystery book, Devil’s Porridge, involves munitionettes who mixed the volatile substance known as Devil’s Porridge So, following on from my previous post about the munitions factory where they worked, I thought I might share with you some of my research into the women who produced the ammunition which helped to win the First World War.

Gretna munitions factory was a massive place which employed something like 30,000 workers, many of whom were the women and girls the newspapers had nicknamed munitionettes. These munitionettes risked their health and their lives in the munitions factories during the Great War, although no recognition was given to them at this time.

Cordite Section Mossband

HM Factory Gretna was established to produce Cordite RDB a propellant required for the manufacture of bombs. The end result, the cordite, was produced at the Mossband end of the factory site and resembled spaghetti. However, my novel, Devil’s Porridge, focuses on the opposite end of the site at Eastriggs where the devil’s porridge was mixed. This was the paste that was used to make the cordite.

Devil’s porridge was the name given to the paste which the munitionettes kneaded and mixed with their bare hands as if they were making a massive loaf of bread. The mixture they were kneading, in the large lead tubs, was gun-cotton and nitroglycerine, a highly explosive substance.

The name ‘devil’s porridge’ was coined by Arthur Conan Doyle, in an article, he wrote for the Annandale Observer, published in December 1916. He said: “The nitroglycerine on the one side and the gun-cotton on the other are kneaded together into a sort of devil’s porridge. The least generation of heat may cause an explosion. Those smiling khaki-clad girls who are swirling the stuff round in their hands would be blown to atoms in an instant if very small changes occur. The girls smile and stir their ‘devil’s’ porridge, but it is a narrow margin between life and death.”

Not only did the munitionettes risk their lives mixing the devil’s porridge, they also risked their health. Fumes from the acids they used affected their breathing and caused their hair and teeth to fall out, although I think there was less risk of their skin turning yellow which was caused when munitionettes worked with TNT (trinitrotoluene) and led to them being called ‘canary girls’. As far as I can tell, HM Factory did not work with TNT.

Some quotes from munitionettes:

“I remember once a girl was killed in the factory, up at Broomhills, the acid point. They said dirt had gotten into the gun-cotton and that was what caused it.”

“The acid plant was a nasty place. Whiffs of acid would keep coming over every now and again, and use to fairly take your breath away. My gums were all poisoned with the acid and I had to have all my teeth taken out.”

“We worked in three shifts and we went to work in trains with wooden seats. We changed into overalls and hats to cover all our hair and shoes that must not touch the ground outside where we worked.”

Munitionettes going into the railway station on their way to work

The munitionettes came from all levels of society and from all over the country, to work at Gretna Munitions factory, and afterwards, they returned to their previous lives because there was no longer a role for them in peacetime Britain. Their contribution to the war effort was soon forgotten and it is for this reason I have dedicated my new novel, Devil’s Porridge, to their memory.

Most of the action in Devil’s Porridge, takes place in Gretna township, one of the new towns built to service the factory workers, and in a mixing station at the Eastriggs end of the site, hence the name, Devil’s Porridge. I have incorporated munitionettes, Irish navvies, the women police who patrolled the factory, and I’ve thrown in a German spy for good measure. Naturally the sabotage, assassination, and murder elements of the plot are solely fictional, but quite a lot of factual information has been woven in, and I hope you won’t see the join between fact and fiction.

My next post will cover the two new townships, Gretna and Eastriggs. Following that I will do a post covering the involvement of the newly formed Women’s Police Service, and the ‘lady police’, at Gretna Munitions Factory.

Chris Longmuir

You can buy Devil’s Porridge here:

Amazon.co.uk

Amazon.com

My website: http://www.chrislongmuir.co.uk/

Amazon author Page UK

Amazon author page US

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