Haunted Writing Bureaus

Hell's Belles is out this week! And there are copies going out to people already. I've just done a long interview with Book Chick City, so that should go on her blog pretty soon. Mark at the King's Theatre and Theatre Royal in Glasgow has just written to tell me that, like a Bride on her wedding night, he's holding off reading his copy, until his colleague Gillian has her own copy in her hands. Just this morning he emailed:

"I haven't started yet and it's killing me - joining a gym caused
less stress than this and that was tough!

"I have a small lacquered writing bureau, not sure what the official name
for such an item is (probably small lacquered writing bureau), and in a very Brenda and Effie way I have locked the book in it. Out of sight and out of mind - almost. I would swear the box rattles when I walk by, like Brenda's spare parts - reminding me that it's there!"

I love the idea of a writing desk haunted by the book it contains! (My friend Amanda's granda' refused to pronounce french words and so he called his bureau a 'baroo.' That's always stuck in my head.)

Speaking of spooky things - I've been really enjoying Audrey Niffenegger's 'Her Fearful Symmetry', which I started on the over-hot train home from London, in plenty of time for December's book club. It's beautifully atmospheric with all those dripping graveyard scenes. I love the characters, too - that old fella with the OCDs and those everso slightly precious twins. It's maybe taking itself a little too seriously, as a novel... I'm halfway through and really enjoying its pace and I've been nicely surprised here and there. The chapter devoted to the twins watching Stephen Moffat's Who episode, 'The Girl in the Fireplace' made me smile. That ep clearly owes something, plotwise, to Niffenegger's previous novel, 'The Time Traveller's Wife'. I thought her use of it here was witty and everso slightly spikey.

There's some lovely stuff about ghosts in Niffenegger's book. So much of what she (sometimes over-) writes rings so true.

What am I looking forward to moving on to next? I don't care much for new novels coming out at the moment. Maybe the new Stephen King. Before Christmas I want to read some more Wodehouse and Ngaio Marsh. Some more Jojo Moyes and George Mann. I want to read one of the gorgeous Persephone reissues of Dorothy Whipple. More Maureen Lee and K.M Peyton. I want to read John Dickson Carr. Yesterday I dipped into 'The Waxworks Murder' and found the first chapter very deliciously written. Stiff with atmosphere and suggestive menace. I want to get to that Junot Diaz novel that everyone was going on about a while ago. And then - as Christmas gets near - I want to read some of my anthologies of Christmas crime and ghost stories that I've been collecting up. I'm in the mood now for some festive chillers. The temperature has dropped here in Manchester and each evening J. has built us a fire. The house in the morning smells of woodsmoke, coffee and toast.