OPENINGS

The first lines of a book are its greeting to the reader. Here are some to consider. Lower down on this page, you can read extensive extracts from a few selected titles.

No Kiss For A Killer
THERE was a time, a desperate time, when I cursed the gentle mists of my native Oxfordshire and regretted its  picturesque vales and folds. Among the fruitful brown and green a deceptive dip will conceal the approach of riders.

Amateur Rebel
WE were young folk then, and chasing our dreams in a new land, me and Jeremy.

 Wee Charlie’s World
SMALLER than a kitbag and only four years, the youngest in that army, Charlie watched the soldiers come aboard: pith helmets, khaki shorts, puttees, boots, bolt-action rifles.

Spirit of Waterloo
ALPHONSE haunted the garrison school because it was there. It was heavily there, on his grave.

Born-again Bandit
BRILLIANT, simply brilliant. The Colonel reflected on his cleverness. Brilliantly simple. Such sound planning won Britain’s battles, created the Empire itself.

The Coolie’s Sweetheart
LONG ago when Britain ruled the world, Wee Charlie flew to school on a large oriental cushion.

Blood On The Wind
THE willy-willy nearly took my ute wagon as I drove over the red plains to Cattlecreek. Then it was raining bullybeef tins.

The Widow’s Golden Weeds
MARJORIE, content in the autumn of  her years, was watering her garden, and therefore did not notice the advancing threat.

Prize Bride
“YOU'LL love Ellen,” said Uncle Charlie. “She's a wonderful girl.” I recall how his eyes of Royal Navy Blue sparked at me, and how his chin jiggled in merry arrogance, as if about to fight the Frogs or the blasted Yankees.

Luckless Liz And The Lotto Dream
“UNLUCKY, that’s me. Always have been.” Liz threw down her Lotto card in disgust, another losing week for her in the nation’s sweepstake.

Look In The Well
LOCALS called it the witch house, and for half a century it was a hospice where old folk came to spend their final days. But to Joan and Simon, a couple with a young family, it had character, comfort and surprisingly low cost.

Birthday Snakes
ISKANDER the Magnificent, Sultan Supreme, interrupted my singing with a flick of his fat, jewelled wrist.

Great White Hunting Flop
WHEN I was a young man in British Malaya I felt I had to take up hunting, the abominable tradition of  Englishmen abroad. It seemed the right thing to do.

Kill Him Sweetly
DEATH spoiled the party, and I was the woman who saw it all.

Swamp Magic
SLURP, burp, heh heh, hic! The chuckles  skitter over  the Australian wetlands where Chief Munday, back in the Dreamtime, had often dined on tortoise.

The Painted Ladies
THE dirty drawings were in his sketchpad. Maggie had picked it up and flicked through the pages while sharing the rowboat ferry across Swan River with the artist, Ensign Robert Dale of the 63rd Regiment.

Jesse Owens And The Sprinting Buddha
JESSE OWENS, greatest athlete of the generation, laughed in polite disbelief when I pointed to a fat soldier. "That man has equalled your sprint record," I insisted, "believe it or not."

Run Maggie Run
A FINGER of sunshine poked through the grime of courtroom windows, polished the dock’s varnished panels and created a halo for the prisoner, she who was known as Maggie, age nine. The charge was murder.

Eden’s Deadly Shore
SEVENTEEN. When a girl's eyes sparkle and her heart throbs, and her face in the looking glass is almost lovely. Almost - beneath the grime of her dye stain. Drat!

The Killing Of Hamlet
THE first murder was before an audience, in a picture-postcard English village, ten miles from the roar of the M1, on a temperate summer’s day, the kind that nudged Shakespeare to lyrical bliss.

Murder Piping Hot
MY gut twisted when the knife-wielder declared he was digging a trench of gushing entrails. The grisly words accompanied the scooping dance of a ten-inch blade.

That Lovely Feeling
IT is strange, yet true, that a people so personally modest have a folk song about orgasm.

The Seventh Petal
SOLO female on a long hike, I found words pinned to a dead man’s chest and they mesmerised me.

 EXTRACTS

From Wee Charlie’s World:

The  holy coconut
by Bryce McBryce

FROM GARRISON COMMANDER
To all personnel
Military Intelligence identifies Fort Frederick as the intended
 target of a bomb attack by the terrorist Mutulingam.
 All Officers, NCOs, Other Ranks and Dependants are urged to
 maintain an alert watch and to report suspicious strangers,
 especially of the native variety, or any unusual happenings,
to the Duty Officer Of The Day.
By Order, Officer Commanding Fort Frederick 

CHILDREN raised in a fort where centuries of battle and massacre have bled will absorb from its wallstones an urge to contend, and so it was in Fort Frederick, built by Ceylon’s first invaders from Europe.

The Portuguese imperialists made use of the stone blocks remaining after their righteous demolition of a large Hindu temple, and the fort had in the fullness of time and warfare become British army headquarters in Trincomalee, and Charlie’s home. The army’s mission was to defend the harbour, but the children of that army engaged phantom enemies among the crumbling bastions erected 400 years earlier by Admiral Lorenzo D’Almeida.

Old-fashioned cannons stood rusting, the citadel was occupied by serpents and cockroaches, and the ancient ramparts gave easy points of ambush.

“Hoi, give us a coconut,” yelled the brats who regularly accosted pilgrims wending to the site of the ransacked temple ruins. “Hoi, give us a coconut,” parroted Charlie, who followed where the bigger boys led. Without fail, they whooped warlike against the devout, who came twice a week to worship at Swami Rock, a clifftop thumb where once had stood The Temple Of A Thousand Columns.

The worshippers danced along with ash-smeared faces, incense, flowerpetals, fire, and fruit for their god. They shooed away the feringi urchins while praying as always, the rite of centuries, to Siva the Destroyer. They snubbed shrill pleadings from these foreign imps who claimed to appreciate, even more than Siva, the tasty milk and meat of a coconut. Only scowls and growls met this suggestion, and an occasional raised elbow.

Fiercest of the incomers was the terrorist Mutulingam. He had disguised himself as a devotee by painting a third eye, glaring white and vermillion on his corrugated brown forehead. He had also disguised his bomb, as a fat green coconut.

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Spirit of Waterloo
by Bryce McBryce

ALPHONSE haunted the garrison school because it was there. It was heavily there, on his grave.

The Colonel had ordered that work proceed notwithstanding the soldier’s remains, after the builders unearthed a coffin while digging the school’s foundations. A brass plate identifying a French officer was unscrewed from the mahogany lid and  sent to a military museum in Paris, then the grave was filled again, with cement, encasing the bones in a concrete shroud.

In death, the fort’s ghost had retained Alphonse’s philosophical outlook in life. It accepted the needs of the living, and emanated no wrath when its last resting place was disturbed. Eh bien, was it not an honeur to have this new shrine of learning to crown one’s tomb? The great and beloved Emperor Napoleon himself had no monument to equal this, nor all the kings and popes. It was true the pyramids of the Nile might outsize Alphonse’s imposing edifice, yet these lacked the vibrant chatter of children, the closeness of the young and the animated.

Closest of all to Alphonse’s place of burial was the youngest of all, the one they called Charlie, who sat immediately over the old grave. He was gazing out the window thinking of his mother’s birthday, this coming Sunday, and the gift with which he would surprise her. It lay secreted under his desktop, gift-wrapped by a kindly corporal at the Naafi, the little shop run by the Navy Army and Airforce Institute. The perfume had been expensive, the whole fifty cents of Charlie’s savings, but the man read him the label, Eau de Cologne. “That’ll cool Mum’s brow on a hot afternoon,” he promised. Charlie felt a tingling in his ears at the memory, and then the sensation intensified.  

“Please miss, my ear’s gone cold again like yesterday.” Charlie, now 7, waved a ruler to catch Teacher’s attention. “It feels all funny.”

“Then stop staring out the window, it’s just a draught. Pay attention to the sums in your book, face pointed downwards, Charlie, if you please.”

They suspected nothing each day as Alphonse seeped up from the chill, through the concrete floor to hover among the pupils at their work. Sometimes he would whisper an answer, or he could make an inkwell spill if a child was behaving badly, or mist Teacher’s glasses when she tried chalking her sums on a disappearing blackboard. Just a bit of fun, nothing dangerous or spiteful. At night when the school brooded empty, the ghost of Alphonse would stand by Charlie’s desk and regard the stars and watch the moon painting light across the Dutch graves, high beds of stone that housed enemies of old and that, for too long, had  dominated the flat sward between the tennis courts and the cricket pitch. Now, however, the Alphonse Tomb, dedicated to education, held supremacy in the old burial yard where once his body had mouldered unremembered beneath the unmarked sod.

One midnight as Alphonse meditated on the superior tolerance of French spectres there came a sinister shadow above the battlements near Bastion Number Nine. Tiens!Alphonse stroked the moustache that no longer existed with his forefinger that had long vanished and felt the fright of his own ooo, oooh-wooo. An enemy image, painfully familiar astride a big chestnut charger, was floating down across the face of a cringing  moon.

Not Dutch – they stayed in their bed-graves, obedient to a rigid interpretation of eternity. Not Portuguese either, nor Sepoy, Gurkha or rebellious Sinhalese; not any of those. Here came a demon cockaded, braided and arrogant, more fearsome than the Apocalypse Quartet. Sauve qui peut. Every spook for itself.  The scared wraith of Alphonse retreated at the double, in a hasty swirl of jotters, nibs and chalkdust, down down to his tight bunker of concrete.

 “I SHALL RETURN,” the Iron Duke promised when leaving Trincomalee to seize Mauritius, conquer Batavia, fight the French for possession of Egypt and then hammer the rajahs of Madras. As a Colonel in Fort Frederick back in 1800 he had, like the present Commandant, noted the need for a garrison school and intended coming back from his many campaigns to order it built.

“The playing fields of Fort Frederick shall win me all India,” Wellington had enthused, but in a life devoted to sword and slaughter he had to settle for the playing fields of Eton winning him a damp Belgian field named Waterloo. His afterlife, however, offered all the time in the world, and beyond. The vow niggled his warlike soul, the academic ambition nagged, until at last his lordship did now return,  determined to instil cunning and bloodlust into the newest generation.  The spirit of Waterloo was back.

“Please miss, my ear’s now gone all hot.”

“Be quiet, Charlie, let’s get the morning prayer over.”  She was a puffy woman, red-faced and plump as a rambutan, hair like spikes to confirm this image, and a small tight bun topping it. Her swollen eyes behind thick lenses spoke of late-night studies, for she was ever pursuing wider knowledge, being committed to intellectual stamina and to Reason’s straight path, which was ancient yet clear.

“The other one’s sizzling now,” complained Charlie as she concluded the litany with an amen repeated by the older children. There was only one classroom in this school, where pupils ranged in age from seven to thirteen. Pam, the oldest, had been delegated from Day One as unpaid assistant schoolmarm, and she now hissed menacingly for Charlie to shut up.

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Great Land of Dreams
by John Ivor

Chapter 1.
A FINGER of sunshine poked through the grime of courtroom windows, polished the dock’s varnished panels and created a halo for the prisoner, she who was known as Sma'shot, age nine.

            The charge was murder. The judge: Mr Justice Gallows.

            In the various parchments of the Crown Court Of Scotland the designation of this wretched child had been inked by the calligraphist, in black flourishes, authoritative and awesome: Margaret Macleod,  factory apprentice, of  Tayside, Perth, arraigned against His Majesty King of The Realm,  Supreme Emperor and Defender of the Faith, George the Fourth of Great Britain and Ireland.

            The judge smiled, nodding encouragement to the waif. The dusty finger of God, if such it was, also beamed behind the man's plump shoulders, persisting in its golden line towards the timid stare of the accused, whose face was a splotch, colour upon colour.

            Like her cheeks and her nose and her puckered brow, her arms and legs were stained, and these poked from her tattered frock as hideous rods. Yet her eyes sparkled and her ragged return grin to the judge held the magic of youth.

            A moment ago she had heard him mutter to the bored-looking clerk, "I'm a father and grandad, Angus. This bairn's button eyes dinna fool me."  That's what the judge had said, a shrewd grandfather wise to the wiles of children, but his own merry brown eyes were twinkling back at her.

            He knows I'm innocent.

            Absorbing that reassuring smirk from the man on the high bench,  Sma'shot realised at this moment that the terrible tales people whispered about Gregory Gallows were slanderously exaggerated. True, he had condemned seven-year-old Jamie Weir to the noose for snitching a hankie, but Jamie had been guilty, a repeat offender, and the hankie was of silk and worth all of sixpence.

            True, the judge was related by marriage to the man Sma'shot  was accused of  killing, but that made no difference, not a bean. Hadn't Mr Justice Gregory Gallows, adopting his posh legal voice, reassured the court on this very point?  Just now, this  minute, while casting her that grandaddy grin.

            "My personal, somewhat tenuous relationship to the victim - to the deceased I should say - has been hinted at by Defence Counsel, a most improper and distasteful slur. But the Bench is confident that this foul libel will not influence any Members of  the Jury. Because no private connection can sway a Magistrate of the Realm, be it commerce, politics, or family . . ." Here he scowled a challenge at her agitated defender, and  growled, "or all three!"

            Then, dimpled chin raised to the people who filled the sparse public pews, he  concluded his screed on a note of pomposity. "The dedication of this court is unflinchingly to the fair conduct of an onerous duty."

            He adjusted his long white cuffs, twitched his nose and, by  reverting to vernacular, verbally embraced his legal  workmates. "Aye. Well now. Good colleagues of the jury, let's get on wi' the whigmaleeries."

            Sma'shot had scrubbed up for the trial in her best frock, frayed, patched but unstained, and she had been  pleasantly surprised to discover that the hanging judge had done the same, sitting on his great carved throne in a satin gown of  red and white, stuck over with bows of pink ribbon. A great wig like a cuddle-toy sat on his chubby head and had  flapped down to tickle his meaty, round shoulders when he selected fifteen of the forty-five jurymen  present rather than resorting  to the customary ballot.

            "A juror must own a brain that works," he declared. "I will not have any peat noddles messing up the legal process. In my court, a juror has to comprehend." Each of the jurors he approved received quill pen, paper, and inkpot for the taking of notes.         

            Now a tall court official in black tails and high starched collar was marching towards Sma'shot. Should she bow her head? No way! Innocent is innocent. Not guilty, sir, not guilty!  She stared calm defiance as he began to intone in a lofty voice.

            "Prisoner at the bar, you are charged with the murder of Ian Henry Lamont, senior foreman of the Tayside Weaving  And Tartan Company in our fair city of Perth, on October the first anno domini  1828. . . ."

            Sma'shot closed her eyes, bravado vanishing, and she shivered at the memory and was instantly back inside her nightmare. That hateful day haunted  her and hurt and hurt and hurt. And confirmed the colour of hell - it was tartan.

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