celticman's blog

I picked Teresa up last week, Thursday. She'd her brother's funeral today. She was carrying two plastic bags, stuff from the Coop and Jimmy’s medication from the chemists. She stood waving her arms, standing at the clock across from Dalmuir Library. I tooted the horn and parked at the traffic lights. ‘I thought you were a taxi,’ she said. Teresa is scheduled at the end of July to go for a cataract operation. Then she said I was an angel. I’ve...

Barbara Kingsolver thanks Charles Dickens in ‘Acknowledgement’ for writing David Copperfield. Similarly, I’d need to thank Book Club Mom. I hadn’t heard of Kingsolver, but her blog made me want to read the book. 546 pages, what we used to call epics. But for Charles Dickens, with his newspaper serialisation, Copperhead would be labelled a short story. Dickens had a wonderful handle on people’s names. Like epigrams, he matched them to his...

https://player.stv.tv/summary/secrets-of-the-bay-city-rollers I grew up with the Bay City Rollers. My older brother, Sev, was meant to look a bit like Les McKeon, the lead singer. The latter died in 2021, aged 65. My brother about thirty years before that. My sister Phyllis had Bay City Roller pictures on her wall. All the girls did. Wee Emily, my brother’s girlfriend, had the cut-off tartan trouser and scarves and even a kiss-me-quick hat with...

Georgio Pellegrini has an epiphany. He’s like to open a decent Italian restaurant. One that would allow him to blend in with those that doesn’t worry about money, respectability, or the need to pay the cops to keep them off their back. He’ll just need to pull one last heist. Pellegrini has to factor in being double-crossed. Formaggio, and the insider who provided details of the armoured truck, and how much loot it is carrying, can easily be...

Local author, Alex Kane, (a pseudonym) tends to write what you know. Janey slots into the genre of Scottish Noir also known as Tartan Noir. Writing is a verb, not a noun. This is Kane’s ninth book. She does her talking on the page. Lets the gods of Amazon decide. Most writers tend to be women. Eight out of ten readers are women and they prefer heroines rather than heroes. A virtuous circle. The protagonists in Kane’s novels tend to be women you...

Tiffany McDaniel dedicated her book to the Chillicothe Six. On the dedication page, she names the victims. Charlotte Treggo , 27. Disappeared May 3 rd , 2014. Still missing. Tameka Lynch , 30. Disappeared May 2014. Body discovered in river. Wanda Lemons , 37. Disappeared November 4 th , 2014. Still missing. Shasta Himelrick , 20. Disappeared December 2014. Body discovered in river. Timberly Clayton , 38. Disappeared May 2015. Found shot to death...

Alan Warner’s debut novel Morven Caller was adapted and made into a film. He’s one of Scotland’s most successful writers. Nothing Left to Fear From Hell is a step away from the usual write-what-you-know school. A short novella. Bonnie Prince Charlie’s flight through the Highlands. Most readers know about his escape to France. So we know the ending. We think we know the plot. Why bother? Warner addresses these issues in Afterward . This could and...

The Barra Boy is a whodunnit split into three parts. Beginning (Part One: Ewan Fraser). Middle, (Part Two: The Barra Boy of the title). End (Part Three: Laura Robertson). What happened in Barra is split into two time frames. Ewan Fraser, a successful London solicitor, thinks he saw Billy Matheson on the other side of the window on the crowded Tube station in 2022. But Ewan is in his fifties. Yet Billy seemed to be the same eleven or twelve-year-...

Everything has a past, even the future. Let Scotland be Scotland it the cry here, but what type of Scotland and who’s Scotland are we talking about? He takes a page out of Hugh MacDiarmid’s On a Raised Beach : ‘…We are so easily baffled by appearances And do not realise that those stones are at one with the stars. It makes no difference to them whether they are high or low, Mountain peak or ocean floor, palace or pigsty. There are plenty of...

George Mackay Brown writes about what he knows. An Orkney life. His characters are crofters, grounded in the shallow soil and windblown sea, their surnames a mark of where they bide. One bleeds into the other in a communal life in which Mackay Brown is poetically versed. The opening lines of The Golden Bird show this by documenting an island feud. ‘They had not spoken to each other, the crofts of Gorse and Feaquoy, for three generations. And...