If you live anywhere near Aberdeen, you have a chance this weekend (19-20 October) to visit the scene of a crime committed 168 years ago. Well, not really. It’s a crime I invented as part of Unsolved – Aberdeenshire’s Crime and Mystery Festival. I explained the background to it in an earlier blog. At that time I was thinking of going back hundreds of years but various clues and aspects of the location (Leith Hall) made me bring it all a wee bit closer.

In case you haven’t read the link, the idea is to create a murder scene in a property belonging to the National Trust for Scotland. Visitors are given the basics of the crime, invited to question suspects and, after due deliberation, come up with a culprit using only the evidence and techniques available at the time. They then get access to today’s techniques (fingerprinting, DNA, fibre analysis, ballistics) and see whether they reach the same conclusion.

When visitors arrive, they’ll be given this:

It’s 1845. Lord & Lady Fairfax are part of a shooting party visiting Leith Hall in Aberdeenshire. Lord Leith is in the grounds with the rest of the party reconnoitring for the following day’s shoot.  They’re also shooting now and again. Leith’s daughter, Arabella, is playing the piano in the music room, his wife, Lady Leith, is resting in the Leith bedroom. In the dining room, Ferguson, the butler, is preparing for the evening meal. He’s being helped by Angus, a footman, and a housemaid, Molly, who is also Angus’s girl-friend.

The highly unpopular and unpleasant Lord Fairfax has been left behind by the others. He’s wearing his military uniform and is in the drawing room with Lady McMarne, another female guest. He’s been drinking a lot. His wife has gone for a stroll around the lake. He makes advances to Lady McMarne which she resists. His idea of being playful is to load his new pistol (of which he’s very proud) and pretend to threaten her with it. He quickly tires of her and, when she excuses herself to go to the bathroom, the sound of the piano in the music room makes him decide to try his luck with Arabella. He mutters something about hearing someone in the library and leaves.

Some 5 minutes later, a shot is heard and he’s found lying dead in the library, with a gunshot wound in his upper chest.

Your first task is to investigate the death by questioning the witnesses and using only the techniques available at the time of the event (1845) to pick up clues, motives and proofs.

Once you’ve done that and decided the culprit, you’ll be given access to more modern investigative techniques to see whether you reach the same conclusion.

Another of the weekend’s activities is for schoolchildren in Aberdeen and Aberdeenshire. I’ve written a 500 word opening to another story set in Leith Hall and they have to complete the story, which must be up to 2000 words long in total. There are great prizes for the winners. I’ll probably blog about the results when the competition’s over and maybe include the opening to see whether any of you want to try it – just for fun.

So, if you’re in the vicinity, Leith Hall’s a great place to visit, and there’s a murder to solve as well.

Before I started writing novels, I used to write plays for radio and stage. It’s a completely different discipline and I’ve been feeling that I’d like to get back to it for a change. The thing that’s set me thinking about it, though, is the fact that I’m writing a sequel to The Figurehead and part of the action concerns the visit of a theatrical troupe to Aberdeen in 1842. It’s meant that I’ve had to revisit 19^th century drama, which was the subject of my Ph.D. thesis and I’ve been reminded of how passionate audiences were then about plays.

The most popular form was melodrama and, in France in the 1830s (when revolutionary spirits were high), the theatre was a literal battle ground between the Romantics and the Traditionalists. The opening line of Victor Hugo’s Hernani (famous for the ‘Battles of Hernani’ that erupted in the audience night after night) throws down a gauntlet because the play’s written in a verse form called alexandrines which followed strict rules (until Hugo started loosening them). They were self-contained lines of 12 syllables and their meaning should never run on into the following line. But Hugo’s play begins with an old servant asking:

Serait-ce déjà lui? (Un coup.) C’est bien à l’escalier
Dérobé.

Which, very loosely translated, is :

Is he here already? (A knock on the door.) That’s certainly from the hidden
Staircase.

Splitting the noun and adjective in that way was a direct challenge and there was uproar immediately. Different parts of the audience threw cabbages and even worse things at one another.

In another part of the play, the king asks a courtier ‘What time is it?’ Cue more uproar because that’s not how kings speak. And when the courtier replies ‘Nearly midnight’, the traditionalists go bananas because courtiers would never be so familiar with monarchs. A contemporary English melodrama showed the way with the same sort of Q & A.

– Is midnight passed?
– Long since. Just as we crossed the glen the monastery chime swang heavy with the knell of yesterday.

Melodrama had its own language, its own range of gestures. Audiences knew what characters were thinking (or, more often, emoting) without any words being said. But the interesting thing is the degree of passion the theatre aroused. There’s one anecdote which illustrates it perfectly.

Antony was a play written by Alexandre Dumas. It was a huge success and had full houses every night. The character of Antony, played by the famous actor Bocage, loves Adèle d’Hervey, played by the sensational Marie Dorval. Adèle is married with a daughter but Antony wants her to run away with him. They’re madly in love but Adèle refuses to leave her daughter. In the last act, Antony tracks her down to an inn and enters her room. Her husband’s on his way to join her and, just as Antony is about to drag her away by force, there’s a knock on the door.  It’s the husband. If he comes in and finds them together, she’ll be dishonoured (even though they haven’t done anything). Adèle says Antony must kill her to save her honour. He kisses her and stabs her, the door crashes open and the husband sees his dead wife. Antony says ‘Yes. Dead. She was resisting me. I killed her’. Whereupon, the curtain falls to thunderous applause. End of play. That last line became famous and crowds continued to flock to the theatre to see and hear it.

But …

One night, an over-eager stagehand dropped the curtain when the husband came in and struck his horrified pose. There was no time for Bocage to say the line. The audience went crazy, screaming and yelling for the curtain to go up again, threatening all sorts of mayhem and refusing to leave the theatre. The trouble was that Bocage was already getting changed. He’d started taking off his makeup and refused to go back on stage. But the gallant Marie Dorval saved the day. She told the stagehand to raise the curtain again. He did and she staggered to her feet from her prone position, limped to the front of the stage and said ‘Yes. Dead. I was resisting him.  He killed me’. The audience loved it and went home even happier than if they’d heard the line spoken by Antony.

You don’t find baying crowds nowadays except at football matches, so that sort of passion has disappeared even though theatre is still capable of generating intense catharsis. But the anecdote demonstrates how theatre can, at the same time, be unbearably intense and fundamentally absurd. That really was a willing suspension of disbelief.

In the good old days, many writers were forgiven all sorts of things because they were geniuses. They woke up (around noon), slipped on a silk dressing gown, breakfasted on absinthe then lay on a chaise longue waiting for the muse to arrive. If she didn’t, they’d try some laudanum or other opiates, grab a pen and scrawl a desperate sonnet or two before it was time to hit the boulevards for more absinthe and a dalliance with one or more soubrettes. The more flamboyant among them would accessorise such lifestyles in a variety of ways, many of which led to the devastations of syphilis, but my personal favourite is that of Gerard de Nerval, who used to take his pet lobster for a walk in the Jardins du Luxembourg on the end of a long ribbon.

Those days have gone now (as Flower of Scotland reminds us) and there are thousands, probably millions, of writers grabbing fleeting moments to scribble between looking after kids, being estate agents, selling insurance, driving buses or, in my case, retiring and having the leisure to write full time. Except that we can’t because, when you’ve written whatever it is, you’ve got to sell it. All of which is a preamble to confessing that, when it comes to promoting and marketing my stuff, I’m rubbish and I lament the passing of the days of silk dressing gowns and absinthe.

The proof? Last weekend, I’d arranged for my satire on online role-playing games, Alternative Dimension, to be free for three days. You see, I was being proactive. The problem was, however, that I didn’t tell anyone I’d done it. I think a total of 19 souls found out somehow that it was free and downloaded it. When I realised what an idiot I’d been (that was late on the third day of the promotion), I extended the freebie period by two days. This time I remembered to broadcast it but then along came an email reminding me that I’d also made Unsafe Acts available at the same time. At the time of writing (3.10 pm, Saturday 14), 4476 people have downloaded it, so it seems that, somehow or other, the news gets through. But think of what that figure might have been if I’d inherited the PR gene. This, however, is part of my attempt to overcome my deficiencies. The promotion is running for the rest of today and tomorrow and you can get it here in the USA  and here  in the UK.

If you have any questions about it, I’ll be on the chaise lounge.