Celebrating Rock Cake Day and the Great Readers in our Lives.

Edge Author Dave Cousins on books, baking and inspirational readers.

In our house, January 16th is Rock Cake Day!

My nan would have been ninety-four today, and each year we mark her birthday by baking a batch of Rock Cakes, using the closely guarded secret recipe (don't even ask!) she developed and passed on to us.

At this point some of you may be thinking—“Hang on a minute! I thought this was the Edge? The home of gritty YA fiction. Why’s this bloke babbling on about buns?” 

Let me explain …

Apart from her legendary baking skills, my Nan was also a great reader. (She is the only person I have ever met who managed to read the entire works of Charles Dickens—twice!) Her love of books started when she caught whooping cough as a child and had to spend long periods of time in hospital. Her dad was a big reader and, worried that his daughter might be missing out, took books in for her. When she got home, my nan still wasn’t strong enough to play outside, but found plenty of adventure and excitement in the stories she'd discovered.

Her first job, aged 16, was as a seamstress with a small firm in Birmingham in the 1930s. Keen that her workforce of young, sometimes poorly-educated, girls should find further enrichment, the owner started a tradition of reading aloud during the lunch break. My nan told me how they worked their way through the Old and New Testament of the Bible, before moving onto Dickens and Shakespeare—a bit different to Radio One blasting away in the staff canteen!

As I little kid, I remember Nan as always having a book on the go. It made me think that there might be something in this reading business—so I copied her, and started carrying A Bear Called Paddington around with me! I’ll admit that to begin with I didn’t open it that often, but after a while I gave it a go—and of course, I was hooked.

As I got older, I began recommending what I was reading to her. I’m not sure how much she actually enjoyed The Three Investigators series, but she read them, and we talked about how great they were. In turn, she lent me The Wind in the Willows and Watership Down (the first book to make me cry, sitting up in bed at 2am, sobbing by torchlight!) But the greatest passion we shared was Robert Westall. We were on a mission to collect and read his entire works. Sadly, my Nan died before we could complete the quest, but we did a pretty good job. I am now keeper of the collection—still guarded by the pig bookends she used to keep them in place.

Readers need each other—just as much as writers need readers, and readers need writers! I suspect that human beings have an innate need to share the things we like. (Have a quick look at Facebook or Twitter if you don't believe me.) We see a fantastic film, hear a great record or read a brilliant book, but it’s as though the process isn’t complete until we can tell somebody about it—and stories are meant for sharing.  

So, to all the great readers I have known and talked books with—but especially my nan—Happy Rock Cake Day! And if there is one special person who first introduced you to this wonderful world of books, why not give them a call—find out what they're reading, or meet up and share stories over a brew and a rock cake! You know it makes sense.

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Who is your inspirational reader? Please leave a comment and let us know your story.

The Inspiration for my new crime mystery Chasing the Dark – by guest author, Sam Hepburn

This week, we are delighted to welcome Sam Hepburn as our guest author at the Edge. Her new novel Chasing the Dark is out now! Over to you, Sam …

Inspiration is such a strange and slippery thing. For me, the seeds of a story seem to take root when a memory from the distant past is triggered by something that catches my attention in the present. That is exactly how this scrap of paper came to spark the plot for my new book Chasing the Dark.

I found it lying in the street when I was trying to come up with the plot for a crime mystery. I can’t even remember where I was at the time but it made such an impression on me that I took it home, pinned it to the notice board beside my desk and looked at it all the time I was thinking about the plot.

The little boy is smiling at the camera, happily leaning back in his mother’s arms and obviously feeling safe and secure. His mum however, is looking off into the distance. Is she thinking about the future or the past? Has someone or something caught her attention? You get the feeling that these two are alone in the world, so perhaps she is a single mum. If you look more closely you can see that the image has been created from two separate pictures put together with a ragged white rip passing between the two figures. While the little boy is surrounded by warm red bricks and the homely clutter of garden chairs, the mother is cut off by a bleak cold wall, as if he has a future and she does not.

The boy also appears to be mixed race, which resonated with me because I am the child of a white English mother and an absent African father, a combination that is commonplace nowadays but pretty rare when I was growing up in the 1960s and 70s. This is a picture of me and my mother taken when I must have been about two.

So I was interested in exploring the strengths and tensions within a modern single parent family with a missing African father and the more I looked at the image on my notice board the more it began to shape the back story of Joe Slattery, the fourteen year old hero of Chasing the Dark.

All he knows about his father is that he was a Kenyan student who went back to Nairobi before Joe was born. His mum Sadie has struggled to bring him up, earning a precarious living by singing in pubs and clubs and performing at weddings. They live on a rundown housing estate in North London and although they have their problems their bond is extremely close. Joe’s whole world is therefore ripped apart when his mum is killed in a hit and run car crash alongside a well-known investigative journalist. Since Sadie never accepted lifts from strangers, the only conclusion Joe can draw is that for some reason the journalist had met her by arrangement before driving her home. Joe is overwhelmed by a burning desire to know what that reason was and as he struggles with his grief he begins a desperate chase through a dangerous world of secrets, lies and conspiracy.

Part of that conspiracy was inspired by a documentary I made for the BBC nearly twenty years ago, called “The Picasso Files”, all about the files that the Soviet Secret Service had kept on the artist Pablo Picasso during the cold war. It gave me a fascinating insight into the way the KGB ran their spying operations. The KGB archive in Moscow sent me a huge box of photocopied files in Russian which I sent off to a translator. When the translations came back I realised that some of the pages had nothing to do with Picasso and had quite obviously been misfiled. To be honest, what was on them was really unexciting but I have always wondered what would happen if a few pages that were still top secret accidentally found their way into the hands of a reporter. Then, a couple of years ago, I read that the government in Ukraine were opening up some of their KGB archive to the public. When I discovered that former Soviet spies were panicking because top secret files really were falling into the hands of journalists I knew I’d found the key to the mystery at the heart of Chasing the Dark.

Chasing the Dark is out now, published by Chicken House.

Find out more about Sam Hepburn at www.samhepburnbooks.com

Thanks to Sam for being this week's guest at the Edge.

New Book Announcement! Savita Kalhan

I am delighted to announce that my next novel for teens and young adults will be published in spring 2013 by Frances Lincoln Children’s Books. It is called AMNESIA, and it’s about a fourteen year old boy who wakes up in a hospital bed with no memory. He doesn’t even recognise his mother.

The inspiration for this book came from some unusual places. A friend had recommended The Man who Mistook His Wife for A Hat by Oliver Sacks, to me, which I was reading late one evening. The TV was on in the background. I often read like this, and, yes, you might think that I can’t possibly concentrate on both at the same time, but actually I seem to manage quite well. I grew up the eldest of seven kids and learnt to read with constant noise in the background, so it’s an old habit that I can’t seem to break. I went upstairs at some point and heard my teenager talking in his sleep – he only does this around midnight and only for a few moments.

By the next day I had the germ of an idea for a book.

In The Importance of Being Earnest, Oscar Wilde wrote, Memory is the diary that we all carry about with us... Losing your memory is like losing yourself, your identity. You are completely reliant on others to help you fill in your past.

By the afternoon I had written the opening of AMNESIA.

Ideas and inspirations for stories often spring from the strangest places. Where do you get your ideas from?

Summertime and writers go out in the world........by Miriam Halahmy

Writers constantly need to replenish their imaginations and for me that has always meant taking to the road. When I was young I travelled all over the UK and Europe, sleeping in youth hostels, tents, barns, railway stations and under the stars on the beach. 

The earth belongs to me ( and to you of course) and I have continued to travel all my life. I have paddled in four oceans and withstood temperatures from -30C all the way to +45C. I have spoken in languages from Russian to Arabic and everywhere I went I always had a notebook at the bottom of my bag. 

This summer I started a new book and I had to dig very deep for the words. My travels took me to Crosby beach within sight and sound of Liverpool and its great historic docks.

On Crosby beach are 100 cast iron life-size figures, sculpted by one of our great modern artists, Anthony Gormley ( Angel of the North.) The figures are made from casts of the artist’s own body. They are dotted along 3km of the foreshore and 1km out to sea.  Gormley says, “they harness the ebb and flow of the tide to explore man’s relationship with nature.” 

When we first reached the beach at 11.00am the tide was in and huge waves crashed against the concrete walkway. The sculptures were completely covered but as the waves rose and fell; heads and sometimes shoulders were revealed like upright drowning men. 

People hang jumpers, scarves, sunhats and even a motorbike helmet on the sculptures, casting them as modern scarecrows trying to frighten the gulls and the wind farms out at sea.

 By 4.00pm the beach was like a different planet. The sea had receded by almost a quarter mile and all along the damp sands we could see the iron men facing out to sea as if seeking a new world. Gormley calls the installation, ‘Another Place’ and says, “This sculpture exposes to light and time the nakedness of a particular and peculiar body. It is no hero, no ideal...

The entire experience blew a new world through my body and my mind, giving me inspiration, mystery, imagination, pictures, colours and streams and streams of words. If I am to remain true to my art of writing and writing without compromise to the edge, then days like this are the structure and sculpture that I need to propel my work forward.

Do you write to travel or travel to write?