Tag Archives: pirates

In which the Author publishes his 31st book, ‘Bloody British History’…

Bloody British History, my 31st book, has just been published. It’s a sanguinary canter through some of the

more gruesome aspects of British history, with an eye to not merely the murderous and macabre, but also to

the strange and, at times, surreal. Delve within the illustrated pages and you will learn of prehistoric cannibals using skulls as drinking cups, discover how to boil a poisoner to death, understand the technique of chemical warfare during medieval sea battles, and learn more about the use of cheese as an instrument of torture than you ever wanted to know.

With a full cast including Ancient Britons, Romans, Barbarians, Anglo-Saxons, Vikings, Normans, Pirates,

Jacobites and invading Frenchmen, Bloody British History relates some of the most famous episodes in the

history of the British Isles from unfamiliar perspectives. The sight of the largest ship in the Spanish Armada

keeling over with blood pouring from its scuppers. The giant Viking at Stamford Bridge finally defeated by a

spear thrust to the testicles from below the bridge he was defending. William the Conqueror turning the North of England into an uninhabited wasteland. The Scots inventing the concentration camp. Roman SEALs

conducting amphibious warfare. Witchcraft in Westminster politics. Not the six wives, but the Six Executions of Henry VIII. And how not to assassinate Queen Victoria.

Featuring walk-on parts from all manner of unpleasant characters from Richard the Lionheart and Bloody

Mary to Jack the Ripper and Hitler’s Gestapo, Bloody British History does what it says on the can.

There will, indeed, be blood.

The book is published by The History Press and is available through all the usual retail channels, including the country’s hard-pressed but indispensable brick-and-mortar bookshops.

In which the Author takes part in the Creative Process Blog Tour…

The Creative Process Blog Tour

My thanks to Hilary McGrath for nominating me for this round of the Creative Process Blog Tour, where writers get to answer four questions and whitter on about their innermost creative processes.

Note: every word below is the absolute unvarnished truth.

Except for the lies.

What am I working on?

1) VAMPIRES.

I’m sending my completed iconoclastic vampire novel Palefaces out to literary agents. The tagline:

Cops – vampires – vampire cops.

There will, almost certainly, be some blood.

There will, almost certainly, be some rejections.

2) CRIME.

I’m half way through the writing of Sex, Lies and Croissants, a softboiled crime novel set in southwest France,

featuring a handsome but irredeemably grumpy British detective mixed up with porn stars, religious maniacs and

drunk Frenchmen with guns. First in a series, if the gods be kind.

3) BLOODY HISTORY.

I’m working through the proofs for The Bloody History of Britain, which will be published by The History Press in September. This will be my 31^st non-fiction book. Expect:

Cannibals from the Dawn of Time

Anarchy in the UK (12^th century style)

Pirate Monks

The Six Executions of Henry VIII

Plus Norman genocide, Nazis, Zeppelins, Jacobites, and a surfeit of lampreys.

All this and murders, torture, massacres, punishments, castrations and executions galore. You’ve got to laugh,

haven’t you?

4) SEX.

I’m using allure, coquetry and a packet of powerful pheromones in the hope of attracting agents or publishers to a non-fiction book on some of the stranger but universal aspects of sex and sexual culture.

5) SHERBERT LEMONS.

Notes are being made and ideas corralled for a YA fantasy involving cryptozoology, time travel and sherbert

lemons. There may also be a fantasy/high-tech film screenplay incarcerated in the oubliette.

How does my work differ from others of its genre?

My natural tendency when I am writing is to upset the apple cart of expectations.

When writing about vampires, I want to destroy the entire accepted vampiric mythology and create a completely

new take on their origins, behaviour and sexuality.

If I’m setting a crime novel in rural Gascony – beloved by Terry Wogan and other Brits – my hero has to loathe

other expats and everything they stand for.

In The Bloody History of Britain I avoid the clichés of history and tell stories from the shadows: how Scotland

invented the concentration camp, the reason the Wars of the Roses were like a football match, and why King John was marginally better than that narcissistic psychopath Richard the Lionheart.

My ghost books are sceptical about ghosts. My paranormal books interrogate the paranormal rather than just

going ‘Woooh!’ Whether it’s fiction or non-fiction, it is my pleasure to tamper with accepted ideas and default genre preoccupations. Punk iconoclasm, that’s what we need.

Why do I write what I do?

I wrote my very first book, The Guide to Mysterious Perthshire, because I was living in Perthshire and it was

something I wanted to read – but there was simply nothing like it on the market. I write non-fiction on the weird and the strange because of a longstanding conviction that the world is weirder and stranger than most people think,

and that some of the data gathered may actually lead, one day, to a paradigm change.

And I write fiction because it is a socially acceptable way to kill people.

How does my writing process work?

I don’t actually have any ideas myself. I pay a subscription to an ideas-generating company based in the Cayman

Islands and they send me ten creative suggestions a month.

Who I nominate next…

I now pass the baton to those fine individuals and writers Kirstie Swain and Moore & Reppion. Good luck, chaps.

In which the Author reanimates some historical zombies…

The Walking Dead. Walkers. Biters. Eaters. The Infected. The Contaminated. The Re-animated. Revenants. The

Living Dead. Whatever you want to call them, the zombie apocalypse is coming. You know it, I know it.

So, faced with the inevitable, what do you do? Do you wait until that dull bloke from No.37 is lurching through the

French windows, intent on feasting on your entrails? Or do you step up, take some pride in your actions, and take out some of history’s big guns before you are finally eaten?

If the latter, then you are in the right place. The end of September sees the publication of Zombies from History: A Hunter’s Guide, the all-in-one guidebook on how to take out sixty high-value targets from Britain’s illustrious (and

ignoble) past. The good and the great mix with famous criminals, rebels and pirates. Do you itch to take on one of

the grandees of nineteenth century literature, or test yourself against an axe-wielding medieval bampot? Wrestle

with Nelson? Battle with Boudica? Then this, friend, is your opportunity. Where they are buried, what wounds and weaknesses they bear, height, age, difficulty level – everything the fully prepared and thoughtful zombie hunter

needs to know.

Note that contemporary zombie culture did not start with Night of the Living Dead. The dead have been returning

for centuries. Zombies from History is therefore peppered with accounts of those who were declared dead but yet

lived; those who survived the hangman’s noose or were buried alive; and descriptions of bog bodies, preserved

corpses and mummified remains. In addition, there are juicy bits of folklore, tall tales and unlikely legends

concerning the walking dead, most taken from historical accounts that stretch back more than a thousand years.

Over the next few days and weeks I’ll be sharing some zombified portraits of famous Britons. To kick off, here’s

the king of the car park, Richard III, on the book’s cover.

Geoff Holder / Geoff Dupuy-Holder

Screenwriter, Author, Curmudgeonly Old Git

Tag Archives: pirates

In which the Author publishes his 31st book, ‘Bloody British History’…

In which the Author takes part in the Creative Process Blog Tour…

In which the Author reanimates some historical zombies…