Michael Walters's Blog

Most of the news coming out of Mongolia at the moment seems to be concerned with political tensions and civil unrest (here's a very comprehensive and apparently balanced account from Mongolia Web).

But, by contrast, here's a more positive story from the New York Times about a young jockey.  Though I'm not sure whether to be pleased or depressed that the influence of Manchester United stretches even to Mongolian 13 year olds. 

Political turmoil continues to grip Mongolia, but of course life outside the capital just goes on. 

In the Publishers Weekly interview (see last posting), I mentioned that some incidents and themes that I thought I'd fictionalised or exaggerated in The Shadow Walker had subsequently been reflected in real iife events in Mongolia.  Having just finished editing The Outcast, which deals in part with political activism and potential civil unrest, I was disturbed to see that, following its recent general election, Mongolia has responded to violence on the streets by declaring its first ever state of emergency.  The problems have been described as the 'teething troubles of a young democracy'.  Let's hope so. 

I've been a little quiet on here for the last week or so, as I've been completing the final edits for The Outcast, which is now (I hope) just about ready to go. 

In the meantime, I've been also made some more updates to the website, including adding the first exclusive extract from The Outcast.  More to follow. 

I've also mentioned on the news page that, following its starred review of The Shadow Walker, this week's Publishers Weekly carries an interview with yours truly by Jeff VanderMeer. 

I've just received a first sight of the proposed cover for The Outcast which is due for release by Quercus in November.  A s you can see, it's really rather splendid.

In celebration of the first sighting of the cover, I've now added a new page for The Outcast on the website.  I'll also be adding an exclusive extract very shortly, so keep watching the skies. 

Finally, thanks to Maxine of the ever-excellent Petrona blog for her endorsement of the books in this week's Sunday Salon.   All this, and a starred review in Publishers Weekly...

You'll probably be aware by now of the three Mongolian manly sports of archery, horse-riding and wrestling.  But you've possibly never heard of the sport of ankle-bone shooting.  If not, this article from the ever-enlightening UB Post will tell you everything you need to know. 

Meanwhile, elsewhere on the sports front, there seems to be nothing to stop the global expansion of football (that would be soccer to any US readers).  As over here we wend our way into the latter stages of the European Championships, out east the Mongolian Premier League has just kicked off. 

We Brits seem to have exported our perhaps not entirely enviable reputation for pre-nuptial drinking and carousing to most of the known world, but Mongolia had largely escaped.  Until now. 

You might have noticed a few minor changes to the main Shadow Walker website over the last few days.   With support from the ever-excellent webmeister John O'Malley, I've now been let loose to update the site for myself, with the result that I've now (finally...) added some reviews of The Adversary as well as one or two other minor updates.  We've also added a news page which I'll be launching very shortly, and, most importantly, I've finally included some links from this blog to a number of the other excellent crime fiction blogs out there - I'll be adding more of those shortly. . 

I'll also be adding a page for the third Nergui book, The Outcast, in the very near future, including an exclusive excerpt...

I recently posted about Richard Tuschman's excellent work on the cover for the forthcoming US edition of The Adversary.  Berkley Prime Crime have now sent me the final version, which is very slightly different and, I think, even better than the version Richard posted on his blog. 

Apologies for the shameless self-promotion, but I couldn't resist drawing your attention to what I think is a pretty stunning piece of work.  Thanks once again, Richard. 

No - not a previously undiscovered Robert Ludlum novel (see Peter Rozovsky's comment on my last posting...), but a new blog set up by my agent, the estimable Peter Buckman of The Ampersand Agency.  The blog is designed to stimulate interest in and discussion about - well, people like me, I suppose. 

Apart from yours truly, the Agency's clients include a number of crime writers - Helen Black, S. J. Bolton and Cora Harrison, amongst others - and a pretty diverse range of other authors.  So best wishes to Amy Wigelsworth who's maintaining the blog - give her a visit!

The academic and critic John Sutherland is adept at highlighting literary quirks (as in his splendid books and Is Heathcliffe a Murderer? and Where was Rebecca Shot? which explored the possible implications of apparent literary anomalies).  In a piece in Saturday's Daily Telegraph, he examined the tendency, common in crime fiction but unusual elsewhere, of applying themed titles to series novels.  Some are obvious - Erle Stanley Gardner, James Patterson - but others are less so.  The Raymond Chandler thematic signature is obvious but for some reason had never occurred to me.  And of course I'm also guilty of this practice myself...

Incidentally, the list of James Patterson's 'nursery rhyme' titles seemed ripe for parody and reminded me vaguely of a New Statesman competition some years back in which readers were asked to come up with suggestions for as yet unpublished novels by famous authors.  My favourite was John Le Carré's One Potato, Two Potato, Spy.

In her entertaining book, Wild West - Travels in the New Mongolia, Jill Lawless comments that 'In contrast to the season's symbolism is most countries, spring in Mongolia is the season of death, a time for herders to watch the sky and worry'. 

If one doubted her words, the reports of this week's devastating snow storms in the east of the country provide ample demonstration of Mongolia's uniquely arduous climate.

The relationship between Mongolia, its immediate neighbours and the West was one theme of The Shadow Walker, and it's a subject I've returned to, in a different guise, in the forthcoming third Nergui book, The Outcast. 

But those relationships continue to change and develop, bringing new tensions and new opportunities.  Here and here are a couple of interesting perspectives - the latter particularly interesting for its discussion of Genghis Khan's largely-unheralded role as the father of democracy...

Sergei Bodrov's film, Mongol, opens on 6 June in the UK (and, I believe, in the US).  It's been generally well-received, and was nominated for the Academy Award for Best Foreign Movie.  But views within Mongolia itself seem rather less positive...

A while ago, I posted a link to the fascinating blog maintained by Richard Tuschman, the artist who has designed the splendid cover for the US edition of The Shadow Walker.  Richard's posting on the subject was fascinating because he described the thinking that had led him to the final design, and also provided examples of some of the alternative designs he'd discarded along the way.  It offered a remarkable insight into the creative process. 

Well, he's now done something very similar in respect of his (equally splendid) cover for The Adversary, which Berkley Prime Crime are publishing in the US next year.  Again, he describes the process as well as providing examples of some discarded earlier versions. 

By coincidence, I was reading in this morning's Guardian about the increasing expansion of Tesco into book retailing in the UK.  Joel Rickett of The Bookseller notes that Tesco is moving well beyond simply stocking the obvious bestsellers, but notes in passing that 'the supermarket is typically unapologetic about its influence on the homogenisation of book cover design - pointing out that shoppers need to instantly recognise genres'.  I'm not sure whether that's true or not, but I hope it doesn't prevent artists such as Richard Tuschman from deploying their very considerable talent. 

Mongolia was never a good place to be a vegetarian, as our friend, the children's author Anne Rooney, will attest.  During her visit, I think she subsisted mainly on slightly green tomatoes.  But things are obviously changing, as this review of a new vegetarian restaurant demonstrates. 

Ulaan Bataar is apparently a 'sister city' to Denver, Colorado.  I'm just wondering whether this creates opportunities for a Mongolian version of South Park. 

Thanks to Karen of the entertaining and informative Austcrime blog for a very generous review of The Adversary.  The words in the title, incidentally, are those she chooses to describe Nergui.  Just right, I think. 

I do occasionally worry that Western popular culture is slowly corrupting the world...

Martin Edwards's always fascinating blog, Do you write under your own name?, has recently included a couple of references to the town of Marple in Cheshire (or, more accurately these days, Greater Manchester).  His first post discussed the theory that Agatha Christie's famous detective was named after the town.  Yesterday, he discussed the now largely-forgotten crime writer, Joyce Porter, who was apparently born there.

I've found this interesting since, as it happens, I've lived in Marple for over ten years.  What's more, there's at least one other current crime writer living in the vicinity,  and the writer Edmund Cooper - best remembered as a science fiction writer but author of at least one crime novel - was also born in Marple. 

Given that Marple's a fairly pleasant little place on the edge of the Peak District, with a very limited number of mean streets, I'm not sure how to explain this affinity with crime fiction.  The attraction of opposites, maybe.