Unholy doings on hallowed ground

December by Phil Rickman
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Four members of a rock band called "The Philosophers Stone" split up after a recording session on a December night at Ystrad Duu Abbey in South Wales. It happened to be the night that John Lennon was killed, and one member of the band felt that he was experiencing the event as it was happening. The others all experienced bad things too, so they destroyed the tapes and left without completing the album they were recording.

Fourteen years later a producer tries to persuade them to get back together to finish the uncompleted album. but they have heard that bad things had happened there before, and seemed to happen at seven-year intervals, so they are reluctant to do so, unless they can break the jinx on the abbey, whose history seems to have been less holy than they had thought.

This book is vintage Phil Rickman, first published in 1994 when he was still writing horror, before he started fancying himself as a writer of whodunits, so I was glad to have found it in a second-hand bookshop, and find it was one that I hadn't read -- I've found new books by Phil Rickman in the past and then discovered that they are ones I've already read, but have been sneakily reissued by the publishers under a different title. I liked this one a lot better than some of his more recent books which are more like detective stories. In this one there are dead bodies and the police do investigate, but by the time all the bodies are counted, everyone knows who did it. It's not that I don't like whodunits. I do, and quite often read them. But there are lots of better whodunit writers out there than Phil Rickman; there are not nearly as many good horror writers.

As with most horror books there are also some pretty nasty things that happen. Why in a ruined abbey? Well, it seems that there were unholy goings on there in the past, including the ultimate betrayal. And while reading it I kept thinking of something told me many years ago by Father Ephraim of the Simonos Petros Monastery on the Holy Mountain. He said that more people go to hell from monasteries than anywhere else. It's all too easy for a monk to lose his (or her) nipsis (watchfulness).

There are some flaws. One of them was that he rapidly switches viewpoint characters without indicating which character it is, so I often found I would start reading a section, and by the third paragraph real ised which character it was, and had to go back and re-read from the beginning of the section to place the scene in my mind. That gets mildly annoying after a while.

He also included too many cliffhangers --something bad happens to one character, and just at the critical point he switches to another, and by the time you get back to the scene you find that something else had happened, and often to a different character. This is OK the first couple of times, but when it is overdone it gets tiresome, and Phil Rickman doesn't seem to know when to stop.

But aside from those rather minor niggles it was an enjoyable read.




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Will the real Lucy please stand up

Julian Lennon came home from school one day with a drawing that inspired his father to write the song Lucy in the sky with diamonds, but there seems to be some confusion about which Lucy inspired the original drawing. BBC NEWS | Beatles song 'inspiration' dies:

The woman who was said to have inspired the Beatles song Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds has died at the age of 46 of the immune system disease Lupus.

It was rumoured the song featured on the Sergeant Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band album was about the drug LSD.

But Lennon insisted it was inspired by a drawing by his son Julian of Lucy, a classmate while they were at a nursery in Weybridge, Surrey in 1966.

But then there's this Lucy Richardson (I) - Biography:

She was a few years older than Julian Lennon when he enrolled at the private Heath House School, in Weybridge, Surrey. However, because John Lennon and the other Beatles used to visit the Richardson family's antique and jewellery shop, she knew Julian. So when he became homesick and unsettled she would be called out of class to sit with him while he drew pictures. One of those pictures was of Lucy. One day John Lennon came into the shop and said, 'Hello, Lucy in the sky with diamonds', but they thought it was just John being John. However, when a song with that same name appeared on 1967's Sgt Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band album, the family began to wonder.

How many more claimants are there? Will the real Lucy please stand up.

Thank you for the music

I've had the TV wittering away in the background, waiting for some mention of the death of Mary Travers. Not a word. When Michael Jackson died there was no other news the whole day, and the same happened on the day of his funeral. I can't recall a single song by Michael Jackson, but I can think of many sung by Mary Travers. I suppose it must be the generation gap.

Mary Travers: the singer who used pop stardom for the greater good:

Mary Travers, who has died from the side effects of chemotherapy aged 72, was the essence of the freewheeling Greenwich Village bohemian — even if Peter, Paul And Mary's Puff The Magic Dragon may suggest otherwise. Singing protest songs with a strident glamour, a shock of blonde hair shaking to the sounds of righteousness as two bearded folkie types played guitar on either side of her, Travers was the ideal public face for New York's beatnik scene. Prettier than Bob Dylan, less hectoring than Joan Baez, she made the idea of sipping overpriced coffee in a downtown dive, while a guitar player sang songs of freedom seem like the greatest thing in the world.

Hattie Carroll's killer dies

In 1964 Bob Dylan released a record album, The times they are a-changin' with the song The lonesome death of Hattie Carroll, about a black barmaid who died after being assaulted by the son of a rich white farmer, who was sentenced to six months imprisonment for his role in her death. Now her killer has died, but his deed lives on in infamy.

William Zantzinger - Telegraph:

William Zantzinger, who died on January 3 aged 69, was the scion of a rich tobacco farming family in Maryland whose drunken, racist assault of a black waitress at a society ball in 1963 ended in her death. He would have subsequently sunk unmourned from view had the attack not come to the attention of a young folk singer, 22-year-old Bob Dylan. As it was he became a notorious and widely-loathed icon of bigotry just as America's civil rights movement came to the boil.

'William Zanzinger killed poor Hattie Carroll/With a cane that he twirled around his diamond ring finger,' Dylan sang in The Lonesome Death of Hattie Carroll.

The times they have a-changed, at least to some extent, and at least in part as a result of the songs of Bob Dylan.