The year is 2039.
The setting is the British Isles – but not the British Isles as we know them today.
The brutal economic impact of the United Kingdom’s withdrawal from the EU, together with the ever-accelerating effects of global warming have led to a very different environment indeed, in almost every way. Politics, geography and technology are all in flux.
But some things remain the same – greed, murder, conspiracy and corruption among them. When Stephanie Flack, licensed private eye in the Royal Province of Anglia, is asked to track down some missing diamonds, she soon finds the trail leading her into some very unexpected and highly dangerous places, with dead bodies appearing with alarming regularity. Including, very nearly, her own.
R.M. Cartmel’s skilful characterisation, sharp observation and quiet irony provide a glimpse into a future which we can almost recognise. A brilliant, gentle, wry dystopian murder mystery.
North Sea Rising by R M Cartmel was published in paperback by Crime Scene Books on 16 August 2018. As part of the #RandomThingsTours Blog Tour I'm delighted to welcome the author here to Random Things today. He's talking about the books that are special to him in My Life in Books.
My Life In Books - R M Cartmel
When I was a small boy I read boys' adventure stories like Biggles until I discovered Hammond Innes, Nevil Shute, and Alistair MacLean, who wrote sort of more grown-up boys' adventures. From those days I pick my first book:
On The Beach by Nevil Shute. It was the first book that I had ever read that did not have a ‘happy ending’. In fact it scared me witless. Here was a tale that told the story of the results of a conflict which conflagrated into nuclear war.
I continued to read avidly, and becoming a student in Oxford, I discovered a bookshop just ten minutes' walk from my college. I was in there often to get a new textbook for my studies and I took the opportunity to just browse. It was then that I discovered the value of a ‘good’ as in ‘memorable’ title. There was a book I saw several times, whose title kept leaping off the Science Fiction shelves shouting ‘Me! Me!’ and in the end I found I had a spare 3/6d and bought it:
Mindswap by Robert Sheckley. What I didn’t expect was that this story, on occasions, left me howling with laughter at the problems a man who went on holiday by swapping bodies with someone else who wanted to go where he was. The problem was that someone had nicked a personality along the line so he had to keep changing who he was just to stay alive!
From thereon I have always dabbled in science fiction, and once again it was a good title and a wonderful cover that grabbed me:
The Many-Colored Land, Volume I in The Saga of the Pliocene Exile by Julian May. And for the next few years I read each episode of the saga as they appeared
For my fourth book I have chosen:
Hans Helmut Kirst’s The Night of the Generals. This is a story about an obsessional detective in the middle of the Second World War who, despite all the brutality and carnage all around him in Warsaw in 1942 and Paris in 1944, was totally fixated on the murderer of two prostitutes. In true Agatha Christie style, the detective finally catches the killer in 1956 when he kills again. There is a message there - if you’re going to kill someone, never do it again. Kirst’s main subtext is the difference between being a German and being a Nazi. He has written several brilliant books on that subject and I could have chosen Brothers In Arms, Officer Factory, or Hero in the Tower but Night of the Generals is the most famous and they made a big Hollywood film of it starring Peter O’Toole, Omar Sharif, Donald Pleasance and Tom Courtenay.
For my fifth and final book, I have gone back to my bookshop browsing habits and spotted another ‘great title’ that wouldn’t leave me alone:
Quite Ugly One Morning by Christopher Brookmyre. The cover just had those words on the front. I bought it and read the book and loved his spiky sense of humour and his plotting. I have been an avid Brookmyre-o-holic ever since. Ask me which I think is my favourite, I have no idea, but that book was the first one. I am also aware I have seen him perform at several conferences, and he is invariably screamingly funny.
R M Cartmel - August 2018
Following
a highly successful career as a GP, RM Cartmel returned to his first love and
took up writing again.
Well-known
for his wine and crime series set in France, The Inspector Truchaud Mysteries,
he also has a second, rather more offbeat series of North Sea Noir, which can
be read as stand alone but connected novels, set in Peterborough. North Sea
Rising is the second of these.
Twitter @CartmelDr
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