The Dai and Julia Mysteries by Jane Jago and E.M. Swift-Hook, a  whodunit series set in a modern day Britain where the Roman Empire still rules.

Early November MDCCLXXVII

The golden autumnal weather had given way to a chilly November. Dai Llewellyn sat at his desk by the broad window that looked out over the walled garden of his residence. He still struggled to think of it as ‘home’. Maybe it was the eagle over the door that sneered at him every time he crossed the threshold with its silent message that this was a villa designated sub aquila – Roman only. He wondered if he could arrange to get the facade remodelled on some excuse so above the name of the house, the poppies of its name were wreathed there instead.
He had been absently playing with the silver band around his index finger as he thought these near treasonous thoughts. Then he looked at the ring, it’s intricate blend of Celtic knots and Roman letters and symbols. It marked him out as a citizen – as Roman as his beloved wife Julia and without it she could not be his. She had given him this ring to remind him that their worlds were enriched by each other, not diminished.
Days like this he had to be reminded of that. Sighing, he tried to focus again on the information in front of him. A breakdown of the tenancy of a group of insulae on the rougher edge of Viriconium’s expanding commercial area. The buildings were owned by a Britannia wide property agency – Titus Holdings. They provided housing for over four hundred families – most were single-parent households or impoverished elderly folk who either had no family or whose sons and daughters lacked the space and resources to take them in. It was one of the poorest communities in the city and Dai knew that Titus Holdings did little for its tenants except ensure the structural integrity of the building was maintained. And that was only to avoid facing criminal charges if they should collapse.
He had not visited the estate himself since his return to Viriconium after almost a decade living in Londinium, but his Senior Investigator, Bryn Cartivel had done so and his account had been harrowing.
“I’m not saying I’ve not seen as bad – we both have. Think the dreg ends of the Caligula, but that was Londinium and most there were unregistered and criminals. These people are just desperately poor. Most do seasonal work in the farms around or go begging even. Half the kids look like they’ve not had a decent meal in their lives and most all the old folk are ill from the mould and damp. I was told there is a local joke that the estate has to restock each spring ‘cos so many don’t make it through the winter.” Bryn shook his head at the thought. “It’s grim, Bard.”
“Grim – but not illegal.” Dai had a bitter taste in his mouth as he spoke. “The law says no one forces those people to live there, they choose to do so. That means they choose to accept the conditions the owner offers. After all, if they don’t like it they can always leave.”
“I can see it now you put it that way. They are spoiled for choice with alternatives – sleep on the streets, or under a bridge by the river – or maybe in a nice comfy hedgerow.”
Dai sighed.
“Roman logic. People who can’t imagine what it is like to be so poor the very concept of ‘choice’ about anything in life is meaningless.”
“Not all Romans are rich – your Julia was born in a place not so very different, from what my Gwen tells me.”
“That’s true, but it’s the rich ones that make the laws.”

The reason Bryn had been visiting the Titus estate was the same reason Dai was pouring over complex legal documents relating to the ownership of it and looking at the list of tenants. Over the last month there had been a series of unexplained accidents – lifts failing, elderly people falling down a few steps and being injured but saying they felt as if they had been pushed, people reporting things being stolen whilst they were out but with no sign of a break in, a couple of small fires when people were out and reports of strange sounds coming from the walls. Not surprisingly, the local rumour mill had it that the blocks were cursed or haunted – or both.
Dai had ordered an investigation of the buildings from a structural viewpoint and he had read the surveyors report the previous day. It both utterly exonerated the owners for meeting the minimum legal requirements of upkeep, whilst completely damning them for taking no care or concern for the condition and welfare of their tenants. But that had been a careful subscript and had no legal significance at all. Which would have been the end of Dai’s ability to intervene had a fresh chance accident not occurred – only this one was fatal.
And it wasn’t an accident.
Gedder Blynae had been one of the better off residents of the estate and lived in Insula Cicero. He had returned home early from a family visit in Caesaromagus and found someone – or someones – in the process of emptying his home of its contents into an unmarked and unregistered van. Having served as an auxiliary in his youth, Gedder decided to tackle them himself. Being in the tail end of his seventies, his will was stronger that his way and he was found by his neighbours with severe injuries. Unfortunately for the thieves who killed him, he lived long enough to talk to the first of the vigiles on the scene. She was one of those who had transferred from Londinium with Dai and Bryn.
“He was in his right mind, dominus. Gripped my hand that tight I got bruises,” she had shown Dai and Bryn the imprint of Gedder’s fingers. “He said ‘You tell’em it was them bastards who did it – them was Titus boys. I pulled the mask off the one and he were the same as gets round when the rent is due’. Then he swore a lot and that was it.”
The word of a dead Briton spoken to a non-citizen vigiles against that of a citizen was never going to stand as anything more than inadmissible hearsay in a court presided over by Roman law. But for Dai, it was enough to set him pouring through the affairs of Titus holdings with a fine toothed comb. But so far it all came up squeaky clean legally. What he couldn’t figure was why Titus Holdings had decided to mount a campaign of terror against its own tenants when the profit being made from them was easily tripling any expenditure on the insulae.
So he did what he did whenever something was not working out in his own mind and went to find Julia.

From ‘Dying for a Home’ a short story in The First Dai and Julia Omnibus by E.M. Swift-Hook and Jane Jago.

Me and my rat terrier, Gyp, have opinions on a lot of things – like beef, cheese, beer, television. And designer dogs.

Do. Not. Buy. A designer dog. 

They are mongrels – and often not as healthy as proper accidental scruffs. When I wanted a dog I found a farmer whose terrier bitch had got out and mated with a dog or dogs unknown. I gave him a tenner for Gyp who is an excellent companion – if a bit inclined to fart under the dinner table and bite visitors.

He’s an ugly little sod and his hair is the bane of my life, but there again he wasn’t specially bred for his face or not to shed hair on the Aubusson.

However, I do like all dogs, though, even the poor designer chaps. So why am I so against idiots paying a couple of grand for an ‘oodle’?

I’ll tell you why…

When me and Gyp amble along to the pub we meet a great many ‘oodles’ with their shiny collars and special fleece coats and often ridiculous haircuts. They are never let off their shiny red leashes and their walk buddies ignore their pleading eyes as they fiddle with their smart phones or count their steps on their twitbits. Meanwhile Argus, or Tweedledum, or whatever the poor animal is called, has been demoted to a mere accessory and is expected to look beautiful but not to need fun or affection.

We see the poor animals watching Gyp with envious eyes as he scuttles about in the undergrowth. We watch the yummies treat their dogs like status symbols and our contempt for them knows no bounds.

So. Unless you want a grumpy old lady and a bad-tempered terrier to creep up behind you one day and liberate the dog you don’t bloody deserve, here is a list of things You Do Not Do.

Don’t buy a designer dog. Go to a shelter and adopt a dog.

Don’t get your dog a stupid haircut

Don’t put stupid clothes on your dog

Don’t drag your dog along behind you and ignore it

Basically if you have a dog it should be your best mate. 

If you don’t understand that you better just bugger off now, before Gyp pisses on your shoes.

Cherie wanted a dog with every fibre of her being, but the doctors wouldn’t countenance the hair or the drool, so her loneliness grew and each day she faded a little more.

Schnitzel started life as a poster on Cherie’s bedroom wall, his face made her laugh and she seemed to take comfort from him.

When money is no object very little is impossible and Cherie awoke from a fitful slumber to find her favourite poster made ‘flesh’. 

“Schnitzel,” she whispered. 

Who knew that a million dollar artificial dog could give a precious child the impetus to try and live.

Jane Jago

I come across books to review in a variety of ways. Some cross my path, I find them in the hallway where Mumsie has dropped them after imbibing one too many. Some impact me deeply, like those that she has hurled at me in one of her moods. Some I trip over, usually on my way to bed where it has been left prominently placed by my parent in the hope I might read it. A few,  however are recommended to me by Adoring Fans.

1984 was one such. I shall not name and shame the one who suggested it was suitable reading material, but it is enough to say I have struck their name from my list of those who I shall be sending signed copies of my next book.

My Review of 1984 by George Orwell

A rather boring office worker has a love affair disapproved of by the authorities. The lovers think they are keeping it secret but it turns out they are not. They are punished for having the love affair by being put in prison and having to endure endless boring lectures. Then they are released. The end.

This book seemed determined to play on the popularity of a couple of television series I have had the misfortune to watch ‘Big Brother’ and ‘Room 101’. I am surprised the author could get away with such blatant plagiarism. The title puzzled me too. Why 1984? Why not 2013? That would have sounded much more sinister.

I failed to find much in this book to merit further comment.

One star for effort.

Moonbeam Farquhar Metheringham IV

You can find more of IVy’s profound thoughts in How To Start Writing A Book courtesy of E.M. Swift-Hook and Jane Jago.

Spring was getting going which meant The Owners took longer walks so Bowzer and Bubbles could too.
Bowzer checked the peemails on the oaktree which he hadn’t got to visit since the end of summer.
“Ohhh, Daisy had another litter,” he told Bubbles. 
“Anything from Old Pogle?”
Bowzer sniffed.
“Nothing in a while.”
“Guess that means…”
“Mebbe.”
They trotted on, lost in sad speculation. Pogle had lived the other side of Muddy Wood, they’d only met on long walk days.
“Pogle liked spring.”
“I’ll miss him.”
“Wait!”
Bowzer caught a familiar scent on the breeze and ran forward barking happily.

E.M. Swift-Hook

They called her Nanny Bee, although as far as anyone knew she had never been a wife or a mother, let alone a grandmother. But she was popularly believed to be a witch – so Nanny it was. She lived in a pink-walled thatched cottage that crouched between the village green and the vicarage. The Reverend Alphonso Scoggins (a person of peculiarly mixed heritage and a fondness for large dinners) joked that between him and Nanny they could see the villagers from birth to burial.
Nanny’s garden was the most verdant and productive little patch you could ever imagine, and she could be found pottering in its walled prettiness from dawn to dusk almost every day. People came to visit and were given advice, or medicine, or other potions in tiny bottles or scraps of paper – but they always had the sneaking suspicion they were getting in the way of the gardening.
But there again, digging is second nature to gnomes.

It was a sunny Sunday morning and Nanny was listening to the church choir while she pricked out some seedlings. She was idly wondering who possessed the piercing soprano that was permanently half a beat behind the rest when a shadow fell over the potting shed. She put down her dibber and went outside. A winged horse hovered over her tiny lawn.
“Ho sister,” it said, “there’s trouble at the castle and you wanted immediately.”
“If His Greediness has got himself indigestion again, I ain’t coming.”
“No. It isn’t that. There’s something happened to the lordling. His wife is in her chamber sobbing and he’s nowhere to be found.”
“Oh right. Hang on. I’ll just get my bag.”
“And maybe change your gardening boots?”
“Oh. Right. Okay. I’ll come out the front door.”
It’s not every day that you get to ride on the back of Fledge his own self, but Bee was a prosaic being and rather resented being pulled away from her petunias.
Fledge dropped neatly to earth in the stable yard and walked quietly to the mounting block. Nanny jumped down and bowed to the horse.
“I thanks you for my safe ride.”
“You are welcome.”
The castle functionary who awaited her sneered down from his great height. Nanny ignored him and stumped off towards the private apartments. To his chagrin, the tall clerk had to run to keep up with her. The door guard saluted her with his pike before winking broadly.
She walked sturdily into the formal presence chamber and chaos. There appeared to be upwards of a dozen people all shouting at the very tops of their voices. The only pool of silence centred around a slender figure cloaked in rose-pink velvet, who stood right in the centre of a patch of sunlight. She turned her perfect face and smirked at Nanny, who chose not to notice her.
“You’ll have to be polite to me when I have the young one’s ring on my finger,” beauty hissed.
“Oh. I doubt it,” Nanny spoke absentmindedly as most of her brain was taken up with assessing the situation around her.
As far as it was possible to make any sense, the Lord and his Heir were nose to nose and both were puce with rage. Her ladyship was alternately screaming like a banshee and having recourse to her lace kerchief. The other shouters appeared to be various staff members and functionaries who could safely be discounted.
Nanny ambled over to where father and son were having their ‘discussion’ and knocked politely on the younger man’s knee. He stopped yelling at his father and looked down.
“Ah, Nanny,” he said genially, “can you make this old fool see that I’m firm in my resolve.”
“Your resolve to do what, sir?”
“Why to divorce my unfaithful wife and marry my true love.”
Nanny looked into his fair and foolish face and sighed. She beckoned and when he bent down he was felled by a scientific blow from a knobbly little fist.
As soon as he hit the ground the air wavered about beauty and she began to look less beautiful. She looked at Nanny with loathing before she picked up her skirts and ran.
“When he wakes up he won’t remember any of this. But somebody needs to explain to his wife that she is NOT to withhold his conjugals if she don’t want this to happen again.”
Nanny went back to her petunias, deeply grateful that gnomes only consider sex in an abstract manner, and only as it pertains to other people.

I sing a song of spring and flowers
Quiet moments gentle hours
Grass of green and sky of blue 
Nature in her brightest hues
Daffodils in petticoats yellow
Primroses in colours mellow
As I sit beneath the sky
I think of you and wonder why
You walked away and stole my heart 
Although you swore we’d never part 
I sing a song of spring and sorrow
Perhaps I shall forget tomorrow

Jane Jago

Fatswhistle and Buchtooth by Moonbeam Farquhar Metheringham IV is seminal work of science fantasy sets the benchmark by which all others are judged. Where quest meets tragedy, and comedy meets despair. Critics are calling it ‘the best ever cure for insomnia’ and ‘the book that finally persuaded me I hate science fantasy’.

A tiny weeny extract in which we explore the tender relationship between our hero and his trusty female companion.

They came out of the desert into the fertile valley of the big river, just as the sun was dropping. Buchtooth kicked her camel until it knelt and leapt off the saddle throwing her clothing off as she ran towards the water.
“Come on Fatswhistle you ugly bastard, get off your frigging camel and get into this water. You smell worse than him.”
Fatswhistle followed his companion in a much more leisurely fashion. He was just removing his cracked leather boots when she threw herself into the water. Her back was broad and freckled and as she dived, the white globes of her arse were displayed to Fatswhistle’s suddenly interested gaze. He removed his clothing at a rather accelerated pace and hurried after her into the brown water.
She was singing tunelessly and washing her long carrot-orange curls when he waded over to her and sat down. The river mud felt like silk under his buttocks and he picked up one of his own feet and looked between his toes. He watched his companion from under his eyelids finding her heavy breasts surprisingly exciting as they dipped in and out of the water. He scooted closer and put out a tentative hand. She snorted and wrung the water out of her hair. Emboldened, he touched the freckled skin on her shoulder. She jumped and swore, dunking him under the water until he saw stars…
“Gerrof.”

Fatswhistle and Buchtooth is currently out of print as one engages in secret talks pertaining to the future of that piece of one’s very soul. Instead, here is a smidgin of impeccable verse

Within the inglenook of creeping night
I steal Calliope’s wings steeped with flame
And an homunculus enters my sight
Bearing aloft a banner with my name.
I stalk to rocky kloofs of distant height
To claim the fabled phoenix for my own
And by the wounding pens terrible might
I slay the fierce chimera all alone.
Those Labyrinthine paths conquered by right
So now upon my head Theseus crown
Marks my soliloquy of posey bright
As in Morpheus arms I softly drown.
From forth my dreams thus comes triumphs of rhyme
For of the Muses choice, I am the prime.

A Bite of… Moonbeam Farquhar Metheringham IV

Question 1: Who is your greatest literary influence? And why?

Dame Barbara Cartland is in one’s humble opinion a writer in the presence of whose excellence we should all bow our heads. And if you cannot see why then one washes one’s hands of you forthwith

Question 2: What is your guilty pleasure?

One must confess to a partiality for that very out-of-fashion but delectable cocktail the snowball. And to being wholly unable to resist white chocolate in any form.

Question 3: Would you rather be a hero or a villain.

On first glance one could only say hero. But closer thought made one discern that one’s hero is always heading for heartbreak whilst one’s villain had no such feelings to injure. Ergo one would be a hero with the moral compass of a villain.

About Moonbeam Farquhar Metheringham IV

The only offspring of a doomed union between the daughter of an English Country Gentleman and the unsatisfactory son of an American stomach pills magnate, Moonbeam resides with his maternal parent in leafy suburbia. His ruling passion is writing, and as he is fortunate enough to be in possession of a small private income he is able to write with only literary excellence in mind, being able to ignore the demands of mammon that may force his lesser colleagues into prostituting their art for a few pieces of silver.
Fatswhistle and Buchtooth was a whole decade in its gestation, and you may expect the next magnum opus to take even longer as Moonbeam hones his craft to ever more delicate points.

In the meantime, one’s his fans may catch more of one’s his highly distinctive wit and wisdom in a slim volume facilitated by the rather boring women who run this blog assisted by one’s his maternal parent – How to Start Writing a Book: The Wit and Wisdom of Moonbeam Farquhar Metheringham IV.

Or April Fools to you semi-literate little webbies. It’s just around the corner and you need to listen up!

That day of all days when making bloody silly jokes is all right.

Only it isn’t. It isn’t funny to send your sister a photoshopped image of her boyfriend in bed with a blonde. It isn’t funny to put an announcement of your mother’s death in the local paper. It isn’t funny to befriend somebody online only to make them the but of your annual ‘humour’ fest.

Just stop it.

It’s not funny. You’re not funny. Leave humour to those who don’t equate being funny with making people cry. Stop being an asshat for ten minutes and consider how you would enjoy being the but of one of your own ‘jokes’.

For those of you who find themselves on the receiving end of one of these gems of sparkling ‘wit’ I have the following advice.

If the perpetrator is an online acquaintance, by all means retweet or reblog the offensive item adding one or more of the following hashtags:

#sentbytheguywiththegherkindick

#sentbyadiscardedlover

#sentbythebitchwhohasnofriends

#thanksasshole

I think you get the idea.

However, should the ‘joker’ be known to you outside cyberspace, vengeance is perfectly acceptable. Consider one of the following:

Itching powder in the underwear.

Chilli in the wine

Pepper in the chocolates

And the classic. A kipper wired to the exhaust pipe of their car

Soooooo. To recap. Don’t do personal April Fools jokes. They are seldom kindly and never funny. 

But.

If you do. Expect vengeance…

Have fun until the next thing pisses me off.

Crossing had never been more than a one-horse town, but when the railway shut down and the boys got drafted into the army it stopped even being that. 
We women done our best, but with kids to raise and mouths to feed the soil become more important than the saloon bar, and the horse pretty well took over from the truck. Them few of us brave enough to drive a car pretty soon found that there warn’t any fuel to be had anyway. It was all going to the war effort – whatever in tarnation that meant.
And that’s pretty much how it looked right up until the boys come home, one dirt street with rusty trucks leaning drunkenly on their useless tyres and hosses picketed under the shade trees outside the deserted saloon. 

The winter of forty-five was hard and the men what drifted home warn’t nothin’ like the boys that went off to fight the old men’s war. They come home thinner, and harder, and somehow soured by what they seen and done. And that ain’t counting the ones that never come home.
I wasn’t expecting nobody to come home for me and mine. My durn fool of a husband got hisself killed bein’ a hero in some battle a whole ocean away. I think I musta shed a tear when they sent me a wire sayin’ he was gone, and I kinda had to look properly sad when a big fat man in a general’s uniform brung along his medals and pinned them on nine-year-old Jethro Junior’s chest. But, jest between you and me, all I was really thinkin’ was what a pigheaded eejit I had married. Jest couldn’t keep his head down and his nose clean and come home to me and the little ‘uns.

During the spring and summer of forty-six I looked about me and seen what war had done to our menfolks. I was almost glad that my Jethro never come home – him having been a hard sort of a customer even before the scars of war. Seemed to me that what the war broke there wasn’t no amount of lovin’ nor understandin’ gonna be able to put back together. Seein’ as how I was a nurse and worked in the hospital in Big Town (until Pa decided I had to come home and marry Jethro) I seen with my own eyes what the men hereabouts come home capable of. I tended broken bones, bruises in every colour you can imagine, and the ragged cuts caused by bullwhips bein’ wielded in drunken hands. All in all I reckoned I was better of alone.

The winter of forty-seven seen Pa called to his maker, but before the influenza took him he signed a lawyer’s paper leaving’ the property to me. That surprised me some, him settin’ so much store by the male line, but he smiles at me and says I’m more of a son than any man could ever be. Brung a lump to my throat that did, and as I nursed him through the cruel cold I kep’ myself warm with the knowin’ that me and the kids was safe.

Summer rolled around and I was milkin’ the most awkward of our three cows when I heard a engine. Something was toilin’ up the dirt track to the farmhouse. Now we never knew nobody with no truck, so I let the cow go and sneaked around back to where I could pick up Pa’s Colt and make sure she was loaded fer bear.

By the time a rusty rattler of a Holden scraped to a stop I was settin’ on the stoop watchin’ the yard from under the brim of my greasy old Stetson. The man what stepped out might a bin Jethro’s twin. Same handsome face. Same swagger. Same hard, cold little eyes. I pushed back my hat with two fingers.

“Howdy,” I said. “Help ya?” 
“I sincerely hope so. I’m looking for Dorothy, widow to my Cousin Jethro Tomkins.” He smiled at me, but his smile never reached his eyes. “Might that be you.”
“Might be.” I offered him a grin. “Set a spell and tell me what brings you to these hyar parts.”
“I come to look over my property.”
“Your property?”
“Yes. Mine. Cousin Jethro done left it to me in his will.” 
“That’d be a trick, seeing as how he never owned it in the first place.”
I settled my hat back down over my eyes and leaned back in my chair.
He was just stupid enough not to go for his gun. Instead he made a grab for me.
“Smart-mouth woman needs slapping down hard.”
He fisted his hand in the front of my shirt and I shot his fool head off.
Me and the kids buried him back aways in the scrubland before the mesquite starts.
We keeps chickens in the Holden in his memory…

Jane Jago