OK, I’m happy with that! Nifty…

You can read the full review here.

It came about through our contact on twitter. Somehow we followed each other. I checked out Sheryl’s work as an animator and wondered if she would be interested in doing something based on one of my stories. I didn’t want a conventional book trailer. But I did want something that could help me promote the collection and my writing. A kind of micro film, if you will.

Symptoms is quite short and intense so I thought that might be a good one to work with. I sent it to Sheryl and she agreed. Right from the start I gave her a pretty open brief – basically, I said take it and do whatever you want with it.

That said, Sheryl is a collaborative film maker, so we did talk through a number of the decisions. First of all we talked about the style of the animation.We both thought that because the film came from a short story, it would make sense to use text in some way. But we didn’t want the usual static subtitles of a book trailer. We wanted the words to seem like an integral part of the film, to come out of whatever else was happening.

I had seen this student trailer for Miranda July’s collection, No One Belongs Here More Than You, and liked the way the text was incorporated into the setting. Sheryl came back with some examples that she thought were interesting: Jonathan Hodgson’s Feeling My Way which uses a technique called rotoscoping. As Sheryl said, “I like the idea of the use of text and visuals and something a bit manic and rough.”

She was also looking at Prince Achmed by Lotte Reiniger, which uses animated silhouettes. It was another technique she was thinking about at the early stages.

This rotoscope music clip by someone called Kurt D. was also something we looked at.

So we decided on a rotoscope technique, combining live action elements with animated ones. In fact, in Sheryl’s film I would say that the live action background is itself animated. I find it pretty hypnotic watching it!

The Symptoms Of His Madness Were As Follows: from Sheryl Jenkins on Vimeo.

More to come!

The Symptoms Of His Madness Were As Follows: from Sheryl Jenkins on Vimeo.

This is a short film based on one of the stories from The Bridge That Bunuel Built.

Edited by Chris Wrigley, it’s a wide-ranging book by an impressive number of authors, all of them distinguished academics. Each author contributes a different themed chapter, for instance on the Conservative Party, Foreign Policy, The Empire, The City of London, Leisure, Religion and Culture. I can’t say that all the chapters have been on equal interest to me and I confess to having skipped one or two. The period I’m particularly interested in, for my novels, is the years before the First World War. The book covers that but it also goes on up to the start of the Second World War. I’m a bit of a completist (I will go back to fill in the skipped chapters, I promise) so I find it necessary to carry on reading the various historical surveys beyond the period I’m immediately interested in. There’s not really any such thing as an isolated period of history, sealed off from what came before and what will come after.

A couple of days ago I read the chapter titled Crime, Police and Penal Policy by Clive Emsley, Professor of History at the Open University. As a crime writer, this is naturally of particular interest to me. The opening to Professor Emsley’s chapter paints an interesting contrast between the reality of crime and policing during this period and the myths represented in fiction of the time. It amused me a lot, so I thought it was worth sharing it with you:

“In 1931 the Buckinghamshire village of Brill had a population of 869, and the Census suggests that this was declining. Nevertheless, Brill remained the centre of a county petty sessions division covering fifteen other parishes with a total population of 4,803, and it had its own police station. The Occurrence Book of that police station lists only eight offences for the year 1931: one instance of wilful damage and seven others listed initially as theft. Two of the latter remained undetected, but no other occurrence resulted in a prosecution. The victim of the wilful damage, a local gentleman, declined to prosecute the two boys, aged nine and ten, and two girls, aged six and four, who had broken his windows. In the detected instances of theft, one woman refused to prosecute the domestic servant who had taken clothing and bedlinen, a father would not prosecute his eleven-year-old daughter for taking a £1 note, and an uncle would not prosecute his nephew for taking three £1 notes. A spare wheel, reported stolen from a car, appeared rather to have fallen off in the road. Nineteen sheep reported stolen by their owner had, in fact, been properly delivered to his slaughterhouse by two of his labourers.

“Brill cannot be taken as typical of England and Wales in the first third of the twentieth century, though its rural setting is reminiscent of that portrayed by many of the authors of popular detective fiction during the period. Nor is 1931 a typical year in the Occurrence Book of Brill police station. Usually there were rather more offences listed, including the occasional case of violent sexual assault. But if the setting resembles Agatha Christie’s St Mary Mead, the murder rate was quite different. The Occurrence Book lists no murders and only one instance when murder was attempted; this was in 1904, when a seventy-year-old man tried to kill his equally aged wife. Christie’s Miss Marple would have been bored to death in Brill, for here the predominant offence was petty theft and the usual offenders were juveniles and young people; to this extent the pattern of crime in Brill does appear similar to that of the rest of the country.”

Clive Emsley, Crime, Police and Penal Policy, from A Companion to Early Twentieth Century Britain, Ed Chris Wrigley, Published by Wiley-Blackwell

There’s also a nice reference to the book’s “standout predecessor, 2012’s Summon Up the Blood”. So, excuse me for blowing my own trumpet. But there is no one else here to do it.

Read the full review here.

I’ve had some nice online reviews too. This one from Dragons and Fairy Dust concluded “The book is absorbing. It is a fascinating portrayal of a different era and I kept turning the pages until I found out the ending. The characters are fascinating and the interaction between them really brings them to life in a unique way.”

Madhouse Family Review has this to say “If you like crime fiction and period drama, you’ll be in your element. Imagine a Sherlock Homes mystery set in the department store from BBC drama The Paradise and you’ll get a rough idea of what awaits you inside The Mannequin House”

Read the whole review here.

The verdict? “Mannequin is rewardingly abundant in quirky episodes and oddball players still unaccustomed to the early 20th century’s altered mores. Quinn definitely deserves a third outing.”

Read the full review here.