'The Obscured': A Magic Realism Novel

 The Obscured: A Magic Realism Novel

The Obscured: A Magic Realism Novel eBook : Rooksmoor, Alexander: Amazon.co.uk: Kindle Store

I read 'The Glamour' (1984) by Christopher Priest in 1993, having bought it in a remaindered book store in London along with 'A Dream of Wessex' (1977) and 'The Quiet Woman' (1990) by the same author. Priest wrote straight contemporary set novels as well as science fiction and fantasy. 'The Glamour' straddled genres in that it is set in 1980s UK, but there is one element which is fantastical, i.e. that there are people who have the ability not to be seen by the general public. The term 'glamour' while having a contemporary meaning of glossy appearance in the media, had an older meaning as a kind of spell to cast an illusion of what people saw.

At the time magic realism a genre which had been recognised since the 1920s, was going through a popular phase for authors writing in English rather than translated from Spanish or Portuguese. Thus, this book fitted in quite well, though it differed from a lot of what else Priest wrote, it was a phase of 'quiet' novels by the author before he reached a new peak in his career with 'The Prestige' (1995; movie 2006). While I have read many of Priest's novels, admired his deftness in writing and enjoyed the breadth of topics that he covered, my opinion of him was soured by reading his 'Fugue for a Darkening Island'  (1972) which could be on the reading list for any aspiring Reform party member or apostle of Donald Trump in its racist view on human migration.

Still, in the years after I read 'The Glamour' I remained fascinated by the concept. I kept envisaging various scenes which have now gone on to feature in 'The Obscured'. Alongside 'Death in Amiens' (2018), this is probably the novel which features locations that I know personally. Scenes in West and East London, at Sandown racecourse and other locales in Surrey, plus those in Devon all came from places I had visited. Even some of the striking outfits that Peri wears were ones I had seen in southern England and Germany, worn by real women. Having read work by Carlos Ruiz Zafón and 'The Armageddon Rag' (1983) by George R.R. Martin, in 2024, I decided it was time to bring together the various scenes together into a novel.

I was determined in part to 'get back at' what I felt had been Priest's racist writing in  'Fugue for a Darkening Island' by taking his magic realist concept and placing it in the genuinely multi-cultural context of London, which was multi-cultural in his day as well. Apprehensive about cultural appropriation for some reason I had been drawn to Iranian mythology and in exploring this came across the ideal being to be the originator of the obscured. For the readers of Farsi, the language used in Iran, text on the front cover gives away a clue about how the story unfolds. The novel touches a little on the differences between pre- and post-revolutionary Iran, but primarily from the perspective of Westerners' engagement with the country.

This aspect also meant the novel explores issues around identity and families in the UK worrying about the colouring of their children's children, raised to prominence with questions asked of the Duchess of Sussex when she was pregnant, given her mixed-race background. This then began to connect with the British context, especially those families who had been involved with the oil industry especially living around the Weybridge and Walton areas of Surrey. Furthermore, between me first reading Priest's books and the mid-2020s I had become familiar with Dorset and Devon, the latter of which featured in 'The Glamour' and naturally in a particular form in  'A Dream of Wessex'.

The other prime challenge is how far technology has advanced since the mid-1980s. These days it is typical that you have to gurn at your smartphone to get it to open up for you. Facial recognition software is habitually used in many public spaces. Perhaps I could have gone into this a bit further, but I do look at the advantages and disadvantages of being 'obscured' when so much of our appearance and activity is being judged not by other people but by machines. Another challenge is the decline in the use of cash. This shifted the types of crimes that an obscured person would have to, might be able to, pull off. Simple pickpocketing is less fruitful in 2024 than it would have been in 1984. However, 'shoulder surfing' as people use electronic devices in public and the ability to take such devices, sometimes even just temporarily, can open up access to other opportunities to steal funds. These questions had been part of my mulling over these scenarios in the past few decades and I feel I explore them in this novel without it becoming an essay on identity and technology in our era.

While there is action and jeopardy in this novel, in contrast to many of my novels 'The Obscured' is more a character arc as Tara Houghton comes to learn more about herself and the condition she has had thrust upon her.

The Otto Braucher Stories - Revisiting the Weimar Germany Detective

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Very influenced by the Maigret novels by Georges Simenon plus teaching modern history, back in 1995 I decided to write a series of crime novels set in 1920s Germany. Not only was it a period that I knew a lot about, but it seemed that it offered ample opportunities for crimes given the political and economic turbulence and the availability of guns as a result of the First World War. Berlin would have been a logical location but I realised that as Munich had suffered less as a result of the Second World War, finding out what it looked like in the 1920s would be rather easier. I was very fortunate to be given a tourist guide to the city published in that period. 

You have to remember that back in 1995 the public did not have the internet. Email tended to be restricted to academia. Libraries had moved to computer-based lists of their books, but you still had to go and find the physical book and read it. Having moved to London in 1994, I was in a better position to access a variety of libraries. I had a GCSE in German that I had got three years earlier when unemployed, so with the aid of a large German dictionary I was able to get material from German-language texts too. Friends also lent me books, notably about the German Army in the First World War. I assembled a huge file of notes (which I still have) including hand copied and photocopied maps and long lists of names from the era. 

I was determined that my detective would be in contrast to so many would be a family man rather than a loner. I also felt it was appropriate for him to be a serious Catholic and knew this would impinge on how he went about his work. Him having a family also allowed me to bring in connections to different elements of society through his wife and children. He was to maintain a positive outlook, though given the context it is unsurprising that he becomes cynical. I revisited the idea of a positive detective in 'Death in Amiens' (2016) which drew heavily on my very depressed time I spent in that town and the police detective was an intentional counterpoint to my perspective on the place.

Otto Braucher started out as Otto Beckmann, using the name of a German family I had known in West Germany in the 1980s. It was also supposed to reference the artist of the inter-war Weimar Germany era, Max Beckmann (1884-1950). However, then in 1996 there was the UK TV crime series 'Beck' and in 1997, the Swedish police series also called 'Beck', began. The German series, 'Beckmann' which began in 1999, was a chat show, but still I felt the name was getting too much usage. So, looking for an alternative name, I switched to 'Braucher' which I saw used in the USA but had a German ring to it and as a German friend said to me, it had an analogous meaning which might seem useful/appropriate.

Anyway, through the late 1990s and into the 2000s, I was writing these stories, 15,000-20,000 words, so novellas very influenced by Simenon. I did not have an idea of publishing them and any hopes seemed dashed when I encountered the first three Bernie Gunther novels of Philip Kerr published 1989-1991. Though set in Berlin, I felt I was be seen to be aping his novels. However, especially in the covers of these first three (there was a shift in style when he revived the series in 2006), which echoed the Penguin crime novel editions of the 1960s, I had to go with that green urban style myself. Of course, since then we have seen numerous crime novels set in the Weimar Germany era, the most successful being the Gereon Rath novels of Volker Kutscher, published since 2007. Berlin has primarily remained the focus, but Rory Clements has now left crime in 16th Century England for 1930s Munich with 'Munich Wolf' (2024).

Self-publishing ebooks did not really become a thing until the 2010s. My wife, a published author, suggested I got into it and having already produced 12 Braucher stories and even faked up some covers for them (pretending that Penguin had taken me up), these seemed sensible ones to start with. My original idea had been 3 x 6-story anthologies and I launched 'Braucher's Solution' and 'Braucher's Inheritance' on this basis. However, in the mid-2010s, there was a real fade for short and episodic ebook fiction, stories people could complete in a single train journey, so I disaggregated the stories and launched them as stand-alone novellas. I was rather uncomfortable selling them in that way, but it seemed to work. I continued writing more finally reaching 17 novellas in total.

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In 2015 I finally got around to completing the full-length Braucher prequel novel, set in 1922, 'Munich White' which I had started at the same time as the novellas back in 1995 but had run out of steam. Having worked more with Braucher and his setting, but the 2010s I was ready to come back and complete the novel. Having three story threads that occasionally bisected was probably rather over-ambitious but we can put that down to the confidence of my youth back then. There have long been plans for 'Munich Brown' set during Munich's Beer Hall Putsch of November 1923, but, despite lots of ideas for what might happen in it and some of the roots of these being laid in the Braucher novellas, I have been unable to come up with a satisfactory structure whether the three-story strand or a focus just on Braucher. This is often a challenge with historical novels, having an appropriate set of characters able to witness what you need them to witness without them teleporting all over the place or having to employ a whole platoon of characters as I ended up doing for 'Scavenged Days' (2018) and some would argue, unsuccessfully.

Now the fad of the 2010s for short or episodic ebooks seems to have died, indeed ebooks themselves seem to be waning, I still felt uncomfortable when speaking about my books having to say, 'well, of course, 17 of those crime novels are just novellas, not full-length [read 'proper'] novels.' Thus, I decided to reassemble the novellas back into the three anthologies I had originally envisaged. I was short the 18th story to complete the third anthology. For a long time I had intended to write 'Braucher and the Circle' which would be around spiritualism something which was extremely popular in Britain and Germany in the post-First World War period - Sir Arthur Conan Doyle was very into it. However, again despite coming at it from different angles I could not get a satisfactory structure. Thus, I decided to swap it with 'Braucher and the Expectation' which I had intended to be set in 1924, but seemed to work instead in October 1923, rounding out the third anthology. I decided to title that anthology 'Braucher's Value' referencing the hyperinflation of mid to late 1923 that is in the background and influenced a lot of what happened at the time in Germany.

Of course, reaggregating the novellas I took the opportunity to check and revise the writing. I realised how far my writing has come since 2012, let alone 1995 and I feel these revised editions are more lucid than the approach I had back then. In addition, it is so much easier to get hold of detailed information about the era especially on political groups and the law. Accessing maps and images is also incredibly easy certainly compared to having to read through scores of books. This has allowed me to expand and indeed correct some of the details that I featured, notably on the A.G.V.K. political grouping which is mentioned in all three anthologies. Details of when certainly newspapers, cars and weapons were available is also so much easier, indeed I can access German newspapers of the time from the comfort of my own desk at home, something that would have seemed very futuristic back in 1995.

Thus, while I have always been proud of my Braucher stories, I do feel these three re-released anthologies do show the stories at their best and the 'train spotters' of historical novels might be more satisfied that anything even mildly anachronistic has been corrected. While the competition is much stiffer now than thirty, let alone thirteen years ago, I do hope that even a few readers enjoy the Braucher books, cheaper and more accessible than before, simply with fewer of those green-tinted photograph covers that myself and others have long enjoyed.