Galbraith & Pole

With a new one on the way, I'm shamelessly plugging the first three

I’m very excited that last week my first pre-beta reader announced that the plot of the next Galbraith & Pole (book number four in the series) is not the disaster I had feared it might be. So time to start tidying it up.

When I’m writing historical novels, my first drafts tend to be quite clean. I know it’s not regarded as the best way to work but I edit as I go along because my historical efforts involve so much detail tying fiction and recorded timelines together. If I did something that didn’t quite work, I would end up having to rewrite the whole thing so as not to have somebody arriving somewhere that they couldn’t possibly have got to for another week. Or whatever. You, I’m sure, get the point.

Writing Urban Fantasy, by contrast, is something I can do quickly and go back and fill in any holes later. When I say ‘quickly’, I mean ‘less slowly’ because I am a very lazy writer with advanced skills in procrastination. I also have only the vaguest idea when I start where the story will take me.

This story is clearly the maddest so far, as you can probably judge from the name, which started as a joke but is now looking set to be the actual title: Killer Robot Ninja Sex-dolls. Imagine a cross between a James Bond film (villain in a subterranean lair with an apparent inability to kill the hero quickly if an elaborately staged complicated alternative is available) and those 1970s horror movies that always featured girls in white sacrificed by evil men, preferably in cowls. Throw in a robot assassin powered by AI and you’re pretty well there.

So far, all the stories have been self-contained. Yes, it helps to start at the beginning with Something Wicked. That introduces the idea of a special organisation that deals with unnatural crimes and which is headed up by a vampire (Chief Inspector Pole), who ends up working alongside the very human Chief Inspector Galbraith. Their relationship builds across the series, but you can pick up the books pretty much anywhere. New characters are introduced and we learn a little more about Pole’s mysterious Section S, but it’s easy for a reader to follow without any particular knowledge of the world.

Like the previous three, Killer Robot Ninja Sex-dolls, can be read alone, but there are references to earlier stories that might reasonably leave you wondering why Pole seems to have torn the throat out of a senior army officer at a secret military base off the M4. (It’s a real place, like most of the locations in the books.) Or what a werewolf is doing in the Palace of Westminster. Honestly, you’ll end up wishing you’d read the earlier ones and they’re all available on Kindle at £3.99 or less. They’re short, too. I know people say they want a lot of words for their money, but that’s why they have huge TBR piles. Fork out your £3.99, read it, and feel happier. As you have probably worked out, they don’t take themselves too seriously and, though they’re not supposed to be laugh-out-loud funny, they have a whimsical sense of humour that might produce the odd chuckle.

Anyway, I have to get back to my editing (and drinking endless cold drinks – it’s 30 degrees at my desk as I write this). So that’s it for Substack this week. It’s a more blatant plug than usual. If you want me to write about something less crudely sales related, tell me what you want to read and I’ll see if I can accommodate you.

EDIT: You can tell that my heart isn’t in this plugging business because I forgot to add a ‘buy’ link. Here it is: https://www.amazon.co.uk/dp/B09YS87QX8