Clouded drab

My friend Peter Kirkham traps moths and photographs them. Occasionally, if I'm lucky, he sends me photos. I thought I'd share some of them with you. The names alone are wonderful. Here is - from the top - a Clouded Drab, Common Quaker, Hebrew Character and Red Green Carpet. . .

Death and the US cover

While I'm on the subject of Death and the Arrow covers - there is another one (in fact another two, but I don't have a copy of the Danish one to hand). In the US, the book was published by Knopf which is under the umbrella of Random House.

I was so excited to have a book published in the US but I was a little taken aback when my editor at Knopf - Nancy Hinkel - sent me a copy of the cover by email. I actually giggled when I saw it. It looked like someone had described the book to the illustrator over the phone - 'It's about Death, yeah. And he's got this arrow apparently. . .'

The story revolves around a series of mysterious deaths, the victims all being shot with arrows and found to have a Death card in their pocket. This card is a calling card, featuring the Death figure shown below and is described as such in the book. It is most definitely not a Tarot card.

Added to which, it had a Victorian look about it somehow, rather than early eighteenth. And it looked a little heavy metal. But, looking at it now, I wonder if the Americans did not get it right. Or at least better.

My attitude to covers has changed over the years. I think I would rather have an exciting cover than a pedantically accurate one. In fact I know I would. I think, for all it's faults, the US cover is arresting in a way that the two UK covers are not. They are both more tasteful - but what ten year old cares about that? And it picks up on the creepy aspect of the book, and that is a good thing. It isn't a great cover, but it works.

Incidentally, US publication of Death and the Arrow was momentarily threatened by the fact that in October 2002 a real-life sniper (rather than archer) called the Beltway Sniper was shooting people in and around Washington DC and - in a startling bit of coincidence - leaving a Death card on the bodies. Because of the timing of the publication, there was a danger that it would look like I had been inspired by this real-life event, but things moved on and the book came out as planned.

Death and the Arrow print

The only element of the cover I had any part in was an insistence that there should be at least some kind of visual element. In this cover it is a coloured version of an image I saw years ago in a Dover Book of eighteenth century prints.

There was something about that image that grabbed me. There seemed to be so much going on in that small, crudely drawn picture of the man oblivious to the pointing figure of Death behind him, ready to strike him down with an arrow.

The whole story of Death and the Arrow came out of that one image - or at least that was where the story began. I'm often asked where I get my ideas from, and it is one of the hardest questions to answer succinctly. The fact is, they come from everywhere and from everything you have ever seen of experienced. Sometimes they even come from a curious image like this one.

Death and the Arrow 2

And this is the cover as it is now after being reissued a couple of years ago.

Death and the Arrow

This is the cover for Death and the Arrow with my illustration

Death of a cover

And speaking of covers, I have just heard from Random House that the original edition of my book, Death and the Arrow, will no longer be available.

Death and the Arrow is a book I still like a lot. It is the first part of a trilogy of books featuring Tom Marlowe and set in the first quarter of the eighteenth century. They are mystery adventure stories and they were a lot of fun to write.

As well as writing them, I did some chapter heading illustrations and I also did the covers. If I did it tomorrow I would no doubt do it differently, but I still think this cover is OK. But then I'm biased.

Paperback terrors

Here is the paperback cover for Uncle Montague's Tales of Terror, due out in October, published by Bloomsbury. As always the illustration work is by David Roberts.