Joy Martin's Blog

A beautifully written and magnificently researched book set in a remote mountain homestead in Norway and the Shetland islands, The death of three year old Edward's parents has always been shrouded in mystery for him. His taciturn grandfather doesn't explain. But, as an adult, Edward becomes increasingly determined to find out what happened to them for, as he says - 'There was something about Mama and Papa's story that was stirring, quietly, like a serpent.' Clever plotting - and a most unusual resolution.

A superb spy thriller set during World War 2 which pits the wits of a German aristocrat and master spy (code name 'The Needle') with that of a spunky protagonist, Lucy Rose. Amongst the many incredible features of this book is the fact that Ken Follett wrote it in the space of only three weeks: as he says in its preface - 'I wish I could do it again.' His readers are simply delighted he did. Thrilling, nerve-racking and ingenuous, it will live on - and on, and on.

The third in the Detective Jackson Brodie series. In Devon, a six year old girl witnesses the murder of her mother and siblings. A crime investigation which would be almost unbearable in the hands of anyone other than Kate Atkinson whose originality, intelligence and - strangely - humour carry the plot. As The Sunday Times observes, this is 'not a detective novel in the formal sense, although it is full of unresolved mysteries and suspense. It is one of those rare fictions that defies categorisation.'
But that's Kate Atkinson. She is, quite simply, the rarest of beasts.

See https://joymartinbooks.com/new-blog/

Ghosts don’t feature in Twelve Shades of Black, or not in the literal sense. This book isn’t fiction but, rather, a series of interviews which I conducted with black South African men and women living in the townships outside Johannesburg during the apartheid era. Yet, it seemed to me then, that many of them were ghosts – shades of the people they might have been, had they been free to be themselves, outside the confines of their environment.
If some of these interviews seem stilted today it was because blacks were frightened to talk to whites because who knew what might happen to them once they began to open their mouths.
Whites were equally nervous when it came to talking to blacks. Liberal whites paid a price for their views. This was a society in which houses were watched, phones were tapped and innocent friendships between men and women of different races were automatically assumed to have sexual overtones. Puritanical, racist and ill-informed, the architects of apartheid were obsessed with the concept of sex across the colour divide: on the basis of its title alone, Anna Sewell’s enchanting children’s book Black Beauty ­– an ‘autobiography’ of a horse, first published in 1877 – was banned by the South African censor.
Apartheid harnessed sexual fear. So, perhaps not surprisingly, when white people heard that the Belgian photographer Sylvie van Lerberghe and I were going to the townships to research this book, they were convinced that we’d never come out. Two young, blonde white women setting off on such a mission? We’d be raped, we’d be murdered, they said to us, sadly. Instead, we were greeted with warmth and civility. In Soweto, where small dirt roads led out of other small dirt roads and where the thousands of square bungalows all looked alike, our only fear was of getting lost. Sometimes, but not always, the people we met dared to tell us how they really felt about their situation: the poet, Wally Serote, one of the most courageous characters who features in Twelve Shades of Black, had already spoken to me, pouring out the anger which was burning within him.
But, in order to protect themselves, most blacks concealed their true feelings under a mask of politeness. I talked to the priest whose flock took religion with a soupcon of witchcraft. To the canny inyanga whose confidantes paid her on HP for charms. To the millionaire businessman who wasn’t permitted to buy a house of his own. To the talented artist and the shebeen queen and to the others who appear in this book and I wished that they dared to come out of the shadows and reveal more about themselves. And then, one dark evening I was smuggled back into Soweto, lying on the back seat of a friend’s car, covered by a blanket. Whites were not allowed to enter the townships after nightfall: the friend I was with wrapped a dark scarf around his head, put on a pair of black gloves and hoped that we’d get away with it. We were going to the theatre, to see a musical play. The so-called theatre was nothing but a basic hall. There was no stage, no floodlights, no sets and no costumes for the actors – only, more importantly, an explosion of incredible and exuberant talent. Watching spell-bound, it suddenly struck me that here, finally, was the reality we had been seeking. For in pretending to be other people, the cast had truly come out of the shadows into which they had been thrust. They had set aside their protective African masks. Ghosts no longer, they were free, even if only for a night.

In Seeking Clemency Caroline Tremain, returning to the Georgian manor where she lived when she was young, goes into the walled garden at the rear of the old house. Although it’s now a veritable jungle, she remembers it very clearly as it had been in her grandmother’s day:

‘The roses, pink and white and delicate, added to the overall impression that she had employed a potter, an expert in fine porcelain, to create a work of art of which a lady would approve. There’d been a hedge of double whites. Borders of the rounded damasks. And growing over by the shrubs…’

All of a sudden, her mind goes blank. She can no longer see the garden in the state that she remembers, but another image of it. ‘The same garden, but with different flowers in it. Brilliant colours. Lots of reds. Begonias and red-hot pokers. Stonecrop. Mallow. Dahlias. The recollection of each flower was every bit as clear to me as the water from the well. Star-shaped blooms and trumpet shapes. I saw them all from memory.’

She is, although she doesn’t know it, walking in a ghostly garden, as I once did myself in a very different setting. Opposite the National Botanical Gardens in Cape Town, on the corner of Rhodes Avenue and Kirstenbosch Drive, is a small Anglican church. Adjacent to it is a long stretch of un-occupied land. People go there to walk their dogs. Walking across it myself one day, I noticed that small flowers were growing in clumps at regular intervals. Unlike the sweet-smelling scarlet ericas, wild gardenias, cycads and proteas which flourished on the other side of the road, they were the kind of flowers which grow in suburban gardens: white anemones, red, yellow and orange pigs’ ears, bachelor’s buttons and Goldilocks.

Odd… Or, rather, sad as I soon found out because those cultivated flowers are all that’s left of the homes of the Cape Coloured families who were forced to re-locate to other parts of the Cape under apartheid in the ‘60s. Their houses were destroyed but down the road, in Newlands’ Village, similar cottages are still standing: valuable because of their proximity to the city, they were snapped up by opportunistic developers, superficially renovated and sold off to yuppie buyers. In contrast, the poor prices that the ‘non-whites’ got for their homes did not allow them to purchase equivalent mortgage-free houses. Only the gardens that they planted remain – a floral testimony to the ruthless destruction of a community and a unique way of life.

The ghosts of those gardens remained in my mind as the ghost of another garden remains in that of Caroline Tremain in Seeking Clemency. ‘Red. That dream. That image of a different garden. All the flowers had been red… The night sky was as grey as charcoal but a red sheen, like a gaping wound, was running across its belly… Red was the colour of danger… The night and the fiery arc and the volatile lake seemed united in a chorus of warning…telling me to run. To go before it was too late…‘ It was all a long way from my own walk in the Cape. But that’s how ideas take root and grow in an author’s mind.

Next episode: The Ghosts Who Lived in the Black Townships.

Episode 10: The Mystery of the Missing Bureau.
In 1928 Edward Barnsley, one of the most important master craftsmen of the 20th Century, made a bureau for a 12 year old girl called Gonda Neale. The bureau was exquisite. Both delicate and sturdy, hand-carved from oak, it was mounted on a stand with chamfered posts and block feet. In the front it had three panels and along the brass handles on its drawers ran a diamond-shaped motif. It would be Gonda’s most prized possession and eight years later, when she went to Berlin to study photography, she took the bureau with her.
Forced to flee from the Nazis, she left the bureau behind in her flat. And that, as she told me over dinner in Ireland decades later, was the last she saw of it. After the war, friends who went to visit her flat, on the second floor of Number 53 Joachim Friedrich Strasse, found her possessions were still there – except for the bureau and her books.
‘The Nazis confiscated my books, ‘ she said, ‘But, at a time when popular taste was for French-polished furniture they wouldn’t have had the nous to appreciate my bureau ! I suspect the diplomat who lived in the flat downstairs.’
I knew I couldn’t find the bureau, but I had to write a novel about it. The book is called The Image of Laura and though it isn’t Gonda’s story and its heroine, Laura Conway, bears no resemblance at all to her, in creating it, I did re-trace Gonda’s footsteps and so I went to Berlin. The street in which Gonda had lived had been the target of Allied bombs and most of its big ugly grey houses had been levelled during the war. But Number 53 was still standing and as I looked up at the windows of her flat the plot of the book took shape in my mind.
As The Image of Laura begins a retrospective exhibition of works by the photographer Laura Conway is being held in a London gallery to commemorate her 75th birthday. The party has ‘attracted the rich, the gorgeous, the famous and the outrageous. Some looked stylish and elegant. Others were wonderfully ostentatious. Frilly knickers under a satin slip dress…cyclists’ gloves and Nike trainers combined with scarlet silk… A man with a cane in his hand lurked beneath cover of cloak and Ray-bans.’ By contrast, Laura ‘who wore only black, white and grey; whose eyes were grey and whose once pale ash blonde hair has long since turned silver, might have been a ghost, so shadowy is her appearance.’
In the gallery another ghost is waiting. Behind a screen, ‘in mint condition, mounted on a trolley and all ready to be presented with a flourish to its rightful owner, is Laura’s long-lost bureau,’ which her grand-daughter Cassie has found in Berlin. Laura, thinks Cassie, will be delighted by this special birthday gift. Laura is certainly moved but not in the way that Cassie expects. Instead, confronted with the bureau, she trembles’ with the wrong kind of shock.’ Pale at the best of times, she is ‘now completely devoid of colour.’ For Laura has lied to her family about her life in Berlin. She has created and carefully nurtured an image of herself. With the re-appearance of her bureau, that image is about to be shattered.
Next episode: Walking in a Ghostly Garden.

Episode 9: Wonderful Women.
Here is an image out of my childhood: a woman on her knees weeding a field in which turnips have been planted before it’s set out for grass seeds. Around her are her 13 children, the older helping with the weeding: their younger siblings tethered like goats to prevent them wandering off. In a land without opportunity then, Irish women had it tough.
As the wife of one of my grandfather’s farm hands, at least the woman in that image had a house in which to sleep, albeit one with smelly carpets fashioned out of dried cow dung. Other women had no homes.
Like the Seanchai, the traditional itinerant storytellers who travelled from one community to another offering their skills in exchange for food and shelter, the ‘Shawly Woman’ and the ‘Friday Woman’ were a feature of our lives, walking the country roads all year round, stopping off at homes like ours where they were given food and drink. In return, they gave us news of other households, spiced with gossip and surmise.
Our washerwoman, Mrs Markham, was another source of gossip. Slaving at her tub and washboard, she had definite opinions and in creating Mrs Cash, who features in A Wrong to Sweeten, I’d been thinking about her (‘That fellow,’ said Mrs Cash, ‘Wouldn’t he steal the eye out of your head and come back for the eye-lash, if you gave him half a chance.’).
And when, in Seeking Clemency, I created Norah Cusack, I was thinking of our Bridie, though the two were not alike. Clever, pretty Bridie Hogan was 16 when my grandmother, Nina O’Brien Kelly, hired her as the children’s nanny. For Bridie, living in an orphanage, the job seemed like a salvation. When the children all grew up she became the household cook. Seventy years later she was still in the house, having long since become ‘family.’
Many others weren’t so lucky: even in the 1950s, domestic labour was still the largest single source of paid work for Irish women. Many of them never married: ‘followers’ were not allowed and the hours of work so long they had no time to socialise. If you were a farmer’s daughter you might well be married off. Matchmaking is one of our oldest traditions and much of it took place in a small spa town called Lisdoonvarna. Each September people flocked there – some to simply ‘take the waters’; some, with daughters in their ‘twenties, to see what land deals could be made by arranging marriages with the sons of other farmers. Official matchmakers were on standby to officiate at ‘deals’ – daughters, sometimes grateful, sometimes not, had little say in what went on.
Courageous, practical, upbeat, they made the most of what they got. They were truly wonderful.,
Illustration: Detail from Kerry landscape by Reg Gammon, in the author’s own collection.
Next episode: The mystery of the missing bureau.

Episode 8: The castle which might have been ours…
My grandmother, Nina O’Brien Kelly, took ghosts in her stride. Official records state that her family home, Manister House, in Croom, County Limerick, was ‘demolished because of problems with ghosts.’ Kneeling by her bedside to pray as a child, knowing that she was alone in her room, she felt hands upon her shoulders.
Her maiden name was Helena Cantillon and long before Manister House was built her family had another home. The Cantillons, or the de Cantelupes, were Normans who settled in Kerry in the early 13th century. As lords of Ballyheigue, they owned a great swatch of land in the area – and a castle.
‘A castle !’ I used to think as a child. ‘Our family owned a castle…’ Dream on. By the latter part of the 17thcentury the Cantillons had been stripped of their title as punishment for siding with the Jacobite cause and their land ceded to the Crosbies, a Protestant family. Before moving to Croom legend has it that the Cantillons sunk their hoard of gold in Ballyheigue bay so it wouldn’t fall into the Government’s hands.
No castle - but there was always the gold, even if no-one had ever retrieved it. And then, too, there was the on-going saga of the Cantillons themselves, some of whom did rather well in life. In France, James Cantillon led the Irish Brigade to victory at the battle of Malplaquet. His brother Richard became a world famous economist. In the 19th century, his grandson, Colonel Antoine Sylvaine de Cantillon, President of the Council of War in Paris, was created Baron de Ballyheigue by the French Government as atonement for what had been done by the British.
There were religious Cantillons, too - St Thomas de Cantelupe was the last saint to be canonized in England before the Reformation – and Cantillons with intriguing connections: in his will Napoleon the First left 10,000 francs to a Lieutenant Cantillon with the comment: ‘Cantillon has as much right to assassinate Wellington as that oligarch had to send me to perish on the rock of Helena.’
In my third novel, in The Moon is Red in April, I introduced two fictitious Cantillons, Richard and his sister, Catherine, into a story of Ireland and France in the 18th century.
The book was inspired by the true-life experience of the founder of Hennessy Cognac: in my novel young Dick O’Shaughnessy embarks on a hazardous journey to escape the Penal Laws in Ireland and to fight for his country in France. Abandoning his childhood sweetheart, spirited out of Ireland on a tiny corvette, he makes his way to Paris to join the Irish Brigade. Studying at the College des Grassins, later the Sorbonne, he learns how to handle a sword and a musket. Staying with the Cantillons, he gets to know Paris, a lively and elegant city, its boulevards studded with coffee shops, little theatres, the opera-comique, street jugglers, acrobats, Spanish dancers and exotic performing animals.
It was all a very long way from the castle in Ballyheigue that had belonged to his Cantillon friends.
Next episode: Wonderful women

Episode 12: The Ghosts Who Lived in the Black Townships
Ghosts don’t feature in Twelve Shades of Black, or not in the literal sense. This book isn’t fiction but, rather, a series of interviews which I conducted with black South African men and women living in the townships outside Johannesburg during the apartheid era. Yet, it seemed to me then, that many of them were ghosts – shades of the people they might have been, had they been free to be themselves, outside the confines of their environment.
If some of these interviews seem stilted today it was because blacks were frightened to talk to whites because who knew what might happen to them once they began to open their mouths.
Whites were equally nervous when it came to talking to blacks. Liberal whites paid a price for their views. This was a society in which houses were watched, phones were tapped and innocent friendships between men and women of different races were automatically assumed to have sexual overtones. Puritanical, racist and ill-informed, the architects of apartheid were obsessed with the concept of sex across the colour divide: on the basis of its title alone, Anna Sewell’s enchanting children’s book Black Beauty ¬– an ‘autobiography’ of a horse, first published in 1877 – was banned by the South African censor.
Apartheid harnessed sexual fear. So, perhaps not surprisingly, when white people heard that the Belgian photographer Sylvie van Lerberghe and I were going to the townships to research this book, they were convinced that we’d never come out. Two young, blonde white women setting off on such a mission ? We’d be raped, we’d be murdered, they said to us, sadly. Instead, we were greeted with warmth and civility. In Soweto, where small dirt roads led out of other small dirt roads and where the thousands of square bungalows all looked alike, our only fear was of getting lost. Sometimes, but not always, the people we met dared to tell us how they really felt about their situation: the poet,Wally Serote, one of the most courageous characters who features in Twelve Shades of Black, had already spoken to me, pouring out the anger which was burning within him.
But, in order to protect themselves, most blacks concealed their true feelings under a mask of politeness. I talked to the priest whose flock took religion with a soupcon of witchcraft. To the canny inyanga whose confidantes paid her on HP for charms. To the millionaire businessman who wasn’t permitted to buy a house of his own. To the talented artist and the shebeen queen and to the others who appear in this book and I wished that they dared to come out of the shadows and reveal more about themselves. And then, one dark evening I was smuggled back into Soweto, lying on the back seat of a friend’s car, covered by a blanket. Whites were not allowed to enter the townships after nightfall: the friend I was with wrapped a dark scarf around his head, put on a pair of black gloves and hoped that we’d get away with it. We were going to the theatre, to see a musical play. The so-called theatre was nothing but a basic hall. There was no stage, no floodlights, no sets and no costumes for the actors – only, more importantly, an explosion of incredible and exuberant talent. Watching spell-bound, it suddenly struck me that here, finally, was the reality we had been seeking. For in pretending to be other people, the cast had truly come out of the shadows into which they had been thrust. They had set aside their protective African masks. Ghosts no longer, they were free, even if only for a night.