[Brenda & Effie 07] - A Game of Crones

  Table of Contents

  Copyright

  Read the whole Brenda and Effie Series

  Blurb

  The Days of Brenda and Effie

  The Woman in a Black Beehive

  Bat out of Hull

  Spicy Tea and Sympathy

  Brenda has Risen from the Grave

  Mrs Hudson at the ChristmasHotel

  The Arabian Nighties

  The Woolworth Horror

  With Huge Thanks To

  A Game of Crones - Paul Magrs

  Proudly published by Snowbooks Ltd ISBN 978-1-913525-12-5

  Copyright © Paul Magrs

  Cover art by Matthew Bright

  Typeset by Emma Barnes in LaTeX

  Paul Magrs asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work. All rights reserved.

  British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data. A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

  Read the whole Brenda and Effie Series:

  978-1-911390-61-9 Never the Bride (1)

  978-1-911390-75-6 Something Borrowed (2)

  978-1-911390-76-3 Conjugal Rites (3)

  978-1-913525-05-7 Hell’s Belles! (4)

  978-1-913525-07-1 The Bride that Time Forgot (5)

  978-1-913525-10-1 Brenda and Effie Forever! (6)

  978-1-913525-12-5 A Game of Crones (7)

  In this new volume of adventures for Brenda and Effie we do battle with vampires and mummies and haunted cats! We uncover the mystery of both Elephant Men and meet Tolstoy the Long-Eared Bat out of Hell! Brenda also gets to go back to her roots with Baron Frankenstein, and we even share an investigation at the Christmas Hotel with the famous Sherlock Holmes.

  Whitby has never felt so hectic, and everyone here is very glad to welcome you back..!

  The Days of Brenda and Effie

  You have to wait for the right moment to bring characters back to life.

  I really believe this.

  Sometimes they haunt your subconscious and flicker about at the edge of your vision. Other times they’re jumping up and down trying to catch your attention.

  But you can’t fully do justice to them until the moment is right.

  I guess this sounds a bit crazy, doesn’t it?

  Like the old clichéd idea of a writer’s head being filled with all his or her characters dashing about inside. As a child I used to love that portrait of Dickens in his study – have you seen the one? – and there are little puffs of smoke all around him, and characters from his novels can be seen floating around in each one. I thought it was a beautiful image of how writers carry all these people around with them, all the time.

  Readers, too. We absorb characters, I think. When they’ve made a big impact upon us characters get incorporated by their readers and we never forget them. Readers are haunted just as palpably as writers are.

  Anyhow, I was going to tell you about being haunted by Brenda and Effie.

  These two characters are the mysterious sleuths in my series of six novels set in Whitby, beginning with ‘Never the Bride’, which I published in 2006 and wrote during the previous year.

  But those characters and their town and the things they got up to had been in my head for quite a few years before that.

  They’d been there since at least 1998.

  Back then I was working at the University of East Anglia, and I was commissioned by Radio 4 to contribute an afternoon Short Story for their famous weekday slot. That week’s collection of stories was to be themed around the idea of writers bringing new life to a nineteenth century novel by focusing on a lesser-known background character. I was told that, for example, the marvellous Shena Mackay was writing a tale from the view-point of Long John Silver’s parrot.

  For this, my first radio commission I was a last minute replacement, and I had less than twenty four hours to produce my 2,200 word story (precisely fifteen minutes when performed aloud). So, after a long day on campus I raced home on the bus and practically skipped all the way back to my rented house. I was so excited by the idea. Not least because I knew exactly who I was going to write about.

  The Bride of Frankenstein.

  Who’d ever done justice to her afterlife before? I meant, the version we read about in the original Mary Shelley novel. She gets constructed in a makeshift lab on a remote Scottish island. The great surgeon Frankenstein is bullied by his first-born monster to make him a mate but, upon seeing what he has done and, horrified at the thought of the possible offspring, Herr Doctor Frankenstein destroys his handiwork at once. He flees into the night, pursued by his monster, and the two leave the poor discombobulated lady behind.

  I wanted to tell the tale – in my fifteen minute monologue – of what life had been like for the Bride in the ensuing two hundred years. Like many badly-treated women, she tells us, she had to pick herself up, put herself back together, and simply carry on.

  Rushing home that Friday night, on the bus, down the street, letting myself through the front door, I could hear that voice. Homely, pungent, mysterious. I could actually hear her! I knew what Brenda the Bride of Frankenstein actually sounded like.

  Actually, at that stage, she wasn’t called Brenda. Her name in that first story was Bessie.

  Her monologue was written in bursts of text throughout that night, on different bits of paper. I scratched away in pen and ink at the dining room table, sitting up all night with pots of tea turning darker and murkier as the hours passed.

  I experimented. I free-associated. I sent myself into a trance. I took all the bits of writing so far and cut them all up into pieces and rearranged the order of paragraphs, sentences and each and every word. I tried to think how Brenda thought – this perplexing, scrambled, stitched-together woman. This creature of shreds and patches. What was her mind like? How did her thought processes flow? How did she reveal her secrets to her audience? How would she yield herself up? Would she tell all? Would she tease us? Would she hold everything back and just drop hints about her incredible, long ago past?

  Dawn came up and the story was done.

  And she was alive..!

  I was very happy with the result, and I think my producer and the BBC were, too.

  I remember listening with my partner Jeremy, in our new house, several months later. We had bought our house on Onley Street and were filling it with all our stuff. We had men in doing plastering in the living room on the very day my story was broadcast. They took a break while ‘Never the Bride’ came on and we all listened – hearing the wonderful tones of actress Joanna Tope reverberating off the empty walls and the bare boards.

  So that was Brenda in 1998.

  Of course at the time I wondered whether I would tell more stories about Brenda. I’d brought her to life, and her snooty friend, Effie, and plopped them into the spooky town of Whitby. Were they really living in quiet retirement, though? Was this glimpse of Brenda really the first and last we’d see of her – right at the end of all the excitement of her life?

  But other stories and other characters came my way instead.

  Years went by. I wrote other stuff. I left one job, and left the city. Moved to another and started another job.

  Still no Brenda.

  Had I forgotten her?

  Then in 2005 all of a sudden… I don’t know what it was that provoked it.

  It was the summer vacation starting. It was our first summer in this house in South Manchester. The lawn at the back was overgrown. I had a deck chair under the magnolia tree. I was sitting out there with a great thick pad of paper and I was writing in chunky black felt tip.

  What was I meant to be writing?

  My agent at the time had
given me a very earnest talk about how I had to think very seriously about what I wrote next. I had to approach it very carefully and check out every stage with her. I had to do something we could all be confident about. Something that would ‘break through’ this time. Nothing daft. Nothing ‘cultish’. Something more mainstream.

  Oh dear.

  She was clear that I had to ratify my next fictional project with her first. We had to check and double check that it had legs. That it was viable. And that it was right for me.

  Right. Okay.

  I would do that.

  Too often in the past, I thought, I had made the silly mistake of writing just what I wanted to. I had followed my own stupid, idiosyncratic nose. I had blundered into writing some of the least commercial or successful novels the world had ever known. Yes, I needed saving from myself and my ridiculous instincts.

  Ok.

  So what did I do?

  I went out into the sun – it was late in May, 2005, and it was the beginning of a lovely long summer in Manchester. I flung myself down into the deck chair under the shade of that tree and I wrote and wrote like a demon. I wrote an entire book synopsis that afternoon in black felt tip. I wrote something like eight thousand words of outline for a novel called ‘Never the Bride.’

  Somehow, as soon as I was installed in that deck chair, my old ladies of Whitby came back to me. My spooky investigators were going into business!

  And it felt supremely naughty, too. I was suddenly writing exactly what I wanted. And it was a very wayward, silly, eccentric novel I had in mind. Not at all the kind of thing my then-agent would have wanted.

  But I just couldn’t stop myself.

  Not from writing that one, or the sequels that followed every year afterwards.

  My then-agent despaired, I think.

  But at least I was sure. At least I knew what I was doing.

  But really, there was no choice in the matter.

  I mean it. Even though it sounds crazy.

  If you’ve got the knack of creating great characters – beware.

  They will ambush you. Any time, any place. If you ignore them they won’t go away. They’ll wait years. Even when your agent that wants you to write about something sensible and different… that could well be the moment that your characters decide to… POUNCE!

  The Brenda and Effie days were very happy ones.

  When I think about publishing each of those books, I think about the people that I met as a result of Brenda and Effie. Sometimes people would dress up in fancy costumes for the occasion – especially when there was a signing at the splendid Whitby Bookshop during Goth Weekend at Beltane or Hallowe’en. Year after year we had these launches for the books, and sometimes the shop was so busy people couldn’t even get in through the doors…

  Brenda fans are very loyal.

  Sometimes I’d meet people who’d say: ‘I’d never read fantasy, or horror, or science fiction. But I read these books because I love Brenda…’

  They’d follow Brenda into any genre, is what I was discovering. And Brenda led them a merry old dance through those novels. She time-travelled, she went into alternate dimensions… once she even fell into the making-of DVD extras of a Cult horror movie. And everywhere she went in Whitby she uncovered nefarious goings-on and very spooky mysteries.

  I can’t stress enough how much I loved writing these books, and how chuffed I was to discover they had readers who loved them.

  My publisher at the time never really understood what the books were about, or why anyone would love them, or who those people would be. They certainly didn’t know how to market them. They always seemed mystified and a bit embarrassed by poor old Brenda and Effie and me. I was told by publishing people I was working with that, really, I ought to be writing darker and edgier supernatural fiction. My heroines should be younger and more feisty…

  My heroines should, in short, be more kickass than bus pass…

  But I carried on writing Brenda’s adventures in exactly the way I wanted to. Eventually my then-publisher pulled the plug, and the wonderful Snowbooks published the sixth and ostensibly final volume in the series. There have been side steps and related novels, of course – ‘666 Charing Cross Road’ features the adventures of Brenda’s slightly rougher sister, and ‘Fellowship of Ink’ takes us back into the 1930s for some mysterious goings-on investigated by Henry Cleavis, Reginald Tyler, and Tyler’s housemaid – who turns out to be a slightly younger Brenda.

  One feature of many of my books is that they interconnect in many subtle – and some not-so-subtle – ways. I love it when readers chase up these links and see the bigger story...

  I once had a literary agent (not for very long) who told me that I had to abandon Brenda and Effie. ‘They’re dead in the water! Those books are dead! A flop! They were a commercial failure! You’ve got to do something else! Something more sensible!’

  A commercial failure perhaps, in this world of disposable stuff that people pick up and swiftly chuck away: all those cookie-cutter books with feisty kickass heroines. But Brenda and Effie somehow endure, and I hope they’ll go on enduring and finding a wider and wider readership who take them to their heart in the way the loyal hardcore has done, so far.

  The current volume features a bunch of inter-related stories for our heroines. Some of them have been produced as audio dramas by Bafflegab Productions in recent years, with Anne Reid performing all the female roles. She was wonderful, of course, but the real voice of Brenda for me will always be Joanna Tope, who read the first six books as unabridged audios for what used to be AudioGo (or AudioWent, as we now call it). Jo will always be the real Brenda to me.

  So here we are, with the ladies of Whitby again. Time for another trot down to the harbour at twilight, and maybe a drink or two at the Christmas Hotel. Even writing those words makes me feel nostalgic. They get me hankering for those days between 2005 and 2012 when I was writing these stories and thinking about these adventures all the time. They really were happy times with those two old dames… and maybe those days aren’t over yet.

  Paul Magrs

  Manchester, November 2019

  The Woman in a Black Beehive

  My name is Brenda.

  This is the tale of how I came to live in this new town of mine.

  I arrived here by the coast in the early spring. I fell in love with the vastness of the grey sea and the brightness of the light. You see, I’d been hiding away for far too long in the shadows. Now I wanted to be out in the open air. Feeling that salty breeze on my cracked and ancient skin. I’ve been well nigh cloistered. Out in the daylight I was feeling positively macabre.

  Such a long, long life I’ve had. And I don’t remember the half of it. When I say that, you must believe me. It’s like there is some kind of fault line in my head and many of my lifetime’s memories have drained away. Sometimes I think the human brain has capacity enough for only one average lifetime. And I have had much more than that. I am very old, you see.

  But this is my new life. A quiet life beside the sea in this town of Whitby, which has protected itself well against the oncoming crassness of the ages. In the twenty-first century it still feels like a Victorian holiday town, with its higgledy-piggledy rooftops and stovepipes and labyrinthine streets. This pleases me for I am, at heart, somewhere deep inside my bosom, an old-fashioned girl. This place – with its busy harbour and hulking, rocky headland and gloomy ruins – suits me quite well.

  It is here that I have decided to sink all of my savings into a Guest House, bang on the harbour. Here I will live as just one more landlady in a town overrun by that fussy, capable brood. And no one here will ever know my secrets, or anything about the many complicated lives I have left behind me. Here I will simply be Brenda. A little tall, perhaps, and heavyset. Slathered in too much make-up, covering scars that only I know about. Brenda with her towering black beehive. As I sit writing my journal by candlelight, here in my attic sitting room, my wig sits on its stand beside me. A fluffed up and nea
tly-coiffed sentinel in the moonlight.

  I gaze past my wig through the circular attic window at the sea mist that slinks up from the harbour and at the stars above Whitby Abbey and I think over events during my first few days in this place. Already a great deal has gone on, despite the fact that the last thing I was looking for was any kind of mystery or adventure…

  I suppose you might say it all kicks off when I meet the woman from next door. The very day after I take possession of my B&B. I’ve only just put up the sign that says ‘vacancies’ and I am anticipating a few days’ solid work – cleaning and stripping and painting and varnishing and buffing everything up until it is just so. The place needs a thorough going-over before I can invite anyone in over the threshold to be my first paying customers. So I am bustling out of the door in my side passage, on my way to buy all the necessary cleaning supplies when there comes this rather shrill call.

  ‘Yoo hoo,’ it goes and I turn round to see a skinny, oldish woman with her hair in a bun and a sucked lemon face. She’s done up rather smartly in a worsted two-piece, clutching a shopping bag somewhat aggressively. She glares at me, asking, ‘You’re the new lady, aren’t you?’

  I have to admit that yes, I am the new owner of this particular B&B. She stares at my sign, which says, ‘Brenda’s B&B’ and seems unimpressed.

  ‘Plain old Bed and Breakfast won’t do these days, you know. You have to have an interesting gimmick. A unique selling point. You have to add value. This couple I know in Scarborough, they went in for a Medieval theme.’

  ‘Oh yes?’ I say, trying to be polite.

  ‘It wasn’t very nice. The hygiene in their dungeon was shocking and that ought to be paramount, oughtn’t it? I’m Effie Jacobs, by the way. I live next door to you. That’s my Antiques Emporium.’

  Well, I’ve already taken note of the dusty windows of the tatty junkshop next door. Now here’s the owner, puffing it up into something far fancier than it looks from outside.

  ‘Curios and trinkets, some furniture and antique costume wear. All very select.’ She extends a skinny hand. ‘I take it you’re Brenda?’