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SHOTSMAG CONFIDENTIAL


SHOTSMAG CONFIDENTIAL

Who really did kill Katherine Armstrong??

Posted: 06 Apr 2022 11:30 PM PDT

 

When Katharine Armstrong, a 48 year-old mother of three, died in her bed one morning in February 1921 no one thought other than that she had died of natural causes. Yet, within 15 months, her husband Herbert, would be arrested, tried for murdering her and attempting to poison a rival, at a sensational trial. The proceedings were reported all over the western world as he was found guilty and executed exactly one hundred years ago – the only British solicitor ever to be hanged for murder.

The case was extraordinary because it was on the surface so ordinary: a tale arising out of small town professional rivalries in remote Hay-on-Wye on the English-Welsh border. But the twists and turns of the story could have been written by any of the then fashionable crime writers such as Agatha Christie, Dorothy L Sayers or Anthony Berkeley who were just starting their careers and who would all reference the Armstrong case in one way or another in their stories over the coming years.

The tale, so famous at the time, has long fascinated me, not just because of the social milieu, ripe in period detail, in which it took place just after the First World War, but because its outcome remains contested. Much remains to be unravelled. Only two full length books have been published in the last fifty years: one convinced that Armstrong was guilty and the other that he was innocent and should never have been hanged. On the centenary of his trial I took up the very cold case and discovered not only poignant details about what happened, but also a previously overlooked witness whose evidence casts a new light on the story.

Katharine was more highly strung and nervous. She became delusional and depressive, worried that she was letting the family down, to such an extent that in 1920 she was committed to an asylum for six months. After she came home in January 1921 she was clearly not cured and went rapidly down hill, dying a month later. Within months Herbert was getting entangled with the town's rival solicitor Oswald Martin over a land sale which was proving difficult to resolve and becoming acrimonious. One afternoon that October they met for tea at Herbert's house, during the course of which he handed Oswald a scone, apparently with the words: "'scuse fingers". After he got home later that evening Oswald fell violently ill, though he soon recovered.

His father-in-law, the local chemist Fred Davies, remembered selling Herbert Armstrong arsenic over the counter (as you could in those days) to make weedkiller to tackle the dandelions in his lawn. It was Davies who suggested his son-in-law might have been poisoned. They remembered that the Martins had received an anonymous box of chocolates shortly before, one of which had made Oswald's sister-in-law ill.

The local doctor, Tom Hincks, who had treated Katharine and Oswald without any suspicions of foul play, was convinced now that they might both have been poisoned. The Home Office and Scotland Yard were surreptitiously called in and on New Year's Eve, Herbert Armstrong was arrested in his office. A small, lethal dose of arsenic was found in one of his pockets. Charged with the attempted poisoning of Oswald, Armstrong was in custody when his wife's body was exhumed from the local churchyard. It was found to contain a large amount of arsenic.

Herbert was tried at Hereford Assizes before Mr Justice Darling, a hanging judge who seems to have set out to find him guilty from the start. In summing up he ignored most of the evidence in Armstrong's favour – which was quite substantial – and pressed for his conviction. The jury of local famers duly obliged, taking just 48 minutes to reach a verdict. Herbert was hanged at Gloucester prison five months to the day after his arrest. The hangman claimed to have heard him mutter: "I'm coming Kate!" as the trapdoor opened beneath his feet.

Was he guilty? As one reviewer has said of my book: "It's for you to decide." And there's a twist on the very last page.

The Poisoner Solicitor: The True Story of a 1920s Murder Mystery by Stephen Bates.(Icon Books) Out Now

A brilliant narrative investigation into the 1920s case that inspired Agatha Christie, Dorothy Sayers and Margery Allingham. On a bleak Tuesday morning in February 1921, 48-year-old Katharine Armstrong died in her bedroom on the first floor of an imposing Edwardian villa overlooking the rolling hills of the isolated borderlands between Wales and England. Within fifteen months of such a sad domestic tragedy, her husband, Herbert Rowse Armstrong, would be arrested, tried and hanged for poisoning her with arsenic, the only solicitor ever to be executed in England. Armstrong's story was retold again and again, decade after decade, in a thousand newspaper articles across the world, and may have also inspired the new breed of popular detective writers seeking to create a cunning criminal at the centre of their thrillers. With all the ingredients of a classic murder mystery, the case is a near-perfect whodunnit. But who, in fact, did it? Was Armstrong really a murderer? One hundred years after the execution, Stephen Bates examines and retells the story of the case, evoking the period and atmosphere of the early 1920s, and questioning the fatal judgement.

More information about Stephen Bates can be found on his website. You can find him on Facebook and you can also follow him on Twitter @StephenBatesEsq

Why Fiction Needs More Female Action Heroes

Posted: 06 Apr 2022 10:00 PM PDT

'Female action heroes don't sell books. Fact.'

That's what they say in conventional publishing, and by that, I mean the world of print and paper, Waterstones and WH Smiths, the big five and their huge marketing departments.

And, broadly speaking, they are right. 

Male action heroes don't sell that many either, with a few exceptions like Lee Child's Jack Reacher. Even spy thrillers don't shift in huge numbers, apart from those by John Le Carré and a select handful of others. If you want a UK spy thriller (the reading public reasons) you go to John Le Carré, king of the genre. Why would you go anywhere else? No need to reinvent the wheel. Le Carré's appeal is broad - he is read equally by men and women and beloved by both, something he shares with Lee Child. And this is the key to their success. 

Because it is women who buy fiction. 

According to Helen Taylor in Why Women Read Fiction (and I see no reason to doubt her) 80% of fiction books are bought by women. Pretty staggering, right? And it's not that women don't like action, it's just that, all things being equal, they prefer other genres, and if they are reading action, they seem to prefer (for whatever reason) male heroes. 

Now let's consider the brave new world of content consumption that is Netflix, YouTube, Audible, Amazon Prime, Tiktok etc. Compared to twenty or thirty years ago, there is vastly more content being delivered now, in vastly more original ways, and every bit of it is in direct competition with print books. Books are up against it in the fight of their lives. 

On the plus side, the amount of content being consumed is also going up. Accurate data is hard to come by but, in the last couple of decades, it is estimated our content consumption has more than tripled. Smartphones have a lot to do with this. They are with us all the time – when we're walking, driving, at the gym, in the house. And earbuds make it so easy. They carve out a space for new content where there wasn't a space before. It is no surprise, therefore, that audio, as a means of delivering content, is increasing its market share fast. 

And here's the thing - the absolute game changer for conventional publishing - the audio audience is not the same as the audience who buy print books. Because half of them are men. 

Granted, they are not all listening to fiction. There are podcasts and an ever-expanding array of non-fiction titles to choose from, but still. The numbers of men, and the quantity of fiction they are consuming, is steadily rising. 

This is good news if you write spy thrillers with a female lead because here's the other thing. 

Men like stories with action heroines.

I guess it shouldn't be that much of a surprise. Kick-ass women have been popular on screen (and gaming consoles) for years: Ripley, Buffy, Nikita, Lara Croft, the Black Widow, Electra, Trinity, Dark Angel, Sydney in Alias (to name but a very few). Popular on screen that is, but not in conventional publishing.

The only place in a bookshop you will find a kick-ass action heroine is young adult fantasy. The Hunger Games, The Cruel Prince, A Court of Thorns and Roses, Throne of Glass (basically everything by Sarah J. Maas) feature action heroines kicking butt. In fact, if you were to try to sell fantasy YA to an editor, without a strong female lead, you would probably struggle. That's a whole generation who are growing up loving Katniss and Feyre and Aelin, who have had their tastes shaped at a formative age, and who, when they grow to adulthood, will likely find the current fiction offerings lacking. Put it together with the rise of the male reader, and conventional publishing is going to need to up their female-action game.

There is a certain amount of talking my own book here, of course. I write a kick-ass female spy called Winter, for Audible. Winter is what Bond would be if he was being created today. For a start, in our surveillance age, he would work at GCHQ (snoop central), not MI6, and would be good at coding. Also, there's a chance he'd be a she. Some things would stay the same – the promiscuity, the weapons proficiency, the combat prowess. The smug invincibility. Winter is all these things. 

But more than this, she is the hero. The Alpha if you like. The mythic hero. She's not 'making it in a man's world'. She is the world. She is exactly what conventional publishers don't like and audio and screen audiences love. She's a fantasy. A John Wick, Vin Diesel, fight-to-the-death fantasy. Off the top of my head, I can't think of many other heroines in modern fiction who can claim this. She is one of the first, but you can be absolutely sure she won't be the last.

Winter Falling by Alex Callister is available exclusively on Audible from 7th April 2022.

If you can meet with Triumph and Disaster....Firestorm is down - the assassin for hire website that had the world by its throat, gone. Alek Konstantin, king of the underworld, is in hiding. But while the world celebrates, Winter is bracing for what must surely follow. All the world's cut-throats, assassins and thugs are unemployed, roaming the globe without a leader - and nature abhors a vacuum. Or watch the things you gave your life to, broken....Something's not right, and it's not only that Winter's body is in pieces. A boy held captive. An attempted assassination. Thirty men gunned down in rural South Wales. What sinister hand is directing these events, and to what end? GCHQ is a place of secrets, and they follow Winter everywhere. There is so much she must conceal, and Control is keeping something from her, something vital about her past. As she crashes towards the ultimate showdown, Winter faces the hardest decision of her life - and she must ask herself the question - whose side is she really on?

More information about the author can be found on her website. You can also follow her on Twitter @CallisterAuthor. You can also find her on Facebook.

The Return of Lisbeth Salander

Posted: 05 Apr 2022 12:00 PM PDT




LISBETH SALANDER AND THE 'DRAGON TATTOO' SERIES GIVEN NEW LIFE BY ONE OF SWEDEN'S MOST SUCCESSFUL NOVELISTS


Karin Smirnoff lives on a farm in northern Sweden, just a short car journey away from Stieg Larsson's birth place. She is a bestselling author whose novels have sold over 700,000 copies in her home country, has a black belt in karate, and enjoys spending time with her mother and kids. But now, her life is due to change completely as she is about to become one of the world's most famous novelists after taking on the Stieg Larsson mantel to write about one of Sweden's most iconic women, Lisbeth Salander. With approval of the Stieg Larsson estate, Karin Smirnoff has taken on the monumental task of writing the next three books in the 'Dragon Tattoo' series. The first novel (number 7 in the series) is due to be published in the UK on 31 August 2023. 

Karin was born in Umeå in the north of Sweden, grew up in Stockholm, and left school at 17 to travel. Now, she has returned to her birthplace and lives on a farm which has been in her family for many decades. Karin has hinted in interviews that the main storyline for Millennium 7 (as the as-yet-untitled novel is called) will move from Stockholm and the south to the wild expanses of northern Sweden that are so familiar to her. She read the Millennium novels when the first three books came out and is familiar with the universe created by Larsson and continued by fellow Swede David Lagercrantz.

With Karin Smirnoff as the new writer of the series, and its acquisition by Katharina Bielenberg of the MacLehose Press, an imprint of Quercus Books, the series – which has sold over 100 million copies worldwide – will have a female author and publisher, with a female translator also being lined up. 

Karin Smirnoff says, "It feels almost solemn to write the sequel to Millennium. I said yes to the project without hesitation, even though it postpones my own ideas for new novels. It's an exciting opportunity to independently create and make something new based on a unique fictional universe that is known worldwide. The Millennium books are classics in their genre, where the combination of unforgettable characters and the strong political and societal engagement still fascinates readers. I will continue to build on Stieg Larsson's core themes, such as violence, abuse of power, and contemporary political currents." 

Katharina Bielenberg says, "The Millennium series has been a constant at MacLehose Press and
Quercus since Christopher MacLehose acquired Stieg Larsson's The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo back in 2008. Everything we know about Karin Smirnoff and her work tells us she has the perfect sensibility not only to continue on from David Lagercrantz's trilogy with great drive and imagination, but also to make the series her own. And it feels just right that Lisbeth Salander's universe should now be brought to life by a woman. We are absolutely thrilled to be working with Karin on these next instalments."

Jon Butler, MD at Quercus Books, says, "The Millennium series – 'the Dragon Tattoo books' to most people in the English-speaking world – of course constitute one of the biggest publishing stories of the last twenty years, selling over 100 million copies worldwide. Stieg Larsson's iconic creation, and the brilliant sequels written by David Lagercrantz, reached people who rarely buy books, which is the holy grail for any publisher. So, we couldn't be more excited to announce a new trilogy; except that I probably am more excited. Karin Smirnoff is a literary talent of the highest order, and a huge bestseller in her native Sweden. We can't wait to launch her creation to the widest possible English-language readership next year."

The trailer for the Millennium 7 can be watched below.

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