Historical – Page 3 – A. L. Lester

#AmReading

I haven’t done an #AmReading post for a while, largely because my reading has consisted of doomscrolling on twitter and a deep-dive in to the fanfic excellence of AO3.

However, I have begun to surface into actual, purchasable books again over the last couple of weeks and the first one I want to tell you about is a re-read of FF historical The Covert Captain by my dear friend Jeannelle M. Ferreira. I include this to indicate that I am biased! Jeannelle is working on the sequel and I did a reread so I’d be ready. This week I also talk about contemporary MM The Other Boyfriend by Darien Cox and The Green Man’s Challenge by Juliette E. McKenna

The Covert Captain by Jeannelle M. Ferreira is a f/f regency and I had forgotten how delightful I found it the first time round. Eleanor Fleming (Nora) comes home from war…where she has spent the last decade or two fighting Bonaparte as Nathanial Fleming. She falls in love with her commanding officer’s sister, Harriet. Hijinx of the ‘gosh I didn’t realise you were a woman!’ variety ensue.

I love the historical detail in Jeannelle’s stories (you should check out Your Fingers Like Pen and Ink if this is your catnip, it’s a free transcript and/or podcast) and The Covert Captain is no exception. I felt immersed in the eighteenth century as I was reading—the day to day detail reminds me very much of Dorothy Dunnett’s style.

I should add…this is not a trans story. It’s a woman dresses as a man to survive story. And it’s perfect. Highly recommend.

The Other Boyfriend by Darien Cox

Darien Cox is one of my favourite authors and I was delighted when I realised I’d missed a release. The Other Boyfriend should probably be described as a romp. It’s got an unusual plot where our main characters Jonas and Lee, the younger boyfriends of two brothers, work out that actually they don’t hate each other after all. I don’t think I can tell you much more than that without massive spoilers.

I really enjoyed it…it’s a light read with positively Shakespearean undertones. Recommend!

The Green Man’s Challenge by Juliet E. McKenna

The Green Man's Challenge. Juliet E. McKenna

Another wonderful Green Man story. This one is set in White Horse Country in the south of England. Dan is called to the area both by a night-time visit from the Green Man and a phone call from Fin, his river-ecologist, swan-maiden lover. She just happens to have seen a giant on her way home from a job in Wiltshire. As you do. I love the magic in these books. It’s very strongly tied to the earth and to English myth and it resonates really deeply with me. The giant isn’t a force for good in the world; but the white horses that populate the chalk hillsides of the area are. This book also introduces good witches that turn into hares, which is brilliant. It’s set in the summer of 2020 or 2021, in the pandemic, and it’s very well done–there in the background, with Dan’s worry about his elderly father, he and Fin’s confusion about whether it’s safe for them to sleep together, all those little things. But it’s not overwhelming or intrusive. The way the real world and the magical world are interwoven is superb as usual.

This is definitely worth your time.

That’s the lot for this time!

London Calling release day!

Today is the official release day of London Calling, the box set of my 1920s London Border Magic series! It comprises Lost in Time, Shadows on the Border & The Hunted and the Hind.

To celebrate I have a giveaway! Roll up, roll up! And read all about it!

London Calling Box Set

Queer British Lovecraftian historical romantic suspense set in 1920s London.

Lew Tyler is dragged from 2016 to 1920 by an accident with border magic whilst he’s searching for his missing friend. He’s struggling to get to grips with life a century before he was born. Detective Alec Carter is trying to solve gruesome murders in his patch of London, weighed down with exhaustion and a jaded attitude to most of his fellow humans after four years of war. In the middle of a murder investigation that involves wild magic, mysterious creatures and illegal sexual desire, will Alec and Lew work out who is safe to trust?

Sergeant Will Grant, Alec’s right-hand man, is drawn to the mysterious Fenn. Is Fenn a man or a woman? Does Will care? And Fenn…Fenn has a secret. They live beyond the border between 1920s London and the magical Outlands and they need to get home. Are they prepared to achieve that by double crossing Alec, Will and Lew?

Two couples hold the fabric of reality in their hands. Will it make them or break them?

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WIN!

To win a copies of the London Calling audiobooks, Lost in Time, Shadows on the Border & The Hunted and the Hind, pop on over to the Audiobook Draw and throw your hat in the ring! Id’ be really grateful if you could share it on social media once you’ve entered if you could bear to…you’ll get more chances to win and more people will see it! (You can also listen to excerpt and buy them here)

Lost in Time,. Shadows on the Border & The Hunted and the Hind audiobook covers

Read an Excerpt

Carter on his doorstep when he got home again was just taking the piss. All Lew wanted to do was climb into his bed and sleep and pretend he was in his comfortable flat-share in 2016 and could wake up and listen to his iPod.
He didn’t even bother to greet Carter this time, just wordlessly locked up the bike and opened the door into the flat so he could come inside. He was glowering again. Lew wished he could say it didn’t suit him. “Come in. Glowering doesn’t suit you.”
Carter grunted wordlessly and suddenly Lew had had enough of it.
“No, honestly. It makes your face all scrunched up—” he demonstrated, “—and I’m sure it’s bad for you. Wrinkles or something.” He couldn’t seem to shut up. Poking a bear would probably have been safer. He wanted to get through to him, though, he wanted to make him growl. The other day and being punched in the face had at least proved Carter had some emotion in there somewhere; he couldn’t feel anything from him, most of the time. He chucked his biking goggles onto the small settee and turned to the kitchen cupboard. “Do you want a drink? I’m having a drink. I’ve had a shit day so far...a shit week, in fact.” He paused, considering, “...maybe even a shitty two years. And so, I’m going to have a drink. You’re welcome to join me.”
He clattered the bottle and a couple of glasses out of the cupboard and smashed them unsteadily down on the counter top. He felt unsteady all over, actually, as if he’d already drunk too much. Adrenaline, and lack of sleep, probably.
He pulled the cork out of the bottle and started to slop spirit into the glasses. Then, all of a sudden, Carter moved to stand close behind him, still not speaking. He hadn’t been expecting it and it made him even more mentally off balance.
He could feel the warmth of the other man’s body through the back of his shirt, although they weren’t touching. He was boxed in by his arms, either side of him, hands flat on the counter. It was shockingly intimate, although Lew didn’t think Carter meant it to be. He meant it to be intimidating. The otherman said, softly, “Tell me. Tell me. Tell me what’s going on. Why have I got more dead men turning up with the same wounds as your friend Fornham?”
Bloody hell. More of them. That was very, very bad. “Get off me.” Lew spoke equally quietly.
There was a pause for a second. “No,” said Carter.
“You don’t know what you’re messing with. Get off me.” Again, that pause.
“No.” His voice was rougher this time.
Lew noticed Carter’s knuckles were white where he was holding the countertop either side of the whisky bottle and the glasses. He shivered.
Suddenly he could feel things coming off Carter after all: the want and the fear and the desperate sense of disgust at himself. The anger and the confusion he felt toward Lew because he wanted Lew and yet he didn’t trust him, with this or with anything, and it was all against his better judgement. The emotions hit him like a wall coming up out of the dark all at once and completely floored him; and he gasped.
Slowly, he pushed the bottle away from him—always with the drink when Carter was around, he absently thought—and turned around, careful not to touch him. They were nearly of a height—he didn’t have to tilt his head much to see that Carter’s eyes were green. Lashes long and dark. He didn’t pull back. It was mid-afternoon and his beard was coming through.
Lew swallowed. “I don’t want to lie to you.”
It came out rougher than he had intended and Carter’s eyes dropped to his mouth.
“Then don’t!” He pulled back angrily and turned away, hands shoving fiercely through his hair. “Tell me what’s going on!”
“Carter...Alistair...” He couldn’t bear the wave of confused anger and emotion coming off the man and he stepped forward and put his hand on his arm, turning him back toward him.
“Alec...”
Carter jerked back as if he’d been burned.

Buy London Calling

Victorian Nurses in the British Army

The Quid Pro Quo is the second in the Bradfield trilogy, although it will stand alone. It’s set a few months after the end of The Fog of War and stars Sylvia’s friend Walter Kennett, and Simon Frost, a detective who comes to Bradfield to investigate a murder. It’s a gay, historical, paranormal, romantic murder-mystery with a m/transm couple set in rural England in 1920.

One of the things I researched when I was beginning to think about Walter’s background was exactly what training he’d have had as a nurse (or an orderly) in the British army. The answer to that question was ‘not a great deal’ in that Victorian army nurses seemed to have been expected to pick things up as they went along. Before the advent of Florence Nightingale and her cohort during the Crimean War in the mid-nineteenth century, nurses had all been men and they had been attached to individual regiments.

Outrage at the terrible conditions in the Crimea led to the development of a Medical Staff Corps in 1855, which recruited ‘Men able to read and write, of regular steady habits and good temper and of a kindly disposition’. This was renamed the Army Hospital Corps in 1857 and reverted back to being the Medical Staff Corps again in 1884*. Confusingly, the medical officers were known as the Medical Staff…and in 1898, the Medical Staff Corps and the Medical Staff were combined into Royal Army Medical Corps.

This is where Walter comes in.

In my head, he joins up as the two organisations are being merged together and he sort of slips through the gaps, staying hidden as a trans man with the help of the doctor who did his medical when he recruited him and possibly with a bit of a blind eye being turned by his army mates. He serves in the Boer War in South Africa and subsequently all over the British Empire before ending up at Sylvia’s hospital in France in World War One. By the time we meet him 1920, he’s forty and had served in the army for twenty-one years.

That brings me to a really interesting blog post about male nurses in the 1920s I found at This Intrepid Band-a blog dedicated to the history of military nursing. Nursing regulation was pretty slapdash until the end of the First World War. Hospitals trained nurses for between one and three years and gave them a certificate. But…anyone could call themselves a nurse even without that training.

After 1919, that changed. I won’t replicate all the qualifying criteria here, you can read it at This Intrepid Band if you want to…but Walter would have fallen under the ‘three years military experience’ criteria. However, as a man, he would have been singularly alone. Even in 1928, although there were forty thousand women on the new register, there were only two hundred men.

I don’t know whether there were any male nurses working at village practices in the early twenties; but I suspect it’s very unlikely. Most of the nurses in 1928 were in prisons or mental hospitals, presumably dealing with men who were considered dangerous and perhaps unsafe for women nurses to care for. Walter’s like Sylvia though, in that he feels that he’s done his bit keeping other people safe and looking after strangers. He wants to be part of a community and part of family as much as he can. So a small village, with his friends, suits him fine.

I hope you like his story!

The Quid Pro Quo

Village nurse Walter Kennett is content with his makeshift found family in tiny Bradfield. However, when a body is found floating in the village duck pond one midsummer morning, danger arrives too.

Between his attraction to detective Simon Frost, concealing Sylvia and Lucy’s relationship and not knowing how much to reveal about the paranormal possibilities of the murder, Walter is torn all ways.

The Quid Pro Quo is a 50,000 word romantic historical paranormal murder-mystery set in 1920s rural England where nearly everyone is queer and the main couple is m/transm.

Amazon : JMS Books : Everywhere Else

(Some of this post was published as a guest post at Addison Albright’s blog in November ’21)

The Flowers of Time: Deleted Scene

Look what I found! I’ve been trying to organise my documents folder a bit–don’t laugh, I bet you’ve all been there–and I found this deleted scene from the the first draft of The Flowers of Time.

The Flowers of Time. A determined lady botanist and a non-binary explorer. Mystery, suspense, monsters and romance in England and the Himalayas in 1780.

My first draft was a mess, honestly. I wrote it over a long period, some of which was during the three weeks I spent in a specialist hospital unit trying to get my seizures sorted–and there were quite a few repeated scenes and double-ups that eventually got chopped out.

Sometimes taking things out is fine, I can see the story will run more smoothly and effectively and I have no emotional attachment to the words I’m deleting. And sometimes I can see that things need to come out and it still really hurts to pull them. This was one of the latter.

Here Edie, our plucky botanical-artist heroine is well on the way to becoming a seasoned traveller. I wanted the physical journeys the characters made (to England for Jones and to India for Edie and then on over the mountains together) to reflect their character growth. There were a lot of strands to plait together and I said quite a few things more than once and had a lot of scenes in there that didn’t move the story forward. This really slowed things down–it’s basically an info-dump about Edie’s initial experience of India, which is interesting if you’re a history nerd (raises hand) and in love with Edie (raises other hand) but less useful to a reader who wants to find out what’s going on for goodness sake! rather than read a history book.

So here we have a deleted scene…part of Edie’s journey.

Despite their father’s occupation as a navy captain and two of her brothers following the same profession, and despite her mother’s early married years taking place on the oceans on board her father’s ship, Edie had never left dry land before this adventure. It had been a terrifying and amazing journey. The cramped quarters and frankly noxious living conditions had been a revelation. She had much more sympathy with her father and brothers now she had lived for a few months in the way they did their whole lives. It had taken seven months from leaving Portsmouth on the Athena to their arrival in Bombay. She had spent the time sewing rough hessian and linen in to bags that would hopefully help to keep alive the plant specimens she planned to send home by retaining moisture round the roots.

When they finally arrived at Bombay it had been a feast to her sense-starved self. The sea-voyage had been magnificent, but the ship was so confining. She wanted to be off seeing the countryside, drinking in all the new experiences she could.
She had left the practical travel arrangements to Bennett and Henry since they seemed to wish to be busy and were dismissive of her assistance. They had procured good quality square tents, one for each of them, a folding camp bed each, some stools and chairs that also folded and the various bedding and cooking accoutrements that were necessary. There were conical tents for the servants and Carruthers’ assistants to sleep in and some mules and camels to carry everything. All in all there were a couple of dozen in their party, which included a handful of Company Lieutenants that were both to assist Carruthers in his geographical and astronomical measurements and serve to protect them.

She had refused to travel in a litter around the city or on their journey like the few other British ladies. Most of them thought her peculiar. Why take up the time of four men though, when she could just as well ride her own horse? She found the handful of ladies married to the East India Company men a little tedious, if she was honest with herself. The whole of the John Company, really. They were very concerned with keeping up standards as though they were in London and had seized on her the moment she had crossed the pounding surf in the small boats that ferried passengers and goods from ship to shore, wanting to know the latest gossip and fashions.
More interesting were the ladies who were not quite ladies, married to some of the soldiers and lesser Company employees.

There had been a pair of sisters on the ship who had been going out to join their cousin. Because Edie had left her maid at home, she had engaged both of them to help her with her toilette aboard ship. Their cousin was married to a soldier and ran a millinery shop. Both sisters were hoping to find husbands. One was a seamstress who would to join her cousin’s business and the other was a baker who was hoping to open her own patisserie near the Company accommodations. There were a number of women in equivalent trades in the small British community and to Edie, their way of life seemed much more sensibly geared to the foreign heat and customs than that of the greater ladies who strove to maintain British manners.
That aside, Bombay was fascinating. A swirl of heat and noise and color and dust and smells that turned her head inside out and round again . They had stayed in the city for three weeks preparing for their onward journey to meet Miss Jones and her party at Srinegar in late May in order to travel over the Himalaya to Leh before the monsoon came in July.

You can find The Flowers of Time at all the usual ebook retailers (yadda yadda yadda!) and it’s available in paperback and audio too.

The Flowers of Time

:: A determined lady botanist : a non-binary explorer : mystery, suspense, monsters and romance : England and the Himalayas in 1780 ::

A determined lady botanist and a non-binary explorer make the long journey over the high Himalayan mountain passes from Kashmir to Little Tibet, collecting flowers and exploring ruins on the way. Will Jones discover the root of the mysterious deaths of her parents? Will she confide in Edie and allow her to help in the quest?

It’s a trip fraught with perils for both of them, not least those of the heart.

“…an enjoyable escapist story, with magic, romance and adventure. The characters were eminently likeable, and I wanted to spend time with them”- The Lesbian Review

Amazon : Audible : Everywhere Else

Eight Acts: when does history begin?

So I’ve been round and about trying to bring Eight Acts to the attention of a few more potential readers this week. It came out in March 2021 and I really didn’t do much to launch it, so it’s sat there quietly and people haven’t really known it exists.

It’s a companion novella to Taking Stock and like Taking Stock it doesn’t have any paranormal shenanigans, it’s a straightforward historical gay romance. However, it’s set in 1967–the year the UK’s Sexual Offences Act was amended to decriminalise consenting homosexual sex between two men over twenty one, in private. My Mama, that bastion of English greatness, doesn’t believe anything before the first world war is history. So for her, it’s a contemporary.

For me, both books are historical (Taking Stock is set in 1972), partly because they are set fifty(ish) years ago and partly because society has changed so much since then. Not only the law with the Equality Act and the Human Rights Act; but how we live generally in the UK. I was born in 1970 and the things I remember from my childhood in the 70’s and 80’s are so different now.

It was a time of the Cold War, public phone-boxes; buying your shopping with cash and being more worried what people thought about you. Your immediate community was very important. Versus today when we have East and West Europe unified, the internet and mobile phones that give us the possibility of wider communities, and a more relaxed attitude to non-traditional genders and relationships. Just for starters.

Memories of the second world war were still very fresh…the young people who’d been on the front line were in their forties and fifties and in middle management and positions of authority. Rationing had only ended fifteen years earlier, in 1954. The generation that had fought in the trenches in the first world war were retired and retiring. A good proportion of people had been born whilst Victoria was still queen.

Social change doesn’t come about quickly. It happens slowly and gradually, almost unnoticed if you’re living it. And every single generation ever has bemoaned that things aren’t as good now as they were when their grandparents were young–see Gildas, The Ruin of Britain, writing in the sixth century AD as an example.

My personal opinion is that it isn’t possible to say when something becomes ‘history’. There’s no precise cut-off. I suppose you could probably say as a rule of thumb that it begins to happen when less than half the population remember it as lived experience. But it depends how different things were too.

The 1960s and how different life was then means that I’m happy for both these books to go into the historical category. I’ve got a page on the website citing the resources I used writing the books, with links to some interesting YouTube videos of personal recollections of gay life at the time and about Polari, the ‘secret language’ of gay men in the twentieth century in Britain, that enabled them to talk about sensitive subjects in public without outing themselves.

Eight Acts

London in 1967 is swinging. It’s the summer of love and consensual gay sex in private has just been decriminalized. Percy and Adrian meet through friends and over the summer their relationship deepens and grows. What will happen in September when it’s time for Percy to go back to his every-day life as a boarding school teacher?

A 20k word stand-alone novella with cross-over characters from Taking Stock.

Trigger warning: A secondary character suffers an off-screen sexual assault.

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