Sunday, March 30, 2014

WHY KINGS CONFESS Signing at Garden District Book Shop


Thanks so much to everyone who turned out for the booksigning on Saturday. After a horrific stormy night that dumped ungodly amounts of rain on the city, the day itself managed to be pleasantly warm and sunny. We had a nice crowd, and I had a great time meeting everyone and talking about the books and Sebastian and Hero and Hendon and Kat and, well, just about everything.

This was our ninth Sebastian St. Cyr signing at Garden District Book Shop. We'll be doing another one next year for number ten, Who Buries the Dead, so hope to see you then! 


19 comments:

Charles Gramlich said...

Excellent. I'm glad it went well. We ended up trying to get our taxes done Saturday. Ended up owing money so it would have been better to do something else. :(

Glad you had a good turnout.

cs harris said...

Charles, sorry about the outcome but at least they're done. Ours are still looming...

Anonymous said...

We had what seemed liked torrential rains here Friday and Saturday as well. Sunday was sunny and beautiful (just in time for the neighborhood easter egg hunt, thank goodness). I'm glad it went well. Would have so loved to be there to hear and discuss my favorite characters. Take care! Sabena

JustWingingIt said...

I would have loved to be there too. Did anyone take any video? It'd be nice to be able to see the whole thing up on youtube or somewhere.

And look, another of my favorite authors has her book advertised in the window (Kim Harrison's The Undead Pool). *grin*

Veronica

cs harris said...

Sabena, thanks! The Easter egg hunt sounds like fun.

Veronica, it only occurred to me afterwards that we could have taken a video of it. People asked some great questions that stimulated a lot of good discussion. Maybe next time we'll think of it.

Susan J said...

I'm really enjoying the Sebastian books and am on the third. I do think, however, you are a bit biased aginst the British Army and you rather conveniently ignore the fact that the British army had 20% Irish and Scottish soldiers and 30% of the officers were also Irish and Scottish at the time. So if the British army were so awful, the Irish and Scottish members of it must have been partly to blame. I read recently of an account of an Irish soldier fighting on the British side, who shot a captured a fellow Irishman fighting for the French, on the spot, to the horror of the English officer who witnessed it. History is never that simple. It will not stop me reading more though, even if I am English. The books are really good.

cs harris said...

Susan J, I'm sorry if the books come off sounding anti-British army, because that was never my intention. I see Sebastian as someone who was once very idealistic and had that idealism shattered by the realities of what he saw and did in the war. He once believed in the superiority of the English but has realized they're just like everyone else, with the same capacity for good and evil. That disillusionment was very painful for him, which means he is easily frustrated by the enthusiastic but naive jingoism of those around him.

I think every country likes to see themselves as "the good guys" who aren't as nasty as their enemy, and that's my point--war is nasty, and it brings out both the worst and the best in everyone. That applies equally to resistance movements such as that in Ireland. What begins as noble never stays that way.

Incidentally, I've also been harshly criticized for things Sebastian has said about the new United States! And my contemporary thrillers provoked outrage in certain quarters for being "unpatriotic" and "anti-military," which is kinda funny, since we're a very military family: my father was an Air Force colonel, my husband an Army colonel, my sister a major in the Marines, and my older daughter is an Air Force captain!

Susan J said...

Thank you for replying to my comment. I did wonder if perhaps you did criticise the American establishment in your other books, as you do have the former American slave do so in one of the Sebastian books. I am fully aware of the faults of the British establishment, particularly as I have moderate Socialist views. I shall never forgive Thatcher for the way she treated the miners during the big strike in the 1980's for example. You also have only to read about the Peterloo massacre in Manchester in about 1820, where working people attending a peaceful meeting were mown down by sabre weilding militia, to feel angry. I also read recently that some soldiers in the British army, who had radical leanings, sympathised with the American rebels cause during the War of Independence. Any decent minded person of today would also be on the rebels side.
It would just be nice if you could include some British army characters in the Sebastian books who were not sadistic murderers! Perhaps you do in later books. I'm on the fourth one now, Hero is becoming a very promising character!

cs harris said...

Well, Sebastian and Gibson were in the English army! As for the other books...hmmm. WHAT DARKNESS BRINGS has a sympathetic army officer, even though he's dead when the book starts. The book with Franklin in it (#5 ?) is rather uncomplimentary to the American rebels--although I guess it's also not too kind to the British navy. WHO BURIES THE DEAD has a seriously nasty colonel--the one behind the incident that drove Sebastian to sell out.

Military men make good suspects/killers because they're young and fit and one can easily imagine them killing. And because the country had been at war for 20 years, there were a lot of them.

You wouldn't believe the anger provoked by the words of that former slave in WHEN GODS DIE--at least, I couldn't believe it. I wonder what those who took offense expected a former slave's attitude to be toward the nation that enslaved him? And since Sebastian was trying to get him to talk, he was of course heartily agreeing with him.

For the record, I do love England, Scotland, and Ireland, past wrongdoings and all. There is no country without ugly deeds in its past.

Susan.J said...

Yes, I realise that Sebastian and Gibson are portrayed as decent. However, so far in the books I've read, there seem to be no other decent representatives of the British army. Also, the Irish are always painted whiter than white. In my first comment, I mentioned the fact that a large proportion of the British army were Irish at that time. Were they somehow innocent of all war crimes? Wellington was Irish after all.
It seems to me that Americans with Irish ancestry have a rose coloured view of Irish history. I wonder how many Irish American women would feel if they were transported back to the Catholic Church controlled Ireland of the 1950's for example, where an illegitimate pregnacy could mean punishment at the hands of The Magdalene Sisters or later in the sixties and seventies having to take the boat to England for an abortion? The recent revelations of the Catholic Church show a Mafia like hold over the whole society of Ireland.
I fully realise the crimes committed by the British Empire in the past but what really annoys me is how people keep banging on about them while the Germans, who started two world wars and murdered six million Jews hardly get a mention! They were rebuilt by the Americans after the war because America was afraid of the communist threat. Meanwhile, we were still paying off our debts to the Americans for old worn out destroyers in the 'lend lease' scheme during World War II, in the year 2000! Germany now rules Europe, thanks to America's help. Why did we bother fighting that war? We should have stayed out of it. Nobody thanks us for our efforts.
The other thing is, the Sebastian books are set 200 years ago. You are speaking of a Britain in a different age, with differeent standards. What excuse does modern America have, with the rumours of secret torture camps etc that will not go away?

cs harris said...
This comment has been removed by the author.
cs harris said...

Judith, have you ever read Chris Hedges's WAR IS A FORCE THAT GIVES US MEANING. It's a fascinating look at the romanticization of war.

Susan, Kat is passionate about Ireland because of what happened to her family, and Sebastian understands her loyalty to the country of her birth. I never intended to portray any nation as all good, only to accurately portray how the characters feel about them. And while I do have a smidgen of Irish in my family tree, it is truly a smidgen: one 18th century ancestor named Noland. I've far more German, Belgian, Cherokee, English, and Scottish, in that order. Ironically, if you asked me which I identified with the most, it would probably be the English part, although that could be a factor of surname and language combined with which nation I've spent the most time in.

And for the record, I abominate torture, no matter who is doing it.

Susan J. said...

I did not mean to imply that I thought that you were Irish American, I spoke in general terms of the perceived view that some Americans with Irish ancestry seem to have. Neither did I suggest that you in any way condone torture. What I meant is that even though we lost our power years ago, Britain still seems to come in for so much criticism, while other nations who have behaved at least as badly, if not worse, hardly seem to get a mention!
If you did not mean to be biased against the British army, it does seem to come over that way in the books that I have so far read. I don't think Napoleon was exactly a saint and I'm sure his soldiers were not without fault.
Anyway, quite apart from all of that, I still like the books and each one seems to get better. I like the way the characters are building with each successive story, with new charaters being added. I also like the atmosphere of Regency London that you create so well. Your research must have been extensive.
I wonder if you were influenced Georgette Heyer's 'Friday's Child' and the character of Jason, the pickpocket Tiger, when you created Tom?

Susan J. said...

I did not mean to imply that I thought that you were Irish American, I spoke in general terms of the perceived view that some Americans with Irish ancestry seem to have. Neither did I suggest that you in any way condone torture. What I meant is that even though we lost our power years ago, Britain still seems to come in for so much criticism, while other nations who have behaved at least as badly, if not worse, hardly seem to get a mention!
If you did not mean to be biased against the British army, it does seem to come over that way in the books that I have so far read. I don't think Napoleon was exactly a saint and I'm sure his soldiers were not without fault.
Anyway, quite apart from all of that, I still like the books and each one seems to get better. I like the way the characters are building with each successive story, with new charaters being added. I also like the atmosphere of Regency London that you create so well. Your research must have been extensive.
I wonder if you were influenced Georgette Heyer's 'Friday's Child' and the character of Jason, the pickpocket Tiger, when you created Tom?

cs harris said...

Susan, I suspect it's a human tendency to root for and identify with the underdog, which is one of the reasons the Irish have such appeal. And because the British Empire was so widespread, there are a lot of instances of oppression to different peoples that writers can use in fiction. The longer the US is powerful, the more instances it will accumulate. I think that's unfortunately human nature; that all nations have the capacity to do horrible things if in a position where it's possible. That really is the only point I'm trying to make in these books.

That twenty-plus year war between France and the rest of Europe was hideous, on all sides. I was aghast when I saw the elaborate tomb given Napoleon and his generals; I was spending the year in Paris doing research on the French Revolution, and after reading about the MILLIONS of men Napoleon led to their deaths (most of them conscripts), I found it appalling that the French would glorify them so. It made me sick.

I don't know if Tom was exactly inspired by Jason, since when I created him my main motive was to give Sebastian someone who could help him and interact with him while he was on the run; it was only as I was writing the first book that I grew to like him so much that I decided I wanted to keep him in the series. But I certainly had Jason in the back of my head, to the point that I hesitated having Sebastian make Tom his tiger because of the echo! I haven't read FRIDAY's CHILD in maybe 25 years; I need to hunt up a copy and reread it. A few years ago I snagged a box of old hardcover Heyers at a library sale, but that one wasn't one of them. I have loved Heyer since I first discovered her when I was about 17. When I want to smile, i pick up one of her books.

Susan J. said...

I did think that America will have it's time in the future, when things that happened years ago keep coming back to haunt it. I suppose it is already happening, with the treatment of Native Americans and African Americans. Of course. Britain is also implicated in those things. Still, at least we've made films like 'Gandhi', rather than the rather airbrushed view of history that Hollywood sometimes portrays. There is the wonderful MASH of course, I wonder if that would get made today, in the current political climate? Sadly, probably not. The various Law and Order dramas are quite good at highlighting inconvenient truths sometimes also.
I have a copy of 'Friday's Child' that I've had for about forty years or more, when I was a teenager! I recently re-read it. It's still as amusing. Did you know somebody wrote to Georgette Heyer that they had told the story over and over again from memory while in a prison camp, to keep everyone going? I recently re-read all her books. They are indeed a wonderful escape, a sanitised version of history but such good fun.
Thank you for taking the time to reply to my comments.

Anonymous said...

Found your Sebastian series several months ago. Hooked immediately and subsequently bought and devoured all 9 novels in record time! Love the depth of character development, the pace of the plots in each novel and the non-fiction details offered in each book. Your gift for storytelling (and historical detail) is wonderful and I am delighted to have stumbled across your series. Anxiously awaiting the 10th in this series! Can you tell me when I might look to find it in hard copy or in the kindle store?
Thanks

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