Rosie Birk Larsson

Been very negligent recently on the blogging front, due to holidays, book five, Jack the ripper and the excitement of a new carpet, indeed a carpet. After living in a building site for years it is really something when a carpet finally goes down and there is one room at least that’s not got cold, jaggy, drafty floor boards...with a gaps so big they create disorder in the space time continuum. All sorts of creepy crawlies come up the gaps, probably terribly mutated by the limitations on the gene pools. Spiders mostly, huge hairy spiders that frighten the pit bull. Been working hard on a play script/ treatment whatever you call it, my story boarding for the jack the ripper musical. I’m taking the challenge on the chin and trying to write it with a degree of empathy for the ripper. He wasn’t a bad old sod really compared with more recent serial killers. Very interesting that it was the first series of murders where there was a literate population to follow what the police were and were not doing by mass media. And the newspapers found out just how much they could boost their circulation by scaring the man, and indeed the woman, in the street senseless.

The name jack the ripper comes from a letter sent by a reporter pretending to be the murderer, just to stir things up a wee bit. Just as well they did not have phones in those days.

In the musical though, we are really are trying to scare the pants off folk. None of this cheery, happy cockney stuff of Dick Van Dyke and Tommy Steele. I’m working with a very talented musical person ( not in the Julie Andrews mould, more in the Lemmy from motor head mould) and a ripperologist who keeps thinking that the truth has some bearing on the issue. (Tempted to say that’s unusual for a cop but that would be unfair. Not.) Never let the truth get in the way of a good story of course!

Book five is coming on a storm, book four is away being proof read. Not sure what the title will be but I think THE BLOOD OF CROWS is top of the list at the moment.

Spent most of my time on holiday reading Stieg Larsson and the Millenium trilogy. And I really don’t know why I bothered. Well I do know, I believed the hype. Sinc e then I have been doing a little bit of market research through my patients who have read all three and there’s a constant theme.. ‘yes, I enjoyed them. No, I didn’t read it all. Yes, I skipped over bits... and then , on close interrogation, there is a strange admittance of finding endless repetition, and not really believing the entire baseline of the story. I read it and was intrigued. I got in touch with a pal who lives in Stockholm, who is a Scottish trained criminal lawyer but has been working in Sweden for a few years. She had read the whole lot and was also wondering how you can be diagnosed as a paranoid schizophrenic with no symptoms. And that an appeal to the court will lift any guardian status for anybody with a lifestyle that they can maintain. Sweden, not Soviet Russia. Or was that the point Larsson was trying to make.

If you want a really tense story of murder, love and betrayal with a truely engaging female character, try that other Larsson.... Birk Larsson. He of the killing Danish TV series, now been remade by American TV. I’ve heard the American version is good but I was so taken by the original I don’t want to have another version in my head. I was so wound up in it I had to look up a spoiler site on the internet and make sure they caught the murderer in the end. I couldn’t get to sleep without knowing that. The guy playing Thise Birk Larsson, the victims father, deserves a TV Oscar .

It was fab.

Just as fab is Random by Craig Robertson, the guy I am appearing at the Edinburgh festival with. The event should be good

More soon