When I was Chair of the CWA, I enjoyed meeting members up and down the country, and among them was Abi Silver (pictured), whom I met at a very pleasant regional chapter lunch. She is a fellow lawyer as well as a crime writer, and I'm pleased to hear she has a new book out. Here's a guest blog post from her, on a topic of timeless interest:
'Britney Spears was in the news recently, not promoting her
music, but making an emotional speech to a US court, in an attempt to extricate
herself from what she termed an ‘abusive’ and ‘controlling’ conservatorship arrangement.
This sparked a flurry of interest in all things Britney, including (perhaps
surprisingly) her professed admiration for Albert Einstein; she had been
quoting the late Nobel-prize winning physicist’s views about the importance of
fairy tales to stimulate critical thinking.
But fairy tales come in different shapes and sizes. The ones
adapted by Disney tend to involve a struggle between obvious personifications
of good and evil, where the hero is required to use quick wits, ingenuity and
perseverance to succeed (most likely the kind of stories Einstein was
referencing). Others are darker (think The Tinder Box and other Hans
Christian Anderson tales) and it’s less easy to find any clear moral message. By
way of example, I have just written ‘they want the fairy tale!’ into the first
draft of my latest offering, to illustrate a menacing demand by some nameless
sponsors to achieve everything their hearts desired.
And whilst many writers argue in favour of reading these
pithy, mythical stories to their nation’s children, there is certainly a fair
weight of opinion in the opposite direction, with others also expounding the
view that The Moonstone by Wilkie Collins was not the first crime novel;
that honour should instead be bestowed on a whole series of much older tales. Crime
fiction is, after all, most often about retribution and the restoration of
justice. The same could certainly be said of Cinderella (a tale of child
cruelty), Hansel and Gretel (attempted murder of children) or Jack
and the Beanstalk (an elaborate fraud which excused theft of the most
precious items).
But what cannot be challenged is the ubiquitous nature of
fairy tales with their universal themes, which has influenced countless
contemporary stories, including, I’m not ashamed to admit, my own.'
**
Abi Silver is the author of the Burton & Lamb legal
thriller series. Her latest story, The Midas Game, is published on 5
August 2021 and available here The
Midas Game by Abi Silver | Eye Books (eye-books.com) or here https://amzn.to/3hqUGDy
You can also find her at www.abisilver.co.uk Abi Silver (@abisilver16) / Twitter
and (2)
Abi Silver, Author | Facebook
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