Author Archives: Anne Penketh

And…Action!

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Tomorrow, known as le quatorze juillet in France and Bastille Day in the rest of the world, is the day when shooting begins for my short film Coming Home. The actors, screenwriter (moi) and film crew are in Paris, and the director is in Washington DC. What could possibly go wrong?

If you’re wondering why you haven’t heard from me recently, here’s why. Forgive me the cliche but it’s been a rollercoaster ride and it’s not over yet.

It was back in April when my filmmaker friend, who seems to spend his time in the air between LA and DC but with occasional stops in Paris or London, asked me to write a 15 minute script for my actress friend Holly-Rose Clegg. She starred in our one woman show that Katie Haigh Mayet and I took to the Edinburgh Festival in 2017 (yes, folks, it was that long ago). The director filmed Holly earlier this year in this short remake of a scene from The Joker with Joaquim Phoenix.

After that, he was determined to submit a short film to next year’s Cannes Film Festival. He wanted it to have a European feeling, imagining Holly on a French train, and that was my only guidance. He was determined to direct the film online because this is his vision for the future of cinematography. The next thing you know, I’d written a screenplay about a couple who meet on a dating app but who realise that they can never be together. To tell you more would be a spoiler alert…

Once Holly and the director decided, much to my surprise, that it was all systems go, we set out to find the other actor who would play with her in the film. That’s another story which I can’t share with you just yet. But I immediately realised that despite knowing nothing about the film industry, with the director in another country I would have to navigate the French film industry from bottom to top by myself, even though I was “only” the screenwriter. I had to find a film crew, get filming permissions, advise on locations, find extras, organise catering, and find a hairdresser and makeup artist. And that’s just for starters.

By a stroke of luck, or fate, my downstairs neighbour in Paris happens to teach cinematography and she literally taught me the A to Z of filmmaking in France, for which I am eternally grateful. But I add to that the friends who have given their time to support us as well as the complete strangers who have helped me jump through hoops when I thought the whole project was going to crash to the ground.

Tomorrow morning is D-Day. Before our rehearsal today, I’d been out printing forms at a place open on Sundays and buying an external drive capable of swallowing all the footage we want to upload. When we auditioned the second actor for the film, my eyes were damp with tears at the chemistry between the two of them. The director said to me that when we shoot the film, “you will shed tears of joy.”

In three days, we’ll know whether that’s true…

Drop the dead dog, or how I turned to “cosy” crime

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I turned to “cosy” crime after finishing the fourth gritty police procedural in my series of detective novels set in Norfolk.

At this stage in my fiction writing, I wanted to have more fun and less gore. Having read Richard Osman – who appears to have cornered the market in this subgenre of crime fiction – and studied the tricks of the trade of other “cosy” crime authors, I decided to take the plunge.

It struck me that the experience of my French sister in law, a longtime local councillor who made a living from a smallholding in deepest Brittany, had the potential to be turned into a fictional murderous romp. Set in a small community and focusing on the relationship between Bretons and Britons, there were all the elements for a “cosy” series, it seemed to me. And so amateur sleuths Jennifer and Pippa made their appearance in the fictional village of Louennec.

However, as my publisher can attest, I soon fell foul of the “cosy” conventions, in which murders – while they can be plentiful – are almost secondary to the plot. They’re never of the grisly kind that I’d described in my earlier novels. And they definitely don’t involve animals.

My worst offence was to kill off a dog. I should say that the Collie cross belonging to one of the characters in The Brittany Murders was extremely annoying because he kept on trying to round up visitors. When discussing an early draft with my editor, she gently pointed out that whenever a dog, or a pet, died in a cosy mystery, the publisher received letters of protest from readers. So Captain the Collie had to be resuscitated and the novel restructured around him. (I’m reminded of distressed listeners’ protests to the BBC in August 2023 when a dog was put down by a vet in an episode of The Archers).

But in that same draft I’m afraid to say that I was a repeat offender, because a white-furred rabbit named Lady Gaga on the smallholding was going to be slaughtered. Needless to say, the rabbit escaped the chop in the final version and has so far survived in the first two books of my Brittany murders series, although her babies quietly disappear offstage every so often.

Another aspect of everyday life on the farm had to be toned down for mentioning “too much blood” in a weasel attack on a henhouse. Then there was the adopted daughter of two of the main characters, who reacted to being bullied at school by self-harming. This was deemed “too dark” and disappeared altogether.

Meanwhile though, I was happy that another “cosy” convention involves sex, or the lack of it, because as every writer knows, describing sex is notoriously difficult. In a “cosy” mystery, sexual activity is hinted at, rather than watched from the bottom of the bed.

So there are some of the pitfalls of genre hopping. It can be a steep learning curve, as I discovered myself, but I hope you’ll bear with me and follow me down this new “cosy” track. The next book in my series of Brittany novels, Murder at the Château, is out on June 6, 2024.

Oh Canada: my 24 hours of border hell

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I bought a nonrefundable plane ticket for a flight from New York to Montreal on a short trip this week. Because what could possibly go wrong?

   Plenty, as it turned out. Thanks to Canada’s visa waiver system which now applies to British citizens and those from the EU, I was turned back at La Guardia airport and find myself in a Catch 22 situation which couldn’t be resolved on the spot.

   As soon as I received the email from Air Canada to check in for the flight the next morning, I jumped on it. But when I saw the question about my visa number I realised that as a Brit, I’d need to apply for a visa waiver. Never mind, it only cost seven Canadian dollars and the website said it took only a few minutes to come through.

   Late that evening, with my flight now only hours away, I received an email saying the Canadian Immigration, Refugees and Citizenship service needed additional documentation to approve the eTA as the Electronic Travel Authorisation is known. For this, I had to sign onto a secure website and then link my application for the eTA to the site. Unfortunately though, once I’d managed to log on (this took time because the site kept throwing me off) it proved impossible to link my application. By this time it was 1 a.m

During the day, friends had sympathised with the delay, pointing out that it was Victoria Day, a public holiday in Canada. Surely everything would be fine before my flight at 10.45 a.m. Just to be on the safe side, as Immigration hadn’t specified which documents to provide,  I sent a copy of my passport to the site, in case I’d made a mistake in my eTA application.

The next morning I decided that as the decision was still pending, I would go to the airport in the hope that the visa waiver would come through in time. While on my way, I checked the status update tool and saw that my application said “the criteria do not match.” The Air Canada agent at the departure desk made a lengthy phone call to Canadian customs office and was told that they had my application and I just had to wait. Seven minutes later, the flight closed and I’d missed my plane. With Memorial Day weekend coming up in the States, it would be impossible to fly on another day in the week.

I discussed the situation with my friend in Montreal and we agreed that I would apply a second time for an eTA (another $7) and if successful, would take the overnight bus there from New York.

I filled out the form while at the airport and after about an hour, the answer came through via the secure Immigration site. They informed me that – 40 years after I worked on the Montreal Gazette – I still had permanent residence status! But while this sounded like fabulous news, I couldn’t cross the border without a residence card. And as a permanent resident I couldn’t apply for an eTA. I now understood what the message meant about the criteria not matching. It was Catch 22. But at no point in this 24 hour nightmare did anyone from Canadian immigration call me about this contradictory situation.

If in future I do wish to apply for an eTA, I must fill out a form asking to voluntarily renounce my residency status and mail it to Canadian authorities. Had they never introduced this waiver in 2016, I’d still be in blissful ignorance about my residency status, because until then we Brits had free entry into the country where King Charles is also their head of state.

Basically, Canada loves me so much that they have allowed me to conserve my permanent residency for more than 40 years, but not enough to let me into the country!

Oh Canada. All I wanted to do was to spend three nights with a good friend in Montreal. I only hope that immigrants fleeing terror and economic misery have better luck with the Algorithm than I did.

Is political correctness behind the police’s failure?

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 As each day passed with the trial of police officer Wayne Couzens, jailed for a whole life term for the horrific kidnap, rape and murder of Sarah Everard, it has become increasingly apparent that the Met and the UK police more broadly have a problem with institutional prejudice. Are the police in denial, and if so, why? Could it be that as a society we have become so politically correct that we can’t see what’s staring us in the face? My latest novel, Murder in the Manor, touches on the issue of homophobia in a remote part of Norfolk and also suggests that the police themselves may be homophobic. Not only some friends with whom I shared the first draft felt this couldn’t be stated in blanket terms, but also I had discussions about the issue with my publisher’s editors. People are tempted to believe the “one bad apple” theory. After all, aren’t there plenty safeguards within police procedures to keep us safe? Yet now it’s known that Couzens was part of a WhatsApp group which exchanged overtly abusive content, including jokes about violence against women, racist messages and information about Couzens’ prosecution. One of the officers now under investigation for gross misconduct is from Norfolk, where my crime novels are set. This is not just a London problem. My own research for Murder in the Manor threw up plenty anecdotal reports about racism, homophobia and misogyny in constabularies across the country. So how come the police authorities have been so slow to act against what is now being described as institutional prejudice? I suspect that it could it be the same political correctness that delayed the investigations into the sex trafficking of white girls in Rochdale and Rotherham because the perpetrators were overwhelmingly of Pakistani origin. So far the Met’s reaction has been far from satisfactory in the wake of the Sarah Everard killing. The Met chief, Cressida Dick, was right to say that Couzens has “brought shame” on the force. But her apologies are not enough. Couzens was clearly not a “rogue” officer. She must resign to allow a root and branch reform of the police force whose practices have left all women wary of the very people who are supposed to protect us.