Liner Notes For Celebrity Endorsement
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The queerest of this set of Strandbridge tales, or at least the most obvious about it, and the second one set at a festival. Obviously Strandbridge is fictional, but based on actual small, slightly strange towns, they tend to fill up the summer calendar with events. Mostly to get the tourists and money in (a not entirely disgraceful motive), but also to give people a celebration, a fun thing to do as a community.
A forties-themed weekend is a real thing that has happened more than once, and it was not uncontroversial for those that lived through the war that air raid alarms and soldiers marching through the streets were happening.
The Fairey Battle is a real light bomber of the early second world war, with many of the flaws described. Hence it’s relegation to the footnotes of history after the Battle Of France and it’s replacement with other planes. For example, 12 Squadron replaced their Fairey Battles with Vickers Wellington medium bombers by the end of 1940, and later Avro Lancaster heavy bombers. I mention 12 Squadron, and the Fairey Battle, as that was the aircraft and unit a relative of mine was flying in when they were shot down and killed in France in 1940.
The theory behind why worked iron, clothes and bread repel fairies comes from Edmund Griffith’s talk Why Are Goblins Scared Of Iron, which uses the evidence of people who believe in fairies to come to an interesting (and conventionally-Marxist) conclusion. Make your own mind up; I find it a useful framework for my fiction.
We’re haunted by the past. And WW2 is passing out of living memory. I don’t – quite – address this in this story, which is a bit packed already, with baked goods, ghosts, queerness and our celebrity.
A Country Accountant is my fictional TV show that I use as a stand in for when characters might talk about TV! Annette de Boden, who plays Lady Glenshire, has previously appeared in the Lacey Lee detective story The Case Of The Concealed Skiffle Tapes. She continues to be all glamour, charisma, magnetic even, and turns out to be quite nice too. Why, exactly, she’s here opening a small town’s fair I don’t know. You’d think she’s a bigger star than that, too much in demand, too expensive. Maybe there’s a story there.
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