ALL CHANGE AT ROBERT HALE BUT BLACK HORSE WESTERNS RIDE ON

It was worrying news that John Hale was taking a much earned rest and in future will be  taking more of a back seat role in operations of the long established publishing house.

Mr Hale himself handled the Black Horse Western range and read most, if not all of the manuscripts, sent in for proposed publication.

Gill Jackson takes over as Managing Director and the Archive has been told by Gill that the Black Horse range is successful for the company and will continue as normal.

"There will be no material change at all in our policy towards the series." Gill Jackson told the Archive.

Tainted Stats

Day	Date	Page Loads	Unique Visitors	First Time Visitors	Returning Visitors
Monday	1st November 2010	419	281	252	29
Sunday	31st October 2010	395	279	245	34
Saturday	30th October 2010	296	218	197	21
Friday	29th October 2010	363	265	234	31
Thursday	28th October 2010	362	258	234	24
Wednesday	27th October 2010	312	237	218	19
Tuesday	26th October 2010	316	241	226	15

MORE GHOST PHOTOS

Archive readers seemed to enjoy the post about ghostly photographs and so here are a few more I've found while surfing.

This picture was taken by Terry Ike Clanton. Clanton is an actor, recording artist and cowboy poet, and is also a cousin of the legendary Clanton Gang who clashed with the Earps and Doc Holliday at the famous gunfight at OK Corral.

"I know there was no other person in this photograph when I shot it," Clanton insists. And he believes the small figure in the background is holding a knife. "We thought this was a tie at first, but after further review, it appears to be a knife," Clanton says. "The knife is in a vertical position; the tip is located just below the figure's right collar. If you're not convinced that something is weird here, look at my friend's shadow in the photo. It appears to be going back slightly to the right of him. The figure in the back should have the same shadow, but it doesn't!"

On November 19, 1995, Wem Town Hall in Shropshire, England burned to the ground. Many spectators gathered to watch the old building, built in 1905, as it was being consumed by the flames. Tony O'Rahilly, a local resident, was one of those onlookers and took photos of the spectacle with a 200mm telephoto lens from across the street. One of those photos shows what looks like a small, partially transparent girl standing in the doorway. Nether O'Rahilly nor any of the other onlookers or firefighters recalled seeing the girl there.



A strange legend surrounds a railroad crossing just south of San Antonio, Texas. The intersection of roadway and railroad track, so the story goes, was the site of a tragic accident in which several school-aged children were killed - but their ghosts linger at the spot and will push idled cars across the tracks, even though the path is uphill. 

This photo was received from Denise Russell. "The lady in the color photo is my granny," she says. "She lived on her own until age 94, when her mind started to weaken and had to be moved to an assisted living home for her own safety. At the end of the first week, there was a picnic for the residents and their families. My mother and sister attended. My sister took two pictures that day, and this is one of them. It was taken on Sunday, 8/17/97, and we think the man behind her is my grandpa who passed away on Sunday, 8/14/84. We did not notice the man in the picture until Christmas Day, 2000 (granny had since passed away), while browsing through some loose family photos at my parents' house. My sister thought it was such a nice picture of granny that she even made a copy for mom, but still, nobody noticed the man behind her for over three years!

CLASSIC PAPERBACK COVERS - THE SAINT

SHERLOCK HOLMES V DRACULA

Originally broadcast on BBC Radio 4 in 1981 and long thought lost, a recording of this play turned up on cassette tape several years ago. Thankfully it was a good copy with only minimal tape hiss and now it has been cleaned up and was rebroadcast back in 2007. It got another run yesterday evening on Radio 7 and it is now available to listen for the next seven days on the Radio 7 website HERE

It's a great play - the audio really builds up atmosphere but then that will come as no surprise to anyone familier with the excellent work of the BBC Audio drama department.

Details:

Adapted for radio and directed by Glyn Dearman.

The year is 1890. A ship is discovered adrift off the English coast, its crew missing, its murdered captain lashed to the wheel, and its only passanger is a sinister black dog. This impenetrable mystery is clearly a case for the inimitable Sherlock Holmes, but for the first time in his illustrious career the great detective is baffled. Clearly the crew have been murdered and dumped overboard, but what can account for the captain's expression of imponderable terror and his acute loss of blood, or the ship's strange cargo - fifty boxes of earth?

The game is afoot, and Sherlock Holmes, aided as ever by the faithful Dr. Watson, finds himself on the trail of no mortal enemy, but the arch-vampire himself - Count Dracula...

Sherlock Holmes...........John Moffatt

Doctor John Watson......Timothy West

Count Dracula..............David March

Professor Van Helsing.....Aubrey Woods

Thomas Parker..........Michael Maloney

Mr. Caffyn................Noel Howlett

Mary Watson........Theresa Streatfeild

Vampire.................Frances Jeater

Inspector Lestrade...Nicholas Courtney

Mrs. Barton.............Katherine Parr

Red Bridger................John Hollis

First broadcast by BBC Radio 4 on December 19th, 1981. 

The Bush man cometh

That well known intellect, the man who Paul McCartney implied didn't know where the White House Library was, is to open the Miami Book fair in November -

The 43rd president of the United States will open the 27th edition of Miami Book Fair International at 4 p.m. Nov. 14 to speak about his upcoming memoir, Decision Points.

Bush's appearance ``speaks to the prestige we've been able to garner all these years,'' said Alina Interián, executive director of the Florida Center for the Literary Arts. ``. . . It's quite timely so soon after the elections.''

Bush is not the first member of the former first family to appear at the fair. Daughter Jenna presented her book Ana's Story in 2007, and his sister Doro Bush Koch appeared at the fair in 2006 with her memoir My Father, My President.
The fair runs from Nov. 14-21 at Miami Dade College's Wolfson campus in downtown Miami.

Visitors to the fair are certainly in for a treat when Bush speaks - check the man out in action below

D C I BANKS - AFTERMATH

This was shown on ITV back in September and marks the television debut for Peter Robinson's detective, Chief Inspector Alan Banks and it was successful enough that the program makers have decided to film more of Robinson's fine crime novels.

Author Peter Robinson was interview on the Archive was back in Feb - click HERE to read the interview.


The Banks books are excellently structured crime novels, with convoluted plots that grip the reader and out of all the fictional coppers Alan Banks is one of the most real feeling. But how has the character transferred to the television screen? Well in my opinion, very well.  Actor Stephen Tomkinson can emote with his eyes closed and all his thespian skills are brought to the fore to ensure Banks comes across as a credible screen creation. The straightforward way in which the story is told does make this seem clichéd at time, which is a pity because the book most certainly wasn't. And the twisty plot points are telegraphed well in advance. At the end I was waiting for a twist that just didn't come. The story also slows down too much in places and things tend to drag

Out of the two recent crime debuts I think I preferred Thorne which unlike Aftermath, cast aside the tried and tested structure for British crime dramas and went the American route - once we British made the best television drama in the world but over recent decades the US has taken the lead and we Brits can not produce anything like The Wire, 24, Deadwood or Dexter. So Thorne was wise to mimic the faster American style while Aftermath is paced like an old episode of Frost or Morse.

Still there's more to come and I did think that Tompkinson was excellent and the source books are absolutely excellent, so I do hope the series does well. Hopefully future episodes will be far better paced.