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TEMPLARS... MASONS.... COVER ART... NICK DRAKE AND THE RIVER MAN. YES, IT'S THE (MOSTLY) ALL NEW Q & A WITH PHIL RICKMAN
The Fabric of Sin takes us to Garway... that's a real place, is it?
And well worth a visit - but don't all go at once, this is not Rosslyn Chapel (much older) and the parking's very limited. It's probably the most interesting Knights Templar church in the country. Everything is there: the Templar coffin lids, the slightly ambivalent Green Man and the dovecote with 666 chambers - although that's on private land and you need permission to check it out. But you can at least see it, as Merrily and Jane did, from the rear of the church, near the holy well.
And, yes, Garway was visited by the greatest-ever writer of ghost-stories, M R James, who left feeling slightly disturbed. And it has an air of separateness that I wanted to go into, along with the idea of crimes which are not merely unsolved, they're actually uninvestigated.
Arguably the most inspiring location to date. It's odd... something askew. You may feel it, you may not.
Knights Templar - hasn't, um, Dan Brown been there?
I do hope not. And I hope this is not remotely like Dan's book, the title of which eludes me. I did browse through The Holy Blood and the Holy Grail again, but didn't actually learn much of use; the alleged bloodline of Christ definitely does not flow through this one. However, I gather Dan's working on a book about the Freemasons who do appear in Fabsin. Freemasonry is one of the last occult mysteries in our midst. My favourite uncle and few other decent guys I've known have beeen Masons but, let's be honest, they do have their sinister side, don't they? If pushed, I have quite an interesting story, but let's not go there now...
And the Prince of Wales is in this book?
Well, not in person, but... I was fascinated by the idea of this man with a vision of a green and spiritual Britain and only a limited amount of time to develop his ideas. As King, his hands will be tied and he knows it.
Anyway, it all came about when I realised that the Duchy of Cornwall, which is the Prince of Wales's private earner, was now a serious presence in Herefordshire. Everybody knows about Harewood Park, which the media decided was being set up for William and which has its own Knights Templar chapel. I wondered what might happen if the Duchy bought another property in the county connected with the Templars and someone claimed it was seriously haunted. Who would they turn to? Probably the Bishop of Hereford. And who would he pass it on to...?
The late singer-songwriter Nick Drake actually appears in this novel.
Mmm... yes, you could say that. Nick's been hovering over this series from the beginning, and I thought it was time.
And I was delighted that we finally get to hear him, just briefly, on the abridged Fabsin audiobook - that's the four CD version.
It's been a strange kind of Nick Drake year. Carol and I went, for the first time last summer, to Nick's family grave in Tanworth in Arden. This was not long before the Family Tree album was released, with fascinating sleeve notes by Nick's sister, the actress, Gabrielle Drake. The words on the gravestone Now we rise and we are everywhere, are from his song From the Morning, and I thought it would be nice to get just a snatch of it on to the audiobook. So I summoned the nerve to ring Gabrielle - what if she resented having her brother's memory woven into a mystery series? But, coincidentally, as it happened, she was actually in the middle of The Smile of a Ghost at the time. Anyway, she's been wonderful, and so has Cally who manages Nick's estate. And so the audiobook has acquired an ending I couldn't do in the novel.
The next book, To Dream of the Dead, opens with a line from River Man. Always something impenetrably enigmatic and faintly sinister about that song. And if you substitute Jane for Betty...
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