Welcome to my spot on the blog tour for City of Ghosts by Ben Creed.
City of Ghosts is published on 15th October 2020 by Welbeck Publishing.
The first in a trilogy, City of Ghosts is set in the Leningrad of 1951 where the shadows of the war and the threats of Stalinism loom large.
When five blackened corpses are found neatly arranged between three parallel railway lines, even Revol Rossel – once a Conservatoire-trained violinist, now a humble state militia-cop – is sickened by the gruesome scene.
Whether victims of the MGB or a crazed yet methodical killer, these bodies soon lead Rossel back into the dark and ruthless heart of the Soviet classical music establishment, a place where his dreams were shattered and his ghosts barely laid to rest.
* * * * * * * * *
A big thank you to Megan Denholm at Ed PR for my copy of the book and for inviting to take part on the blog tour. I am happy to host an extract on my blog today!
Saturday 13 October, 1951
They lay as straight as scaffolding, stark in the glare of the train engine’s headlight. A quintet of bodies on the snowy tracks, parallel and neat. Feet together, arms straight, with their heads turned delicately to one side. As though Death had asked them all to form an orderly queue, and each damned soul had politely obliged him.
Revol Rossel, lieutenant in the Leningrad militsiya, drew on his cigarette, blew out a ring of grey smoke and observed the crime scene from a distance with studied impassivity. It was a habit now, that face. An expression that so far, even though he was thirty-four years old, had kept him out of the camps. ‘Every man must have one face for the world and another for himself, Revol,’ his father had once told him, with a stoic wink. At the time, neither his father nor Rossel had properly understood what a sound piece of advice this was, the kind that could help any Soviet citizen live a little longer. Especially one who lived in Leningrad, a city for which Stalin was known to harbour misgivings.
As Rossel watched on from the front passenger seat of the Moskvich, he could hear the car’s engine wheezing. Away to the left and across a deep field of snow, a black steam engine wheezed and stood still. Behind the engine and its cargo, the track was flanked by trees for kilometre after kilometre but here, before him, it was crossed by another line of rails, forming a small clearing.
‘Come on, then, gentlemen. Time for us to take our bow.’
The car doors beat a tattoo of slams as Rossel and his fellow cops got out. They moved together, lifting their knees high to make progress in the deep drifts. Under their regulation coats, sporting the insignia of their respective ranks in the militia, they wore a variety of pullovers, trousers and thick underwear. Standard uniform alone was no match for a winter’s night. A few hours ago, the radio had said it was minus twenty-seven. ‘Cold enough to turn good hot Russian piss into icicles,’ as Sergeant Grachev had put it the last time he had regaled them all with another story of how he had slaughtered members of the 33rd Waffen SS en route to Berlin.
Next to the steam engine stood two men, frozen and forlorn. Rossel looked to the right at the second track. It met the main line at a forty-five-degree angle, turned and ran parallel for a few dozen metres, merged at a points system and veered off again into the pines.
One of the two men next to the train moved forward to meet them – the train driver, Rossel guessed. He wore a thick, quilted coat over his overalls and a large fur hat that seemed to almost swallow up a shrunken head, and he reeked of burnt coal.
‘What kept you?’ the driver grumbled.
Rossel ignored the question and looked over him at the other man, from the local militia. This must be the one who had phoned in. He was short and thin and looked like a frightened animal – in his early twenties, practically a boy. The youngster and the driver had sullen faces. They’d been quarrelling, no doubt about it. Rossel guessed the driver had wanted to shunt the corpses out of the way, to hell with it, and get going again; the lad would have been too terrified to touch a thing – a policeman from the sticks refusing to budge until someone else took command.
‘What kept you, eh?’ repeated the train driver.
Rossel looked at him and returned fire. ‘Driving nearly fifty kilometres at four in the morning in a blizzard so thick it would turn a snow fox blind. That may have had something to do with it,’ he said.
It had been snowing for three days and it was only mid October. Nothing like it since the winter of ’42, according to survivors of the Siege of Leningrad. Once the militia officers had got outside the city, it had been more like skiing than driving.
To follow the rest of the blog tour…
About the Authors
Ben Creed is the pseudnoym for Chris Rickaby and Barney Thompson.
Chris found his way into advertising as a copywriter and, after working for various agencies, started his own called Everything Different.
Barney is a classically trained musician who studied under the legendary conducting professor Ilya Musin at the St Petersburg Conversatory for two years. He is fluent in Russian and is now an editor.
