NATIONAL NEWS
British
woman fined for again registering her cows as voters
LONDON (AP) - Brenda Gould is in trouble again for registering her cows as voters. For the second year running, the woman from Newmarket, near Cambridge in eastern England, has listed two names on the registration form who turned out to be cows, East Cambridgeshire District Council said Thursday. The previous year, in addition to registering two cows as Henry and Sophie Bull, she listed Jake Woofles - later found to be a dog - as eligible to vote in local government elections, the council said. This year she indicated that her address had been split into two properties, that she resided in one part and that two other persons lived in the second, a council spokesman said. The persons she claimed lived in the second property were, in fact, her cows, the spokesman said. Gould had been scheduled to appear at Ely Magistrates Court on Tuesday but did not arrive. She was convicted in her absence and ordered to pay a 100-pound fine ($251 Cdn) and 110 pounds ($276) in costs. "This was the second time that Mrs. Gould had given false information on electoral forms and so, regrettably, the council felt it was necessary to take action to prevent this abuse of the election system from continuing," said Maggie Camp, the council's senior legal assistant. Gould was not available for comment.
LONDON (AP) -- What is it that Bruce sees in the microwave of the apartment he is sent to survey? Why did Anna vacate the room Pat now has, leaving behind clothes, papers and a distinct feeling of unease? Domenica Macdonald, who lives across the hall from Bruce and Pat and drives a high-powered, custard-coloured Mercedes, seems to know more about Bruce than she's letting on. Welcome to 44 Scotland Street, the latest work by Alexander McCall Smith, one of detective fiction's hottest authors, and a new serial in The Scotsman. The Scottish daily newspaper has begun serializing the story about a group of Edinburgh roommates, and readers are invited to express opinions. It will appear daily in 850-word installments over the next six months. Publication began Jan. 26 and in the first week, the serialization added around 3,000 readers daily, according to the paper's book editor, David Robinson. That has fallen off a little since but there has been "a welter of positive e-mails from readers," he said. "I don't remember any other Scotsman promotion being this successful." McCall Smith, who created the hit novel The No. 1 Ladies' Detective Agency, about a female private detective in Botswana, has already completed the first 50 instalments and has another 70 still to do. "You could say I am living dangerously," he said in a telephone interview. "Stylistically, it is rather different. You have to get an incident into each installment to keep people reading and you are dealing with the characters in real time. This is turning into more of a comic novel because I'm having such fun with the characters." McCall Smith wants to know if readers relate to his characters, who include Pat, a student taking a break from her studies; Bruce, a vain surveyor; a freelance anthropologist and a furniture maker. They live, according to the first installment, "on the edge of the Bohemian part of the Edinburgh New Town, the part where lawyers and accountants were outnumbered - just - by others." "I'm reasonably open about this," McCall Smith said. "If someone writes in and says, 'I know someone like that and they wouldn't do that,' I would think about changing things." So far, Robinson said, teenage girls seem to have a thing for Bruce. "Alexander McCall Smith has taken note of this and he has now written a scene with Bruce in the shower," Robinson said. Many 19th-century novelists - including Charles Dickens, William Thackeray, Count Leo Tolstoy, Henry James and Honore de Balzac - serialized their work weekly or monthly in newspapers or magazines. Armistead Maupin's Tales of the City was a weekly serial in the San Francisco Chronicle in the 1970s. In 1996, Penguin Group, Stephen King's publisher, put out his prison novel, The Green Mile, in six slim monthly installment and in 2000, King himself published another work, The Plant, as a serial on his Internet site; readers paid $1 per installment. Dave Eggers, author of the bestselling A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius, is serializing a work-in-progress on Salon.com. With a first chapter entitled The Unforbidden Is Compulsory or, Optimism, Eggers' novel is a political satire set in California. Tom Holman of Britain's Bookseller magazine said such deals - although still comparatively rare -- can benefit both author and newspaper. "The author gets the publicity and the newspaper gets the sales," he said. "And the publisher gets a chance to raise the author's profile and pulls in new readers." The decision to publish McCall Smith's new book in a daily paper came about after the author wrote an account of a conversation with Maupin for The Scotsman. "We are very excited to be doing something so unusual which gives our readers a chance to interact with one of Scotland's best writers," Robinson said. McCall Smith said he was drawn to serialization by the idea "of connecting with a wider audience who may perhaps not read books otherwise. This also makes my work much more immediate." Details of the deal were not disclosed by the author or the newspaper. McCall Smith, a professor of medical law at Edinburgh University, is best known for his novels featuring private detective Precious Ramotswe. Worldwide sales of the books recently passed the three million mark. The No. 1 Ladies' Detective Agency was short-listed for the American Booksellers Association book of the year in 2003. First published in 1988, The No. 1 Ladies' Detective Agency has been followed by several well-received sequels.
