Blog Tour: Guestpost & Giveaway — Alex Beecroft – Contraband Hearts (Portkennack)

A warm welcome to author Alex Beecroft joining us today to talk to us about new release “Contraband Hearts”part of the Portkennack universe. Alex talks about Cornwell and brought a giveaway you can participate in!

Welcome Alex 🙂

Things you didn’t know you didn’t know about Cornwall.

 

Contraband Hearts is the latest in an expanding series of novels by a number of Riptide’s UK authors—a series set in the fictional town of Porthkennack in Cornwall. Being from the UK myself, it doesn’t always occur to me that our typical reader may not be as familiar with the landscape, history and culture of this, the southernmost county in Britain as the residents are.

 

I was finally alerted to this fact when someone on Twitter asked me how you pronounced “Porthkennack.” My first reaction was “how can you not know? We chose the town name Porthkennack because it was more obvious how to pronounce it than the alternative (which was Caerdu.)”

 

But my second reaction was “actually, I don’t know. I can tell you how an English person would pronounce the name—Porth-ken-ack—but I don’t know for sure if that’s how a Cornishman would say it.

 

You see, both Porthkennack and Caerdu are place-names I made up with elements from the Cornish language, which I don’t speak. One of the things an English person notices when finally arriving in Cornwall after what (to us) seems like a very long drive, is that the place-names change. In the rest of the country you get lots of names ending in ‘ham’ and ‘ton’ and ‘ing’ (and ‘hurst’ and ‘wic’ and ‘borough.’) Birmingham, Brighton, Yeavering, Wychurst, Ipswich, Peterborough, etc. These are all place names that come from the Anglo-Saxon language which evolved into English, and mean, respectively, ‘small village,’ ‘town,’ ‘place of the people of,’ ‘wooded area,’ ‘trading place’ and ‘fortified town.’

 

But in Cornwall you get a whole different palate of words, like Polperro and Towednock, Zennor and Praze-an-Beeble. That’s because when the Anglo-Saxons were invading Britain, they never really got as far as Cornwall. Like Wales and the Highlands of Scotland, Cornwall retained its Celtic language and a lot of its culture.

 

Cornwall has its own flag

 

And its own movement for political independence from the English government in Westminster; Mebyon Kernow.

 

I know I puzzled a few people in Foxglove Copse when Ruan Gwynn thinks “Bloody English,” disparagingly about Sam Atkins when they first meet. I had a couple of comments saying, “But aren’t they both from England?”

 

Which is one of those things where you probably wouldn’t know if you weren’t from around here. Yes, technically Cornwall is in England, but that doesn’t mean that the Cornish are English any more than the Welsh or the Scots are. British maybe, but not English.

 

The Cornish have always been great miners, great sailors, proud of their heritage as a successful trading nation in their own right. So it was important to me to give our Cornish town a name in the Cornish language.

 

‘Porth’ is one of the most iconic elements of Cornish place names. You find a different ‘Porth’ around every corner: Porthallow, Porthcerno, Porthgwarra, Porthtowan. (Respectively “cove of the waterlillies, cove belonging to a guy named Cerno, cove belonging to Gwarra, cove of the sand dunes.”)  If you’re accustomed to the map of Britain, the moment you hear a ‘porth’ name, you think of Cornwall.

 

So I decided my town would be a ‘porth.’ But the cove of what? It had to be a name that—as far as I’m aware—doesn’t exist, but sounds as though it does. Porthkennack is enough like Porthcerno to sound as though it belongs, but (I believe) is an original. Probably just as well, as it means ‘the cove of the swamp.’

 

There is no swamp in Porthkennack now, but perhaps there was, a thousand years ago when the town was first named. Maybe the next thing I should write there should be a Saxon vs Celt love story, in which they fill the swamp in. That’s the nice thing about fiction; unlike culture, history and language, fiction does exactly what you want.

About Contraband Hearts

His future depends on bringing the smuggler to justice. His heart demands to join him.

Customs officer Peregrine Dean is sent by his patron to investigate rumors of corruption in the Porthkennack customs house. There he is tasked by the local magistrate to bring down the villainous Tomas Quick, a smuggler with fingers in every pie in town. Fired with zeal and ambition, and struck to the core by his first glimpse of Tomas, Perry determines to stop at nothing until he has succeeded.

Tomas Quick is an honest thief—a criminal regarded by the town as their local Robin Hood. He’s also an arrogant man who relishes the challenge posed by someone as determined and intelligent as Perry. Both of them come to enjoy their cat-and-mouse rivalry a little too much.

But the eighteenth century is a perilous time for someone like Perry: a black man in England. Two have already disappeared from the wrecks of ships. Tomas and Perry must forsake their competition and learn to trust each other if they are to rescue them, or Perry may become the third victim.
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About Porthkennack

Welcome to Porthkennack, a charming Cornish seaside town with a long and sometimes sinister history. Legend says King Arthur’s Black Knight built the fort on the headland here, and it’s a certainty that the town was founded on the proceeds of smuggling, piracy on the high seas, and the deliberate wrecking of cargo ships on the rocky shore. Nowadays it draws in the tourists with sunshine and surfing, but locals know that the ghosts of its Gothic past are never far below the surface.

This collaborative story world is brought to you by five award-winning, best-selling British LGBTQ romance authors: Alex Beecroft, Joanna Chambers, Charlie Cochrane, Garrett Leigh, and JL Merrow. Follow Porthkennack and its inhabitants through the centuries and through the full rainbow spectrum with historical and contemporary stand-alone titles.

About Alex Beecroft

Alex Beecroft is an English author best known for historical fiction, notably Age of Sail, featuring gay characters and romantic storylines. Her novels and shorter works include paranormal, fantasy, and contemporary fiction.

Beecroft won Linden Bay Romance’s (now Samhain Publishing) Starlight Writing Competition in 2007 with her first novel, Captain’s Surrender, making it her first published book. On the subject of writing gay romance, Beecroft has appeared in the Charleston City Paper, LA Weekly, the New Haven Advocate, the Baltimore City Paper, and The Other Paper. She is a member of the Romantic Novelists’ Association of the UK and an occasional reviewer for the blog Speak Its Name, which highlights historical gay fiction.

Alex was born in Northern Ireland during the Troubles and grew up in the wild countryside of the English Peak District. She lives with her husband and two children in a little village near Cambridge and tries to avoid being mistaken for a tourist.

Alex is only intermittently present in the real world. She has led a Saxon shield wall into battle, toiled as a Georgian kitchen maid, and recently taken up an 800-year-old form of English folk dance, but she still hasn’t learned to operate a mobile phone.

She is represented by Louise Fury of the L. Perkins Literary Agency.

Connect with Alex:

• Website: alexbeecroft.com
• Blog: alexbeecroft.com/blog
• Facebook: facebook.com/AlexBeecroftAuthor
• Twitter: @Alex_Beecroft
• Goodreads: goodreads.com/Alex_Beecroft

To celebrate the release of Contraband Hearts, Alex is giving away a $10 Amazon gift card and an ebook from her backlist, your choice! Leave a comment with your contact info to enter the contest. Entries close at midnight, Eastern time, on May 5, 2018. Contest is NOT restricted to U.S. entries. Thanks for following along, and don’t forget to leave your contact info!