Venusian Frog Broth

Denis McLoughlin and Dinosaurs

2011-05-05T08:33:00.000-07:00

In a brief pause during the writing of my new novel, which along with various TV scripts and some film rewriting, has kept me madly busy in the last few months (apologies for lack of blogs) I got an email alert from eBay. ¶ I was delighted to see the book illustrated here. I placed a bid and was even more delighted when I won it. Michelle, my lovable postie just delivered it, and it now resides proudly on my coffee table (a table that's never known any actual coffee but is overburdened with books and CDs). ¶ It features a cover by one of my all time favourite illustrators, the great British Noir artist Denis McLoughlin. I first became acquainted with his amazing colour illustrations through his covers for the crime thrillers published by Boardman Books. ¶ He is also famed for his Buffalo Bill Wild West Annuals, of which I have a few. But I wasn't aware of these Okay Adventure Annuals. From what I've seen, each year featured a different genre (eg explorers in Africa), but I was lucky enough to glom this particular specimen, with its science fiction theme. Not only does it feature great art, but it also embodies one of my mottoes for life: never go hunting for dinosaurs unless you've got some grenades in the jeep.

Downton Abbey by Julian Fellowes

2010-09-24T08:49:00.000-07:00

When I heard that Ben Aaronovitch had been invited to the BFI screening of Downton Abbey, my immediate reaction was to try to wangle an invitation for myself. It wasn't the exclusive pre-screening drinks or the lavishly catered afterparty that attracted me — or only to the extent that they boded well for networking. ¶ Ben has had great interest in his soon to be bestselling series of novels and I've been commissioned to write an episode of Midsomer Murders. So now seemed like a good time to go networking. ¶ Ben had garnered his invitation through the good offices of Carnival, one of the great British independent TV companies. They were responsible for Simon Moore's Traffik, which remains a high water mark for television drama. ¶ So of course I wanted to lig along. It
sounded like fun. Ben didn't have any trouble wangling me an invitation. ¶ I arrived at the BFI fashionably on time and Ben introduced me to Gareth Neame, former head of drama at the BBC and now a honcho at Carnival. Also, a man who clearly has an eye for writing, given that's he had the uncommon good sense to commission Julian Fellowes. ¶ The pre-screening drinks were scheduled to commence a full hour and a quarter before the screening. I arrived wondering how I could possibly fill that yawning void of time. But as interesting people surged into the bar we introduced ourselves around and ate the little cheese biscuits provided (black napkins — classy touch). Ben was soon deep in schmoozing mode and I set about striking up a conversation with the nearest beautiful woman — who proved to be an internet executive. Before you knew it, it was time for the screening. ¶ We filed into NFT 1. This is one of the finest cinemas in London, with certain towering caveats. For a start it was designed by someone who clearly thought the sightlines for a movie are the same as for live theatre. Oh no, my friend, I am afraid to tell you that they're not.¶ This is why great swathes of the seats on the left and right of the screen give a weirdly angled view with fatal quantities of parallax and distortion. ¶ And don't even get me started about the time they screened Barry Lyndon. At the end of Kubrick's misty masterpiece, after 184 minutes of film, the projectionist was still trying to get the focus right.¶ Stanley would have been foaming at the mouth. Anyway, like I said, certain caveats.¶ But if you're lucky enough to be sat in the sweet spot in the centre aisle, the NFT1 is a great cinema. And when Ben and I consulted our tickets we found we were seated dead centre. And the dishy internet exec was in the row behind us. ¶ There was a good humored sense of excitement, a subdued buzz in the audience as the lights went out. ¶ Julian Fellowes wrote Gosford Park, a film for which he won the Oscar. And like Gosford, Downton Abbey concerns an English stately home and the people who live in and their servants, and it's dynamite. We're instantly acquainted with a large cast of characters and immediately made to care about them. The way Fellowes channels our sympathies is masterful. Plus that redhaired undermaid is really cute. ¶ After the triumphant screening there's a Q&A. It's obvious Downton Abbey is going to be a huge hit. Not least in America. ¶ At the after party, attended by cast and crew plus numerous hangers on (me, for instance) we meet Andrew Morgan, who worked with us on Doctor Who, directing Ben's Dalek story. ¶ "Canapes?" says Andrew, "I thought they said cannabis!" We also meet a Tierra del Fuegian banjo player who is the only person present who isn't ecstatic about Downton Abbey. ¶ He dismisses it with lofty contempt. I listen politely to his specious vapourings before moving off. I make a point of meeting Julian Fellowes, who it turns out is an old friend of Andrew Morgan. ¶ We chat briefly and I convey my great admiration for his script . "Well done on the Midsomer," he tells me. ¶ Walking back along the Thames around midnight, the bright circle of the London Eye looming in the night above, I reflected that it was a great TV drama and a great evening. My only regret is that I didn't speak to the redhaired undermaid — or punch the Tierra del Fuegian banjo player. ¶

Title Fight

2010-08-21T09:58:00.000-07:00

One of my favourite novels is I, Lucifer. It was the work of Peter O'Donnell. You too may have recently read I, Lucifer but the trouble is, there's every chance the book you read was by someone called Glen Duncan. ¶ Now I'm quite willing to believe that Glen Duncan is a nice fellow and who knows, perhaps a very able writer. ¶ But that begs the question why anyone would filch a wonderful title from a fellow artist. ¶ And if the writer had no idea that it had been filched (good word, filched), then why in the name of all the gods didn't said writer's editors or publisher spot the duplication? ¶ Or was it simply too good a title and nobody thought they had to take the original seriously because it was 'just' a Modesty Blaise novel. ¶ I snuck those quotation marks in because any fair-minded person would concede that Modesty Blaise and Willie Garvin are up there with Travis McGee and Meyer or Aubrey and Maturin. ¶ Anyway, when I heard that this book this new book with its borrowed title was coming out I doted on fantasies of acquiring the rights to the Peter O'Donnell original and releasing it at the same time. With a great big publicity push, to create confusion and sabotage the launch of the pretender. ¶ I'll read Glen Duncan's I, Lucifer one day but first I'll have to simmer down. ¶ There's no doubt that I, Lucifer is a brilliant title. And it was Peter O'Donnell who thought of it, in 1965. ¶ The English Assassin is another brilliant title. Michael Moorcock thought of it and used it in 1972. In fact , it's such a good title that it was recently appropriated for a novel by Daniel Silva. ¶ Like Peter O'Donnell's book, Moorcock's original was a kind of spy thriller. It too featured one of the mutant offspring of James Bond (in this case, Jeremy Cornelius). ¶ Reprehensibly (I think that's not too strong a word), Silva or someone at his publishers, has decided to recycle Moorcock's great title, and for a spy novel, too. ¶ Okay, Moorcock's take on a spy novel was decidedly surreal, a meltdown in fact, but it's still a bit much. Glen Duncan at least had the decency to carry the purloined goods some distance before trying to peddle them — so to speak. ¶ Again Daniel Silva may be a prince of a fellow and may have written a fine novel. But again I'm going to have to simmer down a mite before I can bring myself to read it. ¶ I repeat, these writers may be talented, intelligent, engaging chaps who have written fine books. ¶ That's certainly true of China Mieville. But as with Mieville, this no way absolves them of what one would have thought would be their duty as writers themselves to refrain from pillaging the work of other writers. ¶ It's no defence to say "it's just the title." The title is in some ways the crucial thing, and a great one is hard to come by. ¶ Speaking of great titles how about King Rat? Terrific title, terrific book. But is was written in 1960 by James Clavell. And, oh wait a minute, there seems to be a novel on the bookshelves now called King Rat. ¶ But it's by China Mieville. ¶ Mieville is a writer whom I respect. Yet it's hard to believe he was unaware of Clavell's book, enduring bestseller that it was. (Its lack of obscurity was enhanced by the outstanding film adapted from it; nice John Barry Score, great performance from George Segal). ¶ So, just what the blue blazes was going on in a writer's mind when he chooses to make of with another writer's title? ¶ Is that a gleam I see in the eye of Jeffrey Archer? Would it be petty minded and tasteless to remind everyone at this point that Lord Archer is a convicted felon? I think that's the right term. ¶ Anyway, Archer may well be a charming chap. His millionaire's eyrie certainly has a nice view of the Thames. But still it's going to be a cold day in hell before I read his novel Paths of Glory with its stolen title. For the original go to Humphrey Cobb's superb 1930s tale of war (made into a stunning Kubrick film). ¶ Before closing, in the interests of full disclosure, I should mention that I've had two stage plays produced. The title of the first, arrived at after much soul searching, heart ache and head banging (Dark Ride, anyone? How about Death Etc?) was End of the the Night. ¶ Which, despite being a standard meteorological term sounds suspiciously like The End of the Night, a stunning 1960 suspense thriller by John D. MacDonald. ¶ As I mentioned, a good title is hard to come by. My second play was called Under the Eagle which I later discovered to be a novel about a Roman Legion by Simon Scarrow published in 2000.¶

Norman Lewis: The Sicilian Specialist

2010-07-27T07:53:00.000-07:00

I've been meaning to write a piece on Norman Lewis for some time now, having recently read and admired his 1974 Mafia thriller The Sicilian Specialist. What finally galvanised me into action was a news report on the radio yesterday about a Mexican prison where apparently they're letting inmates out, providing them with transport and firepower, allowing them to go off and perform contract killings and then letting them come back into prison to be locked up snugly again. (Naturally the prison officials expect to be remunerated for organising these little sabbaticals.) ¶ Startling? Well, it would have been if I hadn't just read about exactly the same scenario taking place back in the 1960s, in The Sicilian Specialist. I assume the incidents Norman Lewis describes in his novel are versions and variants of things that actually happened in Latin America. ¶ Lewis was a fine journalist, whose exposé of the genocide of Indians in the Brazilian Rain Forest in 1968 was a memorable classic which led to reforms and changed (and saved) lives. Graham Greene described him as one of the best writers of the century. ¶ Now, while I would never pay attentionfkeen
to Greene on say spiritual matters, I'm more than willing to listen to him about writers. So I've been on the look out for The Sicilian Specialist, and having now read it I'm keen to investigate Lewis's non fiction book on the Mafia, The Honoured Society. (The fact it originated as a series of pieces in the New Yorker makes me all the more keen.) ¶ The Sicilian Specialist explores the links between the Mafia and CIA in post World War II Sicily, moving on to America and then Cuba. The least interestingly evoked sequences are in Vermont. There is a fine chase from a roadhouse followed by a savage beating in an autumnal field, but give Lewis a hot, exotic locale any day. His feeling for the crueler sunbaked landscapes of the world is clear. The scenes in Sicily and Cuba are superb, so it comes as no surprise to learn that Lewis's wife was Sicilian or that he was sent to Cuba by Ian Fleming to interview Ernerst Hemingway (if you're going to visit Cuba, that's definitely the way to go). ¶ Norman Lewis is a master of sudden, violent action and the amazing, audacious succinctness of his descriptions rivals that of Charles Willeford. In The Sicilian Specialist the darkest and most disturbing of deeds are presented in a measured, beautiful and intelligent prose that is informed by a love and understanding of the far away parts of the world — and of the human psyche. It's like Jim Thompson meets Patrick O'Brian. ¶ The Sicilian Specialist becomes unstuck at the very end, when its brief and brutal saga dovetails with the Kennedy assassination in Dallas in 1963. It's hard to convey my disappointment at this development: oh god he even mentions the grassy knoll. Of course, there was no way Lewis could have known at the time he wrote this what an egregious cliche that would become. ¶ And this in no way spoils the novel, which remains a classic thriller. It's just that the last few pages seem an unworthy conclusion for all that has gone before. ¶ But even here Lewis throws in a moment of casual brilliance, describing a near fatal accident in the air with indelible terse vividness. Highly recommended, and I'm off to find The Honoured Society. ¶

The Words of Anthony Burgess

2010-06-19T05:20:00.000-07:00

I pride myself on having a good vocabulary. I suspect I'm not alone in this. Indeed the drooling madman lurking in the ill-lit concrete underpass probably prides himself on his vocabulary. ¶ But it is rare for me (and presumably not so rare for the drooling lurker) to come upon a word in a book which is unfamiliar and indeed downright unknown. ¶ Rarer still to come across so many such words in one book that I begin to write them down and even, gasp, overcome my habitual sloth and actually look the damned things up in the dictionary. ¶ I have a great dictionary, a brainy brawny monster permanently crouching on my (oval, glass, space age bachelor pad) coffee table. It's the Oxford Dictionary of English and it weighs a ton and costs £40 — worth every penny (I got mine for free).¶ I just love this book. But since it weighs a ton, and it's buried under a bunch of other books on the coffee table (oval, glass, etc), it's quite a gala occasion when I crack it open. ¶ Often this is when I have a list of words to look up, from a book by a writer who is more well read than me or maybe just more pretentious. The first writer to get me keeping lists was Umberto Eco. ¶ Primarily from Foucault's Pendulum. As I recall the marvelous Name of the Rose didn't spring so many new words on me. Or maybe I just didn't write them down.¶ More recently, Anthony Burgess has been keeping me busy. Earthly Powers threw up quite a haul. Here are just the highlights. ¶ Hermeneutic means interpretative or explanatory. Oneiric is of, or suggestive of, dreams. ¶ An epigone (or epigon) is a copycat or an inferior imitator of some distinguished writer or artist or musician. I like that one and I'm thinking of ways to use it right now.¶ A myrmidon is a faithful follower who carries out orders without question. Marmoreal means resembling marble in smoothness, whiteness or hardness. I immediately thought of thighs, for some reason. An apothegm (or, more alarmingly, apophthegm) is a terse, witty, instructive saying; a maxim.¶ Eupeptic means having good digestion; happy. On the other hand rebarbative means unattractive, objectionable (from the Old French se rebarber, which means to be in agressive confrontation, chin to chin, or literally beard to beard). ¶ Panglossian is optimistic whatever the circumstances, after Pangloss the tutor in Voltaire's Candide. ¶ And my absolute favourite, proleptic. This means anticipating. ¶ The example in my dictionary was great and rang with drama: "He was a dead man when he walked into the room." ¶ Lastly there is, perhaps all too appropriately, pleonastic. Which means, verbose, using more words than necessary to convey the meaning of something. ¶ All of these beauties have just given the spell checker a proper nervous break down. I would love to say I was dropping them all regularly in daily discourse. But, to be honest, of that list the only ones I've really retained in my memory so far are marmoreal (those thighs), the wonderful rebarbative and of course proleptic. ¶ Recently (see 13 June 2010) Burgess was up to his old tricks again, and I emerged from his Malaysian Trilogy with another exotic horde.¶ Here's the highlights of that haul. As usual I didn't write down the first few because frankly I was hoping they'd eventually stop. But when they didn't I sighed and took my notebook out (my trusty Moleskin cahiers journal with the handy pocket at the back for tickets, etc) and began to make notes. ¶ It's been so long since I read the book I have no idea of where the words appeared or how they were used. But I've got page numbers written beside the words so I can go back and look at how they were used in context — if I can be arsed. ¶ First up is the Spanish sounding seigniory. It turns out to mean a feudal lordship. And it's actually from Old French again, seignorie. ¶ , Next is the naughtily amusing sounding crapula. Can it possibly live up to our expectations? It turns out to be Latin. The only English form is crapulent, relating to drunkenness. From the Latin crapula, which means inebriation, from a Greek word, which I can't yet render in this typeface, that means "drunken headache". Magic! ¶ Then there's vaccine. Hang on, hang on, of course I know that meaning. But Burgess is using it as an adjective! So let's see what the Oxford has to say about that. My guess is that it's something like bovine. Yep. It means cowlike.¶ Now here come a couple of real corkers, exiguity and rhotacismus. My money is on exiguity being something like urgency. Nope, way off. It actually refers to a very small amount. From the Latin exiguus for scanty. ¶ Rhotacismus? I'm not going to hazard any guesses after that bruising defeat. Flipping through the pages of the Oxford Dictionary of English we discover that it's quite technical and to do with phonetics and the precise pronunciation of a vowel (to "reflect a following r" as in farm or bird, if you must know). ¶ A bit disappointing that, except perhaps to the linguistic experts among us, and maybe the lurking drooler in the underpass. ¶ Finally there was once again our old friend proleptic. Well, thanks Mr Burgess. ¶ This was just a selection you understand. My notebook is bursting with other specimens. I might post about a few more, if I think I can endure the pain of learning something new.

Anthony Burgess Part 2: The Malayan Trilogy

2010-06-13T09:21:00.000-07:00

I like to have a book in my pocket to kill time on public transport. Since the passing of the pocket sized paperback (see my earlier diatribe on this here) I’ve had to depend on the vagaries of the second hand book market to provide my reading matter for buses and trains. ¶ I suppose the nice thing about this is, you never know what’s going to turn up. Last year at a church book sale (about the only time you’ll catch me in church) what turned up was a copy of Anthony Burgess’s Malayan Trilogy. This was a rather nice Penguin edition, with cover art by Peter Bentley of Bentley/Farrell/Burnett. ¶ It gathers together Burgess’s first three novels, Time for a Tiger, The Enemy in the Blanket and Beds in the East. Together these form the Malayan Trilogy which has the umbrella title The Long Day Wanes, although you wouldn’t know it from my Penguin. ¶ I’ve always liked the title of the first book, Time for a Tiger (written in 1956), which seems to suggest tumultuous and violent events in this jungle nation, when in fact it simply means "it’s time for a beer", Tiger being a Singaporean lager popular in the far east at the time and popular all over the place now. ¶ The title of the second book (1958) remains obscure to me even if Wikipedia thinks it alludes to the conflicts in the central character’s marriage. Beds in the East (1959) is a quote from Shakespeare (Antony and Cleopatra): “the beds in the east are soft.” ¶ Quoting from Shakespeare is something Burgess does rather too much of in these books, straining credulity by having some of the most unlikely characters spout this stuff, or reflect upon it. The trilogy is a mixed bag, although it unquestionably conveys a vivid and unforgettable portrait of Malaya, or Malaysia as it is now known. ¶ Just how accurate Burgess’s picture is was demonstrated to me last week. One of the running gags in the books is the obsession the local sultans have with acquiring posh and shiny cars. Politically incorrect you say? Downright racist stereotype? I might have been inclined to think so myself, until I read this news story. ¶ Burgess is a remarkable and important writer. Probably my biggest beef with him, however, is his ineptitude in handling plot. It’s not, I think, that he’s incapable of writing a carefully plotted and satisfying story. It’s just that he doesn’t care. ¶ This propensity was particularly obvious in Any Old Iron (see my earlier blog entry) where the whole, lengthy narrative, is supposed to concern an ancient sword. But the story of this goddamned sword is deployed raggedly, perfunctorily and almost resentfully, as though Burgess regretted having lumbered himself with it. It keeps getting elbowed aside by the characters and vignettes, which is good news because both of these are great. ¶ This same tendency is very much in evidence in the Malayan Trilogy. In Time For a Tiger, Victor Crabbe, the hero of the trilogy, is burdened with a psychological block. He can’t drive a car because of traumatic memories of the fatal accident in which his first wife died. Finally, late in the novel, as the result of an ambush by communist insurgents on an isolated jungle road, Crabbe is forced to take the wheel of a car and drive. ¶ If this suggest a conventional story arc of tribulation, catharsis and redemption, forget it. Once again Burgess is so slapdash and perfunctory in his deployment of the plot that it hardly amounts to a story at all. And, anyway, certainly not a satisfying one. Equally slapdash and half hearted is his account of Crabbe’s affair with a local widow and a rebellion by the students at Crabbe’s school. In fact I found it hard to take any interest in Crabbe or his doings. He never appealed to me as a character. ¶ Who did appeal to me, though, was the wonderful Nabby Adams. From the moment that this huge, shambling loser rose from his bed, his old dog emerging after him, her medal clanking, I was enchanted. I loved the story of this sweating, scheming wreck with his impossible debts, his alcoholism and his dog. I’ll never forget my disappointment when I learned, turning to chapter two, that the whole book wasn’t going to be about him. Time For a Tiger never really recovers from this. And indeed the trilogy never recovers from Nabby’s departure into the sunset at the end of the first novel. ¶ Supplementing this lovely bit of characterisation there are some of Burgess’s other typical strengths on display — the book has a brilliant ending, even if it is totally deus ex machina. ¶ The second novel, The Enemy in the Blanket is considerably weaker than Tiger. The plotting is as half-hearted as ever and with Nabby Adams gone we’re stuck with the dull Crabbes, annoying Victor and his drippy wife Fenella plus a cast of numerous other colourful (or, in the case of Rupert Hardman, literally colourless) individuals who never come fully to life or arouse much interest. ¶ The final volume, Beds in the East, continues the tradition of token, tepid plotting, but that doesn’t really matter because it features some wonderful new characters. Victor Crabbe is still in attendance, even less sympathetic and engaging than before (if that’s possible). But we also have the gorgeous Rosemary Michael, a kind of Walter Mitty would-be femme fatale surrounded by her pet cats and an amusing array of drooling suitors. In some ways a hair raising caricature (“Black but comely...”), Rosemary is also unquestionably a great comic creation. ¶ But even better than Rosemary is Robert Loo, the teenage son of a Chinese shopkeeper. Robert is gifted with musical genius, and this provides Burgess with an excuse for descriptions of Robert’s inner mental landscapes when he is composing. And it is here that the author shows real genius of his own. These are marvelous, rhapsodic, hallucinatory episodes which are the most striking thing in the book. And that’s hardly surprising when you consider Burgess’s own deep involvement with music and love of it. ¶ Eventually Rosemary and Robert are manoeuvred together in a characteristic piece of Burgess contrivance. But this plot device works well enough, not least because it’s invested with the ironic energy which builds and builds to finally give the book, and the trilogy, an ultimately satisfying, and highly comic, conclusion. I was chuckling almost constantly as I turned the last few pages. ¶ So what’s my verdict on The Long Day Wanes? I’d recommend that you read the third book, forget about the second altogether and if you’re going to bother with the first one, just skip through it and read the chapters about Nabby Adams. ¶ That sounds like a pretty savage indictment, but it’s not. The trilogy shows Burgess’s formidable talent as a novelist just beginning to warm up, and Beds in the East is definitely a minor comic classic. If there’s a fatal flaw in these books it’s the supposed protagonist, Victor Crabbe. Unsympathetic and uninteresting, I was only too pleased when he finally got stung by a scorpion and fell in a river. Sorry, Victor. Sorry, Anthony.

Anthony Burgess: Beyond Clockwork Orange

2010-05-22T08:23:00.000-07:00

It's odd. I've been aware of the work of Anthony Burgess (the pseudonym for John Burgess Wilson) for decades, ever since I discovered him in connection with Clockwork Orange. Prompted by the Kubrick film I went down to the Fort Garry public library and borrowed a copy of Burgess's novel. ¶ After seeing the film I read it again, but I don't think I ever bothered with anything else by Burgess. Until now. ¶ I had a copy of Earthly Powers on my shelf for decades. Somebody gave me a copy of the first Penguin paperback edition shortly after it was shortlisted for the Booker prize. Now and then over the years I'd take the fat, heavy book down, admire it's cover illustration (by Bill Sanderson), read the first couple of sentences, then put it back of the shelf. But not long ago I was out of action for a while, at home in bed with a cold, and I was looking for a big fat book to read. Finally Burgess's time had come... ¶ Earthly Powers is an episodic epic spanning the better part of the 20th century. Its protagonist Kenneth Toomey is a hugely successful, though personally tormented, writer loosely modeled on Somerset Maugham. ¶ Full of historical detail, the book is well written and intermittently compelling, although for me far and away the most effective sequence is a brilliant little tale of the supernatural set in Malaysia which is vivid, horrifying and unforgettable (although, having said that, I was talking to Graeme Curry, who'd also read the book, and he couldn't remember the episode at all). ¶ Earthly Powers isn't a masterpiece. I found it exhausting and its charms rather variable. Above all, I have to admit, I found the protagonist, in whose company we spend 649 pages, singularly unsympathetic (although I'm an admirer of the real life Somerset Maugham). ¶ The ending of the book, however, is stunning and left me full of admiration for Burgess. It certainly prompted me to look for something else to read by him. ¶ What I found was Any Old Iron. Despite being lumbered with a contrived and unconvincing narrative thread (a search for an ancient sword which even Burgess doesn't seem particularly interested in) this is a much better book than Earthly Powers. ¶ Again it's a wide canvas depicting the 20th century, and again it's beautifully written, with great authority. In particular, the war sequences, seen from the point of view of the ordinary soldier, are superb. The book doesn't reach a satisfying or interesting conclusion, however. ¶ To sum up, Earthly Powers is a serviceable novel with a splendid ending and Any Old Iron is a splendid novel with a serviceable ending. Burgess is clearly a giant, though, and I'm looking forward to spending more time in his company. ¶ I notice he's written novels about both Shakespeare and Napoleon, so those are next on my list... ¶ Incidentally, writing this blog entry has brought forcefully home both the joys and frustrations of the internet. I wanted to include an image of the cover of Earthly Powers, in the edition which I read, with the aforementioned splendid cover illustration by Bill Sanderson (design by Butcher & Gomez). ¶ But I don't have a flat bed scanner and my search on the web for a jpeg of the cover (a perfectly reasonable request, I thought), only threw up a couple of pitiful little scans of battered paperbacks. On the other hand, though, I found Sanderson's website which provided the magnificent illustrations you see here. ¶ This piece was supposed to be about Anthony Burgess but one of the bonuses of writing it was discovering Sanderson. He's a phenomenal artist and if you have the funds, you should contact his agent and commission him immediately.

My Attempt to Overthrow the Government

2010-03-21T10:04:00.000-07:00

I had an odd little experience a few weeks ago, which ended up with me appearing on national television, fighting my corner against the forces of darkness. Or at least a whole bunch of silly newspapers. ¶ I asked the appropriate colleagues of my feisty book agent Julian Friedmann if I should try and write a piece about it for one of the less silly newspapers. The general consensus was that it was already yesterday's news. But an old schoolfriend, Ken Goodwin, urged me to give it a go anyway and I ended up doing a piece for the Guardian. ¶ That brief account was a much abbreviated version of what appears here. (You can also read the Guardian piece on their website.) ¶ It all began on a Wednesday with an email and a phone message from my screenwriting agent, the fragrant Janet Fillingham. Janet told me that a Sunday Times journalist had been in touch with her. He was doing a piece on Sylvester McCoy for that weekend's edition, the hook being Sylvester's new comedy for the BBC. ¶ Was I available for a quick chat, to provide some background colour? Always be nice to your agent, is my motto. Janet hadn't been able to find out anything about Sylvester's new comedy, from a quick search on the internet, but at the time that seemed neither here nor there. ¶ The following day I emailed the journalist with my home phone number.I was on the way out the door later when the phone rang. I came back to answer it. In the days that ensued, I was going to have plenty of time to reflect on what might have happened if I hadn't picked up the phone. ¶ It was the guy from the Sunday Times. I spoke unguardedly and at length, about Sylvester and other things, and hung up with the smug feeling of having done a favour for a friend. ¶ That Sunday I bought a copy of the Times to look for the article. I scoured the TV and entertainment sections and found nothing. I shrugged and decided this was about par for the course. But then emails started to arrive. The first one was from my old friend Simon Butler in Cambridge. "Great piece in the Sunday Times! I particularly admire the response to the interview question, must try that one next time." ¶ What? ¶ I went online and found the Sunday Times piece. Reading it was a bracing, icy shock. I had just about convinced myself that nobody was likely to read it when more friends began to email me. And even while I was answering those emails the story began to pop up all over the internet. Like evil toadstools sprouting, was my main thought. The Telegraph and The Mail now had it. What was going on? I went back to my copy of the Sunday Times and discovered why it wasn't in the TV section. It was on page 3 of the news section. In fact, it pretty much was page 3. ¶ The chief problem was that the story was being slanted as an attack on the BBC, an institution I revere. (I mean, Composer of the Week that week on Radio 3 was 'Bebop' - what could be better than that?) ¶ It seems that I had inadvertently handed a certain section of the press a magic bullet to fire at the Corporation. ¶ The most contentious bit being I suppose that, when asked in my job interview for script editor of Doctor Who, what I would most like to achieve, I'd replied "Overthrow the government." Of course the ensuing response I'd described, gently but firmly discouraging any such action and the ensuing discussion about the parameters of the job, weren't cited in any of the articles. ¶ I felt terrible. I composed an email to my agent and sat tight. On Monday she replied saying about the story, prophetically, "I suspect this won't disappear in a puff of extra terrestrial smoke." ¶ That was just before we learned that virtually all the Monday papers had picked up the story. And just before I got the phonecall from BBC Radio Wales, who wanted me to come on at drive time and talk about the, ahem, situation.¶ I agreed enthusiastically. I wanted to put my point across. I was quite nervous about the radio spot, until I got the phone call asking me to appear on TV that night, on Newsnight on BBC2. Right then, no disrespect to Radio Wales, my nerves about being on local radio vanished, to be replaced by apprehension about appearing on national television.¶ A few hours later I was being sat on the sofa in the Newsnight studio where they do the "soft" pieces. "Please sit with your right thigh on the seam of the sofa, Andrew. Look into camera 2, please. Thank you." ¶ I was seated, thigh on the seam, between Gavin Esler, our host for the night, and Tim Collins, who was sort of the Conservatives' man in science fiction. All three of us were slightly orange as a result of the make up. ¶ Tim and Gavin managed to have what seemed like a lengthy conversation about the British tradition of fantastic literature while I mostly fiddled with a glass of water. ¶ But I did manage to get a few key points across, and hopefully achieved some damage limitation. You can watch a clip of the show here. ¶ Then it was back into the deserted green room, where a pile of wet wipes awaited, piled on the arm of the sofa, for us to remove the make up. I rode back in a taxi through London at midnight, looking out at the streets, feeling strangely light headed and happy, making a note never to pick up the phone to a journalist again.

The Parker Novels by Richard Stark

2010-03-11T01:34:00.000-08:00

Okay, the first thing I should say is that Richard Stark is actually Donald Westlake. Westlake wrote priceless comedy crime novels under his own name, perhaps most famously The Hot Rock but also dozens of others, many of them filmed, including Cops and Robbers, Bank Shot and The Busy Body, which had a Frank Frazetta poster I'll try and include here somewhere. ¶ While the Westlake books are often laugh out loud funny, the Stark pseudonym is reserved for hard edged noir neo-pulp crime stories. And they're great. More tightly plotted than Elmore Leonard, more coherent and engaging than Jim Thompson, the Richard Stark novels mostly concentrate on dark, suspenseful tales of the ruthlessly proficient mononymic professional thief, Parker. ¶ Two things first attracted me about these books: the wonderful Coronet paperback editions with the die-cut bullet hole covers, and the fact that John Boorman's Point Blank, one of my all time favourite films, had been based on the early Parker adventure The Hunter. ¶ It was a great pleasure to assemble the complete adventures of Parker in those beautiful Coronet paperbacks. They had the classic design simplicity of Raymond Hawkey at his best (compare those bullet holes with Hawkey's edition of the James Bond novel Thunderball), although I suspect they were the work of someone else; Hawkey generally gets credit for his work and these classic designs remains shamefully anonymous (if you know who the unsung genius was, do share). ¶ The series was a high point in British paperback design and it was a sad day when Coronet abandoned it for a more conventional (not to mention dull) approach with Butcher's Moon in 1977. This cover was so lame I'm loathe to reproduce it here, but I will just to prove a point. Its utter lack of appeal may help explain why this is one of the scarcest Parker novels. Who would want to buy such a dull travesty of a cover, especially after a run of such magnificent editions? ¶ Anyway, copies of Butcher's Moon now change hands for silly amounts of money and the book spelled the end of the series in more ways than one. It would prove to be the last adventure of Parker for over 20 years. But Westlake is a clever fellow and he revived Parker in time to greet the new millenium. This was great news for connoiseurs of crime fiction — and news which only recently caught up with me. ¶ Last week I had the pleasure of acquainting myself with the renewed Parker saga by reading three of his latest adventures. (Yes, I really did power through three novels in a week, while busy writing my own stuff; they are that addictive.) These three novels were Firebreak, Breakout and Ask the Parrot. Parker novels, at least these days, are not so much stories about heists as about heists going badly wrong. Richard Stark — I'll refer to the writer by his pseudonym to avoid confusion — is a master of suspenseful plot complications and even though Parker is a remorseless, hard nosed bastard you will soon find your heart going out to him as he faces the seemingly endless series of obstacles his creator throws at him. ¶ Incidentally Westlake wrote a short story which depicted the last word in criminals thwarted by unexpected complications. It was called The Curious Facts Preceeding My Execution and it is deeply, darkly funny. ¶ In Firebreak Parker is embroiled in a fine art heist while contending with a loose cannon accomplice and a sequence of hit men who have been assigned by an old enemy to kill him . In Breakout Parker's heist goes wrong on the first page and he spends the rest of the book trying to deal with the consequences, including, as the title suggests, by breaking out of prison. ¶ Ask the Parrot begins with Parker already on the run as a result of a job that went sour. As he flees from the police and dogs up a wooded slope he encounters his dubous saviour, an embittered hermit who wants revenge against the race track where he used to work. He wants to rob the place — and Parker is just your man. ¶ The films based on the Parker novels deserve an essay all their own, so I'll content myself with a few highlights. Point Blank is by far the best of them, and a modern classic. The Mel Gibson remake Payback, written and directed by Brian Helgeland, has its moments, but isn't in the same league. ¶ The Outfit, written and directed by the British film maker John Flynn has many virtues, including Robert Duvall as Parker and a score by Jerry Fielding. It is also probably the film most true to the original novels. In particular it faithfully reproduces Parker's technique of asking his victims their names. So, for instance, when he orders them to lie down while he robs their bank, he can address them properly and they're more likely to cooperate. I've never tried this but it always struck me as a convincing detail. ¶ Lastly, The Split, directed by Gordon Flemying, another Brit (yes, he directed the Dalek movies) is worth a look, if only because of a cast which includes Donald Sutherland, Warren Oates and Ernest Borgnine, and a score by Quincy Jones. This score is available on a CD which includes liner notes with a detailed appreciation of Stark, and Parker. ¶ As a last, quirky detail concerning the Parker novels, there's one non-existent book, called Child Heist. What the hell do I mean by a non-existent book? Well it only appears in another book. ¶ In fact, and I love this, there's a Donald Westlake novel called Jimmy the Kid, which is about the incompetent John Dortmunder, who also starred in The Hot Rock and Bank Shot. The copy of Jimmy the Kid illustrated here has a terrific airbrush cover by the great Robert Grossman who worked for everyone from Time Magazine to National Lampoon. In Jimmy the Kid, Dortmunder and his gang have a copy of this 'imaginary' novel featuring Parker and they try to replicate the kidnapping described in it, and naturally bungle everything. ¶ Donald Westlake meets Richard Stark. It's like the scene in Monty Python's Meaning of Life where the short film attack the main feature. As with the revival of Parker, I've only just learned about this book and I'm off to buy a copy now. ¶ Another fact I discovered while researching this piece was, sadly, that Westlake died just over a year ago. There's an appreciation of him and his Parker novels here. What a shame. Westlake, Stark, Parker and Dortmunder all gone... Luckily there are over a hundred novels in print which feature one, or all, of them.

Troy Kennedy Martin Part 2: Reilly Ace of Spies

2009-10-25T09:04:00.000-07:00

A few weeks ago (17 September) I wrote about the tragic loss of screenwriter Troy Kennedy Martin. The loss would have been more tragic still if it wasn't for the substantial legacy of great drama he left us, much of it now easily available on DVD. ¶ These wonderfully useful silver discs enabled me to pay my respects to Kennedy Martin by launching my own personal retrospective film festival. I started by watching the six episodes of Edge of Darkness. A gloomy masterpiece. ¶ I then planned to dip into Kelly's Heroes — sheer joy, a World War 2 high octane black comedy with a Lalo Schifrin soundtrack. But I changed my mind and decided to watch Reilly Ace of Spies instead.¶ If, after reading this, you decide you want to follow suit, then you're in luck. The unwieldy six disc DVD set I paid through the nose for a few years ago (utterly devoid of extras, too, he said bitterly) has recently been replaced with a sleek, streamlined three disc edition which nonetheless still contains nearly 640 minutes of undiluted Reilly — and Troy Kennedy Martin's genius. ¶ Reilly Ace of Spies was the most ambitious production ever by Euston Films, perhaps the most presitigious producer of British television drama, famed also for The Sweeney, The Minder and the fact that they failed to hire me as a script editor. ¶ Actually, by the time I went for my job interview at Euston the firm was well in decline. The presiding geniuses' current big idea was to replace Minder (a humorous crime series about a likeable, plucky working class underdog) with Capital City (a glossy soap drama about unsympathetic rich young city bankers). I never got my chance to tell them what I thought of that particular strategy, unfortunately.¶ The big script brains of Euston, in the shape of Verity Lambert and Linda Agran were long gone by this time. (I later had a job interview with Linda Agran. She didn't like my rucksack.) But in the days of Reilly, Lambert and Agran were very much in evidence and it's unlikely that without women of their taste and perception at the helm that a writer of Troy Kennedy Martin's distinction and talent — and eccentricity — would have been allowed loose on such wonderful material, and with such profound and memorable effect. ¶ In short, Sydney Reilly was a sort of a precursor of James Bond, operating from the early part of the 20th century until the early days of the Soviet regime. He was a real person, although the story of his adventures had probably been considerably sensationalised before Troy Kennedy Martin got hold of it and made it more sensational still. ¶ Some commentators are sniffy about this departure from the facts. Personally I think it's great. Nobody tells a more enjoyable story than Troy Kennedy Martin and I wouldn't want to see a writer of his ability strait jacketed by mere facts. ¶ In the 12 episodes of the serial we follow the adventure of Reilly (Sam Neill is satanically sauve in the title role) from manoeuvrings over oil supplies, an alliance with arms dealer Basil Zaharov (Leo McKern), the Russo Japanese war and spying in Germany through to the Russian revolution, an attempt to bump off Lenin (Kenneth Cranham), tommy gun battles in New York and Reilly's execution in a snow covered forest outside Moscow. ¶ The last mentioned incident was particularly harrowing and as I watched this final episode (Shutdown) last night, I kept hoping against hope that Reilly would somehow escape the Cheka (the Russian secret police). ¶ This is a fascinating period in history and Troy Kennedy Martin's account of it left me wanting to learn more. Some of the details are just amazing. For example, Reilly's nemesis is the head of the Cheka, Felix Dzerzhinsky (pronounced Dijinksy) played by Tom Bell. ¶ This is a man so fiendishly clever that he protects the Bolsheviks by creating the Trust, a supposedly anti-Bolshevik organisation which he can use to monitor and manipulate his enemies. This scam is so successful that the enemies of Communism are soon contributing millions of dollars, supposedly to overthrow the Bolsheviks but actually providing all the money needed by the Reds to fund their counterintelligence! Incredible stuff, and Troy Kennedy Martin does full justice to it. ¶ The cast of the show are also top drawer, including all the aforementioned luminaries plus Alfred Molina as a Social Revolutionary assassin; David Burke as Stalin, whom Troy Kennedy Martin brilliantly introduces us to eating sardines out of a tin at his desk, and who in his murderous Georgian paranoia will dismantle the Trust, leading to the downfall of Dzerzhinsky and the death of Reilly; Laura Davenport as Pepita, the last of Reilly's many wives; and Clive Merrison, with whom I worked briefly on Doctor Who as Savinkov, Reilly's friend and the head of the anti Bolshevik movement. ¶ Approaching 12 episodes of story and over ten hours of viewing may seem a bit daunting and you might be tempted to just dip into a few episodes intitially (this was certainly my approach). So, let me reccomend a couple of episodes in particular. ¶ Visiting Firemen is a gem, with Reilly stealing plans from a German weapons plant. It features memorable black humour, a nail biting confrontation atop a high crane, breathtaking ruthlessness on the part of Reilly, and the gorgeous Joanne Whalley, who would later make such an impression in Dennis Potter's The Singing Detective (illustrated here because, criminally, I couldn't find any images of her in the Reilly episode). ¶ The other standout episode is After Moscow, which features Lindsay Duncan (later in Simon Moore's Traffik) as the Plugger, a guntoting meretrix who eats cornflakes with champagne and shares Reilly's dangerous life in London after fleeing from the USSR with a death sentence on his head. ¶ The same story features Joanne Pearce as Carryl Houselander, the psychic whose love for Reilly will result in her exhibiting stigmata during his brutal beatings at the hands of the Cheka in the final episode. Unforgettable viewing.

Slaughterhouse Five by Kurt Vonnegut

2009-09-26T00:17:00.000-07:00

Thanks to its naked greed and breathtaking business acumen, my local yoga centre decided to respond to the credit crunch last year by doubling its prices. This proved to be the absolute definition of a blessing in disguise when, monumentally ticked off with these jokers, I quit the centre for good and began practising yoga at home — every day. ¶ The net results of this new regime was not only that I made more progress in six months than I had in the previous six years (look Ma, I'm doing the full wheel!) but I also I found myself listening to a solid, and enlightening, seven hours of internet radio a week, while practising said postures. ¶ The latest fruits of this routine have included an outstanding dramatisation of Kurt Vonnegut's Slaughterhouse Five on BBC Radio 3. I only just caught up with it and it will only remain available for another two days (click here) but if you miss it, don't despair. A work of this quality is bound to be repeated and I will keep you posted. ¶ Admirably adapted by Dave Sheasby, the novel works surprisingly well on radio. But what struck me most of all was how beautifully written, casually profound and bitterly funny the book is ("Anti-war novel? You might as well write an anti-glacier novel"). ¶ There's a full cast of Vonnegut's regular characters in attendance, including Eliot Rosewater from God Bless You Mr Rosewater, which I think was the first Vonnegut novel I read; Howard J Campbell Jr from Mother Night, which I re-read recently, and which was another compact masterpiece (also an excellent film starring Nick Nolte); and of course the pervading presence of hack science fiction writer and fellow peddler of casual profundity, Kilgore Trout (a name which is an obvious play on Theodore Sturgeon, though unlike Trout, Sturgeon writes very well). ¶ Listening to the radio play also brought back startlingly vivid memories of seeing the movie with my mum. At the cinema in Grant Park Plaza, I believe. Mum enjoyed the movie, but she was a little upset by the cruelly pointless death of Billy Pilgrim's sweet, loving wife, Valencia. So it goes.

Troy Kennedy Martin 1932-2009

2009-09-17T11:02:00.000-07:00

In my, admittedly idiosyncratic, view the three greatest British screenwriters to work significantly in television (Dennis Potter is a near miss) are Nigel Kneale, Simon Moore and Troy Kennedy Martin. This week I was saddened to hear that Kennedy Martin had died. The only up-side of his loss is that we might get a BBC4 retrospective devoted to his work. ¶ I first became aware of Kennedy Martin's writing, although I was already an admirer without knowing it, through Edge of Darkness. When I started working at the BBC as a script editor in television drama that influential six part serial had only recently been made. There were still posters on the wall and scripts lying around the offices in Shepherds Bush. ¶ I never met Troy in person (we'll use his first name to avoid confusion with Ian Kennedy Martin, his brother, creator of The Sweeney and another considerable British screenwriting talent) but after Edge of Darkness I watched everything I could find by him. I mentioned above, somewhat cryptically, that I'd been an admirer of his without knowing it. That's because I'd seen and appreciated Kelly's Heroes, the Clint Eastwood feature which Troy had written. ¶ His other famous movie, from much the same period, is the cult favourite The Italian Job. Both Kelly's Heroes and The Italian Job are marred, in my view, by undistinguished direction which encouraged some broad slapstick and hammy performances. But both films rise above their deficiencies and the essential brilliance of Troy's writing shines through. Add to these The Sweeney 2, a crackling, sardonic and salty big screen version of the police TV series his brother created, and you have the best of Troy's big screen work. ¶ His other feature credits consist of co-writing the Walter Hill mismatched buddy-cop movie Red Heat (a proficient and engaging thriller fatally compromised, I think, by some questionable casting, while the great character actor Peter Boyle languishes in a minor role), adapting the South African suspense writer Gillian Slovo's novel Red Dust (an intelligent and mature but strangely under-powered script) and The Jerusalem File (an obscure thriller which I have never seen; roll on its DVD release). ¶ The highlights of his later television work are Edge of Darkness and Reilly Ace of Spies. I can't tell you about his early TV dramas, because with exception of one episode of Z-Cars (which he created) I haven't seen them. Fingers crossed that the BBC4 retrospective materialises soon. A big screen adaptation of Edge of Darkness is in the works, starring Mel Gibson, but Troy did not have a hand in the script and I suspect it will have as little resonance with his original as the recent Italian Job remake. If you want to catch the original, classic version of The Italian Job it's worth noting that the latest DVD has a new commentary featuring Troy Kennedy Martin himself. There are some interesting website postings about him here and here.

What I'm Reading on Buses (and Trains)

2009-09-12T08:59:00.000-07:00

Paperbacks used to be called pocket books. (Stick with me kid and you'll learn something.) This was for the very good and simple reason that they were of a size to fit comfortably into the pocket of a jacket. ¶ You could carry the book around with you and read it whenever you wanted, cancelling out those mind numbing waits for (or on) public transport. Such books had been specifically designed with this in mind. ¶ So, the lucky reader had the choice between these frangible pocket books, or paperbacks if you will, and hardcover books. The latter were more permanent and durable than our easily destroyed little paperback friends, but also a lot bigger and heavier, and wouldn't fit into the pocket of even Andre the Giant's jacket. But that was cool, because you always had the paperback option. Then some marketing genius got the idea that there was money to be made in making paperbacks bigger and classier (and more expensive, natch) and altogether more like hardcover books. ¶ These mutant aberrations were called trade paperbacks. This scam, I regret to report, worked only too well and today most paperbacks are these bloated hybrids. The point I'm getting at — they won't fit in my fershlugginer pocket any more! So when I head out on public transport I always go through my vintage paperback library (and baby, it's quite a library, believe me) and select a proper pocket book. Sometimes it might even be a Pocket Book. ¶ Recently, as regular readers of this blog (both of you) will know, my pocket-stashed reading has been William Golding's Lord of the Flies. I'm very familiar with this book, having read it more than once over the years and seen the film what seems like dozens of times when I was a kid. That film, written and directed by Peter Brooks, made quite an impression. ¶ But it is a perhaps feeble shadow of what might have been if Nigel Kneale's adaptation had got made. The creator of Quatermass, Kneale was a stone cold genius, a formidable screenwriter and a dangerous mind. In his version of the film there would have been both girls and boys stranded on the island, a more valid microcosm of society. It's a tragedy that film never got made. Anyway — I thought I was familiar with the story. But I was in for quite a surprise. ¶ My first impression of the book was that Golding is a very good, vivid writer. He has a strong visual sense and a good turn of phrase. His tropical island is also very convincingly evoked. So much so that, knowing he'd served in the navy during World War Two, I assumed he had been posted to the Pacific and encountered such places at first hand. ¶ In fact, a bit of painless research (very painless, since Peter Carey's biography of Golding was serendipitously serialised on the radio recently) revealed that the author had in fact spent his war service in cold Atlantic waters. Which makes his achievement all the more laudable. So far so good. ¶ My problems with Lord of the Flies, and they are substantial, begin with the Beast. Allow me to back track. As I opened my battered Penguin Modern Classics copy (nice cover by Andre Francois) and began reading it, sitting on a train bound for Waterloo, I had a clear idea of how the story went — or at least, I thought I did. ¶ It begins with an admirably terse and eliptical reference to a nuclear war that has swept the globe. A passenger jet full of schoolboys, refugees, has crash-landed on an isolated tropical island. Soon they begin to descend into savagery, ending up finally pursuing one of their own number in a hunt to the death. Well, in all of those particulars I was correct. ¶ But I'd completely forgotten about the whole stupid "Beast" subplot. Which goes like this. Some of the smallest kids ("littluns") have bad dreams at night, and believe a menacing beast stalks the island. ¶ The older kids poo-poo this. But then one night, unseen by any of them, a dogfight takes place in the sky over the island. Two jet fighters duelling to the death. (This is all quite nicely and economically described. Golding, I'm sure he'd be pleased to hear, can write.) Then one of the pilots comes floating down from the sky on a parachute. The trouble is, he's dead. ¶ He lands on the highest hill top of the island, where the boys try (and often fail) to keep a signal fire going. Some of the kids spot the strange, billowing, vaguely supernatural shape of the parachute, which has snagged on an outcrop. In the darkness they think they've seen a monster, and flee. Powerful and convincing? Nope. Sorry William. It's bunk. ¶ And it gets worse with a couple of other encounters between Gullible Kids and Parachute Corpse. Soon word on the island is that the Beast really exists. All this nonsense about the Beast is contrived and thoroughly unconvincing and seriously damages the book. ¶ It's like all that crap about Vietnam and Daffy Duck in Alex Garland's The Beach (I notice it was the first thing that screenwriter John Hodge filleted out when he adapted the book for the screen). I wish some editor had had the brains to say to Garland, "This is a great book, just lose all that tripe about Vietnam and Daffy Duck. Oh, and do try and think of an ending. There's a good chap, Alex." Because that's the way editors talk. ¶ And I wish even more emphatically that someone had said to Golding to lose all the Beast bollocks. The worst part is, he kind of uses it as a device to explain, or at least hasten, the degeneration and growing violence of the kids. I'm all for a powerful account of the descent of civilised children into murderous savagery. Bill, you're playing my song! This is the most powerful and enduring aspect of the book. But you don't need the boring bloody Beast to justify it. This subplot weakens and diminishes the whole book (it sold a mere ten million copies. Imagine how many copies it would have sold if he got it right!). Good book, though. ¶ Anyway, having just finished the book and reflecting on this, I sat down for coffee (hot chocolate, actually) with Phil O'Shea, a writer buddy of mine from Dark Knight days and all round nice chap. Phil knows that I'm a vinyl nut and always ordering LPs (mostly jazz) from all over the world. These LPs arrive in specially designed LP boxes and, because I have what some would call an unwholesome penchant for music, there are a lot of these lying around the place at any given time. ¶ And any given time is usually when Phil O'Shea turns up, with a bag of pastries to bribe me, and takes away my precious boxes. He uses them to ship the records (mostly classic rock) he sells all over the world. This is a sideline of Phil's and at the moment there is probably more money in it than there is in writing for television. End of digression. ¶ As I sat there with Phil, sipping the superb hot chocolate I'd made for us, kvetching about writing, he happened to mention this new biography of Golding. And he told me that the original draft of Lord of the Flies had apparently been full of quasi-supernatural doings and accoutrements. Oh, and that beautifully terse and elliptical reference to the nuclear apocalypse? Apparently in the original there was reams of stuff about this war and its aftermath. But, thanks to the cleverness and taste of Charles Monteith, a tyro editor at Faber, most of this stuff was cut. How fascinating. If only Monteith and Golding had gone that extra mile, and got rid of the Beast, too. Still, it provides a nice excuse for that Andre Francois cover. If you look carefully you can see the face of the Beast looming in the background over the boys, cleverly composed of the signal-fire smoke which is such an important element in the story.

Ikea Dave laptop table: a heartwarming success story (not words I often associate with Ikea)

2009-08-12T11:40:00.001-07:00

I am a profesional writer so I spend a good portion of my life hunched over a laptop, madly typing away. I's important to be comfortable as possible while I'm doing this. I don't have to sit at a desk — that's one of the nice things about working at home; instead I sit on a sofa with the laptop, yep, in my lap. But you can't actually use a laptop like that. There is the issue of painful overheating, plus lambent paranoia about what the buzzing overheated electronics are doing to a fella's reproductive capability. ¶ So you need to set the laptop on something. You could always use a cushion or a pillow — yes, you could always do that if you wanted your computer to overheat and seize up in a terminal and very expensive disc crash. Or alternatively just burst into flame. ¶ The solution I arrived at was to use a pillow but to put a large book on top of the pillow (I mean a very large, but very thin book, a solid hardcover. For some reason I used to be fond of using A Pictorial History of Sex in the Movies by Pascall and Jeavons, Hamlyn 1975) and place the laptop on top of that. This provision of a hard flat surface for the computer allows its vents to 'breathe.' This is an adequte, but not an ideal solution. For a start, when you invite half a dozen actors around for a reading of your latest play, and they spot the book, they might laugh scornfully at your explanations to account for its presence on your sofa. Also the angle for your wrists when you're typing on this set up is far from perfect. ¶ I used to dream of commissioning a precision engineering firm to install one of those tables on a hydraulic arm which can be swung in and out, like they have to hold the instruments adjacent to the chair at a dentist's. Such a device fastened to the wall beside the sofa would, I imagined, hold my computer and be adjustable so I could set it at just the right height and position for typing. Colour me thunderstruck when I discovered that Ikea, of all people, had come up with a budget version of just such a mechanism. ¶ Yes, I have gone and purchased an Ikea Dave laptop table. And I like it. I like it a lot. Lest this become an encomium, though, let me list what I don't like about it. The only frustrating real design flaw so far is the painfully knurled adjustment knob which digs into my shin. I sit cross legged while I'm typing (did I mention on a sofa? While listening to jazz. Specifically Count Basie at the moment, as it happens) and presumably the ergonomic tests didn't allow for such an eccentric (indeed potentially subversive) posture. ¶ Also, it shakes while I type. Causing the screen to dance annoyingly. This is only a pain when I'm concentrating on something small on the screen. About the size of this font as I type this entry, as it happens. ¶ And then there is the slight problem (compounded by the shaking) that the laptop on which I'm typing starts to slide gradually off the table. You can't quite see from the picture at the top of this entry, but the table tilts to a convenient angle for typing. This angle combined with the almost but not quite brilliantly designed matte high-friction non-slip surface of Dave send my MacBook on occasional excursions over the precipice.

2009-08-10T13:08:00.001-07:00

I've just finished a new play called The Lift. I've given it to friends to read and luckily my friends include some terrific writers and also Conrad Blakemore, a terrific director. So the feedback is always very high quality, though I must say sometimes a trifle tardy in arriving, gentlemen. And often very useful. ¶ The Lift looks now like it's in good shape. So of course I'm now casting about for what I'll write next. First up is my novel Operation Herod, a spy thriller. ¶ This marks the debut of Rupert Hood, my 007 for the twenty first century. I'd put a link to Ian Fleming here but I'm sure nobody needs that. They do? Okay. Now, the two most important things about a James Bond story are the villain and the big action set piece at the end. So I had these criteria in mind, along with the character of Rupert, when I set about writing Operation Herod. I completed the novel and since it was powerful and moving and funny as an escapist paperback thriller should be, I sent it out into the world. Then of course I came up with a way of improving it. ¶ A simple but powerful improvement. I did this before, on The Wise. The Wise was my first novel and it was about this brilliant shrink who falls in love with one of her patients who thinks he has strange powers. The complication is that he does. Boom boom. I finished the book and sat back in my favourite armchair listening to Miles Davis. Then a nagging thought assailed me. I sat aside my glass of Appleton Estate twenty one year old rum, a spirit as fine as any great brandy. I pondered the idea... What if I just added a little vignette, a little teaser chapter at the beginning? To introduce the shrink. To warm her up as a character, so to speak, for the reader. To get the reader to engage with her. ¶ So I wrote this nifty prologue in which she lost a patient. "If you're a psychiatrist and you're working with schizophrenics, one of the problems is that you're going to have a certain number of suicides. It just happens," said the shrink from north London I spoke to. Rather alarmingly, he'd had two that week. ¶ So anyway I gave this situation to my character in The Wise, in a taut, grim little vignette. Then, mind at rest I resuming listening to jazz in my armchair. My then editor at Virgin books, Rebecca Levene was so impressed that she almost bought me lunch. In fact she did buy me lunch, on a number of occasions, bless her. "It has transformed the entire beginning of the book," she didn't say. "It makes you feel completely different about the the character," she didn't add. But she did say words to that effect. As well she might.¶ End of flashback. So now I propose to apply the same procedure to Operation Herod. Back to work.I sigh as I rise from my armchair and change the music. Steely Dan I think, this time. Listening to this and other nutritious sounds I wrote a brief (five page) teaser prologue. My thinking behind this is that the book as it stands takes a while to get to the action and suspense, and a little vignette at the beginning will serve to instantly give a mission statement, so to speak. The prologue in place I also decide to set about making a few other deft revisions, mostly small cuts, to further turbo-charge the book. ¶ Having done my novel writing for the day (there goes the morning) I turn to my next play. A big new project. Yes, another stage play. I love writing these. The scale is so different from a film or novel. There is an intensity and immediacy which is unique. And you can riff on dialogue. ¶ Anyway, I was casting around for a new subject for a stage play and this light bulb went off over my head. ¶ A few years ago I wrote a film script which attracted a lot of attention and was even optioned. The rights have now reverted to me and it's just lying around. But last week I suddenly realised it would make a great stage play. In fact, it's more naturally a stage play than a film.
¶ This was a real moment of revelation. As I said, I was convinced I'd hit upon a great idea. And what was even better, it gave me something to do while I was sitting on my sofa listening to Raulzinho's International Hot. But then began the ticklish business of changing from one medium to another. Physically this was quite easy to do. I discovered that if I just cut and pasted the film script into a play script, the software I use (Final Draft) automatically reformatted it so that it now looked like a stage play. Great. The wonders of the computer. If I was doing this in the days of a typewriter I'd need a bottle of laudanum and revolver. ¶ Next I went through and cut out any material that obviously was wrong for a stage play, was obviously only for the big screen and that I was never in a million years going to use in a play. ¶ Then I realised much of this stuff was actually perfect for a play and and had to restore it. Ah the creative process has begun! ¶ My next order of business was to bring the characters down to a reasonable number. In a modern stage play the absolute maximum is about eight. My first play, End of the Night, had eight actors and I'll never do that again. They were all great actors, and engaging characters, but the fact that there was so many of them indicated a tyro's brio in the writing, and also frankly some poor planning. Still, as I say, it was my first play. ¶ My second play, Under the Eagle (which Conrad Blakemore directed; great job there Conrad!) had six characters. So that was moving in the right direction. ¶ Then Authenticity, my stage thriller (not yet staged) has four. Now The Lift had two. So logically, the next one should have none. Could be difficult. Wait a minute. Didn't Beckett pull it off? ¶ In fact, with a little work pruning, I soon had it down to five or six characters plucked from the movie version who could effectively express the story (essentially the same story) on stage. At this point I stalled. Because most of the characters (not the central character, luckily) were subtly wrong for the stage play. And it was very difficult to make the necessary alterations without losing them altogether. When you tamper with characters there's a danger they'll vanish in a puff of smoke, so to speak. ¶ Yet the five or so main characters in the play needed to be substantially the same as the main characters in the film. They were good characters. They required small yet crucial changes to be right in a stage play. This I was finding, ahem, challenging. ¶ It's a bit like making mayonnaise. If you get it right, it thickens nicely into something delicious. If you get it wrong it separates into a runny mess. (You sigh and gaze ruefully at the half litre of fine olive oil you've just wasted.) ¶ But today was a turning point. Having got the prologue for the novel done I sat down and started on the first scene of the new play. This would introduce the basic situation and four or five of the main characters. I really got into it and it went well. It runs about 15 pages, which means a substantial portion of Act 1 completed. For anyone who is appalled by the swiftness of this I would modestly cite the example of Alan Ayckbourne and Noel Coward who would happily write play in a weekend. And some of their stuff turned out okay he said in a tone of ironic understatement.¶ Of course I'm not that quick but the beauty of a play remains that a big scene can come together quickly. ¶ This is what is happening now and the best thing about what I've written is that it really is a play, the characters are living in a play and it's not a film any more. ¶ Also, it's funny. Which in a comedy always helps. Yep, it now looks like this new play is viable. I'll keep at it.

2009-08-09T04:29:00.000-07:00

One blog is not enough. I find it telling that the first blog I created was about the music in my life and only the second one was about writing (and reading). But then writing and reading come under the heading of work as well as pleasure, whereas music is for me pure pleasure. ¶ I guess it would be different if I was a gigging musician. Instead I'm a gigging writer and that's what I'll be writing about here. And also what I'm reading, which at the moment is William Golding's Lord of the Flies. A nice old Penguin Modern Classic paperback edition. It lives in the pocket of my jacket and gets read on trains. ¶ Recently I was reading with trepidation the scene where the increasingly feral schoolboys, armed with spears, attack a sow suckling its piglets. Having speared the screaming piglets, the boys are chasing the sow through the jungle of their tropical island. As a well known animal lover, I was frankly dreading this. ¶ The boys finally corner the sow in a forest clearing. As they prepare to close in for the kill, Golding describes the uncomprehending desperation of the sow. And he says the clearing is full of "sweat and noise and blood and terror". At which point I began to chuckle, utterly jolted out of my discomfort. Golding, you chump! Pigs don't sweat. They don't have sweat glands. ¶ What a relief, to have what promised to be a gruesome prose experience converted so smoothly to a mirthful moment of chuckling superiority over the author. I guess you can say the spell was broken. A big relief for a pig lover like me. Now where is that Milano salami sandwich...