Monday, 7 December 2009

I want to read more Rosemary Timperley





It's just not fair. There's so many dreadful, unspeakable novels piled mile-high in bookshops these days, and others have vanished completely. And libraries have shovelled otherwise unavailable hardbacks into skips to make way for games consoles and other stuff with flashing lights.

Look at these book covers. I'm desperate to read more Rosemary Timperley. All I've read are those small, macabre stories she placed in The Fontana Books of Horror and Ghost Stories. She's anthologised a bit... but there is no dedicated volume of her short fiction - and her novels are vanished. I've just found a website with a full, enticing bibliography and a smattering of details. Here's a fine quote about the lady in question, which makes me want to read her even more:

"Timperley remarked in 1961 that she lived alone in an old-fashioned flat and existed on black coffee, pink gin and cigarettes - like so many of the characters in her novels! Timperley went on to say that her writing was down to a "mysterious compulsion" and that her work carried no particular "message". Timperley remained a writer for the rest of her life and to my knowledge she never remarried after the death of her husband in 1968. In later years Timperley is quoted as saying: "Now that I'm old I lead rather a recluse-like life. Although I've written a lot, I've never had a best-seller or 'hit the headlines', which is probably a good thing, as I don't think I could have stood up to any sort of notoriety--what the shrinks call 'inadequate personality'. I live very much in my own mind and in the fictional world of my rather unsuccessful little novels. I regard myself as lucky in being able to scrape a living out of doing something I enjoy doing, when so many people are tied to jobs they don't like.""

Sounds like a completely marvellous heroine, fuelled by ciggies and pink gin, and tapping out her annual Gothic Romances. Who can we get to bring her back to life..?

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1 Comments:

Blogger Camino Real said...

I'd heard of Timperley from the Fontana books too but I didn't know she'd published sixty-three novels. I remember having to shelve quite a lot of them when I worked in a public library. Robert Hale, her publisher, sold a lot of hardback fiction to libraries which I think was their main marketplace. Certainly many of the secondhand copies on sale at Amazon are discarded library copies.

11 December 2009 10:00  

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