Over indulges himself??!

Back in time for Hallowe'en...!

here's a few nice reviews of the Brenda books. Here's Next Read: http://nextread.co.uk/2009/10/28/review-something-borrowed-by-paul-magrs-headline-review/#disqus_thread

But what's that? I do what? Over-indulge myself..?

And another nice one from Book Chick City: http://www.bookchickcity.com/

Happy Hallowe'en everyone! Here at home we've had episode one of 'The Daemons' already tonight. We're toying with watching Peter Cushing in 'The Uncanny' (Fester's choice, since it's about cats) and I've just been informed by J. that we get the right channel for Most Haunted Live...! Bliss!

The pics above: I reckon that's Effie in her racier days, attending one of Sheila Manchu's strange parties at the Hotel Miramar. And in the other one she's visiting the Abbey with a certain gentleman friend...

Here's another piece of Brenda crit - from 'A Pile of Leaves' (link in the sidebar):

"Shelley’s novel (Frankenstein) has a lot of things twisted up in it. Fear of the Other, the child, the father, the scientist, God’s retribution on the irreligious, and even of the self. It’s that particular insecurity Magrs draws on for the black comedy, the melancholy, even real emotional drama, of his fabulous character Brenda, bed and breakfast proprietress and (long since thrown-over) bride to the Monster. As well as recalling the tone of Alan Bennett’s Talking Heads, there’s something private about Brenda’s voice. It comes as a direct response to Herr Doktor’s manic confession, and Brenda’s drive to create comfort, to make a corner of the unheimlich town thoroughly homely, is as touching as it is funny.

"It also makes sense, a new sense, of the original story. Whilst obviously prefiguring the Zombie narrative, in a way, it’s a reverse-possession story – the bodies of unfortunates and criminals are imbued with innocent, semi-feral, childlike minds. Their inheritance is a numb, random collocation of limbs, and a numb, random morality which produces them but can’t protect them, won’t even help them to create identity beyond that of test subject. The fact that Brenda is given not just a long and eventful life, but also a choice, a choice of life, and happiness, makes Never The Bride a generous and clever extension of the narrative, and if it could have been taught alongside Frankenstein itself, it would have been a good addition to the course."

More Found Pictures

A handful of further found pictures... and a reminder that tonight I'm reading at Lancaster Litfest at the Storey Auditorium at 9.30pm. There's a best-costume competition, Christmas trees - and a preview of 'Hell's Belles' from yours truly.

What do you think of this set of photos? George looks like he's embarked on a life as a writer and existentialist, having left Bury or Preston way behind him. He's got a duffel coat and a packet of Gitanes and a whole headful of ideas. He's had this photo taken and copies made so he can send it back to the family at home. What would they think of him? Swanking along, down by the Seine? That's his family, out for a Sunday stroll in town. His parents and his wife's parents and his wife herself. They're having a summit meeting. They've come together - even though they've never really got on - and they're going to discuss the problem of George. George who's absconded and is abroad, practising his ennui.

Found pictures

When I was quite little and starting to show an interest in history and stories my Big Nanna fetched out all of her newspapers from the war years up till the Queen's Coronation. I pored over them. The pictures and the text, trying to make sense of it all. I loved the adverts and the funny little mentions of things in the corners of pages. Later that same day, we visited the other grandparents and my Little Nanna couldn't believe that my Big Nanna was letting me dwell over this old fashioned, morbid stuff. What did the bairn want with thirty year old newspapers? She let me cut out a few photos I liked (crowds at the King's funeral, which I pasted into my Silver Jubilee scrapbook), and then binned the rest of the papers.

I was always someone who loved looking at other people's old photos. Going through old albums, trying to piece the stories together. Our own family albums seem a bit threadbare in places, what with one thing and another. Some of the pictures I've inherited from my Big Nanna's side are filled with unfamiliar people. In photos from only forty years ago, the faces are starting to become unnameable, unknown. The stories and connections haven't lasted as long as the visual record.

I'm very drawn to other people's snaps. In various junk shops and tabletop sales I've bought bags and boxes of other people's ancient photos. I can't bare the thought of them becoming landfill some day. These unique pictures. Look at these three examples, all of which came from a miniature suitcase I bought in an antique store in the Yorkshire Dales last January. The thing was stuffed with about a hundred years' worth of photos, and a few letters and post cards. It was a kind of novel in kit form.

I love the faces in photos like this. The looks that people give each other when they should all be facing front and smiling for posterity. Look at that goofily grinning lad in his long socks and suit and tie, standing beside the tall girl in the wedding photograph. And the groom who, at first glance, seems to have hold of the page boy's ear. I'm intrigued by the lady at the very back, obviously standing on a scullery chair and wearing the fanciest hat out of everyone in the family. Her face is mostly in shadow. You can see she thinks she's a cut above the rest.

I wonder if everyone in the suitcase belongs more or less to the same family? If it's a multi-generational saga I paid seven pounds for, and rescued from the brink? The case was shoved amongst heaps of old comics and enyclopedias. It had been opened and ransacked and cast aside.

That living room looks like it's the 1960s now. Anaglypta walls and pictures framed in white plastic. The staring eyes of the man in the armchair are a bit worrying. Everyone's staring or smiling in different directions. It looks like an older sister has come to visit. Who's is the teddy? It looks a bit worn. Maybe she's brought it for the kid. But that woman on the arm of the chair cradles it oddly like a baby. The bear looks bemused.

That couple on the Prom look a bit mithered to me. They should be enjoying themselves, but it looks like they've had words. Are they brother and sister? Or a couple who've grown to look just like one another, with same dark eyes and concerned grimace? Old-fashioned-looking people, my Big Nanna would have called them. Smart-looking and togged up for a day in the sea air.

Anyone else collect stuff like this? And pore over the minutiae? Is it just me? Is it morbid and strange like my Little Nanna said?

"Howards End is on the Landing" is on the Landing

Just recently I've given up on reading a couple of things that were dragging along. I don't feel guilty about that anymore. One of them was 500 pages and I was about 50 from the finish and I thought - well, I know how this is going to end. Another I was halfway through and it was so bleak and boringly, self-consciously horrific - though nicely-written - I just put it on the pile by the front door for going back to the library.

And got on with other stuff instead. Rereading 'The Secret Garden' for my workshop and seminar this week on the MA course. This time just about everyone loved discovering or rediscovering the book - after mixed results with the Eve Garnett and the Edith Nesbit. We talked about life-affirming books and the importance of novels in which there are no out-and-out villains. Novels which resist the temptation to demonise and see things very simply.

So, that was a pleasure to reread. I've just picked up Susan Hill's memoir of a year spent rereading, "Howards End is on the Landing" (which actually is on our top landing table - see illus.) I love reading about people's reading habits, and that's one of the reasons I enjoy bookish blogs. This book's like one extended one, in many ways - with Susan Hill roving through the stacks of books in her house. I love the way the shelves and cases themselves get mapped out for us. I kind of want a Tolkienesque map in the endpapers, showing just where that row of Observer books lies, or those Penguin reprints...

Something very engaging about the idea of not buying new books and going all greenish with the ones you've already got, clogging up the house. As I've said before, our house is rammed full. They're tottering everywhere and all out of order. And the cellar's chocka, too.

At the station yesterday - held up going home - I was making up rules for days spent book-shopping. Rules which might include making sure you take with you a couple of carrierbags of books you've finished with, to pop into a charity shop as your first port of call. Only then are you allowed to buy anything new. That might work. I mean, look at that to-read pile in the corner of my tiny study. (The pic with the hedgehog lamp).

When I was in Ilkley for the festival, I met up with Stuart after my workshop and before my reading, and he'd driven all the way down from Edinburgh. We were starving but the first thing we did was find ourselves an amazing remainder bookshop, where everything was 3 for 5 pounds. (One day I'll write a piece about the joys of remainder bookshops. I don't care what anyone says - I love them.) He was under express orders from his wife not to go home with more new books. But before we knew it we were both sitting with a pile of purchases in a tea rooms ordering bacon barms and mugs of tea. Completely helpless and hopeless.

Maybe Susan Hill will help me concentrate my various collections down. Winnow out some of the chaff. Maybe. While she picks through and finds the all-time favourites she's returned to repeatedly, she also spends some time writing about the pleasures of owning books you haven't read yet. The spanking new novels that sit there enticingly - patient for your attention. (Look at Murakami's "Wind-Up Bird Chronicle" - a full eight years it sat waiting for me. Its paperback went through two new covers and a change of publisher before I took it down and took it on holiday.) So I'm also being talked into not parting with anything at all. One day that thing that's sat there will find its moment in your life... perhaps.

J's always on at me to get rid of some. Then I filled three deep cardboard boxes and put them in the downstairs hall. Waiting for him to drive them to a charity shop... but then I find him digging through the boxes, fetching things back out... 'Hey, there's a signed Terry Pratchett in here!' etc.

Anyway... so I'm enjoying Susan Hill's book, and the new sequel to Winnie the Pooh by David Benedictus which came in the same Amazon haul... and I'm completely loving rereading "The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society". Soonest reread of all time, this one. I read it in the summer - and now it's Book Club choice for next month. It's my suggestion and I'm relishing the chance to revisit the world of those characters. This time, as well as Helene Hanff, it's reminding me of "Diary of a Provincial Lady", "Mrs Minniver" and Stella Gibbons in "Cold Comfort Farm", but that's okay - I like those echoes. The tone's not too arch, it's not too deliberately heart-warming, it's not too precious or worthy. It lets us make up our minds and draw out the implications from the overlapping letters. It's just a nicely put together novel and I like it. A keeper.

But then, most of them are.

The Panda Book of Horror - writer line-up announced!

Panda Book of Horror Line Up

Ding Ding! All aboard! Room for a little 'un at the back!

Iris Wildthyme, her small friend Panda and their transtemporal double decker Routemaster bus are just about ready to leave the terminus and set out on their most terrifying adventures yet!

Yes, The Panda Book of Horror will soon be on its way to the printers, with a publication date in mid November 2009!

Along for the ride this time are...



Paul Magrs
Mark Clapham
Mark Michalowski
Simon Guerrier
Ian Potter
Dale Smith
Phil Craggs
Eddie Robson
Nicholas Nada
Blair Bidmead
Matt Kimpton
Mark Morris
Jac Rayner & Orna Petit

Many of these names will be known to Doctor Who book fans from the Virgin, BBC, Telos and Big Finish ranges, but new to Who-related fiction are Nix Nada and Blair Bidmead, both of whom submitted stories via the Obverse website, and Phil Craggs, editor of blankpages magazine. As for Orna Petit, who can say? All we know is Jac insisted and who are we to argue...

With cover art by Paul Magrs and a pretty damn nifty pastiche of the original Pan Books of Horror design by Cody Schell, we think you'll enjoy The Panda Book of Horror...though perhaps enjoy is the wrong word...

Available for pre-order soon from Obverse Books - why not buy a copy of the Celestial Omnibus while you're waiting

PS. Nice quote from Mark Clapham's announcement of same, on his blog yesterday: "With Iris Wildthyme and the Celestial Omnibus, Obverse put out a highly professional and entertaining first book, one which allowed authors familiar from, ahem, other time-and-space travel related franchises to cut loose creatively, presenting a diverse selection of stories, each with a distinct authorial voice, brought together by Iris Wildthyme's genre-defying escapades."

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Vintage Item No.8: Hunky Dory by Bowie

In a house full of music I’d never found a favourite artist of my own. My Mam played vinyl records in my earliest memories. Dylan, Rod Stewart. Marvin Gaye and Tammi Terrell’s album, ‘Easy’, all of which I still adore. Later in the Seventies my Mam and stepdad had a music centre in smoked glass, all black and sleek and we had records by Ian Dury, the Clash, Blondie.

But I was a kid who loved comics and books and cartoons. The only records I really had were Disney albums (‘Bobbing Along…’) and that Geoff Love record of disco-ed up space themes.

I had friends who were obsessed with punk, New Wave bands, Goth. Michael learned to play guitar. His sister was in a band influenced by Genesis. They loved dark, gloomy music. At home we loved the charts and had the Top Twenty blasting out of the radio on Sunday nights. We went on road trips to the Lake District with Abba’s ‘The Visitors’ or ELO’s ‘Out of the Blue’.

But I never had a musical hero of my own.

Until I was fifteen and Bowie played Live Aid. In amongst all the sweaty guitarists in their vest tops and sunglasses, here came David. He swished onto stage in a fifties’ style suit with pointy shoulders. A lilac suit. He had on powder blue eye shadow and fuschia lipstick. His hair was teased into a golden quiff.

Of course I’d been aware of him before. Michael’s sister Angela lent my parents ‘ChangesOneBowie’ on vinyl. My Mam had said how unusual she was, as a teenager, liking not just contemporary stuff, but old classics like Bowie, famous from when she’d been little. I was aware of others’ infatuation with him – but how he’d recently gone commercial with his EMI tour and his Let’s Dance stuff and his top ten hits. He’d spoiled himself. He’d been so much better as Ziggy Stardust.

There was a glamour and danger about him. This spikey, queer, alien being.

A New Town like Aycliffe is the perfect place to grow up dreaming about a character like Bowie. It’s sort of sterile and culture-less. You have to make your own distractions. Make up your own fantasy life. There was one book about him in the tiny town library. The market in our town precinct was on Tuesday and the bloke there sold bootleg cassettes of Bowie gigs: three pounds a time for all of this jumbled, precious noise.

At home I dug through the million cassettes in racks in our house. I found a compilation my stepfather had made. A bit of Hunky Dory, bit of Aladdin Sane. My favourite bits of both albums, as it turns out. All the outrageous stuff with Mike Garson’s piano going full tilt: all the stuff that sounds like vaudeville cabaret stuff on Mars. To me at fifteen, listening properly on headphones, and absorbing myself in his lyics, in his world, Bowie was like some glorious, faggy, draggy macabre clown. Slightly reptilian, chilly, unearthly. His voice like no one else’s. Decadent, carefree, bonkers. He was building a whole world in these songs: a land of prairies and ruined cities. Touches of Ballard, Eliot, Waugh, and Ray Bradbury. He had a charming gleefulness and there was a nostalgia in his music… but it was nostalgia for a time we hadn’t even been to yet.

That tape of highlights from the early Seventies was the first time – in a house of music, of vinyl and tape – that I felt I had found an artist of my own. Within a year I’d heard everything of his up until that point. Within a year I was trying to convince myself that the soundtracks to ‘Labyrinth’ and ‘Absolute Beginners’ were worth saving up for, getting excited about. Within two years I was standing in the rain at Roker Park, watching him do the ‘Glass Spider’ live… waiting for a glimpse of something that would take me back to that moment of first listening to that bright orange home-recorded cassette.

Nothing ever does take you back to that moment, though, in things like this, it seems. Maybe ‘Hunky Dory’ does. I bought my first vinyl copy of that album the week after Live Aid, upstairs in Boots in Durham. That was when shops like Boots had record departments. They were like a cross between boutiques and laboratories, with everything kept in protective plastic sleeves.

Maybe there’s still magic and fairy dust trapped in the grooves of that record. I can still put on ‘Hunky Dory’ and be back in that land of prairies and cabaret bars in dark cities and laughing gnomes with Warhol wigs on a radioactive beach and manic clowns playing grand pianos in bombed out cinemas, or drag queens in New York with their bippety boppety hats.

'Hell's Belles' Competition winners!

We got loads of entries to the competition to win copies of my new Brenda and Effie novel, 'Hell's Belles', which is published by Headline on November the twelfth. Here are my five favourite entries, all of which completed the sentence:

'I want to travel to Whitby to meet Brenda and Effie because...'

The winners will receive their copy of my new book pretty soon!

*

Anthony Townsend:
I want to travel to Whitby to meet Brenda and Effie because...
... a holiday just isn't a holiday without them. I long to be alongside them, unmasking those pernicious purveyers of paranormal delinquency that frequent the Yorkshire coast. Or a cuppa and some cake would be nice.

*

Jon Bishop:
I want to travel to Whitby to meet Brenda and Effie because...
...I need a quiet break! Starting the day with coffee and cake at ‘The Walrus & Carpenter’, later lunch at ‘The Christmas Hotel’. Teatime supper at ‘Cod Almighty’ ending up in Brenda’s attic drinking spicy tea, and not a single adventure in sight!!

OR WOULD THERE BE??

*

Ali McNally:
I want to travel to Whitby to meet Brenda and Effie because...
...If we met we'd be friends. I'd lend Brenda my blackest eyeliner, Effie'd covet my massive boots. We'd grab fish&chips in salt-tangy air with snakebite&blacks to shake our hair under April Skies returning to the B&B where beautiful PVC-clad boys serenade us with Poe and dream of sunrise.

*

Ian Potter:
I want to travel to Whitby to meet Brenda and Effie because...
.... at the edge of hard land there's a town made of stories, where old fictions hide among those seduced by their glamour- the hopeful are robbed of their dreams in the harbour front arcade with no need now for hands of glory, Prussian Blue rinsed old dears, fat on john dory, tut at the young skinny monsters with their Jet black eyes, History and Legend battle politely here, Yorkshire Grit and Kensington Gorey.

*

Jonathan Dennis:
I want to travel to Whitby to meet Brenda and Effie because...
...it shall have a sky of lightning and glitterballs and the streets are paved with assorted chocolates and ice creams, or did I just forget my meds?

*

But well done everyone else as well, and thanks for sending in your emails!

xp

Lancaster Litfest has gone bonkers

Look at this lot!

I'm doing Lancaster Litfest next Saturday - the 24th October, 9.30pm at the Storey, Auditorium. They've invited people to dress up as characters from the Brenda and Effie novels - so you can attend as Frank or Effie or Sheila Manchu or a Christmas Elf or Mrs Claus, or whoever you fancy being. Anyway - now there's a list of suggestions on their website's blog: http://www.litfest.org/blog/2009/10/paul-magrs/

with photos!! Look at this lot! It's like Mapp and Lucia meets the Rocky Horror Picture Show (Not a bad description of the books generally, that!) I particularly like the pic of the surly-looking waitress Jessie, who has had her genes tampered with at the Deadly Boutique. I love the fact that the caption on the Flickr album tells you that Jessie's waitress uniform may be worn with an ape mask, to represent her periodic regression to a zombie womanzee.

I can't wait for this..!

Two More Favourites: S Simmons and G Plimpton

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These two favourites in my top ten are both biographies. And, thinking about it now, the thing that links the two and makes them a bit different to most books of their type, is the fact that they're full of talking. They're full of life and air and actual voices. A lot of even very good biogs can seem a bit weighed down with research and the fanciness of the author's style. In fact, that's been a vogue for a number of years in life-writing, hasn't it? The show-off biographer who's there to dazzle us with their own stylishness and brio. The subject becomes just an excuse for some showing off.

But both these books aren't like that. George Plimpton's 'Truman Capote' is quite extreme in the self-effacement stakes. The whole thing is a vast arrangement of quotes from conversations and written testimonials by those who spent time with Capote. Not a single word of linking text is provided by Plimpton to orient us or to try and tell us how to interpret the quotes or the story we're piecing together.

He said at the time, I think, that he wanted it to feel like we're at a party, overhearing all these brilliant conversations. Each chapter feels like a different party - from the early, breathtaking years when Capote is starting out with his short stories and can't put a foot wrong. I love all the stuff about those residences he did, writing in these fantastic places all undisturbed. (How do you get onto these residencies? Why did I never find out?) All the stuff about the glamorous parties and balls in NYC are amazing. You can see the crash looming before it happens. You can feel the canker coming when he starts knocking about in high society. He's gone from pretty, brilliant boy to some kind of jester goblin hopping about and bitching on yachts. The ending comes way too soon and it's like rushing to the end of a breathtaking, suspenseful mystery. Plimpton teases us along with the promised revelation of Capote's final, mysterious project.

I've read that one again and again. I love the swarming voices and the conflicting viewpoints. Why hve no other biographies followed this lead? I'm bored with the measured pace of most biogs. Most biographers are like detectives or doctors, weighing things up, calmly diagnosing. Or weighing in with spurious opinions or flights of fancy, or patches of 'fine-writing' of their own. Plimpton chucks us in at the deep end and seemingly leaves us to it.

My other favourite biog has another fantastic maverick for its subject: Serge Gainsbourg. This must be about ten years old, too: Sylvie Simmons' 'A Fistful of Gitanes'. This is a book by someone who obviously adores her subject. The fannishness of it all comes through unashamedly. She also uses her original interviews really well, too, in that she lets Jane Birkin take centre stage, verbatim, so much of the time. And so she should. Birkin comes across wonderfully like a batty old aunt, blithely telling us about what they all got up to back in the early seventies. Some of it's gorgeously outrageous stuff. Simmons writes best about those bits of Serge's life when he couldn't put a foot wrong. Every record was brilliant. Every accident turned out to be amazingly fortuitous. He annoys Bardot and she tells him to write her a love song to make up, and he writes her 'Je T'aime.' He careers about the place, stumbling drunkenly, spilling his red wine, dropping fag ash everywhere... but everything he recorded seemed sublimely effortless.

I suppose both biographies here are about men who rattled about, sometimes disastrously, through ramshackle lives, sometimes damaging themselves and others around them. But who both made the wonderful things they did look easy. These two books about them are filled with that same kind of buoyancy and gracefulness. They're compulsive reads.

Just edged out of my favourite ten - Maria Riva's amazing book about her mother, Marlene Dietrich.

Secret Garden

Our garden here in Manchester's surrounded by red brick walls, some of them crumbling a little. There's a mature magnolia tree that blossoms in March and August, with those flowers that my friend Alicia always says look little china cups and saucers. There are hidden corners and chairs and firs and squirrels everywhere and cats doing pasaggiata along the fences and down the paths. It's a kind of hidden-away garden, tucked amongst lots of others besides the railway lines south of Piccadilly. Right now it's too chilly to sit in, and carpeted in leaf mulch and conkers. It's maybe still warm enough to take out a cup of spicy tea and do some crunching about in the untamed grass for about ten minutes.

I think I love walled gardens and things going a little unkempt because I loved Frances Hodgson Burnett's 'The Secret Garden' so much. When I sit out in ours, any time of year, I get that same sensation of belonging to something and being settled somewhere that Mary gets. It was the same feeling in our garden in Norwich, which was smaller and even more hemmed in and secret. J. laboured like mad to make that into a little oasis. He built trellis fences and mounded curtains of honeysuckle. We had glowing lamps and blazing torches. We had Chilean potato blossom - which was rife all over the city's gardens, as were passion flowers, dark purple and notched like clockfaces growing on the vine.

Our teacher read us 'The Secret Garden' when I was ten. She read out every word and, coming from Yorkshire, did all the accents with great aplomb. She was a teacher very big on nature. We visited woodlands and wild fowl parks. We tramped about down the Burn, picking wild flowers and observing the pertinent features of things. I pored over the Observer Books of this that and the other.

She wasn't my favourite teacher, the one we had that year. My favourites were Mrs Saferi the music teacher who looked like Barbra Straisand, and Miss Booth who we had the following year. But this particular teacher chose wonderful books to read us. 'The Secret Garden' I remember best, but there was also both Dodie Smith dalmation books and two of the later Narnias. All year I was agog at the point in the day when it was time to listen to the teacher reading to us. I loved it and I think it's partly why I still love hearing people read now. That point in the day when all the maths and science and stuff was finished with and it was time for stories.

Speaking of which - we're just back from the Whitworth Gallery, and the Northern Salt reading. Very nice to sit and listen to four Salt authors do their stuff in such a lovely setting - those tall windows and the chilly park beyond. I met again some lovely people I've met before, such as Elizabeth Baines, Ailsa Cox and Mark Illis. And I met Jen Hamilton-Emery from Salt for the first time, which was a treat. She presented me with the first copies of my book of short fiction, 'Twelve Stories.' It was like magic! There it was, twelve years in the making.

Tonight at home we're settling down with the fire going for a quiet night. J's bringing in the firewood and battening down the hatches. Time to cook and to feed Fester, who's jangling all the bling he wears round his neck, and calling for catfood.

Oh! The other picture above is the Raoul Dufy painting I mentioned the other day: my favourite painting in the world, I think. It's called 'La Vie en Rose' - I got the name wrong the other day. I've had a print for about twenty years and saw it in the flesh in Paris a few years ago. It was colossal. It was a room big enough to walk into.

New Brendas

Two large parcels have just arrived at our door! My hardback and trade paperback copies of 'Hell's Belles' - the fourth in my Brenda and Effie Mysteries from Headline. The finished books look exceedingly handsome - thumping great thick things with lovely spot laminate on the cover. So lovely to have them at last and they'll be in the shops and online pretty soon, I guess. Imminently!

This time there are few new additions to our cast of characters. We begin the book with a young woman called Penny, arriving in Whitby in search of a new life. She's a Goth girl who's ran out on her terrible husband, and she's hooked herself a job at the Hotel Miramar. She has no idea what she's getting herself into. Especially with a film crew arriving in town in time for Hallowe'en, which will see the culmination of their shooting a hellish movie remake at the Abbey... Their leading lady, Karla Sorenson, Classic Screen Queen of the Vampire Flick, is a complete nightmare in more senses than one.

I can't wait to hear what people make of this fourth trip into the world of Brenda and Effie. It's important to point out, too, that you can start here, with 'Hell's Belles'. That's true of all the books, actually. Each one is a new jumping-on point. That's important to me. I think it's great to reward long-term readers with fun and flashbacks and clues and so on - but I like to think that anyone can join in reading at any point.

Through Penny Danby's eyes, 'Hell's Belles' gives us a new view-point and a new slant on some of Brenda and Effie's doings...!

Also in the post today I received a lovely letter from Joanna Tope, the actress who played Brenda on our Radio 7 serial a couple of years ago. She was also the original voice of the Bride, back in the 1998 Radio 4 short story. Of course, when BBC Audio recently decided they wanted to create an unabridged audiobook of the first in the series, 'Never the Bride', I suggested straight away that they ask Joanna. She has such a wonderful take on Brenda's voice. Gentle and funny - but with all that darkness and mystery between the lines.

So, this morning I get a nice letter from her, telling me that she's been in Bath all week having 'enormous pleasure' being Brenda once more for BBC Audiobooks. I hope she won't mind my quoting her here, when she says: 'It was such a joy to spend many hours with Brenda and the gang; loving the poetry, philosophy and hilarity of the piece.'

Six months until it comes out! Should be worth the wait!

And in the meantime - for me - it's back to the hard work on the new book...

Books from Salt - plus Sheffield, Donald and Cinderella

Here are two more images from my Purnell Disney book, circa 1969, when I was born. The first book I ever owned. These are for Redscharlach, who left a comment remembering the selfsame volume. Here's the Cinderella ball (All that pink! Makes me wonder if this picture's the reason my favourite painting ever is Raoul Dufy's Rose Room). And here's Donald in Disneyland, with his bratty nephews, too - a Calvinoesque tale, putting the fun back into metafiction.

Just back tonight from Sheffield, where I had a wonderful time reading to everyone at Hillsbrough College. Thanks to Ruth Owen and Judith Adam for looking after me, and everyone in the audience for listening so nicely and asking such brilliant questions. Doctor Who fans and Brenda fans in attendance, which always makes me happy. Such, such good questions. I'm always amazed. When I sit in an audience like that I never know what to ask. To be the person up there, standing with your pile of books and your bottled water, you're desperate for good q+a and I'm hardly ever disappointed.

Back home to see a terrifically happy pic of Chris Hamilton-Emery on the Salt blog, with him holding up four new books hot from the presses. Including mine! 'Twelve Stories' is now in print! Which I'm very, very happy about. I love having a new collection of stories about to come out and the finished thing looks great. Can't wait to see it in the actual flesh.

I'll be at the Salt reading at the Whitworth Gallery in Manchester at 3pm on Sunday - as a listener, rather than a reader, this time - and I'm looking forward to meeting the Salt team. I'm so pleased they've wanted to do a book of mine.

Vintage Item No.7: Disney Storybook

This is about the first book I remember owning, and reading for myself. It was a huge, thick, blue clothbound volume which, over the years, eventually lost its cover. I read that book into oblivion.

Purnell did these yearly Disney books - not quite the same as Annuals, with their mix of quizzes, games and strips - these were much more special. Treasuries, they would call them, filled with retellings of Disney cartoons.

Sometimes I forget that Disney was just about my first love. After dinosaurs and animals in the zoo. I was obsessed with Disney films. When I was four it was all about 'Bedknobs and Broomsticks.' When we had company round our house in Darlington everyone was cajoled into believing that our front room was the sea and we all had to get our legs up off the floor and sing 'Bobbing Along'. I had a blow-up dolphin and a toy chimp in dungarees to somehow add to the effect. My Big Nanna went along with all of this most enthusiastically, seeing a chance to gently mock the men in the family for not joining in with the fun enough.

This particular Purnell Storybook consisted of - I've since found out - a reprinting of lots of the 'Little Gold Books' from the US. These were concise retellings of film plots, accompanied by specially commissioned artwork and not simply movie stills. The illustrations in my first Disney book were gorgeously atmospheric things. They were lush with airbrushed colours and sometimes rather gloomy. Sleeping Beauty's castle and Gepetto's sleepy town were places of darkness in my book. The forest where Snow White was to discover the dwarfs was a terrifying one. I loved that fact that the drawings made a distinction between the films I knew (from the pictures, from clips shown on Bank Holidays on 'Disney Time.') It felt as if the versions glimpsed in my book were 'my' versions. They were something that belonged to me. They were more scary and less light and fluffy.

There were also some stories that didn't belong to any movie, and these were facinating for that. There's a very sweet, sentimental tale about a grandfather rabbit who teaches his whole family to paint things - Easter eggs and so on. He dies and it becomes a story about bereavement. We're told that he's gone elsewhere and is painting glorious sunsets and sunrises for everyone to see. I had forgotten that story completely until I ordered the book for myself from ebay, a few years ago. And then, of course, I remembered it all word for word, opening up that new copy of the Disney Storybook (which somehow smelled exactly the same as the one I had lost years earlier.)

So I taught myself to read with this, I realise now, well before I started school. By first poring over the illustrations as my Mam or Big Nanna read to me, hour after hour. (My Big Nanna would eventually get to stop by pretending she had lost her voice.) Just like my sister, seventeen years later, with her book of Victorian nursey rhymes, I would pretend not to be able to read it for myself, just to prolong the bliss of being read to.

These fairy tales were the first thing I consciously took in by reading. They're like a first layer of wallpaper and paint in a new house.

Top Ten Books

I was already thinking of posting a top ten of my favourite-ever books. Then I heard the news that Barry Letts had died. He wrote my favourite Doctor Who novel ever. I took it with me to read on the train to Ilkley on Saturday. I must have read it a dozen times since I bought it in 1980. Of course I loved all the Terrance Dicks and Malcolm Hulke Doctor Who books, but there was something very special about the Daemons. There was something very cheery about this kids' lit excursion into Dennis Wheatley territory.

It's a properly cosy supernatural adventure story, complete with village pub and a witch's coven under the ancient church. We've got malevolent living gargoyles and appearances by what appears to be Old Nick himself. The whole village of Devil's End is placed under a force shield and all the brilliant characters are at the mercy of the villainous Master and Azal, the Daemon from deep space.

It's the opening chapters that I loved the most, with the live TV broadcast from the opening of the Barrow in Devil's End. It's a sequence that finds echoes in TV - Stephen Volk's masterly 'Ghostwatch' in 1992 and, of course, the wonderful 'Most Haunted.' There's something very special about this sequence of events in Letts' novel (and the original TV version too): with the Doctor and Jo racing through the stormy countryside in their vintage roadster, and the arrogant achaeologist scraping away with his trowel, live on telly. And the men from UNIT, of course, obliviously watching the rugby on the telly, eking out their Hallowe'en with corned beef sandwiches.

The other book I'm picking out here for my top ten is Nina Bawden's 'Carrie's War.' I read this when I was eleven and many times since. It's the tale of evacuees being moved to Wales during the war, a brother and sister, who wind up staying with a mean shopkeeper. He won't even let them stand on the stair carpet in case they wear it out. His sister looks after them kindly, though, and they meet the rest of his family, down in the valley, and they uncover some pretty dark secrets from the past. It's such a sad story this one, somehow. Everyone feels rather thwarted and lost, at first. But even the horrible characters are redeemed. We even feel for Mr Evans, in the end. It's a book about loyalty and love. There are slightly Gothic touches - with cursed skulls in libraries and old houses burning down.

It was my first day atWoodham Comp I was given this to read. Thank you, Mrs Sewell, our English teacher that year. Every English teacher I had at Woodham Comp was a saint. That first day I'd had a horrible time, so far. We'd had a hideous PE lesson, involving a Cross Country run: a mile up and down hills in cold black mud. That awful PE teacher screaming at us all the way. We were told this would happen every Monday till Christmas. And then the boys had a metal work lesson, in which we were told we mustn't be scared of the many frightening-looking machines: the lathes and brazing hearths and god knows what else. No, we had to get used to such things if we were to go on and be successful in finding a factory job when we grew up.

Then, at the end of the day, came our first English lesson with Mrs Sewell - and she went round passing out copies of Nina Bawden's book. All the boys thought it looked like a book for just girls. They were wrong and I didn't care, anyway. Such a brilliant choice for a first book in a new school. It's all about settling in somewhere new and being scared and becoming brave enough to deal with it all.

Someone else was telling me recently that kids in secondary school rarely get to read a whole book. It's all excerpts these days. They only get to study the bits they'll be asked about in exams. That sort of thing makes me livid. Another example of that whole penny-pinching, mean-minded, exam-passing, hurdle-jumping utilitarian view of the world. The world's full of target-setting nincompoops who like people to 'evidence' stuff rather that actually do it, or experience it.

Anyway - enough ranting!

These are two of my favourites. Nina Bawden and Barry Letts, from round about the same time in the mid Seventies and read by me at the start of the Eighties. Two definites in my all time top ten.

Recent events and adventures...

Just a few updates today... I had great fun at my events this weekend just gone. The Ilkley Festival did me proud on Saturday. I taught a workshop on plotting Secrets and Subtexts and the large class of people were all halfway through their novels and very keen to learn and experiment. Then there was time to get a bacon and tomato sandwich in a tea room that wasn't Betty's (Betty's was chockablock) and dash to the Playhouse. I did a Gothic-themed event with Kevin Jackson, who's published a book about vampires with Portobello (a publisher I like - because of their doing that lovely book about Enid Blyton a couple of years ago, and because they're doing Tiffany Murray's second novel.)

Anyway, we'd sold out, which was pretty good. The festival had laid on special supplies of gloopy and peppery Bloody Mary's, both alcoholic and none, and we had a nice time talking about monsters and vampires in myth and film, and things such as Paranormal Romance and the old Universal Monster Team-ups and took some very interesting questions from the audience. Afterwards I was glad to sign lots of copies... and delighted to hear from a woman who belongs to a Leeds Book Group, who said they'd had a flurry of excitement about my stuff - and the term they used for circulating 'Never the Bride' and 'Something Borrowed' etc, was 'Borrowing the Brenda'!

Sunday was all about the sublime Lass O'Gowrie pub in Manchester, and attending the epic daylong NovelCon event. This was a long overdue celebration of the Doctor Who novels - the books that kept the story going during the lost years of the 1989 -2005 hiatus. There was a large gathering of novelists and readers of all kinds and a really splendid time was had by all, I think. Many congrats to the genial and unflagging host, Gareth Kavanagh, who put together this whole day of debate and nostalgia and beer and pies. I spent quite a lot of time in the snug with a shifting cast of old and new friends.

It seems like the autumn season of events and talks and dashing about on trains is well and truly underway..!

This week I'm off to Sheffield for their literature festival. There, I'll be reading some Brenda and Effie (from my brand new proof copy of Hell's Belles!). Details follow. It says Sold Out (hurray!) but I guess they could squeeze in a couple more.

Paul Magrs
Thu 15 October 2009 @ 2pm

This event is sold out

The Sheffield College

A chance to meet the prolific writer Paul Magrs who will be talking, amongst other things, about his latest novel Hell’s Belles the fourth in his series of mysteries featuring Brenda and Effie, two very unusual old ladies who help keep evil at bay. His collection of short stories Twelve Stories is about to be published and his most recent Doctor Who project is the five part BBC Audiobook series Hornets Nest starring Tom Baker. Paul also teaches on the Creative Writing MA course at Manchester Metropolitan University.

Facilitated by Hillsborough College

Tickets

Tickets £3/£2 (cons) from Reception, Reference and Information, Central Library, Surrey Street, Sheffield 1 - Tel. 0114 273 4737 and Finance Office, Hillsborough College (Mon-Fri 9am-4.30pm) For information Tel. 0114 260 2215

Del Rey, Bantam, Ace

This is about books that were exotic and cheap. American fantasy novels that had gaudier, tackier, more glorious colours than had the books in British shops. Some of these books never came out in this country at all. The only place they could be got was in remainder shops. Stacked twenty deep with a hole punched in the top right hand corner of the cover. They smelled of wood pulp and a weird damp smell. The smell of ships’ holds, maybe. They brought with them a whiff of Atlantic cold and dark. Like books brought up from the bottom of the sea. The pages’ edges were stained with green and yellow ink sometimes.

Del Rey, Bantam and Ace Fantasy novels. In the late eighties, early nineties, there was a bookshop on the corner of the market place in Darlington. It had stripped pine floorboards and loads of stuff you’d never want to buy: romances and picture books about babies and the Royal family and stuff. But there was a central table with stacks of imported paperbacks. Fantasy, horror, sci-fi. From Del Rey, Bantam and Ace. 70p a pop. It was a chance to sample writers you’d never heard of. It was a glimpse of a vast array of genre fiction. Those lists in the front and backs of these books were mind-boggling. Those alluring and crazy blurbs about books you hoped to see remaindered too.

Four of my favourites are scanned above. I’ve read Jonathan Carroll’s ‘The Land of Laughs’ five, maybe six times. A man obsessed with a kids’ book writer – a writer of strange picture books, rather like Gorey or Sendak - sets off to complete his set of first editions and ends up with far more than he bargained for. We get a journey into dark Americana, a true small town experience with touches of twisted Gothic fantasy and some lovely, unshowy reflections on the craft of writing and biography. Something pulls me back to this book every couple of years or so. I’ve read other Carrolls and some come close to having the same charm for me, but not in the same way.

‘Tea with the Black Dragon’ is a San Francisco-based fantasy techno-thriller, underscored by Chinese mythology and an air of genteel strangeness and good humour. Another one I’ve read repeatedly – and I was delighted to find there was a sequel, too.

I loved Jon De Cles’s ‘The Particolored Unicorn’ back in 1991 or whenever it was I first read it. It’s a freewheeling picaresque fantasy romp, with lots of comedy and mad invention. A bit like ‘The Princess Bride’, in a way. When I reread it last summer I found his website and discovered that he was just about to publish the sequel, all these years later, and I was cockahoop.

And then David and Leigh Eddings’ Belgariad series, with which I was obsessed the summer I was fifteen. I would buy one every day, running out of book at the end of each night and having to dash out the next day for the next in the sequence. This, the second one, is still my favourite: with all that sinister stuff with the snaky queen in the southern swamplands… and the frightening sequence when the young hero Garion kills one of the baddies simply with his touch… burning him into dust and making him realise what powers he really has. Those Eddings books were very soapy, and that was why I liked them – all the aunts and uncles and characters you could recognise.

These books come from a time when there was less fantasy, generally, in UK bookshops. Now you can barely get moved for it. I feel a bit blasé about goblins and mermaids and quests that begin with tattered old maps and end in dark towers. Perhaps it seems a bit easy to get hold of these days.

I preferred it when fantasy was darkly comic, sometimes sinister and hard to get hold of, rather than earnest, ubiquitous, and family friendly.

Barefoot in the Summer

Last night I watched Jane Fonda and Robert Redford in 'Barefoot in the Park' for the first time in decades. It was one of the Sunday afternoon films of my childhood. My Mam and I would watch films every weekend. Musicals like 'Gypsy', or anything with Paul Newman or Robert Redford in. This particular film is one of those that furnished my mind with indelible images of New York. It made me imagine that's what living there would be like and feel like and look like. I remembered really clearly Jane Fonda's excitement over her new appartment, painted battleship grey and at the top of five flights of stairs. I remembered the bit with Redford being snowed on through a broken skylight as a he lay on the settee in the middle of the night. And the twitchy uptight mother who gets taken out on a wild night out by the strange man upstairs and has the time of her life. It was wonderful to see this film again.

It reminded me of getting that first flat with my friend Amanda in Edinburgh in 1995. Five flights up a fire escape and painted battleship grey inside. Open plan living with a kitchen breakfast bar in the sitting room. No wonder it all seemed vaguely familiar at the time, that move to a life on the rooftops of a reasonably big city...

Anyway - today's blog was meant to be a quick review of my summer's reading. Now that it's all completely, utterly over, and term is well underway, autumn's definitely here and the season of readings at festivals and publication is upon us... I thought I'd tot up how I did over the summer, finding stuff to read, to distract me, to keep me out of mischief.

Out of thirty six books read I'd say twenty two were good. Twenty two were worth the time and some of them I would read again. (This is where I need to harden my resolve and decide to Get Rid Of the other fourteen books. The ones I hated and would never touch again. They need to go to charity. Can I do it, though? Mightn't I pick one of them up again at a later date and realise that I was dead wrong about it?)

Six of the thirty six were rereads: all of them kids' books, in preparation for my course. Twelve were things I'd meant to get round to - such as Murakami's 'Wind-Up Bird Chronicle', or the books I read by Raymond Chandler, Ed MacBain, Ngaio Marsh and PG Wodehouse. Only two were complete stinkers I wish I hadn't bothered with. Interestingly, both of those were cases when I had fallen for the blandishments, hype and money-off offers in WH Smiths at Piccadilly Station. Waiting for my train I can be lured in by anything, it seems - and both 'December' by Elizabeth H. Winthrop and 'The Paris Enigma' by Pablo de Santis weren't worth my time. One was meticulous in its miserably picky details, the other sketchy and repetitive and not as exciting as a novel with lots of murders and detetctives ought to be.

What did I love? Well... My favourites of the summer...

'The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society' by Mary Ann Shaffer and Annie Burrows. A novel where the hype was justified. Just enough like Helene Hanff to hook me in the first place and then original, warm and clever enough to keep me enthralled.

'The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle' by Haruki Murakami, which I've had on my shelf for years. I loved everything about this. It has one of the most edge-of-your-seats scenes of cruelty and suspense I've ever read. But it was never gratuitous. It was surreal but always made us care for the characters at the mercy of the absurd stuff it flings at them. It has some lovely mind-bending concepts and magical set-pieces. It's like being inside a maze of silly ideas, all of which make complete sense when you're inside there. Everything adds up in the end. (Which wasn't true when I read a colection of Murakami short stories a few years ago. Without the cumulative effect they seemed a bit precious and so-whattish.)

'A Freewheelin' Time' by Suze Rotolo. Her memoir of the Sixties in Greenwich village, when Dylan was her boyfriend. I think she writes better than Dylan did in his 'Chronicles Vol One.' She's so composed and calm about it all. She gives us the atmosphere and the excitement of those times. She's generous enough to make the reader feel part of it, rather than stressing what a wonderful time and place it was to be young, but it's all over now, so hard cheese. Lots of other memoirs tend to do that. The 'lucky me and my fabulous' life genre. I love the fact she goes over to Italy for a few months to do her own thing when Dylan's having some of his most important breakthroughs. She reminds me quite a bit of the heroines of Adriana Trigiani's novels.

Similarly generous and wise was Sheila Hancock's 'The Two of Us.' It's a joint biography, and a portrait of a marriage. Amazingly touching and unsentimental. The 60s and 70s are the main focus here: and what it meant to be an actor from a working class background on stage and on the telly at that time, when the whole world seemed to be opening up. When popular drama could be radical and exciting. I love autobiographies in which you get such a fierce sense of the personality at work inside them. There's no glossing over or self-mythologizing here. Just artists working hard to find their places in the world. It's a book about growing older and finding love and it's one of the most powerful descriptions I've read of the grieving process. That makes it sound like a very sad book. I found it all very uplifting.

Yeah, I'd say they were my favourite four of the summer.

Reminders

Apologies for doing this twice in a day... but I have a couple of reminders...

First of all for my appearance at the Ilkley Festival this Saturday http://www.ilkleyliteraturefestival.org.uk/user/index.php

and also for NovelCon in Manchester this Sunday
http://www.wegottickets.com/event/54747

Busy weekend coming up, I guess.

Here's a couple of good things to read. Gene Hult's published one of his earlier short stories on http://www.citysqwirl.com/

and I've just been directed to Lucy Mangan's articles in the Guardian on classic kids' books. To follow up this week's post about Eve Garnett, here's her piece from last year on 'One End Street':
http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2008/dec/06/family-from-one-end-street

Nick C at 'A Pile of Leaves' emailed me about 'Hornets' Nest' part 2 'The Dead Shoes' and wrote the following:

"I finally heard The Dead Shoes. Where did the Captains go, both Yates and the dog? Outside of this, I absolutely adored it. Too many favourite things – the chase through the dollshouse, the malevolent giant baby, the mummified feet, the Truth About Mrs Wibbsey, the peculiar dancing. I think what I most like is that you take these wonderful, obscene images and then, very subtly (in a way) tip things into absurdity, so that they’re not actually nasty. It’s like you’re constantly testing the limits of Doctor Who by firmly driving into them and bouncing off – I think whenever that’s been done, by Robert Holmes or whoever, it’s had a marvellous effect, and made the series the strange beast it remains. So well done, and thank you."

And here's Cody Schell in Iowa, experiencing the Stuff of Nightmares first thing in the morning...

"Good morning! How are you doing?

"Today is a cold rainy day (which I love). I listened to the first half of "The Stuff of Nightmares" on my way to work, through the rain, the sky turning that funny blue that only happens just before the sun comes up. Listening to Tom Baker murmur about stiff legs jutting out from rubbish tips made me laugh and then chilled by spooky owls and ticking clocks. Really nice atmospheric morning! I can't wait to hear the rest."

I love the fact that the people who like my stuff write such lovely letters!

One of the pics above is of Fester sleeping on my reading chair.

Book Club First Anniversary Dinner

Last night our Book Club took a cab into town for our first anniversary dinner. We went to Sweet Mandarin in the Northern Quarter because our book last month was Helen Tse's family memoir about that restaurant and the three generations that have worked there. Lisa Tse was there to welcome us and we had a pretty raucous time, with lots and lots of talking and cocktails and a banquet for six. We did a bit of discussion of the book in hand - Charlaine Harris's first Sookie Stackhouse novel (the title of which I always get wrong.) I hadn't enjoyed it as much as the others did, it seemed. It felt a bit underwritten and unexciting to me. Of course, there was lots of talk of the TV version - Tru Blood - which almost everyone had seen. J. was at home, taping ep one on Channel 4 just as we were talking. So lots of vampire talk as we messed about with chopsticks and devoured springrolls, crispy beef and Lily Kwok's famous curry.

We had two new members joining us last night, too, so there was lots of catching up and recounting tales from our first year of meetings. Already legendary is the evening we did a Kazuo Ishiguro novel and, ninety minutes into discussing it, someone pointed out that my book had a different cover to everyone else's. I think someone said, 'Why's yours got a tree on the front?' And of course it turned out that I'd read the wrong Ishiguro book. We'd been talking about it all that time and no one had noticed that we were on with different books. Dunno what that says about us or Ishiguro, but it was pretty funny.

We've all taken turns to pick next month's book and we've had some triumphs... when everyone enjoyed it and the conversation on the first Wednesday of the month went swimmingly. Like when we did Khaled Hosseini's 'A Thousand Splendid Suns'. That zoomed off into a very involved talk about religion, politics, the whole shebang. Similarly, Patrick Gale's 'Notes on an Exhibition' got a good response from us all.

And we've had some stinkers as well, though. We began with an Alexander McCall Smith mystery, thinking it'd be a gentle, nice, middlebrow beginning for us. But when we turned up for our first autumn meeting last year we found we'd all got annoyed with his rather superior heroine, Isabel Dalhousie and her snobby ways. We'd all kind of enjoyed his Ladies Detective Agency books, but the Edinburgh ones seemed irksomely snooty. His prose is so smooth it's a bit like food blended just that bit too far. Like baby food. I like the stuff about Edinburgh's New Town, though. It reminded me of living there, all that time ago. But we were pretty nonplussed in the end... as we were by a couple of others on our list. Most of us liked Neil Gaiman's 'The Graveyard Book', but it also seemed a bit too slick and cynical as well. Elizabeth Berg - who I adore - struck others as a bit smug and bourgeouis and not a patch on Anne Tyler.

We've got Audrey Niffenegger's new spooky novel up next. I think we all read The Time Traveller's Wife and enjoyed it - though everyone thought it was too long. I'm keen to see what she's doing next. (Though what was that daft boring comic strip she had in the Guardian Review section? They let people do some funny old stuff in that paper...) It'll be good to have something supernatural for the November meet...

So anyway last night was a successful celebration... we toasted our Book Club with cocktails named after Manchester Streets and we were the last ones there. Gossipping and drinking wine club, as I say, is what J. calls us. But what else is there to novels than that?

Garnett and Ferguson

What do you do when you aren't particularly enjoying something you're reading? I always remember a very sensible friend of mine saying that life's too short to read stuff you're not getting on with. There are so many novels out there that you'll never catch up. If you read a hundred pages and you hate it, just give it up. Seems like sound advice, but I always think if I do I'll miss the point when it suddenly gets good, and I'll never know what happened. Or that I'm missing the point of the thing I'm reading, somehow, through being obtuse or reading stupidly. (I wasn't enjoying Nancy Mitford's 'Love in a Cold Climate' when we read that for my book group, then suddenly, with the arrival of the hilarious Cecil, the whole thing warmed up considerably.)

At the moment I'm struggling a bit with Rachel Ferguson's 'The Brontes Went to Woolworths.' I've always been intrigued by that title and so, when I saw that Bloosmbury had republished it, with other 'forgotten' novels of a similar vintage I snapped it up. It was one of my 3-for-2 binges, this time in Borders in Edinburgh. ('The Disappointing Binge' sounds like an Edward Gorey book.) Beautiful design on this 'Bloomsbury Group' of reprints, by the way. They're like exotic sorbets.

But the actual novel is leaving me a bit cold. It feels like eavesdropping on a whole load of private jokes between posh school girls. They're all fussing over a high court judge they've got the hots for, which is amusing up to a point. But there's something twittery and too arch about their fantasy lives and in-jokes and the whole thing. But we'll see. I'll stick with it. I promise! I know that some people love this book and Bloosmbury clearly thought it worth bringing back to life... so maybe I'll be convinced by the end...

The other thing I've been thinking about is Eve Garnett's children's classic, 'The Family from One End Street', which we were talking about in my MA class last night. Very interesting that those of us who'd read it in childhood were less impressed by it, returning to read it now, for the course. I remember being gobsmacked, when I was a kid, reading these episodes of domestic realism and gentle tribulation; all of them set in terraced streets recognisable from my own visits to my Little Nanna Mason in South Shields. When I was little, bits of Shields still looked like the 1930s, and that very matriarchal, working class life was still very much in evidence. I think Garnett's book was one of the first times I saw people I recognised and knew inside the pages of a novel.

Looking at it now though, it feels a bit benign, even anodyne. The whole MA group thought that. Where was the plot? The adventure? The danger? Would it hold a kid's attention now, when all kids' books seem so whizz-bang and busy? It's the very small things, though, in 'One End Street' that are the most dramatic. The bit that stuck with me from childhood is when the girl has a go at ironing for her mother's boss, and, to her horror, shrivels a petticoat in an instant. ('The Shrivelled Petticoat' could be another Gorey title.)

Great conversation, anyway, about the book, last night. About the charm of ordinariness. How strange and shocking it must have been at the time: a book about an ordinary family having ordinary, mildly funny adventures. It got us onto the whole topic of the 'family novel', and how often they have at the centre of them the child (usually a girl) who grows up to be a writer. I think you can feel the difference between the emotional charge of 'Little Women' and the 'Little House' books, in which the eventual writer began as a part of the family in the story, and 'One End Street', in which she didn't.

Edith Nesbit next week! I'm looking forward to hearing what the class makes of the Phoenix and the Carpet.

More book talk tonight! It's the first anniversary dinner of my local Book Club, which began last October at my kitchen table. We've doubled in size and feel like congratulating ourselves, so we're all off to Sweet Mandarin in the Northern Quarter for dinner and to discuss this month's book. 'Dead After Dark.'

J. (who isn't in Book Club - and nor is Panda) calls it, 'Drinking Wine and Gossiping at the Kitchen Table Club.'

Park Life

Yesterday tea time we took a proper Sunday walk across south Manchester, all the way to Platt Fields Park and round the boating lake. It was just perfect – leaf mulchy smells and geese looking cross as they bobbed in the blue-green algae. Us buying chocolate on the walk back home. It made me think that we don’t really go walking enough round our way, or use the parks where we are.

On holiday it’s a different story. My favourite places on holiday always end up being the parks we’ve walked in, found an outdoors café in, and sat reading books and papers in. It’s two months exactly since our trip to Paris, the highlight of which for me was, once again, pulling up one of those heavy green metal chairs in the Jardin du Luxembourg and reading Murakami and PG Wodehouse. Under all that spangly green light under the plane trees is my favourite place to be reading and watching people and drawing stuff. I love it when you sit so long you start to get drowsy and have to fortify yourself with frothy coffee.

Central Park was a revelation, too, when we went a couple of years ago. I always knew I’d love it, after years of Spiderman comics, Woody Allen films, and umpteen novels set in New York. The whole place occupied a mythical and impossibly romantic space in my mental landscape. The day I first got to venture out into Central Park was my first morning in New York City, and it took the form of a reunion after eighteen years with my first ever boyfriend. It was the first day of spring and it was searingly bright and ludicrously like being in a film. We walked and clambered on huge chunks of granite and wandered down tree-lined lanes and sat beside another boating lake catching up on all that time since we were twenty.

I suppose the park that underlies all my love affairs with parks is Marine Park in South Shields, one of the earliest places I remember visiting. They still have a miniature railway that completes a swift, shunting circuit around the lake and through the woods. It’s the park near the noisy, exciting fun fair. It’s the park that my Big Nanna described as being the place where everyone went dancing during the war. They’d cover the grass with a dance floor and it was set out in different tiers about the bandstand and I think both sets of grandparents talked about going there to dance during the war.

But there was South Park in Darlington, too, which had birds in cages and other animals and a tuck shop. Even Simpasture Park in Newton Aycliffe was brilliant – they had tennis courts and miniature racing cars and a giant metal spider for climbing on.

Anyway, I was glad to find a park in Manchester, one with topiary hedges and fruit trees and honking geese. That’s what I love about this city. Somehow there’s always more stuff to find, more space to spread out in and things to explore. Just so long as I can find somewhere nice to sit with all my books and drawing and writing things, and there’s somewhere nearby to get a proper cup of coffee.

Maureen Lee

Sunday morning and I'm reading a novelist my Mam has been a fan of for a while.

Maureen Lee is in the tradition of all those wonderful old Catherine Cookson novels... multi-generational sagas which begin with multiple familes and character view-points back in the old two-up two-down terraces, with everyone starving and jostling along through endless hardships. At first it's easy to dismiss it all as just another clogs-and-cobbles job... nicking bits and pieces from every Victorian melodrama going and then suddenly WHAM. I'm hooked. It was true of Catherine Cookson and now it's true of Maureen Lee, whose novels are set on Merseyside, rather than Tyne and Wear.

I'm utterly absorbed in 'Queen of the Mersey.' I'm completely living through the lives of these characters as they tumble through the war years and the fifties. I'm utterly obsessed with poor Queenie, whose tart of a mother beat her and so neglected her that, having chucked her down the stairs, forgot to have her broken arm set properly. Poor resourceful Queenie survives and is taken in by the family downstairs and joins an extended cast of overlapping poor-but-cheery families. We go through the bombing raids and evacuations to Wales; inadvertant murders and infidelities... the whole raft of human experience and emotion. And, to me, none of it feels hackneyed or cliched. None of these great, trundling apparatuses of plotting feel cynically deployed. I feel like Maureen Lee believes totally in her characters and cares desperately about what happens to them. Perhaps this is the difference between really smashing popular fiction and the lesser sort: the author actually caring. (It's the same with any kind of fiction, though. I think the author has to care about what they're doing. It's not always obvious, in some cases, that they do...)

As with precursors in this genre... notably Barbara Bradford Taylor's blockbusting 'Woman of Substance' from donkeys years ago... there has to be the inevitable gaining of immense wealth and all the tribulations that come with it. Queenie (imaginary spoiler space here!) falls in with the owner of Liverpool's fanciest department store, becomes fashion buyer and his mistress. He buys her a boat and they sail off to Greece, and then her raddled old mother turns up on the doorstep after many years' absence. All the details are delicious: the stuffed vineleaves Queenie tries on her Greek sojourn... how she lusts after the sailor in the blue woolly jumper and curls up by the fire to read Gone With the Wind as a storm rages over the island. And her mother's orange frizz of hair atop her manky leopardskin coat. All of these details, and all the specifics of fashion and period detail in the department store are things I find immensely appealing.

All the characters in the large cast are very distinct, too. Through all the complications at the plot level we never lose track or count. This is a great skill to learn, I always think. And when they're all yammering and chatting we're hardly ever in doubt about who is speaking. Another great novelist's skill... and one that's on show very modestly, I think. It's like we're eavesdropping on friends... and that's a lovely recommendation for a book, I think... that the writer can make you feel like that.

It's one of those thick, fruity Christmas cakes of a book. It's about as thick as one, too. The kind that's been made early, stowed away, fed regularly with booze and wrapped up in greaseproof paper to acquire further richness.

To me, this whole genre of saga novel is like visiting relatives. It's like seeing how they were getting on - these aunties and Nanna's, back in the war years, between, before and since. The half-heard stories of extended families, fashioned into a ramshackle plot that makes some kind of emotional sense.

I've just remembered, maybe twenty years ago. Reading a Catherine Cookson of my Mam's, and my Big Nanna was stopping by for tea. 'Ee, that's not a man's book he's reading.' I think I shuddered at the time. I guess she meant I should be reading something about war? Or maybe something more 'literary'? What with me being away at university and all that? Maybe, like many of my peers, I should have been reading Martin Amis, Ian McEwan... all that gaggle of clever-clever boys. Well, I read them and found them to be heartless, narcissistic drips.

I still like a good saga, it turns out.

Vintage Item no.6 - K9

K9 was written into Doctor Who round about the time Star Wars took off and, at first it seemed like he was just an excuse for a merchandising rip-off. But there was more to him than that. I’ve always loved this querulous know-it-all, trundling along at top speed on his castors. How can something so essentially expressionless manage to play such a range of emotions? Everything from a profound fit of pique to the depths of despair. How can that red visor thing make it seem as if he’s rolling his eyes in disdain?

I was horrified when they wrote him out of Doctor Who, so casually, so carelessly, just before Tom Baker left the show. Hope leapt up briefly with the Christmas pilot episode of ‘K9 and Company’ in 1981. Seemingly everyone hates this show but me. I watch it every Christmas Eve (along with a set of other Christmas TV specials – of which, perhaps, more later.) I love the idea of Sarah and K9 being pushed together by the Doctor’s invisible hands and winding up battling Satanists deep in the English countryside. Oh, that fantastic theme tune (sung by K9 himself!) and those shots of him and Sarah jogging energetically, perching on dry stone walls, and typing articles for magazines outside pubs. And oh…! that spooky transsexual red herring at the sherry party!

But, as we know, it never took off. There was an annual, a year later, which I treasured. And Sarah and K9 cameo’d in The Five Doctors in 1983, but K9 didn’t get to the Death Zone along with all the other characters because the ground was a bit too rough for him.

The last time I went to the wonderfully tatty and glorious Doctor Who Exhibition in Blackpool – it would have been 1984 – there was K9 himself, shoved on a conveyor belt, appearing behind glass partitions and coming out with his various catchphrases. Looking as hopeless as Chi-Chi the world-famous panda, stuck behind glass in the Kensington Natural History Museum café (and she gave me a shock, when I first saw her, too.) My heart bled for that robot dog.

Of course, everything comes back. At least it does in Doctor Who. At the moment I’m probably the only one amongst the people I know who was cockahoop over the advert on Youtube for the Bob Baker / Dave Martin K9 series recently filmed in Australia. Call me daft, I think it looks marvellous. Especially bit where K9’s apparently turned evil – wearing some kind of high priest robes covered with hieroglyphs and swooping around in the air. And The Sarah Jane Adventures is coming back for a third season too – with hopefully, more robot dog action. It looks likes they’re letting him out of that cupboard a bit more.

It makes that fourteen year old Paul, visiting Blackpool, staring at that battered K9 on the treadmill, very pleased to know that the disco dog is back in work.

It makes me wonder, though, about Christmas 2009. With curious goings-on in Sussex… unseasonal deadly hornets, stuffed animals rampaging about. Other strange, untoward stuff going on. Imagine if Sarah and K9 sloped off alone to investigate? And found, in a hidden-away cottage, the Doctor – her Doctor – just as she was, sitting there with Mike Yates and Mrs Wibbsey. My guess is that Mike probably phones Sarah at some point in Christmas Eve to get the Doctor to bellow hello down the phone at her, as a nice surprise.

Funny to think of all these characters from my childhood being about at the same, still having adventures this autumn and Christmas.

Of course, rereading E Nesbit recently for the course I’m teaching, I’m realising that K9 is more like one of her magical wish-granting creatures than he is R2-D2. He’s really the Psammead or the Phoenix – with his haughty tone, his capricious nature – his slight sulkiness but willingness to do anything for his masters. With his batteries winding down every now and then he reminds us of the way the Phoenix’s carpet would only grant three wishes in a single day. And the literalness of the wish-granting in Edith Nesbit’s books is a precursor to the straightforward thinking of a small, puzzled robot dog.

Once again, it seems – I’m finding fairy tale motifs in Doctor Who where, on the surface, it’s supposed to look like science fiction.

Above – a drawing from my 1982 page-a-day diary, and one of the illustrations from that fabulous but unique 1983 K9 annual.

Put on your dead shoes and dance...

First of all... keep the entries coming in my first competition! Remember - Headline are going to have those 5 copies of 'Hell's Belles' hot off the infernal presses pretty soon..! I've had some cracking entries so far - so keep them coming! 50 words or less: 'I want to visit Whitby to meet Brenda and Effie because...'

Other stuff to catch up with!

Go and visit Lancaster's Litfest's website: www.litfest.org, which looks great. I'm on, doing my turn on Saturday 24th October at 9.30pm. I just noticed that the week before they've got Steven Hall and Ellis Sharp on together. I remember reading Ellis Sharp a number of years ago - these wonderful, pithy, surreal short stories - and Steven Hall's a smart fella, too.

In the shops right now - apparently early! - is the second volume of Doctor Who: Hornet's Nest - the Dead Shoes. This episode is set back in the 1930s on the sea front at Cromer, featuring a haunted ballerina and a creepy Museum of Curios. There's some extremely spooky stuff set inside a dolls' house, even if I do say so myself. Jim Smith calls it my 'macabre joie de vivre', a description I love. The museum in real life is actually in Whitby - it's well worth a visit. All the items mentioned by the Doctor are actually still there... including a very nastily withered Hand of Glory. The rest of the Cromer details actually come from trips that J. and I made to Cromer while we lived down that way. That storm-lashed pier and its tiny theatre were simply perfect, I always thought, for a Doctor Who story.

Nice thought from an Amazon reader, here: 'I will say that I highly recommend this title and suggest listening in a comfy chair with a box of violet creams and a glass of cream sherry.'

What else? I've also been scouring the proofs of my short fiction collection with the help of the marvellous Jen from Salt books. 'Twelve Stories' is only a month away from publication and I'm very excited about it. I don't know if I've mentioned, but it includes the original story to feature Brenda and Effie (or Bessy and Effie, as they were back then!), first broadcast on Radio 4 in 1998.

Here in Manchester it's been a blowy week with smatterings of rain and dead leaves everywhere. (See pics above of the view from my study window in South Mamchester). I've been embroiled in new classes and trying to write a thousand words each morning before the sun appears. It's also been a time for mulling over and planning new projects... trying to sort out what I'll be writing this time next year...

Hell's Belles! competition!

So... Headline publish the fourth Brenda and Effie Mystery, 'Hell's Belles!' in about a month's time!

I thought I'd run a little competition here on my blog to give away five copies of the new book...

All you have to do is complete the following in fifty words or less...

'I'd like to travel to Whitby and meet Brenda and Effie because...'

Email your entries direct to this site, or to my email or project it through the astral plane if you like. (Actually, there's an easy-to-fill-in-form, just a click away from this site's front page...)

Just so long as we get plenty of funny, pithy, poignant or ridiculous replies. I'll judge the five best and Headline will send you the brand new book!

To get you started, here's the wonderful Jill Mansell - the Queen of Chicklit herself:

"I'd like to travel to Whitby and meet Brenda and Effie because I'm incurably nosy and love to speculate about other 'normal' people's lives. What are they hiding? Who else is staying at Brenda's B&B? And that odd-shaped skull for sale in Effie's shop...whose skull is it and why does it sometimes seem to smile...?"

So - go on, give it a go! I know the adventurous ladies of Whitby have got fans out there, keen to get their hands on the new volume...!

(oh, and thanks to the marvellous Bret Herholz for his interpretation of Brenda and Effie... looking rather stylish and 1920s, there...)