The Mixed-Up Bag of Late November

Very mixed reading bag to catch up on. At least in terms of genre and style, it is. I happened to love all three of these books. In fact, in setting about compiling my list of favourite reads of the year yesterday, I realised how very few stinkers I've actually put myself through this year. I think I've been listening to the bookshop hype less. I've been avoiding big stores and definitely I've been avoiding newspaper reviews. So I think this has had a happy effect on my reading.

So... I read another Maureen Lee. This one was a 'split level' narrative about a mother and a daughter, separated by murder and twenty years in prison. It's another lovely portrait of Liverpool and Liverpool families, taking us from just before WW2 and up to the early Seventies. The book's various threads are wound and twined together very cleverly, culminating in a twist that I gasped rather than groaned at. It's a book about reconciliation and difficult choices. There's an unfortunate kinky Colditz section that doesn't quite work out for me. All the gay characters in this are portrayed as wicked perverts, which I've a bit of a problem with. This could have been balanced by having the hero's obviously-gay brother outed and allowed to stand in counterpoint to the queer nazi commandant who effectively destroys everyone's lives... But I don't suppose you can have everything. This strange strand in the novel didn't spoil my enjoyment of a novel which has all of the trademark warmth and wit of Maureen Lee.

Marta Acosta's vampire series was new to me. I came across it through the interviews I was doing with wonderful Paranormal Romance sites, such as Book Chick City. Suddenly there were all these fab comic vampire novels to delve into. I'd been off vamps for a while after ploughing through drippy old Twilight... but the first in Marta's 'Casa Dracula' series is a complete antidote. It's spicy and salacious and silly. Thank god for a bit of naughtiness and brio. Here we've got fag hags and glitz and shopping and a cross old matriarch stomping about in a mansion. Our Latina heroine Milagro has a hard time of it, choosing between sexily monstrous men and winds up, bitten and misbegotten, in a safehouse mansion with a crackpot vampire family trying to keep her under house arrest. It took me a few chapters to realise that it reminded me of some bizarre Gothic version of Dynasty or Dallas. All the elements are there - the frosty matriarch who wins our hearts with her brusque one-liners and her hidden-away broken heart. The sexy fellas who vie for the new girl's attentions. The villains trying to lure her away...

It's a real romp, anyway, and I'm looking forward to getting on with the sequels.

My third book to catch up on is Muriel Barbery's 'Elegance of the Hedgehog.' In a departure for me, I listened to the whole unabridged audio on the weekend's road trip to my wonderful sister's graduation. There's something really compelling for me about audiobooks and this one works brilliantly as it's in two very distinct voices, given here by two excellent actresses. It's about a cranky and philosophical concierge in a posh Parisian apartment block and a little girl, bright beyond her years, determined to commit suicide by burning down her apartment by the end of the book. Both are brought together and helped along in the unacknowledged quest for happiness by a japanese man who moves in upstairs. It's beautifully written, I think. And I bet it feels rather dense on the page, with its allusions to Tolstoy and Husserl and who knows what else. Read aloud it has a wonderful lightness of touch. I didn't even care about the incredibly slow pace or lack of drama. And the ending is wonderfully sad.

Those are my three at the end of November! Also Susan Cooper's 'The Dark is Rising', which I've reread YET again, for my class tomorrow. But more of that later...

Writer in Residence

Now I'm Writer in Residence in two places at once!

I began the year by becoming WiR at the Portico Library in Manchester, which is a little oasis of calm in the city. And now I'm taking up a similar role in my favourite cafe bar in town, Taurus on Canal Street.

What does a Writer in Residence do? Well, I've never been one until this year and my best guess is that it means me sitting there now and then with a coffee or a glass of red wine, scribbling away in my notebooks. Loads of stuff I've written has been out and about in public spaces already. I wrote much of 'Strange Boy' in Via Fossa, also on Canal Street. And every single word of 'Exchange' I wrote under the dome of the Central Library. So I like writing and thinking new things up when I'm sat out and about in the world. When I lived in Edinburgh every single thing I wrote I wrote in cafe bars, the length and breadth of that place. In the summer of 1997 I had three hardbacked notebooks - one for my journal, one for 'Could it be Magic?' and one for 'The Scarlet Empress'. I would rotate them through the day, working through pitchers of frothy iced coffee.

Right now I'm hoping that these two very different locations - the cosy lamplight of the Portico and the convivial chatter and tinkling glass of Taurus - will inspire me to create something completely new, in situ. Anyway, if you see me there, working away in the afternoon or early evening, do say hullo.

Roald Dahl

We've reached Charlie and the Chocolate Factory on the MA Children's Lit class. We were pretty unanimous in our love for the book - then and now. Everyone in the group had read it at some point in their childhood. Our memories of both movie adaptations were very strong and it was interesting to go back and see what *wasn't* actually in the book. There's the whole temptation / betrayal sub-plot to do with the everlasting gobstoppers. That's when you get that wonderful moment of changeabout for Gene Wilder in the original movie - the way he suddenly turns on Charlie.

In the book it's a much easier ride all round, but no one seemed to mind that. I think I'd forgotten just how well written it actually was. (A certain biography of Dahl in the 1990s spoiled my enjoyment of him for a while, I have to admit.) I love the zippiness of his writing. There's a spontaneity and an improvisational quality - similar in a way to Enid Bylton - that has you believing that he's thoroughly enjoying himself as he tells you this stuff.

All of us remembered that footage on Blue Peter, years ago, that showed him stomping off happily down his garden to sit in his shed on his old armchair. That image of him writing with sharp yellow pencils and resting on a tea tray has always been my personal image of what it's all about. He's remained in my mind as the perfect image of the writer at work.

The savagery and cruelty of the book bothered no one in the class. In Dahl's world justice is meted out in quite a straightforward way. Fate is fickle and character is destiny (and sometimes so are surnames.) There are huge dollops of sentimentality and violence. It gets squishy and maudlin and sometimes quite sickly and unpalatable. But somehow Dahl always gets away with it. I don't think I've ever not enjoyed one of his books. Even 'The Great Glass Elevator' had its moments - though the rest of the class didn't agree with that.

But what's with the special editions of all these books? Week after week, I'm sitting there with my ancient copies. Pages falling out all over the place. Outdated illustrations and scribbles in the margin. And there are these brand new copies in the class - with extra forwards and afterwords and god knows what. Making me want to go out and get new copies of these things I've already got numpfty times over already. I realised I don't have a nice copy of Willy Wonka with the Quentin Blake drawings in - which seemed a huge omission on my overcrowded shelves.

This morning, though, I've been wondering about following Susan Hill's example and setting a New Year resolution to buy NO MORE NEW BOOKS next year. Simply reading from home, as she puts it, and making some headway through the heaps of to-read piles scattered and teetering about the house. What do you think? Is it possible? I'd miss those Amazon parcels brought to our door by out increasingly grumpy postman. I'd miss those trawls around the secondhand bookshops. But maybe it's worth a try...?

Reading at Manchester Central Library

Hope you can come along! I'm reading at Manchester Central Library on the evening of Thursday December the tenth at 6.30pm! (NB Slightly earlier time than I've been telling everyone.)

I'll be launching and reading from 'Hell's Belles' and also my new collection of short fiction, 'Twelve Stories.'

It's in a lovely room upstairs - the Committee Room on the second floor. I'm so pleased they've asked me, and am really looking forward to it. See you there!

Car Boot Sale Art

Here's something else I love to collect, as well as Found Photographs. In recent years we've scoured and haggled our way through Car Boot Sales of the North West of England. Now we've got this strange collection of paintings in the hallway. Paintings that no one loves - not even their original owners. What gets me about these is that they could easily have vanished forever.

They're bad - of course they are - but in a quite touching way. Often Outsider Art comes about when the artist has no training at all. They're pootling along in their own messy, merry way and producing work quite unlike anything else on Earth. Car Boot Sale paintings like these are a bit different. They are reminders and remnants of a stranger's one-time hobby or fad. Or it might have been an abiding passion. But it's gone now, and someone's flogging off their works for a few pounds.

Anyone else collect this stuff?

Here are two, for now.

I seem to gravitate to snowy scenes.

The first is Snow Hovel, as I call it. It's clearly meant to be an idyllic wintry retreat, deep in the woods. Cosy and nostalgic. But the weird geometry of that house makes you queasy, if you stare long enough. There are queer dimensional instabilities in this snowbound Grimms Fairy Tale world. I like their urgent wolfhound, dragging the old couple home. But what's with their strange pig-child? He's wearing suede knickerbockers and a pork pie hat. He's staring blankly at the painter. It makes you feel like shouting out a warning. But I'm not sure who to.

The other's a more conventional and suburban scene in South Manchester. Someone here's had a few classes, you can tell. I love the atmosphere of this. It reminds me of skidding home on frozen slush with shopping bags, at that point in the day when it starts getting dark mid-afternoon. And I always wonder whose house that is bang in the middle. The artist's family? There's someone dashing over the slippery road towards it. Another figure struggling through snow towards home.

I'd love to know who painted these.

I'll post more soon.

We Are the Famous Five

I never really minded the Famous Five. I grew up in a time when they were massively unpopular. Elitist, snobby, old-fashioned, racist and the rest of it. And it's easy to see where some of old Enid's shortcomings are. But I loved her books, I didn't care what anybody said. I'd devoured Noddy at three, pre-school, book after book. In infants' school I'd loved the Faraway Tree books and the Wishing Chair. Strange to think how Blyton's held up as some kind of jingoistic and retrogressive figure. As a reader it always seemed that she was avid for the different and the exotic. The Faraway Tree books always seemed to be about travelling elsewhere, to other places and - yes - respecting other cultures and beliefs.

We were talking about Blyton a lot in my MA class this week. Most of us had grown up with her and we talked about that sense of being addicted to her books. I read the Secret Seven and Famous Five a little later than most - maybe nine or ten years old. I was in that typical boy thing of loving to read series and working my way through a whole collection. I was the same with the Target Doctor Who books and the James Blish Star Treks and various other things. And I liked the endless repetitions of the Famous Fives. It's a comfy holiday thing: they get together in their vacations for reunions and adventures. They do the same old stuff and the reader doesn't groan when the same picnics, the same clues, the same kinds of villains recur. We get the pleasure of recognition, of feeling safe in this world.

Some wonderful stuff came out in the seminar about exposition. About how Blyton saves most of it for the dialogue, so that the characters themselves tell us what's going on. Just as kids playing games do. Narrating their own stories as they improvise them. And there's something very improvisational and on-the-hoof about Enid's writing - banging away, six thousand words a day, a book every fornight - her typewriter on her lap in front of the drawing room fire. You really get the sense of someone having a lovely time, with complete confidence, making it all up as she goes along.

As she kept saying in the BBC4 biopic this week starring Helena Bonham-Carter: She knew exactly what kids wanted to read. She just knew exactly what to write. (The film was okay. Nicely made. Not much to it. She was awful with her own kids. We knew that already and the film didn't go much further. It was a kind of Mommie Dearest with jam tarts and lashings of ginger pop.)

Much better is the Duncan MaClaren book, 'Looking For Enid', which I read Christmas before last and which set me off and rereading a tranche of Blyton. It's lit crit by an ex-Enid addict who rediscovers his fanboyishness in a charity shop and seeks out the locations for her books and life. There's some ropey and unnecessary pastiche (similar to the Laura Thompson biog of Agatha Christie, published the same year - why is it these biographers suddenly feel the need to get all creative on us, halfway through?) but I thought it was a fine book.

It made me go back to Kirrin Island again - and back to my favourite - Mystery Moor.

Something that was said in our MA class this week that rang very true. Growing up on a council estate in the 70s or 80s, the world of Blyton's islands, caravans and picnics seemed very alien and false. Yes, they were posh and privileged. But that didn't put you off. It felt like reading science fiction or historical fiction. They were just different, with different stuff around them. So you didn't feel excluded. It was all about being drawn in and being made part of that gang and that's what we loved.

Ringpullworld released!

This has been released! I meant to say...!

from Big Finish Productions:

Doctor Who: Ringpullworld


(Duration: 60' approx)

CAST:

Mark Strickson (Turlough), Alex Lowe (Huxley)

SYNOPSIS:

Vizlor Turlough is in trouble again: piloting a stolen ship through a pocket universe on a mission that is strictly forbidden by the Doctor. He would be going it alone, but there is unwelcome company in the form of Huxley, one of the legendary novelisors of Verbatim Six, who is narrating and recording Turlough’s life.

As they hurtle towards unknown peril, Turlough recalls his arrival in the TARDIS, and the circumstances that propelled himself, the Doctor and Tegan into the Ringpull universe. He has a story to tell. But only Huxley knows how it might end…

AUTHOR:	Paul Magrs	DIRECTOR:	Neil Roberts
SOUND DESIGN:	Daniel Brett	MUSIC:	Daniel Brett
COVER ART:	Iain Robertson	NUMBER OF DISCS:	1
RECORDED DATE:	23 April 2009	RELEASE DATE:	30 November 2009
PRODUCTION CODE:	BFPDWCC25	ISBN:	978-1-84435-428-3

CHRONOLOGICAL PLACEMENT:

This story takes place between The Five Doctors and Warriors of the Deep.

Reviews and interviews

Here's a bit from a lovely review by Book Chick City. The first review of Hell's Belle to see print!

"Magrs has such an amazing talent. His writing is so clever as although there are many plot twists and turns they all read smoothly and easily, there is no confusion as to what's going on. We are introduced to many characters throughout the book but each character has a unique voice and I thoroughly enjoyed reading them all. Two of the main characters, Brenda and Effie, are retired old ladies!

"I honestly didn't think that reading about two old ladies would be my thing. I have to connect and be able to relate to the characters in some way to really enjoy a book and reading about two retired old ladies did initially make me a little apprehensive. But after reading Conjugal Rites, I absolutely fell in love with Brenda and Effie, and I had no problem connecting with them. It was the same with Hell's Belles. They are just so funny, quirky and warm. And don't think for a minute because they are old they can't fight their own battles - Brenda and Effie can kick-arse with the best of them - well, they have to, being the guardians of the hell mouth!"

http://www.bookchickcity.com/

Also, there's another interview with me at My Favourite Books: http://myfavouritebooks.blogspot.com/2009/11/paul-magrs-chats-about-effie-dr-who-and.html

Those Pesky Twins

I read her 'Time Traveller's Wife' with complete absorption, and it was the same with this. I like her rather pent-up and self-concerned characters. It feels like they could all be pretty hysterical and mad - if they could only be bothered. The word languor pops into my head. They're busy enough, all these people of hers. They're zipping about London and through Highgate Cemetary, having spooky and complicated lives... but everything moves so languidly, so carefully for the first 350 pages of this new book of Niffenegger's.

I love all the dripping trees and gravestones and the researchy bits about the graveyard. The whole book's steeped in a kind of subacqueous gloom and we drift from room to room of the shared house at the centre of the book. The man beset by OCDs, wrapping everything in bubble wrap and fretting over his cryptic crosswords. The younger fella and his endless research into the dead. And those dreadful twins. I think they'd irritate me in real life, as would their ghastly mother and aunty. I wish the body swapping and Gothic stuff had started much earlier. It's like being inside of of those shove-ha'penny machines in an amusement arcade... waiting for the huge cache of pennies to drop...

I like the ghost hovering about. I like the technicalities of being a ghost and how they're dealt with. I loved the scene with the snagging of the kitten's soul.

It's Emo Goth. Maybe that's why it feels a bit precious and coy? The girls loll about in the fancy flat they've inherited, reading ghost stories by Henry James et al. I think I was irked by the fact that no one in the book actually has to work or to worry about money. Only the daft old fella in the upstairs, fretting over his compulsions - he does his crosswords and emails them to the Guardian. I'd rather see the Gothic and the spooky stuff happening to people who are in the midst of life, and who are getting on with more ordinary, everyday things. It's as if, in order to write what feels like an authentically English literary novel, Niffenegger has to import some of the snobbery and poshery that seems to go with most English literary fiction.

But I still liked being inside this story. It's a silly one in lots of ways. I don't buy the twist that I'd been warned about on Twitter by various Twitterers. I saw it coming from miles away - and it depends entirely on one character being quite different, actually, to what we had been led to expect. And the plot revelations about her character only added to my feeling that she was being bent out of shape in order to make a punchier climax.

So I'm still a bit torn about it all. It's a bit like having a good old mope and a sulk about, this book. And I guess that's what it's really about, isn't it - at heart? It's all about the chance to become a teenager again - literally. And that's precisely what it felt like.

I'd forgotten I'd written about brain-eating...

I'd forgotten I'd written about brain-eating. It was back in 2004 in 'To the Devil - a Diva!' The book was about lots of other things too, and I have to say that the brain bit was incidental - if somewhat vivid.

Lyzzybee has just reminded me of the episode - alerting me by Twitter to the following from her blog:

"5 Jun 2009 - Castle Bookshop outside, Hay-on-Wye

"At least I rescued this from a damp fate! I love Magrs' books and pick up any I see. This looked fun, if not totally a LyzzyBee book, with its vampire B-movie star attempting to save the ratings of an X-rated soap, set in Manchester's gay and fanfic communities. Unfortunately when I was half way through things got too icky with me, with brain-eating etc (handily signposted at least) and I had to give up. Which was a shame, as I was enjoying the read!"

FORTY!

Paul Klee cheers me up - not that I need it especially, following my Very Quiet Birthday yesterday. Klee did a painting called 'Bird Wandering Off' that I really love - that J has in a big Klee book somewhere. I remember him showing me this painting in about 1997, during our first week together and how it just seemed really funny. I wish I could find it on the internet - at least a pic large enough to see. I don't want to go digging through the cellar for the actual book.

Okay - forty. I spent the day deliberately trying not to work. Which is hard when I've new projects to start.

There were some nice things on the internet, to do with 'Hell's Belles' being published yesterday. Book Chick City did an interview with me, which was fun, and got some good feedback - lots of people from the States wanting to know how to get their hands on Brenda and Effie books...

Here's what I said about publication in the states:

"Paul: I hope so! Though sometimes I hear from publishing people that the US wouldn’t ‘get’ a series of books that mixes Buffy with Alan Bennett, and Miss Marple with the Rocky Horror Picture Show. People fret that the US and the rest of the world wouldn’t ‘get’ North Yorkshire and Whitby.

"But I think people who read paranormal romance and dark fantasy and cosy mysteries really would get these things. They all know about Dracula and Frankenstein, don’t they? They all know Yorkshire from the Brontes! By definition I think readers of Gothic romances and mysteries are extremely well-read.

"My Brenda and Effie Mysteries are simply about the wives and girlfriends of the monsters from the old Universal horror movies, and they all live in the spooky harbour town where Dracula first came ashore. That’s all there is to it! I’m sure readers can get that.

"I don’t think the age of my heroines would stand in the way either, would it? I mean, lots of books in this genre have young women at the centre. In my books they’re just older sexy women! What’s not to love, America?

"So… we’ll see..!"

The thing I love about sites like Book Chick City are the recommendations - for books and series I'd never heard of. There are LOADS of comic, sexy paranormal romance series out there - and of course I was straight on to Amazon, buying loads of stuff. I especially want to read Marta Acosta's 'Casa Dracula' series and Linda Wisdom's 'Hex' series. Without these blogs I'd never know about these things. They're just not in shops here in the UK. It's like when I first became aware of Cosy Mysteries a couple of years ago - I felt like: Where have these things been hiding?!

Another lovely review - NextRead has just covered 'Conjugal Rites'... And I really like what he says about the way I don't press the 'reset' button with each book. My characters have to live in the wake of decisions made... to me it's a properly ongoing story, with repercussions and consequences.

"I have the feeling that Magrs doesn’t want to give Brenda and Effie an easy life nor does he seem to condone resetting events after a mystery is solved (I’ll have to ask him about that though).

"Events in this spooky mystery pick up from the very ominous ending of Something Borrowed...

"It’s not only Mr Danby, quite a few more of the supporting cast make a welcome, and in some cases an unwelcome, return. This is what I meant by not resetting events. The consequences of their previous choice and actions are continued. And those threads are cleverly tugged and pulled about, sometimes like heart strings, by Magrs."

Thanks to NextRead and Book Chick City! I love getting this coverage from blogs. In the old days you'd sit around hoping to get a mention or a column or even a quarter page in one of the tabloid review sections. Now those pages are getting smaller and (I think) even less interesting. I like the generosity of spirit of these bloggers - plus their generosity with their time. And the fact that they're properly enthusiastic about what they read. I've always liked people who are real readers, who want to find more things to read... who draw up huge long lists they know they'll never complete.

PS Moorcock to write a Doctor who novel? Maybe. Believe it when I see it. Are the Who books likely to re-embrace the weird and wonderful, the polymorphously perverse, the improvisational and nonsensical, the experimental, the twee and the daft? Are the Doctor Who books going to become quirky again?

I'm going to reclaim 'quirky' and 'whimy', I think. Too long I've flinched at these terms, thinking them a bit patronising.

What about the New Quirky? The New Whimsy?

Favourite review of the day...

My favourite review of the day is of 'The Dead Shoes' and comes from an honest soul on Gallifreybase:

"Some of the ideas in these scripts are stretching my imagination to breaking point. Give me the more pedestrian (in comparison) scripts of the TV show any day. "

Vintage Item no.9: Ladybird Well-Loved Tales

Decimalisation had just come in, and they cost fifteen pence each. Slim, matte-covered hardbacks you could buy at the newsagents. We were talking about my addiction to Ladybird books this weekend, when my family was visiting. Mam was saying that she'd buy me one every time we went to the shops. I remember the slightly crayony smell of them, and reading them again and again until I had them off by heart. They were the first thing I was conscious of collecting: fascinated by the titles listed on the back of each volume.

I think it was the slightly more obscure of the folk and fairy tales that appealed to me the most. The Giant Turnip and the Magic Porridge Pot. That wonderful tale I found myself repeating in a class I was teaching recently - about the wolf coming to the house of the goat family. Trying to fool the kids their mother was home, by dipping his paw in flour and poking it round the door. Some of these were terrifying. None more so than the tale of the troll under the bridge and the doomed pedestrians (Goats again!), or the Ladybird version of Beauty and the Beast.

These books were illustrated in what I think of as a very 1950s style. Photo-real. Rather literal. Brilliant sunshine. They were very English, commonsensical tellings of the old tales, retold with the economy and good sense with which other Ladybird series taught you about Nelson or motorcars or what birds did in winter.

I seem to have my reading organised in strata in my memory. Under the jumbled stuff I've read in recent decades are the books I read as a teen - and under that are the Puffins and Disney... back and back in time.. to the start of the Seventies and the deepest layer of all. Underneath Noddy, even. And that's where the bedrock is - the 'well-loved tales' that Ladybird published in their series that collectors know as '606'. I've never been tempted to hoover this lot up again from ebay or abe or wherever. I don't seem to need to.

My sister is 17 years younger and, in my early twenties, I used to read to her a lot. The Ladybird books by then were dreary corporatised, americanised things. Rife with clipart and unimaginative text. Tie-ins and cash-ins and looking like just anything you could get anywhere. Why's no one reprinted the original 606's? I want to see those characters in their strangely dehistoricized Britain. It's a land in which some people are a bit eighteenth century in their gilded palaces; aristos dancing with goblins and dallying with trolls, and others are Medieval peasants on farms that rear monstrous vegetables and talking beasts...

Haunted Writing Bureaus

Hell's Belles is out this week! And there are copies going out to people already. I've just done a long interview with Book Chick City, so that should go on her blog pretty soon. Mark at the King's Theatre and Theatre Royal in Glasgow has just written to tell me that, like a Bride on her wedding night, he's holding off reading his copy, until his colleague Gillian has her own copy in her hands. Just this morning he emailed:

"I haven't started yet and it's killing me - joining a gym caused
less stress than this and that was tough!

"I have a small lacquered writing bureau, not sure what the official name
for such an item is (probably small lacquered writing bureau), and in a very Brenda and Effie way I have locked the book in it. Out of sight and out of mind - almost. I would swear the box rattles when I walk by, like Brenda's spare parts - reminding me that it's there!"

I love the idea of a writing desk haunted by the book it contains! (My friend Amanda's granda' refused to pronounce french words and so he called his bureau a 'baroo.' That's always stuck in my head.)

Speaking of spooky things - I've been really enjoying Audrey Niffenegger's 'Her Fearful Symmetry', which I started on the over-hot train home from London, in plenty of time for December's book club. It's beautifully atmospheric with all those dripping graveyard scenes. I love the characters, too - that old fella with the OCDs and those everso slightly precious twins. It's maybe taking itself a little too seriously, as a novel... I'm halfway through and really enjoying its pace and I've been nicely surprised here and there. The chapter devoted to the twins watching Stephen Moffat's Who episode, 'The Girl in the Fireplace' made me smile. That ep clearly owes something, plotwise, to Niffenegger's previous novel, 'The Time Traveller's Wife'. I thought her use of it here was witty and everso slightly spikey.

There's some lovely stuff about ghosts in Niffenegger's book. So much of what she (sometimes over-) writes rings so true.

What am I looking forward to moving on to next? I don't care much for new novels coming out at the moment. Maybe the new Stephen King. Before Christmas I want to read some more Wodehouse and Ngaio Marsh. Some more Jojo Moyes and George Mann. I want to read one of the gorgeous Persephone reissues of Dorothy Whipple. More Maureen Lee and K.M Peyton. I want to read John Dickson Carr. Yesterday I dipped into 'The Waxworks Murder' and found the first chapter very deliciously written. Stiff with atmosphere and suggestive menace. I want to get to that Junot Diaz novel that everyone was going on about a while ago. And then - as Christmas gets near - I want to read some of my anthologies of Christmas crime and ghost stories that I've been collecting up. I'm in the mood now for some festive chillers. The temperature has dropped here in Manchester and each evening J. has built us a fire. The house in the morning smells of woodsmoke, coffee and toast.

Fireworks and afternoon tea

On the very full train last night, coming back in the dark from London. We were treated to fireworks all the way home. Every town had its own displays, flaring here and there, making tired Friday commuters shout out happily as we blazed past. We were on the tilting train that takes two hours and mercifully it doesn't make me queasy anymore.

I'd had a lovely London trip, dashing here and there in less than two days, all under the new Christmas lights. One of the highlights was, of course, afternoon tea on the terrace at the top of Harrods. It was June's idea to gather us there, for a few hours of lovely talking and dainty cakes. We were joined by Katy and David - Iris and Panda respectively in our Big Finish 'Iris Wildthyme' audio series. All around us the staff we working to turn the place into the Emerald Palace from the Wizard of Oz. That somehow fitted in with our fairytalelike congregation. There was some kind of celebratory ball about to begin. We ducked out just in time - finding ourselves leaving via a yellow brick road through the parfumerie. Lots of intense and colourful chat between the four of us - stories and ideas about projects old and new.

Other things I did while I was south - a great night of Guinness and masses of chat with a gaggle of mouthy writers from my favourite mailing list in a pub on Tottenham Court road. Signing hardbacks of 'Hell's Belles' at the Headline office for my brilliant publicist Maura Brickell. Popping into Goldsboro books, as I've done for a few years running now, to sign hardbacks for the lovely David and Daniel. What a shop that is! Like a treasure trove, perfect-bound, tucked into that arcade of swanky bookshops on Cecil Court. I was paying particular attention to the bookshops round there, this time - mental note-taking for something I'm planning to write next year, if all goes well.

Yesterday I spent in a meeting in various locations all over the South Bank. A very intense and creative day indeed - and all planning another new thing, another v exciting project, and one that will take up a goodly chunk of next year. Keep me out of mischief, keep me inventing. Bliss to sit outside Pain Quotidien with milky coffee, covered in pastry crumbs, talking about writing plans, watching the river with people streaming past onto the bridge, on their way to more immediate work situations. I love this time between books and scripts, with a gap of breathing space - a tiny gap - for making new things up.

The only note of discord in the whole trip were the gobby women sitting at my table all the way down to London. Two of them, in advertising, and they couldn't shut up about work all the way there. Cudgelling their brains for slogans for a campaign - a campaign seemingly advertising some kind of legal drug for making kids behave in a particular way. I was trying to read (David Baldacci's 'The Christmas Train' - which was okay, I suppose. I fancied a Christmassy book. It wasn't bad. Just a bit swagged with research-heavy tinsel and dangling with shiny cliches.)

Fields in November

Here's two views of autumn fields in Devon. I'm still using the tiny Rowney watercolour set I was given at Christmas about 25 years ago. It folds down into nothing.

Off on my adventures again today - exciting stuff to do in London. After a successful Book Club in Mrs L's converted cellar. We enthused - almost unaninously - about 'The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society.' One of my favourite books of the year - so far. I'll not go drawing up lists till the end of the December, but Barrow and Shaffer's book has to be up there somewhere with my finds of the year (hardly a find - you can't get moved for it in bookshops. In this case it's ubiquity is earned). Now we've got the new spooky Niffenegger to absorb before our Christmas meet. It's coming on the train with me this morning, if I can get some peace between the madly loud intrusive announcements they go in for on Virgin trains to London. (Why do we need to hear about everything that the shop sells in a great long list? Why do they go to such great lengths to wind up our paranoia about not-having-the-correct-ticket? Am I sounding curmudgeonly enough yet? I'm almost of an age to be.)

Anyway - time for coffee and then braving the cold railway station with all my bags and books and stuff.

Oh - very exciting discussion last night about the possibility of our Book Club becoming a radio show in the new year. It could really even happen...! Watch this space...

Hornets opinion

Lovely email from the incomparable designer June Hudson, who's just last night listened to Doctor Who - Hornets' Nest part two: 'The Dead Shoes'... she wrote to both Tom and I and says she doesn't mind my quoting the following here:

'The second episode has arrived, and I have just finished listening to it. I had intended to listen in two parts as it is late, but I was so gripped by the narration delivered by Tom, I listened to the very end. What a yarn ! Tom's glorious voice
swooping and soaring like the elements, roaring and purring like the sea and the wind as the enchanted ballet dancer whirled away. WOW, Thats the stuff, you are incomparable Paul.
A most exciting story delivered by a Master.

'I listened to it on an old ghetto blaster, with rich bass, I bought in 1995, instead of a ticket
to Amsterdam. It is huge, with super sound, just the thing for Paul Magrs' strange and gripping yarns.'

The Box of Delights

Last night the members of my MA class were talking about a book that is a special favourite of mine: John Masefield's 'The Box of Delights'. Interesting range of reactions to it - from flat-out amazement at the jumbled incoherence of its structure; the way everything but the kitchen sink is whopped into the mix to utter enthrallment at its dreamlike lucidity.

The book is even more of a cornucopia than the 1984 TV serial - with episodes that the TV people wisely lopped off occurring every other chapter. Other people in the group loved the anarchic fantasy of it all and the way that it doesn't always add up or make sense. The point was made a couple of times that it is a fantasy story as a kid would write one... with sudden twists and changes and some plot points dropped and never resolved. It's a kind of attention deficit fantasy which reads as odd to us now, when kids' books often seem so carefully crafted for the mass market, with all the sharp corners sanded down.

Masefield was a poet, of course, and the story follows a poet's logic - as well as a child's and a dreamer's. We move swiftly from one image to a next, from Roman Centurions to stags in the forest, phoenixes and gangsters, clergymen and wolves. To me it all makes a perfect kind of sense, especially when you're in the thick of its very particular atmosphere.

It's this atmosphere that makes it, of course. The cosily snowed-in, wolf-at-the-door ambience of the best Christmassy spooky tale. Susan Cooper later borrows some of it for 'The Dark is Rising', as does Phillip Pullman in the first and best instalment of his increasingly-stodgy 'Dark Materials' sequence. I'd say CS Lewis was a reader of 'Box of Delights', too. There's a whiff of Turkish Delight in some of these chapters.

When I first reread it ten years ago I found it a bit rich and too chewy. I much preferred the telly version. This time though I loved that prose. It's a gorgeous book. I read it in the new Egmont edition, which sports a handful of Quentin Blake illustrations. I say a handful - he contributes only a very few to this most visual of kids' books. This seems a bit skimpy to me. I love Quentin Blake and I think a book's not really illustrated by him unless he has his ticklish lines scrawling all over each and every page, as he used to do with Roald Dahl's books, say.

Anyway, a lovely revisit, this. Just in time for the approach to Christmas and the annual weekly re-viewing of the dvd. I fondly imagined a lovely sequel last night. One featuring Maria, the proto-feminist cousin to the hero Kay. The one who demands that Christmas in 1935 be brought up to date with pistols and gangsters and pirates. Wouldn't it be great to have a story with her as an orphaned teenager in the Blitz and the Box of Delights finding its way into her vengeful possession? We wondered last night whether the Box represents a portable version of Alice's rabbit hole... or whether it's a Pandora's Box. It'd be fun to explore that in a darker world, set five or ten years after Masefield's fantasy.

Are Brenda and Effie too obscure and parochial for the rest of the world..?

Would no one in the States or Europe or anywhere else around the world care for the adventures of my spooky investigator ladies? This is the message that's been passed back to me. Even in a world obsessed with vampire stories and zombie stories, no one wants to hear about the supernatural ladies of Whitby, on the North East Coast of England, the site of course of Dracula's first arrival on these shores.

So, is it true? Does a touch of local colouring and legend put people abroad off? Does the 'very British humour' and 'macabre joie-de-vivre' not really translate?

Here's a nice review from a US-based review site, specialising in paranormal romance and spooky mysteries: http://www.bookchickcity.com/2009/10/book-review-conjugal-rites-by-paul.html

I love Book Chick City, and rely on her recommendations for the strange and mysterious and series I haven't found yet.

(Another lovely review - UK-based this time) is on Simon Savidge's site: http://savidgereads.wordpress.com/2009/10/31/conjugal-rites-paul-magrs/

So what do you think? What should I do? Set something in California, suddenly?

I'm reminded of when I first started publishing novels and my first few were set in County Durham. Then, when I set something in London I was told: 'Oh, that's good. You're maturing now.' Aaagghhh!

I just posted on facebook and twitter a bit about my predicament. The brilliant Gothic specialist, Catherine Spooner came straight back with: "It's just occurred to me that the U.S. is the *home* of regional writing, it's a major part of their literary tradition! " Which is true! Where would I be without the gorgeous low-demotic of Carson McCullers and Truman Capote?

Also, novelist Mark Clapham points out: "That's really weird, as most books I've seen which touch on similar things like The List of Seven (Conan Doyle, Whitby) or Newman's Anno Dracula books (various fictional horror characters) have had BETTER distribution in the US than over here..." Which makes me feel a bit less obscure in mining out this seam...

and here comes Tavis Ryan King with the very pithy comment: "I'm American and I freaking love those girls. I would have given my right arm for a book like that in High School before I jumped ship for the UK."

Oh! Illustration above comes from the blog of Sorrel Sparks (http://sorrelratbagsparks.blogspot.com/) who I don't know, but I think is brilliant. Especially her imagining of Brenda and Effie.

So tell me! Should I put my efforts elsewhere if I want to sell abroad..? What do you think?

Maggie Craig by Marie Joseph

Marie Joseph was who my Mam read when she ran out of Catherine Cooksons. This was in the late Seventies, early Eighties. Her novels are set in West Yorkshire and East Lancashire. Characters are heard to mutter darkly about those who live in Todmorden.

So there are touches of DH Lawrence, as there are with Cookson. Kids playing out in the streets, mothers slaving in sculleries, fellas boozed up and raging in tiny sitting rooms. There are also Gothic touches here, too: Maggie Craig's father's despair and how he cuts his own throat when her back is turned. The tiny wizened evil woman who leaps out of her bed to strangle our heroine on a stormy night. And the Brontesque feature of how just about every character at some point suffers with a fever or the flu and staggers about on the cobbles or round the shops for a delirious chapter or so.

It's another Seventies book set in Edwardian times, rehearsing once again the lives of ordinary working class people as mapped against the events and the aftermath of the Great War. I have this idea that people learned this history in the Seventies from novels like this and TV shows like 'Upstairs Downstairs' and 'When the Boat Comes In.' I certainly did, as a kid.

Marie Joseph gives us the feeling of the time really well, I think. We've got a stroppy heroine, glamourous in all the muck of her town, and she makes her predicament central and believable. There are little touches that ring true - the details of food (cod head stuffed with bacon bits begged off the butcher) and things like the kids going to school with rags pinned to their pinafores, for wiping clean their slates. The close confines, darkness and muck are so well captured. She puts us right inside those deep, dark valleys by Todmorden and Hebden bridge.

She even does her scenes in the trenches of WW1really well, with Maggie's lost love Joe Barton being in the thick of all that horror. When he's invalided out there's an incredibly touching scene in which a nurse gives him a newborn baby to look after, following its mother's demise. It's a lovely piece of writing, filled with tenderness. Joe lies with the baby tucked into his side and his pent-up composure cracks at last.

Then, of course, the baby turns out to be the very thing that brings Maggie back to her one-time lover, in a bit of plotting and coincidental magic that I don't think even I would try to pull off. But it works nevertheless and the book keeps us guessing right until the very last line, whether love will win the day.

Only thing I'm not at all sure about is the treatment of Maggie's husband - the 'soft, flabby. womanish' fella she marries once her lover has gone. Kit Carmichael is obviously gay and everything in the time and place mitigates against him. At first it seems Marie Joseph is approaching his story with compassion and understanding, showing a thwarted and brave soul, making the most of things and loving Maggie as he can. But because of the clunky demands of what is in the end a Romance novel, his uselessness has to be constrasted sharply with the desirability of the virile and very straight Joe. In both Edwardian times and popular fiction of the late 1970s, it seems there was no other way for Kit to be portrayed, other than an emasculated 'mummy's boy.' It's made me wonder about hunting out a good novel that deals properly with Edwardian working class gay life. Any ideas? It'd be fun to turn 'Maggie Craig' or its like on its head and write it from Kit's point of view. Has it been done yet? It must have, surely...?

'Twelve Stories' is published!

November the second sees the publication of my second collection of short fiction, 'Twelve Stories" from Salt books (saltpublishing.com). This book's been a long time in the coming and I'm so glad it's here at last and that the lovely people at Salt have believed in it.

Twelve years ago I published my first collection, "Playing Out" with Vintage, somewhere between my first and second novels. The short story is something I really believe in; something very important to me. One of my favourite kind of commissions, when someone asks for one, out of the blue, with a quick turnaround and a quirky brief.

I hope you'll all buy and enjoy the collection! Let me know what you think.

I thought - to celebrate on my blog, I'd present a story that isn't in the book. The thirteenth story in "Twelve Stories". Here it is:


Karlotte at the Colette-Willy

by Paul Magrs ((C) 1999)


While Karlotte took the floor, Ma Baumgarten sat like a mandarin at her favourite table, surrounded by her lady friends. Karlotte hopped and bobbed in the spotlight, sporting a red crepe dress with puffed sleeves and a Spanish-style hat. She grinned as she sang, sometimes cracking out in laughter at herself. After every song she said, “That went well! I haven't sung that one before.'

Ma Baumgarten knew this wasn't right. Karlotte's programmer - the thin white man working the disk machine - had a list of all the songs Karlotte could sing. He passed a menu of songs around the bar. The audience was small that night when she started her act: just Ma Baumgarten and her friends. Most nights it was just them: the Collette-Willy was almost a private club. It was Ma's own living room.

Ma clapped her large hands close to her face and spoke out between songs. She would give her opinion of the performance or describe the memories the music brought back to her. Her voice was rather gravely, carrying across the space of her club. Everyone listened. She faced away from her table, staring across the room to watch Karlotte. Kites and festoons of ribbon, tinsel, baubles hung from the ceiling: green, gold and crimson.

This evening Ma Baumgarten wore sea green. An aqua kimono with looped necklaces of jet. Her hair was green, too, scraped back into a bun. Hardly any make-up. She wanted to look like a kabuki actor with her high, primped eyebrows and her unreadable expression.

She was an Empress, clicking her fingers, making everyone listen. Having a photo taken of us, at our own table, while we sat there. The five of us had just arrived as Karlotte began her act. “I have your picture now,' Ma told us. Sinister - when she quelled our laughter and our singing along. Silenced us with a glance; a twist of her mouth. We wanted pink champagne - she snapped her fingers and it was done.

Karlotte came to sit at our table. Someone told her I was a writer and she wanted me to write the story of her life.

“It is a long and difficult story, for people have been so horrible to me, especially here in Koln. People are so cruel and they don't even know it. But I suffer - in here, inside, since I was a little girl. I am eighty now, and I was a little girl who never wanted the things that people want. I never wanted a man or the kiddies. I wanted to dance and to sing for people.

“I have fallen in love so many times. Sometimes men come, they say they loved me and I let them. Then they leave me and I have to take care of me. I have no one.'

“But here,' I said stupidly, “at the Colette-Willy, it's such a friendly place. Everyone is like a family, together, laughing.'

“This is the only place in Koln that is nice. There are nasty people in this city, who have been horrible to me. The women are the worst, if they think you are a star. But not a star up there, big enough for them to respect. If you are a star just down here they will hate you.

“You think I am happy when I am singing? Did I look happy?'

Karlotte signed the CD we bought from her bag. She wrote with a
silver pen over the laser-copied picture of herself, and put her
address inside. She asked when we would phone, when I would start to write her book.

The others were saying we would never get out of Ma Baumgarten's club. Someone surmised that we had died on the street outside the pasta restaurant earlier that evening. We had all died under a tram without realising it. We had drifted off like spectres in Cologne and ended up here, in the Colette-Willy, in a kind of heaven.

We flung up our hands for encores. Brava!

When I said that this opulent bar was a friendly place I saw Karlotte's eyes flicker. She glanced at Ma Baumgarten. She didn't know how much she could or couldn't say.

I went behind the silver stage, the crushed velvet curtains, the statuettes. I found costumes hanging up. In the lav there were cabinets of crockery, all mismatched.

*

Dear Boys,

First of all I would like to excuse me for writing you so late. Time was going on and you know it certainly by yourselves... tomorrow, tomorrow...

Now my opinion to the idea of writing and sending you my autobiography.

I'm sorry but honestly it would be too difficult for me to do it alone without your presence. Unfortunately my English is not as well as it should be and if you were here in Koln more often I see a possibility of success. It is a pity but this is reality and I hope that you'll understand me!

The wonderful evening we passed together in Frau Ma's establishment was for me unforgettable and I would be happy to know when you could come again. My next show will be the 21st of December. Therefore I enclose you a leaflet about my presentation. You will see me as an angel with wings.

Please, boys, can I await a soon answer from you? I hope you are well in every way. That means: health, success and love! I am also well but there are still some wishes open concerning my singing. I told you already last time that without a manager it is extremely difficult to find opportunities for engagements, above all in Koln.

All my life I have left cities, all in the war and now. This is a real problem for me! Nevertheless I will sing in spite of all!!
So, my dear friends, I'll finish this letter wishing you the best of the best with all my heart.

yours,

Karlotte.

K.M Peyton and Nick Sharman

This week I rediscovered K.M Peyton's Flambards. It was among the many elderly Puffins I've snaffled from second hand and charity shops over recent years. I read my Mam's copy in 1979, when we both used to watch the Yorkshire Television adaptation of all four books in the series.

This time the book took up a long train journey and I loved it all over again. We're in the years before WW1 and it's an orphan story, with 12 year old Cristina being sent to live at crumbling Flambards, with a monstrous uncle and two cousins - one brutish and one sensitive and obsessed with messing about with proto-aeroplanes. There's lots about hunting and riding and horses and I guess these were the things that gave me a mild aversion to going back into Peyton's books. But she writes about these things so beautifully. The fate of Christina's first horse Sweetbriar is extremely dramatic and involving. The girl's horror at the idea of these creatures being fed to the dogs once they've lost their usefulness is something I found had stuck with me for thirty years.

Nick Sharman's "The Cats" was my Hallowe'en read. I've been saving up a pile of these "Animals Attack" books for a while. They're all "...in the tradition of James Herberts' The Rats''and were published shortly after his bloodthirsty and episodic classic. (I do! I really think it's a modern classic!) The Cats is pretty poor on many levels. Like many lesser horror novels of its period it skimps where it should fill in some background stuff on the characters. What makes Stephen King and (sometimes) James Herbert great is their willingness to sketch in a living backstory for characters that they're going to kill off five pages later. I used to love that as a kid, and still do now - the way they make these doomed cameos so vivid.

There are a few sparks of life in Sharman's book - the bullied kid who sort-of becomes infused by the malign will of the cats and leads them on their killing spree. The american politico who tries to make peace - too late - with his son, who turns out to be responsible for the plague that has turned all of the cats in London kill-crazy. There are even some marvellously Sweeney-like moments:

""Listen to me, for God's sake. I've had enough of this big, important MP crap. I'm not interested in you or your damn influence. I am interested in the three hundred people lying dead in the morgue this evening on account of the cats. I need to see your son and I'm going to see him,' his teeth clenched together in a grimace that frightened Dempsey, 'even if I have to punch your stupid head in to do it. GET ME?""

It belongs to a genre that the fanzine 'Paperback Fanatic' and the blog, 'Groovy Age of Horror' reminded me about some time last year. It's a very Seventies thing. Very Jaws, very Rats. Natures wreaking revenge, and so on. Only the tiniest hint of the supernatural. A hint of polyester about it all.

Anyone else still read these? Anyone still read K.M Peyton..?