Haunted Hogmanay and Right, Ho Jeeves

Perfect reading for New Year's Eve blues: a bit of Jeeves and Wooster and some ghost stories. 'Haunting Christmas Tales' is a Scholastic anthology from 1991. Right about that time I think I was bemoaning the fact that the great era of Puffins was more or less gone. Immersed in Susan Cooper and Alan Garner and revisiting other kids' spooky fantasy books of the Seventies, I really wanted to know that there were still such things being published in the Nineties. Later on I knew about Goosebumps and Point Horror, because my sister Louise loved those books. They were pretty entertaining - if bland and repetitive and completely american, of course. What I never knew was that Scholastic got together a whole set of British kids' writers in anthologies such as 'Haunting Christmas Tales'. People like Garry Kilworth (who, elsewhere, published one of my favourite short stories ever), Joan Aiken (actually, ditto), Jill Bennett and Susan Price. For the past couple of years I've reread 'Mysterious Christmas Tales', a collection with more or less the same people contributing. Last year I found the present volume - the highlight of which for me is, I think, David Belbin's 'The Investigators' - about a boy away at college, making friends with a pair of paranormal researchers.

All of these stories conjure very real worlds of electricity-free cottages in the middle of the countryside, tower blocks and fish and chip shops, comprehensive schools and misty bus rides home. They're all contemporary-feeling, but with a very strong sense of the Victorian, Edwardian eras... or the period between the wars... because there are figures from those times who come haunting the narrators of these tales. It's a wonderful book and - of course - mostly unavailable now, outside of Amazon Used-and-New, Ebay, etc. I feel like I've found a kind of junior version of the Fontana Books or Horror from twenty years earlier. Just enough to read in a single day - that's what's perfect about these. I find those gallumphing Mammoth anthologies of horror stories, etc far too big and unwieldy. Also, those 'best of' kind of books don't have stories written especially for the occasion. With these Scholastic books, you know that this is the story's first time out in the world. Almost twenty years after publication, this collection feels very fresh. Evergreen.

I discovered there was a third: 'Creepy Christmas Tales', in 1992. So that's on order. I know, I know - this is right before my No More New Books year begins.

Back to Jeeves and Wooster which, you'll be glad to know, is an elderly Penguin from the Sixties, which has been waiting patiently on my study shelves.

Can you believe I even avoided going to the Borders closing down sales? I went in briefly but it was all too much like a jumble sale. Luckily, I was tempted not in the least to Buy More New Books.

Turn of the Screw last night on BBC 1. Was it me, or was everything spelled out a bit too much? I love Sue Johnston in anything: she made it watchable. But it was another adaptation that was all pretty pictures and bugger all else. I liked the warning at the start that tonight's Henry James adaptation would feature scenes of a sexual nature. Turn of the Screw with actual screwing, as it were.

Best Christmas Telly

We had a lovely Christmas - with family visiting and a houseful for our party on the 28th. In the bits when I wasn't going from room to room with plates of nibbles or popping corks or wrapping or unwrapping presents I was watching telly. There was quite a lot to get through - I'm quite systematic with the Radio Times. There were some hideous disappointments of course - including a horrible Christmas Day Corrie. Why do they feel the need to turn themselves into Eastenders? I'd love to sit down the people responsible with a disc of Christmas 1965 on the street. I think that was the one with the whole cast doing a pantomime for the kids - or maybe it was the one with Stan Ogden wrestling the Masked Marvel while Annie and Ena drink the Rovers dry of sherry, burying the hatchet at last?

The Triffids adaptation was a waste of time, of course, as many people have pointed out. What is it with BBC and ITV? Do these producers only have about three or four books on their shelves? Can they only do stuff that's been done before? Are they that convinced that the public will only put up with stuff that THEY ALREADY KNOW? That's how it seems to go. All these endless remakes and overhaulings of familiar stuff. Umpteen Wuthering Heights and Jane Eyres. Endless Returns to and Reruns of.

The Triffids looked marvellous. Like venomous aloe vera. But there was no need to augment Wyndham's novels with new material. And what was all that voodoo innoculation rubbish at the end? It was magic, pure and simple. I usually love a touch of the supernatural... but not in John Wyndham. It just seemed an awful betrayal of his book.

I'll not talk about Doctor Who until the second part's been on, I think. So far it seems like a remake of the 1996 TV Movie with Paul Mcgann. I so wanted less to be happening. I wanted it to be about Bernard Cribbins and his pensioners dashing around London, trying to prevent the satanic rite in the prison that would bring the Master back to life. That's enough story for me, frankly.

Anyway - the triumphs.

Just recently I was saying Jeanette Winterson's recent novels have disappointed me. As a long-term reader of hers I was feeling out of touch and disgruntled. But Christmas Day morning there was 'Ingenious' - an hour long kids' drama set in Cheshire, in the shadow of Jodrell Bank. With this tale of an arabian genie and a dragon and una stubbs as a retired witch, she won me over all over again. It was a proper old fashioned kids' drama. It has to be a pilot. I can't bear it if it's a one-off. C'mon, there's a series, isn't there? There must be. We need to know! The episode was credited as being 'created' as well as written by Jeanette, so here's hoping it's a franchise in the making. In so many ways it was more Doctor Who than Doctor Who was. And Una Stubbs is a saint, in a quietly pent-up with anguish kind of way.

My other favourite TV thing - which I've waited yonks to see - the HBO movie of 'Grey Gardens' with Drew Barrymore and Jessica Lange. I love the 1975 documentary about Jackie O's bonkers aunt and cousin. It's an eye-popping experience, first seeing that film. It's the definition of tragicamp. This new film - slipping the backstory and afterstory through the making of the documentary film is sublime. It's a beautifully made and acted piece of work. A labour of love, you can tell.

On radio I loved Radio 4's 'Someone Like You' - yet another retelling of five of Roald Dahl's 'Tales of the Unexpected'. As if they needed them. But again, it's SOMETHING WE'VE HEARD OF. But they were made very nicely - Charles Dance and weird Mantovani chillout theme and all. But why couldn't it have been five stories by R Cheywynd Hayes or Rosemary Timperley? Is it because NO ONE WILL HAVE HEARD OF THEM? And that would scare the producers and the commissioning people?

Gimme something I've never heard of. Make me fall in love with something new. Some of the old stuff is great but I hate the idea that people assume we're all middlebrow, cretinous and timid in our choices.

Though - if we're gonna have old stuff remixed and remade over Christmas... I wish Doctor Who had been about the triffids fighting dinosaurs and daleks on the streets of London on Christmas Day. That'd have been fun. Chap with tendrils, Sergeant Benton...!

The Christmas Hoover

I think that, round ours, we're cursed with hoovers. We're doomed with them. We seem to buy at least one a year. In comes the new one, full of promise. Its ailing elders sit around the house and they've seen it all before. They're looped in tubing and festooned with leads. What are they hoping for? That we'll plug them in and we'll give them another go? Maybe a rest will have restored them to maximum suck?

J.'s just destroyed our most recent model. No, it's the one before the one before last. The one that languished in the over-crowded cellar for a while. We should have known it couldn't be relied upon. But we pressganged the poor thing back into service. Sure enough, Christmas Eve lunchtime - getting the house prepared for the fun to come - there's a terrible scene. J. loses his temper and hoys the hoover out the front door. Now he's out there smashing it into splinters, on the very spot he chops up firewood.

Now the hoover's shattered and lying in pieces on the drive. Its dusty, fluffy, cat-hairy innards lie exposed in the snow. The brown paper bag of its heart has collapsed.

Out went the Dyson, several months ago. The orange thing that's supposed to swoosh hot soapy water about - that's even less cop. What it did really well was produced gallons of fermented, gunky soup.

In a wild and wonderful Christmas story the hoover would lie outside now on the ice and slush of our front path. It would lie there all day as the light faded. It would leak some lint and bits of fluff and try not to despair too much. At midnight tonight there would be a visitation by some kind of household appliance fairy. The whole thing would be observed by the various snowmen, Santas and Christmas ducks on our tree in the dining room. They had witnessed the whole atrocity that followed when the hoover had coughed and choked and sucked his last.

The Christmas toys and baubles would watch the Appliance Fairy bringing the hoover back to life. The hoover would be like Cinderella submitting to the ministrations of her Godmother. He'd gaze down at himself. He'd pull himself together with hardly any effort. Pulsating and glowing. His various panels would click into place around his fully-functioning and now decongested parts. His cables and tubing flash out like lasoos. Easily, with no snarling or tangling for the first time ever. Now it's time to set off and fly about the rooftops of Manchester. The snow's been bad. He could suck up the excessive drifting and leave just enough snow to keep the place decorative.

I told J: 'That's what I'll write. My Christmas Story this year will be about our hoover and how you knacked it. I *was* going to write a proper ghost story. I was going to write about that story my Mam told me on the phone the other night. About the guitar she and her twin were given by my Big Nanna when they were thirteen. The guitar that had mysteriously played itself in the night. But I'll hold that over for now and write the Christmas Hoover story instead and you'll be the big bad villain who reduced it to smithereens on Christmas Eve...'

He shrugged like he couldn't care less about the hoover. He was thinking about new hoovers. Thinking about the Sales to come on Boxing Day and everyone going bonkers in the Trafford Centre. The new appliances nervously waiting in showrooms and the pushing and shoving of the queues. Well, I can't stand sales these days, personally, so maybe I'll stay home in the half-vacuumed house.

Tonight I reckon that the Christmas Hoover will sweep up over Levenshume and Fallowfield and up Victoria Park. It'll soar over the towers of the Palace Hotel and the Town Hall and across the dome of the Central Library. It'll swing about the Arndale Centre, now miraculously empty of shoppers and then it'll swoosh up the frozen canals. Startling geese and - what was it Alicia saw by the canal yesterday? - the ocasional heron. Then up and down the neon bunting of the Curry Mile and the crisp blankness of Platt Fields park. Chugging along on its tiny motor. Not clapped out yet. Through the wintry clouds: our hoover moonlighting far away from home. Longer than any lead would stretch. He'll be turning end over end. No one to push him around. Deciding where he wants to go for himself.

I'm not sure where he'll end up in the early hours. Snowmen melt, don't they? Reindeer return to their stables in the far north. Fairies dissipate in a shower of tinsel. I reckon our hoover will come shuffling back up the gravel of our front garden in the dark hours before dawn. He'll know the house has loads of broken things that might yet get mended. He'll sit by the door on Christmas morning and cough politely and hopefully.

Klee's Little Pine Tree

These are two of my favourite Christmas paintings: they're on the wall of my study all year round - Paul Klee's 'The Little Pine Tree' from 1922 and 'Snowballing at Stenico Castle' dated 1400. They were both Christmas cards a few years ago and for some reason I like the combination of the two.

The snow came down again last night. J. went out at midnight to take photos of the streets of Levenshulme and the sky looked green. We'd had an afternoon in town with Alicia - having lunch in one of my favourite Northern Quarter cafes, Teacup (formerly Cup - I think I preferred it when it was less smartened up...) Lots of slip-sliding about on the impacted ice.

Still not buying books...! But I'm going to be doing some reviewing again. The grumpy postman just brought two parcels to our door. More on this later. J. says I've found a way round my No More New Books resolution... hmmm. But I'm looking forward to these new proofs in the post.

So... we've got everything we need, I think. The fridge and cupboards are stocked up. There's a huge turkey in the fridge and a wallopping leg of lamb in the freezer (Last night's Radio4 adaptation of 'Lamb to the Slaughter' top notch, by the way. PLEASE next year - following M.R James and Dahl - could we have another series? Anyway, why isn't it more regular? What happened to Radio4's wonderful 'Fear on Four'? I must dig those episodes out. When did that stop..?)

It's Christmas Eve and we're all set, I think.

I hope I'll post again between now and then - if not - Happy Christmas, everyone. It's been a quick-quick-slow shakey-up kind of year round here. There's been disasters and fall-outs and dramas and unbelievable stuff. But there's been a lot of laughs and loads of work, and making up brand new stuff, and favourite characters returning and some modest triumphs too, I reckon. Like any Soap worth its salt. (I'm reviewing the year - I shouldn't be - that should be next week, shouldn't it?) I think it's Marc Almond singing 'Say hello, wave Goodbye' on Stuart's sublime Spotify list just now - that's put me in a reflective mood. Get the Carols back on!

Christmas Viewing has started...

Last night we watched four of the annual Christmas-episodes-of-things. It used to be Christmas Eve, but there's so many of the things to get through now...

THE REAL CHRISTMAS SHOW. Gaby Roslin's video diary programme from 1996, covering Christmas for a group of different families. This gets more brilliant by the year. Thirteen years on, even the awfulness and toe-curling embarrassment of some moments have gained a pathos. And I'm convinced I saw that scouse woman on the plane to Portugal this summer. I keep revisiting this show each year and it's like a bunch of old friends - like a kind of festive GHOSTWATCH.

K9 AND COMPANY. The 1981 pilot for a show that didn't happen until twenty six years later. This is ropey in so many ways, but I love it. That magical moment when Sarah helps K9 out of the crate, where he's waited for years. The fact that he has to do battle with ordnance survey maps and a snotty public schoolboy, and satanist market gardeners as soon as he comes to life. Interesting to see how snappy and twitchy Sarah is all the way through this - and how other characters comment on her touchiness. The simpering, satin-clad hermaphrodite Juno who lives in a nearby cottage and is the obvious, sheeny red herring all the way through is a marvellous creation. They should bring her back these days, I think. This episode's at its best when it's closest to being the Wicker Man, featuring a cross journalist in mohair, a robot dog and sundry sly rustics.

THE BOX OF DELIGHTS ep 2. We're behind this year. Usually we watch an episode a week, leading up to Christmas. We should be coming to the end - but episode 2 is fun, anyway. It's the long animated sequence when Kay opens the box and Herne the Hunter asks him to come and run in the wild forest with him. They turn into deer and ducks and trout. The same series of transformations appears in both 'The Sword in the Stone' and 'The Dark is Rising.' Anyone know the source of this? The old magician mentor takes his apprentice on a swift run of changes?

CHRISTMAS SPIRITS. This is a 1983 ITV Ghost Story for Christmas written by Willis Hall. Faded aristos trying to hire out their haunted mansion to a film company as a location. Location scout gets stuck in house on Christmas Eve and gets driven batty by the spirits of murderous children. Obviously spurred on by the brilliant BBC Christmas Ghost Tales - ITV decided to have a stab at the genre one year. Hmmm... let's hire Elaine Stritch. The whole thing is wonderful and demented. I love the spectacle of Stritch racketing up and down the set, clutching the banisters and shrieking like a chainsmoking banshee - especially when Stephanie Cole hovers round her.

That's our first night of Christmas watching... by a crackling log fire - crackling old VHS and ancient studio-bound drama...

The other thing last night was the second episode of Radio4's 'Someone Like You' - five radio adaptations of classic Roald Dahl stories. They are done really, really well. Last night was 'Skin', which has never been creepier. Well done to whoever made them!

Novels in the Nineties

Having made my list, the other day, of favourite novels of the decade - one per year - I promised I'd do the same for the Nineties, didn't I? And, when I said it, I imagined my list would be chilly and bleak - which, for some reason, is how I remember fiction from that decade. But I was wrong! Here they are:

1990 The Passion - Jeanette Winterson.

(I read everything of hers on first publication until, I think, 'Lighthousekeeping.' I've been through so many phases with Jeanette W. Adoration of those first three or so novels, when she couldn't do wrong in my eyes. Even neglecting to have a story or losing track of who her narrator was and blaming it all on spirals, on fairy tales, blaming it on the boogie, whatever. I loved it all. I even passionately defended her when others jeered at 'Art Objects' or 'Art and Lies' or her Fitness Book. But gradually she's faded away for me. The brilliant critic Paulina Palmer tried to talk me round 'The Powerbook' over dinner at the Gothic conference last July, but I still couldn't learn to love that book. When she's good Jeanette is incandescent. When she's bad... it's like she's printed off twenty half finished short stories from her hard drive and tossed them together. She's found a / the canny conceit to link them.

Oh, look. That sounds carping. I love Jeanette! This will be a top ten of novelists I loved in the Nineties. And still love. But it's having affairs, isn't it, reading novels? You're in and out of love like you are luxury hotels. I've carried her books around with me, I've flung them from me, as far as they can go. That's what being someone's reader is like. I'll go back to her. I will! I'll catch up again!)

1991 Wise Children - Angela Carter. I applied for funding for my Phd on Carter about two months before she died. It was a weird time, because she was coming to life for me, so wonderfully, so completely on the page. When I read 'Wise Children' it was during my Creative Writing MA and it was amazing to read someone doing a low comic turn - a cockney voice - the raucous low demotic - and using it to talk about life, art, theory, society, culture. All the things a voice like that ain't supposed to know about. The book's a glorious kick up the arse for supposed high culture. It's a punch up the hooter. Angela Carter was such a big part of my reading, studying, thinking, writing life for a number of years afterwards.

1992 Saint Maybe - Anne Tyler. Which I've written about somewhere else on this blog. Carter and Winterson were my twin goddesses of intellectual glamour in the Nineties. For flashiness and blinding wit and fan-dances with wolves. Anne Tyler was my antidote to showy excess and in-your-face cleverness. She's subtle and unassuming. She later became a worldwide phenomenon and people started reading her in earnest, giving the kudos she deserved. 'Saint Maybe' was the one I loved the best. She's got the lightest of touches. She hides all of her working-out miraculously. She writes about embarrassment, obligation and the way families invent their own mythologies. Not flashy, fashionable subjects. And it's been an era that praises fiction that gets overwrought and revels in its own conspicuous effort... I'm glad Anne Tyler's still doing what she does.


1993 Maybe the Moon - Armistead Maupin. I'm writing too much about each book. I need to quicken this up. One of my favourite novels ever. Another one that I've reread a lot. My friend Alicia and I went to see him read it in a smart hotel's literary lunch on Deansgate in Manchester in 1993. We had to share round tables with strangers, like at a wedding, and eat prawns and melon balls sprinkled with nutmeg. I remember he read brilliantly, though he must have done it a thousand times on that tour. We had our book signed and I marvelled at the idea of sitting there, signing new hardbacks for people who couldn't wait to take them home to gobble up. The novel is a wonder. A showbiz midget's raucous fairy tale. And again, much, much cleverer and subtle than anyone would give it credit for. Because it's popular and funny and the midget has a dirty mouth.


1994 The Lights of Manchester by Tony Warren. The first novel by Coronation Street's creator. A hefty saga, brimming with melodrama and fondness for its teeming cast of characters. I sat agog all one Christmas with this. He did three more, partially linked to this, by theme and / or characters. It was like he was building a Manc Tales of the City. With hints of Howard Spring and Masie Mosco.


1995 Anne Tyler again - 'Ladder of Years.' I was sent it for free, which made it even nicer. In 1995 I sold my first novel and it was to Chatto and Windus, and in paperback to Vintage. So that meant I was sharing a publisher and catalogue space with Winterson, Carter and Anne Tyler. 'Ladder of Years' came out just after I'd signed the contract for 'Marked for Life.' My editor sent me it as a gift, as I worked on my copy-edits. (It was all so quick! Bought in April - out in November!) It was a strange time, really. I'd been reading this stuff. Now I was amongst it. Weird being in that Chatto catalogue - with the Angela Carter-painted cover - to be in there with AS Byatt, Iris Murdoch, and all these grand dames. It felt reachable, somehow. Tangible.


1996 Got to choose two, sorry. Georgina Hammick's 'The Arizona Game' and Patricia Duncker's 'Hallucinating Foucault.'

1997 'My Silver Shoes' by Nell Dunn

1998 'The Object of my Affection' by Stephen McCauley

1999 'The Hours' by Michael Cunningham

So it was in the Nineties that I really discovered what it was I liked to read and explore. This, through a process of reading everything I could get hold of. I read quite a few stinkers to get there. But I found I loved formally quite complicated books - but ones that somehow hid that fact: they made their complexity seem inevitable, as if rising out of the circumstances and demands of their characters' lives. The immediacy of the characters' voices was what hid the book's scaffolding, so carefully, so apparently easily. I loved books about women of a certain age and gay men. I loved magical realism, outrageous fantasy - but wonderfully observed realism, too. I loved these things all jammed together. I loved ensemble casts. Rollicking tales that intertwine. I love jokes and ludicrous anecdotes. I still can't see why so many novels are po-faced.

Tha's my list, anyway, for the last decade but one. That's two lists covering twenty years I've given you! What do you think?

Christmas with Liberace, Disney, Buckaroo

Lovely dinner guests round here on Saturday - a night with games of Buckaroo and Kerplunk and J. digging out the old vinyl - Christmas with Liberace and a Disney album that, it turned out, almost everyone present had a copy of as a child. The Ronco one with the poorly-drawn cover.

We're loving the snow here in Levenshulme still. It ushered in the festive season proper this weekend. We've braved the crowds in the foodhall at M+S and the Trafford Centre going bonkers on the last Sunday before Christmas.

I loved the ending of George Selden's 'The Cricket in Time Square' and, doing a little light research, was delighted to find there were a number of sequels. He writes with such warmth, compassion and atmosphere. Why don't we know of him in the UK at all? The Puffin copy I've got dates from the Sixties and I don't think he's currently in print here. He seems like a glaring omission. How come there was no big Disney movie - in the Seventies, say - some time around The Fox and the Hound?

Anyway - the Christmas reading goes on! I'm now reading George Mann again. I'm devouring the first of his Newbury and Hobbes novels, 'The Affinity Bridge' and am just ready for that cosy steampunk atmosphere - crashed zeppelins and glowing blue policemen and all...

I'm right between projects now, on the writing front! I've paused halfway through one top secret project and have delivered to my agent. Then on January the first I start another top secret project. Day one, page one, that'll be. But now's the lovely time inbetween. The way my writing works these days, commuting from one project to another is like going to stay with different sets of old friends. The small lulls between are regathering thoughts en route and biding time quite pleasantly on the train. Watching the snowy landscape, chewing toffees. Imagining the adventures to come.

Was it just me or was the Cranford TV special a bit miserable last night? Deaths in childbirth and people keeling over all over the place? I'd been looking forward to going back and revisiting that world... and it was good - it was very good - but it was taking itself very seriously, though. I mean, really, at Christmas I kind of want TV dramas to be a bit light and festive and silly.

Here's a piece from the news this morning. Here's a pantomime I'd have liked to have been at:

"Singer Amy Winehouse is facing a police investigation for allegedly lashing out at a theatre manager after subjecting panto actors to a stream of abuse.

"The troubled star is said to have disrupted a performance of Cinderella on Saturday night by heckling the cast.

"She is later alleged to have launched a physical attack on a member of staff at the theatre in Milton Keynes, Buckinghamshire.

"The Back to Black singer was said to have shocked children and parents by shouting "He's f****** behind you" during the performance and yelling out "F****** Cinders, Prince Charming, marry me".

"Refusing to sit down, she also branded the Ugly Sisters "bitches", The Sun reported."

The only other place - apart from our dinner party in Levenshulme - I'd have liked to be this Saturday night was Time Square in NYC. Have you seen those pictures of the snowball fight on the street?

Charlotte's Web and Stephanie Plum

Both SFX Magazine and the Times Literary Supplement gave Hell's Belles very nice reviews this week. The TLS reviewer says: 'The skill of the author, apart from the jokes, is to give characters taken from previous novels a real presence in addition to their supernatural one.' I think she means my habit of adopting Gothic characters from out-of-print texts and trying to bring them to life in the here and now. She also, happily, sees the link with E.F Benson's Mapp and Lucia, which I was very chuffed about.

Here's a nice piece of mail that highlights a real problem though...

"hello Paul
just wanted to let you know, that i've had a right game trying to get hold of hells belles ! I'm in the midlands area and have been to book shops in Merry hill, Brum, Wolverhampton and Walsall !!!

in the end ive had to go to Amazon

i'm desperate to get my hands on it and def hope its here for christmas

your books are amazing, your imagination amazing, your storytelling captivating

thank you and merry christmas

Rach x"

Hope Rach doesn't mind me reprinting! But any post to me is in danger of ending up on my blog... She brings up a pet peeve - the stocking of my books in bookshops. All I can do is tell people to keep asking them to order them in! They'll get them for you. These shops just need a bit more encouragement to restock me on the shelves and to get me in those ubiquitous three-for-two piles. So, keep badgering them, everyone.

Okay - Christmas reading is going on apace.

Why did no one ever tell me I HAD to read Janet Evanovich? The first in her Stephanie Plum series, 'One for the Money' has been sitting on my shelves for years. I had a feeling it would be too hard-boiled or butch, somehow. But I loved it! This hapless, gung-ho New Jersey broad with her beat-up car and her determination to become a bounty hunter. The whole thing is wonderfully plotted and sparky with one-liners and some fantastic set-pieces and twists. LOVED IT. Now I want more. There's fifteen, isn't there? I love all her secondary characters. The gruff Grandma in her lime green shorts and sexy Joe Morelli, the man she's ostensibly hunting... Why did no one insist I read it? Why didn't I read this when it came out, fifteen years ago?

But then I guess it's all a process of ambling along, making up our own reading lives. Sometimes taking recommendations, sometimes not - depending on the fervour and the person giving them. Sometimes things pass us by completely and we let them, thinking they mustn't be our kind of thing: they're the wrong genre, the wrong type of character, the wrong picture on the cover. The wrong typeface inside. The only way of knowing is by sitting down properly and reading that first chapter. That's the only way to know whether it's your thing or not. That's what I say.

I reread 'Charlotte's Web' - again. I think there's real magic in that book. A sense of genuine, magical empathy, I love the way that the little girl, Fern, simply peels away from the story - her attention as she grows up drifting away from the barn and the pig and sitting on the stool, listening to the animals talking. That rings so true, somehow. She vanishes from the book and there's a sadness in that - but the reader is too busy being caught up with the drama of Wilbur and Charlotte and Templeton. I love these characters and revisit them often these days.

The scenes with the spider's egg sac and the very moment that the first baby spider pops up - to be followed by five hundred siblings - is very powerful. As is the bit where they parachute away in a cloud of gossamer balloons, leaving Wilbur bereft again. We had a spider exodus like this in our garden a couple of years ago. J. and I spent a whole spring afternoon watching these space stations tucked under the branches of tall garden plants simply exploding with gentle, silent WHOOMPHS. And then the air was filled with tiny spiders on missions - legs akimbo and fearless in their thousands. Geronimo! There are some photos J. took somewhere - I'll have to dig them out.

My latest love, though, is a book that came out of that random pile of ten I listed here the other day. When I was making my point about unearthed treasure in the house - and how I'm going to stop in my tracks and buy No More Books until I've explored some of what's already here. Anyway - I posted the cover of a book I knew next to nothing about - 'A Cricket in Times Square' by George Selden, from 1960. I read most of it yesterday evening and it's just wonderful. Delightful. Something - again - I wish I'd come across much earlier, so this could be a rereading. (Strange, that.) More about it soon. Anyone else know this fantastic book..?

Ten Novels of the Decade

I just realised it's the end of the decade. Funny - I think I was sickened off such turning points with the whole millenium thing. Bit of a squib, that one. Especially in Norwich, where we were living just then...

Anyway, I thought I'd try to work out my ten favourite novels of the decade. It's distorted because I've allowed myself just one book per year and some years were much better than others. Sometimes my favourite book was an old one I'd eventually gotten round to and sometimes it was non-fiction. But here are the novels, anyway - one per year through this pretty tumultuous decade:


2000: Chocolat - Joanne Harris.
2001 - Kavalier and Clay - Michael Chabon
2002 - Carnevale - M R Lovric
2003 - Dancer - Colum McCann
2004 - Shadow of the Wind - Carlos Ruiz Zafon
2005 - Mr Starlight - Laurie Graham
2006 - Hot to Trot - Lou Wakefield
2007 - The Woman on the Fifth - Douglas Kennedy
2008 - The Palace of Strange Girls - Sallie Day
2009 - The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society - Marie Schaffer and Annie Barrows

So... I like epic stories set over decades, or decades ago... with quite a bit of comedy and romance... probably classed as the more popular end of literary fiction... something life-affirming with eccentric ensemble casts of characters... with touches of showbiz, arty stuff or detective / adventure gubbins. My very favourites seem to have to include a bit of all this stuff. (I might have to go back to my reading journals to see how the Nineties compare. Somehow I think contemporary novels in that decade were altogether bleaker. These are pretty sparkly, on the whole...)

Two recommended websites - and a nice review

June Hudson has got a new website (www.junehudson.com), showcasing her costume design work over the years. There are some wonderful, familiar drawings of Doctor Who characters circa 1980 (my favourite pictures are from the sublime 'Warrior's Gate'.) But there are unfamiliar and new images, there, too. Did you know, for example, that June was responsible for the exact look of Mrs Slocombe and Mr Humphries in 'Are You Being Served'? Just look at her drawings from 1972 - somehow she just captures their attitudes, and the precise way that these iconic characters will hold themselves.

The other recommendation is Mark Clapham's blog (http://www.rollbackandmix.blogspot.com/) on which he reviews and posts about all kinds of cultural tat, atefacts and phenomena. He's just posted a stonking review of Hornets' Nest, which I'm very pleased with - and which I hope he won't mind me reprinting here.

"Next up, a Doctor Who story (or stories). With Who dominating the airwaves over Christmas, any more might seem excessive, but Hornet's Nest, a series of five CDs from BBC Audiobooks, is distinctly different from the all-ages bombast of the current TV show.

"Thankfully, in spite of marking Tom Baker's first proper return to the role after only brief appearances in telethons and theme nights, Hornet's Nest isn't a direct return to a version of the character and the show that played itself out over the actor's long initial run and has been strip-mined in novels, short stories and comic strips ever since.

"Paul Magrs story/stories - the five CDs are linked into one narrative, but are each distinct - is/are closer to being an imaginary BBC4 Who spin-off to sit alongside the ones on BBC3 and CBBC, a version of that universe aimed at an older audience that remembers Ghost Stories for Christmas with fondness, shot on a low budget and aiming for slow burning chills. It's essentially a series of fireside tales exchanged between Baker's Doctor and retired soldier Mike Yates, two old men sharing scary stories and going on one last big adventure.

"The insistence on drawing a seventies period Tom on the covers, and placing it within that continuity in the dialogue, seems unnecessary and intrusive, a handwavy sop to obsessives and the BBC licensing department, who doubtless frown upon spin-offs chucking a brick through such continuity staples as which-Doctor-regenerated-when. This is an older Tom different to the one who descended into boggle-eyed tedium on-screen, and a different type of Who story tailored to it's leads current tastes, a story full of the macabre and weird, as well as cottages, wolfhounds and whiskey.

"Magrs makes a virtue of writing for his star's tastes, and goes full-tilt with a story that's genuinely creepy in places, and even manages to make that repetitive staple of early Tom stories, possession by aliens, work in a new and interesting way. The acting is fantastic, Tom being better here than a lot of his TV appearances, maybe better than he's ever been and Richard Franklin's older Captain Yates is certainly more interesting than the uncomfortable romantic lead he was cast as in the 70s. While a couple of the supporting cast hit the button marked 'northern whimsy' with a repetitive frenzy I could have lived without, there are great turns by the likes of Michael Maloney and Stephen Thorne - and in what other medium than radio could the towering Thorne play an Italian midget, hmm?

"Hornet's Nest is an entertaining, spooky new take on Who, and well worth investing in, an atmospheric treat for the cold winter months.

Mark"

Reading From Home

I'm getting serious about this idea now. Susan Hill put it into my head with her book, 'Howard's End is on the Landing.' I mentioned the idea three or four weeks ago on here... and people are threatening to take me at my word... but what if I actually went ahead? What if I tried my very level best not to buy any books for a year?

I've tried to test out the feeling a little in the past month. I've bought very few novels for once. Okay, there was the Book Club choice for January's meeting - the new Tom Perrotta, but that can't count. Book Club is intractable. Also, there was joining Audible, and promising to buy a book a month from there - but that shouldn't count either, since mp3 files take up NO SPACE AT ALL. And space is the issue here, in the no-buying-books stakes. These past few days I've even boxed up books to go into the attic. We're being that radical round here. Oh, I bought 'The Edwardians' in a charity shop, too, didn't I? But that was a single secondhand book. One secondhand book in almost a month! That's unheard of!

The thing that's persuading me most to go ahead with No More New Books is to do with this reorganising of shelves and sorting through heaps of stuff. It's a process that has unearthed masses of things I want to read right now. Books catch my eye and I buy them and bring them home and it's like they drift down to the bottom of the river. I catch at one or two and read them... but so many are sent drifting soundlessly to the silty bed of the stream. Sediment settles over them. They're on the shelf but you stop noticing them. But... they're there the whole time: waiting for you. Waiting to come flashing up to the surface. I really think books find you at the right moment.

Just now - hoiking things off the bottom shelf of my bookcase by my desk - it's double-rowed and packed solid. So packed solid, this particular to-be-read bookcase - that it's hard to squeeze individual books free. But - just now - hoiking ten up at random... I get things I realise I can't wait to be reading. Adam Ant's Autobiography. Barbara Erskine's 'The Warrior's Princess' - another bonkers reincarnation spectacular from Barbara, lying neglected there! A 1974 story anthology edited by beloved Mary Danby, 'The Frighteners.' John Wyndham's collection, 'The Seeds of Time.' John Dickson Carr's 'The Waxworks Murders' (You read the first chapter and loved it, didn't you? But then you put it down when you raced out for the train that day and somehow forgot to go back to it. Fickle, fickle!) Ursula le Guin's 'Wizard of Earthsea.' (You must have read that once surely? But when? Where? You need to read it again!) Jackie Collins' 'The World is Full of Divorced Women.' (Remember how pleased you were to find there was a sequel to her 'World is Full of Married Men'?) John Rowe Townsend 'Goodbye to Gumble's Yard' (It's set here in Manchester! How did you miss it?) 'The Cricket in Times Square' by George Seldon, unknown to you.. Ed McBain's 'The Mugger' (Time to go back to 87th Precinct!)

And these are just ten. Lying about. Waiting for you. Amongst hundreds of paperbacks in the house.

THE PANDA BOOK OF HORROR now available!!

Here it is! Available from Obversebooks.co.uk

Fabulous spooky adventures with your Aunty Iris and her macabre art critic chum, Panda. Here they are - fifty years exactly after Herbert Von Thal's original First Pan Book of Horror. They're here to desecrate the legend of that august anthology series...!

For those of you who love a little ghost story or two for Christmas...

Get them now while they're infernallly hot...!

Tales of the Unexpected

This is really about the TV show, rather than the story collections it was based on. I loved both, however, but the TV show has a special place in my heart. Dahl's creepy, sometimes nasty stories take up the first two seasons, the other seven series' worth being brought in from other sources. I think it's fair to say the best are Dahl's. The Unexpected world is one ruled by a smart-arse globe-trotting gadabout raconteur. One who sits by the fire and tells you that he knows exactly how the world works, and what a shocking and terrible place it is. And people are ruthless, faithless monsters who'd stab you in the back. That's the twist in the Unexpected world, almost every time. And yet this ghastly world-view is presented in the most homely and cosy fashion: on the brightlit sets of studio bound TV drama of the period (apart from the rather glossier and almost always more crappy US-shot episodes starring the likes of Telly Savalas.)

I must have been nine or ten when those stories first imprinted themselves indelibly on my mind: Susan George as the wife who's killed her husband, cooking the leg of lamb for the coppers at the scene of the crime; the man who has fed his baby Royal Jelly... Elaine Stritch staring at her husband in reduced circumstances, when all that's left of him is a staring, still-living eye in a petri dish...

The late 70s and early 80s was a brilliant time for anthology tv of a creepy or sinister kind. The kind of TV that kids talked about excitedly in the playground the next day: Hammer House of Horror ('The House that Bled to Death' and the tea party sprayed in blood!), Armchair Thriller and Tales of the Unexpected - they were all shows that you knew you perhaps shouldn't be watching. You were chancing your arm, asking to watch them with the grown-ups. There was something racey and macabre about these stories. I used to think that 'Tales' especially was a glimpse into the bizarre adult world - in which people made outrageous bets with each other, or betrayed each other in appalling ways, or made pacts with the devil in human form.

And of course the theme tune was the best thing. And the dancing woman in the title sequence flames. Somehow they conjured up for me the very idea of the surreal, the quixotic and the faintly menacing.

This is all brought on by the thought of my promised Christmas present: the Complete box set. I can watch - to my heart's content - Peter Cushing, Brian Blessed, Joan Collins and Elaine Stritch - get hoist by their own horrible petards. Again and again and again. People used to make jokes about how predictable some of the Tales were. (Peter Cook: 'Tales of the Pretty Much as we Expected'). But I enjoy these stories even more now that some of the novelty has worn off their shocking endings. They're like old friends, with amusingly familiar kinks and twists.

Santa Clawed and Midnight Hungers

Here's the cover for Big Finish's latest release from the Iris Wildthyme audio adventures: The Claws of Santa, written by Cavan Scott and Mark Wright, and starring Katy Manning and David Benson. I haven't heard it yet, but I can't wait. It's been a fabulous year for Ms Wildthyme and her Panda chum, what with the pink boxed set of four adventures out in the early part of the year and selling like crazy. And then two hardbacked anthologies of short fiction from Obverse Press - 'The Panda Book of Horror' is, I'm informed, just about to be unleashed upon the world. Just in time for Christmas... Think M.R James meets Barbarella's gin-sodden aunty.

Just dropping by, as well, to say that there's a new interview with me on the website of the sublime Marta Acosta: www.vampirewire.blogspot.com. Hers is a fab blog - not least because she praises my prose, but she's told me about so many books series I want to read, and she keeps putting up pictures of those fellas from Supernatural.

Did I rell you I read an anthology of erotic gay vampire novellas from Kensington Press? Whoah nelly. Very rude and wonderfully dark and silly. I love Kensington books and their anthologies. Last year it was that fantastically witty and sharp, 'All I want for Christmas' collection.I wish they published over here. Where's the gay romance and supenatural novels in this country, eh? Answers on a Christmas card, please.

Worzel Gummidge Again - Barbara Euphan Todd

What could be nicer than a Puffin with this cover? Worzel Gummidge the scarecrow dressed as Santa Claus, sitting backwards on a pink cow? The cow's got a wreath of mistletoe about her ears and she's trampling up a snowy hill to join the other scarecrows under the moonlight.

For those of us of a certain again Worzel means the TV show with Jon Pertwee and Una Stubbs: a show that was creepy and jaunty in equal measures. But the books are definitely worth rediscovering. They come up quite fresh, actually - especially the Christmassy sections of this first sequel from 1937.

"Everyone, even Mrs Bloomsbury-Barton and even Tommy Higginsthwaite, was too surprised to speak. It didn't seem as though it could possibly be true. Cows do not come to Christmas parties and stand swishing their tails and mooing. Neither do two dozen people usually share the same dream.

"'Have to be off now,' said Gummidge.

'Still nobody spoke. Nobody moved either except for the rabbit which suddenly hopped from John's pocket and went lolloping across the floor to join scraps of red flannel and tufts of wool in Worzel Gummidge's dressing-gown pocket. He patted it gently, then picked up the empty sack, sat stride it and grasped the cow's tail.

"'Anybody else coming for a ride?' he asked. 'Anybody coming to my Christmas tree?'"

The world of Euphan Todd's original books seems much darker and more chaotic than that of the TV show. There's no paternalistic Crowman to save the day in the end. Worzel and his wife (!) are shambolic and homeless, rattling about Scatterbrook Farm with their few possessions, forever falling apart at the seams. There's some funny stuff with things like Mrs Bloomsbury-Barton's wig - the usual kind of slapstick japes - but there's something sad in these books, too. A sense of being displaced, unwelcome, and at the mercy of the elements.

Glad to see that 'A Pile of Leaves' has been reading Puffins too. 'The Giant in the Snow' is a lovely novel, John Gordon's snowy fantasy set in 60s Norwich - which I bought in a charity shop in that very city. (Wonderful seasonal Spotify playlist on 'A Pile of Leaves' at the moment, too!)

Vita Sackville West - the Edwardians

I generally love books set in the Edwardian period. I'd never read any of Sackville West's books, but knew of her through Virginia Woolf biographies, etc. I found this old, old Hogarth Press edition in dirty orange covers a couple of weeks ago, mooching in Macclesfield.

It's very interesting because, although she does so many things right - lovely description and period detailing (it's set thirty years before her time of writing); occasionally waspish, funny flashes of dialogue and gems of wit... there's something missing from the novel. At the end it feels like it was all played on one note. It's all set-up and premise and nothing much else.

Lots of potential for classy drama, here, though. We've got the last two children of the grand house of Chevron, Sebastian and Viola. Sebastian is the nineteen year old last son of the family - we're told endlessly how strapping and 'patrician' he is. Houseguest and globe-trotting radical, Leonard Anquetil challenges the son and seduces the daughter (by airmail). We don't hear much about the actual seducing - we just get some dreary conversations about the fall of the great families, etc etc. And all the queer undercurrents *stay* under, too - even though it is Sebastian who eventually sails into the wild blue yonder with Leonard. It's Sebastian, rather than Viola, who gets taken up the Limpopo...

I just wish there had been a few more set-to's and to-do's in this. Whether it's Sebastian's crush on Anquetil, or his scandalous affair with his mother's best friend, or his dalliance with a doctor's wife - each of these potentially interesting, explosive set-ups is faded out and finished before it can get anywhere.

In a sense, Sebastian's is the last point of view the author should have plumped for. Yes, she's telling the whole story of the decline of a class through his adventures (a bit like 'Upstairs, Downstairs', thirty odd years later would tell much the same tale - much more effectively - through the story of James.) but it'd be so much better if we never got to see how vacuous he really was: if he was observed only by those characters who touch on his life and get discarded by him, one after the next.

Strangely, it seems as if Sackville West has it all going on. It reads like a novel, it's written nicely. There are even some lovely scenes - especially when he almost gets the doctor's wife into bed. The two of them watch the snow falling on the grounds of Chevron. His room is lit a chilly blue. He prepares to launch himself upon what appears to be a willing victim. And the doctor's wife is just mortified. Similarly, I liked the scenes with his older mistress realising that she is being snubbed by society for her indiscretion. But again, there's something missing. The connective tissue. The real warmth generated by a living piece of fiction. It's as if she has the skills, but none of the true talents, of a novelist. That's what I came away from this nice old edition thinking.

Spiderman, Lennon, Christmas

The pic comes from 'Spiderman Comics Weekly' from February 15th, 1975: when I was obsessed with Marvel Comics and in the UK they were reprinting all the great strips that Johns Romita and Buscema drew.

Christmassy stuff is starting to happen here in Manchester. Last night was my reading at Central Library - thanks to Libby and Maura for organising! It was a full house, which was great. We had wine and I read them some of the early chapters of Hell's Belles. I love giving readings and meeting readers. It completely makes it all worthwhile.

Our tree's up - but with no decorations yet. But it's all ready to go. We're going to be dashing about madly from now on - in-laws are arriving today. This morning was the first breakfast with a Christmas cd playing in the kitchen. Each year it's roundabout the time that Lennon comes on singing 'War is Over' with Yoko - that's when it feels like things are really starting. Lennon's solo stuff always reminds me of December. Because of his shooting, I guess. And there's something so pure and hopeful in that Christmas record.

Here's a review from the Gallifreybase forum. I hope the writer, Dewi Evans doesn't mind me quoting it in (almost) full. But I was so delighted by his just *getting* right some of the stuff we were doing with Doctor Who - Hornets' Nest. Just as I do, he sees it as a kind of gallimaufry of symbols and tokens from classic English mystery stories...


"It's quite unlike almost any other incarnation of the programme I've come across, yet it's not that difficult to imagine it as part of the same franchise. You only have to look at how the Doctor acts when travelling alone at the start of The Face of Evil and The Ribos Operation to see that this particular version of the Fourth Doctor isn't really as out of character as we might imagine.

"As for the tale itself, I loved what I can only call the 'English kitsch' element of it - the heaping on of traditional elements of Victoriana and Edwardiana (and in part four, Medievalana, to coin a phrase). The iconography of popular British legend and fiction: the bleak midwinter countryside, glorious seaside piers frequented by tipsy vicars, a grotesque cricuses, country cottages, ancient religious buildings, christmas dinner, sweetshops stacked to the rafters with gobstoppers and anaseed balls, forests full of ravenous wolves. All of which was augmented by a healthy dose of eccentricity that was always just this side of bonkers: giant hornets that can control people's size, a house beseiged by stuffed animals, a chase through a doll's house, shoes that compel the wearer to dance, a troupe of circus freaks, a headquarters inside the skull of stuffed zebra. A lot of this might not be quite as original as the execution sometimes implied, but to be honest I think this was rather the point - Magrs's style revels in traditional iconography, which is then turned on its head, with the camp turned up to eleven. And what could be more Doctor Who than that?"

Christmas Cakes and Blue Carbuncles

I have to mention two more favourite Christmas stories. Arthur Conan Doyle's 'The Blue Carbuncle' is the most fun of all the Holmes stories. It makes me think of dashing about, very last thing before Christmas, as Holmes and Watson tear all over the place in this story of goose clubs and greed. Sherlock's at his best in this: solving problems seemingly for the fun of it, and tying his opponents up in knots.

Another favourite is Truman Capote's 'A Christmas Memory', about a woman and her nephew who set out to make thirty-odd Christmas cakes for neighbours, favourite film stars and the President and his wife each year as soon as they scent 'fruitcake weather' on the air. The story's set during the Depression and during the very year that Buddy, the nephew's life is about to change forever, and he gets sent off by his other relatives, to military camp. It's about the last Christmas of childhood, in many ways. I'm always amazed by this story. Capote sometimes wrote about grotesques and his work borders on the cruel. But there are these pieces of his that are filled with... sweetness, I suppose. Just a vast amount of good nature and humour.

There are tv movies of both of these stories. Jeremy Brett stars in the best version of the Blue Carbuncle, of course, though the BBC Peter Cushing episode from twenty years earlier is pretty good. The Hallmark afternoon movie of the Capote story starring Piper Laurie is heart-wrenching. Call me soft.

Christmas Books

What's your favourite reads or rereads over Christmas? I love anthologies of spooky stories and I've just comes across two collections of ghostly festive stories for kids, edited by Dennis Pepper. These are brilliantly chosen and put together, I think - with everything ranging from that Arthur C Clarke story I mentioned the other day, to Susan Price, Shirley Jackson and Robert Fisk. It's a lovely eclectic mix. There's a very funny story by Patrice Chaplin about the give and take and give again of recycling presents.

My other favourite set of anthologies are the Scholastic ones from the Nineties: Haunting / Mysterious / Chilling Christmas tales, etc. They're like the UK branch of Goosebumps, but with a bit more oomph and substance and genuinely spooky stuff.

In terms of rereads over Christmas... well, I've already written here about my favourites - The Dark is Rising, Carrie's War, the Box of Delights. I might be giving these ones a rest this year.

My utterly guilty pleasure is in reading Star Trek original novels. I've only mentioned this to a few people before. I guess it's something to be ashamed of? I don't even enjoy watching the TV show anymore. But there's something about those novels. I mean the Pocketbook ones of the early 80s. And my favourite of all time is Melinda Snodgrass's 'Tears of the Singers.' It's a ludicrously sentimental thing about Uhura falling in love with a kind of interstellar Rick Wakeman, and the two of them travelling to a world of alien seals, who are endangered by hunters... whose song upholds the very fabric of time and space... and whose crystal tears fall when they are clubbed to death... By all rights I should hate it. But I ADORE this book. I have read it most Christmas weeks of recent years. I get gooseflesh just thinking about Uhura holding up her dying Rick Wakeman as he labours over his futuristic organ... and the seals are singing all around him... and the klingons and the Enterprise have vanished seemingly forever inside a great rip in reality... It's MARVELLOUS stuff. I think I love the Star Trek books because the writers at that stage never forgot that it was meant to be melodrama and space opera... and I think those producing the TV show actually did forget that.

Anyway! What do you you read over Christmas? Don't tell me it's something classy and smart. What are you reading when you crack the sweet sherry open? I need recommendations!

I want to read more Rosemary Timperley

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

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

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

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

Adrian Salmon's drawings plus Ms Danby and Ms Timperley

I have to say how much I love the illustrations of Adrian Salmon. Hope he doesn't mind me reproducing these two from his blog (http://adriansalmonart.blogspot.com/). The one of Baron Frankenstein and his creature could almost come from 'Hell's Belles.' Adrian's illustrated loads of Doctor Who stuff - including a story of mine in the current 'Doctor Who Storybook 2010.' His Terry Sharp comic - about an all-action demon-routing 70s film director is amongst my favourite of his projects, though. I'd love to see him have a go at Brenda and Effie and their friends and foes some day.

Speaking of the ladies of Whitby, Gav at Next Read has just this morning posted a new interview with me about them. http://nextread.co.uk/2009/12/07/interview-paul-magrs-hells-belles-headline-review/

He goes in for a lovely mix of books and genres on his review blog, and I'm glad to be amongst his choices. And he fires off some pretty good questions, too. I'm going to repeat the last one here...

Gav: Finally, are there anybody else’s spooky stories that you really enjoy?

Paul: Lots of people’s. But my favourites might well be Mary Danby’s or Rosemary Timperley’s. Both women’s stories appeared in the Pan Books of Horror and the Fontana Books of Horror back in the sixties and seventies. You can’t seem to get their stuff anywhere now. But they wrote wonderful, nerve-shreddingly scary and disturbing fiction that deserves to be reprinted by someone now.

...because I'd like to know, really - why don't we have lovely spanking reprints of the stories by Ms Danby or Ms Timperley? Who's got the rights? Where are the stories? Can I get someone to bring them back into print? And does anyone else remember these particular tales?

Here's the clipping of my nice review from yesterday's Guardian. It's not online yet, so I thought I'd post this. I'm really chuffed with the reception Hell's Belles is getting - in the press and on people's blogs. We need more copies in shops though. C'mon Waterstones. And stop just putting it in the SF section of the shop!

Quiet Sunday here after a nice, long, pretty raucous dinner round ours last night with friends. Today's been for reading the end of Rosemary Sutcliff's 'Robin Hood'. And, as I hoped , it did become a lot more perilous and dark, and did indeed cover the eventual murder of Robin at Kirklees Abbey. But Marion gets killed off pretty early, and there's a lovely autumnal interlude in which the hardcore Merry Men return to the woods in their personal Middle Ages. I'd definitely recommend Sutcliff's retelling. I'm always mindful, when reading her wonderful, muscular prose, of hearing somewhere about her own physical challenges, and how she would handwrite every draft of every book of hers - sometimes as many as seventeen - in little exercise books. Every word seems so craftily carved out of the page, somehow.

Also this afternoon I've had a spot of Space Opera, in complete contrast to the Greenwood. I came across a marvellous story by Arthur C Clarke called 'The Star' - about a faded civilisation, a supernova and the Christmas story. And then, making lunch I listened to the second half of George Mann's terrific Doctor Who audiobook, 'The Pyralis Effect.' Some great, creepy, gutsy stuff in space. But now it's back to V Sackville West as J. rackets about the house, moving bookcases and boxes and boxes of books. Quite noisily.

P.S

Quote of December comes from from Blair Bidmead: "What's not to like about a final confrontation set in a paper city within the brain of a stuffed zebra where the hero defeats the evil giant insect with a vibrating ballet shoe full of jelly?"

Rosemary Sutcliff

I still think my favourite Robin Hood is Richard Carpenter's 1980s HTV show, 'Robin of Sherwood.' Or maybe Roger Lancellyn Green's retelling. I've only just started reading Rosemary Sutcliff's 1950 version for the first time and, though it's deliciously written, it doesn't have that sense of danger. Of the daily jeopardy that living in the Greenwood as fugitives and outlaws would have brought. But I'm only halfway through - maybe I'm speaking too soon. I love the brilliant dayglo of that 1950s version of the Dark Ages, though - it's a kind of Look and Learn world. Later, I think, Sutcliff's books would be darker and grittier, especially the ones meant for older kids.

Reading this last night and, having watched the (sublime) finale to 'I'm a Celebrity... Get Me Out of Here!' it struck me that that show is Robin Hood in reverse. In any retelling of Robin Hood it's about how the ranks of the Merry Men were expanded, one by one, as they met new friends and characters. Everyone found a role to adopt in the camp in the middle of the wilderness. Every little adventure is a kind of Bushtucker Trial. On 'Celebrity', though, it's about being voted off and watching the Merry Band dwindle. In Rosemary Sutcliff's Robin Hood there seem to be ever-increasing hordes of men. Hundreds, she says, at one point.

I'm really hoping we get that lovely tale at the end, of Robin's death at the hands of the heartless Abbess who has captured Marian.

On another note entirely, 'Hell's Belles' got a lovely review in the Indepedent yesterday:

"Hell's Belles, By Paul Magrs
Reviewed by Emma Hagestadt
Friday, 4 December 2009
From transsexuals and teenagers to vegans and vamps, Paul Magrs has always shown a soft spot for outsiders. Perhaps his finest creations are Brenda and Effie, the geriatric stars of his Whitby-based gothic mysteries.

The fourth installment finds Brenda (the erstwhile Bride of Frankenstein) and Effie (a witch) dipping their toes in the movie business.

When a film crew arrives in town to remake the schlock horror movie, Get Thee Inside Me, Satan, the two friends are alarmed to discover that the lead, Karla Sorensen, hasn't aged a day.

Something fishy is afoot and the blue-rinsed brigade are determined to get to the bottom of it. This is paranormal redemption at its most camp."

Skellig in Macclesfield

I had a morning in Macclesfield because J. had a meeting there and I just fancied a mooch about the shops up the long high street. I was buying fancy cheeses in the nice deli and finding a 1930 Hogarth Press edition of Vita Sackville West's 'The Edwardians' in Oxfam. (I know, I know I said no more books.)

Funny thing in Nero's. I was getting to the end of David Almond's sublime 'Skellig', which I'm rereading for next week's class. It was the bit with the angel leaving and all that's left of him is a heart drawn on the floor and three feathers. And I looked up at just that moment because someone was shrieking at the next table and, just as I looked - there was a feather on the laminate flooring. I mean, it was a pigeon feather scuffed in with someone's carrierbags or shoes, but it was still pretty strange for a second.

On the way back we visited garden centres, looking at summer houses and Christmas trees. The skies over the fields were dark at two o'clock, mounded with purple clouds.

My Books of the Year

Ok, I hope this won't be like one of those endless and boring features in the broadsheets as Christmas approaches in which a load of old gits pick out books published by their friends this year and praise them up. You know those features? I go up and down the columns going, 'No one ever picks ME!! I hate them!! I hate them ALL!' Which isn't the best way to be going on when Santa's on his way. So now I avoid those pages, usually. Anyway - here's my list for 2009! It's a list of 15 - I've not got it down to ten yet - of my favourite books this year. I can't even rank them in order.

Best old book I wish I'd read before:
Helene Hanff - 'The Duchess of Bloomsbury'. I read 84 Charing Cross Road twenty years ago, but didn't know there was a sequel, about Hanff making her much-anticipated journey to 'literary London' at last. It's a beautiful short book, republished by Virago recently, detailing the trip in diary form. It's lovely about travel-nerves and making new friends and loving books.

Best Memoir:
Split between three. I loved Caroline Sullivan's 'Bye Bye Baby' - a massively confessional and toe-curling tale of chasing the Bay City Rollers about in the early Seventies and being a monstrously embarrassing groupie. Also, Suze Rotolo's 'A Freewheelin' Time', about her relationship with Bob Dylan and how she was never going to be anybody's groupie! And thirdly Sheila Hancock's 'The Two of Us', which I've written a little about before and still think back on as a completely uplifting book about love.

Best second novel:
Split between Caros Ruiz Zafon's 'The Angel Game' and Audrey Niffenegger's 'Her Fearful Symmetry.' Both were overlong and could have done with some taking in. Both were pretty leisurely in pace. Both had wonderfully dense, rainy atmospheres, laced with menace. Both were in the shadow of their author's first novels for me, though.

Best first novel:
'Mr Toppit' by Charles Elton. Multi-perspectived, mad family, acting badly. Loved it.

Favourite first novel - probably favourite book of the year:
'The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society' by Marie Ann Schaffer and Annie Barrows. Call me a softy. I read it twice. I think it's great, I really do.

Favourite book by writer who I can't believe I've never read before:
P G Wodehouse, 'Thank You, Jeeves.' What was I thinking of?

Best book about a cat:
'Dewey' by Vicki Myron. I've been a sucker for books in WH Smiths in Piccadilly Station this year. I keep picking up the things they're promoting. Pathetic, isn't it? What happened to my being all eclectic and exotic and discerning? When did I start reading sentimental stuff about cats? But I adored this book, about the town library somewhere in Iowa adopting the kitten left in its overnight book-drop drawer. I keep thinking about the moment the author had to peel him off the frozen metal of the drawer. She said his tiny pads tore away because they were stuck with the cold. It's a very touching book about pets and unconditional love.

Best novel I've had sitting on my shelves for eight years and finally got round to:
Haruki Murakami - 'The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle.' Sorry, Vic - you were right. It's fantastic. I should have read it years ago. Contains the best scenes about sitting at the bottom of wells, and also the best torture scene of the year's reading. Gave me a harrowing afternoon in the Jardin du Luxemburg in July, reading that.

Best saga:
Maureen Lee - 'Queen of the Mersey.' Something no one would ever talk about in one of those 'Books of the Year' pieces. Too lowbrow and popular, maybe? But it's a splendid portrait of working class domestic life and a whole load of melodrama tossed into the mix. My first Maureen Lee. My Mam was right when she said she thought I'd love her books.

Best rediscovered kids' book:
'Flambards' - K.M Peyton. One of those rereadings that makes you feel that, somewhere under the skin, you've learned the whole thing by heart. Horses, old crumbling houses, biplanes and a choice of fellas - what's not to love?

Favourite audiobook:
'Elegance of the Hedgehog' - Muriel Barbery. I wonder if I'd have liked it as much if I'd just read it? Something about having those voices in my head wherever I went made this a very special experience. It's a book about thinking, and about worriting at ideas and the audiobook was a great way to experience that. I'd have loved it anyway, I'm sure.

Favourite short story collection:
'Wednesday Night Tupperware' - T A Gilbert. She's fantastic. Funny, punchy, touching. It's from a small press and needs people to get onto amazon or onto their bookshops and buy it. It needs this in a way that some of the other mass marketed, heavily-hyped things I'd read this year really don't need. Gilbert is a genuine classy talent and I hope her first novel isn't far behind. I've read some chunks of it - she's the only author on this list I happen to know personally - and I know it's going to be great.

Okay. That's my too-long list. What's yours like?

Favourite email of the day

This is my favourite email of the day. It's from Glyn Evans, who's been listening to my 'Doctor Who - Hornets' Nest' in instalments with his daughters:

"Just thought I'd share this little scene of two small girls on the way to ballet on Saturday morning:

Thing One (7): I'm wearing the dead shoes! I'm dancing off the cliff!
Thing Two (5): The hornets are making me dance!
Thing One: I'm Ernestina!
Thing Two: I'm Reverend Small!

You should see Thing Two's drawings of the hornets attacking people. Brr.

Currently very much enjoying The Circus of DOOM - Tom's just putting his head in the lion's mouth... "

I guess it's time to remind people that the final two episodes have just been released on cd and download...!

Drawings by June Hudson

Since they've recently been made available on a Who discussion board, I thought I'd post a few drawings by June Hudson, the wonderful costume designer. In recent years she has taught a design class at the University of Redlands, California, with the talented Piers Britton. For these they have used some of my Doctor Who books and, resulting from these sessions, we've got these fabulous interpretations of some of my characters. The ones above come from the novel I published in 1999, 'Doctor Who - The Blue Angel', perhaps one of the strangest Who novels I wrote. I'm so proud to have drawings by June based on my stories.

Today I'm surveying the heap of books I've chosen for December reading. There's a stack of ten, and I think they cover most bases. I need to get my Christmas reading just right. In other years I've spent the festive season rereading old favourites - but this year, all new, I think, is the best way. But I need books of the right sort. They can't be completely unknown quantities. I'm starting with a beautiful old hardback from 1950: something that's been patiently biding its time on my shelf. Yet another retelling of the Robin Hood story. But this one's by Rosemary Sutcliff, so it's bound to be beautifully constructed and tastefully embellished. I'm dying to dive into it properly... but first there's stuff to do at home... and a departmental meeting this afternoon... and Book Club tonight...

The Dark is Rising

Tonight I'm teaching a class on Susan Cooper's The Dark is Rising, the second in her sequence of fantasy novels of the same name. They're from the late sixties / early seventies, though I didn't encounter them until I was 21 and doing my MA. I was alerted to this wonderful, dark, mythic, snowy sequence of books by a fantastic anthology Puffin published in 1991, edited by Judith Elkin and illustrated by Michael Foreman: a kind of gallimaufry of children's lit from the 20th century.

Since reading the excerpt from Cooper in that book, and dashing out to buy all five books in the 'Dark' sequence, they have become favourites of mine. This second volume, about the Christmas Will is ten, and first discovers his connection to the Old Ones and the powers of the Light and the Dark, is my undoubted favourite. I've read it every winter since the year I first discovered it and it just gets better and better. Cooper writes beautifully. I've often said that overdone descriptive prose is something I find embarrassing. But there's something amazingly absorbing and intense about Cooper's writing about nature, especially. Her action sequences are wonderful. Her scenes which take place in queer, liminal spaces - between times and places, in half-lit, mysterious realms - these are all convincing and authentically spooky and strange. And her characters always ring very true. I know these people - Will with all his siblings, hiding his secret nature from them at Christmas time, as their house gets snowed in. Merriman the Merlin figure, flitting darkly between all these books - all at once avuncular and forbidding and strange.

There was a dreadful film - be warned. I was foolishly hopeful for it, when I heard they'd cast Ian McShane as Merriman, Christopher Eccleston as the Rider. But it was awful. Standardisd, bastardised Hollywood pap, with loads of flashing lights and questy nonsense. They'd turned it into action-adventure, having decided it was a mix of Rowling and Tolkien. But it's more than that - it's a clear rewrite of Masefield's Box of Delights, but with a lovely infusion of Celtic, Nordic, Anglo-Saxon myth.

So the film's rotten - not least because they never used the wonderful song by Mercury Rev from their 2001 album 'All is Dream.' Somehow they just get the atmosphere of that book right into the song.

Susan Cooper's written other books since The Dark sequence. I loved her book about Shakespeare from a few years ago. It's another one about slipping through and between times. But I long for a return to the story of the Dark. Can't we get up a petition or something? Can't we beg her to revisit this world? There's so much drab, forumlaic, idiotic fantasy fiction out there for kids these days. Stuff produced by greedy robots. I just think there's genuine, startling, frightening magic in this particular series of books for kids.