Brenda and Effie by Bret

Here's Brenda and Effie as drawn by the brilliant Bret Herholz! What do the Brenda fans out there think? Do they look how you imagine them? I'm urging Bret to keep plumping Brenda up and make her a bit more bosomy. But I love the look of these two. They look just as if they're about to launch into some terrifying investigation.

This is all in preparation for a special project that I really hope comes off...

For myself, I'm almost halfway through the first draft of a special secret project that began on New Year's Day... and I'm on schedule so far...!

I'm longing to catch up with reading. I'm coming to the end of Lev Grossman's 'The Magicians', which I have just adored, all the way through. The final, climactic sequences are crazy. They've gone bonkers. I'm looking forward to writing a piece about the book here, quite soon. After that, I want to / need to read Cormac Mccarthy's The Road - which I'm dragging my feet about a bit, because everyone else in Book Club says how bleak and disturbing it is. A couple of members had nightmares about it. I'll leaven the experience by listening to the unabridged new novel by Laurie Graham, which I got from Audible - and reading, at last, 'A Billion for Boris' by Mary Rodgers - which was the *other* lost kids' book I couldn't remember, and the second one that the amazing Nick at A Pile of Leaves plucked out of the ether for me.

But I'm falling behind in my reading, I feel like... I've mysteries and space operas and murders and merry men and werewolves and angels to get to...

And this week's looking pretty busy. Tomorrow I'll be all day at the recording of something very exciting... more about which, later...!

Thanks for all the comments - here and on facebook - about Paul Gallico! I loved hearing recommendations for Gallico stories I've not read yet. Seems like there's a lot of fondness out there for him. We need to get someone to bring out a full edition of his books, maybe...?

Keep the comments and questions coming - I love getting them.

Paul Gallico

Last week I was really chuffed to hear that Bloomsbury are reprinting two of Paul Gallico's novels about Mrs Ada Harris, in one volume, as part of their swanky 'Bloomsbury Set' series of reprints. I've been going on at people for years, about how Mrs Harris ought to be dusted off once more.

'Flowers for Mrs Harris' is the best of his many books, I think. It's the life-affirming tale of a London charwoman of the Fifties saving up her pennies over the years and eventually setting off alone for Paris - an innocent abroad, with the outrageous dream of having a frock made for her by Dior. Of course she encounters snobs and horrors of all kinds, but Mrs Harris is brave and doughty and makes friends everywhere she goes. She's a kind a fairy godmother to the people she encounters, curing their ills with sheer kindliness. It's really funny, too. Gallico is a brilliant mimic and caricaturist.

I've read a bunch of his novels over the years. Only a certain few people I know know his work at all. He's one of those who - massively successful in their own day - have fallen through the cracks in recent decades.

There's a heap of his things that should be brought back into print. 'Love, Let Me Not Hunger' - about a circus that gets stuck in the middle of nowhere, and all the animals, clowns and gymnasts begin to starve. Or 'Love of the Seven Dolls', about a small girl adopted by a creepy Parisian puppeteer: he treats her horribly, but the dolls are her only friends. There are ghost stories he wrote too, about a slightly hapless psychic investigator. He wrote the novel of 'The Poseidon Adventure' - he was responsible for Shelley Winters' brilliant moment of heroism and self-sacrifice! And he wrote the one book that people still seem to remember him by, The Snow Goose.

I think of his books in fifties library editions with highly-coloured paper covers. The kind of books that have gone through many hands and now, fifty years on, are just about falling into pieces. Just as the books of Elizabeths Bowen and Taylor were. But the Elizabeths, etc are rescued by publishers such as Virago and Persephone, who find and bring back lost women writers from the past. But what about the men? Especially those slightly soppy men, such as Gallico, or Howard Spring, EF Benson or Angus Wilson? The ones who wrote fables about intelligent animals, living puppets, weirdos, funny old ladies, harridans, hookers, monsters, effete young men and lonsesome ghosts? Who's bringing them back...?

My Favourite Dracula

I think I've run out of Fifties sf classics! I couldn't get the disc of The Blob to work in the machine - but if I remember rightly, The Blob's overrated.

So I moved onto horror last night. Something to put me right in the mood for my editorial work on Brenda and Effie Mystery No.5.

More Vincent Price in The House of Wax. It hit me what a fantastic physical performer he was. I always think of that purring voice of his and the faces he pulled... but in House of Wax he moves about the place brilliantly. When he's in his hat and cape, stalking his victims, he's like a great, angular spider, mincing and loping from shadow to shadow. What I love about Vincent is that he really understands how the macabre works, and how it takes great big glistening dollops of camp. This is one of those revenge movies that he excelled in: just like Theatre of Blood and the unsurpassable Doctor Phibes movies. He is always the wronged artist, brought down by irksome petty little men - critics and financiers or jury members. He exerts revenge upon them in the most baroque and spitefully ingenious ways possible. I think this strand of Price's career is much more interesting than the lauded Poe adaptations he appeared in. Much less Poe-faced. I'm not sure I ever really got to the heart of Poe's appeal.

Then - watching films far too late on a school night - 'Son of Dracula' carried me into the early hours. Lon Chaney made a very ordinary Dracula. Such a shame. He looks like a disgruntled taxi driver. He never really nails the camp. Which is a shame - given this is a story about Dracula's surviving relative moving to the 'virile' New World, setting up home with a new and very glamorous wife on a plantation in the Deep South. There's scope for whole new vistas of outrageous camp here, but the film never really chances it. It makes you long for Bela Lugosi.

There are some great visuals, though. The smoke effects are wonderful: Dracula's bride melts into a single puff on a black and gold Sobranie. The Forties fashions look terrific. You expect Joan Crawford to come stomping into the scene. I love the moment the Bride is found on her honeymoon, when she's already supposed to be dead, sitting up in bed, her face like alabaster and wearing a fluffy bed jacket. Chaney has a great moment when he glides effortlessly across a swamp towards his beloved. Dracula's best when he simply floats through it all. It's only at the very end of a Dracula story when you should see him lose his cool. That's what all the great Dracs of the past have known.

Which is my favourite Dracula? Lugosi is ok, but never elegant enough. I find Christopher Lee too bombastic, on the whole. The Gary Oldman thing was a joke. The recent BBC version with Marc Warren impersontaing Gary Oldman's version was another of their Christmas paint-by-numbers dramatisations in which they're so keen to give it a new twist they forget what was great about the original story (see: Triffids, Henry James, etc etc). The Dracula I've enjoyed in recent years was Louis Jordan in the 1977 BBC serial. Anyone remember that? The luridly bloody and sexy bits are done in montage, so that they look weirdly like pop videos or dance numbers by Pan's People.

I'd have loved to see Vincent Price play Dracula. Did that never happen? Did no one ever ask him?