Paul Magrs

Brenda and Effie by Bret

2010-02-03T10:12:00.002Z

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

2010-02-02T10:17:00.002Z

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

2010-02-01T09:33:00.004Z

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?

Italian zombies and Universal monster kits

2010-01-31T10:51:00.004Z

There's heavy frost and even some new snow round our way this weekend. J. bought twelve stone oil lamps in the Habitat outlet store yesterday: they look like white apples with fiery leaves set out along the veranda of the chalet/shed/beach hut. We were out there at midnight as the frost took hold. I popped out for a bit between films - I had a triple bill last night - the sublime, the ridiculous and the utterly grim. The grimmest tale was Vincent Price - relatively young and magnificently morose - in 'The Last Man on Earth', which I was surprised to find was an italian movie. It's the very first adaptation of Richard Mattheson's 'I am Legend'. Definitely the best, too. Its foreignness really helps that air of unreality. The landcape, the houses, Price's co-stars - even the coffee cups - seem diffrent, more sophisticated. It's like watching an arthouse zombie apocalypse. They mess up the storyline about the dog and lose the true pathos of the novel, but the final revelations about cures and antidotes and Price's character's status as 'legend' is really well done. I can't believe this is a film I knew nothing about till now.

Then I relished the sublime 1960s 'Village of the Damned' - it's genteel and brutal and unstinting in its horror. It comes to an abrupt halt once the story is told. It's as clipped as the spoken English of any Fifties starlet. My final movie of the night was the ludicrous 'Creature from the Black Lagoon', which I've always loved.

This time it reminded me of the glow-in-the-dark model kits I used to get as a kid. There was a shop in South Shields called Rippons, and they'd always get the best stuff in. One year - probably 1978 - they stocked a range of Universal monster kits. My Granda' would assemble them on Saturday nights, painstakingly at the kitchen table. He'd have layers of newspaper out, and all the parts of the kits, and those tiny brushes and paintpots and the tubes of incredibly powerful glue.

The walls of their living room were filled with the kit rifles and handguns, battleships and sailing ships he had built over the years. While my Little Nanna stirred up a panful of the broth she always made on Saturday nights, and all the grandkids watched telly as late as they wanted in the front room, Granda' would work at the kits, hunched and squinting at the precise little parts.

He did the same for my Universal monsters, one a week that autumn: Dracula frozen mid-swirl of his cape; the Frankenstein Monster with his arms outstretched, lumbering over a graveyard; Godzilla looking rather chunky (he wasn't Universal, was he?) and the Creature, stepping out of his Black Lagoon, claws outstretched. The monster would be ready and dried by Sunday lunchtime, when it was time to go home. On each kit a different bit would be glow-in-the-dark luminescent green: Frankenstein's monster's hands and bolts, Dracula's whole head, and the talons of the Creature. My Granda' would paint the rest of the models as per instructions in thickly lathered metallic paint. The models woul absorb sunlight all day long and radiate palely through the night, seeping into my dreams.

I think a marathon of Universal monster movies might be next on the cards, after my run of Fifties sf.

Meanwhile, I'm still hugely enjoying reading Lev Grossman's The Magicians. Kind-of grown up Hogwarts. The chapter the students spend learning to fly like geese and travelling in formation to antarctica is wonderful. Beautifully written. There's lots of interesting stuff, here. About magic being the indissoluble linking of word and thing, and the beginning of a magical education being the acceptance of that. That idea gave me pause for thought - remembering instantly the very first lectures of my university career, and the cornerstone of all the theory we were asked to accept from day one. That was the very opposite of magic, I suppose - all that stress on the arbitrariness of language and the man-made fibres of poststructuralism, postmodernism, whatever they went on to call it. Unmagical in its cynicism. We'd all opted to study literature but we were told that we had to question whether it even existed at all. 'What is literature? What are texts? What is language? Is language language?' Aaaagghhh! Educated in the Eighties. I suppose it was bound to result in a generation of two of readers who go on to like nice thick books, saturated in magic and fantasy. Books you can disappear into, no questions asked.

A thick book I enjoyed recently was Elizabeth Kostova's The Swan Thieves. My review of it was in yesterday's Financial Times, and should appear online soon. It's her first follow up to the massive Historian - her Dracula novel from five years ago. What I liked about her Drac book was that it began all classy and smart, like an academic reseacrh-heavy romp-around. But pretty soon there are chases and monsters and before the end that vampire's glowing in the dark at you.

The Affinity Bridge and Ruby's Spoon

2010-01-29T08:55:00.004Z

A couple of very nice things yesterday... Firstly, the post van brought a lovely objet from Snowbooks: the slipcased hardback of George Mann's thoroughly enjoyable Steampunk Extravaganza: 'The Affinity Bridge.' This is the first of the Newbury and Hobbes novels, which promises to be a whole series of action-packed adventures set in the unnaturally-prolonged Victorian era. These special collectors' editions are wonders to behold. Snowbooks have done a fabulous job. They're numbered and signed and this one even contains a commemorative coin! Just like the ones they used to give out at school for jubilees and royal weddings. This particular special coin celebrates plague revenants stalking the metropolis and grisly cyborgs bent on disaster! Thanks, Snowbooks and George!

Also yesterday - I got a nice email from Anna Lawrence Petroni, whose first novel 'Ruby's Spoon' is just about to be published by Chatto and Windus. Remember how I mentioned I was thinking of doing some reviewing again? Spurred on by keeping up my blog? Well, the TLS sent me Anna's novel to read and I really enjoyed its murkiness and mystery, all tinged by magical realism. The review should be out pretty soon, I guess. Yesterday I get this email from Anna - and it's another example of randomness and serendipity at work:

"I'm so glad you enjoyed Ruby's Spoon.

"I thought you might like to know that you played a significant part in the writing process. You may know that the book started as a writing exercise on a short course I took back in 2003 (we had to take a few words at random and see what ideas we could generate: I asked my family for some words and they gave me 'button factory', 'spoon', 'witch' and 'fire'. Alchemy, magic - whatever! It makes me grin to remember this!). I was given the place on the course as a birthday present, along with 'The Creative Writing Coursebook'. I referred to the book again and again through the writing process and it's now heavily annotated. I started using it again last year when I started work on a second book... I recommend it to anyone who's starting to write, but I know it'll be at my side as a source of reference, encouragement and practical direction for years to come. It's such a well-formed collection - diverse perspectives with its own coherent narrative. Thank you so much!

'Best wishes,

Anna Lawrence Pietroni"

Isn't that lovely? I know Julia Bell, who edited the book with me back in 2001, will be pleased by that, too. Isn't it odd, how things come back round like this? And I love the sound of that random-plot-generating exercise with the list of elements. I use random-list exercises a lot these days in the workshops I teach - they really free you up to write, and I think there's a magical charge at work, too, in the way things get combined. It's like the elements of a story shuffle together while your back is turned...

Anyway - good luck to Anna with 'Ruby's Spoon'!

I was sad about Salinger last night. I was pointlessly cross about the tv news coverage, which was all about how many copies he's sold and stuff like that. I was thinking about those memoirs by his daughter and one of his girlfriends (was it?) and those amazing chapters in the Ian Hamilton biography, which all took us into Salinger's hard-won and hotly-defended private life. I was thinking about the uncollected short stories, which the online New Yorker seems to be making public. And I was thinking about first reading 'Catcher in the Rye' when I was sixteen. The whole German Literature class - including our teacher - bunking off from reading Schiller to race through Salinger's novel. And then, at twenty, when I belatedly learned there were three other books - and reading 'Bananafish' standing up in the books section of WH Smiths in Lancaster. As a student I let myself buy one paperback a week. I would let myself read one book a week that wasn't on any of my courses (for which I was already reading five a week..!) 'For Esme - with Love and Squalor' was my second week's choice - back twenty years ago, exactly, when I started keeping my Red and Black reading diary.

My fifties sci-fi movie last night was the original 'Invasion of the Body Snatchers.' It was stupendous - and colorized in the eighties, so that everyone looked pretty bogus, as it happens, not just those who had been bodysnatched. But what a movie it is! Some pretty gruesome stuff in the greenhouse there, when our heroes find their own replacements gestating amongst the potted plants. Last night I dreamed of a fifties america populated by Salinger creations - over-educated, awkward, chainsmoking characters shuffling listlessly through their apartments as the plots of a dozen b-movies rumble on unnoticed all about them. That would be my perfect read today - the film tie-in novelisation of The Day the Earth Stood (Relatively) Still by J.D Salinger.

George Pal's The Time Machine

2010-01-28T08:27:00.002Z

I was in the middle of watching George Pal's film of The Time Machine last night and it came to the bit where it all turns into a proper punch up. There's a full scale barney going on in the year 800,000 and the Time Traveller's socking it to the blue-fanged meanies of the Underworld, those awful Morlocks. It struck me then that it was like somebody's dream about HG Wells's novel. As if someone had just finished reading that strange and thoughtful book and had dropped off and their subconscious had turned it into something a bit more gung-ho and zippy. The same goes for Pal's War of the Worlds. The source material has been transformed somehow into something less about surmising and more about running about and thumping people and blowing them up.

Everything seems like a dream - or like stories that kids would make up in the playground. That's exactly what the Fifties sci-fi films feel like to me - like a bunch of hyperactive kids have got hold of the original stories, and a set of images and ideas to do with aliens and the future and have been set free to tell the stories how they want.

This version of the Time Machine is just lovely, I think. I love this bogus, Hollywoodized London, in which the Time Traveller lives in a cottage with a house keeper somewhere off the King's Road. His friends are there on New Year's Eve at the turn of the twentieth century to sample his port and exclaim, 'Preposterous!' and 'Outrageous!' when he expounds his ideas about travel in the fourth dimension. Funny how, all these years on, and after a whole wealth of tales about time travelling, this story stays fresh. When he unveils his curious invention - all wood, brass, leather and surmounted by a ludicrous wiindmill - we're egging the Time Traveller on to prove himself right.

I found myself quite touched as he goes forward and learns the fate of his best friend and his friend's son, who owns the shop which becomes a vast department store, across the road. Strange, too, to see this 1960 film anticipate a nuclear disaster in 1966. Our hindsight fools us into thinking '1966' onscreen guarantees us stock Carnaby Street swinging London imagery. What we get instead are mushroom clouds and the railway bridge exploding and a mountain of rubble dropped on the Time Traveller's already dusty cottage. It reminded me, shockingly, that this was a 1960 view of future history now: one that had shot straight past the original Edwardian predictions.

The Morlocks and Eloi episode and climax to the film remind me of Star Trek. One of the slightly boring late Sixties episodes in which Kirk falls in love with a dopey woman on a paradisal world and Spock is the only one to realise that something horrible lurks under the ground. There's a touch of the Thals, too, about the Eloi - the pacifist aliens from Terry Nation's original Dalek story in 1963. They, like the Eloi, have to be goaded into giving their oppressors a good thumping. Is that what Time Travellers do? Turn up in other eras to overturn regimes and tell pacifists they've got it all wrong?

I like the way it ends. It's a very romantic, wistful ending. He's off to find his girlfriend in the far-flung future, but who knows? The Time Traveller goes off to explore a new dimension. It's a bit like the strange finale to the Shinking Man story: their futures are indeterminate, but they have found a whole new set of worlds within worlds to check out.

I'm not sure what the best film version of Wells is, now. Has there been a really good one? One that gets him right? I must admit to a fondness for the adaptations of his works that take liberties with teh material - such as this knockabout film, or the Jeff Wayne album of War of the Worlds - or even 'Timelash', which is probably the worst Doctor Who story ever, and the worst ever use of HG Wells's persona and ideas. But I love it nonetheless.

It's like thinking about sf itself, thinking about Wells. He was earnest, serious-minded. He really thought about this stuff and hammered brilliant ideas into elegant stories. But how did it all turn into multi-coloured rubbish, all about fighting and robots and dashing about like kids? I'm not saying that's bad - far from it - I'm just interested.

Reading: I picked up Lev Grossman's The Magician's, at Gene's recommendation. Loving it so far. I've been reading it when I should be doing other stuff. Good sign. Review to follow! Right now, this hidden world of Magicians-in-training seems less like Hogwarts than it initially appears, than it does Boot Camp on the X Factor.

The Captain Hook Affair by Humphrey Carpenter

2010-01-27T15:18:00.002Z

Well, it was exactly the book I remembered borrowing from Newton Aycliffe library several times in 1979, and it was just as fantastic as I remembered it being.

Last week I mentioned on this blog that a real childhood favourite of mine was a novel in which kids got hold of a magic silver pencil which, when it touched the pages of fictional books or comics, brought the characters to life. Because I remembered neither title nor author I thought I stood no chance whatsoever of finding the book again. But then Nick from 'A Pile of Leaves' came up with the exact title I was trying to remember and just a couple of days later a Puffin copy was in my hands, thanks to Amazon's Used and New Service. (I LOVE that service! Books for 1p! I imagine the system working like some kind of Steampunk internet thing, with all the secondhand bookshops in the world being connected by brass tubes and firing on hydraulic pistons... sending bubblewrapped novels shooting through intricate networks all over the world...)

It's Puffin's anniversary this year, isn't it? Seventy years? They should get their fingers out and reprint some of the ABSOLUTE CLASSICS they have let go out of print. 'The Captain Hook Affair' first, I think.

Lizzy is a girl who lives with her mother and grandmother, both ailing and she finds herself, as the book begins, about to be shipped off to a children's home. The only thing that cheers her is the mysterious silver propeller pencil her grandmother gives her. Once she is is in the confusing, alarming Home it isn't long before Lizzy discovers the fact that the pencil can take you into fictional worlds. We get some lovely cameos by the Mad Hatter, Merlin, Samuel Whiskers, and the Giant up the Beanstalk. The 'real world' that Lizzy has to return to is gritty 1979 vintage: she is surrounded by well-meaning teachers and professionals who fear for her safety. There is a very friendly social worker, Jane Jones who comes to believe in the magic and a crazy psychiatrist, Dr Max Smeethe (who dresses more like a film director than a doctor) - who furiously disbelieves the magic that happens all around him. Even when he is almost eaten by the Giant or baked into a pie by Samuel Whiskers.

Lizzy is accompanied on her adventures by Jack, who is clever and, as things go on, increasingly amoral. When the ruling regime at Riverside House children's home gets too awful, it's Jack who elects to fight fire with fire. He summons up the cast of pirates from Peter Pan, and that's how Captain Hook and his cronies come to take over the whole place. The adults are sent packing in a gloriously anarchic chapter, and all the kids become pirates. Captain Hook goes round swigging incredibly sweet 'British Sherry-Type Wine' and smoking two cigars at once, and getting the former head of the school into terrible trouble by making him look like a drinker. It's all fantastically good fun.

I was really interested to revisit and find darker shades in this fantasy, too. When Jack gets carried away with his ideas of revenge upon the adult world, he turns to science fiction novels and tries to arm himself with weapons of the future. He tells Hook that he wants 'certain things which could... kill people or paralyse them for as long as we wanted just at the touch of a button...' It's a chilling moment. As is the sequence in which the two heroes get banished to the 'Crooked Land' of the old nursey rhyme and are put into a grey prisonlike establishment for weeks on end, to be conditioned into accepting the 'crookedness' of the world. They slowly start to forget their own world and learn to live with the terrible world that wants them to conform...

The book is a lovely fable about the imagination and freedom. Of course they escape from the world of grey conditioning and come back to a happy ending that seems utterly and completely earned. The book finishes in the grounds of the Children's Home on a perfect summer's day - with everyhthing restored not just to order - but better than it ever was before.

I hope Posy Simmonds won't mind my using one of the illustrations above. There are dozens of wonderful drawings by her, throughout the book. They're casual, unfussy and perfectly characterful. They, plus Carpenter's casual, avuncular, slightly fussily old-fashioned tone, makes you long to wield a silver pencil of your own - and vanish into this story more than any other. That's what it does for me, anyway. Just as it did when I was ten, in 1979.

Oh! Final thing - I had misremembered the book as being set in a brownstone apartment building in New York. At one point Lizzy tells her teacher that she has been to New York, via the magic of the pencil. I wonder if I extrapolated my own story there?

But then yesterday Nick emailed to say maybe I was thinking of a book by Mary Rodgers, who wrote 'Freaky Friday'? A bit of googling - and I find a book from the Seventies set in a New York apartment building - about kids who find a TV that plays tomorrow's programmes today. Now, I'm sure I read that. It's ringing bells madly... So, my NYC novel is on its way...)

Overheard at a reading...

2010-01-26T22:42:00.004Z

I was at a poetry reading the other day and just before all the excitement started I was earwigging on the group sitting in the row behind me. They were obviously a poetry group, who swapped poems and went round attending these do's together. The woman who seemed to be the leading light was introducing the members of her group to another set of poets she was involved in. They were sitting in the row even further behind. The woman in charge was showing off the only man in her group.

'Oh, and I should introduce you to my friend Graham, as well. Graham's dangerously experimental, aren't you, Graham?'

I peeked round and saw that Graham was looking stricken at this. He was trying to disappear into his coat. 'Oh, no. I wouldn't say that.'

She wouldn't stop. 'You are, Graham. You're more experimental than most.'

Everyone was looking at Graham by now.

Oh - pictured: the poster for Tarantula! A curious rewrite of The Island of Doctor Moreau. I found it rather touching: the country doctor courting the laboratory assistant. She's come out to stay in the desert, in the middle of nowhere, just to work at the side of the famous scientist who's engaged in solving the world's anticipated food shortages. His experiments in breeding huge animals (rats, guinea pigs, tarantulas) have awful side effects. Each of his lab assistants end up with a rare disease, turning them into Mr Hydes, one of whom almost suceeds in killing his creator and burning down the lab. And that's how the giant Tarantula escapes, eventually to wreak havoc in the final reel. But all the spidery shenanigans seem beside the point and, actually, rather easily sorted out.

I was more caught up in the plight of the scientist. The gruff genius who gradually falls foul of the substances he's developing, turning into a monster and going up in a flash.

Dangerously experimental, indeed.

The Silver Pencil and other special books

2010-01-25T09:06:00.002Z

I've had some marvellous parcels, these past few days. Ebay and Amazon Used and New have reunited me with a couple of childhood favourites - both from 1978 (the year of The Key to Time, Splinter of the Mind's Eye, Grease, Sinbad and the Eye of the Tiger, the Battlestar Galactica novelisation...)

The Encyclopedia of Science Fiction was a present from my Mam and step dad at Christmas that year, or maybe my birthday. It was after that tidal wave of excitement about Star Wars and all the follow-ons from that. This lavishly illustrated book offered a kind of context for my obsession with sf and showed me what a long and distinguished history the genre had - all of which had been sampled and referenced by George Lucas. Best thing about the book were the mind-blowing paintings. They were magnificently creepy: screaming egg-headed aliens in front of exploding stars. Weirdly shaped spaceships wheeling across gaudy skies. Barbarella types wrestling giant snakes in tar pits on distant moons. Lizard men landing their space ship at the site of the crucifixion. I don't think I read a single whole chapter from this whole (rather earnest and scholarly, it turns out) book. But I was transported by the pictures, every time I peeked inside. And the glimpses of stills from those Fifties films were formative, too - they are still the impetus behind my ongoing marathon (This Sunday night was for 'Tarantula!')

The other reunion came courtesy of this blogging habit, actually. Nick at 'A Pile of Leaves' did some googling 'in an idle moment', as he said - and actually found the book I mentioned the other day! When I wrote my piece about not remembering titles and author names of books loved in childhood - and lost forever. Well, 'The Captain Hook Affair' by Humphrey Carpenter was the book I borrowed several times from Newton Aycliffe library in the late Seventies and have never seen since - until this morning. It's the one about the silver pencil that can bring fictional characters to life. I'll report on it fully when I've reread it yet again!

The Waxworks Murder

2010-01-24T20:24:00.002Z

After a lovely long night out, Sunday has been about reading. J. has been kitting out the Beach House / Chalet / shed with furniture, lamps, carpet, coffee table, even paintings... and I've been polishing off 'The Waxworks Murder' by John Dickson Carr. I'd never read one of his mysteries before, and this one came from the depths of my reading pile. It's a sassy and macabre 1930s mystery, set in the sleazier parts of Paris. As with most crime and thrillers, there's a soggy middle bit to the souffle for me - when it's all theories and surmising by the detective and his friends. I'm never so bothered by that. I want more of the tense conversations and set pieces, and more scenes of action and adventure. We get all of that here, anyway, as well, which is great.

I loved the creepiness of all this. Mostly it is set in a gloomy, rather nasty Waxworks Museum, populated almost wholly by effigies of killers and victims. There's a shambling old bloke and his frosty daughter in charge of the place and it's not long before we learn about secret keys and mysterious passageways and connections with a high class sex club next door. It's a club where people wear different coloured masks, signalling their status or desires. Lots of shady goings-on and glamorous depravity... And all the clues are tiny, it turns out. Things I never notice at the time. But I never look at these kinds of books as puzzles to solve. Is that wrong? I just let the whole thing unfold around me and don't go pushing at the mystery as I go along.

Am I reading the detectives wrongly, do you think?

My other great fun read of the day is The Jon Pertwee Book of Monsters from 1978, which I mentioned the other day as something from my school library that I would love to read again. Ebay delivered - and I have to report it's just as wonderful a collection of stories as I remember. Again, like the 'Armada' Monster books, the characters are close to home - these are kids in ordinary schools, in ordinary towns, in circumstances not too far from the presumed reader's. We get dragon eggs hatching and monkeylike mermen with savage teeth, and evil newt spawn from outer space. Glorious.

Friday Night Double Feature

2010-01-23T09:49:00.003Z

Yesterday we christened our new garden shed / chalet / writing hut / beach house at the bottom of our garden. We took bacon sandwiches and mugs of tea and had them sitting on the veranda. It was a bit muddy out, so Fester the cat didn't join us. He's not really bothered about outdoors until the magnolia starts to blossom at the start of May. Until then it's enough for him to sit on the doorstep, front and back, a couple of minutes each day - sniffing the air with the look of someone tuning into the news headlines. I can't wait for the weather to clear, so I can sit working in our chalet / shed / beach hut.

Over lunch J. was bemoaning the lack of old films on telly, and the decision apparently made by BBC and ITV and everyone that they won't show so many black and white movies, because people don't know what they are any more. They think something's wrong with the telly when they come on. It's certainly true that you don't get many films older than about twenty years getting shown. Oh, maybe some war films in the afternoon, but that's no good to me. ITV thinks the only films ever made were James Bond ones. And those CGI animation things make me feel nauseous: Christmas Day telly was awash with the weird, shiny bright, synthetic stuff.

I just wish channels like BBC 2 and Channel 4 still did their late night double bills of horror and sci fi. When I first had a portable black and white tv at twelve, those late night showings were my whole introduction and schooling in film history, and also a whole storehouse of stories. The best run of films ever was Channel 4 going through the entire cycle of Universal Horror movies in the late Eighties. And, watching them, you'd faze in and out of sleep, catching some bits and missing out chunks of others... and piecing it together in a lucidly dreaming, half awake state.

So what you have to do these days is make up your own double bills with dvds. Last night I went all monochrome - delving into two ancient classics I don't think I've ever seen all the way through before: 'The Incredible Shrinking Man' and 'It Came From Outer Space.' The first has a Richard Mattheson script, so it is a perfect little fable. There's not a single beat or line out of place. Mattheson also wrote 'I am Legend' and 'Nightmare at 30,000 Feet' and I think of his stories as wonderful, succinct modern fairy tales. They're very distinct, but are often about one man completely on his own, left with the consequences of some amazing piece of weird bad luck - and having to be resourceful to stop himself going mad. 'It Came From Outer Space' is classic UFO paranoia stuff... but of a gentler kind than you'd expect, I think. It's about making bargains, making peace - about becoming civilised.

Something that struck me about both films was how wonderful their musical scores were. Has there never been a cd collection of the incidental music and themes from sf movies of that vintage? Those soundtracks would be wonderful things to write to... I can imagine sitting at the bottom of the garden in the beach house... with fifties sf film music bonging and clashing and wibbling away...

The Thing from Another World

2010-01-22T11:12:00.004Z

Another old sci-fi film last night: 'The Thing from Another World'. It's the original Base-Under-Siege-by-Monster movie. Its imagery and ideas are so familiar to us from so many iterations and homages and rip-offs down the years that it's another film you think you know better than you do. I thought it was wonderful: all the revelations about how this was a sentient and rather brutal vegetable stalking them inside the arctic base. It was unexpectedly horrible - the husky drained of blood in the greenhouse, and the sudden violence of the monster's attacks, when he breaks down the doors and brings in the swirling snow, smashes the lamps and the coffee mugs.

The characters under siege had a pretty hard time of it - being picked off one by one by this bloodsucking demon... but on the whole they're a cheery lot. They dash about in a group, sipping coffee and coshing the treacherous scientist on the head when need be. They try things like setting whole rooms on fire with kerosene or electrifying the floor and they seem very pleased with themselves and their wherewithal with malevolent extraterrestrials. I love the scene where they pace out the shape of his spacecraft under the ice and, standing in a perfect circle, realise all together that it's a saucer. They've got an actual flying saucer! And then they blow it up by accident. So again, although there's paranoia and fright and that marvellously doomy 'Watch the Skies!!' ending... there is still here a great sense of delight. Of excitement about being in a great adventure story. Of wary but joyous expectation of doing battle with monsters...

I'm thoroughly enjoying my impromptu 50s sci-fi marathon. I think it all came about because last week I had to rewatch Roger Corman's superlative, neglected B picture 'The Wasp Woman.' I had promised an essay all about it for a book on sf film history that Mark Morris is editing for PS publishing, coming out later this year. That Wasp Woman has sent me off on a little research detour, I think. Let's see where it takes me.

Technicolor in January

2010-01-21T09:57:00.004Z

Probably in reaction to the grey, dismal days of January, everything went a bit Technicolor round here last night. We had a double bill of fifties science fiction movies and it was great fun. I love all that pulsating, vibrant colour from the 1950s. We watched the George Pal 'War of the Worlds', which I've seen many times before, but not for years. And it made me realise it was this that the Spielberg movie was based on, rather than H G Wells. The scenes in the cellar with the snakey probe and the Martian dashing about are replicated shot by shot. But what a dull and grey film that Spielberg effort was. Just noisy crashing about. He used to have such lovely scripts, didn't he? 'Jaws' and 'ET' and 'Close Encounters' were so witty and gentle in their scripting - you really believed in those people. What's happened with Spielberg?

Anyway, the scripts in these double-feature films last night were no great shakes, of course, but that's not the point. It's the dazzle and the spectacle and the sense of impending chaos. I love the fact that these films are only 80 minutes long. For someone prone to falling asleep every twenty minutes during a film on TV, this is great news.

I thought I'd seen 'This Island Earth' before - but it was all very new to me. Maybe all I'd seen was the photo in the 1977 'Star Wars' magazine special, which had pictures from classic movies influencing George Lucas. I looked at that brain-headed, goggle-eyed beast in the boob tube and invented a whole mental movie around it, without ever actually watching the thing. But it's a lovely film - best in the final section and the visit to the alien world that's crashing down around the aliens' ears. But also great in the middle bit when our scientist heroes are being held in a research facility by dome-headed boffins who won't let them go. It's a bit like The Prisoner, that bit.

It struck me, watching these, that everyone in them gets very excited about science, about space travel, gadgets and nuclear bombs. The scientist heroes are young and virile - they wear bomber jackets and become the love interest. One of the female love interests is a scientist herself, all pointy-breasted and armed with the secrets of the universe. It seems that the usual tale about fifties sf in the movies is that it was to do with paranoia and the Soviets, etc etc. And obviously the Cold War is there... but it seems that the movie makers were very worked up and optimistic, too. Over-excited as they invented new toys to mess around with. These are quite cheery films, really.

With my B-movies in the post yesterday also came the Steampunk anthology edited by the Vandermeers I've been looking forward to. So it'll be interesting to see where we're up to now, with literary sf.

Yes, it was a parcel of books. I'm off the wagon. But Gene suggeted the Lev Grossman, and we're doing Cormac McCarthy for Book Club... and then Nick at Pile of Leaves was talking about Jenny Nimmo - and then I saw that the 'Snow Spider' trilogy was out in one volume and.. and... All excuses, really, I know. I LOVE NEW BOOKS. I love old books, too. I'm just addicted to having heaps of this stuff about the place.

Books You've Forgotten

2010-01-20T13:24:00.002Z

In about April 1990 I started keeping a list of every book I read. It's still being kept, in the same red and black hardback notebook - almost twenty years now of worsening handwriting and different coloured inks. The books I read before that I've tried to remember, but there are gaps. Mostly they were books I borrowed from Newton Aycliffe library in County Durham (pictured!). This was the place I found loads of great stuff - not all of it Terrance Dicks, Malcolm Hulke or James Blish.

On Access Weekends with my father in the late seventies we would go to the library first of all and he would supervise my choosing some non fiction - usually about dinosaurs, space or history. He didn't think I should be reading fiction because that was for girls. Luckily, those weekends finished about the time I was ten and I was free to choose what I wanted. I'd often go to the library after school and do my homework there. It was a cardboardy building with a tiny stock, but it seemed an endless array of fiction. My favourite times were when it lashed down with rain against the glass wall that faced the town precinct. The rain sounded like hooves on the flat roof.

In recent years I have remembered titles and authors' names enough to re-find certain favourites through ebay or Amazon used-and-new. David Rees' gay teen novel, 'In the Tent' and Eric Houghton's 'Steps Out of Time' are novels that became important to me, and that I borrowed several times over - and which have since found their way back to me.

However, there are still those books that remain elusive. Yesterday, the conversation about Ursula Le Guin continued on my facebook page - and there are a number of people wondering whether they actually read Earthsea at the time, or absorbed it somehow, or whether they just remember reading something else. Reading is such an inexact science and memories and details can be elusive. In the course of this Helen Shay started talking about a favourite series of fantasy adventures for children by the american writer Edward Eager... and immediately they seemed familiar to me - especially the book called The Time Garden.

I remembered the kids' book I've always wanted to get hold of again. I don't remember title or author, so I realise that the chances are slim. But I thought it was worth trying to describe it here - and to see whether anyone can help..?

I must have borrowed this book in the late seventies or early eighties. It would have dated from about then. It was about a brownstone apartment building in New York City, and the kids who lived there. The illustrations were sort of Quentin Blakish. The kids get hold of a silver pencil - and with it, they can bring to life drawings out of story books. There is a whole sequence in which Captain Hook and his pirates run amok in New York.

Does this ring any bells for anyone?

There was a also a teen sf novel... to do with a trickster character - a boy who dressed like a harlequin or a jester, in a costume sewn with mirrors. I think the people lived under a dome, with lush countryside beyond, where the jester character lived. It sounds like John Christopher, but isn't... Any ideas?

Surrealism in fantasy novels

2010-01-19T09:07:00.002Z

There's a section in 'A Wizard of Earthsea' in which Le Guin has Ged try to save a dying boy's life using his magic powers. The wizard goes into the land of death and it's like one of those running-through-treacle moments and he can't catch up. It's a land steeped in gloom and completely nightmarish. Also, as he turns back, to return to his corporeal body in defeat - he is met by the dark spirit who has been haunting and hunting him since the day he first summoned it. It's a wonderfully frightening and disturbing moment in Ged's quest.

It also reminds me of those atmospheres of dread that you tend to get in paintings by the surrealists. The examples above are from Max Ernst and Leonora Carrington. And I'm wondering... if the thing I really love about these kids' books that use fantasy images and tropes and storylines... is not just the stuff plucked out of ancient world myths... but the fact that they are infused with the atmosphere of surrealist painting? John Gordon, Susan Cooper, Joan Aiken, Ursula K Le Guin... their work is as informed by the irrational and the nightmarish as it is legend, I think. My favourite moments, anyway, are those bits when it's just as if we are slipping into a waking nightmare - full of dread but tantalised... like stepping into 'Tom's Midnight Garden' by Phillipa Pearce - in pyjamas, with the clock striking thirteen - and stepping into the fantasy landscape without even knowing what's out there...

Maybe that's why I find some of the contemporary fantasy unsatisfying? It's too rational, worked-out and dayglo?

Earthsea

2010-01-18T11:04:00.002Z

Up late on a Sunday night reading 'A Wizard of Earthsea.' Now I really do wish I'd read it and added it to my favourites-for-rereading back when I was a teen. Maybe it would have gone somewhere between Narnia and Alan Garner and David Eddings's The Belgariad. That would have been the perfect spot, I think.

What I'm most surprised and pleased about is its darkness. The whole idea of summoning a nasty spirit and then having it pursue you from home to home, always looking for a means to break out into your world and attack you... that's quite heavy stuff. The way she always calls it a 'clot of darkness', too - gives me the shivers. There's something about Le Guin's voice that makes this story seem like it's a folk tale, loaded with inevitability and fate. It's all so long ago and there's nothing we can do about it: these things are the stuff of legend. But she brings us so close to the action, too - we know this boy and his mistakes and the way he brings about disasters, through hubris, self-defence and showing off. When he elects to conjure spirits we know it's all going to go to the bad.

I thought I didn't even like Epic Fantasy anymore. I thought I was cheesed off with dragons and fed up with bloody wizards. Especially bloody kids learning to be bloody wizards. I'd had enough of sword fights and hexes and mountains and made-up names for countries I wasn't bothered about visiting. But Le Guin goes about these things with such zest and - here's the crucial bit - economy.

driving in the hills again

2010-01-17T10:46:00.002Z

It was like we were hunting for the last bits of snow to be found. Yesterday we drove off into the Pennines and saw these wonderful hills, almost silver with distant snow. We had sandwiches from the flying saucer-shaped Services at Forton and - of course - a flask of tea, which we had out of plastic cups, up on the hills, looking at the view and talking to the multi-coloured Swaledale sheep.

We went to Sedburgh - the book town - but spent all our time in just one book shop: a colossal one, filled with ex-library books. What I was really looking for was the anthology pictured: The Jon Pertwee Book of Monsters. I'm still hankering to fill the gaps in my collection of Monster Anthologies I read when I was about twelve.

The Pennines remind me of my first wek away from home - it was a school trip to Ireshopeburn with our junior school class. We stayed in a big house in a valley and trudged miles through wintry woods and up the hills and drew pictures of trees and wildlife and had a brilliant time. Such an adventure. The dormitories were in this old, creaking attic of the house and it was just like being in a proper kids' ghost story. We got the screaming ab-dabs one night when a door on the wardrobe nearest to my friend Richard dropped off, seemingly of its own accord. It was a real creeeaakking SMASH noise in the dark.

The big thing was that it was a week away from family and telly and everything we were used to. We had a radio playing in the school room on Tuesday night for the charts - Adam and the Ants were number one, I think. They were always number one just then. It was the best week ever - we had the best teachers we ever had (Miss Booth and Mrs Woods!), and we were all togged up in parkas and cagouls. Scarves looped round and round, and all clutching clipboards with worksheets attached - ticking off examples of nature as we came across them.

Funny seeing the same landscape yesterday - the snow just clinging on, and the jagged montain streams fat and fast with melt water. It all looked exactly the same as 1981.

I was carrying with me, all day yesterday, a novel I feel as if I should have read back then. In fact, I can't believe I've got this far without ever reading Ursula K Le Guin's 'Wizard of Earthsea.' At least, I don't think I've never read it. It all seems very familiar so far - especially the disturbing 'clot of darkness' Ged summons into being when he starts messing around with spells and calling up spirits. It seems like some books I've absorbed as if by osmosis, and reading them is just like inking darker lines on faint pencils.

Those silver white hills in the Pennines looked like those old Magic Colouring Books, where you just had to daub water onto the page to make the colours wash in.

'hard to be hip over thirty'

2010-01-16T08:27:00.002Z

My favourite bookshop this side of town is the Save the Children on Levenshulme high street. They've always got such a strange selection of paperbacks, and everything costs £1.29. I was in the other day and came across a poetry collection I've meant to pick up for a while. It's a Persephone reprint of Judith Viort's 1968 collection, 'It's hard to be hip over thirty.'

It's as pithy and funny as I expected it to be, from reading about it in the Persephone Quarterly, but the real surprise, once I opened it up at home, was the photograph I found inside. It's a proper Found Photo, and here it is - above. Just look at that spaniel's sidelong glance at the photographer. It's the wearily tolerant expression of someone forced into company with silly, annoying relatives for the day. It looks as if these three are off for a day out somewhere. The one of the left looks particularly keen. I love finds like this.

In other news - I'm still enjoying the novels I'm reviewing, and even more, 'Espresso Shot', the seventh in the 'Coffeehouse Mystery' series by Cleo Coyle. Lovely to read something that's pure pleasure - after I had to struggle to finish the worthy, issue-heavy Tom Perrotta novel, 'The Abstinence Teacher' for Book Club this week. (The whole group was disappointed with that, I think. He brings up some lovely, chewy ideas and gets the reader all riled up about religious intolerance, hypocrisy and the ludicrous rise of the far right in public institutions in the States - and then turns it into a sappy romance which doesn't even go anywhere. The novel should really have begun - not ended - where it ended.)

TV - loved the first two episodes of Glee. On vintage boxset watching I'm still going through 'Tales of the Unexpected', 'Fraisier' and 'Robin's Nest.' And, of course, 'Celebrity Big Brother' gets my full attention each night. I still find myself having to explain to tv-snobs, culture-snobs and just plan snob-snobs why I find BB so compelling. Don't know why. It's just about being fascinated by people and behaviour, isn't it? It's like a living, day-by-day novel. Beautifully made and put together. I'm enjoying Stephanie Beacham and Vinnie Jones. One episode this week ended with them calling a flighty, silly, flirty housemate an orchid - rootless, pretty, taking what she needs to get by from her environment. It was a lovely scene, with them kicking this metaphor around.

I'd love to see a remake of The Avengers with Vinnie Jones and Stephanie Beacham as John Steed and Mrs Peel. That would be perfect. In fact, I can't believe it hasn't already happened.

I noticed that they're releasing the Avengers on dvd again in a pretty handsome set. What's happening with the rights, anyway? Is anyone going to have another go after they royally arsed the movie up? Surely ITV should be making a Saturday night version for the months that Doctor Who and Primeval aren't showing? Anyway - you heard the suggestion here first. Vinnie and Steph for leads.

TV Tie-ins

2010-01-15T09:50:00.003Z

I've always been a great fan of TV and film tie-ins, whether they are novelisations or original novels based on pre-existing formats. I think they're a dying art form and it's all down to dvd box sets. People can now own, straight away, the show they love and they don't need a novelisation to relive the drama and excitement. That's a real shame because good tv tie-ins were so much more than that.

'Splinter of the Mind's Eye' was the first follow-up to the original 'Star Wars', in my mind. Alan Dean Foster's novel came out a year after that first film and it was a gloomy, spooky thing, with Luke, Leia and the droids trapped on a swampy world and beset by a spectral Darth Vader. Alan Dean Foster has to be the king of movie novelisations.

About the same time there was the novel version of the original 'Battlestar Galactica' pilot movie, which I loved with a passion. Two things still stand out in my memory: the backstory for the Imperious Leader, up there on his plinth - all about strange and nasty stuff to do with genetic engineering. And then there was that interlude on the casino world with the insect people underground, capturing unwary gamblers in lift shafts and making smoothies out of them.

I won't get into Doctor Who novelisations / original novels here. There are so many and so many eras and they are such an involved part of my life. As I've said before though, 'Star Trek' novels are my guilty pleasure. I'll rarely ever watch a TV episode of any Trek, but the novels I've always loved: from James Blish's early 70s retellings of the TV series as short stories in twelve volumes, to the original novels of the 80s by people like Melinda Snodgrass, A.C Crispin and Vonda McIntyre.

'Upstairs Downstairs' had a marvellous set of novels devoted to it. Each season was adapted into novel-form, one volume each. But there were also novels devoted to each major character, delving into their past lives and telling how they came to live and work at Eaton Square. 'Rose's Story' by (I think) Mollie Hardwick is my favourite in that set.

And then there were the three Coronation Street novels by H.V Kershaw. For me, these books based on Sixties episodes - from a time before I was born - they were like delving into prehistory. They were like hearing family gossip, like I did at Christmas or at birthdays, when the women would sit down in the kitchen and rove over the old stories. Oh - and Malcolm Hulke's Crossroads novels - forgotten now, besides his Doctor Who books. Actually, Hulke was the king of novelising telly, come to think of it.

So - what else? Anyone got favourites? I just noticed that the 'Howard the Duck' novel - based on a stinker of a movie - was adapted by the same fella who wrote the only (and fabulous) novel based on 'Northern Exposure.' So it's probably great.

Which contemporary shows need novelisations and / or original novels? I wish there'd been more based around my beloved 'Farscape' - plus novels about 'Northern Exposure', after the series finished. Any other suggestions...? Is it just me that loves this neglected and often derided form...?

New Snow

2010-01-14T09:50:00.003Z

Here are two pictures to do with the new spate of snow yesterday. I had a day working at home, writing and tinkering - and egging on the snow.

Two more very nice reviews of Hell's Belles have appeared - on 'Groovy Age of Horror' and 'NextRead.'

Something that came up in my Online Novel-Writing workshop the other night: If your novel was a cake, what kind would it be? Got some wonderful answers: tirimasu with sprinkles and glitter and curls of chocolate heaped on; angel cake with splinters of glass; a millefueille with a dozen crisp layers... sharp tangy tarte au citron; squashy Black Forest Gateau with a creamy middle and cherries on top. I love exercises that let people step away from the close-focus of their writing and to talk about it in different ways - using images or other senses all together. It was good fun and it's made me think that I'm in the middle of writing a baked vanilla New York cheesecake. I think the Brenda and Effie's are Yorkshire teabread (there's a word for it - begins with a b?) Or maybe dark, sticky, spicy Parkin. Or cakes out of that brilliant tearoom and bookshop in Whitby - Becketts: the ones with the surprising combinations - apple and Wensleydale cheese, for example. Becketts is great.

Further to my thoughts on The Tales of the Unexpected and the way that Dahl's stories peter out and the old fella is made to introduce stories by other people. Just imagine - an alternate dimension, sometime in 1979 - and the show became 'Angela Carter's Tales of the Unexpected.' If there was any justice in the world and if anyone in telly had any taste, that's just what should have happened. Imagine if they'd adapted some of her stories in those half-hour mostly-studiobound slots? Imagine the Unexpected repertory: Joan Collins, Elaine Stritch, Sian Phillips, Elizabeth Spriggs... appearing in tales such as Carter's 'Lady in the House of Love' or 'The Company of Wolves' or 'The Erl King.' Or Brian Blessed and Susan George in 'The Bloody Chamber'.

I must return to reading Angela Carter again soon. It's been a long time. In the nineties I read everything, again and again, while I was doing my PhD. It must be nineteen years this month since she died? Things seem quiet on the Angela Carter front in the wider world. Where are the films based on her novels? Where are the TV adaptations at Christmas?

They're still scared of her, aren't they? Her wit, her irony, her savagery and daring. This is much more timid age than even the one she lived and wrote in.

Running out of Roald

2010-01-13T10:59:00.003Z

One of those long days yesterday, and I was glad to get home to pizza and a glass of wine and a whole heap of episodes of vintage telly. I'm working my way through 'Tales of the Unexpected'. I'm at the end of season two, so it's 1979 or thereabouts. Watching them in order is fascinating, because it's at this point that they start to run out of stories by Roald Dahl. He's still presenting and looks slightly grudging and piqued when he has to lavish praise on somebody else's story-telling genius.

Something curious happens... one minute we're in Dahl-land... a land of colonels and crazy wagers and vintage wines. It's essentially a world from the forties and fifties and the end of the British Empire. I just watched Maureen O'Brien being a strange kind of vamp in a story about a portrait painter. The most shocking and unexpected thing going on in that story is the fact that a woman's nude portrait is set before her society friends - and the shame drives her to murder. It seems somehow quaint. (Quaint as the disco-style retooling of the Ron Grainer theme in the nightclub scene at the start of the episode...)

But then, at the end of the season, we get a shift. Three episodes written by three new writers. Younger men, you presume. The world conjured up in these last tales is a different one. A world of academics and faculty wives and research trips. There's still adultery and capricious murder, as in Dahl's world - but it seems truer and more vicious, somehow. We're in a nastier world. One closer, perhaps to that of Brian Clemen's anthology series, 'Thriller.' It's a world that seems more macabre than Dahl's. Here comes Elizabeth Spriggs and we think she's a poor, duped, rich widow... but look how she gets the upper hand! What a monstrously clever woman! But what's going to happen to her in the end? And what will happen to her husband as a result? They're more sophisticated, these tales, as well as nastier...

The final episode in season two takes us into a seedy harbour town... kindly prostitutes, gangsters, and a protagonist who stoops to murder, quick as a flash, for a few bob. And we'restill meant to be on his side, and be appalled when he can't escape the consequences of his own actions.

In Dahl's world Dahl - or someone very like him - was always at the centre. A rich and clever man about town; always up for a good bet, always willing to display his superior knowhow. We're supposed to cheer when he wins through - or feel shocked when he gets unexpectedly swizzed. But when Dahl's not writing this character gets turned on his head. He's the cheating, wife-killing surgeon who chops up Sian Phillips in the bath and buries her under his greenhouse. He gets found out and hoist by his own petard. It's a really interesting shift in the tone of the series. I'll be fascinated to see how it pans out. It's like the whole of the series begins, in thrall to the Dahl character, sitting before the fire and telling us what's what... and then, slowly, surely, unexpectedly... the whole programme turns against him... As if to say that no one and nothing is sacred or safe in the 1980s... no one is exempt from the twist in the tale...

This Busy Monster

2010-01-11T11:17:00.003Z

Not so much time for blogging today! Term's starting and I'm gathering my stuff together for my online class this evening. I'm teaching novel-writing for the next eleven weeks, online and at home - while at the same time trying to meet all my own writing deadlines. Wish me luck! I hope I'll still be able to blog here while I'm on with stuff.

The snow's going! It drizzled coldly in south Manchester yesterday and it all looks perilously icy outside. I really enjoyed those days of snowmen and ladies and snow pandas and giraffes in people's gardens.

I'm still reading my Armada books of Monsters. Last night I read R Chetwynd-Hayes' final story in the last of the series. It's about a boy with an unspecified illness who lives at the top of a tower block. The visiting doctor tells him he has special sight and can probably see creatures that no one else can see. And he does - a flying bull with no legs and a scarlet nose, who breathes in clouds and forces gales upon the world. There are tiny flying old women in this story too, and other strange mites floating about in the air. Only certain people know that they are there. It's a rather gentle story, all about magic and belief. This story - and the others in this set of six books - make monsters into creatures that you'd rather bump into than not. They're books for kids who read things like The Unexplained and Arthur C Clarke's Mysterious World and wanted it all, more than anything, to be true. To be real.

(Maybe that's why I found last night's first episode of 'being human' season 2 a bit miserable and dull? In that show being a monster seems such an earnest business. Not much fun at all. What a programme! They try too hard! All that *acting*. All that *writing*. Horror for me always implies a touch of the macabre - and that means having just a *bit* of a sense of humour...)

BTW - RE my heading. Whatever happened to the band called This Busy Monster? I know two brilliant songs of theirs - one about a werewolf, one about Edward Gorey. I've only ever heard them online. Where are the records? Is the band still about?

More Armada

2010-01-10T10:50:00.002Z

Here are another couple of Armada Monster Book covers! Specially for those who never knew the series went beyond the first couple. I was glad to stir a few memories yesterday, with mention of this late Seventies paperback anthology series. And it was good, too, to be reminded of the companion set - the much longer running 'Armada Ghost Books', which were mostly edited by the brilliant Mary Danby. I remember tales of haunted ponies and ghostly gymnasts from those books.

On our day out yesterday - a fantastically wintry drive into the snowbound Derbyshire hills - I was reading Armada books all the way. We went swerving through deep forested valleys where every branch was coated with snow and the waterfalls were like bronze. Peggy Lee's Latin LP's playing on the car stereo and me reading R. Chetwynd-Hayes' intro to Monster Book 6:

'...alas we have all grown up too sophisticated in recent years and have had a surfeit of giant apes, and dinosaurs, pterodactyls, golems, things from outer space, and nameless horrible wriggly things...'

He must have had his young audience agog. No! We haven't had enough of monsters!

The book is full of wonderfully gruesome beasts. The best is probably the animated cadaver in the first story - the Mudadora - the living corpse held together by slimy mud. Angus Campbell seemed to be a regular contributor, as was Terry Tapp, who here contributes a strange Mexican story about a giant jumping bean that one day disgorges a colossal deadly butterfly with sapphire wings. A strangely benign monster story in the end. It must have seemed impossibly exotic to the young me.

So these things were churning round in my head all day yesterday. The monstrous and the sepulchral. As we braved the snowbound hills - flask of tea and blankets and shovel at the ready on the backseat, of course. J. wanted to visit Bakewell - for closing down sales in his favourite DIY store and a fancy chinaware shop he likes. I was keener on a visit to Barnham Broom - which is a warehouse-sized remainder bookshop in the middle of a field on the Buxton Road. We got there for the last half hour it was open. And I fell off the wagon - I'm sorry! - and bought a batch of reduced kids' books. One of those great Kingfisher anthologies of stories from a few years back; a novel by Sherryl Jordan (who wrote the magnificent 'Raging Quiet' - anyone know that?); and a curious fantasy trilogy by a Canadian kids' writer called J.C Mills. And a great-looking thing in which Holmes and Watson are dogs and the villains are cats.

What can I say? I slipped up. All those new shiny books swayed me madly.

We need someone to gather up a batch of these spooky writers of the 70s into a new anthology. I've said it before about the horror stories for adults, but what about these kids books? Terry Tapp, Sorche Nic Leodhas, Roger Malisson, Daphne Froome, Pamela Vincent. Where did they go? And it strikes me now that these might have been pseudonyms? Were they all R Chetwynd-Hayes, perhaps? Does anyone know?

Quiet day today with more reading. Unwinding completely. It looks like more snow coming. Teaching term starts tomorrow!

Armada Books of...

2010-01-09T11:07:00.002Z

I'm in the middle of reading a hugely thick and involving novel... and last night was a very late night after lots of TV and company - so I wanted something easier to fall asleep with at two in the morning. By my bed I've got the shelves where I keep ancient old favourites for rereading and redicovery and easiness. And sweet and sometimes sour dreams. Paperbacks so well used and loved they're falling apart. Their covers are like little folders for their brittle pages. Anyway, out popped the last of the Armada Books of Monsters, edited by R Chetwynd Hayes.

In and around the late seventies this grand old man of short horror fiction was putting together these volumes. They were like the Pan Books or the Fontana Books of Horror, but especially for kids. They were perfect stocking-filler material for those kids with a macabre turn of imagination. Armada books were wonderful, I always thought. Somehow less posh than Puffin. ITV to Puffin's BBC, as J. might say. They had those little boxes on the first page: 'This book belongs to...' and you could fill in your whole address so a lost book might be returned to you. Somehow Armada - and Captain Armada, their piratical mascot - understood that these were books that kids were going to treasure.

Chetwynd-Hayes picked out wonderful monster stories. He rightly understood that, in all those horror stories, it was the monsters that the kids liked best. Creatures and stories were called things like, The Mudadora, The Tele-Mon, The Hoppity-Jump and the Terror of Tottercombe-on-Sea. I used to love the editor's kindly-slash-eery intoductions, and the fact that he would usually include a story of his own. Why not? Not to do so would have been false modesty. He would sometimes keep his own story for last, as Mary Danby sometimes would, in the Fontana Books. It is as if the voice that gives us the introduction and compiles their chilling series of entertainments then decides to give us, right at the end. a tale from their own repertoire. The monster tale at the end seems even closer to home...

Closer to home was an important point about these kinds of stories. They were abotu kids like us. Kids who played in play parks and on estates and who went to precincts and on school trips. Monster stories on TV more often involved grown ups and professors, dolly birds and the military and - though thrilling - those were taking place in a fantasy world elsewhere.

I remember The Third Armada Book best of all, for some reason. It was on one of those paperback carousels in a supermarket in New Aycliffe on a rough estate next to ours. It was the nearest place to shop and we went there as if into a warzone. The supermarket was called The Dandy Cart, but really, that was the name of the forbidding boozer next door. It was an old-fashioned supermarket, with fraying lino and that pervasive smell of cooked meats and cheese kept in cabinets that weren't chilly enough. But the brilliant thing about the Dandy Cart was that it was the only place in town you could get export DC comics. Often they were wrinkled and stained from transit, but it was amazing to find The Justice League for the first time. Anyway, there was this lovely scarlet, be-dragoned cover to the Third Armada Monster Book and there it was in 1977, amongst the pony books, the Enid Blyton's and the Make-and-Do type books. Drawn to it at once, of course. And the story that I loved was by Roger Malisson, 'The Gargoyle' - about girls on a school trip to a church and the gargoyle that follows them home. It stuck in my head and this particular book and all the others in the (six strong?) series were Ebay buys in recent years.

There was a sci-fi series too, wasn't there, from Armada? And other collections by R Chetwynd-Hayes? I also loved the cash-in ones - The Jon Pertwee Book of Monsters, the Peter Davison Book of Alien Planets. I really used to wonder if those actors read and collected those stories. And whether they spent their spare hours in the TARDIS compiling ghostly and monstrous tales just for their readers. (The Doctor was always encouraging you to read, wasn't he? Like Tom Baker hosting The Book Tower. Not so much these days. I can't imagine the Tennant Doctor sitting down long enough to read anything much,)

Anyone else a fan of these collections...?

Steampunk Central

2010-01-08T10:17:00.002Z

I'd been thinking a lot about Steampunk just before Christmas and was amused to see that even the Beano Book this year had a Steampunk strip. Billy the Cat had a flashback to his Victorian forbear, William the Cat, in a very steampunky world of giant robots and nefarious adventures. So I was talking on here about what to read, and whether there was a Steampunk canon... and I got some great answers and suggestions. I thought I'd post the list up here, and see if anyone could add any further ideas.

Brian Willis sent me this nice long list...

"'The Anubis Gates' by Tim Powers

'The Time Ships' by Stephen Baxter (a sequel to 'The Time Machine', officially authorised by the Wells estate)

'Homunculus' by James Blaylock

'The Court of the Air', 'The Kingdom Beyond The Waves' and 'The Rise of the Iron Moon' by Stephen Hunt (1st three novels of the 'Jackelian' series)

'Morlock Night' (another 'Time Machine' sequel) and 'Infernal Devices' by K.W. Jeter (who is credited with the invention of the term 'Steampunk')

'The Difference Engine' by William Gibson & Bruce Sterling

'The Space Machine' by Christopher Priest (more stuff inspired by Wells - you think there's a pattern here?)

'Zeppelins West' by Joe R. Lansdale

Also, there's the original graphic novel of 'The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen' by Alan Moore & Kevin O'Neill (avoid the rubbish film, at all costs), the tv series and movie 'The Wild Wild West', and of course numerous Doctor Who episodes - 'Evil of the Daleks','Talons of Weng-Chiang', 'The Unquiet Dead', 'Tooth and Claw', and 'The Next Doctor' being probably the nearest to Steampunk in style.

Probably the best single anthology would be this one, edited by Ann & Jeff Vandermeer"

... and I know and have read about half of these. Blaylock is one of those US -remainders from that favourite bookshop in Darlington I talked about a little while ago. He's one of those fantasy writers who make you feel like you're the only person to find them. I loved the Anubis Gates, of course (though the savage, butchering clown gave me the willies...) and I love the Extraordinary Gentlemen and Christopher Priest's 'Space Machine' is marvellous. That's the one with the flying brass bed, isn't it? Time travelling and bouncing about on the surface of Mars?

Is it all about Wells and Verne and Conan Doyle, then?

Other suggestions - Cavan Scott reminding me about Bryan Talbot's 'Grandville' (which I read on Boxing Day! My beautiful signed and drawn-on copy from Deborah). Also, interestingly, reminding me to look back on the work of the Italian Futurists. Perhaps they're responsible for the look of some of these stories and hypothetical worlds?

Battypip suggested: GW Dahlquist - The Glass Book Eaters (and the not so good sequel The Dark Volume)

Stephen Hunt - The Court of the Air, The Kingdom of the Waves, The Rise of the Iron Moon

and Knife and Spoon said: 'Philip Reeves’ series (in a world where cities scramble round on mechanical legs chasing one another) Mortal Engines is pretty well regarded.'

Interesting to see how many YA novelists embrace the genre.

Mark Clapham suggested Cherie Priest.

So... I've broken my 'No More New Books' resolution already. I've ordered the Vandermeer anthology. But I regard this as proper, necessary research... so I can get away with that, can't I...? Hmmmm.

Maybe more publicists and stuff should send me free books to review on here, then I won't have to break my NY resolutions. What do you think?