A Reading Life

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2010-03-19T10:36:00.001Z

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Short Story Competition

2010-02-23T11:57:00.000Z

New writers out there might be interested in the Mystery Women's short story. It's open to unpublished writers only and the closing date is 15 March. Go to the Mystery Women's web-site at Mystery Women.freeserve.co.uk for further details.
There'll be a proper blog later in the week. Bye for now.

Historical novels

2010-02-17T10:41:00.003Z

I am not generally a fan of historical novels, largely I think because I am an historian myself. I prefer the line between fact and fiction to be clear-cut. I really can scarcely bear to read novels set in my own period, the nineteenth century, because they so rarely seem to ring true. The way people thought in the past, the things they took for granted and assumed that other people took for granted: that is very hard to capture. Having said that I can enjoy a good Sherlock Holmes pastiche and am tempted to try my hand at one sometime.
This is by way of explaining why I felt a certain reluctance to read William Brodrick's A WHISPERED NAME, even though it won the CWA Gold Dagger last year - and was in addition recommended to me by Richard Reynolds at Heffer's bookshop. Richard has recommended some great writers to me in the past, so I decided to take a punt. The novel is set in the First World War and concerns a court martial for treason and the attempts of a present day monk to untangle what really happened. I was totally convinced by the evocation of the trenches and the men who lived and dies in them. It is a gripping read and beautifully written.
Another writer is pretty well pitch-perfect is summoning up the past is C. J. Sansom in his series set in Tudor England and featuring the hunchback lawyer Matthew Shardlake. I've nearly finished SOVEREIGN and it is a cracking read. Shardlake is an engaging figure and the historical background is conjured up in wonderfully convincing detail, a particular tour-de-force in a novel that is 650 pages long. Only once was I pulled up a bit short: surely 'week-end' is a word that wasn't in use until the twentieth century? But really, I am full of admiration for the way Sansom combines accessibility and historical accuracy. It doesn't matter that it won't have been quite like this, because as one reads, one's suspension of disbelief is total and that is all that counts.

Short Stories II

2010-02-10T20:17:00.007Z

A few blogs ago I mentioned that I'd written a short story about a surgeon who had murdered his mistress. Well it's been accepted by Ellery Queen's Mystery Magazine. I love this magazine (of course!). They have just published another short story of mine, 'A Tour of the Tower' in their March/April issue. I only wish there was somewhere similar to place short stories in the UK. it's a form that I very much enjoy. A short story provides a welcome change of pace from a novel and its rewards are more immediate. It can be a thrill to find oneself rubbing shoulders with writers who are far more distinguished than oneself. My very first short story was published in a CWA anthology along with writers whose work I'd long admired: Michael Gilbert, Reginald Hill, John Harvey. I could hardly believe it.
If I had to pick a favourite crime short story it would have to be 'A Jury of her Peers' by Susan Glaspell, first written in 1917, though stories by G.K, Chesterton and Conan Doyle would run it close. Although it is set in a vividly realised time and place, It hasn't dated and I can give it no higher accolade than to say I wish I could write something as good one day. I often reread it as a masterclass in psychological insight and narrative control.

Maidens' Trip

2010-02-03T16:09:00.003Z

I have been on the look-out for this book by Emma Smith for a while, even since I learned that it was about the war service of young women on the canals during the Second War War, and had recently been re-issued. It's an intriguing subject. This was her first book, published in 1948, when she was only twenty-five. It was based on her own experiences and she explains in the introduction is part fact, part fiction. She wrote it at breakneck speed in three months and it does show in places. It veers between the first and the third person rather disconcertingly, but no matter. It is full of youthful verve, innocence, joie-de-vivre and, she frankly confesses, egotism. It's the story of three young women - all under twenty - taking a boat full of steel to Birmingham and bringing back a cargo of coal, an arduous and even dangerous journey. I loved it. There's some wonderful writing and some piercing little insights: 'we tried to delay the passing of any portion of our lives, we still imagined that we lost, not gained the minutes.'

The Girl Who Kicked the Hornets' Nest

2010-01-27T14:51:00.004Z

In a recent blog, Martin Edwards referred to the rather old-fashioned habit of putting a list of characters at the beginning of crime novels. I could have done with one recently when I read THE GIRL WHO KICKED THE HORNETS' NEST, the last of Stieg Larsson's trilogy. These novels, in particular the last two, are not free-standing and long as they are individually, together they make one enormous story. Some of the characters have rather similar names, too, and I didn't always remember who was who from the second volume. I thoroughly enjoyed it: gripping reading. But what I find hardly credible as a writer is that he wrote the whole lot without looking for a publisher - of course, it wasn't his day job, just something he knocked off in his spare time for fun. And that's even more staggering. Just the thought of it makes me want to lie down with a wet towel round my head.

Snow

2010-01-20T10:26:00.007Z

After I wrote about SICK HEART RIVER in last week's blog, I got to thinking about other works of fiction that deal with the intense cold, not least because we've had a bit of that ourselves and have been snowed in. I realised that some of the most memorable books I've read have dealt with weather conditions of snow and intense cold.

I first read Apsley Cherry-Gerrard's THE WORST JOURNEY IN THE WORLD (1922) about twenty-five years ago when a friend and I were house-sitting in Sussex. It was written by the youngest member of Scott's disastrous expedition to the South Pole. Cherry-Gerrard was part of the rescue team that found the frozen bodies of Scott and three other men. I recommend this book as a cure for mild depression, because as you read it you begin to feel profoundly grateful that you are not there. At least, you console yourself, you haven't been driven to eating the ponies. So things can't really be that bad.

Solzhenitsyn's A DAY IN THE LIFE OF IVAN DENISOVICH I always associate with the winter I spend as a postgraduate at Keele University. Hardly the gulag, I agree, but it was very, very cold and there was still snow on the ground at Easter. Transport connections were lousy and I had a bad case of cabin fever.

Peter Hoeg's best-seller, MISS SMILLA'S FEELING FOR SNOW, was gripping for about the first two thirds, but the plot became preposterous after that and it is largely the evocation of a wintry Copenhagen that stays in my mind.

Finally, Jack London's short story 'To Build a Fire' (1908). I first read this years and years ago - probably as an undergraduate - and I have just found the full next on the internet. It is about a man travelling in the Yukon whose only hope of survival is to build a fire and it is just as chilling in every sense as I remembered. I don't want to spoil it for you. Go and read it - and shiver.

John Buchan and others

2010-01-12T17:06:00.004Z

A friend who reads my blog asked me, 'How do you manage to read so much?' I don't read nearly as much as I have done at some periods of my life, but still . . . ten minutes sometimes over an early morning cup of tea, half an hour over lunch, always at bed-time, maybe even for a couple of hours in the evening. It all adds up. I can read pretty fast, but I don't tend to unless the book has lost its grip on me and I just want to get to the end. I prefer to let the writer set the pace and really sink into the novel.I did manage to get through a fair bit of reading over Christmas and the New Year. Here are some that I rate highly.

Stefan Zweig's BURNING SECRET is really a novella, published as a very attractive little book by Pushkin Press. It is set at a turn of the century German watering place. The philandering young Baron is determined to seduce an attractive married woman, almost past her prime, holidaying with her twelve-year old son, who at first provides the Baron with a way into her affections and then is an impediment to the consummation of the affair. Zweig is a wonderful writer with a deep understanding of human nature. I galloped towards the end, heart in mouth, desperate for things to turn out well, and fearing that they wouldn't. I won't say what happens. Do read it.

John Buchan's Edward Leithen stories were recommended by Natasha Cooper at St Hilda's last summer. They are good fun, and the last, SICK HEART RIVER, which takes place in the frozen wastes of Northern Canada, is a lot more than that. It is about coming to terms with mortality and about wresting meaning from life in the face of death. Buchan writes so well. I could almost feel the cold coming off the page and it's touching to reflect that it was written at the end of his own life and published posthumously.

Finally Marilynne Robinson's fine noveL, GILEAD, which I should really have read before HOME - discussed elsewhere on this blog- because it was written earlier and essentially tells part of the same story from a different viewpoint. A full realised world and a tour-de-force of technique and imagination. Brilliant, really.

The Pattern in the Carpet

2010-01-04T11:52:00.002Z

Margaret Drabble's book is subtitled A PERSONAL HISTORY WITH JIGSAWS. It is partly a history of jigsaws (a little too much of this for me) and partly a memoir, focusing on her Aunt Phyl with whom she shared a love of jigsaws. Aunt Phyl was a key person in Drabble's childhood. Drabble remarks that it was almost impossible to please her mother, but almost impossible not to please Aunt Phyl. A primary school teacher and single, she liked playing with children and was pretty much the perfect aunt. We get sidelight too onto Drabble's parents, her difficult, depressive mother, and gentle Quaker father. At one point she wonders what he would have thought of Hugh Kingsmill’s words about the Kingdom of Heaven which ‘canot be created by charters and constitutions nor established by arms. Those who set out for it alone will reach it together, and those who seek it in company will perish by themselves.’ This fascinating thought makes me what to find out more about Kingsmill, who was the first subject of biographer Michael Holroyd (Drabble's husband).
I ended this book liking Drabble for her modesty and honesty. And wondering if I should take up jigsaws, which she suggests is an excellent pastime for writers. It switches the brain onto the visual track and gives the verbal part a rest. Gazing out of train windows and going to exhibitions also fulfill that function for me.

A Woman at Home II

2009-12-19T14:40:00.007Z

Going to the post office to buy stamps and post cards to friends abroad, writing cards, writing letters to the people that I write Christmas letters to, cooking meals, going back to the post office to send the one foreign card I forgot, buying Christmas presents, wrapping Christmas presents, doing the washing, going back to the post office with a parcel, preparing a Christmas stocking, making a Christmas cake, planning menus, posting Christmas cards, cooking meals, writing a shopping list, ordering a turkey, collecting a turkey, cooking meals, taking a child to the pantomime, doing the washing, tidying the house, making up beds for guests, preparing and giving a reading at Carols by Candlelight, cooking meals, going to the post office with a final parcel, doing the washing, choosing and wrapping present for child's teacher, stopping car so that child can run back to the house for it on the last day of term, ordering flowers for my mother-in-law's birthday, doing the washing, finding time to celebrating my own birthday a week before Christmas, going food shopping, having a tooth out, cooking meals, doing the washing, doing my accounts, vetting a contract with a publisher, taking old toys to charity shop to make room for new toys, cooking meals, doing the washing, remembering cards and Christmas boxes for the postman, the dustbin man and so on, persuading my reluctant husband to come with me to buy a tree from the local National Trust nursery, consternation when we see the SOLD OUT sign, driving on over the moors in a desperate search, it's starting to snow, and it's getting dark, and the car's making a strange clanking noise . . .

I take back everything I wrote in my last blog.

But when the last Brussels spout peeling has sunk into the compost, the last bit of Christmas wrapping paper has been smoothed out for recycling, and my head is no longer full of lists, I'll be back on my blog writing about books.

Maybe I'll even get round to writing a novel myself.

And yes we did find a tree in the end. We got home safely, too.

A Woman at Home

2009-12-04T10:23:00.004Z

I am still mulling over the biography of Elizabeth Taylor that I wrote about a few weeks ago. One of Nicola Beauman's arguments is that Taylor might have been an even greater novelist if she hadn't been tied to her sweet-manufacturer husband and the domestic round. I wonder . . . There is virtually always a difficult time in the life of a writer when they are honing their craft, serving their apprenticeship as it were, and earning hardly any money. For many writers this problem never goes away. The general public would be amazed, I think, if they knew how little most writers make. For Taylor this was never a problem. There was plenty of money - enough soon for domestic help and for boarding schools for the children - and she was able to concentrate on producing the best work she could while for years she didn't earn a penny. In his book ON BECOMING A NOVELIST John Gardner states the case baldly, 'The best way a writer can keep himself going is to live off his (or her) spouse.'

Yes, there's another side to this. Cyril Connolly felt that the pram in the hall could be the ruin of a promising writer, and it is true that combining writing with babies and toddlers is difficult, but once the children are at school it becomes a whole lot easier (even without boarding schools). Of course the school day is short, but look at what Trollope managed to do in three hours a day. He thought a writer shouldn't need much more than that, and I tend to agree. It's the other stuff (like writing this blog!) that it's hard to fit in.

On balance, it suits me. And I couldn't put it better than Agatha Christie, who once sly remarked that crime is an excellent occupation for a woman at home.

Stranger than Fiction . . .

2009-11-24T10:16:00.004Z

I recently finished writing a short story which centred around a murder committed by a surgeon who wants to get rid of a woman who is threatening to spill the beans about their affair. I asked myself if this is a plausible motive for murder in this day and age, and decided that given the conservative nature of the medical profession and the fact that it happened thirty years ago, it was fine. So imagine my interest when I opened a newspaper the other week and read about a hospital consultant who spiked his mistress's coffee in order to induce an abortion and ended up jailed for six years. I guess most writers have had the slightly eerie feeling of writing about something and finding that something similar has happened in real life.

On the other hand events that occur in real life aren't necessarily plausible in a work of fiction. All writers use real events in their own lives or in other people's as starting points, but the closer you stay to that real event, the less convincing it is. The story has to take on a life of its own, and it won't do that if you stick slavishly to the facts. And then, too, sometimes real life has to be toned down. Things happen that in a novel would have the reader throwing their hands up in disbelief: bizarre coincidences, solutions to problems coming completely out of the blue, freak accidents. So, yes, it's a cliché, but truth often is stranger than fiction and the novelist walks a fine line, the crime novelist perhaps more than most.

Home

2009-11-17T10:40:00.003Z

Marilynne Robinson's fine novel explores a question that I've sometimes pondered. After all the excitement of the return of the Prodigal Son, what happened next? Once they'd eaten the fatted calf and ordinary life resumed, what then? How did the good brother, the dutiful one who had stayed at home, come to terms with the situation? Did the prodigal one really manage to give up his wandering life and settle down? Could the father really fully forgive?

HOME begins with the thirty-eight year old, Glory, one of eight children, arriving home to take care of her elderly father, a retired Presbyterian minister. She is wounded by romantic betrayal and the knowledge that she has lost the chance of children and a home of her own. The scene is set for the arrival of the true prodigal, her brother Jack, always the black sheep of the family, who has been gone twenty years. This is a quiet novel about quiet people. There is no huge drama, and sometimes violent emotions produce little more than eddies on the surface, but how brilliantly Robinson depicts the ebb and flow of emotion, the importance of what people don't say, the pain that well-meaning people can inflict on one another. It's the 1950s and the TV news shows civil unrest. The anti-segregation protests seem a world away from the little town of Gilead in rural Iowa, but we come to understand that it isn't. As for home, I think it was Robert Frost who defined it as the place where when you have to go, they have to take you in. But is it also the place that you can never escape from? There is something Checkhovian about this subtle, compassionate novel.

The Mandarins

2009-11-06T16:34:00.004Z

I was about 200 pages into this 700 page novel by Simone de Beauvoir, when I paused and considered: was I going to finish it or not? It was the choice of my reading group. But was I prepared to devote that much time to it? I decided to push on. I'm glad I did. Though it isn't in my view a great novel, it has an interest all its own. It's the kind of great big baggy novel that would never get published now: pages and pages of unrealistic dialogue about politics and philosophy, clunky exposition, far too many characters who aren't sufficiently distinguished from each other, most of them with names beginning with L or S. But as a portrait of post-war French intelligensia I imagine it is unsurpassed. I wish I had read in my twenties when I read Sartre's novels.
It is told from the alternating views of Henri Perron, novelist and journalist (third person), and Anne Dubreuilh, psychiatrist (first person) and we explore through them the dilemmas of politically aware intellectuals in a fractured society still reeling from the trauma of occupation: how those who collaborated should be dealt with; how far to compromise one's ideals for the sake of political expediency; how to find meaning in what for de Beauvoir was a post-Christian world.
There is a strong autobiographical element: too strong, I feel, in the account of Anne's affair with an American novelist, Lewis Brogan, a thinly disguised portrait of de Beauvoir's actual lover, Nelson Algren, to whom the book is dedicated. He objected - and no wonder. It reads very much as if it was a straight transcription of what had really happened, and I kept thinking: enough, I don't need to know this. The question of how far the writer is justified in pillaging the lives of the people around them is one that's often debated. Faulkner thought that 'the writer's only responsibility is to his art . . . if a writer has to rob his mother he will not hesitate; the 'Ode on a Grecian urn' is worth any number of old ladies.' I think this is bunk. Writers are human beings and moral agents before they are writers. Lionel Shriver wrote recently about the havoc caused in her family by a novel which they regarded as being too autobiographical. Some prices are too high to pay.

Coming of Age novels

2009-10-27T10:55:00.003Z

I've recently read two novels which fit into this category. Giorgio Bassani's THE GARDEN OF THE FINZI-CONTINIS and Olive Anne Burns' COLD SASSY TREE. In other ways they could hardly be more different. Bassani's novel, published in 1962, is elegaic. lyrical,
and poignant. It is set in Ferrara in the 1930s and we know from the beginning that the Jewish family of the Finzi-Continis, including the daughter, Micol, with whom the first-person narrator falls in love, will end by perishing in the gas chambers - most of the narrator's family too. Bassani grew up in the Jewish community of Ferrara and drew on his own experience of anti-semitism in the thirties.
In COLD SASSY TREE (1984), published when the writer was sixty, Olive Ann Burns was drawing not on her own life, but on the stories that her father told about growing up in Georgia at the beginning of the century. She writes from the point of view of Will Tweedy, a young man in his twenties, recollecting his experiences as a fourteen year old boy. It is a tour-de-force, never less than convincing, funny, touching, even bawdy as Will observes the marriage between his very recently widowed grandfather and a much younger woman turn from a marriage of convenience into a real love match - and suffers the pleasures and pains of first love himself.
It's not surprising that so many writers should tackle this subject - that period of life is so vivid, so memorable. And it's interesting too that these are often one-off novels. Olive Ann Burns planned a sequel, but it was never finished. And the one-off novels I wrote about in an earlier blog, TO KILL A MOCKING BIRD, LE GRAND MEALNES, were coming of age novels too.

The Other Elizabeth Taylor

2009-10-20T13:52:00.002+01:00

I was eager to read Nicola Beauman's biography of the wonderful novelist and short story writer, Elizabeth Taylor. I've admired since quite by chance I picked up an old Penguin copy of A VIEW OF THE HARBOUR about twenty-five years ago in Austin's second-hard furniture emporium in Peckham (long closed, alas). I was actually looking for a wardrobe - and I bought one too.
THE OTHER ELIZABETH TAYLOR certainly gripped me, because as well as being the other Elizabeth Taylor, a middle-class mother and housewife, married to a sweet manufacturer, she had another life as a member of the Communist party and as the lover of a fellow communist, an ten-year affair which began soon after her marriage in the early 1930s. I had no idea either that she knew David Blakely, who was murdered by Ruth Ellis, the last woman to be hanged in England.
And yet as I read on, I became ever more uneasy. There was so much speculation: 'Elizabeth must have thought . . . Elizabeth would surely' and so on. She was a very private person, so perhaps this was inevitable to some extent, but there was an awful lot of it. What I found even harder to take was a reference to 'poor Elizabeth.' The biographer's relationship with their subject is a delicate one and in my view the biographer should never presume or patronise. I didn't always agree with Beauman's assessment of the novels either
The biography was authorized by Elizabeth Taylor's husband, John, and the biographer certainly met him, yet there is a curious void where one would have expected him to be. I had little sense of him as a person and there isn't even a photograph of him. Taylor's children were, to use their own words, quoted by Beauman, 'very angry and distressed' when they read the manuscript and would not endorse it. Was this because of the book recounts extra-marital affairs on the part of both parents? It's not made clear.
When I finished the book, I had a strange feeling. It was as if I had glimpsed Elizabeth Taylor in a mirror that had slightly distorted her.

Well, I'm back ...

2009-10-12T10:20:00.002+01:00

...and it's been so long that I have almost forgotten how to blog. No sooner was I recovering from the car crash - plaster off and walking on crutches - than I caught swine flu -and so did my daughter. There have been other problems too which I can't write about, because they involve someone else. Suffice it to say that the last six weeks or so rank among the most difficult of my life. Housebound as I have been for much of the time and bedbound too for some of the time, books have been a vital comfort and escape. So thank you, Garrison Keillor, for LEAVING HOME which I read in the gaps between being wheeled around between the consultant, the X-Ray department, the plaster room, and the physiotherapy department at Chesterfield Hospital. Thank you E. B. White for the hundreds and hundreds of witty and humane letters that you wrote: perfect for sick-room reading. Thank you, Martin Edwards, for THE ARSENIC LABYRINTH, which made me forget everything for a while. Thank you, Jane Austen, for MANSFIELD PARK, which I re-read with immense pleasure. Thank you, Sara Paretsky, Ann Cleeves, and Tess Gerritsen for the fine crime fiction which beguiled many weary hours.
This blog is about books, but I want to say thank you to all my lovely friends who took me out and saved my sanity, drove me to hospital and my reading group, e-mailed me, sent me cards, even did my ironing. I'm a lucky woman.

Accident

2009-09-18T10:34:00.003+01:00

Just over a couple of weeks ago I had a nasty car accident and fractured my leg. I won't write much now as I am in plaster and can't sit for long at my word processor, but I do want to say thank to the lovely people who rescued me and called an ambulance. If you're reading this, please get in touch. I would be more than happy to send you copies of my books.
Normal service with be resumed as soon as possible. Look forward to another blog on comfort reading. E. B. White's letters have been a godsend.

Holiday reading

2009-08-26T10:33:00.002+01:00

I'm always anxious when I go on holiday that I might run out of things to read - or take the wrong books. Two occasions spring to mind. One was a trip to Italy when I fell ill in Urbino and had only the Nonesuch Byron to read. Nothing wrong with it as such - far from it - but a good thriller would have been more like it. The other time was at an airport in Greece when our flight was delayed and I discovered that Amanda Cross was not my favourite crime writer. I've been careful since then to make sure that I keep something very absorbing in reserve for emergencies. Careful planning is essential when you're flying, but when you're driving to France as we did this year, it's possible to pack a bag full of books, and I did.

I took and read:
Sue Grafton, M FOR MALICE - excellent, one of her best
Andrea Camilleri, AUGUST HEAT - as usual, a treat
Raymond Chandler, THE LONG GOODBYE
Patricia Highsmith, THE TALENTED MR RIPLEY
(these last two is preparation for a paper that I was planning for the St Hilda's crime fiction conference, the Chandler repaid rereading, the Highsmith didn't)
Brad Gooch, FLANNERY: A LIFE OF FLANNERY O'CONNOR
Hakan Nesser, THE MIND'S EYE - a fine addition to Swedish crime fiction
Colin Cotterill, ANARCHY AND OLD DOGS - to be honest I might have read this before I went away, but it's so good I'm going to mention it anyway.

I took and didn't read:
Jane Austen, PRIDE AND PREJUDICE
Richard Cobb, PARIS AND ELSEWHERE
Jeffrey Deaver, A GARDEN OF BEASTS
Elliott Patterson, THE SKULL MANTRA
Alan Furst, THE FOREIGN CORRESPONDENT
Francis Spufford, I MAY BE SOME TIME: ICE AND THE ENGLISH IMAGINATION

On Not Reading Proust

2009-07-20T14:25:00.003+01:00

A couple of weeks ago I drove north to Redcar to put flowers on my father's grave, the first time since my mother died last year. My father died when I was nine and my family moved away when I was twenty-three. I've only been back a handful of times since and I think that is why my memories are so very vivid. They haven't been overlaid by more recent ones. So when I drove through Saltburn I could almost see myself sitting on the sofa with Joy, my best friend, at her house watching the moon landings almost 40 years to the day, could almost hear Stevie Wonder singing 'My Cherie Amour,' the soundtrack for that seemingly endless summer.
I drove round by our old house in Redcar and sat looking at it for a while. It's a cliché I know, but it really did look smaller than I remembered. The stained glass in the front door that used to throw jewelled light onto the hall floor and stairs had gone. And in thinking of that I remembered that the stairs used to be one of my favourite places for reading.
And what years those were for books, my mid teens to my early twenties. I had a summer job some years, but still there seemed to be endless days, hours and hours, for reading, and my appetite for serious literature was endless. I did an English degree so I was meant to be reading anyway - PARADISE LOST was set as the task for the first Christmas vacation - but I read a lot on top of the set books. CRIME AND PUNISHMENT, WAR AND PEACE (read mostly in the bath, believe it or not), ANNA KARENINA. I didn't read Proust, but maybe that was the wrong age. I was in my thirties when I read the first third, and was bowled over by SWANN IN LOVE. I think I appreciated it more than I would have done when I was younger. Now my life has the wrong rhythm for Proust. I wouldn't be able to take a run at it. Maybe one day I'll give myself a sabbatical in France and read the rest.
And talking of sabbaticals, I'm taking a little break now. But I'll be back in mid-August, so don't go away.

Memory Lane

2009-06-30T14:06:00.006+01:00

The first book I remember buying in a book shop, or, more likely, having bought for me, is THE BORROWERS by Mary Norton. My memory is hazy - but I see the dark wood shelves (and paneling, too?) of the old W.H.Smith's on Redcar High Street - which probably means I was staying at my grand-parents. It's the feeling I remember most - of wanting and the thrill of possession. I don't know how old I was. Seven? Eight?
We didn't have a lot of books in our house, because we didn't have much money, but when we lived in Ampleforth, my mother used to take us the bus into Helmsley once a week and we would get books out of the library. I loved the Norse legends and was frustrated because I was a good reader and had usually finished my book long before the next visit came round. However I couldn't have been so very short of books, because there were enough for me to pretended to be a librarian and catalogue them: I see that ALICE IN WONDERLAND is number 10. That had been one of my mother's books from her own childhood: so was ANNE OF GREEN GABLES which I adored. In my copy of WHAT KATY DID AT SCHOOL by Susan Coolidge I've written a date: I was six when I was given that. I read it many, many times and much preferred it to ALICE IN WONDERLAND - I think that is a book for adults. As a child I found it disturbing. Maybe my grip on reality wasn't strong enough for me to enjoy the joke.
Later, aged around ten or eleven, I saved up my pocket-money to buy the Pullein-Thompson pony stories to fuel my own fantasies of one day owning a horse. Then a year or two later it was Gerald Durrell's series of books about collecting animals: THREE TICKETS TO ADVENTURE, MY FAMILY AND OTHER ANIMALS and so. I've still got those. Looking back it seems to me now that a very wide of range of reading appealed to me and it wasn't just a solitary activity. My friend Linda and I loved Biggles - how extraordinary that seems now - and my friend Pauline had a terrific collection of Superman comics. We used to pore over those together as well as over our copies of JACKIE.
Will today's children have the same relationship with the printed word? My own children haven't - there are so many other calls on their time, TV, the internet, DVS . . . I feel something has been lost. But then I would, wouldn't I?

The romance of Abebooks

2009-06-25T15:05:00.004+01:00

I love to browse in bookshops. One favourite is Scarthin books in Cromford, nr Matlock, which sells both new and second-hand. I used to go there so often with my small daughter that she got it muddled up with the library and used to call it 'the library shop.' Another is Heffer's book shop in Cambridge to which I paid one of my regular visits yesterday. Now that Murder One, the London crime fiction bookshop, has closed, Heffer's probably has the best selection of crime fiction in the country, thanks to the wonderful fiction buyer, Richard Reynolds. He can usually be found at his desk in the crime fiction section and I always ask him to recommend something. I've come across some terrific books that way - Rennie Airth's THE BLOOD-DIMMED TIDE, Colin Cotterill's series featuring the Laos coroner, Dr Siri - and yesterday came away with Louise Penny's STILL LIFE. That personal recommendation can't be bettered. And in a bookshop there's always the chance you'll come across something that you didn't know you wanted until it sparks your imagination- and that can be gold dust for a writer.
But I do like buying books on the internet too - and especially through Abebooks. The names of the shops and places are so evocative. Aunt Agatha's in Ann Arbor, Michigan, Poisoned Pen in Phoenix, Arizona . . . I'd love to do a road trip touring mystery bookshops in the US and maybe I will one day. In the meantime it is magical to me that I can order a book from a shop in Pasadena in the evening and find an e-mail the next morning that tells me it has been sent out. And the things that are sometimes sent out with the books . . . but that is a story for another day . . .

F is for Fan

2009-06-15T14:09:00.004+01:00

You know how it is sometimes with a new friend. You really get on, you see a lot of each other, and then, you're not sure why, you can't seem to get round to ringing her, she doesn't ring you either, and you can't put your finger on it, but the spark's gone. Maybe after a while you'll pick up where you left off - and maybe you won't. That's how it was with me and Kinsey Millhone. But last week I read Q IS FOR QUARRY and all the old friendly feelings came flooding back. What a pro Sue Grafton is and I mean that as high praise. She never short-changes her reader. Her novels are rich and satisfying, full of characters who step right off the page. I particularly enjoyed the two old-timer police officers who employ Kinsey to help them identify a murdered girl long dead. Now that I'm back I'll read the other ones I'd missed.
Two things led me to pick up Q IS FOR QUARRY. I've got my mother's copies of Sue Grafton's novels now, so they are right there on the shelf, where I can see them if I turn my head. My mother really loved them, read them all, and and looked forward to the next one. The other is that Sue Grafton received the CWA Diamond Dagger last year in time for me to tell my mother that I'd be meeting her at the reception which in the end was a month or two after my mother died. I told Sue how much my mother had enjoyed her books. Of course she was pleased and said so. Another writer might have left it at that, but she drew me out about my own work, said sympathetically 'writing is bloody hard' and made me feel better when I was struggling a bit.
So yes, writing is hard, but good writers make it look easy, and that's what Sue Grafton does.

Flannery O'Connor

2009-06-04T10:43:00.004+01:00

I've at last finished THE HABIT OF BEING, a selection of her letters. It took me weeks. There are 600 pages, I only have a certain amount of time and energy for this kind of reading, and it took me a while to get into them. In particular it was hard for me as a Quaker to enter into her devout Catholicism and the racism of some of her attitudes, though common for that time and place, was still hard to swallow. But I am glad I keep going. As I got close to the end, I kept looking anxiously to see how many pages there were left, knowing that she was soon to die young and sorry that there wasn't going to be any more. It reminded me of when I read the MEMORIALS OF EDWARD BURNE-JONES years ago in the library of the Barber Institute in Birmingham and found myself in tears when I got to the end. It is a curious thing, reading about someone's life as it unfurls and all the time knowing what they cannot know: when it will end.
What I particularly enjoyed -in addition to the salty humour - were her thoughts on writing.
'When you present a pathetic situation, you have to let it speak entirely for itself . . . you have to present it and leave it alone.'
'You can suggest something obvious is going to happen but you cannot have it happen in a story. You can't clobber any reader while he is looking. You divert his attention, then you clobber him, and he never knows what hit him.'
'It appears I have finished my novel . . . someone said you don't finish one you just say to hell with it.'
She also once wrote something along these lines: 'a writer can do anything that they can get away with, but no-one has ever got away with much.' I like that.
I think she would have been wryly amused to find her short story, 'A Good Man is Hard to Find,' in THE CRIME LOVER'S CASEBOOK, which is where I first read it after picking it up in a remainder bookshop.

More Guilty Pleasures

2009-05-30T11:27:00.003+01:00

I've got more books on writing than I can bring myself to tell you. There's some justification. They've been essential tools in learning how to write. And then too writing is a solitary occupation and it's good to have a few old friends handy on shelf to turn to when I grind to a halt. But do I really need to have so many? In truth they are something of an addiction.So here are a few favourites. For inspiration, rather than technique there's Dorothea Brande's classic BECOMING A WRITER (first published 1934) and Brenda Ueland's IF YOU WANT TO WRITE (first published 1938). I wish I'd known Brenda - the biography in the front of her book notes that she received an international swimming record for the over-80s and was knighted by the King of Norway. As for her book, what woman writer wouldn't warm to this chapter heading: 'Why Women who do too much housework should neglect it for their writing.' Now that I've got it down from the shelf, I want to read it again. Also good when I need a pep talk are James M Frey's HOW TO WRITE A DAMN GOOD NOVEL II and Stephen King's ON WRITING.
Plot and structure are what I have always found most difficult and in the early days Robert J Ray's THE WEEK-END NOVELIST and Robert Mackee's STORY: SUBSTANCE, STRUCTURE, STYLE AND THE PRINCIPLES OF SCREEN WRITING were constant companions. I still go back to them. And then there's Lawrence's Block's books on writing, one of which has the great title, TELLING LIES FOR FUN AND PROFIT and . . .But you get the idea.
And do I find myself reading about writing instead of actually writing? What do you think?