Personal experiences

Yesterday I had lunch at the BAFTA Club.  It is an extraordinary place, decorated both inside and out in the grand style (slightly decayed).  It is situated at 195 Piccadilly, in an unassuming building conveniently equidistant between two great bookshops: Waterstone’s Piccadilly and Hatchard’s.  I entered a small foyer and mounted a shallow flight of steps.  Massive red velvet curtains, drawn, not open, hang at the top of the steps, presumably so that the club’s more distinguished members can burst upon the scene with a flourish.  To the unfamiliar and more humble visitor (especially this one with a bent for crime fiction) these curtains are vaguely intimidating.  What might lurk behind them?  The answer proves to be a 1950s-style reception console, ‘womanned’ by two terrifyingly efficient ladies.  The Greek masks of tragedy and comedy have been fixed high on the wall to their right.

The dining-room is small, cosy and cramped.  The waiter service is friendly but formal and the food is excellent, in an old-fashioned upper-class clubby sort of way.  I was there to meet Matthew Pritchard, an author new to the crime-writing scene; we had both been invited by a literary agent.  I have had the privilege of reading some of Matthew’s work in draft and I am very impressed.  He is definitely an author to look out for.

In fact, watch those curtains  –  he might just pop out from them!

My six author’s copies of In the Family came from Salt Publishing yesterday.  They looked very nice, nestling in the box like a litter of kittens.  Even though I need only one for myself, I shall part with them reluctantly!  However, I have already sent one on its way, with my full blessing: I’ve given it to Anita, my neighbour, who had not the slightest idea until today that I am a writer.  Nor is she a reviewer, a bookseller or anything remotely to do with publishing; she does not even belong to a reading group.  She keeps a horse and dogs (lots of them).

When she was ill a few years ago, she discovered in herself a liking for books that she had not experienced when she was younger and (since my house is heaving with them) I became her unofficial librarian.  We have a shared liking for crime novels and our tastes are remarkably similar.  We also both hate the winter!  When the evenings began to draw in, a year ago, she asked me if I had some books for her to read and I took round a wheelbarrow-load.  They just about lasted her until the spring.  I think of Anita as my yardstick: she is my model for all the unseen people I can never know personally for whom ‘a good read’ is an important part of life and who know what they like without analysing it too much.  One thing I can rely on Anita to do is to tell me the truth.  As a Yorkshirewoman through and through, if she doesn’t like In the Family, she will certainly say so.  If she says that she does like it, I shall feel greatly privileged.

In regular use at this address

I have got to the age and stage at which I do not suffer fools gladly.  The fools in question today belong to TV Licensing, that very unaugust organ of the state charged with the task of preventing anyone from receiving television programmes without first parting with the annual television licence fee of £145.50.  (I won’t digress here to discuss whether I think it’s worth it to support the BBC…)

For the past seven years, this impersonal body has been sending out letter after letter to our household to warn us that we might be watching television illegally, as no record of a licence at the address it has for us seems to exist.  Back in 2005, when the letters started to arrive, we did as requested and rang the given number to explain very carefully that the postcode which TV Licensing was using did not exist and that the property at our correct postcode was properly licensed.  The overseas call centre telephonist assured us that this would be rectified.   Nothing happened and the letters continued to arrive.  Diligently, we repeated the process four times; nothing happened and the letters continued to arrive.  We felt that we had fulfilled our moral and legal duty and therefore took no further action.  The letters have since continued to decorate our doormat and have varied in their threat level with all the graphic appearance of the rolling English road.  They are still coming and the one announcing an imminent summons is in front of me, looking very fierce; I think that we have had several of those over the years.

We have dutifully paid our licence fee throughout our time at this, our proper postcode; the ‘legal occupier’ of the fictional and extremely draughty house in the field over the road has not.  It will be an interesting day in court.

The proof

Margaret Yorke was among the first of the writers whose books I read when I became interested in crime fiction.  I ‘discovered’ her and Ruth Rendell at about the same time.  Pondering sadly on her death, having read obituaries and blog tributes, I have been thinking about the last time I read one of her books.  Called Dangerous to Know, it was published about twenty years ago.  I finished it last winter, having finally borrowed it from my friend Sally, who lives in London, after reading it in short bursts each time I went to stay with her over the period of a year or so.  It is a psychological thriller about a man with a dangerously-inflated ego who victimises his wife and daughters and eventually turns to murdering women who he believes have slighted him.

Sally’s copy is a proof from her time working as a bookseller.  Finding it again has made me blush, for I realise that by still having it in my possession I have myself committed a crime which I abhor, that of borrowing a book and not returning it to its owner!  I am penitent.  Dangerous to Know will be restored to Sally next time we meet.

Margaret Yorke produced novels almost once a year for over forty years: an incredible achievement.

Ooops, not much left of this one!

An article in yesterday’s BBC online magazine describes ‘scientific’ evidence that chocolate makes you clever.  This is based on the theory that rats and snails live longer and have better cognitive function when they eat chocolate.  More tenuously, the authors link chocolate consumption with human intelligence, especially of the prize-winning variety.  Apparently the number of Nobel prize-winners per thousands of population is highest in countries where the per capita consumption of chocolate is also highest.  Unsurprisingly, Switzerland takes the (chocolate) biscuit, whilst Sweden is the odd one out, because although it has the second-highest number of Nobel prizes for its population size, chocolate consumption is low there.  (The authors say, somewhat archly, that ‘this may be because Sweden has a patriotic bias’ when awarding Nobel prizes.)  Speaking for myself, this is good news indeed: if I keep on eating chocolate at my present rate, I should be sweeping the literary board in no time: not only the Nobel prize for literature, but the Man Booker, the Pulitzer and even the Theakston’s Old Peculier Award all seem well within my grasp!  A thought strikes me, however:  Is my chocolate-eating prowess above average, average, or – whisper it quietly – possibly lower than the norm?  I can’t do the maths!

Now the alpha male in the house (not a chocolate eater) is feeding the snails chocolate on his vegetable patch to win them over from his greens.  He clearly needs to discover Green and Black’s for himself.

In true Leadbelly fashion, I woke up this morning convinced that the blues had got me; it must have been the impact of too much noir in books and on television over the weekend.   What is it in human nature that always pushes us towards ever-darker stimulation?  I am reminded of the fashion for gothic in the late eighteenth century, when there was plenty of noir about to titillate readers ever more hungry for the gruesome, the erotic and the oneiric.  Fortunately for sanity, there is always an antidote to this and parodies of noir inevitably follow too great an emphasis on the nastier, seamier side of life.  Jane Austen’s splendid satire on the gothic novel, Northanger Abbey, must have been very refreshing to readers suffering too much of a bad thing.

When I have had enough of the mean streets of the gritty city and the jaundiced and jaded detective soured by too much corruption amongst criminals and police superiors, I start looking for something lighter to compensate.  Too much Philip Kerr?  Perhaps I’ll come up with some Birmingham Blanc.  Nothing like a bit of fun when the blues get you.

Today is the day that my book has been published.  When In the Family was little more than the glint of an idea, I dreamed of this day.  I don’t know what I expected  –  certainly not some kind of red carpet event!  Hundreds of booksellers beating a path to my door?  Having been a bookseller myself, hardly that!  The best that I can hope for is that booksellers in all sorts of places are very kindly getting sweaty and grubby opening boxes which contain my book among others.  Booksellers are the great unsung heroes of the publishing industry and they deserve a separate blog entry to themselves about that.

So what is happening today?  A mellow autumn sun is shining palely; the leaves continue to fall.  I’ve been to the local farm shop to order a goose for Christmas and was lucky enough to find the ‘fish lady’ there, so bought a crab for dinner.  All of this feels like a celebration –  the kind of celebration I like best, just appreciating the good things as they come and knowing the book is there, like a warm glow in the background.  Thank you for your support along the way.  I hope that you will find a way of celebrating with me, too.

Available from Salt Publishing at:

http://www.saltpublishing.com/shop/proddetail.php?prod=9781907773242

I have been interested to read quite a number of recent Twitter posts which confirm a powerful hatred of fireworks and of Bonfire Night.  I enjoyed these two: “When I’m rich, I’m going to buy ALL the fireworks on sale on Merseyside and bury them” and “I refuse to endorse 400-year-old celebration of anti-Catholic bigotry.”  Personally, I have mixed feelings; the problem is that Bonfire Night and Hallowe’en have blended into a fortnight’s slow-release firework fest, combining the best of the visual extravaganza with the worst of the mischief.  However, I remember that, when I was growing up in Spalding, in the East of England, Bonfire Night and Mischief Night were rolled into one on November 5^th and children blacked their faces with soot on a cork or dressed up as ghosts and took their guy around the neighbourhood to demand (with appropriate chants) their treats; owners of pets knew that there would be only a couple of days of potential danger for their animals and the whole thing seemed to be blessed with innocent fun and excitement.  I have not forgotten that my imagination was always inspired by the occasion, for there lay behind it all a sense of the macabre and of lurking threat, which was real enough in the time of James 1^st and still finds its way in various forms into the work of crime novelists.  I rather like Bonfire Night… and a plot to blow up Parliament is the stuff of fancy!

Amanita muscaria (fly agaric)

It is a clear crisp autumn day today. Although the sunshine is bright, it contains more than a hint of winter.  The leaves are falling fast, but the woods are still a kaleidoscope of burnished colours.  Walking with the dog (mercifully, early enough to miss the shooters), I noticed that last week’s dismal mists and drizzle have coaxed out some glorious displays of fungi.  Most people would have recognised the fly agarics beneath the birches, but particularly impressive to me was a cohort of tiny orange bracket fungi which had formed a symmetrical pattern across the whole of a fallen forked branch.  It reminded me immediately of Laura Ellen Joyce’s impressive debut novel The Museum of Atheism.  It will be published by Salt on November 15th

and I have been privileged to read an advance copy.  It is about the murder of a child beauty queen and its theme is moral decay.  Laura reinforces this by opening each chapter with a short description of a species of fungus, which is brilliantly effective.  Check it out on the Salt website.