Paul Magrs

After my review of ‘Good-Bye to Gumble’s Yard’ yesterday, I got a very nice email from John Rowe Townsend himself:

I’m glad you enjoyed “Goodbye to Gumble’s Yard.”  It’s an old book
now, and out of print, but it was always one of my favourites.  It
sounds as if you haven’t read the book that preceded it, which was
just called “Gumble’s Yard”  and is about the same family.  It’s
still in print and can be ordered from Oxford University Press in
paperback at £3.99.   I hope you’ll like that one, too.  Happy reading.

John Rowe Townsend.

I’ll have to get that – and check out the rest of OUP’s list, to see what else they’ve brought back into print. Well done, them!

Meanwhile, my ‘Diary of a Dr Who Addict’ has been getting a few online reviews lately, which I’ve been very pleased about. ‘A gentle, beautifully observed novel’ says Total Sci-Fi, while Ian Berriman at SFX tells us:

‘Thirtysomethings will smile at references to Breville sandwich toasters and Tudor crisps. Fans will chuckle at David’s vocabulary of words-learnt-from-Who (like “chitinous”, “unearthly” and “voluminous”). Teens, meanwhile, will be reassured that it’s okay to be different – and realise that a previous generation experienced exactly the same uncertainty.’

One of my favourite reviews so far comes from Frank at Cathode Ray Tube, a rather nice blog I hadn’t seen before. He says:

‘David’s love of The Show is my love of the series too. At the same age, I bought those shiny red Silvine exercise books and promptly filled them with strange Doctor Who stories where I was the Doctor’s companion and, yes, we would end up in genre busting crossovers with Star Trek and Planet Of The Apes. Magrs understands the importance of fan production and how genre shows such as Doctor Who inspire young writers to blossom and use their talent. It’s such a positive aspect of David’s story, along with Robert’s similarly exultant discovery of his own sexuality and creativity in music, and confirms that such a love of The Show is not time wasted, is not a misspent youth.’

And this just in from Big Finish Productions – the cover for my upcoming Doctor Who audio starring Katy Manning as both Jo Grant and Iris Wildthyme, ‘Find and Replace’. But before anyone says – no, it’s not about the Autons. I believe the blank faces are symbolic!

‘Good-bye to Gumble’s Yard’ was first published in the Sixties, as ‘Widdershins Crescent’ and was a sequel to ‘Gumble’s Yard’ – a novel about kids growing up in inner city Manchester, amongst the sprawling urban decay of warehouses and back-to-back terraces. This sequel is about the ramshackle family of orphans, cousins and ne-er-do-well adults being rehoused on a a smart new council estate beyond the Green Belt, out of town.

The child characters are immediately likable. They are bonded as a unit, weathering the storms caused by their terrible father-figure Walter, who gambles and drinks away every penny that comes the family’s way, and his wife Doris, who’s hardly any better. When the kids use all their resourcefulness to furnish the house with reclaimed solid wood furniture from the old streets being knocked down, they return home to find that Doris has filled the house – in an instant – with tacky ‘modern’ stuff made of plyboard and bought on the never-never.

It’s a book from a time when moving to a council estate was a chance for self-improvement. When the family neglects to tidy its front garden they are written to by the council and threatened with eviction. The place must be maintained as an environment that everyone is proud to belong to. When the narrator starts digging, neighbours pitch in to help him spruce the place up. Later, when his younger cousin is discovered to have a near-genius IQ, his headmaster moves heaven, earth and his ignorant father, in order to get him a place at the posh school. The whole street turns out to see Harold set off on his first day in uniform:

‘I suppose nobody in Widdershins Crescent has had anything special in the way of education, and none of their children have done anything striking either. But they were all proud of Harold. Whatever anyone might have thought about privileged schools that most children couldn’t go to, nobody grudged him his triumph. He was also, I realized, a sign that in spite of everything we were beginning to belong.’

It’s a spiritual successor to Eve Garnett’s ‘The Family from One End Street’, but it’s not quaint enough and long-ago enough for it to feel safely distant to a contemporary audience. And I don’t think it’s available nowadays. ‘Gumble’s Yard’ was reprinted a little while ago, but not its utopian New Town sequel. It reminds me a little of Angus Wilson’s New Town novel of the Sixties, ‘Late Call’, which is all about people adjusting to living in futuristic boxy houses and shopping in precincts built of poured concrete. These are books from a particular moment in the late Twentieth Century that chime a real chord with me: when we lived in futuristic settings and the tarmac roads ran Widdershins.

I’m sorry I’ve never read John Rowe Townsend before. His dialogue is punchy and naturalistic. He doesn’t flinch from depicting the ugliness and hardships of people’s lives, and how they can make things worse for themselves, but sometimes better, too. There is optimism and hope in this book, too. I’m going to have to hunt around on Ebay and suchlike for his other books – though I saw the other day that he has a website and a small press of his own, reprinting his earlier books.

On car journeys we sometimes listen to Doctor Who audios together and for this weekend’s trip J. and I took the first two stories from Big Finish’s new ‘Lost Stories’ series. I fully expected to not like them much. I mean, these are stories that were pitched, written, dumped and deliberately lost back in 1986 – during the period popularly and fondly remembered as The Show’s nadir.

Except… Except I was always very fond of the Colin Baker Year(s). The stories were garish, crass, nonsensical, badly developed and scripted. They were often bizarrely violent and gruesome and macabre. They were over-lit and horribly designed. Key roles were often played by weirdly miscast actors, familiar from sitcoms and soaps. But I loved those stories. To me, more than ever during that period, the Doctor was a citizen of the universe. An arrogant and incredulous figure, stomping about in his yellow trousers and spats and coat-of-many-colours – as happy striding into the throne room of Princess Zog as he was up and down the back streets of the East End of London.

It was an outrageous time for The Show: short on genuine wit, reeling with gratuitous use of continuity points from the programme’s history and revelling in the sheer ugliness it managed to drum up on screen week after week. Technobabble and pantomime gestures existed side by side in a way that even Blake’s 7 hadn’t managed. And there was a roster of returning super villains – the Rani, the Master, Sil and Davros – all of them despicable, leeringly awful. The Show was more like the 60s Batman TV  show than anything else.

Anyway, as history had it, that version of The Show was canned. Like anything oddly, truly original, it was sidelined abruptly, just as it was becoming truly great. I was so gutted at the time. I can’t even tell the story without feeling a little bit sickly, all over again. I was doing o levels and living in a world where I had to defend The Show on a daily basis to anyone who knew I still adored it. How everyone laughed at the Timelash, and the sequence that had Colin Baker dangling in that tinsel-strewn crystalline dimension made of polysteyrene. But I would never agree with them – ever! – that it needed a rest, or that it was no longer The Show it had been.

Legend has it there were completed scripts for what would have been the 1986 season…  and I remember imagining what they might be like. Skip forward to this year – to this weekend’s car journey back to the North East for my sister’s birthday – and here we are listening to the first two of those stories.

And I adored them. They’re noisy, silly, nonsensical and completely ludicrous in places. Each plot hole from 1986 has been lovingly restored. Each stupid piece of exposition has been beautifully hand-crafted and reinstated. Individual flourishes of cack-handed imagineering have been recreated with a masterful magician’s touch.

This series is incredible. Even the incidental music has the genuine nerve-splitting noodling and electronic pinging and zinging that The Show delighted in back in the 80s. Colin Baker’s back at his HUGELY acerbic height, hose-spraying friend and enemy alike with his vitriol and scorn. Even when he mourns an enemy’s doom he does it COLOSSALLY, relishing each mellifluous syllable. And Peri, his american assistant is back to being near-hysterical in every scene. The only girl companion who could scream sarcastically while still sounding like she meant every word of it.

I love the colour and variety of all this. These tales belong to an era when The Show could and would take you anywhere. Even if the budget couldn’t allow it – they’d still have a bloody good go. In ‘The Nightmare Fair’ we’re behind the scenes at Blackpool Pleasure Beach and in ‘Mission to Magnus’ we’re on a dayglo planet with exploding ice caps and a race of domineering, brutish women who are clearly (even on audio) wearing pink Dusty Springfield wigs and nylon kinky boots and silver eyelashes. In just four episodes the Doctor’s been locked in mind games with a million year old Mandarin; played a deadly game of Space Invaders; wrestled with Ice Warriors and – rather surprisingly – told his wicked childhood nemesis to ‘Get stuffed..!’

There’s gleeful silliness as well as deadly danger, here. It’s serious, but never earnest. Dramatic, but never realistic in the slightest. And it’s never, ever boring. I’m looking forward to all the rest of this series. It’s something that needn’t ever have existed in the world. It’s a glorious folly. A folly someone’s patiently restored and then dropped a load of sticky paint and glitter on top.

And before these Lost Stories are over, we’re promised one written by Ingrid Pitt herself. My mind is boggling at the rescue of all of this trashy brilliance.

For some reason it’s just struck me that this month it’s fifteen years since I published my first short story. The story was ‘Patient Iris’ – a magical realist piece, very short, set in South Shields, and taking its starting point from a day out I had with my Big Nanna in 1993, visiting the Roman remains and talking with her about South Shields during the war.

The British Council’s annual anthology ‘New Writing’ was published by Vintage at that time and they produced these huge books of poetry, stories, essays and fragments. Mostly these were by old and established writers, but they had an open submissions policy, too, which I took note of, at some point in 1994. By 1994 I was twenty five, in the middle of a PhD in Lancaster and quietly despairing of ever publishing my fiction. I’d written ‘Does it Show?’ and ‘Marked for Life’ by then. Lancaster seemed like a very long way from everywhere.

I sent off the brown envelope with two or three stories for New Writing – and made myself forget about it. That summer of 1994 my housemates and I had to leave the lovely house by the canal we had shared for a year or more. The Scottish chef who owned it was taking it back – piano, chandeliers, patio and all. That summer I had to go back to Newton Aycliffe – where our house was standing empty on the edge of the estate. I went back to Aycliffe and found that, while my family had been away in the Middle East for months, a whole pile of post was waiting for them. Almost as high as the letterbox itself.

My friend Alicia had hired a van and driven me and all my belongings and all my boxes of books across the Pennines that day. After all the fetching and carrying I think she was relieved to leave me sitting there, working my way through that mountain of post. After all the bills and circulars and stuff to sort out I found a letter for me. It was sort of strange, sitting there in Aycliffe – where I hadn’t lived properly for about five years. Postmarked London, from the British Council, from the desk of the very impressive sounding Harriet Harvey Wood. Next thing I was yelling and running up and down our hallway, though there was no one there to hear me. The British Council, Vintage Books and editors A S Byatt and Alan Hollinghurst liked my story ‘Patient Iris’ enough to offer me a hundred quid for it.

It was about nine months until the book eventually came out. I spent the rest of that time cockahoop and feeling like a proper writer at last. I wrote more stories and started another novel. I put aside the Phd for a summer or so and read books of a non-theoretical nature…

Bliss when New Writing 4 eventually came out. There was to be a launch party. An actual swanky launch party with drinks and canapes and press and all that. In what used to be Books, etc on Charing Cross Road. Of course I planned to go, though naturally I was very nervous. I’d seen some of the other names that were in the same anthology and they were pretty smart and impressive.

I was lucky: on the morning of the launch the Guardian ran a long review of it, by James Wood. I woke up in my then boyfriend’s flat in New Cross and found the phone ringing off the hook: my flatmate Amanda in Lancaster had seen the review and she was screaming into the phone about it. The review was great!

So I felt a bit more confident, though no more calm, about going to Charing Cross Road that night. Pausing to look through the bright windows beforehand at my first after-hours book party. Seeing all these large, guffawing, bespectacled, confident people with flyaway hair, red faces, paper plates and wine glasses. I went in and found that there were readings already happening. It was a bit like a school nativity, the way people went to the front: four readers and a teacher-like person nudging and spurring them on. I remember meeting Brian Aldiss. I remember A S Byatt being lovely and enthusiastic – glimmering the whole time, as she praised my story – and remembered in detail the other two stories I had sent. And I remember being pleased to meet a famous editor who had been good friends with the subject of my phd, but who looked me up and down and at my jeans, which were ripped at both knees and said, ‘You’re wearing things that should be given to the poor.’

It was a nice night, though. I remember hooking up with my agent and my friend Sara and going to a restaurant on Charlotte Street with livid green walls and pink flamingos everywhere. Before we left the bookshop, though, a publicist from Chatto introduced herself. She knew about the review in the Guardian. She had read my novel manuscript, which I had sent to Chatto months ago. She had just finished reading ‘Marked for Life’ and she loved it.

And that started off the process of how I got into selling my first novel. That happened pretty soon after – there came a bunch of faxes and emails from agents and editors after the review of my story. But all that was yet to come.

Just that night in March I was happy to have a story out. A story that seemed real and solid and as good as anything I’d ever written.

Here’s James Wood, then chief literary critic of The Guardian (I hope he won’t mind my quoting the following) :

‘…Paul Magrs here contributes his first published story. According to the contributors’ notes, he is 25 and comes from County Durham. We shall be hearing much more of him. His story ‘Patient Iris’ is beautiful and strange. It is a little spindly, and Magrs too earnestly correlates all his imagery. But the story is so airy that it escapes this over-determination.

‘Iris, an old and dying lady with terrible bedsores, watches the harbour town of South Shields from her window. The old Roman remains are being renovated, and appear to be growing daily. A fierce winter grips that town, heralded by a magically ordinary sentence: ‘Winters like this, everything turns to jewels.’ Iris recalls a long-ago winter so cold that the harbour froze, and the seals came south to give birth on the harbour-ice: ‘The mothers rolling over, moist with their own cooling gels…’ Unlike Kneale’s and Kureishi’s stories, which are narrowly plinthed on a simple reversal, Magrs’s is a magical expansion of utopian inversions: the Roman ruins that are not disappearing but growing, the winter that does not kill life but engenders it. When Iris dies, the winter turns her into its own magical energy: ‘This is the kind of cold that crystallises fragments of lost souls in the air.’ Iris dies, and the writing follows her consciousness into the wintry but utopian world of the newly dead. It is a little like Chekhov’s story ‘Ward 6′, in which a dying man has a vision…

‘Magrs, as it were, crosses ‘Ward 6′ with one of Donald Barthelme’s playful exhalations. Death, for Iris, is (a) place where she can ‘wear her bedsores as jewels’ and, released from her bed, skate across the ice towards the seals, ‘as their children are slapped out like old shoes on to the bloodied glass.”

It was a pretty nice first review to get! Of course, then followed the novel – similarly magical realist and set in the north… and not everyone was quite so kind..! The novel was out by November that year – which seems incredible now… that it was all so fast. Maybe I’ll go on and tell the story of that publication, too…

This is the latest in a sporadic series of posts dedicated to Neglected Puffins. That is, kids’ books that have gone out of print and show no signs of returning to the world. They’re not always Puffins, but lots of them are, and it’s a good a collective term as any.

Patricia Lynch’s novel ‘The Bookshop on the Quay’ came out in 1956. I’ve had it waiting around the house for years. I must have picked it up in Norwich when I was buying up elderly Puffins for 79p a time. (Curious price – but that’s what everything cost in the charity shop on Magdalen Street.)

This is a lovely novel. We’re in Dublin in the early part of the twentieth century, and we follow Shane, who goes on a quest to find his uncle, a drover who was last seen headed for the big city. Shane winds up staring in the window of a secondhand bookshop right on the Liffey. He’s first seen reading the display copy of ‘Gulliver’s Travels’. Jonathan Swift – one-time dean of the nearby church – is a major figure in this book: the greatest writer Ireland’s ever produced, according to the warm-hearted bookseller who takes Shane in, giving him a family, a home and a job in the process. Shane discovers what appears to be a handwritten note from Swift – and later encounters the ghost of the writer himself one night in the chilly city.

That’s a very magical moment – as the children follow the dancing rag doll, Migeen, across the bridge and then come face to face with the phantom. The whole sub-plot to do with the loss of the doll and Bridgie’s heartbreak is genuinely moving.

My copy was illustrated by Peggy Fortnum – who, of course, drew the wonderful Paddington books. Just a few sharp squiggles and some primped eyebrows – she can suggest so much movement and atmosphere.

It’s a lovely book. Another – like Humphrey Carpenter’s ‘The Captain Hook Affair’ and ‘The Cricket in Times Square’ by George Selden – that Puffin haven’t kept alive and on the shelves. Someone should, though.

There’s so much in this particular book – with its family of book obsessives – that makes it just the right the right one to highlight on World Book Day. I love the image of the O’Clery’s sat round the breakfast table, with their fried eggs and white pudding and kippers, with books resting open against milk jugs and tucked down the sides of their chairs.

This is out quite soon: George Mann’s new novel, set in a different time and place – though ostensibly the same universe as – his Newbury and Hobbes steampunk books. This time we’re in Jazz Age New York with gangsters and cabaret singers and Long Island millionaires who throw parties for strangers for the sheer hell of it. It’s a murky tale of ritualized murder and oddly pristine Roman relics…

I should introduce Spoiler Space…

The concept is blindingly brilliant and deceptively simple. It’s The Great Gatsby meets Bob Kane’s original Batman. Between throwing his grand, nihilistic parties on Long Island, our millionaire glamourpuss Gabriel Cross dons trenchcoat, fedora, and red-glowing goggles and seeks to provide vigilante justice high above the rooftops of Manhattan. He metes out death in startlingly violent scenes (though he never shoots first) and thunders about the Art Deco skyline on his jet-powered boots. This first adventure sees him up against the Mob and a crazed killer known only as The Roman. Things become personal pretty quickly for our impassive anti-hero, as his cabaret singer girlfriend Celeste gets kidnapped, and he realises that she is somehow deeply implicated in the peculiar backstory of his nemesis.

This is great melodramatic stuff, with lots of secondary characters and amazing action sequences. I think the fights and air battles and car chases are a particular triumph here. Mann’s writing is direct, clean and punchy. I love all the world-weary whisky-slugging and Jimmy Cagney-type dialogue.

Then, just when we’re feeling cosy with the familiarity of the elements we get some mention of coal furnace-powered cars or communication by hologram or the ongoing war with England… and we’re reminded that we’re in an offshoot of Mann’s invented Steampunk universe here.

An uncanny rather than cosy place to be. Uncosy should be the word for it, I think: when the sampling of tropes from popular fiction becomes unsettling and disquieting…

When the Ghost – our grim-faced hero – teams up with Donovan, the cop, I was reminded of my favourite era of the Batman comics: early 80s, when Gene Colan drew the strip. His darkly smoky, photo-realist style really fits the New York that Mann creates here.

Most startlingly, the climax of the book takes us into a very strange place indeed… hinting at a larger backstory to do with otherworldly creatures that Gabriel has encountered before, in France, during the Great War. When we see the tentacled beasties here, trying to break through into our dimension, it’s like the book has flung open a portal into HP Lovecraft’s arcane world, for just the brief, bloodthirsty climax of the book. I was in heaven: Scott Fitzgerald meets DC Comics meets Lovecraft’s mysterious monsters – slugging it out in Twenties New York. I mean, where else do you get a fabulous combination like that..?

This week Radio 7 are repeating the three episodes of Brenda and Effie adventures they recorded.  Here’s the link to the Listen Again page:

http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b0092n8g

Hope you enjoy them! If you do, let Radio 7 know, and tell them you want some more!

This was my schlocky movie of choice for Sunday. Sometime in the middle of Sixties Batmania someone threw together this outrageous rip-off, featuring the utterly bizarre Batwoman and her gang of nubile batgirls. They don’t seem to do an awful lot, for a bat team: they stand around pools in bikinis looking bored and perch on armchairs and settees in Batwoman’s front room, pledging allegiance to her in bored, self-conscious tones. Batwoman herself is a buxom matron with a hint of Woman’s Prison about her demeanour. She’s garbed in dominatrix ensemble, topped off with a hairy cape, a sparkly mask and a several examples of what they now called Fascinators stuck in her coiffure. Her bat sign appears to be drawn in felt tip, straight onto her ample chest. Various lackeys and mad scientists and villains appear. We’ve got monsters and strange hearing aids and curious plans to do with a variety of Cup-a-Soup that can loosen the inhibitions of even the most uptight soul and set them go-go dancing on the spot.

The film is just outrageous.

I realise that one thing I love about really badly made films and their amateur actors is how bad-tempered some of the acting is. I’ve noticed it in Ed Wood and John Waters, for example. And I love the way that films like this gleefully chuck everything into the mix: UFO’s, gorillas, magic pills, beach party musical numbers and curious soup. The final battle here is glorious: with the whole cast running crossly round and round the scientist’s laboratory after multiple versions of the lead baddy, Ratfink. No one quite seems to know exactly what they’re up to or why – but they’re having wonderful fun, and frowning with concentration much of the time.

Batwoman needs to come back, somehow. She’d give Bruce Wayne a run for his money. I love the way she has all these elaborate code names and numbers for things, and ends up reciting them into her various communication devices, disguised as junk jewellery. At times she looks like she wished she hadn’t even started with this whole, complicated superheroine malarkey in the first place. You can just about see her tutting and rolling her eyes under that mask all the way through.

Salinger’s novel is our Book Club choice for March and I’ve just finished it again. I don’t know how many times that makes it now, that I’ve finished this book. I first read it when I was sixteen. It was a craze we all got into in my A Level German Literature class. It was a very small group, maybe six of us and my friend Nic brought in Catcher one week and it went round all of us in pretty quick succession. I remember our teacher telling us he’d read it one night in a single sitting, and he couldn’t believe that he had never read it before. I had the same feeling, even at sixteen: of wanting to have discovered the book sooner. We should have been talking more about Schiller and Kant and other German stuff, but we spent class after class talking about Salinger.

Our German lit teacher was great. I think it was his first job. He was funny and talked with a broad Geordie accent. He had a word processor at home. It was the first time anyone I knew ever had a word processor and he had to explain the very point of it: that it let you keep files of your words and so you could change things around. He even read what turned out to be my first completed novel and liked it. He took it home and typed it up for me, even.

Anyway: that was me at school at 16. These past few days I’ve been revisiting Holden Caulfield and those nights before Christmas when he absconds from his old school. The book is nothing more, really, than a series of inconsequential encounters with a gallery of characters who look at him with a range of reactions from concern to outright scorn. Holden is by turns desperate, charming, loud-mouthed, show-offy, despairing and needy. He rackets about the streets of midtown Manhattan for a couple of out-of-control days and nights, slouching about chainsmoking and wearing his red hunting cap back to front. He’s desperate for company: he rings up old girlfriends, dances with bored strangers, meets up with ex-schoolmates, visits ex-teachers and wakes up his younger sister, Phoebe, in the book’s most touching moments – when he finds himself a stranger in his parents’ own appartment.

This time what was different for me in reading ‘Catcher’ was that since my last reread – back three years ago – I’ve actually been to New York. I’ve wandered all those streets and across Central Park and I’ve been just about everywhere Salinger mentions in the book. Not in some programatic way, as a kind of literary tour: just because you can’t help it. His footsteps are all over the place and within the human-scaled confines of those canyons and neatly-plotted acres, you can’t help crossing his path again and again.

Something else that stood out on this read was how often he becomes aware of the loudness of his own voice – often when he’s drunk and ranting about something that his fellow interlocuter would rather not be hearing about. I love the way he rails against the phoniness of the world – usually quite justifiably – and then sinks down in embarrassment as much as he does despair. He’s a well-brought up kid. A very mild rebel, really, who just wants to do good things. But even the record he buys his sister is something he smashes into smithereens clumsily on his way to see her.

When I reread all four published Salinger books in 2007 it was Catcher that retained its charm the most. The stories and the novellas that revolve around the various members of the Glass family had far less interest for me than they used to. But still part of me hankers over those books that I’ve imagined Salinger writing for years in his seclusion. Wasn’t it that ex-girlfriend who wrote a memoir about their time together, who said he was keeping all these unpublished manuscripts in a safe? I would still love a whole load of new books to come out posthumously. It’s a fan completist gene thing, I guess. I feel about Salinger and Salinger’s secret writing like I do about the Loch Ness Monster or the Yeti. Yes, it might ruin the mystique and the novelty, but I’d still love to see them some day, too.

It’s out next week in the UK, published by Simon and Schuster – my new teen novel!  Here’s the blurb…

“It’s the 1980’s and David has just started secondary school. He’s becoming a teenager, but still hanging onto the rituals of childhood, particularly his addiction to Doctor Who, sharing the books with his best friend and neighbour, Robert, and watching the TV show. But time moves relentlessly on, and Robert starts rejecting the Doctor in favour of girls, free weights and new music. Against a backdrop of Bowie, Breville toasters and trips to Blackpool, David acknowledges his own abilities and finds his place in the world.”