Paul Magrs

I’m completely worn out this morning, and probably good for nothing all day. I slept really badly last night because south Manchester was aswarm with police helicopters all night. I don’t know who they were after, or what was going on, but they seemed to be swooping and diving all over our little bit of town. It was like Blade Runner with cobbles round here in the early hours of the morning – and I was awake for a while, expecting all kinds of drama. Just when I dozed off there was a huge crash from somewhere in the house. Bravely I steeled myself to get up and look around – and found nothing untoward.

Until I went to the bathroom and saw that the giant aloe vera on the shelf about the basin had committed messy green suicide everywhere. It had flung itself down and ruptured all of its fat, fleshy spikes. It looked like a Triffid had broken into our house and done something unspeakable.

So. Today I’m going to be very tired since after that I had to sit reading for ages before nodding off again.

But it least I slept in the end. And it was only things such as hornetlike helicopters and crazy cacti keeping me awake…

The picture above is of the books I’ve chosen to dive into for the start of this autumn. They’ll be interspersed of course with Green Carnation re-reading, as we move towards the shortlisting (announced November 1st.) But these are the books I want to mop up the days with in this surprise Indian Summer we’re getting.

The sun here is wondefrul, golden and green. I had a late afternoon with Mary Stewart yesterday – reading another of her delightful 1950s thrillers on Canal Street in the sun and then home in the garden with Fester sitting by me.

This particular TBR pile is almost perfect, I think. There’s a bit of everything, nearly – a children’s classic trilogy I’ve never quite finished (Jenny Nimmo); a Saint, a Poirot, a vintage Margery Sharp I found via Ebay; a Little House, a Nancy Drew, the second Gail Carriger ‘Parasol Protectorate’ steampunky adventure (thanks, Orbit!), and a new Berkeley Prime Crime novel, kicking off a spooky crime series by E.J Copperman – and a Dorothy L Sayers-edited anthology of supernatural tales. Maybe this heap of books is on the lighter side, with the stress absolutely on enjoyment… but that fits my needs perfectly just now. I find that with stressful things impending (as they are – and I think the aloe vera knew it…) – my reading shapes and moulds itself to my moods and needs. I swing into cosy – like no one’s business.

What a week! Friday already. So many high points and classic moments. One of my favourite moments was after we’d finished recording episode five of Demon Quest in those wonderfully cool studios in Soho on Wednesday afternoon. Tom Baker leaving the building in a long coat and clutching a shopping bag – a bit like Eric Morecambe at the very edge of the stage at the end of a show. He turned back and said, ‘Well, I suppose it’s time to go back to reality, isn’t it?’

And maybe it was. But it’s never for long, before the next adventure starts.

And for everyone else – Doctor Who – Demon Quest has just begun. Episode one was released this very week, just as the last part was being recorded. (The first hour-long episode is costing only three quid on iTunes and Audible at the moment, btw!) The very first online, quickie review went up on Gallifeybase last night: ‘It is wonderful and amazing fun. A joy!’

Which says it all, really.

Wednesday morning I sat outside my favourite Soho cafe in the sun with a cappuccino. I had my favourite-ever-albums playlist blasting on my headphones. Geoff Love launched into that brilliant orchestral, cinematic, 1978 version of the Doctor Who theme and I realised that I was waiting there at 9 am for Doctor Who to actually arrive…!

I’m back home after a very busy couple of days in London, spending time on two very important projects…

The first was the Longlisting Meeting for the Green Carnation Prize, which was held over dinner in Bloomsbury. We had our photos taken – looking a bit like a bizarre crime-fighting team from a TV show – and we set to work with all our notes and thoughts and ideas and weeks’ worth of reading behind us.

But we did it! We got our longlist!

Everyone else has already posted it on their blogs – and I’m the last to do so, having just got back last night. But we want the list to be as many places as we can get it. We want people to know about these books and to be reading them as we reread and think about the Shortlisting process.

Here they are!

• Generation A by Douglas Coupland (Windmill Books)
• Bryant and May Off the Rails by Christopher Fowler (Doubleday)
• Paperboy by Christopher Fowler (Doubleday)
• In A Strange Room by Damon Galgut (Atlantic Books)
• God Says No by James Hannaham (McSweeney’s)
• London Triptych by Jonathan Kemp (Myriad Editions)
• Mary Ann in Autumn by Armistead Maupin (Doubleday)
• Children of the Sun by Max Schaefer (Granta)
• Man’s World by Rupert Smith (Arcadia Books)
• The Slap by Christos Tsiolkas (Tuskar Rock Press)
• City Boy by Edmund White (Bloomsbury)

It’s only a few years since I started reading detective stories properly. I don’t know what it was with me and crime. It just didn’t do anything for me. And yet I’d read books in other genres and look past the conventional props and tropes and see that, really, it was all about the characters and what they were up to and that, really, genre was immaterial. But crime always left me a bit cold.

A few years ago I started to read bits and pieces of Agatha Christie and Dorothy L Sayers and found myself enjoying it all, almost despite myself. Almost guiltily I fell for the gallows humour and the sly campery of it all. I began to fall in love with the whole Golden Age thing. I wasn’t even all that bothered about the crimes, the puzzles and their solutions. I don’t think my mind works in that cryptic-crossword sudoku kind of way that so many people’s seem to.

Does that sound wrong? I like reading detectives but I’m not bothered about the crimes or even who did them?

I read them for the characters. I always loved Holmes and Watson but hadn’t read the whole canon till recent years. Now I’m mopping up apocrypha and wanting to spend more and more time with these two insatiable duffers. I fall happily upon things like Laurie R King’s series about Holmes, married in his dotage to a bright young gel – because I don’t want those adventures to end.

I think I like the mysteries more than I do their solving.

I think ‘mystery’ is probably a different genre to crime anyway. It’s in the shadowy edges… somewhere between crime and, often, the supernatural. The stories where the irrational supercedes everything and the answers aren’t so cut and dried. Spooky mysteries, in short – but where do they belong in generic terms..? Do we even have that category any more?

One of the things I was so chuffed about – getting into all of this research and reading round – was to find the whole Cosy Mystery scene going on. I read masses of these imported paperbacks (so cheap on Amazon! So varied and bonkers – these endless series featuring crime-solving cats, teddy bear-stuffers, flower arrangers, doll’s house menders, vampire lovers and bookshop owners.) My favourite of all these series, after much hunting, turns out to be Cleao Coyle’s magnificent coffee house  mystery series, published by Berkeley Prime Crime. I’m waiting to get onto the seventh (or eighth?) in the set – a Christmassy one, set like all the others in a swanky cafe in Greenwich Village, NYC, where Claire Cosy, her ex-cop boyfriend and everpresent ex-husband are forever dealing with dead bodies and seemingly impossible conundra and interpersonal problems. These books are just bliss – heady as too many chocolate-covered coffee beans.

I had thought this whole genre of Cosy mystery was a strictly US affair. In some ways they’re rather nostalgic and benign, even when they’re being rather brutal. I didn’t think we still had genteel and slightly camp mysteries in the UK. But it turns out that we do. For a while now I’ve been enjoying the raucous shenanigans of MC Beaton’s Agatha Raisin, down in the Cotswolds. These are very self-consciously Christie-derived, village-based crime stories – and it’s all a bit knockabout, with characters drawn in very broad brushstrokes. Yet there’s still something irresistable about Ms Raisin – the ex-PR manager and mouthy Londoner, retired to the countryside and plagued by corpses. I love her rudeness and her habit of using less than genteel epithets like ‘fart face,’ for those who stand in her way.

A more recent find in this line for me has been Lesley Cookman’s Libby Sarjeant series, set in Kent. Similarly bucolic in setting and camp and cosy in tone, these adventures of two rather self-deprecating ladies – one a theatrical, the other a spiritualist medium prone to ‘moments’ – is building up rather nicely. I love that fact that with books in series like this, we’re going back each time to meet old friends. This Bank Holiday weekend – beseiged by work and worries from all sides – I’ve managed to relax and forget for a while by reading ‘Murder at the Laurels’, second in the series and all about old ladies in nursing homes being smothered and the mystery behind cottages beside the sea.

So what about you? Do you read cosies – or more hard-edged crime? Do you like the ones that blend genres, like Charlaine Harris, who began in Cosies and popularised Paranormal Mystery and Romance for a mass audience? Or do you like the harsher stuff, the more shocking stuff? I do like the occasional Martina Cole or Mandassue Heller, I must admit. And there’s nothing whatsoever cosy about those two…

I’d like to enthuse for a while about I site I discovered yesterday – one devoted to the first 25 years of Pan Paperbacks. (http://www.tikit.net/) I’ve always had a fondness for these rather lurid artefacts and have picked up a number of them in secondhand shops over the years – though not in a very concerted, collectory way. All the books I buy are reading copies, of course, and I’d rather have a splashy, garish vintage copy than some rather staid contemporary reprint. (Why do they reprint even the tackiest of novels these days with covers that try to make them seem classier than they are..?)

Anyway – the Pan fan site is exhaustive and marvellous, and illuminates just how much they put out, and how broad their range was. I love the fact that they did M.R James and James Bond and Margery Sharp all in a uniform edition. And the artwork is just beautiful in some cases. Those woodcut type illustrations on the ones from the late forties are superb. My treasured copy of ‘Dracula’ comes from the 50s and is splendidly tacky and devoid of mystery – with a bloody-fanged count leering right out at us. (It was this copy that I read all through my first week at college. I couldn’t face all those determinedly-jocular drinks in the bar, and retreated with Stoker in Pan paperback for comfort.)

I wish someone, somewhere still published paperback editions with such gloriously colourful covers. For me, these seem to hearken back to an era of what was called the Common Reader. When novels were all, unashamedly about entertainment – and it was all about making every genre accessible and available to readers. These days I feel like things have got a bit particularized, separated out and – in some quarters – pretentious. Every single one of these vintage Pans look like that more treasured of objects: the Page Turner.

What do you think? Am I just being overly nostalgic? Tacky and tasteless…?

Simon Savidge’s blog today about his trip to see his Gran in Derbyshire and the bookshopping and visiting they did has prompted me to go on a bit more about my Edinburgh trip. I love tales of bookshopping and recommendations of fab shops to try. I also like charity shops as much as I do any number of fancy-schmancy secondhand shops or independents or chain bookstores. A good trip out, for me, is a mixture of all three, and a nice long walk with lots of stops for coffee besides. Edinburgh provides this perfect kind of day out.

We even found a shop on London Road that I thought was long-vanished. A very old place with very expensive and beautifully chosen and arranged tomes, plus staff and customers who are so posh you can hardly believe they exist in the same world as us. They seem to belong to some parallel dimension to ours where it’s always the past, where everything is nice and highly-refined – and they don’t even see the rest of the muddle and mess and chaotic life of Leith Walk.

I was so pleased to see this shop again. I forget its name – but you descend into it down stone steps into a basement space, all polished wood and the creaking and mouldering of preserved dust jackets. In 1996 I wandered down there, buying paperbacks for a hoilday in Wales I was taking with pals. Dithering over what books to fill my week with I seized an ancient copy of Mary Stewart’s first, ‘Madam, Will You Talk?’ Which turned out to be a rollicking screwball thriller set in the south of France that I’ve reread several times since.

Secondhand shops are where you get mucky fingers but they’re also where serendipity takes place. I’ve found more of the books that have stuck with me – fast as binder’s glue – in old places, where they’ve been left, unloved. Many more than I have in shiny palaces where everything’s stacked twenty high.

Our walk took us over the North Bridge and right along South Clerk street, almost as far as Pollock Halls, where J. had a flat when I first met him. Back then, when I was writing ‘Could it be Magic?’ and ‘The Scarlet Empress’, I’d walk up and down here all day long. I’d spend my whole day writing piecemeal in two separate journals – one for each book. I’d stop in every charity shop and I particularly remember 1998, in the summer, when I wanted to read blockbusters. I was wearing cargo pants and had pockets down my legs – and I had ‘Sophie’s Choice’ down one leg, ‘Rich Man, Poor Man’ down the other.

Pockets were a big deal on Saturday too – since my book-shopping companion Stuart was deciding to limit himself to only three books all day. This was agony for both of us, as he selected his three pretty early on (a detective, a spacey Moorcock and a Star Trek, I think). He was pretty good at keeping up the will power, though. I didn’t do too badly, either – conscious of the fact I’d have to carry everything back on the train and my already overspilled shelves at home.

Here’s Stuart outside a charity shop on South Clerk street. There were gigantic bears in fancy outfits in the windows. No, you’re not imagining that. They look just like the Autons in Doctor Who – the shop dummies that come to life and wreak havoc on city streets. Cody Schell has already dubbed these ursine specimens, the Pawtons.

I was on the lookout for more Margery Sharp, but had no luck whatsoever. Even if anyone’s ever heard of her, they tut and shake their heads and say, ‘You don’t see many of those passing through. Not these days.’ But I did find a nice multi-generational Rumer Godden, and a Nicholas Fisk I’d never heard of. And in Blackwells I was about to delve into a three-for-two before stopping myself (I REALLY want to read Gladys Mitchell after NextRead’s review – and the new edition of Mame is out… and that frenchy take on Sherlock Holmes looks great and… and…) But I stopped myself boldly – thinking of the Green Carnation and all we’ve got to get through (before our longlisting meeting next week in London. Or schlong-listing, as Simon once mis-typed it…)

Tills bookshop –  our furthermost point of exploration, at the corner of the Meadows – was a slight disappointment. J. and I used to pop in there quite often and come away with heaps of things. If any shop could have helped me out with finding Pan paperbacks of the 50s, Tills could. The nice girl at the counter shouted at me – quite politely – for using their stepladders to exlpore. She didn’t want me breaking my neck on her watch.

I must say a word about the shops on the Grassmarket. This is the real heart of Edinburgh book buying. There’s always one snooty shop with unfriendly staff that you don’t even want to go in (every bookish centre has one!) but there are also some wonderful cramped, crammed treasure houses.

I must mention ‘Edinburgh Books’ at 145-147 West Port, which is a lovely place – with a stuffed water buffalo head on the wall. In their cellar room everything costs a pound and I was cockahoop to find Paul Gallico’s ‘The Silent Miaow’ – his long out-of-print witty cat-care book – translated, as it says on the cover, from the feline.

TransReal books is a science fiction specialist and an independent. It’s absolutely brilliant for US imports and for getting in those novels you see reviewed on nice blogs. I had my eye caught by so many things in there – and was chuffed to bits that the owner is stocking my Brenda and Effie’s.

My favourite cafe experience of the weekend – after numerous stops in fancy coffee places and pints in pubs tucked away down ginnels off the Royal Mile – had to be the Blue Moon on Broughton Street, where our circuit of the town wound up that night. This was the setting of so many youthful adventures in the Nineties, when it used to be open all night and I’d sit there all day as well by the fireplace in the dining room writing pages and pages of all this stuff. The Blue Moon was the place we’d meet up and talk for hours and have nachos and lager and burgers. It was always about the tex-mex and the comfort food, and it still is. It was great to see that it’s all much the same, fifteen years after I spent my first summer there. I wondered – it seemed likely – whether some of the books we’d found on Saturday had been waiting on shelves for us for all that time.

Back – after a great weekend in Edinburgh… shopping for books and braving the crowds. And seeing – it has to be said – not a single show. Visiting friends like that – sometimes it’s better just to spend the whole time talking and catching up and dreaming up new projects and ideas. So we walked a huge circuit around the teeming city and sat in cafes and pubs and mooched in bookshops and charity shops. Wearing ourselves out with chatting, perusing, ambling about and rummaging in old paperbacks. And then back at the house old telly and films, more chat and Singapore Noodles. In short, bliss.

Now it’s back in the rather muggy Manchester – to find even more entries for the Green Carnation Prize in the post. And I still can’t talk about what they are! Or which very exciting proof copy I was reading on the long, lazy train journey north and then south again. Another thing I can’t do is break into the stack of paperbacks I picked up in Edinburgh – not yet – not for a while – not until I get through a whole lot more Green Carnation reading – and we get to the longlisting preliminary meeting in London next week…

And all the non-gay reading I’ve got stacked up is so tantalising – more Rumer Godden, more Margery Sharp… But I’ve go to hold on..!

It’s much more autumnal. Term’s just around the corner. I’m cracking on with my novel(s!) and waiting for the resit paper marking to be flung my way…

Autumn, of course, is the perfect time for ghost stories, and while I’m here I must put out a plug for Noose and Gibbet’s forthcoming collection of Mary Danby short stories. Editor Johnny Mains has done a wonderful job in getting this together – it’s the first time Danby’s had a whole collection pulled together like this. She was always my favourite of the writers in the Fontana and Pan horror collections. Advance orders are required though, so head over to Noose and Gibbet’s website or facebook page and support this utterly unique and wonderful-sounding tome.

The fourth and final book I had with me on holiday in Paris was the second Crossroads novelisation by Malcolm Hulke. Another lightly-comic period piece to follow on from EF Benson. There’s a good intro at the start of each of Hulke’s Crossroads books, about the demands of a daily tv serial and its narrative shapes being quite different to those of a novel and how fans will have to accept that he has chopped and changed and twisted around storylines they think they might already know, in order to fit them into a paperback. He makes it sound like smoothing out a big tangled mess of spaghetti.

I really enjoyed being back in this 60s world of g-plan furniture and premium bonds. Just as in the first book, the soap opera becomes a slightly racey comedy of manners. This time though, there is a creeping darkness to it all… Poison pen letters are being sent to each of the characters (and each of them blench with horror when they read their post). There’s a uniformed stalker attacking lone waitresses at night. And then, in the most bizarre sequence, Meg takes off in a private plane with her australian friend and a blown tyre forces them to land in the wilds of the lake district. There they wind up in a remote mansion with a couple of creepy old men, and butler and a child who doesn’t even know what year it is, and who talks backwards. Meg has to dress in mothbally Edwardian costume and, before we know it, it’s all turned a bit Gothic. (As if Crossroads wasn’t already similar enough to Dark Shadows…!)

It did make me think though, how wonderful it would be to have a new series of spooky mystery novels about Meg and the staff of Crossroads circa 1968. I can just see the character running the motel and, in her spare time, being a mixture of Jessica Fletcher and the Exorcist. Meg was always called on to sort out everything…

There’s a nice sub-plot here about an old man who wins a relative fortune, holes up in the motel, puts an advert in the paper and auditions rich old women to be his wife. He winds up with more than he can handle and, of course, is the victim of an elaborate ruse. On TV it would be a funny reversal – in a novel it’s slightly sinister… these gold-diggers in different coloured wigs, whom he meets for breakfast, lunch and dinner in the motel.

My favourite bit must be the ending, in which all the characters are gathered together in an end-of-novel party by Meg and an alcoholic magician actually manages to make a spell come right, and floats waitress Diane high above everyone’s heads. When he passes out with alcohol poisoning Diane is stuck up there and no one can bring her down. (Until the creepy Cumbrian boy reappears and spookily reverses the spell by talking backwards…!) It’s a kind of burst of magical realism in 1960s Birmingham, mystifyingly rounding off a novel that’s already included romance, Gothic intrigue, mystery and low comedy. The joke about Crossroads the TV show was that the plywood walls of the sets used to wobble as the characters moved about. If the walls wobble in the novels, it feels like it’s the walls between the genres moving…

So that was me – reading all that last day of our short break – finishing up on the plane back to Manchester. A trip so short and smooth I hardly noticed it was happening. Charles de Gaulle airport was all done up spanking new – luxurious and futuristic – just as such places must have felt back in the Sixties, when everything went stylish and people like Meg Mortimer wondered what holidayers would want. We had espressos, dark chocolate and chilled strawberries – and I was reading Crossroads and then our holiday was over.

Bloomsbury have been digging out a whole load of out-of-print novels and repackaging them in a stylish way. They’re kind of chintzy classics – all of them seem pretty camp period pieces, in various ways – and an EF Benson had to be among them. Here’s one I’ve never read – Mrs Ames, whose heroine lives in a little place and among characters very much like those in Benson’s Mapp and Lucia series.

Perhaps this Riseborough and its peculiar inhabitants are a little darker… and the stakes are a bit higher. When people fall in love with each other’s wives and husbands we are aware that there could be dire consequences. Real feelings could be hurt, real damage could be done – and all the while we are aware that these are characters so bored, stifled and bound by polite convention that they’ve only really imagined themselves in love in the first place. They’re playing parts – deliciously, and with real zest – as they all do when it comes time for a Shakespearean costumed ball and no less than three Cleopatras turn up.

But it takes someone with the good sense and – ultimately, I think – good heart of Mrs Ames to re-establish the precarious status quo. There are some marvellous scenes towards the end when she convinces her husbamd’s would-be fancy woman to go home and stop being so silly. Her husband, meanwhile, quails and hides away upstairs. It’s a chilling moment of control, as we see where the real power lies in this little town. The whole book has been about Mrs Ames’s social standing and power being whisked away by the vivacious Mrs Evans. The reader is keen for Mrs Ames – with her ’small, toad’s face’ to resume control and put people back into their places.

For all the strange darkness and slightly hysterical feelings running high – there is the usual amount of comedy and wit we’d expect from Benson. Mrs Ames getting herself carried away with the sufragette movement and managing to chain herself to the table on a podium during a political rally is a particular high point. I love the way she goads herself into action – and then the shame that everyone feels at her making a show of herself.

I started this last Monday in the Jardin du Luxembourg, and then sitting by the river on the Ile de France. Perfect weather both days – fetching apricot custard pastries from the bakery and drinking pink wine in the park.

I picked four books for reading on holiday and I don’t think I’ve ever picked a more enjoyable bunch.

It might have been all to do with the way that I read on holiday. Those long relaxing stretches in the evening or first thing in the morning on days with nothing but nice things to do. Or those snatched bursts of reading at cafe tables, under awnings or sitting in parks. Maybe the circumstances lend certain books a particular gloss or charm. Or maybe this 1937 romance by Margery Sharp is just great on its own account. Either way, it was delicious. Like really cold Sancerre or those raspberry macaroons in the shop on the Ile de France.

Who could fail to love a novel in which a racey London ex-actress of a certain age is called to France to be reunited with her rather conservative daughter, whom she hasn’t seen in years. The book opens with her beginning her journey, meeting a gaggle of sexy male trapeze artists on the ferry and winding up on stage with them in Paris before nightfall. There is something completely irresistable about the escapades and the scrapes that Julia gets herself into. When she’s with the daughter and on best behaviour she still gets into rotten trouble – dashing off to the casino to scam cash of some dopey old lothario, for instance, or mistakenly giving the impression to the doddery grandma that she’s intending to open a chic Chelsea cake shop. All of Julia’s attempts at respectability and good behaviour are doomed.

But then she falls in love – with her daughter’s rich guardian. At last she has found a man who can accept her on her own terms, for the well-meaning adventuress she is. Towards the end it seems like nothing’s going to work out – and Julia slinks away in the night, utterly defeated. But it won’t spoil it too much to tell you that everything works out quite satisfactorily in the end, I think.

This is the first Margery Sharp  for adults that I’ve read. I remember reading her first ‘Rescuers’ book for children, on which my favourite Disney film was based. I’m definitely up for finding more of these brilliant confections.

Short chapters, too. Hurray!