Paul Magrs

Have you ever discovered that there was an extra book by a favourite author that you never knew about? Or an unknown book in a series you adored? Those moments are wonderful, and I had one when I found this in a bookshop in Buxton a little while ago: a ‘missing’ Paddington book.

Paddington was a huge thing for me as a kid. I love everything about these stories – all the characters – especially the obviously gay and jewish Mr Gruber in his antiques shop where Paddington would go for a chelsea bun and cocoa. I loved the frightening Mr Curry who lived next door and who you just knew was always going to come a cropper. I loved the safety of all that world, with the Browns’ housekeeper, Mrs Bird, presiding overall like a sternly benign goddess – and the absolute good sense of the characters in his invented famly that surrounded this small, bewildered bear.

This ‘Blue Peter’ collection turns out to be a set of stories that were published each year in the late sixties and early seventies in the Blue Peter annual. For some reason I never knew it even existed. When I bought it the usually quite sensible man behind the counter in the Buxton bookshop said something like, ‘Ha ha, isn’t this a bit young for you?’ And I found myself giving him what aficianados of Paddington would recognise as ‘a hard stare.’ At two pounds I found this rarity very good value indeed, so I left it at that and this book joined all the others on my teetering TBR stacks.

These stories are particularly funny because each of them involves – in some way – a connection with the kids’ TV magazine show Blue Peter. The then presenters Val, John and Peter make various appearances in the action and Paddington makes a number of  visits to the Blue Peter studios – usually when he has won a competition and – as they always say – havoc and hilarity ensue. My favourite is the story about the baking competition when he puts so much mixture into the portable oven that he can’t get it out again, and it just seems easier to ice the whole thing into one gigantic cake with a door in the side.

These books have made such a mark on me. Whenever I go anywhere for work, or anywhere new in any kind of official capacity, I always feel a bit like Paddington. That is, quite keen to encounter novelty and strangeness, and reasonably sure that I won’t *always* grasp the wrong end of the stick. But with a vague feeling, somewhere under my hat, that things might – at any moment – take a sudden turn for the worse…

The bound proof copies of the new Brenda and Effie novel have just arrived at Headline Towers! Brilliant publicist Maura (Red_books on Twitter) has just tweeted me some pics!

All the discussion of the Green Carnation Prize has led some of us to think about our all-time favourite novels and memoirs by gay men. It’s taken me ages to sort out a top ten – and I wrestled a bit with the ones to take out. Maybe I’ll have a few honourable mentions at the end.

Here they are:

EM FORSTER – A ROOM WITH A VIEW. It’s the first gay novel I think I ever read. It’s all pretty hidden away – except for the scene when all the homoerotic stuff goes on in the pond in the woods. Filmed twice – beautifully both times – and hilarious throughout. I’m looking forward to getting Wendy Moffatt’s new biography of Forster – which got a rough ride in a Guardian review lately for dwelling on his sex life. I’ve always thought desire was his main subject.

CHRISTOPHER ISHERWOOD – GOODBYE TO BERLIN. I read this at twenty and it was hugely influential – all that atmosphere – of decadence and dread. The clipped, perfect dialogue – the banter between the leads. The, ‘Very queer indeed!’ coming-out moment in the queue to a club. Is it just me, or do all these novels have brilliant soundtrack albums available? Is that the essence of gaylit?

E.F BENSON – MAPP AND LUCIA. More brittle, nasty comedy – with women very much to the fore. Very silly, very camp – with daggers drawn. I came to these books comparatively late. I think earlier I might have had less patience with all the poshery and poncing about… but I love Benson. Except for some of his other, rather more earnest novels. These are like souffles.

TRUMAN CAPOTE – TOO BRIEF A TREAT – SELECTED LETTERS. I could have chosen any of a number of Capote books. They’re all so different and brilliant. In a late essay he complained about his disappointment in his own books – that nowhere had he brought together all his skills and talent in one place. I’d argue that Gerald Clarke’s selection of his letters – witty, warm, nasty and above all – loyal – is the place where all the colours come together on one amazing palette. His letters to the policeman Dewey’s son about how-to-write are just fantastically concise and useful. I love collections of letters and this has to be my favourite. A new discovery this year, on holiday this spring.

TONY WARREN – THE LIGHTS OF MANCHESTER. In the Nineties the creator of Coronation Street published four wonderful, thick, commercial blockbusters and this was the first. Steeped in the lore, language and fuggy atmosphere of mid-century Manchester and evoking the ghosts of everyone from Howard Spring to Ena Sharples, this book is a wonderful treat. Comedy dark as the filling in an Eccles cake. Shamefully out of print.

DAVID REES – IN THE TENT. The teen novel I read at 11 and actually – rather than Forster – this was the first gay book I ever read. It was exciting and astonishing and shocking at the time. I couldn’t believe the way it made everything seem ok. Rees had a number of teen novels out in the 70s and 80s. They really ought to be back in print.

GEOFF RYMAN – WAS. An amazing juggling act with element sfrom the Wizard of Oz. This book is so clever and intricate, making connections across time and layers of fictions. There are amazing cameos and flashbacks and startling moments of clarity. You get to meet a ‘real world’ Dorothy and see what her Prairie life could have been like – and you meet a present day actor who is slowly turning into his idol the Scarecrow. It’s one of those books that you feel could take you anywhere, at a moment’s notice.

Something all these books have in common is that I’ve read them again and again. My top tens are always of inexhaustible books.

ARMISTEAD MAUPIN – MAYBE THE MOON. But it could so easily be ‘Tales of the City’ – another book with a brilliant soundtrack. ‘Maybe’ will always be special, though. I think it cuts closer to real life – to rawness and honesty and embarrassing everydayness than any of his other books. There’s not a second wasted in this novel. It’s a complete, perfect tragedy from beginning to end. Classic.

STEPHEN McCAULEY – OBJECT OF MY AFFECTION. Another book that might seem it’s a bit light from a distance – specially since it was filmed with Jennifer Anniston. I think McCauley is a fine writer, though. I’ve read the lot of them. It’s that very immediate, colloquial, easy american voice.

DAVID SEDARIS – Oh, all of them. I can’t choose. Everything is wonderful.

Damn, how many’s that?

My honourable mentions then – COLE LESLEY’S LIFE OF NOEL COWARD; JOHN RECHY’S CITIES OF NIGHT; MICHAEL CUNNINGHAM’S AT HOME AT THE EDGE OF THE WORLD; PATRICK GALE’S ROUGH MUSIC; DALE PECK’S LAW OF ENCLOSURES; ALAN BENNETT’S UNTOLD STORIES; JAMES BALDWIN’S ANOTHER COUNTRY; ANGUS WILSON’S COLLECTED STORIES, ANDREW HOLLERAN’S THE DANCER FROM THE DANCE; REUBEN LANE’S THROWING STONES AT JONATHAN.

See? Way too many. I like the way they might make a nice kind of reading course, when you put them together like that.

Ok – having launched our longlist last week, there’s been a bit of mithering in the ether about who’s included and who isn’t.

Here’s my response to that:

Hi,

All I can say is that the judging panel chose the books they thought were the best from all the submissions that were made to us. It was democratically and fairly done. We judged the books on their own merits and took no account of what we knew or didn’t know about the authors. So it didn’t matter to us if someone had been writing for forty years or if it was their first novel, for example, or whatever activities a writer was involved in outside of writing novels. All that mattered to us was whether we liked a book enough to vote it onto our longlist.

I’m really pleased and proud of our list. I think there’s a broad range of approach and technique, light and shade, popular and challenging writing on display.

It’s always disappointing when we don’t see our favourites on a prize list, but it shouldn’t mean that we get negative about what *has* been chosen. Read them all and *then* see what you think about our choices.

best

paul magrs

Soon as the leaves start to turn a bit and the squirrels get busy chucking conkers onto the tarmac, it’s time to delve into a nice collection of ghost stories. I’m saving up M.R James till term is well underway, and it doesn’t seem time to read a Pan Book of Horror – at least, not until the reprint of volume one that’s coming out next month. So I plumped for this instead – a slim little US paperback from donkeys’ years ago, with tiny print and pages edged in dark red. Stories chosen by clever old Dorothy L. Sayers – and what a marvellous job she makes of it, too.

Two of my all-time favourites are here: WW Jacobs’ ‘The Monkey’s Paw’ – a nasty three wishes story that seems so straightforward and simple in some ways, but I find something new in it each time I read it. And E.F Benson’s ‘Mrs Amworth’ – which is almost like Mapp and Lucia plus vampires – but not quite.

Other things that stood out here included Arthur Machen’s strange long story, ‘The Novel of the Black Seal’, which feels convoluted and dense to a modern reader, I think – but there’s something compellingly strange about it. He’s one of those people I come across in anthologies – but have never looked into any further. May Sinclair also provides a stonking afterlife / curse story, ‘Where Their Fire is not Quenched’, which proves chilling because it’s about how your own daft actions always bring about your own madness and sadness.

This is, perhaps the running theme in some – if not all – of these choices. We bring on our own fates and our own hauntings. The supernatural reaches out to grab us because we deserve it – or because we find ourselves duped by those who would use those powers, or fake those powers. The people who come off badly here are those not clever enough to see their own destinies approaching.

Great collection, though. I’m not sure if it’s still available in any form. I wonder where all those stories are still available? The older ones – Victorian and Edwardian tales – that used to turn up in collections. I wonder who’s publishing them now? Anyone know?

And what are your favourite collections of spooky stories?

Fourteen years ago, during another Indian Summer, a whole bunch of us went off to rent a bungalow in North Wales for a week. It was one of those perfect holidays and all we did was sit on a variety of bright, sunny, completely empty beaches. I took four novels – two were duff – but the other two were Georgina Hammick’s sublime first novel, ‘The Arizona Game’, and the other was ‘Madam, Will You Talk’ by Mary Stewart, which I’d picked up in ancient paperback from McNaughton’s Bookshop at the top of Leith Walk, over the road from where I was living at the time. Just stepping into that place the other weekend (a shop I thought long vanished) reminded me of the bliss of reading Stewart’s camp, silly Gothic thriller. That first of hers is a book I’ve reread a few times since.

Somehow it’s taken me till now to broach another. ‘Nine Carriages Waiting’ is similar in storyline, in many ways – with a young woman becoming alert to a web of murder plots surrounding a child who has been placed in her care. This time the mood is a little more sombre. We’re up in the mountains and the woods and the zig-zagging deadly roads where sports cars go whizzing along in deadly pursuit of absconding governesses. There’s a lovely gallery of rather uptight, polite grotesques in this novel and a fascinatingly repressed sense of horror. When our heroine Linda confronts the villains at the end she’s remarkably understanding of their need to murder the kid. And when a crucial character blows his own brains out at the very end, the shock only mildly registers with our cool and clever protagonist. It’s as if, back in France in 1958, everyone’s just too damn cool and sophisticated to get too worked up about anything much.

Reading the descriptions of her other novels, they all sound marvellous. I’m liking the sound of the one about ritual sacrifices on the isle of Skye. These are all back in print, I think. Well done to Hodder for keeping these eccentric books – I’d have to call them Gothic thrillers – still on the shelves. Even if the current misty-mountain covers are awful. I much prefer the cheesy old covers – the slinky cardigans and perturbed expressions on heroines standing in front of badly-painted grand houses in exotic locales.

This was a random buy in Waterstones (on the day I discovered Deansgate had moved all their fiction upstairs – so that almost all of downstairs is given over to Paperchase. Weird to walk into a bookshop I’ve used for twenty years – to find it full of suddenly *empty* books… as if all the words had fallen out or run away.) It was when I was wanting a break from Green Carnation reading – and I was after something very different. ‘The Sugar Queen’ turned out to be exactly what it seemed like at a distance – wintry, tinged with magical realism – life-affirming and down-to-earth at the same time. From the blurb’s mentions of fairy godmothers, young women addicted to romance novels and candy, tough-talking women who work in diners, crazy widows and Southern Belles… I was expecting some kind of mixture of Alice Hoffman for the feeling of fairy tales embedded in everyday life – and Adriana Trigiani’s Big Stone Gap novels for that sense of a community seen through the eyes of the women and their interrelated lives.

I love this. It’s so cleverly worked out – revolving us round the stories of Josey, the town’s rich girl who no one has allowed to grow up; and the waitress Della Lee Baker who takes up residence inside Josey’s closet when the book opens, and Chloe, the girl who is besieged by books, which appear like magic beside her. This has happened all her life – as if some disembodied someone is forever plaguing her with unwanted reading suggestions…

All three have tangled love lives and three blokes hanging around them and all of these complicated romances are convincing. Especially believable is the postman, Adam, who Josey loves from a distance. It’s a strange, muted book – but it’s explosive with long-held , hurtful, even violent secrets – which all come bursting out before the end. And there’s a twist and a revelation towards the very end that I just never saw coming and was delighted by. I’l say no more and let you discover.

I’m really keen to read some more of Sarah Addison Allen – I was glad to see that there are at least two other novels out there – and, from the write-ups,  they seem to have that same blend of gentle soapiness and glittering magical realism. Hurray!

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…