Paul Magrs

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!

Here’s a novel I first read when I was about thirteen. Or rather, it was read to me and the rest of my class at school by the indomitable Mrs Nicholson. She was a fearsome teacher, with a reputation for harshness. She was like someone out of another age, it seemed, in a school of fairly young teachers. Mrs Nicholson was a disciplinarian and a stickler for grammar and manners. She had a pronounced limp and this earned her the unfortunate nickname of Peg. Because she tended to talk about the necessity of our knuckling down and preparing ourselves for what she called The World of Work an Grown-Up Life, she was a bit unpopular.

But she read to us. She didn’t care if she spent the whole lesson doing nothing but reading to us. She must have felt we needed it. Back in the early Eighties she was already rebelling against the commodification of education down into digestible chunks. She was determined that we were going to love novels – whole novels, not tidy extracts – for just their own sake.

She read us Huckleberry Finn and did all the voices. We sat spellbound at the strangeness of some of the voices coming out of this woman in her orange velvet skirt, snowboots and purple woollen cardigan. She had a kind of Beatle haircut, we always thought, streaked with grey.

Then she read us Gerald Durrell’s memoir of his childhood with his crazy family on Corfu – and I fell in love with the book, the characters and everything about it. I fell in love with the juiciness and the wit of the writing itself. And again our fierce teacher did all of the voices: older brother Larry’s pretentious drawl; Mother’s long-suffering air of distraction; and the hilarious pidgin English and cheerful vulgarity of Spiro the cab driver. Clas 3F was thrilled by all the shouting and swearing she was doing from the front of the room.

Coming back to the book – at last – on holiday was a real treat. It was even better than I remembered. After all these years I found that not just incidents (Margo and the toilet paper!) but actual phrases were stuck in my head. The book has such a crisp, shimmering atmosphere. Its characters are warmly, beautifully drawn. I got it from a charity shop in Cheadle Hulme – along with eight other Durrell books – three quid for the lot! I’m looking forward to following him into adulthood and around the world on his wanderings.

Was there never an illustrated edition of this? I could just see Quentin Blake drawings for this. I now know there were two tv versions – no sign of these getting a DVD release…?

Almost a week away and we’re back in Manchester now – after dashing about Paris. Lots of eating out and walking, and looking at pictures and reading in the park. We had almost exactly the same holiday as last year – which I found very soothing. We stayed in the same hotel off St Andre des Artes near St Michel and went to nearly all the same restaurants. We missed out one of our favourites on the island because they’d cut down all the trees in the square where we usually sit and it didn’t have quite the same atmosphere.

My favourite of our days there was probably the one we spent in the Jardin du Luxembourg. It always is. This past week I’ve been revelling in reading some rather older, perhaps neglected novels – my favourite of which was The Nutmeg Tree by Margery Sharp. What a find this was. It’s from the 1930s has that delicious, all-knowing, easy kind of wit. The day in the park – the warmest and sunniest of our whole break – was when I read most of the Sharp book. Hopefully in the next couple of days I’ll catch up with my blog and tell you a bit more what I read while away.

Right now it’s back to rainy Manchester – with the first tremors of autumn in the air – and loads to do, stacks to sort…

(c) Michael Stevens/AudioGo Ltd.

Here’s one of my favourite photos – from back in June, at one of the earliest recording sessions in Soho for Doctor Who – Demon Quest.

Tom Baker’s own website has just published a news item, photos and synopses for all five episodes of this new series of audio adventures.

http://is.gd/e4kx7

So… it’ll soon be time to return with the Doctor to Nest Cottage to find out what terrible thing Mrs Wibbsey has gone and done in his absence…!

September 10th is when the fun all starts, with episode one: ‘Relics of Time.’