Authors Electric

Recently I read The Black Douglas by Victorian novelist S.R. Crockett, whose works have recently been republished by Ayton Publishing . Being introduced to Crockett was an interesting and enlightening experience. Here we have an author who was, in his lifetime, as popular as Dickens. Just over a century later, he’s largely forgotten (though he might be about to make a comeback, thanks to Cally Phillips and Ayton Publishing). Crockett seems to be one of the victims of changing literary tastes, a writer whose standing in his lifetime has not been reflected in the years following his death. Nor, of course, is he alone. There’s a story that the readers of the Manchester Guardian, asked in 1929 to predict which contemporary authors would still be read in 2029, chose John Galsworthy. They weren’t entirely wrong, of course; Galsworthy is indeed still read, and still has plenty of admirers. However, BBC screen adaptations of The Forsyte Saga notwithstanding, he isn’t quite as popular...

          Every year the Literary Review Bad Sex In Fiction Awards ‘draw attention to the crude and often perfunctory use of redundant passages of sexual description in the modern novel.’           This year’s award went to Nancy Huston, an undeserved winner, I fear, although I note with a certain satisfaction (albeit of the purely cerebral kind) that Guardian readers voted resoundingly for the ‘big generative jockey’, while I myself also favoured the ‘elfin grot’ reference, but there you go. These things are very personal. Earlier this year, John Grisham endeared himself to me no end by describing how he had written an explicit sex scene and given it to his wife to read. She had collapsed into so much helpless laughter that he had decided it wasn’t his forte. Would that a few writers of literary fiction had so much insight, but perhaps their spouses are so overawed by their genius that ...

                   Actually, I really do want to shrivel your blood,                                      by Dennis Hamley I ended my last blog by saying that if you were good I'd tell you a ghost story.  Well, you have been so I will.  And it is true.  It is, it is. First, the backstory.  The year was 1964, the month was October.  For the previous four years I had been teaching at Stockport Grammar School even though I'm a soft southerner.  I thought it was time for a change so I crossed the Pennines to Wakefield and Queen Elizabeth Grammar School.  And in October I was teaching Wuthering Heights for A level to a crowd of Yorkshire sixth-formers. Now while I was living in Stockport I met a nurse who worked at the Christie Cancer Hospital in Manchester and before I left for Yorkshire we had agreed to ...

To write is one thing. To cast spells another. How to do it? Aged three years old, I used to tell stories to the children next door, weaving fantasies by means of my imagination. Those children were big ones who went to school and could read and write - but they’d line up on their side of the wall to ask what happened next. They were desperate to know but couldn’t for reasons I didn’t understand figure it out themselves. It fell to me - the little squirt peering over her garden wall - to tell them. There’s a knack to casting spells over the imagination. I didn’t know that then, but I do now. Not everyone can do it. But there are a greater number of people who can than do , and it’s not just the hard work, time and effort required that puts people off. It takes a supreme act of self-confidence to believe that the stories going on inside your head are of interest to anybody else. At three I never questioned that they were, but at nine - when I started my first few secret stories -...