Authors Electric

Perhaps this is a lockdown experience or perhaps it’s a reversion to earlier ways of living and working. We, like so many other families, find ourselves working from home, each in our separate spaces. Bertie’s in the attic, laying-out books with Indesign; Francis somewhere downstairs trying to find the right angle of physical endurance for solid hours of Private Eye deadlines and me … well, to be honest, I’m most characteristically surrounded by WW2 naval memoirs, copies of Lloyd’s Registers and overflowing scribbled papers … in bed. Together with my faithful laptop, miraculously fact-checking and emailing, tweeting and posting. Thus Golden Duck (UK) ltd keeps busy. One of my favourite Margery Allingham novels Flowers for the Judge (1936) tells the story of Barnabas and company, publishers since 1810 at the Sign of the Golden Quiver. It’s a perfect setting for a classic murder mystery: an enclosed location, limited number of suspects, distinctive atmosphere, ra...

It's there, (in illegible white type) & I was Julia T then So what’s the difference between a life-writer and a biographer? As far as I'm concerned the difference is rooted in the words.  Life-writing comes from Anglo-Saxon: biography from Greek. They mean the same but the first has a sense of something unadorned and fundamental: the second is distinctly arty. Last Saturday, in an upstairs room in Felixstowe’s Orwell Hotel, life-writing met biography in conditions of great amity -- appropriately so. Whenever I come to Felixstowe, which is at least annually for the Book Festival and more frequently for agreeable connected matters, I think of it as the Happy Place – a reassuring combination of the Latin felix  (happy) and Old English stowe (place). Last Saturday's occasion had initially been prompted by biography. When I first wrote about the detective novelist, Margery Allingham, all those years ago in 1991, I wasn’t allowed my preferred title of “Adventures” th...

I don’t think I’m very good at knowing when to stop. When I wrote the first version of Margery Allingham's biography back in 1991 and had to leave the unsolved mystery of what went wrong in her marriage in the early 1950s it irked me. Discovering the existence of her husband’s unknown child, Tom, conceived in 1951 with lesbian icon Nancy Spain it didn’t answer every question – in fact it posed a few more – but there was a feeling of yes! as puzzle pieces slipped into place. It was enough to persuade me to re-publish the biography in 2009 as The Adventures of Margery Allingham , the title I’d always wanted but which the original publishers didn’t quite get. And that was the first volume under the Golden Duck  imprint. One thing led to another and more pieces of unfinished business pushed their way insistently to the front of the publication queue until GD volume 13, The Cruise of Naromis: August in the Baltic 1939 by my father, George Jones, caught me unawares in a c...

So there I was, rummaging in the attic, looking for something else entirely, when I discovered … (insert mystery item here).   My  trouvaille  in the autumn of 2016 was a faded blue hardback folder holding thirty sheets of densely-typed paper with photographs every facing page and handwritten amendments.  THE CRUISE OF NAROMIS: AUGUST IN THE BALTIC 1939 G.A. JONES Oh gulp, I remembered what this must be... Years ago my father, George Jones, had begun telling my brothers and me about his trip through the Kiel Canal, aged 21, in the weeks immediately before the Second World War. I also remembered my total failure to feel interested and felt ashamed.  I was probably reading Leon Uris’s  Exodus  at that time or watching  The Great Escape.  When I realised there were no heroics or atrocities in Dad’s story I simply stopped listening. I assume he stopped telling us. Naromis  was a 37’ motor yacht built on the Norfolk Broads...

As we're all writers on this blog, it can't be breaking protocol for me to do a preliminary review/puff for Julia Jones's new book Black Waters. It's the fifth in her trilogy – or rather, it’s volume 5 in her Strong Winds series – and it takes her into ever-deeper waters. For me, it raises the perennial question: what is a children's book? But first, boringly, I'd better declare a supposed interest. Julia has extremely close connections to Private Eye, and neither of us would relish a knocking piece in that prominent and thrusting organ. Julia is also a publisher, and her imprint Golden Duck publishes one of my own books, Wild Wood. A Firefly on a run - they're faster now! So, down to brass tacks. Black Waters, like the previous volumes, is an adventure story with teeth, sinews and muscles. Nominally about one girl’s (young woman's) struggle against the unrelenting rivalry of top-level sport, it inevitably confronts racism, greed, and what I...