Authors Electric

 If that mockingbird don’t sing…*   It was my birthday, and Sue and I went to see  To Kill A Mockingbird  at the Gielgud theatre in London. It has been rewritten for the stage from Harper Lee’s original novel by Aaron Sorkin and is directed by Bartlett Sher. You may know something of the story yourselves on account of the famous film starring Gregory Peck, where Atticus Finch defends Tom Robinson from a false rape charge, and you may even have read the book at school. Despite an excellent defence from Finch, Robinson is found guilty by an all-white jury and is later killed in a desperate escape attempt from the prison, where he is being held awaiting an appeal. There were a number of schoolboys in blazers and ties attending the performance and I surmised that  To Kill a Mockingbird  is likely to be a GCSE set text to be tested in the summer exams. I had read it myself as a teenager and as I watched it on stage the story took me back to my own boyhood and my...

Goodbye and good riddance, February 2016. You were a hideous month, a month that robbed us of two great writers: Umberto Eco and Harper Lee. I’m not going to attempt a critique of Eco’s and Lee’s respective contributions to literature – that’s already been done, and done far better than I could do it. This is just a very small personal tribute to two writers who made a big difference to me. It’s a small, belated ‘thank you’ to two people I’ll never be able to thank in person. Umberto Eco. Image credit: Bogaerts, Rob / Anefo | Wikimedia Commons I gobbled up Umberto Eco’s The Name of the Rose in just a few sittings. It was for this mediaeval murder mystery, of course, that Eco was best known, at least in the English-speaking world. The novel was an instant, international success, and I like to believe that this was – at least in part – because Eco, in these dumbed-down times, never underestimated his readers’ intelligence. He was an unabashed intellectual, a professor of ...

  Saucy Jack! Black Jack! Leather Apron! Oh no, no. One name alone does justice to your deathless razzmatazz. And nothing can do justice to the leap from your brief reign to world-wide Rippermania. It all started on four fog-swept nights... The Facts Scene: The impoverished areas in and around Whitechapel, London. Year: 1888. Five prostitutes--Mary Ann Nichols, Annie Chapman, Elizabeth Stride, Catherine Eddowes and Mary Jane Kelly--were murdered between 31 August and 9 November 1888. These women are the "canonical five", believed to have been murdered by a single killer. Three had had internal organs removed with surgical precision. And the fifth kill was the grisliest.  Why Black Magic Beats Mere Numbers Oh, Jack. You might have been only a footnote in the annals of serial killers. The competition today is tremendous: Luis Garavito.  Colombian child-murderer, torture-killer, and rapist known as ”La Bestia”. Confessed to killing 140 children over...

There's been a fair amount of silence on this site recently about the ethics of e-book publication. I haven't heard the word sock-puppet mentioned for ages, although the perennial problem of Amazon reviews and which of them to take any notice of at all clearly hasn't gone away. Why would it? We all believe, possibly with very little evidence indeed, that lots of five-star reviews lead to lots of sales. Look up Fifty Shades of Grey, or the latest Dan Brown, and I bet you'll find a million reviews, or possibly a squillion, but they won’t have shifted any extra copies. One of the most fascinating byproducts of the social media has been a mass outbreak of critical diarrhoea. Everybody has an opinion – that hasn't changed – but now everyone can not only express it, but get it up in lights. And the critical kind, like most forms of diarrhoea, is almost always shite. Look at the beating poor old Harper Lee's been getting over Go Set a Watchman. I happen to think...

There’s a lot of advice for writers out there, some of it very Authors Electric Mari Biella good. Joshua Wolf Shenk’s “Have the courage to write badly” is essential for any writer who doesn’t want to give in to utter despair whilst reading through their first drafts. Harper Lee’s advice to aspiring writers that they would be “wise to develop a thick hide,” is more relevant than ever in the age of Amazon and Goodreads. Paul Theroux’s blunt suggestion that young would-be writers should “leave home” makes sense – your parents are unlikely to understand, still less support, your decision to become a writer and starve in a garret, so perhaps you’d do well to cut the apron strings. As for Dorothy Parker’s advice that the greatest favour one could do for wannabe writers was to shoot them while they were still happy – well, we’ve probably all felt like that at one time or another.           Certain other nuggets of advice, on the other hand...

The problem with writing a best seller is that then the pressure really is on to follow it up. Some authors do succeed: the seventh Harry Potter book reportedly had sales of 11 million during the first 24 hours, beating book six by 2 million sales. The series has come to an end, but eyes are once again on J K Rowling this month, with her first adult book due out on the 27 th.   Can’t say I’d like to be in her shoes as there are doubtless going to be a lot of people out there hoping to see her fail, and I suspect there will be a lot who run it down, regardless of its quality. Yes, trying to follow up a best seller must be a tough task. While Rowling has kept on writing and each of her books so far has outsold the previous one, some authors become literary one hit wonders - Wuthering Heights and Black Beauty spring to mind, although to be fair their authors had little chance for a second crack of the whip:   Anna Sewell died five months after publication of her masterp...