Authors Electric

One day in 1986 I opened the Writers and Artists Yearbook, shut my eyes, and stabbed at the agents’ section at random. It came up with London Independent Books, which sounded like a nice unpretentious title. I’d had a number of short stories published in magazines, and five radio plays broadcast, so I wasn’t a novice. But I’d always dealt with those concerned direct.  It didn’t seem like the way to go with a book. I sent off my manuscript, and that was the start of a relationship that lasted thirty years until Carolyn’s death on the 17 th June this year.  Carolyn Whitaker Things were different in those days. Everything was done by post, which took time, and agents didn’t get you to sign a contract. They just read your work, suggested some alterations, and then sent whatever it was off to probably no more than three publishers. After that you waited. It was, in fact, seven years before Carolyn sold a single thing I wrote, and then it was a short story, which agents...

At the beginning of this year, I read Philip K. Dick’s Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? for the first time. I usually don’t feel drawn to read a book if I’m very familiar with the film based on it, but when I looked at reviews there seemed to be a consensus that the film, Blade Runner, was vastly different from the novel. That turned out to be true. It’s almost as though Ridley Scott, the director of Blade Runner , excised 85 per cent of the content of the novel, perhaps all the best bits, and pared it all down to a short story, an action story. That might be what happens essentially with all film adaptations, of course… I remember reading in one of Norman Mailer’s essay/non-fiction collections, long ago, an account of his sale of the rights for his first novel, The Naked and the Dead. Later, he saw the film and loathed it, thought it was an abomination. Then he described talking to writer friends who told him it always went that way, that the film adaptation of any nove...

I started out as a radio writer, doing plays for Afternoon Theatre and a short series called Just Before Midnight , one of which I re-wrote for the stage. I also penned short stories for both radio and magazines. Writers sometimes feel that things have got a bit stale, so I did an MA in Creative Writing at Bath Spa, which was terrific fun. After that I became a poet for a bit. The need to make some money (and on the suggestion of my agent) I started writing rather more racy stuff under a pseudonym, initially in short story anthologies and later in novels for – shall we say – the more adventurous female reader. Eventually I was told there was too much plot in my stories, and not enough of the other, so I did a complete about-turn to children’s books, which have been my most successful venture. I’ve also done a couple of straight adult novels. This means that I have mixed in many different writing worlds, and they’re not the same by any means. They do, of course, change over the ye...

As a child in the 1970s, I remember that those cheap hardback editions “for children”, of classics like The Three Musketeers, The Prince and the Pauper, or Oliver Twist, were in circulation, so that this was how I first came across those wonderful stories. At the same time, remakes of these stories were being made for British cinema and, perhaps because, as he later said of himself, he was born too late and would have been happier in an earlier time, it was Oliver Reed that UK directors turned to when they wanted to cast a powerful character in these films: Athos in The Three Musketeers, Bill Sykes in Oliver Twist, Miles Hendon in The Prince and the Pauper… As a child watching these films on a black-and-white portable TV, I noticed Reed right away. His energy seemed different from other “actors”. This is probably because he was doing less “acting”. And yet, there can be sensed within him a fierce, but sensitive, commitment to whichever part he is playing at any given time. ...