My Scottish crime-writing friends have kept me up-to-date on plans to launch the first Scottish crime-fiction festival. Now, it's official, taking place in September in Stirling. The programme will be revealed on 17 May at the Stirling Smith Museum and Art Gallery. In the meantime. check out the website on www.bloodyscotland.com
Very sorry to hear that warm and witty man, Reginald Hill, has died of a brain tumour, at the age of 75. Above is the link to the obituary I did for the Independent .
I didn't know him well but I knew him a bit. I first met Reg in 1993 when I was doing a feature on him for the Indie. I liked him a lot: intelligent, acute, friendly and very, very funny. At the time Yorkshire Television were filming the first Dalziel and Pascoe adaptation as a star vehicle for dire comics Hale and Pace. I asked him about it and saw this wonderful disjunction between the diplomatic words coming out of his mouth and the expression on his face.
I got in touch a couple of years later when I was looking for preview quotes for my first comic crime novel, No Laughing Matter. He read the novel. I’m not sure he really liked it but he was nice enough to give me a quote.
He also sent me a postcard referring to an incident in the book in which a family cat comes out the loser in an encounter with a python. He pointed out that crime readers will forgive any violence perpetrated on humans but you mess with their pets at your peril. He signed the card with a formulation I’d never seen before – Yours Aye - although since I’ve seen it often in communications with Scottish writers.
I saw him give an uproariously funny Toastmaster speech at a crime convention in Manchester. RUTH RENDELL was another guest of honour. He teased her affectionately but she was NOT amused. In my limited experience of her she is not a barrel of laughs. She glowered as he made his light jokes but I suspect he quite enjoyed her discomfort because a po-face was not something he could identify with.
Reg seemed to love life. He and his wife, Pat, were keen ballroom dancers and I can imagine him being deft and light on his feet - he was a lean, trim man.
It’s a few years since I last saw him – we did an event together one balmy evening in Edinburgh and after had a pleasant couple of beers and a chat sitting outside one of the side-alley pubs. He was peeved about the TV production company wanting to get rid of the characters Ellie and Sgt Wield from the series. "So I wrote the last book from Ellie's point of view," he said with a big grin on his face.
Reg, RIP. Yours Aye.
Over the past few months I've been invited by various TV production companies to pontificate on the 1963 UK Great Train Robbery because of my small but perfectly formed true crime account published by the National Archives a couple of years ago.
When I wrote it, I used every relevant police, court and Post Office file in the Archive. They made a tower about 16 feet high and they revealed zilch about the man who had tipped the robbers off to the fact there was £2.6m waiting to be stolen from the overnight Glasgow to London train.
For that reason I turned down all the TV production companies because I didn't have anything new to say. The Great Train Robbery's Missing Mastermind may have come from one of them - I didn't keep track - but it didn't have anything new to say either. Mind you, it said it an entertaining enough way. It made a narrative out of someone having access to the Post Office's previously withheld own files in which their attempts to track down who on the inside gave the robbers the nod were detailed. Except copies of these files were in the National Archives when I did my research. And the Post Office investigators were as clueless as the police.
There was no mastermind behind The Great Train Robbery but there was someone on the inside. A couple of the robbers still alive know who that was. They've never said, although they've spun a number of entertaining yarns for money over the years. Neither of them featured in the Channel 4 programme. You have to admire the robbers for keeping schtum about a few of the most intriguing parts of the whole story for the past 50 years. And it is fifty years next year since the biggest robbery in UK history.
Oh, did I mention my account is coming out on Kindle in the next month with a new Afterword? It doesn't identify the mystery man/missing mastermind but it asks all the right questions and provides the clearest account of the robbery and the theories about it (if I do say so myself...). It was a relief to see that this Channel 4 programme had nothing in it to contradict my take on the crime. Expect a slew of other books next year.
So there I was sitting on the Sussex Downs, looking down on the giddy seaside resort of Brighton and across at a cremation site for Indian soldiers wounded in the Great War. I imagined that Sherlock Holmes might have retired right here to raise his bees. I was also thinking about the fact that, during World War One, Brighton's Royal Pavilion, a weird 19th century Indo-Chinese confection that Walt Disney would have wished he had created, was converted into a hospital for those soldiers of the Indian army who were wounded on the Western Front. The idea was that they would feel at home there. Yeah, right.
How I came up with the next bit eludes me. I was aware that Agatha Christie's first Hercule Poirot novel, The Mysterious Affair At Styles, was written and set in 1916 (though not published until 1920). That was just two years after Holmes and Watson had foiled a German spy's nefarious plans in His Last Bow. Poirot and Holmes were, for a few years, contemporaries.
Wouldn't it be great if they encountered each other? Well, yes it would, but when I checked I found only a couple of short stories by the late, great Julian Symons, in which such a meeting had happened. Why had nobody else thought to put those two great, eccentric egos together?
I discovered the main reason, in recent years, was probably copyright. Sherlock Holmes is fair game but Poirot is tenaciously protected by the Agatha Christie Estate. Hmm. I dug a little further and discovered that before Christie created Poirot there had been a fictional French policeman called Jules Poiret. And contemporaneously with the first appearance of Poirot there was an Hercules Popeau.
Meanwhile, back on those beautiful South Downs I'd been thinking about Indian soldiers recuperating in Brighton (or being cremated on the Downs) and then about The Sign of The Four. Three of the four were Indians, although Arthur Conan Doyle's grasp of Indian culture was rudimentary so their names suggested they had dual religions, both Sikh and Muslim. In Conan Doyle's novel we never find out what happened to them.
I found out what happened to them writing The Belgian and The Beekeeper. It covers the Sikh Wars and the Indian Mutiny and the battle of Maiwand where Watson got that pesky Jezail bullet wound that moved around a lot in the course of Conan Doyle's short stories. There is Sherlock Holmes at the flickers and an unlikely partnership between two great detectives and much, much more.
I avoided copyright issues with a little sleight of hand. I put the novella up on Kindle with some other goodies as a Kindle Original. It's the first of three Holmes adventures I'm bringing out over the next twelve months. It was fun to write. I hope it's fun to read.
French publisher, LE ROUERGUE, is publishing the first of my Brighton trilogy, CITY OF DREADFUL NIGHT, in March 2012. French title to be confirmed.
Meanwhile, THE BELGIAN & THE BEEKEEPER, the first of three playful novellas set between 1916 and 1918 and featuring Sherlock Holmes and a distinctive foreign detective, is now available as a Kindle Original, priced $4 in the US and £2.65 in the UK. It comes bundled with other Sherlock Holmes goodies, including short stories and a taster of a forthcoming Sherlock Holmes novel.
And, finally (for the moment, that is), THE LAST KING OF BRIGHTON is now out in paperback.
TERRY WOGAN was such fun to interview. I was half-expecting him to take over the event, which would had been fine with me as he's the consummate pro. But he's generous with me and my questions. Good event.
Often comics like to do their own schtick and MARK WATSON was no exception so I could kick back in the audience. Same with CLARISSA DICKSON WRIGHT, who has produced a fascinating history of cooking.
Then it was on to adventurers of various sorts. MARK BEAUMONT had cycled the length of the Americas with a couple of mountains to climb en route. He had the slides to show it. CHARLEY BOORMAN & RUSS MALKIN had explored much of the world on motorbike together (Malkin produces the EWAN MCGREGOR/BOORMAN bike journeys for telly). Old mates, they delighted in taking the piss out of each other. BOORMAN had never met ED STAFFORD, who had walked the length of the Amazon over 28 months, but they got on well on stage, even though they seemed chalk and cheese: Boorman slightly shambolic biker; Stafford rugby-playing ex-army captain. However, they shared good sense of humour and a love of adventure so the event went well. It was pretty much the last event of the festival and there was a sense of winding down around the site. A good couple of weeks though.
Had a blast in Cheltenham over ten days. Got off to a slow start on the first Friday as former buccaneering MP BOB MARSHALL ANDREWS was unable to attend and parliamentary sketch-writer, MATTHEW PARRIS, was promoting a book he hadn't actually written. (As he was the first to admit.)
COLIN THUBRON was a delight in the evening - thoughtful, articulate. I've always admired his travel writing AND his novels so it was a pleasure to meet him.
THE SPANISH CIVIL WAR was hard work the next morning, as a historian dropped out at the last moment and I was left with two intelligent cultural commentators who were also chalk and cheese. One was quick-witted and energetic, the other more ponderous. The event never properly jelled for me as it was quite anglo-centric - I was hoping for someone to discuss the response of Spanish artists to the Civil War but Spirit of the Beehive, Pan's Labyrinth and Javier Cercas's Soldiers of Salamis, among other responses, only got a mention from me. Still the audience on the whole seemed to enjoy it.
In the evening, advertising guru JOHN HEGARTY was urbane and amusing looking back over his life as one of the UK's leading ad-men. Not very forthcoming on comparisons between his generation of ad men (the Eighties) and Mad Men though.
ANDY MCNAB was a bluff pro and knew exactly how to be with the audience in his sell-out event. Chaos in the signing tent afterwards as his queue got mixed up with that of Jarvis Cocker and his PR was going mental (excuse the technical expression) as people were trying to snatch photos of him (strictly verboten) on their phones. He ended up signing people's books at a table facing a wall with his back to the room.
I'd seen STEPHEN POLIAKOFF's new play MY CITY at the Almeida in London a few days before I interviewed him and was puzzled by why the festival had invited him to discuss such a London-centric play in Cheltenham. In the event we roamed over his whole career.
I'd read that he spoke in incomplete sentences and could be quite jittery and both things seemed true when we met beforehand, his leg jiggling and his fingers twisting a plastic straw. On stage, however, he was brilliant.
Movie-maker JOHN LANDIS cancelled on the Monday, which was disappointing but I had been wondering how to approach his dire Burke and Hare movie. Had a chat with LEE CHILD in the writers' room instead.
Tuesday I had the great pleasure of spending time on and off-stage with EDNA O'BRIEN, who was as delightful and sharp as ever.
Many people during audience questions and at the signing told her how inspirational the session had been, to which she responded, not-so-sotto-voce to me "I wish I could bloody inspire myself".
DUNCAN BANNATYNE later that evening was hard work not because he was difficult or anything - he was most amenable - but because he gave short, almost abrupt answers so I was whizzing through my questions
Plus he told me, seconds before we went on, that he hadn't yet had time to read his ghostwritten book. Since I'd structured the interview around the contents of the book this understandably threw me. Worked out fine in the end, of course.
HUNTER DAVIES talking about ALFRED WAINWRIGHT and his collected letters was a welcome interlude the next lunchtime, though I didn't warn to Wainwright from his self-absorbed letters send at the height of WWII whilst he was in a cushy home front job and obsessed with walks and women. Hunter told me some great stories about his relationship with Sean Connery when he was due to be ghosting the actor's memoirs. His next project is to edit JOHN LENNON's letters - provided Yoko gives permission.
Whilst busy at the Cheltenham festival I received the unwelcome news that an old friend, Alan Haydon, had died after a short illness. We lost touch some years ago, although I was aware that for the past ten years he had run the De La Warr Pavilion in Bexhill. Indeed, I had met him there a couple of times. On the Pavilion's website their are encomia to him from the likes of Anthony Gormley for the work he did with artists there.
When I knew him best, we were both working in the arts in Hammersmith and together ran a film programme in a Shepherds Bush community/arts centre called The Last Chance.
We had many triumphs (in a small way) but my fondest memory is of him laughing helplessly as one of the reels of film from a rare jazz film unexpectedly unspooled from our 16mm projector and curled up at astounding speed, first round our feet then round our knees in the small projection booth.
He will justifiably be remembered for his many accomplishment but I will always cherish his grin and his laugh.
I'm mostly bemused by the press release from Faber & Faber I received today announcing that P D James's new novel is going to be a mash-up of Pride and Prejudice. Phyllis has long made clear her love for Jane Austen and for the last ten years has done what she damn well likes in terms of her fiction. But that a 91 year old should follow a callow trend seems, well, weird. Publishing. Nothing amazes. Much depresses.
Spent a pleasant couple of days up in Hampstead chairing events at the Ham & High Festival. WILL CARVER, debut author of GIRL 4, was a delight: interesting and funny. NICCI GERARD & SEAN FRENCH - both of whom I've bumping into for years via the Observer and various festivals and publisher things - were a terrific double act. (They are man and wife but that doesn't always signify...).
Had a great time - and I was pleased there was time to get a chilly dip in one of the swimming ponds on Hampstead Heath early one morning. I like to do that a couple of times a year . Swimming with goose shit isn't exactly swimming with dolphins but it's still fun - as long as you keep your mouth closed. They are being closed down for a while to sort out flood barriers. I don't quite understand but there's a worry that if they flood they'll drown Kentish Town. Quite why the ponds would flood I'm not entirely clear. But, just in case, I didn't jump in.