Pages & Proofs

AbeBooks’ bestselling book in recent months is easily Kevin Barry’s City of Bohane. It’s a debut  novel and probably marks the appearance of a real writing talent.

The book blurb describes itself as “Forty years in the future. The once-great city of Bohane on the west coast of Ireland is on its knees, infested by vice and split along tribal lines. There are the posh parts of town, but it is in the slums and backstreets of Smoketown, the tower blocks of the North Rises and the eerie bogs of the Big Nothin’ that the city really lives. For years it has all been under the control of Logan Hartnett, the dapper godfather of the Hartnett Fancy gang. But they say his old rival Gant Broderick is back; there is dissent within the Fancy ranks; there are problems with the missus. and then there’s his mother.”

Barry is indeed Irish, from Limerick but he now lives in Dublin. He has also published two short story collections called There are Little Kingdoms and Dark Lies the Island.

The Guardian reviewed City of Bohane last year:

Kevin Barry is a great storyteller, and the twists and turns of City of Bohane are satisfying, if, in places, familiar (all gangland narratives seem compelled to have the same dreary combination of over-sentimentality and violence). But as Ol’ Boy Mannion says at one point, “Bohane City don’t always gots to be a gang-fight story. We can give ‘em a good aul tangle o’ romance an’ all, y’check me?”

Barry’s short stories are not to be sneezed at. Earlier this year, his short story about  a group of middle-aged beer connoisseurs on a train journey to Wales won the Sunday Times short story award and Barry took home £30,000. The beer story can be found in Dark Lies the Island.

I like his sense of humour. He was interviewed by the Short Review and when asked how he was feeling now that he was selling books he replied:

“Really cool. And I’m afraid I have to make a confession. (This is all turning out to be very therapeutic, actually.) I’ve been haunting bookshops and hiding behind display signs of TV chefs (Nigella is excellent to hide behind as she has a huge arse) as I spy on the short fiction section and see if anyone’s tempted by my sweet bait. I’ve also been counting how many copies of the book are left in shops, and I’ve been covering other “upcoming” authors’ books with mine. Oh what a rancid, poisonous, competitive fiend I’ve become! I have by now attracted the attention of several store detectives.

Author Will Self and his family had a narrow escape earlier today when the roof of their London home, in Stockwell, and three neighbouring Victorian townhouses collapsed.

He told the Evening Standard: “It was like the front of my house fell off. I got the children out to the back of the property because it was all about to go. Once things had stopped falling off I got them out through the front door. Somebody could have been killed.”

Flappers ahoy! Here’s the trailer for the forthcoming movie of The Great Gatsby, directed by Baz Luhrmann and shot in 3D. It’s certainly going to be a pretty movie. I wonder what F Scott Fitzgerald would have made of it.

The Guardian carries a review of Railsea, the new novel from China Miéville. they say it’s a “wildly inventive crossover/young adult fantasy with elements of SF and trains, lots of trains, all done with the kind of brio of which most writers can only dream.”

Joan Aiken, the Awdrys, Daniel Defoe, Ursula Le Guin, Herman Melville, Robert Louis Stevenson, the Strugatsky Brothers and Spike Milligan are listed in the acknowledgement section. Miéville just seems to go from strength to strength, and is really the darling of the critics. It would be interesting to see him and Neil Gaiman in conversation. I’m sure there is definite crossover with readers who loved Neil now adoring China’s books.

Paul Kimmage triumphed at the 10th British Sports Book Awards with his biography, Engage: The Fall and Rise of Matt Hampson.

The author used to be a journalist at the Sunday Times. Hampson is a former rugby union prop who was paralysed from the neck down after an accident in practice while on duty for England under 21 in 2005. He needs a ventilator to breathe. The book is critical of the NHS and RFU, and puts into perspective a side of sport that is rarely considered – the life changing accident.

The book is highly critical of the standards of care he initially received from the National Health Service, and the attitude of the RFU, which contrasts with that of the Leicester Tigers board.

Nick Hornby received an award for Outstanding Contribution to Sports Writing. It’s 20 years since the publication of Fever Pitch.

Earlier this year, I read Moby-Duck by Donovan Hohn. Here is my video review of this non-fiction book about thousands of bath toys that fell into the ocean off a container ship and were washed around the globe.

For seemingly no good reason at all, the BBC asks why locked room mysteries are so popular. It’s good to see the article reference John Dickson Carr, who was the master of the locked room mystery as detailed in our feature about this sub-genre of thriller writing.

Dickson Carr, who also wrote under the pseudonym Carter Dickson, was a genius of the locked room genre, a man able to wring mind-bending mysteries out of a bloodied corpse found in the most sparse of surroundings. In novels like The Crooked Hinge, The Hollow Man and Castle Skull, readers thrilled to tales of men shot dead in closed elevators, strangled to death in locked huts and abducted from railway carriages under constant surveillance.

There’s a rather amusing new Tumblr – Really Long Book Titles of Really Old Books. Boy, AbeBooks could supply a long list of gems for this one.  How about Illustratio Systematis Sexualis Linnaei. Denuo edita, revisa ac translatione Germanica locupletata per M.B. Borckhausen adiectis tabulis CVIII ad originale Millerianum aeri incisis et coloratis, which can be seen above? A super rare edition from 1804.

The first rule of Mustard Club is…. The Recipe Book of the Mustard Club edited by Gourmet, which was actually crime writer Dorothy L Sayers.

Apart from penning memorable novels and essays, Sayers was a skilled copywriter and worked for Benson’s advertising agency in London. This spoof recipe book was a promotional tool for Coleman’s Mustard, one of her clients. She also wrote copy for Guinness ads.

The Recipe Book of the Mustard Club was illustrated by John Gilpin and Sayers’ amusing copy includes Fish Stories by Miss Di Gester, In Praise of Pig by Lord Bacon, Mutton and Beef by the Baron de Beef, Fair Game and Fowl by Augustus Gusto, Good Cheese and Good Cheer by Signor Spaghetti, Sandwiches by the Mustard Club’s Travelling Correspondent and Sauces of Domestic Happiness by Lady Hearty.

Memories were flooding back to me as I browsed these long forgotten Blue Peter Annuals ranging from 1965 to 1981. Some of the covers are shocking – what were the BBC thinking? John Noakes and Peter Duncan falling over and getting hurt. Lizzie Dripping (aka Tina Heath) becoming a host. Lesley Judd’s boots and flowing skirts. Peter Purves’ solid reliability.  Petra and Shep. The garden. The black and white one with the elephant. Valerie Singleton’s absolutely crystal clear voice and young Sarah Greene.