A pleasurable re-read

I'm on a re-reading kick right now, which is both unexpected and, to be honest, a little bit counter-productive. I have enough unread books to build a house obviously (don't we all!) but more immediately importantly I'm supposed to be proof reading the excellent second Shooty Dog Thing collection for Paul and Jon and finishing off reading a really pretty superb fantasy novel which it looks like Obverse Books may soon be releasing (before any of the involved parties get the hump, rest assured I'm half way through both books and I'll have them finished asap!).

But I managed, while negotiating my way to my desk in the glorified corridor I call my office, to kick over a pile of haphazardly stacked paperbacks. They fell like a pack of playing cards, fanned out across the floor (all the way to the guinea pig cage for those who know my house) and right in the middle, shining up at me, was the first Brenda and Effie book, Never the Bride. I reviewed that in another place ages ago so I won't bother doing so again, but one thing which struck me at once is that Brenda and Effie and the rest arrive fully-formed in this first book in the series. There's no feeling, as with many such series, that this is a testing ground, that Brenda may end up a different character as Paul Magrs writes each successive book, honing the eponymous bride to his satisfaction. Instead everybody feels real from their first appearance on the page and, as a result, it's a book which takes no effort at all to read, slipping down even on a second read like an exotically Alan Bennett flavoured sorbet (or something). Looking forward to Something Borrowed now.

Of course, one book re-read hardly makes the promised re-reading kick, but I also put both the full set of Little House books and the full set of Flashman novels on my e-reader when I got it, and sitting outside shops waiting for Julie recently, I found myself dipping into - and then being ensnared by - both series, so that, almost before I realised, I was travelling out of the Big Woods of Wisconsin with Laura and 'defending' a besieged Afghan fort with Sir Harry. Since I'm also just about finished Simon Forward's very enjoyable Evil UnLtd book (review to follow) and writing a secret short story for the Obverse Quarterly (and pondering plotting out a Max Carrados novel - well, you never know, someone might be interested!), I seem to have a pleasantly full book-related calendar ahead of me - which is how I like it.

Which mean, I suppose, that I must stop typing on the Internet and get back into it...

Enter Wildthyme - Paul Magrs (snowbooks, 2011)

By now you'd think that reading a new Iris story would be like pulling on comfy slippers. After all, it was back in the last millennium that I first came across the character shining out of the pages of a Doctor Who book like the sudden beautiful view across the hills that you sometimes get on the road to somewhere dreary. And since then there have been novels, short story collections and audios, some of them even written and published by me. You'd think I'd be bored.

But not at a bit of it, as this new Iris novel proves. True, Iris has recreated herself again, but that's part of the charm of the character as well as the perfect way to keep things fresh. Paul Magrs is incapable of writing dully and Iris, Panda and the Bus are the ideal foil for him, even more I think than his other fabulously mad series with Brenda and Effie. Actually, it's a bit surprising that Brenda doesn't make an appearance in here; almost everyone else does as Magrs pulls off the clever trick of introducing a plethora of new characters to first time Iris readers, while making their various introductions intetesting for more seasoned dabblers in the Magrs' universe.

Like one of those Hollywood spectaculars of the fifties and sixties, if you name a star from a previous Magrs' book he or she probably makes an appearance (even if only in cameo) in Enter Wildthyme. Unlike those movies, however, I was never left thinking 'why the hell is John Wayne playing a Roman centurion?' Here everyone has a part to play and so, rather than over-filled or gratuitous, this book feels like a party to which we've all been invited by Iris, the reader included.

It'd be a bit pointless to go into detail about everyone who turns up and what role they play, but I can't let pass the opportunity to mention that Barbra the Vending Machine from Sick Building and 'The Dreadful Flap' returns in all her stale crisped glory. Even if the rest of the book were rubbish (which it isn't - it's great!) it'd be worth buying this just to see Barbra on the Bus.

They should invite Paul Magrs to write for Doctor Who on telly. This is the one sort of story missing from the series since it came back, a proper, mental, funny, sometimes sad, often daft extravaganza.

Top Five Books of 2010

Prompted by the inclusion of The Obverse Book of Ghosts inclusion in at least one reader's Top Reads of 2010, I thought I'd belatedly do mine, with the obvious proviso that I don't buy that many brand new books, so this is books I read in 2010, rather than the best books released in 2010.

Jonathan Strange and Mr Norrell - Susanna Clarke

It's a fantasy novel which is over a thousand pages long, it's filled with footnotes, and I see someone called it the 'adult Harry Potter'. I should have hated it - but I loved it, reading it first of all the books I had with me on our two week cruise round the mediterranean.

It's a sign of how good it is, and how much the prose and the sheer volume of clever ideas drag you in that I had no issue with carrying a book the size of a small bungalow round the 100 degree heat of Sicily and Rome. I loved to find myself sitting with Julie in some cafe or other in the shade, drinking cold beer and eating rolls jammed full of mozarella and ham, while Strange moved whole armies by magic in the Peninsular War and Mr Norrell sat and brooded.


The Box of Ho Sen - Anthony Skene (in Sexton Blake Wins!)

All the stories in this slightly tatty looking 1980s collection of Blake novellas is worth a read, but the best by far is Skene's 'The Box of Ho Sen'. If Blake is known at all to the public today, it's as a cut price and shoddy rival to Sherlock Holmes or (for those with unpleasant memories of the various Sexton Blake Library releases of the mid to late sixties) as a seedy investigator of blackmail and kidnapping.

Which is a real shame as he's so much more than that in his prime.

'The Box of Ho Sen' is an example of the very best of Blake, with Zenith the Albino in opposition and a suitably fiendish, convoluted and cunning plot for the reader - and Blake - to get his teeth into.

What makes it particularly stand out though, both in terms of Blake and in terms of my reading last year, is the character of Zenith who is nowhere better described and utliised than here.

"Sooner or later someone, whether it might be a police constable on the beat or his arch-enemy, Sexton Blake, the private detective of Baker Street, would succeed in arresting him and conducting him towards a police station. Then he would simply smoke one of the tiny opium cigarettes which he carried in a platinum case within his waistcoat pockets. Nobody smoked those cigarettes save himself, and one of them was marked by a crimson ring. That was death; and if all else failed and he saw that he was doomed to imprisonment, there was always that cigarette which he might smoke and thus obtain release. What did it matter? Only those who enjoy life fear death; and to Zenith life was a constant reminder of his abnormality."

You don't get that degree of layering in your Bond villains, do you? Perhaps I'm completely wrong, but give me an opera cloak and suicide fags over a third nipple or a white cat any day...

The Osiris Ritual - George Mann

I should think that amongst the most common reminiscences of a seventies childhood is mention of sitting on the settee on a weekend night, watching a double bill of a Universal and a Hammer horror movie. J and I both remember watching shadowy black and white Mummies and luridly colourful Draculas on a Friday night, sitting up on the settee, eating crisps and hiding behind our mums.

They just don't make horror movies like that anymore. Nowadays the movies are full of young girls being disembowelled and dead aliens dreaming of slaughter and mayhem from the bottom of a well, but back then it was heaving bosoms as far as the eye could see and every second film was either set in mittel Europe or in swinging London.

George Mann's Newbury and Hobbes books are the point at which the Hammer movies crash into the Universal ones by way of a steampunk highway. A mummy's curse is pure Universal, a slaughtered archaeologist sheer Hammer and the villainous Ashford is completely brilliant steampunk, a man-machine version of Callan, dripping gobbets of rotting flesh.

Wonderful stuff, to be continued in 2011 it seems!


The Bride that Time Forgot - Paul Magrs

Reviewers of old used to talk about 'rich confections' and 'heady cocktails', gluttonous metaphors for novels so packed with magnificent incident and glorious wonder that you can almost taste them. That's te Brenda and Effie series of novels in a nutshell.

The Bride of Frankenstein (now a B&B owner) and her best friend, a witch, live in Whitby, sinkhole of sheer badness that it is, solving crimes, fighting evil and sending the minions of Hell back where they belong (underneath Whitby, it turns out). What's not to love?

This fifth book in a series which began with Never the Bride and gets better with each instalment was a present in December which I put to one side to savour over the holidays. Picking it up on the 28th of December I'd read the entire thing by the evening of the 29th (and it's not like I'm not busy at that time of year!).

Mental, metafictional and magnificient, this is another series I'd like to see continue for ever - and spread out to TV (with Annette Crosbie as Effie, please).

Space Captain Smith - Toby Frost

I love pulps, I love square jawed heroes and I love science fiction, so this tale of a square jawed pulp hero in space was never going to have to struggle to win me over. I'd read Space Vulture, a more deliberate homage to the pulps, early in the year and enjoyed it hugely, but the writing, wit and inventiveness on display here easily eclipsed that earlier read.

Skewering all sorts of sf standards in an affectionate manner, battering British cliches round the head and generally tweaking the nose of everything Smith comes in contact with - perfect summer reading for anyone who's sat through a pompous English movie from the thirties or yawned through the interminable dullness of 2001 : A Space Odyssey.

Hornets Nest, written by Paul Magrs and starring Tom Baker (2009)

My friend Jim has the happy knack of often coming up with just the phrase perfectly to encompass all that's best about one creative endeaviour or other, and he's seldom been more on the ball than in describing this first series of BBC Tom Baker Dr Who audios as 'macabre joie de vivre'.

Appearing in the autumn and early winter of the year, the five parts of Hornets Nest felt like a second annual season of Doctor Who, following the brash and colourful television series like a cleverer and more odd elder brother. Redolent of winter evenings, drinking mulled wine by an open fire, the curtains closed and an old friend come to visit, Paul Magrs rather brilliantly managed to provide both comfort and innovation in a single, beautifully crafted package.

From the very first, I was happily dragged into the latest World of the Doctor.

Nest Cottage feels like a natural extension from the house that Pertwee built in Magrs' earlier Dr Who book, Verdigris. And of course the Doctor would have a big old dog about the place, and a housekeeper to cook his meals and argue with him. Of course he'd have old friends round for adventures now and then (but not all the time!) and of course he'd stay up all night telling stories which, in the end, become one with present reality, so that everybody is in The Most Terrible Danger!

The fact that not all of this is in place at the start of the series makes the voyage of discovery all the finer - and the manner in which that voyage takes in one deliciously creepy (macabre, even) location after another, back into the watery depths of time, is finer still.

For me - and many more like me - this is the real Sound of the Seventies; the wheezing groan of the TARDIS, the fourth Doctor barking orders at Mike Yates and anyone else who gets in his way - and the sinister rustling noise of an alien entity sliding surreptitiously into an unsuspecting but compliant human body.

Beautiful and a little bit scary - like all the best Wintery things...