Little Cheapies

Well I'm never going to get rich publishing Obverse Books, but the payment in cheapies is ongoing and constant.  On the same day that I get hold of a physical copy of a book with a story of mine alongside stories by Michael Moorcock, Paul Magrs, Mark Hodder and George Mann, the little Iris sampler I put on Amazon last week reached number 16 in the sf short story charts.  Means nothing and makes even less, but I think that's cool :)

Yopu can buy a copy for a pound here...

Fourth Doctor Adventures!

Co-incidentally, I've read two new adventures of the fourth incarnation of Doctor Who (Tom Baker, for th eperosn readin gthis who doesn't already know!) in the past few months.  One of them is a big-money, big-splash hardback adapatation of the 'classic' lost story, 'Shada' by current tv writer Gareth Roberts, based on a script by the late Douglas Adam.  The other is a Lulu published paperback (very loose) adaptation of the even more lost, Baker and Marter script 'Doctor Who Meets Scratchman' by author and blogger Nick Campbell.

I liked them both a great deal, I must say.  The Baker-era has not been brilliantly served in novel format, I think, though the high points - Steven Marley's Managra, say - have been pretty high indeed.  But both of these examples illustrate in their own way the strength of the TV show at the time they were initally conceived and which authors should use far more when writing for the Baker Doctor now.

They are very different though.

'Shada' is an big budget production, with Gareth Roberts - an able prose writer but, I think, a better dramatist - bringing both bow strings to bear on Adams' script, to generally pleasing effect.  It's a book designed to appeal to the casual Who fan, the sort of people who watch the new series on telly and who know the name 'Douglas Adams' from somewhere or other.  It's funny at times while overly obvious at others, clever but also clumsy and well-written but unsure if it's a Target novelisation or a Douglas Adams' book.  I didn't care for the gushing over the genius of Adams towards the end, which felt forced and out of place, but for all that it's a decent rendition of a certain point in TV time and very welcome amongst the bland uniformity of much of the Who prose output since the TV series lurched back onto the screens.

'Doctor Who meets Scratchman', on the other hand, reads like the fabulous but slightly scary love-child of Paul Magrs and Terrance Dicks, midwived by Barbara Euphan Todd and Rosemary Sutcliff.  It's a Cajun stew of a novel, full of peculiar textures and odd tastes, alive with an outpouring of ideas, and so obviously in love with the whole era that it's virtually palpable as you read.  From the Target style cover featuring Vincent Price as Scratchman all the way to the last page which promises the upcoming 'Dr Who Discovers the Miners', this book is a proper wallow in something actually wonderful, in the real sense of the word.  At times while readng it, lying on my bed with the rain battering on the window, I disappeared into 1975 again, with Tom striding about, cabbage companion to hand, and Sarah and Harry to the rear, the sexiest couple on TV.  I can easily picture myself slipping this book into place on the long shelf which ran above my bed when I was ten, in between 'Revenge of the Cybermen' and 'Terror of the Zygons', then mentally hugging myself as I considered the every growing rank of spines, each little adventure mine to keep and re-visit whenever I want. There's something genuinely brilliant in a book which can conjure up that kind of memory so clearly, I think.

The Ninnies - Paul Magrs

Mum wouldn’t believe me when I told her Dad had been taken away by the Ninnies.


She thought he’d left us of his own accord. She thought he’d taken his bucket, ladder and chamois leather on his window round that Monday and simply never came back because he’d gone off us. Or that he’d imagined a better life somewhere else. ‘He could never stand any pressure,’ she sighed, eating another handful of Flying Saucers. ‘He was never any good with stress.’But I knew. I knew he’d never just up and leave us. Not with Squoosh, my little sister on the way. I knew what had really happened.He had been taken away by the Ninnies.Though Mum would not listen to a word of it. ‘You’re too fanciful,’ she told me, cramming another load of Flying Saucers into her mouth as she sat there at the kitchen table. ‘You get it from him. He was always dreaming. Making daft things up. All about the things he saw through people’s windows!’ I could tell that Mum herself was making stuff up as she ranted. She was making herself believe that we would be better off without him.

We both knew that wasn’t true.

A new YA fantasy novel from Paul Magrs, creator of Iris Wildthyme, Brenda and Effie and author of the best-selling AudioGo! Fourth Doctor adventures.  Fully illustrated throughout by Bret Herholz.

In a one time only limited edition of 100 hardback copies.  Order now for delivery in mid-May.

“A deliciously dark tale of crunchy crisps, abridged animals and merciless Mancunian monsters. When you read The Ninnies you may laugh or you may cry – but you’ll definitely sleep with the lights on…” – Tommy Donbavand, author of Scream Street

“The Ninnies whisks the reader away into the great dark stretch of some fabulous nightmare, pinned down by Paul Magrs with poetry and precision. Vivid fantasy with the warmest heart, best read by torchlight in the dark.” – Steve Cole, author of Astrosaurs

Available from www.obversebooks.co.uk...

Some random thoughts regarding telly viewed from a sick bed

Siege of Golden Hill  feels almost like it goes meta-fictional at one point, as a scene where the teenagers are acting poorly in a rehearsal of a play moves into one where teenagers who can't really act pretend to be scary gang members.

My Old Man - only point in history when high rise flats were viewed as a wonderful thing.  But funny, as you'd expect from something in which Ian Le Frenais had a hand.

Game of Thrones - didn't watch it because I suspected it of having elves in it, but Sharon convinced me too (clever girl!) and it was great, and not afraid to kill off people just like real life - i.e for no reason other than that's what happens.

Not With a Bang - only lasted seven episodes, of which I think only three were shown up here, but I've wanted to see this again since the 80s, and it didn't disappoint.  With a post-apocalypse setting and a cast including Steven Rea and Ronald Pickup, that's highly surprising, though. Network replied to my emailk to say they wouldn't be doing a DVD however.  Boo!

Mrs Brown's Boys - The episodes where Mrs Brown gave herself a bikini wax, took LSD and thought she was being put in a home are, quite geneuinely, the funniest things I've seen for years.  To the extent that the latter two were effectively turned into audios due to the tears in my eyes.

Then my back got better and I went back to work, but not before I read a pile of books too, of which more later...

Wolf's Head 1: Oath of Blood by Arthur Frazier (NEL, 1973)

Among the many and varies things I like are dog-eared New English Library paperbacks like 'Wolfs Head 1: Oath of Blood', apparently by Arthur Frazier.

I say apparently because this first book in a six book series is actually the work of prolific NEL author Kenneth Bulmer, a man second only to Wilfred McNeilly in my personal pantheon of forgotten heroes of pulp. Bulmer is better known for science fiction than this sort of Saxons vs Normans throwaway, but even so it's 108 pages of small text which never flags for a second, even while it sets up the premise for the remaining five books in the series.  This is a book that fills every page with incident and action, like an Alan Moore comic strip or a  big summer blockbuster novel, never stopping for breath or reflection, and making sure that every inch of available canvas is in play.

Attempted rape, mutilation, revenge, death and pitched battle combine with beautiful women, saxon art, good fellowship and self-sacrifice to make a book which is never dull.  That may not seem like the greatest compliment ever paid a book but there are times when incident packed is all you really want...

Mr Hudson's Diaries - Michael Hardwick (Sphere, 1973)

For all my pretentions to literary fiction and for all the nice things I might say about Umberto Eco and Ian McEwan (well, not McEwan - he bores the arse off me), my real first love are tv tie-ins.  Some of that is down to nostalgia, obviously - the Target Dr Who books for me, as for lots of people my age, were the reading materials of my youth after all - but sometimes it's because a tie-in novel seems able to do things which I can't believe the parent show would ever touch.

Books like the BBC Doctor Who novels The Blue Angel or Interference go well beyond what their parent show is even capable of imagining, let alone presenting on screen, but that's possibly to be expected.  The Virgin and first set of BBC Doctor Who spin-offs are acknowleged by all but partisan fools to be amongst the best tie-ins every created and the show is one which cries out for limitless imagination.

Other series, however, seem as though they'd be far less interesting when committed to paper - but that's an equally foolish assumption.  As I mentioned somewhere else on here (I'm sure my reader can get off his chair and go and look) the Crossroads book 'A Warm Breeze' features a Lost Horizon-style hidden valley, a boy who talks backwards and ends with actual magic taking place, but that's a genuine novelisation of several bonkers (and now tragically lost) episodes of the soap opera, so the madness lies with the script-writer not the novelist.

I've just finished one of the Upstairs Downstairs back-story novels, Mr Hudson's Diaries however, and Michael Hardwick and his wife Mollie have done as solid a job with the story of Angus Hudson's life prior to coming to 165 Eaton Place as anyone could possibly expect.  But added to the tales of Hudson's crippled father, first dalliances with women, tragic loss and eventual rise, is a chapter in which an actual poltergeist haunts the Bellamy family home until the bones of a murdered baby are found buried nearby.  Like the apparently genuine Ouija board in the Christmas 2011 edition of Downton Abbey it's this brilliant implausability which raises the book above the ordinary.  There's no need for anything so mental, but it's entertaining and interesting and improves a solid book into a memorable one.

You don't get great stuff like that in bloody Atonement, I can tell you.

Hiram Grange and the Nymphs of Krakow - Richard Wright (Shroud, 2010)

You need, I think, to have a minimum of two strings to your bow to be a really good writer.  A great sense of character allied with an ear for dialogue, say, or a strong plot element combined with a vivid imagination.  Richard Wright, thankfully, has all four of those plus a couple more besides.  He's done a couple of excellent stories for Obverse Books and, as the back cover blurb by Steven Saville says, he is a bit of a hidden gem.

The Nymphs of Krakow (from Shroud Publishing) needs all his skills, not because it's a poor idea but because it's the final book in a five novella series and if there's one thing I really can't be doing with it's clunky and intrusive exposition (that - and the fact it seemed to have been written as a joke by an idiot in crayons - killed Hawaii 5-0 for me just last week, for example - but I digress).  Instead of that, all the information the reader needs bleeds into the book - almost literally, at times - and the story is left to run at its own natural and enjoyable pace.  The dialogie is snappy, the various Big Bads intriguing and unexpected, even when they seem to be fantasy cliches, and the finale has a nicely ambiguous feel to it.

Don't get me wrong - this isn't War and Peace.  It's an 80 page adventure novella in what fans call 'dark fantasy' or 'urban fantasy' or something like that.  But instead of being the usual teenage wibbling about torture and eating babies and a guy working down the chip shop who swears he's Cthulhu, this is a driven narrative in which sundry plot strands are tied together, various characters get their comeuppance or otherwise, interspersed with some exciting and very well written set pieces.  There's a darkness at times - the fate of one errant river God gave me a chill, for a start - and Hiram Grange himself is an interesting soul, even if he has rather too many little quirks for comfort for me (using only a Webley revolver is fine, but all the stuff with the absinthe?  As bad as Morse and his real ale - chracter created by check list).  But Grange isn't Wright's character, so he can hardly be blamed for that.

In the end, this last story was good enough to make me seek out the first four.  Can't say fairer than that.

(In other news I listened to the Doctor Who audio 'Curse of Davros' in the car on the way to and from work over the last few days.  Let's just say - to use a phrase currnetly much in fashion - it's not my favourite Big Finish release).