Star treatment

You know how it is when you're a big-time writer. You get the star treatment, right?

Er, no. Not exactly.

Go see what Tess Gerritsen has to say about being on the road plugging her books. (Link courtesy of Mediabistro.) Now although I didn't much like one of Tess Gerritsen's novels when I reviewed it a while back, it is undeniable that she is a big commercial success. But you'd never know it if you talked to some bookshop managers. She tried, and found they'd never heard of her.

At Store #3, the manager doesn't want me to sign ANY copies. She wants to be able to "return them all" if necessary. Then she looks in the computer and stares. "Wow," she says. "We have a lot of your books in stock. I guess you must sell really well here." Only then does she allow me to sign three copies of VANISH. I ask her if she has many authors come through her store.

"You're the only one," she says. (Do other authors know something that I don't?)

Trying Neaira

Debra Hamel’s Trying Neaira is an object lesson in how to write a non-fiction book which has academic credibility and yet remains easily comprehensible to the general reader.

The book’s subtitle is The true story of a courtesan’s scandalous life in ancient Greece. The courtesan in question is Neaira (pronounced neh-EYE-ruh), and the ‘trying’ part of the title refers to the fact that, towards the end of her life, she was prosecuted for living with an Athenian citizen as his wife.

Under the laws of Athens, foreigners (of whom Neaira was one) were forbidden to marry citizens. The penalties were far from negligible: if found guilty, Neaira might have been sold back into slavery, and Stephanos, the man in her life, would have lost all the rights and privileges associated with citizenship.

First published in hardback in 2003, the book is now available in paperback. The publisher is Yale University Press, and in the academic world there are few more prestigious names. Yale will undoubtedly have had this book vetted (anonymously) by experts in the field, and indeed the author thanks them for their suggestions. So you can be sure that the information conveyed is correct.

The cover of the book features a highly apposite illustration: a sumptuous nude study by Jean-Leon Gérome. The artist’s subject is another famous Greek courtesan, Phryne, who was known for charging variable prices according to whether she liked you or not.

In essence, the book is very simple. It tells, in as much detail as is known, the life story of Neaira. She was brought up in a Corinthian brothel – in the fourth century BC – and was at one time a sex slave but bought her own freedom. And then she entered into a thirty-year relationship with Stephanos of Athens.

Stephanos, is seems, had enemies, and some of them sought to attack him through his long-term relationship with Neaira. The prosecutor was one Apollodoros, and the text of his speech to the court has amazingly survived; it constitutes the main source for Debra Hamel’s book.

In the course of describing Neaira’s life, Debra Hamel passes on a substantial amount of background information about life in ancient Greece, not least about the extraordinary legal system of Athens.

Trying Neaira is short and to the point. The author has mercifully chosen not to write in the fashionable style of gobbledygook which is so eagerly adopted by many who work in the humanities. Equally mercifully, we are spared a lot of feminist propaganda to the effect that all men are bastards; Debra Hamel allows the facts to speak for themselves.

As you would expect, there are extensive footnotes, enlarging on the points made in the text, and there is a substantial list of references. One book missing from the bibliography is Hans Licht’s Sexual Life in Ancient Greece, which was popular when I was a lad; but no doubt it has been displaced by more recent studies in this field.

One way and another Debra Hamel has provided this book with masses of supporting material on the web. You could start by going to her book blog, which is a valuable resource in itself, or you can go to the book’s own web site and work on from there.

Maybe, in the course of time, someone will do Neaira – the Novel. And after that Neaira – the Movie. Who knows?

Follow-ups

Here, in no particular order, are a number of thoughts and links which arise from previous posts and comments upon them.

Science fiction

A correspondent tells me that the University of Minnesota has put up a series of mp3 files which are recordings of a set of lectures on science fiction and fantasy. I have not dipped into them myself, but my correspondent tells me that they are ‘worthwhile, knowledgeable, and accessible.’

Macmillan New Writing

One correspondent tells me that he submitted a ms to Macmillan New Writing back in May, since when he has heard nothing. Well, maybe that’s a bad sign. On the other hand, when a publisher hangs on to something it is sometimes an indication that he/she is taking it seriously.

Meanwhile, Roger Morris has not only submitted a novel to MNW but has had it accepted. There you go, see. Keep the faith. To celebrate, Roger has started a blog, which he refers to as a plog because it largely exists to plug his forthcoming book. Which is in my view a very smart thing to do.

I see from yesterday’s post that not only has Roger signed the contract but he has had proofs delivered. Hot damn, they must move fast at MNW.

Furthermore, Roger tells us that Jordan – aka Katie Price and author of what is currently the hottest ‘autobiography' in town has been signed to do two novels! Wow. I can’t wait.

Having dipped into other parts of Roger’s plog, I find that he has another one: Taking Comfort. He also says that, since Macmillan have been so niggardly with the advance, they have been generous with their punctuation, adding lots of commas and a few hyphens. Well, that’s publishers for you.

It all seems good-humoured and well calculated to arouse interest. Which, given the MNW slimline approach, he is largely going to have to do himself.

Beyond You and Me

W.S. Cross (not sure if that’s he or she) has sent me details of the erotic novel Beyond You and Me. Now what could possibly have made Cross think that I was interested in erotic fiction? Well, maybe it was the piece I wrote about Mitzi Szereto, or the one about books on sex.

Anyway, Cross is another author with a blog and a determination to tell the world about the new novel. This one isn’t sold yet. In fact I don’t think it’s even finished. But hey – it’s never too soon to start plugging, right?

I can’t say that I have actually dipped into Beyond You and Me because I got distracted by the long list of links to other erotic sites which W.S. Cross provides. But then Mrs GOB caught me at it and I was sent upstairs without any supper.

The Celebrity Café

The Celebrity Café wrote to me on the basis of no pretext whatever, but to point out that it is the internet’s longest-running entertainment magazine, read by 3.4 million people a month. Under the links section there is a section for authors, and for a consideration – e.g. a reciprocal link – they will no doubt give you and your book (whether out or forthcoming) a mention.

The Intellectuals and the Masses

Paul Vitols read my piece about John Carey’s book on the intellectuals and didn’t entirely agree with it so he wrote his own extensive comments on his blog Genesis of a Historical Novel. Well worth a look.

Gerard Jones

The great Gerard, whom the gods preserve, is still working on the audio version of Ginny Good. I particularly enjoyed the Introduction (bottom mp3 file on the list), which includes some of Joan Baez, and also a story about a man who was bitten on the neck by a deer which was in the back seat of his car. Look, you just have to listen to the story, OK? And it’s free.

Gerard is absolutely unique and if the internet had been invented solely in order to publicise his book it would have been worthwhile.

Cantara Christopher on Murder in the Genre

Cantara Christopher has commented on various of my posts in the past, and today she has a piece on literaryrevolution.com. Warning. This piece is seriously disturbing. It reminds us that the blogging world is but a shadow of the real world and that the real world contains a great deal of unpleasantness. The stuff that I write about – books and publishing – scarcely qualifies as real at all. But if you want to read something by someone who is prepared to face up to the difficult issues surrounding murder, motherhood, and grief, Cantara’s piece is for you.

Laraine Anne Barker

Laraine has some kind words to say about my essay On the Survival of Rats in the Slush Pile, which she is recommending to beginning writers who seek advice on her FAQ page. Laraine is the author of The Obsidian Quest and other novels, details of which are on her web site.

And, er, that’s about it for today.

More Moneypenny

Yesterday’s Sunday Times carried an odd sort of article on a forthcoming book by one Kate Westbrook: The Moneypenny Diaries.

I first mentioned Miss Moneypenny and her diaries on 8 July. In Ian Fleming’s astonishingly successful series of novels about the British secret agent James Bond, Miss Moneypenny was the secretary to M, the code name for the man who was head of the UK’s Secret Intelligence Service (SIS) and hence Bond’s boss.

For those who are too young to remember these things, perhaps I should point out that the Bond books (the first of which appeared in 1953) were wildly successful as novels. However, what really established the Bond name on a worldwide basis was the even more successful series of films, beginning in 1962 and still running today. These have not only generated untold millions for all involved in them but have made the name James Bond known throughout the world. In the far east he is known as Mr Kiss Kiss Bang Bang.

In my first post on this matter I pointed out that, although the Moneypenny diaries clearly made use of Fleming’s characters, it appeared that the Ian Fleming estate, in the form of an organisation known as IFP, knew nothing about them; and IFP had not, it then seemed, authorised the publication. If they hadn’t, I wondered, how long would it be before they reached for their lawyers?

The Sunday Times, in a thoroughly confused and confusing manner, supplies an answer, of sorts.

First of all, let it be said that I assumed from the outset the Kate Westbrook’s book was a work of fiction. And Amazon has it listed as such. However, it would appear that, for a while at least, the publisher – John Murray, with managing director Roland Philipps as spokesman – was trying to make out that the book was factual.

It is hard, frankly, to discern the true story from the Times’s jumble of facts and quotes. But it appears that Philipps claimed that the author, Kate Westbrook, was a distinguished historian – a fellow of Trinity College, Cambridge no less. Further, he claimed that the diaries were actually written by a woman who, at the time, was secretary to the head of SIS. The references to ‘Miss Moneypenny’ and to ‘James Bond’ were simply used to cover the names of real people, people on whom – it appears – Fleming based his books.

Clear so far? No? Well don’t blame me, I’m doing my best with this nonsense.

OK. Next thing. At a certain point, someone – possibly Richard Brooks, who wrote the Sunday Times article – made a few simple phone calls and established that the story didn’t hold up. For instance, there is no fellow of Trinity called Kate Westbrook and never has been. The stories in the book, when checked against the memory and knowledge of experts on the SIS, were held to be ‘implausible and improbable.’

Philipps seems then to have changed his tune. He now admits that the diaries are not genuine. ‘It’s a spoof,’ he says. Go on – we would never have guessed.

One wonders what on earth Philipps thought he was up to. Did he really believe, at any stage, that the Moneypenny diaries were real? Well, you gotta remember that there were a few people around who were dim enough to believe that the Hitler diaries were genuine.

Or, did he pretend they were real in order to beat up more press interest?

Or – hey, this is beginning to get like one of those complicated thriller plots from the days when espionage novels were all the rage, and you had double bluffs and triple agents and all sorts. Weren’t they fun?

Or, as I was saying, perhaps it was a devious ploy to avoid having to do business with the Ian Fleming estate?

There is a slight hint in the Times article that this latter explanation might, perhaps, be the right one. Corrine Turner, IFP’s managing director, is quoted as follows: ‘We always take protection of our intellectual property seriously and, in normal circumstances, would have stopped this book. However, after detailed negotiations with John Murray we have reached an agreement to allow this project to receive the public attention it deserves.’

She adds that ‘We were certainly led to believe by the publishers that there was a real Miss Moneypenny.’

Well, frankly I am beginning to lose interest. But it looks to me as if the story is very simple. Somebody, somewhere, decided that a successful commercial project could be launched by getting a writer to churn out a series of books (because there are more promised, I gather) which purported to be the diaries of Ian Fleming’s character, Miss Moneypenny. Any fule can see how this might work jolly well. A few bob would be made by everyone, and no harm done.

But then there was the tricky business of IFP demanding a share, as, again, any fule would recognise that they would. Perhaps, just perhaps, the author, agent, and publisher were unwise enough to try to proceed without asking permission. Perhaps they thought that by pretending it was a ‘real’ document, which used the names of Fleming characters for convenience, there would be no breach of copyright and no requirement to do a deal.

The IFP director's statement that normally they would have stopped such a book (dead in its tracks, she might have added), suggests to me that IFP came into the act late in the day; possibly when they were alerted by John Cox, the Bond fan mentioned in my first post. An item in the Observer at the beginning of this month also suggests that this was the case.

I can only say that, if that really was how it happened, I would not personally have cared to be on the end of the legal kicking and thumping which was, doubtless, administered by the IFP lawyers. The Bond franchise has generated many many millions, with more to come, and heavyweights like that do not react kindly when you tread on their toes.

Harry Blamires: The New Bloomsday Book

Yesterday we noted how, in order to separate themselves from the vulgar masses, the intellectuals of the early twentieth century deliberately developed a form of literature which was too difficult for the ordinary reader to understand. And few books in that era were more difficult to understand than James Joyce’s Ulysses (1922).

You might imagine, therefore, that the appearance of Ulysses would have been greeted with cries of joy and acclamation from the literary intelligentsia. But not so.

Why not? Well, there were two problems. The first was that Joyce himself was not one of us; he was a definite oik. And the second problem was that Joyce’s hero, Leopold Bloom, was even oikier. The man was an Irish Jew, for a start. And he was some sort of clerk, for heaven’s sake; and there were few worse insults in the intellectuals’ armoury than to describe a fellow as a mere clerk.

The word oik, by the way, is an old-fashioned English term for a person of uncouth behaviour and/or appearance. A friend of mine once had to act as guide to a distinguished politician called Roy Jenkins (now deceased). Roy was sometimes known as Woy, because of a minor speech impediment. By way of small talk my friend and Woy fell to discussing other personalities in UK politics, and my friend asked Woy what he thought of Kenneth Clarke – a man who may soon lead the Tory party. ‘Oh,’ cried Woy, ‘an absolute oik!’

But back to Joyce. Yes, strive though he might to be the leader of the avant-garde and hence the intellectuals’ darling, poor old Jimmy boy never quite made it. He was dismissed by Virginia Woolf as a ‘a self-taught working man, and we all know how distressing they are, how egotistic [ha!], insistent, raw, striking and ultimately nauseating.’ He probably smelt too.

Leopold Bloom also failed to find favour. He was not an intellectual. The only book we see him buy is entitled Sweets of Sin (not one feels, a highbrow volume), and he reads a periodical called Tit-Bits!

We may note, in passing, that Tit-Bits was not as salacious as it sounds, but it was a magazine which was regularly singled out for condemnation by the intelligentsia. It was aimed firmly at suburban readers, and in its early days each issue contained 40,000 words of text covering a remarkably wide spectrum of subjects. It was clearly bought by those of the lower social orders who sought to improve themselves, and such people got little encouragement from most of the intellectual community.

So, one way and another, James Joyce did not receive universal approval and admiration from the literary intelligentsia, despite the fact that they were the obvious audience for his book, and despite the fact that Ulysses was as difficult to follow as anything ever published up to that point.

Not that Ulysses is impossible to read in the same way that you would read any other book, but it is pretty hard going. It is much easier to follow, on the whole, if you have a guide to help you. I myself have found that the best guide to the book is Harry Blamires’s The New Bloomsday Book – subtitled A guide through Ulysses. First published in 1966, a second edition appeared in 1988; this is the one that I have. A third edition, however, was issued in 1996. If you buy a copy, you should ideally make sure that you have an up-to-date edition of Ulysses, so that the page-number references match.

As I have remarked before, my favourite section of Ulysses is the Nighttown sequence, which is written largely in the form of a play script. I am not always sure, however, whether some of the symbolism that Blamires’s commentary draws attention to was placed there by Joyce himself, intentionally, or whether it is something that Blamires himself has read into the text. Either way, Blamires’s guide to this longish section of the book has proved invaluable to me, and I warmly recommend it to others who are about to wrestle with Joyce’s masterpiece.

Some time ago, a reader of the blog kindly sent me a quotation from Albert Camus: ‘Those who write clearly have readers, those who write obscurely have commentators.’ Well, as commentators go, Blamires is one of the best.

John Carey: The Intellectuals and the Masses

A while back, someone wrote a comment on one of my posts in which he suggested that I should read John Carey’s book The Intellectuals and the Masses. And indeed it has proved to be a rewarding experience.

John Carey, by the way, was Merton Professor of English at Oxford until he retired in 2001, and he is still an emeritus Professor. The sub-title of his book is Pride and Prejudice among the Literary Intelligentsia, 1880-1939.

The book comes in two parts. The first part contains various ‘themes’ and the second offers case studies of several writers.

You don’t have to read very far in this book before you get a surprise. And the surprise is that an Oxford Professor really doesn’t have much time for the literary intelligentsia. Or at any rate, not the kind of people he writes about in this book. In fact I don’t think I’m reading too much into it when I say that he despises large numbers of them.

The general thesis of the book is that the (largely self-anointed) intellectual classes were deeply shaken by nineteenth-century social developments. I’m not sure that Carey mentions the French Revolution of 1789 (it isn’t in the short index), but I think we could argue that that event was deeply disturbing to all those in Europe who held positions of influence, power, and wealth.

What the French Revolution demonstrated was that you weren’t necessarily safe even if you were a King. You could still end up in prison, or worse, with your head chopped off.

As the nineteenth century moved on, the ruling classes (from whom intellectuals were exclusively drawn in those days) began to be aware that the masses (for want of a better term) were rapidly growing in power and influence. What was more, they were being taught to read! And this was deeply alarming. Who could say what ideas they might pick up? A revolution in France was bad enough – but what if it spread? A widespread and deep-seated fear of the masses began to percolate through the intelligentsia.

As far as literature is concerned, Carey argues that, in the face of this much enlarged reading public, the response of the intellectuals was to create new forms of work which were deliberately exclusive. The whole point (conscious or unconscious) of modernist literature was to exclude the ordinary people. It was to create a class of writers and readers who could feel comfortably superior to the masses, because only they – the new intelligentsia – were clever enough to understand the new literature. And how reassuring it was, how comforting, to be aware that there were still people like themselves – people who were so infinitely superior, in every way, to the great unwashed masses who revelled in sordid crime stories and slushy romances.

Ortega y Gasset, for example, in The Dehumanization of Art, argued that it was the essential function of modern art to divide the public into two classes – those who can understand it and those who cannot. The intellectuals could not prevent the masses from learning to read. But they could prevent them reading certain types of literature by making it too difficult; and this they did.

Without even trying very hard, Carey reveals to us that intellectuals such as Nietzsche and Ortega y Gasset were quite exceptionally nasty people. ‘I believe,’ said Nietzsche, ‘that the mob, the mass, the herd, will always be despicable.’ Which is plain enough. The immense popularity of Nietzsche’s ideas, Carey tells us, is indicative of the sheer panic that the threat of the masses induced.

It isn't long, of course, before that raving old madman F.R. Leavis appears on the scene. The mass media, he declared, arouse ‘the cheapest emotional responses. Films, newspapers, publicity in all forms, commercially-catered fiction – all offer satisfaction at the lowest level.’

You see how the thinking goes? I am not one of the masses. I am someone special. I am an intellectual – one of the elite. Therefore my emotional responses, obviously, are far more sensitive and subtle than those of my cleaning lady.

And where, I ask (though Carey doesn’t, explicitly), is the scientific evidence for such a belief? Who has done the research which demonstrates that a third-rate man like Leavis (or even a first-rate man) has more sensitive emotions than someone with an IQ of 75? Who has proved that the grief felt by a bereaved mother is more intense if she is Lady Hermione from the Manor than if she is Mrs Jones from no. 3 Railway Cuttings? Where is the machine which measures the intensity and 'quality' of emotions, as a sphygmomanometer measures blood pressure? There isn't one.

The fear of the masses also acted as the cover for an equally nasty attitude among the intelligentsia, and that was the fear of women. Popular newspapers were hated and despised because (no doubt in the interests of circulation, a sordid motive if ever there was one), they encouraged women to better themselves. Good God! Women will be demanding the vote next!

A whole array of intellectuals are revealed by Carey not merely to be snobs and fuzzy thinkers, but possessed of singularly unattractive opinions based on nothing more than prejudice, stupidity and fear for their cosseted life style. D.H. Lawrence, for example, wrote to Lady Cynthia Asquith from Ceylon , assuring her that the natives were ‘in the living sense lower than we are.’

That remark reminds me of a canard that I used to hear when I was a boy: black boxers, it was said, win more world championships than white boxers because ‘they don’t feel pain like we do.’ Neither this assertion nor Lawrence’s was based on anything that might even loosely be called reliable data. Idle gossip is more like it.

Incidentally, although I am no admirer of D.H. Lawrence, Carey succeeds in shocking me when he relates that some of the intelligentsia in the early twentieth century anticipated Hitler in favouring the extermination of the old, the sick, and the suffering. Lawrence was among them. ‘If I had my way,’ he said in a letter of 1908, ‘I would build a lethal chamber as big as the Crystal Palace.’

The literary intelligentsia, as noted above, created a class of literature which was impossible for the average reader to understand. But I doubt, personally, whether it ever provided much pleasure for the elite, except in so far as it allowed them to demonstrate, to their own satisfaction at least, that they were infinitely superior in every way to those ghastly oiks who favoured penny dreadfuls; or, later, Ian Fleming; or Dean Koontz; or anyone else who sells big but is despised by the literati. That, I suppose, is the price you have to pay for being allowed to feel superior; you don’t actually enjoy anything very much.

All these attitudes were reflected in what books got reviewed and in how they were reviewed (and they still are). Jerome K. Jerome’s Three Men in a Boat was roundly denounced for its vulgarity, and for being written in ‘colloquial clerk’s English.’

The principal aim of all this, says Carey, was ‘to acquire the control over the mass that language gives.’ After all, if the masses exercised power, they would probably start spreading out wealth more equally, and then where would we be? Democratic government, thought Thomas Hardy, would lead to ‘the utter ruin of art and literature.’

The masses were feared because it was thought that they would behave like crowds: i.e. they would be ‘extremely suggestible, impulsive, irrational, exaggeratedly emotional, inconstant, irritable and capable only of thinking in images – in short, just like women.’ The process of civilising women was, incidentally, considered by the intellectuals to be one of extreme difficulty.

Every development which favoured the middle or working classes in England was viewed with deep suspicion if not outright hostility. Suburban growth, with improved new housing, was decried for ruining the countryside. Cyril Connolly considered suburbs worse than slums.

Enough, I think to make the point. Carey succeeds, well beyond anything I had thought possible, in demonstrating that, in the period covered by his book, 1880-1939, English intellectuals (in particular) were an unpleasant, snobbish lot. Motivated by sheer funk – terrified that they might lose all their privileges, which in truth were seldom justified – they objected on the one hand to anything which might be called progress, while on the other hand they busily reinforced their own all too fallible self esteem through the creation of ‘superior art’ which the masses could not understand.

The trend continues to this day, as you have doubtless noticed.

After the general introduction of part one, part two of Carey’s book provides several case studies. He deals with George Gissing, H.G. Wells, Arnold Bennett, and Wyndham Lewis, particularly the latter’s connection with Hitler.

Gissing, though now forgotten, ‘was the earliest English writer to formulate the intellectuals’ case against mass culture, and he formulated it so thoroughly that nothing essential has been added to it since.’ Gissing, incidentally, was a charming fellow whose sexual appetites required women who were his intellectual and social inferior, and he could only get it up by humiliating and punishing them. He claimed to have beaten both his wives with stair rods.

H.G. Wells is remembered rather better than Gissing. I heard a rumour recently that someone had made a film based on one of his books. But his views are unattractive from our perspective. What will we do with the black and the brown races, he wondered, since they are so obviously inferior to us in intelligence and initiative, and there are so many of them. He became obsessed with reducing the world’s population.

Arnold Bennett is included by Carey because the author views him as a hero. ‘His writings represent a systematic dismemberment of the intellectuals’ case against the masses.’ But Bennett was, of course, despised by the intelligentsia because the bounder made money from literature. Only an utter cad would do that. He also wrote a book called The Truth about an Author, which I really must read.

Intellectuals, Bennett believed, should write so as to appeal to a wider audience, and he did not see why a book which the masses liked should automatically be thought of as trash. Between the popular and the highbrow reader there was, he argued, no essential difference. Neither is there: in fiction both seek emotion; in non-fiction both seek information.

Wyndham Lewis, it turns out, wrote several books in the 1930s, all of which were enthusiastic about the German Fuhrer, the charismatic Adolf. Contempt for women was perhaps the key to Lewis’s character. ‘Stay to dinner,’ he asked a friend. ‘I’ve a wife downstairs. A simple woman, but a good cook.’

I don’t think anyone is likely to reprint Wyndham Lewis any time soon. Whiteness, he suggested, ‘is in a pigmentary sense aristocratic’, and is the proper colour for a gentleman. As for his description of what he calls ‘the average Nigger’, I really don’t think I dare quote it, lest someone should mistake it for my own opinion.

As far as Hitler himself is concerned, Carey tells us that ‘the tragedy of Mein Kampf is that it was not, in many respects, a deviant work but one firmly rooted in European intellectual orthodoxy.’

Carey ends his survey at 1939, but he reminds us that the old intellectual prejudices have not died out yet. The ever-expanding mass media have ‘driven the intellectuals to evolve an anti-popular cultural mode that can reprocess all existing culture and take it out of the reach of the majority.’ This mode is variously called ‘post-structuralism’, or ‘deconstruction’, or just plain ‘theory’, and it began in the 1960s with the work of Jacques Derrida. It has managed, says Carey, to evolve a language that is impenetrable to most native English-speakers. You can say that again. Much of it is gibberish. The whole wretched business was exposed by Alan Sokal.

Carey has, in my view, summed up all the modern apparatus of criticism and reviewing very neatly. Every department of Literature in every university and college in the world takes the line that there is a form of ‘serious literary fiction’ which is inherently superior to popular or commercial fiction. But where, I ask, not for the first time, are the sound arguments and research data which demonstrate this truth?

I have been reading novels for at least 55 years, reading about novels for at least 50 years, and writing them for 45 years. If there was any such evidence I think I would have noticed it by now.

In fact, as I have argued many times before on this blog, there is no evidence for seeing the world of fiction as a hierarchy. According to the intelligentsia, the world of fiction is, so to speak, a tower block with ‘serious literary novels’ firmly ensconced in the penthouse. In the basement, needless to say, is romantic fiction, which is read only by those brainless women.

This tower-block, or hierarchical, view of fiction is, in my view, a product of male intellectuals. The tower block is a male erection; and, like all male erections, it is fundamentally ridiculous.

The only sensible way to view the world of fiction is as a street with many bookshops. Each of these bookshops stocks a different kind of fiction, and the sensible reader will visit all of them at one time or another. On this street there are no prime sites; all premises are of equal value.

The kindest thing that can be said about the intellectuals’ view of the world of fiction is that it is the product of fuzzy thinking. Unfortunately, as Professor Carey has demonstrated, there is a much darker side to this mode of thinking which, particularly in the 1930s, led to some very unpleasant and unwelcome consequences.

Professor Carey’s book on intellectuals and the masses is, in and of itself, a good argument for the existence of universities. Only an academic would have the time (and indeed the duty) to undertake the necessary reading and to think through the implications of the results. I doubt whether many of Professor Carey’s colleagues ever thanked him for this book; but the rest of us ought to be deeply grateful.

Michael Gruber: Tropic of Night

Michael Gruber’s novel Tropic of Night is a thriller; and it’s an absolute… I was going to say cracker, which in England means a firework, and hence, metaphorically, would mean in this case that Tropic of Night is a tremendous read. But I’ve just realised, based on the evidence in the book itself, that in the US the word ‘cracker’ means something else (see any of the several dictionaries of racial slurs).

Anyway, you get the point. This book is one hell of a good read – always assuming that you like thrillers; and even if you don’t – and I strongly recommend it.

Michael Gruber is evidently a very smart man. He has a PhD in marine biology, from the University of Miami, to prove it, but it’s perfectly clear from his book. This is said to be his first novel, but his slightly mysterious and vague background mentions that he has had a number of jobs, most of which included writing, and usually anonymously.

Whatever he did, he has certainly learnt his business. It is highly unusual, frankly, to find a first novel which is this good, and I suspect he has had practice under other names. Either that or he worked with a very good book doctor on the structure and pace of the thing. Which is possible.

Set in the present day, the action takes place in and around Miami. The chief characters are a police homicide man, Jimmy Paz, and a woman in peril, Jane Doe, who is an anthropologist. There are several grisly murders involved, but fortunately the emphasis is not on the gore but on the characters.

Jane Doe is a woman who has not so much kidnapped a child as rescued her from an abusive mother – and has killed the mother in the process. So Jane is on the run. And not only because of the child. Also because her husband is looking for her.

The two cops involved in this book, Jimmy Paz and his partner, are tremendously strong characters, expertly delineated. This is top-rank crime writing, my notes say. Who taught Gruber how to do this? You don’t get to write like this overnight.

The time structure of the book is complicated, and I am not normally in favour of complicated time structures. I prefer a straightforward chronological account. However, if you must have flashbacks, do them as well as this. The viewpoint also switches from first person (Jane) to third (Paz). But again this is smoothly handled.

I don’t know whether you believe in witchcraft, sorcery, black magic, and all that kind of thing. But by golly you will be much more likely to believe in it by the time you’ve read this book.

Even though this is a work of fiction, there are a few points made about witchcraft, shamanism, or whatever you wish to call it, which hold up, I think, in the real world. Jane Doe is an expert on shamanism, and one of her mentors points out to her that spiritual does not necessarily mean nice. Witches, shamans, wise women and other variants of the same are more than likely to have their own agendas. Some of these people may be saints, but saints are about as common among them as saints are among the generals, corporation presidents, and politicians of the non-magic kingdoms. This is worth remembering, I think, before you rush off and join your local Wiccan coven, or whatever.

The story rattles along at a fair old pace, distracting one from the occasional shortcoming. And there is at least one substantial problem with the credibility of the story, if you bother to think about it. It could have been cured with a couple of paragraphs early in the book but it wasn’t. Never mind. Many readers won’t notice.

Not only is this a first-rate thriller, but there is a moment towards the end which is truly affecting. And that’s not so common in this genre.

All in all then, a highly successful beginning.

So good, in fact, that when I’d finished it I looked round for more. And fortunately there is some. I had feared that, having devoted a fearsome amount of time and energy to this book (it couldn’t be written otherwise), Gruber might have decided that the cash generated didn’t justify further books. And he might have given up in order to concentrate on a properly rewarding career. But fortunately that doesn’t seem to be the case.

Second in the Jimmy Paz series is Valley of Bones, which was published in March this year.

Oops. I just got around to searching for a Michael Gruber biography, so that I could point you towards it. And I have found one which someone seems to have cobbled together unofficially, without any help from the man himself. From this I learn that Gruber was born in 1940!

What is more, I find, reading on, that he has ghosted a legal thriller for his cousin, Robert K. Tanenbaum. In fact, reading further, there seem to be fifteen of them!

Well, dammit, I’m not going to go back and change a word of what I’ve written. This late discovery of Gruber's apprenticeship just proves how perceptive I am. Heh heh heh.

His US publisher, by the way, still refers to him as 'one of the most talented thriller writers to debut in many a year.' And the official biography tells us very little. Publishers -- you just can't believe a word they say.

Agent 007

I’m not sure why, but somehow I’ve been slow in getting around to reading the Agent 007 blog. And that was a mistake.

Agent 007, as the first part of her name name suggests, is a literary agent working in the US market. If you read the small print you will learn that she started blogging in July this year (so far as I can make out); but her profile says she’s been on Blogger since September 2003, so maybe she had a previous existence.

Anyway, it’s now all very much worth a look. I particularly recommend her piece on the slush pile. This attracted masses of comments, as you would expect.

Christopher Booker: The Seven Basic Plots

Oh dear.

Oh dear oh dear oh dear. What can one possibly say?

Contrary to what you might think, I do try to say something positive about every book that is mentioned on this blog. A book, after all, usually represents a year (at least) of the author’s life; and it represents an investment of perhaps £20,000 on the part of the publisher. So positive I try to be. But in this case it’s going to be difficult.

The problem is that Christopher Booker’s The Seven Basic Plots reminds me of the story of Professor Jowett’s father.

In the nineteenth century, Benjamin Jowett, Master of Balliol College, Oxford, was an eminent man; but his father was a failure. Towards the end of his life, Jowett senior got it into his head that what the world needed was a metrical translation of the Psalms. He spent several years obsessively working on this project, during which time the son had to support his parents financially. It was obvious to everyone except the old man that this was an entirely futile undertaking, and, when it was eventually published, the metrical translation of the Psalms received absolutely no acclaim whatever.

And that’s the problem I have with Mr Booker’s opus. It seems to me to be entirely pointless.

Let us suppose, just for the sake of argument, that Booker (or someone) were to work out the seven (or 15) basic plots on which every story, novel, play and opera could be found to be based. What possible value would this be? How could the knowledge be put to practical use?

Let us take the novel, for example. How would a knowledge of the n basic plots help a publisher, a bookseller, a writer, or a reader?

Would the publisher put out a sign saying, Don’t send us anything but plot no. 4? I doubt it. Would the bookseller arrange his stock according to plot, and alphabetically within each plot? It seems unlikely.

And what of the poor bloody writer? How does it help him? Is he going to say, I shall write plot no. 5 this time, because that was a massive hit for Shakespeare and Goethe, so it’s sure to put me at the top of the bestseller list? Hm? Would he?

Even the reader doesn’t get much help from such an analysis. Is any reader going to say, I only read plot no. 4 because the rest just don’t do it for me?

It’s all futile, useless and pointless. I get no pleasure from writing those words, but that’s the way I feel. Booker’s book seems to me to be gloriously beside the point. The point is not that the number of plots is limited: it is that the number of possible emotional effects that can be created in the reader/audience is limited. The number of ways in which those emotions can be aroused, however, is infinite, and depends largely (but not entirely) on the skill of the writer. (For a much simpler and shorter explanation than Booker’s, see Chapter 5 of my own book The Truth About Writing; the chapter is 53 pages long.)

Let’s go back a bit.

Christopher Booker has been a fairly well known writer in the UK for some forty years. In the 1960s he was the very first editor of Private Eye, and he has produced a number of well-received non-fiction books. As a journalist he is best known for his weekly column in the Sunday Telegraph, where he has been a fierce critic of bureaucracy.

But in addition to all that, Booker has, by his own account, spent thirty years (on and off) faffing around with this nonsense about basic plots.

The book itself, as a physical object, is distinctly off-putting. It is heavy, and thick. It runs to 728 pages, and by my calculation contains over 400,000 words. The typeface is small.

I have a fundamental problem with non-fiction books which are long; and I am not alone. Thirty years ago, one of my duties was to process students’ PhD theses in a university. One day, an academic came into my office and picked up a thesis which was three inches thick. ‘If I were the examiner,’ he said, ‘I would fail this on sight. A student who hasn’t learnt how to condense the results of his research into a volume of reasonable length hasn’t learnt very much.’ And that’s my view too. At one fifth the length, The Seven Basic Plots might be readable; as it is, it ain’t.

I also have a problem with what in academic terms is called the methodology. In other words, how the author went about things. In the humanities we can, of course, pretty much forget about science from the outset; but we can at least be systematic, and adopt some kind of structured approach. Has Booker done that? No. ‘I embarked,’ he tells us, ‘on an almost indiscriminate course of reading and re-reading, through hundreds of stories of all kinds.’

Another difficulty, for me, is that Booker has chosen to use Jung as a guide to generating insights. You see, when Booker and I were lads, Freud and Jung were not only respectable but positively revered. But the world has changed, and Booker doesn’t seem to have noticed. Freud, to my mind, is so hopelessly unscientific that he comes close to being a charlatan; and when Jung is mentioned, I fear that the phrase ‘mumbo-jumbo’ enters my head. So to me Booker's approach does not seem promising, and I am not surprised to find that, in my judgement, it has led nowhere.

One way and another, Booker has spent thirty years in reading, drafting, and re-writing. And in the end this is what he has come up with: an amorphous mess. His seven basic plots, in summary, and for what they are worth, are listed on the cover of the book: overcoming the monster; rags to riches; the quest; voyage and return; comedy; tragedy; and rebirth.

Comedy, I may say, is not a plot at all. It’s an effect: it is something which is generated by stories of various kinds, if the material is properly handled.

There are endless, endless problems with all this. And I could go on. But I won’t. Not for long.

This book belongs in a long tradition of books in which the authors have sought to identify the secret of narrative success. There are few indications that Mr Booker realises this – and certainly none in the bibliography – but it may be said that the 'secret of success' sequence started with Aristotle’s Poetics, and it really got under way about 150 years ago. It became obvious about that time that a successful novelist or playwright could make lots of money, could become famous, and would therefore enjoy all the trappings of celebrity. Hence a number of sharp lads began to scratch their heads and try to identify what it was that went into a successful book/play, so that they too could become rich and famous.

The long series of ‘secret of success’ books is most clearly defined in relation to stage plays and, nowadays, movies. It began, I suggest, with Freytag’s Technique of the Drama (1894), and went on through William Archer, Brander Matthews, Krows, Price, Egri, Grebanier, and now, in the present-day movie context, Robert McKee. All of these men sought to produce rules or a set of principles which could be followed and which would guarantee success.

Of course none of them ever succeeded, or they themselves would have become famous playwrights and screenwriters. But their response to the ‘if you’re so clever why aren’t you famous’ line was simple: 'Ah well, they would say; I can show you the basic principles, but to apply them you need a touch of genius.’ And, since there is never any shortage of ambitious wannabe writers who are sure that they have more than a touch of genius, they were able to sell their books.

Booker doesn’t present us with a how-to book for wannabe writers. Goodness me no, that would be far too vulgar. This is a serious academic analysis. But his work is, nevertheless, in that tradition. Its closest comparator, in my view, is George Polti’s The Thirty Six Dramatic Situations, which Booker mentions only in a footnote, and then dismissively. (The British Library lists five editions of Polti’s book, from 1924 to 1944, so it must have sold well. It was reprinted in 2003. Presumably Booker hopes for similar popularity and longevity, but I don't think he's going to get it.)

Enough, surely. You will gather that I don’t recommend this book. I certainly don’t recommend that you should buy it – though you will shortly be able to pick up lots of secondhand copies at bargain prices.

And what can I possibly find to say about it that might loosely be interpreted as positive?

Well, I suppose it is possible – just – that a young person who fancies a career as a novelist or screenwriter might read this analysis and gain one or two insights into the way plots are structured. Possibly. But how does it avail us to have even a perfect template for a plot? We still have to sit down and write Othello, or The Importance of Being Earnest.

Ah – I have it. The book is at least written in plain English, and not in academic gobbledygook. Sorry, but that’s the best I can do for positive.

One person at least does seem to have read this book from cover to cover. The copy that I had was borrowed from the Wiltshire public-library system, and one previous borrower had not only read it – apparently every footnote – but had also commented copiously. In blue felt-tip pen. Now normally I would regard that as very naughty, but in this case the comments were more fun than the text. (‘Too glib’; ‘far too superficial to be taken seriously’.) And the fellow is fiendishly well informed to boot.

Poor old Booker occasionally gets even his facts wrong. He tells us that Peter Brook introduced Waiting for Godot to the London stage. And he didn’t; as we noted last week, it was Peter Hall. (The Phantom Scribbler of Wiltshire knew that too.) And now that I come to use it, the index isn’t reliable either. Peter Brook isn’t in it, and I knew I’d come across his name somewhere in the text.

Finally, I think I must have a look on the internet, and see if anyone liked the book better than I did.

OK. Results. Well, ahem, even the Sunday Telegraph, Booker’s own outfit, was less than enthusiastic. The Daily Telegraph had reservations: ‘Booker's principle of classifying stories is a possible, but not the only possible (or even necessarily the most illuminating) approach.’ The Observer was lukewarm: ‘Christopher Booker’s hefty tome of cultural archaeology is peculiar, repetitive, near-barmy and occasionally rather good.’ The Times piece was not so much a review as an attempted summary plus quotes from the good and the great.

In America, the New York Times man was not happy at all. He claimed that Booker had lifted his ideas from ‘a wide spectrum of influential, even canonical works by writers and thinkers as varied as Jung, Freud, Joseph Campbell, Bruno Bettelheim, Sir James George Frazer, the Shakespeare scholar A.C. Bradley and the folklore experts Peter and Iona Opie.’

Furthermore, Booker is said to have made absurd generalisations about well known classics. ‘Such inane readings of modern literature effectively eclipse the more engaging arguments presented in the first portion of Mr. Booker’s book. Anyone tackling The Seven Basic Plots would be advised to peruse the informative first half and quickly ditch the second half of this 700-plus page tome.’

All the British reviews were written by people who, if not exactly friends, are likely to bump into the author from time to time. Oh, and by the way. If you yourself should happen to be introduced to Mr Booker, and if he should ask you, in that modest self-effacing way that writers have, whether you have, by any chance, read his book on the seven basic plots, here’s a little tip.
What you do not say is, ‘No, I haven’t read it, and I gather it’s a bit of a mess.’ Dear me no. No, what you must say is this: ‘No, Christopher, I haven’t actually read it yet. But I’m really looking forward to it.’

Comments and searches

Just a reminder that this blog allows you to comment on a post if you wish to. From time to time I fish out a comment which I think deserves a special airing, lest it get overlooked, but that is a slightly invidious process. In any case, what I think is a particularly valuable comment is not necessarily what you will value, and vice versa.

Today, I think, I will simply remind you (modestly) that some of the comments are possibly more useful than the original post. Not often, it’s true, but occasionally.

If you want to look at the comments on a post, there are two ways to do it. On the front page of the blog, you will find a grey line at the foot of each post. The number of comments, if any, will be shown there, and you can click on the link to reveal them. What you then get is a new page with that one post on it, plus the comments.

Back on the front page, if you want to look at a post which is listed under Previous Posts (top right) you can click on its title, and that will similarly open up a page with that one post only, plus comments.

Don’t forget either that there is a handy search facility, for this one blog, at the very top of the front page, to the right of the word Blogger. If you want to know, for instance, whether I have ever commented on a particular book, or a topic, put the key words in the search box and Google will search the GOB only and give you a list. For book titles, phrases et cetera, put the words in double inverted commas, as with other Google searches.

Mr Big in books

Booktrade.info put me on to an article in the New Statesman. It is available online, sort of, but you have to pay at least £1 to read it. Instead I went out and bought a copy, because it was a while since I’d read the magazine, and that cost me £2.50.

The article is by Nick Cohen, who is presumably the same Nick Cohen who wrote the book Pretty Straight Guys – an analysis of the New Labour types who are anything but – and various other pieces for the Guardian, Observer, and so forth.

Cohen’s subject is Mr Big, the jokey name that he gives to Scott Pack, the buying manager for Waterstone’s, which is one of the UK’s top bookselling chain stores (200 shops, 14.7% of the market).

Literary London, says Cohen, fears Scott Pack, largely because he cares little for literary London; the literati regard him as ‘cheap and tasteless.’

Pack’s crime, apparently, is that he is not impressed by airy-fairy literary prizes; the Booker, he claims, does not sell books – not many, at any rate. Neither does our Scott have much time for the broadsheet review pages, which ought to be a means of getting punters eagerly into the shops but aren’t. (Given that the broadsheets seem to concentrate on books like Specimen Days, which is currently getting acres of space, I can’t say I’m surprised.)

So, the result of all this is that Waterstone's, under Pack, is going ‘downmarket’; which means that they are going to concentrate on stocking books that sell.

Can’t see anything much wrong with all that myself. Scott Pack seems like a man after my own heart.

However, the overall tone of the Cohen article feels a bit odd to me. He refers to the sale or return process as if it was something new, introduced solely by Waterstone's; and ditto the practice of publishers buying display space.

Cohen also appears, in places, to side with the literary lot. He seems to find it unacceptable that, even if a book makes the Booker long list, Waterstone’s will not necessarily stock it. And he states that, as a result of Waterstone’s strategy, ‘the next generation of serious writers will find it harder to reach an audience.’

Quite why anyone should think that those who write literary fiction are more serious than those who write crime or romance, I am at a loss to know.

However, at the end of the piece, Cohen says this: ‘Listening to Pack’s incandescent critics, I couldn’t help feeling sympathy for him. Anyone who has heard the herd of editors, publishers, authors and critics mooing their political and cultural clichés at a London literary party and not felt the urge to reach for a baseball bat is less than human.’

Well quite. Quite.

So, the New Statesman article is a bit of a hodge-podge really, and I wouldn’t encourage you to go out and spend money on it.

Rather more interesting, and free, is a piece in yesterday's Sunday Telegraph. This is a similar discussion of Waterstone's role in the marketplace, with much less emphasis on the influence of Mr Big.

So worried are the publishers about offending Waterstone's, which is one of their biggest customers, that they will not be quoted by name. However, there are lots of anonymous quotes. The article begins by suggesting that Waterstone's may have lost a lot of money on the latest Harry Potter, which Waterstone's deny, and goes on to discuss how the firm will cope with competition from the supermarkets.

'If Waterstone's wants to just be a mass-market retailer,' says one publisher, 'then it has to take on Tesco on price. And Tesco will eat it for lunch. Waterstone's is simply not geared to that cut-throat competition.'

Well, we shall see. At least these two articles do demonstrate that there are a few people in the UK book trade who are trying to think straight and who are aware of the economic facts of life. And I suppose that’s worth knowing about. Kind of reassuring, really. Maybe there’s hope yet.

Five tips to avoiding total disaster

Or, to give this thing its full title, Five Tips to Avoiding Total Disaster as a Novelist from a Poor, Wretched Fool Who Had to Learn the Hard Way.

Yesterday I had an email from Yolanda Carden at FSB Associates, enclosing an article by Kris Saknussemm, author of a novel called Zanesville, which is being published by Villard in the US in October. No sign of a UK publisher yet, but the book is listed by Amazon.co.uk, so there should not be a problem in getting a copy.

The article, said Ms Carden, was available for me to use on my blog if I wished, free of charge.

Now, I am usually somewhat resistant to this kind of thing. After all, it is only a week or two since we looked at The Traveller, an intensely hyped book which was commensurately disappointing. However, I made a few checks and decided that Zanesville sounds quite interesting.

First of all, Villard is a perfectly respectable publisher, part of Random House no less, and therefore not your run-of-the-mill POD outfit.

Second, if you go to Amazon.com you can find the Publishers Weekly review of the book. PW is not 100% enthusiastic by any means, and the plot summary isn’t going to attract every reader, but it intrigued me.

Third, FSB Associates is a highly professional book-publicity firm with a very fancy web site; and, presumably as part of the push for Zanesville, there is a site devoted to the book, on which you can read some other reviews and plugs. FSB seem to be doing their stuff.

Finally, when I came to read Kris Saknussemm’s article, it seemed to me to contain some sound advice. So, here then is what Kris has to say:

The problem with ‘should’ advice is that it’s either something you already know, i.e. your diet should include more fruit and vegetables than cheeseburgers and martinis -- or it’s something really difficult (like consuming more fruit and vegetables than cheeseburgers and martinis). So, based on my own stumbling, fumbling experience, I offer the following list of things I would strongly advise aspiring and despairing writers not to do. I doubt that simply by avoiding these pitfalls you will be guaranteed international fame and fortune, but I’m confident that you will at least escape many unnecessary frustrations and defeats, so that you can be fresh for the really poignant failures and setbacks that will either make or break you -- and with any luck will do a bit of both.

First Tip. Do not spend years gathering interesting material -- odd quotations, overheard remarks, colorful phrases, bits of trivia, weird statistics and obscure facts in the hope that you will one day find a story to contain them. I ended up with a literal warehouse of such stuff and I can tell you now with considerable confidence that the larvae of the human botfly bore into the skin and gorge themselves, emerging as centimeter long maggots, while a Joshua Hendy nine-thousand horsepower steam turbine delivers a cruising speed of 16 knots at 78 rpm. There is nothing wrong in knowing that if left underwater for years brass gives off a bright verdigris stain or that the first Birds of Paradise shipped back to Europe had their legs chopped off to facilitate packing, but the collection of details is like any acquisitive habit -- potentially obsessive. You can end up with a novel that reads like the Gospel according to St. Matthew translated into the Duke of York Island language and a response from the publishing industry reminiscent of a deserted poolroom on the shore of Sheepshead Bay. Put bluntly, burn your notebooks and clear your head.

Tip #2. Do not spend years experimenting with different forms of writing and various intellectual follies such as cut-ups and verbal collages, intricate multiple person narratives, dream stories, recipe books, anatomies, imaginary academic theses and the like. Yes, it’s true that some of the world’s most interesting literature has elements of these forms -- but that was then and this is different. If you are serious about getting a work of fiction published today you need quick sharp answers to the following questions. In what section of a bookstore or retailer’s website will your book be found? Which authors can your work be likened to? In three sentences or less what’s your novel about?

Tip #3. The Puritans believed in covering the body for modesty’s sake. Yet they developed a sexualized fascination for the ears of women and the noses of men. My point? (See Tip #1) In apparent restriction there is unexpected release. Dickens created over 800 individual characters and laid down some of the most intense cultural satire in English -- but his writing really came into focus when Wilkie Collins hipped him to the detective story. I struggled for years trying to find a form for my writing, flitting around like a Ulysses butterfly. The moment I gave myself permission to write an action/adventure story, things started falling into place. Modern art has provided artists with unparalleled and some might argue paralyzing freedom. Don’t waste time trying to create a new form. It’s given to very few people in any medium to do that -- and many of their achievements end up looking like legless Birds of Paradise later. A seemingly simple repetitive musical style like the Blues has proven capable of expressing the full spectrum of human experience and has inspired countless variations and mutations. Give yourself over to an established structure and follow its guidelines, and suddenly interesting points will emerge to surprise you.

Tip #4. Read your work aloud, to some willing victim ideally, but at least to yourself. Storytelling began as an oral form and the ear (however erotically appealing) has a trueness to it that will reveal what’s working and what’s not in a more immediate and decisive way than simply scanning the page. This discipline will also slow you down psychologically and bring you into more intimate contact with your story. In the end, it will take no more time than reading back a page silently.

Tip #5. Ignore all reasonable sounding advice like “write about what you know,” “read as much as you can,” or “try to write every day.” If you need to hear this advice you are in the wrong game. But more importantly, reasonableness won’t get the job done. One day in an ice-stricken back alley in Boston I saw a fat little Irishman beat the daylights out of four larger, stronger assailants. When it was over, and it was over astonishingly quickly, he brushed himself off and said simply, “I had to get unreasonable with ‘em.”

Unless you are willing to face the unreasonable in yourself -- unless you are willing to entertain some strange notions (and deal with them when they stick around) -- unless you are willing to get lost, confused and even terrified -- then what you’re doing won’t have any meaning. The famous device of conflict upon which all stories are supposed to hinge starts within the writer. You are all the characters in your dreams and so too with a novel. You can’t put your creations into jeopardy or into embarrassing or miraculous situations without going there yourself, and that is not a sensible ambition for a grown person to have. As a writer who has made more mistakes than most, my goal above all else is to be very, very unreasonable.

About the Author:

Kris Saknussemm grew up in the San Francisco Bay Area but has for a long time lived abroad, in the Pacific Islands and Australia. A painter and sculptor as well as a writer, his fiction and poetry have appeared in such publications as The Hudson Review, The Boston Review, The Antioch Review, New Letters and ZYZZYA.

Zanesville (Villard; October 2005; $14.95US/$21.00CAN; 0-8129-7416-6) is his first novel and the first in a series of books called The Lodemania Testament. For more information, please visit these websites http://www.saknussemm.com/ or http://www.zanesvillethenovel.com/

Reviews and obituaries

Publishers Lunch guided me to an article in Slate, about book reviewing in the United States, and it is well worth reading. However, the really good bit comes at the end.

The author of the article, Jack Shafer, tends to the view that British book reviews are better than American ones because British literary editors don’t give a twopenny whatsit about any link between the reviewer and the author of the book. Quite the reverse: they will often appoint the sworn enemy of an author to review his latest book. Result: sparks.

At the end of the article, Shafer remarks in passing that British obituaries are better than American ones too. They go in for plain speaking. (See, for instance, my reference to David Hooper’s obituary of Peter Carter-Ruck.)

Shafer offers a link to an absolute peach of an obituary: it appeared in the Daily Telegraph, and the subject was the journalist Graham Mason. As the first line of the obituary tells us, Mason was the drunkest man in the Coach and Horses – a title for which there was, by the way, considerable competition.

Among the competitors was the famous Jeffrey Bernard, who was turned into a play, so to speak, by Keith Waterhouse. Peter O’Toole played the part of Bernard, and you can get a DVD which is a recording of a performance of the play at the Old Vic.

For a good many years Bernard wrote a weekly column for the Spectator. It was described by Jonathan Meades as a suicide note in weekly instalments, because it mostly dealt with his boozing and with the increasingly catastrophic effects of that habit on his health. The title of the Keith Waterhouse play was Jeffrey Bernard is Unwell, which was the excuse offered by the Speccie whenever its author was too ‘tired and emotional’ to produce any copy.

The column ran for years, and some of the characters in it became famous as a result. The owner of the pub, Norman Balon, became known as the rudest landlord in London. He was even invited to publish his memoirs; which he did, with a little help.

Samuel Beckett: Waiting for Godot

To the Theatre Royal, Bath, last night, to see Samuel Beckett's play Waiting for Godot, directed by Sir Peter Hall.

For several summers past, Sir Peter Hall has brought a company of actors to Bath, where they have performed a number of plays in repertory. Last year, for instance, I noted Shaw's Man and Superman. This year the plays are Private Lives (Coward), Much Ado (himself), Waiting for Godot, and Shaw's You Never Can Tell (not yet seen).

Last night's performance was particularly interesting in a number of ways. It is now fifty years since Peter Hall first directed the play in its English-language world premiere. He has written an account of how that premiere came about in the programme notes.

To understand what an extraordinary event Godot was in the London theatre of the 1950s, you need to have some feel for what English society was like at the time. And if you weren't around then -- or even if you were -- you could do worse than read my post of 13 June, in which I describe the atmosphere.

Suffice it to say here that in the 1950s the English were, as I put it, 'tight-arsed and morally restrictive to a degree which young people today would find hard to believe. It seems as if, having fought so hard to preserve what we had, in two world wars, we had lost all awareness that change might sometimes be for the better.'

In the theatre of 1955, the fashion was still for traditional well-made plays, usually in three acts, with a beginning, a middle, and an end. There was, of course, a censor (the Lord Chamberlain, no less), who eliminated any hint of smut, overt (or even imaginary) references to sex, comments on religion, references to the Royal family, et cetera. Theatre, in short, was bland, polite, respectable, and dull.

In 1955 Peter Hall was 24 years old, and, as he puts it, a very lucky young man. After a career in undergraduate theatre at Cambridge, he had been put in charge of the Arts Theatre in Great Newport Street, London, and was told to produce a play every four weeks. He used this opportunity to do a number of new and adventurous productions.

One day, Donald Albery, a leading impresario of the time, offered him Waiting for Godot. It had been running in Paris for a couple of years, where it was a hit with the avant-garde, and Beckett (who had originally written it in French) had now translated it into English. But Albery could find no English actor willing to appear in it, or a director willing to risk his professional life by directing it.

Hall liked the play, but he too found it difficult to cast, and the reviews were not encouraging. Even the great Bernard Levin described it as 'a remarkable piece of twaddle.' The production nearly closed at the end of its first week, but the drama critic of the Sunday Times, Harold Hobson, saved its life. He not only wrote a warm and perceptive review, but went on writing about it for the next seven Sundays.

Godot mania soon gripped London. It was the Rubik cube or the Sudoku of its day. It caught on: cartoonists depicted it, commentators wrote about it, and television pundits discussed it.

Godot was, of course, and still is, a bit of a puzzler. The set is a bleak space in the 'open air', with the bare bones of a tree and a rock to sit on; nothing else. In this landscape two tramps talk about nothing very much as they pass the time while they wait for Godot to appear. After a while they are joined by two other strange characters, who also talk about nothing very much. It is a two-act play, as one critic said, in which nothing happens: twice.

Godot puzzled, and it offended. Lady Dorothy Howitt wrote to the Lord Chamberlain requesting that the play be banned. She described it as 'offensive against all sense of British decency.' But it was also, of course, very funny. Only recently an elderly professor of biology told me how amazed he was by that original production.

Peter Hall has directed the play only once (I believe) between 1955 and 2005, and that was seven years ago, at the Old Vic. So this anniversary production is something special. Last night was the very first performance, and was technically a preview; the press won't be invited in for another week.

As you would expect, the Peter Hall Company perform to a very high standard, but the first-act curtain was messed up by the lighting director, and there will doubtless be a few more tweaks before Hall is satisfied. In my opinion there are a good few laughs to be got out of it yet -- a few opportunities missed.

I first saw the play in the late 1950s, in Cambridge, where the audience was young, sharp, and alert. Last night's audience was, as is always the case in Bath, middle-aged at best, and perhaps slightly sleepy. Despite that, the play got a warm reception. If nothing else, the audience seemed to understand that this was a historic occasion.

If you see the play for the first time this year, you may well wonder what all the fuss was about. But it is hard to underestimate its impact. The success of Godot altered everything. As Hall points out, the way was opened for Harold Pinter, Joe Orton, Edward Bond, and subsequent generations. A decade on, the impact was clearly felt in such productions as Monty Python's Flying Circus; and today Spamalot plays on Broadway.

By the way, here is a little conundrum for you. In the post-war era, Cambridge University has produced countless theatrical stars, including directors (e.g. Peter Hall, Jonathan Miller, Nicholas Hytner), actors (Hugh Laurie, John Cleese, Emma Thompson), and producers, lighting men, et cetera. How is it that the drama department of the University has achieved such distinguished output?

Answer: there is no drama department at Cambridge. If you do theatre at Cambridge you do it as an extracurricular activity, on top of your formal degree studies.

Do you think, perhaps, that there could be a lesson here for all those universities offering MFA degrees?

Detective work on the Sherlock copyright issue

On 8 August I wrote about a modern book featuring Sherlock Holmes, and noted (not for the first time) that the copyright of Conan Doyle's work(s) was a murky area, one which the wise person would stay well out of. Ditto for writing novels featuring the characters of any other writer whose work is still in copyright.

I had also written about the Conan Doyle copyright on 8 July, in the context of a wider discussion of the extent to which copyright prevents or allows the use of copyright characters in sequels or spinoffs; and that post recently attracted a comment from Darlene Cypser.

Darlene is a US attorney (among other things) who seems to be unusually well informed on the subject, so I have fished out her comment, lest it get overlooked, and reproduce it below. I finish off with a few comments of my own.

Here is what Darlene had to say:

I don't know enough about UK copyrights to agree or disagree with Ms Solomon's assessment of law there.

However, in the US, while here, too, copyright protects the expression of ideas and not ideas themselves, there is case law that has interpreted the law to protect the use of characters. In the US the use of the character would be considered a "derivative work" and only the copyright holder has the right to create a derivative work. I guarantee you that Disney believes this or they would not have gone to such an effort to extend the copyright law another 20 years to protect Mickey.

The whole issue is moot in the UK related to Sherlock Holmes because Doyle's Sherlock Holmes stories are now in the public domain the UK.

In the US all of the Sherlock Holmes stories EXCEPT those in the Casebook are now in the public domain. (The Casebook was just about to fall out of copyright when the Bono Act extended it another 20 years.)

This leaves an ambiguity. If the stories which defined the character are partially in and out of copyright can you create a story based on the character and claim you are basing it only on the public domain stories?

Of course, you can claim that but would you win in court? I don't think anyone can answer that question at the moment because no court has ruled on it.

Regarding the missing website: It is still around. They just moved it to a different domain, possibly due to the ongoing battles over the copyrights. You see, the website that you referred to does not tell the whole story. It merely tells the claims of Mrs. Andrea Plunket, ex-wife of Sheldon Reynolds. [See below: GOB]

Most Sherlockians acknowledge Jon Lellenberg as the appropriate representative of the Doyle estate. He represented Dame Jean Conan Doyle (the last of Doyle's children to die) and now represents her estate. (Go here and search on Arthur Conan Doyle: tyler.hrc.utexas.edu )

I think you are attributing the publication of some pastiches to Reynolds or Plunket which were authorized by Dame Jean through Lellenberg. The books authorized by Dame Jean or her estate say so.

There have been ongoing legal battles between these two sets of supposed representatives. However, the end result seems to be that both have some claim.

Many people don't seem to understand that if two people jointly own a copyright EITHER can authorize publication and NEITHER can prohibit any publication authorized by the other. That's a fact of US Copyright law.

In this case the parties claim their rights under different children of Conan Doyle.

Actually the person to blame for the mess is probably Sir Arthur himself. He obviously wrote his will without adequate legal advice. (I have a copy in front of me.)

If all the children and all the children's spouses and heirs had gotten along then there would not have been a problem. But you can't count on that. He should have put the copyrights in a trust, named an institution the trustee, and named his wife and children the beneficiaries. Then there probably would not have been 75 years of arguments and litigation.

Well, there you have it. The last time I myself had to make enquiries about a Conan Doyle matter was in 2002. I see from my files that I then corresponded with Jonathan Clowes Ltd., who appear to be the UK agents for Mrs Andrea Plunket. They wanted what I considered to be an unreasonable sum for what I had in mind, so I gave up on the idea. But perhaps, in view of what Darlene Cypser says, I was talking to the wrong people.

If you want to pursue your own ideas for the use of Sherlock or his mates (which I do not recommend), there is a website for the Andrea Plunket side of things. Follow the link to 'About the Estate' and you can find one view of the uninspiring history of the copyright dispute. There is no mention, so far as I can see, of Jon Lellenberg.

If you prefer to deal with Mr Lellenberg, he can be reached at JonLellenberg@aol.com.

The Sherlockian web site, edited by Chris Redmond, makes the following comment on the competing parties:

A recently created web site for "the Sir Arthur Conan Doyle Literary Estate" represents Andrea Plunket, the former wife of Sheldon Reynolds, producer of the 1954 television series starring Ronald Howard as Holmes. Reynolds controlled the copyrights in the 1950s. Plunket is proprietor of a guest house in Livingston Manor, New York. Her claims to rights in the Sherlock Holmes stories have been repeatedly rejected in U.S. federal court decisions (including Plunket v. Doyle, No. 99-11006, Southern District of New York, February 22, 2001; Pannonia Farms Inc. v. ReMax International and Jon Lellenberg, No. 01-1697, District of Columbia, March 21, 2005). She has also filed a claim to the name "Sherlock Holmes" as a United States trademark, and it too has been turned down.

There are lessons for us all there.

Number one, don't get involved with trying to negotiate deals to use other people's characters. It's not worth it. Not only do you have to deal with the (alleged) copyright holder, but, as you can see from the above example, there may be different situations in the US, UK, and every other country on the planet.

Number two, if you yourself own any copyrights which are worth a warm pitcher, for goodness' sake leave a will which is clear. And try to have children who will agree with each other.

Before I finish, here is a story which I find passably amusing.

Some twenty-odd years ago, when Andrea Plunket was still married to the film producer Sheldon Reynolds, I had dinner with her. Yes, I know, it's a very modest distinction, but some of us have to clutch at straws. Anyway, I found Andrea to be a perfectly amiable person, but that was not a universal view.

After Andrea and Sheldon were divorced (I don't know who did what to whom), she went off and became the close companion of Claus von Bulow. Yes, that very same Claus von Bulow who was accused of murdering his wife Sunny with a lethal injection of insulin, and who was, in due course, acquitted by a jury. His story was turned into a film, Reversal of Fortune, starring Jeremy Irons (who won an Oscar in the process).

At one point in all these shenanigans, Sheldon Reynolds was asked what he thought of his ex-wife going around with a man who had been accused of murder.

Sheldon gave it a bit of thought. 'Well,' he said, 'let's put it this way. If Claus marries Andrea, he'll wish he'd been found guilty.'

Neal Asher: The Skinner

Neal Asher's science-fiction novel The Skinner is a book in which the author's powerful imagination overcomes some of the problems thrown up by what I judge to be an inadequate grasp of narrative technique.

The Skinner runs to 473 pages, and in my view it would be more effective at two thirds the length. As it stands, there are too many principal characters, and in the early sections of the novel we are not always sure which of them we are supposed to be concentrating on.

Given that the action takes place on a planet called Spatterjay, where things are very different from what we are accustomed to on earth, there is too much new information for the reader to absorb comfortably. The result, I fear, is a certain amount of confusion, blurring of the story line, and a tendency for the reader to put the book down and pick up something else.

What, then, kept me reading? Answer (as I indicated at the start): the fact that this author has a powerful imagination. He has created an entirely new world for us, a task which must have absorbed his energies for a very long time, before he even began to write the novel proper. And it all hangs together tolerably well.

Furthermore, there is absolutely nothing wrong with Neal Asher's technique that couldn't be put right by a thorough reading of Dr Zuckerman's book Writing the Blockbuster Novel. As I have remarked before, you should not be put off by the catchpenny title. A careful study of this book will pay dividends no matter what sort of a novel you intend to write, even the most literary.

Personally I was quite glad I did stick with The Skinner, because at about page 300 it began to get quite exciting. And it continues in that mode until the end. But there is, I repeat, too much for us to absorb early in the book, and we are trying to keep track of too many characters, right to the end.

This is one for serious SF fans, I think.

The author has his own web site, where, as usual, you can learn more about him and his various books.

Publisher profiles

Back in June, I mentioned that the UK book-trade journal The Bookseller is planning to publish a book in October this year with the title Consumer Book Report.

The principal feature of this report is to be 'a comprehensive, detailed profile of the top 100 publishers' (presumably the top 100 in the UK market), together with quantitative analysis of their sales and market share; also on offer will be detailed research showing prospects, opportunities and threats over the coming years.

All of which sounds tolerably interesting: a mixture of fact and speculation. And if you go to the book's own web site, and take the trouble to register, you can get a taster of one of the company profiles; three more will be available shortly.

The first company profile is that of Pearson, one of the biggest media groups in the world. Print out this profile and it runs to two and a half pages.

To tell the truth there isn't a lot here that we haven't come across before, although in this instance all the info is gathered together in one handy package.

Pearson has three major divisions: Penguin group, Pearson Education, and the Financial Times group. Penguin imprints include Michael Joseph, Allen Lane, Hamish Hamilton, Viking, and a good few more. Between them they have 4,000 staff worldwide and published 4,000 books last year. (Altogether Pearson has 33,000 staff.) They have a 12.1% share of the UK market.

Brief mention is made of the crisis at Penguin's distribution centre in Rugby (early 2004), which caused a massive loss of sales and damaged goodwill among authors and booksellers. But again, we knew this already. Sales in 2004 were down by £54 million compared with 2003, and operating profits were down by £35 million.

None of which prevented Penguin group from having a string of bestsellers. Top of the list was You Are What You Eat by Gillian McKeith, which shifted 965,423 copies in the 52 weeks to 18 June 2005, a circumstance which illustrates the power of television. Not bad for a book which, as some nit-picking columnists and bloggers have pointed out, comes from an author whose academic qualifications and knowledge of nutrition are questionable.

So, as I say, this is all tolerably interesting. It would, no doubt, be useful to have 100 of these company profiles, plus the promised forecasting of the future, all assembled in one tidy volume, which one could draw down from the shelf as and when necessary. At £15, or even £25, I might go for it. But at the offered price of £249? Thanks, but I don't think so.

The book is not, by the way, listed on Amazon; so it's no good looking for a discount there.

More tips

Tim Bete is director of the Erma Bombeck Writers' Workshop at the University of Dayton. He tells me that he gets dozens of emails every week with questions about book publishing. He therefore decided, earlier this year, to document the key stages in seeing a book of his own through the publishing process. The result, he feels, provides answers to some of the more frequently asked questions.

You can find Tim's article, Anatomy of a First Book, at his personal web site. Tim covers how he started writing, how to create an author's web site, how to write query letters and book proposals, and a lot more.

The material on offer is not so much a template for everyone to follow as an example of how one professional writer handled each stage of the process, from the first approach to publishers to book signings. What worked for one person may not be precisely right for you, but you can build on the examples.

If you are new to the submissions business, and particularly if you are trying to sell a non-fiction book, this is well worth a look.

Tim Bete's web site, by the way, has been selected by Writer's Digest magazine as the best writer's site of 2005.

From the horse's mouth

Here is some advice from the horse's mouth -- which is what I wrote without thinking about it. Then I did think about it. What does that phrase mean exactly?

Well, the Oxford dictionary says that it means '(information) from an authoritative source'; and I guess that the origins lie in horse racing. In other words it's a tip from someone who is in a position to know.

This particular tip relates not to racing but to another form of gambling, namely publishing. Yesterday a real live actual British agent made a comment on an earlier post of mine which I think deserves to be dragged out into the full light of day, because info from agents is usually worth passing on.

This particular piece of info/tip relates to writing novels -- a distressingly bad habit, like biting your nails, which some of you seem to have picked from mixing with entirely the wrong people.

This is what the (anonymous) agent has to say, in response to my post about Francis Ellen's novel The Samplist:

It's interesting how often struggling writers embittered by rejections from countless agents and editors hurl their derision on the idea of a Big Brother contestant having his or her autobiography published as an example of taste subordinated to commercial viability. As far as I know, no Big Brother contestant has ever had their autobiography published by a trade publisher, and no agent or editor worth his or her salt would even think of commissioning such a book.

As an agent, the first thing I look for in a fiction submission is precision; the precise elucidation of ideas. It's a prerequisite for reading beyond the first page or two (though it's not enough on its own; it has to be accompanied by narrative flair). I'm not surprised Paul [another commenter on the same post] hasn't found a publisher, if his scattergun rant is any evidence.

Incidentally, I don't give a damn whether a novelist attended a particular school, or who they know. I'm only interested in the quality of the writing, and I speak for a very large majority of my fellow agents in saying so.

That said, in the case of certain high-profile novelists, I do think a deeply conservative and depressing prize-giving / reviewing culture has developed. Positive reviews and reputations do indeed gather their own momentum regardless of the quality of the author's most recent novel, and today's Booker longlist is evidence of the fact. Ian McEwan, Rushdie, and Zadie Smith - presumably the favourites to win - are trading on reputation alone; all three new offerings are embarrassingly bad.

C.E. Vulliamy: Prodwit's Guide to Writing

A few weeks ago, while trawling through an old-fashioned secondhand bookshop, I came across an old-fashioned book: Prodwit's Guide to Writing. Ever eager for illumination and improvement, I bought it.

The author's name, C.E. Vulliamy, seemed familiar to me, but, having studied the list of his published works, I can't say that I remember reading any of them. However, he wrote a number of novels, as well as many non-fiction books, and some of his fiction took the form of detective stories, so maybe I have.

Vulliamy, who was active chiefly around the middle of the twentieth century, seems to have been an all-round man of letters. He wrote biographies of Voltaire, John Wesley, Mrs Thrale (aka Mrs Piozzi), Byron, and others. He produced two volumes of autobiography. He also wrote at least six books which his publisher categorises as satire; and some of his fiction is also said to satirise British society.

In short, he seems to have been a man with a well-developed sense of the ridiculous. And that -- or at the very least a sense of humour -- is an essential attribute for anyone who is trying to make a career in the book world.

Prodwit's Guide to Writing falls firmly within Vulliamy's satirical output. His publisher describes it as 'a rollicking satire'. However, the publisher adds, 'many of Prodwit's observations are exceedingly just, and an appreciable amount of his advice is of genuine value.'

First published in 1949, Prodwit's Guide purports to be the work of the late Giles Bendigo Prodwit, as edited by Mr Vulliamy himself. In addition to the normal editorial work, Mr Vulliamy tells us that he has felt bound to introduce some comments on Prodwit's wilder assertions.

In short, the Guide is what used to be called a 'conceit', which the Oxford dictionary defines as 'an elaborate metaphor or artistic effect', but which I usually think of as an extended joke.

When I tell you that this book extends to 164 pages, you may suspect that the joke might wear a bit thin before the end. And so it does; but the world was a different place (in some respects) in 1949, and I dare say it amused a few people then. Certainly the book seems to have sold tolerably well: there are still plenty of copies available on the secondhand market, and that isn't true of everything published at that time.

I'm sure that Vulliamy's main reason for writing the book was that it allowed him to say exactly what he thought of the book world without incurring the sort of wrath that would result if he had written a direct and controversial attack on the good and the great. And, despite the good-clean-fun approach, it is pretty clear that he had a fairly low opinion of how certain aspects of the post-war book trade were conducted.

What does Prodwit have to say which might conceivably interest us today? Well, for a start he says that 'writing is a trade which requires little previous knowledge.... It is much easier to become a successful writer than it is to become, say, a successful plumber.'

Prodwit hold this view because his experience has proved to him that it is possible to build a career as a writer very largely by stealing other people's work and claiming it as your own.

He argues that one essential piece of equipment for would-be writers is a library of the complete works of Standard Authors -- the important point being that these authors should be safely dead and out of copyright. The adroit and intelligent use of other men's work, says Prodwit, 'leads to public applause and adequate remuneration.' This is the system 'upon which the overwhelming majority of writers have established their renown.'

And so on.

Also amusing, nearly sixty years after they were written, are Vulliamy/Prodwit's assertions that 'the sale of a novel was never more uncertain than it is today', and that far too many novels are being published. This, mark you, was his opinion at a time when the number of books published in the UK in a year was somewhere around 10% of today's figure.

Prodwit ploughs his way through 23 chapters in all: How to write history, poetry, biography, travel, and so forth. On your relationship with your publisher, Prodwit's advice is that you should 'ring him up as often as possible. Remember, he has very little to do in his office, and he will certainly appreciate your friendly attention.'

Recalling my own recent essay on reviewers, I had a look at what Prodwit has to say about them. 'You can have no idea,' says Prodwit, 'without experience behind the scenes, of the intimacy and intricacy of this muddy business.... Friends caress and enemies batter each other continually by means of literary reviews, and entire cliques are thus organised for offence or defence.'

Balzac said much the same thing a hundred years earlier. And, bearing in mind what the Washington Post has to say about its own recent review of John Irving's new book, it is painfully apparent that, in the last 56 years, nothing much has changed. It was ever thus, and it ever will be.

Guillermo Martinez: The Oxford Murders

Guillermo Martinez is an Argentinian author who has a PhD in Mathematical Science. He has written several highly acclaimed novels, and this one, The Oxford Murders, won the Planeta Prize.

The Planeta Prize, founded some 53 years ago, is not one I'd ever heard of, but it seems to be highly prestigious in the Spanish-speaking world. It also seems to be worth about $200,000 in cash, so it's definitely one worth winning.

The Oxford Murders turns out to be a classic detective story. I was going to say an old-fashioned detective story, but that would give the wrong impression. What is more, it belongs in that particular niche of the crime-fiction genre in which the puzzle is the overwhelming centre of attention.

By the way, while I think of it, the purest form of the detective novel which centres upon the puzzle is the locked-room mystery. What happens in such cases is that a person is found dead inside a locked room -- or sealed chamber, or whatever. The question that the detectives have to answer is basically how it was done; though the question of who did it and why is never forgotten.

One of the masters of the locked-room mystery was John Dickson Carr. Carr was at one time immensely popular, though I was never very keen on his work myself. To me it seemed to concentrate on the complications of how the crime was committed to such an extent that character and credibility often went out of the window. But in his day his books sold in vast numbers.

Should you wish to read an analysis of all the possible variations on the locked-room theme, you can find one in chapter XVII of Carr's novel The Three Coffins. And, if you're a really dedicated researcher in that field, you will also wish to track down an article by Bill Pronzini in the November 1981 issue of The Writer (volume 94, pages 11-15), entitled 'But That's Impossible'. Yes, it's amazing what information I've got tucked away in my files, isn't it? I surprise myself sometimes.

Back to The Oxford Murders. As the title makes clear, the novel is set in Oxford; the year is 1993. The narrator is an Argentinian mathematician who is spending a year in Oxford. Before long there occurs the first in a series of murders, and, in trying to solve these, the narrator works closely with an eminent man called Arthur Seldom.

Seldom is said to be a mathematical genius, and his area of expertise is logic. His most famous work is a philosophical extension of Godel's Theorem of Incompleteness, and his book includes a chapter on serial killers.

In the series of murders which the novel describes, the killer always leaves a clue, and the clue takes the form of a mathematical symbol which is clearly part of a series.

Well, you get the idea. What we have here is a puzzle of the intellectual variety. The characters are well drawn and not without interest, but the main focus is on the mystery of the symbols. Who committed the crime, and why, takes second place.

As you would expect in a writer with a mathematical mind, the book is cleverly constructed and includes the usual series of bluffs and false endings at the conclusion.

All in all then, a modern example of a genre which was once wildly popular but has now faded by comparison with books about pathologists and Hannibal Lecters.

The Oxford Murders is the only one of Martinez's books to be translated into English. It was first published in the UK, in paperback, earlier this year, and I see from my copy that it has been reprinted three times already. So it has evidently been a success, though reviews are hard to come by.

The book is, however, recommended reading for the boys of Harrow School. Well, at least there isn't any sex in it, so it's a safer choice than some.

Loren D Estleman: Dr Jekyll and Mr Holmes

The most interesting part of this novel is the author's Afterword; but more of that in a moment.

Loren D Estleman writes in both the mystery (crime) and historical-western genres. He first published a novel in 1976, since when he has produced 53 books and hundreds of short stories and articles; he has been a full-time writer since 1980 and has won lots of awards. In short, he is a professional.

As you would expect, therefore, Dr Jekyll and Mr Holmes is a professional piece of work. That said, the title more or less gives away the plot, at least for those who are tolerably well read. Mr Holmes is, of course, the famous Sherlock. And Mr Hyde is one half of Robert Louis Stevenson's Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde. Most people will know how that story goes, even if they haven't read it; there have been several movie versions. The mystery element in Estleman's book is therefore minimal; the interest lies in how he handles the thing.

(The doctor's name, by the way, should be pronounced Gee-kill; the same goes for Gertrude of that ilk, if you're a gardener. And the Stevenson original was, please note, short. World-famous, and short. A moral there, you might think?)

I can't say that I overwhelmingly recommend Dr Jekyll and Mr Holmes, which first came out in 1979. It's a passably entertaining story, and (for an American) Estleman gets most of the period detail right. He does, however, refer to the 'trash basket' in several places, and there ain't no such animal in England. He also has a pretty vague idea about the value of money. But otherwise OK.

No, I write about the book here mainly for the Afterword, which seems to have been written for the 2001 reprint. Here the author talks about some of the editing and marketing problems that he experienced the first time around.

It is particularly interesting to note that his editor was thoughtful enough to suggest that his original ending wasn't really satisfactory; and she recommended a different one, which he accepted. What chance of getting such hands-on editing today, I wonder?

But now to the main point. On several occasions in the past -- most recently on 8 July -- I have written about the problems which can arise when a writer has the brilliant idea of writing a new novel featuring characters created by another writer, preferably one long since dead. In Estleman's case he was using, principally, Holmes.

'There is a popular misconception,' says Estleman, 'that the characters created by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle passed into public domain some time ago. They are still very much in the control of those who administer his estate.'

Estleman says that he has no problem with this situation 'except for migraines caused by some of the people I have had to placate.' Estleman's agent from the 1970s told him that he had come close to quitting Alcoholics Anonymous during and after his conferences with those who controlled the Conan Doyle copyright.

Worse, Dr Jekyll and Mr Holmes was Estleman's second round with those people. He had earlier written Sherlock Holmes Vs Dracula. Estleman's editor at Doubleday therefore knew what was involved, and she told him that when the second book landed on her desk she had to go out for along walk before she could bring herself to read it.

Well, I think I said in an earlier post somewhere that my own experiences of trying to negotiate with copyright holders -- even if they are co-operative and helpful -- was sufficient to convince me that the rewards of using famous characters in your wonderful new novel are simply not worth the effort. So don't say you weren't warned.

If you must use famous characters from the past, make sure that they are out of copyright. And that may not be so easy to establish as you might think.

Francis Ellen: The Samplist

A while back, a reader of this blog asked me if I had heard of Francis Ellen's self-published novel The Samplist. At the time I hadn't; but I certainly have since.

Let's get the background out of the way first. Francis Ellen (a pseudonym) is a man with training in both music and computing. He was a guitar student at the Royal Scottish Academy of Music and Drama, and subsequently did a master's degree in maths at Stirling University. Not surprisingly, therefore, his novel The Samplist is about computer-generated music. And, what's more, it comes complete with a CD of the music which is written about in the book; not many novels do that.

You can find a profile of Ellen in the Scotsman, and details of his book on his own publishing company web site. There you can also find extracts from reviews, an excerpt from the book, and you can listen to the music.

So far so good. And in due course I might have got around to finding a copy and reading it. However, in the meantime I find that Mr Ellen himself has been here and left a message, in the form of a comment on one of my posts. Unless you are an exceptionally keen reader of the GOB, and go back and read comments as they appear, you will probably not have seen it. And as it's long, and well worth reading, I am going to copy it in here.

This is what Francis Ellen had to say about my little essay on the way things are in the book world:

I noticed this discussion and as it concerned me on two fronts: my self-published novel, The Samplist, and the apparent 'desire' to create the appearance of a mastermind behind terrorism. I couldn't help but comment.

I self-published and yes, I got reviewed up the wazoo. The earliest reviews were horrendous, beyond rude. Two reviewers didn’t even read the back cover; they simply misquoted it (by sticking in their words and leaving out some of my words) and brandished their own rewrite as evidence of my lack of ability. (This was a 'legitimately' published novelist; trust no one!)

I did get a couple of great reviews early on as well but the turning point was a review in the Times Literary Supplement.

After that, things changed. The last two reviews of The Samplist (BBC Music Magazine and the British Science Fiction Association's Vector Magazine) were out of this world.

Why?

A word to self-publishers; every time you get a good review, send it to the next reviewer WITH the novel. My guess is that it's the ‘sheep’ effect; gradually, the reviews get better and better (the BBC Music Mag review trashed earlier reviewers for comparing me to Dickens, Heller and Flann O' Brien and then compared me to Tom Sharpe - well, Tom Sharpe'll do me thanks very much).

On the 'intelligent' terrorist: The reviews helped to get me two offers from agents. I rejected a heavy hitter and settled for a guy who seemed 'in-tune' with my writing. I recently sent off the first 10,000 words of my latest novel to him and he told me that he wouldn’t try to sell it 'In this climate' and that 'no editor would touch it.'

Why?

Because I used to work for a company that did the software security for a lot of government agencies that use three-letter acronyms and I know where the real holes are in the security AND I paint both the security agencies AND the terrorists as dimwits.

So, nobody wants my first novel because only two out of five people who read it love it and the other three hate it so there’s 'no market,' and I’m being censored because nobody wants to hear 'some' truth about the dreadful world in which we live. My writing is callous and offensive. My latest novel has a Muslim as the lead character. The whole terrorist 'thing' is viewed from the perspective of the kind of Muslim that doesn't really care about religion. The book also is about the new slaves of the American Empire: The H1 Niggers, and about the accelerated demise of the U.S. and the rise of China (as unwittingly promulgated by idiot politicians and deliberately by smart speculators).

I grew up reading, and reading about, writers on the edge. People who challenged the mass hypnosis of the day, but now I find that if I don’t wear a silly hat I don't get to create a narrator who lives and thinks differently from me. I thought this was the point of fiction, of literature, of entertainment?

I don’t even get the chance to become the victim of the first American Fatwa. My subject-matter is to be strangled at birth before my ham-fisted attempts to bring my feeble story to life are even completed.

As to publishers; a few more words: I have feedback from dockworkers and postmen and laborers; people who tell me they haven't read a book in thirty years and they loved my book but an endless list of publishers has turned me down (although in
each company there was at least one person who loved the book – if only I could get them all into the same company?).

I grew up in the roughest part of the roughest part of my country. I was perhaps the first person in my family to get an education. But every publisher I speak to is a 'literary' type. I'm writing for a completely different audience but I won't write 'about' druggies on housing estates so I lose my natural 'edge'. I write for people who normally watch TV. I write for an audience that is huge but the publishers don't 'get' them beyond patronizing celebrity tripe that they stuff down their throats (at great marketing cost).

Why can't I understand the market? Who are they to say, 'I loved the characters, the color….. but I didn’t warm to the story.' Didn’t warm to the story?

So?

Who cares? You know that others have 'warmed' to the story. Don't you have stock holders who want you to sell books? Sell the product. There is a demand but every single shopkeeper I try is as hard as trying to get a bloody agent. One store manager asked me to send a synopsis after the book was reviewed by the TLS.

Now I have 30,000 words of a great story that I have to write (another year at the day job) and I've already been told I'm wasting my time because I'll offend Americans (and the French) by suggesting that the security services are as dumb as the terrorists (and all of them are as monstrous as they are incompetent).

The TLS said The Samplist was 'saying something important'. I wrote the book as a pure entertainment. If The Samplist said anything important then this book really IS important.

But I cannot argue with the genius of the publishing industry. Should an executive hand over a million dollars to a politician for a book that reads like the author wrote it after he got hit in the ass by a tranquilizer gun… well, he did the right thing because nobody can predict the 'market'.

I can predict MY bloody market. Publishers should start hiring people with some commercial acumen and keep their opinions out of it.

Robert Charles Wilson: Spin

Robert Charles Wilson's Spin is a science-fiction novel. As such, it is far better than either Michael Cunningham's Specimen Days or John Twelve Hawks's The Traveller.

In Spin we have characters who are convincing as rounded individuals; in The Traveller the characters are pure cardboard. In Specimen Days the science fiction scarecly rises above the talking-squid level, but in Spin one feels that the writer actually knows what he is talking about and everything that is described could, all too easily, come about.

That said, both Specimen Days and The Traveller will far outsell Spin. In fact, both those books will probably shift a million, in various editions, worldwide. How many will Spin sell? Well, I'm not party to Wilson's royalty statements, but if you told me 10,000 I wouldn't be too surprised.

So, life isn't fair then? Nope. And there is nothing about the past history of publishing to suggest that talent, sound narrative technique, and a gripping story are guaranteed to get you the kind of hype which is needed to propel a book into the bestseller list.

Robert Charles Wilson is no beginner in the business of writing novels. He has written twelve so far, with more to come. He has won a variety of prizes for these, and for his short stories. He was born in California and moved to Canada when he was nine; he seems to be very proud of being Canadian. Sadly, his official web page does not give us a biography: I would like to know about his education, because to me (a non-scientist) he seems to write with authority about a number of scientific and technological theories and developments.

Spin is narrated by Tyler Dupree, and it is mainly concerned with Tyler and his relationship with a pair of twins, Jason and Diane. And, although this is a longish book (364 pages), Wilson limits his focus largely to these three and their families and friends. Smart move, and a sign that the author knows what he is about.

The book begins roughly twenty years into the future. One night, Tyler and his two friends are looking at the sky -- and the stars go out. In due course, it emerges that the earth has been covered by a kind of protective blanket, put there (the earth scientists deduce) by some alien power.

The real sun is replaced by an artificial sun, and life goes on. But gradually, scientists discover that time outside the earth's protective blanket is passing immensely faster than it is beneath it. In particular, the sun is aging, in terms of earth time, at massive rate. The scientists calculate that, in some forty years' time, the sun will die.

All of this is conveyed to the reader far more convincingly than it can be in a brief summary. But while that particular part of the plot is interesting in itself, it is not the author's main concern.

His main concern -- and I hesitate to say this, in case it puts some readers off -- is the love story between Tyler Dupree and the female twin, Diane. In fact, what we have here -- and again I risk putting you off completely -- is a classic romance. Boy gets girl, boy loses girl, boy gets girl back again.

Although I have read a fair amount of science fiction, I cannot claim to be an expert on it. But I would be surprised if anyone told me that there is a science-fiction writer around who handles people better than Wilson. Certainly I have not come across anyone. What we have here is a classy mainstream novel (I wouldn't insult it by calling it literary), set within an entirely convincing science-fiction framework. This is an unusual combination, and one which deserves the highest praise.

There are passages in this book where the author achieves that hypnotic effect on the reader which comes about when a writer knows precisely what he wants to do, and has both the literary technique and the psychological insight to achieve it.

This is, in short, the novel that Michael Cunningham might have written if only he knew any science, and if he had a better understanding of human nature. And for once it would have deserved its accolades and million-copy sale.

Unfortunately, a search of the database on Publishers Marketplace reveals that, while Cunningham has pulled down 26 reviews in major US newspapers, there are none listed (so far) for Spin.

I did, however, find one review in the Washington Post, where Paul di Fillipo says that the book may be, at last, an example of 'the long-anticipated marriage between the hard sf novel and the literary novel, resulting in an offspring possessing the robust ideational vigor of the former with the graceful narrative subtleties of the latter.... Neither the culture of art nor the culture of science is slighted. And isn't that the ideal definition of science fiction?'

Well, it's one such anyway.

Spin is highly recommended to anyone who likes thoughtful, literate, intelligent fiction -- never mind the genre.

Another note about comments (and permissions)

I would like to repeat a note about comments that I made a few months ago.

Today I received notice of a comment from someone who wanted to circulate a couple of my posts to other people. Because of the way comments are set up -- see below -- I was unable to reply to this person.

The answer to the query, by the way, is yes, no problem. The GOB is published under a Creative Commons licence -- see the logo in the right-hand column, right at the bottom, for details. You are free to use the posts here for any non-commercial purpose, without contacting me, so long as you credit the source.

And here's a bit more about the peculiarities of the comments system.

This blog makes use of Blogger.com facilities, and I have tried to set the Blogger options so as to make it as easy as possible for people to post comments.

I would like you to be aware that the Blogger system is set up so that, whenever someone posts a comment, I get a copy of it by email. You can later delete your own comment from the blog, if you wish, and the public will not be able to read it, but I will still have had the email.

If you expect me to reply, or hope that I will, probably your best plan is to send an email to me direct, rather than post a comment. You can find my email address through my Blogger profile -- use the link at the top of the right-hand column on this page. I cannot send a reply to you if you simply post a comment -- in other words, although I get an email containing your comment, the 'reply' facility doesn't work because the system doesn't have your address.

The only exception (I am guessing here) is if you are already a registered Blogger.com user yourself; then the email containing your comment does seem to contain your email address for me to reply, if I want to.

Occasionally, if I feel it is sufficiently important, I have been able to trace an email address for a commenter via Google or some other device, but that is the long way round the houses; and it isn't always possible.

John Twelve Hawks: The Traveller

A trivial point first, I think. John Twelve Hawks's novel The Traveller is known as The Traveler in the US. Where, for reasons best known to themselves, they spell things differently.

I first heard of this book about three weeks ago when I read a review in The Times, or its Sunday sister. The review made it clear that The Traveller had been heavily hyped. Hmm, I thought. Just goes to show how remote (or 'off the grid' as Hawks would say) we are out here in darkest Wiltshire, because I had never heard of the book.

Anyway, I looked it up in the Wiltshire library catalogue -- and behold! They actually had a copy. Which is a novelty in itself, because (a) they often don't get copies of popular and/or much-reviewed books, and (b), when they do, the new titles take weeks or months to get catalogued. Once I got over my surprise, I put in a reservation and found that I was the book's first reader.

Well, perhaps I should say 'attempted reader', because having ploughed through a hundred pages I am going to give up. Sorry, but this just ain't for me.

John Twelve Hawks is, one assumes, a pseudonym. Rumours allege that he is a well known novelist who is moonlighting (I doubt it), or one who has failed under another name (much more likely), or that he is actually a collaboration (entirely possible, given the patchy and, to me, unsatisfactory nature of the prose). Anyway, JTH is a bit of a mystery man. The book's jacket says only that he 'lives off the grid', which presumably is intended to create an air of mystery. And he is said to communicate with his publisher only by untraceable satellite phone or through his lawyer. All cobblers, no doubt, but it helps to generate talk.

As for the book, what the hell is it? Well, I suppose it's a techno-thriller. A mixture of science fiction, fantasy, and thriller. Heavily influenced, I would guess, by movies such as The Matrix, and aimed at a similar audience.

The plot seems to boil down (and here I quote the flyleaf) to a life-and-death battle 'between those who wish to control history and those who will risk their lives for freedom and enlightenment.'

All of which is all very well, and not unattractive in its way, but the problem, for me, is that the book just doesn't work. The early chapters are not well handled from a technical point of view. The viewpoint is not clear, and there is too much stodgy information conveyed to the reader directly by the author, rather than being passed on painlessly in the course of interesting action. Most of this background information could, I suspect, have been kept until later in the book.

Chapter 3, my notes say, is much better, and Chapter 6 is quite well written. But I still wasn't at all interested in the characters. For a start there are too many of them, and none of them are very convincing.

One way or another, I found this book curiously adolescent. Which is not, in itself, off-putting -- I've read plenty of children's books in my time, and enjoyed them -- but I didn't have any real confidence that the author knew what he was doing.

From my point of view, the book is chiefly interesting as an example of what you can do by way of marketing hype if you take enough trouble and spend enough money. This book began, I presume, as a concept in the mind of an author. But it could just as easily have been a concept dreamed up by an agent or a publisher, who then put the package together.

Somewhere along the line the originating publisher, who seems to have been Doubleday in New York, was persuaded to put up some substantial capital. And, according to reports from those who know about such things, the marketing campaign was aimed not so much at the public as at the marketers. For instance, a number of ladies dressed up as one of the book's characters, Maya, were mixing with the crowds at BookExpo America.

You can find an account of the hype at Cross-Media Storytelling, together with links to various web sites and a blog which is (so to speak) written by one of the book's characters, Judith Strand.

All in all then, what we have here is a determined attempt to generate buzz and publicity in relatively new and innovative ways. And it seems to have worked.

Certainly the book is generating acres of newsprint and there are masses of links on the web. The book is also reported to be on various bestseller lists. The movie rights have been sold, and there will be two sequels to make up a trilogy.

The major newspapers, for reasons explained last week, have given the novel a reasonably warm reception, but you may find that some smaller reviewers may be more enlightening, e.g. Shots or Blogcritics.

Well, credit where credit is due, I suppose. The various editions of The Traveler or The Traveller are selling lots of copies. Which is the point of the exercise. Compared with that, the fact that the book isn't actually very good becomes almost irrelevant.

The writer's lot-tery

The Book Babes in the The Book Standard are usually worth reading, and this week they have a piece about the writer's lot-tery. Here they discuss what makes or breaks a book, the importance of a powerful agent, the fact that first novels seldom are, and all like that. Worth reading.

Among others, they quote Jim Lynch, whose first (published) novel is an autumn lead for Bloomsbury. He says this: 'When I finally came to peace with my novel-writing obsession was when I came to the conclusion that it is my job/goal to write a novel good enough to deserve getting on the publishing roulette wheel. That's really all a writer can do. The rest, to some degree, is up to timing, luck, connections etc. And if you start dwelling too much on what it takes to get published or reading too much into what gets published or what does well, I think it not only hurts your chances of writing something strong and original, but it also nudges you closer to the writers' ward of the nearest mental hospital.'

Well that's certainly true.

Free advice for (non-fiction) writers

Publishers Lunch pointed me to a blog post by Seth Godin, in which he gives his five big ideas about publishing.

Is this of interest? I suggest that it is. Seth Godin is the author of several big-selling books on marketing and on the transformation of business firms into commercial superstars. He is also the author of Unleashing the Ideavirus, which was apparently the biggest selling ebook of all time (so far). So perhaps he has something useful to offer.

Seth's comments apply chiefly to those who write and seek to publish non-fiction books, but to me they also sound pretty relevant to fiction writers. You need to read the whole piece to get the full benefit, but here are Seth's five basic principles, with a few added comments from me, in brackets:

1. Please understand that book publishing is an organised hobby, not a business. If you're doing it for the money you're going to be disappointed. (This definition of publishing is probably the best I have ever come across.)

2. The timeframe for the launch of books has gone from silly to unrealistic. Even today, it still takes at least a year to get the damn thing into print. (Or even longer.)

3. There is no such thing as effective book promotion by a book publisher. (This is not quite 100% true, but Seth estimates that in America perhaps 100 books a year get properly promoted. That's out of what he says is 75,000 books published each year, but I seem to remember that the true figure in the US market is nearer 175,000.)

4. Books cost money and require the user to read them for the idea to spread. And the snag is, people don't like to pay and many of them don't like to read.

5. Publishing is like venture capital, not like printing. (What Seth seems to mean here is that getting a book printed to a professional standard is the easy part. Selling the thing and making it work for you are altogether different matters.)

In general, Seth seems to take the view that books are mainly useful for spreading the news about how wonderfully expert you are in your area of expertise; they thus generate income in ways other than through royalties. But there may be, Seth suggests, quicker, simpler and more effective ways of spreading your name around the world than going to all the trouble of writing a book.

Hey, you know what? You could write a blog. Doesn't take more than about three hours a day.

More thoughts on Empress Bianca

Early last Friday morning (29 July), when I was not as awake as perhaps I should have been, I wrote about the difficulties being experienced in relation to Lady Colin Campbell's new novel, Empress Bianca. The statements that I made in that post require, I think, a little further elaboration.

But first, a brief recapitulation. Empress Bianca was published in March this year, in the UK, by a small English firm called Arcadia Books. Soon after it appeared, a wealthy individual named Lily Safra claimed that the principal character in the novel was based on her, and she therefore threatened to sue for libel. Mrs Safra, by the way, is said to be the richest widow in the world.

As I understand it, anyone suing for libel is essentially claiming that they have been defamed. And the classic definition of defamation is the following: 'A statement concerning any person which exposes him (or her) to hatred, ridicule or contempt or which causes him to be shunned or avoided or which has a tendency to injure him in his office profession or trade.'

Arcadia Books evidently decided that, regardless of the rights and wrongs of this matter, it was too expensive for them to defend themselves against Mrs Safra in the law courts. So they withdrew all copies of the book and have undertaken to have them destroyed.

Lady Colin Campbell, however, took a dim view of the Safra allegation, and has threatened to sue Mrs Safra in return. You can read a full(ish) account of the whole matter in the Independent.

This case nicely illustrates some of the dangers and problems relating to the law of libel in England. And those of you who at this point decide that you need read no further, because you live in the USA or wherever, should think again. For two reasons.

First, you will undoubtedly have libel laws of your own to contend with; and, second, it is far from unknown for the authors of books published in, say, the USA, to be sued for libel in the English courts. Even if the book has never formally been published in England.

If someone wants to make trouble for an author, because of real or imagined damage to their reputation created through the publication of a book, all they have to do, to sue in England, is prove that one copy of the book has been sold here; e.g. through Amazon. This is not difficult to do. And there are good reasons for aggrieved parties to sue here rather than in, say, the American courts, because English libel law is much more favourable to the complaining party (the plaintiff) than are the laws in many other parts of the world. Hence the phenomenon known as 'libel tourism'.

Back to Empress Bianca and the arising issues.

To remind myself of the key points of law, I turned to what is, in my opinion, the best book on libel for the lay reader in England: Reputations Under Fire, by David Hooper. This is both an entertaining read (provided, of course, you have never been involved in a libel action yourself) and a source of much useful information.

On pages 422-437, Hooper provides a valuable discussion of 'libel in the world of make believe' -- i.e. in fiction.

First of all, what is Lily Safra complaining about? Well, she says that 'friends' have pointed out to her that there are remarkable similarities between the lead character of Empress Bianca and herself. The character, as portrayed in the book, is a ruthless person who murders two of her four husbands. Mrs Safra therefore alleges (I presume) that she has been defamed.

Have your friends ever pointed out to you that a character in a book bears an uncanny resemblance to yourself? No, me neither. But you will find, in these cases, that the person complaining always has lots of attentive friends who are assiduous in scanning the bookshelves for volumes which traduce the innocent.

The publishers deny that Mrs Safra has been defamed. However, Gary Pulsifer, the managing director, says 'We're too small to fight something like this', and he seems to have agreed to more or less everything demanded by the Safra lawyer (who, incidentally, once negotiated Princess Diana's divorce from Prince Charles).

Why would Arcadia do this, if they believe that the book is not truly defamatory?

Because fighting such cases is notoriously expensive and also difficult. English law very much favours the plaintiff (i.e. the person who claims to have been defamed).

David Hooper tells us that the law makes an 'initial assumption in favour of the plaintiff that defamatory words are false and that he or she is of good reputation. Equally helpful to the plaintiff is the fact that he or she does not have to prove actual damage as a result of the libel.'

The traditional defence in libel cases is to assert that what has been published is true, and then prove it. This is the reverse of what common sense would suggest. You might think that the plaintiff ought to have to prove that she has suffered damage; but she doesn't. And, furthermore, if your defence is that the words complained of are true, you may be in difficulty. Witnesses may be reluctant to come forward and testify that a man is a serial murderer, for obvious reasons.

And if the book in question is a novel, which is supposed to be an invented work of fiction from start to finish, then proving that the allegations are true is scarcely an option.

In short, if someone chooses to allege that you, the novelist, have written about them in a defamatory way, then you have got a big problem.

What can you do to prevent this happening?

Most of the cases that are brought are based on novels which use the same name for a character as that of a real person. So if, for instance, you write about a mass murderer, by the name of Manfred Blennerhassett, who is (you say) a retired Colonel, and you describe him as living in Argyle Street, Wimbledon, then you had better take very good care care to make a number of checks.

First, do a Google check to make sure that there is no real-life person of that name who has been convicted of anything (preferably), and certainly not of murder.

Next, check the Army list to make sure that there is not a real-life retired Colonel (or anything else) with the name that you have selected. (And by the way, it is often thought best to choose very common names, rather than unusual ones, for bad guys.)

Third, make sure that there is no Argyle Street in Wimbledon, or anywhere nearby for that matter.

And, finally, keep notes about these things: how you selected the name, what checks you made, et cetera. In 1974, the author Tom Sharpe chose an outlandish name for a character who was a portrayed as a television presenter in Porterhouse Blue. Tom Sharpe assumed that the name was sufficiently absurd for it not to exist in real life. But behold, out of the bowels of the BBC there crept an individual with that very same name.

Sharpe was advised that, since he had kept no notes of checking the BBC staff directory (for instance), he had no defence. The plaintiff was paid £250. This was scarcely enough to bankrupt Mr Sharpe, but the episode no doubt caused him worry and expense.

Frankly, any author who fails to check the relevant professional directories for characters who are military officers, clergymen, doctors, and so forth, is just asking for trouble. And, since all these professional persons seem to have legions of friends who will swear that, when they read your book, they immediately viewed it as a vile slur upon the character of a noble doctor, admiral, or whatever, trouble you will assuredly get.

I once had a book published by a man who told me that one of his authors had named all his characters after people living in his village. This is not a good plan, and the book had to be pulped. As did Piers Paul Read's novel Polonaise, when he referred to a certain Lord Derwent, without bothering to check whether there actually was a peer of that name and whether he had a sense of proportion about these things.

By now you may be wondering if there is anything else that you can do to avoid being sued for libel. Yes, there is, and the advice comes from Peter Carter-Ruck, who was the most famous libel lawyer of them all.

To be certain that you will never be liable to pay damages for libel, you should 'refrain from writing, printing or publishing or distributing any written matter of whatsoever nature.' So that's easy enough, isn't it?

But what of Lady Colin Campbell's threat that if Mrs Safra doesn't shut up and go away, she will sue her in return? Now that would be really interesting. And it would constitute, so far as I know, a first.

Presumably -- and I am groping in the dark here -- presumably Lady Colin would claim that, when Mrs Safra alleged that she (Lady C) she had used her (Mrs Safra) as the basis for a character in a novel, she (Mrs S) had libelled Lady C. Lady C would claim, in short, that she (Lady C) had been defamed.

It seems to me, speaking purely as a layman, that Lady C would have a pretty good case. As we have seen, Lady C, in counter-suing, would not even be required to prove actual damage. And it would, presumably, be up to Mrs Safra to prove that her original allegation was true. She would have to prove that Lady C had, deliberately and knowingly, based the character in her book on Mrs Safra, in order to expose Mrs S to hatred, ridicule and contempt, et cetera.

That, I suggest, would be mighty difficult. And that is the point which I was trying to make last Friday morning; though I did so too briefly and somewhat clumsily. I hope today's effort is clearer.

For more on libel (if you can bear it) see my post of July last year about the memoirs of Peter Carter-Ruck.