Typhoon, by Qaisra Shahraz

Last night, I was at Chorlton Library to interview writer Qaisra Shahraz as part of Chorlton Book Festival. It was the first time we’d met in person, although we were fellow jurors a few years ago on the First Novel Award for the Writers’ Guild of Great Britain, and Qaisra has involved me in online events for the Muslim Arts and Culture Festival (Macfest). She told me in advance she would read from her second novel, Typhoon (2003), so in preparation I read that, as well as some of her short stories and a chunk of her first novel, The Holy Woman (2001), and dug through some old interviews and reviews.

Typhoon opens on a Tuesday in May 2002 in the village of Chiragpur, Pakistan, where the local qazi or judge is dying, but causes a stir by asking to see two particular women before he dies. We then jump back 20 years to understand why. In May 1982, a young woman called Gulshan is woken in the night by her husband is sneaking out of bed. Without him knowing, Gulshan follows him outside and sees him passionately embrace another woman — one she recognises as a recent arrival to the village from the city, and whose modern ways have already aroused some comment. Gulshan returns home, tells her mother Hajra what she’s seen, and Hajra goes out to see for herself. 

Soon, the local gossips have got wind of what’s going on, and it’s like a typhoon has whipped up. Hajra demands than the local qazi pass judgment… But what Gulshan and Hajra witnessed going on isn’t quite what they think…

Typhoon is a fast-moving, engaging story with lots of tension and emotion, and some great twists along the way. It involves a huge cast of different characters, and several plots going on at once. For example, there’s also the story of a rich young widow who refuses to remarry, and the strain on the qazi’s granddaughter of leaving her husband to come tend to the dying man. This means we often witness particular events from one character’s perspective, then have what we think happened challenged or shifted by someone else.

Some pivotal scenes are told very visually. For example, one key moment towards the end of the story — which I won’t spoil, but involves a woman at a well — is conveyed by describing the surface of the water being disturbed, and I had to read it again to ensure I’d understood what was happening. It’s a powerful moment, and a key one to the novel, but it’s rendered in a kind of cinematic prose.

Qaisra told me last night that this kind of thing was, in part, informed by her time working on the TV drama Dil Her to Hai (The Heart It Is), broadcast in Pakistan in 2003. Based in Manchester, she wrote the scripts in English and they were translated into Urdu by the production team, who also made some amendments and even added whole scenes to better showcase the leading actors. In Typhoon, she adopted some of the visual storytelling she’d developed in the series, but exerted more control over characters and story.

I think we can also detect some of the tensions experienced in working in TV in a particular line from the novel:

“The TV people forgot that there were people living out in the countryside whose problems and lifestyle needed to be reflected” (p. 69).

Qaisra kindly gave me a couple more of her books last night, so I’ll get to those in due course…

The Coral Bones, by EJ Swift

Three woman, separated by 250 years, are drawn to the same stretch of the Great Barrier Reef. In the present day, marine biologist Hana Ishikawa is working on a laboratory project to artificially evolve corals that will be more resilient to climate change. She also sets out in scuba gear to document the extinction of the coral out in the sea, bracing herself to dip under the water to see the damage done. Then a dead man is discovered in the water, his body painted in different colours as some kind of warning. The death creates headlines, and then the man’s widow gives Hana her late husband’s research, which includes old scientific papers about the waters where he was found, written by…

Judith Holliman is 17 when, in 1839, she convinces her father — a captain in the navy — to let her go with him on a voyage to chart the waters off northern Australia. Judith is an avid naturalist having read the books in her father’s library, but her options are limited due to her sex. How can she ever hope to be taken seriously, let alone be published? Things aren’t helped by the ship’s on-board naturalist, Mr Pook, treating her with such disdain…

And then, towards the end of the 22nd century, Telma Velasco is employed by a government agency to track down rare animals held in captivity, in a heat-ravaged world where climate mitigation is just beginning to have an impact. She is also grieving — or failing to properly grieve — the loss of a grown-up daughter in a wildfire. But then Team gets the most extraordinary tip-off…

As with the author’s When There Are Wolves Again, this is a brilliant book. Like that novel, it involves two women battling to respond to the debilitating effects of climate change, and begins in the present day and extends into the future. In doing so, it explores what we’re going to have to live through and what things might be done to protect ourselves and the environment. It is by turns devastating and full of hope. But here, there’s a third woman, writing in 1839, just after Darwin has published a report of time on the Beagle but before he’s worked out his ideas of evolution by natural selection. I think that would help win over readers who would not normally venture into sci-fi.

The three women are very different in themselves, a fact underlined by the audio version having three narrators, Anna Burnett, Brigid Lohrey and Kate Winter. The three protagonists live in very different times, facing very different social pressures. Yet all three share a passion for the natural world, a horror at its destruction, and are constrained in what they can do. It it seems impossible that any of them might have a happy ending. 

Hana, for example, is so overwhelmed by grief for the coming apocalypse, the sixth major extinction event on Earth, that she breaks up with her pregnant partner — unable to contemplate the world in which they’d be bringing up a child. Judith is on a last adventure before she is inevitably sent to London where her mother will find her a husband. Telma is so beaten up by grief and loss she can’t face her surviving family, including a new grandchild.

As the story continues, there are hints of links between these three women, and the chance to work out what became of Judith and Hana after their own accounts end, teased from clues in the later-set stories. It’s beautifully done, teasing us with pain and loss to come for these people we’ve come to like. They’re each well drawn characters, with foibles of their own: flawed humans, in the face of insurmountable odds and loss, trying to do the right thing and save something of our world. I didn’t want it to end.

Arise to Conquer, by Wing Commander Ian Gleed, DFC

A friend recommended this extraordinary first-hand account of the Battle of Britain by one of the Hurricane pilots, written soon after the events of the summer of 1940 and published in 1942. That was just as well, as Wing Commander “Widge” Gleed was killed in action the following year. I got hold of a first edition, yet knowing his fate casts a shadow as I read it. His friends are shot down, he’s in a serious accident, he wonders about his odds, and won’t make long-term plans... 

The book begins on the morning of 3 September 1939, with Gleed woken by his batman, going for breakfast with other pilots, then to check his plane out on the ’drome before listening to the Prime Minister’s announcement on the radio. Yet war doesn’t kick off immediately — the expected Blitz doesn’t come, at least not at first.

“For days there had been no action” except instructions on what to do in an air raid, the business of blacking out building and vehicles, and ominous warnings of fuel rationing that is bad news for one friend, Micky, who owns a rather fuel-thirsty Buick.

The commanding officer knows Gleed as “Leeds” (p. 14), his fellow pilots called him “Widget” or “Widge”; of the latter, he claims “I don’t know why” (p. 15), but Wikipedia suggests it was because he wasn’t very tall. He must have known that but chose not to say, the first of several examples of him not being entirely honest with the reader.

Given a forty-eighter, or 48 hours’ leave, he heads to Herne Bay with his girlfriend Pam, where they sail his boat to Broadstairs — where she lives — without formal permission to be in the water, running the risk of being apprehended or hitting mines. They chance their luck anyhow and, “It was a wizard day,” he says (p. 19) — an adjective he uses a lot. So here he is, cheerful, optimistic, a bit gleefully mischievous. 

Yet this scene and several that follow read very differently when we know Pamela didn’t exist. Gleed later claimed he invented a girlfriend for the book because reader’s like a romance. But in later years, some people who knew Gleed claimed he was gay. So I found myself reading the frequent references to Pam wondering if she was entirely invented, and how much she might stand in for someone else, a man Gleed was close to but did not dare put in print.

For example, Gleed has a last weekend with his parents in Finchley before being posted to France. His mum has amassed a great wealth of supplies for him to take, including two rolls of loo paper; his father — a veteran of the First World War — knows he’ll want to travel light. Meanwhile,

“Daphne, my sister, ‘phoned up Pam for me, and asked her to come and stay the night with us—rather a tall order for her, as she was at home at Broadstairs. She said that she would be arriving at Victoria at ten that evening, and would I meet her?” (p. 24)

He and Pam stay up until the early hours talking, and in the morning Mum can barely keep the tears back, Daphne has to blow her nose a lot, “and Pam and Dad smiled.” If Pam never existed, did something like this still play out, with Daphne — perhaps knowing more than Mum and Dad about the nature of the relationship — inviting someone else?

Then there are some other encounters. In France, Gleed arrives in Merville to find the place crowded with troops and refugees, but he finds a house with a huge double bed going spare, and offers to share it with another pilot, John Banks:

“He was a young boy, who was looking very tired … After asking the lady of the house to wake us at four-thirty, we retired to our room with a couple of candles, stripped and leapt into bed naked. … In two minutes I was asleep.” (p. 40).

In Lille, Gleed and another pilot are the only ones not to befriend the local sex workers and find a double room together (p. 26). It’s at least suggestive.

These infrequent moments aside, the bulk of the book is vivid descriptions of battle in the air. He gives a really good sense of the nerves before a flight and the eagerness to get airborne and have a crack at the enemy. Then, when specks of black appear in the sky, we’re suddenly “Tally-ho” and into the frantic business, the breathless style often passing into internal dialogue and the present tense. Brrrrrrrrm! he tells us, and rat tat tat, rat tat tat.

There’s a lot of slang — Gleed feels the need of footnotes to explain “bull” (red tape),  “flap” (a fuss), “a bind” (a chore), “bumf” (paper), “duffs up” (conditions becoming hazy or cloudy; by extension “duff” means anything going wrong), “force-lob” (forced landing), “piece of cake” (easy), “gong” (medal). I wonder how much war films are to blame for much of this passing into common use. He uses “wizard” a lot, and also “old boy” — the latter still a favourite of my paternal grandfather, who was also in the RAF in the war; it's how he addressed me in my teens and twenties. 

Gleed uses “damned” and “bastard” but there are several instances of a censored “b——s”, not least in referring to the enemy. There are also footnotes for the technical terms used by the RAF: “gen” (genuine information, to be relied on), “black-out” (rendered unconscious by by pulling too quickly out of a dive or turning too quickly), “perspex” and “glasshouse” (the hood of the cockpit), and “super-readiness” (pilots sitting in their planes so they can be airborne in 15 seconds). Pilots shout “Contact” to ground crews when their planes are starting up, and wish one another “Good hunting”. A system for producing a little extra speed is known as a “tit”, which results in an extraordinary sentence in the midst of one scrap:

“I was balls out with the tit pulled” (p. 79).

He’s good on other details: the role of batmen in running round after their pilots, getting them washed and packed and fed; the different types of Hurricane screw; the physical impact of flying (lots of sweating, plus sore arms); and the nature of tests conducted on pilots — a naked examination where Gleed is worried about having dirty feet, then a sight test involving being able to discern tiny letters or figures on a colour background, then blowing a bubble of mercury up a tube and holding it there, as seen in The Right Stuff. 

There’s also good detail on what pilots do in their time off. There’s a lot of drinking — one evening involves, “sherry, champagne and port; then, after that, beer” (p. 15). Once promoted to Wing Commander, Gleed is a bit more careful:

“We all drank orange squash, much to Robbie’s disgust. I was strict about that, as we had a long time to wait, and it’s so damned easy to drink quietly away, not noticing how many beers you have; by the time midnight came we would have been in no condition for a ground-straff. So orange squash it was.” (p. 93)

We learn the pilots share a copy of the book Gone With the Wind (p. 55), read detective novels and magazines, and go to the flicks or the theatre — after getting his gong from the King at Buckingham Palace, Gleed has lunch at the Savoy and then sees Cottage to Let. Pilots lark about, build model aircraft, eat lots of bacon and eggs and worry about getting their tea. It’s a convivial fraternity with Cock, Robbie, Dusty, Watty, Dinky, Beaver, Dickie, Rubber, etc — and so all the more shocking when some of these chaps don’t come home. There’s a poignant chapter in which a few men attend the funeral of one man, Squadron-Leader “Shuvvel” Forbes, killed in the big blitz on 14 August 1940. He’s from New Zealand so has no relatives nearby; his colleagues fly in for the ceremony, place their wreaths and then fly back to HQ ready for the next scrap, trying not to think too much about their own mortality.

All in all, this is an invaluable primary source. For all that bits may be invented, it conjures the sounds and atmosphere. The tone of it, the I-say-you-chaps, is very like the other books I’ve read on the subject and the films of the time, though I think anyone writing about the Battle of Britain or the pilots of the time — my forthcoming Doctor Who — The Missing Hour involves Hurricane pilots on Malta around this same period — may find it too easy to fall into pastiche. That would be a pity given that this book, this record of a man on borrowed time, is so bracingly alive.

I have also been recommended Flying to the Limit (1996) by Roland Beaumont, who flew with Gleed. More on that to come...

Jean Steps Out, by Jean Kitson

Published this month, Jean Steps Out: The Memoirs of a Yorkshire Actress in Rep 1946-1959 is an account by Jean Kitson (1928-2020) of her years with Harry Hanson’s Court Players in Leeds, Bradford, Sheffield, Keighley, Chester, Stockport and Swansea. It’s been published by her son David, who provides notes, a list of his mother’s known stage performances and biographies of the other actors in the company. That includes Jean’s sometime boyfriend, David Whitaker, about whom I wrote a book.

Jean and David were both in the cast of Murder at the Vicarage at the Prince’s Theatre, Bradford, performed during the week of 19-24 February 1951, and rehearsed the week before. They remained in Bradford for the next couple of months and then both transferred to the Theatre Royal, Leeds, their last known credit together Night Call, which ran from 24 to 29 November 1952. In the new year, David joined the Hanson company in Stockton-on-Tees and Jean rejoined the company in Bradford.

This memoir is an engaging account, full of anecdotes about the practicalities of repertory theatre: what exactly an assistant stage manager does, and how they move up to full actor; the fact Harry Hanson wouldn’t allow prompting of lines in actual performances; his kindness and support in turning up for shows across the country; the fact he chose the plays he thought his audience would pay for, imposing them on his companies. 

For a researcher like me, it’s useful to know what Jean got paid — having left school, she was on 25 shilling at week at a mill office in Morley, then £2 a week at the Inland Revenue, then £4 a week as ASM at the Theatre Royal in Leeds, so joining the theatre was a step up from ordinary work. Still, there were privations: the cold, the struggle to find costumes and props, even the accommodation. For a season of plays in south Wales, Jean had to share a bed with leading lady Joyce Cross (p. 21).

Yet this is a cheery account of a fondly remembered period. Jean’s enthusiasm for her days in rep is matched by her delight in the later success of many actors she worked with — Billie Whitelaw, Peggy Mount, Patricia Pilkington (ie Pat Phoenix), Francis Matthews and Bryan Mosley, as well as future Labour MP Gerald Kaufman. I was particularly interested to read more about names that are perhaps less well known but are familiar to me from the cast lists and reviews of David Whitaker’s own stage plays, such as Cissie Ashley, Lawrence Storm and Frank Senior.

And then, at the end, the book includes a QR code with a link to an audio recording of Jean and (it’s thought) John Whyte in a scene from the play Jean Steps Out and with John Roberts in a scene from Quiet Wedding, both recorded in 1948. The former is rather risqué — Basil calls the bluff of his fiancé’s flirtatious sister Jane by turning up in her bedroom one night. The accents are cut-glass, a hint of the north-east still discernible under vowels stretched by elocution. It’s a vivid bit of social history, suddenly alive — and gave me shivers.

Sadly, for my purposes, there’s no mention in what Jean wrote of David Whitaker, as either actor or boyfriend, but Jean’s son David has kindly told me what his mother told him. Indeed, he got in touch because he recognised his mother in one of the photos included in my biography. The memoir provides some context for that picture:

“During the summer months many of the towns we played on organised Sunday afternoon fetes and galas. Celebrities were sought on these occasions, not only to perform the opening ceremony but to crown the Carnival Queen and sometimes judge a fancy dress competition. Not having access either to Royalty or the film industry the organisers looked closer to home, and that’s where the Court Players came in handy.

“We girls always thought it was well worthwhile. I’m not sure the men were quite so enthusiastic but they gallantly came along as escorts ... For us it was a rare opportunity to dress up glamorously, be picked up with some ceremony at the Stage Door and whisked away to a summer afternoon of festivity.” (p. 66)

So here is David Whitaker, on his feet and in mid-flow, in the summer of either 1951 or 1952, presumably in Leeds. Jean is beside him in the white hat. There is a prize cup on the table in front of them, about to be awarded. David and Jean are both 23 or 24 in the picture.

Sadly, Jean probably didn’t know that David immortalised her in the names of the protagonists of his episode of Public Eye (1968) — Valerie and Eric Kitson, played by Sheila Fearn and Edward Fox.

See also:

• Jean Kitson at Theatricalia
• David Whitaker at Theatricalia

Written by Terrance Dicks book launch, 25 November

The Portico Library in Manchester will host the launch of my new biography, Written by Terrance Dicks, on the evening of 25 November. I'll be in conversation with Portico Library trustee Esther Lisk-Carew from Manchester Metropolitan University, discussing Terrance's life and career.

• Buy tickets for Written by Terrance Dicks: Book Launch with Simon Guerrier

As well as his prolific contribution to Doctor Who and the 235 books he published, Terrance was also script editor and producer of the BBC's classic serials in the 1980s. At the event, the Portico Library will display some first editions of some of the books he saw dramatised, including Jane Eyre and Oliver Twist. 

I'll also be at Target Book Club in London on 24 October. More events and details relating to the book, including how to pre-order it, to follow soon. You can already pre-order my novelisation The Six Doctors and Steve Cole's novelisation of The Vampire Mutation, both based on papers I uncovered in the course of researching the biography.

(Yes, 25 November is the anniversary of the UK broadcast of The Five Doctors.)

The Great Dictator, by Matthew Sweet

The Dr and I had a lovely time this week in That London, at the launch for this new biography of Barbara Cartland by our pal Matthew. What joy to catch up with old mates and natter to new people. 

The book is magnificent, in part because its subject is so extraordinary, at once compelling and alarming. I found the accounts of her brothers’ wartime experience especially moving, and the attempts to cash in on the family connection to Princess Diana particularly cringe-inducing. But the book is also peppered with other, extraordinary lives — the various scrapes of Commander Glen Kidston, which begins with him as a 16 year-old naval cadet being torpedoed and rescued twice in one morning in 1914 (p. 146), or the amazing locked-room mystery of a man who somehow fell from a plane (p. 148). 

As ever, Matthew has an eye for the telling detail, the incongruous and absurd — such as the promotion to give away Cartland’s books to customers of a particular butcher. As he says, she’s a major figure of the 20th century, so her life is a kind affords a new history of that period, stranger than we might expect.

It is also a new experience to be papped.

London, UK. 9 September 2026. (C) Simon Guerrier, writer, attends the launch party of The Great Dictator: A Life of Barbara Cartland by Matthew Sweet (Hodder & Stoughton) taking place at The Warburg Institute in Woburn Square. Guests were encouraged to wear pink to honour Barbara Cartland. Credit: Stephen Chung / Alamy Live News

See also: me on Bookish Volume II by Matthew Sweet.

The Masters, by CP Snow

First published in 1951, this is the fourth of Snow’s “Strangers and Brothers” novels, which chart the life of lawyer and scholar Lewis Eliot (the series that originated the phrase “corridors of power”). This one, spanning 1937, begins with Eliot, now based at an unnamed Cambridge college, informed that the beloved master there is dying of cancer — but doesn’t know it himself. The master’s wife, out of love, wants to let him enjoy what life remains.

While Eliot and his colleagues debate the ethics of this, they also discuss which of them will succeed the master — or whether the unthinkable might happen, with someone brought in from outside. Yet when two candidates put themselves forward, the electors are split seven to six. Eliot favours a man called Jago, but others think him too ordinary, his wife too presumptuous and overbearing. Before the old master is dead, the campaigning starts to get nasty…

There didn’t seem much substance to this not-quite-comedy of manners, at least to begin with. But as the months pass and word comes through of things seen and heard on the Continent, the petty squabbles, egos and viciousness of this small college become an analogy for something greater — politics and honour and relationships and values in the shadow of looming war. 

It’s also peppered with strange, sad details. There’s a particularly haunting moment relatively late on, when Lady Muriel finally tells her husband the truth, that he will not recover from his cancer. Until this moment, the lie about his condition has been a burden for Lady Muriel and the others in the college, but telling him offers little solace. Though ill and getting ever thinner, the master had been ploughing on with a book. Now that abruptly halts, because, “It’s hard to think without a future,” he says.

Then there’s what the news does to his relationship with his wife:

“But the hardest blow for her was that in looking towards his death, he seemed to have forgotten her.”

Indeed, a close friend, Roy Calvert, reveals to Eliot that the master and his wife have long had problems.

“Theirs had not been a joyous marriage. The Master might have brought happiness to many women, Roy said, but somehow he had never set her free.” (p. 126)

It’s all quietly devastating, but I’m also really struck by that conception of what a good marriage should be — liberating and empowering, so that your partner takes flight.

The campaign against Jago is horrible, and reminded me of the villainous Mrs Gamart in The Bookshop by Penelope Fitzgerald, whose malicious campaign is just as destructive. It’s also horribly misogynist, and there’s a lot here about a little world of men, petty and jealous and vain, who are — for all some of them have the potential to be brilliant — all in their ways little men. 

I thought one younger member of the group might be different, a scientist called Luke. But then he has some success in puzzling out a new theory, and goes full on Swiss Tony:

“It’s wonderful … when you’ve got a problem that is really coming out. It’s like making love — suddenly you unconscious takes control. And nothing can stop you. You know that you’re making old Mother Nature sit up and beg. And you say to her, ‘I’ve got you, you old bitch.’ You’ve got her just where you want her. Then to show there’s no ill-feeling, you give her an affectionate pinch on the bottom.” (p. 268)

The story ends with with some last-minute shenanigans over who will vote for whom, the result of the election and the loser being brave. One wonders how agreeably things might continue in the college given the way people have behaved. But the sense from Eliot is that some kind of order is restored — though, as readers, we know they’re all now under the cloud of war. That’s explored in the next novel in the sequence, The New Man (1954).

Snow then provides a 12-page appendix with the history of his fictional college. A bit to my surprise, I found this compelling. He charts how, in the middle ages, an informal gathering of locals seeking advantage in trade abroad, which meant learning some Latin and maths, slowly gained structure and architecture. While the colleges and university — the two are apparently distinct — have existed for a thousand years, we’re told that most of its traditions are just a few generations old. The implication is that its history is fiction, but it’s an invented place anyway, based on fact.