New short story in What The World Needs Now, ed. Martin Edwards

I have a short story in the forthcoming anthology What The World Needs Now: Mystery Stories Inspired by the Music of Burt Bacharach, edited by Martin Edwards and with an introduction by Rupert Holmes. 

It’s being published by Level Best Books to raise money for autism charities in the US and UK. What The World Needs Now will be published on 30 June in the US and 7 July in the UK, and is available to preorder on Kindle at Amazon:

• What the World Needs Now on Amazon.co.uk
• What the World Needs Now on Amazon.com

I’ll share the title of my story and more details in due course. Blurb for the book as follows: 

What the World Needs Now is a book of brand new mystery short stories written by leading crime writers from around the world, inspired by the music of Burt Bacharach, to raise funds for autism charities in the US and UK.

Burt Bacharach is popular music’s closest equivalent to Agatha Christie, a hugely successful and innovative composer whose work is loved by millions across the world and continues to influence countless songwriters to this day.

Edgar and Diamond Dagger award-winning author Martin Edwards has put together a collection of hugely entertaining new mystery stories, each taking a title (and often much more than that) from a Bacharach song as the starting point. The result is a fascinating anthology that will appeal to mystery lovers everywhere.

Charles Todd, Mark Billingham, Ragnar Jonasson, and Abir Mukherjee are among the bestselling contributors to a book that is not only unique but dedicated to a truly worthwhile cause. 

All proceeds from What The World Needs Now will be donated by the publishers to autism charities in the US and UK.

Martin posted last month that other writers include Sarah Hilary, Rhian Waller and me. 

It’s been a delight to get to know Martin — and go for lunches — as I’m a big fan of his work. I’ve previously posted about his epic The Life of Crime and he is consultant on the British Library Crime Classics, including the following ones I have wittered about:

• Green for Danger, by Christianna Brand (1944)
• The Widow of Bath, by Margot Bennett (1952)  
• The Man Who Didn’t Fly, by Margot Bennett (1955)
• Someone from the Past, by Margot Bennett (1958)

A Riot of Writers, by Terrance Dicks

First published on 16 July 1992, this was the second of a series of illustrated, non-fiction comedy titles written by Terrance Dicks for Piccadilly Press. 

Terrance had written numerous children’s books for Piccadilly since it was launched in 1984, and before that worked with the company’s founder, Brenda Gardner, at both Target Books and Pepper Press. This run of comedy titles seem to have been a conscious effort to try something a bit different, aimed at a broader and more grown-up audience than the usual fare. 

The first, Europe United (published 10 October 1991) was well timed given the imminent signing of the Maastricht Treaty, and was well received, too. In the Sunday Times, Harry Enfield called it, “The best Eurobook … bright and amusing … intelligent and great fun.” In the Guardian, Stephanie Nettle said it had, “A snappily amusing style”. They’re cited on the back of this follow-up.

As with Europe United, A Riot of Writers was illustrated by Ray Jelliffe, a former creative director in a large advertising agency who now, in his retirement, kept busy illustrating books and greetings cards. My suspicion, based on previous books by Terrance, is that the writer didn’t brief the illustrator. Instead, Jelliffe would have received the manuscript and then devised his cartoons, as a sort of commentary on the text.

The book is a guide to what Terrance calls “Eng Lit”, as though this is revision for an exam. It provides potted biographies of 30 writers, from Geoffrey Chaucer (1340-1400) to Ernest Hemingway (1898-1961), or to JRR Tolkien (1892-1973) if reckoning by the subject latest to die. Of this 30, there are four entries on women: Jane Austen, the Brontë sisters (sharing a chapter), George Eliot and Virginia Woolf. 

It’s interesting to compare Terrance’s choice of canonical authors with the much shorter list compiled by FR Leavis, Terrance’s tutor at Downing College, Cambridge, in the 1950s. In The Great Tradition (1948), Leavis decided that the canon of Great Authors comprised Austen, Eliot, Henry James and Joseph Conrad, though he also allowed a single book by Dickens, Hard Times. Terrance skips James and Conrad entirely, and clearly doesn’t think much of Eliot, though conceding that Middlemarch is a “masterpiece”.

Throughout, the style is chatty and irreverent, reminiscent of the later Horrible Histories books by Terry Deary (the initial pair of which were first published a year after this book, in June 1993). The humour is a bit end-of-the-pier, akin to Terrance’s early days in radio comedy, and sometimes a bit bawdy. For example, in the entry on Byron, we’re told:

“Fashionable hostesses were delighted to have him — and not just for dinner” (p. 46).

There are jokes, too, about bisexuality and homosexuality (the Bloomsbury group, for example, had enjoyed a “gay old time”), which all seems a bit mature for a title from a children’s publisher by a well-known children’s author, even if this isn’t explicitly marketed as a children’s book. It’s a kind of humour, and a book, from another time.

Terrance acknowledge’s Kipling’s chauvinism, and provides examples, but his attitude to Carrie Kipling is a bit judgemental.

“Kipling married Carrie — or perhaps she married him. She certainly ran his life from then on, doing his accounts, fixing his appointments, protecting him from visitors” (p. 120).

The sense is of a domineering figure, rather than this being something Kipling might welcome, or need. There is something similar going on in descriptions of both Chaucer’s Wife of Bath (p. 3) and Shakespeare’s Lady Macbeth (p. 7) as being “an early feminist” — the gag feels all the more condescending because it’s repeated so soon. 

The only mention of Henry James in the whole book is his reference to George Elliot as “magnificently ugly” (p. 83). Yes, this is Terrance reporting what was said at the time, but other authors are are not judged on their looks. In his entry on George Bernard Shaw, for example, he could have cited the famous story about Isadora Duncan suggesting that a child of theirs would inherit her beauty and his brains; Shaw quipped that it might be the other way round.

Terrance mentions that The Invisible Man by HG Wells was adapted for television, but not that he worked on this production. Several of the authors in his canon here were dramatised under Terrance’s era as script editor then producer of the BBC-1 Classic Serials: Dickens, Charlotte Brontë, Doyle, Kipling and Wells. 

I’ve seen paperwork in which Terrance says he didn’t think Austen was suitable for the Sunday teatime serial, so it’s interesting to see here his evident admiration of her work. He also admires Shaw for the strident women at the forefront of many plays. Terrance, of course, borrowed from Pygmalion in Doctor Who, with the character arc of Jo Grant. Like Eliza Doolittle, Jo outgrows her tutor and leaves him heartbroken. But Terrance often downplayed his role in that and the creation of Sarah Jane Smith, who began life stridently championing women’s lib to sisters in the middle ages and in outer space. 

He also quotes a line from Shaw’s Arms and the Man with approval — it’s a very Terrance sentiment:

“You can always tell an old soldier … The young ones carry pistols and cartridges, the old ones grub” (p. 108)

There’s a joke on p. 10 at the expense of Jonathan Miller, who had repeatedly criticised the Classic Serials, Terrance apparently still rankled about it. Some of what’s here helpfully confirms my theories about Terrance’s views on particular authors or modes of writing. I’m delighted to find, for example, that he did have a contemporary drama in mind when commissioning his first Classic Serial, Kipling’s Stalky & Co:

“The Grange Hill of its day, it was severely criticised for the ‘horrible vileness’ of its picture of English public school life” (p. 121).

His thoughts on other writers are interesting, too. While Terrance was at Cambridge, his tutor FR Leavis published DH Lawrence, Novelist (1955), and I’ve evidence that Leavis passed on his enthusiasm for Lawrence to his students. Yet Terrance was not persuaded, or reassessed Lawrence in the years afterward.

He speaks — presumably from first-hand experience — of the “well-thumbed, smuggled-in copies” of Lady Chatterley’s Lover that were all that were available until Penguin published its paperback edition in 1960. Then he shares his judgment: 

“Lawrence describes their love-making in graphic detail, using well-known four-letter words in the process. Despite its lurid reputation Lady Chatterley’s Lover is a worthwhile attempt to describe physical love in plain and honest language. To be honest, it doesn’t really work. Tweeness keeps creeping in. The couple refer to their respective naughty bits as ‘John Thomas’ and ‘Lady Jane’ and there’s an incident with a daisy-chain you’ll never see demonstrated on Gardeners’ World.” (p. 145)

Then there’s his assessment of Lawrence as a whole:

“He was a genuine pioneer, and his reputation has suffered ever since. Despite some weird, almost fascist ideas about the deep dark stirrings in the blood, and the need for an intellectual elite, Lawrence at his best is a wonderful writer. The characters he creates, their emotional relationships and the worlds they live in are real and solid, completely convincing.” (p. 144)

There are several places here where I disagree with Terrance and a couple of occasions where he’s misremembered the details of a classic text (he says, of The Time Machine, that the Eloi prey on Morlocks, not the other way round). But this is a fascinating account of what Terrance thought constituted great writing: basically, a good story grounded in real characters and real situations. For example, he suggests that the power of The Hobbit, and why it still sits above its many imitators, is not the epic imaginative fantasy, but the relatable stuff.

“Small, tubby and timid, caught up in the wars of great men and magical beings, the hobbit makes the most reluctant of heroes. All he asks is to survive and to get home to a blazing fire, a pipe, a flagon of ale and four square meals a day.” (p. 149)

It’s exactly what I’ve seen in his Doctor Who novelisations. You can judge the best of English literature by its meals.

***

For more of this kind of thing, see my big list of the 236 books written by Terrance Dicks, with links to posts about them. My biography, Written by Terrance Dicks, will be published by Ten Acre Books later this year.

Here are some posts about books by authors in Terrance’s canon of Eng Lit:

• Agnes Grey, by Anne Brontë
• The Tenant of Wildfell Hall, by Anne Brontë
• David Copperfield, by Charles Dickens
• Our Mutual Friend, by Charles Dickens
• The Sign of the Four, by Arthur Conan Doyle
• The Jungle Book, by Rudyard Kipling
• Kim, by Rudyard Kipling
• A Short History of the World, by HG Wells

A Hard Day’s Night, by Samira Ahmed

I really enjoyed this engaging insightful study of the first Beatles movie, filmed and released in 1964. It’s the first book written by my friend Samira, with whom I’ve made various documentaries for the BBC, and it’s amazing what she packs into the 128 pages. I thought I knew the film pretty well, but now want to watch it again to pick up on the little details and big connections.

In her “Introduction”, Samira explains some of the cultural context from which the film came, and her own relationship with it. In “Watching A Hard Day’s Night”, she recounts what happens on screen. This is much more than a summary of the plot, chock full of insights about what we see, and things for us to go back and spot, like the cameo by Bob Godfrey (p. 56) — he of Roobarb (1974), Henry’s Cat (1983-93) and the Academy award-winning musical animated biography of Isambard Kingdom Brunel, Great (1975).

“Making A Hard Day’s Night” is, as you’d expect, a history of the production, again full of great detail, like the fact that John and Paul so enjoyed the TV play No Trams to Lime Street (1959) by Alun Owen, who wrote the screenplay for this Beatles film, that they wrote four pages of a script in the same style, called Pilchard (pp. 72-73). I was particularly struck by what inspired Owen in setting out to write a film about the Beatles: seeing them in Dublin, he had a sense of them trapped by their commitments, their public, the whole machine (p. 73). 

“A Hard Day’s Night and TV” is about what the film shows us of (fictional) live TV broadcasting, and a kind of light entertainment line-up that was once a staple of telly and is now historical artefact. “Women in A Hard Day’s Night” is a compelling chapter on representation, with particular focus on Millie (Anna Quayle) and the unnamed Secretary (Alison Seebohm). I’m really taken with Samira’s idea of a movie telling the Beatles’ story from the perspective of their wives and girlfriends.

“Reception and What They Did Next” explores the critical response to the film and then what followed: another Beatles movie, Help!, also directed by Lester, and then more disparate projects. The sense is that A Hard Day’s Night was made and released quickly to cash-in on the popularity of the Beatles, assuming that the bubble wouldn’t last, but the film helped to establish them as something more than a flash-in-pan pop sensation. Then there’s a concluding chapter on “Legacy”, which ends on a poignant note.

Samira thinks a key moment in the history of all-things Beatles is the “Beatles at Christmas” season on BBC Two over Christmas 1979, not only because it’s when she discovered them but because it presented a body of work by artists. I looked up the details on Genome and Magical Mystery Tour (1967) was shown at 6.10pm on 21 December; Help! (1965) at 6.35 on 22 December; The Beatles at Shea Stadium (1965) at 5.30 on 23 December, Yellow Submarine (1968) at 5.40 on Christmas Eve and A Hard Day’s Night at 3pm Christmas Day. That they weren’t shown in chronological order suggests a value judgment; they’re in order of ascending quality, A Hard Day’s Night the best.

More of me on Beatles books:

• Revolution in the Head by Ian MacDonald
• Love and Let Die by John Higgs 

Star Trek 2, by James Blish

This second volume of prose adaptations of TV episodes was first published a year after the first, in February 1968. So says the indicia of my 3rd printing of the US edition, which is marked 50 cents on the spine but bears a sticker giving the UK price of 3/6. According to trade paper the Bookseller, it was issued in this form in the UK in August 1969, a month after Star Trek starting airing on the BBC — and three years before Corgi printed the first UK-specific editions of these Star Trek anthologies.

It looks quite different from the first Star Trek anthology, which boasted artwork by James Bama which had been commissioned to promote the TV show. Rather than commission — and have to pay for — new artwork, this volume features a photograph of what were surely considered the two leads of the series: Mr Spock and Captain Kirk (in that order). The photo is small, contained within a vertical strip of black down the centre of the otherwise white frame. The black strip includes the title “ALL NEW STAR TREK 2 adapted by James Blish”, the photo, and then the boast, 

“THE ULTIMATE TRIP! WORLDS BEYOND TIME! WORLDS BEYOND KEN! BASED ON THE EXCITING NBC-TV SERIES CREATED BY GENE RODDENBERRY”.

The back-cover blurb of the first book focused on three leading characters (Kirk, Spock and Rand), but the back cover here doesn’t name anyone:

“A GALACTIC TICKET TO INFINITE ADVENTURE! Eight journeys into the unexpected with the crew of the starship Enterprise. Travel to the unexplored reaches of outer space, to worlds where Humans are an alien race and the unusual is routine. Astonishing new worlds of strange beings, bizarre customs, unknown dangers and awesome excitement. * A world where war is fought by computers! * A world inhabited by great lizard-like creatures of conquest! * A world ravaged by a relentless plague of madness and death! * A world where life has developed beyond the need for physical bodies! * TRAVEL NOW TO THE BOLD NEW WORLDS OF TOMORROW.”

There’s a second blurb, inside the front page, largely cribbed from the first volume, but now the three leads are Kirk, Spock and Lt Uhura. The latter has usurped Yeoman Janice Rand in her shipmates’ affections but is described in almost all the same words:

“Easily the most popular member of the crew, the truly ‘out-of-this-world’ female has drawn the important assignment of scan engineer on her first mission in deep space.”

There’s no mention that she’s black, or Bantu (the word used repeatedly about her in the first book). Did the publishers fear that mentioning this, or showing the third-lead on the cover, might affect their sales?

The book is dedicated,

“To my new-found relative BARBARA BESADNY and all the other Star Trek fans who wrote to me about the first book”

In later books, Blish referred to extensive correspondence he received about Star Trek, not least once the TV series was cancelled. The first book had been dedicated to Harlan Ellison, a writer on the series, but from now on when Blish dedicated a book it was to female fans. Spock Must Die! (1970) is dedicated “to Kay Anderson”, Star Trek 4 (first published in the US in July 1971) is dedicated.

“To DONNA WOODMAN and the the other new English Star Trek fans”,

Star Trek 9 (1973) is dedicated “To Maire Steele” and Star Trek 10 (1974) “to KARIN who also wanted to set Spock to music”. It gives the impression, at least, of an active, engaged and female-led fandom.

Star Trek 2 boasts the same page count as the first volume (128pp including unnumbered pages), but comprises eight stories rather than seven. They are: Arena (12pp); A Taste of Armageddon (13pp); Tomorrow is Yesterday (15pp); Errand of Mercy (15pp); Court Martial (16pp); Operation — Annihilate! (18pp); The City on the Edge of Forever (17pp); and Space Seed (17pp). 

The original plan had been to pack eighth stories into the first volume, too, and I wonder if Blish and the publishers felt it represented better value to feature more stories. The result, of course, is that the adaptations here are even breezier than before.

The running order seems determined by ascending page count rather than broadcast order or the continuity of the TV series, such as in the use of star dates. Even so, Blish includes a few references in later stories to earlier ones (and to events in the first volume), so there’s a sense of a continuing saga. 

We gain some new information, and some corrections to statements in the first volume. We’re in the 23rd century (p. 114) not the 27th and we’re told more than once that the Enterprise can’t land on planets (not the implication in the first book). Blish also moves events of Tomorrow is Yesterday from the 1960s, as on screen, to 1970 — which he gives as the year of the first Moon landing (p. 28). The same story, but the setting bumped along so it is / was still in the near future.

The Enterprise has a crew of 430 (p. 1), where before the figure was a vague 400+. A quarter of the crew are female, and there are 12 ships like Enterprise in the fleet (both facts from p. 30). Warp Four is 64 times the speeds of light, or “64c” (p. 26), while,

“Warp Eight [is] two factors above maximum safe speed” and “over a hundred times the speed of light” (p. 2).

However, Warp Eight is used only in emergencies and not for long, as it would damage the ship (p. 38).

In one story, Scotty refers to the Enterprise’s protective “screens” (p. 22), but in the next story it’s the more familiar “deflector shields” (p. 31). A single star date is given in the whole book: Lt Col Ben Finney “died” in 2947.3 (p. 59).

Not everything is taken from the TV episodes, or from draft scripts containing extra or contrary details. It’s been fun to spot things that are surely all from Blish. Tomorrow is Yesterday features a character called John Christopher; here, Spock refers to the “popular author” or the same name (p. 33), whom Blish surely knew in person.

Later, in Space Seed, Kirk is annoyed at being asphyxiated twice in the same hour (p. 120), Blish rather hanging a lantern on the repetition in the TV story. He also gives Kirk’s perspective a wry humour, such as his response — in the narration but from his point of view, when Spock tries to use telepathy on a guard holding them both prisoner:

“Nothing seemed to happen for at least five centuries, or maybe six” (p. 16).

I’m sure that scholars before me have dissected these anthologies by what’s in the TV episode, what in a draft script and what Blish threw in for his own amusement. He opens City on the Edge of Forever with a seven-line footnote explaining that it draws from both TV version and draft script (p. 89), apparently the only example where he consciously mashed up the sources. 

My suspicion is that the TV episodes are riddled with continuity errors, where a fact given in one episode doesn’t quite match a fact given in another. We might not notice on first viewing, not least with a week between each episodes. But the brevity of the adaptations here, the speed we can hare through several episodes at once, means we’re more likely to pick up on this stuff. 

The most striking bits of continuity, for me, are those that overlap with the later Star Trek movies of the 1980s — the bits of Trek with which I’m most familiar. In Tomorrow is Yesterday, the suggestion that a pilot from 1970 could travel with the the Enterprise into the future is quickly dismissed as he would be,

“archaic, useless, a curiosity” (p. 35).

But that’s in no way the fate of cetologist Dr Gillian Taylor in Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home (1986), who finds a useful role in the future. That’s all the more striking because that film clearly drew directly from this episode in its method of time travel by flying the Enterprise close to the Sun (p. 36).

Likewise, in Operation — Annihilate!, the Enterprise fires “two fully armed planet-wreckers” that explode with “atomic fire” and destroy a whole plant, leaving behind a nebula (p. 87). This seems to be standard if rarely used artillery on board but in another episode, The Doomsday Machine (adapted in Star Trek 3) and the movie Star Trek III: The Search for Spock, the very idea of a planet-destroying weapon is a new, horrific kind of menace.

The final story here is Space Seed, which ends with Kirk sending a gang of villains to settle a new world. He worries that this crop from this seed (his words) might one day come looking for him again, which is exactly what happens in Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan. But in that, the villains are found dwelling on the planet’s surface in their old ship Botany Bay. Here, Kirk sends them down to the planet without their ship, and keeps Botany Bay in tow, thinking it might be of interest to historians. 

Space Seed, of course, involves villainous eugenicist megalomaniac who hails from the 1990s, here called Sibyl Khan Noonien— Blish working from draft scripts — and “dictator of his own breed” (p. 116). Our first sight of him presents an exotic mix of different racial characteristics:

“bathed in a gentle violet glow was a motionless, naked man. He was extremely handsome, and magnificently built. His face reflected the sun-ripened Aryan blood of the Northern Indian Sikhs, with just an additional suggestion on the oriental. Even in repose, his features suggested strength, intelligence, even arrogance.” (p. 108)

Here and elsewhere, what a person looks like is an indicator of their character and inner thoughts, which is all a bit racist for a story about eugenicists being bad. Blish also uses “oriental” as a synonym for “alien”:

“The Klingons were hard-faced, hard-muscled men, originally of Oriental stock” (p. 44). 

That surely implies they originated on Earth. In the next book Spock’s quarters are “simple, sparse and vaguely Oriental” (Star Trek 3, p. 106) and here, at the end of Tomorrow is Yesterday, in a sequence not in the TV version, he quotes from “Omar” (Star Trek 2, p. 39); Spock is not only familiar with the Rubáiyát of Omar Khayyám, but on first-name terms with its author.

Dr McCoy refers to “basic humanoid stock” and to the “genetic drift” of a population of colonists who left Earth centuries previously (p. 95). He’s not exactly tactful in his choice of words: elsewhere, he refers to people afflicted by alien parasites as “vegetables” (p. 74). 

The same page features oddly vernacular phrasing from Spock, when he refers to the alien parasites:

"they wanted to brain us” (p. 74).

I also thought Kirk saying “Blooey” and referring to “Miss Uhura” (both p. 27) oddly out of character. It’s from Kirk’s perspective that we first see Edith Keeler in The City at the Edge of Forever. 

“The girl … was simply dressed and not very pretty” (p. 96)

That’s extraordinary for a character played by Joan Collins and with whom Kirk is about to fall in love. Indeed, “No woman was ever loved as much”, we’re told at the end of the story. There’s a tender moment between Spock and Kirk, when the former offers to take his grieving friend to Vulcan, where the nights are long and restful. Kirk responds that they have “all the time in the world” (p. 105).

This isn’t in the broadcast version so must come from Harlan Ellison’s original draft. (I thought, initially, that “all the time in the world” might be Blish linking these tragic events to another grieving hero, but the James Bond film On Her Majesty’s Secret Service was released in 1969, a year after this book. ETA Steven Flanagan points out that it is the last line of the novel, published in 1963, so perhaps Blish did have that in mind...)

Blish also says that these closing moments are the first time Spock calls Kirk “Jim” (p. 105), a key moment. It’s all a much more emotional scene between the two men than the TV version. I wonder: was Blish responding to those active female fans and what they saw — and wanted to see — in the relationship?

The adventure will continue in Star Trek 3...

Project Hail Mary, by Andy Weir

After delivering a manuscript a couple of weeks ago, I celebrated by taking the Lord of Chaos to see Project Hail Mary at the cinema, having heard good things. We loved it to pieces, and I was inspired to try the book on some recent long drives.

While following much the same plot, the book is markedly different from the film. There are some additional scenes in the book, and a scene in the film that lets us know the fate of one principal character that we don't get in the novel. 

The plot, for those that don't know - and without giving too much in the way of spoilers - involves an astronaut waking up with amnesia to find himself the sole survivor of a mission to deep space. As he figures out who and where he is, fragments of memory come back to him and we piece together his role in an ambitious global effort to save Earth's Sun. Then it turns out that it's not Earth involved...

I found the book version of Ryland Grace a lot more annoying than the one on screen. He's a bit of a jerk, for example publishing an academic paper in which he names all the academics with whom he has  quarrelled, or telling us that he wants to slap the parents of kids who don't know bits of physics he takes for granted. He refers to "manned" rather than "crewed" missions into space, and is pedantic about the continuity of Predator movies when there are other, more pressing matters (eg the extinction of all life on Earth). He's maverick, lone-wolf free-thinker or, in layman's language, a dick.

Effectively, the book and film are a series of puzzles to solve: who is this guy, why's he out in space, how does he (and humanity and someone else) answer an existential threat. Like The Martian (also by Weir and also a very good film), the effort to overcome disaster using science, courage and wit is really compelling. There's also a relationship at the heart of this story, two characters learning to understand one another, that makes the whole thing really sing.

But the wonders and emotion here are slightly constrained in the book version because Grace has such a limited vocabulary. Things are often simply either "awesome" or "bad", or in extremis really awesome or really bad. Like, really really bad. Have I told you how bad? I mean, really.

The result is that his - and our - encounters with extraordinary phenomena and the most profound experience can sometimes feel as though they're narrated by Steve from The Lego Movie. (The Lord of Chaos, overhearing some of Ray Porter narrating the audiobook, thought it might have been Walter Sobchak from The Big Lebowski. Yes, there's an element of that, too.)

The point of the book, paid off in the closing chapters, is that this maverick selfish loner is ultimately faced with a dilemma that would require him to be selfless, entirely out of character. So yes, he's meant to be kind of a jerk. But I think that makes it harder to believe that, early on when he's teaching kids at primary school, they all seem to love him and eagerly play along in the physics quiz. Kids have an unerring eye for weakness or any kind of character flaw. Surely one of them would pick on Mr Grace having no friends...

Still, this jitter about the main character aside, it's a thrilling, smart book - and even more compelling film. And I'm haunted by the mention, in the book not in the film, that someone waits alone for 46 years before a auspicious meeting. Amaze amaze amaze.

See also: me on Artemis by Andy Weir

Stalky & Co, by Rudyard Kipling

A fortnight ago, I was again at the BBC’s Written Archives Centre to undertake more research for my forthcoming biography of Terrance Dicks. Among the files I looked at were “RCONT22-617-1 Hall James Andew 1980-84” and “RCONT22-90-1 Baron Alexander 1980-84”, which provided some useful material on Terrance’s time as script editor of BBC-1’s Sunday tea-time Classic Serials.

Paperwork I saw at WAC shows that Terrance’s predecessor, Alistair Bell, was still in post as late as 21 May 1980, when he accepted the script for the first episode of Great Expectations, dramatised by James Andrew Hall. This acceptance meant Hall had the go-ahead to write the remaining scripts. Great Expectations was broadcast in 13 episodes between October and December 1981, with Terrance credited as script editor — his first credit on Classic Serials.

Meanwhile, producer Barry Letts commissioned his own dramatisation, Gulliver in Lilliput. As well as writing the scripts, Letts directed all four episodes, broadcast in January 1982.

That left Terrance to find a six-episode story to complete the 22-episode “season”. The earliest document I can find relating to his time as script editor is from his own archive of papers. On 2 June 1980, he wrote a to-do list in a notebook. He had to write The Cop Catchers (the latest novel involving the Baker Street Irregulars), then the novelisation Doctor Who and the Monster of Peladon, then an outline for a never-published original novel. On the next page of the notebook, so on or after 2 June, he listed three potential Classic Serials: The War of the Worlds, “Edwin Drood — solved” and The 39 Steps. He clearly wanted to take the series in a more action-adventure direction.

After some back and forth over suitable, available choices, on 18 September Terrance formally commissioned his first Classic Serial: Stalky & Co by Rudyard Kipling, dramatised by Alexander Baron. He inherited Baron, who’d dramatised Sense & Sensibility for Bell earlier that same year, just the latest in a line of dramatisations and original plays. 

Terrance clearly got on with him: Baron dramatised several more classics for Terrance: The Hound of the Baskervilles (1982); Jane Eyre (1983); Goodbye Mr Chips (1984); Oliver Twist (1985); and the 16-part epic Vanity Fair (1987), the penultimate Classic Serial. He also dramatised a six-part serial for Terrance where the scripts were accepted and Baron paid in full, but the production was then cancelled. More on this in my forthcoming book....

The choice of Stalky & Co at the start of their ongoing relationship is really interesting. It’s a book of stories about three naughty schoolboys at a minor public school in the mid to late 19th century, and not exactly in step with 1980, all punk, Grange Hill (1978-2008) and The Empire Strikes Back. My wife has been entranced by Baron’s later dramatisations for Terrance but this one left her utterly cold. There’s little to like about this cruel, privileged trio in their cruel, privileged world. There are almost no women in it at all. What was Terrance thinking?

Well, Terrance was a big fan of Kipling: as I’ve posted before, Kim was among his favourite books. But that is set in India and told on a huge scale. Stalky & Co was better suited to a TV budget, being set in England, with three principal characters and a smallish supporting cast. 

Perhaps this particular book also offered a twist on Grange Hill, which — as detailed in Box of Delights by Richard Marson — caused a storm of outrage by showing badly behaved school kids at an ordinary comprehensive. Stalky & Co presents badly behaved school kids at a posh, Victorian school, perhaps suggesting a legacy of hijinks, that this stuff is not new. I also wonder if, in 1980, Stalky & Co seemed relevant because of the Thatcher government, elected the previous year, being so full of public school old boys. In that sense, it offers a view of how those leaders, or their kind, were forged.

The stories certainly resonated with later generations of pupils at posh schools. My edition, published in 1950 by Macmillan, boasts a sticker saying it was bought for Brown's House Libray in 1951 and was surely read by students there given that it still included a bookmark of someone’s chemistry homework. I suspect the stories reminded Terrance of his own school, East Ham Grammar School for Boys, to which he gained entry as a working-class boy from East London — an outsider.

As detailed in Baron’s own memoir, he was also a a working-class boy from East London, who joined the Communist Party in his youth. I can see both dramatist and script editor being fascinated by the power dynamics, the anthopology, of this strange, elite world as conveyed in these stories. If so, I think they played that down in the TV version.

At least, I think that sense of anthropological study is more pronounced in the book. The nine stories were originally published separately in magazines, beginning with the two-part “Slaves of the Lamp” in consecutive issues of Cosmopolis: A Literary Review in April and May 1897. Part I involves three schoolboys (Stalky, M’Turk and Beetle), engaged in rehearsals for a school pantomime and getting their own back on a teacher who treats them severely. Part II is set decades later, when Beetle — now a man — hears of his former friend Stalky’s heroic exploits in India, turning the tables on his foes. The implication is that school, and the outwitting of rules and teachers, has been a training ground for the adventure of empire.

To this base, the book adds a further seven stories, all from the schoolboy period. Stalky, M’Turk and Beetle (the latter based on Kipling himself) get into various scrapes. In several episodes they enact a kind of justice or revenge. The man who accuses them of thieving is framed to look like a thief; the master who accuses them of trespass is framed to look like a trespasser; the rival House that accuses our heroes of stinking is made to stink. In one story, a teacher even engages the three boys to deal with a bully.

The boys smoke pipes and sneak alcoholic drinks. Their larks include spitting on wild rabbits, shooting and killing a cat, and stealing and pawning each other’s watches to spend the money on tuck. The sense is that this is all meant to be fun, and its based on close observation of real experience, but I didn’t warm to these boys very much.

Even so, it’s interesting how Baron — and Terrance and the team — approached the dramatisation. In surviving paperwork, Terrance implores Baron to stick as closely as possible to the book, and to Kipling’s original dialogue. Yet there are significant differences. For example, the first TV episode is based on “An Unsavoury Interlude”. In the book version, the three friends are out in the countryside one afternoon. Beetle leaves his friends, and M’Turk and Stalky decide to shoot a rabbit.

“Hi! There’s a bunny. No, it ain’t. It’s a cat, by Jove! You plug first.” (p. 75)

They then hide this cat in the rafters of a rival House, and over time it stinks out the place, making their rivals smell bad. Yet in the TV version, Beetle is with his two friends for the rabbit shoot and, being short-sighted, he shoots a cat by mistake. It’s the same nasty incident, but not so cruel.

The choice of stories to dramatise is also interesting. The TV serial adapted six of the nine stories in the book Stalky and Co, but BBC paperwork shows that rights were agreed — with Kipling’s work still in copyright — to three other stories about Stalky and his friends: “Regulus” (1917), “The United Idolators” (1924) and “The Propagation of Knowledge” (1926). None of these ended up on screen. 

Of the three stories skipped from the original book, “Slaves of the Lamp Part II” was obviously cut because it largely describes events in India, decades after the boys leave school, so would have entailed a different, older cast and expensive location filming. “The Impressionists”, set in the boys’ school days, includes a plot element where the boys lend money to their peers, and there are references to “Shylock” and other antisemitic phrases. I can see why Alexander Baron, born Alexander Bernstein, felt he could skip that story.

Then there’s “The Flag of the their Country”, which may have been skipped for being too polemic. Kipling clearly had something to say about patriotism and heroism, though perhaps not what we would expect. In the story, the local council is keen that the boys should drill (march, exercise etc) to prepare them for the army. Stalky ends up running drill as yet another dodge. The headmaster informs the council that the boys are drilling themselves, and word reaches one Raymond Martin MP, who is so impressed he turns up at the school to deliver a patriotic speech, full of platitudes and cliches. The room full of boys listens “in sour disgust”. To conclude, Martin shakes out a rolled-up Union Jack “and waited for the thunder of applause”. This is how the boys respond:

“They looked in silence. They had certainly seen the thing before—down at the coastguard station, or through a telescope, half-mast high when a brig went ashore on Braunton sands; above the roof of the Golf Club, and in Keyte’s window, where a certain kind of striped sweetmeat bore it in paper on each box. But the College never displayed it; it was no part of the scheme of their lives; the Head had never alluded to it; their fathers had not declared it unto them. It was a matter shut up, sacred and apart. What, in the name of everything caddish, was he driving at, who waved that horror before their eves? Happy thought! Perhaps he was drunk.” (p. 213)

The same story tells us that 80% of the boys in the school were born abroad, and 75% of them are sons of officers in one or other of the armed services, while other stories in the book underline that the boys are largely being readied for military or administrative work in the empire. In “A Little Prep”, which was adapted for TV, we’re told that nine old boys of the school have been killed in India in the past three years, which the current pupils take in their stride. A wounded old boy then visits the school and shares a story about encountering a classmate on the battlefield, where they exchanged their old nicknames:

“I never knew it was one of us till I was right on top of him. There are heaps of Duncans in the service, and of course the name didn’t remind me. He wasn’t changed at all hardly. He’d been shot through the lungs, poor old man, and he was pretty thirsty. I gave him a drink and sat down beside him, and—funny thing, too—he said, ‘Hullo, Toffee!’ and I said, ‘Hullo, Fat-Sow! hope you aren’t hurt,’ or something of the kind. But he died in a minute or two—never lifted his head off my knees.” (p. 178)

In the final story — or the first, in the order that Kipling wrote them — we learn that Beetle ends up getting apprenticed to a newspaper in India, M’Turk leaves school for “Cooper’s Hill”, aka the Royal Indian Engineering College, while Stalky goes to Sandhurst. India is, says Beetle, full of men like Stalky. The boys and their peers are the fuel of the British Empire, so their attitude to the flag is surprising. But it fits with the sentiment in “A Little Prep”, where the hero of the tale is not a soldier but one of the teachers, who puts themselves at risk, without seeking acknowledgement or thanks, to help one of the boys. That is Kipling’s point: Such selfless courage earns admiration; the flag gets nothing at all.

Was that sentiment too controversial, too punk, for a dramatisation in 1982? Perhaps they could have got away with it when the serial was first broadcast, from 31 January to 7 March. But less than a month later it would surely have been unthinkable, given the start of the Falklands War on 2 April.

So, I think Stalky & Co was a more potent, resonant book to dramatise at the time than may first appear. And I think we can see that in the subsequent books dramatised for BBC-1 Classic Serials with Terrance and script editor and producer. More on this to follow...

See also:

• My list of the 236 books published by Terrance Dicks, with links to my longer posts about them
• Me on The Jungle Book by Rudkyard Kipling

The Great When, by Alan Moore

“So it’s all true then. I suppose I’ve always had a feeling in my stomach telling me it was, but if you’ve been there, then I can’t deny it, can I? Birmingham is real.” (p. 224)

Eighteen year-old Dennis Knuckleyard works in a grubby little London bookshop, where proprietor Coffin Ada — she is always coughin’ but her nickname relates to a murder — would rather tear up a book than haggle over the price. One day in 1949, she sends Dennis across town to buy a set of books by Arthur Machen from another dealer; if Dennis can negotiate a lower price, Ada says he can keep the proceeds. So, he haggles, pays just a fiver, and finds himself the owner of one particular book that doesn’t, that shouldn’t, exist.

This book turns out to be an artefact from the Great When, a London-of-the-imagination, a place of vivid dreams and nightmares, that lies beneath the London we know. Dennis must return the book to this place, following appropriate procedures, of face an awful fate. Then he must organise a meeting between a nefarious real-London criminal and a criminal from the Great When. And then he discovers that one of his trusted friends cannot be trusted at all…

Meanwhile, he falls for sex worker Grace Shilling, goes to an art show and learns various things about the people with whom he knocks about.

It’s a typically rich, strange adventure story from Alan Moore, chock full of bits of real history and literature, sometimes warped and twisted. In his acknowledgements, Moore speaks of the book’s “balance of coarseness and refinement” (p. 313), and much of the fun comes from juxtaposition: the comic and horrific, the mundane and the fantastic, the clash of people from very different worlds.

A lot hangs on made-up elements in the (real) short story “N” by Machen, and the ways that the past lives on in the present. But I was also really struck by the premonitions of the future, with a new world as yet to be forged after the horrors of war. For all the magic and fantasy stuff going on here, that put me in mind of Bookish — set in a bookshop not too long a walk from Ada’s, and at around the same time.

This is the first of a new series: the “Long London” novels, according to the cover. A prologue, involving elderly wizards, doesn’t seem related to the main story, but presumably lays clues for these subsequent adventures. But the Great When — the place, rather than the novel — is a domain of headache-inducing nightmares and not exactly fun. Scenes there, often lasting pages, are relayed all in italics, which this reader found a bit hard-going. I wonder how Moore will entice us back.

I also felt a bit disappointed by his handling of the two main women in the book, one a cross old lady who — big twist — used to be younger and more beautiful — and the other a young sex worker with a heart of gold. There’s a repeated joke in the penultimate chapter where Dennis learns something new about each of them, where what they share is that Dennis made assumptions based on how they both appear. In one case, he decides to end the relationship having learned the truth, and I thought less of him for it.

Having finished the book this morning, I poked about online to find discussion of male-skewed “mantasy” (clever Juliet E McKenna previously referred to “blokes in cloaks” and its counterpart “guy-fi”). Yes, that’s an issue for The Great When: a new, original and often thrilling story, but still too embedded in the cliches of the past.

See also:

• Me on the Backlisted podcast discussing The Ballad of Halo Jones by Alan Moore and Ian Gibson
• Me on V for Vendetta by Alan Moore and David Lloyd
• Me on Alan Moore and Melinda Gebbie discussing Lost Girls with Stewart Lee