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Post by samdawson on Jul 21, 2022 13:04:07 GMT
[/div] Can you recommend more?
Silverview, by John Le Carré. Published posthumously, with his son Nick Cornwell doing a great job of filling the gaps and guiding it to completion. Features a City type who has bought a bookshop in what looks a lot like Southwold. A very rewarding read, but also a reminder of what we lost when Le Carré passed on.[/quote] What am I saying. Aldeburgh. The bookshop sounded like it was in Aldeburgh, not Southwold |
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Post by johnnymains on Jul 30, 2022 15:01:56 GMT
Bookseller, spybreaker, narrowboat lover. Enter the world of Russell Stickles. Any book about a bookseller as got to be good as far as I'm concerned. Book is in three parts: Part one - THE CUT: Russell Stickles in 1956 meets his old friend Dennis Wheatley, becomes a client of Herbert van Thal and hires a narrowboat via Robert Aickman. All the while he is trying to fend off the ghosts of his mother and wife. Part two - CHOKE: Russell Stickles, once famous author, now owns a bookshop. The year is 1987. He tries to protect a young girl from her father's abuse. At the same time he's trying to stop someone going to press with a story about his exploits in the late 50s.
Part three - A MAN AT WAR: Russell Stickles works for Dennis Wheatley as a spy-breaker during WWII. His methods are unorthodox. After being almost blown up by a stray bomb, he is told that his step-father is a spy for the Germans. Something has to break.
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Post by johnnymains on Oct 30, 2022 17:21:40 GMT
TK Pulp (Oct 2022)
Out now - here's the *m*z*n link - very happy with the final book. Contains cameos from Herbert van Thal, Robert Aickman and Dennis Wheatley.
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Post by Swampirella on Oct 30, 2022 19:21:17 GMT
Sounds like a great book; congratulations on it's publication!
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Post by johnnymains on Oct 30, 2022 21:09:48 GMT
thank you! Started writing it on the first day of lockdown - so it's taken a while to get to here!
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Post by weirdmonger on Nov 9, 2022 15:28:09 GMT
TK Pulp (Oct 2022) Out now - here's the *m*z*n link - very happy with the final book. Contains cameos from Herbert van Thal, Robert Aickman and Dennis Wheatley. Just read THE CUT in this book by Johnny Mains… “It’s at that moment my mother opens her eyes and fixes them on me. She screams and with her hand that was clutching her elbow, rakes deep furrows into my skin…” And with that elbow-trigger to end all such elbow-triggers, we enter the world of Russell Stickles and the horror literature he writes as well as his involvement during real-time in the explicitly mentioned non-linearity and subtext of ‘magic realism’, and I can safely say that I have well-travelled both these by-ways of fiction, and they here do ring true in the Mains, also with the financial ‘cut’ that is so explicitly needed by the publishing impresarios of the late 1950s (an era I recall well from the standpoint of a Grammar School boy) as I also do believe the passages about cruising the canal ‘cut’ in a narrowboat, as I did much of that in the 1980s, and I know full well what it’s like to steer one of such unwieldy vessels through a tunnel with only a speck of daylight in sight, which forms part of this work’s suspenseful climax. All of it seems real to me, as does the horror fiction world itself, another area I have travelled in my life and I can appreciate Mains’ detailed knowledge, here, with characters in the plot actually being, inter alios, Herbert van Thal, Robert Aickman (Bobbo) and Dennis Wheatley, the latter being someone Russell worked for on secret missions during the then recent war. I also live now — and was brought up — on the rail line eastward from Liverpool Street…It feels as if this was all written for me! But we do know that that is a moot point as we have long believed in Wimsatt’s Intentional Fallacy! The plot itself — impossible to cover in full here — is often quite outrageously funny as well as horrific, and in my old age it is harder to empathise with the goings-on of a potentially healthy young man. A series of scenes are described from Russell’s viewpoint and also separately from the viewpoint of a much younger woman with whom he is having a series of sex acts. He is also haunted in dream or in actuality by two dead women, his mother and the previous woman with whom he consorted. There are twists and turns regarding the novel and stories he is writing, and what his current “darling darkling” thinks of his novel by dint of her mass marginalia. (Luckily he eventually gets a good blurb from Graham Greene.) And the intentional fallacies, indeed, of what goes on within these characters are inspiring to those who read the sort of literature I love, including when Russell steals, at night, a full collection box from a church near the canal because its dead vicar, I think, was once a serial strangler… And then there is the burning woman, or was it Aickman himself? I enjoyed most of the plot, even the fish pie and the brain cancer. Not forgetting the sheets of carbon paper needed by writers, instead of our using ‘select’ and ‘cut’ as today’s way to ‘copy’ and paste’… This is a remarkable work, one I have been privileged to read. “Three miles further down the ‘cut’ we come to a split in the canal.” *** |
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