Hauling Like A Brooligan

Stephen Gallagher

Author: Steve

  • Bob Shaw

    I once asked Bob how he’d managed the switch in technique from short fiction to novels, and his response was a typically wry and self-deprecating one along the lines that he hadn’t… he said that he tackled his novels as if they were short stories, rather like a sprinter who sails up to the hundred-metre…

  • Tarzan the Silent

    A heads-up regarding the dirt-cheap DVDs available from Alpha Video, a company whose output I can best describe as ‘glorious tat’; a lot of public domain stuff and many titles that would be below most commercial distributors’ radar, but I wish they’d been around when my dad was alive so I could have bought him…

  • Friday Night Crusoe

    Forwarded to me by Avrum Jacobson: At its first of several upfront presentations to advertisers today at 30 Rockefeller Center in New York, NBC outlined its 2008-2009 season based on a 52-week schedule. The network will introduce the 52-week lineup this fall with a slate of new original programs and continually add other new originals…

  • The Brimstone Boys

    More from The Hollywood Reporter on developments in the US version of Eleventh Hour. I have to tell you, the trade press is where most of my information is coming from. Any direct involvement I might have had in the production was precluded by the exclusivity clause in my Crusoe deal, made within a couple…

  • Interview

    I’ve been away on Crusoe business – two good days with the incoming writers followed by three equally productive days scouting locations for the UK scenes – and I find on my return that the WGGB site now carries the interview that Tom Green conducted with me back in January. (No word of Crusoe in…

  • A Book by its Cover (2)

    In the comments section of A Book by its Cover, Gail Renard wrote: “Oddly enough, I first read Thunderball and a few other James Bonds when I was 10. Do you think he was the Harry Potter of our generation?” Dammit, yes! Why didn’t I think of that? Potter may be children’s fiction openly read…

  • Third Acts in Writers’ Lives

    While we’re on a thriller theme… I’ve always thought of Bond as a ’60s phenomenon but of Fleming as a ’50s writer. A quick check shows that he died in 1963, the same year that Gavin Lyall turned to full-time writing. Lyall was my favourite of the postwar adventure writers, though Alistair Maclean was probably…

  • A Book by its Cover

    In a recent piece in The Financial Times, James Lovegrove cites Raymond Hawkey’s 1963 Pan cover for Thunderball as one of the all-time greatest paperback designs. (In case you’re not familiar with it, those ‘bullet hits’ are actual holes in the cover.) I so agree… although for me it’s one of those cases where your…

  • Anthony Minghella

    I turned on the radio for the lunchtime news a few minutes ago, and was dismayed to hear the announcement of the death of Anthony Minghella at the age of 54. I swore out loud, and scared the dog. Anthony and I were fellow students in Hull University’s Drama Department, back in the mid-seventies. I’m…

  • Cricket and Me

    I don’t ‘get’ cricket. Never have. And it seems I’m not alone. I was in London’s Natural History Museum around the end of last year. In one section there’s a wall display bearing a montage of cartoons that illustrate various explanations for the extinction of the dinosaurs. One shows an enthusiastic diplodocus with a bat.…