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Johnny Hollywood Explains it All (2)
How do you stay motivated to finish a novel? How do you stay focused? I don’t start a novel unless I’ve got a story that gives me a little sense of awe whenever I think about it. Not out of vanity, I mean that sense of having lucked into something classical and timeless like a…
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Disappointments and Discoveries
Two things to talk about, here. One, a movie I had some expectations for, the other a novel reminding me that literary fiction need not be the turnoff that so many literary novels have made it into. By which I mean the kind of literary novels you get when bad poets have access to too…
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The Artisan Thriller
“Walking into her apartment, both of them laughing at something he’d said, the man made a mock bow for her to precede him, his eyes already seeing the room, darting around it, looking for something to kill her with.” So begins Tony Kenrick’s Neon Tough, a novel published in ’88 and set against the backdrop…
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“Good Sentences, and Well Pronounced”
Someone once asked me how to go about achieving a writing style. Like the caterpillar challenged about its coordination in walking, I stumbled as soon as I started thinking about it. I think the best answer I could offer was that you should try to state the obvious simply, and the style would take care…
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Mystery and Imagination
In the comments section, Good Dog wrote: …if you’re stuck for something to do next weekend, the Mystery & Imagination Bookshop at 238 N. Brand Blvd in Glendale is having a signing/celebration for Ray Bradbury’s 89th Birthday on Saturday 22nd, August starting at 1:00pm. When I last stopped by (some years back) they were still…
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John Garforth
By the miracle of Google (and I can’t for the life of me remember what I was looking for at the time) this morning I discovered this, the personal website of one-time – or, more accurately, four-times – Avengers tie-in writer John Garforth. Garforth wrote four Avengers novels for Panther Books in 1967. Two years…
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Young Sherlock
Happy to see that my old friend Andy Lane is the writer chosen to helm a series of Young Sherlock Holmes adventures approved by the Estate of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle. According to the announcement on the United Agents site, “The Colossal Schemes of Baron Maupertuis (is) due to be published in Spring 2010. The…
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Books Do Furnish a Room…
…in a way that DVD or video cases don’t. If you’re in in any doubt about it, just look at the backgrounds in at-home TV interviews. I think it’s something tied in with the physical objects themselves, not just with the intellectual life they represent. A shelfload of shabby old middlebrow novels is way more…
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The Thirty-Nine Steps (2)
Back in July I posted some thoughts inspired by a re-reading of John Buchan’s The Thirty-nine Steps. If so inclined, you can find them here. What I didn’t go on to explain was that my revisiting of the book had been part of a discussion between me and producer Archie Tait, whom I’ve known and…
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Michael Crichton
A year or so after we moved into our current house we had a bookshelf collapse that was a consequence of a) the urge to display far too many cherished hardcovers on a screw-to-the-wall track system, and b) my total inability to put a secure screw into a plaster wall. One of the most cherished,…
Hauling Like A Brooligan
Stephen Gallagher
