Hauling Like A Brooligan

Stephen Gallagher

Category: novels

  • Johnny Hollywood Explains It All

    Last year I gave an e-mail interview to a journalist preparing an article for a US magazine. Turned out to be one of those pieces where a dozen of you oblige and the writer cherrypicks a quote or two from each. I never saw the piece so I’ve no idea of what may have been…

  • Deadwood

    Last year we made one of our US road trips. It’s by far our preferred kind of holiday; pick a part of the country we’ve never seen, book a flight, rent a car, and then launch. We’ve never been disappointed, and I’ve always come home with notebooks loaded with ideas and material. A couple of…

  • 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…

  • 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…

  • The Wingrove Boy

    In the comments section of the Crusoe post below, Tara provides this link to a site where you’ll find details of what Chung Kuo author David Wingrove has been up to in recent years. It’s a fascinating piece of insight into the roaring energy of a writer’s imagination. I can’t be sure whether we first…

  • The Midwich Cuckoos

    A few years back, before the project was stalled by litigation, I started to develop ideas for a contemporary TV adaptation of John Wyndham’s The Midwich Cuckoos for producer Marc Samuelson. At that time Marc’s company had a long-term option on all the Wyndham material that still lay within the Estate’s control. My take on…

  • Dexter

    ITV have begun running promos for Dexter, so pretty soon everyone in the UK will have a chance to see what all the fuss has been about. In the US, it’s already completed its second season. I referenced the show in a talk that I gave to the Forensic Science Society almost two years ago,…

  • New Gig

    When people ask me whether I prefer working on novels or screenplays, I tend to give the same answer. Whichever I’m working on at any given time, I always yearn for the other. Novel writing is all brooding and solitude, which I kind of like. Screenwriting on a ‘go’ project is all deadlines and pressure…