The Big Friendly Letter!



As Roald Dahl Day fast approaches, a  letter the author sent to a lifelong fan almost thirty years ago has come into my possession. And what an amusing missive it is!

 

The letter belonged to a former Essex hotelier who wrote to the 'Tales of the Unexpected' author at the ITV Press Office in London's Tottenham Court Road in 1986.  Rose-Marie Scheel had devised a plot for one of the famous half-hour dramas and asked permission send it, such were the manners of those days...

 

'No, please don't send me any more stories, but thank you so much for asking before sending,' replied Mr Dahl. 'Most people simly push them at me and I don't know what to do with them all..'

 

Mrs Sheel had told the author  her son was 'reared with James and the Giant Peach' and thanked him for all the pleasure he had given to the family. So what was the plot she had in mind?

 

'My father had a wine cellar,' she told me this weekend at an antiques fair in Lytham, Lancashire, 'and I thought it would be a wonderful setting for a myster. Although Roald Dahl declined the offer, I was thrilled to get his autograph and have treasured it ever since. Now I want someone else to enjoy it.'

 

Her plot may remain a secret, but I reckon the  Big Friendly Giant knows something about it. Don't you?

 

 

Roald Dahl Day is on September 13, 2013. Tickets available at the Roal Dahl Museum and Story Centre, Great Missenden, Buckinghamshire.

Not the Booker Prize - now who's telling Little White Lies?

I always tell the truth, even when I lie,  Al Pacino once quipped in one of my favourite quotes of all time. Now scriptwriter and novelist Suzie Tullet admits that stretching the truth has helped her to hit the headlines.

Suzie's latest novel, Little White Lies and Butterflies has been shortlisted for the Guardian newspaper's Not the Booker Prize 2013.

Protagonist Lydia Livingstone is approaching her 30th birthday without the elusive man of her dreams. Unconventional she may be, but she longs for a career-free life with a brood of children swarming at her feet.

With her family pressing her to celebrate in style, she runs away to Greece where things gets even more complicated. Pretending to be a chef to avoid the local Romeo, she finds herself cooking up quite a storm...



This hilarious book grabs your attention from the start with its quirky sense of humour and brilliantly researched settings. Released only three weeks ago by Safkhet Publishing, in paperback and digital format, it soon attracted the interest of Guardian readers.

 Says Suzie 'Although it came as something of a surprise, I'm both excited and honoured to have made The Guardian's Not the Booker Prize short list.'  There are some great books on there, written by equally great authors - to have made it this far feels like an achievement in itself."

Not the Booker Prize was created by the Guardian's book blog in 2009 in  'a pioneering attempt to create a truly democratic reader-judged book prize.'

The final judging takes place on October 14 and the results will be announced at a live online event.

Barbara Cartland rises again... (Maybe Millie's next??)

 

Oh how easy it must have been to mock Dame Barbara Cartland with her ageing Barbie-doll looks and positively panting prose... And yet, what an amazing woman she was with no less than than 700 novels to her name by the time she died in 2000 aged 98.  I, for one,  welcome the news that 160 of her unseen manuscripts are soon to be published  in both print and digital editions, giving a new generation the chance to discover what old fashioned love was all about.

Dame Barbara, also well-known as Princess Diana's step grandmother, had no problem with making fun of  herself.  She once joked that  Diana only ever  read Cartland romances - leaving her with an unrealistic view of modern men! With the now-unheard of luxury of dictating  her novels, the author produced most of her work at her sumptuous ten-bedroomed mansion in Hertfordshire, once the home of Beatrix Potter.

Scouring the internet for some of  Dame Barbara's more famous quotes, I found one that really summed up her attitude to writing romance: If you read newspapers today you will find things that our mothers and grandmothers would have been shocked to read. It's sex, sex, sex...all the time and it's not what we want.  I wonder what she'd have made of Fifty Shades of Grey?

The 'new' work, entitled The Pink Collection, comes to us courtesy of the author's son Ian McCorquodale in association with M-I Books. The family even run their own website -www.barbaracartland.com

Meanwhile, I've discovered  that my three-year-old granddaughter has learnt how to write her name, with quite a flourish if the photo, above, is anything to go by. Perhaps one day she'll be writing for 'Millie's and Boon?'


 

Do you know how to say No?

I've never been very good at saying No.  The little Yes word slides out of my mouth before my brain assesses the implications. Yes, I'll work on my day off, yes I'll come to your grandmother's ninetieth birthday party, yes I'll attend one of those jewellery parties where they sell cheap looking pieces at exorbitant prices. So I was fascinated to read this week of a survey of 350,000 books published in Britain between 1800 and the year 2000 which shows a huge decline in the words 'duty' and 'obligation' in the body of the text. No-one told me that these had gone out of fashion...

The survey, carried out at the University of California in Los Angeles, quotes the inimitable Elizabeth Bennet in Pride and Prejudice fending off an unwelcome invitation from  Lady Catherine de Bourgh. 'I am much obliged to your ladyship for your kind invitation, but it is not in my power to accept it. I must be in town next Saturday.'  Now why didn't I think of that?

Not surprisingly  it seems the words  'choose' and 'get' have increased  in latter years as well as, more significantly, the word 'feel,' a reflection perhaps, of our so-called touchy feely society. Professor Patricia Greenfield, who led the research, believes that this shows 'a shift in society away from living in small communities in a rural environment towards materialistic urban living.'  In other words we've all become more self-centred and prefer to look after Number One.  Now why am  not surprised?

This investigation, published in  Psychological Science journal, also involved more than one million books published in the US during the same  200 year period, including popular fiction and text books. Interestingly, Professor Greenfield used  a very modern approach - Google's word count tool, the Ngram Viewer, which can count word frequencies in millions of books in less than a second.
I wonder what Elizabeth Bennet would make of that?

Val-Ediction? That was the Week that Was...

 A warrant has been issued this week for the arrest of a pensioner who threw ink over a best-selling author. No, I'm not making it up. According to The Times yesterday, Sandra Botham of Sunderland failed to turn up to be sentenced for her attack on Val McDermid, author of The Wire in the Blood,  at a book signing last year.  You may remember that The Wire in the Blood was a successful British crime detection series starring Robson Green that ran from 2002 to 2009.

The defendant apparently held a 28 year long grudge against the author who once wrote of  a woman called Sandra 'shaped like a Michelin Man.'

Meanwhile, the legal firm that leaked J K Rowling as the true author of 'Robert Galbraith's' crime novel The Cuckoo's Calling has had to pay out 'a considerable sum' to charity at her request after one of its partners passed on the gossip. According to today's Daily Mail the author was entitled to the expectation that her secret  would be safe.'

Looking more closely at the  cover of JKR's latest offering I found  this quote 'The Cuckoo's Calling reminds me why I fell in love with crime fiction in the first place...'  The author?  None other than Val McDermid.

Just a coincidence?  Or could it be that truth really is stranger than fiction after all?

 

My brief encounter with a famous love story...even better than Booker?

Here comes the  Man Booker longlist again.  With an eclectic list of  authors  from around the world, it's refreshing to see that  three out of the thirteen on the list are debut novelists, and more than half of them are women. All these novelists have the freedom to write about what's closest to their hearts - something that would not have been possible in pre-war Britain.

This week I visited Carnforth Railway Station in Lancashire where Noel Coward's legendary Brief Encounter was filmed in 1945. This  film was based on a one-act play entitled Still Life, written in 1936, which tells us more about forbidden love than anything else produced at the time.

The  story follows a brief illicit affair between two married people, an affair that is doomed from the beginning. Particularly poignant is the widely-held belief that Coward was writing about his own homosexuality in a world where he, too, was unable to love freely.The choice of Rachmaninoff's  Piano Concerto No 2 to evoke these sentiments was, to my mind, an act of genius.

In an article on the Noel Coward Foundation website it says, 'Can many of us go through a lifetime without meeting someone and feeling a spark of recognition that we shouldn't, an attraction that goes beyond the physical? What a terrible world it would be if our emotions and psyches were amputated at the altar (of marriage.) Heavy stuff. 

The screenplay itself covers less than seventy pages. Which proves, as always that  content (quality)is far more important than quantity.  In the current Booker shortlist Colm Toibin's The Testament of Mary is a mere 112 pages, as opposed to Richard House's 912-page tome The Kills.  I wonder if that's an omen? We shall have to wait and see.

The shortlist will be announced by September 10 and the winner declared on October 15.

From the refreshment room at Carnforth Station - the fictional Milford Junction with
Trevor Howard and Celia Johnson


 

   The pre-war luggage still sits on the station platform

  

 

 

One flew over the Cuckoo's nest - or did it?

 

The Cuckoo's Calling by - er - JK Rowling?

 

Congratulations to Orion's fiction editor Kate Mills  for admitting she turned down 'Robert Galbraith's' debut novel The Cuckoo's Calling. So she rejected the world's best selling author?  Well, good for her, I say, for having the  courage to admit it.

 

In a world of 'it wasn't me, Sir honest' when no-one seems to take responsibility for their actions, I found her confession quite refreshing.

One of my favourite examples of 'missing the genius' has to be the publisher whose rejection of George Orwell's Animal Farm  stated 'Animal stories don't sell in the USA.'

And then there's William Golding's original manuscript for Lord of the Flies.  An editor had attached a note to the top of the work stating  'This man will never make a writer.'

But back to the present. In the current 'Bookseller', a reviewer rates Julie Cohen's Dear Thing  'a cut above The Cuckoo's Calling.'  I've met Julie several times and she's one of those successful novelists who, as a tutor of creative writing, always encourages writers to follow their dream.

'It's a story that's close to my heart for so many reasons' she says on her website. 'I hope it touches you, too.'


    http://www.thebookseller.com/news/galbraith-reviewed.html


 

Summer has arrived (so have the silly headlines!)

'Smirking Svengali who'll make Murray a mint,' says a headline in today's Daily Mail doing its best to make us all groan. It refers, of course, to Murray's manager Simon Fuller whose aim is  to fill the star's coffers along with his own. But then there's something about Wimbledon that always seems to bring out the silliest headlines.

My favourite of all time dates back to 1987 when Pat Cash played Czechoslovakian Ivan Lendl in the men's singles' final. Czech v Cash wrote one clever sub who must have been waiting for that opportunity for years...  Incidentally Lendl, the former world No 1, joined Team Murray 18 months ago to 'head  the coaching operation,'  so he should be smiling all the way to the bank, too.

Football is another sport that has gained its share of clever headlines. Super Caley Go Ballistic, Celtic Are Atrocious - is probably the Sun's most famous one from the year 2000.  Reporter Rodger Baillee wrote the story about Celtic's unfortunate defeat but we never got to know who penned those immortal words.

As for cricket - to my mind the best headline came from Mile Selvey in  the Guardian back in 2006 - True love comes from bowling a maiden over. How right he was.

And finally we come to rugby - Mike Tindall seems capable of making his own headlines without help from anyone.  But today he gave us the news we've all been waiting for; he and Zara Phillips are expecting a 'sub heading' of their own.  Congratulations to them both.  I bet the Sun's writers are having a (rugby) ball... 

 

Anyone for tennis? (Or a haircut?)

  Once again Wimbledon has burst into our lives with tumultuous  tennis, the odd tantrum and, er, one or two very important haircuts.  If you are a Times reader, then haircuts are just as important as who's beating whom on the centre court, or so it would seem....

In an article by Lucy Bannerman  in today's edition we  learn that Suzanne Strong, the championship's official hairdresser for the last 30 years, has her money on Novak Djokovic. The World No 1, says Suzanne, has booked in for his second haircut in as many days, 'which may prompt anyone to read requests for a trim, like leaves in a teacup, to conclude that the Serbian star is preparing for a long week of photo opportunities.' Oh yes, obviously.

I would tell you a bit more of what Ms Bannerman has to say but she seems to be doing a very good job of padding out the story, in a desperate attempt to fill the page, without any help from me.

Ok - so here's a snippet: Women don't come in as regularly as the men - and female players stick to either very long or very short hair. Ah, that makes a lot of sense.  You would have your hair long or short wouldn't you?  Sorry, now where was I? Oh yes, the tennis.

Sorry, did you hear me yawn?  I forgot to add that Suzanne has cut Laura Robson's hair but never Serena or Venus Williams'...

Oh, I do miss being a journalist. I'd forgotten how much fun it was.