Forgotten Authors No.14 / Richard Bach

Forgotten Authors 

No.14 

Richard Bach

Christopher Fowler
Sunday 16 November 2008

Richard Bach

There are certain books only college students have the patience to read. In the Seventies, Everything You Always Wanted to Know About Sex but Were Afraid to Ask and Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance were romping up the book charts in university towns. Each generation of wide-eyed freshers promotes one of these into the bestsellers, and at least it can be said that the standard is improving. For all I know, Jonathan Safran Foer's Everything Is Illuminated could be wonderful beyond page 17.

Back in 1970, though, students were prepared to read a book exploring the life philosophy of a seagull. Richard Bach's Jonathan Livingstone Seagull smashed the bestseller records. The slender, square tome was to be found poking out of backpacks the world over. It concerns an anthropomorphic seagull that yearns to fly higher instead of just worrying about where its next whiting is coming from. Millions swallowed the inspirational Christian parable which, at 120 pages (heavily illustrated), took about 12 minutes to digest. It was so successful that it became a film consisting of shots of seagulls floating about to wiffly Neil Diamond songs, the overall effect of which was like lapsing into a coma caused by a getting a paper cut from a Hallmark card.

Bach followed this with Illusions and One, the message being that we transcend the gravity of our bodies and believe in ourselves, or something. Bach described The Bridge Across Forever as "a story about a knight who was dying, and the princess who saved his life," which, as it concerned the second lady in his life, must have felt like a smack in the face to his first and third partners.

Claiming to be a direct descendent of Johann Sebastian Bach, the former pilot-turned-novelist loved to explore the metaphysical aspects of flying. Bach's books are fictional versions of moments in his life that illustrate his philosophy. Call me a curmudgeon, but I like to think that his books fell from popularity because students became too sophisticated not to see through this kind of tendentious new-age sputum.

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Forgotten Authors No 54 / Richmal Crompton

Richmal Crompton

Forgotten Authors 

No 54

Richmal Crompton

Christopher Fowler
Sunday 23 May 2010 00:00

Writers of children's books tread a fine line. They need their lead characters to be interesting and a little wayward, but if they are too wild, the wrath of parents and librarians will be incurred; too soft, and their target audience will lose interest.

Certain schoolboy heroes from the past have fallen from fashion, the victims of changing attitudes; the once hugely popular Billy Bunter books have been expunged from history, presumably for being calorifically challenged (I'd like to have covered Frank Richards' series, but couldn't find any copies). Happily, several of Crompton's Just William books are available in reprint, though they are now a minority taste that probably appeals to older fans with a sense of nostalgia.

Most readers thought Richmal Crompton Lamburn was a man. So shy was she that she did not disabuse them of the notion, even as her anarchic, disruptive schoolboy, shown with his cap askew and tie undone, graced nearly 40 volumes of exploits. Crompton wrote for adults too, but her lasting claim to fame is this William Brown, whose adventures were populated with a gang of rebels called the Outlaws, including Ginger, Henry, Douglas and the awful, frilly, lisping Violet Elizabeth (catchphrase; "'I'm going to thcream and thcream until I'm thick!"), who was appropriately played in a TV adaptation by Bonnie Langford.

Crompton was born in Lancashire in 1890. The first William story appeared in Home magazine in 1919, and she continued writing them throughout her life, the last being published in 1970 after her death; there is something touching about a writer who never married producing books beloved by children.

With a certain amount of boring inevitability, Crompton's books were later attacked by critics for being irrelevant and middle-class, as if being able to write well was itself a liability. One reader points out that nowadays the books aren't a very easy read for preteens because they are peppered with words such as "epicurean", "apoplectic" and "discoursing", to which I say, "Look it up."

And of course, William's rebelliousness – performing a conjuring trick with an egg that goes wrong, trying to arrange a marriage for his sister or planning to sell Ginger's brothers as slaves to raise money – are hopelessly mild compared with the minefield of dangers facing modern parents. But perhaps an updated version, "William and the Crack Dealers", featuring a schoolboy wielding a sharpened screwdriver instead of a catapult, might rob the books of their childhood charms.

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Obituaries / Christopher Fowler

 

Christopher Fowler: Time Out called him ‘an award-winning novelist who would make a good serial killer’. Photograph: Jill Mead/The Guardian

Christopher Fowler Obituary

Author of the Bryant & May detective novels, short stories and essays on forgotten writers – including himself

Steve Holland

20 March 2023

In a brief biographical sketch, the crime writer Christopher Fowler, who has died aged 69, claimed he had achieved several of his “pathetic schoolboy fantasies”: releasing an “appalling” Christmas pop single; working as a male model; posing as the villain in a Batman graphic novel; running a Soho night club; appearing in The Pan Book of Horror series; and standing in for James Bond. Rather than examples of Fowler’s wicked sense of humour, all these claims were true. Time Out, meanwhile, called him “an award-winning novelist who would make a good serial killer”.

Christopher Fowler: ‘I get really lost in that world, I have to be dragged out.’ 

Interview

Bryant & May author Christopher Fowler: ‘Writing the end was really emotional’

After 20 outings, the unconventional detective duo of Arthur Bryant and John May have solved their last case. But their creator is not willing to let them go entirely …

Suzi Feay
Saturdady 10 July 2021

Christopher Fowler is picking at a healthy-looking bowl of protein and veggies. “I don’t have much appetite these days.” For the last two years he has been having cancer treatment, but remains upbeat. Lunch over, we move to the other end of his penthouse flat in London’s King’s Cross, where a floor-to-ceiling bookshelf houses a vast collection of London esoterica. Outside on the terrace, the large, shiny model of Marvel superhero the Silver Surfer that used to stand guard is gone. “He got frostbite and his fingers fell off. He couldn’t handle King’s Cross, let alone the depths of space.” A wide sweep of the skyline takes in the London Eye to the Shard, and far beyond.

Invisible Ink No 319 / Christopher Fowler

Christopher Fowler
Photo by Jill Mead

Invisible Ink

No 319 

Christopher Fowler

Christopher Fowler
Sunday 20 March 2016 14:25

A typical example of the late 20th-century midlist author, Christopher Fowler was born in the less attractive part of Greenwich in 1953, the son of a scientist and a legal secretary. He went to a London Guild school, Colfe’s, where, avoiding rugby by hiding in the school library, he was able to begin plagiarising in earnest. He published his first novel, Roofworld, described as “unclassifiable”, while working as an advertising copywriter, a job he described as “one level above sewer-toshing”. He left to form The Creative Partnership, a company that changed the face of film marketing, and spent many years working in film, creating movie posters, tag lines, trailers and documentaries, using his friendship with Jude Law to get into nightclubs.

Invisible Ink No 169 / Jim Shephard

Jim Shepard

Invisible Ink

No 169 

Jim Shephard

Christopher Fowler
Saturday 20 April 2013 20:00

Here's an unusual situation; an author who's certainly not dead, not unknown or out of print in his native USA, greatly admired, yet ignored and unrepresented on these shores. While UK publishers reprint the most minor Nordic crime novels, we're denied an astonishing American voice.

Forgotten Authors No 01 / E M Delafield

EM Delafiel

Forgotten Authors

No 01

E M Delafield

Christopher Fowler

Sunday 10 August 2008

Edmée Elizabeth Monica De La Pasture lived through two world wars, writing immensely popular novels, stories and non-fiction, could be as laugh-out-loud funny as PG Wodehouse, and numbered housewives and prime ministers among her fans. The Sussex-born daughter of a Count, she enlisted as a nurse in the First World War and as a lowly ARP worker in the second, and also worked on a Russian collective farm. In the UK, only a handful of her 30-plus publications can now be found on bookshelves.

Her five most famous books are largely autobiographical. The Diary of a Provincial Lady chronicles the author's daily life as she tries to balance the housekeeping books and run a family. Written in a deceptively relaxed shorthand, it's a Pooterish masterpiece of 20th-century humour that shows how easily Delafield could communicate unspoken feelings of embarrassment and annoyance. Here she is at tea:

"Lady B asks me how the children are, and adds, to the table at large, that I am 'A Perfect Mother'. Am naturally avoided, conversationally, after this, by everybody at the teatable. Later on, Lady B tells us about the South of France. She quotes repartees made by herself in French, and then translates them. (Unavoidable query presents itself here: Would a verdict of Justifiable Homicide delivered against their mother affect future careers of children unfavourably?)" And here she is on the blackouts: "Serena alleges that anonymous friend of hers goes out in the dark with extra layer of chalk-white powder on her nose so as to be seen, and resembles the Dong With The Luminous Nose. (Query: Is it in any way true that war very often brings out the best in civil population? Answer: So far as I am concerned, Not at all.)"

Perhaps Delafield's gossamer charm is not suited to coarser times. Virago did her no favours by shoving four volumes into one dense paperback, prefaced with a peculiarly mean-spirited forward that they later had the good sense to remove. Provincial Lady was eventually serialised for radio in the UK, but Delafield's other novels remain virtually lost. The diaries are comedies of manners, but she also tackled lesbian feelings, real-life murder, alcoholism, all manner of family cruelties, adulteries and betrayals. Delafield's reasonable voice is currently out of favour, but thankfully she survives in the nation's second-hand bookshops, awaiting rediscovery.

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Forgotten Authors No 45 / Winifred Watson

Winifred Watson

Forgotten Authors

No. 45

Winifred Watson

Christopher Fowler
Sunday 3 January 2010 01:00

When it comes to literary success, timing is everything. Before JK Rowling's boy wizard there had been a virtual industry of magic-schoolboy tales, but Harry Potter was the one that clicked. Winifred Watson's literary career was curtailed by three major events; the depression, the attack on Pearl Harbor and the Blitz.

Watson was born in 1906 in Newcastle upon Tyne, and remained there all her life. Due to follow her sisters into higher education, she found the way blocked when her father's shoe shops failed in the Depression of 1929. She wrote her first book, the Northumbrian historical drama Fell Top, in dull days stuck behind a secretarial desk, after her boss suggested bringing in knitting to keep herself amused. Finishing it in six weeks, she stuck it in a drawer and forgot about it until she spotted an advert from Methuen looking for new writers. The novel was critically well-received and became a radio play. Watson was young and pretty, and got local coverage, so the publishers asked her for more. The result was Odd Shoes, produced in a different style that benefited from proper research.

Her third book horrified Methuen. Instead of being serious, it was fun, and she was writing on subjects she knew nothing about. The book was Miss Pettigrew Lives for a Day, about a frumpy governess who is accidentally sent by her agency to work for a louche actress and nightclub singer running a complicated love life. Watson said: "I didn't know anyone like Miss Pettigrew. I just made it all up. I haven't the faintest idea what governesses really do. I've never been to a nightclub and I certainly didn't know anyone who took cocaine."

The book was an immediate hit, and a Hollywood musical was planned starring Billie Burke, the good witch from The Wizard Of Oz. The bombing of Pearl Harbor put paid to that. "I wish the Japanese had waited six months," she said later.

Watson married and wrote every day, but when the house next door was blown up in the war, her family was forced to move into one room with her parents, making writing impossible.

Persephone Books persevered with the republication of Miss Pettigrew, and the book found its way on to Hollywood desks once more. A rather charming film version starring Frances McDormand and Amy Adams finally appeared in 2008, six years after Watson's death.

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The Book of Forgotten Authors by Christopher Fowler / Book review by David Hill

The Book of Forgotten Authors by Christopher Fowler – book review

• By David Hill
• Feb 1, 2018

Obituaries of authors, many of whom are not dead, make an entertaining read.

I’m pretty sure it was Tessa Duder who remarked of a writer, in a critical essay, that “she lived long enough to see her books forgotten”. I remember the shudder of recognition down my spine. Who was the sad she? Sorry, I’ve … forgotten.

Distilled from years of Independent on Sunday columns, Christopher Fowler’s obituaries (they are not meant to be, but they often read that way) are not so much a who’s who as a “Who?”

There are 99 mini-essays on individuals, plus a few diversions into Forgotten Booker Authors, including a winner who had died; Forgotten Nonsense Writers, including the laceratingly funny Harry Graham; Forgotten Dickens, including something called Mugby Junction.

Each 500-word entry is a brief bio, a smattering of titles, an assessment, a couple of anecdotes. Breath-catchingly amoral Simon Raven once telegraphed his wife, “Sorry no money. Suggest eat baby”; Lobsang Rampa of The Third Eye was a Devon plumber called Cyril. Isn’t that just great?

Fowler’s choices are sometimes provocative, as they should be. Mystery writer Margery Allingham has vanished? What a mysterious claim. Arthur Upfield, Barbara Pym, Georgette Heyer? Make up your own mind.

You’ll accept the obscurity of others. Try Kyril Bonfiglioli, Lucille Fletcher, or the gloriously christened Edward John Moreton Drax Plunkett. As I’m sure you know, they were respectively the creator of mincing 1970s art thief Charlie Mordecai, a US script writer hugely admired by Orson Welles and an Anglo-Irish aristocratic novelist who always used a quill pen.

So what edged them and many others into the shadows? Chance. Marketing. The Blitz. Illness. Chance. Changing social mores. Addiction. Chance.

It’s a commendably eclectic selection. We get Frank Richards of Billy Bunter fame; Ian Fleming’s older brother Peter; Michael Green, who wrote books entitled The Art of Coarse [insert subject] about just about everything; Arthur Mee, children’s encyclopaedist and author of that seminal article “Our Wonderful Glands”.

Evaluations are free and frank: “a disgraceful cliffhanger”; “a horrible human being”. Fowler won’t be getting a Christmas card from the author of Jonathan Livingston Seagull (“artery-hardening New Age sputum”) or Booker-topping The Sellout (“motor-mouth”).

He may have written the most emetically coy author note of the decade, but the guy cares about books and their authors. A lot of his pieces build to a plea for restoring reputations, and he gets quite emotional about the arbitrary injustice of neglect. True: why is Keith Waterhouse here, and not Jeffrey Archer? A paradoxically reassuring book – for writers – in its emphasis on Fortune’s wheel. Its other paradox is that it may boost the subjects’ sales. In second-hand bookshops, anyway.

NOTED

Invisible Ink

No 96 

Elizabeth Taylor

Christopher Fowler
Sunday 2 October 2011

It must have been odd for a novelist with such a horror of publicity to have to share her name with an opposite.

Elizabeth Taylor felt that her life was not worth bothering readers with. "The whole point is that writing has a pattern and life hasn't. Life is so untidy. Art is so short and life so long. It is not possible to have perfection in life but it is possible to have perfection in a novel."

She came from a quiet, bookish, middle-class family in Reading, was a lifelong Labour supporter and married the owner of a confectionary company. Her uneventful world provided her with the research for novels and short stories about everyday life, and what effortless novels they seem, filled with acute grace notes.

At Mrs Lippincote's was a sensitive portrait of an officer's wife, and must have touched many at the time of its publication, in 1945. It was followed by 11 more novels, including Palladian, which reads like a latter-day Charlotte Brontë.

This most English of writers had the ability to create richly populated worlds. Her plots involve artists and their exploiters, affairs and marriages, small betrayals, intellectual alliances, respectability and disappointment, and fall so naturally into place that they don't feel plotted at all. Of course they are, and this is their beauty, but it has taken a long time for this style of low-key writing to come back into fashion, and Taylor's books are once more appearing on shelves. They're a testament of quality to a woman whose life was considered so devoid of incident that her friend Elizabeth Jane Howard turned down a request to write her biography. Ivy Compton-Burnett described her as looking like someone who had never had to wash her own gloves.

But there may have been more to Taylor than met the eye. Her letters were mostly burnt, but secrets have been hinted at. Certainly, beneath the polished exterior of her prose there's a surprising amount of violence and tragedy. An early taste for melodrama included accidents, suicides and glimpses of sexual cruelty. It wasn't all birdsong and flower-arranging.

Her most peculiar and ambiguous book is The Real Life of Angel Deverell, about an Edwardian lady novelist who becomes a huge success. The joke is that, although sincere, she's a truly appalling writer, and there's a suggestion that Angel is Taylor's alter-ego. Angel was filmed by François Ozon in 2007.

THE INDEPENDENT

FICCIONES

Casa de citas / Elizabeth Taylor / La otra

DE OTROS MUNDOS

Existe otra Elizabeth Taylor

La otra Elizabeth Taylor / Redescubriendo a una de las mejores novelistas inglesas del siglo

Elizabeth Taylor / El hotel de Mrs. Palfrey / Introducción

Elizabeth Taylor / Sin rabiar hasta el final de la noche

El éxito sorpresa de Elizabeth Taylor

Elizabeth Taylor / El orden equivocado y otros cuentos / Lectura para privilegiados

MESTER DE BREVERÍA

Elizabeth Taylor / Palomas

DRAGON
The 100 best novels / No 87 / Mrs Palfrey at the Claremont by Elizabeth Taylor (1971)
Elizabeth Taylor / A brief survey of the short story
Invisible Ink No 96 / Elizabeth Taylor
Famous for not being famous / A great writer with a glamorous name

Christopher Fowler / Missing Marvels

MISSING MARVELS

LONDON

24TH MAY 2015

As many of you know, for several years now I’ve been running a column called ‘Invisible Ink’ in the Independent on Sunday about authors who wrote the popular books which have vanished from bookshelves. Every once in a while I update my favourite ‘missings’, so here’s the current revised list, and you can find more each week in the IoS.

1. Maryann Forrest wrote three novels, including the terrifying ‘Here: Away From It All’, then vanished. Her real name, it transpired, was Polly Hope, and she gave up because she was busy designing the Globe Theatre with her husband. ‘Here’ is an adult ‘Lord of the Flies’ novel, unsentimental and shattering. It has been republished.

2. Nicholas Monsarrat wrote ‘The Cruel Sea’ and many other naval dramas, but controversy followed with ‘The Story Of Esther Costello’ about TV evangelism and fundraising; it upset the teaching staff surrounding the blind Helen Keller, who felt that its criticisms were levelled at them. His books were once everywhere; now they seem to have disappeared.

3. Pamela Branch died you after writing just four hilarious crime novels, and was by all accounts quite a character, as well as being very glamorous. I’m just reading ‘Murder’s Little Sister’, about a hated agony aunt who falls out of a window. Once you get on her wavelength, she’s delicious and very witty.

4. Alexander Baron wrote an epic novel of Edwardian Jewish gangs, ‘King Dido’, remains a personal favourite; here is a tale that outlines, with infinite care, the causal link between poverty and crime. Its final pages are utterly heartbreaking. It’s one of the greatest and least read novels about London ever written.

5. JB Priestley is surprisingly unread these days, ‘Angel Pavement’ is a detailed portrait of London seen by the employees of a veneer company, when the genteel firm is wrecked by a tough new employee. It’s funny, moving, and a window into a forgotten London.

6. James Hadley Chase wrote ‘No Orchids For Miss Blandish’, a tale of kidnap and rape that caused controversy and became a smashing success. A genuine one-sitting page-turner, it was unlike anything that had been published by an English author before, packed with surprises, non-explicit sex and violence. He supposedly wrote it in a day.

7. Rachel Ingalls wrote novellas, a format which has fallen from fashion, but tales like ‘Mrs Caliban’ pack a real punch. She’s been named one of the 20^th century’s greatest writers but no-one has heard of her. There’s a US republication, but I haven’t seen a UK one.

8. Hans Fallada‘s life was even more disastrous and extraordinary than his books. He shot his best friend in a duel, spent time in a lunatic asylum, became a morphine addict and went mad.  Try ‘Alone In Berlin’, a true story about an apartment building during WWII. ‘Wolf Among Wolves’ is almost unbearably dark.

9. Dennis Wheatley is the odd one out here – he’s a fairly dreadful writer, but rather fun. He went from lousy crime and historical novels to pulpy tales of the supernatural before Churchill asked him to work out what the Germans were up to… ‘The Dennis Wheatley Library of the Occult’ was hugely popular in its time, and Hammer adapted his work, their best being ‘The Devil Rides Out’, although I think his best book is ‘The Haunting of Toby Jugg’.

10. Gladys Mitchell’s sleuth Mrs Bradley was a wizened crone who tested the constraints of the murder genre by pushing them to breaking point. Like the more successful Miss Marple she provided insights into the cases the police overlooked. Unlike Miss Marple she could be a real bitch.

CHRISTOPHER FOWLER

Forgotten authors No 37 / Lionel Davidson

Lionel Davidson

Forgotten authors

No 37 

Lionel Davidson

Christopher Fowler

Sunday 6 September 2009

Oddly, Lionel Davidson is one of those authors who turns up a lot on the racks of second-hand bookshops, in sexy little Penguin editions that fit a pocket.

A Yorkshireman who spent years as a freelance reporter, Davidson's versatile, pacy novels propelled him into the forefront of thriller writing. Although they are now back in print, mentioning his name to younger readers produces blank looks. Let's put that right; he's a terrific writer.

His first novel, The Night of Wenceslas (pictured), concerns a young spendthrift forced into a spying trip to Prague during the Cold War in order to retain his beloved car (used as a stake in his debts). Our anti-hero manages to get beaten up before flushing the information down the toilet, and falls deep into a trap of his own making. It's a typical Davidson ploy, to graft a sympathetic character into an increasingly elaborate plot.

His second novel, The Rose of Tibet, had something of H Rider Haggard about it, and was a genuine adventure that won the admiration of Graham Greene and Daphne du Maurier. This tale of a quest for treasure from India to Tibet should, by rights, have been a Harrison Ford film.

I first discovered Davidson in his 1971 novel Smith's Gazelle, and being of an impressionable age, was moved to tears. It's a fable concerning a small Jewish boy and a wizened old Arab, who join forces during the Six Day War to save the titular gazelle (the last of its species) from extinction. The story has a wonderful timelessness and a compelling message.

The Chelsea Murders won Davidson the Gold Dagger Award for best thriller. It presents a chillingly disguised murderer and a raft of memorably louche Chelsea characters, although the plot favours method over motive a little too much. It also has a problem common with books from the 1970s: a lack of political correctness that was simply the linguistic currency of the time, and which is no direct fault of the author's.

Davidson's most recent thriller, Kolymsky Heights (1994), has a terrific premise: the hero is a Canadian-Indian with a linguistic talent that allows him to infiltrate one of the most forbidding places on earth – a secret laboratory buried deep in the permafrost of Siberia. The question is not just whether he'll succeed in his mission, but how he'll ever get out. As usual, the style and pacing of the story is superb.

THE INDEPENDENT