The return of Gillian Freeman

Valancourt Books are a very fine American publishing house who specialise in reprinting classic and lost novels. Rather wonderfully, they've acquired the rights to republish three novels by the great Gillian Freeman and - even better - have invited me to write an introduction to one of them.

I first read The Leader back in the 1970s - a decade or so after it was written - and I've loved it ever since. I also try to promote it whenever I can, so it turns up on my Trash Fiction site, gets mentioned in a couple of my books and frequently appears in lectures. So I'm thrilled to be asked to write a few words to accompany Ms Freeman's work. My thanks to James D. Jenkins for the invitation.

The Return of Mister Cain

I have a website called Trash Fiction, which reviews the contents of my bookshelves. Admittedly, I haven't added to it for several years, for various reasons (mostly because I've been busy elsewhere, and also because it's becoming increasingly difficult to track down the kind of stuff I like at a reasonable price: charity shops simply aren't what they were). Even so, I still have a great fondness for the popular fiction of earlier times, particularly that of Britain in the 1960s and 1970s.

And I've long had a fantasy of getting some of this stuff back in circulation. Not the real trash, you understand, but the books that have been neglected for a couple of decades or more and shouldn't have been. Popular fiction that's well written, entertaining and revealing of its time.

The existence of e-publishing makes this a real possibility. And I'm pleased to say that over the last few weeks I've been helping Brian Freeborn make available on Kindle the two novels he published in the mid-1970s: Good Luck Mister Cain and Ten Days Mister Cain?

And now there they are, available for download at Amazon.

They're genuinely great books: classic thrillers that would still be a fine basis for a movie, and also perfectly of their time. They're set in London and make no concessions in terms of language and attitude to anyone else, but still managed to get ecstatic reviews in the New York Times, as well as in the British press. (Incidentally, it's a sign of the times that this was an era when even the Daily Mirror had a decent book-review page.)

I'm hoping that this is the start of a longer project, in which other lost masterpieces can be reclaimed. But even if it isn't and my energy flags, it's been worth it just to bring Mister Cain back to life.

Trash Fiction

I have to confess that I don't take the Sun every day, and consequently I often miss out on big breaking stories. So it was only when going through some old copies of the newspaper that I came across the fact that on 24 November 2006 they were kind enough to nominate my Trash Fiction as website of the week:

'A glorious celebration of those tacky exploitation paperbacks from the Sixties and Seventies, as well as TV and movie novelisations. Saucy, tasteless and truly astonishing they got published. Marvel at the covers - and that anyone bought them!'

That's very sweet of them. I shall endeavour to keep abreast of the paper more often.

Lies, Damned Lies and Webstats

My somewhat valedictory note about my website Trash Fiction yesterday reminded me that I did do a sort of blog-type thing for the site in 2003, though I never posted it. I think it was intended as an email newsletter. In any event, the only bit I can find is the following passage, which I reproduce for my own interest, if not yours.
I’d like to point out that I’m not as obsessive about webstats these days. Possibly because my current hosting company don’t provide such detailed information.

When I first started Trash Fiction, I had no idea why I was doing it, where it was going or why anyone would ever want to visit it. Two years down the line, and all that’s changed. Now I know why people visit it.

I know because of my addiction to the webstats helpfully provided by my hosting company. On a daily basis they tell me what it was that people entered in search engines in order to arrive at my site. And it turns out that the most common names are Fiona Richmond, Rudolph Hess and Mandy Rice Davies. Well they would be, wouldn’t they?

Nestling just behind this curious trinity are mini-skirts, teen teases and wrestlers (both female and professional). A little further down the charts, I find Tommy Steele and the late Arthur Mullard neck-and-neck with Joyce McKinney, she of manacled Mormon fame, whilst Oh! Calcutta and Nell in Bridewell are also doing good traffic.

In short, despite what I consider to be a pretty wide-ranging selection of books, many of them neglected and forgotten masterpieces of popular culture, what it really comes down to is sex. To be more specific, British sex. With a bit of light entertainment on the side.

And, of course, Herr Hess.

Except that there’s also Peter Tinniswood to give me hope that something a little more elevated is pulling in the punters. Actually he represents a fairly strong current, which seems to correlate to a Radio 4 audience. The visitors coming in for Tinniswood escalated enormously immediately following his death, and received a further boost when some of his work was repeated in tribute to him. Similarly a Radio 4 documentary on the Angry Brigade saw a short-lived wave of anarchists storming the Google barricades.

Presumably there are also explanations, of which I’m ignorant, for the other peaks. In January 2003, for example, more than a hundred people turned up in pursuit of Lindi St Clair (the absurdly endowed prostitute and former parliamentary candidate for the Correction Party), but in the following five months she received not a single visitor. Whatever it was that Ms St Clair did last January, I’m afraid I missed it.

Then there are the one-offs, the searches that have only ever worked on one occasion: ‘Billy Connolly’s incidental music’, ‘eternal nymphet’ and – a particular favourite for the more intrepid holiday-maker – ‘Satan World’.

But I suspect some of these entries are circular. The fact that someone once came in search of ‘alistair campbell porn forum’ intrigued me sufficiently to try it out myself, and I found myself visiting the weblog of someone ruminating on the fine distinction to be made between art and porn. (Mr Campbell’s early work, needless to say, fell into the latter camp.) The fact that I did so will register on the webstats of the person running that site and no doubt I too will go down as a one-off freak.

Mostly though, the charts are dominated by regulars: people or books who are at least mentioned in Trash Fiction, but who don’t get much of a look-in elsewhere. Which means essentially the minor figures of British culture as remembered by the over-forties. People like the great Kent Walton.

‘Have a good week … till next week.’ That was his catchphrase.

Trash Fiction Trashed

I think it’s time I admitted defeat.

Back in 2001 I started a website called Trash Fiction, which was dedicated to the contents of my bookshelves – mainly paperback originals from the 1960s, ’70s and ’80s. And very good it is too.

But I haven’t added anything to it for ages. Not since my own books started getting published at a regular rate. Come October, I’ll have had seven books out in the space of four years, and – what with that schedule and a day job – it’s left me very little time for writing other things.

And Trash Fiction has been the main casualty.

I’ve also – and not necessarily in an attractive way – started to get very possessive about the books I’m reading. The stuff I write tends to draw quite heavily on popular culture, and I find myself hoarding away books that aren’t very well remembered, so that I can use them in my own work. I’m not sure if this is egomania or paranoia. Or indeed if the two are separable.

But I do think it’s time to accept that Trash Fiction probably won’t get updated again for a while. I shall keep it online, with the intention of returning to it when I find that I’ve run out of publishers prepared to work with me. But it’ll effectively be in suspended animation, kept going only by the life support system of the Internet.

I’ll be sorry to (sort of) leave it behind. It’s provided me with some very fine experiences over the years. I was contacted by some of the authors featured on the site and by other enthusiasts for the byways of British literature. I got a feature in the pages of Mojo magazine. I even got myself quoted in the blurb for a US reprint of James Robert Barker’s classic rock and roll novel Fuel-Injected Dreams. It was fun.

And I received lots of odd emails. The one I treasure most came from a man in Michigan who wrote to me asking if I could pass a message on to Muhammad Ali. ‘I am wanting,’ the message ran, ‘to ask him to be our special speaker for a Christmas Party that we are giving for the Blank County Foster Children.’ Obviously a worthwhile cause (though since Mr Ali is a devout Muslim, his celebrations of Christmas may be somewhat muted), but it does leave one wondering why an American thinks that a person running a site in North London about second-hand paperbacks would have a direct line of access to the former heavyweight champion of the world.

And the answer apparently is that I have a page on Jack Olsen’s 1967 biography (titled Cassius Clay, incidentally). Even so, it seems extraordinary that a web-search on Muhammad Ali would have brought someone to my site. I just tried Google and there are over 3.4 million results. Even the name Cassius Clay produces over 300,000 references.

I was also once contacted by a young man who was booked in to get his first-ever tattoo. Who – he wanted to know – are the best artists to go to? How does someone just starting down this path know what he’s letting himself in for? Is World of Tattoos (the establishment he was planning to patronize) a reputable studio?

And his reason for asking these questions of me was that I had a review of George Burchett’s 1958 book Memoirs of a Tattooist on my site. Sadly, that doesn’t make me much of an expert on the subject. It’s on the same page, incidentally, as Sheila Cousins’ 1953 classic To Beg I Am Ashamed: The Autobiography of a Prostitute.

But I can’t help you on that front either, I’m afraid.