Category: Film - M J Johnson

Past and Future

13/5/2018

I was prompted to read 1984 again, after recently watching the movie (1984) starring John Hurt, Suzannah Hamilton and Richard Burton, who all give superb performances. It is a very watchable film, presenting us with a post-apocalyptic, dystopian world, with which we are sadly all too familiar as modern cinema-goers. The last time I read this book was as a teenager, forty-odd years ago, and although it undoubtedly influenced and shaped my view of the world, I always felt Orwell was out, at the very least, by a few hundred years.

After re-visiting the book, one instantly becomes aware of how inferior and far short of the book, despite remaining fairly faithful to the story, the movie is. This is because Orwell’s 1984 is not simply about the dysfunctional love story that happens within a totalitarian state; but far more than this, it is also a polemic on the abuse of state power wielded against the individual. Orwell depicts for us a fully-realised world where rebellion is not possible, in which a global elite constantly perpetuates itself, where history is unceasingly reviewed and updated, and the thinking of the individual is repeatedly crushed by the application of Newspeak and Doublethink.

I think the movie version was, as I’ve already said, engaging, yet it largely misses the opportunity to take full advantage of the talents of a truly great actor in Burton, sadly in his last film role before his death, and who was simply made for the part of O’Brien, Winston Smith’s interrogator and nemesis. There are so many brilliant speeches of O’Brien’s in the book that Burton would have delivered with aplomb and the most impeccable world-weariness and cynicism. Film however, despite having been once known as The Talkies, tends to shy away from long speeches - perhaps movie moguls fear losing their audiences through too much talk; it’s always a far better bet to concentrate on the torture and horror! Unfortunately, Orwell mostly conveys the message behind this terrible futuristic vision, through his mouthpiece, O’Brien. The movie of 1984 is a decent film, but if only it had had the courage to increase its running-time by twenty minutes, it might have been a masterpiece!

We live in strange times, where government spokespeople are heard to refer to 'Alternative facts', and we are warned by many in authority and in the mainstream media that much of the news we see is 'fake'. In such a time, it behoves all of us to exercise our hard won democratic rights to free speech, to ensure that we are served by a free, fair and unbiased press, one that is not simply the mouthpiece of a handful of powerful oligarchs. Like I said at the top, when I read this book when I was fifteen, I don't think I thought it could really happen; now, many years on, I'm not so confident ...

I highly recommend this brilliantly written book, justifiably a classic.

The Shape of Water

4/3/2018

The wife and I rarely make visits to the cinema these days, mainly because we don’t find very much that we consider worth watching, it’s quite common for us to have torn the film to shreds before reaching the car park. Our local cinema, despite the fact that it operates ‘eight screens of magic’, generally only shows the most commercially successful offerings. I read Marvel comics as a teenager, and watched the original Star Wars in my early twenties, but don’t want to see these stories endlessly re-packaged again and again, and have become a little weary, not to say wary, of any more feel-good movies (save me, please!). The current state of the movie industry is I think what happens when money dictates the rules to creativity - the loser is always originality. Nor do I like the way in which the film industry has cynically increased the violence and bad language (in my view, they’d probably disagree, but then they would) in films graded as suitable for younger audiences.

When The Shape of Water was released I was unusually eager to see it. I’ve watched a number of Guillermo del Toro movies, and although I can’t say I’ve adored every single one, I certainly found them absorbing and often thought-provoking. I hadn’t read any of the reviews when I saw The Shape of Water, and still haven’t, so the views stated here are entirely my own. I did know however that The Shape of Water cost very little money to make by movie standards - probably less than some movie stars pick-up for headlining on a picture. From the pre-release blurb about the film I was led to expect something along the lines of a fifties Sci Fi B movie, cross-pollinated with some art-house touches. Yes, all these elements are there, however for myself, and for aforementioned wife, what came across most loud and clear to us was the film’s allegorical voice. I very much doubt whether this will become a ‘must-see’ film in the Trump White House, for it is a tale deeply ingrained with liberality and liberal values.

The story is set in Baltimore in 1962, at the height of the Cold War, presumably at a time before it was necessary to ‘Make America Great Again’. The central character, Eliza, played by Sally Hawkins, works as a cleaner along with her friend, Zelda, played by Octavia Spencer, at some kind of secret military establishment. All the main characters in this movie are outsiders, outcasts even; Eliza is mute and Zelda is a down-trodden black woman; Eliza’s friend and neighbour, Giles, played by Richard Jenkins, is a lonely gay man. Eliza, we glean, has a fascination for water, and when an amphibious man, played by Doug Jones, is brought to the secret establishment where she and Zelda work as cleaners, she is immediately fascinated and starts to communicate with him through sign-language. There is a strongly subversive undertone in this movie, with its authority figures, a secret-service man Richard Strickland, played by Michael Shannon, and General Hoyt, played by Nick Searcy, shown to be corrupt, sadistic and decadent. These two share a powerful scene with some excellent dialogue about the quality of ‘decency’. Even the (normally) bad guy, a Russian agent posing as a research scientist, demonstrates more humanity and understanding than these bastions of the establishment.

I don’t do spoilers, so I’ve said more than enough already. I liked this film and can honestly say that I enjoyed watching every frame of it. At a moment in time when the voice of reaction seems to be getting louder and society’s ‘outsiders’ are accorded little value, I am delighted to watch a film, albeit a fantasy, that favours difference and diversity. My previous blog was a review of Into That Darkness by Gitta Sereny, who interviewed Franz Stangl in Dusseldorf prison shortly before his death; Stangl had been Kommandant of Treblinka, the Nazi death camp in Poland where approximately a milion ‘outsiders’ perished. As we came out of the cinema, Judith and I agreed that the Nazis would almost certainly have despised and banned this movie and labelled it decadent art.

So do please see it, if only to piss off a Nazi!

Buddy Reading The Shiralee by D'Arcy Niland

5/2/2017

I’ve mentioned before how, together with a small bunch of reading enthusiasts discovered on Twitter, we take on a group read twice a year. This time we read The Shiralee by D’Arcy Niland. I vaguely recall having watched the 1957 film of the same name which starred Peter Finch on TV, probably sometime in the late Sixties, on one of those long drawn-out Sunday afternoons that always held a kind of dread back then, and seemed to colour everything a little bit grey - strange, because I love Sundays these days, and aim (not always successfully) to do as little as possible.

D’Arcy Niland was a writer dedicated to the great art of short-story writing, and during his relatively short life (1917-1967) he managed to produce over five hundred. He left school at fourteen to help support a large family, and seems to have lived a life as an itinerant worker in much the same way as Mac Macauley does in The Shiralee. He had been encouraged to write by the nuns at his school and he seems to have self-educated himself whilst on the road. He married New Zealander Ruth Park in 1942. She, like Niland, had done some journalism, and they decided they would try and pursue their ambition to write full-time. They had five children together and they both won various literary prizes to support their writing. In 1952 Niland was awarded £600 by the Commonwealth Literary fund to write a novel, and the result was The Shiralee (published 1955). It has never been out of print since and has been translated into many languages.

What did I think of The Shiralee? It is a very fine novel. Niland possessed a short-story writer’s eye for capturing detail that might otherwise pass as mundane or fleeting. It’s not a very thick book but what it lacks in size is made up for in weight. I laughed and wept and genuinely felt a little sad when I finished it, simply because there were no more pages to turn. Niland was a very good writer, as was Ruth Park, whose Harp in the South trilogy, set in the slums of Sydney and partly based on what they observed from living there, is equally worth reading.

Mac Macauley, the book’s main character, is walking the backroads of New South Wales, always on the look out for work, his four year old daughter Buster, the shiralee (burden) of the title, alongside or trailing behind. Macauley is hard and uncompromising, like the land and the life he has always known. He bumps into friends and enemies along the way but this is a story about a man and a child, about loyalty and love. The characters he meets are wonderful, rich, poignant, sometimes spiteful, occasionally violent, but most often surprisingly generous and kind-hearted. I think Tommy Goorianawa, Beauty Kelly, Luke and Bella Sweeney, Wigley, Sam Bywater and the wonderful Desmond have established themselves in my psyche just as firmly as Ham Peggotty, Yossarian or George and Lennie. This is an exceptionally good book, the writing is wonderful. I would go so far as to say that it’s one of the most beautiful books I’ve ever read, and it will most certainly be making my Favourites shelf on Goodreads. I urge everyone to read it.

Thanks to my clever Twitter book club friends for suggesting another great book I would probably never have discovered without them! Having both read it, the wife and I are now very keen to trek up to London to see the Australian Impressionists exhibition.

Frankenstein by Mary Shelley and Some Other Thoughts

12/5/2016

I am sometimes appalled to hear educators declare that teaching the classics of English literature in our schools should be abandoned because they hold no relevance for modern children. I firmly believe that anyone who truly wishes to understand the development of language and writing needs to possess a firm grasp of of our literary heritage. The famous quotation from Sir Isaac Newton to Robert Hooke acknowledging his indebtedness to others, “If I have seen further it is by standing on the shoulders of giants,” can be applied to any discipline just as easily as science. There would be no detective/thriller genre if Wilkie Collins hadn’t created books like The Woman in White and The Moonstone (just imagine what prime-time TV would ever have done then, even more reality and game shows perhaps?), without H Rider Haggard there would be no Lost World genre (Tarzan would still be apeing about in the jungle and there would be no Jurassic Park!). If John Polidori’s The Vampyre hadn’t influenced Bram Stoker, then there may never have been a Dracula, and Stephen King wouldn’t have written Salem’s Lot. The whole Fantasy genre basically stems from the pen of one man, J R R Tolkien, who had himself been inspired by the Norse myths. On a personal note, I most definitely couldn’t have written Niedermayer & Hart or Roadrage without following the bright trails that lead back to their many rich sources. Anyone who claims total originality is I think deluding themselves. However, there is a big difference between following themes or traditions and direct, deliberate plagiarism.

I’ve just read Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein or, the Modern Prometheus, for the first time (published 1818 - and acknowledging its debt to Greek mythology in the title). It is of course the original mad scientist scenario that has since become a stalwart of just about every form of popular culture. The story, then not a hundred years old, first made it to the cinema screens as far back as 1910 - we just love to be horrified! The book might be loosely classified as science fiction too, and its influence on art and literature has been incredibly far-reaching. As a novel it most certainly deserves its classic status. The book’s basic premise of man taking on the role of God has cross-bred with other genres: combine a mad scientist and lost world theme and you get Jurassic Park, mix mad science that creates computers who themselves create horrific human-like machines and you have the Terminator series, perhaps even Tolkien had something of the book in mind when he has Saruman create the Uruk-Hai.

Mary Shelley was born Mary Godwin in 1797, the daughter of the feminist writer Mary Wollstonecraft and writer and journalist William Godwin. Her mother died soon after she was born, and Mary received no formal education and doesn’t seem to have taken very well to her step-mother. She began an affair with the poet Percy Bysshe Shelley when still a teenager and eloped with him to the (then war-torn) Continent. She began writing Frankenstein in 1816 whilst holidaying on Lake Geneva ; by this time she had lost her first baby and had given birth to a son (sadly not to survive either). They were assailed by weeks of rain, and their chum Lord Byron suggested to the group of friends present, that they each compose a horror story to pass the time. The rest is, as they say, history.

The story is well written and has withstood the test of time. The monster of her tale undertakes to do many cruel and vindictive acts in revenge upon his creator Frankenstein; yet it is the monster who is given the last word in the novel by Shelley, and it is for him that we feel the deepest sympathy. Frankenstein never acknowledges his responsibility as creator, and simply abandons his creation which he finds too abhorrent to even gaze upon. The monster subsequently wanders the world like a lost child receiving only cruelty, unkindness and hatred from mankind who he yearns in his heart to join. Is the monster in this story the creature, or the human ego?

We stand at a point in time where such matters are no longer far-fetched. Whilst our governments can attempt to reassure us that any genetic experiments are only carried out with the utmost care and with every attention paid to what is both morally and ethically right ... we know too that once the genie is out of the bottle ...

I wrote a blog some time back that was based on the National Theatre’s production of Frankenstein.

And on a lighter note - one of my favourite comedy films, Young Frankenstein.

Musical Weekend

3/5/2016

My wife is currently reading the autobiography of Helen Keller, who, from a very early age, lost both her sight and hearing. I simply can’t imagine what that must be like - a very different kind of life I guess, though, certainly in Keller’s case, not without joy and a sense of fulfilment . It’s hard for anyone born (especially since the invention of broadcast sound) to conceive of a life without music; it’s all around us a lot of the time. Just step into the garden a moment: hear the radio blaring from the guys working on the loft conversion in the next street, the pounding bass of a passing car as it drives by, or the sound of a child practising piano scales.

A running theme of our past Bank Holiday weekend seems to have been popular music - not intentionally planned though, things simply fell out that way. We’d booked several months back to see Eric Bibb in concert at the Assembly Hall in Tunbridge Wells. We possess several of his albums and have always enjoyed listening to these, so it was very satisfying to get an opportunity to catch him live. He is a highly accomplished blues performer, a beautiful songwriter with a distinctive and very pleasing voice. On Sunday evening he had a band of excellent musicians and backing vocalists accompanying him. His daughter Yana Bibb, a skilled jazz vocalist, provided the support for the first part of the evening. The Bibb family are something of a musical dynasty: Eric Bibb’s father Leon was very active in the New York folk music scene of the 60’s, his godfather was the legendary Paul Robeson and his uncle was the jazz pianist and composer John Lewis. You get the feeling that the musical luminaries of the sixties like Bob Dylan, Judy Collins, Odetta etc regularly dropped by the Bibb family home like my mother’s neighbours in the valleys of South Wales used to pop round to borrow a cup of sugar. Eric Bibb himself moved to Sweden in the Seventies and now lives in Finland. I see one of the dates he has for his current tour is Porthcawl in South Wales - a favoured holiday destination of my family’s when I was a child. I’d love to see him again if I had the opportunity and excuse to pay a visit to Wales at the end of the month! He’s playing at a number of locations all over the UK - so I hope you take the opportunity to see him. Check out Eric Bibb's website for details.

The reason why I said our weekend had a musical theme was because we also watched the George Harrison documentary, Living in the Material World, directed by Martin Scorsese. This is a film in two parts, beautifully realised through hundreds of clips and interviews with those who knew George. If you grew up in the Sixties as I did, The Beatles were inescapably part of your life. And George, the youngest of the four, was in many ways the most fascinating and complex character, often upstaged by Paul and John in the song-writing stakes, he too created some wonderful songs including Something, While My Guitar Gently Weeps, My Sweet Lord and dozens more. If you haven’t seen this film (I’d caught about half of the second part on TV a few years back)and if you’re interested in The Beatles, The Sixties, George Harrison, or all three, this is an excellent film which I can highly recommend.

Careless Talk ...

10/1/2016

As mentioned before (see How I came to Traditional English Folk via Abba) it can be a dangerous thing to voice a preference in my house. This Christmas I received a pile of Patricia Highsmith books - I read her Ripley stories last year as well as her classic first novel, the psychological thriller Strangers on a Train. All it would have required from me were the words “I really like ...” and Judith would have ear-marked them for her pressie drawer. Fortunately for me, I probably completed the above sentence with words along the lines of “(I really like) and admire the way Patricia Highsmith writes,” rather than “(I really like) the artwork - it’s the best thing about her books!” So, lots of great reading for me to look forward to in 2016. I already own a (tragically small) cache of the Charles Portis titles I haven’t read yet - I eke my Portis out because he’s a favourite writer, and as a novelist he hasn’t been very prolific (although he may still surprise us, of course!) - maybe I’ll pick up one of the new ones and re-read an old favourite this year. Yippee!

A funny thing happened this Christmas - the first time in all the Christmasses Judith and I have spent together : we gave each other the same present. It was a DVD of The Seventh Cross (1944) starring Spencer Tracy. It’s a bit difficult to get a copy of it in the UK, and I’d always wanted to see it again having caught it only once on the TV as a boy in Wales. It’s set in pre World War Two Germany, with the Nazis in power, where an atmosphere of fear exists. It’s easy to understand why we thought to give each other this film, as we did a Christmas market trip in mid-December to Dortmund in Germany, where we visited a former Gestapo prison, now a museum which bears testimony to those who opposed the Nazis and their despicable ideology. The film tells this story too, and is perhaps an unusual example of a wartime propaganda movie because many of the Germans are portrayed sympathetically and not simply as stereotypical bad guys. For my money, Spencer Tracy is always worth watching. The museum in Dortmund was excellent and my wife Judith has written a very interesting piece about it on her own blog, take a look Winterreise to Dortmund .

So, here we are, the Christmas/New Year shenanigans are behind us once again and most of us have, I expect, settled back into daily life. I’m back writing, working on the last chapters (second draft) of the follow-on book to Niedermayer & Hart. One nice thing about writing a second draft, in contrast to a first, is the certainty that you actually do have a book.

Pip Pip!

Halloween Again!

31/10/2015

The clocks went back last weekend, so it’s light when we wake up and gets dark sooner in the evenings. The shops have been jam-packed with the paraphernalia of Halloween for weeks. This still seems quite an odd phenomenon to people of my generation, as it wasn’t a very celebrated festival when we were kids and the ‘trick or treat’ element, imported from the US, took at least a decade after my own childhood before establishing itself as a cultural event in Britain.

Judith and I just returned from a few days’ holiday in Wales. We had a grand time, visiting old friends and interesting places. Last Sunday morning we could be found walking across the cliffs at Ogmore, where during my teenage years back in the early Seventies I spent many happy weeks at the school camp there. I could find no trace of it and wonder if the site itself is no longer? A large amount of house-building has gone on there since I was a boy and although the coastline is unassailably spectacular it has lost something of its wildness due to this. Still beautiful though, and I was delighted to be introducing Judith to a section of coastline we’d somehow missed during our many dozens of return trips home.

The evening before, we’d visited Rest Bay in Porthcawl, just six or seven miles around the coast. We sat on the bench I always associate with my parents. It was their favourite spot and it's not hard to see why! Judith and I sat in silence and thought of them for a while, all the happy ‘jaunts’ we’d been on with them to that very spot. Very soon it will be three years since Mam passed away and inevitably, as with the death of any loved one, I find my mind at this time of year filled with memories, some happy, some melancholic.

Appropriately for Halloween:

I recall visiting my parents back in the eighties. I think on this occasion I had come alone, and I remember HTV, the Welsh commercial television network, was showing the TV movie of Stephen King’s Salem’s Lot over two consecutive evenings, late night. Dad was a man who liked to get to his bed before midnight, but Mam was a night-owl like me and loved a good drama. Because Salem’s Lot was made for television and consequently (1979) wouldn’t have been able to rely on gore and violence to tell its story, it concentrated on the building-up of suspense and atmosphere to communicate the tale’s horror. The excellent vampire make-up design for Mr Barlow, based on Count Orlok from the great silent classic Nosferatu, and completely going against the more urbane vision of evil that King gives us in the novel, works marvellously. Tobe Hooper, who directed the TV mini-series, keeps ratcheting up the tension and allows us only the briefest glimpse of Mr Barlow in the first episode. A great deal of the work of chilling the audience is handled with great aplomb by the superbly cast James Mason in the role of Mr B’s acolyte, Straker. Mason presents us with a truly unsettling vision of evil, allowing us to get just a whiff of the man’s viciousness and depravity masked beneath a wafer-thin veneer of sophistication. He was a fabulous actor, and Salem’s Lot is worth watching for his subtle but very scary performance alone. Yes, the series probably looks a little dated today, but no CGI here, just a good script, excellent direction and a competent cast. A horror classic in my view, and I’m sorry to have to admit (apologies to any die-hard Stepen King fans reading) considerably scarier than the novel!

Anyway, Mam and I stayed up late and watched both episodes. I’m immune to horror movies (I believe that this may be because as a teenager I was scratched by a radioactive reel of Hammer Horror film!) but I remember my mother saying to me over breakfast the following morning after we’d watched the even more unsettling second part, “I had to give myself a good talking-to after watching that film with you last night ... that Mr Barlow was horrible, wasn’t he? When I got into bed, Dad was asleep, it was windy outside, the curtains were blowing around ... my imagination got going. I had to tell myself, ‘Don’t be so soft, Mair, it was only a film’ ... it was really good though, wasn’t it Mart?”

Happy Halloween.

We Are Many

25/5/2015

We rarely make visits to the cinema to watch documentaries, we tend to catch up with these on the small screen. However, we made an exception for We Are Many, a film by Amir Amirani, a respected London-based journalist/film-maker of Iranian origin. His film, which has received very little publicity, is about the protest marches that took place right around the world on 15 February 2003 in opposition to the furious scramble for war being driven by the government of George W Bush in the US and heavily supported by our British Government led by Tony Blair.

The London protest, which we took part in, was reputed to have been somewhere between 1.5 and 2 million people strong - the official figure halved this figure of course! However, I have no difficulty believing that we were nearer the number quoted by the march organisers. We came out of Charing Cross Station on the morning of 15 February and immediately found ourselves amongst people we knew from the Sussex village where we’d formerly lived for ten years. We shuffled off along the Strand with them, then went down to and along the Embankment taking us through Westminster, and along a route through central London that eventually brought us to Hyde Park. Our progress was at a snail’s pace, and it took more than five hours to reach our destination. The march in London was only one among roughly eight hundred similar protests taking place in cities right around the world on that day and it has been estimated that something in the region of 30 million people mobilised themselves. What was remarkable about the London march was the sheer diversity of the people who took part in it, people from literally every walk of life and background. I remember feeling incensed by the rush to go to war, with Hans Blix and the UN weapons inspectors pleading for just a few more weeks to prove conclusively that the Weapons of Mass Destruction for which they were searching did not exist.

On the day of the March I remember thinking to myself how it was inconceivable that a British Labour Government could ignore the voices of so many raised in peaceful protest. How wrong I was! The true civilian death toll from the Iraq War has never been published; the number is estimated to be somewhere between 500,000 and 1 million. The cost of the Iraq War was about £10 billion to UK taxpayers and somewhere in the region of $2.2 trillion dollars to US taxpayers. All the coalition forces lost far too many of their sons and daughters there - for a cause that has since been shown to be totally erroneous. The Middle East is certainly not a safer place for this intervention and the toppling of the indisputably wicked Saddam Hussein and his foul regime has not made life in Iraq better, in fact it has been shown that simply containing him would have led to far far fewer deaths. It has always struck me as a very bad joke that Tony Blair, shortly after he stood down as UK Prime Minister, was appointed Middle Eastern Peace Envoy working on behalf of the US, Russia, the UN and the EU.

This film is anything but sensationalist, however it is truly disturbing. It doesn’t have any big financial backing so distribution is patchy, but I hope you’ll find a venue and get a chance to watch We Are Many. I highly recommend seeing it.

Oh Boy, When Things Go Wrong!

5/2/2015

“Oh, boy ... When things go wrong!” as voiced with great feeling by Kenneth Mars as Franz Liebkind, the pro-Nazi playwright and composer of the bogus musical-comedy Springtime for Hitler - billed as - a gay (traditional sense) romp with Eva and Adolf at Berchtesgaden- in Mel Brooks’ marvellous film comedy creation The Producers. I have watched this film countless times and am able to quote almost every line - for me, everything about it just improves with age. Kenneth Mars’ Franz, complete with German WWII helmet, is just a little too loveably insane to ever be truly terrifying. A Nazi-sympathising author would be a horror if encountered in real life, but this is the art of comedy: where madmen, liars, thieves and adulterous philanderers delight and entertain rather than enrage us. In the film, Liebkind, whose maniacal fantasy of ‘taking’ Broadway with his musical before going on to ‘conquer’ the world, comes out with this splendid line once his dearly-held dream has been thoroughly wrecked. He places a revolver to his temple and pulls the trigger ... only to discover he is out of bullets - “Oh, boy ... when things go wrong!”

Actually, the reason I chose this title for the week’s blog is because my son and I spent a good hour and a half last night waiting for a breakdown man to arrive on the verge of a dual carriageway, in what felt like a wind spawned in the Siberian tundra. We were on our way to see an apparently excellent exponent of the blues, singer Kent DuChaine from Georgia at the Anchor pub in Sevenoaks. Tom, who is a much finer judge of great music than I am, and had already seen a Kent DuChaine gig, assured me I was in for a treat; we were eager and on time. I’d even brought along a copy of Roadrage (it’s set in Sevenoaks!) for Snakehips Sue, the dedicated organiser of the Blues with Bottle Club, who generally runs a raffle, to give away. All was going so well, that is until the engine on Tom’s little run-around suddenly died. We were fortunate that he could safely navigate the car over onto the hard-shoulder before we stopped moving forward altogether. So, if you were on the A21 last night and happened to see a young man and an older one wrapped-up together in a blanket whilst standing by the side of the A21 - that was us!

Actually, up until the breakdown, things had been going very well indeed this week: a Niedermayer & Hart countdown deal finished on Monday and I was extremely satisfied by the response to it; also Roadrage received an accolade - well, sort of, well, something along those lines! You see, it got onto a list. Let me explain, there are a number of things that are incredibly difficult for an indie/self-pub - writer to achieve:

1 It’s really hard to get people to believe that your book isn’t littered with typos and grammatical errors, and that it was thoroughly edited by a team of highly literate people.

2 It’s really hard to get people to believe that any nice things reviewers have written about your books weren’t all manipulated through multiple accounts organised and run by your Mum! Conversely, any negative review, no matter how badly it’s been written or how rotten the reviewer’s grammar is, or whether his/her spelling sucks, must be the damn truth!

3 Promotion is really hard - the big publishers actually pay stores like Waterstones to give prime positions to their latest titles. David and Goliath isn’t in it - it's impossible to compete! I’ve often wondered how they get starry reviewers to say all kinds of lovely things about a pretty mundane book. Ever read the blurb on a book’s cover and thought ‘This must be a cracker’, but fifty pages in you wonder if they attached the wrong cover to the pile of doo-doo you have in your hand? (Okay, rant over! )

Anyway, back to accolades, ah yes! In the words of Hamlet’s father’s ghost, “List, list, oh list!” This week Roadrage, as voted for by people on Twitter and Facebook, made it onto a W H Smith list entitled Underrated Crime Books. So - Hurrah! I say, and grateful thanks to W H Smith and especially grateful thanks to the kind souls who voted for Roadrage.

Incidentally, the list couldn’t have been better timed, because I had arranged weeks ago for a Kindle countdown promotion to begin over the forthcoming weekend on Amazon UK. From tomorrow morning, you can download a copy of Roadrage for just 99p, and I hope that as many people as possible will take advantage of this (US readers had the same opportunity on Amazon.com a few weeks back).

The Roadrage countdown offer starts 8 am Friday, 6 February and runs over the weekend until 8 am, Tuesday, 10 February before reverting to its normal price.

Here’s the link: Roadrage on Kindle countdown

Random Harvest and Roadrage

14/11/2014

My late mother adored a darn good film and was generally a lot of fun to watch a movie with. I went to the pictures with her often when I was a boy, and I recall she always got caught up in the action on screen very easily. Sometimes (as children are strangely wont to do!) I’d cringe with embarrassment at her cinema antics, like the time when we were watching Where Eagles Dare and at the moment when it looked certain that Richard Burton was a Nazi spy, Mam muttered loud enough for me and a few nearby rows to hear, “Ooo, you wicked bugger!” I momentarily shrank in my seat, and by the time the interval arrived (RB wasn’t, it turned out, a baddie, and yes, long movies had intermissions back in 1968!) Mam looked round at me, her eyes dancing with excitment and exclaimed, “It’s very exciting, Mart, isn’t it? Shall we have an ice-cream?”

Last weekend Judith and I watched a favourite film of Mam’s from her wartime days, which we’d bought on DVD. My Dad, her fiancé, was by this time (1942/3) far away in India, and Mam was at home alone, just a lovelorn girl of eighteen or nineteen. The film Random Harvest was based on the James Hilton bestseller of the same name and starred Ronald Coleman and Greer Garson. It’s about a young man who has lost his memory after he is discovered injured in No Man’s Land during World War One. Believe you me - this film helps you arrive at a fully comprehensive understanding of the term ‘tear-jerker’! I’d never watched it before, but Mam, who had seen it at the Rex Cinema in Aberdare, and had gone to every single evening performance over the week it played, had given me a scene by scene description many times throughout my childhood years. Yes, it’s sentimental, but so what, we had a box of tissues leftover from the last time we watched It’s a Wonderful Life! The performances, despite the era when it was made, are subtle and understated, and the script is always convincing, even if the overall premise may be a little far-fetched. Anyway, it was great to watch, not least because it was in some way like being able to share the experience with Mam. Definitely got the thumbs-up from me and Judith.

Last week I announced that Niedermayer & Hart was on a Kindle Coundown offer - however, this offer only applied to US readers. A similar deal starts today on Amazon.Com for my psychological thriller Roadrage, which will kick off at only 99 cents (before rising incrementally every 40 hours to its normal price of $4.99) - so if you’d like to read a copy, get in fast! UK readers will have their own opportunity to purchase both books through a similar offer from the end of next week.