M J Johnson
  • Blog
  • Home
  • Books
    • Niedermayer & Hart >
      • Reviews for N & H
      • The Prologue
      • Sample the Book
      • Animations
    • Roadrage >
      • Reviews for Roadrage
      • Roadrage Sample
  • Contact Me

The Perfect Read for Halloween!

30/10/2012

1 Comment

 
A few weeks ago I did a book signing at the Cult Publishers Expo at the Cinema Museum in Lambeth. I always enjoy meeting other people who write, so I stopped by the table of two very friendly chaps who were also signing. We chatted for a while and their books sounded really interesting so I suggested we do a straight swap - theirs for a copy each of mine! Their books were published by MX, an independent publisher whose catalogue is mainly divided between Victorian literature and educational books - a great number of the books they publish are about Conan Doyle's famous Victorian detective, Sherlock Holmes. In fact, one of the authors, Luke Benjamen Kuhns, had written his book about the Baker Street sleuth, entitled The Untold Adventures of Sherlock Holmes. I'm afraid that I haven't had time to read this yet but hope to get round to it in the not too distant future.

Picture
The other author was Roger Johnson and his book was In The Night In The Dark - Tales of Ghosts and Less Welcome Visitors. The title is a quote from one of my favourite horror movies, The Haunting (1963) directed by the excellent Robert Wise. In The Night In The Dark  is a compilation of ghostly and supernatural tales and the book is divided into three sections: Things that Go Bump in the Night (tales from the Endeavour); Things from Beyond; and More Things in Heaven and Earth.

The first section is comprised of ghost stories written in the tradition of M R James, which are a joy to read. They are exquisitely well written and I have found them delightful bedtime reading over the last couple of weeks (my wife thinks I am barking mad to read ghost stories just before I go to sleep!). As with all story compilations I had my favourites of course but they are all beautifully crafted to a very high standard indeed. I devoured all these tales with much glee, although I suppose the stories that really stood out for me were The Scarecrow, The Wall Painting and The Prize. The stories are linked by a device whereby people are invited to tell their ghostly tale to a couple of locals in the setting of an old fashioned Essex pub, called The Endeavour. This section was originally published in 2001 as A Ghostly Crew: Tales from the Endeavour. I would have been more than delighted with the book on the strength of this section alone.

The book's second section Things from Beyond is based on the writing of H P Lovecraft. I must confess to not being a great Lovecraft fan myself, however, Roger Johnson managed to keep me reading and more importantly kept me interested. The book's final section More Things in Heaven and Earth is a miscellany of various pieces of writing that includes some poetry. This section also includes a chilling tale entitled Love, Death and the Maiden based on the grim and very bloody life history of Countess Elisabeth Bathory, which I thought was truly excellent.

I can't think of a worthier book to be recommending on 31 October - Happy Halloween!

In The Night In The Dark is available from all good bookshops and may also be purchased from Amazon, Barnes and Noble and in electronic formats like Amazon Kindle and Kobo.


1 Comment

A Cheese Feast!

24/10/2012

2 Comments

 
PictureSay Cheese!
I've been thinking (musically!).

When my son was fifteen or so, teenagers actually used to compile and listen to these now obsolete things called cassettes. How quaint! A few years later on, the rage amongst the young was to burn compilations of their favourite songs onto CDs for their friends. I expect they do something similar with their ipods today, or whatever is the current method of sharing music. I'm certain of one thing, they will definitely be sharing tracks. Since the birth of recorded sound every new generation has adopted the popular tunes of each era as its personal soundtrack. When I was young, your mate suggested you came over to his house after school to listen to the new Bowie album. If he was a good mate he might even let you borrow it.

Anyway, I say, why should the youth have all the fun!

I was lying in bed recently and I started humming some of my favourite tunes. Then, I started to think about my favourite cheesy songs. Let me explain, a cheesy song in my definition isn't a bad song, although it might have been toe-curlingly awful if it hadn't been for that little bit of fairy dust that came along and made it great.

So, for this blog only: here is my all time best cheesy/fantasy compilation album!

Since that's a bit of a mouthful (as cheese can occasionally be!) I'll simply call it:

The Cheese Feast (with extra cheese topping!)

My album tracks would be as follows and run in this exact order:

Harper Valley PTA - Jeannie C Riley
Bang Bang - Nancy Sinatra
Sex Machine - James Brown
Son of a Preacher Man - Dusty Springfield
Walk on By - Dionne Warwick
Return to Sender - Elvis
Jolene - Dolly Parton
Mona Lisa - Nat King Cole
Fever - Peggy Lee
Something Stupid - Nancy and Frank Sinatra
Hit the Road Jack - Ray Charles
Respect - Aretha Franklin
Son of Hickory Holler's Tramp - O C Smith
That's Amore - Dean Martin
If I were a Carpenter - Johnny Cash and June Carter
King of the Road - Roger Miller
The Shoop Shoop Song - Cher
These Boots are Made for Walking - Nancy Sinatra
From Russia with Love - Matt Monro
The Onion Song - Marvin Gaye and Tammi Terrell

Wouldn't this be a truly awesome album?

A veritable festival of cheese!

After all, let's face it, a little bit of cheese is always palatable. But for me this album would totally fit the bill, because sometimes when the mood takes me, and when it comes to cheese - nothing else will do!

Eat! Enjoy! (no crackers needed!)


2 Comments

Haussmans

17/10/2012

0 Comments

 
The wife and I were really happy last Thursday because we were off to see another play in the NT Live season at our local cinema. The season actually began about a month ago after a short summer break. It started with Simon Stephens' adaptation of Mark Haddon's novel The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time (which took its name from Sherlock Holmes' remark to Watson in the story Silver Blaze by A Conan Doyle) about an autistic boy. Unfortunately, we weren't able to get to that one - you can't win them all!

Anyway, back to the production we saw last week - The Last of the Haussmans by Stephen Beresford. Beresford himself is an actor turned writer and this was quite incredibly his first play. Imagine what a terrifying experience that must be, having your very first play performed at the National? I can picture the poor chap on the first night pacing the battlements (substitute - upper circle) like the ghost of Hamlet's dad!

If this was actually the case, he really needn't have worried: the cast, direction, set design, lighting etc were all superb. The play's action takes place in the house and garden of Judy Haussman's dilapidated house on the Devon coast. Judy (Julie Walters) as a young woman had left her children with her (Edwardian in outlook we are told) parents and gone off to experience a hedonistic existence in an Ashram in India. Her children, now grown-up, are not surprisingly both extremely damaged and needy. Libby the daughter (Helen McCrory) is desperate to find love and affection wherever she can get it and is for much of the play roundly condemned by her own daughter Summer (Isabella Laughland). Libby has recently been having an affair with creepy (married) local doctor, Peter (Matthew Marsh), and we sense from the very first that it's not going to end well. The doctor covers-up his sexual liaisons with Libby by exploiting  the swimming skill of a damaged local teenager, Daniel (Taron Egerton), who practises daily in the Haussmans' crumbling pool. Judy's son Nick (Rory Kinnear) returns home in the first scene; he is an overtly gay addict/alcoholic who like his sister has a history of forming relationships with the wrong people.

Phew!

The catalyst for bringing the family together is Judy's health scare which is at first believed to have passed but has, we learn later on, been mis-diagnosed. This is a comedy about extremely dysfunctional human beings. The script is very funny but I have to say at times I found them far too sad to laugh at - a bit like pointing and laughing at a troupe of lame dogs! However, I think it might have been far easier to watch this play live in the theatre (which is of course what it was written and produced for!) as opposed to live in a cinema. The show was often shot in quite big close-ups, which is of course never an option if you're part of a theatre audience, and personally I think it was a mistake to get in quite so close to the action for so much of the time. Actors gauge their performances quite differently for different media and what might be fairly subtle on a stage may equally appear quite broad when your face is twenty feet high on a cinema screen!

I'm not really complaining though. It's great to see world class theatre for the price of a cinema ticket and to be able to get home have a cup of tea and be tucked-up in bed by 11pm! (Is that a bit sad? Please don't answer!).

NT Live plays in cinemas all over the world; however I believe the dates can vary from country to country. In November we've already booked for Shakespeare's Timon of Athens with the wonderful Simon Russell Beale in the title role. Then in January we hope to get seats (not yet bookable last time we checked) for The Magistrate by Arthur Wing Pinero and which stars the excellent John Lithgow.

Can't wait!

0 Comments

Book Signing at the Cinema Museum

9/10/2012

0 Comments

 
I'm really looking forward to signing copies of Niedermayer & Hart next Saturday (13 October). I was delighted when Dexter O'Neill of Fantom Films asked me if I'd like to be involved. I only got to know him last year, and he was very kind to offer his advice when I was in the process of publishing Niedermayer & Hart through the little company my wife and I started a few years back, called Odd Dog Press. He had originally got in touch with me to ask if I'd like to be involved in a panel interview he was organising - a day of talk events with the dubious title Acceptable in the Eighties!
Picture
My personal contribution to eighties Dr Who was in the guise of Tyheer and the Bandril Ambassador in the two episodes of the series Timelash - alas, never regarded (not even by die-hard fans!) as the Doctor's finest hour.

Picture
In fact if you're imaginative with words and good with letters, as pointed out to me by a fan on the Acceptable in the Eighties signing day, the letters in the title Timelash can be easily rearranged into a moderately rude and some might say quite apt two-word anagram. (For more stuff about Timelash see my blog Dr Who, Timelash and the Bandril Ambassador)

The event is at the Cinema Museum in Kennington, which is somewhere I'm certainly hoping I'll get a good chance to look around on the day. They have all kinds of interesting cinematic paraphernalia there and a fantastic programme of scheduled events. Take a look!

The book event itself is titled Cult Publishers Expo. I can hear them ask, Is Odd Dog Press a cult publisher then? No, definitely not, although I do have a friend who firmly believes N & H will attain cult status at some point in the future. Personally, I only wish he'd read the tea- leaves (or whatever gave him this insight into my up and coming good fortune) with a bit more precision timing-wise! A year - mmm, nice! Two years - yeah okay! Twenty years - oy veh!

I'm looking forward to seeing Paul Darrow there on the day - he was also in Timelash, although I think on this occasion he's there in his capacity as a cult hero from that cult series Blake's Seven. Be honest, did I use the word 'cult' too many times in the last two paragraphs?

If you live near Kennington or fancy a daytrip to London on Saturday 13 October, I'm sure it'll be a fun day. The day's programme of events runs from 11am til 4pm and there's a series of interesting talks throughout the day. The address is The Cinema Museum, Kennington, London and I'll be there from 11am until 2pm. So come along and have a chat or better still chat to me while I sign your copy of Niedermayer & Hart! And just think, if you do buy a book, not only will you be putting a smile on the face of an impoverished writer/actor, you may be helping N & H on its way to achieving cult status too! LOL!

0 Comments

Double - Oh - Fifty!

3/10/2012

1 Comment

 
There was a bit of a kerfuffle earlier on in the week: on Monday someone cheekily put Adele's new Bond single out on the internet. I didn't hear it, although I did catch a tiny snippet later that afternoon on the PM programme. The song is being officially launched on Friday to mark Bond's fiftieth anniversary.

The Bond series is fifty years old, imagine!

If JB was a real person and hadn't always managed to stay roughly the same age throughout his various incarnations, I expect he 'd be a nonagenarian by now. I can just picture him in a Home Counties nursing-home dedicated to the care and welfare of retired operatives of the British Secret Service. It would have to be a place especially comfortable, for those exceptional agents who carried a double-o prefix - who knows, perhaps his old sparring partner 'Q' is there too! And maybe he's busy dictating his memoirs to a certain elderly lady called Moneypenny - a 'Miss' rather than a 'Ms' - who spent her life swooning and waiting for the adoration of one man to be reciprocated.

My first encounter with Bond was at the age of nine when my grandad, Dycu (Duck-Key) to me in my family's Valleys' dialect but officially Dadcu (Dad-Key), took me to see Goldfinger. The year in question would have been 1964. Dycu was an avid reader and it was probably from him that I picked up the habit myself. The man almost always had a book in his hand; Nevil Shute, Dennis Wheatley and Ian Fleming were amongst some of his favourites I recall. He must have liked them a lot, because he had whole shelves dedicated to these writers, and there were countless others too whose names I can't remember.

PicturePlaza Cinema, Kingsway, Swansea
I think it was possibly the only time Dycu took me to the pictures, certainly the only occasion I ever recall. I remember we went to see it in the Plaza Cinema, Swansea, which made a huge impression on my young mind. Because of all the ornate ceilings and chandeliers I believe I may have thought I was entering the court at Versailles. It was without a shadow of a doubt the most opulent building I had ever encountered - a true picture palace. It had been built in 1931, seated 3000 people and was at that moment the largest cinema in Wales. It  took a hit when Swansea was badly bombed during WWII but had been restored in time for me and my Dycu to see the Bond film. It was pulled down to make way for a dance hall, supermarket and smaller cinema (though still massive compared to cinemas today which tend to go for fairly small multi-screened complexes) the following year.

And what about the film? It was the most exciting thing I had ever seen! My mother came to meet me and Dycu as we came out and I reckon our eyes must have been popping out of our heads, because I recall Mam saying,"Well, I can see you both enjoyed that!"

After Bond I required my pearly-handled six guns with the low-slung holsters that I sported about our garden in Wales considerably less. I started to wear a trilby hat, had a card in my pocket that bore my secret service number (licensed to kill of course), when taking refreshments in our kitchen I sipped small glasses of Tizer pop (shaken not stirred) and always carried a gun discreetly in a shoulder holster. Cowboys were out - secret agents were in!

For the next twenty years I went to see every new Bond movie. Roger Moore made the series fun, but Connery, with a little touch of sadism about him, was always best in my eyes. I loved Thunderball as a boy with all its underwater action but as a man I think I like From Russia with Love most of all. And Goldfinger , the template for every Bond film that came after it had the best villain, best villain's henchman and best theme song, sung of course by 'Our Shirl from Tiger Bay'.

I really like Adele, think Daniel Craig's great as JB, but honestly let's face it, they don't really stand a chance against the wide-eyed-awe of that boy I've been travelling with since 1964!

Happy Fiftieth Birthday Mr Bond!


1 Comment
    Picture
    Available in paperback and ebook:
    Amazon.co.uk
    Amazon.com
    Picture
    Available in paperback and ebook:
    Amazon.co.uk
    Amazon.com
    Picture
    Available in paperback and ebook:
    Amazon.co.uk
    ​Amazon.com
    my read shelf:
    M.J. Johnson's book recommendations, liked quotes, book clubs, book trivia, book lists (read shelf)

    M J Johnson

    You can join Martin on
    Facebook
    If you'd like to subscribe to this blog, click on the RSS Feed button below

    RSS Feed

    Categories

    All
    Art
    Books
    Family Matters
    Film
    Historic/Factual
    Might Raise A Smile
    Miscellaneous
    Music
    Niedermayer & Hart
    Places Worth A Visit
    Roadrage
    Tea 'n' Coffee
    Theatre
    TV Stuff
    TV Stuff
    Wales
    Wilhelm & Laszlo
    Writing

    Archives

    April 2019
    December 2018
    November 2018
    October 2018
    August 2018
    June 2018
    May 2018
    April 2018
    March 2018
    June 2017
    February 2017
    January 2017
    October 2016
    September 2016
    July 2016
    June 2016
    May 2016
    April 2016
    February 2016
    January 2016
    December 2015
    November 2015
    October 2015
    September 2015
    August 2015
    July 2015
    June 2015
    May 2015
    April 2015
    March 2015
    February 2015
    January 2015
    December 2014
    November 2014
    October 2014
    September 2014
    August 2014
    July 2014
    June 2014
    May 2014
    April 2014
    March 2014
    February 2014
    January 2014
    December 2013
    November 2013
    October 2013
    September 2013
    August 2013
    July 2013
    June 2013
    May 2013
    April 2013
    March 2013
    February 2013
    January 2013
    December 2012
    November 2012
    October 2012
    September 2012
    August 2012
    July 2012
    June 2012
    May 2012
    April 2012
    March 2012
    February 2012
    January 2012
    December 2011
    November 2011
    October 2011

Powered by Create your own unique website with customizable templates.