Authors know everything
After a week in which Donald Trump gained more votes in the Iowa Republican caucus than all the other candidates combined...
“People never lie so much as after a hunt, during a war or before an election.”
Otto von Bismarck, fearsome nineteenth century unifier of Germany, whose three-volume autobiography Gedanken und Erinnerungen sounds much more intimidating in German (trans: Thoughts and Memories).
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Under the Hornbeams by Emma Tarlo. Faber £18.99
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Until recently I used to walk along the Regent's Canal every day, past two gentlemen of the road who had made a home beneath a bridge. One looked like Tolstoy until he got rid of the beard, the other was just some dark hair poking out of a sleeping bag. They had their possessions arranged neatly around them in bags and seemed quite content to be there, untroubled by the odd rat sprinting past. They lived there for a few years, then one day they were gone, I thought perhaps to get away from a more permanent encampment that had appeared on the other side of the water, a bit like a housing development going up in the field behind your house. And here they are, in a book, sharing their sense of freedom from their new address, beneath a tree in nearby Regents Park. Nick is talkative and from the Wirral, Pascal is "a master of silence" and from France. After 16 years in each other's company, neither could be happier nor wastes any time wishing they had a roof over their head. Meanwhile the author who befriends them, an academic, feels crushed by university bureaucracy and suffocated by how no one dare say anything for fear of offending. She's not about get the sleeping bag down from the loft, but there's no doubt which of the parties is more satisfied with their arrangement. Buy this book
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The Strong Words Hot List New books! Five crime and thriller titles to get the blood circulating. |
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5. Lost and Never Found by Simon Mason riverrun, £16.99
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A third case to bicker over for two Oxford detectives who are both called R. Wilkins. Ray (suave, educated, heading for promotion) can barely disguise his disgust for his colleague Ryan (coarse, can barely dress himself, has been booted out of the force once already). But it's Ryan who makes all the investigative progress when a socialite who has left her Roller wrapped around the entrance to the city's station goes missing without trace. Buy this book
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4. The Actor by Chris MacDonald Michael Joseph, £16.99
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Just as it seems an actor's career is about to run out of road, he delivers the performance of a lifetime in a film that could restore him to glory with an Oscar. But how did he manage to summon the intensity for the movie's incredible final scene? Was it thanks to the astute guidance of his method acting guru? Or was it more to do with the early loss of a classmate as a student, the exact details of which he would prefer to keep to himself? Turns out he's not alone in knowing what happened all those years ago, and that could scuttle his Oscar dream. Buy this book
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3. Directions for Dark Things by Stephanie Sowden Canelo, £9.99
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In southern California in the shoulder-padded eighties, a lonely old lady receives a chirpy female visitor at her junk-packed mansion. Would she care to sell her property to a developer? Why yes she would, on one condition – that the young woman spends a week beneath her roof. That's fine with the estate agent – she has her own motives. But house and crone have history, and in flashbacks to the twenties, mistakes were made by the owner and also by a cop. The policeman, now back on the scene as an old man, is seeking to redeem a decision that has haunted him since the dawn of his career. Buy this book
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2. Hot Springs Drive by Lindsay Hunter Renegade Books, £22
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In small town America, what else is there for young mothers to do in their moments of relief from round-the-clock childcare, but put on weight, and then having taken it off again, have an affair with the next door neighbour? There is another thing: try and work out who wielded the crowbar when a woman is found with her head bashed in, the day after she discovered her husband at it with the mother-of-four over the fence. Buy this book
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1. Here in The Dark by Alexis Soloski Raven Books, £16.99
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Sharp of tongue but with a low opinion of our species, a New York theatre critic can only really experience a connection with others while observing life on a stage. An actor herself for whom it all went wrong, her goal is the top critic's job, but her career takes a turn for the truly dramatic when she is interviewed by a student who then goes missing. As the last person to have seen him alive, what information can she share? And when she turns detective (who wouldn't?) how good is she really at reviewing the performance of others? Buy this book
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The world's reservoir of enthusiasm has diminished with the death of Annie Nightingale.
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The sad news that Radio 1 heroine (and my former next door neighbour) Annie Nightingale died recently prompted a trip back to her latest book, Hey Hi Hello (White Rabbit, £10.99). Her life was sufficiently long and colourful to have produced three autobiographies, and when she spoke to me for Strong Words in 2020 she still had loads of plans, many of which involved eardrum-melting nightclubs, in spite of her eightieth birthday already being behind her. Some of the best stuff in Hey Hi Hello though is about the early days at Radio 1, when executives far younger than eighty were having seizures over the dreadful young people and the prospect of women playing records on air. "I reckon the bigwigs at the BBC were secretly hoping this pop music was just a fad and would be dead in the water within a year. That it would all go away, and Radio 1 with it," she wrote. Also that, "the management heads in the early Radio 1 days were technical-grade blokes, some ex-RAF. Their mantra was: Radio 1 DJs are ‘husband substitutes’, jolly chaps who would keep the little woman at home entertained, the imagined housewife in her frilly pinny, till hubby came back from work and male authority could be restored in the home." In spite of this low-expectation, shouldn't-you-be-in-the kitchen-love approach to broadcasting,"I did find out some years later that all the DJs on Radio 1 had been vetted by a branch of our intelligence service, MI5." I wonder what they found? Former spooks with access to the Radio 1 files, please share. And Annie, bon voyage. You were tremendous. Buy this book
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On the dreadful first lines debate...Ed, re: your US presidential no-hoper Asa Hutchinson and the most boring first line ever written, are you aware of the Bulwer-Lytton Fiction Contest? Every year people are encouraged to send in comically bad first sentences of imaginary novels, in celebration of Bulwer-Lytton's 1830 clunker "It was a dark and stormy night." Elaine K, (subscriber)If you'd like to see the kind of thing the B-L F C lives for, go to bulwer-lytton.com. Beware though, there's a lot of it and it's quite pleased with itself. Personally I've never quite understood why people are so keen to gang up on "It was a dark and stormy night". Other than someone once saying you should never start a novel with the weather, it brings a bit of drama and it doesn't hang about. I say, let it through. Ed.Please share your own rules of "good" and "bad" writing at info@strong-words.co.uk.
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Dear Ed, on the subject of poetry, I wonder if any of your readers still use it to try to impress young men or women they've got their eye on? When I was at university in the seventies at least three admirers chose verse as a means of declaring their interest. They were sort of on the right lines, although also couldn't have been wider of the mark – I preferred books to people. Do you think a love poem has ever smoothed the path, etc?
Helene M, Glasgow
I guess poetry's fetish for vagueness is an asset to those trying to get their own personal turbulence down on paper, but whether people still believe poems have a dash of love potion in them, I have no idea. I'm sure someone somewhere still has faith that rhyming moon with June will do the trick where all else has failed. Ed.
Has poetry ever provided a beneficial service for you? Please share all evidence of poetry coming to the rescue at info@strong-words.co.uk.
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How authors find their inspiration...Coming next week is a re-issue of the New Yorker columns that the magnificent Maeve Brennan, who moved to the US from Ireland at 17, wrote between 1954 and 1981.
While some writers make a virtue of the ordeals they put themselves through, the risks they take and the contacts they cultivate, Maeve displayed a scandalously unfashionable lack of desire to know more. Writing of herself in the original 1969 introduction...
"As a traveller she is interested in what she sees, but she is not very curious, not even inquisitive. She is not a sightseer, never an explorer. Little out-of-the way places have to be right next door to wherever she happens to be living for her to discover them. She has never felt the urge that drives people to investigate the city from top to bottom. Large areas of city living are a blank to her. She knows next to nothing about the Lower East Side, less about the Upper East Side, nothing at all about the Upper West Side. She believes that small, inexpensive restaurants are the home fires of New York City. She seldom goes to the theatre or to the movies or to art galleries or museums."
(From The Long-Winded Lady, by Maeve Brennan. Peninsula Press, £12.99) Buy this book
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