Drew Payne

She was smart, tart Dry as a martini— Ah, but underneath… She was all heart Something by Puccini— Ah, but underneath... Ah, But Underneath, Follies - Original London Cast, Stephen Sondheim Julia McKenzie, dressed in a white silk dress, walked slowly to the centre of the stage, dry-ice swirling around her feet, and picked out by a single spotlight. Then she stopped, looked off into the middle distance, and began to sing “Losing My Mind”. She stopped the show. It was 1987 and I was sitting in the audience at the Shaftsbury Theatre, London, watching Follies, my first West End musical. I had heard so much about this musical, about the A-list cast taking to the stage in it, I had already bought myself the cast recording of it before seeing it. “Losing My Mind” was a torch-song about unrequited love, but listening to that album I had no idea of the power of that song. Sitting there in the theatre, that song hit me face-on, and it stopped the show. I could feel other people around me reacting in the same way. Now, Julia McKenzie is a very fine actor, with a wonderful singing voice, but it wasn’t just her performance of that song, it was her performance that whole evening. We had seen how her character was deluding herself, chasing after a lost love from twenty years before and denying the problems in her marriage. When we reached the part of the musical where she sang “Losing My Mind” near the end of the second act, we knew this woman and we felt so sorry for her; we were swept up in the real nature of the song because we were hearing it in context. My mother always loved musicals but she loved the big, Hollywood, romantic musicals. The musicals where the action would stop for its great love songs and it always had a happy ending where the star-crossed lovers found happiness together. I hate those musicals, especially the unrealistic nature of them where the action stops for another song. Growing up, I was sure I didn’t like musicals; well, I didn’t like the ones I had been exposed to. As a teenager I discovered the television show The South Bank Show. This was a weekly arts show, broadcast on a Sunday night. Unlike most arts shows then, it wasn’t a magazine show, filled with short segments about different and often unrelated subjects; The Show Bank Show would dedicate the whole show to one subject, one writer, one artist, one film, or one play. One Sunday night in 1980, it was about the musical Sweeney Todd, which was soon to premier in London. I watched it in amazement. The musical was about multiple murders and cannibalism, not your usual musical fare. (It was based on the London legend of Sweeney Todd, the barber who slit the throats of his customers, and his sidekick Mrs Lovett, who cut up those bodies and cooked them into meat pies.) But it was more than just a musical horror story; the songs examined the nature of revenge and the destruction of a man’s mental health. I was fascinated and I’d discovered my first musical hero, Stephen Sondheim. Three years later, a touring production of Sweeney Todd came to Manchester; I was still living with my parents in Liverpool. I persuaded my parents to take me to a matinee performance. I was a teenager and learning how to “persuade” my parents to let me do what I wanted to do. It was a musical and that was enough to appeal to my mother, and my father went along with it because my mother wanted to. My mother, though, after the curtain rose and the songs began, rapidly disapproved of it, and she could disapprove with a force like thunder. The last song of the first act is called “A Little Priest” and is a comic song about cannibalism. My mother was audibly huffling throughout it. During the interval, my mother announced, “Tommy, this isn’t what I call a musical!” My father replied, “But it’s very interesting, dear, and those actors are taking good parts.” We stayed for the second act. The atmosphere in the car on our journey home that day was tense. My mother silently oozed disapproval; it had not been her idea of an afternoon spent at the theatre, especially as the second act seemed drenched in murder and madness. I sat in the car’s backseat silently because I had been swept away by what I had seen. It had been a fast-paced plot with a cast of not-so-lovable characters, but it had also discussed some big themes like the nature of revenge, how destructive it can be, and how it doesn’t give you justice or peace. This was what drama could be about. I had to wait until I’d left home and moved to London to see my next Sondheim musical, Follies. This was a very different musical, about the 1970s reunion of the Follies Girls, showgirls from a 1950s musical extravaganza. This musical was about relationships, nostalgia and how we can fool ourselves with both, plus it didn’t have a neatly happy ending. It showed me how fantasy can be used so effectively in drama, where the characters can step forward and tell the audience what their problems are, in this case with four very different and very original Follies numbers. “Losing My Mind” is one of these numbers. Since then, I’ve had the opportunity to see theatrical productions of all his musicals; some have been memorably good, some have been easily forgotten. Sondheim’s musicals do demand so much from actors and production, they are not easily staged in a room above a pub with mediocre actors. Living in London, I have been fortunate to have been able to see some amazing theatrical productions, and so many of them have been Sondheim’s musicals. What Sondheim’s musicals do, which I found revolutionary when I first saw them, is that his songs still carry the plot forward. In one of his musicals, the plot does not stop for a song; instead the songs are so important to the plot, moving characters and plot forward. His lyrics also capture the characters’ speech patterns; you can hear their dialog in the lyrics of the songs they sing. The meaning of the emotions in his songs deepens when you hear them in context, when you have spent an evening with the characters who are singing them, when you know who they are and why they are singing that song. Sondheim’s most famous song is “Send in the Clowns”. It is always sung as a romantic song, a love song, but in the musical it is something very different. In A Little Night Music, it is sung by the character Desiree who has spent the musical chasing after Fredrik, an old lover who she thinks will make the perfect husband and father for her teenage daughter. In the second act, she finally gets Fredrik alone in her boudoir and he tells her he really loves his wife. She sings “Send in the Clowns” as her reply. The song is an “oh shit” song. She has finally got Fredrik where she wants him, but he doesn’t want her and she realises she really doesn’t want him. It is such a human and awkward moment, but you do not get that if you only hear the song out of context. It was a great joy introducing Martin, my husband, to Sondheim’s musicals. I had worried at first that he wouldn’t like them, that he would see them just as camp froth, as so many people claim them are. Fortunately, he saw in them what I do, he too enjoys the plots and characters that are carried along by Sondheim’s sharply lyrical songs, what he also enjoys are their plots. None of Sondheim’s musicals could be described as having “conventional” plots, no two of his musicals even have similar plots, but they always have fascinating plots, even if the plot does not hit the mark, like in Anyone Can Whistle. When I first moved to London, the first gay men I met happily told me that Sondheim was gay, he was one of us. At first it was reassuring; such a genius like Sondheim was also gay. I found comfort in those famous and intelligent and creative men who were also gay. Later, I came to realise, as I read more about Sondheim and his life, that him being gay was one part of the outsider that he was and that his outsider-ness, not being at the heart of any of the societies he belonged to, made him such a talented composer and songwriter. He was looking in from the sidelines, not celebrating from the centre, and so could comment on all he saw, good and bad. I have found that in myself, so much of my writing is me looking in at something I didn’t fully belong to. On the 26th November 2021, Stephen Sondheim died. He was at home with his husband when he did. He has been called a titan of musical theatre and he certainly did reinvent the musical form. But I fear that we won’t get another Sondheim. He made his songs an integral part of the musical’s plot, but musicals have changed so much in the last thirty years. They now cost hundreds of thousands of pounds to stage and MUST be a hit. So we get lots of revivals and jukebox musicals, musicals based on the back catalogue of a famous singer or group or musicals based on famous eighties blockbuster films, which use eighties pop hits as their songs. Musicals with a big and ready audience before they even open, musicals that guarantee a happy ending. Unfortunately, I do not see any space for new composers and songwriters who are trying to do something different, like Sondheim. But there is always fringe theatre. With his death, I have lost the hope that maybe there could be a new Sondheim musical somewhere in the pipeline. He was not the most prolific of composers but always produced quality over quantity. I do have the hope of more productions of his work. In 2017, the National Theatre staged a production of Follies. They got every element of it right; the casting, staging, orchestration and direction were so right that they generated a perfect production and we got to see it. It is a memory I will happily never forget. Drew

“I gave you good script,” Ma to Alan Cocktail Sticks, a play by Alan Bennett The writer Alan Bennett has been very open about how much he is inspired by real-life events. He has written plays and film scripts all inspired by real-life events; he has written several volumes of autobiographical essays, and every year or so he publishes extracts from his diary. I’ve seen and read all of them and enjoyed them so much. In his autobiographical play Cocktail Sticks, about his relationship with his parents, the character of Ma (based on his mother) says, “I gave you good script,” meaning he has used so many of the actual things she said in his writing. I cannot class myself in the same writing league as Alan Bennett, but I take so much inspiration from real-life events. That inspiration seems to fall into three different types. The first is when I want to write about events or attitudes that have made me angry or upset. This is when I use fiction to explore how I feel about a subject or when I want to write about attitudes in order to expose the negative/destructive nature of them. My short story I Always Knew is an example of this. It was the height of the Jimmy Savile scandal and I heard an elderly journalist on the radio saying that he’d always known about Savile’s crimes. My anger led me to explore that attitude, those people who are always “wise” after a tragedy, in this story. Secondly, I can find inspiration in news headlines and real events. Sometimes it a headline and a short news item that inspires my imagination. I don’t do anymore research, instead I let my imagination dwell on those sparse descriptions or even single event and then I fill out the events and with characters I’ve created. Without researching the events any further I can make sure I am not using the people and their tragedy for my own fiction, that my story is a complete work of fiction. A Family Christmas is an example of me using this type of inspiration. There was a mass shooting in America, on Christmas Eve, the year before I wrote this story. I learnt no more about that tragedy but my imagination filled in the blanks and I created a story that explored a theme that leapt out at me from this tragedy. I don’t always search out stories of death and tragedy, all kinds of things in the media can set my imagination off running. I read an interview with the actor Russell Tovey where he said a throwaway comment, but that comment set my imagination off. The result was the story That One Big Role. I have also been researching historical events for a series of stories. These take a lot more research and less of my imagination filling in the blanks, though some of that is still needed. With these stories I want to examine a historical event from a fictional character’s point of view, find the human story inside the facts. These stories do take a lot of work, but I don’t want to stop writing them, the research is fascinating. The Trial of the Century is the first one in this style I wrote. Thirdly, I find inspiration from my own life. It can either be just one small factor that I then spin off into a whole story, or else it can form a larger part of a story, or else I fictionalise something that happened to me as a way to explore what and why that thing happened. Boxing Day 1975 is a short story of mine that was inspired by one event from my life. When I was a young child, on Boxing Day, together with my family I watched the big film on television that evening, One Million Years BC. That was the only part I took into the story, it is certainly not based on my own family but I do vividly remember how my family all sat down together to watch the same television film. I met my first boyfriend in 1987 but our relationship did not last. Our break-up was different, difficult and not that conventional. I used that break-up scene, almost word-for-word from real life, as the opening scene of my story Out of the Valley. I used this story to explore obsessive love and not being able to let go of an ex-lover, none of which was my reaction to the end of that relationship, though this story did go through many rewrites over the years with the wish-fulfilment ending being quickly dropped. Then there are those real-life encounters that play on my mind and imagination and form the bases of some of my stories. Jonathan Roven Is Lost (a story in my collection Case Studies in Modern Life) is a story that started off in that way. Through my job, I saw the effect dementia has on the partners of those people with it. My blog here gives a much fuller picture of how that story was created. For me, there isn’t just one way that I find inspiration, but I guess that is the same for so for many writers, but using inspiration and facts from real life is very important to me, I want my stories to have that taste of authenticity. I don’t use overheard dialog in my writing, like many writers do, because the few times I’ve heard anything decent I’ve forgotten the actual words by the time I get home. But I do use real people in my writing or people’s attitudes and beliefs. I don’t use direct copies of people; I don’t feel comfortable if readers can easily identify the person who was the inspiration for a character. So often I combine different things from different people—the attitude from one person, the clothes style from another and the physical appearance from another. But what really fascinates me are people’s attitudes and beliefs and how they affect their lives and how people’s personalities react in different situations. For me, I find inspiration in so many different ways, so many different things can spark and inspire my imagination, but in the end it is my imagination that forms the story from whatever the inspiration is, though I always work to create authenticity in my fiction. I hope my stories bear that out. I do remember one of the classic things my mother said, though I have never found the right story to use it in. I was in my early teens and had just come home from school one afternoon and my mother was unpacking her shopping. “I won’t buy anymore lemonade, all you lot ever do is drink it,” my mother said. “What should we do with it, wash in it?” I said. “You know what I mean,” she told me. And I did. Happy reading Drew

It was a love affair, carried out by letters and parcels, though the love was all on my side. I would wait, with both excitement and anticipation, for each new delivery, some of which would take weeks to arrive. Aged eighteen, in suburban Liverpool, in the early 1980s, I had little chance of finding any queer literature. The big chain bookshops in the city centre only sold bestsellers and mainstream books. The independent bookshops sold the same bestsellers and sentimental books on local history. I was starved for any gay literature; I was desperate for anything that reflected my sexuality, which showed me how gay life was lived. I would search the Central Library, Liverpool’s large city centre library, for any books with gay content, even if they were just minor characters or slight themes. I read so many offensive and homophobic books in that search. Almost by accident I fell upon a copy of Gay Times magazine, it was tucked away amongst the top shelf porn magazines in a rundown newsagent up near Liverpool’s two cathedrals. Almost with a nervous twitch, I bought it. It was only when I got it home and I was safely on my own that I started reading it. What leapt out at me, amongst all the other things within its pages, was a mail order service from the Gay’s The Word bookshop in London. They offered only gay books, several of which were mentioned elsewhere in the magazine. With excitement, I filled out the order form, choosing two novels, writing a cheque to pay for them, sealing it all up in an envelope and posting it off. Then I waited. Nearly two weeks later, my parcel arrived, wrapped in plain paper, and inside were my two new novels. With glee I started to read both of them right away, ignoring all the other books I’d been reading. Soon this became my routine, each month I would send off my order and wait for my parcel of books to arrive. The anticipation of waiting for those books was sometimes greater than the thrill of receiving them, but I was always excited when my parcel arrived. At first, I ordered gay romantic novels, stories where handsome men would meet and fall in love, eventually living happily ever after. They were fantasies, but I wanted that fantasy. I was deeply closeted, living in a strongly homophobic environment, and those romantic novels held the hope that one day I could find a lover and live happily ever after. I lapped them up, even with their poor plots and stereotyped characters. As the months passed by, though, my tastes began to expand. Gay’s The Word made book recommendations and Gay Times had its own book review section. I started to read contemporary gay novels, discovered the crime novels of Joseph Hanson (his portrait of California was so different from that of Hollywood), novels of gay life in 1980s England, and many coming out stories. I also began to read non-fiction books, I started with self-help books on how to be a Happy Homosexual but I soon moved away from them because of their very simplistic views. Quickly I moved on to biographies and historical studies of gay life. What did it mean to be gay in Victorian London? What was the Gay Liberation Front? Was there a gay scene before 1960? I read all those books with a voracious appetite. This was a world that had been hidden away from me. As those books kept arriving for me, I began to wonder where they were coming from. What did the Gay’s The Word bookshop look like? It must have been a huge bookshop judging by the variety of stock they carried. I imagined that it stretched over several floors of a big, brightly light book superstore; all smooth, laminated bookshelves, polished floors and assistants who all wore name badges telling the world who they were. I imagined it was a great palace of gay literature, where I could simply lose myself in the pleasure of buying a book. At nineteen, I began to explore the tiny gay scene that Liverpool had to offer back then. Even as I did this, I still relied on those parcels of books from Gay’s The Word. Those books were still such a large part of my life. They were my main entertainment, but they also offered me information and consoled me when my adventures in gay life flat-lined. At twenty-one, I finally moved to London. Ever since I’d started receiving my parcels of books, it had been my dream to move to London and finally throw myself one hundred percent into gay life. That dream had been created and fuelled by the books I’d read, so many of them had portrayed London as the centre of gay life in Britain, the San Francisco of British gay culture. The reality of London both lived up to my dream but also disappointed me; so many things were different from what I’d imagined them to be. But London was also where Gay’s The Word had their bookshop, in the heart of Bloomsbury. Even its location sounded literary. I didn’t rush to Gay’s The Word the moment I arrived in London; I didn’t have the opportunity. It was a month later that I was actually able to visit the shop. One Saturday lunchtime, I took a tube train to Russell Square and walked the short distance from there to Gay’s The Word. When I found the shop, on a street made up of Victorian buildings with a large 1970s block of flats dominating one end of it, I was shocked at what I saw. I wasn’t mistaken, this was the right shop, its name was clearly on display above the plate glass window that covered its tiny frontage, but it was so small. It was tiny. It was as small as so many of the shops squeezed onto many of London’s streets. It was no bigger than the newsagent where I bought my morning newspaper. It wasn’t the huge gay book superstore I’d imagined it to be. It was a tiny, dusty London bookshop, like so many others across the city. It wasn’t the glorious palace I’d imagined it to be. It was another of the disappointments I found in London. But this was a gay bookshop and I was running out of reading material, so I went inside. Inside, though, was a different world, an Aladdin’s treasure cave of books. Though small, miles of wooden shelves had been squeezed into there, all filled to bursting with different books. The mail order service had had a wide range of books, but the shop itself was bursting full of different ones. I’d never have imagined there could be so many different lesbian and gay books in one place, let alone that so many had been published. I was so excited, almost too excited to know what to do. So I simply started at one end of the shop and worked my way round to the other end of it, looking at every book I found. I was lost in the most perfect world to me, a world of books. Gay’s The Word wasn’t the shiny, laminated bookstore I’d imagined; it was crowded and cramped, with dusty wooden shelves that were overstuffed with books. It was perfect though and I fell in love with it in that first moment I stepped inside. It was full of the widest range of queer books, journals and magazines; I was in heaven. On that first visit there I stayed twice as long as I meant to and spent three times as much as I had intended to, but I didn’t care. I’ve returned there many times, but how could I not when they love books as much as I do. (I originally wrote this essay for a proposed anthology of true stories called My First Gay Bookstore. It was accepted, the editor liked my different take on the subject, and I was elated. But all good things… The anthology was never published, everything just went very quiet and I heard nothing. But this is still an essay I like; it is a personal story but it is a different telling of a familiar subject. It shows one of the ways I slowly overcame my very isolated teenage years and is about a place that is still very special to me) Drew

My latest published book is an e-book version of my story Boxing Day 1975. This story is written in the Rashomon style. This is where the same events are told and retold from the prospective of different characters, two or more. My story is about a family watching the Boxing Day film, on television, in 1975. They all have a very different reaction to the film, reflecting the changings times of 1975. The film they are watching is One Million Years BC. The style/effect is named after the 1950 Japanese film Rashomon, where a murder is seen from the prospective of four different witnesses who all have a very different view of what happened. It has also been called the Unreliable Witness and has been linked to real-life court trials. I’ve never seen Rashomon. I first came across Rashomon style by watching a BBC television play in the early 1980s (unfortunately I cannot remember the name of it). It told the story of a rape from the prospective of a wife who was raped, her husband, who witnessed the rape, and a stranger, who did or did not rape her. The wife blames herself for being raped in front of her husband. The husband is angry that his wife has sex with another man in front of him. The stranger feels used by the husband and wife in a kinky sex game. I feel uncomfortable writing this description even now, it was a very questionable story with some questionable attitudes to rape. But the style of it fascinated me, three different characters with three different views of the same event. I tried using this style in my writing. At first, I wrote short dramas where three different characters narrated the same event, sometimes fictional and sometimes real historical events described by fictional characters (Boxing Day 1975 is very much in this style). But over the years I have adapted and developed my own take on the Rashomon style. I have written several stories where characters react to the same event but not at the same time. One character will experience the first part of the story/event, another character (or more than one) will experience the middle part of the story/event, and yet another character will experience the end of it. I will tell a story, moving from one character to the next, each one only seeing their view of the events. I do enjoy writing in this style, I can explore how an event affects different characters and I can show how people often do not have the full picture of what is happening around them. Moving Pictures was the first time I used this style, it is set over one evening with each section taking place after the previous one. Each character has such little insight into what the other ones are feeling and doing; they are there in their own little world, unaware of how their actions will affect the other characters. Saying all this, Boxing Day 1975 did not start off as a Rashomon style story; I originally wrote it as a flash fiction story that only saw the events from one character’s point of view. A friend read it and suggested that I expand it and include other characters’ points of view. Her advice sharked my imagination and I set about rewriting it. Doing so gave me the chance to explore some other issues too. 1975 was a time that was culturally interesting; things were beginning to change, with the women’s movement, Black rights and gay liberations. But also things were staying very much the same; just watch some television from then to see how patriarchal, sexist, racist and homophobic society was. My own memories of watching One Million Years BC are still very vivid. It was the big blockbuster film on television that Boxing Day night. My mother, my father, my sister and I sat together in our sitting room to watch it on our colour television, while our dog slept in front of the fire unnoticed. During the film my father and sister argued about whether humans and dinosaurs lived on the earth at the same time; I was puzzled by there being no dialogue, just a lot of grunting, and at the end of it my mother announced, “That was rubbish.” She was right. Happy reading Drew

The first time I saw it she was visiting me and took out her purse to pay for a purchase. There it was, inside her purse, a picture of me. An old and unflattering picture of me. It was a passport photograph, taken years ago. My hair was in a style I’d not had for years, short and flat. I was staring fixedly into the camera, no smile on my face, the harsh light making my skin seem pale and unhealthy. I wondered why she had chosen that one, but I said nothing. It wasn’t an easy question to ask. I have many pictures of her. Ones from her youth, as a bright and happy young woman, her hair short and dark, dressed in pale or white summer dresses with wide belts and full skirts. Pictures of her in motherhood, her clothes changing over the years, showing her own slow change in tastes. Pictures of her taken only in the last few years, her as the rosy-cheeked, white-haired grandmother that she grew into. (I have no pictures of her at the end, a tired and ill old woman, but I don’t want to remember her like that.) I didn't keep any pictures in my wallet. Even if I did they would become lost in the chaos of paper, cards, loose coins and my different IDs and all the other things tucked away in there. For me pictures are placed in frames and hung on walls so that everyone can see them, enjoyed at a glance. That’s what I did with my favorite pictures of her. Not hidden away in the dark and clutter of my wallet. (I have heard people say that they carry pictures of their loved ones, their partners or children, with them so they can see them whenever they want to. I carry around my memories of her with me, as bright as any photographs.) I always wondered why she chose a picture of me to carry around. I am not her only child; I have an older brother and sister. Maybe that was the reason. I was her youngest child, the last one to leave the nest. After I had gone she was no longer a mother, the role she had had for over forty years. Maybe there is a special bond between a mother and her youngest child, I don’t know, and if there ever was I am ashamed to admit I never noticed. Why that picture, of all the ones she had of me, such a harsh and unemotional one, to carry with her? (It is too late now to ask these questions.) At the end, as she lay there in that bed being cared for by nurses who it had only taken her a few days to grow close to, I was unable to ask any but the simplest of questions. I had thought, at the end, I would be able to ask her all those questions I had been yearning to know the answers to, ones over which I had puzzled and wondered for years, not least about that picture. When the time came, all I could ask were the basic questions, "Are you comfortable?" and "Is there anything you want?" The profound forgotten and replaced by the important. As a child I had questioned and questioned her, why this and how that, almost challenging everything she said. As an adolescent I had distanced myself from her and her rules as I was fighting to be myself, whatever that meant. What did she know? Only as an adult, when I had become a professional in my own right, we were finally able to reach an understanding and peace with each other. I was still her son but now we could talk as equals. At the end I was the one she requested of, the one she asked to look after her husband, my father. After it was all ended, the funeral and cremation and final spreading of her ashes, did someone find found that picture of me? As my sister-in-law and my sister were clearing out her handbag, the final act of tidying a life away, tidying away her now unneeded things, did they find her purse? As they emptied it did they find that picture of me and what did they make of it? These questions are unimportant; I will forget them and never seek an answer. Instead, I will hold on to those memories I have of her, memories that live outside of pictures. For Joan Margaret Payne 12/1/30 to 2/5/01 (I originally wrote this in the week between my mother’s death and her funeral. It was my way of working out how I was feeling. I have rewritten it in the subsequent years, but the emotions here still remained intact.)

Jonathan Roven is Lost is a story I am proud of. It concerns a subject that I have rarely seen written about, namely how a gay couple manages when one of them develops Alzheimer’s Disease. I’m also proud of the journey this story has taken. Originally, it was just 900 words long, with a different ending. It was written as a flash fiction story (stories under 1,000-words long) to a prompt of Losing Your Lover. So often do I find a left-field response to subjects. It was first published on the Gay Flash Fiction website. Unfortunately, it has been deleted from that site since then, but other stories of mine are still available there. The original version can be found here. As always, I had that rush of excitement whenever I have something published, the excitement of knowing I am communicating with people I’ll never meet. Then something strange happened. The site’s editor emailed me because he had received a complaint. An American lawyer, called Jonathan Roven, had demanded that my story be taken down or changed. It seemed the real-life Jonathan Roven didn’t like having a fictional character named after him or sharing his name, or he didn’t like my character called Jonathan Roven, or all three. The editor wasn’t happy; he argued that there are probably lots of real-life Mr Darcys out there, and they aren’t writing to Jane Austen’s estate, demanding her character’s name is changed. I did a Google search on fictional characters with real people’s names, and I also looked up Jonathan Roven. The first page of links was all to the same American lawyer, except for a link to my story, which was surprising and interesting. My other Google search returned some interesting results. I’ve included the links below. Under American law, it seems, calling a fictional character by the same name as a real person alone is not libel. Jonathan Roven would have had to prove that the fictional character was based on him, with more similarities than just names, and that the fictional character had harmed his character and/or reputation. In my story, the fictional character is a 60-year-old gay man with Alzheimer’s Disease; I don’t even name his profession. Also, in America, winning a libel case where you say a fictional character libelled you seems to be very difficult. Now, I’m a nurse and not a lawyer, and this is just what I learnt from an online search. When I first created the character, he was to have been called Jonathan Raven, but I made a typo and called him Jonathan Roven, which I liked the sound of, so it stayed. I’m British, and the Gay Flash Fiction website isn’t run for profit; it’s much more a labour of love. Neither of us could afford to fight a court case, so we quickly agreed to change the title character’s name. Therefore, we changed it to Jonathan Raven is Lost, well in the version on the Gay Flash Fiction website anyway. But it left a sour taste in my mouth and created an unpleasant memory. What had so upset the man that he wanted my story changed or removed? Was it because the character who shared his name was gay and/or had Alzheimer’s Disease (and I’m not sure which one it would be), or was it because he’d lost the top billing of having all his results on the first page of a Google search? I’ve since posted the original version of the story, under its original title, on my old blog and on the GA website, where it can still be read, and I’ve heard nothing from the real Jonathan Roven. In these locations, I have no intention of changing the title or the story or the character’s name. When I was selecting stories for my published collection Case Studies in Modern Life, I naturally chose Jonathan Roven is Lost. It is such a good example of my writing, but it is also about a subject I feel strongly about. Many of the patients I nurse in my job have Alzheimer’s Disease, and I have seen what it does to lives and relationships. Like many of the stories in this collection, I workshopped it at my Writer’s Group. I received amazing feedback, and people advised me to open the story up because there was more to tell. I returned to it and started to re-shape it. The rewrites took the story from 800 to 11,000-words long, and as I rewrote it, so much more of the story came out. I introduced new characters; the narrator’s best friend, their neighbour, Jonathan’s sister, and his social worker, plus a nurse called Lilly. So much of the plot expanded, and I found there was so much more to tell. Other writers talk about stories and characters taking on “a life of their own”. I’ve never really experienced that. I’m a great planner of stories, and I always know where my stories are going. As I re-wrote this story, I found myself thinking about it more and more, planning it out in my mind. I found there was so much more to write, so much more of these characters’ stories to tell. I am also proud that I was able to write a story about Alzheimer’s Disease from an original perspective and also realistically look at how to manage if your partner does develop it. This story isn’t a road map for how to manage life with a partner with Alzheimer’s Disease, but it does provide advice from my experience. I also have Steve, one of the other members of my writer’s group, Newham Writers Workshop, to thank for his suggestion about a change to the story’s ending. His suggestion created a much more poignant ending to the story, highlighting the emotional cost Jonathan Roven’s Alzheimer’s Disease has taken on his partner. This story was originally written as a flash fiction story about losing a lover but in an unusual way. Since then, it has grown into much more. It is now about two men’s tragic journey and is very typical of the subjects I write about. The inspiration for this story occurred back in the late 1990s. I was working in my first District Nursing job and looking after an elderly couple. She had severe dementia, and he was her main carer, but he was also her second husband. Due to her dementia, she had forgotten his name and called him by the name of her first husband. The pain on his face every time she did this was heart breaking. I have never forgotten his expression, though he carried on caring for her. Happy reading. Drew When Fiction & Reality Collide Could I Be Liable for Libel in Fiction? “Libel in general is when somebody claims that a statement of fact made about him or her harmed his or his character” Law & Order' Faces Libel Suit A Writer's Guide to Defamation and Invasion of Privacy Defamation in Fiction—What’s in a Name?

Writing is a very solitary activity; we sit there on our own, writing away on our computer or laptop, or even doing it “old school” via paper and pen, pouring out our stories and preserving our characters there in the written word. But how do we know that what we are writing is any good? We can ask our family and loved ones, but will they give us the feedback we need? They are our loved ones and so often they want the best for us and may not give us the feedback we require, or they may not be able to handle what we are writing about, especially if it doesn’t fit their image of us. As a teenager I wrote poetry, like so many teenagers. I wrote a poem about loneliness. It was bitter, angry and dark. “Nothing kills you faster than loneliness,” was its last line. My mother read the poem and said it was “Nice.” As writers we can get so absorbed in our own writing, get so far into our characters’ heads that we can miss the obvious. We may have failed to introduce our characters, not given them a distinctive enough voice; we may have left huge plot holes; we may have overused one particular word literally. Because we are so close to our writing, we can’t see these mistakes. We also need to know that our writing is readable and engaging, and that cannot always be achieved by rereading on our own. Good and honest feedback will always make our writing better. Writers’ groups have provided me with this; they have been a wonderful source of feedback and support. I’ve learnt so much just from meeting with other members. The first writers’ group I went to was when I was eighteen. The Old Swan Writers were based in the Old Swan district of Liverpool and it was one long bus ride away from my then home. Those bus rides gave me plenty of time to think and read. But that writers’ group told me and showed me I could write. This group of adults showed me I could create a story and characters, plot it out and write it down on paper. It was an amazing revelation. There I received feedback without any agenda. They weren’t pulling me down because they thought I was getting above myself by wanting to be a writer or else telling me polite things because that was what they thought I wanted to hear, both of which had happened before. (Unfortunately, after an extensive Google search, I cannot find any mention of the Old Swan Writers. Like all good things, they seem to have ended) When I moved to London, I stopped attending any writers’ group, not because London is short of them but because I led a very gypsy lifestyle in those early years. I changed jobs frequently and I often moved home. I only really started to settle down when I started my nurse training, and that didn’t leave me much time to write anything that wasn’t related to my studies. I seriously came back to writing after the millennium, when I started to find many avenues for my writing, not just fiction. It was also when I reconnected with a writers’ group, first online and then later in person. I’m now a member of my local writers’ group, Newham Writers Workshop, and they have been so helpful. I’ve had some very helpful feedback on my writing, how my plots and characters are working, how readable my writing is, how my descriptions work, how they paint a picture for the reader. I have also learnt so much about the craft of writing, subjects like “head-hopping”, “filter words”, distance and intimate view points and about using the “unreliable narrator”. I learnt about self-publishing from my writers’ group. But giving feedback to other writers has also helped me. We have a policy of always giving feedback that supports the writer in what they want to write. So there is no saying, “I don’t like this,” neither can you just say, “I liked this.” You have to explain why, what makes this a good piece of writing, where the writer could improve it, what does not work but why it does not work. I have also been exposed to some amazing writing there, listening to/reading other writers’ work has opened my eyes to how you can do things differently and stylistically. It has also shown me what my own personal style is; I like to write from a very intimate point of view of my characters, to get under their skin. The vast majority of my stories in Case Studies in Modern Life have benefited from the feedback from my writers’ group, in some cases I have completely rewritten them after getting some really thought-provoking feedback. My writers’ group has also shown me how inclusive my writing is. The previous two writers’ groups I joined (one online and one in person) were both LGBT groups. I wanted the support of other LGBT writers, it was a safe place and a safe idea, but good things can come to an end and both these groups closed for different reasons. I’m now a member of my local writers’ group and this is an open group. I’m the only openly gay man there and yet that has never been an issue. Now I am writing about gay issues and themes; the other writers there have understood my writing and have seen what I want to write about. It has shown me that my writing has a wide appeal and that is amazing and very reassuring. Newham Writers Workshop has been the last cog, though a very big one, in the machine that encouraged me to publish my collection of stories, and I’m very grateful for this. And then there is the social element. After each meeting, when meeting face-to-face, most of us go to a local pub for a drink. Talking with other writers about writing in general, or even life in general, is a breath of fresh air. It takes the solitude out of it all. And I’ve made some good friends there from very different backgrounds. It is nice to get out of my comfort zone. I would encourage any writer to join a writers’ group; no matter what your experience or level of writing, you can only benefit from good and honest feedback. Drew Case Studies in Modern Life (On Amazon) Case Studies in Modern Life (On Smashwords)

Case Studies in Modern Life is my first published book and it has been a long time in writing. I have been writing all my adult life. I was eighteen when I discovered I could write stories. At first I was writing sketches for a drama group. It was an amazing feeling turning an idea I had into something written down that worked and then watching actors perform my words. It was also the first time I realised I had an ear for dialogue. I would hear people talking in public and remember how they spoke; later, I would be able to write in the style of their dialogue. I also experienced something else. If people enjoyed a sketch, they didn’t call “Author, author!” They really weren’t interested in who wrote it; people usually heaped their praise on the actors, and I liked that too. I could happily hide away in the shadows and carry on watching people and writing about them. The first piece of writing I sold was a short monolog to my then local radio station. It was about someone who stole pillows, and only pillows, from stately homes. It was about getting away with the “perfect crime” because no one cared about missing pillows. It was a silly piece but again, when it was broadcast, I could hide away behind the knowledge that the vast majority of people who heard it knew nothing about me. The first short story I had published in print was a story about a gay couple spending Christmas apart because one wasn’t out to his family. It wasn’t a happy story; I’d wanted to capture the reality of life for some people. But as I saw my own story in print, with my name attached to it, I had a marvellous feeling. The vast majority of people who read this story had no idea who I was. I could communicate with people and all they knew about me was my name on a magazine page. People read it without any prejudice against who I was. They would like the story, or not, based solely on its content. That felt so good. You’ll be sensing a theme by now; I like to hide behind my writing. My writing isn’t about me rehashing my life as fiction, rewriting my life so that I always come out on top, re-writing history so that I am always the winner. My writing is my way of exploring themes and events that fascinate me or make me angry. I want to find the people behind a subject. I don’t want to be the focus of my writing. The theme of Case Studies in Modern Life also took a long time to come about. Coming out as gay changed my life in many ways and it certainly gave me something to write about. As I explored my gay life, I found there were so many different things to write about. At first, I wrote wish fulfilment stories. I was in my twenties and wanted the best of all possible worlds. As I grew older and experienced more of life, I saw the ways in which gay men adapt to the challenges of their lives or don’t, and this started to fascinate me. How do gay men maintain relationships with lovers, friends and relatives? How does being gay affect our attitudes to health and illness? How and where do gay men find a place for themselves in this world? After reading some of my stories, a friend of mine suggested that I put together a collection about gay life that didn’t focus on the typical subjects of dating apps and finding a boyfriend. I am so grateful for her advice. The stories in this collection cover some of my favourite themes to write about. There are stories about sex, not sex stories about people’s attitude to sex, which I find endlessly fascinating. There are stories about relationships. Not stories about trying to find a boyfriend, but stories about how relationships work or don’t work; the compromises we make inside relationships and that unique moment of joy that I thought we might never see. There are stories about the issues gay men can face in our modern world, some that only gay men face and some that are universal to all people. And there are stories about how health, ill health and a change in health can affect someone’s life, but this is something I have seen first-hand (though all the characters in this collection are fictitious). If you read my collection please leave a comment about it, here or even on Amazon, and if you are minded please review it on Amazon. Comments and reviews drive people to my work, as they do for any author. Case Studies in Modern Life can be found here on Amazon.co.uk and here on Amazon.com Drew

Urban legends are fascinating; they say so much about our society and the stories that it runs on. Scott Wood certainly loves urban legends. Scott ran the Southeast London Folklore Society, and it shows in this absorbing book. He doesn’t only write about those common urban legends that have been circulating for years—though they have their space here—but he has also dug deep and found some obscure items, including those that were a flash-in-the-pan in years ago. But what lifts this book above all those other volumes that merely list urban legends is that Scott Wood investigates and analyses each one himself, in person. He looks at the history and origins of each legend and how, many times, they were printed as the truth in newspapers. He also questions the sexism of some of the stories and why it is always a woman in peril in them. This book also works as an alternative history of London because so many of these legends are rooted in the history of the city. They are intensely wrapped up in the urban life of London, and many of them are unique to London life. Scott Wood’s writing style is very readable; for example, it was perfect reading for my daily commute to and from work on the London Tube. He does not talk down to the reader or try to be over-friendly. His aim is to inform us and discuss the urban legends with his audience. The only downside of this book, for me, was that it ended too soon. Scott Wood knows his subject and took a refreshingly cynical look at these urban legends. I can always hope for a sequel.

It was no secret that Ruth Rendell also wrote as Barbara Vine. Writing under this pseudonym, she created many gripping psychological thrillers. They are not so much who-did-it as how-they-did-it or why-they-did-it. The House of Stairs is the best example of this. The book opens with a chance meeting between the narrator and Bell, a woman she hasn't seen in over twenty years because Bell has been in prison for murder. The story slips back and forth in time between the 1980s, as the women begin to reforge their relationship, and the 1960s when the events that lead to Bell becoming a killer unfold. The setting is London and Vine/Rendell paints such a vivid picture of 1960s Notting Hill that you can almost taste the counterculture and see people dropping out. The title comes from the Notting Hill house, owned by the flamboyant and eccentric widow Cosette, around which the 1960s section revolves. It’s a tall, narrow house where it seems every room has someone different in it. The house appears as just as strong a character as any of the people who pass through it. The suspense here does not come from wondering who the killer is; we are told almost from the beginning that it is Bell. But rather from the question, “Who is she going to kill?” This also gives the novel a sense of doom as we wait for the inevitable death but don’t know when it is coming or who it will be. The suspense builds as the twists and turns of the complicated relationships between the characters unfold. The characters, with all their faults, failings, and needs, are all too human. They are not mere devices to keep the plot flowing; it is the reverse; the plot comes from them, with their human foibles and shortcomings driving it forward. The main Vine/Rendell take on human relationships is present here; all are equally dysfunctional. From the friendship between the two central women that turns into a secret lesbian affair, to the siblings who appear strangely too close, to the older woman and younger man who may or may not have found true love together. The tale is dark, sinister, repressed, and doom-laden, but also page-turning. The House of Stairs is one of the best Vine/Rendell creations, and, like the best of her work, it is not only a thriller; it is also a contained novel. It paints a picture of 1960s Notting Hill that feels all too real, especially to someone too young to remember it. At the heart of it is a repressed and secret lesbian affair that drives along so many of the events, but that is also one of the most important relationships in at least one of the women's lives. Some people say Rendell’s view of gay and lesbian relationships was homophobic, but I find that she treated all relationships the same and had a cynical view of all of them. For me, I wanted this novel to never end, so involved was I with the characters and their spiralling downward journey, but I also desired to know what was going to happen next, and that pushed me onwards. This is truly a page-turning novel.

Its 1964 and the beginning of summer in the English market town of Kingsmarkham. Margaret Parsons, a shrewish and quiet housewife, disappears from her home. Days later, her murdered body is found in a copse of trees outside of the town. Chief Inspector Wexford leads the enquiry into her death, criss-crossing the almost quintessential Home Counties town to do so. From Doon with Death is not only the first Wexford novel by Ruth Rendell, it is very much a novel of its time. It isn’t just that the characters pay for everything in pounds, shillings and pence, but it is also a world of sexism and social inequality. The murdered woman and her husband live a sparse life with no mod cons, while two rich couples still have servants in their homes, and few women here have jobs other than “housewife”. Rendell herself, in her afterword, says this novel should now be viewed as a historical novel; our world has changed so much since 1964. Unfortunately, this novel also reads very much like a first novel, by a writer still obviously learning their craft. There isn’t the character insight that was such a pleasure of her later novels. The only characterisation here that stood out was that of the murdered woman’s husband as he slowly drowned in grief. The plot also felt slow, with an almost join-the-dots feel to it, and the revelation of the secret passion at the heart of this story might have been daring and shocking in 1964 but I spotted it long before it was revealed. This didn’t have the character-driven twists that made her later novels. What I am grateful for is that this novel was published because it introduced us to the great writer Ruth Rendell would become. She certainly learnt from this novel, the things I found disappointing here are absent from her later novels. I do not know if this is a good place to start reading Rendell’s Wexford novels, maybe Shake Hands Forever, A Sleeping Life or Put On By Cunning would be better places to start. These novels have all the traits that made her a great crime writer and a great writer.

Alien invasion is a staple of science fiction and has featured far too many novels and films, but in The Midwich Cuckoos, John Wyndham turns that classic theme into a frighteningly original story that is still disturbing now. The Midwich Cuckoos begins with Richard Gayford (the novel’s narrator) and his wife Janet returning from an evening in London, celebrating his birthday, to the English village of Midwich, where they have recently moved. Midwich is the stereotype of the quiet, sleepy 1950s English country village where nothing unusual ever happens. Except this day Richard and Janet find they cannot enter Midwich, all roads are blocked. So they set off, on foot, across the fields, only for both of them to collapse, unconscious, in their tracks. The army, who are trying to keep everyone out because Midwich is incommunicado, rescues them. Everyone in the village is unconscious, as if they collapsed were they stood, the same happening to anyone trying to enter the village. An invisible force is surrounding the village. This lasts for twenty-two hours and then everyone wakes up as if nothing has happened. Soon it becomes apparent that every woman able to bear children is pregnant—some without the benefit of sexual intercourse. Also, together, the women give birth to beautiful but strange babies, all with blonde hair and golden eyes… There are no bug-eyed aliens or reptilian creatures fighting humans here, instead there are strange children who look and behave like humans but are not. As they grow up, the children begin to show nonhuman-like behaviour, slowly stretching their power over the villagers. As an alien invasion this is an original and disturbing approach, to have humans as hosts for the aliens and trick them into raising and protecting these “cuckoos” in their midst. Also, this is an implied alien invasion; no one names it as such. Wyndham’s novel is a slow burn, slowly and piece by piece giving the reader information, slowly revealing the nature of the children. Yet the characters here are all too real, displaying that all too human trait when faced with the extraordinary of simply accepting it as ordinary. He also taps into one of our fundamental fears, that our children are not our own but have been substituted by changelings. I first read this novel as a teenager and it frightened me; coming back to it as an adult I find it just as disturbing but for different reasons. This invasion almost mimics the way a virus attacks a body. It is such a simple but very original premise. The Midwich Cuckoos is set in 1950s England, when it was written, and so reflects the attitudes and prejudices of the time, children born out of wedlock are a source of shame and class rules everyone’s relationships. This only adds to the atmosphere and feel of this novel, the setting so real that it makes the extraordinary events that slowly unfold seem real as well—only adding to the horror. John Wyndham should be held up there as one of the greats of science fiction, though he seems to have slipped down in people’s memory. If you are new to Wyndham’s works this is an excellent entry into his dark universe. If you read this novel many years ago, give it a new look—it has lost none of its impact and is also now strangely relevant.

For so many of us, Armistead Maupin is known for the Tales of the City series of books. Though set in San Francisco, these books chronicled so many of the changing events of the seventies and eighties in such a personal way. Logical Family is Maupin’s memoir, starting with his birth in very conservative 1940s/1950s North Carolina up to 1970s San Francisco when he first started publishing Tales of the City as a serial in a newspaper. This is an amazing and complicated journey that Maupin tells in an engaging and insightful way. The son of a traditional Southern lawyer, Maupin was born into a very conservative and privileged family, in a home that included a portrait of a Confederate ancestor. He grew up to be the perfect white and conservative son, but his journey away from that world is the fascinating part of this story, and it’s his queerness that started that move, long before he told anyone. His description of his childhood is very evocative, but it is his time in the Navy, posted to Vietnam, that stands out. There are tenderly erotic descriptions of the intimate rituals of Navy life, there are comic moments were Maupin struggles but succeeds in being the last American naval officer to leave Vietnam, and there are the tragic tales as Maupin grapples with his sexuality in the face of the very homophobic atmosphere of 1960s and 1970s America. The greatest and most compelling strand of his story is how his struggles and eventual acceptance of his sexuality changed him as a person, forcing him to reject his conservative upbringing and all its values. This is the best thing that Maupin has written since the last Tales of the City novel. Maupin’s non Tales of the City novels always felt lacklustre, lacking the fun, insight and page-turning enjoyment of those books, as if he was trying to prove himself as a “serious novelist” but not quite succeeding. Logical Family is a breath of fresh air; it is Maupin as the natural storyteller, but one with an important story to tell, and Maupin at his page-turning best again. The worst part of this book was that it ended too early, with Maupin beginning to publish Tales of the City as newspaper serial. I wanted to know what happened to him in the 1970s, the 1980s, and the 1990s as the world around him changed so much. What could he tell us about those times? Please Mr Maupin, can you write a sequel?

The premise of this book appears simple; it chronicles the 29 hangings that took place within Kirkdale Prison, Liverpool, until it was closed. But inside that premise lies a fascinating social history. In 1868, an act of parliament stopped all public executions; after that, all capital punishments took place within a prison’s walls, away from the excited crowds of onlookers, and Steven Horton uses this as the starting point of his book, ending when Kirkdale Prison was closed in 1892. He researched the 29 people who were hanged for murder during this time. In each section, in chronological order, Horton outlines the murders, the trials and the executions. At first glance, this book appears to be just another True Crime book, listing the injustices committed by one person against another, but Horton’s research lifts it out of that category. This book provides a fascinating and uncomfortable history of the Victorian working class, looking at so many of the harsh realities of their lives. This isn’t the warm chocolate box portrayal of Victorian society we have been presented with in films, television dramas and badly written novels. Horton highlights the hardships faced by the Victorian working class. Through his descriptions of these murders and trials come some uncomfortable themes, the results of heavy drinking and domestic violence being the two that jumped out. But also the effects of poverty, prostitution and racism are highlighted here. None of these murders are “exciting” or “complicated”, the type that populate True Crime books; they are grubby and sordid, the murderers often being quickly caught. But that is such an important factor here, so often these crimes come from poverty and disappear. Horton illustrates broader Victorian social themes as well. The place of religion in Victorian society. The speed of Victorian justice, sometimes indecently fast. The nature of Victorian street violence and the gangs who attacked casual passers-by. The often self-righteous and moral panic-making nature of the press, especially when they weren’t allowed to witness a hanging inside the prison, which uncomfortably echoed our present-day media. And then there was the incompetent executioner who tied the hangman’s rope too short so that the prisoner didn’t die instantaneously from a broken neck but choked to death, and then in the next execution he tied the rope so long that the prisoner was decapitated. I cannot say this was an enjoyable read, the stories here of human desperation and failings were too sad for that, but this a fascinating read. It gave me so many insights into Victorian society, things I was never taught in my history lessons. This was also another book that ended too soon, Horton’s style of writing and storytelling is easy to read and yet made me want to read more and more from this book. Fortunately, Steven Horton has written five other books, all of which I intend to read. Find Liverpool Murders here on Amazon

Philip K Dick’s name gained notoriety with a string of Hollywood films, but none of them have done justice to the dark and paranoid worlds created in his books. Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? (filmed as Blade Runner in 1982) is Dick at his best, combining so many of his favourite themes—post-nuclear war, religion, identity, technology and dis-utopia. It is set in the near future, on an Earth that has suffered a nuclear war but at a high cost. This Earth is dying, everywhere is surrounded by “kibble” (rotting bomb debris), all the animals have died from radiation, people wear lead-lined underwear and anyone successful has emigrated to Mars or beyond. In this world is Dekker, a bounty hunter who is hunting down “replicants” (more artificial copies of humans then robots) who have illegally returned to Earth. Using the structure of a Private Investigator thriller, Dick asks an unsettling question: how do you cope in a world where you can’t tell the real humans from the copies? Many of Dick’s novels have good premises but the plot often doesn’t follow it through, leaving the reader disappointed. With Do Androids… there is no disappointment, the plot lives up to all of the promise of its premise. It has a dark, twisting plot with a truly unsettling ending. The characters here are dark too; the people are worn down by their dying world, they are not the bright and glamorous people of so many science fiction films. When reading this novel, don’t think of the film Blade Runner, they have so little in common. If you’ve never read any of Philip K Dick’s novels then this is an excellent entry into his dark and dis-utopian world; if you’ve encountered him before then this novel is where so many of his most unsettling themes come together.

“A murder is announced and will take place on Friday October 29th, at Little Paddocks at 6.30 p.m.” So reads the announcement in the Chipping Cleghorn Gazette that morning. That evening, the local neighbours all dutifully turn up at Little Paddocks, all with their different excuses for being there. At 6.30 p.m., without warning, all the lights go out and… This is the beginning of one of Agatha Christie’s most intriguing novels that is firmly rooted in post-war Britain. She chose to set it in the classic, golden age of crime setting of an English country village. But this is a place very changed by the Second World War. No longer is it a place where everyone knows everyone else. This is a place of strangers. The war caused such upheaval; many people left the village, many never to return, and newcomers have moved in, people whom everyone else has to accept are who they claim to be without “knowing their people”. Christie uses this as a strong thread to her plot, are these people even who they say they are? Her intriguing plot is served well by the tone Christie creates in this novel. At first it is light-hearted and almost comic, the surprise and speculation in the characters’ reactions to the announcement of a murder, none of them believing it is anything sinister. Even after the first murder, she maintains this light tone; the victim is a stranger and certainly not a “good type” of person. But slowly the novel darkens; the second murder is too close to home and casts a dark shadow over the story. Christie handles this well; the grief of some of the characters is uncomfortable to read. This novel uses several plots trails that will be familiar to Christie readers, but here she certainly plays around with them. The village setting but with a cast of characters very different from her pre-war novels, her use of sexism to aid her plot and having the detective gather all the suspects together in one place to announce who the murderer is. Christie created this convention with her first novel, though she used it sparingly in her subsequent works nowhere near as much as the film adaptions of her works would lead us to believe. Here, though, it is the police inspector who gathers together the suspects, not Miss Marple, and it is not to unmask the killer but to lay a trap for them. This novel also benefits from having Miss Marple as its detective, rather than Poirot. Poirot was always the star of the novels featuring him, while Miss Marple was so often one of the supporting characters, watching the events from the sidelines. Here Christie uses her to her best, aiding the plot but also giving the other characters chance to breathe by not being in every scene. In the centre of all this is a portrait of a lesbian couple, whom all the other characters except without question. Only at the end, after tragedy has struck, do we see the depth of their love. Agatha Christie might not have been the greatest of literary writers, but what she did do she did so well. She knew how to plot her novels; she created twists that never left the reader feeling cheated. She laid just enough clues so that once the twist occurs you can feel, “Oh that makes sense now.” She also knew the characters she wrote about, the upper middle-class English, though her novels also chronicle the changes in English society. She might not have been the finest descriptive writer but she knew how to create characters with dialog and used that effectively. This certainly is a classic Christie, plot, characters and setting all come together to make a fascinating read. I challenge you to work out who the murderer is, until they are revealed and then it all makes horrible sense. Happy reading Find it here on Amazon

There have been many different theories about the spread of AIDS, some of them bizarre, but here James Chin returns to a very old one; AIDS is not a threat to the heterosexual population. Chin is an epidemiologist and bases all his arguments on a narrow reading of the HIV/AIDS statistics. He seems to want to turn back the clock to when we talked only of “risk groups”. There are no political, cultural, social or psychological elements in Chin’s arguments, which leaves this book very one-sided. Between 1987 and 1992 Chin worked for the World Health Organisation (WHO) on HIV/AIDS surveillance until he abruptly resigned over what appears to have been a personality clash. This book seems to be an attempt at settling his old scores with WHO. Throughout it there is a relentless attack on WHO’s HIV/AIDS programs, the main argument being that WHO is wrong in saying that AIDS will affect the general population because, Chin claims, they have overestimated the figures. This book is written in the first person; while appropriate for a biography it does not enhance an academic work. It only shows the one-sided nature of Chin’s arguments and highlights the lack of depth to them. There is little analysing here, only Chin’s singular views. This book does show the dangers of using only one discipline to tackle a complex problem and the narrow findings this can give. All this book offers the reader is number crunching and the rehashing of a very old argument, HIV/AIDS prevention needs to be far more than just that. (This review was originally written as a commission by the Nursing Standard magazine) Find it on Amazon here

His Dark Materials was a groundbreaking trilogy of fantasy novels. They were breathtaking in their scope and originality; the concept of a person having the personification of their soul in the form of an animal called their daemon was both simple and a stroke of genius. It was also a wonderful writing device; characters could literally talk to themselves. For a long time, Pullman hinted that he was writing a second trilogy, The Book of Dust, following on from His Dark Materials. Finally, in 2017, the first part of that trilogy was published, La Belle Sauvage. This book, unlike the other two books in this new trilogy, is a prequel to His Dark Materials, but unlike so many other prequels, this isn’t an origins story. This is an intense adventure in its own right. Malcolm Polstead, the main character here, is a plain and non-heroic boy, not the usual adventurous type of boy found at the heart of a fantasy story, and this book is all the better for that. Malcolm’s ordinariness draws the reader into this story of cloak-and-dagger spying and sinister danger against the backdrop of the all-powerful Magisterium. Malcolm lives in an inn, on the bank of an Oxford river, run by his parents. On the opposite bank is a convent of nuns, several of the elderly nuns Malcolm has befriended. Three characters from His Dark Materials trilogy make an appearance here. Lord Asriel has a small but important part to play in the plot, Mrs Coulter makes a sinister cameo appearance, but it is Lyra who is an important part of the story, even though she is just a newborn baby here. The story begins with her left in the care of the nuns. What lifts this novel up from a well written, sinister spy adventure is the horrible event at the centre of this story. A terrible storm hits the country and overnight the whole of Southern England is flooded. What were once cities and towns and green countryside are suddenly turned into a desolate, dark sea of dank water. Suddenly the only land is at the top of hills or tall buildings. Into this dangerous world Malcolm and Lyra, accompanied by Alice, the inn’s young serving maid, must race across this now alien land in Malcolm’s small boat in an attempt to keep Lyra safe. Pullman’s writing is always of a high quality, he doesn’t turn in lazy or shallow characterisation because this is a “children’s novel”. The first part of this novel crackles with the sinister and dark tones of a spy thriller, but it is the second part of the novel where his writing shines. He paints the flooded landscape as an alien and dangerous world, the familiar gone as it is drowned under an unforgiving sea of water, in which the three characters have to survive. This book was certainly worth the wait. Pullman has lost none of his skill as a storyteller but neither has he run out of ideas and stories to tell in his unique universe. So often with sequels, especially after such original stories as His Dark Materials trilogy, there can be the law of diminishing returns, the author having used up all their ideas in the first book/books, not so here. The quality of La Belle Sauvage bodes well for the rest of the trilogy, and I am so glad to report that. Find it here on Amazon

Before reading this collection of stories, put out of your mind any memory of the Tom Cruise/Stephen Spielberg film of the same name. The Cruise/Spielberg film was very loosely based on Philip K Dick’s story, taking only a few elements out of the story. The original story is far superior to the brightly coloured adventure film that bears the same name. In his best fiction, and this collection certainly contains some of that, Philip K Dick was a visionary—a dark visionary with a downbeat but all too real take on the future. The title story, Minority Report, is set in the Bureau of Pre-Crime where three pre-cogs (people so brain damaged that they live in permanent comas and constantly mutter their predictions) predict murders not yet committed, but this is where the similarity with the Cruise/Spielberg film ends. This is a post nuclear war world, where vast swathes of the country are a burnt wasteland. The central character is a middle-aged, overweight man with a much younger wife who finds himself at the centre of a political assassination plot. This is a twisting political thriller set in a world mutated by radiation, where every piece of new information causes another change of direction. Within this story Dick asks the question, if we know what the future holds does that automatically change the future to an unknown one? A lot of these stories are set in post nuclear war worlds, a theme very popular in Philip K Dick’s fiction, but they are not the same world rehashed for different stories. Whatever worlds he sets his stories in they are dark and unforgiving worlds. His future is not bright, clean and hopeful. In this collection there are stories about robots used for assassination; automatic factories that rule the world and don’t want to give that up power; the search for a war criminal who is more or less than he seems; a government sanctioned machine that controls your thoughts; an America where the first lady is the most important person and even if the presidents come and go she remains the same; a future where they look to 1960s sci-fi to solve their technological problems; a time-travelling business woman; and much, much more. A problem that can be levelled at Phillip K Dick’s novels is that, though often with an original plot premise, he did not know how to end them. This does not apply to these stories, even the longer ones. With these stories Dick ends them perfectly, whether it is an ending to a story or a question left up in the air. Most of these stories were previously published in American sci-fi magazines of the 1950s and 1960s; whether this is the reason for their solid structures I don’t know, but these are very satisfying stories to read and have not aged the way a lot of sci-fi from that period has. Forgot the bright, clean and upbeat sci-fi of Stephen Spielberg, George Lucas and Star Trek; try the dark and all too real sci-fi of Philip K Dick. Some of the peripheral details of his stories may have aged but their central themes are still fresh and still relevant today. Find it here on Amazon

“Billy Pilgrim has come unstuck in time.” This is the premise of Kurt Vonnegut’s greatest novel, but it is far more than that. As a middle-aged man, Billy Pilgrim is a successful optometrist, dully married to his wife with two children. As an elderly man, Billy Pilgrim is abducted by aliens, the Tralfamadores, and kept as an exhibit in their zoo on their home world. There he meets and starts a relationship with Montana Wildhack, a beautiful model who is abducted to be his companion. As a young man, Billy Pilgrim is a chaplain's assistant in the American army, during World War II. He is woefully undertrained and under resourced and is soon captured. As a prisoner of war, he witnesses the carpet bombing of Dresden. This novel does not have a linear format, the story jumps around in time with many sections not following on chronologically from the previous one, but this only highlights Billy Pilgrim being unstuck in time, it also highlights the fractured nature of this story. Unfortunately, it doesn’t make this novel easy to read, but it is only one of the elements that make this novel a difficult read. All that said, this is a novel worth the effort of reading it. In my opinion, it is probably Vonnegut’s best novel. The description of Billy Pilgrim’s odyssey through German-occupied Europe, as a prisoner of war, is so memorable, from moments of loss and deep atrocity (the nightmare bombing of Dresden) to moments of almost farce. Vonnegut presents all of this with a cool and unsentimental approach. Lesser writers would have milked the tragedies here for every drop of forced emotion that they could, but Vonnegut just presents them as events that happen. When a character dies, the narration simply states, “So it goes.” This novel, in part, has been said to have been Vonnegut trying to understand what he saw and what happened to him during World War II, but it is no less for that. It is one of the great anti-war novels because Vonnegut wrote about real events with real-world consequences. What lifts it well above a simple anti-war sermon is Vonnegut’s storytelling and the scope of his imagination. This is not an easy read but it is worth the effort. I recommend it; even if it is the only novel of Vonnegut’s you read, it is worth reading. “So it goes.” Find it here on Amazon

This novella has a simple but enjoyable premise, which Alan Bennett exploits with his sharp and intelligent wit. The queen, unusually for her, is at a loose end in Buckingham Palace and goes for walk. Around a corner she doesn’t usually walk around she discovers a mobile library. Thinking it rude not to, she borrows a book from it. This first book sets her off on an odyssey of reading. She reads for pleasure, but also her reading educates her and opens her mind. And all this reading leads to a surprising ending. Bennett was the first playwright to include the queen as a character in a play, to have an actress portray her on the London stage. Her character stole the second act of his double bill of one-act plays, Single Spies. Here he portrays her as the central character of this story, through whose eyes we watch the gently unfolding events. Bennett’s prose is simple but still very enjoyable, and his wit is not dampened here. There are many jokes and comic scenes, again with the queen getting some of the best lines. But Bennett’s prose is also very readable; you can almost hear his distinctive voice as you read it. His characterisation of the queen is gentle and affectionate; he doesn’t send her up or portray her as too privileged and out-of-touch. But her character is written very much to serve his plot. This book is about the power and necessity of reading. Here books are a gateway into a new way of thinking and ultimately living. This story is also about the power and necessity of public libraries. The queen doesn’t discover the power of literature from the books hidden away in her own private library but from that most public of public libraries, a mobile library. It is ironic that Bennett uses a mobile library as the trigger for his plot, the thing that was invented to provide libraries to our remotest communities here turning up in the centre of London. This is only a slight book, a novella, but no less enjoyable for it. Bennett knows exactly when to end it and how to quietly make his points. Find it here on Amazon

The hard-bitten American PI, working on his own to solve a murder, has become such a staple of crime fiction that it is now a cliché and has been parodied more times than I can even begin to count. There has to be something original to one to even make me think about reading it, and Marshall Thornton has found that something original with his Nick Nowak mystery series. Nowak is working as a one man PI, in 1981 Chicago, when these stories start, but he enters these three novellas with his own baggage. His life has recently been turned upside down. Novak was walking home with his lover Daniel when they were queerbashed. This leads to him being outed at work, as a Chicago cop, and losing his job, being ostracised by his own family, a lot of whom are also Chicago cops, and his relationship with Daniel ending. This all happens before the first novella even starts. Marshall Thornton has created three interesting mysteries for Nowak to solve. The first is a missing person that is anything but straightforward. Then there is an arson attack that has a shocking path. Finally, there is an apparent suicide that is anything but. These three stories are very rooted in gay Chicago of the 1980s. As engaging as these mysteries are, the real enjoyment here is Nick Nowak’s own life and his navigation of the unfriendly world of the 1980s, especially if you were gay. Nowak is an engaging narrator, someone whose voice makes these stories fresh, but Marshall Thornton has created a supporting cast of characters who are just as interesting and engaging. Nowak’s world isn’t unrelentingly negative; there is joy and friendship here and sex. Nowak has no problem finding other men to enjoy his sexuality with. The Nick Nowak books are much more than hard-bitten PI stories; they are the chronicle of a man’s life and his relationships. They are also wonderfully evocative of 1980s gay life. Marshall Thornton should be applauded for this; these are very enjoyable and easy reads. So often crime stories can be guilty pleasures, but the Nick Nowak books are far better than that and should be enjoyed as such. But do read them in order, so many characters return in later books, providing different strains to the stories, and if you don’t know who they are it could be a difficult read. Find it here on Amazon

Agatha Christie was the queen of the literary three-card trick. She would create a mystery, lead you down a path thinking a certain character was the murderer and then at the end pull the rug from under your feet with the murderer as a totally different character—the last character you would suspect or the first one you’d discounted. Reading one of her books is like playing a game against her, can you spot the murderer before she reveals them? It can be said, and not unfairly, that many of her books are comfy and reassuring. There is a murder, often more than one, but by the end order has been restored and the good can live happily ever after. But this is not the case with all her books, especially her finest ones. And Then There Were None is one of her finest novels, if not her finest. The plot is simple, but in its simplicity lies the genius of this novel. Ten people are invited to a mansion on an island off the Devon coast, ten people all with a personal secret. Once on this island, they find their host, the strange Mr Owen, fails to appear. After dinner, on the instruction left by the mysterious Mr Owen, a record is played that accuses everyone there of causing another person’s death through neglect, incompetence, cruelty, greed or prejudice—though none of them are actual “murderers”. Then, one by one, the ten people begin to die, murdered following the lines of the children’s poem Ten Little Indians. To begin with, this does have the feeling of other Agatha Christie novels, light in mood with the expectation that the murderer will be unmasked and all will be returned to normal, but this doesn’t happen. More characters die and the tone gets darker and darker as fear grips the surviving characters. At first, the characters believe the murderer is an outsider, not one of them, hiding somewhere on the island. Then the realisation comes that one of them is the killer; with that comes the real fear. This novel has been filmed many times, so original is its premise, but all of them follow the stage play version, not the novel, and have a far brighter and upbeat ending. The novel has all ten characters die on the island before the murderer is unmasked. Only at the very end of the novel, when the murderer’s confession is finally found, is the mystery revealed. This is by far Agatha Christie’s darkest novel with a very original premise. A tense psychological thriller with a real feeling of cat and mouse about it. It has all her stock-in-trade favourite characters (the old maid, the doctor, the major, the servants who see too much, the attractive young couple), yet here she puts them in a very dangerous situation that pushes them out of the realm of architypes and into real characters living a dangerous game. If you have only ever seen one of the film versions of this novel, try the original novel because you will find it very different and gripping. If you have only known Agatha Christie through her Miss Marple and Poirot stories, then try this novel for a far darker read. If you are an Agatha Christie fan, sit back and enjoy her at her best. Find it here on Amazon

Treatment and survival of people with HIV has improved greatly over the years. No longer is HIV an automatic terminal condition. Now treatment opinions are varied and complex so treatment manuals are a required resource, but a resource is only as good as the information in it. The editors here, Libman and Mackadon (both doctors), appear to have put a lot of work into this volume. The authors of each section are qualified for the area they are writing on. It felt refreshing that the editors have selected a variety of authors. So often editors only have a handful of authors, the same people writing many of the sections, spreading their experience rather thinly. This book is very medical in tone. The majority of authors are medics. The language used and the approach taken is very medical. This can be off-putting, but don’t pass by this book because there is a wealth of information here. The focus here is a medical model, emphasis on treatment opinions and the physiological effects of HIV, but this information is still valuable for many of us. This isn’t a book to read from beginning to end, some of the dry and medical language used here could make that difficult; but it is a book to dip into for information. The price of this book could also be off-putting; but it is a useful resource for anyone working in the field of HIV. (This review was originally written as a commission by the Nursing Standard magazine) Find it here on Amazon

Lord Peter Wimsey has fallen in love with the crime novelist Harriet Vane. Unfortunately, she is on trial for her life, accused of poisoning her former lover. Lord Peter, to demonstrate his love for her, sets about to prove Harriet is innocent before she faces a retrial. Dorothy L. Sayers has often been called the best writer of the Golden Age of Detective Fiction, but I have never found this. Her descriptive style is certainly better than Agatha Christie’s and Ngaio Marsh’s, but I find her plots and characters’ motivations so lacking. This novel is a prime example of this. There is no mystery as to who the killer is, there is only one other suspect here, and the how-he-did-it factor is not presented with enough mystery to hold the anticipation. There some interesting elements here, the female detective agency that Wimsey occasionally uses should have been given their own novel, but these elements do not add up to an interesting whole. The premise is interesting, Harriet Vane on trial for murder, but Sayers begins this novel at the end of the trial, the judge’s summing up, we do not even get any degree of courtroom drama. Many of the working-class characters are uncomfortably deferent to the nobility. The biggest problem for me is at the heart of the novel, Wimsey himself. He’s a playboy detective, full of charm, though Sayers never explains where his detective skills come from. Is he so good at solving murders because he’s so upper class and therefore bred to be superior at everything or is it because Sayers’ mysteries are so easy to solve? Not everyone is going to like every author. Many people have told me that Sayer is the greatest of the Golden Age crime writers but I have never seen how this is so, there are many other authors I’d read before her. Find it here on Amazon