Stephen Gallagher's Blog, page 3

The Governess

A stocking filler or secret Santa for less than four quid? 

I’ve written this Edwardian-style chapbook featuring The Lost World’s Professor Challenger and Edward Malone. Available only for this holiday period, then it’s gone. 

Paperback, 40 pages, illustrated. Would suit Sherlockian or similar. No time wasters. 

  

Click here to buy The Governess

Night Vision Memories

Came across this photo while searching the old albums for something else. Back in the day I had the honour of sharing Night Visions 8, one of Dark Harvest's classic series of three-author anthologies, with John Farris and Joe R Lansdale. Joe and I had met at the previous year's Fantasycon. Our families were together on a visit to Nacogdoches and we had the idea of a group photo with all three of the Night Visions contributors.

John Farris was - is - one of my writing heroes. From his early 'Steve Brackeen' pulps (which I managed to track down at San Francisco's incomparable Kayo Bookstore), to the magnificence of such titles as The Fury and Wildwood, he's a key figure in the creation of modern everyday-world horror. 

Joe agreed that the thought of having a shot the three of us together was so cool. Only problem was, John wasn't there with us.

So we improvised. And you know what? I don't think anyone ever noticed.

Of Nightmares and Angels

Recently I saw a gratifying burst of Twitter affection directed towa rd Nightmare, with Angel. It was as unexpected as it was welcome. I once saw a member of an online book group refer to it as her go-to ‘comfort read’ and that was pretty unexpected, too.

If you don’t know it, Nightmare, with Angel is a trans-European novel in which eleven-year-old Marianne Cadogan coerces a local man into helping in the search for her German mother. I didn’t realise it until later but the setup has echoes of Wim Wenders’ road movie Alice in den Städten, except in this case the local man has a record that renders him the least suitable person for the job. It all takes place in the Spring of 1990, within a few months of reunification.

Just before Covid put the world on hold I’d been looking to Germany again with a couple of projects, one of them a big coproduction and the other more personal, and I’d had occasion to revisit some of the novel’s settings. To research the book I’d written some letters, made a few appointments, and then slung a bag into the back of the car and headed for the Hamburg ferry. My plans took me from Hamburg to Düsseldorf and from Coburg through abandoned checkpoints into the former East. 

One of the places I was curious to see again was the town of Hirschberg, the setting for the story’s finale. Back then it had been a tannery town on the Saale, a community with schools and a Hall of Culture built around a single industry. The riverside tannery buildings were almost a city in themselves; sheds, warehouses, tall chimneys, wide cobbled yards. I’d arrived just as the workers were emerging in their numbers for the midday break.

Now the tannery’s gone and the area’s green. Just one of the buildings stands, and it’s a museum. A bit of the border’s been preserved and that’s a museum, too. Germany’s former East now shares much with my own home country, England’s North; a rich industrial heritage and a dearth of jobs. Whenever a Nightmare screen version gets mooted, as it regularly does, the question always arises; Why don’t we make this present-day? And my answer’s always the same—because I set out to nail a moment in history, and I still feel I pretty much did.

(These days the discussions are usually around a co-produced miniseries but the first option was for a feature. The American producer was pursuing Liam Neeson for Ryan O’Donnell while the German producer argued for the less well-known but well-on-his-way Daniel Craig. All was moving forward until a director came on board and had me dropped from the project, after which they couldn’t get a workable draft. I later learned that he was one of those known in the business as a ‘writer killer’; directors whose projects are never completed by the writers who started them.)

After that epic research trip I came home and wrote the book in a rented attic above a payroll company in the middle of Blackburn. It was bare boards and rafters but the landlord let me take my dog to work every day. The memories I summoned up in those rooms remain vivid; the empty solitude of Morecambe Bay, the abandoned wire and empty observation towers of the unmanned border, the yellow fields of oilseed rape that pin down the season almost to the week. A hidden city of the homeless in the derelict carriages of an old railyard. The scent of a fish soup in Saxony that I followed to its source like a cartoon character floating above the ground to a windowsill pie.

(Probably so memorable because I shed half a stone on the trip by otherwise living on bratwurst from open-air truck stops. Not a diet I’d recommend. Not a diet at all, really, so much as actual malnutrition.)

So there you go, the story behind the story of Ryan and Marianne.

Okay, it’s an unlikely comfort read. But I do know what she meant.

More about Nightmare, with Angel 

The Sentinel Case

...is the original title of my second Eleventh Hour story for the 2006 ITV series that starred Patrick Stewart and Ashley Jensen.

I've decided to add the script to my small library of downloadable PDFs because... well...


Rather than a coronavirus, the story concerns an outbreak of hemorrhagic smallpox. It was partly inspired by the last recorded smallpox death in the UK - the result of a lab escape at the University of Birmingham Medical School in 1978 - and a separate story of forgotten pathogens discovered in commercial cold storage.

My research was aided by the late Steve Connor, Science Editor of The Independent. The fun stopped there because the show as shot was not the show I wrote. So much so that I did something I've never done before or since; I walked off it.

So what you have here is the version you never saw, and not the one of which Robert May, former Chief Scientific Advisor to the Government, wrote in the Times Educational Supplement, 'the underlying epidemiological science is melodramatically misrepresented; (eg) "In 24 hours, the virus will be on every continent"... we need watchable dramas in which the science is done well.'
Download The Sentinel Case (PDF)
A couple of years later my story was adapted by Adam Targum for the JBTV remake of the show on CBS. It can now be streamed on Amazon. You're welcome to feel differently, but it's my preferred version.

Donald Roy 1930-2020

Sad to hear that Donald Roy, founding head of Hull University's Drama Department, has died in Brighton at the age of 90. I was a Drama and English joint honours student in the mid-70s and  so many of the good things in my own life can be tracked back to that special time with that exceptional bunch of people.

Don excelled at marshalling a lineup of uniquely quirky but highly able people for his teaching staff, who between them fostered a we-can-do-anything atmosphere. When the department started, it was just Don on his own; it was only the third Drama Department of its kind in the country, but under his guidance it became the first to have its own fully-equipped teaching theatre and TV studio in The Gulbenkian Centre.

After his retirement the performance space was renamed The Donald Roy Theatre. The TV studio would later be revamped and named The Anthony Minghella Studio, for the late writer-director (and my fellow cast member in Don Roy's translation of Romain Weingarten's Akara; I was in drag as a woman whose son was a dog, Tony was a frog who played the piano. Theatre of the Absurd. What can I say?)

The drama course was terrific, a deep dive into human history seen through the lens of performance and exploring its inextricable links with mythology, religion and social change. On top of that, the practical craft of production and the actual business behind show business. And on top of that, the very thing that people seem to think that drama students do to the exclusion of all else - a weekly session of fannying around in leotard and tights. The purpose of this, I now realise, was never to make us into actors. It was to give us an understanding of what performers do.

Which is not to say that the department didn't turn out its share of talent. When I tried to image-search for a photo of Don the screen filled with headshots of actors whose CVs all include early roles in the Donald Roy Theatre - quite the testament in itself.

So instead of Don's headshot, pictured is the performance space that bears his name.

Tales of Dark Fantasy 3

Advance review from Publishers Weekly; book launches August 2020, available for preorder now in both a trade hardcover and a limited edition signed by all the contributors.

Coming Soon from The Brooligan Press

Free Reads, Honestly

Been getting some reports that The Authentic William James doesn't always show up as free. I've had this problem with Amazon promotions before and never quite got to the bottom of it.

Here are some links that I've just tested with the ebook coming up at the required price, ie 0.00.

US, try this link 
UK, this one: 
Everywhere else
And if nothing works for you, email me via the Contact page and I'll send you an epub file.
Whew.

Free Reads, This Week Only

These are troubled times and though they surely will pass, we’ve no say in how soon and there’s little we can do other than disengage, lie low, support the science, and keep our spirits up.

Reading can play a big part in that process, and every reader knows it. All across social media I’m seeing independent booksellers rolling out local delivery services and online publishers slashing their prices, not just to stay afloat but to give active encouragement to the readership. I’ve been looking at what I might do to join in. Most of my material’s licensed out; Orion handle my ebook backlist while Random House have The Kingdom of Bones and The Bedlam Detective, but there still a few pieces of work over which I have control.

I’m making all of them free to download for 5 days, from Monday March 23rd until the following Friday. They’re all on Amazon so I don’t know what your local time will be when the change kicks in. Even if you’re an Amazon refusenik, you can treat it as a chance to get something for nothing out of Jeff Bezos.

Here’s what there is: 

The Authentic William James . Novel. As the Special Investigator to the Lord Chancellor’s Visitor in Lunacy, Sebastian Becker delivers justice to those dangerous madmen whose fortunes might otherwise place them above the law. But in William James he faces a different challenge; to prove a man sane, so that he may hang. Did the reluctant showman really burn down a crowded pavilion with the audience inside? And if not, why is this British sideshow cowboy so determined to shoulder the blame?

Download it here
In Gethsemane . Novella. In the early years of the Twentieth Century, a Spiritualist and a stage illusionist become strange allies when they take their clashing ideologies onto the lecture circuit.

Download it here
Melody James. Novella. In the lobby of a Blackpool hotel, one year after the end of the Great War, Britain's spymaster recruits a young sideshow fortune-teller for a mission of historic importance.

Download it here
Two Tales . A pair of short stories, Out of Bedlam and The Plot.
 
 Download it here
One Dove . Short story.

  Download it here 

Leap Before You Look

If anyone who plans on hiring me searches my social media beforehand, I'm sure I'll be fine