Stephen Gallagher's Blog, page 7

Leytonstone: the Afterword

The second in Stephen Volk's Dark Masters trilogy of novellas, each of which delves into the fictional psyche of a real-life figure from the darker end of the popular arts, Leytonstone is an extended riff upon a well-known incident from the early life of Alfred Hitchcock. I was honoured to be asked to write an afterword to its original edition from the Spectral Press.

Now all three novellas have been collected together into a single volume by PS Publishing, and a thing of great beauty it is. Leytonstone now takes its place between Whitstable (featuring Peter Cushing) and Netherwood (Dennis Wheatley, in a tale of an uneasy alliance with 'Great Beast' Aleister Crowley).

There are no afterwords in this new edition, either mine or that of Mark Morris for Whitstable; but you can read my little Hitchcock essay here, if you like.

You don't have to have read the novella. Though you may want to, afterwards...

Don't say you were never warned.

 

Read On
Buy the Trilogy 

Scraps of WHO

A quick note on some Doctor Who-related stuff I've got coming up in the New Year. I'll give more details on each in due course but for now, just the headlines...
During the summer I was one of four Season 18 writers participating in a filmed chat for the as-yet unscheduled Blu Ray release. All of us around a table in a rather nice pub. I've seen an early cut and it's turned out rather well.I've signed a contract for a BBC Audiobook of the Terminus novelisation, and...After banging on about the 'lost' version of the Warriors' Gate novelisation for many years, I finally bit the bullet and reassembled the text from surviving fragments, again for BBC Audio. The production will be something special. With BBC Books focusing more on recent material, there are no plans at this stage for a print version.Frank Collins is working on The Black Archive #29, a book-length study of Warriors' Gate. Along with interviews from me, director Paul Joyce, and others, he's had access to all my drafts and working papers in the Hull History Centre.Earlier this year I delivered 'Lost Story' Nightmare Country to Big Finish, being the completion of an unmade treatment for a Season 21 Fifth Doctor four-parter. Scheduling will be contingent on getting the original cast back together.Neil Cole's Museum of Classic Sci-fi in the Northumbrian village of Allendale features some pieces from Warriors' Gate and, most impressively, the original Garm mask and costume from Terminus.More on each of these as news becomes available.

And in the meantime, there'll be the audio release of Casting the Runes, a contemporary production featuring Tom Burke, Anna Maxwell Martin, with Reece Shearsmith as Karswell, from Audible in December.

Becker's World

"We have a man. We want to know if we can trust him and I think you can get us the answer."
Sebastian Becker was never meant to live, but sometimes you just don't plan these things.

He made his first appearance in The Kingdom of Bones, pursuing the fugitive Tom Sayers from London's Music Hall circuit to a final confrontation in a Lousiana furniture store, a Javert to Sayers' Valjean. The Bedlam Detective found him back in England with his young family, working cash-in-hand to support them as an investigator for the Lord Chancellor's Visitor in Lunacy. In The Authentic William James he's handed a job with political implications that he turns into a personal mission.


“You feel others’ pain. But you won’t share your own. There are people who love you. They love you more than you know. But you can never bring yourself to believe that you deserve it.”


Along the way I've been adding shorter pieces, fleshing out Becker's world, filling in some of the gaps. Out of Bedlam falls between The Kingdom of Bones and The Bedlam Detective; the action of One Dove slots in between Bedlam Detective and William James. The new novella takes us forward with a character whose potential I'd begun to sense along the way. For new readers it includes a (relevant) sample chapter from The Authentic William James.


buy the paperback novella, 102pp
ISBN 978 999920784
buy the ebook

Broadcast Blues

I've begun watching a WGA preview screener of Amazon’s Homecoming with Sam (Mr Robot) Esmail directing Julia Roberts in a podcast-inspired drama. It's too early for me to offer judgment, but so far it’s intriguing and engaging and matches no obvious broadcast model – half-hour serial fiction with varying episode lengths and other "No one ever does that" elements that I’ll leave you to discover.

Right now it seems like no more than a week or two goes by without some form-breaking novelty from one of the streaming platforms. A lot of shows that do nothing for me, but a significant number that do. 3 years ago I was working for a US network whose drama VP told me that the traditional networks were expecting to survive no more than 6 years in their current form. I get it now.

This item in The Guardian's media section brought that conversation back to mind:



The big game-changer was Beau Willimon and David Fincher's House of Cards, I reckon. Prior to that, online drama meant no-budget, no-name exercises in the disguising of negligible resources. HoC landed among the webisodes like Orson Welles in a paddling pool.

The success of Netflix et al is that of providing for a wide variety of tastes. In the arc of my career I’ve seen UK broadcasting go from ‘something for everyone’ to the steady narrowing of focus onto one or other imaginary demographic. Lost count of the number of times I’ve been told what “the ITV viewer” or “the BBC1 audience” wants (usually homely and heartwarming ‘people like us’ stories).

Nothing wrong with that. But it’s like beans for every meal.

I had a conspiracy theory that the BBC’s Bodyguard Radio Times cover spoiler was a veiled rebuke to the on-demand viewer. But I do hope our national broadcasters survive and prosper, without being reduced to a diet of sports and shiny-floor shows with live voting..

By the sound of it, they’ve got 3 more years to work out how.

Dark Mirages: Dracula

Dark Mirages is a new book presenting unproduced screenplays by writers with genre credentials, each with a story behind it.

In my case Dracula was commissioned by the BBC and cancelled, unread, on the very day that I delivered the script. The producers were Deep Indigo working with BBC Wales.

 My angle was that nobody had 'done' the book properly since Gerald Savory's 1970s adaptation. Dracula is a work that's often plundered and rarely honoured. Stoker never gets the respect that's automatically accorded to an Austen, an Eliot, or a Hardy, maybe because he wrote an instinctive classic rather than a cerebral one.

Things would have to change, as in adaptations they always do. But for me the guiding motivation would always be the question, What was Stoker getting at, here?

I won't insult you by explaining how the novel is a collage of second-hand perceptions, cast in the form of letters, journals, and dictated notes from the principal characters. The character of Count Dracula is offstage for much of the novel, which adds to his mystery and enhances his credibility.

Because of this approach, you don't get Count Dracula's version of the events. You can work it out by a kind of literary triangulation, but I've never seen it done and still come out as Stoker. Dracula's role gets rewritten, as if his character somehow isn't integral, nor needs to be rendered with any fidelity to the author.

What we usually get is either a romantic rapist or, if the makers want to signal that they've seen Nosferatu, a hideous cockroach. Rarely has anyone made a serious attempt to show us Stoker's nasty-minded, empty-hearted predator, who insists to his dissipated party-girl 'brides' that he's capable of love, and then goes on to prove at great length that he isn't.

It was the fastest, fiercest script I've ever written. We opened a discussion with Vincent Cassel's people, for our Dracula of choice. And as my script made its way to Cardiff a drama executive in London heard of a proposed ITV version over lunch and cancelled our project that same afternoon.

We had a completed script, we were way ahead. The other project didn't even have a writer yet. But the news took over a week to reach us, during which time the producers of the ITV project got out a press announcement and effectively bombed the BBC's boat.

There's a coda. About two years later, the BBC financed ITV's version and screened it as their own. I didn't - couldn' t - watch, but the general opinion seems to be that it was not great.

So there's that.

Until October 7

 
The Crown edition, US and Canada. See previous post for links.

The Bedlam Detective price promotion: $1.99 from digital retailers

Crown are running a price promotion on The Bedlam Detective ebook from now until October 7th, with an additional targeted placement to 3 million Bookbub subscribers in the US and Canada on October 1st.

Click the 'Buy' option on the Penguin/Random House Bedlam Detective page for a drop-down menu of digital retailers, or click on any of these links:

AmazonBarnes & Noble (Nook)BAM! (Books a Million)iBooksKobo
Alongside Crown's promotion, during the week of October 1st-5th you can download One Dove: A Sebastian Becker Story for free. This offer is worldwide.

Click here or on the image in the sidebar to link to your region's provider.

Coming Soon

The Brooligan Press

The Brooligan Press website is now up and running, with details of all the titles in our list and global links for ordering paperbacks and ebooks.

You can find it right here

The British Horror Movie You'll Never Get to See, and Why

Last weekend found me back in Pooley Bridge. It's a village at the northern tip of Ullswater in the Lake District with a post office, a couple of pubs, a handful of tourist shops, a posh bistro, and a steamer pier. Ullswater is, for my money, the fairest of the Lakes, and the village was the model for the settlement that I called Ravens Bridge in my novel The Boat House.

It's the story of a Russian hitchhiker who goes to ground there in the 1980s, on the run from the authorities and from the Soviet-era police agent sent to track her down. She stays because the woods and lakes remind her of her Karelian homeland, a place she was forced to leave because of a growing obsession with deaths by drowning. She finds a seasonal job and a place to crash, and works hard to put down some roots.

I messed about with the place for fictional purposes, of course. I put a lakeside restaurant on the steamer pier and gifted the town a boatyard. I had form for this; it was in the adjacent valley of Martindale that I'd found the setting for my first 'proper' novel, Chimera, just a few years before, and early efforts to teach myself some basic movie skills had involved a 16mm camera, a rented shooting lodge on the Dalemain estate, and a group of press-ganged friends and coworkers.

With The Boat House I can fairly say that I suffered for my art. To research Alina's backstory I made a rail trip from Helsinki to St Petersburg and came home with a dose of Hepatitis A, courtesy of the kitchen hygiene at the Europiskaya Hotel. This made for a somewhat fevered writing process but the result, heavily edited with a cooler head, felt exciting and unique. It took a while to get published, but when the book deal came it was a good one. It wasn't long before screen rights were optioned by a respected producer, and with her I produced a treatment that snagged us Film Council development funding. By now her feature-director husband had become involved. The resulting script drew in a major studio. An A-list cinematographer was attached and a top-notch production designer - if you've ever worked in film you'll know how utterly crucial to a movie's look and tone that is - headed up to the Lakes to start finding locations. It was at this point that I was out.

That's right; I was fired from my own project, on the 'would benefit from a fresh eye' pretext. In this case the fresh eye was that of the director's assistant, a young woman with no writing credits then or since, who gave the screenplay a page one rewrite that pretty much put an end to the studio's interest.

What followed was a perplexing time. My unused screenplay was earning its keep as a personal sample and fetching me new work, while those producers kept on commissioning scripts from other writers. I'm not sure how many but after five I stopped counting. These weren't rewrites, but new first drafts. I didn't see them all, but I did see a couple. One was a competent job with no one's heart in it, while the other script wouldn't have got the writer past the door of a film school.

Here's the problem; all this time, the meter had been running. Even bad scripts don't come cheap, and nor do feature film department heads. By the time the option ran out the charges against the production were somewhere north of £125,000. That's money that would need to be repaid on the first day of principal photography by anyone taking the property on. Chump change for an American studio, I know; but The Boat House is a British Picture, albeit one with a Lewtonesque vibe. It's closely bound to a landscape with a specific sense of place, and that kind of money is a budget killer for any British producer.

And that's why you'll never see the movie.

So what's prompted me to be telling you this now? Well, getting back after a four-hour walk on the hottest day of the year so far, I called into the Post Office to pick up a cold beer or two. Don't judge me, I'd earned it. The Lake District boasts a number of craft brewery labels, but one in particular caught my eye; on the front the image of an ethereal lake creature, and on the back, "By the historic Coniston Copper Mines, mythical Asrai emerge from the caves above the moonlit Levers Water. Cold and pure, these elusive creatures fear capture by man lest they fade away and turn into pools of water."

Mythical Asrai? Moonlit waters? That's pure Boat House stuff. Dang. Where was this brew when I was writing?  For inspiration I'll take it over Hep A any time.

Pooley Bridge took a severe battering in the storms and winter floods of 2015, and its charming sixteenth century river crossing was destroyed and swept away. For the short term it's been replaced by a temporary metal bridge with a permanent replacement planned for construction later in the year. A number of padlocks on the ironwork have begun to appear this season, like the ones that brought down the parapet on the Pont des Artes in Paris.

I guess if you want to hedge your bets when declaring undying love, a forever lock on a temporary bridge is the way to go.