F.G. Cottam's Blog, page 8
June 30, 2010
dark echo
Becoming increasingly excited about the prospect of the publication next month of Dark Echo in the States. I'm optimistic it might do well because the character at the heart of the story is American. He is Harry Spalding, a jazz-age playboy and Paris expatriate who has built and sails the racing schooner of the title.
I based him on Harry Crosby, a Black Bay Bostonian who knew Hemingway and Fitzgerald in Paris in the 1920s and subsequently shot himself in a suicide pact with his mistress in New York during that decade.
Crosby was affected mentally by his experience as a volunteer ambulance driver in the Great War. After it, he became a poet and founded the Black Sun Press. He became increasingly reckless and decadent in his private life but was insulated against the usual consequences by his immense wealth.
I asked myself the question, what if Crosby had lived and just kept on becoming more and more debauched? Thus he became the inspiration for Spalding in the novel; though Spalding is not slavishly based on Crosby. Once I started to write, he developed a character all his own. In the novel, he's also compared to Jay Gatsby. But as my female protagonist Suzanne points out, Gatsby was a bootlegger. Spalding was the Devil himself.
I'm hoping readers across the pond receive the novel kindly.
I based him on Harry Crosby, a Black Bay Bostonian who knew Hemingway and Fitzgerald in Paris in the 1920s and subsequently shot himself in a suicide pact with his mistress in New York during that decade.
Crosby was affected mentally by his experience as a volunteer ambulance driver in the Great War. After it, he became a poet and founded the Black Sun Press. He became increasingly reckless and decadent in his private life but was insulated against the usual consequences by his immense wealth.
I asked myself the question, what if Crosby had lived and just kept on becoming more and more debauched? Thus he became the inspiration for Spalding in the novel; though Spalding is not slavishly based on Crosby. Once I started to write, he developed a character all his own. In the novel, he's also compared to Jay Gatsby. But as my female protagonist Suzanne points out, Gatsby was a bootlegger. Spalding was the Devil himself.
I'm hoping readers across the pond receive the novel kindly.
June 28, 2010
Wayne's World
'Course Wayne Rooney, renaissance man of English football, has been signed up to write five books. A cynic (or realist) might argue that's five more than he has ever read; but in Wayne's world, writing a book just means autographing a contract and chatting for a few hours to someone with an education and a tape recorder.
I've got no axe to grind with Wayne in particular. Every member of the team underperformed. I don't go along with the revisionist view that they're mediocre players flattered by the talents in their league sides of the Premiership foreigners they play alongside in the domestic season. They were good in qualifying.
Yet against the USA they were rubbish. Against Algeria they were afraid and against Germany, inept. They let themselves down. They let us down.
I've seen pub teams play with more heart.
I've got no axe to grind with Wayne in particular. Every member of the team underperformed. I don't go along with the revisionist view that they're mediocre players flattered by the talents in their league sides of the Premiership foreigners they play alongside in the domestic season. They were good in qualifying.
Yet against the USA they were rubbish. Against Algeria they were afraid and against Germany, inept. They let themselves down. They let us down.
I've seen pub teams play with more heart.
World Cup
Read this morning that the England squad have skulked home after their pathetic showing in the World Cup. They're wearing appropriately grim expressions, but I don't think they understand just how profoundly the nation feels they let us down. They're surrounded by sycophantic agents and fawning club staff and commercial sponsors desperate to get their signatures on a contract to promote a drink or brand of boot. All they experience is flattery and praise and adulation. Even Gerrard and Rooney, working class lads from Liverpool, won't really get it. When someone like Wayne Rooney can get a quarter of a million quid for posing on a bed on a magazine cover with his missus; when he's paid enough each week by his club to go out and buy a Bentley with the proceeds in cash, he's somewhat removed from the hopes and aspirations for the national team of the average football fan.
After his showing in South Africa, that caravan he's living in in the Nike add is too good for him. How about a Leaky tent on a plot neighbouring a landfill site? He could sit in it, pondering the responsibilities that come with the privilege of wearing the England shirt.
Couldn't help noticing he's had his chest waxed. He should have spent the time that appointment at the beautician's took practicing with the spherical object he's supposed to be able to kick into a net.
After his showing in South Africa, that caravan he's living in in the Nike add is too good for him. How about a Leaky tent on a plot neighbouring a landfill site? He could sit in it, pondering the responsibilities that come with the privilege of wearing the England shirt.
Couldn't help noticing he's had his chest waxed. He should have spent the time that appointment at the beautician's took practicing with the spherical object he's supposed to be able to kick into a net.
June 8, 2010
Harsh
Anybody reading my reviews (and apparently some people do); could be left with the superficial impression that I'm easily pleased. The opposite is actually true. Depressingly, most of the books I start to read, I don't finish. This is particularly true of fiction. Life is too short to persist with stories that are tedious or unconvincing or just seriously technically flawed. I probably only finish 40 per cent of the novels I try to read.
But I won't review a book unless I've read it all the way through. If I haven't, I don't feel I'm qualified to do so. That's why my reviews are overwhelmingly positive.
But I won't review a book unless I've read it all the way through. If I haven't, I don't feel I'm qualified to do so. That's why my reviews are overwhelmingly positive.
May 31, 2010
Waiting...
June has finally arrived, the month that sees the publication of The Waiting Room, my fourth novel with a strong supernatural element and probably the one with the concept easiest to grasp.
A derelict waiting room on the platform of an abandoned branch-line station seems to me to be intrinsically sinister. There is just something about the atmosphere of waiting rooms; all that shiftlessness, the transience, the anxiety, no one who ever sits in one or paces its floor truly relaxed because travel is inherently stressful.
They are repositories of thoughts and feelings and fears with nowhere to go because their owners have moved on. Waiting rooms strike me as being more haunted than almost any other building (right up their with derelict hospitals and lunatic asylums).
Of course, you need a plot. But I think this one the best I've come up with. Hodder have done a great job with the cover.
Shale Point Station welcomes weary travelers. Though the trains may not run strictly according to timetable...
A derelict waiting room on the platform of an abandoned branch-line station seems to me to be intrinsically sinister. There is just something about the atmosphere of waiting rooms; all that shiftlessness, the transience, the anxiety, no one who ever sits in one or paces its floor truly relaxed because travel is inherently stressful.
They are repositories of thoughts and feelings and fears with nowhere to go because their owners have moved on. Waiting rooms strike me as being more haunted than almost any other building (right up their with derelict hospitals and lunatic asylums).
Of course, you need a plot. But I think this one the best I've come up with. Hodder have done a great job with the cover.
Shale Point Station welcomes weary travelers. Though the trains may not run strictly according to timetable...
May 28, 2010
cruel and unusual
I watched a classic movie the other night, The Vikings, starring Kirk Douglas and Tony Curtis and Ernest Borgnine and the gorgeous Janet Leigh (who was Mrs Tony Curtis at the time). The film is 50 years old and the best turn in it is Borgnine's performance as the old viking king. The worst thing in it is the costume worn by Tony Curtis, which features a pair of what look very like hot pants. He plays a slave in the film. I'm not sure that 'slave' was a concept vikings understood. They were not as class-obsessed as ancient Greeks or Imperial Romans. But as I watched I started to think, maybe the slave hot pants were a deliberate psychological ploy to debilitate the slaves by ridicule so they wouldn't revolt. In this case it didn't work. Curtis, despite his debilitating hot pants, half-blinded and eventually killed Kirk and finally got the girl.
The best thing about the movie was the genuine Scandinavian locations. I always thought and still think Star Wars ridiculous because it was so obviously shot in Morocco. Morocco does not, with the best will in the world, look like a planet from a far flung alien galaxy. Tony's hot pants were made of sheepskin, I think. Perhaps just ahead of his time?
The best thing about the movie was the genuine Scandinavian locations. I always thought and still think Star Wars ridiculous because it was so obviously shot in Morocco. Morocco does not, with the best will in the world, look like a planet from a far flung alien galaxy. Tony's hot pants were made of sheepskin, I think. Perhaps just ahead of his time?
April 29, 2010
Folklore
Writing a story set on the Cornish coast, I needed something about Cornish myth and legend and was lucky enough to strike pure gold. Yesterday I came across a big hardback on the bookshelves of a charity shop. Published in 1973, this is a 550 page Reader's Digest volume entitled, Folklore Myths and Legends of Britain. I started reading it last night. It is brilliantly illustrated (Blake, Dadd, Rackham, Holman Hunt); and a fantastic work of scholarship. The subject is a huge one, but this book does it justice. It was, as I've said, a very lucky find. I cracked a can of Ruddles Ale and read the chapter on Cornwall. But the book deserves to be read from cover to cover and that's a Summer treat I'm looking forward to.
March 22, 2010
Kate Rusby
Much to the irritation of some readers, I refer to songs quite a lot in my fiction. I needed something from the Napoleonic period for a novel I've just started and looted the ragbag back-catalogue of my memory for a folk song Kate Rusby does called The Recruited Collier, in which said collier is pressed into military service while drunk. The song did the trick very ably plot wise (well, in my opinion); but also tempted me into a weekend Rusby-fest of pure wonder.
I don't think Kate Rusby is that well known in America because she is a nervous flier and hasn't toured there much, if at all. But she is the best English folk singer since Sandy Denny in my humble opinion. If you haven't heard her, you are in for a treat when you do.
I don't think Kate Rusby is that well known in America because she is a nervous flier and hasn't toured there much, if at all. But she is the best English folk singer since Sandy Denny in my humble opinion. If you haven't heard her, you are in for a treat when you do.
February 21, 2010
Sinister
Some periods of history strike me as intrinsically sinister. The 1880s in London would qualify because of Jack the Ripper and the 1790s in Paris because of the French Revolutionary Terror. But for no very obvious reason, I think the 1920s a really chilling decade. There's something ominous about those sleek black sedans the Chicago gangsters got about in. There's that heartless, breezy music played on shellac records under grinding needles. There are the tortoiseshell cigarette holders and the hats and Malacca canes and worst of all, the spats. Is anything more sinister than a pair of canvas spats? Maybe it's just me...
I do think the 1920s a peculiarly heartless decade, marked by corruption and decadence and shrill sensation-seeking. The 1970s? Mullet haircuts and Brut aftershave. The 1920s? Dark.
I do think the 1920s a peculiarly heartless decade, marked by corruption and decadence and shrill sensation-seeking. The 1970s? Mullet haircuts and Brut aftershave. The 1920s? Dark.
February 10, 2010
history
I'm reading two books at the moment as research for a new three-part work of fiction I'm writing. The first is a History Today volume called The Age of Chivalry, edited by Nigel Saul. I've been meaning to study the medieval knights and their codes of behaviour ever since seeing the tomb of the Black Prince in Canterbury Cathedral as a student at Kent University and 30 years on have finally got around to it. The subject is fascinating.
equally fascinating is Robert K Massie's book, Dreadnought, about the castles of steel built by the British and German navies in the arms race that preceded the Great War. Massie is not only a superb historian but a writer who makes research a real pleasure rather than a necessary obligation. A fleet of these vessels at sea must have been an awesome sight to witness. I'm only including one of them in my story, and that one has undergone a few sinister changes since its fitting out and sea trials.
equally fascinating is Robert K Massie's book, Dreadnought, about the castles of steel built by the British and German navies in the arms race that preceded the Great War. Massie is not only a superb historian but a writer who makes research a real pleasure rather than a necessary obligation. A fleet of these vessels at sea must have been an awesome sight to witness. I'm only including one of them in my story, and that one has undergone a few sinister changes since its fitting out and sea trials.
