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All the Devils Are Here
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'All the Devils Are Here' by David Seabrook
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Is David Seabrook dead? What started as a trickle of email and phone call rumour yesterday, had by today turned into a flood of conversation. The first message was from true crime author Neil Milkins: “Are you able to tell me if David Seabrook has died. I have had an email saying he died January 2009.” When Cathi Unsworth contacted me about Seabrook today, I was able to trace the rumour mill carrying this story back through a network of my friends via novelist David Peace to film director Paul Tickell. So I called Paul to get the story.
http://www.3ammagazine.com/3am/is-dav...
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In his book 'Jack Of Jumps' Seabrook attempts to identify Jack the Stripper, a serial killer who murdered eight prostitutes in West London in the early sixties. Seabrook gives a meticulous account of the police work; however, the murderer remains unknown, although the book contains insinuations as to his identity."
This review makes it sounds quite interesting, this section caught my eye...
The case remains unsolved, despite Seabrook's best efforts, but that hardly matters when his real subject is metropolitan jetsam and the kind of desperate lives that usually go unnoticed for want of a chronicler. While his category is true crime, his implicit references are to fiction and film, to an imaginative landscape variously represented by the drinking culture of Patrick Hamilton's lowlife novels and the Notting Hill of the film Performance. Seabrook transforms the stale material of hundreds of "as-told-to" accounts into an act of epic retrieval, full of arcane cross-referencing. Implicit in his argument is a city haunted as much by a lost popular culture as by its missing souls.
https://www.theguardian.com/books/200...
And of course the same crimes inspired Cathi Unsworth's 'Bad Penny Blues' which we discuss here...
https://www.goodreads.com/topic/show/...
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However the following chapter on Broadstairs, where he uncovers curious connections between John Buchan, Lord Curzon's house, William Joyce (Lord Haw-Haw), and a Nazi con-man, who happens to be Audrey Hepburn's father, is a big improvement.
Definitely one that many Hamiltonians should find something to enjoy.
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Rachel Cooke, Observer writer, New Statesman TV critic and author joins John, Andy & Mathew to discuss 'All the Devils Are Here', the astounding travelogue through Kent and the depths of human behaviour from David Seabrook.
https://soundcloud.com/backlistedpod/...
They all absolutely love it. I am not quite so unequivocal but it's still a good book.
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'All the Devils Are Here' has an acute sense of place, and I enjoyed David Seabrook's constant linking of disparate places, events and other information, often relayed in a feverish inner monologue
David Seabrook both loves Kent and is freaked out by much of what he discovers, or that he imagines he discovers. His perceptions and connections often appear to be a reflection of his own tortured psyche.
Overall David Seabrook's trawl round the coast of Kent results in a very unusual and disturbing memoir.
Click here to read my review
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David Seabrook (other topics)
David Seabrook (1960 – 18 January 2009) was a British crime writer and journalist.
In his book 'Jack Of Jumps' Seabrook attempts to identify Jack the Stripper, a serial killer who murdered eight prostitutes in West London in the early sixties. Seabrook gives a meticulous account of the police work; however, the murderer remains unknown, although the book contains insinuations as to his identity.
'All the Devils Are Here' is Seabrook’s account of Kent's unglamorous seaside towns entwined with local literary and celebrity history.
At the time of his death Seabrook was working on a book about the life and mysterious suicide of the show business solicitor David Jacobs - something that happened very close to where I live.
'All the Devils Are Here' and indeed David Seabrook are worth their own thread here on TPHAS, I think he and his work would find favour with many here
'All the Devils Are Here' is a tour of the shady Kent coast.
David Seabrook creeps round the blustery coast of Kent from Rochester to Broadstairs via Margate with his notebook. What he finds fills the pages most agreeably, reviving lost times and neglected places.
It begins with a convalescent TS Eliot and ends with a truly disturbing glimpse of wizened Carry on star Charles Hawtrey on the beach at Deal.
This from a review in The Independent by Brian Dillon....
All the Devils Are Here essays a kind of seaside situationism, predicated on the porousness of borders: between time and space, past and present, nature and culture.
Kent, with its ghosts of pleasures past (the seaside towns they forgot to close down), is ripe for this treatment. In Rochester, Seabrook finds a town trapped in a grotesque performance of its own history: economic decline giving way to the living death of heritage time. In Chatham, "a long time dead", he raises the spectre of the painter and patricide Richard Dadd. The whole territory is alive with significance, real or imaginary. From Broadstairs (John Buchan, Willam "Lord Haw-Haw" Joyce) to Deal (the last days of Charles Hawtrey), the shades of the past circulate about Seabrook's base in Canterbury.
Seabrook paints an almost caricatured picture of himself (skinhead, vintage Crombie), but the sharp lines blur as drink, fatigue or anxiety take hold, or his face reminds an interviewee of some long-lost conquest. There is a sense that the book's fractured landscape could only make sense to a mind bent on putting something back together again, shoring fragments against its ruin.
http://www.independent.co.uk/arts-ent...
This is from a review in The Guardian by Andy Beckett....
Seabrook takes four famously unsettling works of literature - The Waste Land by TS Eliot, The Mystery of Edwin Drood by Dickens, Robin Maugham's The Servant and John Buchan's The Thirty-Nine Steps - and attempts to expose their origins in real Kentish places and past events. Sometimes Seabrook's approach is that of relatively conventional biography and literary criticism. He finds a few lines about Margate Sands in The Waste Land , describes how Eliot spent a few weeks in the town in 1921 while convalescing after a nervous breakdown, and identifies the chipped Victorian pedestrian shelter, still standing on the front, where the poet wrote, watching the grey waves and the shell-shocked veterans of the world war just gone.
At other times the book makes riskier connections. In Broadstairs, known for its genteel retirees, Seabrook's roving eye settles on a large white clifftop house. It has been sliced up for flats now, but there are steps nearby, suggestively leading down to a hidden beach. As he circles the house and talks to suspicious neighbours, and slips old newspaper cuttings about the property into his narrative, Seabrook gradually reveals something rather startling. During the 1930s the house was the home of Arthur Tester, the son of a British diplomat, who was also a spy for German military intelligence and a prominent supporter of the British Union of Fascists. Tester ran a company based in London called the European Press Agency, which put out anti-communist propaganda and received covert funding and support from the German government. He wore a monocle and smoked imported cigarettes. He kept a large yacht moored near the cliffs, on which he was rumoured to entertain Oswald Mosley and important German Nazis.
Tester hurriedly left Britain in 1938 after questions were asked in the House of Commons about his activities. He ended up as a German army interrogator in Romania during the second world war, and was killed in Transylvania in late 1944, "carrying a passport signed by Hitler". All this is so perfectly sinister that it could take over the book, but Seabrook lightens his discoveries with black humour. Tester, he writes, was like "a stage Nazi...a man they might have called in to thicken the plot of 'Allo, 'Allo." When John Buchan wanted some villains and a dramatic setting for the climax of The Thirty-Nine Steps , Seabrook convincingly suggests that he borrowed Tester and his Broadstairs eyrie.
The chapters about Dickens and Maugham are slightly less successful. The former lingers too long and pruriently over a notorious murder in a village near Rochester in 1843, which may help fill in the blanks in Dickens' unfinished last novel. Seabrook's detective work runs away with itself, recalling the American cultural critic Greil Marcus at his most excitable and opaque.
The Maugham section, meanwhile, is atmospheric about Deal's tight streets and its embattled but louche gay subculture - Seabrook describes the Carry On actor Charles Hawtrey "reeling round town like an old wasted weasel" - yet you wonder what it all adds up to, beyond a set of tempting shaggy-dog stories.
One answer seems to be a theory, which can be sensed at work throughout the book, about the seaside as both a refuge and a dead end for unconventional Britons. Many of the characters here have turned to drink; they are recovering, or not, from defeats and fatal turning points in their lives. Seabrook himself, it becomes clear, has lost a fiancée to cancer. His writing's acute sense of place, its restless need to make associations, its moments of feverish interior monologue - at first it all seems simply an original prose style; but then it takes on a greater emotional weight. There is empathy here, and that is rare and welcome in this kind of book. David Seabrook clearly loves Kent and its internal exiles as much as they spook him. He probably need not move house when this comes out.
https://www.theguardian.com/books/200...