In tribute to P.D. James
Here, in tribute to P.D. James, who died last week, is my interview with her from 2011 in which she looks back over her career.
All posts filed under: crime fiction
4. Books of the Year – Andrew McConnell Stott
Andrew McConnell Stott is an award-winning writer and academic. For several years he was a stand-up comedian, described by London’s Evening Standard as “an absurdist comic with a satirical eye for popular culture.” The world, however, was unprepared for such hilarity and so he decided to give it up. He is the author of Comedy (Routledge, 2005) and The Pantomime Life of Joseph Grimaldi (Canongate, 2009). The latter was praised by Simon Callow in the Guardian as a “great big Christmas pudding of a book, almost over-stuffed with rich and colourful life”. Jenny Uglow in the Observer called it a “fast-paced, rumbustious biography” and said: “A round of applause is due to this exuberant, impassioned portrait, for bringing the great Grimaldi, ‘Joey the Clown’, into the limelight again.” You can hear my interview with Andrew by clicking here. Andrew is currently a Fellow at the New York Public Library’s Cullman Center for Scholars and Writers. Here is his selection of books he has enjoyed this year: I don’t tend to read that many books-of-the-moment, because …
Summer Reading Choices: Jan Zalasiewicz
Today’s holiday reading selector is Jan Zalasiewicz, who teaches geology at Leicester University. He was a guest on the very first Blackwell Online podcast, in which he told me about his book The World after Us. You can listen to the interview here. I’m hoping to interview him again this autumn when his new book, The Planet in a Pebble, appears. Here is his summer readiing recommendation: Holidays! It’s off to the beach or café terrace or simply that rickety deckchair in the weed-strewn garden. Now – what to pack to read? Nothing too demanding or (the Gods forbid!) improving. An adventure that rattles along with zing and charm and fun and characters you can live with. But that’s so hard to find… There are the staples, of course, that rarely disappoint: Terry Pratchett and George MacDonald Fraser and – a personal quirk, mostly from the charity bookshop, now – the early Saint stories of Leslie Charteris, admired for their style and craft by that other old dependable, P.G. Wodehouse. But more of that ilk? …
Summer Reading Choices: Elizabeth Speller
Today’s guest selector of summer reading is Elizabeth Speller, author most recently of a highly praised debut novel, The Return of Captain John Emmett. She is also the author of several works of non-fiction – including a memoir, Sunlight on the Garden – and a prize-winning poet. Here are her choices: Dragging a hefty suitcase of books to Greece to provide a whole summer’s reading tends to sharpen opinions about the contents; there is, literally, a heavy freight of expectation and hope. This year three or four big disappointments have been balanced by three surprises. Only as I write do I realize that these are linked by a theme of war. This is perhaps not surprising as my own novels concern war, but my three choices are so different from each other that this almost irrelevant except that war changes everything and these are all novels of individuals whose certainties have been swept away. Richard Bausch’s Peace is a short novel set in a hard WWII Italian winter and focusing on one small, weary platoon …
Summer Reading Choices: Michael Bywater
Our next guest recommender of Summer Reading is Michael Bywater, author (of Lost Worlds and Big Babies, inter al.), broadcaster, and – as you will see when you read on – now writing for the stage… This summer I’m too too utterly utterly up to my ears in queers, dears. Specifically the (slightly illusory) late nineteenth century London homosexual world and the point at which it collides, in a flurry of ortolans’ tongues and lilies, with the largely abortive English Aesthetes. This is no indulgence – actually at times it’s hard going – but work: I’m writing (it may sound improbable) a musical about Oscar Wilde with (equally improbably) those two giants of American popular music, the songwriting duo Leiber and Stoller. The work itself is a treat, but Oscar himself poses three problems: his literary work was something (in England at least) of a dead end; most of the legends about him are untrue; and the world is well-supplied with Oscar mavens who’ll be on the edge of their seats, not with delight, but …
Nicola Upson interview
My interview with Nicola Upson, recorded last autumn in Heffers in Cambridge, is currently on the Bookhugger home page. In it I talk to Nicola about her second Josephine Tey mystery, set in 1930s Cornwall. Click on the image below to listen.