Bryan Forbes 1926 - 2013

Ray Harryhausen 1920 - 2013

Bank Holiday Big Book Bonus Bonanza

Okay, perhaps the post title's overselling it a little, but on May 23rd The Bedlam Detective sees UK publication and in anticipation of the event, we're making the Kindle edition of Down River free for the holiday weekend. You'll have 72 hours in which to grab it, from 12.00am (Pacific Standard Time) on May 4th to around midnight PST on May 6th.

UPDATE: apparently Amazon can be a little approximate with timing, depending on traffic at their servers.

Johnny Mays has the moral conscience of a selfish child in the frame of a plain-clothes police officer. The city is his playground, the rest of us his toys. He likes to find out where we work, where we live, what will scare us most. And Johnny never had a toy he didn't break.

But Johnny starts a car chase, and he pushes it too far. Soon they're fishing for his body at the foot of a dam, and partner Nick Frazier has been left behind.

They were friends, once, a long time ago, and there's no greater anger than that of a friend who feels betrayed. Nick had hoped that he might keep Johnny from going over the edge, in every sense. But Johnny doesn't see it that way.

Johnny's last words still echo in Nick's mind: "I'm going to remember this. I'm coming back for you."

Then the killings start. Killings of people Johnny didn't like. While Johnny's car is dredged up, empty.

"The denouement, thanks to Gallagher's strong writing and excellent characterisations, is unforgettable." (Publishers Weekly)

"An out-and-out novel of paranoia, tension and sharply honed violence which confirms Gallagher as one of Britain's most exciting writers of literate, nerve-shredding thrillers. Down River is Gallagher's most impressive novel to date. He's stripped, oiled and tuned his prose until it growls like a Ferrari, smooth, fast, and very, very powerful. The horror is firmly rooted in reality, yet seems ready at any moment to veer into deep, dark shadows... an unstoppable, gut-wrenching ride to the last page." (Starburst)

"Oktober broke new ground in its blending of genres, its thoughtful characterisation, and its non-stop action. With Down River, Gallagher returns to his own brand of police procedural once more... and he's pulled it off brilliantly." (Mystery Scene)

Click here for the Kindle book

A Criminal History

The Devil in the White City is one of my all-time favourite nonfiction reads. Historian Erik Larson counterpoints the planning and staging of the 1893 World's Fair with the murderous activities of one "Dr H H Holmes". The fake doctor – real name Herman Webster Mudgett – was a plausible charmer who preyed upon young women drawn to Chicago by the prospect of work and the excitement of big-city life in changing times.

One of the most frequent arguments to be offered in praise of the book is that it 'reads like a novel'. So it does, and a particularly rich one at that. We look into a world that is not our own, distanced by time, to find a timeless drama of fear and conflict. The historical panorama fascinates but it's the crime, the crime that drives the tale.

Historical crime. Pick any era, and you'll find a crime writer working the ground. Margaret Doody's Aristotle Detective, the Falco novels of Lindsey Davis, Phil Rickman's Doctor Dee, the Victorian railway detectives of Edward Marston and Andrew Martin (working half a century apart). Alienists, playwrights, and celebrities of the day all take the investigator's role, with varying degrees of credibility and success. Anthologist Mike Ashley's collections of historical crime draw together stories from Ancient Egypt to 1930s New York, and just a glance down their contents pages is enough to show that there's far more to the field than yet another Sherlock pastiche or tale of Jack the Ripper.

For me the stories that work least well are those which impose modern methods or attitudes on their historical context, treating history as little more than a dressing-up box. The best of them recognise that the past is, indeed, another country, where it's part of the thrill not to feel at home.

When it comes to imaginative creation, historical fiction is a harder act than most to pull off. The rules for the Walter Scott Prize, one of the richest in the field, require that "the majority of the events described take place at least 60 years before the publication of the novel, and therefore stand outside any mature personal experience of the author."

What does that mean for the story? For the author it means putting in serious work to achieve a sense of authenticity, where nothing can be assumed or taken for granted in the creation of your fictional world. That still leaves plenty of room for the imagination. In skilled hands and with the right attitude, even the most improbable events can be made plausible. Conan Doyle did careful research on his Lost World, and then populated his plateau with believable dinosaurs. Publication of The Lost World in 1912 gave me the springboard for a work of my own, when I was inspired to look into the real lives of its Edwardian subjects. The result was The Bedlam Detective, in which a discredited explorer's fantasies may hold the key to the murders of young girls on his estate.

I've read other 'true crime historicals' since The Devil in the White City. Larson's own Thunderstruck counterpoints the Crippen case with the development of the technology that would play such a big part in its climax, while Howard Blum's American Lightning juxtaposes the birth of Hollywood with the bombing of the Los Angeles Times offices in 1910. But the balance is an elusive one. It's a rare dramatic crime that exactly fit the needs of a dramatic narrative.

Which means it's rare to find the factual history that really does read like a crime novel.

For that, you need a novel.

First published in The Weekly Lizard

The Stone Tape

Despite being a single studio drama first broadcast on Christmas Day 1972 and reshown only once a few months later, Nigel Kneale's seminal TV ghost story still seems to have managed to mark, scar or otherwise influence just about everyone who saw it back then. Amongst my generation of horror writers, most either acknowledge a debt or at least are aware of its effect on the field.

The Stone Tape was first made available on DVD about a decade ago. It was one of a series of BFI releases of classic television drama.  To say that it had been possibly the most wished-for and anticipated release of its kind would be no exaggeration. There had been rare festival showings of the British Film Institute's archive copy, but otherwise The Stone Tape had been inaccessible for almost 30 years. More than a memory, almost a legend. Murky tenth-generation bootlegs circulated on VHS and versions of the script could be found out there on the internet, but these only sharpened the sense of absence. They did little to mitigate it.

Now the drama has been re-released in handsome form by niche distributor 101 Films, in a version that includes the illuminating commentary/conversation track with Kneale and Kim Newman.

To a restored country mansion called Taskerlands comes a team of research technologists led by the controlling and bombastic Peter Brock (Michael Bryant). The team includes nervy and damaged computer programmer Jill (Jane Asher), and they're here to brainstorm their way to a new form of information storage and transmission that anticipates the digital revolution - flash memory, in particular - in uncanny detail.

Brock believes that he may have glimpsed his personal and professional grail in the form of Taskerlands' resident ghost, a recurrent haunting that has driven the builders away with their work uncompleted. No believer in the supernatural, Brock seeks a scientific explanation. Matter, he suggests, may be able to absorb an emotional charge that can be triggered to replay the moment of its imprinting directly into the medium of the human mind; that, in essence, is the reality behind the ghost and the nature of the 'stone tape'.

This is pure Kneale, the application of the rational to the irrational, not to demystify it but to take it to an entirely new level. In turning their equipment onto the phenomenon, the scientists not only fail to tame it... they reveal it to have depths and dimensions that are way beyond their hope of control.

The big, serious, one-off TV studio drama is now a lost form, seen only in occasional 'event' pieces like George Clooney's Fail Safe or the BBC's live Quatermass Experiment makeover. Such dramas resemble the film form in a superficial way - scenes, shots, cuts - but are essentially theatrical. The acting dictated the rhythm of a scene. The shot-to-shot cuts were planned by the director but actually made by a vision mixer in the gallery, following the performances in real time. Postproduction editing was kept to a minimum and mainly involved the stringing-together of completed scenes into a continuity. More complex edits were often required for outdoor sequences where multiple-camera technique had been unfeasible, and these tended to be less successful.

(There were various reasons for this - when I first started out in TV, union practices and the technically cumbersome nature of two-inch tape ensured that it was top-grade video engineers who did the actual cutting. The amount of expensive machinery that had to be tied up meant that all video editing was done against the clock, and in a hurry. What you can now do on your phone once involved analogue copying back and forth between three massive playback-and-record machines, each one the size of a small car).

As far as The Stone Tape is concerned this means that Peter Sasdy's fluent, ambitious direction pushes the medium right to its limits and often exposes them. This unsteady crane shot, that patently fake stumble... and everybody shouts a lot, the way they do in the theatre. And the visual effects are... well, the effects are purely token in a disco-light kind of way.

But nonetheless, The Stone Tape justifies its reputation as a landmark achievement in TV drama, in the genre, and in Kneale's career.

Trust me. Your life is incomplete if you haven't seen it yet.

Bedlam News

I just heard that the US edition of The Bedlam Detective is going into its second printing. Glad news for any author, and thanks to all who've picked it up. Even greater thanks to those who didn't put it down again, and went on to pay for it.

The UK trade paperback edition will be launched by Ebury Press on May 23rd, with fireworks over the Thames and an all-night star-studded gala in the grounds of the former Bethlehem Hospital. Though I may be lying about that last part.

In the meantime, there's this.

Two short stories in one eBook volume. Out of Bedlam is a Sebastian Becker story that was specially written for a Random House Dead Good Books promotion. The Plot is a Victorian mystery originally published in Subterranean Magazine and reprinted in my collection Plots and Misadventures, not yet available in eBook form.

This link should take you to your region's Kindle store. Amazon Prime members can access it free.

Peter Diamond

This month, mega-niche distributor Network releases the complete first (and only) season of Virgin of the Secret Service, a 1968 Empire-spoofing obscurity remembered with fondness by at least one viewer. I was thirteen at the time, and in my autograph-collecting phase; I wrote to leading man Clinton Greyn and in return got a typed slip of paper that read, "I'm sorry but ATV say they can't afford to print fan photographs." But he'd signed it, so it went into the album anyway.

On Network's website they're marking the launch with an appreciation by Frazer Diamond of his father Peter, the series fight arranger.

Peter Diamond, who died in 2004, was a British stunt performer, arranger, and swordmaster with a staggering list of credits ranging from just about every piece of classic British TV through the Bonds, Star Wars and Highlander movies and every other big-budget blockbuster of the late 20th century.  He was responsible for the swordplay in The Princess Bride and The Mask of Zorro. He acted, too; any time you saw a bald guy being punched, shot, or thrown down the stairs, there's a fair chance it was him.

Back in 1997, when I was shooting the Oktober miniseries for ITV, I specifically asked for Peter to supervise the action. I was in awe of his reputation and saw it as a chance to work with a true legend. He was terrific, supportive to a novice director, and without any discernible ego; he’d listen to my ideas, quietly mould them into something better, and then present the results as if they were my own.

On more than one occasion, when a crew member challenged my judgement in the light of my inexperience, he’d catch my eye and quietly shake his head; he’d seen it all, and if Peter reckoned it would be OK, it would be OK.

Stick to your Conkers, Mister Bond

I was reprimanded at the age of 10 for taking Thunderball into school as my book for the 'own choice' reading period... I can date it exactly because I still have the headmaster's remarks on my school report.

Oh, well.

Years later I was amused to see several of Ian Fleming's James Bond novels, Thunderball included, being issued in 'abridged and simplified' editions (with the abridgements credited to Gordon Walsh) in an attempt to encourage teenaged boys to read.

Kubrick Hair

Over on the Scouting New York blog, this post about the impossible geography of Kubrick's settings in The Shining and Eyes Wide Shut triggered a memory from 1997.

I was in production at Pinewood Studios when Eyes Wide Shut was filming. My office was in the long main building but on the other side of the lot, visible from afar, was Kubrick's New York exterior set.

The set was highly secure while the work was under way, and you couldn't get anywhere near it. But once shooting was over, the guards disappeared along with the crew and no one prevented me from walking over and poking around.

It was the usual situation that you find with any outdoor studio set. From the outside all you could see was an array of flats and scaffolding. Step inside and suddenly you're The Omega Man or Will Smith in I Am Legend, or else you're The Last Woman on Earth (a movie that I thought I'd just now made up for the purposes of gender equivalence, until I looked up the title and found that Roger Corman has actually made it).

The Eyes Wide Shut set consisted of a couple of New York city blocks but here's the thing that struck me - on at least 50% of the set, every single piece of signage was reversed. Store signs, street names, even graffiti.

Without being party to any of the detail that would no doubt be mentioned in the movie's famously lengthy schedule, I assume that Kubrick took scenes on the streets dressed as normal and then the art department did a mirror-image redress, after which he shot more scenes and reversed the photographed image to get double value out of the same limited piece of backlot real estate.

I'm a fan of Kubrick though not, alas, of Eyes Wide Shut, which  I think of as Dennis Wheatley Makes a Porno.

(The title of the post was my suggested name for those digital embellishments added to cover the movie's sexy bits, to create a version that could secure distribution in the more over-excitable territories.)

Silent Witness DVD

Released March 25th. Buy my episode and get all the others thrown in absolutely free! Amazing bargain.

Find it here

And in the aftermath...

If you picked up The Boat House during the 48-hour giveaway - and it cheers me that so many of you did - I hope you'll enjoy the read. Did you know that, a year or two after the book came out, it was almost a movie with Jude Law and Milla Jovovich? My agent still sends out my screenplay as a writing sample, sometimes. It's about the only use I can get out of it now, given the turnaround costs that have been run up against it.

You can read that story here.

If you feel the urge to go back to Amazon and add your review, I wouldn't discourage you. 

I'll probably liberate another free book from the backlist in a few weeks, but this time I'll be more businesslike about it and tie it in with the UK paperback launch of The Bedlam Detective.

Free Boat House, 2 Day Offer

If you prefer, you can skip the story and go straight down to the link for the free book. Otherwise...

In 1984 I travelled to Finland and took the train to Leningrad, as St Petersburg was then known. I was alone, with a backpack and not much money. I'd been living by writing for four years and it wasn't going all that well. My second novel had tanked and my third was unsold. Yet here I was, digging into what little reserves we had to gather the material for a fourth.

This was Soviet-era Russia and so travel was restricted, and had to be organised through the state-owned Intourist agency. I couldn't get into Russian Karelia so I began the research in that part of the divided region that lay within Finland; the area had been split up in 1940 after the Winter War, and the border ran right through it.

All for the backstory of a book set mostly in the Lake District.

That's how I worked, back then. I was neither worldly nor experienced, so I'd go out into the world on a calculated mission to record some experiences. My method's still the same although the backpack hasn't been out of the attic for some years, and I've lost my taste for dossing on railway station platforms.

You know what brought it back? A Disney song on the radio, heard while driving home from town a couple of hours ago. Because it made me realise that The Boat House is essentially a modern-day reimagining of The Little Mermaid.

Which led to an impulse to go online and schedule a couple of free days for the book on Kindle. So for March 13th and 14th you can download it from Amazon for absolutely nothing.

And the novel? Like the one before, I couldn't sell it. Until I sold Valley of Lights, and then The Boat House went for a shedload of money along with the previous book. Film rights too, but that's another story.

While it's free, get it here.