Chris Moore

In my post of the influence of Philip K Dick I talked about Chris Moore, cover artist for many of the PKD titles in the SF Masterworks series; just to add you can now buy signed prints from his website.

'Sizzling Summer Reads' Promotion

It's with some irony that I'm writing this as the rain hammers hard on the skylight above my head... but the Top Suspense Group, of which I'm a member, is running a day-to-day Summer Reads promotion and yesterday was my day in the sun.

Titles featured so far include Lee Goldberg's Watch me Die, Vicki Hendricks' Voluntary Madness, and Naomi Hirahara's Summer of the Big Bachi. There'll be a new title featured more or less daily until the end of the month.

So if this rain continues, you can always stay in and read a book. With my salesman's hat on, here's what I wrote for the Group's blog.

I was within two blocks' drive of Paradise when the call came over the air. It was a 927, a general code meaning to investigate unknown trouble. The dispatch girl was offering it to Travis and Leonard, both of whom were checking IDs for warrants in the scrubby little park around the Adult Center on Jefferson; knowing that I could have them as backup in three minutes or less if the 'unknown trouble' turned out to be something bigger than anticipated, I cut in and took the call. Squad Sergeant responding, one minute or less.

Valley of Lights is a fusion of crime and horror, a dance between predator and prey in which the story twists, the stakes increase, and the tables are repeatedly turned.

It grew out of time that I spent in Phoenix, Arizona, researching the city and the desert and going on ride-alongs with the Phoenix PD. I was working on a novel that I never actually got to write. That novel idea was ambitious and sprawling. It was everything I ever wanted to say. It was art. It would have been as boring as hell. Instead, I wrote this.

It began as a simple idea for a short story and grew as I wrote it, in the way that no book had ever grown in my hands before. The story flew. All those days in the squad car with Lieutenant Dave Michels, the late shifts with Sergeants Tom Kosen and Jesse James, the flophouses and the trailer parks and the stakeouts in gaudy motels and the millionaires' houses in the Camelback Mountains - everything came together to feed the tale.

This is the book of which Dean Koontz wrote, "If thriller reading were a sin, Stephen Gallagher would be responsible for my ultimate damnation. His work is fast-paced, well-written, infused with a sense of dark wonder, and altogether fresh."

When I selected the title to present as my Sizzling Summer Read, fellow Top-Suspenser Ed Gorman kindly wrote, "I still think that Valley of Lights is one of the coolest - and most imitated - novels I've ever read."

Here's what Phoenix PD Sergeant Alex Volchak finds on his arrival at the Paradise Motel:

We came to the last of the units. Beyond this was some empty parking space and then a high cinderblock wall topped with wire. Not a place, on the whole, that I'd have cared to spend any time in. The desk clerk stood out front and gestured me towards the window as if to say take it, I don't want it, the responsibility's all yours. I was aware that, some distance behind me, one or two people had emerged and were watching to see if anything interesting was going to happen. I stepped up to the window and looked inside.

The sash was open an inch at the top, and some faint stirring of the air had caused the drapes to part down the middle. The bug screen and the darkness inside made it difficult to see anything at all, but as my eyes adjusted I began to make out shapes. Something that had at first looked like a bean bag resolved itself into a human form, slumped, halfway out of a low chair as if he'd fainted while sitting. The details weren't clear, but also in my line of sight across the room was the end of the bed with somebody lying on it. I could see a pair of soiled tennis shoes for this one, not much more.

Just drunks sleeping off a party, I thought, remembering the heavy breathing that was being picked up by the dislodged phone, and I turned to the clerk and said, 'Who's the room registered to?'

'A little s...' he began, but then he caught himself. 'A Hispanic guy. I don't think he's even one of them.'

'Well... all I see is people sleeping. I don't know what's so unusual in that.'

'For four straight days? It could have been longer. He registered weeks ago, he closed the drapes on day one and he musta sneaked the others in when no-one was watching.'

'What about the maid?'

'We're residential, maid service comes extra. She just leaves the towels and sheets outside, doesn't go in. What do you think?'

I felt a definite stirring of interest. I said, 'I think you should get your pass key so we can go inside and find out what the problem is.'

'And that's legal? I mean, I'm all square with the owner if I do what you say?'

'Get the key, all right?'

We went inside; or rather, I went inside and the little monkey in the technicolor shirt hovered in the doorway behind me. My first expectation, which was of the smell of opium smoke, turned out to be wrong; what hit me instead was a rank odor like bad breath and drains. I crossed the room and opened the window as wide as it would go, and then I turned to look at the place in the harsh angles of daylight.

Nobody had moved. There were three of them. Slumped in the low chair opposite the window was a man in a grey business suit, an expensive-looking summer lightweight with the pants stained dark where his bladder had let go. He was the one who'd fallen against the phone and dislodged the receiver, as if he'd been propped awkwardly and hadn't stayed that way. The soiled tennis shoes on the bed belonged to a short, muscular-looking man in his late thirties, while over in the other chair by the key-operated TV sprawled a black teenager in a leather jacket.

All three of them were inert, like corpses; but I checked for a pulse on each one, and they were all alive and steady. The arms of the man on the bed, who was wearing a T-shirt, showed no fresh needle marks or even old scars.

I said to the clerk, 'Did you move anything when you came in before?'

His face was that of an animal that had just been stunned prior to slaughtering. Perhaps he thought I'd read his mind; he probably didn't realise that he'd already given himself away.

'No,' he finally managed. 'I didn't move a thing.'

You can find Valley of Lights for the Kindle right here.

The Bedlam Detective

New book coming. If you were waiting, sorry to have made you wait so long. Issues mostly beyond my control.

(This isn't it, by the way. This is the Italian paperback of The Kingdom of Bones, which just came in.)

The Bedlam Detective picks up Sebastian Becker's story in 1912, one year after the conclusion of The Kingdom of Bones. When Kingdom ended, he'd brought his family back to London in fulfilment of a long-standing promise to his American wife. Now he's working as the Special Investigator to the Lord Chancellor's Visitor in Lunacy, sent out to uncover criminal insanity amongst those who have the wealth and position to conceal it.

I've a date for early 2012 publication but it's not set in stone yet, so I'll not get too specific until it's confirmed. Ditto with the cover, of which I've seen a rough.

This is the novel that I'd originally titled The Suicide Hour, but once it was in proof my editors at Crown suggested a change to something that sounded more more like the book I'd written, and less like a memoir of despair. Before you leap in and argue on my behalf, let me say that I didn't take much pushing to agree. The new title's all mine, too.

Previously I wrote:

It's a murder mystery, with locations ranging from Southwark to the Americas. Becker is sent to the West Country to establish the mental state of Sir Owain Lancaster, a discredited industrialist under the control of a personal physician. Following the deaths of two children on Lancaster's land, Becker unravels the secrets of a disastrous expedition that destroyed the man's reputation and possibly his sanity.

If The Kingdom of Bones owed its origins to Bram Stoker, I suppose The Bedlam Detective could be described as my Conan Doyle tribute number. But like The Kingdom of Bones, it's very much its own thing.

I didn't intend it as a sequel, or ever see Becker as a series character - in fact Howard Morhaim, my agent, had to persuade me not to kill him in one of the early drafts of Kingdom - but I'm deep into a third Becker story now, with an idea lined up for a fourth.

If it isn't a series then I'm not sure what to call it - a sequence or a cycle, maybe, following a character through his life and seeing him significantly changed as he goes. Don't get me wrong, I love series characters. They're just at odds with what I try to do in a book.

Just as a track car is stripped of many of the features required for the road, series characters are built for distance and consistency. They collect just enough baggage to maintain the illusion of life, but never enough to slow them down. At the extreme end you get those private eyes who live lives of brutal solitude, yet have an endless supply of Old Friends who show up on their doorsteps in need of help.

I'm fine with that. It's just not what I do.

UPDATE: Amazon.com already has The Bedlam Detective listed with a US release date of February 7th. No image as yet.

As to why the US, see my previous post on the subject.

Scooter, Skeeter, Spud.

In one of the few non-Murdoch pieces in today's Guardian, critic Peter Bradshaw asks, "Why are closing credits full of nicknames?"

Grips, wranglers, animators, all kinds of below-the-line employees opt for their contractual credit to include the nickname by which they're known within the industry. Why? Mainly it's the internet. Crew members choose to be known by unique nicknames for the same reason that new businesses hire consultants to create compound or invented words, so that they'll stand out in database searches. It didn't used to matter; now it does. Ask the owners of Syfy, the former Sci-Fi Channel.

Few of us may hang around to watch an entire credit roll but it's the only permanent embedded proof of each project's workforce, and often the only way to verify a technician's CV. Production companies fold, studios clear out paperwork, negatives are lost, but as long as one complete print exists then prospective employers - and, later, historians - have a reliable record.

But Bradshaw concludes,

Real stars don't get nicknames. The nickname is for the little people: it's a nice thank you to the legions of supporting players and humble crew members essential to movie-making. It's well intentioned, of course, but if an American actor or second grip asked me for some career advice, I'd say lose the nickname. Do you want to get to the top or not?

Peter, I know your tongue is probably in your cheek at this point (or I hope it is) but I doubt those 'little people' will be beating a path to your door to pick up career wisdom.

A credit isn't a 'thank you', it's a contractual right. Unless it's a 'thanks to', in which case it's a usually substitute for money. If you're ever on a set visit, and you find yourself at the craft services table alongside any of those hardworking little people... it might be handy to get a nickname or a middle initial so you can blame all this on some other Bradshaw.

Meanwhile, those 'real stars' don't have any need to distinguish themselves. Never wondered why Equity doesn't allow any two actors to register with exactly the same name?

Paranoia and the Legacy of PKD

The Gary Sinise movie based on Philip K Dick's Impostor was a waste of the premise, but one of my earliest and most vivid TV memories is of a 1962 adaptation in ABC's Out of this World anthology series (that's the British ABC, the one that produced The Avengers, not the US network).

(That's the British Avengers, not the Marvel... ah, forget it)

Impostor is a PKD short story that involves a crashed spacecraft, and a sole survivor who's unaware that he's an android built around a bomb. Realising the truth will be the bomb's trigger. Doesn't that just send a chill though the back of your brain?

I recall a studio camera production, black and white, with cheap sets and a bit of modest model work for the crashed spacecraft. The final devastating explosion was achieved by cranking up the gain on the image so it went to white-out. The script was by Terry Nation and direction by Peter Hammond, two of the era's solid journeymen and go-to guys for genre material. As I was only eight at the time I had to have the ending explained to me, but that didn't diminish its power.

After broadcast, the tape was wiped and the show lost.

What lodged in my eight-year-old mind was the thrill of that notion. To think that you're human, and not be. That the reality you take for granted may be unreliable. It's an irresistible seed of paranoia. That's the appeal of PKD's fiction to filmmakers, I reckon, that strange poetry of identity with a sense of endless, unresolvable conflict.

The problem, shown up most recently in The Adjustment Bureau, lies in the inevitable drive to tame the intriguing premise in a conventional narrative. To resolve that which only grips because it's unresolvable. SPOILER: the ending of The Adjustment Bureau is total cack.

For a proper stab at a Dickian conclusion, see Source Code, which isn't based on a PKD story but which honours the legacy pretty well while achieving the near-impossible, a happy ending that doesn't betray the premise. Blade Runner, famously, was sent out into the world with a patched and cobbled ending that did exactly that, until later cuts removed the clumsy fixes and allowed the ambiguities to resonate. If you don't think that Deckard's a replicant while I'm certain that he is, then that's exactly as it should be. To push it to any firm conclusion is to kill the magic.

At the risk of lowering the tone, let me tell you that I drew on my memories of Impostor in the writing of a Bugs episode, once. It was in the second season, the one where we got steadily more sfnal before the BBC reined us in. My premise involved the first computer virus to jump the species barrier; the indebted twist was that awareness of the infection triggered its effects. Ros (Jaye Griffiths) grew ever more alienated from the others as they struggled to save her without being able to tell her why.

Those were the days, my friends, those were the days. I could ask for a Russian submarine or a particle accelerator and they'd get me one or build me one. If you're interested in the story behind the show, I wrote about it here.

Incidentally, the cover illustration at the head of the piece is by Chris Moore, whose bio I contributed to Paper Tiger's book on his art. Here's the image in its full glory:


Through the Gollancz SF Masterworks series, for many Chris has become the artist most closely associated with Philip K Dick's work. Those Masterworks covers are some of my all-time favourite SF art. You can see more like this on his website.

Tough Pitch

For some reason the networks are reluctant to take a look at my love-triangle procedural, Two Girls, One Cop.

Ray Harryhausen

One of the proudest moments in my career came when I was remembered and recognised by Ray Harryhausen in a Convention bar.

Happy 91st birthday, Ray.

On Suspense

Over on the Top Suspense blog we're trying out a form of online craft discussion in which a bunch of us tag-team the post over a number of days. Here's my contribution; hop over and check it out in the context of the others' thoughts and comments.

My take on suspense is a pretty straightforward one, I think. You have a character with whom the reader empathises, who needs to achieve something. Bad things are going to happen if he or she doesn't achieve it.

As they set out, everything seems set for success. But then obstacles arise - immediate, unplanned-for problems that have to be solved before your protagonist can move forward toward the greater goal. Meanwhile, the bigger situation deteriorates and the bad consequences loom larger.

Solving the lesser problem may get your protagonist closer, but gives rise to further problems that will impede progress even more. This is where the art comes in. Those problems have to be entertaining, and the effect of the delays and diversions has to be a pleasurable one. Suspense isn't about making the reader uncomfortable. It's about deferring closure in a way that heightens the anticipation of it.

The reader is trusting you to deliver an ultimate reward. But there's only a slim chance of success for your protagonist. And it gets ever slimmer, the closer you get to it. Will that slim chance disappear altogether just as you get there, or will your protagonist make it in time? For me that's the essence of suspense.

The Killing 2

No spoilers, but thanks to a friend with connections I've been getting a sneak preview of Forbrydelsen II and it (probably wisely) doesn't attempt to replicate the first season's slow-burning emotional drive. It's more of a mystery thriller, revolving around a deeply-buried secret in the recent past of a Danish military unit. Imagine if Michael Mann had directed an episode of NCIS in the style of Manhunter. The counterpointing of procedural and politics is there as before, and the Lund/Meyer relationship is roughly paralleled, though not recreated, in her pairing with a new partner.

And more than that I will not say.

Thanks to the same source, along with the release of the first Krister Henrikssen Wallander season on DVD, the last few weeks have seen something of a Scandinavian TV fest chez Brooligan. I don't know whether it's just a case of distance lending enchantment to the view, but digital-era cinematic visual style and American story pacing seem to have blended with the home culture without the inauthentic feel I get from some of our own crime shows.

Den Som Draeber (aka Those Who Kill - see a trailer here) is a more conventionally glamorous murderer-hunting show than The Killing, but it scratches an equally legitimate itch. Rejseholdet (Unit One, clip here), is a team-of-cops show with another strong female lead, and featuring a pre-Bond Mads Mikkelson in the lineup. I'm midway through season one, where a retro-feeling credits sequence gives the show an almost '70s air; YouTube clips like this one from a later season indicate a slicker visual style.

I'll watch more stuff and keep you posted.

A word of warning; if chasing down DVDs, check for English subtitles before you buy. And when it comes to Eurocrime, Engrenages (Spiral) still rules them all.

Oh, and you can buy your own Forbrydelsen season 2 Sarah Lund sweater here.

Manchester Events

Got a couple of things going on in Manchester in July, and as the month's speeding toward us I suppose I'd better a) mention something about them, and b) start getting psyched about what I'm going to do.

Both events take place at "Manchester's perfect pub" the Lass O'Gowrie near Oxford Road, and the first of them's Doctor Who-related; I don't do much Who stuff so it'll give me a chance to trot out my anecdote. Titled Vworp 4, the 'convention in a pub' runs from 9am until 6pm on Sunday, July 3rd, and confirmed guests include Bob Baker, Paul Tams, Dez Skinn, Adrian Salmon, Andrew Cartmel, Ben Aaronovich and "the Scottish Falsetto Sock Puppet Theatre performing an exclusive set of their Doctor Who material".

Tickets for the day are £19.95 and you can get them here.

Then on Saturday July 23rd, as part of the Lass O'Gowrie's ongoing Pub Fiction programme, there's just me for an hour in the Salmon Room from 6.30 to 7.30, most likely with a few video clips to talk around. Tickets for this are £5 (there's a capacity limit on the room so you can advance-book here to avoid disappointment - as if)

Just before me, at 5.30, there's an illustrated talk by old mate Bryan Talbot in which he'll be discussing his graphic novels Grandville and Grandville Mon Amour.

Then at 8pm they're screening a classic horror double bill of Night of the Demon and Vampire Circus. Despite the presence of lightweight B-movie import Dana Andrews and the show it/don't show it rubber monster controversy, this updated 50s retelling of M R James's Casting the Runes is well worth your attention - not least for Niall MacGinness's Dr Julian Karswell, a shaded and thoughtful take on an Aleister Crowley-style villain.

In fact if you cast an eye over the programme of events for the venue's month-long fringe festival, the Lass O'Gowrie is becoming a significant national hub for genre and genre-related activity.

My Start

It's only looking back that I realise how fortuitous my career timing was. With just one spec Saturday Night Theatre script it was like I stepped into radio's National Theatre. My very first producer (on The Humane Solution) was the legendary John Tydeman, who'd pretty much launched the careers of Joe Orton and Tom Stoppard. He was head of BBC radio drama and led a very small team of highly experienced producers.

Martin Jenkins produced my next (An Alternative to Suicide) and I think with one exception he directed everything I wrote for BBC radio thereafter. We got on really well. While I was still working for Granada he came up to Manchester and I took him to see the outdoor set for Coronation Street, of which he was a fan.

He obviously enjoyed the fact that my stuff was anything but social realism, and that it gave him opportunities to push the medium in all kinds of unusual ways. For my part, I got an enormous sense of uplift walking through the doors of Broadcasting House on Portland Place, feeling a connection with everything that had passed through those studios before. On Alternative, a science fiction piece starring Michael Jayston, I can remember the studio managers wiring up every piece of weird and extreme equipment in the building, tying up every channel and turntable. When I had to leave for my train they were still bringing in more.

(Without telling me, Martin sent the Alternative script over to the Doctor Who production office which was then in Threshold House, possibly the dullest, grimmest office building on the planet just a couple of doors away from the Shepherds Bush Empire. But that was the start of another story.)

I wasn't the biggest fan of radio drama in my growing-up years; that would be the 60s and for me the most meaningful radio of the time was the scripted comedy. We must have had terrible reception in the house because I can remember going out to the garage and lying on the scratchy back seat of my dad's Ford Popular to listen. The model didn't come with a radio but he'd installed his own and that's where I'd catch the block of comedy shows on a Sunday afternoon. The material was a mix of traditional and radical – Ken Dodd, The Navy Lark and The Clitheroe Kid alongside I'm Sorry I'll Read That Again and Round the Horne. Actually, in retrospect I'd move Ken Dodd into the radicals' camp. These days he's usually thought of as the last of the traditional variety performers, but on radio I remember him as a demented surrealist.

The drama that probably influenced me most in terms of what the medium could do, and what it ought to sound like, was a series of Sexton Blake stories dramatised by Donald Stuart. This was 1967, so I'd be 12 or 13. William Franklyn was terrific in the lead. In form and pacing they were almost cinematic, way more so than the TV of the time, where you were very limited in sets, staging, and coverage. Stuart had been writing Blake for story papers and pulps since the 20s but there was nothing dusty about his radio technique.

That spec script didn't come out of nowhere. Prior to my first BBC sale I'd written drama for Piccadilly Radio, a commercial station in Manchester, where my total lack of experience coupled with enthusiasm made me appealingly cheap. Piccadilly was a music station, but they'd made a commitment in their franchise application to deliver scripted content.

We made the episodes as a kind of co-operative, in the sense of everyone mucking-in and no money. Tony Hawkins was their commercials producer, and he produced. Pete Baker was the breakfast DJ and he handled the technical side. Our cast was drawn from the actors and voiceover people we worked with every day... Malcolm Brown, John Munday, Peter Wheeler, Chris Kay, Jim Pope, Charles Foster, Diana Mather, Colin Weston, Mike Hurley... a year or so later I roped many of the same people into making a short film which, if I'm lucky, will never see the light of day again.

Pete devised a method by which we'd use our limited time with the actors to get a clean voice recording, and then he'd prepare all the sound effects on the instant-start cartridges used for commercials and jingles. Then he'd re-record the voice track through the DJ's desk in the station's unused backup studio, varying the acoustics with equalisation and playing in all the effects in real time.

The serial was called The Last Rose of Summer, and Piccadilly traded it to other independent stations that were in the same pickle vis-a-vis their franchise commitments.

It was a different situation at the BBC. There it was a rehearse-record system. Different parts of the studio were furnished in different ways to produce different kinds of sound quality, and effects were either created live with props by a studio manager, or played-in from pre-cued vinyl recordings on one of a bank of turntables. Watching it all come together was like some great elaborate ballet resulting in auditory magic. This was my words getting the historic BBC treatment and I was living the dream. But Pete's method was ahead of its time and gave a comparable result, I've always thought.

I still get mail about The Last Rose of Summer. The master tapes are now in the North West Sound Archive and there are bootleg copies knocking around online, if you know how to find that kind of thing.

I mourn the dismantling of BBC radio drama production in its old form, simply because it was the nearest thing we'll ever have to a National Writing School. I was a 23-year-old from the provinces who sent in a spec script and from day one was treated with the same consideration as any experienced pro. The structure and dialogue skills I learned in radio have served me as an equal foundation for both prose and screenplay writing.

But while I mourn, affordable technology and new means of distribution mean that the 'co-op' approach that got me started is now available to anyone. If you want to make a play, you can make a play and put it online, podcast it, whatever. What's harder is that move from there up to the next level.

UPDATE:  I had an approach from BBC4Extra over the possibility of rebroadcasting the episodes. Mixed feelings from me over bringing such early work out of the past for present-day scrutiny... all of which is a bit moot because the initiative seems to have run aground on the question of rights, despite the agreement of all the involved parties. One thing we did establish, though - the North West Sound Archive say they don't have the tapes. Though on the upside, some of the bootlegs have proved to be of near broadcast quality.

'king Crimson

I've been catching up with The Crimson Petal and the White and it's an encouraging reminder of BBC2's much better days, though I'm uneasy at the BBC's current operating assumption that the only acceptable historical drama involves shagging or lesbians. Don't get me wrong, I'll happily watch either, but the feeling's like that of reading the newsletter of some kinky middle-class society of which I'm not a member.

The camerawork's fashionable, which is never good, but the production design is terrific and the performances spot-on. In tone, and in Mark Gatiss' side-plot of sexual self-loathing, I'm reminded of David Turner's 1970 adaptation of Sartre's Roads to Freedom trilogy. The script is cinematically paced and encourages inference in place of exposition; Lucinda Coxon, Crimson Petal's adaptor, is a playwright with no prior TV credits.

Does the current season mark a turning point for BBC drama? As Good Dog points out, this one will be the first to show the outcome of the BBC Trust's stinging 2009 quality review. Or maybe it represents Ben Stephenson's master plan anyway, and the review merely marshalled him the way that he was going. It's good to get an adaptation of a literary work that isn't already crashingly familiar. But with a generation of writers crushed and discouraged by the Holbification of drama, it's going to be a while before we start hearing original voices in authored TV again.