Arthur and Sherlock

Most of my background knowledge on Arthur Conan Doyle comes from his autobiography Memories and Adventures, and from the 1949 biography by John Dickson Carr. I haven’t read the 1995 bio by Michael Coren but I understand that it goes further into the Doyle/Joseph Bell connection - the relationship that inspired the Murder Rooms BBC series - than most of the others. What I’ve read of the debate suggests that there are various camps arguing for a single model for Holmes (Bell, Doyle himself) when it’s perfectly obvious to any working writer that every character has multiple sources.

I read the Holmes short stories in my early teens and it was probably around then that I saw the Douglas Wilmer/Nigel Stock BBC adaptations. I reckon there's always a special place in your heart  for the actor who first introduces you to the character, much as Doctor Who fans divide along generational lines and four generations of adolescent boys lusted after whoever was wearing the catsuit (Gale, Peel, King or Lumley) in The Avengers when the hormones hit.

I can’t say I was ever the rabid kind of Holmes fan. I knew a boy who was, to the extent of taking up the violin because of it. If he's stayed true to form he’s probably a coke fiend by now. I liked a core of the shorts and none of the novels, which I felt lacked the tight structure and single focus that made the stories work. As for the rest of Doyle's output: I read Tales of Medical Life but I skipped Brigadier Gerard. I read some of the boxing stories. My big Conan Doyle book was The Lost World – loved it then, love it now. In fact I never thought about it until this moment, but now I count I’ve got at least five different editions of it scattered about the house, including a first. I even slogged my way through The Land of Mist because it had Professor Challenger in it, which is a serious test of affection.

The Holmes stories that have stayed with me all turned on some elegant and ingenious element, (the fire trick in A Scandal in Bohemia, the goose trick in The Blue Carbuncle) but I think I was never quite convinced by Holmes himself. I saw him as a group of eccentric attributes that never quite cohered into a believable personality. In retrospect I think the stories succeeded because Holmes and Watson together make a single character, divided for the purposes of narrative development. What I liked about Murder Rooms was that it dispensed with the fictional figureheads while occupying the same dramatic ground, effectively reinventing the whole thing. Bell and Doyle hit all the same buttons as Holmes and Watson, but with none of the limitations.

The first time that I felt the character of Holmes approached reality onscreen was in Billy Wilder’s The Private Life of Sherlock Holmes – neither a slavish copy nor a spoof, more of a jazz riff on Doyle’s tune. Not the definitive big-screen Holmes but for my money the most satisfying. If Doyle had felt able to develop the character with the same kind of freedom, maybe he wouldn’t have grown to detest his own creation so.

At this time of writing we have two very different screen Holmeses to consider - three, if you count Robert Downey Jr's charismatic man of action, an interpretation that drew criticism but which for my money got further under the skin of the character than any of the pipe-and-deerstalker brigade. I mean, Roger Moore? Charlton Heston? No offence to those gentlemen but... FFS... it's like Holmes has always been fair game to any fast-moving wheeler-dealer producer with access to tax shelter money and cheap studio time.

TV offers us two radically different takes in the form of the BBC's Sherlock and CBS's Elementary. Note to fans; it's OK to watch both. Benedict Cumberbatch's version is dazzling performance art, a fascinating and superhuman creation that you'd never expect to meet in life. Jonny Lee Miller's awkward, vulnerable and self-aware Sherlock is something else; tightly-wound and earnest, more human than superman, more psychological truth than fireworks.

Doyle was never what you’d call a psychological writer. His was a world of concrete certainties. His certainties were entirely his own and he owed them to nobody – he believed in fairies and Empire and you could hardly call such a combination the mark of a conventional thinker – but in all his life and deeds he seems to have been free of any element of self-doubt. Which is great for a crusader and a champion, both of which roles he played in later life, but something of a hindrance when sitting down to imagine characters of conflict and complexity.

My private theory on Doyle is that inside his head he was always twelve years old. He wrote stories. He dreamed of dinosaurs. He was idealistic in an old-fashioned, chivalric, Walter Scott kind of a way. He carried boxing gloves in his luggage and challenged other boys to fights. He started to learn the banjo in middle age. When he went to visit the trenches in 1916 he designed himself a uniform.

Chimera: the making of a TV Monster

Here's a follow-up to this post from a couple of weeks back, in which discovering the whereabouts of an old colleague inspired me to revisit one of my early projects.

During Chimera's pre-production and filming I hopped around with my then state-of-the-art camcorder and collected footage which then sat, unshown and unseen, until Revelation Films secured DVD rights to the show after long and patient effort.

I offered the footage for use as a possible extra feature - in fact it made three featurettes. I recorded the commentaries on a deceptively tiny digital recorder in my Los Angeles apartment, working around the distraction of hummingbirds outside the window and the noise from my landlord's leafblower on the drive, and emailed them back to the UK.



This is the first of the three. If you want to see the others, it won't ruin you to buy the disc. Which also includes a PDF of the earlier radio adaptation script, and the show's original Press Kit, and a couple of other things I don't even remember. "Contains moderate gore".

Incidentally, with so much nostalgia-driven stuff on the blog of late you might be forgiven for thinking I haven't been working on anything new.  Not so. I spent most of 2014 developing a network project and working between drafts on a new Becker novel that I delivered last month. Development happens off the radar, so there's nothing to say about that right now. And it's too soon to give you any news on the novel.

But if you'd rather imagine me idle, feel free.

Crusoe to UKTV

From C21 Media:

UKTV has picked up a trio of scripted series from UK-based producer and distributor Power, including NBC drama Crusoe... The 13-part adaptation of Daniel Defoe’s classic novel stars Sam Neil and Sean Bean and was originally commissioned by NBC in the US and produced by Power.

Crusoe was last shown on British terrestrial TV as a Christmas season special on (if I'm remembering correctly) Channel 5. The shows have been acquired for UKTV's Drama channel, which is free-to-air on Freeview.

More here.

From Chad to Cumberbatch

Back in 1990 I drove down to Pinewood Studios for the first of several visits to the workshops of Bob Keen's Image Animation, a special effects company that had supplied prosthetics and animatronics for Richard Stanley's Hardware and Clive Barker's Hellraiser movies.

It was all a bit of a scramble. The script of Chimera had been doing the rounds of UK TV companies for over a year. First it had been picked up by development producer Simon Moorhead, then Morse producers Zenith had thrown their weight behind it.

Each of the majors had turned us down and we'd all but given up hope when a foundering project created a sudden gap in Anglia TV's production schedule. That misfortune was our opportunity. We found ourselves with a four-hour monster show to make and not much time to make it in.

It was a great experience for me. I got to hang out everywhere, and it would be a long time before I'd again get to be so hands-on in a show. The design and building of the creature is covered in one of the featured extras on the Chimera DVD, which can now be had for less than a fiver if you shop in the right place.

Our project was handled for Image Animation by Simon Sayce and our creature designer was an FX artist introduced to me only as Little John. They're both in the documentary, and that's Little John in the picture above. Behind the Chad mask is movement specialist Douglas Mann.

In the years that followed, I often wondered what had become of some of our team. In Little John's case, Google was no help. He was even billed as Little John onscreen and on the IMDB, where his credits stopped soon after. When someone seems to vanish from the record, you fear the worst; it's a precarious business, even for the most talented.

Last week, a development; thanks to the combined research efforts of the Demonic Offspring and filmmaker Paul Campion, I learned that not only does Little John have a surname but that I failed to stop his career in its tracks.

John Cormican is now the senior sculptor for Madame Tussaud Studios, travelling the globe and handling many of their high-profile projects. In the video he takes us through the measuring and modelling of Benedict Cumberbatch's figure, much as he did for my camera in the Pinewood workshop all those years ago. Look at the work here and you'll see why he's reached the top of his profession.

(Or if you're one of those lured here by the Benedict factor, take whatever you need)

All this pleases me more than I can tell you.

UPDATE: Well, this is just a bit spooky; from the Time Celebrity Newsfeed, "Watch Benedict Cumberbatch Pretend his Name is Chad".

The Doll Collection

Starred review from Publishers Weekly for The Doll Collection, edited by the invincible Ellen Datlow and available next month from Tor.

PS I'm in it.

The Paragraph Test

Last Summer I discovered a bookshop with a healthy haul of '60s paperbacks, many of them in great condition for their age and fairly priced at three quid a pop. So of course I kept going back.

I put my focus on popular fiction writers that are now forgotten, or had passed me by, or that I'd been aware of but never read. It was a chance to see if my affection for the literate 70,000 word thriller had altered or diminished over time. Also to appreciate the all-but-forgotten art of the British commercial illustrator, for whom the Photoshopped stock image has proved an inexpensive substitute.

(They say you can't judge a book by its cover. But don't people do that all the time? Given that it's the cover's purpose?)

Any book that caught my eye would be subjected to the usual test, which is to open a page at random and read any paragraph. You know within a few lines if the writer can write, just as you know after a few notes whether a person can sing. Maybe it's a tribute to old-style editing, but back then fewer published authors seemed to get away with just plonking it down.

I'm still working my way through the reading pile, and will be for some time... I don't read as much as I once did. I blame this partly on The Job, because I pay too much attention to technique and can't lose myself in story as easily as before, and on bad TV, because there's always something on.

What am I finding? A couple of things stand out. Readers are more educated in procedure now, and won't stand for investigations driven by intuition or an investigator's whim. And though there were notable female thriller writers active at the time - Helen MacInnes and Josephine Tey spring immediately to mind - the female characters in this male-dominated field are largely undercooked stereotypes. They fall into the rough categories of fantasy wife, virgin to be rescued, or bitch to be tamed.

As well as discoveries - Donald MacKenzie deserves to be better-remembered than he is - the paragraph test spawned a few surprises as well. The quality of some writing was so at odds with the author's lack of reputation that I was driven to Google to find out more. What I'd often find was a famous writer knocking out decent thrillers for money. E V Cunningham turned out to be a pseudonym for Freedom Road and Spartacus author Howard Fast. The witty and elegant Edgar Box proved to be none other than Gore Vidal.

There's a line in "Box's" Death Before Bedtime that maybe hasn't travelled as well as some. Camilla Pomeroy, wife of the prime suspect in a Senatorial murder case, has wangled her way into the narrator's bed. We skip tastefully over the gymnastics, and in the aftermath:

She sat up on one elbow and pushed her hair back out of her eyes. She was obviously proud of her body; she arranged it to look like the Duchess of Alba. "What on earth would my husband say."

The Duchess of Alba? I didn't get the reference, so I had to look it up. The educated reader of the time should have been thinking of the pose in this painting:

Those with Safe Search off can find the complete image here. Spain put it on a stamp, so it's hardly scurrilous. Its actual title is La Maja Desnuda and art historians argue over whether it represents the Duchess at all; but the face is recognisable from Goya's formal portraits of his subject, with whom he was said to be obsessed.

Anyway...

Having no idea of what Vidal was shooting for with the image, I searched for The Duchess of Alba.

Here's what came up...

Yes, that's the Duchess of Alba.

All I can say is, the culture's moved along.

The Imitation of Life

In some of the awards-season discussions of The Imitation Game I've noticed a subtext in which anything other than support for the film is read as an act of disloyalty toward Alan Turing himself. Much as, once upon a time, thinking The Green Berets an awful movie branded you as anti-American, or finding 12 Years a Slave a grim duty-watch made you an apologist for its horrors.

Personally, I thought The Imitation Game a passable time-filler. But then I'm not a big fan of re-staged histories, which seem to me the least ambitious use of the drama toolkit. I must be in a minority because they come out in starry droves every awards season, an opulent parade of beards and wigs and rubber noses.

Like it or don't like it but don't conflate the film with the man who, more than a posthumous pardon or a memorial, deserves a time machine and an unqualified apology.

I was set thinking about Sebastian (1968). You probably won't know it. It's very much a 'Swinging 60s' movie in which Dirk Bogarde plays a charismatic Oxford academic overseeing a squad of female codebreakers. Given what was and wasn't public knowledge at the time, both about the Bletchley Park scene and Bogarde's sexuality, it now feels like one component in a dizzying meta-cocktail of movies and material.

For years Sebastian was just a remembered viewing from my teenaged years, but now someone's put it onto YouTube in its low-res entirety. It's a rarity with an impressive pedigree - Michael Powell producing, the Cinematographer was Gerry Fisher, score by Jerry Goldsmith. Based on a story by former wartime cryptographer (And Peeping Tom screenwriter) Leo Marks, which explains a lot.

Brian Clemens 1931-2015

They say you should never meet your heroes. I'm here to tell you that it isn't necessarily true. I've written elsewhere of my personal debt to The Avengers and little imagined, as a kid growing up with 60s TV, that I'd someday get to play in the telefantasy sandpit.

(Actually, that's a lie. I fantasized about it a lot.)

I first met Brian Clemens at the Manchester Festival of Fantastic Films, where I got to interview him onstage. I have to admit that I reverted to a fanboy mode that I've never really broken out of. In the '90s we were co-consultants on Carnival Films' action-adventure series Bugs. He subsequently wrote the intro for my first collection of short stories. Publisher Pete Crowther approached him for me; I was embarrassed to ask. But holy shit, did I glow when he said yes. And a couple of years ago we switched roles when I contributed the intro to Brian's own collection, titled Rabbit Pie & Other Tales of Intrigue. It was at a Brighton Fantasycon signing session that we last met up, starting in the bar and ending the evening in a Chinese restaurant while a bastard of a rainstorm raged outside. Brian seemed frail, but he was sharp. We last spoke a week before Christmas, when he phoned me out of the blue. He was bright, upbeat, just the same as ever. He invited us down to visit in the New Year.

I was out of the country when Brian guested at the 2009 Fantasycon, but I got to write the appreciation in the programme book. Here it is again.

It was one o'clock in the morning and I had stuff on my mind. I turned on the TV for distraction. In a '60s Geneva created from library footage and a crisply-photographed studio backlot, an international security agent who'd been missing for two days walked into his headquarters building and calmly shot one of his superiors. For the next hour, the stuff on my mind ceased to trouble me and the world was young again.

(Except, of course, when my world was young, there was no TV or much of anything else going on at one in the morning)

I hardly needed to look at the credits to know who'd written the episode. Brian Clemens was always the master of the arresting story hook, a Sensei among warriors in the screenwriting ranks. There's hardly a piece of classic British 'cult' TV that doesn't either have his fingerprints on it, or his DNA somewhere in it. Even The Prisoner, a show in which he had no actual hand, can be traced back to the Clemens-scripted Danger Man pilot in which both Patrick McGoohan's secret agent persona and the Portmeirion location made their first TV appearances.

For many people Brian Clemens will be, forever and above all else, the Avengers guy. But The Avengers is really just the most prominent peak in a career characterised by prodigious energy and inventiveness, coupled with an impeccable professionalism. In a field that can so easily be colonised by journeyman work, his writing always has a voice, an angle, an attitude.

Born in 1931, Clemens grew up in Croydon. After service in the army and work in advertising, he sold a single play to BBC Television which led to a stint as house screenwriter for the Danziger Brothers. Depending on your prejudice or your point of view, the Danzigers were low-rent exploitation producers or resourceful low-budget entertainment providers in the Roger Corman style. They supplied second features for British cinema bills and half-hour filmed series for UK and US television. While in their employ, Clemens developed a proficiency in writing to deadline around available resources, as the brothers seized opportunities to get some extra use out of sets, props and sometimes even paid-up performers from other, more expensive productions.

Those skills were widely used by Clemens in such series as Mark Saber and Richard the Lionheart for the Danzigers, while also moonlighting scripts for Sir Francis Drake, Ivanhoe and HG Wells' The Invisible Man. He once said, "At one time, all of British episodic television was written by about ten writers, and I was one of them." He credits the Danger Man pilot as his big break; renamed Secret Agent, the show was picked up for network screening in the US by CBS and blazed a trail for all of UK international production throughout the '60s.

Although Sidney Newman is often credited as the creative force behind The Avengers and other classic TV including Armchair Theatre and Doctor Who, his role was more accurately that of a godfather. Newman came up with the Avengers title, and the idea of doing something new with Ian Hendry's Police Surgeon character from an underperforming series. Clemens was again brought in at the pilot stage, and three seasons later took over full creative control of the series as it moved from electronic production to film. The mix that had been brewed up in the creaky and low-res live-action studio now exploded with the application of top-drawer production values. The result was unique and confident. It didn't so much mirror the swinging sixties, as play a major part in defining them.

Season four was the 1965 black-and-white season, with such classic episodes as The House that Jack Built, The Town of No Return, and the glorious and notorious A Touch of Brimstone. Season five went to colour and hit the same level of triumph with knobs on. But it's those episodes in 'sparkling black and white', as the American trailers described them, with their stark op-art world and King's Road sensibility, that made the first and deepest cut for me. There is a place forever in my heart where the door to Emma Peel's flat has a big eyeball on it.

Although Clemens freelanced scripts for just about every high-profile action show from Adam Adamant to The Persuaders, after The Avengers he was also a force as a producer. When he was making The New Avengers a TV Times profile made reference to "his sixth Ferrari" and "the exclusive privacy of his four acres in Bedfordshire". With the suspense anthology series Thriller he became that rare thing for a screenwriter, a marquee draw with his name linked to the title. The Professionals made as much of a mark on the '70s as The Avengers in the decade before it, and the sitcom My Wife Next Door brought him a BAFTA award.

When Brian Eastman's Carnival Films wanted a high-concept, pacy action show for BBC1 on Saturday evenings, they turned to Clemens for Bugs. The show ran for four series and gave me the opportunity to write the kind of TV I'd grown up on, and later to share the role of series consultant with one of my biggest professional heroes. Imagine that! Though we'd met at festivals by then, we never actually met on the show. I'm told that half the time our feedback was 100% in agreement, while the other half of the time our comments were in complete opposition. Which I suppose sounds kind of healthy.

But back to that late hour, a few nights ago. My one o'clock diversion did exactly as its author intended. It gave an hour's pleasure, and a valued respite from the ordinary. It was an episode of The Champions, the Heroes of its day. I understand that it was written during the brief period when Clemens was out of The Avengers (after Diana Rigg's last season, and before Linda Thorson's first) and before he had to go back in and sort out the mess they got into without him.

The Champions episode was typical of Clemens' contribution to other people's shows. It's as if he examined the underlying concept and set out to nail it just a little bit better than anyone else, in this case taking the main characters and setting them, Marvel-style, to use their powers against each other.

There's much I've missed out. I've said nothing about his sales to American TV and I've been skipping over feature work that includes See No Evil with Mia Farrow, The Golden Voyage of Sinbad for Ray Harryhausen, an excursion into writer/director territory with Captain Kronos, Vampire Hunter for Hammer, The Watcher in the Woods for Disney. But check out his Internet Movie Database page; it lists over a hundred entries, many of them for multiple series writing credits, and it's still growing. The films are as eclectic a selection as the TV work, but all have the same stamp on them; Hitchcockian technique, with an irreverent light touch.

And if you were thinking of asking: no, he had nothing to do with that Avengers movie.

You know Christmas is Coming When...

Hey, I don't want to brag, but I got my card from the Blairs.

No Ann Radcliffe at the BBC

After Saturday's mass signing at Forbidden Planet, and catching up with old friends at the enjoyable British Fantasy Society open event afterwards, a less pressured Sunday included a visit to The British Library's exhibition Terror and Wonder: The Gothic Imagination before the drive home.

The exhibition follows a path from Otranto to the present day that will be familiar to the dedicated reader of horror and the fantastic, and which provides a crash course in the essentials to anyone new to the field. Where the BL excels is in its access to original materials - first editions, letters, manuscripts... if you don't get a kick from a note written in Poe's own hand, or original Frankenstein pages in Mary Shelley's handwriting with Percy's additions crowded into the margins, then this kind of thing is probably not for you.

It's atmospherically presented, driven by literature (obviously) but with further coverage of the films, art and architecture that extended the Gothic sensibility into wider culture. I doubt that many of us read Frankenstein and then were moved to seek out the movies; it tends to work the other way around.

A few years ago I proposed an adaptation of Ann Radcliffe's The Mysteries of Udolpho to the BBC. Not an easy book to 'find the movie in', as anyone who's ever picked it up will know. Got nowhere with it then and, with the way that drama commissioning has moved since, I don't expect to, ever.

So, inspired by Terror and Wonder, I'm putting it online. This was my pitch document - making the case, breaking down the story, outlining a production approach. Should you happen to be interested.

www.stephengallagher.com/udolpho.pdf

I'm Here 'til Tuesday...

 

It's called a Kindle Countdown Deal; the price of an e-book gets slashed to the bone for a couple of days and then rises in increments over a week or so until it's back to full price again. Grab 'em, do; they're going for about 99p/99c but the clock is ticking.

The Spirit Box and Nightmare, with Angel are on offer from Amazon UK, while White Bizango and Red, Red Robin are on promotion from Amazon.com.

In other news, this new edition of The Bedlam Detective. "Only bad thing about his books is that they eventually end. Brilliant." (Jonny Lee Miller)

See the previous post for an update on the next Becker book.

The Accidental Blogger

I know I haven't updated the blog for some time, and if you've been checking, I'm sorry. It's partly laziness - so much easier to fire off a quick snarky mindbite on Twitter than to actually organise a thought or two into something worthwhile - and partly personal, but mostly it's business.

The personal - this summer I forced myself to take weekends off, and decided I rather liked it. If I don't consciously remove myself from the proximity of the study I can find myself drawn back to the keyboard. I'm not even aware of it happening, but I get pulled in by its gravity like one of those rolling coins spiralling down into a charity collection tub. And then, because I've sat myself down without a plan, I don't actually achieve anything when I get there - I just check my emails and fart around on Twitter.

I still check my emails and fart around on Twitter. But at weekends I do it on my phone, somewhere nicer.

The business part - well, last year was weird, including a bunch of projects you'll never hear of because they didn't happen. None of them was my own. In each case I was brought on board to develop a property which never made it to launch. For a while that suited me, again for personal reasons, but it quickly grew frustrating. I've developed stuff I didn't create before now, Crusoe being a case in point. But it's not what I'm in the game for.

So I blocked out some time and wrote a spec TV pilot, which no one in the UK wanted but which a producer friend took to MIPCOM where it was picked up by one of the US networks. More about that in due course.

Now that I had something to plan around, I could wind up the third-party commitments and schedule-in something of great importance to me, and that's the third Sebastian Becker novel. It's been on the stocks for a while, devised and researched and planned down to pretty much the last detail.

But here's the point I always have to make about novel writing and screenwriting; their working rhythms are totally different, and they can't coexist. They can't for me, anyway. A screenwriting career is a constant juggling of drafts, pitches and projects. For a novel I need to be able to dedicate big blocks of dedicated weeks.

The Becker books are complicated beasts to conceive and plot. If you've read either The Kingdom of Bones or The Bedlam Detective you'll appreciate that each is an ambitious one-off, not the kind of series where you can turn a handle and crank them out.

And their history is a complicated one too - of film rights bought and sold, of auctions and ousted editors and wound-up imprints and orphaned acquisitions... and for these reasons among many others the Becker books have a special importance to me, like the puppy that survived the hurricane. So much of this summer was set aside for the completion of The Authentic William James, and I'm happy to say that the pieces fit together.

None of which is what I set out to tell you.

The actual aim of this post was to shill for a Kindle promotion for the novels next week. It's to mark my birthday (don't ask). On Monday October 13th the price of four of my ebooks (two on Amazon UK, two in the US) will be slashed to... well, buttons at first. But only at first. The prices will rise by increments over the following week until they're back at the regular level. Apparently this enthuses people to jump in and buy early. Well, Amazon seem to think so. And they seem to be rather better at this than I.

These are the titles:

The Spirit Box and Nightmare, with Angel will be on offer at Amazon.co.uk. White Bizango and Red, Red Robin at Amazon.com.

I'll post a reminder and links on Monday.

Happy weekend.