And so to Bedlam

No, I don't plan to quote every review I get - not least because it's asking for trouble and an inevitable eventual slap from someone somewhere - but thanks to Pamela O'Sullivan for making my weekend with this contribution to The Library Journal.

Gallagher, Stephen. The Bedlam Detective. Crown Pub. Group. Feb. 2012. c.320p. ISBN 9780307406644. $25.

Reviews: Fiction | First Look at New Books, January 13, 2012

Sebastian Becker is a special investigator for the Lord Chancellor’s Visitor in Lunacy — a detective who studies whether various wealthy individuals are of sound mind and capable of conducting their own affairs. He is assigned to investigate a rich landowner, but his arrival in the man’s small town coincides with a double murder for which the subject of his visit seems a likely suspect. As he works to ferret out the truth, Becker must find a way to distinguish the real monsters from the imaginary ones. The story moves easily between present and past events, leading to a conclusion that is as perfectly logical as it is surprising.

Verdict Intricately drawn characters, carefully shaded depictions of events and situations, and an excellent sense of pacing mark this latest offering from Gallagher (The Kingdom of Bones; Nightmare, with Angel). This is a real page-turner, and fans will hope to see more of Sebastian Becker in the future. It may also attract readers who enjoy historical thrillers in the Caleb Carr tradition.

Back to the Murder Rooms (2)

My daughter Ellen, known to the Twitterverse as @audreydeuxpink, had a small speaking part in my Murder Rooms episode and has been blogging about her experience of the shoot. Check out the middle picture in the post below - that's her in the doorway of the travelling-show caravan, between Warwick Davies and Charles Edwards.

You can read the first instalment here.

Back to the Murder Rooms

Is it Box Set or Boxed Set? One's wrong but sounds right, the other's right but... oh, never mind.

The main thing is that the series of TV-feature length Murder Rooms mysteries produced by BBC Films is finally getting a widescreen DVD release in the UK. Created by David Pirie out of a two-hour special that he'd made a couple of years before, the series features the young Arthur Conan Doyle (Charles Edwards) and his real-life mentor Dr Joseph Bell (Ian Richardson) in what amounted to a new and baggage-free take on the Watson-Holmes relationship. The set comes bundled with a 2002 Holmes documentary fronted by Patrick Macnee.

I imagine that the commercial thinking behind the release involves a gamble on the continuing Richie/Downey/Moffatt/Gatiss movie and TV euphoria... the individual shows have been around on DVD for a while but in a form I've always recommended avoiding. They were soft, muddy 'fullscreen' transfers, released when the 4:3 format was already on its last legs. The target market seemed to be technophobes and pensioners; the discs could be had for a fiver in Past Times shops and at one point were even given away with The Daily Express. The episodes were actually gorgeously lit and shot on crisp Super-16. They'd look great in Hi-Def or on Blu-Ray. I know 'cos I was there.


Let's leap lightly over the fact that my Murder Rooms story and one of my (unrelated) novels share a title - I can explain how that happened some other time. But I loved the show, thought it showed the BBC at its best and had a driving concept that would have sustained it for a number of seasons.

I almost didn't get to join the party. The BBC Films machinery was set up to deal with one-offs, not series, and funding was being released in stop-start increments. First the money for one script, then for another... then a green light to go ahead with the first couple of episodes... it was like the constant opening and shutting of a miser's purse, a few coins reluctantly handed over every time. The original aim was, I believe, to film seven stories. I think mine was fifth in line but it got bumped up in the production order because I got my first draft in quickly, and with most of what it needed already in place. The purse slammed shut on four episodes but by then I was in.

It was a class production, handsomely done. The series producer was Alison Jackson, with Jamie Laurenson as development exec/script editor. My director was Simon Langton - Simon effing Smiley's-People Pride-and-Prejudice Langton. I watched and learned. He shot with graceful, understated, old-school brilliance - terms that could equally describe Ian Richardson's approach to an old-school magisterial role. The editor came on set one day to observe, and confided to me that he wanted to see how it was being done because the footage was pretty much falling together.


And it was a success - the notices were good, and so were the viewing figures. We geared up for second season that would kick off with those three unmade stories. I was asked for another, and put in my pitch. Ian Richardson shared his Joseph Bell research with me. David Pirie got a publishing deal.

The BBC pulled the plug. All plans were cancelled.

I was told some time after the event that this was most likely the outcome of a silent turf war between BBC Drama and BBC Films. The word went around that the show had been "too successful for the wrong department". Co-producers The Television Company offered to take it over and finance it themselves, but were turned down. BBC Drama then announced a Hound of the Baskervilles with Australian actor Richard Roxburgh for screening the following year. My recall is that it was a serviceable retread of the familiar material, but nothing special. A disappointing changeling, for many.


The new set won't be out for a couple of weeks yet, so I can't comment on its quality. Ignore the information on the Amazon sleeve pictures, they're for the old versions; in an email this morning, a representative for distributors IMC told me, "I can confirm the new set with the four episodes will be in a 16:9 re-edited format." Prior to this, if you wanted to get hold of widescreen DVDs you'd have to order from Sweden, the US, or Australia.

Personally, I'd like to see them reshown on the BBC's HD channel. Not least because I might get a couple of bob out of it. But mainly for, you know, cultural reasons.

UPDATE: The 'Ultimate Collection' DVD set is unwatchable. Avoid.

Everyone's a Critic

Okay, first up, here's the deal; the eBook versions of both Down River and Oktober are relaunching with new covers by Paul Drummond, and I've 20 review copies of each to give away. In return I ask you to add your review to the Oktober and Down River pages on Amazon.com. Use the contact page to let me know if you're up for it.

How you rate them and what you write is entirely up to you. I'm not shilling for stars, just hoping to see some balance in the system; I can't fathom how Amazon aggregates its marketing material but there's some weird alchemy that sometimes pulls in the reviews from previous editions, sometimes not. In this case I've got two otherwise well-received novels, one of which spawned a TV miniseries, in new editions with their two worst notices attached.

Well... their two worst notices so far.

I guess I'm old-school in that I think you should draw the line at asking friends to give you favourable reviews or, even worse, writing your own. During the research period for Crusoe, I chased down various Defoe biographies; the worst-organised and least useful of them carried a glowing five stars from its own author, writing about himself in the third person.

But the eBook jungle favours the barefaced; one self-published writer's strategy involved organising a squad of friends and family to buy multiple copies of his book within the same hour, with a simultaneous order for one of the site's topselling titles. The aim was to ride the 'customers who bought this item also bought...' algorithm to public attention.

Did it work? I've no idea.

Until four or five years ago, the writing game was fairly clear-cut. You wrote your first book and when it got turned down you wrote another. Here's how that works: your writing evolves as you go, and you realise that as you look back. It's not about that one book, but about developing your skills. Eventually you plunder your early work and it sees the light of day in a form you hadn't originally imagined.

There was one debutant I knew who'd written an 800-page SF epic and was determined that he wouldn't write another word until the world had recognised the work he'd put in. It wasn't a bad first book but it wasn't special, either. I urged him to write short stories and submit them to small presses as a way to build up his writing skills and connect with an audience, but it wasn't what he wanted to hear.

Last I heard, he was very bitter and had still written nothing else. But how would I advise him now? The handful of stories of debut authors who self-publish and do well, beating the odds like lottery winners, provide ammunition to counter any argument for a learning process. Especially when it's a painful learning process that used to be involuntary, but which can now be sidestepped.

Some of them may be terrific writers. The few that I've looked at aren't, but they do fall into an honourable tradition of fast fiction, offered cheap, that runs from the feuilletons of the nineteenth century through the story papers, pulps, and mushroom jungle paperbacks of the twentieth.

Just like those 'mushroom publishers' of the postwar period, created in an explosion of low-cost bulk fiction occasioned by the lifting of paper rationing, the vendors of eBooks are more concerned with turnover than quality. They're exploiting an opportunity, and doing so to the hilt. But I'd like to think that, as with those same postwar publishers, e-publishing's business moves may eventually enrich the field without destroying it. Darcy Glinto may well be unreadable now, but it's a grim culture that has no room for Lady - Don't Turn Over.

My most-retweeted Twitter remark of recent weeks is Still befuddled by ppl who drop serious money on an eReader but won't pay more than 99c for a book. Clearly it chimed with a shared perception that a generation of buyers are being trained to expect all books to be dirt-cheap or given away. But after reading this blog post by Romance writer Elle Lothlorian, I brightened a little. She writes:

While skimming various Kindle reader forums, I ran across a thread on the topic of pricing. One reader wrote that she never bought a book that was $2.99 or less because it was sure to be self-published “indie crap” riddled with typos... (by setting a low price) I think I had inadvertently turned my Amazon page into the equivalent of a dubious used-car lot, with blinking neon lights screaming “SALE, SALE SALE! EVERYTHING MUST GO!”

The thrust of the piece is that by raising her prices, she engaged with a more committed and interested readership. Her sales actually went up, suggesting that there are still readers who are interested in something other than a race to the bottom in quality and price. They're out there; they've always been out there; it's just that there's a 'fair field full of folk' obscuring them from our view.

I don't control the eBook price of The Kingdom of Bones or The Bedlam Detective, but while I don't plan on putting my backlist titles in the premium bracket, I'm not about to throw them in the bargain bin either.


Link for review copies here.

Bernice Summerfield Did My Headshots

Seriously. Lisa Bowerman - aka Doctor Who's Bernice Summerfield - is a talented portrait photographer, specialising in actors' headshots. You'll find numerous examples of her work in the Spotlight directory of performers. She works with traditional film negative and natural light, moving to digital for delivery.


Photo credit: Lisa Bowerman

Okay, so Pitt and Clooney have nothing to worry about. But I love the way she takes honest shots with no flattery or fakery. And technically she's so good that you can zoom in to my eyeball at the highest resolution and see her with the camera reflected there.

For actors it's important to show who you are, not what skilful studio lighting could make you look like fifteen years ago. Having been on the other side of the audition table to hear actors read, I can say that sending in a misleading photo does no one any good at all. Rather than give you a head start, it suggests insecurity and, at worst, delusion.

Writers' headshots are a whole other field of study.

We need to have them but, being writers, we don't want to pay for them. Sometimes your publisher will commission some publicity stills but that doesn't always work out - Hodder & Stoughton once sent me to a man who specialised in photographing fruit for Marks & Spencer. Maybe they chose him because of the "&". I don't know what fruit he had in mind when he studied me - maybe Zombie Cucumber. We took the shots in his attic, with me lurking behind a wormy pillar or looking out around a peeling chimney wall. The result: I looked like a ghoul in the fourth stage of something terminal.

I fared no better when I decided to splash out on some shots of my own. I picked a local wedding photographer with a sideline in industrial work - he should have been good, he had a studio and everything. I asked for no diffusion but he thought he knew better. The results were well nigh unusable - not sharp enough for good reproduction and I looked like one of those primped 80s guys in Movies4Men softcore porn.

Don't tell me you don't know what I'm talking about.

My first professional headshot was for the jacket of Valley of Lights. I forget who put me onto him, but the photographer was Arthur Waite of Arthur Waite Publicity, a one-man operation in a poky studio behind Salford Cathedral just down the road from Granada TV. Arthur looked a little bit like Paul Daniels, as I recall... there was an electric fire warming the studio and a Sheltie lying on a dog bed in the corner. Arthur specialised in photographing Variety acts and advertising copy for The Stage. His portfolio included Ken Dodd, Tom O'Connor, and International Cabaret Stars Margo and Trevor.

I told him what I did and what I needed. He'd never had a writer for a client before. He thought it over then gave me the lighting he used for magicians, which I rather liked the idea of. I liked the work he did, as well.


Photo credit: Arthur Waite Publicity

Hey. I've not changed that much. Maybe I could get away with using this one...

Bedlam Detective first review

Thanks to Bill Schafer at Subterranean Press for forwarding this Publishers Weekly starred review:

Fiction
The Bedlam Detective
Stephen Gallagher. Crown, $25 (256p) ISBN 978-0-307-40664-4
Set in England in 1912, this masterful whodunit from Gallagher (Red, Red Robin) introduces Sebastian Becker, a former policeman and Pinkerton agent who now works as the special investigator to the Masters of Lunacy, looking into cases involving any “man of property” whose sanity is under question. His latest assignment takes him to the small town of Arnmouth to determine whether Sir Owain Lancaster has gone around the bend. Lancaster returned from a disastrous trip to the Amazon, which claimed the life of his wife and son, only to attribute the catastrophe to mysterious animals straight out of Doyle’s The Lost World. Lancaster believes that the creatures that plagued him in South America have followed him home, and are responsible for the deaths of two young girls, a theory supported by a local legend of a beast of the moor. Gallagher’s superior storytelling talents bode well for future adventures starring the well-rounded Becker. Agent: Howard Morhaim. (Feb.)

Yeah. What he said.

Salut, Georges

On this, your birthday.

The Bedlam Detective

I've just had word that the jacket art is locked, so here it is. The book will be published in hardcover on February 7th by Crown.


The story features ex-Pinkerton man Sebastian Becker, last seen arriving in England with his family at the end of The Kingdom of Bones. He installs his family in cheap rooms in Southwark and takes a gig as Special Investigator to Sir James Crichton Browne, the Lord Chancellor's Visitor in Lunacy. Becker's job is to pursue the criminally insane whose wealth or position protects them from the law.

I'll be mentioning this again. You can count on it.

New to Kindle

Two more of my backlist titles are now available in eBook form. Full info on each title soon, but for the moment here are the new cover designs by Paul Drummond.



On The Boat House:

"Gallagher handles the balance between mundane reality and stomach-turning horror with reassurance and offers a nicely twisted ending to boot. Highly recommended." Nigel Kendall, Time Out

And on Rain:

"Gallagher has become Britain's finest popular novelist, working a dark seam between horror and the psychological thriller." Arena

Click here to find Rain on Amazon, and here for The Boat House.

Getting Published 101

In the week of the announcement that Penguin have paid £400,000 to acquire a party planning book by celebrity relative Pippa Middleton, it must be hard for new writers to keep their optimism alive. The temptation to dump your first draft straight onto Kindle and wait for the e-millions to roll in must be a powerful one.

Console yourself with this. That £400,000 is just business. The book will be ghostwritten and will go the way of all such rubbish; bought, gifted, unread, remaindered. It has nothing to do with publishing. It's regrettable that a great name like Penguin should be attached to such a venture but the writing was on that wall when they paid a fortune for the meretricious Lace, all those years ago.

Every now and again I get an email to the website asking for advice on getting into print or getting an agent. Here's pretty much what I always say; read on and save me the trouble of saying it again.

Despite a widespread belief that publishers are resistant to new work, they're all on the lookout for good stuff that they can run with. And it's always been harder to get an agent than a publisher. You're asking a publisher to commit to a book, which is a known quantity. An agent commits to a career, which is a major unknown. Often the best time to get a good agent is when you have a publisher's offer.

The traditional strategy is to study what's around and note the kind of publishing house that would seem to be a fit for what you're trying to do. Then find out the name of the fiction editor (a quick phonecall to the switchboard usually does it) and write a brief, polite query letter asking if he or she would be willing to look at your submission. Work on the letter; the verbose, the needy and those who can't spell rule themselves out at this stage. If they ask to see something, send only your best. Not something unfinished, not work-in-progress; keep your work offline and out of the public eye until it's done.

It's an ever-changing market and traditional publishing is under pressure, but it's still the quality route. I shouldn't need to tell you to watch out for the predators and never pay anyone to represent or publish your work, but for safety's sake I'll say it anyway.

Magic and Memorabilia

Along with Chris Moore I headed down the motorway to Memorabilia last weekend. There I met up with Good Dog, and we had our first decent chat since a fleeting hello at the NFT's South Bank Chimera event. I urged him to get blogging again. Which is slightly ironic, considering my own long periods of blog silence over recent months...

Memorabilia's a twice-yearly UK event where one of the halls in Birmingham's National Exhibition Centre gets turned into a giant dealers' room for mostly SF and media-related goods, old and new, along with a section of autograph-selling tables for mostly TV faces, mostly old. It probably pales by comparison with similar US events, but I enjoy a mooch and usually come home with a few stocking-fillers for friends and family.

I view the autograph tables with a mixture of cringe and curiosity... very few of the personalities involved get more than sporadic visits, and most spend the day fiddling with their pens and chatting with their neighbours. Some have solid achievements in their resumes, like lead roles in old shows, and they're the ones I feel for; but while I'd love to chat to Quiller's Michael Jayston or William Gaunt of The Champions, I come from a tradition where such appreciation is offered over a drink in a Convention bar, not fifteen quid on a table. And not when cheek-by-jowl with someone who did two days' work on Star Wars and has been blagging hotels and expenses off it ever since.

But then I think back to the time when @Audreydeuxpink and I stood in line for a picture and a word with the great Leslie Phillips, and I think, Oh, what the hell. Each to his own magic. But I suppose I feel a share of the pain when the magic falls flat.

As it happened, Good Dog was acting as minder to some of the better-known faces on the weekend's guest list. The organisers have got it together more since the early years when signers were just parked alone with no one looking after them, but I can still find it an uncomfortable spectacle when people with careers have put themselves out there and nobody's stopping by. I can remember The Man from Uncle's Robert Vaughn, alone at his table with no one else around him, looking like the most pissed-off man in the world while attendees tiptoed nervously past at a respectful distance.

That's a Brit thing, perhaps. But it's compounded by the way that the less experienced of the enthusiasts who organise fan weekends and conventions can sometimes show little idea of what's required of them as hosts, especially when their guests are ageing performers, often insecure and uncertain of their reception, lured with a promise of hospitality only to be cut loose to fend for themselves amongst strangers.

They're not those giants you see on the screen; they're rather more like you and me. And I know how I'd feel if it was me out there.

For a start, there was that book signing in Watford in 1989...

The Metropolis image is one of a range of brilliant movie posters created for screenings at San Francisco's Castro Theater and offered in hand printed, limited editions by Memorabilia exhibitor The Dark City Gallery. Those that may look a little dull on the website are actually printed on gold or silver stock, and have to be seen to be appreciated fully.

Coming Events