Dark Arts, Dark Lives: The World of Alan M Clark

June 6, 2016 greydogtales 2 Comments

“I like knowing what we were as human beings, what we’ve been. It gives me some indication of where we’re going and why.” Weird art, horrors from history, the relevance of Jack the Ripper and much more today in our exclusive interview with Alan M Clark. Alan is an artist of long standing who has garnered many awards and nominations for his illustrations. In recent years he has also gained a strong following for his disturbing fiction.

A resident of Oregon, he has illustrated books and stories by authors as diverse as Jack Ketchum, Poppy Z Brite, Stephen King, Joe R Lansdale and Ray Bradbury. His most recent fiction release was The Surgeon’s Mate: A Dismemoir, an unsettling work which combines genuine autobiography with Victorian horror. Let’s hear all about him…

Please note that as with a number of our guests, Alan is a professional artist, and his work is copyright. For those who are interested, a .pdf is given at the end of the article, citing where the art first appeared, etc.

greydog: Welcome to greydogtales, Alan. As you’re both an artist and a writer, we ought to try and do justice to both sides of your creative output. Let’s start, as you did, with the art and amble along to the writing later, if that’s OK?

alan: Thanks. Yes, I am a story-teller on both fronts, and they require similar techniques to engage an audience.

On Art

greydog: You have more than thirty years professional experience, both in producing original works of art and in illustrating other people’s fiction. Did you intend to make this your main career when you started out?

alan: As a teen in the 1970s, looking into the future of college and work, I had little hope of doing what I wanted for a living. What I wanted to pursue was creative endeavor—visual art, writing, film, acting—at some level, yet I didn’t expect to succeed in making a career of it. Luckily, I had parents who payed for my college education. I was best at visual art and disdained the commercial, so I chose a fine arts college, the San Francisco Art Institute, and got a BFA in painting, with a minor in sculpture. Without hope of making fine arts career, I saw the experience of college as good practice for what interested me, but felt as though it was merely four more years I wouldn’t have to work in a plant, a factory, in retail, or food service.

After college, I had a few forgettable jobs, got married, and continued to produce artwork in my spare time. I tried to get my paintings, drawings and sculptures into galleries, and quickly realized I didn’t like the fine arts scene. Being an avid reader of fiction, loving many of the cover paintings on the books I read, being a writer and story-teller at heart, and, finally, meeting people involved in the publishing industry, I decided to give illustration a try. Turned out I was pretty good at the business end. With persistence, I got work.

greydog: You’ve won many awards for your artwork, including the World Fantasy Award (1994), and have done an enormous number of book covers. Did you find the cover work satisfying, or was it basically about earning a wage?

alan: I’ve truly enjoyed my career in illustration. Before I became an illustrator, I could not have dreamed of all that I’ve accomplished, much of it in collaboration with others in the industry, the writing I’ve had the good fortune to enhance visually, the editors and writers I’ve met and befriended, the weird and wonderful that I discovered within my own imagination, the trust given me as I took artistic risks that I could only hope would pay off.

greydog: There are some fantastic pieces of original art in your portfolio, ranging from quiet and suggestive to out-and-out bizarre. Do you have an artistic comfort zone, or is it all about exploring?

alan: When I get a job, I always establish in my mind some idea I’m comfortable with, something to fall back on for the job, something I know I can do well and that would please the publisher. Yet I am not satisfied unless I am growing, trying new things. I push myself to reach for the new and different, things that will test and stretch my skills.

Exploration is key. I want plenty of discovery in my visual art, as well as in my writing. I have various techniques that promote that, and I maintain a work situation that has distraction built into it. That helps me avoid the echo chamber in my head that comes from concentrating too intently on the work at hand. I try to take avenues into the work that allow for the element of chance. That’s a bit hard to pin down with words, but I suppose a good way to describe the state of mind I want to achieve while working is one of free association.

greydog: We regularly feature artists on the site – some are long-timers, others developing their careers. How has the art scene changed since you got involved? Do you think it’s easier or harder now to make your mark?

alan: If you’re talking about book and magazine illustration, there are a lot more opportunities than when I started out, but publishers want to pay little to artists to produce artwork. With less pay involved, it’s difficult to devote all ones energies to a career in illustration, and nearly all those I know in the business have other jobs as well. I’d say it’s more difficult to make your mark today.

On Writing

greydog: OK, we should move on. What would you say triggered the move to write your own books?

alan: I’ve written ever since I was a teenager, especially short fiction. For the longest time, though, just as with the artwork, I didn’t assume there would be enough interest in what I did to make a go of it. My first four published novels were collaborations with other writers, Siren Promised, with Jeremy Robert Johnson, The Blood of Father Time duology with Stephen C. Merritt and Lorelei Shannon, and D.D. Murphry, Secret Policeman with Elizabeth Massie.

Cameron Pierce, editor for the Eraserhead Press imprint, Lazy Fascist Press, asked me for a novel, and that broke my assumption. The novel I wrote for him, Of Thimble and Threat, was the first volume in what became my Jack the Ripper Victims series, and truly inspired me to devote my writing energies to what I call Historical Terror: Horror that Happened, basically a line of dark historical fiction.

greydog: Your recent novel The Surgeon’s Mate: A Dismemoir is an unusual book. We’ve just completed it, and found it fascinating. You present both a harrowing personal memoir and a portrait of a deeply disturbed fictional character. People often say that writing about one’s own difficulties is cathartic. Did you find that the case here?

alan: Thank you. Yes, I did, but then the difficulties I wrote about, surviving brain abscesses and alcohol and drug addiction are ones I dealt with over twenty years ago, so I’ve had plenty of time to get stuff off my chest with family and friends. The novel was in some ways an effort to pull back from my life and get a bit of perspective. Along with viewing it from a different angle, as well as contrasting my life with that of a character who embodied chilling cruelty and horror, came gratitude for what I have had, for what I have. Strangely, the experience of writing it also gave me hope for the future.

greydog: Was the idea of the surgeon’s mate character, Frederick, born during your periods of disorientation and hallucination, or did he come along later to be used as a counterfoil to your own experiences?

alan: As awful as it may seem, the character of Frederick truly was born in hallucinations I had during seizures, a result of brain abscesses in the right temporal lobe of my brain. The hallucinations that come with seizures of that type, because of their location in the brain, are highly emotional. Mine were full of an intense dread and came with visuals, smells, and sounds that though vivid, were too bizarre to describe, like a dream too weird to remember after awakening. Of course, I would not name the figure that came to me in the visions until twenty-six years later, when I wrote The Surgeon’s Mate: A Dismemoir.

Most of what I knew of Frederick at the time of my illness and hospital stay was only feeling, impressions of an individual who wasn’t or at least shouldn’t have been real. He did feel real, even though I quickly came to assume he was purely hallucinatory. The dread that went with the hallucinations gave him an aspect of being broken, abused, and of being malevolent. He wanted to abuse. The “feeling” I had of him stuck with me, and I gave his personality to a 19th century serial killer I wanted to write about, a contemporary of Jack the Ripper. That said, somehow he and the hallucinations had suggested to my imagination that they emerged from that time period, the late Victorian era. The idea for the character in the novel emerged from the complex feelings associated with the seizure hallucinations. These are complex things to talk about in a short interview. Suffice it to say that the human brain is just plain weird and wonderful, a conjuror capable of the wildest flights.

greydog: A Dismemoir also raises the subject of Jack the Ripper, something relevant to your on-going series of books on victims of the man. This series is another unusual take – what inspired it?

alan: Reading the police reports about the murders and finding a list of the possession Catherine Eddowes had on her person at the crime scene. That list humanized her for me for the first time. She’d stayed the two nights prior to that of her death in the casual ward of the workhouse. That was an outdoor segment of the facility for those who needed a place to sleep but either didn’t want to enter the workhouse proper or were unwelcome, such as those who arrived clearly ill or criminals known to the workhouse staff.

Catherine Eddowes had over fifty items with her. She wore several layers of clothing and had numerous pocket-like bags, no doubt worn hidden beneath her top skirt, which held her possessions, most likely everything she owned. The list was pitiful and spoke of one who survived day to day with very little. Clearly, she valued even the incomplete sets among her items, such as the single red mitten, and broken items, such as the partial pair of spectacles. I envisioned a novel that demonstrated the incidental acquisition of the possessions over the course of her lifetime in the midst of telling the story. That became the first novel in the Jack the Ripper Victims Series, Of Thimble and Threat. Here’s the list, omitting only her numerous garments:

2 small blue bags made of bed ticking
2 short black clay pipes
1 tin box containing tea
1 tin box containing sugar
1 tin matchbox, empty
12 pieces white rag, some slightly bloodstained
1 piece coarse linen, white
1 piece of blue and white shirting, 3 cornered
1 piece red flannel with pins and needles
6 pieces soap
1 small tooth comb
1 white handle table knife
1 metal teaspoon
1 red leather cigarette case with white metal fittings
1 ball hemp
1 piece of old white apron with repair
Several buttons and a thimble
Mustard tin containing two pawn tickets, One in the name of Emily Birrell, 52 White’s Row, dated August 31, 9d for a man’s flannel shirt. The other is in the name of Jane Kelly of 6 Dorset Street and dated September 28, 2S for a pair of men’s boots. Both addresses are false.
Printed handbill and according to a press report- a printed card for ‘Frank Carter,305,Bethnal Green Road
Portion of a pair of spectacles
1 red mitten

The second novel, Say Anything But Your Prayers, about the life of Elizabeth Stride, was inspired by the woman’s lies and various mysteries surrounding her life, death, and even the inquest into her murder.

greydog: Given that you’re obviously well-versed in the subject, is Jack the Ripper himself actually important? Despite all the grandiose theories, he may just have been an inadequate man with mental health issues. Does he really deserve such lasting notoriety?

alan: Good question. Yes, the identity of Jack the Ripper has become such a muddle, with so many extravagant, tabloid-like speculations that I’ve lost some interest in the killer. For me, the Whitechapel Murderer is more a symptom of the social, economic, and environmental ills of Victorian London. Lately, I find the tales of the survival of common folks within that gritty environment more compelling.

On History

greydog: Much of your writing seems to be split between historical Americana and Victoriana – we get the feeling that you’re a serious history buff.

alan: I suppose I am. I like knowing what we were as human beings, what we’ve been. It gives me some indication of where we’re going and why. More than that, I am interested in the situations in which human beings find themselves at odds with their environment, the decisions they made, and how they managed to persevere. That’s at the heart of all of the great tales that have been told.

In modern western society, we manage quite easily compared to our forebears. We have a lot of advantages in technology and infrastructure. Take all that away and you have an exotic environment. That’s what has become so compelling to folks in zombie fiction and other post apocalyptic tales of late, with society in shambles and folks scrambling to secure their world with almost no technological infrastructure.

Instead of a totally made-up one, such as you might find in a science fiction or fantasy tale, I use the past as an exotic environment and demonstrate the human grit and determination required to survive, if not thrive. Emotional struggle, conflict, characters facing adversity and succumbing or prevailing based on their flaws, strengths, or, strangely, both, that’s what stories are all about. Human beings have lived like that; lived with that, and through that cycle of emotions for thousands of years. We are not so different from our forebears that we cannot understand them. All our emotions are the same and we’re good at interpreting the choices and motivations of others within the contexts of their lives. What stimulated the emotions of someone who lived one hundred and fifty years ago might have been a bit different here and there, but we just need to know the context—environmental, personal, and historical—in order to understand.

greydog: True. We were amused when we came across the poetry of Sextus Propertius (d.15 BCE) years ago. Many of his verses are entirely understandable today – a turbulent affair with a woman called Cynthia, complaints about the streets not being safe and the like. Over 2000 years ago, people were still people.

On a slightly different note, your company IFD (Imagination Fully Dilated) Publishing is described as ‘dedicated to presenting works of fiction that reflect the glorious and terrifying nature of life itself.’ Are the books you publish very much those which match your own personal approach, or do you look for contrast when working with other writers?

alan: My partners in IFD Publishing are Elizabeth Engstrom and Eric Witchey. All three of us write character-driven narratives in which the motivations of the characters are paramount. Elizabeth Engstrom wrote the historical fiction novel, Lizzy Borden, which was one of my inspirations in conceiving the idea of Historical Terror: Horror that Happened. We three joined forces as a sort of consortium, each of us bringing various and different talents to the publishing effort, my contribution most often illustration. We did it initially to put out our back lists, those novels previously released by other publishers, but out of print. With time, we’ve taken on a few other authors and done some of our own first publication releases.

greydog: We must let you escape. You have another Victims of the Ripper book coming this Summer – anything you can tell us about that one?

alan: Yes, the third novel in the Jack the Ripper Victims Series, A Brutal Chill in August, is about the life of Mary Ann “Polly” Nichols. The story explores how alcoholism can gradually and seductively take one down the rabbit hole. Being an alcoholic in the twentieth century, I’ve survived what killed nearly all those afflicted with the disease before AA and substance abuse treatment came along. I had a lot of help, and have been sober for 26 years. In Whitechapel, London during the Victorian era, a time in which middle-aged, single women were seen to have little worth, the prospect of fleeing into such a derelict state was certainly a chilling death sentence. A Brutal Chill in August will be released by Word Horde in August 2016.

greydog: Thank you very much for joining us, and good fortune with A Brutal Chill in August.

alan: Thank you. Often I don’t have time to think of good answers when people are asking about my creative process, but here you’ve given me more practice. I enjoyed answering the questions. Good luck to greydogtales!

You can find out more about Alan and his work at his website alan m clark . Here are links to just some of his books:

the surgeon’s mate: a dismemoir

of thimble and threat

a parliament of crows

say anything but your prayers

We’ll link up to A Brutal Chill in August again nearer the time. You can also get two of the Victims series in one ebook – double event.

And here’s the .pdf with details of Alan’s art in this post – PublishingAndCopyrightInformation

We’re worded and weirded out. We’ve done a lot of interviews recently, so we’ll have a short break for general writing, lurchering and other pieces. Back in a couple of days with that sort of thing…

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Fight Like a Fantasy Author: An Interview with Joanne Hall

June 4, 2016 greydogtales 1 Comment

We’re going all fantastical, dear listener. As we haven’t yet finished a new lurcher article, we did the next best thing and got you a writer with a greyhound. Indie UK author Joanne Hall joins us to talk about her writing, her editing and acquisitions work in a brand new interview. As an added extra, we also poke a cautious spear at the multi-headed Fantasy-Faction, a major fantasy community on the web, which is looking to extend its scaly reach.

The greydog himself, John Linwood Grant, has more author-type news, but we haven’t room for him today. Maybe we’ll let him mumble something next time. We’d rather get talking to Joanne Hall, who has being scoring multiple hits with her novel Spark and Carousel and then her duology, The Art of Forgetting.

Not content with this, she has recently edited the anthology Fight Like A Girl (with Roz Clarke) and later this year she will be releasing her next fantasy novel The Summer Goddess. Our guest is tragically based in South West England, not Yorkshire, but she makes the best of it, and her website describes her thusly (which saves us typing it in again):

Joanne Hall is the same age as Star Wars, which explains a lot…. She lives in Bristol, England with her partner. She enjoys reading, writing, listening to music, playing console games, watching movies, eating chocolate and playing with the world’s laziest dog.

To the interview-mobile…

greydog: Joanne, welcome to greydogtales. We’ve been looking forward to speaking to you for a while, but now we gain reflected glory because your novel Spark and Carousel is on the Gemmell Award long-list for fantasy fiction, and in grand company. A surprise?

joanne: Complete surprise. Especially considering some of the other names on the list. It’s a really strong longlist this year, so to be on it with people like Joe Abercrombie and Robin Hobb, especially as a relatively unknown indie author, is amazing. I’m a huge fan of several of the authors on the list, so have got this far and to be in their company is not something I was expecting!

greydog: We’ll ease our way in with an old standard. You’ve been at this a while – what first drew you into writing in the fantasy field, rather than just reading the stuff?

joanne: I always knew I wanted to write, even when I was really young. But reading Diana Wynne Jones and David Eddings, and David Gemmell a year or so later, was what made me realise that what I wanted to write was fantasy. It just seemed like these authors were the ones writing all the fun things, and I wanted to write the fun things too.

greydog: Apart from Spark and Carousel, you’ve had quite an impact with The Art of Forgetting – Rider, and then Nomad. Have you any idea what it is about your work that’s caught the imagination of readers? Themes, characters, or a particular style that you’ve used?

joanne: That’s a really hard thing to quantify. I write the sort of books I like to read, so I guess in a way I’m writing for me and people like me. I guess I write characters that are really relatable to a lot of people; they’re flawed and damaged and they make mistakes, but most of them are essentially good at heart, or acting for reasons that they think are good ones. They’re easy to empathise with even if they’re not always likeable.

greydog: We’ve been amusing ourselves by reading some reviews of your work (which are very positive, we should add). They range from complimenting you on the subtlety of your use of more ‘adult’ themes to being shocked but impressed. Is Joanne Hall on a mission to inject reality into fantasy?

joanne: The only mission I’m on is to eat this bag of doughnuts before my boyfriend gets home… I think my fantasy is quite grounded in reality. It’s muddy. It rains a lot. People have vaguely unsatisfying sex and go to the toilet (not at the same time…) I’m not interested in a pristine world. I’ve studied History my whole life and I’m interested in the weird bits, the bits (and the people) that don’t quite fit, so I guess my background interest in history has lent a veneer of reality to the fantasy I write. But it’s not a mission statement, it’s just how the stories tend to come out.

greydog: For people who don’t know your work so well, you started with the New Kingdom trilogy, from 2005 to 2008. How do you think that your writing has changed since then?

joanne: I think I’ve grown more confident. I’m more willing now to try new things and see if they work, and to know to ditch them if they don’t. I think I trust my instincts more now, and I’m less worried about what people might think, having been on the receiving end of some sharp reviews!

greydog: Some fantasy writers obsess on maps and genealogies, others on tiny quirks of personality. We know that they’re not necessarily exclusive, but in general would you say that you’re a world-builder or a character-builder?

joanne: Both, I think. The world shapes the characters just as much as the characters shape the world. I like to be able to create a wider world than the one you see on the page, one with a history and culture shared by the characters that doesn’t have to be spelled out to the reader. Juliet McKenna calls it “writing off the edge of the map” which I think is a good way of looking at it.

greydog: The Art of Forgetting is a duology, a format of which we rather approve (as an antidote to padded trilogies). Is it really one story which turned out to be too big for a single volume, or did you plan it in two distinct sections?

joanne: When I wrote “The Art of Forgetting” I wrote it as one long book, in one massive sprint (I say sprint, it took eight months to write the first draft, so it was more of a marathon.) But it did kind of fall naturally into two halves. When I was submitting it a lot of people where very positive about it but the overwhelming response I got was that at 190k it was just too long. I actually submitted to Kristell Ink because they said they didn’t have a problem with long novels, and it was Sammy’s suggestion to split it into two books because it just made more sense economically.

greydog: You have another book, The Summer Goddess, coming this year. Care to give our listeners a hint or two about what they’ll find there?

joanne: The Summer Goddess is a stand-alone sequel to The Art of Forgetting. The heroine, Asta, is forced to undertake a perilous journey, and forges an uncertain alliance with a pair of assassins, to save her nephew from both slavers, and the deranged worshippers of an imprisoned god.

greydog: Onto other aspects of your work. You recently edited Fight like a Girl with Roz Clarke, not your first time as an anthology editor. Is it a role you enjoy?

joanne: I really do. It’s so nice to be able to work with new authors, and to see them then go on to other projects. That’s the part I enjoy most, being able to give inexperienced authors an opportunity, and being able to edit them and bring them up to the standard of more established writers. And it’s great to be able to bring the stories together, to see what themes develop over the course of putting together the anthology. Roz and I also edited Airship Shape and Bristol Fashion, and Colinthology, and she’s a great editing partner.

greydog: Fight Like a Girl is a great collection, with a fabulous cover. When you started the project, were you looking for strongly contrasting stories, or those which blended in with each other to give a particular feel?

joanne: The cover was by Sarah Anne Langton – have you held it under UV light? It was important to us when we started out working on Fight Like A Girl that women were involved at every stage of the process, from writing to editing to publishing to cover art. Our only criteria when we took on the project was that we wanted stories of combat written by women, or people who identified as women. We never stipulated that the stories had to feature female protagonists, but that’s what we got! I’m really impressed at the range of stories that were submitted to us, and the high quality.

greydog: The UV effect is neat (but we won’t spoil it here). Now, you’re Acquisitions Editor for the publisher Kristell Ink (imprint of Grimbold Books), ploughing through SFF novels. What sort of experience has this been – a lot of doleful head-shaking, or pleasure at the range of potential new authors?

joanne: A bit of both! Though by and large the quality of submissions has been very high, and it was really hard in the end to choose which books we were going to publish out of our final shortlist – contracts are going out pretty much as I type. (I didn’t think it would be just as exciting being on the sending end as it is on the receiving end, but it actually is…)

Most of the books that we rejected quickly were ones that had committed some fundamental error, like sending three completely random chapters when we asked for the first three, or send us epic poetry, which we don’t publish. I’m really happy that we’ve taken on some brand-new authors, and I’m looking forward to working with them!

greydog: Another one of your sidelines is that you’ve been the Chair of BristolCon, the science fiction and fantasy convention, for some time. We used to do some con-running ourselves, and it can be hell. Are you a convention junkie?

joanne: I would go to more conventions if I had the time. Or the energy. Or the financial wherewithal. I really do enjoy them, but then I come home and have to sleep for about a week to recover. They are a great way of meeting people and networking and catching up with old friends, but sometimes they can be full on. Especially the bigger conventions. Luckily BristolCon is a petite one-dayer, and very friendly. You can find out more at www.bristolcon.org.

greydog: Given that this is the home of the weird and the lurcher, we notice you also have a rather lovely four-legged companion of your own. May we have a quick word-portrait to share with our three reprobates?

joanne: That would be Lyra, who is deeply weird even for a greyhound. She doesn’t know she’s a greyhound; she thinks she’s a hippopotamus, and her mission in life is to wallow in every puddle and muddy spludge she can get her feet into. Her main interests are sleeping, scrounging and bullying her best friend Charley in a variety of entertaining ways. Like me, she was last in all her races and, also like me, she has a passion for frozen yoghurt.

greydog: She would fit right in with our odd crew, by the sound of it. Finally, apart from The Summer Goddess, what’s coming up for you in the next year? Do you have any grand plans to extend the rule of the Hall-ian Empire?

joanne: Taking over the world by increments is the general plan… The Summer Goddess will be out at the end of September, all things going to plan. I’m hoping to finish a new novel set in an entirely different world by the end of the year, and I’m sure there will be various projects I happen along on the way, but my main focus right now is on The Summer Goddess. After that I might take a breather for a few weeks!

greydog: You deserve it. It’s been an absolute pleasure talking to you, and we look forward to reading The Summer Goddess!

You can find out more about Joanne and her work on her own site and at her author page on Amazon:

joanne hall site

joanne’s amazon author page

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Fantasy-Faction

We do love fantasy literature, although we often crouch at the old and weird end of the spectrum. A couple of weeks ago we rattled on about earlier fantasy authors (see 10 classic female fantasy authors), but occasionally we want to read something new. And as we pad through the murky swamps of social media looking for such fodder, we occasionally come across groups and blogs which do not make our heads explode. One such is the Fantasy-Faction Facebook Group, which has two especially laudable aspects:

1) The members are genuine fans, and are always full of interesting suggestions about modern fantasy stories, novels and authors (with a jot of old-style surfacing occasionally).

2) It’s a group which discourages arrant self-promotion – the best discussions are about other author’s books and what might be got from reading those (we writery people have to self-promote, but gods-help-us, not all the time, please)

It’s a great place to get reading recommendations, or to query other fans about what they thought of a particular character, story or book.

That’s not all, though. Behind the Facebook group looms the dark, brooding presence of Marc Aplin, with his Fantasy-Faction team. Marc started the UK-based website towards the end of 2010 after being exposed to too many good fantasy novels. Fired with enthusiasm, he wanted to build a network which promoted quality fantasy and encouraged people to explore the genre. So the website hosts all sorts of reviews, major author interviews and articles related to modern fantasy. And it does have a very positive vibe about it. As they say there:

“Why the name Fantasy-Faction? A faction is basically a grouping of like-minded individuals. Five years later our faction is part army, part family, and all lovers of fantasy books. We are now one of the largest fantasy communities on the web and it’s all thanks to our amazing contributors and our loyal Factioners.”

Access to the Fantasy-Faction site and their huge range of articles is free, but they have now started a Patreon page to help with costs and developing the range of features that they offer. If you’re a fantasy enthusiast, have a look at their site:

fantasy-faction main site

And here’s the direct Patreon link if you’d like to support them:

fantasy-faction patreon

Next week on greydogtales – we bring you up to speed on greydog’s own writing, have an illustrated mega-interview with award winning artist/writer Alan M Clark. drop a few names and throw in a longdog or two…

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The (Odd) Things We Leave Behind

June 2, 2016 greydogtales 2 Comments

Most of us have had a father at one time or another. Life sort of works like that. I was fortunate that I knew my father, but unfortunate in that he died not long after I left college, in the early eighties, so I never knew him as well as I should have done. He was a liberal, eccentric man, and leaked money on a regular basis, so there was no eager waiting at the solicitors. No chance of any “And to my valet of twenty seven years devoted service, I leave the Island of Guernsey” moments.

I think that my mother and I were mostly relieved that he hadn’t gone bankrupt on the quiet and that the tortoises weren’t going to be repossessed. My material inheritance included a loaded .455 Colt revolver under the bed (not that common in eighties Yorkshire) and an attic full of ammunition. He had been a gun-dealer at one time, so this wasn’t quite as unusual as it seems.

I was brought up firing weapons (tea-times could get very dangerous in our house), and I already had his scoped Remington rifle and a Spanish revolver, so the Colt had to go. So did the others, eventually, although I miss the Astra. It was a short-barrelled revolver which was utterly inaccurate, so if you pointed at the centre of the target you got a lovely spread of bullet holes all round the edges. Very arty.

Additional heirlooms included his lighthouse-keeper uniforms, boxes full of family memorabilia and a lot of books. Oh, and instructions that a farming friend of his was to destroy all his ‘Scandinavian’ magazines. Somehow I don’t think that those were about Viking history.

I had wanted something really intimate by which to remember him, such as a prized collection of twenty pound notes, but books were better than nothing. He wasn’t exactly a reader of Greek classics. He loved westerns and adventures – Zane Grey, Louis L’Amour, Hammond Innes and so on – and crime novels by people such as Georges Simenon, Ngaio Marsh and John Creasey. We had all the Lesley Charteris ‘Saint’ novels, and a lot of oddities, ranging from a leather bound set of Lord Roberts’ ‘Forty One Years in India’ to Frank Yerby adventure-romances.

And he had obviously been a real ‘boy’ in his day, reading all the comics and short books they used to publish, including the Greyfriars School stories (best known now probably for the Billy Bunter character), and copies of The Boys’ Friend Library.

Some of the latter he bound himself into little compendiums. I have in front of me right now what he called “Adventure – Volume 3, which contains:

The Silver Dwarf by John Andrews
The Lion at Bay by Roger Fowey
South Seas’ Treasure by Charles Hamilton
Columbus, Junior by Jack Holt

It is worth noting that The Lion at Bay is a thrilling alternative history/SF adventure where African and Asiatic troops seek to invade England, and is possibly the most racist piece of SFF I have ever read. It is irredeemably and horribly offensive, but includes the Norton Triple Gun, the favourite weapon of my childhood:

“The length over all was more than forty feet, and it might have been eight feet wide. There was a very fat tapering barrel laid upon what appeared to be a solid metal base – actually, very powerful motors were here concealed.

“Low down on either side of the barrel there were troughs in which men could lie. At the end of the barrel there was a protective hood behind an enormously thick stretch of metal (containing) hydraulic buffers. Beneath the hood was a small instrument board, now lit by shielded electrics.

“There are three barrels (Norton explained). Each fires a shell the fraction of a second after the other. Each barrel is automatically aligned to send its shell on exactly the same spot as the others…. The third shell will complete the penetration, no matter how thick the armour.”

Equipped with a pre-production Norton Triple Gun, plucky chums Keith and Don thwart the entire invasion, of course. It’s that simple.

I have other Boys’ Friend Library collections somewhere, but not as many as I would like. Dad bound up a few collections in the late 1930s, including some of Robert Murray Graydon’s Captain Justice series of books.

Robert Murray Graydon (1890 – 1937) wrote under a number of pseudonyms, including Murray Roberts, and produced astounding adventures for Captain Justice, who faced evil Arab sheiks, aliens, androids and undersea nasties as a matter of course.

“Very British, Captain Justice wore white ducks, smoked cigars and worked out of Titanic Tower in the mid-Atlantic. In the course of battling for good he survived Robots, giant insects, runaway planets and an Earth plunged into darkness. His exploits deeply affected the impressionable mind of a young Brian W Aldiss, among others of that generation.”

sf-encyclopedia.com

Graydon also wrote at least four Sexton Blake adventures. If you’re into this peculiarly British period stuff, you can find a full list of the Boys’ Friend Library and covers at the Friardale site. I nicked some of the cover illos used here from them because my copies are mostly the worse for wear.

friardale – boys’ friend library

Dad had always wanted to be a writer, and had worked on all sorts of political thrillers. He left me some old manuscripts of his, although they seem to involve trade unions and espionage at Hull docks. I don’t think they bear resurrecting, sadly.

On the plus side, he also left me the early family name Linwood, which I do rather like, and thus I keep it prominent in my own writing tag, a sort of memorial to the old chap. I shall leave it to my own son in turn, who has no interest in writing whatsoever. He will say “Stupid name.” and go back to his X-box.

Such is the nature of inheritance.

On Saturday, we interview rising star of the fantasy novel world, sight-hound enthusiast and lovely person Joanne Hall…

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Come Freely, Go Safely: Dracula Returns, Scott Handcock Rules!

May 31, 2016 greydogtales Leave a comment

“Come freely. Go safely; and leave something of the happiness you bring.” Today The Voice of Horror is back with a shudder. Earlier this year we were bowled over by Big Finish’s version of William Hope Hodgson’s tales. Now they have expanded their classics again with a major three hour production of Bram Stoker’s Dracula, starring none other than Mark Gatiss. And we have a brand new interview with ace audio producer Scott Handcock, who made it all happen.

Big Finish have been known for a while for their extensive range of cult audio, including of course Dr Who, but what interests us in particular is their growing range of adaptations based on classic supernatural and horror tales, such as Dorian Gray, Frankenstein, and the afore mentioned Carnacki (see the starkey stratagem).

Their Dracula was released on Thursday 26th May, 119 years to the day after the novel’s first publication. It’s a full-cast production, and we should rightly credit all the talent involved:

Mark Gatiss (Count Dracula), Joseph Kloska (Jonathan Harker), Deirdre Mullins (Mina Murray), Nigel Betts (Abraham Van Helsing), Rupert Young (John Seward), Alex Jordan (Arthur Holmwood), David Menkin (Quincey P. Morris), Rosanna Miles (Lucy Westenra), Elizabeth Morton (Mary Westenra), Ian Hallard (Renfield), Edward Petherbridge (Mr Swales), and Katy Manning (Sister Agatha).

Before we talk to Scott, we’ll share some of our own thoughts, something we tend only to do with audio productions. The audiobook provides three hours and fourteen minutes of drama, plus a bonus fifty minutes of background material – opinions, cast interviews, music and so on. And did we enjoy it? Indeed we did. It was notable because of three things:

It drew us away from the many re-interpretations and variants on the Dracula/vampire theme that have accumulated, particularly over the last couple of decades, and made us want to go back and read Stoker’s original for the first time in years. It was something akin to a purging of all the weird re-imaginings. At the end of the audio we thought: Gosh, that’s actually quite a good story. We’d almost forgotten.

Gatiss is excellent, as we’d hoped and as you might expect, and it’s a great cast in general. However, Deirdre Mullins is outstanding as Mina Harker. From beginning to end, her performance is so striking and engaging that we were rooting for her more than for anyone else in the story, and towards the end our main concern was that she, of all of them, would survive. This was a real surprise, and we can only hope that she does more work in this area.

We are admittedly becoming the strangest of creatures, Scott Handcock groupies, if such a thing is possible. Carnacki was terrifically well done (not forgetting Dan Starkey’s outstanding performance as Carnacki himself, of course). This adaptation of Dracula again asserts the value of a well-produced audio play as compared to film and TV. The atmosphere, and the immediacy of engagement with the characters through their voices, made it a pleasure.

Mark Gatiss, famed for his involvement in Sherlock, Dr Who, The League of Gentlemen and other series, has played a vampire before – Mr Snow, in TV’s Being Human. He has a long association with horror, including examinations of M R James’ work, and made a three-part BBC documentary series entitled A History of Horror, a personal exploration of the history of horror cinema.

(As a trivia aside, Gatiss met his League of Gentlemen co-writers and performers at Bretton Hall, a drama school not that far from the greydog kennels in Yorkshire.)

“(Dracula) is a part I’ve always wanted to play – and I’ve been rehearsing for 48 years,” says Gatiss.”You may be able to tell that in the relish and bloodied glee in which I approach this role!’

He also commented in a Dr Who-related interview for scifibulletin, when asked about his role in Dracula:

“…I had a wonderful time. It was all very close-mic work and I loved it all. I watched a few Hungarian language things – [Transylvania] was actually Hungary not Romania at the time – and they all sound just like Bela Lugosi but you’ve got to be careful, I think, because it has been mocked so much. You either go the urbane Christopher Lee route or do the Hungarian thing – I’ve settled for something in between.”

Gatiss delivers a subtle performance, full of quiet threat rather than mad cape-swirling, and all the better for it. And as he says, his accent is enough to give depth but not so much that it becomes a stereotype. You genuinely get the feeling that people have no choice except to do what he says. When he tells Jonathan Harker to start writing letters home, and you realise that Harker may be doomed, you get a real chill.

But let us move on to producer/director Scott Handcock, who makes a welcome return to greydogtales to give us a view from the inside…

greydog: Great to have you back with us, Scott, and with such a cool production – Dracula. We’d normally ask you how you’ve been and chat a bit, but we suspect our listeners are here to get the low-down on this new adaptation, so we’ll be business-like. Firstly, Mark Gatiss. How did you get him on-board (apart from paying him, of course)?

scott: I’ve known Mark for a good few years, ever since my days at BBC Wales. He’s one of those people who’s effortlessly pleasant. No matter what your role or status on a production, he likes to know who you are and what you do, so I’ve encountered him on and off since my days on Doctor Who Confidential.

I then heard on the grapevine, following my production of The Picture of Dorian Gray, that he’d rather liked to have played the part of Harry Wotton, so naturally I started forming ideas to get him on board for something else. Following my production of Frankenstein with Arthur Darvill, Dracula was the next logical step for the gothic trilogy, and obviously there was no better fit for the role than Mark! So I dropped him a quick note, sounded him out, and he instantly came back to me with a yes.

greydog: We can certainly see him in the role of the older, hedonistic aristocrat Wotton. So, for this production did you negotiate the take you wanted on the character between you, or did Mark already have his own ideas of how he wanted to portray Dracula?

scott: I think characterisation comes primarily from the script, and it was clear from Jonathan Barnes’ brilliant adaptation that this was a very straight take on the character. Mark came in with his own interpretation and ideas, but they pretty much matched my own. Neither of us wanted this to be a caricature, so although there is an accent, it isn’t too pronounced. Rather than make him a monster, he’s very much a man, which in a way makes him more frightening.

greydog: We’ve heard his performance, reminding us that he has that ability to convey a deep, disturbing menace. We imagine that this works particularly well in a sound studio.

scott: The advantage of the audio medium means you can really measure a performance and lend your performance an intimacy you might not otherwise have on screen. Mark’s Dracula is terrifying because he’s so contained. He knows how powerful he is, so he doesn’t need to rant or rave. It’s brilliantly judged!

greydog: The adaptation was written by Jonathan Barnes, who already has an eye for Victorian period detail. Not only did he write the period horror The Somnambulist, but are we right that he did the dramatisation for your production of Frankenstein: The Modern Prometheus?

scott: Absolutely! We had a blast working on Frankenstein, and it was out of the success of that production that we got the green light for this one. Jonathan really knows his stuff, and how to pace a potentially unwieldy novel over the space of three hours. And like his previous work, the joy of his script for Dracula is how identifiable the world and characters are. It’s a period story, yes, but by focusing on the characters and their relationships, it draws the listener in. You really care about the characters and the hold that Dracula has over every one of them.

greydog: Dracula has been adapted and re-interpreted many times. From the length of this offering (three hours) and the size of the cast, this seems to be a pretty faithful adaptation. Were there sections which you and Jonathan had to cut or re-interpret to fit the running time?

scott: By its very nature, any adaptation requires a degree of compromise. You can’t include absolutely everything from the original work – otherwise you’re just doing a reading – but Jonathan’s been very smart in including all the things people think they know about Dracula, whilst also working in a lot of the forgotten details and characters too. So we have Mr Swales, the wolf enclosure, and all manner of other sequences that are easily omitted from most modern interpretations. Plus we have all three of Lucy’s suitors. It really is a packed and faithful retelling – and one that really makes the most of its extended run time.

greydog: As far as the cast goes, we see that you’re back with Joseph Kloska (playing Jonathan Harker), who was Dodgson to Dan Starkey’s Carnacki in the Hope Hodgson stories you released earlier this year. Deirdre Mullins is playing Mina, Nigel Betts is van Helsing and even the smaller parts include some intriguing contributions – you have Edward Petherbridge, for example, who we remember for his stylish Lord Peter Wimsey at the BBC, and Katy Manning, immortalised as Jo during Jon Pertwee’s Dr Who.

scott: I’ve been hugely lucky with my cast on Dracula. With the exception of Nigel Betts and Edward Petherbridge, I’ve worked with most of the others a few times before, so it created a real sense of family. Everyone who comes in to work with Big Finish loves the company atmosphere. We work very hard, but we have a lot of fun doing so, and tackling something as well-known as Dracula really focussed everyone even before we entered the studio. Each of us has an idea of the story, and the weight of the characters and narrative, so it was remarkably easy to form the relationships between characters that guide the listener through. Deirdre Mullins as Mina is especially impressive, literally holding the story together from the very beginning. But everyone else is magnificent too! I couldn’t ask for a single line to have been played any differently…

greydog: Deirdre is a marvellous Mina Harker indeed. So, you’re both producer and director. Is it somewhat nerve-wracking doing a full cast production like this, as compared to readings or limited-cast dramatisations?

scott: Every project’s different, if I’m honest. Something like Dracula isn’t any more nerve-wracking than a more straightforward reading – you still have to pay the same attention to detail, so the process in studio is much the same whatever you’re recording. The difference comes beforehand. A project that spans three days usually means leaping around the narrative to make the most of different people’s availabilities (no point keeping people hanging around if they’re not needed), so as a director, you really need to know the script inside-out, so performances match from one scene to the next, even if they’re recorded days apart. But I love that aspect to the bigger productions. It makes it a bit more of a challenge…

greydog: And given that we have no experience in this area whatsoever, how much studio time do these longer productions need? Are we normally talking a couple of straight, one-take performances which are then edited, or weeks of calling people in, separate recordings and re-takes?

scott: We usually record an hour a day. Sometimes the studio days can be spread out over a few weeks, as with Frankenstein, but we were lucky on Dracula to have three consecutive days to really focus everyone. Rather than one big read through of the entire three hours, which would most likely wear everyone out, we tackle a scene at a time. Read it through, then record, with several takes to work with in the edit. It’s a brilliant way of working that really helps keep the energy up, and I honestly couldn’t tell you which sequences were recorded on which day any more! It’s just one long terrifying story…

greydog: We’d better let you get some rest. Many thanks for your time – you are, of course, now our favourite audio producer – and we thoroughly enjoyed immersing ourselves in Dracula. We also hope that you’ll keep in touch over anything you do on the dark and supernatural side.

You can buy Dracula here:

big finish – dracula

And Scott has since promised to come back and talk about the final series of his Confessions of Dorian Gray production in the autumn, so we might go Dorian-mad later in the year.

Back in a couple of days, and do subscribe if you want to know when we have a new feature out. Take care out there…

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