Taking a pop at the fizzy drinks industry

The Accidental Spurrt by Walt Pilcher
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

Vintage Pilcher and a great follow up to Everybody Shrugged (which now looks prescient given the state of world politics). The Accidental Spurrt takes a pop at the fizzy drinks industry. Pilcher is a master of the absurd. The strands of multinational concerns, of personal relationships, of struggling individuals just trying to eke out a living all coalesce with breathtaking speed and you can only watch with gritted teeth as the collision happens in front of your eyes.

Mark Fairley is pushed into taking on a job for Spurr Nutritionals. He has no choice, having just been downsized out of employment. They want him to ghostwrite the history of the family business, no more, no less. They certainly don't want him, or anyone, getting wind of the bizarre accident on the bottling line. Mark himself wants no more than an uncomplicated relationship with the firm so he can do the job and get the dosh.

Alas, we don't always get what we want.

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I Used to Be: Believably real voices from the two very different women protagonists

I Used to Be by Mary Brown
My rating: 5 of 5 stars


I loved this book, but beware it will pull at the heartstrings. The depiction of grief is raw. It’s the story of two women, brought together by chance, very different from each other. All they seem to have in common is that each is as much an outcast as the other. Maude is in her 70s. Kayleigh is barely in her teens. Both voices are authentic. It comes as a surprise to learn that this is a first novel, though the author is clearly an experienced writer. It’s quite a short book, but it’s compelling; it follows an emotional rollercoaster of a journey but is ultimately uplifting.

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Everybody Shrugged: A timely tale of government overreach with Pythonesque overtones

Everybody Shrugged by Walt Pilcher
My rating: 5 of 5 stars



It’s advertised as a tale of government overreach on steroids. And it is! Pilcher's humour is Pythoesque, but the story unfolds with a terrible feel of inevitable internal logic that you can only stand back and watch. Obsessions, self-interest, naivety, corruption and plain malice play cat and mouse as the characters and factions jockey for position, each chasing their own absurd goal, and all rushing unaware towards an outcome that none of them could possibly have foreseen.

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National Poetry Month

I’ve only just been told that it’s national poetry month so I thought I should mark the occasion with a couple of recommendations. I won’t go for the classics because everyone knows what they like in that respect. If I did, though, I'd mention Emily Bronte’s poetry, dark though it tends to be.

Nearer to home – geographically and timewise – how about physician-poet, Robert Jaggs-Fowler whose collection, A Journey with Time, is a delightful mix of styles and subject matter, light and serious.

Or this collection, Old Playgrounds, edited by Sue Knight, a family memoire spanning the decades from WWII.

Torc of Moonlight by Linda Acaster

My rating: 5 of 5 stars


The contemporary story is of students Nick Blaketon and Alice Linwood who meet as undergraduates at Hull University. Very different but drawn together. It’s what is behind the reason they’re drawn together that gives this book its amazing twist. The predatory lecturer and his past have a role to play and also a story from a whole lot further back. Linda Acaster gets inside the head of her characters in a way that not many authors manage, so that as a reader you revel in their triumphs, and are crushed by their despair. A compelling tale where the interwoven stories pick you up at the start and rush you along to the end.



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Bulldog Sheila or the Gang by T F W Hickey

My rating: 5 of 5 stars


This is a personal 5* because this book meant so much to me when I was 8 years old. Written as a children's adventure, it's something I can still read today (very occasionally, but it holds memories of childhood for me). It's the story of Sheila whose parents go away and leave her in the care of her aunt. Almost at once, sinister things start to happen. With over 200 pages it looks as though it should be a daunting read for any child but the ones I know who have read it have found it unputdownable. Bulldog refers to the fictional Bulldog Drummond idolised by heroine Sheila who wants to be as brave and resourceful as he is. I was never a huge fan of the Bulldog Drummond books myself and do not think they have travelled across the decades. I couldn't read them nowadays. The style of Bulldog Sheila or the Gang is light and easy and in many ways hasn't dated. However, it was published in 1936 and reflects the attitudes of the day in ways that can be quite disconcerting. But mainly it is a brilliant adventure story.



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West End Girls by Barbara Tate

My rating: 5 of 5 stars

An incredible tale that almost didn't make it to publication. Barbara Tate tells the story of her time as a prostitute's maid in Soho. This is easy reading and it's for the story itself that I rate it. Her draft was much longer, so I'm told - more the story of Soho in those years than her own and May's story which she thought wouldn't interest anyone.

On several levels it's an amazing tale - the story itself and the insight it gives into Soho at the time and when she revisited years later; how she came to be there at all; how the book came to be blocked when she first tried for publication (that story is added at the end).

She went on to have a very successful career as an artist, coming back to her manuscript in later life. It should be a tragedy she didn't live to see the book in print, and yet it isn't. The real pity is that she didn't publish earlier and have the time to write more about her life.

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For short story fans of no particular genre

The anthology, a Sackful of Shorts, has no theme in the usually accepted sense. What holds it together as an anthology is the history of its group of authors. Most but not all the stories are published here for the second, third or fourth time, having originally been published or broadcast elsewhere. Many of them are prize-winners. The author bios at the end of each story provide more information about the writers and give links to their other work.

The plan was to offer this collection as a free e-book, but that would have prevented it being available in some key outlets, so it is offered at a minimal price of 99 cents. And half the book can be downloaded for free.

And now this blog becomes a bit of a cheat because author and reviewer, Stuart Aken, has written it up on his blog so I direct you to his excellent piece for more detail.

The anthology can be found, downloaded or bought on Smashwords.

My book is out there

Wow, my book is on the front page of the publisher's website. If someone hadn't mentioned it, I'd never have thought to look. It's been popping up in all sorts of places for a few weeks now. Initially, it kept appearing on financial websites or those 'Guard against fraud' type sites. All because it's called Like False Money. I can't believe I never saw that interpretation of the title, but I truly didn't. I was using the comparison with the way counterfeit money gets into circulation and is then tendered in good faith by honest people. Now I'm worried about people buying it expecting to learn how to protect their assets from fraudulent transactions. Well, not that worried if I'm honest (which I am). More of a worry is noone buying it because then I might not sell number 3.
Anyway, it's up there on Hale's front page

Sweet as pie

I read a blog at the weekend about the clichés that make people stop reading a book and throw it at the wall. The one quoted was fat people who move like lightning. I hadn’t stopped to think that one through before, but I suppose I will next time I come across it.

I don’t tend to throw books over clichés. If I’m going to throw books it’s more likely to be over injustice, crimes against humanity, misplaced apostrophes...

There are no particular clichés that really get my goat.

Why goat? What is the origin of that one? I can find two: the less likely that it comes from the use of goats as companions to nervy racehorses and thus getting someone’s goat would spook their horse and so annoy them. The other is that ‘get’ is used in the sense of ‘bring out’; thus brings out the goat in me, presupposing that I act like a goat when annoyed. Not sure about that. It isn’t usually annoyance that makes me want to eat everything in sight.

Here’s one – sweet as pie. It doesn’t enrage me, but it stops me. What sort of pie – steak and ale, chicken and mushroom, meat and potato? Is sweet the right word? If the intention is to signify sweetness, is pie the right word? Even apple pie doesn’t do it for those of us who prefer fruit pie to be tart and fighting back. Why not something unambiguously sweet – honey, sugar, fruit pastels?

Bald as a badger is another one. Why not bald as a train or a pencil-sharpener or a rock? Why something with hair, for heaven’s sake? Oh, OK, apparently it’s bald as a coot, though I’m sure it’s badger in this part of the world. A coot isn’t much better. No hair, but plenty of feathers. Black and white. There’s the key. Not hairless bald, but pie-bald.

If inhumanity gets my goat and humanity gets my vote... Does that make goat the opposite of vote? There’s an election coming so I’m going to use it that way. That’ll be just sweet as pie-bald.