PREVIEWS FESTIVAL BOOKS
TOP 5
BARRY FANTONI TELLS BRIAN DONALDSON HIS FAVOURITE FICTIONAL CRIME- SOLVERS Philip Marlowe Marlowe is everything the genre demands. The Bay City PI is sardonic, laid- back and self-deprecating. His creator, Raymond Chandler, is, in my book, not only the greatest crime writer of all, he is one of the greatest writers, period. A crime author who said he didn’t know what his plots were about gets my vote. He put the character first. He wrote stories, not crossword clues.
Inspector Maigret The plots of Simenon’s inspector are thin and the narrative what you would expect for a story written in 11 days, the time he gave himself. But the heavy, pipe-puffing, often short- tempered Paris-based Maigret is in a class of his own. Sherlock Holmes With Dr Watson as the fall guy, he and Holmes are the blueprint for all double detective acts. The pipe, eccentric lifestyle and an eye for detail are legend and used by hundreds of disciples of the crime-solving club. But Doyle is the master.
Mike Hammer Mickey Spillane’s over-the-top hard-nose style and obvious plots should put Mike Hammer in division four of detective fiction. But the sheer energy of the writing and the relentless toughness make up for all the weaknesses. His books have never been out of the top 50 of the USA best-selling list. Joe Friday Joe Friday and his partner (they changed throughout the long series) were the first and best of all TV cops. Dragnet was the name of the show and Jack Webb was its creator, director and just about everything else, including lead actor. The fact that the stories were all true adds to the interest. The research into police procedure is a joy in itself. ■ 13 Aug (with Sara Sheridan), 2.30pm, £10 (£8).
9–16 Aug 2012 THE LIST 31
FRANK COTTRELL BOYCE A new take on a classic car story
Liverpudlian writer Frank Cottrell Boyce has a career which can only be described as enviable. When we spoke he was in the midst of working on the Olympic Games opening ceremony, as one of director Danny Boyle’s hand-picked creative advisors. He’s worked with Boyle before, on the 2004 adaptation of Boyce’s own chil- dren’s novel Millions, while his past work for the screen involves many films with celebrated director Michael Winterbottom, as well as stints on the writing staff of Brookside and Coronation Street.
This year in Edinburgh, however, he’ll be discussing his latest dream job: Chitty Chitty Bang Bang Flies again, his authorised sequel to Ian Fleming’s famed novel, which Boyce was approached to write by the author’s estate. ‘It was a brief conversation,’ he says. ‘They asked me, I put the phone down and my kids told me “you’re doing it”. It was lovely to write though. I went to a meeting in Ian Fleming’s old house and they gave me carte blanche to do what I wanted. A big moment for me was when I discovered that Chitty Chitty Bang Bang was a real car in the 1920s, a monster racing car build by a colourful character called Count Louis Zborowski. Finding out about that vanished world freed me up, it took me away from the Edwardian-influenced film and let me write something with a bit of muscle.’
Boyce’s new take on the old story recasts the car as a camper van, all the better to play to what he sees as the original’s greatest strength. ‘I like the fact the whole family are along for the ride,’ he says. ‘Normally chil- dren’s books start with the parents being killed by a mysterious disease or war breaking out and the kids being evacuated, but I love that in Chitty Chitty Bang Bang mum and dad got to be there.’ (David Pollock) ■ 11 Aug (with Andrew Motion), 10.30am, £4.50.
SARAH HALL Stories where animals and humans converge
The Scottish writer Douglas Dunn once gave Sarah Hall a cru- cial piece of advice while she studied Creative Writing under him at St Andrews: ‘Sarah, why don’t you try writing in sentences?’ Dunn must be very proud of her now given the quality of sen- tences she has produced over the course of four novels and a new book of short stories.
Among those long fictions are the Booker shortlisted The
Electric Michelangelo and The Carhullan Army which earned a spot in The Times’ 100 Best Books of the Decade list. But Hall will we swinging by Edinburgh to chat about the contents of her short story collection from last year, The Beautiful Indifference, which evoked comparisons with Alice Munro and Raymond Carver.
Across seven stories with titles such as ‘Butcher’s Perfume’, ‘She Murdered Mortal He’ and ‘Bees’, Hall traverses some fairly bleak territory featuring sexual power games and an ill-fated holiday in a war-torn nation while inserting a recurring theme of mistreated animals and humans indulging in beastly behaviour. But all the while, those all-important sentences are crafted with a cultured finesse, proving that Sarah Hall has taken Dunn’s advice seriously and lifted it to greatly impressive heights. (Brian Donaldson) ■ 13 Aug (with Tessa Hadley), 10.15am, £10 (£8).