BINGE-READING RAYMOND CHANDLER.

Where did I start? The same place I started from originally: with Raymond Chandler’s books about the detective Philip Marlowe. When I decided to read them, I chose to read the books first and the short stories after. This was, accidentally, the best move I made.
   If you want to read Chandler’s detective stories, start with the books. This is for an obvious reason. He wrote the short stories and then welded a few stories into one book: The Big Sleep. And he would do that again for other novels. So read the books first. If you read the short stories and then the novels...you’ll think the books are awfully familiar in places.
   You owe it to yourself to read the books before the short pieces. I started there. Recently I decided to read Chandler again. All in a rush. So I started there, all over again. What is the body of work? Novels. Completed ones. Detective books. Big on mood, and atmosphere. Plotting takes a back seat. That’s Chandler’s style. What did I binge-read?
   The Big Sleep.
   Farewell, My Lovely.
   The High Window.
   The Lady in the Lake.
   The Little Sister.
   The Long Good-Bye.
   Playback.
   No Poodle Springs fragment completed by another hand after Chandler’s death. All Chandler, and all books. In order. But not quite in the order I’d like. I’ll return to that bit. But first, what is it you read, if you binge your way through Raymond Chandler’s books?
   There are no two-minute eggs in this collection. These stories are boiled hard, for at least ten minutes and maybe longer than that. There’s a lot of world-weary talk in these novels. Chandler pretty much hates everyone and everything. The books started up in the late 1930s, and continued through the 1940s and into the 1950s and Chandler’s death. It’s difficult to keep on writing after that. Brain-in-a-jar technology is always five years away.
   Hates everyone? In other words, expect racism. Chandler isn’t nice to black people. Mexicans, he generally doesn’t care for. He has a bit of a hate on for the Native American. It’s the mid-1940s, so hating on the Chinese sits next to detesting the Japanese. If there hadn’t been a Japanese sneak-attack, he’d have scorned the Japanese anyway.
   Chandler finds time to hate a lot of rich white people. And poor white people, too. He certainly hates himself. When television starts to appear in his fiction, he hates that as well. He finds time, through his character of Marlowe, to hate crooked cops and corrupt politicians. Hollywood-coded homosexuals fare no better. Chandler finds the time to hate the homophobic cops who hate the Hollywood-coded homosexuals. If he’d lived longer, he’d have written up a murder mystery about the death of Santa Claus.
   Women get their own separate category of hatred.
   If there’s a soft-boiled woman within Marlowe’s view, he’s sapped over the head before he can comment. Men murder men in Chandler’s books. And men murder women. Women do their share of murdering, too. Marlowe does kill. But he also spends a lot of time taking guns off people or having guns grabbed away from him.
   I bought these books one at a time, even though I could have picked up the whole collection at once. Then I bought the volumes of short stories and dived on in. Later, I’d return to a book to remind myself of the mood. The mood: desperate people commit all sorts of crimes. Marlowe trails along in the bloodied wake, finding bodies as he goes.
   One book stood out. I remember enjoying the story. Until I revisited the book, in isolation. For whatever reason, the novel fell flat for me. There seemed to be less in it than I remembered. That was The High Window. I guess I was in a mood myself, that time.
   Now, over the past week, I binged on Marlowe’s exploits. Reading each book hot on the heels of the last, I gained a deeper appreciation for the things Chandler did well. His stories are coffee-strong on mood and atmosphere. People will tell you Chandler wasn’t all that interested in plot. He was interested. Mood and atmosphere, the style, interested him a hell of a lot more.
   So what did I notice, this time around? Coffee and booze and cigarettes – oh, and pipes – don’t inhabit the landscape. They are the landscape. Cigars: not so much. In that time period you could buy information by waving a dollar around. Every story Marlowe hears from a suspect is screwy. And everyone Marlowe interviews is a suspect.
   If a bird turns up in a tale, chances are it’s a hummingbird. Radios blat, more than once. Chandler’s stories seethe with blatting radios. Climbing the corporate ladder inside a building involves sitting in a corner office. Occasionally, some of Chandler’s characters might even be sober as they get behind the wheel of a car.
   Los Angeles becomes a character, but not a character anyone could learn to like. Marlowe finds it difficult to cope with straight cops. The default setting is crooked. Big business could only grow big off the back of big crime. Chandler was an oil-man, and didn’t have to be told twice about that.
   Over the span of these books, Marlowe moves from the 1930s to the 1950s. He does so a little slowly, not quite ageing one year for every year that passes. That puts him in the same general area as a lot of fictional detectives. As the tales move into the 1950s, Marlowe and Chandler are both painfully aware that the world is leaving them both behind.
   It is jarring to read of television, helicopters, jet aircraft, and science fiction. Why would Marlowe bother mentioning them? He dances to his writer’s voice. Chandler decides. If we skip the details you could pin down to a specific time, what else covers the atmosphere in these books?
   Driving. Marlowe has to travel around to interview people, crumple under a sap, face bullets, crack wise at dirty cops, and so on. Driving gives Marlowe time to think. He doesn’t think very well of the world in general or California specifically. Driving time is time spent crossing California. To Marlowe, it’s such a chore.
   These, then, are the things you’ll notice if you binge-read Chandler’s books: closeted homosexuals and the cops who hate them a little too much for their own reputations, women as damaged goods, coffee, cigarettes, cigarette-holders, booze and lots of it only more so, corner offices, the smell of sandalwood, hummingbirds, the blatting of the radio, driving, being knocked out, violence, cracking wise to tough guys, tough guys cracking wise back, Hollywood as a cess-pit only more so…
   You’ve got the wrong attitude, reader. You’re not human tonight.

The Big Sleep. This is the novel brewed up using a formula. Take a few earlier stories, stitch them together, amplify on the text, square away most of the holes generated by a new overall plot, and ratchet up the mood. Place emphasis on the mood.
   Chandler gives us the detective caught up in two separate cases that somehow dovetail into the same case. There’s a hallucinatory feel to the book, starting in the unwholesome greenhouse where Marlowe is given his assignment. Do one thing. But don’t look into the other thing. Everyone assumes Marlowe is hired to look into the other thing.
   This brings a million complications. It’s a tough old world, boiled and uncompromising, and Marlowe is sent stumbling through it. Occasionally bruised and battered, he survives to go off into the sequel. And if you thought that was a plot spoiler, go fry a stale egg.
   What emerges from this first book? Marlowe wasn’t the character’s name, originally. He was going to be Mallory. Why? We dig deep into Arthurian legend here. Sir Thomas Malory had a huge hand in tales of King Arthur. And Chandler’s work is full of references to knights.
   This first book sees Marlowe on his way to that greenhouse. Before he reaches it, though, he catches sight of artwork at the entrance to the mansion. Or castle. A knight, but not one in shining armour, is untying a naked damsel in distress. We get plenty of knight references after this.
   Marlowe enjoys chess puzzles. And the knight is that peculiar piece in chess. It makes a sideways move to go forward. And Marlowe as a detective has to make a load of side-moves to gain any forward progress. It’s no surprise that Marlowe could have been Mallory, after Malory. He’s Marlowe, after the playwright Kit Marlowe. An outright Shakespearean name-reference would’ve been too close to the bone when dealing with tragedy. Chandler was no slouch in throwing Shakespearean references at the readers.
   Having revisited Chandler’s first book, what did I find? The jump from one case to another works. Here begins the recurring theme. Was a suicide a murder? Maybe a murder was actually suicide. The big question about the death of the chauffeur – who killed him – goes away if Chandler/Marlowe writes it off as suicide.
   It’s a great beginning to a detective series. And I still rate it highly.

Farewell, My Lovely. Arthurian references abound. Ultimately, Marlowe is on a quest for a woman named Grayle. And that’s no coincidence. A grail-quest is just the right sort of mission for a slightly tarnished knight like Marlowe. Again we have two cases and nothing to connect them. The connective tissue is there, though, and Chandler is far more adept at welding older stories together here.
   It’s one thing to write a classic introductory mission for a detective. But it’s really something else to create a classic follow-up. The atmosphere here is built up through unconnected stories merging strangely in the night. Of all the characters Chandler gives us, he gives us Marlowe. But he remembers to throw a Shakespearean supporting cast his way, too.
   Moose Malloy, a force of nature and a storm at that, flits through the story with all the grace of a vampire bat – tied to the back of a raging bull in a China shop. Everything is larger than life in Chandler’s fiction, and Moose Malloy is the poster-child for that theme. It’s the switch to pursuit of jade in the second case, tied to the first case, that still fascinates on returning to this book.

The High Window. I liked this, read it again and it left me cold…but reading them rapidly one after another creates more of an atmosphere inside these books. This time around, I appreciated far much more was going on and it didn’t leave me flat at all. It jumped up off the floor and took its rightful place back there in the series.
   You’ll notice I’m trying to limit myself to the details of the plot. I’ll throw this at you, instead. Another Arthurian reference. Marlowe is almost Sir Galahad. But worn-out. World-weary. Shop-soiled. Given his womanising, he’s more like Lancelot after accidentally-on-purpose sleeping with the Queen while the King is away. More chess pieces, of course. Yes, I returned to liking this one. Maybe it is the overall package, reading book after book, relentlessly, that helped.

The Lady in the Lake. There’s little that’s more Arthurian than a reference to a lady in a lake. Here, we are in the mid-1940s and America is at war. This is the home front that American troops are defending, and what a crime-ridden setting it is. Or is there a crime? The lady found in the lake might have died there accidentally or suicidally. Sure, there’s a murder suspect. But there’s always a murder suspect. The lakeside setting takes Marlowe out of his usual stomping-ground, but he goes back and forth.
   We have series continuity, with Chandler building up the corrupt Bay City. Characters from one book turn up in another. Marlowe sees a few familiar faces across the seven-novel series. At this point, we’ve reached that peculiar blip in the road.
   Chandler worked in Hollywoodland, and detested it. He turned in a script called Playback. Chandler was paid for this, but the movie was never made. Nice work if you can get it. Later, at the end of his career, Chandler took elements of the screenplay and worked his way up to a book of the same title.
   But. The best place for Playback, in the series, is after The Lady in the Lake and before The Little Sister. If Chandler had worked up the energy, he could’ve rewritten Playback to follow in the trail of continuity after The Lady in the Lake. I still believe that’s where it should have gone, in the reading order. Alas, it was not to be. Playback became something else, entirely.

The Little Sister. Chandler throws Shakespeare at us early in this one, with a reference to Lady Macbeth. The devastating level of world-weariness in this book is something to marvel at. I’m talking about chapter thirteen. Chandler, through Marlowe, has a go at California, Los Angeles, and Hollywood and he takes no prisoners. Expect blatting from the radio.
   Chapter thirteen is a driving scene, giving Marlowe a platform on which to rage against California. It’s one of the standout pieces of writing in this novel. Chandler gives us more bile in a later driving scene when he’s heading to a confrontation. He’s not done.
   Of the plot I can say nothing. If you had a hard time working out who killed the chauffeur way at the start of these books, you’ll be scratching your head over the murder confessions in this one. When people turn up to cover for someone else, bending Marlowe’s ear with an agenda, where does the truth lie but dead in the dust…
   Much of the book turns on the murder of Moe Stein. He deserved murdering, of course. I’ll draw your attention to a doctor: Vincent Lagardie. We’ll return to that point in The Long Good-Bye. Anyway, this entry in the series stays with you. It’s later Chandler, and he’s still on top form.

The Long Good-Bye. Everything builds to this. It’s the finest finish to a detective series that I can think of. Yes, it is followed by Playback. But the series ends here. You know it. I know it. This is a much longer book, and Chandler uses the space to let characters breathe a little: Marlowe, in particular.
   There’s a piece of plotting around finding a crooked doctor. The letter V features big-time. No, Marlowe isn’t hunting for Vincent Lagardie. But isn’t it strange that, across two books, there are four doctors associated with the letter V, and all of them are crooks…
   Marlowe finds the crooked doctor almost immediately. But he can’t be sure. So he follows up on the other leads. Dead-ends, barely worth the shoe-leather. But I liked the depiction of chasing after loose ends and tying them off before returning to the better prospect and hunting the true culprit down.
   In a shorter novel, Chandler would have limited himself to one suspect. To save space in the book, if nothing else. But this novel opens up, takes its time, and builds to that ending. This is as late as Chandler gets. The series ends here. Except that he dusts off a screenplay from the 1940s and has one more go.

Playback. This is a much shorter book. Lean. Chandler gets on with it. And I like it. There are great moments in here. It’s no way to end a series, not after The Long Good-Bye. But here we are. More tough guys making with tough guy acts. I remember one character vividly, and that’s an old man in the hotel, the man who could lip-read. Call it a hunch. I felt sure Raymond Chandler was writing himself into the story. No, I’m not the first to think that, and I won’t be the last.
   This is the end, and it is okay. It would be much better to shunt this story back before The Little Sister and to edit accordingly. That’s where this one truly belongs. After this, there was an attempt to write again. Chandler produced a fragment completed by Robert B. Parker. That’s called Poodle Springs. But we’re not talking about that here.
   What did I think of the series? It worked. In its time, it was steeped in the 1930s and 1940s. Here and now. Fresh. If you go wading through the fiction and find it cliché-ridden, remember those clichés had to start somewhere. Marlowe, for better or worse, became a template for the tough private detective.
   Chandler’s writing endures. Readers waltzing unawares into the fiction will discover that hard-boiled gritty writing isn’t terribly nice to women. It doesn’t show men in a great light, either. Everyone and everything is tough. The toughest character in the books? Los Angeles. Not even an earthquake could erase the stain of it.

 

HOW MANY WRITERS IT TAKES TO CHANGE A LIGHT BULB: A REPORT FROM A FUGITIVE.

So how many writers does it take to change a light bulb? One writer. There’s no one else in the room when you are writing a story. Though, when a writer changes a light bulb, you are hoping for a really good twist that illuminates.
   And once the light bulb is in and switches on over the writer’s head, hell, that answers the question of where the writer gets all those ideas from.
   I could spend the rest of this blog post making jokes about writers and light bulbs, but I am recovering from the trauma of changing a light bulb. Don’t know what the fuck I was using for illumination before I performed essential maintenance.
   The dim bulb that flickered its last wasn’t really putting out any Lumens, Candles, or a hint of a Lux. Wattage could best be described as rumoured to exist at some point in the distant past – that faraway star snuffed it and died long ago, leaving only faint impressionistic memories of light.
   Typically, the inevitable death of a bulb happened after dark. Luckily, I have two lamps on this side of a Great Wall of Books. By the light of one, repair the other. I reached for a new bulb that isn’t new at all. It’s been lying in wait, ready to pounce at the right time.
   Well, the time came after sunset. And now, I can see. I think the replaced bulb was powered by a tiny candle hidden deep within the mechanism.
   Maintenance this month has been of the essential variety and attacked me from all sides. There was a lot of it. Had to be done. If I don’t blog now, I won’t blog at all. Yes, I could spend the whole blog doing a dog-ate-my-homework sketch.
   But instead, I’ll talk about a movie I watched. Fantasy movies still have a pretty bad rap in the film industry. Make them cheap, throw them out fast, see what sticks. Cut the budget for the sequels. Fade out.
   Occasionally, fantasy films are really good. They are few. We’ll go with the argument that STAR WARS is a fantasy movie about a wizard, a princess, a farmhand who doesn’t know he is a prince, and an evil knight with a magic sword.
   For Arthurian fantasy, there’s Excalibur. There’s a wizard…
   Okay, we can shuffle the elements around. We have a boy who doesn’t know he is a king. And there are plenty of lightsabres in Arthur’s story. For fire-breathing fantasy, there’s the Disney movie Dragonslayer. It’s enjoyable nonsense. I find Sir Ralph Richardson’s turn as a wizard quite appealing.
   When he’s miscast in a movie like Rollerball, you wonder who was on drugs during that computer scene of his: you, watching, or the casting director foaming at the mouth in a dark red corner somewhere.
   We’ll give old Ralph a pass in Rollerball. The computer scene itself looks like it wandered in from another movie and brought the actor along in its wake. My point is…Richardson’s standard level of whimsy works very well in Dragonslayer and also in Time Bandits.
   I could go on, listing this fantasy film or that one. Good. Excellent. Stellar. But that’s not the aim here. You don’t get far in the fantasy movie landscape before you fall off a cliff into a lake of acid.
   Of assorted Dungeons & Dragons movies, I will say only this: caution. I believe Jeremy Irons funded the purchase of a castle in Ireland off the back of his scenery-devouring performance as a misunderstood villain. No one could understand what he was in the movie for.
   For the money, clearly.
   Sooner or later…and I’ve come late to this one…you encounter a movie named Gor. I encountered it last week, in low resolution, at double speed, on the information super back road that is the internet. This is now the only acceptable way to watch Gor. You’ll save yourself a lot of time…
   By reading this and deciding not to watch the movie.
   We’re in familiar territory here if you know your Edgar Rice Burroughs. American man is transported from civilised world to barbaric planet and must learn epic combat skills or die trying. Yes, I have a review here…
   I don’t like sand. It’s coarse and rough and irritating…and it gets everywhere. (A. Skywalker.)
   Gor. What is it good for? Absolutely nothing. Our hero, if you can call him that, is Tarl Cabot – which sounds like the guy’s own porn name. Surely that’s a typo. I have the overwhelming rage in me to fix that and call him Carl Cabot.
   At least then he’d be in the company of characters like Lief Langdon from Dwellers in the Mirage by A. Merritt. Anyway, back to Gor. We’re dealing with a man out of his own time and place. He arrives in the most beige fucking fantasy world I’ve yet seen.
   I’m with Mr Skywalker here. Don’t like bland sand. This fucking movie. It’s cheap and filmed nastily on a dry golf course at the arse-end of the back of fucking beyond. At least, that’s how it feels.
   Our hero is a professor spurned by blondie. He drives off in the rain and his wayward vehicle hits a tree. And he dies. The rest of the story about being transported to another world is just a hallucination of the people behind this production.
   Anyway, Tarl – should be Carl – has a magic ring that sends him to the world of sand. He can be a loser there instead of back home. Meanwhile, Oliver Reed shows up to film his scenes on the weekend: in short takes between trips to assorted pubs.
   Or that’s how it all appeared to me. Ollie is up against it in this production. His whispered menace competes against an energetic soundtrack that has been hijacked from another movie. The composer is using notes in Morse Code to transmit SEND HELP.
   Action in the film just doesn’t live up to the adventure promised by the score. Maybe that’s a good thing. I can’t see the cast living up to any real action on offer if real action stumbled in out of the darkness.
   No, I’m not saying the leading lady was hired for her ability to emote with her tits. However…I am saying that. But we mustn’t lose sight of the plot, such as it is. Our hero, Porn Name Guy. Incidentally, that reminds me of Flash Gordon.
   Stop me if you’ve heard this one before. You’ll truly understand the pacing of Flash Gordon if you realise, in that movie, you are never more than ten minutes away from an Italian porno.
   Oliver Reed shows up as a budget Oliver Reed playing a toned-down Brian Blessed from Flash Gordon, minus the wings. And flecks of foam in the beard. Ollie wants this big glowing rock for reasons unknown.
   He might have explained those reasons during a whispered monologue, but, frankly, with characters like these it was hard to care.
   Ollie’s instant son is instantly killed by our instant hero in an instant accident. And then our hero flees. He gradually joins a low-rent Dungeons & Dragons party that’s too cheap to have an elf in it.
   There’s the first third of the movie for you. Our man wears native costume, and crosses the desert after a spot of training. Travel concentrates on viewing everyone from behind, to show off the hero’s arse-cheeks. It’s not all about the bikini-clad women in this non-epic.
   As far as the director is concerned, I’m starting to think Tuff Turf was the highlight of his career. We get into a spot of mischief at a settlement. This is the sort of crossroads you’d expect in four or five fantasy movies of variable quality.
   There’s no variable quality here. It’s consistently awful. The movie felt like one of those films you saw after midnight on a weekday that felt like a hallucination the next morning, whether alcohol featured or not. Particularly if not. Tiredness robbed you of half the plot, and that was no bad thing.
   Know what the movie needs? A heavy. Surely this guy’s the heavy from Crimewave…yes, yes, he is. We have a low-rent Brian Blessed in the form of Oliver Reed. To this festering stew of a film we must add a knock-off Bud Spencer look-alike in the shape of Paul L. Smith.
   This leads to a catfight. Our heroes win something or other. The right to continue into the depths of the dry golf course. Our D&D party is built up to include the hero and heroine, a wise older character, another dude who is too cheap to put on elf ears, and a little person hired for comedy relief purposes.
   They trek a few hundred yards into an elaborate built-up super-bunker on the golf course, and then must deal with…a hole. A hole opens up. And it pads out the movie. It could be the hole in the plot formed from all the tiny holes in the plot so far.
   Maybe the shoddy nature of the golf course has infected the production, and they’ve thrown a mad ad-lib into the mix. The mix of shit and gravel that is this film. What the fuck is this film? When fans of the Gor books write in to complain about the adaptation…
   Yikes.
   Our heroes attract the attention of a guard and dispose of him. The cunning disguise of putting on a helmet and pretending to be the guard…would work in a game of D&D. Not so convincing in this movie.
   Eventually, after much sand…
   I don’t like sand. It’s coarse and rough and irritating…and it gets everywhere. (Oliver Reed, coming back from the pub.)
   We reach the pointless infiltration of the villain’s lair. Some of the costumes may have been recycled from Flash Gordon, but I can’t be arsed checking the accuracy of any of that. Our villain, the wri…the dir…the produ…Oliver Reed…decides to invite our hero to join his merry gang.
   For, y’know, reasons ’n’ shit.
   Throughout the movie we see women in bikinis and men thinking about calling their theatrical agents and asking soul-searching questions about careers thus-far.
   Oliver Reed finishes his last remaining speeches. In his head, he’s playing Falstaff in Stratford, down by the banks of the Avon in some open-air performance. Pretending to be drunk.
   We’re about an hour in and there’s a dance number. Of course there is. And we have a character moment. This allows us to care about Tarl Cabot. It doesn’t. I lied. A woman is presented for branding. Our hero flexes his mighty thews and enemy guards fall before him like ripe grain before the reaper’s scythe.
   No. I lied again. He just watches. Maybe he likes to watch. Then, when it is the leading lady’s turn, our hero must mark her with the branding iron. He rebels, and starts a change of government right there. Cool.
   Except. Why didn’t he save the first woman? Dick. We move to the open revolt and getting the hell out of Dodge. But first, remember to grab the big glowing stone. It is really important. For…reasons. I mean…someone paid money for the prop, so fucking use it.
   It’s not enough to free the oppressed and reclaim the stone. No. It’s important to get captured and face Oliver Reed one more time. He has to pay…for luring us into this cinematic diarrhoea.
   Things I neglected to mention.
   One. An ineffectual flaming portcullis trap. Straight from the mind of Gary Gygax. Roll well enough on the dice, and our heroes easily survive Cabot’s Sphere of Conflagration.
   Two. The less said about trying to pick a lock with a sword…the better.
   Three. Oliver Reed would bounce back from this mess and deliver lines about queer giraffes in Gladiator. There, in his sober head, he’s still playing Shakespeare at Stratford, by the riverbank, in the pissing rain.
   But let’s deal this movie the final blow. I have to say, this is some feeble shit I had to sit through. It’s been more than a heartbeat since I sat through something this bad. The Acolyte still takes that crown, though.
   Wookiee Jedi? And he’s going to fight the bad guy? (Dies off-screen in his fucking chair. Still hurts. Dies in an office chair, staring at his accounts. Harsh.)
   Our hero has equipped himself with a bow. More importantly, he’s found ammo as well. Earlier in the movie he watched while a woman was branded. Here’s the same woman again. She’s threatened with fiery death…and he just watches.
   Did he really not like the look of her? Was she not using enough hairspray? The leading lady consumed the hairspray budget, it is true. Well, this ritual sacrifice goes as expected. Twice in the film our leading man has the chance to step in and save this woman. He fails spectacularly.
   What’s left? Save everyone else. Fire an arrow through Oliver Reed’s neck. No, seriously. Then he can fall to his fiery death – just to confirm that he’s still alive as he hits the flames, and then there is no way back for him in a possible sequel.
   Sequel?
   To this warm garbage? It isn’t good enough to be hot garbage. This reheated garbage. A sequel? You are fucking kidding me. But wait a bit. Here’s Jack Palance…who has form in the cheap fantasy section of cinema…
   He turns up to introduce himself. O………kay. Meanwhile, our hero returns home. Where he punches out the dude who annoyed him and stole his gal. There’s a moral in here somewhere. The moral is…YouTube should allow me to watch shit films at Warp Factor 10, Mr Sulu.
   The scenes in our world, at the beginning and end of the movie, should have been cut out of the movie – along with all the other scenes. But we return to sequel territory. The tale ends with Jack Palance, this time in a mad fucking hat. There’s a wild declaration about ol’ Jack’s drive for power, here.
   And the only man who can stop him is the guy who just fucked off back to his own planet. Right. Gotcha. No chance of making a sequel to this nonsense, right. Who is behind the production?
   Cannon. A hit-and-miss company with many a cinematic stinker under the brand. Some gems, it’s true. Cannon’s financial history is of greater interest than the film output. Of course Cannon would go after the sequel. I’m not sure I have the mental strength to see me through another one of these efforts. Not even at double speed, and skipping the credits.

MISTAKING WRITERS FOR OTHER WRITERS: A REPORT FROM A FUGITIVE.

Really, truly, when I think of that bit about mistaking writers for other writers, if I think of the topic at all, I realise I’ve misplaced a story. I believe, with the rabid fury of a thousand frothing suns, that one writer wrote a tale penned by another scribbler. Simple as that.
   Then something awkward happens: a loose detail floats over the horizon, staining the otherwise unsullied sky. Now the sky is sullied by the fury of a thousand waxing moons. Wait a bit. This book was written a few years after the author’s death. How can this be?!
   It could be that the storyteller’s last manuscript sat forgotten by daylight, beneath a massive pile of socks in a holiday home untouched by time. Only now are we dimly hearing of this belated publication.
   Or maybe there was a bitter family dispute over the eventual release of the last great work/collection of notes for a story/a fragment little better than a receipt for dry-cleaning.
   Maybe, though, just maybe, I’ve mismatched the author to the wrong bit of scribble. And now I am on a (hopefully) short trail to find who wrote what, when, and possibly where. Complicated as that.
   Generally, I don’t think of the mystery writer Josephine Tey being mistaken for the children’s author Eleanor Farjeon. It’s never on my bingo card in any year, and won’t show up behind door number one on the advent calendar of strangeness. Or any other door.
   Except…
   I was staring into the middle distance of the internet, and squinting at a so-called picture of Eleanor Farjeon. My response was surprising.
   That’s Josephine Tey.
   Firstly, I was astonished that I knew this. Somewhere along the line, the strands of the interwebs were muddled in the weaving of it. And, from some polluted stream, from one slightly awkward source, I suppose a miniature industry of mistaken identity poured forth.
   Eleanor Farjeon wrote Morning has Broken. This religious ditty went to church in a shotgun wedding with an old Scottish tune by the name of Bunessan. You may know it as a pop hit by the singer/songwriter Yusuf. (Additional noodling provided by Rick Wakeman.)
   What else to say of children’s author Eleanor? She won a few literary awards in her day, and had one named after her. And she’s not the mystery author Josephine Tey. Did these two women write in the same area? No. Not even remotely.
   Misattribution. Who wrote this one? Maybe Ray Bradbury wrote that story. Or I thought he did. And it was someone else. Or I believed someone else wrote Ray Bradbury’s story. But, then, watching the end of DARK STAR by John Carpenter, I fucking KNEW I’d read that bit of the story before. And it was absotively posolutely by Ray Bradbury.
   Turned out to be the case. Well. Damn.
   So, yes, there’s plenty of scope for confusion. William Shakespeare’s War of the Worlds, or Much Ado About Martians, for example. Could’ve sworn he wrote that. He didn’t pen a word. Christopher Marlowe was the author.
   Marlowe famously faked his own death, polished all of Shakespeare’s plays, entered into a Faustian pact with the devil, became immortal, and passed his own stories off as those of H.G. Wells.
   Legit. As legit as an award for Legitness provided by the International Committee of Legititude™, based in Luxembourg. That is a lie. The organisation flies a Panamanian flag when operating at sea. A fiction was told there, surely.
   No worse than supposing that Lord Byron was in fact a vampire. Tom Holland appears to be the source of that story. Spider-Man wrote about Lord Byron the vampire? Fuck it. Yes, yes, he did. No, no, he didn’t. It’s an easy mistake to make. Is the writer Tom Holland not the same person as the actor Tom Holland? Oh. Okay then.
   Was Christopher Lee, the historian, also in fact a vampire?
   There is no real or unreal evidence of this. My source is that I made it up. Anyway, I invented my source. Even that bit is fabricated.
   Also, concerning Lord Byron, there is no proof that he was a werewolf, a herewolf, a therewolf, a mummified corpse, or a creature from the black/blue/dried-up lagoon. Was he the Invisible Man? I just don’t see it.
   That’s The Invisible Man written by Christopher Marlowe, naturally.
   I myself am often mistaken for the Venezuelan rocket scientist of the same name. It’s a light burden. Any questions that come my way concerning rocket science and the laws of physics are quickly farmed out to my scientific advisor: Doctor Google.
   Doctor Google himself made a Faustian pact with the devil to acquire that sort of knowledge. There is no direct record of Doctor Faustus making a similar Googley pact to gain control of the interwebs.
   Unless you count that play, The Tragical Search History of Doctor Faustus. There’s some evidence that the work was scribbled on the back of a hard drive by one Will Shaxberde, believed to be a French literary critic down on his luck, in need of funds, and lacking wine. Except that he wasn’t officially French. Just for reasons of beef tax.
   Often, facts are at our fingertips just as those facts slip from our grasp and bounce down the stairs into a million fragments. Honestly, though, it might as well be a hundred fragments for all the difference it makes to us.
   I was once told that I knew that song by the guy who was singing about the thing…
   An attempt to get me to provide the name of the singer, the song, and the subject matter. I DEFINITELY KNEW THE SONG. Gradually, based on the sliver of a crumb of an atom of a detail, I worked out the name of the song. And it was coincidence that I knew it.
   YOU DEFINITELY KNOW IT. THE ONE ABOUT THE THING THAT THE GUY SINGS AND THERE ARE WORDS WITH MUSIC AND STUFF. IT’S REALLY CATCHY. YOU KNOW. THAT ONE.
   You know it. It was that one-hit wonder. It keeps popping up on the radio. And on the radio’s successor. Internet radio. But you definitely know it. That song, about the thing. By the guy. Who sings about that thing, very specifically without any detail handed over to tell you what the fuck anyone is talking about whenever they raise a topic in so vague a manner.
   I typed that while listening to the song. It was featured on the interwebs. All I had to do was type the guy’s name and there he was. You definitely know, anyway.
   All I had to do, when staring at a so-called picture of Eleanor Farjeon, was to type the name of another author. And the same photo popped up. A picture of Josephine Tey. OR IS IT?! Maybe the photo of Josephine Tey is really the picture of Eleanor Farjeon, has been all along, and the whole thing was messed up since BEFORE the beginning.
   Despite the actors Anthony Quayle and Anthony Quinn looking nothing like one another, they are often mistaken for each other. That must be very confusing when they appear in the same movie together.
   I was about to include a photo showing both of them together in a movie. But they are both on the right in the picture I selected, and the temptation to type Anthony is pictured on the right is really too much. I must let the weak joke die where it stands.
   Checking stuff is difficult. You face the Dictionary Problem. What is that? To know what you are looking for in a dictionary, first you must know what you are looking for. And if you know already, then maybe you don’t need to look it up.
   When I saw the picture of “Eleanor Farjeon” I just knew she was Josephine Tey. So I went looking for Josephine Tey. And there she was, in several images, looking like herself in all of them.
   It’s a conspiracy. She replaced herself. Like, y’know, that big unsinkable ship. The one that hit the iceberg. Or did it?
   RMS Titanic was replaced in a last-ditch effort to pull the world’s supply of wool over everyone’s eyes in order to…
   (Checks notes in ever-rising levels of disbelief.)
   …swindle an insurance company.
   According to Robin Gardiner, the sister ship Olympic went to the bottom of the ocean instead and the real Titanic was in service until scrapped. The most remarkable thing about Gardiner’s career is the legit profile of the White Star Line he somehow managed to write. That appears, at least, to have been written by someone who was rational.
   Doesn’t explain The Great Titanic Rock ’n’ Roll Insurance Swindle vibe that emerges from his other writings. You see, if you measure the width of the sprocket found on the ocean floor, and you compare that against the detailed blueprints stored in the secret filing cabinet, you’ll realise it’s all a load of nonsense.
   Never Mind the Bollocks. Here’s the Fruit Pastilles.

A YEAR IN THE BLINK OF A TWELVE-DAY WEEK.

Not to go all Solomon Grundy on you, but time flies when you’re having a Pandemic Attack.
   For the convenience of rhyme, Solomon Grundy was born on a Monday. He didn’t last long. And 2020 didn’t last long, either. It’s been a twelve-day week instead of a twelve-month year. And what a week it’s not been.
   Festina Lente isn’t Elon Musk’s babysitter or his new electrical perambulator. Latin is a universal language in the sense that every single phrase in Latin offers up the same universal truth: Latin is dead. You are not. Remember this.
   Make haste slowly. If there’s one thing to make a speeded-up year of not doing awfully much zoom in like a Zoom meeting on LSD, why, it’s not one thing but many things. The Pandemic was (and remains) many things.
   When sorrows come, they come not single spies, but in raging flaming clouds of fleets of swarms of zillions of fucking battalions.
   I quote loosely from the general text. Hamlet is the go-to manual for studying the effects of Covid-19 on just about everything. To be. We would have a proper year. Alas, turns out it was more in the line of…
   Not to be.
   Much happened on a personal level that I will not relate here. So what else is there to talk about? Plans that slid sideways from under me, making way for new plans, seem as though from another world.
   On the reading front, I no longer know and no longer care how many books I’ve read this year. It was a short reading year, and felt like twelve days. The last time I read a book, I read it in a sitting. But it’s all a blur, at this end of the short year.
   Everything dragged, and suddenly it was Christmas.
   Books came into the house. A few books were read by someone who may have been me. My plan to keep score of the overall gain or loss on the bookshelf front…that went utterly nowhere. Did I buy in nineteen books and read twenty? Well, I’m ahead of the game by one book, right?
   No clue. Kept score. Lost score. I could sift through electronic receipts, but what’s the point? Does reading an old book again count for anything? For the experience I gained in revisiting a story, yes. But I gave up the arithmetical quirks of what to add to and what to leave out of the mystical calculations.
   I ran my YouTube channel for two years and managed an average of a little over one video per week. Life under the pandemic got to me, and I took a fucking break. Had to. Other priorities. But I will return to video production.
   Life is what happened to Allen Saunders while he was making other plans.
   The reading of books was a thing in 2020. My solid stainless steel plan to note how I was doing on that front? That plan stood out in the rain, softened, split, and then…only half of it sagged into the leaf-strewn street. Even fragmenting plans, it seems, cannot fall apart in a regular way.
   If I misremember rightly, I read three short books in one day. They didn’t count, being really short. But they were books. I have them on my shelves. Somewhere. So maybe they did count. We all did stuff in 2020. But finding those handy bookmarks in the compressed diary of a twelve-day week, telling me what I did, is proving difficult.
   The bookshelves themselves came into play once more. I had a crushing need for space downstairs. This led to the return of furniture to this floor. The office floor. And that forced me to hack a farm-fresh clearing from the jungle of bookcases.
   This was a mighty feat. I accomplished the task by wriggling bookshelves across the floor, in a dance that wouldn’t have looked out of place in a barn. Generally, my bookshelves line the walls and also project deep into the room. In this latest bookcase case, I found a way to rearrange the puzzle pieces. At one end of one room I’ve created an area in which the bookcases line the walls.
   Mostly.
   It’s been a year of hurry up and wait. What a fast week it has been. The year is a has-been of a year, all right. Delivery drivers played chap-door-run-away with parcels the size of televisions.
   Out shopping, those who didn’t queue in masks queued in scarves. With gloves. Autumn-wear came early. We were counted into supermarkets as we shuffled through the airlocks, and we were counted back out as we fled with prized loot.
   Toilet roll.
   No one can explain the scarcity of toilet roll to me. Covid-19 is a shitty disease, not the shitting disease. I left a supermarket with a pack of 24 paper nuggets, each more precious than gold. You could wipe your arse with gold toilet paper, but then you’d be King Midas. Sitting on a golden throne.
   There will be signs of the coming Apocalypse. A well-worn idea. In our case, the signs asked us to wear a face-covering and to wash our hands. Please don’t touch your face. Or anyone else’s face. We should add more signs.
   Change your underwear frequently.
   Rattling pots and pans at night in support of people isn’t in support of those people if they are trying to sleep come mid-evening.
   Being in government and sticking to rules is a thing people in government should stick to. This last item simply exposes people in government as never sticking to any rules during the working day. Covid-19 merely unveiled an entire approach to living. It’s not as though the official in charge of that thing decided, spontaneously, that it would be okay to break the new rule for reasons of no reason at all. No. That fucker was clearly breaking all the rules every live-fucking-long day.
   I feel as though it were only yesterday, a million years ago, when young idiotic Americans (with names reminiscent of models of electrically-driven cars) were determined to have their spring break and damn the fatal consequences.
   It has taken me this long on my wayward journey to realise that spring break means the Easter fucking Holidays. But that is a mere aside. It is of little or no consequence. An electron microscope could provide a sturdy result on a scientific point, but…
   This is December and there are no flying fucks left to give. Those vanished in the first wave of toilet roll hoarding. Flying fucks were rationed at the rate of two per customer, and soon ran out. That was late in March.
   The march of the mood of the year was a slow one, to the tune of a popular little ditty by Chopin. Covid-19 turned the speed up to 11. Even Chopin’s Funeral March gets the squeaky squirrel treatment, played fast during a Pandemic Attack.
   When I watch videos on YouTube, I almost always hit double speed. With rare exceptions, everyone’s a squeaky squirrel. Unless I watch a video featuring a voice that starts out squeaky or fast-paced. Increase the speed in those cases, and only bats hear the results.
   I am a very patient person, I am here to tell you. Yet I find myself listening to videos that are 40-minute rambles to start with. At double the speed, a rambling video leaves me twenty minutes to go and stare out at the empty streets during a Pandemic. Priorities, right.
   Last blog post of the year. School’s out for Christmas. I’ve resisted the Covid-19 waffle that the world’s been indulging in all year/twelve-day week. So I know I am not adding anything to the talk. Except talk of vaccine today.
   Jam tomorrow, then.
   And what of tomorrow? New plans? Old plans, dusted down. I scrapped my notions of keeping score. How many books will I read next year? And how many will I buy? (I am awaiting a parcel of many books as I type.)
   The real question is how many books will I enjoy? How many are going to be useful? The tally, the score, is not important. It never was. And that’s no secret. You’d think I’d have spent the year hunkered in the bunker, all Covid-proofed and high on coffee, rattling through a book a day.
   And each day, a book on a wildly different topic at that.
   Fuck. I’ve just remembered there’s a pizza in the oven. I’m five minutes away from that meeting. Prompt. I will remain prompt as long as I can. In anticipation of sleeping in, I set the alarm and I climbed out of bed just as the alarm decided to warn me of its existence. Prompt today. For once, no hurrying.
   And only a wait of a few minutes for food. Not exactly waiting. Hurry up and wait. It is still a thing. Just as the virus is still a thing. And it will remain a thing, even as the first waves of vaccines hit the veins.
   This is not the fucking time to go fucking daft. Unless it is time to go daft…for pizza. It is socially distanced, being on a separate floor. I will mask the flavour of the pizza with sauce. That’s the only mask I can use, when devouring food.

EIGHT FOLDERS: A REPORT FROM A FUGITIVE.

Time to eat eight folders. Then I can say I ate eight folders. The major reorganising of the computer archive was always going to leave loose ends. I look back on that change now and I see eight folders left dangling in the wind. They have their slice of the sub-folder pie, it is true…but I’m down to those eight folders at last.

   Am I, though?

   No. The point of the archive was to duplicate effort here, there, and avoid loss of data. As far as I am aware, in all my time computing, I haven’t lost any major data. I’ll tell this one again, about gaining data. There were files that had to be cut down.

*

It was important to keep the files, with their file names, but data inside those files had to die. I started weeding. Select text. Delete text. Select text. Delete text. The autosave hadn’t kicked in. I worked rapidly. The power went.

   Bzzzt. Except, without that sound.

   I hadn’t saved the file. And the system hadn’t autosaved the file. The only changes made were in data erasure. All those cuts were gone when the power was restored. I faced a power-cut and gained data in the file I worked on. All the erased material waved back at me. I had to delete that stuff again. Careful in what I deleted, I saved as I went.

   This brings up a point of procedure. When generating data, I save regularly. It’s a habit of mine to save every paragraph, and to save mid-paragraph if I feel the need. There are times when I save every sentence. This is not a difficult process. I hit the left CONTROL button and the letter S and the save goes ahead.

   No matter the state of play in terms of sentences or paragraphs, I save if I have to step away from the machine. There’s always an exception, and my exception is data removal. I am cautious in what I delete, and ensure the right thing goes. Later, I’ll save it. Obviously, the power-cut intruded on that routine and here we are with this anecdote all over again.

*

To stress the vital point: save often, and save early. I don’t believe I’ve lost vital data. There are many back-up systems in place. As far as an author is concerned, the best back-up for your work is always going to be publication of it. Write it. Check it for typos. Back it up by putting it out there into the void.

   Tackling eight file folders is a mammoth task. I’m not deleting the information inside those folders. Instead, I am moving things around to sit, neatly, under new signposts. That’s the tricky part. This feels like having moved house. And, having moved house, looking from room to room and seeing packed boxes lying around…hell, that is inevitable. Life-draining. Unavoidable. Part of existence.

   Let’s see how many folders I can face tackling as I write this blog post.

*

These folders are, typically, all sub-folders themselves – falling under the category of archives to 2017. This is clearly a lie, as two of the folders are for 2018 and 2019. I know exactly why I didn’t change the main heading…

   There’s a desktop shortcut leading to these files for my convenience, and to change the folder title is to destroy the link to the shortcut while leaving the shortcut icon mocking me on the desktop. Once I’ve reorganised the lot, the shortcut goes. But not a second before. That way, madness lies.

   Nothing is ever straightforward in the archive. How many empty sub-folders will I encounter across the archive? There’s no way to ever truly know that number. It is one of the last great mysteries of the universe.

*

One coffee and a bit of wrestling with categories later, and the folders are what I’d call manageable. I find myself creating more folders…what a surprise…to deal with the way I categorise things now. Then, there were categories with different names. Ah, simpler times. It’s all about managing signposts.

   A few things defy categorisation. That is what the miscellaneous folder is for. I discover miscellaneous material from 2011, but no folder to house that stuff in. I see that 2011 was a year for quite specific things, and not that many miscellaneous items. Not enough to warrant the building of a mighty folder, back then.

   Now, it is but the work of a few irritable seconds. Though…the new folder is far from mighty. How much deletion is involved? I find a spot of duplication. It would be unutterably strange to find zero duplication. Accept this.

   I find obsolete files that should give pangs on deletion, but I feel nothing. They are, after all, truly obsolete. Other entries give pause for thought, Horatio.

   For there are more things in files than mere data samples. I see and hear people who flitted in and out of my life and work. Some I could call on today and take up conversations where we left off, even at the distance of GASP time. Others wandered into different universes.

   Also, there’s a fucking shocking record of prices in 2011. A few items from back then would be bargains now. If you could get them at all. And other necessities, being necessary, shot up in price with rockets strapped to the tags.

*

My digital archive is as random as are the books on my shelves. I store things where they need to go at the time and under the circumstances. The storage of those things makes sense, then, and makes sense to me now only in the sense that it all made sense then.

   A missing file from 2012 turns up in the 2012 folder. Colour me stunned.

   Only a few seconds of work in it, and the 2013 folder sees its wayward sheep herded into a large miscellaneous pen.

   I’ve written with a miscellaneous pen from time to time. The last time I wrote with an actual physical pen was at the end of 2019. And with a pencil? Oh, the week before that. There are still reasons to scribble things down, away from the digital archive. And, yes, I take notes on the digital archive by pen. Sometimes, it’s the easiest way to fly.

   In the cosmic scale of things, I am approaching another coffee. It’s clear to me that not everything in the archive was in the archive. Now that I’ve eaten eight file folders, noted by year, and deleted the obsolete shortcut leading there, I am certain that…

   Not everything in the archive is in the archive. When a new year unfolds, I’m forced to unpack the months. I keep a folder of sub-folders with the months of the year running numbered 1 to 12, listing the first three letters of each month.

   No, I don’t know why I arranged things that way. I suspect, if pressed on the matter, that this notation is the orphaned remnant of a far earlier computer system. Let me just run a check on something. No, I don’t see what I wasn’t looking for.

   Inside an entirely different system, I used to have aardvark files. Yes, this was purely alphabetical. Priority files went at the start start, with the double aa in aardvark. But that primitive computer system gave way to this primitive computer system, and I don’t truly need aardvark files any longer.

*

As I type this entry, I am minutes into 2020 and already I need to set up a monthly file entry. Generally, I use monthly sub-folders to keep track of communications with people across the year. And people are using the internet to wish me a Happy New Year. I’m buzzing on mints and the notion that the last day of the year was one of the frostier ones in an otherwise mild winter. That thought resides in this file. Soon, it’ll be in a monthly folder.

   Archiving with aardvarks may have ended long ago, but archiving itself never ends. It’s one thing to look forward to 2020, and quite another to actually set the files up to cope with the admin of looking forward into the future of right now, just this minute.

   The feeling haunts me…I should set these damned things up well in advance instead of having a microwaved template that I drop into folders as and when needed. But the point of a template is to have a template just for these moments.

   It’s better to wait around and see who and what I’ll need to set the monthly archives up for. Copying and pasting into every last corner is too much duplication of effort. Even for me.

   I ate the eight errant folders a million years ago, whoosh, and need never concern myself with those loose ends, stowed away as they are. But I’ll always have months in years to deal with. Life is set up that way, and I don’t see any other system coming along to replace the calendar any old time soon.

MORE INJURY FOR WRITERS: A REPORT FROM A FUGITIVE.

Another day, another injured digit.
   I suspect I'm on a quest to damage a finger or thumb each dawn. Some of those digits are definitely going to be mine.
   Despite the latest trauma, I republished seven times today. My recent formatting war with the back catalogue of prehistoric files forced something from the mirk.
   When that something surfaced from the depths, I went tsk. In the sense that I said fuck.

*

The project irresponsible is slim thriller. I've split the book into four chunks. Not hard to do - I wrote the book in four chunks.

And did those files in ancient time

Unfurl with ease upon the computer screen:

And was the formatting odd

On ev'ry effing paragraph seen!

   Sometimes, bringing old stories into line with e-book conventions is easy. That's not the case with this fossil.
   However, I spotted something awkward - meaning it wasn't wrong.
   It was, infuriatingly, right. I speak of the gargoyle. There's a gargoyle in the book. And I researched the word gargoyle before I wrote the gargoyle into my tale.
   A gargoyle gurgles.
   If a gargoyle doesn't divert water away from a building, it isn't a gargoyle.
   Remembering this bit of research from the hinterland of yesteryear, over the hills and very far away, I did the obvious thing.
   I ran a search for the word in my published works.
   And I saw that, in at least three cases, I'd gone on to use the term incorrectly much later.
   This brings up an important point. If you must correct something in an e-book, run a check on all of your books. When factual errors creep in, as they must, they come not single spies, but in battalions.
   If you research gargoyles, and write properly about them, hell, that doesn't stop you from writing improperly about them later.
   Gargoyles crawled over my work like, er, gargoyles on a cathedral. And I'd let the definition drift. That loose masonry needed fixing.
   I fixed.
   On top of that, I'm from the last generation to be taught the use of whom. If you find yourself using the word in your writing, here's some handy advice.
   Kill it - kill it with fire.
   I went through my published work and checked for usage. The word has the odour of bottled creatures to it.
   Though I didn't use the word much, I had the advantage of knowing how to use it. I'd say that's the same as not using a scythe much, but professing great skill just the same.
   Raymond Chandler defended the word, but I am not here to defend Raymond Chandler.
   And so...
   Welcome, anatomically accurate gargoyles. Farewell, whom. It lingers in my blog posts, but no more in my fiction. Gargoyles and whom forced me to republish seven books today. Our world survived the tumult.

LET IT SNOW: A REPORT FROM A FUGITIVE.

After deciding to make snow on the blog a permanent feature, I braved the elements.

   This is an unsubtle code used in newspapers and on television. It means I went out in the rain.

   A rogue Christmas card came in. Rogues appear before the start, causing the start. They also appear near the finish and slightly after. The true rogue card arrives in late November.

   It was on sale in a shop from September, though. :0

   By mid-December, the single spies turn to flocks. I greatly misquote Bacon in mangling Shakespeare. Kevin Bacon will forgive me, I'm sure.

   At the other end of the month, just before Christmas, as the postal service freezes over, there are late-arriving festive messages. These are  handed in by weary travellers who walked the length of an entire street.

   Those people are in our thoughts.

   Blank cards stay handy for near-instant replies. Some neighbours are organised, and deliver cards by fake daylight. This endless twilight is battleship in its greyness and greatness.

   Other neighbours struggle against the rising tide, fail, and are swept along in darkness. Muttering is done.

*

The night before the night before Christmas, one last local card came through the letterbox. That source was investigated. A handy card lay blank and ready for a return shot.

   I braved the elements.

   And I thought about the snow on my blog. Walking through the streets to deliver a card, I marvelled at the light displays beaming through the rainy night.

   Snowflakes on windows. Reindeer. A large red-clad jolly chap. Icicle lights dangling from on high. Wintry themes, all. Frosty. Snowy.
   But life is rainy far more often than not. This time, I am hard-pressed to remember more than two frosty mornings. And I'm including November in the tally.
   Occasionally, a proper wintry day comes along, bringing a chill wind. And I think of that day as a January one.
   There are places far-flung and nearby, with snow all around. Whether it's raining or not where you are, here's the cold code for snow on your blog...

IT'S COLD OUTSIDE.

<script src="http://yourjavascript.com/25223141921/snowstorm-min.js"></script><a href="http://www.globeinourhands.blogspot.com/" target="_blank">SNS Blog Snow Effect</a>

   I'll leave you with a year-round song about winter, written by Dave Goulder and performed by Mike Harding.
   THE JANUARY MAN.

*

Update. Blog revamping took the snow away. If I ever find a way to return it, I'll drop clouds of the stuff on this blog.

HAMLET OR NOT HAMLET. THAT IS THE QUESTION: A REPORT FROM A FUGITIVE.

When I was generating a final copy of my annual archive, I spent time on the Twitter describing that process. I invented new words for slow.
   Bleeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeerrrrrrrrrrrrrrrgh wasn't one of those words.
   I sailed into the night, back and forth, between two computers. One machine, at least, had the internet. So I whiled away some of the time in random searching.
   The name of an actress came up.
   I thought I'd check out the internet's opinion of this actress. She gave excellent performances in a few movies I'd seen. I'd long-ago decided she'd serve as the model for a character in one of my books.

*

Which one? That character is in my Hamlet adaptation. To avoid confusion, the story's called not hamlet. And that's perfectly true...
   Better to say that it's not just Hamlet. Another story intrudes. One of the features of Hamlet that always interested me was the notion of a play within the play.
   Strolling players visit the castle. Hamlet manipulates them into putting on a particular play. He does this to drop heavy hints about his father's murder.
   Hamlet has no concrete proof - he's playing a hunch based on a chat with a ghost...
   But the play's the thing. Hamlet wants to see the murderer's reaction to the play.

*

I thought, suppose the strolling players have their own plot going on. A tale following the murderous trail of the clown, Pagliaccio. Anyway, in my mash-up, Pagliacci works with Hamlet.
   Deep into the night, my archive takes an age to sort out, and, internetting, I stumble on this actress. She's the one I think of when I imagine the character Columbina.
   I fix files. And I copy files. I use the Twitter to reveal the slowness of file-movery. At some point, it's 2.00 in the morning and I'm reading the blog of an actress.
   She has a blog? Worth checking out?
   As events showed, yes. There were insightful gems on that blog.
   The night before, I was writing until 1.00 in the morning. Odd hours? I don't think so. Normally I wouldn't go far beyond 1.00 if writing.
   Background archiving was looking after itself, but I had to look after that too. I owned that paranoid feeling. Must do this now. If I switch the computer off and wait until morning, the whole system might fritz.
   Of course, that paranoia stems from an actual event. HERE'S A BLOG POST ABOUT THAT.
   This is why I stayed up until 2.00. Archiving wasn't allowed to stop for mere sleep.

*

My Hamlet adaptation stalled after six chapters when no one wanted to publish it. After writing just six chapters, I decided I'd shop a story around unfinished.
   Confidence in the finished article, nestled in some futuristic world we'd reach one day.
   The future, though, was floating on the mighty Amazon. I published the first chapter of not hamlet in my INCOMPLETE UNCOLLECTED SHORT WORKS.
   Kindle's there to be used.
   I've been looking at that excerpt. And I'll let it stand as it is, in the collection. But for release into the wild as a full novel, I think my early attempt at Kindle formatting must go.
   Hamlet's adventures deserve shorter paragraphs. They'll be the same paragraphs - just chopped in half for ease of digital reading.
   Midnight descends. I'll finish this post another time. Sleep is considered essential by some. But only if you wish to function. No staying awake until 2.00 this time around.

*

Where were we? This is not a tale of evil kidney transplantation. (With regard to a non-functioning external hard drive, we're in the realms of dodgy transfusion.)
   Hamlet. I stayed up late, fixing the archive. And I read a blog. That actress was on my mind. Obviously, I thought of Columbina. In my tale, she's Pagliacci's second wife. She serves as inspiration for Pagliacci's move into Hamlet's world...

*

But this blog post isn't about any of that stuff. At 2.00 in the morning I'd read the woman's blog, archived my fiction, and had enough.
   Come morning, even though I was thinking of Shakespeare and Leoncavallo, my main thought was of the archive. I bring things forward each year, so my freshest vault contains the latest copies and updates of Kindle PRC files.
   That's in case I iron out a glitch or alter some blurb.
   Projects in progress as one year ends are archived within that year. Then they are copied to a new year for further work. The old archive is then left lying around on the off-chance that something catastrophic happens.
   Though for something catastrophic to happen to fresher chunks of files and NOT to me too, I'd have to be out of the building when that plane hits.

*

My thoughts went to Neon Gods Brought Down by Swords and all its sequels and offshoots. I knew I had to weed out that sub-archive. So that's what I've been doing. Weeding.
   The books that follow the first volume don't exactly follow the first volume. They exist at the same time. Same setting. A few scenes overlap.
   Old ground. Different viewpoints.
   It's a nightmare, juggling those characters. She's here, and hears that news. So she can't be there when that event happens, as she's come from yonder to be here.
   Like that. Multiplied.
   I can't let things fester beyond all rational and irrational control. With this in mind, I started destroying duplicate files. Devious ones.
   Files with different names containing duplicated text. I had to cap a lid on that bullshit.
   And I created a massive table, showing the first book's timeline, with the out-of-sequence flashbacks set down in chronological order.
   Yes. The fun part of writing. Continuity is important to some people. Maybe it's a phase readers are going through.
   So far, only part of the plot of book four felt the strain. Sorting out the action in books two and three should smooth the running for books four and five.
   Especially as she's here when she hears that news.

*

Lots of ideas. Plenty of books on the unwritten pile, waiting to go. Where does that leave Shakespeare, if I turn my attention to a sprawling series instead?
   I'll get to those assorted tales. Without rushing. Every year, my ambition is to write a whole bunch of books. And this year is no different.
   Every year I take interesting detours into reading, or experiencing stuff, or damn-well thinking through ideas that are no good and must be worked on. Sometimes, worked over. As in...
   Tied to a chair. Blowtorches are waved.
   Anyway. I published. And I'll go on publishing. Every detour into another project creates another project.
   I must away, to see to more archiving. There's a file (with chapter titles in it) that flies in the face of the plot of at least two books...

  
  



  

WHERE EAGLES DARE.

After a year of blogging, I decided I’d pull back on the usual level of repetition. Time to repeat other things, instead. Listening to Alistair Cooke for more years than I care to mention, I took note of the level of repetition in his weekly radio shows. And I repeatedly peppered my blog with phrases geared to helping writers. I did so as a matter of policy.

   This, though, is not a blog set down exclusively for writers. I could sculpt in that direction, by curating links to handy articles. Rambling, generating waffle, takes far less time than sifting the internet looking to share crumbs of gold from the digital pan.

   While other bloggers toil at prospecting in the data-stream, I sit by the campfire jawing away. Links to handy articles are golden. My blog posts are 90% hot air. I must think of readers as well as writers. With that in mind, it’s time to state the bleedin’ obvious. If you watched a movie, a TV show, or a play…if you read a rather annoying piece of blurb…if you thumbed through a comic book…

   Someone, somewhere, somewhen, somehow wrote it.

   How we respond to different types of fiction is irrelevant. Provided that we do respond. Even no response is a form of response. It doesn’t matter if you like a movie or dislike it. Plenty of people worked on it. You may be able to point the finger of blame at one person if you hate a movie. And that person may indeed be the writer.

   Occasionally, you’ll find yourself wrapped up in a story. To the extent that you overlook flaws, imperfections, hazy moments…and outright blunders. Sometimes blunders in fiction will set you thinking. If you spot them.

   Here’s one. Wrens make prey where eagles dare not perch. That’s a line from King Richard III, by noted action movie author William Shakespeare. You’ll find the quote in the third scene of the first act. Richard, Duke of Gloucester, is making a point about places where eagles dare not perch.

   This text was truncated and became the title of a movie written by Alistair MacLean. Where Eagles Dare. The original meaning was cast aside. WHERE EAGLES DARE NOT. That is by the by. There are many glitches in the movie. I needn’t list them here. Save one.

   I thought I’d pull the story apart, concerning this one point, to see if I could provide a rough date for the secret mission which carries the burden of the plot. There’s a glitch. I don’t know how many times I’ve watched the movie. Hell, I’ve read the book more than once. Is the movie a great adaptation of the book?

   No.

   The book was based on the movie – not the other way round.

   Is the story any good? I am reminded of Treasure Island, in the sense that the story is utter nonsense from start to finish. That’s no fault. I’ve lost track of the number of times I’ve watched Where Eagles Dare.

   True, I’ve often questioned the inclusion of a helicopter in the story. The German Navy used helicopters, though not the American one featured in the film. MacLean wisely sticks to calling the mechanical beast a helicopter in his book, and just about gets away with it.

   Yes, I regularly bemoan the massive explosions accompanying fragmentation grenades in the movie world. The level of heroism put on display in many a war movie is often enough to earn the participants a fistful of Victoria Crosses, with whistles and bells attached. (That medal is mentioned sarcastically in MacLean’s book.)

   Does any of that matter, if I sit and absorb a mad story? No. Countless times I’ve watched that movie. It had to be pointed out to me that there’s a very peculiar item on the list of things that don’t quite tally. Something rather obvious.

   Now the movie is no historical document – except in the sense that it is a historical document of the movie-making process of the time. Where Eagles Dare was not constructed by Barbara Tuchman, William L. Shirer, or Anthony Beevor.

   I will not give away the deeper layers of plotting which make this mad story of interest. It is worth looking at the war-torn premise. We are in the murky depths of World War Two. The American General Carnaby is on a TOP SECRET mission.

   He’s headed for a rendezvous with his Russian counterparts. The topic under discussion at the meeting is OVERLORD: a complex scheme for the invasion of Normandy. Plans are in need of finalisation. Unfortunately, Carnaby’s aeroplane crashes – he is captured. Shortly thereafter, he is moved to an impregnable castle. The stage is set for a rescue mission. Enter our heroes.

   In reality, no such mission would go ahead. Allied forces would simply alter the invasion plan, and plant disinformation about Carnaby to minimise the damage and misdirect the enemy. (The enemy wouldn’t accept Carnaby at face-value. Why would so senior a planner be allowed to fly by a rather curious route across hotly-contested airspace…unless a double-bluff? They’d tie themselves in knots, thinking it over.)

   A rescue mission incorporating assassination of General Carnaby is the likeliest option. Something similar is proposed in the opening stages of the story – why not just flatten the castle with Carnaby in it?

   Well, that would make for a very short movie.

   When is the story set? Putting a time on the mission is tricky. Though not that tricky. The Americans are involved as allies and General Eisenhower’s name is invoked. In the movie, the phrase Second Front is used. OVERLORD is mentioned by name in the book.

   Critically, the main characters are warned that General Carnaby’s rescue is paramount. His exposure as a keeper of invasion secrets would push back plans for the second front, destroying any hope of an invasion this year.

   Historically, OVERLORD took place in 1944. We’ll be generous, and say that’s when the movie is set. Indicators? There are several. The accidental rehearsal for a Normandy invasion took place in August 1942, with the raid on Dieppe.

   This was no return to the continent, as envisioned at Churchill’s Casablanca summit in January 1943, but the Dieppe Raid was a start. Lessons had to be learned. They were learned the hard way. Heavily-defended ports may be attacked – but (short of neutron bombing) they are almost impossible to seize intact. The use of the target is at an end the moment the target is hit.

   Clearly, it is better to seize a piece of coastline and turn that into a port. By March 1943, the planning process was firming up. Come September 1943, the plans for portable harbours were approved. General Eisenhower was given command of OVERLORD in December 1943.

   Eisenhower took up position in January 1944. In that month, COSSAC – responsible for planning OVERLORD – made way for SHAEF. The SHAEF organisation is mentioned at the start of Where Eagles Dare.

   So the mission couldn’t occur before January 1944.

   OVERLORD went ahead at the start of June that year. Plans for OVERLORD were in flux right until implementation. How late in the day might the story happen? Not too late in the day. The mission occurs in snow.

   Without factoring in phases of the moon, weather, and availability of aircraft, we can be generous and assign a January/February timeline to Where Eagles Dare. The movie makes a point of the drop-zone’s wintry slopes being devoid of humanity from October through to April.

   Smith is the man of action. He leads his men from the drop-zone to the objective. With many a detour. Much of the action is implausible, though this is no fault in fiction. Book readers and movie viewers can get all they want of real life simply by wandering around not doing very much. Entertainment should be more entertaining than that.

   Countless times I’ve seen the film, and read the book. A major criticism of the movie is that radio messages are transmitted in clear speech. There is no encryption of messages. That’s done purely for the movies, to save time. There are concessions to encryption and encoding in the book.

   Insecure exposition concerning General Carnaby is also included in the story for convenience. “Why is this man so damned important?” A question asked at the briefing must go unanswered in real life. It’s poor security to explain General Carnaby’s importance to anyone in a position to be captured and interrogated on the mission to rescue him. However, the movie’s viewers must have the plot explained to them.

   So-called blunders like that are there to prod the story along. They are common. Consider the structural weirdness of having everyone in a multilingual movie speak one language. We know Smith suddenly speaks German as he enters into casual conversation when crossing a bridge, even though the only language moviegoers hear is English. Solution? We just put up with this movie convention. The movie must undergo dubbing and/or subtitling for foreign markets.

   Blunders. Movie conventions. Outright anachronisms. I haven’t mentioned the one that had to be pointed out to me. General Carnaby’s rendezvous with the Russians is set for the island of Crete. Bear in mind that the story can’t occur before January 1944.

   Crete was seized by German paratroop forces in 1941. That set me thinking. This is an Alistair MacLean story. Suppose Carnaby’s mission went ahead. He’d have conducted a covert landing on Crete, met resistance operatives, and made for the Russian rendezvous. All under the hateful gaze of enemy forces. Blunder? Hell no. What an Alistair MacLean story that would have made.

NEXT BLOG: BLINK AND YOU MISS LADY GAGA IN THE SOPRANOS.