Author: MrM0untfield

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My 2025 writing round-up

 

© Schlock! Webzine

 

All in all, 2025 was a horrible year: one in which an unholy alliance of authoritarians, kleptocrats, fascists, media tycoons, tech bros and oil barons worked hard at stripping freedoms from those of us living in societies that have, until now, retained some freedoms; at transferring another huge chunk of wealth from our dwindling coffers to their swelling coffers; and at burning and poisoning the planet we live on in their quest for profits whilst aggressively pushing the line that any science questioning this policy is a ‘hoax’.  But you’ve probably noticed that.  You don’t need me to tell you.

 

On a personal level, and regarding my writing career, 2025 for a time looked like it would be horrible too.  The previous year, 2024, had been my most successful one ever, with its twelve months seeing 17 of my short stories published.  However, in my writing round-up for 2024, I noted warily that “I will be hard-pressed to equal or better that record in 2025…  That’s because of the recent disappearances of certain magazines (like The Sirens Call) and publishers (like Midnight Street Press) who have published my stuff regularly in the past.”  Yes, those closures impacted on me this year.  But for a period of four of five months in the middle of 2025, I really felt that, submissions-wise, I couldn’t get myself arrested.  I sent story after story to publication after publication and, relentlessly, rejection after rejection came back.

 

For a while, my efforts at fiction seemed about as popular as a Cybertruck in a Tesla showroom in a district of Washington DC heavily populated by ex-government employees.

 

But…  “If at first you don’t succeed, Mr Kidd…”  “…Try, try again, Mr Wint.”

 

In keeping with the philosophy of Mr Kidd and Mr Wint, the two camp assassins in Diamonds are Forever (1971) who indefatigably persevere in in their efforts to dispose of Sean Connery, I tried and tried again.  And unexpectedly, I had a breakthrough near the end of the year.  Half-a-dozen of my stories got into print in November and December.  Also surprising – since I’ve never considered myself a particularly Christmassy person – was the fact that three of these stories appeared in anthologies or magazine issues dedicated to the festive season.

 

Anyway, here’s a summary of the fiction I’ve had published in 2025.  It includes details of where they were published, which pseudonym they were published under and how they can be accessed today.

 

As Jim Mountfield:

  • Jim Mountfield, the penname under which I write horror stories, had his first 2025 success with a story that appeared in Issue 22 of the Stygian Lepus magazine.  It was entitled Beach Bodies, was set in Bali, and was about an older man coming into conflict with an extreme manifestation of the foreign backpacker and influencer culture that overruns the island’s tourist spots.  Issue 22 of the Stygian Lepus can be purchased here.
  • In July, a Mountfield story called Slot Boy was featured in Volume 19, Issue 6 of Schlock! Webzine.  At the time I described Slot Boy, which was set in Scotland and not wholly serious in tone, as having a “Scottish backdrop of parochial wee towns, middle-aged neds, cranky auld wifies, mobility scooters, and terrible football.”  You can buy that particular issue of Schlock! Webzine here.

 

© Spiral Tower Press

 

  • My next two Mountfield stories were also set in Scotland. Halloween 2025 saw the release of Issue 5 of Witch House Magazine, whose contents included The Bustle in the Hedgerow.  This story drew on a number of inspirations: a historian who once visited my family’s farm while hunting for the remains of a Roman fort; a hedge my father once planted on the farm after receiving an environmental grant; and the supposedly true story of two ancient Celtic stone heads, known as the Hexham Heads, which caused terrifying paranormal activity to assail anyone who came into ownership of them.  The Hexham Heads traumatized a generation of kids in the UK in the 1970s when the BBC current-affairs show Nationwide broadcast a report about them.  Issue 5 of Witch House can be downloaded here.
  • Early in December, a Mountfield story called The Dark Crooked One appeared in a seasonal anthology from Black Hare Press, Eerie Christmas 4. This combined a legend about Scottish bogeyman who supposedly appears during the shortest days of the year, including December 25th, with the real-life tensions that can arise at Christmas – namely, when you stick a not-particularly-happy family together in a room all day, make them eat and drink too much, and pressurise them into acting like they’re having a good time when, in fact, they’re not.  Go here to buy a copy of Eerie Christmas 4.
  • And later in December, Jim Mountfield was responsible for the first part of a science-fictional horror story, entitled Appopolis Now and set in an imaginary Asian country in the near-future, that turned up in Issue 30 of the Stygian Lepus.  Appopolis Now is currently available to read here.  Its second and final part should appear in the 31st issue of the Stygian Lepus next month.

 

As Rab Foster:

  • Meanwhile, my fantasy-writing alter-ego Rab Foster had his first 2025 story published in April when one called The Cats and the Crimson was accepted for Issue 159 of the monthly webzine Swords and Sorcery Magazine. The first half of the title reflects the fact that the story contains cats – both domestic cats and some ghoulish, demonic variations on the feline species.  The second half of it indicates the presence in its cast of Cranna the Crimson, a fearless and rather incorrigible swordswoman who’s already been a character in two of my earlier published stories.  You can read the story in Swords and Sorcery Magazine’s archive, here.
  • The next month, a Foster story called The Shrine on the Moor appeared in Volume 19, Issue 4 of Schlock! Webzine. This featured another recurring character of mine, the mercenary Drayak Shathsprey, and was a sequel to a story called Pit of the Orybadak, which had been published in the magazine Savage Realms Monthly at the start of the previous year.  Volume 19, Issue 4 can be purchased here.

 

© Cloaked Press, LLC

 

  • September saw the publication of another instalment in the yearly Fall into Fantasy anthology series published by Cloaked Press.  Fall into Fantasy 2025’s line-up of stories included a Rab Foster one called From Out the Boundless Deep.  Its main character, Kayra, had previously featured in a story called The Trap Master, published in the webzine Aphelion in 2018.  As I wrote on this blog: “The premise of both stories is that Kayra inhabits a world where all the creatures of myth and legend – griffins, hydras, harpies, kelpies, minotaurs, etc. – are real and she makes a living by hunting and trapping them.”  In From Out the Boundless Deep, Karya gets summoned to a remote beach where something large and mysterious has just been washed up.  Fall into Fantasy 2025 is on sale here.
  • The year ended with Rab Foster getting another story placed in Swords and Sorcery Magazine, this time one entitled The Palanquin. It’s an attempt to tell a fantasy story set within the confines of a very limited space – the interior of the conveyance of the title.  It features yet another recurring character in the Foster universe, the swordswoman and mercenary Keeshan, who appears sometimes as a partner to Drayak Shathsprey and sometimes as a lone agent.  Shathsprey has a role in The Palanquin too, but it’s a minor one.  Currently, the story can be read here.

 

As Steve Cashel:

  • I usually write non-horror and non-fantasy fiction that’s set in Scotland under the pseudonym Steve Cashel. This year, atypically, he had a story turn up in another anthology of supernatural Christmas tales, White Witch’s Hat and Other Yuletide Ghost Stories from Heavenly Flower Publishing.  The reason for this was because the story in question, Southbound Traveller, was set in a Scottish household on Christmas Day in the early 1990s and for most of its length was realistic in tone.  Only near the end does something strange happen – and it’s more a ‘paranormal incident’ than a manifestation by a ghost or other supernatural entity.  (An inspiration for the story was actually Hans Christian Anderson’s 1845 fairy tale The Little Match Girl.)  It seemed more like a Steve Cashel story than a Jim Mountfield one, so Cashel got the credit.  To purchase a copy of White Witch’s Hat and Other Yuletide Ghost Stories, please click here.

 

© Heavenly Flower Publishing

 

As Paul McAllister

  • Finally, I managed to get two short stories published in December 2025 under the penname of Paul McAllister, which I use for non-scary, non-fantastical fiction set in Ireland.  This felt like scoring two goals in injury time at the end of a football match.  The first of the stories was called That Time and was based on a memory of a brief but harrowing incident that happened to me when I was about eight years old and living in Northern Ireland.  That Time was included in Issue 2 of the digital magazine Still Here, whose title and theme was Ghosts of our Pasts.  A pdf of Issue 2 can be downloaded here.
  • And the team behind Still Here also decided to put out a mini-issue to coincide with Christmas Day, entitled A Light in December.  I managed to get a Paul McAllister story selected for that as well.  Called The Recovery, it’s another one that takes place in Northern Ireland.  It involves a funeral, during the run-up to Christmas, and a case of mistaken identity.  Again, you can download a pdf of the mini-issue here.

 

In the end, despite my pessimistic predictions, I managed to get twelve short stories published during 2025.  Prior to the bumper year of 2024, a dozen published stories was my average total each year.  So, I didn’t fare so badly after all.  From this experience, I would give budding writers two pieces of advice: (1) never give up (which is the advice all writers give aspiring writers); and (2) have lots of Christmas stories ready in your arsenal for the next round of seasonal anthologies.  I’ve already started writing a couple for Christmas 2026.

 

Meanwhile… A Happy New Year to you all.

 

© Stygian Lepus

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Rab Foster takes a ride in the palanquin

 

© Swords & Sorcery Magazine

 

A good place for a writer to go to for ideas – writers of all types of fiction, I’d say, though especially historical fiction and also fantasy fiction, which I write under the penname of Rab Foster – is a museum.  Last year my partner and I were on holiday in the city of Yogyakarta in Java, Indonesia. There, we visited the Sonobudoyo Museum, which is devoted to Javanese history and culture.

 

Among its many exhibits, a couple of items in the transport section caught my attention and piqued my curiosity.  These were palanquins, the conveyances the wealthy once employed to get around, which consisted of a chair, inside a box, with poles attached to it. The poles rested on the shoulders of servants or porters and their legs provided the palanquin and its rich passenger with locomotion.

 

 

What, I thought, if I set a fantasy story almost entirely inside a palanquin?  How would that work?  So I went off and thought about it, and made notes, and planned, and wrote, and the result a year-and-a-half later was a 7500-word short story entitled The Palanquin.  I even managed to incorporate into it a striking detail I’d seen on one of the Sonobudoyo Museum’s biggest palanquins, a carved snake (or naga) that adorned its roof.

 

 

I’m happy to say that editor Curtis Ellet has chosen The Palanquin for inclusion in Issue 167 of his monthly webzine Swords & Sorcery Magazine and that issue is now available to read.  Being fantasy, the story is attributed to the aforementioned Rab Foster.  For the next month, you can access the magazine’s main page here and The Palanquin itself here.

 

And that’s it from me for 2025.  Have a Happy New Year when it comes.

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Christmas comes on time for Paul McAllister

 

© Still Here Magazine

 

A few weeks ago, Paul McAllister, the penname under which I write realistic fiction set in Ireland, had a short story published in the digital magazine Still Here.  (By ‘realistic’, I mean not horror or fantasy stories, which I write under two other pennames, Jim Mountfield and Rab Foster.)  It pleases me to report that that the Still Here team has also published a ‘mini-issue’ to coincide with Christmas, entitled A Light in December, and it contains a further Paul McAllister story.

 

This new one is called The Recovery.  It adheres to the theme of A Light in December, in that it takes place during the festive month.   However, the idea for the story himself comes from a conversation I once had with a distant relative in Northern Ireland – at Christmas – when he recounted something that’d happened to him: a misunderstanding between him and some old friends of his dad.  He tried to present the misunderstanding to me as being funny, but it was actually rather sad when I thought about it.

 

The term ‘mini-issue’ suggests a small, slim publication, but in fact A Light in December puts many full-scale magazines to shame.  It’s 98 pages long and into those pages editor Alauna Lester has packed 19 poems and five pieces of prose.  Design-wise, it’s gorgeous to look at and, best of all, it’s free to download.  Please obtain a copy of this lovely magazine at its home page, here, or its ‘issues’ page, here.

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10 years ago, Lemmy was killed by death

 

From wikipedia.org / © Mark Marek

 

Following the recent death of singer and guitarist Chris Rea, whose 1986 song Driving Home for Christmas has become something of a festive-season classic, a mate of mine observed that this was yet another example of a ‘musician who’s associated with a perennial Christmas song’ expiring at Christmastime.

 

To support his thesis, he mentioned George Michael (responsible for 1984’s Last Christmas and died on Christmas Day 2015) and Shane MacGowan (co-singer and co-writer of 1987’s Fairy Tale of New York and died on November 30th, 2023 – okay, not quite in the festive season but I’m sure the Christmas lights were already up in Dublin at the time).  Referencing the singers of Merry Christmas Everybody (1973) and I Wish It Could Be Christmas Every Day (1973) and the perpetrator of Mistletoe and Wine (1988) and Saviour’s Day (1990), my mate concluded, “…Noddy, Roy and Cliff better take extra care in Decembers to come.”

 

Well, today is the festive-season day of December 28th, 2025.  And it marks the tenth anniversary of the death of a titan of popular music: Lemmy, front-man with one of heavy metal’s most brilliant bands, Motörhead, and a general all-round role model for how to live your life (i.e. loudly, always disreputably and occasionally downright badly).

 

I was going to say that Lemmy’s passing at Christmastime disproves my mate’s theory that only the singers of Christmas songs die during this period.  But I’ve just checked and discovered that, though Motörhead never recorded a Christmas song, in 2008 Lemmy did get together with ZZ Top’s Billy Gibbons and the Foo Fighters’ Dave Grohl and made a cover version of Chuck Berry’s Run, Rudolph, Run (1958) for the same year’s album We Wish You a Metal Christmas and a Headbanging New Year.  (Google AI informs me the song’s vibe was ‘heavy, aggressive and sinister’.)   So maybe there’s something in it after all.

 

Anyway, Lemmy.  What an amazing career he had.  Legend has it that he managed the remarkable feat of being thrown out of Hawkwind for taking too many drugs – though more likely he was thrown out for taking the wrong sort of drugs, i.e., amphetamines, which the other, hallucinogenic-loving band-members looked down on.  He tried to teach Sid Vicious how to play bass (with a predictable lack of success).  He composed the greatest rock ‘n’ roll song ever, Ace of Spades (1980).  He also gave rise to the greatest joke ever – “If Lemmy had a fight with God, who would win?”  “It’s a trick question: Lemmy is God.” – which was funny because it was true.

 

Here, by way of a tribute to the great man, is a review of a Motörhead concert that I wrote back in 2008 for the University of East Anglia’s student newspaper, Concrete.  It’s an excitable and breathless piece of writing but, well, I had just been at a Motörhead concert.  Reading it now, I have a few regrets.  I should apologise to the late Ronnie James Dio – in the years since, I’ve come to realise I like ‘strutting spandex-clad idiots singing songs about elves and wizards’.  Plus, Ronnie was no idiot.

 

And obviously, I regret the fact that the prediction made in the final sentence didn’t come true.

*

MOTÖRHEAD

UEA, November 21st, 2008

If the Nobel Foundation in Stockholm ever creates a Nobel Prize for Heavy Metal, surely its first recipient will be Lemmy, singer, bassist and general driving force of Motörhead.

 

Founded in the 1970s, a decade when heavy metal consisted of strutting spandex-clad idiots singing songs about elves and wizards (e.g. Rainbow) or about their abilities in making vigorous love to the ladies (e.g. Whitesnake), Motörhead were a revelation.

 

Lemmy’s hoarse roar was stuck onto a racket of guitars played at the loudest possible volume and at the fastest possible speed, a sound that helped to spawn the speed and thrash metal sub-genres and supplied Metallica, Slayer, Anthrax and co. with at least 666 tons of inspiration.

 

Lemmy was also an early and crucial champion of Girlschool, the groundbreaking all-female metal band who helped the music to shed some of its reputation for sexism.  And in the segregated pre-grunge era, when heavy metal and punk fans weren’t supposed to associate with each another, Motörhead was the one metal band it was okay for punks to like.  Lemmy and the Sex Pistols’ Sid Vicious were good mates and he even tried to teach Sid how to play bass guitar – unsuccessfully, it must be said.

 

Taking the stage tonight after a short-but-well-received set from Toronto band Danko Jones and a ludicrous-but-loveable one from Saxon – ironically one of those hoary old-style metal bands that Motorhead helped to make obsolete – Lemmy, guitarist Phil Campbell and drummer Mikkey Dee went to work with their usual, blistering single-mindedness.  Old favourites like Bomber (1979) and Killed by Dead (1984) got blasted out alongside items from their new album Motörizer – though unsurprisingly the new stuff didn’t sound entirely different from the old stuff.

 

Apart from a blues pastiche where Lemmy displayed some unexpected harmonica-playing skills, this was business-as-usual in the best sense of the phrase.  Rounding off a perfect evening for the head-grinding crowd was an encore containing Ace of Spades, surely the most brain-batteringly brilliant song in heavy metal – and possibly in 7000 years of human civilisation as well.

 

The big heavy-metal news this week was that Guns n’ Roses had finally put out Chinese Democracy – an album so named because it’d taken so long to record that democracy could have feasibly come to China by the time of its release.   From tonight’s showing, however, Motörhead will be going strong long after China has taken over Wall Street, bought up Coca Cola and put a man on the moon.

 

From blabbermouth.net / © Pedro Alonso

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Keeping their Reds above the water

 

 

I can’t think of anything festive-related to write about just now, so here’s a travel piece about a charming place I visited a couple of Christmases ago when holidaying in Thailand.

 

My partner and I visited the village of Koh Panyee while we were staying at the Thai resort of Khao Lak.  One day we took a boat tour around Ao Phang Nga National Park, which is actually mostly water – it’s a big, island-strewn bay in the Andaman Sea.  Having been to the island of Khao Phing Kan, famously known as ‘James Bond Island’ because it was a location used in the 1974 Bond movie The Man with the Golden Gun, we stopped at Koh Panyee for a late lunch.

 

As far as I can tell, Koh Panyee is also the name of the island the village adjoins. However, as the majority of that island is a hulking mass of limestone, with vertical, vegetation-choked cliffs, and only a small part of it can be built upon, most of the village juts out over the adjacent sea on a forest of stilts.  Centuries ago, it was founded by two families of nomadic Javanese fisherfolk.  Now it is home to about 1600 people.

 

 

To get to the restaurant where we were dining, our boat travelled the length of the village’s seaward façade.  This was an assortment of houses with corrugated iron and tiled roofs, plus a chaotic mantle of wharves and jetties where fishing nets were piled and boxes, crates and lobsters-traps were stacked.  Some sections of the mantle were fixed, some were floating, and some had truck or tractor-tyres attached to cushion them against the hulls of berthed boats.  The restaurant was a big building, also on stilts, at the end.  On one side of its interior was the eating area and on the other side, next to the rest of the village, was a maze of stalls selling souvenirs, fabrics, clothes and jewellery.  After I’d had lunch there, I went exploring. I threaded between the restaurant’s stalls, stepped out through a doorway and found myself on a winding, concrete-surfaced walkway that led into the heart of Koh Panyee.

 

In fact, there were many more souvenir stalls along the sides of that walkway.  Though fishing is its biggest money-spinner, tourism is still important in the village, at least, during the dry season.  But the local vendors didn’t try to push their wares on me aggressively.  And seeing the village itself was fascinating.

 

 

The most striking thing was when I looked between the houses on either side, half-expecting to see alleyways, and found there weren’t any.  There were just gaps with strips of mossy-green seawater at their bottoms, glinting in whatever sunlight managed to penetrate between the eaves.  The edges of the concrete walkway really were edges, with nothing solid beyond them.  Often, the edges were blocked off by rows of potted plants, by blue plastic barrels, or by racks of drying fish. Wooden ladders sometimes descended from them to the water, where boxes and buckets rested on and small boats were tethered to platforms – stationary ones, rigged out of planks and poles, or floating ones, weighed down and stabilised against the swell by lumps of concrete.

 

I noticed a few young kids wandering about that walkway.  If I’d been a parent there, I’d have worried about them toppling over one of the edges and into the sea.  But no doubt they’d been trained to stay safe.  (I should say I spent my childhood in a risky environment myself.  Two roads formed a junction a couple of yards from my front door, immediately past that junction was a river, and at my back door rose a flight of steep, high concrete steps that didn’t have railings. Yet my parents instilled enough common sense in me to avoid death by car accident, drowning or falling.)

 

For some reason, a ricketty-looking bicycle was stowed on a narrow shelf, two planks wide, above the water at the side of one house.  Elsewhere, there were birds in box-shaped cages hanging from beams between the houses, and any space on a ledge or doorstep seemed to be tenanted by a dozing cat.  Indeed, one shop window sported a sign with the warning, BEWARE OF THE CAT.

 

 

The inhabitants of Koh Panyee are Muslims.  The three golden orbs of its mosque – its dome and the finials at the tops of its minarets – can be seen from the sea, hovering above the clutter of rooftops.  Approaching the mosque area, I encountered a sign cautioning me about what was not permitted ahead: no alcohol, drugs, bikinis, dogs or pigs, and I shouldn’t litter, be noisy or ‘buy and sell’.  The mosque stands on a shelf of solid ground at the foot of the island’s limestone cliffs, opposite the entrance of a Muslim cemetery.  On my way there, I passed through a transitional region where below the houses there was neither water nor solid ground, but dark, treacly mud.  Presumably, that mud would be underwater at high tide.

 

 

Considering its location, one of the very last things you’d expect to win fame for Koh Panyee is its inhabitants’ prowess at football.  Yet according to its Wikipedia entry: “The village includes a floating football pitch.  Inspired by the 1986 FIFA World Cup, children built the pitch from old scraps of wood and fishing rafts.  The boys decided to form a football team and compete in the Southern Thai School Championships.  After making it to the semi-finals in an inland tournament…  all of the village was inspired to take up the sport…  As of 2011, Panyee FC is one of the most successful youth soccer clubs in southern Thailand.”

 

And it seems that the people of this aquatic village are Liverpool fans.  Yes, they support the Reds.  Just past the sign for the mosque, I discovered evidence of where their footballing loyalties lay – a colourful wall display emblazoned with slogans such as RED MACHINE and YOU’LL NEVER WALK ALONE, with the Liverpool FC crest, and with a portrait of Mo Salah.  Indeed, I’ve read that legendary former Liverpool player John Arne Riise visited the village in 2019.

 

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When Stan was the man

 

From YouTube / © BBC

 

The great Scottish comic performer Stanley Baxter passed away earlier this month at the venerable age of 99.  Newspaper obituaries for him noted that, though he was a bright star indeed in 1970s British television, by the late 1980s his star had seemingly vanished from the firmament.  He’d gone.  It was almost as if he hadn’t been there in the first place.

 

As a result, one obituarist wrote, it was unlikely that anybody under the age of 40 in modern Britain had heard of him.  That does seem strange.  I can remember his TV shows being, in their day, very big events.  Over two decades, he only made six series – four of the Stanley Baxter Show between 1963 and 1971, one of the Stanley Baxter Picture Show in 1972 and one of the Stanley Baxter Series in 1981.  But during the intervening years, he staged several lavish, one-off specials that kept his face in the public consciousness, especially in the 1970s.  And his viewing figures were huge.

 

The reason Baxter himself gave for his abrupt disappearance during the 1980s was that his shows, full of song-and-dance extravaganzas and loving reproductions of old movie classics, became too expensive to make.  In particular, the television executive John Birt – once described memorably by playwright Dennis Potter as a ‘croak-voiced Dalek’ – had a hand in pulling the plug on him.  “It’s not that we don’t like your work,” he told Baxter. “It just all costs so much.”

 

It probably didn’t help that the type of entertainment Baxter was obviously smitten with, and slavishly reproduced and fondly parodied in his shows, had started to seem old-school by the 1980s.  Much of his material was drawn from the black-and-white days of Hollywood and he clearly took pleasure of impersonating the likes of Marlene Dietrich or Shirley Temple.  He also commonly referenced a former era of British cinema and theatre when accents were cut-glass and upper lips were stiff and he poked gentle fun at people like Sir John Gielgud and Noel Coward.  But by the time of his later shows, the audience familiar with those reference points was surely ageing.  A younger generation had arrived, more attuned to the 1970s New Hollywood movies of Martin Scorsese and Francis Ford Coppola and the blockbusters of George Lucas and Steven Spielberg.  Maybe Stanley Baxter’s TV career simply reached the end of its natural lifespan.

 

Incidentally, offscreen, Baxter was a quiet man who avoided publicity.  This was partly due to the fact he was gay and for a long time he worried about the world finding out – sadly, he worried about this well after the point when most British people no longer gave a damn whether someone was gay or not.  Anyway, by the 1980s, he was entering his sixties and probably welcomed retirement and being out of the public’s gaze.

 

I have to say, watching some of his sketches now, I find myself agreeing with a comment posted below one of the recent obituaries.  The comment-writer said he thought much of Baxter’s TV work was ‘clever’ rather than ‘funny’.  In fact, technically, those sketches are sometimes astonishing.  Baxter played all the parts in them.  However, because the digital compositing technology didn’t exist at the time to layer several images of him together in the same shot (and older techniques like multiple exposure and split-screen effect weren’t very convincing), the sketches were filmed from multiple camera angles with Baxter in different roles at different times.  Copious use was made of filmed-from-behind body doubles and much editing was done afterwards.  They must have been meticulously planned and taken ages to put together.  No wonder, most years, we only saw him in a one-off special.  Also, their writing was smart and Baxter’s impersonations were impeccable.  But as far as comic value is concerned – well, I find myself smiling, perhaps chuckling, at them at best.

 

An example is his spoof of Upstairs Downstairs, the masters-and-servants-in-a-big-house costume drama that aired on British TV from 1971 to 1975 and was the Downton Abbey (2010-15) of its day.  Baxter’s take on it is surprisingly meta.  The servants downstairs are discussing how many of the toffs upstairs have been written out of the scripts recently and replaced by new characters played by bigger-name stars.  Surely, they think, that can’t happen to them, since they’re all played by sturdy, salt-of-the-earth character actors?  But it does – the punchline comes when housekeeper Mrs. Bridges is informed that she’s about to be replaced by Glenda Jackson.  As usual, Baxter plays everyone during the eight-minute sketch and his impersonation of the starchy butler Mr. Hudson (in the real Upstairs Downstairs played by Baxter’s fellow Scot Gordon Jackson) is absolutely spot-on.  But while I might be full of admiration by the end of it, I haven’t done much laughing during it.

 

From wiki.scotlandonaire.com

 

In his sketches, Baxter plays women as well as men and his female impersonations are frequently great.  British comedy has a long tradition of men dressing up as women: the Carry On movies (1958-92), Monty Python (1969-74), The League of Gentlemen (1999-2002, 2017), Little Britain (2003-6), Dick Emery, Benny Hill, Les Dawson and practically every pantomime ever.  But those drag acts were invariably grotesque, their grotesqueness designed to provoke laughter.  Baxter, though, delights in making his female characters as believable and, well, feminine, as possible.  The novelist and critic Anne Billson responded to Baxter’s death the other day by observing how she now can’t watch Barbra Streisand singing Don’t Rain on My Parade in Funny Girl (1968) without thinking of Baxter impersonating Streisand and singing that song on one of his shows.  I have no doubt that Baxter as Streisand was awesome.

 

For me, Stanley Baxter’s work was funnier when it left the showbiz world behind and focused on other things – especially things inspired by his Scottish roots.  I fondly remember a sketch from one of his last specials, in the mid-1980s, wherein a strict Free Presbyterian clergyman (played by mighty character actor Andrew Keir) in the Scottish islands is enraged to hear sounds of partying coming from a house.  It’s Sunday – the Sabbath.  When he confronts the little old lady (Baxter) living in the house, she pertly informs him, “Oh, but we’re not dancing.  We’re having an orgy.”  She then describes a game being played inside.  “The men-folk take all their clothes off and stand in a long line…  The women are blindfolded and they have to identify the men by touch.”  She invites the clergyman in, saying, “As a matter of fact, your name has come up twice.”

 

Also Scottish were perhaps his greatest achievements, the Parliamo Glasgow sketches, filmed in the manner of TV language-learning programmes of the time.  The characters perform a skit in the target language, then change to English and inform the viewers about some of the useful words and phrases they’ve just heard.  This being a Stanley Baxter piss-take, however, the target language is Glaswegian and the skits involve such expressions as “Thatzum bahookey yu-voan-yu” or, fabulously, “Zarra marra oanra barra, Clarra?”  When the instructors switch to English, it’s in the ridiculously posh tones of Received Pronunciation (then a requirement for British TV presenters): “Again, an amorous young lady might use the word romantically to her bashful lover – ‘Zarra bestye kindae?’”

 

This fascination with language, dialect and accent informs another Baxter sketch, involving Nationwide (1969-83), the current affairs TV show broadcast on weekday evenings that consisted of reports from the BBC’s newsrooms across the regions and nations of the United Kingdom.  The joke is that each presenter in each newsroom, in Belfast, Leeds, Cardiff and so on, speaks the local dialect there so strongly that nobody else can understand them.  Finally, the programme switches to the main newsroom in London – where its presenter speaks with such exaggerated Received Pronunciation that he’s unintelligible too.

 

Though his television fame faded elsewhere in Britain, Baxter remained a name in Scotland.  Throughout his career he’d appeared in Scottish pantomimes and in the 1980s and early 1990s he starred in a number of productions at Glasgow’s King’s Theatre: Cinderella (1980-81), Mother Goose (1983-84), Aladdin (1986-87) and, again, Cinderella (1991-92).  I remember that last production getting much attention in the Scottish press because it was billed as his farewell to the stage.  His pantomime work was often done in tandem with another Scot, Angus Lennie, who was best known for playing Steve McQueen’s sidekick, the ill-fated Archibald Ives, in The Great Escape (1962).  Baxter and Lennie’s performances as the Ugly Stepsisters in Cinderella are legendary.

 

From YouTube / © BBC

 

He also turned up in Fitba, a 1990 episode of the Scottish TV sitcom Rab C. Nesbitt (1988-99, 2008-14).  Here, he plays an elderly man, at death’s door, who’s a football fan.  He’s so determined to see the Scottish men’s football team perform in the 1990 World Cup before he passes that he pays the titular character, the garrulous though rough-and-tumble Rab C. Nesbitt, to take him to the country hosting the tournament, Italy.  Baxter’s character is decrepit and moribund and Rab is understandably sceptical about the undertaking.  But he gradually wins Rab’s respect with his determination to make the most of what he has left.  “My time is precious,” he tells Rab in Rome.  “I’m taking a taxi into town.  Then I’ll walk to Via Garibaldi and into Palazzo Doria Tursi to see, among other treasures, Paganini’s violin.”  When he asks about Rab’s plans that afternoon, and is told he’ll maybe get a pizza, he retorts, “A pizza?  In Italy?  My, you’re full of ideas!”  Thanks to Scotland’s recent qualification for the 2026 World Cup in North America, I was thinking about this episode and Stanley Baxter just a few days before he died.

 

Finally, he featured in a handful of movies too: Geordie (1955), Very Important Person (1961), The Fast Lady (1962), Crooks Anonymous (1962) and Father Came Too! (1963).  Decades later, he was one of the many people (also including Vincent Price, Donald Pleasance, Anthony Quayle, Joan Sims, Kenneth Williams, George Melly and Joss Ackland) who did voice-work for Richard Williams’ legendary, but never properly finished, animated epic The Thief and the Cobbler (1993).

 

As a kid, I loved The Fast Lady, though I daresay I’d find it juvenile and knockabout if I saw it today.  But what a sublime cast it has – Baxter as the bumbling hero, Julie Christie as the woman he’s in love with, James Robertson Justice as Christie’s irascible and deeply disapproving father, and Leslie Philips as Baxter’s smooth best friend who tries to aid him in his love-life but only makes matters worse.

 

Ah, it makes me nostalgic.  Who would you get in a British comedy film nowadays?  Danny bloody Dyer – if you’re lucky.

 

© Independent Artists / Rank Organisation / Continental Distributing

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Jim Mountfield downloads the app

 

© The Stygian Lepus

 

The first part of my science-fictional horror story Appopolis Now has recently been published in Edition 30 of the Stygian Lepus, a magazine where, to quote the current blurb on its website, “the shadows don’t fall – they think, watching you from the edges of perception.”  As with all my stories that are dark and fantastical in tone, the story is attributed to the penname Jim Mountfield.

 

Appopolis Now is set in the future and imagines a society that’s slightly more high-tech than the one we will live in at the moment.  It’s also a society that’s…  Well, perhaps not dystopian, but definitely Cronenbergian.  (Wow, I have just typed ‘Cronenbergian’ and the Spelling & Grammar checker hasn’t put a red line under it.  That must mean it’s a recognised English adjective now, like ‘Orwellian’, ‘Kafkaesque’ and ‘Ballardian’.)  If you’re familiar with the works of Canadian filmmaker David Cronenberg, that should give you some idea about what to expect.

 

Edition 30 of the Stygian Lepus contains 14 pieces of macabre, disturbing and unorthodox short fiction and, for the next month, can be accessed here.

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Murder most Margaret

 

© George H. Brown Productions / Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer

 

During the past fortnight I’ve wondered if I should post something about big, recent news stories. About, for example, the draw for next year’s FIFA World Cup in Canada, Mexico and the USA, which happened on December 5th and saw FIFA President Gianni Infantino present Donald Trump with something called the FIFA Peace Prize.  Doing this, boldly going where no brown-noser has gone before, Infantino surely set a new record in how far a shameless groveller could wedge their head up Trump’s arse.  Or about the cascade of claims by pupils at London’s Dulwich College in the 1970s that the young Nigel Farage was a dedicated follower of fascism, taunting Jewish schoolmates with comments like “Hitler was right” and telling black ones, “That’s the way back to Africa.”

 

But no.  It’s Christmas-time.  I don’t want to soil the festive atmosphere of good will by writing about revolting specimens of humanity like Infantino, Trump and Farage.  So, instead, here’s a post about someone wholly wonderful and cherishable – Margaret Rutherford.

 

Wake Up Dead Man (2025), the new whodunnit written and directed by Rian Johnson, starring Daniel Craig as the gloriously accented Benoit Blanc, has just arrived on Netflix.  The Blanc movies – which also include Knives Out (2019) and Glass Onion (2022) – are reminders of how entertaining whodunnits can be when done well.  They put me in mind of an earlier series of cinematic whodunnits I find delightful and turn to whenever I need a comfort watch.  These are the four Agatha Christie adaptations made in Britain in the early 1960s that have veteran English actress Margaret Rutherford playing Christie’s formidable, if elderly, crime-solver, Miss Jane Marple.

 

By then, Rutherford had become a national treasure in Britain for her comic roles in the theatre and cinema, for example, in stage and screen versions of Oscar Wilde’s The Importance of Being Earnest (1939 and 1951 respectively) and Noel Coward’s Blithe Spirit (1941 and 1945).  The Miss Marple movies represent the last great hurrah of her career.

 

One aspect of the films I have a problem talking about is their faithfulness to the original novels.  That’s because I’ve never read any of Agatha Christie’s Miss Marple stories.  Indeed, I’ve only read one Agatha Christie novel ever, 1932’s Peril at End House, which featured her other famous sleuth, the Belgian Hercule Poirot.  However, having seen later versions of Miss Marple in TV adaptations where she was played by Joan Hickson, Geraldine McEwan and Julie McKenzie, it seems fair to say that the persona Rutherford invests the character with is not the persona Christie had in mind.  Subsequent Marples have been quiet, focused and forensic, people you’d barely notice sitting in the corner of the drawing room while skullduggery was afoot.  Rutherford’s Marple is a force of nature – you’d definitely notice her before long.

 

Christie was reportedly unhappy with the Rutherford movies, regarding them as comedies rather than the mystery stories she’d written originally.  That’s true – they are comedies, very funny ones, rather than mysteries.  But Christie seemed appreciative of Rutherford herself and even dedicated her 1963 novel The Mirror Crack’d from Side to Side to her.

 

Though based on the works of a writer closely associated with the sub-genre known as the ‘country house mystery’, only one of the four Rutherford / Marple films mainly takes place in a country house.  That’s the first one, 1961’s Murder She Said, based on Christie’s 1957 novel 4.50 from Paddington.  Next up is Murder at the Gallop (1963), mostly set in a hotel run by an enthusiastic equestrian and foxhunter.  It’s based on Christie’s book After the Funeral (1953), which actually featured Hercule Poirot.  Murder Most Foul (1964), inspired by another Poirot novel, McGinty’s Dead (1952), is about murderous goings-on among the members of a theatre company.  The same year’s Murder Ahoy! is almost an original screenplay, though it uses elements of the 1952 novel They Do It with Mirrors.  Its story takes place on a former Royal Navy warship that’s become a floating reform school for juvenile criminals.

 

© Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer

 

So, we’ve got a stately home, horse-riding, the theatre and the Royal Navy – four great British institutions.  Accordingly, in the films, the heads of these four institutions are played by four much-loved British character actors of the period, James Robertson Justice, Robert Morley, Ron Moody and Lionel Jeffries respectively.  Each is pompous and stuffy and when Rutherford’s Miss Marple arrives on the scene, determined to sniff out the rottenness in each institution – rottenness that’s led to murder – they aren’t happy.  That’s largely what makes these movies enjoyable.  We get to see some old-fashioned, patriarchal British pomposity being relentlessly pricked by an eccentric, infuriating old lady who refuses to know her place.

 

Indeed, I’d argue these movies are subversive in their quiet way.  Rutherford’s Miss Marple is almost a forerunner to Columbo, the disheveled, blue-collar detective played by Peter Falk in the TV show of the same name (1971-78, 1989-2003).  The murderers in that show are always rich, powerful bigshots who totally patronize and underestimate Columbo, but he manages to nab them in the end.  Usually by mercilessly annoying them.

 

I’ve seen people – usually diehard Christie fans – criticise Rutherford’s portrayal of Miss Marple for being ‘dotty’ or ‘batty’, but she’s not that way at all.  Rather, her Marple is admirably proactive.  In Murder She Said, convinced the body of a woman she saw being strangled on a passing train is concealed somewhere on the premises of Ackenthorpe Hall, she infiltrates the mansion by taking on the job of its housekeeper.  There, in the kitchen, she has to deploy all her culinary skills to feed the sizeable and demanding Ackenthorpe family.  Meanwhile, she uses her enthusiasm for the game of golf as cover while she searches the grounds.

 

In Murder at the Gallop, she climbs on top of a cartload of beer-barrels so that she can peer through a top window and spy on the reading of a will.  Later, she proves herself to be an accomplished horsewoman and she dances to some new-fangled rock-and-roll music.  (“One must be tolerant of the young…  I remember my dear mama was quite horrified when she caught me dancing the Charleston in public.”)  Okay, she apparently incurs a heart attack while dancing, but that’s only a ruse designed to trick the murderer into giving away their identity.  In Murder Most Foul she reveals herself as a past ladies’ pistol champion and, at the finale of Murder Ahoy!, as a fencing champion too.  That’s before she takes on the villain in a swordfight – a sequence Rutherford spent a month training for.

 

So, a skilled cook, golfer, horse-rider, dancer, shooter and fencer – she might be light-years removed from Christie’s concept of her, but Rutherford’s Miss Marple is a shining example of, simultaneously, girl-power and grey-power.

 

Her feistiness even wins her the admiration of those pompous authority figures she’s spent the films irritating.  At the end of Murder She Said, for instance, she gets a surprise when Luther Ackenthorpe, the irascible and bearish aristocrat played by James Robertson Justice, concludes that she’s just the woman to share his matrimonial bed.  His proposal of marriage hardly drips with romance, though.  “You’re a fair cook,” he tells her, “and you seem to have your wits about you and, well, I’ve decided to marry you.”  Predictably, Miss Marple decides there are some things a girl has to say ‘no’ to – and this is one of them.

 

Another unexpected marriage proposal comes her way at the end of Murder at the Gallop, this time from Robert Morley’s horse-loving character Hector Enderby.  Miss Marple isn’t taken by Enderby because he’s a keen foxhunter.  “I disapprove of blood sports!” she tells him sternly.  After she’s gone, Enderby sighs, “That was a very narrow escape.”

 

© Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer

 

While Rutherford’s Miss Marple maintains her spinsterhood in these movies, the actress’s real-life husband, the actor Stringer Davis, has a prominent role in all four.  At Rutherford’s insistence, the filmmakers invented a recurring character, ‘Mr. Stringer’, for him to play.  No such character appears in the books.  It could have been a disastrous piece of self-indulgence, but in the context of the films this addition works beautifully.  Tweedy and timid, Mr. Stringer is the librarian in Miss Marple’s village.  She turns to him when she needs research done or information dug up and he invariably, and unwillingly, gets drawn into her unorthodox investigations.  He becomes a faint-hearted Dr. Watson to her gregarious Sherlock Holmes.

 

Davis and Rutherford dated for 15 years and didn’t tie the knot until 1945 when he was 46 and she 53.  The delay was due to Davis’s mother, who deeply disapproved of Rutherford, and the couple only got married after she died.  That might suggest Davis, intimidated by his mum, was as retiring as the character he plays in the films. But he was courageous enough to fight in both World Wars.  During the first one, he served as a young officer at the front in 1918.  At the start of the second one, he re-enlisted at the age of 40 and served for its duration.  His World War II experiences included being evacuated from Dunkirk in 1940.

 

The films’ other recurring character is a genuine Agatha Christie creation who appears in four of her books.  This is Inspector Craddock, played by Australian actor Charles ‘Bud’ Tingwell.  Craddock starts each movie having his patience tested by Miss Marple’s meddling and wild claims but, of course, by the end of it, he’s reluctantly conceded she was right all along and is fighting her corner.  A veteran of the Australian film industry, Tingwell moved to Britain in the 1950s.  He’s forever etched in my memory as Alan Kent, the unfortunate traveller whose blood is used in a gory scene to revive Christopher Lee in the 1966 Hammer horror film Dracula, Prince of Darkness (1966) – the first scary movie I saw that genuinely scared me.  In the 1970s he returned to Australia, where his later films included the delightful and highly popular comedy The Castle (1997).  By the time of his death in 2009, he was so respected that he received a state funeral in Melbourne.

 

© Lawrence P. Bachman Productions / Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer

 

Meanwhile, the guest casts in these films are a joy for someone of my vintage and geographical background.  They’re choc-a-bloc with faces familiar to me from watching TV as a kid – from either the 1960s and 1970s British TV shows or the 1950s and 1960s British movies that were broadcast then.  As well as Robertson Justice, Morley, Moody and Jeffries, there’s Francesca Annis, James Bolam, Richard Briars, Peter Buttersworth, Andrew Cruickshank, Finlay Currie, Windsor Davies, Meg Jenkins, Arthur Kennedy, Duncan Lamont, Miles Malleson, Francis Matthews, William Mervyn, Derek Nimmo, Nicholas Parsons, Conrad Philips, Dennis Price, Flora Robson, Terry Scott, Robert Urquhart, James Villiers and Thorley Walters.  Even a future Miss Marple, Joan Hickson, turns up in Murder She Said.

 

After Murder Ahoy!, Rutherford made one more appearance as Miss Marple.  She and Stringer Davis appeared fleetingly in 1965’s The Alphabet Murders, a Hercule Poirot movie with Tony Randall playing the Belgian detective and none other than Robert Morley playing his sidekick, Hastings.  I haven’t watched The Alphabet Murders, but it’s reportedly dreadful and Rutherford and Davis’s cameo may be the only good thing in it.

 

Admittedly, something that tinges my enjoyment of the Rutherford / Marple movies with a little sadness is knowing that a few years after making them Rutherford started to suffer from Alzheimer’s disease.  Devoted to his wife, Stringer Davis cared for her until her death in 1972.  He died himself just 15 months later.

 

Anyway, I shall finish here as it’s time to go and watch Wake Up Dead Man on Netflix.  Hey, you know what?  If that Daniel Craig plays his cards right, he could become the new Margaret Rutherford.

 

From wikipedia.org

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Paul McAllister is still here

 

© Still Here Magazine

 

Still Here magazine, an online publication that publishes poetry, short stories, essays and artwork focusing on “emotional realism, grounded storytelling, and honest writing that isn’t afraid to bleed a little”, has just published its second issue under the title Ghosts of Our Pasts.  I’m happy to report that Paul McAllister, the pseudonym I use for the occasional piece of fiction I write that’s grounded in reality and set in Ireland, has a short story included in this new issue, entitled That Time.

 

In keeping with the issue’s theme of the past persisting into the present – in the words of Still Here’s editor Alauna Lester, “even what follows us can still lead us forward” – That Time is inspired by a memory of something that happened to me as a kid in Northern Ireland in the 1970s.  At the time it seemed a trivial, and indeed comical, incident.  But with hindsight, and in the context of the madhouse that was 1970s Northern Ireland, it was rather terrifying too.  No wonder the memory has stuck with me.

 

Containing 33 poems, nine prose pieces and four works of art, and formatted in a manner that’s beautifully and hauntingly visual, Issue Two of Still Here can be downloaded here as a pdf, for free.  You rarely get something of such quality for nothing these days, so I urge you to sample it!

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The big Mc

 

From wikipedia.org / © Nonsenseferret

 

It’s exactly a decade since the Scottish writer, poet and columnist William McIlvanney passed away on December 5th, 2015.  Here’s something to mark this melancholy anniversary.

 

For myself and many book-lovers in Scotland in the 1980s, William McIlvanney was both a source of pride and exasperation.  Pride that modern Scottish literature was capable of producing someone as good as he was; but exasperation that the British literary establishment seemed to have little interest in him or his peers (like Alasdair Gray and James Kelman) north of the border.  On their radar, Scottish writers didn’t make much of a blip.

 

Back then, the clique of authors, critics and academics who, through Britain’s highbrow media outlets, decided what was fashionable were a privileged Oxford / Cambridge-educated bunch who lived in London and seemingly lived up their own arses too.  I always find it telling that in 1984, when things felt at their very worst, the Booker Prize – the flagship award for the UK literary establishment – managed to have on its short-list five books that had novelists, biographers, literary critics and literary lecturers as their main characters.  The only shortlisted book that was about people who didn’t make a living out of literature (you know, like 99.999% of the human population) was J.G. Ballard’s Empire of the Sun.  And it didn’t win, though it should have.

 

The novel that helped put McIlvanney on the map was 1975’s Docherty, which was about a tough west-of-Scotland miner and his family trying to cope with everything that the early decades of the 20th century threw at them.  Thus, McIlvanney was never going to ingratiate himself with the ‘in’ crowd by writing about writers, biographers, critics or lecturers either.

 

I’d read McIlvanney’s 1977 novel Laidlaw as a teenager – more about that in a minute – but it wasn’t until I was at college that one of my tutors (Isobel Murray) urged me to read a book of his that’d just been published, 1986’s The Big Man.  I’m glad I listened to her because The Big Man proved to be one of my favourite books of the 1980s.  It features another miner, called Dan Scoular.  He’s an ex-miner, actually, because this is the post-miners’-strike 1980s, Scoular has lost his job and he and his family are struggling to make ends meet.  The imposing Scoular happens to be good at fighting, though it’s a side of him that he’s suppressed for a long time.  Then he’s approached by a Glaswegian gangster who offers to pay him a small fortune if he takes part in an illegal bare-knuckle fight.  Thus, Scoular faces a dilemma – does he do something that he finds abhorrent if it saves him and his loved ones from penury?  Inevitably, after he ignores his better instincts and agrees to the proposal, he finds out that there are more complicated and even nastier things going on in the background.

 

© Hodder and Stoughton

 

The Big Man is the most cinematic of McIlvanney’s books and it was no surprise that it was filmed, in 1990, by David Leland.  The film gets some things right.  The villains, played by Ian Bannen and Maurice Roëves, are good.  However, it gets a lot wrong, including a Hollywood-esque, feel-good ending far removed from the bleak, ambiguous note with which McIlvanney closes the book.  Another problem is that, at the time, there wasn’t a bankable-enough Scottish star for the filmmakers to cast in the role of Scoular.  So they had to search around and the next best thing they could find was a Northern Irishman, Liam Neeson.

 

Now I like Neeson, but every time in The Big Man that he opens his mouth and those dulcet County Antrim tones of his emerge, the sense that you’re in a hard-pressed mining town in the West of Scotland goes out of the window.  It’s a pity that the film wasn’t made during the years since, when some bankable Scottish actors have come to prominence (though it might be difficult to find one with the necessary, hulking physicality that Neeson had).  Incidentally, The Big Man – a movie about Scottish ex-mining communities and ruthless Glasgow criminals – also has Hugh Grant in its cast.  I’ll give you all a minute to pick your jaws up off the floor.

 

A later novel by McIlvanney, 1996’s The Kiln, received a lot of acclaim.  It even had a recommendation on its cover from Sean Connery.  I’ve just praised McIlvanney for not writing books about writers, but The Kiln actually has a writer as its central character, one in the throes of a mid-life crisis.  However, the novel is more a coming-of-age novel because its hero spends much of it looking back on his working-class youth, especially on a period he spent toiling in a local brickworks.

 

When The Kiln appeared, it seemed to cement – an appropriate verb for a book about bricks – McIlvanney’s status as a major figure in Scottish letters.  But it seemed the last time that he commanded such attention.  Recently, I was thinking about The Kiln and I remembered reading it while I was making a long-distance bus trip during the only occasion I was in Australia – which was in 1997, almost thirty years ago and almost twenty years before McIlvanney’s death.  What on earth happened to him after that?  I’d come across an occasional interview with him or article by him in the Scottish press, but that was about it.  In 2006 he published one more novel, Weekend, though it arrived with little fanfare – the antithesis of the reception The Kiln got a decade earlier.

 

© Hodder and Stoughton

 

Though as far as mainstream literature was concerned McIlvanney seemed to disappear from view after The Kiln, he did in recent years win belated acknowledgement for his work as a crime writer – specifically, for his 1977 novel Laidlaw, which was republished in 2013, and its sequels The Papers of Tony Veitch (1983) and Strange Loyalties (1991).  (The latter book also serves as a grim semi-sequel to The Big Man.)  All are about a tough but intellectual and philosophical Glasgow detective called Jack Laidlaw.  Since then, crime novels set in Scotland have sold by the barrow-load and Scottish crime writers like Iain Rankin, Val McDiarmid, Denise Mina, Christopher Brookmyre and Stuart MacBride have enjoyed lucrative careers, so McIlvanney can be seen as the man who started it all.  His Jack Laidlaw was the prototype for Inspector Rebus and the rest.  In effect, McIlvanney created ‘Tartan Noir’.

 

Even when I read Laidlaw at a young age, I found it a bit uneven (as prototypes usually are), its prose shifting slightly uncomfortably between Glasgow-speak and Raymond Chandler-isms.  It wasn’t helped by the way it was marketed, either – “Turn down a Glaswegian when he offers you a drink,” intoned the blurb on the back, “And he’ll break your legs,” which wasn’t what the book was about.  Laidlaw focuses more on psychology than on violence, and I found it disconcerting that in its final pages the hero isn’t rushing to catch the murderer so much as he’s rushing to save the murderer from gangland-backed vigilante justice.  But all power to McIlvanney for inventing what would become Scotland’s biggest literary export.  Iain Rankin, in particular, has always admitted his debt to him.

 

McIlvanney was a political thinker too and during the 1990s – back in those long-ago days when Scotsman Publications produced material that was worth reading – he was a perceptive columnist in the Scotland on Sunday newspaper.  I also remember him delivering a speech in Edinburgh’s Meadows during the March for Scottish Democracy rally held on December 12th, 1992, demanding the creation of a Scottish parliament.  On stage, in front a crowd of 30,000 people, he performed far better than any of the politicians in attendance.  He memorably summed up the case for a parliament saying: “We gather here like refugees in the capital of our own country, wondering what we want to be when we grow up.  Scotland – the oldest teenager amongst nations.”

 

But at the same time he pleaded for racial tolerance.  “Scottishness,” he pointed out, “isn’t some pedigree lineage.  It’s a mongrel tradition.”  I suspect that with McIlvanney’s speech that day began the emphasis on ‘civic nationalism’ that Scottish nationalists – at least, the decent, mainstream ones, not the fringe, far-right heidbangers – have been at pains to cultivate ever since.

 

Finally, William McIlvanney played an indirect role in the start of my writing career.  My very first short story to see publication, a slice-of-life piece set on a Scottish farm with the self-explanatory title Lambing Time, appeared in a magazine called Scratchings, then produced annually by Aberdeen University’s Creative Writing Society.  Scratchings had been launched in the early 1980s with the help of a financial contribution from McIlvanney.  At the time he was Aberdeen University’s writer-in-residence and he was approached by two young students who “wanted to borrow 40 pounds to start a poetry magazine.  Would he be able to lend them the money?”  He did, Scratchings was born, and it provided a home for Lambing Time a few years later.

 

Incidentally, the two students who successfully tapped McIlvanney for 40 pounds were Dundonian Kenny Farquharson, now a columnist with the Times newspaper; and Invernessian Alison Smith, now better known as the novelist Ali Smith, who’s been shortlisted three times for the Booker Prize – yes, the award whose shortlist bugged me so much back in 1984.

 

© Hodder and Stoughton