Blood and Porridge – Page 4 – Ian Smith's blog on WordPress

December 15, 2025December 31, 2025

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 5^th 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

December 7, 2025

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!

December 5, 2025

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 5^th, 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 20^th 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 12^th, 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

December 4, 2025

Christmas comes early for Jim Mountfield too

© Black Hare Press

I’ve never thought of myself as a Christmassy person, but the festive season of 2025 has allowed me to get a couple of Christmas-set short stories into print. So maybe I’m less of a Scrooge or a Grinch than I’d believed.

A month ago, my story Southbound Traveller appeared in the collection White Witch’s Hat & Other Yuletide Ghost Stories from Belfast’s Heavenly Flower Publishing. The story was set in 1990s Scotland and tried mostly for a realistic tone. Rather than ghosts, it featured an example of what’s best described as a ‘paranormal incident’ near its end. For that reason, Southbound Traveller appeared under the penname Steve Cashel, which I use for my less fantastical Scottish fiction.

Now, my story The Dark Crooked One has just been published in the book Eerie Christmas 4 from Melbourne’s Black Hare Press, which its blurb describes as a “collection of yuletide tales where the holly is sharp, the snow hides secrets, and something ancient stirs beneath the carols.” It contains “haunted traditions that refuse to die, gifts that demand a terrible price, winter spirits hungry for warmth, and wishes that should never have been whispered at all.” The Dark Crooked One is much more of a full-throttle horror tale, featuring a seasonal bogeyman – and indeed, Stephen King’s 1973 short story The Bogeyman gets namechecked in it – so it’s attributed to Jim Mountfield, the pseudonym I use for my scary fiction.

Though most of the horror in The Dark Crooked One is supernatural in character, there’s a little real-life horror present too. This is the stress and pain that comes when family-members, who don’t necessarily get along very well, are cooped up together in a couple of rooms during December 25^th, one of the shortest and wintriest days of the year, and are forced to eat too much and drink too much whilst making it look like they’re enjoying themselves. And have to listen to the King’s Speech (or the Queen’s Speech, as it was at the time the story is set).

Black Hare Press have done an excellent job in packaging Eerie Christmas 4. Not only have they been thorough in editing and proofing the text, but they’ve added decorative embellishments to its pages – marginalia, chapter ornamentations and dinkuses – which are both festive and spooky. This anthology is strongly recommended.

Containing 40 tales of Yuletide terror, Eerie Christmas 4 can be ordered in different formats from different vendors via this webpage here.

November 24, 2025December 15, 2025

We’ve lost the other Mr. Mountfield

From wikipedia.org / © Katherine Barton and Gaz Davidson

I was shocked and saddened to hear about the death on November 20^th of Gary ‘Mani’ Mountfield, bass player with the Stone Roses from 1987 to 1996 and 2011 to 2017 and with Primal Scream for the 15 years between his spells in the Roses.

Shocked because Mani seemed such an exuberant figure (in keeping with his exuberant bass sound) that he was the very last rock-and-roll-related personage I’d expect to die at the relatively young age of 63. I’ve seen plenty of other rock-and-roll figures on stage who did look ready to kick the bucket because of their frailty, ravaged-ness and general air of vulnerability. But not Mani, who was always ebullient. In fact, just days before his passing, he’d announced dates for a speaking tour of the United Kingdom planned for next year, which doesn’t sound like someone on their last legs.

Hailing – of course – from Manchester, Mani first played in two bands that were prototypes for the Stone Roses, the Fireside Chaps (with future Roses guitarist John Squire) and the Waterfront (with future Roses singer Ian Brown joining in 1983). The Roses’ definite line-up finally coalesced in 1987 with him, Brown, Squire and drummer Alan ‘Reni’ Wren. During the 1980s he also found time to play in a band called the Mill alongside Clint Boon, who’d later furnish humble but durable ‘Madchester’ band the Inspiral Carpets with their quirky keyboard sound.

Along with the Happy Mondays – and, okay, the Inspiral Carpets – the Stone Roses were the leading lights of the late 1980s / early 1990s Madchester movement, which irresistibly grafted the riffs of rock music onto the grooves of dance music and promoted a cheery, unpretentiously hedonistic vibe far removed from the posing and self-consciousness that’d plagued British popular music earlier in the 1980s. It also paved away for the more internationally successful, but aesthetically less interesting, Britpop explosion of the mid-1990s. Mani’s bass was an essential part of the formula. For instance, it’s the first instrument you hear on I Want to be Adored, the opening track on the Stone Roses’ eponymous and massively acclaimed album of 1989.

Sadly, legal wrangles and musical procrastination meant it was a long time before a second Stone Roses album appeared. Second Coming finally saw the light of day in 1994, five-and-a-half years later. Inevitably, after the wait and all the attendant anticipation, it was deemed a disappointment by the critics. I have to say I think Second Coming is sorely underrated. I fully understand why Simon Pegg, in Shaun of the Dead (2004), refuses to throw it along with the rest of his record collection at two advancing zombies. “I like it,” he affirms.

I saw the Stone Roses for the first and last time during the tour they did on the back of Second Coming. In 1995 they played a gig in the Japanese city of Sapporo, where I was living at the time. It was not a happy experience. Ian Brown was in a foul mood and gave the impression of wanting to be somewhere else – anywhere else. To be fair, a trio of Australian bodybuilders had beaten Brown up in a club in Tokyo a few days earlier, which gave him a credible reason for his lack of enthusiasm. Mani and the rest of the band played perfectly well.

© Geffen Records

Also slightly unhappy was the next occasion I saw Mani perform, which was after he’d joined Scottish band Primal Scream, another outfit intent on exploring the overlap between rock music and dance music. The band were on the bill of a one-day event on Glasgow Green that I attended in 2000. While they were limbering up to play the song Sick City from their new album XTRMNTR, Mani cheerfully barked into a microphone, “This is dedicated to Glasgow because it really is… a sick city!” For a large portion of the Glaswegian crowd, this comment went down like a cup of – appropriately – cold sick. (By the way, this was before ‘sick’ acquired its modern, slang meaning of ‘really good’.) Later, Mani felt obliged to announce that he was only joking and, really, “Glasgow isn’t a sick city at all!” It’d been some banter that folk took the wrong way, but it impressed me that he was man enough to apologise for it.

I saw the Mani-era Primal Scream on two further occasions: at London’s Brixton Academy in 2003, when I thought they were pretty good; and at Norwich’s University of East Anglia in 2009, when they were on blistering form. In fact, I’d include their 2009 Norwich show in my personal ‘Top Ten Gigs of All Time’. With his jolly, everyman demeanour, Mani provided some balance to Primal Scream’s frontman Bobby Gillespie, whom I always found a bit too-cool-for-school when they played live.

Before joining the reformed Stone Roses in 2011, Mani found time to participate in another band, a ‘supergroup’ called Freebass whose gimmick was that it had three – three! – famous bass players, all from the Manchester area. Its line-up also included Andy Rourke, former bassist with the Smiths, and Peter Hook, former bassist with Joy Division and New Order. The project ended ignominiously, with Mani taking exception to what he saw as Hook unjustly exploiting the legacy of Joy Division and his late Joy Division bandmate Ian Curtis – Hook had also formed an outfit called Peter Hook and the Light that performed old Joy Division songs. Hook’s wallet, Mani claimed on social media, was visible from space because it was ‘stuffed with Ian Curtis’s blood money.’ Needless to say, the two fell out, though later – again – Mani apologised and he and Hook made up.

Indeed, Hook has been one of the many musicians who’ve paid tribute to Mani since his death was announced a few days ago. Other condolences have come from members of the Stone Roses, Primal Scream, the Happy Mondays, New Order, the Smiths, the Charlatans, the Verve, Echo and the Bunnymen, Elbow, the Courteneers, the Farm, Ocean Colour Scene, Kasabian, Shed Seven, Badly Drawn Boy… I’m not a big fan of Oasis, but I thought it touching that, at their concert in Brazil the other night, Liam and Noel Gallagher projected Mani’s face onto the giant screen behind the stage whilst performing Live Forever (1994). You get the impression you could go around everybody involved in the British music scene in the 1980s and 1990s and not find anyone with a bad word to say about the guy.

Finally, I owe Mani some gratitude. Years ago – around 2010, I think – I was trying to think of a pseudonym to put on a horror short story I was about to submit to a magazine. ‘Ian Smith’ seemed too dull a name to attach to a piece of short fiction that was meant to chill the blood. At the time, I had a Primal Scream album playing in the background and I suddenly thought, “They’ve really had a second wind since Mani joined them.” Then it occurred to me: Mani’s real name was Gary Mountfield. ‘Mountfield’ sounded about right for a pseudonym – it wasn’t too exotic, but not too common either. (Mountfield was also the name of a village in Country Tyrone, Northern Ireland, where I used to live, so it had a personal connection with me too.) Thus, the penname Jim Mountfield was born. It’s adorned nearly 70 published short stories since then.

So, thank you for the inspiration, Mani.

From wikipedia.org / © livepict.com

November 21, 2025November 24, 2025

Go west, young Scots (if you can)

From bellacaledonia.org.uk

Once upon a time, the misery involving Scotland and the FIFA World Cup hinged around the fact that, though the Scottish men’s football team usually qualified for the thing, they never, ever managed to progress beyond its first round. This was irrespective of whether they played well (in 1974, managing a win and two draws, one of those draws with Brazil, but going out on goal difference); badly but with a flash of genius when it was too late (in 1978, getting beaten by Peru, drawing with Iran, finally finding their mojo and defeating the tournament’s eventual runners-up Holland, but going out on goal difference); or simply badly (most of the rest of the time).

My family moved from Northern Ireland to Scotland in 1977, in time for Scotland’s campaign in the 1978 World Cup. As I noted above, that performance wasn’t all bad. However, the team’s departure for Argentina, the host country, had been accompanied by a Scotland-wide tsunami of insane expectation and over-optimism. The madness was caused by some witlessly hopeful predictions from Scotland manager, Ally MacLeod, which an irresponsible and headline-hungry Scottish press had amplified. (The team had some good players, but not that good.) When their country didn’t win the World Cup, as everyone had been braying they would, but flopped in the first round, the Scots treated it as a national humiliation. And for years, if not decades, afterwards, they suffered from Post-Ally-MacLeod-Stress-Disorder.

During the 1982 World Cup, I was working in Northern Ireland. I got caught up in the euphoria of Northern Ireland’s unexpected and brilliant run in it – they got past the first round and beat host nation Spain along the way – and, probably fortunately, I didn’t have to focus too much on Scotland. By 1986, I was studying in Aberdeen. For Scotland’s final first-round match of that competition, in Mexico, they needed to beat Uruguay by at least two goals. A mate called Alan Kennedy invited me and a few others to his house to watch the game on TV. For the occasion we ordered a keg of beer and tucked into it several hours before the kick-off. Well lubricated, I dozed off in an armchair not long into the match. What a lucky man I was.

Four years later, in 1990, I was working in Hokkaido in northern Japan. This time, with the World Cup taking place in Italy, I invited a few of my friends to my apartment for Scotland’s final first-round game. Their campaign had begun with another gut-wrenching, soul-destroying defeat – by Costa Rica – that added yet more scars to the nation’s psyche. But then they’d beaten Sweden and now they needed to see off Brazil. They didn’t. The folk I invited to my apartment for the game consisted of some Japanese colleagues and a football-daft Glaswegian called Bill Quinn. Afterwards, one Japanese colleague remarked, “I’ve never seen anyone look so sad as your friend Mr Quinn when the match finished.”

Scotland didn’t qualify for the 1994 World Cup in the USA but made it to the 1998 one in France. By now the nation was well past any delusions that they might come near to winning the damned thing. They just prayed that their team would get past that f**king first round and into the second one. Small wonder that for Scotland’s official 1998 World Cup anthem, the Scottish Football Association got Del Amitri to sing a wistful song called Don’t Come Home Too Soon.

From wikipedia.org / © A&M Records

During this competition I was at my family’s home in the Borders town of Peebles and I watched all three Scotland games in the town’s cosy Bridge Inn, known locally as ‘the Trust’. After the third game, a three-goal humping by Morocco that ensured that, yes, Scotland were coming home too soon, I left the Trust and headed for the Green Tree Hotel at the far end of the High Street. The public bar there was full of people who’d just been watching the game in full regalia – team shirts, tammy hats, tartan scarves and kilts – and whom I expected to be miserable beyond belief. They weren’t. Their team had taken an early bath for the umpteenth time, but what the hell? They’d decided they might as well party. The ensuing evening was one of the best I’ve ever had in a pub. Someone behind the bar stuck on a compilation record called The Best Scottish Album in the World Ever (1997) and I couldn’t believe how many grown men around me knew all the words to Shang-a-Lang (1974) by the Bay City Rollers.

That evening in 1998 was symbolic of what’d happened regarding the Scottish football team and its supporters. While the former seemed doomed to flounder at these big events, the latter had given up on any expectation of their team doing well and were simply determined to enjoy themselves, win, lose or draw. In the process, their self-deprecating humour and dedication to good-natured partying earned them the reputation of being one of the best sets of football fans in the world. For instance, the city council of Bordeaux, where Scotland had played two of their 1998 World Cup games, took out a full-page advert in Scottish newspaper the Daily Record to thank the fans for their behaviour: “We will never forget your ‘joie de vivre, the way you know how to have a good time and your sense of fair play. Come back soon. We miss you already!” I’m sure those sentiments were shared by Bordeaux’s bar and off-licence industry.

Indeed, I felt sorry for bigger countries with a reputation for greater footballing prowess, whose fans did expect them to deliver the goods. I’d see those countries’ fans gather to watch a make-or-break World Cup game… And, when the final whistle blew and their country had messed up, lost the game and exited the competition, those fans immediately headed home with scowls on their faces. Wait, I’d think, aren’t you at least going to hang around and party? (Yes, I’m looking at you, England fans.)

We’re more than a quarter-century on from the 1998 World Cup. The issue with Scotland since then is that they’ve failed to qualify for the competition at all. Bellyaching about them never progressing beyond the first round of it seems like an unobtainable luxury now. We didn’t know how lucky we were back in the late 20^th century.

Happily, though, all that has changed. November 18^th saw Scotland clinch qualification for next year’s World Cup tournament in Mexico, Canada and the USA by beating Denmark 4-2 at Hampden Park in Glasgow. Sure, Denmark had the lion’s share of the play, and John McGinn was perhaps not being too modest when he commented afterwards, “I thought we were pretty rubbish to be honest, but who cares?” But three of Scotland’s four goals were amazing: Scott McTominay managing to backwards / overhead-kick the ball into the Danish net whilst seemingly levitating in the air; Kieran Tierney sending the ball scouring around the penalty area and just making it inside the Danes’ goalpost; and, with brilliant insouciance, Kenny McLean punting the ball in the final seconds from the halfway line – and seeing it go over the Danish goalie’s head and into the net.

Mads Mikkelsen, your boys took a hell of a beating.

From wikipedia.org / © Luca Faz

My excitement about Scotland being on their way to a World Cup for the first time in 28 years is tempered, though, by the fact that it’s being held in North America. Under the FIFA presidency of Gianni Infantino – a man who’s managed the difficult feat of making Sepp Blatter look wholesome – the sale of tickets has been, in the words of the Guardian, ‘a late capitalist hellscape’ plagued by ‘dynamic pricing, crypto detritus and corporate doublespeak’. How many ordinary Scotland fans, whose presence at past matches has created such a memorable atmosphere, can afford to attend a game? Not so many, I imagine. Plus, if Scotland’s games are played in the USA, the fans will have to get past that country’s increasingly autocratic rules on who gets allowed in. Dare to criticize President Trump on social media and you get barred, apparently. And I’d guess that, online, more than a few Scotland fans have referred to the American Commander-in-Chief as ‘a big orange bawbag’ at some point.

No, I have a horrible suspicion that the majority of Scotland’s support at any USA-held games would consist of well-heeled, conservative and sober Americans who happen to have a ‘Mac’ in their surnames thanks to some Scottish ancestor – folk who like to see a few kilts at their weddings but who quietly prefer American football and baseball to what they call ‘soccer’. The atmosphere at those games could be terribly lame.

That’s on top of my horrible suspicion, based on past experience, that Scotland will screw up against some embarrassing opposition. I have a bad feeling about the Dutch Caribbean island of Curaçao, who have just become the smallest-ever country to qualify for a World Cup, under the management of none other than former Glasgow Rangers boss Dick Advocaat. I can just imagine them ending up in Scotland’s first-round group. And then Scotland making a giant hash of things against them…

Meanwhile, as the USA’s orange Commander-in-Chief loves bragging about his Scottish roots – his mother came from the Isle of Lewis – I bet he’d make a great show of turning up in person to watch any Scottish World Cup game that takes place on American soil. Mind you, he might not survive the ordeal.

From the Daily Record / © Bordeaux City Council

November 16, 2025November 16, 2025

Christmas comes early for Steve Cashel

© Heavenly Flower Publishing

Belfast’s Heavenly Flower Publishing has just made available a new anthology called White Witch’s Hat & Other Yuletide Ghost Stories, whose Amazon write-up describes it as “a collection of spooky seasonal stories by 21 authors just in time for the short days and long nights as the winter solstice draws ever nearer.” The write-up also contains a proviso. “Reader beware: this book will give you nightmares. If you’re looking for chilling short stories that are more Krampus than Christmas, full of supernatural scares and denizens of dark nights, Yule not be disappointed.” One of those spooky Christmas stories comes from my own pen and is entitled Southbound Traveller.

Although I usually write creepy fiction under the pseudonym Jim Mountfield, Southbound Traveller bears a different nom de plume, Steve Cashel. This is the one I commonly use for ‘non-scary, non-fantastical Scottish stuff’.

A long time ago, back in those naïve days when I didn’t see any reason why I shouldn’t become the literary equivalent of Alasdair Gray, William McIlvanney or James Kelman, I sent many Steve Cashel stories off to various Scottish mainstream-literature magazines. But I only got two of them placed: one in a publication called Gutter, the other in a publication called Groundswell. I will forever remember Groundswell, a modest journal based around Edinburgh University, because they replied to my submission with both a rejection letter and an acceptance letter – I didn’t know if they’d published my story or not until I found a copy of Groundswell in a shop and checked its contents.

Then I started to have more success with my horror and fantasy stories, written as Jim Mountfield and Rab Foster, and the Cashel pseudonym was shelved. From 2023, however, I tried rewriting and submitting again a few of my old Steve Cashell stories and this time they got into print. Thus, Mr Cashel had an unexpected resurrection.

Something weird and inexplicable happens in Southbound Traveller but, for the most part, it’s an un-supernatural Christmas story. It tries to paint as realistic a picture of Christmas Day as possible – at least, as I remember Christmas Day in Scotland in the early 1990s, with lots of TV, such as the Queen’s speech, the big afternoon film and the Christmas editions of the popular soaps, and also with too much booze being quaffed and family members getting on each other’s nerves. It felt more like a Steve Cashel story than a Jim Mountfield one, so I attributed it to the former.

I should add that Southbound Traveller owes something to Hans Christian Anderson’s 1845 fairy story, The Little Match Girl.

Edited by Leilanie Stewart and Joseph Robert, and available as both a paperback and a kindle edition, White Witch’s Hat & Other Yuletide Ghost Stories can be purchased at Amazon US here and Amazon UK here.

November 14, 2025

Beeb afraid… Beeb very afraid…

From pixabay.com / © TheOtherKev

“With the right, it’s always projection.” That’s a sentiment I’ve frequently heard. In other words, right-wingers love to accuse other people of sins that they’re guilty of perpetrating themselves.

For example, the Trump regime has been cracking down on pro-Palestinian protests in American universities, and threatening foreign students involved with deportation, in the name of ‘combatting antisemitism’. But Trump has readily dog-whistled about George Soros conspiracy fantasies; has sat down to dinner with white supremacist and Holocaust denier Nick Fuentes; and claimed that the neo-Nazi Unite the Right movement that marched through Charlottesville, Virginia, in 2017 chanting ‘Jews will not replace us’ contained among its number some ‘very fine people’.

Elsewhere, Trump’s evangelical-Christian support is always eager to label gay and trans people as a threat to children. Yet by the end of October this year, the journalist Evan Hurst claimed to be following 188 news stories in 2025 whereby “Christian pastors / youth group leaders / priests / Christian school teachers, etc.,… had been accused / caught / arrested for / convicted of abusing kids in some way.” Incidentally, Trump has been mysteriously reluctant to release the files about his former friend, the financier, paedophile and human trafficker Jeffrey Epstein. Some believe this is because Trump features damningly in those files himself.

However, the current kerfuffle between Trump and the British Broadcasting Corporation, the BBC, aka ‘the Beeb’, is surely the most blatant case of the kettle calling the pot black. The BBC is in hot water because of an episode of its current-affairs programme Panorama, broadcast last year. It contained a clip of Trump addressing his supporters in Washington DC on January 6^th, 2021 – a crowd that subsequently became a mob and attacked the US Capitol, wanting to prevent Electoral College votes being counted and Joe Biden being confirmed as the new president. Except that Panorama didn’t show one clip as insinuated, but two clips, from moments in Trump’s speech nearly an hour apart. By splicing them together, it’s claimed, the BBC distorted his message and made him sound like he was inciting the crowd to violence.

Well, later, that crowd did behave violently. But Panorama’s critics seem to imply this had nothing to do with Trump. Oh no, sir. No siree.

According to Trump, the BBC “actually changed my January 6 speech, which was a beautiful speech, which was a very calming speech, and they made it sound radical.” The corporation had ‘defrauded the public’. It had lied. Thus, it was Trump’s ‘obligation’ to take legal action against the network and sue them for… one billion dollars.

It’s hilarious to see Trump lose his rag and accuse someone else of lying because, when it comes to telling lies, Trump is the Master of Mendacity, the Pharaoh of Falsehood, the Divinity of Dishonesty, the Deity of Deceit. The Washington Post catalogues him making ‘30,573 false or misleading claims’ during his first presidency alone. By my calculations, if somebody had successfully sued him for a billion dollars for every ‘porkie pie’ he told between 2016 and 2020, he’d have had to shell out a sum of money in 14 digits.

No doubt the BBC was guilty of sloppy, even vindictive (if you can be that towards Trump) journalism with the Panorama episode. But Trump did instigate the Capitol riot. He was impeached for it a week later and would have been convicted if two-thirds of the Senate had voted for it the following month. As it was, a majority of senators voted for his conviction, by 57 to 43, with seven Republican senators voting for it alongside the Democrats. And Wikipedia’s account of the aftermath of the Capitol riot is a reminder of the revulsion just about everyone who wasn’t a diehard Trump supporter felt at the time – no matter how much these days Trump tries to rewrite history about what happened.

© CBS News

His culpability was obvious before January 6^th too. The mob was present in Washington DC that day because of Trump’s relentless lies about the 2020 US presidential election being ‘stolen’ from him. The journalist Howard Goodall has compiled the messages he sent out to his followers in the run-up to the gathering, including: “Big protest in D.C. on January 6^th. Be there, will be wild…!” “We will never give up. We will never concede…” “We’re going to fight like hell. If you don’t fight, you’re not going to have a country anymore.” If the Trump-BBC spat does end up in court, I’d love to hear his line of argument. “The BBC twisted the truth about me inciting a bad thing that I really did incite.”

One great irony is that Trump has massively benefited from news companies editing his speeches, in that they usually pick out the bits where he sounds vaguely coherent and sane and ignore the lengthy stretches that suggest his brain is rapidly putrefying into a dollop of rancid mush.

For example, this is him havering to the American Business Forum in Miami on November 5^th, seemingly unaware of the difference between South Africa and South America: “For generations. Miami has been a haven for those fleeing communist tyranny in South Africa. I mean, if you take a look at what’s going on in parts of South Africa, look at South Africa, what’s going on. Look at South America, what’s going on. You know, I’m not going to — we have a G20 meeting in South Africa. South Africa shouldn’t even be in the Gs anymore because what’s happened there is bad. I’m not going. I told them, I’m not going. I’m not going to represent our country there. It shouldn’t be there. Take a look at what’s happening in different parts of South America….”

The furore erupted when right-wing British newspaper the Daily Telegraph reported on a leaked memo by Michael Prescott, a one-time political editor for another right-wing British newspaper the Sunday Times and, until recently, an advisor to the BBC’s Editorial Standards and Guidelines Board. Prescott’s memo raised ‘concerns’ about the BBC’s impartiality and cited Panorama’s treatment of the January 6^th speech as an example. In the ensuing ruckus, the BBC’s director general Tim Davie and its chief executive Deborah Furness resigned.

It’s rich of the Telegraph to bang on about the BBC’s disingenuity too. According to independent reporter Sam Bright, “in 2025 alone, the paper has been forced to publish over 100 corrections, clarifications, and formal regulatory apologies.” Meanwhile, other right-wing British newspapers soon joined the anti-BBC feeding frenzy, including the Sun (‘BEEB’S BILLION DOLLAR BUNGLE’) and the Times (‘BBC IS TOLD: SAY SORRY OR TRUMP WILL SUE FOR $1BN’). The Sun and the Times’ gaffer is Rupert Murdoch, whose Fox News had to pay 785.5 million dollars in a settlement to Dominion Voting Systems in 2023. This was after Murdoch’s network tried to propagate Trump’s big election lie by accusing Dominion’s voting machines of being rigged to steal the 2020 election from him.

Britain’s right-wing newspapers, of course, are always delighted to see the BBC in trouble. They hate the corporation both out of principle – its publicly-funded existence is an affront to their hardline capitalist ethos – and because of the major competition the BBC’s news operation gives them. No wonder they’re in seventh heaven about Trump bearing down on the Beeb with the threat of a billion-dollar lawsuit.

I also expect that, when the next British general election approaches, the BBC factor will play a part in those newspapers distancing themselves from the beleaguered Conservative Party, whom they’ve traditionally supported. Instead, they’ll swing behind the hard-right Reform party, led by Nigel Farage, who coincidentally is Trump’s number one cheerleader in Britain. If he gets into power, Farage is likely to be as ruthless with the BBC as Trump has been cutting funding for public broadcasting in the USA. No doubt the Telegraph, the Sun and co. see Farage as their best bet for getting rid of their hated rival.

Though its drama, comedy and documentary TV shows were a big influence on me during my formative years, and though it’s Trump who’s persecuting them, I have to admit I find it hard to summon much sympathy for the BBC these days. Its news reporting generally pisses me off for a number of reasons: its much-vaunted ‘impartiality’ (which too often feels like a lily-livered way of not causing offence), its unthinking support of the British establishment and, more recently, its kowtowing to right-wing politicians and opinion-formers.

The news stories on its website often give oxygen to right-wing cranks and extremists – climate-change deniers, anarcho-capitalists, bigots, Trump himself – who are allowed to express their opinions so long as someone else is quoted giving an opposing view. This approach lets the BBC avoid upsetting the cranks and extremists whilst parroting its ‘impartiality’ principle. But as the saying goes, when a journalist finds him or herself in a room with two people arguing about whether or not it’s raining outside, it’s not his or her job to simply write down what both are claiming. The journalist should look out of the window and determine if it is raining or not.

Simultaneously, the BBC is depressingly pro-British establishment. This is most clearly evidenced by the inordinate coverage it devotes to the Royal Family every time one of them dies. Its over-the-top reporting of Prince Philip’s death in 2021 and its ‘perceived attempt to manufacture a largely absent national grief’ drew a record-breaking number of complaints: over 100,000.

Meanwhile, it gives short shrift to anyone threatening to rock that establishment. These include Britain’s trade union movement (one nadir was its coverage of the ‘Battle of Orgreave’ during the Miners’ Strike in 1984, when by reversing footage it suggested the strikers had thrown missiles first and then the police attacked them, when the events had been the other way around); supporters of Scottish independence (during the run-up to the Scottish independence referendum in 2014, the former BBC journalist Paul Mason remarked, “Not since Iraq have I seen BBC News working at propaganda strength like this. So glad I’m out of there“); and left-wing Labour Party leader Jeremy Corbyn (when BBC journalist Laura Kuenssberg interviewed Corbyn in 2017, the interview was doctored to make it sound like he wouldn’t approve of police using shoot-to-kill tactics to deal with terrorists mounting a 2015 Paris / Bataclan-style attack in Britain).

And, presumably fearful of the future, the BBC has spent recent years grovelling to the right in the hope that it’ll curry favour with them. It never does. Grovelling to bullies simply results in them coming back to inflict more pain on you.

People have lost count of how many times Nigel Farage has been on the Beeb’s flagship political discussion show Question Time, but as of May 2024 it was put at 36. Meanwhile, the BBC’s news agenda slavishly follows that set by the country’s predominantly right-wing press – starting with the round-up of the newspapers on its breakfast-time shows, where viewers are exposed to whatever grievances the likes of the Daily Mail and Daily Express are screaming about that morning. If the corporation had a proper grasp of impartiality (and understood that newspapers with a physical presence on the newsstand aren’t people’s only sources of news), it’d try and balance those headlines with ones from more left-wing, online publications like the Byline Times and Novara Media.

But obviously, I find the BBC’s news coverage more palatable than the biased and often bilious garbage served up by the Mail, Express, Sun and Telegraph.

Interestingly – and I think this is something people in England don’t appreciate – the BBC is possibly the last institution that encourages people in Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland to feel ‘British’. It’s still present in most people’s homes across the four nations of the United Kingdom. It still gives them some sense of shared British community through its news programmes and its more popular entertainment shows like The Great British Bake-Off. Should the BBC disappear, I don’t see what else, culturally and in the long term, will act as the glue holding the UK together. (Certainly not the family of Mr. Andrew Mountbatten Windsor.) How ironic if the supposed super-British patriot Nigel Farage destroys this glue by abolishing the BBC or underfunding it to the point of irrelevancy.

That is, of course, if Trump doesn’t bankrupt it first.

November 3, 2025November 6, 2025

Jim Mountfield hedges his bets

I’m pleased to say that at the end of last month – appropriately in time for Halloween – I had a new short story published in Issue 5 of Witch House Magazine. Witch House is devoted to “the pulp fiction tradition of a modern gothic literature called ‘cosmic horror.’ Writers in this tradition include (but are not limited to) the following: Edgar Allan Poe, M.R. James, Arthur Machen, H.P. Lovecraft, Clark Ashton Smith, Robert Bloch, August Derleth, Shirley Jackson, Stephen King, and many more. ‘Cosmic horror’ emphasizes helpless protagonists, unexplainable monstrous menaces, and fictional occult themes such as forbidden lore and evil conspiracy.” My story is entitled The Bustle in the Hedgerow and, because it’s macabre in tone, it’s attributed to Jim Mountfield, the penname I use for such fiction.

Yes, the title was inspired by a lyric (“If there’s a bustle in your hedgerow, don’t be alarmed now”) in Led Zeppelin’s Stairway to Heaven (1971), a song that a very long time ago I thought was great but now, having heard it a million times, I’m heartily sick of. Other songs that fall into this unfortunate category include the Beatles’ Hey Jude (1968), Derek and the Dominos’ Layla (1970) and the Eagles’ Hotel California (1977). But that’s the only Zeppelin-esque influence on the story. The Bustle in the Hedgerow owes its existence to three different ideas I had at three different times, which I duly recorded in my ideas notebook. All published writers and aspiring writers of an elderly disposition, like me, carry a notebook into which they scribble the ideas that occur to them. Though I suppose these days younger writers may record their ideas using a notes app on their smartphones.

The story’s main character was based on the historian, writer and poet Walter Elliot, who’s written extensively about the Scottish Borders, especially the lovely Ettrick and Yarrow part of it. My family own a small farm near the Borders town of Peebles. One day Walter showed up on our doorstep, asking if he could take a look around one of our fields in the cause of historical and archaeological research. My dad happily told him to go ahead and, as a thank you, Walter presented him with free copies of couple of his books. “A historian doing research in a remote farm field,” I thought. “That’d make a good premise for a story.” I wrote the idea down.

I should say that Walter Elliot is still on the go. His work was acknowledged and lauded in the Scottish Parliament in 2021. So please, don’t anyone tell him I’ve turned him into a character in a horror story.

The second idea came when my dad got a grant from the European Union – oh, how long ago that seems now – to improve the natural environment of the farm and planted half-a-mile of hedgerow along the side of its biggest field. One of the reasons why the hedge got approval was because it’d act as a ‘wildlife corridor’, allowing wild animals to move from habitat to habitat without having to cross roads or cultivated land. Because the hedge started at a site where the local burn widened into a pool, and it ended at a shelterbelt of trees adjacent to our farmstead, I had a typically horror-writer-ish thought: “Hey, if something nasty lived in that pool, it could now use the hedge, the wildlife corridor, as a way of getting access to our house!” And another idea was scribbled down.

Thirdly, I’d made notes about, and always wanted to write a story connected with, the Hexham Heads. These were two little stone heads, alleged by some to be Celtic in origin, discovered in the northeast English town of Hexham in 1971. They reputedly caused unwelcome and frightening paranormal activity in the homes of whoever had custody of them. Infamously, Nationwide (1969-83) – a normally easy-going, family-friendly TV current-affairs programme that the BBC aired every weekday evening around six o’clock – featured a report on the story in 1976. For some reason, the makers of the report saw fit to throw in images of severed human heads on tree-branches, screams and an unexpected jump-cut of Oliver Reed from 1961’s Curse of the Werewolf amid the creepy interviews, traumatising every young kid who happened to be watching. It certainly scared the shit out of me. (Long believed lost, footage of that legendary 1976 report has now been discovered and restored. See here and here.)

I don’t normally dispense advice to other writers. For me, personally, this has always felt a bit pompous. But based on my experiences here, I’d recommend them to (1) make notes of their ideas before they forget them, and (2) avoid regarding each idea as having a linear correlation with a story. Rather than thinking ‘one idea equals one story’, they should keep studying all their ideas, however random, and keep looking for ways that two, three or more ideas could be combined in a single work. This cross-fertilisation allowed me to come up with The Bustle in the Hedgerow.

Containing eleven pieces of fiction and five poems, Issue 5 of Witch House Magazine can be downloaded here.

October 31, 2025November 3, 2025

10 scary pictures for Halloween 2025

It’s October 31^st, the day of the spooky festival known in Ireland as Samhain and elsewhere as Halloween. As is my custom each Halloween, I’ll celebrate the spirit of the occasion by posting on this blog ten of the creepiest or most unsettling pieces of artwork I’ve come across during the year. By the way, the above photos are of a house in my immediate neighbourhood in Singapore. Its inhabitants must really love Halloween.

Let’s begin with a great, old-school horror illustration where an unwary boatman has an encounter with a marsh-monster. This was painted by the late Angus McBride, an artist who was born in London to Scottish parents but spent much of his professional career based in South Africa. McBride’s resume included work for the educational magazines Look and Learn (1962-82) and Worlds of Wonder (1970-75), the Men-at-Arms series from Osprey Publishing and the tabletop game Middle-earth Role Playing inspired by the works of J.R.R. Tolkien. In fact, it’s from a collection of those last illustrations – Angus McBride’s Characters of Middle-earth (1990) – that this ghoulish picture comes. The hideous beastie is actually a Mewlip, which The One Wiki to Rule Them All describes as ‘a fictional race, made up by Hobbits of the Shire, mentioned only in one poem.’

Onto something more elegant. I love old posters and illustrations advertising that most decadent of alcoholic drinks, absinthe. These were often the work of Art Nouveau artists, most famously, Alphonse Mucha. But away from the gentle curves and nymph-like belles dames of Art Nouveau, there’s a darker school of absinthe artwork, which suggests the drink’s more sinisterly seductive and ruinous side. These feature green devils, black cats and, depicted in this painting from la Belle Epoque, a splendidly vaporous green lady-ghost. It’s entitled Absinthe Drinker and is the work of the Czech artist Viktor Oliva, who reputedly quaffed much of the stuff in Paris in the late 19^th century. Absinthe Drinker now hangs in the Zlata Husa Gallery in Prague.

From wikipedia.org

You get the impression la Belle Epoque passed by the great Norwegian painter Edvard Munch, whose paintings – most famously The Scream (1893) – often suggest he lived in a state of perpetual, nerve-jangling anxiety. During his childhood, he suffered the trauma of losing his mother and sister to tuberculosis and getting a bout of it himself when he was 13: “One Christmas Eve, when 13 years old, I lie in my bed,” he recalled. “The blood trickles from my mouth – the fever rages in my veins – fear cries out deep within me. Now, now, in just a moment, you will meet your Maker and be sentenced for eternity.” In 1893, drawing on those experiences, he painted By the Death Bed (Fever) with pastels. He would do further versions of it, with oils in 1895 and 1915 and as a lithograph in 1896. It’s the 1915 By the Death Bed (Fever) that I find most disturbing. The white-skinned, almost skull-faced woman on the right could pass for the Angel of Death, while the appropriately diseased-looking wallpaper resembles a close-up of a yellow handkerchief, into which a TB victim has just coughed globs of blood. Actually, the décor puts me in mind of one of the best horror short stories of all time, Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s The Yellow Wallpaper (1892).

From archive.com/artwork

Another all-time classic horror short story is M.R. James’ Casting the Runes (1911), which taps into the fear there’s something monstrous and nasty following you, and following you, and all the time getting closer… The story was filmed as Night of the Demon in 1957, 21 years after James’ death. I think James would have approved of the creepy atmosphere and build-up created by director Jacques Tourneur, but not of big, shonky-looking demon that’s doing the following and appears at the movie’s climax. Apparently, it was shoehorned into the film by its producers, against Tourneur’s wishes. Still, I really like this colourful poster for the movie, painted by Spanish artist Enrique Mataix. Mataix produced movie posters for almost a half-century, from 1939 to 1988, including ones for Bringing Up Baby (1938), Waterloo Bridge (1940), The Glenn Miller Story (1954), Lust for Life (1956), North by Northwest (1959) and Anatomy of a Murder (1959). Yes, his Night of the Demon poster gives prominence to that silly demon, but it’s slightly blurred, which hides its shonkiness. And the surrounding, infernally psychedelic colours are striking.

This next work, Can You Show Me the Way Home by Californian artist Brandi Milne, feels like it could be an illustration from a movie poster. Maybe one for a warped 1960s psychological thriller where children are imperiled, like Bunny Lake is Missing (1965), The Nanny (1965) or The Mad Room (1969). Of course, it also echoes that hoary old 1958 sci-fi / horror movie The Fly, whose finale has a human / fly hybrid – David Hedison’s tiny head grafted onto a fly’s body – trapped in a spider’s web, while the humungous spider crawls hungrily towards it. Rather than an attached-to-a-bug David-Hedison-head, Can You Show Me the Way Home artfully features a detached doll-head. Also, it’s disarmingly presented in a child-like palette of black, white, grey, pink and straw-yellow. Though going by the size of the doll-head, its spider must be pretty humungous too.

And there’s an obvious cinematic vibe – J-Horror this time – from this picture by Ohio-based concept artist David Sladek, aptly titled Waiting at the Wrong Bus Stop. It strikes a particular chord with me. During my misspent youth, I occasionally spent too long in a pub on a Friday or Saturday night and then found myself waiting for a late-night bus, in a decrepit and remote bus shelter, in the company of various unsavoury-looking characters. Though none of them ever looked as unsavoury as the characters here.

And now for something completely different. For depictions of the surreally ghoulish, you can’t beat Hieronymus Bosch. Here’s a detail from The Garden of Earthly Delights, the legendary triptych the Dutchman painted between 1490 and 1510. Its panels depict the paradise that’d been the Garden of Eden, the titular garden with its cavorting, amorous nudes and… hell. Obviously, the hell-panel contains the images that everyone remembers. This part of it shows a knight being devoured by what Wikipedia describes as ‘a pack of wolves’, though to me they look more that horror-story staple, rats – giant ones. No doubt the thoughts flashing through the unfortunate knight’s brain are similar to the thoughts of the first victim in James Herbert’s 1974 paperback epic, The Rats: “Rats! His mind screamed the words. Rats eating me alive! God, God help me…”

From smarthistory.org

And keeping with rats, this gleeful-looking half-human, half-rat creature never fails to give me the creeps. It’s the work of the American artist Brom, originally from Albany, Georgia. His career has included illustrating the roleplaying worlds of Dungeons & Dragons and, more recently, providing pictures for as well as writing his own horror novels. This illustration comes from his 2021 novel Slewfoot: A Tale of Bewitchery.

Meanwhile, proper wolves – though perhaps they’re werewolves – feature in this beautifully evocative watercolour, ink and pencil work done by the Swiss artist Eugene Grasset in 1892, Three Women and Three Wolves. I love everything about it: the trio of eerily floating women, who must be witches, or nymphs, or spirits, and the half-shocked, half-indignant way the nearest woman looks out of the picture at us; the three black wolves also looking, and laughing, out of the picture; the subtly-patterned russet trunks of the forest trees; the carpet of ferns. And what’s that lying in the bottom left-hand corner? A horn? A hunting horn? Have the wolves just been chomping on a huntsman? No wonder they look so jolly.

From wikipedia.org

There aren’t any wolves, giant rats, giant spiders, J-Horror apparitions or any other monstrosities in this illustration by another Californian, Michael Whelan, described as ‘one of the world’s premier artists of imaginative realism’ and the most lauded artist in the history of science fiction. (He has 15 Hugo Awards under his belt for a start.) Done in acrylic, it’s an interior illustration for a Centipede Press edition of the famous H.P. Lovecraft novella At the Mountains of Madness (1931) which, as far as I can ascertain, hasn’t been published yet. It’s the pictorial equivalent of a cinematic reaction shot. But what a reaction. The screaming explorer conveys all the cosmic horror that makes this particular story, set in the wastes of Antarctica, so claustrophobic. Particularly clever are the margins of grey fur along the edges of the explorer’s garments. They’re arranged so that they resemble that most Lovecraftian of motifs – a coiling tentacle.

And on the subject of H.P. Lovecraft… I traditionally feature ten scary pictures in these annual Halloween posts. But this year, here’s an extra one, an eleventh, in honour of the legendary New Jersey artist Stephen Fabian, who sadly died in May this year (admittedly at a grand old age of 95). I admire the black-and-white interior designs he did for a 1998 volume entitled In Lovecraft’s Shadow, which is a collection of short stories not by Lovecraft but by his pen-friend and posthumous publisher August Derleth. Unfortunately, reproducing an entire illustration on this page would mean reducing it and shedding some of its intricate detail. So here’s part of an illustration for the 1948 Derleth short story Something in Wood. It shows a statue of Lovecraft’s ghastliest and most famous deity, Cthulhu, looking tentacle-y and baleful, as ever.

Happy Halloween!