Kim Newman, page 1 of 2

The premise behind Kim Newman’s latest novel is that Raymond Chandler (RT to his friends) and William Pratt (better known as Boris Karloff, but Billy to his friends) not only knew one another — both came from English public schools, and lived near to one another for a while in Dulwich — but teamed up to fight often macabre, even supernatural, crime. And it’s narrated by Chandler, so it’s all done in that classic hardboiled style:

“In a mystery, Joh would be the hero. In life, as it now turned out, he was the corpse.”

The above-mentioned Joh Devlin is — or was — the third of their crime-fighting trio, an ex-cop-turned-private-eye whom Newman based loosely on Leslie T White, a real person the real Chandler used as the partial inspiration for his fictional private eye Philip Marlowe.

At the start of the novel, RT, Billy and Joh have already got a few cases behind them, including “the Mystery and Imagination Murders” and “the Ape Ricotte Abductions”, referred to, and occasionally hinted at, in the best “Giant Rat of Sumatra” style. Then things get serious when Joh Devlin turns up dead — shot in the head, seemingly by himself, while behind the wheel of a car that simultaneously drove off the end of a pier. Everyone immediately recognises it as straight from Chandler’s own fiction, it being an echo of a notoriously untied loose end (who killed the chauffeur?) from Chandler’s first novel, The Big Sleep. (Which, at the time of Newman’s novel, Chandler has only just had published. For most of the book, which largely takes place before Joh’s death, Chandler is only known to the world — if he’s known at all — as a writer for the pulps. Billy, meanwhile, though a star thanks to playing the monster in Frankenstein, is in something of a career dip, as horror movies have temporarily gone out of fashion.)

We then take a step back in time to the bizarre case which led to Joh being ousted from the police force, and his becoming a private eye. Junior Home, the son of an ultra-wealthy Hollywood magnate, has been found nearly dead after being fried alive by some sort of electrified metal cage-suit. Turning up at his mansion immediately afterwards, Joh finds a basement straight out of James Whale’s Frankenstein, complete with crackling generators and knife switches — with the added macabre detail of four bodies hanging from the wall, each encased in a similar cage-suit as Junior Home was fried in. Only, one of these bodies isn’t dead.

Joh gets thrown off the case — and the force — because this is the kind of investigation the corrupt LAPD wants in the hands of officers happy to take bribes. So Joh tells his pals RT and Billy, who decide to do some investigating of their own. Their first stop is the mysterious Lamia Munro Clinic where Junior Home is recovering. Or, it turns out, more than recovering. Because when they find him, he’s far from the frazzled little man he was when Joh last saw him. He is now, somehow, a giant with incredible strength, a super-fast healing ability and perhaps even telekinetic powers. His explanation:

“I decided I didn’t want to die. Not now, not ever; never.”

RT calls him “The world’s first self-made Übermensch”, and:

“As for moral constraints—he was third generation Hollywood money… qualm was bred out of him.”

There’s an excellent interview with Newman about this book at the Talking Scared podcast, where the interviewer points out how redolent the character of Junior Home is of a certain ex-president: a rich man-baby using the wealth he inherited to buy himself power he doesn’t deserve and will only misuse. Newman says it wasn’t a parallel he’d intended (he partly based the character on the Hollywood moguls of Chandler’s and Karloff’s day), and that he’s used such characters since he started writing — which is depressing as it means it’s a type that will no doubt recur, in real life, again and again.

But this isn’t a book about the takedown of a monstrous, over-powered tycoon, so much as it is an exploration of ideas about what drives creativity, and how it too often produces monsters.

“Monsters”, in this book, is an ambiguous term. Sometimes Newman uses it as a straightforward indicator of what is monstrous in humankind — the need for power, and its inevitable misuse — but in a more nuanced way, he sets the term “monster” against “villain”. The monsters of monster movies, though undeniably monstrous, are also often flawed creatures we can feel sympathy for, Frankenstein’s creature being a clear example. These monsters are monstrous because they’re different, and often have a sort of innocence about them. Monsters, RT writes, are often monsters because they’re afraid; villains, on the other hand, are villains because they don’t feel fear. Monsters are the misunderstood; villains are plain bad.

(We get a bizarre example of such villains in the second half of the book, as Junior Home sends out his peculiar bunch of henchmen to deal with the investigators. These henchmen double as the stars, stand-ins, and stuntmen of Home’s rip-off series of Marx Brothers-style comedies, the Sparx Brothers, and they like to do their killing in the style of slapstick jokes and silent comedy gags. Like dropping a safe on you.)

Then there’s where creativity comes from. Newman has RT and Billy both driven by a sort of muse character, a woman or supernatural entity called Ariadne. She has turned up, as a real person, in their past adventures, and both know she’s fascinating and dangerous in equal measure. They glimpse her again during this case, and we never learn fully who or what she is, only that she’s a driving force behind some of the more daring, deep, and dangerous creative acts in history, both those of novelists like Chandler, and of mad scientists like the Dr Vaudois who runs the Lamia Munro Clinic. In this world, creativity is driven by something monstrous like Ariadne, and often produces monsters of the likes of the now-super-powered Junior Home, but only comes about because of the actions of human beings — human beings who are weak, and so can’t help being driven by the likes of Ariadne, and whose weaknesses can’t help being transformed into unbalanced, Frankenstein-like monstrosities in a seemingly endless cycle. As RT says:

They’d shot I don’t know how many Frankenstein pictures and still nobody learned the lesson of the story.

Don’t make Monsters. Just don’t.

It’s a densely-packed novel, both in terms of ideas and language — certainly, one of its joys is the way Newman pulls off the hardboiled Chandleresque tone. (“He contemplated the ingredients of a friend’s head. The puzzle had too many pieces missing ever to make a picture you’d want to look at.”) In his afterword, Newman says it’s a standalone novel, though some of the characters (including Ariadne) have apparently appeared in his other fiction — but I wonder if there won’t be more adventures featuring RT and Billy from Newman’s pen in the future.

‘Is there an opposite of haunted?’ asks Steven Naremore, after he and his family move into the Hollow, an isolated, quirky house in the West Country. They’ve been noticing strange things happening, but not the traditional ghostly things. They aren’t being frightened. If anything, they’re being lightly amused and helped. ‘Un-haunted?’ ‘Blessed?’ ‘Charmed?’ The Naremores — father Steven (in investments), mother Kirsty (who has a few failed business attempts to her name, most recent of which was in antiques), daughter Jordan (a teenager who’s modelling herself after the Doris Day/Judy Garland era of film star), and young son Tim (for whom life is a military operation) — come to the Hollow looking for a new start in life, to get away from the city and some unspecified, narrowly averted familial collapse.

Initially, the Hollow seems ideal. Plenty of space for the family to live their own lives together, and plenty of character, too. The previous owner, Louise Magellan Teazle, was the author of several series of children’s books, including the adventures of Weezie and her ghostly friends (one of the stories, Weezie and the Gloomy Ghost, forms a short part of Newman’s novel), and who obviously used the Hollow as an inspiration for her stories’ house, Hilltop Heights. All her belongings come with the house, and Kirsty, who read the Weezie books as a girl, recognises some of the items of furniture, including a magical chest of drawers:

“The top drawer always had the same thing in and the bottom drawer never had the same thing twice and the middle drawer was always a jumble of surprises.”

There’s a nicely done scene where Kirsty plays with the chest of drawers and is delighted to find that, yes indeed, the top drawer does always have the same thing in it (nothing), the middle drawer has a jumble of surprises (a load of coat-hangers, at first), and the bottom drawer seems to have a different thing in it every time it’s opened. At first, there’s a rational explanation: the thing she put in the top drawer fell down the back and into the bottom drawer. Then she thinks that the newspaper she finds lining the bottom drawer on opening it a second time was something she missed seeing the first time. But the next time she tries the bottom drawer, the magical chest of drawers proves undeniably magical. It’s like that scene in Poltergeist where the mother demonstrates how a chair always slides back to where it’s supposed to be: a moment of fun with the supernatural before the full-on horror begins.

Newman’s An English Ghost Story, though, isn’t your traditional haunted house story. Things don’t move so quickly into terror. There’s a long honeymoon period in which the family members discover their own way of playing with the magical presences of the Hollow — Tim incorporates them into his soldier-games, Steven receives the odd hint or warning via his computer screen-saver, Kirsty has her magical chest of drawers, and Jordan finds a wardrobe full of all the clothes she could ever want.

But things do go wrong. It’s not, though, that the ghosts turn nasty. Rather, it’s the family members’ own troubles that are amplified and enacted by the supernatural presences in the Hollow. Things take a decidedly downward turn when Jordan’s city boyfriend, Rick, fails to turn up on schedule, and her Doris Day ideal gets torn up in an apocalyptic tantrum. Suddenly, the family are at each other’s throats like they were in their old home in the city, only this time they’re surrounded by supernatural presences all too ready to turn the slightest dark whim into a very dangerous, nightmare reality.

“My original concept was to invert the formula of The Amityville Horror or The Shining (and many many others) — instead of a family being driven mad by a house, a house is driven mad by a family,” says Newman in this interview. And the novel is very much about family — how a family can collapse in on itself, into a kind of emotional black hole from which no one can escape, but also how, if they come through that, they can emerge stronger both individually and as a unit.

An English Ghost Story isn’t a straightforward horror, nor is it a creepy style of ghost story. Rather, it’s a sort of nightmarish black comedy, laying bare the murderous undercurrents in a typically atypical English family, told from the point of view of each of the four family members, in a world of ‘What you give… is what you get.’

I can’t let Doctor Who’s 50th anniversary pass without a Whovian post. For me, the highpoint has been Mark Gatiss’s excellent, and wonderfully moving, drama about William Hartnell and the beginning of the whole thing, An Adventure in Space and Time, plus the recovery of The Web of Fear and The Enemy of the World. Though I wrote a while ago about Why I Like Doctor Who, I’ve been thinking that that blog entry only answers — or, perhaps, asks — half the question. I might know why I like it, but what is it, exactly, that I like? What is the thing I’m liking when I say I like Doctor Who?

Kim Newman, in his excellent little critical appraisal of the show for BFI TV Classics, offers a few nuggets. It is, he says:

“BBC-TV’s most eccentric saga, at once cosily familiar and cosmically terrifying.”

(Though I wouldn’t say it’s cosmically terrifying in the Lovecraftian sense — something else I wrote about a while back, on Lovecraftian Who. It is, however, most certainly eccentric and cosy.)

It is, he says:

“…a continually rewritten fiction…”

Which answers my own feeling that I don’t really care too much about the continuity, or world-building, aspect of the show. It doesn’t matter to me that, for instance, Atlantis gets its comeuppance in — is it three different ways? They might be alternative Atlantises in alternative time streams. I don’t care. I don’t care either that the Time Lords in The War Games seem to be different to the Time Lords in The Deadly Assassin. All I care is that there are good stories, and that each one is in done in, as a lawyer might say, a good and Doctor Who-like fashion.

So, what is a good and Doctor Who-like fashion? What is the essence of this thing called Doctor Who? Newman says:

“Boiled down to its simplest format, Doctor Who is a character actor and a police box.”

The best definition of fantasy, as a genre, comes from, I think, Brian Atterby, who says it is a “fuzzy set”. A fuzzy set is a group of things where we’re more sure of what belongs to the set than why. “Games”, for instance, is a fuzzy set. If you try to define “a game” as, say, “something with rules”, then you realise that some games don’t have rules — childhood make-believe games, for instance — or if you define it as “something done for fun”, then you realise that sports are games done by professionals, and so on. For everything you can say is a defining feature of “a game”, there will always be at least one example of something that is a game, but doesn’t have that feature, yet it shares enough other features with other games to be a game. Doctor Who is a fuzzy set, too. There have been episodes without the Doctor, and stories without the TARDIS, but they were still Doctor Who. Each story simply has to have enough Doctor Who-ish ingredients to overcome any potential non-Doctor Who-ishess, and then it can be classed as Doctor Who.

Of course, Kim Newman was writing about the TV show, and Doctor Who is so much more than that. For me, at the start, although the TV show was the focus of it all, it was such a rare event (only 26 or so episodes per year, a poor-but-perfect 25 minutes each), that other things had to make up the bulk of my Doctor Who focus. And for me, this meant the Target books and the weekly/monthly magazine (as well as an awful lot of making up stories in my head).

Without access to the TV show, you had to be a sort of archeologist, piecing together fragments of the past. The magazine had photos and plot summaries, the books had covers and fleshed-out stories. You married it all together in your own head. I remember, at the Brighton World Horror Convention a couple of years ago, a panel discussing people’s experience of the old black & white classic horror movies, where someone said they first learned of these old horror movies through books and magazines, where all you’d have would be the same small set of stills, and that these stills were full of such promise, it made you long to see the film. But when you got to finally see the film, the result was often a slight disappointment. My experience of much old Doctor Who has been the same. I knew those few oft-recycled stills from the old shows so well, and each new, not-seen-before photo was like a treasure. Seeing the actual shows often came as a shock — mostly, for instance, at how clumsy those fantastic-looking monsters moved (the Ice Warriors, so fearsome, noble and warrior-like in photographs, so clumsy in actual motion). Similarly, though I loved the Third Doctor’s Earth-bound adventures in the novelisations, I found him off-puttingly arrogant and short-tempered in the actual TV shows. But I wonder how much part of my experience of Doctor Who was all about that effort of reconstruction — putting together the stories with the photos, archeologically reconstructing those (as I thought) never-to-be-seen adventures of yesteryear from what remained. Being involved in Doctor Who was as much an effort of imagination as it was of passive appreciation.

I recently re-watched the first ever episode of Doctor Who — still one of its best — and realised how appropriate it is that it all starts in a junkyard. Because, if it’s anything, Doctor Who is a junkyard, a junkyard of the imagination, as much full of wonders as rubbish — and often of things that are both at the same time. Like a junkyard, one of the great charms of Doctor Who is unusual juxtaposition, the fantastic beside the familiar — Daleks trundling over Westminster Bridge, Cybermen emerging from the sewers, a hulking Krynoid charging round the grounds of some old country house, Egyptian mummies in a Victorian Gothic folly.

And, of course, junkyards are full of old things. Doctor Who is full of old things, too. And old things means nostalgia. There are, I’d say, three types of Doctor Who nostalgia. There’s the most obvious one, of revisiting the episodes I watched as a kid — and not just that, but re-experiencing the whole texture of TV back then, something that, for me, is particularly evident in something like The Brain of Morbius, with its gloomy studio feel, its flash-bang effects, and the peculiar look of the period’s video technology, that conjures up a whole aesthetic of that time. Another sort of Doctor Who nostalgia is a borrowed nostalgia that comes from learning about shows from the past that I never saw, and vicariously experiencing other people’s fondness for them — the whole quaintness of Dalekmania, for instance, or realising just how 60s the 60s shows were. But there’s a third sort of nostalgia, which is about how Doctor Who plugs you into a much larger stream of the culture as a whole. Mostly, it has to be said, this comes from the show’s own junkyard mentality, of grabbing ideas from elsewhere and trying them out — Doctor Who does Sherlock Holmes, or Doctor Who does Hammer Horror, or Doctor Who does dinosaurs — but also from the way it makes use, as any long-lived, pulpy kind of story-anthology of its type can’t help but do, of all those stock characters and situations of adventure fiction, or science fiction, or British fiction — the retired colonels, the stuffy bureaucrats, the stodgily unimaginative politicians, the mad scientists, the embittered ex-soliders-turned-mercenaries, the fanatic idealists intent on reshaping the world, the dangerously eccentric millionaires, the disfigured geniuses lurking in catacombs — from the way, then, that it plugs you into a cultural nostalgia for archetypal adventure stories.

Presiding over this junkyard is, of course, the Doctor — I. M. Foreman from 76 Totters Lane — who lives, and travels, in a box. It may take the outward form of a Police Box, but this is, really “the box” — the telly itself — and it is through this, the medium of telefantasy, that the Doctor travels, changing time zones and planets as you might change channel, then pausing to observe them through his own TV screen. I’ve never really cared that Doctor Who’s effects haven’t been that great; I like, in fact, its very televisualness, its staginess, its sets-and-rubber-monsters-ishness, its wobbly spaceships on strings. Perhaps this is because my initial experience of what Doctor Who was came as much from those still photos and book covers, which allowed my imagination to bring the stories to life way before I got the chance to see them (again, or for the first time) on DVD. And so I know that the TV show itself can only ever be an approximation to the real thing that is Doctor Who, which is formed within my head.

So to me, Doctor Who isn’t just a TV program. It’s a whole bunch of stuff. Particularly, it’s a whole bunch of random, weird stuff shoved haphazardly together, presided over by a cantankerous and oddly changeable proprietor, who occasionally fits these cultural cast-offs and odd bits of the past together into futuristic or fantastic shapes, and puts them to strange but ingenious uses.

When I say Doctor Who is a junkyard, I really do mean it as a compliment.