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Kurt Vonnegut Jr RIP

posted by Peter James @ 6:34 AM   2 Comments

It has been a bad few weeks for some of the major influences in my life. First the tragic death in a car accident of my old film director friend and mentor Bob Clark, and now, after a fall in his apartment, the death of Kurt Vonnegut, author of one my ten favourite novels of all time, Slaughterhouse Five.

One of his most memorable lines is: "I don't know what's going on, and I guess I am not smart enough to understand if someone were to explain it to me. I think we are being tested by someone - or some thing - a whole lot greater than ourselves, and all I can do is hang around and try to be calm and friendly until it's over."

And another line of his from another of his novels that I love: "We have been put on this earth to fart around, and don't let anyone tell you any different."

I first read this book back in 1970 when I was fresh out of film school, saw that he lived in Cape Cod, phoned directory enquiries, got his number, and to my amazement, he answered! He was incredibly polite (far, far more polite than William Shatner - see much earlier blog!) to a squeakily enthusiastic and nervous as hell young man, and explained, very apologetically, that the film rights had already been sold. But he took my phone number (the very same payphone in the corridor from which I had received a collect call from Mr Shatner) promising to call back if the rights suddenly became available again. But he never did. Or maybe I missed the call...

If you haven't read Slaughterhouse Five I urge you to. I loved also his Sirens of Titan, Cat's Cradle and Breakfast Of Champions. His humour, his sense of irony and his essential profound humanity put him up on a pedestal for me as one of the truly great writers of the 20th Century.
Woody Allen once famously said, "I don't want to live on through my work - I want to live on in my apartment." Sadly we will just have to make do with Kurt Vonnegut's work.

So it goes.

La Crème de la Crime

posted by Peter James @ 8:04 AM   6 Comments

I was in Lyons in France last weekend for the Crime Writing festival there, and was delighted to discover much of the crème of modern British crime writing (and therefore of the world!!!) also there.


Some of the creme


I met Mark Billingham (whose books I like a lot) for the first time. Everyone had told me what a nice guy he was, and they are right - I thought he was extremely nice. We spent some time commiserating with each other about the British Book Awards - Mark was shortlisted last year for Crime Thriller of the Year, and like me, did not win (he lost to Martina Cole). I asked him how he felt when the winner was announced and it wasn't him, and he replied "gutted". That was a very honest reply, and it summed up exactly how I felt too!

Incidentally, I had been warned not to pull a face at the awards, which were televised for Channel 4, but to beam at the winner, as the camera would undoubtedly be on me. But I was damned if I was going to put on a phoney Hollywood Oscars "gosh how pleased I am for you that you won" smile for Ian Rankin as he walked up to the podium, so I scowled and raised an eyebrow, and ten million viewers now know I'm a lousy loser!!!!!

Stewart MacBride was another author there who I was delighted to meet. I read Cold Granite some while back and thought it was a brilliant book - fresh, original writing, a great sense of place, and a wonderful understanding of the world of the police. He was a very charming guy, but probably won't ever speak to me again after our recent dining experience...

We all got taken out to dinner to a very "typical" old-style, paysanne Lyons restaurant for dinner on the Saturday night. The menu read like the chart on a post-mortem room wall. Every kind of offal going, from tripe, brains, sweetbreads, the cow's head, and cheeks, the pig's trotter - it seemed like they'd cut off and thrown away all the good bits... Stewart and I both read it in dumb silence, feeling queasier by the second.

It isn't that I am not an adventurous eater, but Kathy Reichs had managed to put me off sweetbreads (thymus) for life and after a hard day of solid interviews and panels at the festival, I wanted some comfort food. A steak and frites would have been perfect. Then I spotted "andouillette". I told Stewart that this was a sausage and should be OK. He perked up and ordered it, and so did I. Big mistake... What arrived looked like a foetus wrapped up in a condom. When I took my first - and last - tentative bite I felt I was eating bad-breath flavoured carpet lining. Stewart said it all with his eyes - I think the flavour had numbed his vocal chords.

I also renewed acquaintance with Graham Hurley, who I last met when were teaching a workshop at Southampton University eleven years - and, as he and I joked - a genre ago. I was interested to talk to him again, as I am often hearing we are compared to each other as writers, and we have both taken a South Coast city as our settings - Graham turning Portsmouth into a southern crime capital to rival my Brighton slayings!!!!!

Among the other UK crime writers present were the immensely charming John Connolly, Jonathan Trigell, whose very powerful novel Boy A is heavily drawn from the Bulger killings, my namesake, Bill James, and the very delightful historical crime novelist Ann Perry, who spoke better than any author I have every heard on how to write convincing characters.

Among the international field were Robert Crais, and many truly delightful French authors, alas not yet translated into British. Among them were Maurice Attia, who is also a psychologist and a guy I liked hugely, Phillip Le Roy.

The major award of the festival was given to John Harvey, who I had very much been looking forward to meeting, but was sadly unable to come because of illness.

Bob Clark RIP

posted by Peter James @ 2:20 AM   7 Comments

I was immensely saddened to learn today of the tragic death of Bob Clark, the film director who gave me my first break as a producer, and a man who became a very close friend for many years back in the 1970s.

Bob and I worked together on the late stages of Children Shouldn't Play With Dead Things but it was really the wonderful screenplay of Death Dream (originally titled The Veteran and then The Night Andy Came Home) that I read and fell in love with as a young film school graduate back in 1971. We raised the money and made the film, which became immensely successful, after a slow start, and then went on to collaborate on many other films together, including in the incredibly horrific Deranged (Necromania), based on the true life story of Ed Gein, the skinner in Silence Of The Lambs.

The irony of yesterday's accident is that Bob, who did not drink, refused to fly, being scared of planes. A big, tubby guy, with a huge heart, we recently met up in LA, after many years, to discuss collaborating on a remake of Children. I was delighted to see he was unchanged, still just as brimful of enthusiasm as ever, with that wonderful Southern accent still just as youthful.

There is a strange thing I have noticed about phobias. Something you don't expect gets you, not the thing you are most scared of. My other really close friend from the early 1970s, the film director John Trent, one of my partners in Quadrant Films for many years, was paranoid about smoking. So he worked out a system in which he smoked heavily for 6 months every year, then stopped for 6 months, thinking that would clear his lungs. For the 6 months every year that he had stopped he felt lousy, was bad tempered and found it hard to concentrate. He carried on this routine for all the years that I knew him. Then tragically, after delivering his son, who was the Ontario Under 16 show-jumping champion to an event, John was tragically killed by a police car which came around a bend on the wrong side, and hit his compact Cadillac head-on.

I couldn't help thinking how ironic it was that John had spent so much of his life being scared of smoking and then had died in this way. It was also very strange that John had been at my home in Sussex only days before he died. We had dinner and then, over brandy and cigars, discussed our views on life after death. John was firmly of the opinion there was nothing. "We just fade to black", he said.

Neither John Trent nor Bob Clark will ever fade to black in my mind. They are as vivid today as all those years back when we worked and created so much together.

I feel desperately sorry for Bob's family, to have lost both him and his son, Ariel, in this horrendous accident. I have lost a friend and one of my mentors, and the world of movies has lost a massive talent. Luckily his films will live on and continue to give scares and pleasures to millions of people for generations to come.

Today's press ran the following information:
Thu, April 5, 2007
Canadian director Bob Clark killed
Car crash claims Christmas Story, Porky's filmmaker
LOS ANGELES -- Film director Robert Clark, best known for the beloved holiday classic A Christmas Story, was killed with his son yesterday in a car wreck, the filmmaker's assistant and police said.
Clark, 67, and son Ariel Hanrath-Clark, 22, were killed in the accident in Pacific Palisades, Calif., said Lyne Leavy, Clark's personal assistant.
The two men were in an Infiniti that collided head-on with a GMC Yukon around 2:30 a.m., said Lt. Paul Vernon, a police spokesman. The driver of the other car was under the influence of alcohol and driving without a licence, Vernon said.

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