James ellroy

Wednesday

Dan Jones

In defence of Staines

From our UK edition

Ten years ago I moved to Staines and my mate Kwasi Kwarteng took me on a pub crawl. Kwasi was then the local MP, and as we drank our way around town he taught me a useful political heuristic. ‘If you want to predict an election, don’t listen to the BBC,’ he said. ‘Go to your local and listen to real people.’ Say what you like about Kwasi, but he had that right. My local is a backstreet boozer called the Beehive, which in decor and ambience is a portal back to the later 20th century. I go there for conversation, drinking, to play crib, to do a quiz on a Friday night and for political intelligence. For any pollsters looking to know what England really thinks, it isn’t complicated. Fund the NHS, stop the boats, get the scroungers off the welfare.

Thursday

John Burnside

Blood on the tracks: the unsolved murder of the Japanese railway chief

From our UK edition

‘There is no end to influence,’ says Harold Bloom in his seminal 1973 work, The Anxiety of Influence — and without getting into the detail of his argument, we can say that the impact of having read and admired others is always an issue for all but the most naive writers. And while Bloom’s attempts to ‘de-idealise our accepted accounts of how one poet helps to form another’ may seem a far cry from the workings of the current literary thriller, even a passing consideration of the influence of James Ellroy, master of LA noir, on his admirer David Peace quickly raises some interesting questions on how we perceive authorship, and authority, in contemporary fiction.