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James Patterson likes rape, torture, mutilation and death. So do his readers. Who doesn’t? It has been estimated that Patterson’s lifetime sales of thrillers have now topped 150 million, and that one in every 15 hardbacks bought in the world in 2007 was a Patterson novel, which means that we must all like rape, torture,
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‘It looks to me like Boris the Blue Whale,’ said Rightwayup Bird. ‘I have read all about him. He is one hundred feet long and weighs 150 tons.’ Astonishing prescience for 1981? Willy and the Killer Kipper — like the first of Jeffrey Archer’s two ‘Willy’ books, Willy Visits the Square World (1980) — is
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Chekhov originally wrote the dramatic monologue, On The Harmful Effects of Tobacco, in 1886, and substantially revised it for a second version of 1902 shortly before his death. It deals with Ivan Ivanovitch Nyukhin, a hen-pecked husband who delivers a lecture (at the request of his wife) on the evils of smoking. The play has
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Ken Follett is a cult in countries such as Japan, Italy and Spain — in Spain, in fact, there is a statue to him, inaugurated in January this year, in the town of Vitoria-Gasteiz in the Basque country. In Britain he is also loved, but perhaps not with the fanatical devotion he deserves. Most people
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The Crows of Pearblossom is a rare children’s book by Aldous Huxley, written in 1944 and published posthumously. It originated as a present for his five-year-old niece Olivia de Haulleville, who often visited Huxley and his wife, Maria, at their ranch in Llano in the Mojave Desert (Olivia later moved to the Greek island of
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Alexander McCall Smith is best known for his No. 1 Ladies’ Detective Agency series of novels (Tears of the Giraffe, Morality for Beautiful Girls, The Kalahari Typing School for Men etc.) as well as the Isabel Dalhousie mysteries and the 44 Scotland Street series. But McCall Smith has a number of other strings to his
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Using the Oxford Junior Dictionary (1979), by Philip Pullman Before Lyra, before polar bears and His Dark Materials, and before his first children’s book, Count Karlstein, in 1982, Philip Pullman was a lowly drudge in the very humblest halls of lexicography. Pullman in fact spent his earliest career in teaching, working at various Oxford middle
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Ruth Rendell, it turns out, as well as being the queen of ‘adventure sex’, is a furious decentraliser. In this small book of 1989 she argues not only for devolution for Scotland and Wales but autonomy for the English regions and a ‘cantonisation’ of the UK along Swiss lines. Undermining the Central Line is nothing
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Who is Cleo Birdwell?’ begins the flyleaf text of this book. ‘The simple answer is that she’s a New York Ranger, a schoolteacher’s daughter from Badger, Ohio, who becomes the hottest thing in hockey.’ Well, not quite. The simplest answer is that she’s Don DeLillo, author of White Noise, Underworld and Falling Man, publishing pseudonymously
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A. E. van Vogt was a doyen of the Astounding generation of mid-20th-century science-fiction writers, a group whose senior members included Asimov, Clarke and Heinlein. Among van Vogt’s novels are The Voyage of the Space Beagle, Slan and The World of Null-A. He also produced this little book, published in 1992 but conceived much earlier,
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The slender book above was the last thing Roald Dahl ever wrote, and was published posthumously by the British Railways Board. It is something of a deathbed conversion. The author spends the whole of it telling children — whom he describes as ‘uncivilised little savages with bad habits and no manners’ — how to behave
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The Fixed Period is the most un-Trollopian thing Trollope ever wrote. It is a first-person futuristic narrative set in the state of Britannula, an island somewhere near New Zealand, in the year 1980. The President of Britannula, John Neverbend, decides to institute a fixed term of 67½ years for the life-span of his citizens, after
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John Cage was the composer of 4’33”, the piano performance piece that consists of 4 minutes and 33 seconds of complete silence — except for the mutterings of the audience — and Imaginary Landscape No. 4, in which 12 radios are played at the same time for several hours. He was also the inventor of
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A Journey into God is one of four books by Delia Smith on the subject of Christian spirituality, the others being A Journey into Prayer, A Feast for Lent and A Feast for Advent. Delia journeys into God painfully aware of her own lack of recipes. She takes the apophatic approach, describing God as what
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Alternative reading Fences and Gates, Walkways, Walls and Drives by E. Annie Proulx E Annie Proulx is the Pulitzer Prize-winning author of The Shipping News and Brokeback Mountain: she has also won the PEN/Faulkner Award, the O. Henry Award and the Dos Passos Prize, and is thus one of the most lauded of all American
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Santa’s Twin (1996) by Dean Koontz Dean Koontz is the author of the schlock-horror novel Demon Seed (later a film) about a woman who is raped by a computer. Further offerings include Watchers, Lightning, The Bad Place, Intensity, Fear Nothing, and False Memory. His talents, however, don’t end there. His publishers explain: ‘At the request
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Action Cook Book (1965) by Len Deighton The fact that the cover of this book by Len Deighton shows a chap cooking spaghetti while wearing a gun lends itself to many interpretations. Was spaghetti so expensive in 1965 that it needed an armed guard? Will someone be paying the ultimate price for overcooking it? Is
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187 Men to Avoid (1995) by Danielle Brown Danielle Brown … Danielle Brown … isn’t there something familiar about this name? Hold on. If you … remove the ‘ielle’ … it’s … No. Yes. 187 Men to Avoid was written by the author of the Da Vinci Code in 1995, before he was famous and
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Jimmy Stewart and His Poems (1989) by Jimmy Stewart The most intriguing thing about this book is its title. Ernest Hemingway and His Novel by Ernest Hemingway would not work. Katherine Mansfield and Her Short Stories by Katherine Mansfield wouldn’t either. Poems by Jimmy Stewart would be ridiculous, as if he were pretending to be
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A Time Before Genesis (1986) by Les Dawson The rare book shown above (try getting hold of a copy) is Les Dawson’s only serious work of fiction. It provides a disturbing insight into the mind of the late comedian. Its thesis is that the earth has, for millennia, been controlled by alien forces who have