Tag: richard brautigan

I Remember That Guy

On By chrisnickson2In leeds2 Comments

Once upon a time I knew that young man in the picture above. Knew him pretty well, in fact.

He was 17 then, living in Leeds, where he’d grown up, sitting at a friend’s house, smoking a cigarette, wearing the jumper his mother had knitted when he was 12 or 13, one that still fitted, if a big snug.

His hair was probably almost as long as it would ever get. Much more at the back and it would curl up – very annoying, it made him self-conscious.

Even back then, he knew there were two things he wanted to do in life. Either be a musician or a writer. He’d sold his bass, bought an acoustic guitar and become a singer-songwriter. Not a particularly good one, it’s worth saying. He also wrote poems. Did they have the depth and insight he’d hoped? Looking back over them, no they didn’t. The were all sixth form learning and pretension, not a one of them worth saving from a fire. Three years later he’d write a novel that took its cue – took everything, really – from Richard Brautigan, as bad a pastiche as you can imagine.

He had hopes, he had dreams. In the top stream of grammar school, he imagined a clear path ahead to his goals. He’d been encouraged to believe that, as if it was his right.

He had a rude awakening ahead. Very mediocre A-level results, not enough to get into university to study English. Instead, he panicked and opted for teacher training college, which welcome him with wide open arms. But a year would convince him he wasn’t intended to teach kids.

That was in the future, though. A very winding path lay ahead that would take him back and forth between continents. Sitting there, he didn’t know that in four years he’d move to the US and live there for the next 30 years. A life full of surprises.

In the picture, though, I wonder what he’s thinking as he eyes up the camera.

I keep looking, but I can’t find a way into his mind at that age. Maybe that’s what growing older does to us. Piece by piece it divorces up from the person we’d once been. We remake ourselves many times over in a life, some for better, some for worse.

So yes, hey Chris, tell me what you were thinking as you sat there 55 years ago.

While you’re here…the second Cathy Marsden thriller, The Faces Of The Dead, will be coming out in April. If you’d like to pre-order it from your favourite bookshop, I’d be very grateful. It’s very good, I can guarantee it. Whether that young man might think so, I’m not sure. In those days he was very snobbish about literature…maybe he grew up a little.

The Tale Of The Unpublished Novels

On By chrisnickson2In leeds, richard nottingham, the broken tokenLeave a comment

It’s Sunday and tipping down with rain. Much as I’d love to be out at my allotment, there’s not a chance today.

That means it’s time for a story. A true story about the unpublished novels that preceded The Broken Token. Make a cup of tea, grab a biscuit and pull up a chair, because there were a few of them.

The first came when I was 20. I’d married an American and were we living in a bedsit in Hyde Park – the Leeds one, of course. I’d written poetry, which in retrospect was only slightly better than the usual teenage angst, and some short stories. It was time for my big artistic statement. A novel.

I’d read quite a bit of Richard Brautigan and hooked into that style, as best I could. The problem is that I wasn’t a San Francisco Beat/hippie guy who with a highly skewed, often surreal worldview. I was a 20-year-old Brit who had nowhere near the experience of the world as I believe I did. It probably had a title, but I don’t remember it.

The second came after we moved to the US, living in my wife’s hometown of Cincinnati. I was probably two or three years older. We’d bought a very cheap wreck of a house, we were both working. I’d been reading a lot more American crime novels, people like Michael Z Lewin, who books too place in Indianapolis, about 100 miles away. Bear in mind that this is heading towards the late 70s, a more innocent time. And a much more innocent your Brit, who still had a lot of growing up to do. Never mind that I believed that life had hardened me to my core.

The novel wasn’t completely awful. Hard boiled? No. Scarcely soft-boiled. Someone saw something in it and offered to put it out as a YA if I’d make some (a lot of) changes. I didn’t, and now I’m grateful. The title is lost in the mists of time, but the PI was called Steve Holzer.

There followed a more mainstream, autobiographical novel that was so much of a nothing that I can’t recall the plot. Thankfully, probably. After that, The Ohio Boy, about a talented young Ohio poet who was determined on self-destruction through alcohol. I knew nothing about alcoholism back then and didn’t really research. The poems were the ones I’d written a few years before, still seen through rose-coloured glasses. Unsurprisingly, nobody was interested.

After that? Career Opportunities, an American recalling student days in London and his involvement with the punk scene in 76-77. I still have it somewhere. Never reread it; I don’t need the humiliation. I knew about punk from records and the music papers (this was around 1980, long before any books about it all). I didn’t know London. What could go wrong?

A long gap followed. Divorce, and a move out to Seattle on the West Coast. A few short stories, a couple of one-act plays, then diving into becoming a music journalist, married again, with a young kid and a mortgage, writing a lot of quickie unauthorised celebrity bios. I was back in Leeds regularly to see my parents and picking up books on Leeds history, old enough to start really learning about it.

The result was The Cloth Searcher, an historical novel set in Leeds in the 1730s, with Richard Nottingham as a secondary character. I was stumbling towards something and nearly there, in the opinion of an agent who read it.

“Go and write something else and let me see it,” she said.

I did. That was The Broken Token, and the start of all that’s happened since.

Hey, time to wake up.

To remind you, The Scream of Sins is out there now. I’d be very grateful if you could buy a copy or borrow one from the library. If they don’t have it, ask them to get one in – others can read it after you.