Tim Roux's Blog (34)

Some novels are great in that they console you that you are not alone, even if the people you realise you are in the company of are all paddling for their lives in the deepest of deep shit, inadvertently splashing each other wildly in their frenzy, and searching for the rock bottom that has not yet been sighted and may not even be there for the next foreseeable stretch of the sewer.



By this criterion, among several, this is a great novel.



This book is indeed a rocket - it… Continue

As a 54 year old man, I cannot say that I am exactly in the target market for this book which is written for 8 -15 year old girls, I would guess, and maybe their mothers.



I read it because I met the author Leila Rasheed in a local bookshop and volunteered to buy and read her two books (under no sales pressure whatsoever - in fact I think Leila was rather embarrassed and puzzled by my enthusiasm).



Not only am I a 54 year old… Continue

I wrote a part-review of Mel Nicolai’s ‘The Case’ which I thought was wittily appropriate for a book that was being released in part-work format on the SpeakWithoutInterruption site: http://www.speakwithoutinterruption.com/site/2009/04/mel-nicolais-the-case-a-view-from-the-first-empty-bottle/. Mel then sent me the entire… Continue

Whether you are an aspiring actress or a cold-blooded murderess, it pays to be consummate, to do your research for certainty, to distance yourself for clarity, to inhabit the character for persuasion, to deliver the punch line in one take, and to have acquired all these skills from a meticulous tutor at an impressionable age. As a murderess you only get one chance. As an actress you may only get one chance too. The only difference is that the ambitious actress will give her all for fame whereas… Continue

When I was a small child, getting on for fifty years ago, I used to love reading Enid Blyton’s collections of Mr. Pink-Whistle stories, one of which was called with pinpoint accuracy ‘Mr. Pink-Whistle Interferes’.



Mr. Pink-Whistle, from memory, was a smallish man with a pink face and… Continue

I kid myself that I only write from my own experience but, as my wife frequently complains, I more often write from hers.



She also complains that from the evidence of my writing I seem to have understood so much but from the evidence of my life I am almost clueless.



As they say, “It is not so much that married men make more mistakes – it is more that they find out about them quicker”.



In writing, it is the small details that bug me the most. How did anyone write… Continue

There is something lemnescatically appropriate about reviewing Mel Nicolai’s ‘The Case’ at an indefinite juncture into the story.



Did I say story?



In ‘The Case’, Mel Nicolai has done to literature what La Cirque du Soleil did to the circus. In fact, he has gone one frugality further. Not only has he removed the animals (so far, at least), but he has actually removed the story too.



I exaggerate, of course. There… Continue

Tony Flynn’s “Body Politic” eloquently addresses an intractable theme: how does the suffering and death of a political martyr relate to the ordinary lives of the rest of us? Is there a difference? Are all our lives not governed by politics and the effects of policies, yet experienced privately at the same time?



These are the questions that Tony Flynn asks as he nurses his fevered child in his arms (“Lullaby”), watches a small child, and maybe an adult, peeing in the bushes… Continue

In 1980, Tony Flynn published “A Strange Routine”, a compelling map to his terrain of loss – the loss of his mother, of his wife, of his child, of his past. Twelve years later, his “Body Politic” came out, another outright masterpiece, this time including an extended mourning for the victims of state repression.



It has been sixteen years since then, sixteen years in which you get the impression from his new collection “The Mermaid… Continue

Published twelve years before “Body Politic”, Tony Flynn’s “A Strange Routine” is, if anything, the darker work, penned, it would appear, in a particularly despairing period of his life given the topics covered, which include revisiting a childhood town as a stranger, separation and divorce, drifting and self-abandonment, silent rooms and institutional care, and stolen moments of romance.



The power of all of Tony Flynn’s work is that it is so personal, so incidental, permeated here… Continue

Nick Quantrill is a prize-winning Hull crime fiction writer whose work is highly-rated by all who come across it, with one notable exception - himself. However, even Nick reckons that his upcoming novel 'Broken Dreams' is a belter (we'll see what he says about it in a year's time).



Nick started out as a short story writer, winning the 2006 HarperCollins Crime Tour Competition for 'Punishment', an elegant 1,000 word piece which plonks an evil twist down onto the table. Other short… Continue

The Slab #1 mostly gives a distinctive voice to Northern England, and is stuffed full of wholesome goodness, as you might expect, and much brilliance too, from Fiona Curran’s twin racing track “The Penultimate Bet”, or Dan Fante’s wrecked lines and his “meanest bastard starving cat”, to Gaia Holmes’ stunning “Possession”:



“My shoulder blades crack

as he pushes them back

against the carpet.

He holds me down

until I stop twitching.

This

is true… Continue

This is an extract from a current book I am working on ('The Blue Food Revolution') which is a series of interweaving stories about a couple before they meet as they travel around the world, told on the day of their deaths.



Don't worry, I am not on this site to promote my books, more to indulge my love of reading (which is why I write books in the first place - I want to know about the characters and what happens to them), so this is a one-off:



SAASTOPIA



My… Continue

Byker Books was set up because its founder got tired of being told by publishers that they liked his work but they couldn’t possibly publish it because it wasn’t commercial enough. So, he decided to come back at them with a baseball bat, and “Radepacket #1” is definitely a baseball bat. Every story makes a play for a home run.



In fact, the “Radgepacket” series is doing for short stories what “The Slab” series is doing for contemporary… Continue