This doesn’t mean (as all participants are required by law to point out) that I am The Next Big Thing. I’m not even The Big Thing After Next. No, the title refers to my Next Big Thing – that is, the novel on which I am currently working.

There are ten very interesting questions I have to answer about my current work-in-progress. I’ve done so below. I’ve decided to be honest, and confine my answers to my actual current w-i-p (as opposed to the numerous unpublished MSs that are mouldering in what the Pretentious Writer Protocols require me to call “a drawer” but is actually “Drive F:”).

Then I hand on the baton to various other workers-in-progress of my acquaintance…

Before I start, I ought to introduce myself. I’m Richard Smyth, author of the non-fiction books Bum Fodder: An Illustrated History Of Toilet Paper and Bloody British History: Leeds and of the title story in the new anthology Crying Just Like Anybody. 

What is the working title of your next book?

Great Shakes.

Where did the idea for the book come from?

This is always a question that makes me pause, frown, and then mutter to myself: ‘Yeah, where did the idea for the book come from?…”

In terms of the novel’s setting, an interest in the 1920s (both here and in the US) and a knee-shaking fondness for north-east coastal towns such as Scarborough, Whitby and Tynemouth.

In terms of its characters and plot… well, that’s harder to say. So hard, in fact, that I’m going to have to say that I simply don’t know.           

What genre does your book fall under?

Does anyone use the term “literary fiction” as anything other than a term of abuse these days? If they do, then that. If not, then I suppose “historical fiction” – although with the emphasis more on the fiction than on the history.  In fact, let’s just call it fiction.

What actors would you choose to play the part of your characters in a movie rendition?

The following should clear their diaries for 2015.

For Jon Lowell, the mild-mannered young naturalist who’s in for a few nasty shocks, let’s have Andrew Hawley. He’s from Sheffield, so he should be able to do the accent, at least. For his rakish best pal, novelist David McAllister, we’ll have Andrew Garfield, please. Ben Whishaw in a huge false beard can play unpleasant local minister the Reverend Aldridge. And, rounding out the Brit cast, Jodie Whittaker, who is just great, can play Harriet Lowell, Jon’s wife, who gets herself into a bit of adulterous bother.

Now for the Americans: a father and two daughters. For Maurice Shakes, a salty old Whitmanesque bastard, I feel spoiled for choice. Jeff Bridges (with True Grit facial hair) could work. Here, to give you an idea of the thing, is the speech from the novel that will probably earn Jeff an Oscar. The scene is the Lowells’ drawing-room. Mr Shakes has interrupted the Rev Aldridge in his commentary on the story of Jonah, and is now telling his own tale, of a friend who fell from his boat during the capture of a whale:

‘I was there,’ he said, ‘when they cut that damn’ whale open, for I, Reverend Aldridge, was aboard that whaler, too. From the second boat I watched my friend fall into the water. When, with the whale slain, we couldn’t find him, well, we supposed he’d simply drowned, and we each, after our fashion, said a simple prayer for his soul – for whaling men are simple men.

‘Then, on the deck of the White Star, we dug that whale open. With spades, you see – you use spades to break open a whale, you dig into its blubber like you’d dig into the earth. And in due time we reached the whale’s gut, and, in due time, we found, as you will have guessed, my friend.

‘I saw his body fall from the whale’s rent belly. It lay on its back on the blood-drenched deck. An eye was missing from his face. The other eye stared up at us. It said “Your prayers, friends, did me no good”. The acids of the whale’s gut had burned his skin, not like the sun burns it or even like the burning of a fire. His skin was as white as paper, and wrinkled, like an old man’s, though my friend was barely twenty years of age. And the worst, the worst of all: his fingers were all broken, at the middle knuckle, and they were caked in the stinking grime of the whale’s belly-lining. For he had been alive, this man who was my friend – he had been alive in the belly of the great fish. He had clawed at the walls of that foul prison until his fingernails split and his knuckles broke.

‘I remember the sound, all along the line of whaling men with their blubber-spades, of vomit spattering on the deck,’ Shakes said. He was speaking only to Aldridge now. The squeamish Reverend had covered his mouth daintily with his fingertips.

‘There are ladies present, sir,’ he said in a muffled tone.

‘A lady can stomach the truth as well as any man, Reverend,’ Shakes smiled. ‘In any case I’m coming to the meat of the matter. I wasn’t sick. I always had a robust constitution. But something else was vomited up from me, as I looked down on my friend’s dead body – I was purged, in that moment, not of the day’s breakfast, but, Reverend Aldridge, of my faith. My faith, sir.’

Aldridge regarded him with an expression that seemed quite spent of feeling.

He said: ‘I’m sorry to hear that.’

As though a local lady had told him that she had lost her pet cat or a small boy had told him he had lost a ha’penny.

‘So you may carry on,’ Shakes said, ‘telling your nursery stories about men who emerge from the bellies of whales preaching the glory of the god that put them there. You may carry on, as you please, telling tales of the saved and forgetting the lost, though it’s a question of one to a thousand, by my guess. But don’t ask me, Reverend Aldridge, to come and listen to your tales. Don’t ask me to share your slavery. Don’t ask me,’ he finished, still smiling (he had not stopped smiling), ‘to pray to your god-damn murdering god.’

He tipped his hat to us, thanked us for the tea and our company, and left. We all sat quite still for a moment. I watched a bead of tea drop from the Reverend’s beard and make a brown coin on his trouser-leg.

‘The man is an absolute Ahab,’ he said weakly, mustering a smile.

For a moment, replete with pity, I almost liked him.

For Cordelia, the more streetwise of the daughters, Maggie Gyllenhall, please – the right mix of intelligence and off-kilter good looks. For Catherine, less sharp-edged but no less discombobulating for Jon Lowell, Rooney Mara.

What is the one sentence synopsis of your book?

Life in Gravely, a seaside village in north-east England, is disrupted by the arrival of a free-thinking former whaler, Maurice Shakes, who dreams of a grand pier and a Coney Island-style pleasure park, and whose two daughters break like a wave upon local naturalist Jonathan Lowell – and as if that weren’t enough, it looks like there’s a hell of a storm brewing offshore…                      

Will your book be self-published or represented by an agency?

Hopefully my splendid agent, Peter Buckman of the Ampersand Agency, will press it forcibly upon London’s publishing panjandra just as soon as I finish it.

How long did it take you to write the first draft of the manuscript?

Not, as they say, applicable. Hopefully it will be done by summer (and it’s worth noting that, thanks to the achingly laborious way in which I write my first drafts, I’m not much of a one for rewrites).

What other books would you compare this story to within your genre?

Hmm. This is where it is revealed that I read hardly any modern fiction, and am consequently tarred and feathered by my peers. In the non-modern-fiction category, I’d be utterly delighted to provoke comparison with The Good Soldier by Ford Madox Ford, or William Golding’s Sea Trilogy. The Great Gatsby and everything by Hardy will probably turn out to be influential. 

Who or what inspired you to write this book?

To pluck an answer from thin air: a view of Scarborough harbour from across the bay. It seems very fragile, butting into the North Sea like that  (what Jon Lowell calls “a bold and needless venturing forth”). Various windswept views of Tynemouth Priory and Whitley Bay lighthouse fed the flame.

Jon Lowell, our narrator, is part WNP Barbellion, part WH Hudson, part Charles Darwin. Antihero Maurice Shakes is somewhere between Barnum, Whitman and Ahab.

What else about your book might pique the reader’s interest?

It’s going to be great! It’s funny and sexy (without ever crossing the line into rambunctious, or god help me); it goes clattering through British and American history with reckless aplomb; it’s got windswept shore-scapes and high drama; it’s got a few actual historical people in it (this is a cheeky habit of mine: I’ve previously appropriated Dorothy Parker and Damon Runyon as characters); with any luck it will make you weep softly into your handkerchief at the sorrowful beauty of it all.

So now it’s time for me to pass on the The Next Big Thing baton. But the buggeration of it is, I know hardly any writers (and those I do know have already Next Big Thinged). Are you a writer? Are you working on something? Would you like to be tagged? Tell me, and I’ll tag you. Otherwise I am doing nothing but making a sorry mockery of this whole enterprise.

Update: okay, let’s get tagging – award-winning short-story master Sammy Wright (http://bearsick.tumblr.com/) and author and publishing baron Cherry Potts (http://cherrypotts.co.uk/) – from hell’s heart, I tag thee.

Recalling the time he spent as a young child in his widowed father’s company, Gosse (in Father And Son) gives a strangely touching account of how the pair whiled away dark evenings discussing “our favourite subject” – murders.

“I wonder whether little boys of eight, soon to go upstairs alone at night, often discuss violent crime with a widower-papa?” Gosse wonders. “The practice, I cannot help thinking, is unusual.”

The boy Gosse was thrilled by stories of Burke and Hare and of Mrs Manning, who “killed a gentleman on the stairs and buried him in quick-lime in the back-kitchen” (Mrs Manning, Gosse adds in a “useful historical fact”, was hanged in black satin, which thereupon “went wholly out of fashion in England”).

Most compelling of all was a macabre tale that was subsequently to mystify Gosse: the “Carpet-bag Mystery”.

This case, of human remains found bundled in a carpet-bag and suspended from Waterloo Bridge, was not, it seems, well-remembered in 1907, when Gosse published his memoir.

Who will tell me what the ‘Carpet-bag Mystery’ was, which my Father and I discussed evening after evening? I have never come across a whisper of it since, and I suspect it of having been a hoax.

It was no hoax. If Gosse had ever thought to google “carpet-bag mystery”, he would have known that.

On October 10, 1857 – Gosse would indeed have been eight – some boys boating on the Thames found a carpet-bag on a bridge abutment. Inside were twenty-three human bones (what Gosse called “a dreadful butcher’s business of joints and fragments”) and a suit of blood-soaked clothing.

Inevitably, public speculation focussed on two groups of highly suspect individuals: surgeons, and foreigners. But no body-snatching sawbones or swarthy French spy was ever hauled in to Bow Street Station to answer for the crime – in spite of a £300 reward. So no hoax, then – but certainly, and still, a mystery.

You can read much more about it at the excellent Victorian Calendar.

The third part of my Gosse exploration (wild Gosse chase? No?) is not about young Edmund but about the widower-papa, poor old Philip Henry.

PH Gosse was active as a natural historian at a traumatic time for natural historians who insisted on adhering to that old-time religion – and none insisted more vehemently than Gosse. But, confronted by the geological gradualism of Sir Charles Lyell – with its implications of an earth far older than any Biblical interpretation  would permit – Gosse, to his credit, did not hide behind scripture; instead, he answered science with science.

Or, at least, a sort of science.

Gosse’s theory, the great work of his life, his magnificent octopus, went by a single word: Omphalos. His son summed up the theory thus:

  [T]here had been no gradual modification of the surface of the earth, or slow development of organic forms, but… when the catastrophic act of creation took place, the world presented, instantly, the structural appearance of a planet on which life had long existed.

…

For instance, Adam would certainly possess hair and teeth and bones in a condition which it must have taken many years to accomplish, yet he was created full-grown yesterday. He would certainly… display and ‘omphalos’ [a belly-button], yet no umbilical cord had ever attached him to a mother.

This was the theory with which Gosse, fervently and heartbreakingly, hoped to “justify geology to godly readers of Genesis”. No book was ever published, Edmund Gosse wrote, “with greater anticipations of success than was this curious, this obstinate, this fanatical volume”.

And yet:

Atheists and Christians alike looked at it and laughed, and threw it away.

Two years later, Darwin published On The Origin Of Species, and the matter was pretty comprehensively put to bed.

The late scientific essayist Stephen Jay Gould wrote a beautiful and empathetic piece about Omphalos: An Attempt To Untie The Geological Knot and its author; Gould read all of Omphalos, so we don’t have to.

The essay, Adam’s Navel, is collected in the anthology Hen’s Teeth And Horse Toes (1990) and in The Faber Book of Science (1995). I strongly recommend tracking it down and reading the hell out of it.

Omphalos itself – complete with its assertion that (in Gould’s paraphrase) as God would create adults with faeces in their intestines, so too would he place petrified turds into his created geological strata – can be read in full here.

Serio-comic postscript, which probably says an awful lot about something or other, from the reliably odious Conservapedia:

Modern creationists generally reject “omphalos” as a means of proving a young Earth. The two major creationist organizations, Creation Ministries International and Answers in Genesis, along with the rest of the modern creation science movement, reject “omphalos”, instead relying on genuine scientific evidence.

Gosse, Gould tells us, was “a serious and fascinating man, not a hopeless crank or malcontent”. The same can’t be said of those who persist in peddling ‘creation science’.

After his mother’s death in 1857, Gosse was raised by his father, Philip Henry Gosse, a marine biologist and a fundamentalist Christian with a decided hell-fire bent. The younger Gosse described the intense relationship between the two in the book that made his name: Father and Son (1907).

Modern readers of the book might find certain sections of the book oddly familiar. This will probably because (a) they have read it before and forgotten about it or (b) they have read Peter Carey’s marvellous novel Oscar And Lucinda (1988). Carey’s account of the childhood of Oscar Hopkins owes a great (and acknowledged) debt to Gosse.

Here’s Gosse:

He looked upon [each of the feasts of the Church] as nugatory and worthless, but the keeping of Christmas appeared to him by far the most hateful, and nothing less than an act of idolatry… [B]ut the servants, secretly rebellious, made a small plum-pudding for themselves. Early in the afternoon, the maids… kindly remarked that ‘the poor dear child ought to have a bit, anyhow’, and wheedled me into the kitchen, where I ate a slice of plum-pudding…

At length I could bear my spiritual anguish no longer, and bursting into the study I called out: ‘Oh! Papa, Papa, I have eaten of flesh offered to idols!’… Then my Father sternly said: ‘Where is this accursed thing?’… He took me by the hand, and ran with me into the midst of the startled servants, seized what remained of the pudding, and with the plate in one hand and me still tight in the other, ran till we reached the dust-heap, when he flung the idolatrous confectionery on to the middle of the ashes, and then raked it deep down into the mass.

The suddenness, the violence, the velocity of this extraordinary act made an impression on my memory which nothing will ever efface.

One can well imagine. And now here’s Carey:

Oscar took the spoon and ate, standing up… [H]e was just raising the spoon to his mouth in anticipation of more, had actually got the second spoonful into his mouth when the door squeaked behind him and Theophilus came striding across the cobbled floor.

…

He felt the blow on the back of his head. His face leapt forward. The spoon hit his tooth… A large horny hand gripped the back of his head and another cupped beneath his mouth. He tried to swallow. There was a second blow. He spat what he could. Theophilus acted as if his son were poisoned.

…

Theophilus threw what remained of the pudding into the fire.

Oscar had never been hit before. He could not bear it.

His father made a speech. Oscar did not believe it.

His father said the pudding was the fruit of Satan.

But Oscar had tasted the pudding. It did not taste like the fruit of Satan.

Parts II and III of this Gosse extravaganza will have to wait till tomorrow.

[Nagasawa] was a far more voracious reader than me, but he made it a rule never to touch a book by any author who had not been dead at least 30 years. “That’s the only kind of book I can trust,” he said.

“It’s not that I don’t believe in contemporary literature,” he added, “but I don’t want to waste valuable time reading any book that has not had the baptism of time. Life is too short…

…

“If you only read the books that everyone else is reading, you can only think what everyone else is thinking. That’s the world of hicks and slobs.”

I get the feeling that Murakami may have been unpopular at school.

He makes an exception, this Nagasawa, for The Great Gatsby, whose author, at the time at which this conversation takes place in the book, has been dead for only twenty-eight years. Nagasawa’s response: “So what? Two years? Fitzgerald’s advanced.”

Among the writers that, by Nagasawa’s lights, we can all start reading in 2013 are  Hideo Kobayashi, Arthur Koestler, Rebecca West,  Jerzy Andrzejewski - oh, and Hergé. Something to look forward to.

“At the end of an interrogatory sentence, place a question mark. You’d be surprised how effective it can be.”

From Woody Allen’s ‘Reminiscences: Places and People’, written for the New Yorker and collected in Allen’s Complete Prose (Picador, 1997).  

And this, bear in mind, was in a genre – or, rather, an industry – in which flimflam and excessive verbiage (“wordage fat”, in pulp parlance) were just not tolerated. You couldn’t pad your story out with lyrical meditations on love and mortality (although you could always just bung in another sex-scene or knife-fight). Everything was stripped to the bone. It was mostly awful, but by god it was punchy.

Raymond Chandler got his start as a writer at Black Mask, the king of the pulp magazines, making his début in 1933 with ‘Blackmailers Don’t Shoot’. There’s a great chapter on this era – as Chandler the soon-to-be drunk succeeded the already-very-much-a-drunk Dashiell Hammett as the genre’s champion – in Tom Hiney’s biography of Chandler (Random House, 1997).

You can explore pulpworld more thoroughly at the excellent Pulp Magazines Project.

When I see our ravens I have a feeling, almost, that this island is not mine, but theirs. They have been here from time immemorial. They are, so to speak, indestructible, for they are believed to pair for life, and when one of the pair dies, a young bird immediately steps in to fill the gap. The ravens have been there though all the gaps in the occupation of the island by man, and will probably continue long after man has finished with Skokholm.

Perhaps this sense of permanence and continuity is behind our traditional anxious fetishization of the ravens at the Tower of London.

Lockley recalls that “it was once suggested to me that ravens might be established, by way of tame birds at first, as breeders, wild and free, on the Houses of Parliament!”. Not such a strange idea when, in these days of postmodern ecology, practically every English cathedral has its nest of Peregrines.

Anyway, this comes from Lockley’s letter to John Buxton of October 1, 1939, collected in Letters From Skokholm (Little Toller Books, 2010) – thank-you, Frin.

Leeds Castle attracts more than 500,000 visitors a year, which would be great for the city of Leeds, if Leeds Castle was in the city of Leeds, but, of course, it isn’t; it’s in, or anyway near, the small Kent village of Leeds.

The proprietor of the brilliant Leeds guide My Life In Leeds (declaration of interest: I’m on there) informs me that the website attracts a steady stream of geographically illiterate (is there a word for that?) castle-fanciers. Fair enough; it’s an easy mistake to make.

But you’d think that the author of Annals Of Leeds, York And The Surrounding District, Containing, In Chronological Order, All The Most Interesting Events, That Have Occurred In, Or Relate To This Important Part Of The Kingdom; From The Earliest Period To The Present Time, Collected From The Works Of Numerous Authors, Newspapers, &c, &c (Joseph Johnson, 1860) would know better, wouldn’t you?

You’d be wrong.

“In this year [1139],” he tells us, “Leeds castle was besieged and taken by king Stephen, in his march against the Scots.”

He’s half right, except that the castle in question was – as you will have surmised – the one in Kent, not the one in the city of Leeds (which stood about where the Scarbrough pub is now, and was one of history’s most boring castles). If he besieged it in his march against the Scots then he was going a bloody funny way about getting to Scotland.

Besides, he’d routed the marauding Scots at Northallerton the previous year – in the Battle of the Standard – so there wasn’t any need for him to stop off at Leeds on his way home. Unless he wanted to buy some wool or something.

The siege and capture of Leeds Castle, Kent, was part of Stephen’s war with the empress Matilda. No need to drag Leeds into it at all.

So there, John Mayhall. Consider yourself well and truly bearded in your lair.

That man is, or was, Jaques Brel,  and it’s really just as well that he’s dead, because otherwise, even leaving aside all the legal paperwork that would have to be re-done, Dead Belgian would have to change their name. To Belgian.

Dead Belgian are a band from Liverpool who play Brel’s songs. This is Amsterdam. Sing along if you know the words! And, if you don’t know the words, they’re here!

Brel’s version is here.

I came across the band when we took Liars’ League Leeds to the muddy, faintly shambolic but all-in-all massively enjoyable Beacons festival near Skipton earlier this summer. They were just marvellous.

It seems that they don’t only do Jaques Brel: this is them doing a Jake Thackray song. They may technically have been in breach of trading laws by not performing this song under the collective sobriquet Dead Yorkshireman but oh well.

(Photo from Sash Alexander)

These are some Alps:

(Photo by Sandro Vannini/Corbis)

And here are the sand-dunes of Scheveningen:

(Photo by pinktigger)

The connection? Well, they’re all listed in Thomas Hardy’s The Return Of The Native (1878) as instances of landscapes that mankind might, in future, value more highly than such conventionally scenic spots as Heidelberg, Baden, and “the vineyards and myrtle-gardens of South Europe”. These are landscapes that, like the fictional Egdon Heath, “appeal to a subtler and scarcer instinct, to a more recently learnt emotion, than that which responds to the sort of beauty called charming”.

Demonstrating, at the age of 38, a somehat adolescent predilection for morbidity, Hardy goes on:

Indeed, it is a question if the exclusive reign of this orthodox beauty is not approaching its last quarter… The time seems near, if it has not actually arrived, when the mournful sublimity of a moor, a sea or a mountain will be all of nature that is absolutely in keeping with the moods of the more thinking among mankind.

I can see why many people can’t bear Hardy (though I still think he’s great). In any event, I’m sure we can all agree with the critic Holden Caulfield when he says: “I like that Eustacia Vye.”