The Bookshelf
Barbara Kingsolver, Alexander McCall Smith and why some novelists disappear
06 Jul 2018
Chapter 1: What is the main topic discussed in this episode?
This is an ABC podcast.
Welcome to The Bookshelf on RN. I'm Kate Evans.
And I'm Cassie McCullough. And we're surrounded by books and, of course, readers. Eclectic, messy readers whose passions range far and wide.
Alexander McCall-Smith is a long later, creator of the number one ladies detective series set in Botswana. He carries poetry with him wherever he goes, the poetry of W.H. Auden.
Who doesn't? Well, also, American writer Barbara Kingsolver panics if she doesn't have a book with her and will even open one when sitting in her car at a red light. I'm not sure that's legal. It's probably not, but I don't blame her.
We'll begin with the books we've forgotten, you know, those books that everyone was reading and talking about that seemed to disappear without trace.
Yeah, like, does anyone still read Flowers in the Attic?
Or Still Life with Woodpecker by Tom Robbins?
Or The World According to Garp by John Irving?
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Chapter 2: What do Alexander McCall Smith and Barbara Kingsolver read?
These were the writers who made their mark, but for various reasons, entirely disappeared from view. In Australia, Frank Clune comes to mind.
Yeah, and maybe Christina Stead fits into that category until Jonathan Franzen reignited her career by saying that people would bless the day that the book was published if only they knew about it.
Yeah, and in Australia, text publishing has put a lot of effort into finding terrific Australian writers who they've republished. But there are a whole lot of other writers that were just enormous in their day and they just sunk without a trace. And so the English novelist and journalist Christopher Fowler, he became obsessed by popular writers who were neglected or forgotten.
That's quite a weird obsession. Was he worried it was going to happen to him? I think he is a little bit worried about that.
But what he's done is he's collected together the lives and stories of a whole pile of these writers in the book of forgotten authors. And he spoke to me from London. Christopher Fowler, thanks for joining me at some decidedly lost and hidden bookshelves.
Thank you very much for letting me be on the show, Kate.
So what got you interested in Forgotten Authors?
This, it started really when I was very young that I would look at my parents' bookshelves and, you know, parents tend to have a sort of shelf you're not allowed to read as a child and they're forbidden fruit, aren't they? And you want to reach the top shelf and get down the books your dad's been reading or your mum's been keeping to herself.
After a while, I noticed that those books slowly vanished, were given away or lent out or just got rid of. And you couldn't get hold of them anymore. And I was rather interested to wonder why so many authors who sold millions, popular authors who got paperbacks that sold into millions around the world, why they simply disappeared and are very hard to find now.
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Chapter 3: What books have been forgotten over time?
The first point is that I need to not have read them. Secondly, I run the name past a small group of friends. I pick up a book and I first of all see if the book is good and interesting. Then I run their name past friends and if the friends more than 50% say, no, haven't heard of them or if they say, oh yeah, everybody knows that author and I say, well, What have you read by them?
And then they can't name a book. Then that's one that goes on my forgotten author pile.
I was also interested in the books that once I was reading about them in your book, I recognised the title of a book, but I had no recollection of the author. So because you've collected together 99 authors for this collection, and I looked at the contents and thought, I've read three or four of them, including R.M. Ballantyne's The Coral Island, for some reason.
But it turns out I'd read more, but I didn't recognise the name. So Patrick Dennis wrote Aunty Mame, and I read Aunty Mame, the book, I think as a teenager, but had no knowledge at all of him as a writer.
That happens a lot because you think, I was very particularly interested in putting down the names that we've slightly become probably over familiar with and therefore haven't bothered reading. So my mother always had books by Josephine Tay and sort of romantic historical writers and the boys dismissed them anyway as female froth romance because they had these terrible pastel covers.
In fact, a lot of these were written by very good historians who chose to write in this genre. And they sort of fell from fashion and the books vanished. But if I would mention them to someone of my mother's age, she would instantly know them and be able to tell me all the titles. So partly it was an act of reclaiming these books.
Yes, and you tend not to be talking about one-hit wonders. On the whole, these were very successful writers who've somehow sunk since their heyday.
Well, one of the shocking things was how many writers in the book had written upwards of 100 books. People are always shocked that writers can write so much, but I always say to them, well, look at your job. If you put together all the projects you've worked on in a lifetime, you'll probably come to the same amount, so... This is, you know, career authors do this.
I left out the one hit wonders because heavens, it will be three times as long as a book. And as it as it was, I started with 450 authors. And to get them down to 99 had lots and lots of arguments with my editor and publisher.
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Chapter 4: Who are some popular authors that have disappeared from literary discussions?
If we say that paperbacks are not as important as hardback literature, I personally think that's wrong. The other problem is, if you use humor, for example, you create a terrible problem for yourself because... Humour doesn't, it never wins awards.
You can express humour in a book and as soon as you do that, the literary element comes off of what you're writing and you are slightly overlooked by the critics. So this isn't about books that please the critics, this is about books that please real readers.
Sometimes it's just not clear why it is that a novelist disappeared. You use an example of Gladys Mitchell, who was seen as part of a big three of mystery writing, and her contemporaries were Dorothy L. Sayer and Agatha Christie. Is it sometimes chance that one of them fades into obscurity and the others live on? Or have you got better at pinpointing what it is that makes some authors disappear?
I think there's a couple of things. One is often there's only room for one big star in a certain style. So J.K. Rowling, Harry Potter, that's pretty much covered the magical schoolboy subgenre, of which there are many other writers doing many other examples. So, with crime, Agatha Christie was incredibly reliable.
Chapter 5: What motivates Christopher Fowler's interest in forgotten authors?
She produced regularly solid, good books written in simple prose. Gladys Mitchell was not terribly reliable. Some of her books were incredible. Some were really not very good at all. Bless her, she tried many different types of writing that sometimes bordered on experimental.
She would include a supernatural element in a crime novel, so readers would turn around and say, you can't do that, that's cheating. And then she'd go, don't worry, there's another book coming. And so she would try different things. So reliability, on a publisher's point of view, is something very desirable in an author. So those ones rise to the top.
And also the ones who jump around between genres. I myself jump between genres to the point where I give my publicist a terrible headache. And that's another thing, you know, if you stay in one area and mine it, it's very important. Conan Doyle wrote, what, 66 stories, something like that? But the Dr. Thorndike books by R. Austin Freeman
There are many more of those, and he's a contemporary of Conan Doyle. Now, why do we remember Conan Doyle and not Freeman? Well, that's a pretty strange one to explain. I think the Conan Doyle ones are easier. I think they're all the same length stories. They're easier to pick up and put down. The R. Austin Freemans, they're longer, they're more complex.
But now, interesting, they're back in fashion, and they're being published again.
So a lot of this book seems, of your collection of forgotten authors, seems to be an argument about seeking these unusual writers out, rediscovering them, rereading them. But then there's the category you call the justly forgotten authors. Tell us about those.
You know, I didn't want to just present this wonderful rosy picture of this great pile of treasure waiting to be picked up because I do have an awful lot of books at home which I won't be reading again. So I think it's quite a good idea to include a few of those. Often they tend to be poets. I mean, there are some shockingly bad poets.
I did include Oscar Wilde's son, Vivian, who wrote appalling dog rule poetry. I've got one here. I wish you may have better luck than to be bitten by a duck. And though he looks so small and weak, he has a very powerful beak. Well, my copy went into the bin fairly early on.
Well, and you do have other categories like forgotten nonsense writers, which is interesting to look at because, again, some of that is like, I can sort of see why that didn't quite make it.
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