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Report Number 12
MARCH 2004
Another busy month !
Finished copies of Village Cricket have arrived and it looks very stylish although I have already spotted one silly mistake which I thought had been picked up and corrected but which evidently hasn’t. Oh well. The Telegraph are supposed to be running an extract next Saturday (the 20th) and apart from the du Maurier Festival in May, when I’m doing a cricket-writing panel with Jeremy Paul and Simon Williams, I’ve been booked up for the Swindon Festival, a lunch at Trent Bridge, a dinner in the Great Hall of Southwell Minster and a signing at Ottakars in Guildford. All go. The jacket proof of
Death and the Visiting Fellow, with Paul Cox’s splendid illustration, has also arrived. It looks terrific. Paul, incidentally, has also done illustrations for the head of every chapter in the cricket book and they also are as good as one would expect.
D and the VF is published on April 31st and we’ll be doing a launch during the du Maurier Festival preceded by a town hall chat with readings by Jenny Turner who’s well known locally for her acting with the excellent Troy Players. Details in the Festival catalogue and tickets available on-line at
www.fowey.co.uk. I suppose you’d expect me to say it as I am down for no less than four separate appearances but I think this year’s programme is particularly attractive and well-balanced.
I am still struggling to finish the second in the Tudor Cornwall crime series as well as trying, with the help of Michael Motley, the indefatigable agent, to sell an idea for a non-fiction book. This seems to get harder and harder with publishers wanting more and more detailed “outlines”. I am very dubious about the merit of these not least because it seems to me that if you do the research properly you are bound to end up with something you couldn’t have predicted. Surely the whole point of writing a good book is to come up with some surprises? It’s also depressing to feel that you are not writing these outlines for editors but for sales and marketing departments full of people who think of books as “commodities” to be sold and marketed as if they were bars of chocolate or packets of breakfast cereal..
The last few days have been spent away from home on a variety of different errands. On Friday March 5th I was the guest speaker at a black-tie event called “The Gravetye Dinner”. This was organized by Peter Herbert who, since 1958, has owned Gravetye Manor in West Sussex. This beautiful Elizabethan house was one of the first British “country house hotels” and Peter runs an occasional dining club with guest speakers from various worlds, most notably that of wine and wine-making. I must say the food and drink was fantastic though the usual combination of prudence and stage-fright prevented me from enjoying my dinner quite as much as I would have wished. Never mind, we stayed an extra night and I more than made up for any omissions on the Friday.
We then moved on to the Isle of Wight, via Sunday lunch and an over-night stay with Simon and Lucy Brett. I’ve known the Bretts ever since Simon and I were the only two members of the East Sheen Crime Writers’ Squash Club. Nowadays we have converted to Real Tennis and we also share the above-mentioned Michael Motley as an agent. I was on the Isle of Wight to write up the Tennyson Trail which runs from Carisbrooke in the centre of the island to the Needles in the West. This was for Country Life. By the time I’d walked it, wearing a splendid new pair of Brasher boots that my mother gave me as a birthday present, I’d done about sixteen miles. A breath-taking walk on a bright, cold day and not a sign of a blister!
We then drove home, pausing for a delicious fishy meal at the Riverside restaurant in West Bay, and the next morning I set off early for a flying visit to my disabled cousin David, his carer and the local Social Services team in North Wales.As David’s trust fund was paying my expenses I went club-class on Virgin which meant that I was able to plug in my laptop and write a fair bit, completing my Isle of Wight piece and part of a chapter of “Death and the D’Urbervilles”. I can’t warm to Sir Richard’s trains. In this instance the train didn’t warm to me either as the heating failed in our carriage and we all had to transfer to another warmer one at Bristol Temple Meads.
I stayed two nights in Llandudno (change at Crewe for Llandudno Junction) and was amused to find that Tony Benn was starring at the North Wales theatre on my first night. I’m afraid I didn’t go, having missed him once before when he was a guest speaker at the du Maurier festival. The week before the star had been Gyles Brandreth and among the forthcoming attractions were Peter Noon (without the Hermits) and Wayne Fontana (without the Mindbenders). I thought Llandudno a handsome place with some fine early Victorian (I’m guessing) terraces and an impressive pier which seemed in much better nick than poor old Brighton’s. But it did have a definite whiff of “last of the summer wine”.
And so home to Cornwall and the keyboard with breath baited for reviews and stuff. I’m rather dreading them because I feel sure that, though I don’t think either book is anything of the sort, a certain kind of critic will dismiss them as cosy and reactionary. Never believe any writer who says they are not upset by bad reviews. I’m sure we all are and what’s more, it doesn’t matter how many OK notices one gets - it’s the bad ones that stick in the mind. I do sometimes wish I hadn’t pursued a career which was so visible!
Tim Heald
March 2004
NB Doctor Tudor Cornwall, the central character in
"Death and the Visiting Fellow", mentioned above, is introduced
in Tim's recent short story reproduced here in full: "Crime in Store"
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