Nicci French Blog

No Police Like Holmes

I'm sure that Anthony Horovitz's new Sherlock Holmes novel, The House of Silk, will be terrific, but I've been puzzled ever since I first heard about it. It has been referred to, for example here, as commissioned by the Conan Doyle estate.

My first thought was: why is there a Conan Doyle estate and what is it doing commissioning books? Arthur Conan Doyle died in 1930, which means that his works came out of copyright in 2000. Which means that anybody can commission or write a Sherlock Holmes story, right?

Well, there really is a Conan Doyle estate and it has a website. Most relevantly of all it has a page dealing with the issue of licensing. This concedes that Conan Doyle is out of copyright in the EC area, 'but after that date a number of characters created by the author will enjoy trademark protection.' Eh? I'll get back to that.

It adds that in the US, the Sonny Bono Copyright Extension Act of 1997 has extended the copyright of certain works for another twenty years. The act was actually enacted in 1998 and is popularly known as 'The Mickey Mouse Protection Act' because a signficant motivation for the legislation was Disney's wish to stop us all being able to make our own Mickey Mouse tee-shirts. 

Even so, this protection would only apply to final Sherlock Holmes collection of stories, the much inferior Casebook of Sherlock Holmes. 

But what's this about trademarks? The estates claim that Sherlock Holmes, Dr Watson, Mrs Hudson and even the bloody Hound of the Baskervilles are now trademarked. What does this mean? How can a character created in 1887 be trademarked? Can anyone do this? Can I get in quickly and trademark, say, Count Dracula? Or Gulliver? Or Don Quixote? Who gets to do this? Who doesn't get to do this?

I feel that this should be tested in court, but that, immediately, is the problem. There is a serious question about whether Disney's Mickey Mouse copywright is valid. But do you want to make your own Mickey Mouse movie and take on the Disney lawyers? (I must confess that I never cared for Mickey Mouse even as a child.)

Much the same goes for Sherlock Holmes. If you write your own brilliant Sherlock Holmes story in which the great detective lives in a menage a quatre with Dr Watson, Mrs Hudson and the Hound of the Baskervilles, a publisher might well agree with you that the characters are in the public domain. But are they going to spend a hundred grand on lawyers to prove it?

 

 

 

I-Plates

The second most interesting thing I know about Steve Jobs is that - by his own account - the crucial course he took at college was not in coding but in calligraphy. But the most interesting thing, which I learned from this terrific article, is that Jobs drove the only car in the US without number plates. 

It was a perfect Steve Jobs gesture because it was a zen version of megalomania, an unassertive version of aggression, an in-your-face version of abnegation.

It had an absurd sort of practicality - presumably to maintain some sort of privacy by not showing his number plate to the world. But what is less private than being the only car in the country without a plate?

It was also technically illegal, but for fascinating reasons explored in the article, Jobs had presumably calculated - rightly - that he was unlikely to be prosecuted. 

It was a gesture that was both rather splendid and utterly fatuous and futile and trivial.

It must have taken a lot of thought.

I bet Thomas Pynchon wishes he'd thought of it first.

 

 

 

Obscure Objects of Desire

How did we ever do without the term (coined by movie critic, Nathan Rabin), 'manic pixie dream girl'. It stands for, in his words, 'that bubbly, shallow cinematic creature that exists solely in the fevered imaginations of sensitive writer-directors to teach broodingly soulful young men to embrace life and its infinite mysteries and adventures'.

The term has clearly gained traction since it was first identified in 2008. (The classic examples were Kirsten Dunst in Elizabethtown and Natalie Portman in Garden State.) You can see a list of films featuring MPDGs here. There's a really nice article in this week's New Yorker that mentions it. And Rabin himself as incorporated it into his terrific book, My Year of Flops, in which he spent a year looking at cinematic disasters.

There's a serious point as well, which is worth any film or fiction writer considering. The MPDG has no desires of her own. She only exists to rescue the slightly ineffectual/depressed/shy hero and show him how to lighten up/get a life/discover himself. When you're writing, you should try imagine the story from the point of view of every characer, however minor. What do they want? What drives them? 

Bringing Up Baby is very nearly my favourite film. But I've always been nagged by something. I can see what Katherine Hepburn is bringing to Cary Grant's life. But what is Grant bringing to Hepburn's life? (Apart from being Cary Grant.)

Abnormal Service Resumed

We've been in hibernation over the summer, away, various family things (including a great joint fiftieth birthday party in a cowshed in Sweden - not ours, unfortunately) and, most relevantly, finishing off the second Frieda Klein. And now it is, more or less, finished.

A few good things from the summer: John Grant and Midlake at the Royal Festival Hall (we need new albums from both asap); the TV thriller series, Justified, is one of the best attempts at getting the world of Elmore Leonard on screen; series one was good, so far series two is even better. 

Not so good things: we finally got around to seeing Shutter Island. Has ever so much talent been marshalled to such little effect? (Worse still, someone told me that I (Sean, that is, not Nicci) look like Jackie Earle Haley. Please.) And we watched Hanna because someone told us that Hanna was really good. They were wrong. Saoirse Ronan is fabulous. But rule number one of thrillers is: if in every single scene the viewer/reader is saying, 'why are they doing that?' or 'surely they wouldn't do that?' or 'that doesn't make any sense', then you're in troubles. Well, it's not actually rule number one, because it's a bit convoluted, but you get the point.

It also features that most shameful narrative cop-out, the navigable air duct. 

 

 

 

No News is Bad News

At what point does no information become a kind of information? J.D. Salinger died eighteen months ago. When I first heard, I thought: well, now we'll find out what he's been working on for all those years, those manuscripts which he had reportedly stowed away in a safe. It's not looking good, is it? Maybe he wrote the novels and then destroyed them. Maybe he never wrote anything at all. Is anybody going to tell us?

Now I Get It

There's a completely new kind of film criticism, in which you expose a cliche just by editing together lots and lots of examples of it. It's been done with losing your mobile phone signal. And who, until now, would have thought that the most lazily repeated line in film history is: 'You just don't get it, do you?'

I've been racking my brains and I'm afraid I can't guarantee that we haven't used it in our novels. Possibly more than once. 

In My Dreams

Nicci was away, everybody was away, so I finally watched Buried, in which Ryan Reynolds wakes up and discovers he has been buried alive and the whole film - the whole film - takes place in a small wooden box.

What did I think of it? Well, let me answer that by describing the dream I had that night: Quentin Tarantino was torturing me for information I didn't possess. That was the effect the film had on me.

PS Why Quentin Tarantino? I only realized a day or two later. A few years ago Tarantino directed a special double-episode of CSI in which one of the main characters is buried alive. Even my sub-conscious is a film geek.

 

Not In Front of the Children

We're having my mother's 80th birthday dinner this evening, so I was intrigued to read the following reminiscence in today's Guardian by Judy Carver of her parents, one of whom happened to be William Golding: 

    'When my father was 75, he had a big party in London to which we were invited. I enjoyed it tremendously and felt I had been rather a success, an impression supported by a slightly mordant appraisal from my mother. When my father's 80th birthday approached in 1991, I assumed I would be included too. But I learned that my mother had decided not to invite me or my brother. Unusually, I protested. She remained adamant.

    'My father phone me and offered to "make a fuss". But I could see there was no point. It wouldn't be much fun going to a party where the hostess doesn't want you, especially when the hostess is your own mother. My mother said: "It's really a very small party."'

    So now we know what the parents were doing, while the children were on the island in Lord of the Flies. They were having a birthday party.

 

 

Yes I said yes I will Yes

I've developed a bit of an obsession with audiobooks over the last year or so and I've loved many of them but I've just finished what is quite definitely and without any doubt the best of all (for the moment): Ulysses, read by Jim Norton and Marcella Riordan. James Joyce always said to people who had problems understanding the book that they should just read it aloud. That's not quite enough, to be honest. Declan Kibberd's Ulysses and Us: The Art of Everyday Living is a great help. His introduction and notes in the Penguin edition are useful as well. 

The thing is, if you're English, and you tackle Ulysses, you read it with a general Father Ted-like Irish accent. Jim Norton brings the book alive with about a hundred, entirely separate Irish accents. I thought it was the most brilliant performance of a novel I'd ever heard - until I got to Marcella Riordan's performance of Molly Bloom's soliloquy at the the climax. It's a staggering achievement. I hope they won lots of awards for it. 

Just one quotation from the book. It's very famous, but even so. When Bloom and Dedalus step out of Bloom's house, into the garden, they see: 'The heaventree of stars hung with humid nightblue fruit.' 

PS The headline is composed of the last seven words of the book.

 

 

 

 

Oddball Thrillers

A few months ago, Rachel Cooke wrote an interesting piece in the Observer about ten 'neglected literary classics'. I've just read two of them: The Blank Wall by Elizabeth Sanxay Holding, first published in 1947, and The Victorian Chaise-longue by Marghanita Laski, first published in 1953. 

    They both start off deceptively like conventional, realistic domestic stories about a deliberately dull married woman and then each of them takes a really creepy turn, but in completely different ways. The heroine of The Blank Wall is a suburban wife, trying to keep her family life going in wartime while her husband in the military. She stumbles across the dead body of her daughter's lover and decides to get rid of the body herself. Bad idea. It's the subject matter of Patricia Highsmith but - all the more chillingly - written in the romance novel style of Sanxay Holding's earlier books. There are actually two good film versions: The Reckless Moment (1949) and The Deep End (2001). Odd that it should be out of print. Boring title and an unspellable author's name. But still...

In Laski's novella, a woman convalescing on a titular chaise-longue suddenly and horribly finds herself inhabiting the body of the original owner, a Victorian woman with a guilty secret. At first it feels like a bad dream but its worse than that. This macabre fairy story would be impossible to film. It all takes place in the consciousness of the main character (or characters), but it's a small classic. 

Both books have been republished very elegantly (and rather pricily) by Persephone Books. As of today, they have republished ninety-three books, including such intriguing oddities as a serious book by Richmal Crompton, one of those that we've always told are no good at all compared with her William books. But this one sounds very good. Oh dear. So many books, so much money, so little time.