Nicci French Blog

Seasons of mist and mashed potatoes

Nicci:

Today, it is autumn, grey and damp, with soggy yellow leaves on the grass, blackberries in the lanes, a smell of woodsmoke and mushrooms in the air. Time for game pies, rice pudding and open fires, night drawing in, mornings cold and dark - hard to get out of bed and lovely to climb back in (with a hot water bottle). But I have just come back from a four-day trip, driving my parents to the south of France for their holiday. In Provence it was a bright and windy blue. I walked along the Canal du Midi, under the roomy dapple-trunked plane trees, and holiday boats drifted past, the people on board in shorts and tee-shirts, drinking wine on deck at midday. In Nimes, we visited the spectacular amphitheatre. It is on a vast scale, the walls as thick as houses, and the sanded arena where gladiators spilt their blood empty and huge. Tourists at the top were tiny silhouettes against the sharp sky. ice-cream and sun-cream sort of weather, sitting-in-squares sort of weather. But I'm glad to be back here in Suffolk, under its lowering skies, smelling rain. For all the melancholy of autumn, it's a glorious season. And I'm ordering bulbs, ready for the spring.

Interview

There's an interview with us in the Guardian - with, as a bonus, a rather strange photograph. (Not the strangest. We were once photographed in bed together but fortunately I don't think that's available online.)

Factoid Corner

There's a nice letter in this week's TLS. Martin Rose praises a recent book review by David Attenborough but points out that a 'Ghanaian proverb' ("It is unwise to rub bottoms with a pocupine") is not a Ghanaian proverb at all but the winner of a New Statesman competition for inventing fake proverbs. Attenborough has form. In the most recent of John Julius Norwich's anthologies, Still More Christmas Crackers, Norwich thanks Attenborough for contributing the famous speech by Chief Seattle in which he proclaims that the land doesn't belong to any person. If either Norwich or Attenborough had consulted my favourite urban legends website, they would have discovered that the quote is not by Chief Seattle in the 19th century but by a screenwriter in 1971.

A couple of weeks ago, when asked for his favourite example of a scientist in fiction, Attenborough simply replied: 'I don't read fiction.' Yes, he does.

Best Supporting Actors

I've always loved supporting actors. The best of them can steal a film entirely: Dorothy Malone seducing Humphrey Bogart in a bookshop in The Big Sleep (the sexiest scene in the entire history of the cinema: fact), Dennis Hopper taunting the men who are about to kill him in True Romance (the best scene Quentin Tarantino ever wrote?).

Harold Gould died last week. You won't have heard of him. He played the elegant member of the team of conmen in The Sting. He gets to deliver one of the film's best lines, one that was used in the trailer, and I can quote it from memory. One of the team warns him (talking of the Paul Newman character): 'If this thing blows up, I can't do you no good downtown. Gondorf's federal now.' To which Gould's character, Kid Twist, replies: 'Dukie, if this thing blows up, the feds will be the least of our problems.'

Apart from The Sting, Gould did lots and lots of TV, but I'd swap that scene, that line, for Warren Beatty's whole career (well, perhaps McCabe and Mrs Miller excepted).

 

What, us sour? Irritable?

There's a rum old sentence in David Denby's movie review in this week's New Yorker. He's dealing with the new Woody Allen: 'In this movie, as in “Match Point” and “Cassandra’s Dream,” a certain London sourness and irritability takes over.'

Is that how they see us? Does it apply everywhere? To Leytonstone? Merton Park? We were in Golder's Hill Park this week on a spectacular autumn morning and sourness and irritability seemed in short supply. Perhaps we don't notice it, the way fish don't notice water. We're just all swimming in sourness and irritability. 

And if anyone sees that David Denby, just tell him to sod off back to American and stay there.

PS There's also a lesson. When you go to a new place and stay there you get a very strong, instant impression of what it's like. And it's almost entirely deceptive.

 

Who knows?

Someone said: 'It's know what we don't know that harms us. It's what we know that isn't so.' Who said it? I don't know. But I'm gradually learning, bit by bit, factoid by factoid, that everything I 'know' isn't actually true. For example, one of the only 'facts' about business I know is Gillette's strategy of virtually giving away the razor but then charging a fortune for the blades. But John Naughton has just sent me a link to an article which convincingly argues that this isn't really true. Regrettably, like almost everything we think we know - or, rather, I think I know - the truth is a bit more complicated. And it's a story I can't tell any more. Sigh. Thanks, John.

PS I've just googled it. The real saying is: 'It ain't what you don't know that gets you into trouble. It's what you know for sure that just ain't so.' And Mark Twain said it. Of course, he did. Mark Twain said everything. 

Have You Heard the One About...?

I've got a new obsession. I'm listening to Anton Lesser reading Little Dorrit. Lesser's impersonation of the different voices is so virtuosic that I think it's better than reading it myself. I'm on disc 14 of 28. That's a mere warm-up for War and Peace (51 discs).

Of course, I've had to give up writing and family life of any kind, but that's a small price to pay.

 

On the Road

We're appearing tonight at the Reading Festival of Crime Writing (which must be, incidentally, the world's most difficult literary festival to google - think about it. A bit like googling one of my favourite rock bands of the eighties, The The.). 

And on Tuesday morning we're at the Hampstead and Highgate Literary Festival. So if you want to take the day off work...

 

House and Holmes

What are Sherlock Holmes's first words to Dr Watson?

'You have been in Afghanistan, I perceive.' (Actually, his first words are 'How are you?' but let's not be pedantic.)

I knew that the updated Sherlock was going to be good from the very first minute, when I learned that Martin Freeman's Watson has just returned - wounded - from Afghanistan. A Study in Scarlet was first published in Beeton's Christmas Annual of 1887. We can no longer travel by horse-drawn cab and we can't send telegrams from a telegraph office, but we're still in Afghanistan. Dr Watson - the original one - was actually wounded in Kandahar. Will we still be there in 2123?

The writers, Steven Moffatt and Mark Gatiss, have a great deal of fun with updates from the original: the housekeeper, Mrs Hudson; the comedy of two men living together; Holmes's indoor target practice (shooting in the pattern of a smiley face rather than a patriotic V for Victoria); nicotine patches instead of a pipe. I'm disappointed that they've chickened out of updating Holmes's cocaine use.

One inspiration must surely have been the success of Hugh Laurie's House - which is essentially, and very enjoyably, Holmes updated and turned into a doctor. (Just as Stieg Larsson's Lisbeth Salander is Pippi Longstocking updated as a sort of punk techie.) 

A similar process happened when Godard and Truffaut made their own versions of American films noirs with Breathless and Shoot the Pianist, which were then re-imported to America in crime movies like Bonnie and Clyde and Robert Altman's version of The Long Goodbye.

NB to aspiring writers. When looking for ideas, try taking one character and putting him or her in a new setting. (Some TV producer or writer out there must be looking at G.K. Chesterton's Father Brown stories.) Or mixing genres. J.K. Rowling mixed the school story with fantasy. Could it be mixed with the crime story? If anyone read this and tries it out, good luck. All I want is ten per cent.