Category: Nicholas Royle

Nicholas Royle’s latest short story collection is Ornithology (Confingo Publishing). He is also the author of seven novels, including First Novel (Vintage), and two other volumes of short fiction, Mortality (Serpent’s Tail) and In Camera (Negative Press London). He has edited twenty anthologies and is series editor of Best British Short Stories (Salt). Reader in Creative Writing at the Manchester Writing School at Manchester Met, he also runs Nightjar Press and is head judge of the Manchester Fiction Prize.

‘The Patron’ by Jayne Anne Phillips

My copy of Jayne Anne Phillips’ 1980 short story collection Black Tickets, a beautiful King Penguin, a reprint from 1984, with a typically gorgeous cover by Russell Mills, has a bit of blurb on the back: ‘Jayne Anne Phillips’s outstanding debut has been celebrated on both sides of the Atlantic.’ Fine, except it wasn’t her debut, or at least not in the US. She had published two collections with small presses, Sweethearts (Truck Press) in 1976 and Counting (Vehicle Editions) two years later. Anyway, Black Tickets is superb and one of the stories from it, ‘The Patron’, was extracted in London Magazine just before the collection came out in the UK. James is a daytime carer for a wealthy, largely bed-ridden old man. His shift over, James heads down to Harry’s Peek-A-Boo, from where he might look up at the old man’s window to see him held there in the arms of Bruno, his night-time carer, but he’s more likely to be peering into one of a row of machines watching 1940s pornographic films. In just a few pages, James, Harry, the old man, even Bruno, all assume distinct, totally convincing existences. The old man is half-dead but couldn’t be more alive. (Some time in the 1990s Jayne Anne Phillips and I exchanged a look – I don’t want to make a big deal of it, but it was slightly more than a glance – across a hotel lobby in Amsterdam. Inspired by this near-encounter, I wrote a story entitled ‘Jayne Anne Phillips’, which was later published in London Magazine, in 2008, when the magazine was under the editorship of Sara-Mae Tuson. The piece was billed as a feature rather than as a short story, for some reason, but as its author I can confirm it was fiction.)

(London Magazine, October 1980)

‘Lovers’ by GE Armitage

I have known for a long time that GE Armitage and Robert Edric are the same person. I can’t remember if it was ever a secret, if I was ever supposed not to tell anyone, but given that Duncan McLaren, among others, has talked about it in his fascinating book Pen Pals (published online at penpals.org.uk), I think it’s probably fine. Gary – for that is his real name  – must be the only writer to have published two first novels in 1985 and two second novels in 1986. The way to do that is to publish under two different names – and to write very quickly, which he does. He has continued to be prolific, but only as Robert Edric, GE Armitage having been retired after two novels. Two novels and at least one short story, this one. It is another of those stories, like Cox’s, where you have to concentrate and pick up clues to work out what’s going on. I think it is probably simpler than I am making it sound. It has two threads; we switch from one to the other and back again throughout the story, a device that works extremely well for such a short piece. What I really like about it is even after concentrating, even after picking up clues, there are still some things we don’t know. Robert Edric has published some short fiction, and very good it has been too, but I wish GE Armitage would give the form another go.
(London Magazine, April/May 1986)

‘Conversion’ by Helen Harris

In the late 1980s I worked at Reader’s Digest. I had published a few stories, but no books, so I was in awe of a colleague, Helen Harris, who had been featured with three stories in Faber’s Introduction 8 and published two novels. She was a real writer. That was the dream. ‘Conversion’ is the story of Norah Crown of Achilles Street, widowed with a daughter living on the other side of London, and her battle against the developers. Up and down the street tenants are being edged out and their flats done up and sold to incomers. The grocer’s is closed and a delicatessen opens in its place. ‘But it didn’t sell anything that Norah wanted to buy. It was full of foreign food and fancy stuff, nothing plain and wholesome like fish paste or Rich Teas.’ Harris writes with humour, sympathy and understanding about a subject that, if it was an issue in 1984, is an even more urgent one thirty-three years later.

(London Magazine, April/May 1984)

‘Dealing in Fictions’ by Christopher Burns

Two of the stories in Christopher Burns’s excellent collection About the Body (Secker & Warburg, 1988) appeared first in London Magazine. ‘Dealing in Fictions’ was the first of them chronologically, although it comes last in the book, which makes sense, because of its extraordinary explosive power. There’s a jolting shift of point of view, which is totally justified, coming at a pivotal moment when, like in Burns’s recent Nightjar Press publication ‘The Numbers’, everything changes. I don’t understand why Burns is not winning the accolades and prizes that some of his contemporaries, like Julian Barnes or Ian McEwan or Graham Swift, have been enjoying. At the very least, there should be a second collection to gather up some of the excellent short fiction he has published since 1988 including, for instance, one of my all-time favourite stories, ‘Nitrate’, which appeared in Shorts: New Writing From Granta Books in 1998.

(London Magazine, August/September 1985)

‘Ugly Duckling’ by Angela Readman

Angela Readman’s first published story, ‘Ugly Duckling’ is narrated by Matt, who is reminded by a holiday photograph of a nightmare trip to Norway with his parents and brother Jamie, on which, possibly, everything changed. Certainly what Matt hears his father say, during an argument with the boys’ mother, would be enough to create a rupture in a family that would appear to be already at breaking point. Matt plays with a yo-yo, with which Jamie desperately wants a go, and they are briefly separated from their parents on a mountain where, according to local legend (and in a pleasing echo of one of Giles Gordon’s ‘Fingers’), if you throw something off the top, it comes right back up. What comes up the mountain to the brothers, from below, is the sound of their father’s voice and then ‘a sound like a balloon bursting, then another. It could have been a clap of thunder, a banger, an old exhaust. It could have been a lot of things’. The story is not included in Readman’s collection, Don’t Try This at Home (And Other Stories, 2015), and nor is ‘Fishtail’, which was shortlisted for the Manchester Fiction Prize 2015 and may be read online. Readman is one of the judges of the same prize this year.

(London Magazine, December/January 2001)

‘Inside Albania’ by Edward Fox

The narrator of ‘Inside Albania’, an American journalist, like the author, accepts an invitation to visit Albania as a guest of the then president, Enver Hoxha. The narrator flies from New York to Budapest, where he switches to a propellor-driven aircraft that will take him the rest of the way, accompanied on this leg of the journey by a furious-seeming man in a dark brown suit with hair ‘as thick and curly as rams’ horns’. He eventually meets Hoxha and they dine together and the following day drive up to the mountains where extraordinary locals are encountered. It is an unusually compelling story and, up to a point, completely believable. When I read it for the first time I had just been to Albania myself and it seemed to me, so accurate and evocative were Fox’s descriptions, that not only had he also been to that almost uniquely isolated country, but I wondered if he had actually been a guest of the president. When I decided on the organising principle for this Personal Anthology, ‘Inside Albania’ was the first story on my list for inclusion. It may be read online at Edward Fox’s web site http://www.edwardfox.co.uk.

 (London Magazine, March 1987)