Sorting through a bundle of old papers the other day – royalty statements, contracts, letters of rejection – literary rather than personal – I chanced upon the contract for the first book I wrote, the first book I had published – Avenging Angel, a tale of everyday Hell’s Angels published by New English Library in March, 1975.
A 125 page paperback, some 50,000 words, complete with quotations from or references to Leonard Cohen, Bob Dylan, Christina Rossetti and The Coasters, for which I was to be paid the welcome sum of £200. Plus royalties. But seriously – Hell’s Angels? Being the proud owner of a Honda 50 hardly made me qualified, so how come?
I was living and teaching in Stevenage, English & Drama, enjoying it, but beginning to feel a little restless; my third school since leaving Goldsmiths – Heanor, Andover and now Stevenage. I’d been Head of Department and the normal career path pointed towards Deputy Headships, which inevitably meant less actual teaching and more administration. Meanwhile, my friend Laurence James, whom I’d known since Goldsmiths days, having scorned the classroom had moved from book selling into publishing and from there into writing. One of his projects was a successful series of paperbacks about Hell’s Angels under the name of Mick Norman. So successful that his publisher, New English Library, wanted another volume, which Laurence, having moved on, was too busy to provide.
Over numerous cups of coffee, John Stewart or Guy Clark playing in the background, he convinced me that I was the person to fill the gap. Hadn’t I suggested I was in need of a change? Hadn’t I edited the weekly Goldsmiths Students Union newspaper? And, of course, there was the aforementioned Honda 50.
Laurence was nothing if not persuasive. Reading the Mick Normans I could see that in many ways they were like westerns with Harley Davidsons in the place of horses. That with a little social realism thrown in. He helped me with an outline and sample chapter, which I sent off to his publisher at NEL and before long the above contract came back. All I had to do now was write the book.
It’s a bit of a shambles, a bit of a mess; it has as much to do with the flaws and failures of secondary education as it does with ape hanger handlebars and chopped-down Nortons. For all that, I must have done something right because the publisher asked for a sequel – the book that became Angel Alone -and offered £50 more. Give it a go, I thought, handing in my notice, I can always come back to teaching if it doesn’t work out.
Here, just to give a taste, is the opening to Avenging Angel …
Tar : Todd Field Broker : Hirokazu Kore-eda A Yak in the Classroom : Pauo Choyning Darji Return to Seoul : Davy Chou The Blue Caftan : Maryam Touzami Oppenheimer : Christopher Nolan Scrapper : Charlotte Regan Past Lives : Celine Song Anatomy of a Fall : Justine Triet Tish : Paul Sng
Restorations/Reissues …
Know Where I’m Going : Powell & Pressburger (1945) A Matter of Life & Death : Powell & Pressburger (1946)
Serpico : Sidney Lumet (1973) Dog Day Afternoon : Sidney Lumet (1975)
BOOKS
Homesickness : Colin Barrett Philip Guston’s Late Work – A Memoir : William Corbett The Last Days of Roger Federer : Geoff Dyer The New York Stories of Elizabeth Hardwick Salvation City : Sigrid Nunez SempreSusan : Sigrid Nunez Come Back in September : Darryl Pinckney The Queen of Dirt Island : Donal RyanThe Death of Jim Loney : James Welch
In Memory of Bill James (Jim Tucker) 1929 – 2023 Roses, Roses
ART
Magdalena Abakanowicz : Every Tangle & Rope : Tate Modern Barbara Hepworth : Art & Life : Tate St. Ives Alice Neel : Hot Off the Griddle : Barbican Action, Gesture, Paint: Women Artists & Global Abstraction : Whitechapel Art Gallery Souls Grown Deep As the Rivers : Royal Academy Soutine/Kossoff : Hastings Contemporary A World in Common – Contemporary African Photography : Tate Modern Philip Guston : Tate Modern Eve Armold – To Know About Women : Newlands House Gallery Capturing the Moment : Tate Mode
LIVE MUSIC
Philharmonia Let Freedom Ring Season at the Southbank Centre Marin Alsop conducting Gershwin’s “Rhapsody in Blue” in a special arrangement with the brilliant Marcus Roberts on piano. Also James P. Johnson’s “Victory Stride” & “Drums, a Symphonic Poem” & the initial appearance by the Philharmonia Big Band led by Pete Long
London Philharmonic Orchestra at the Southbank Centre Karina Canellakis conducting Tchaikovsky’s 5th Symphony & Shostakovich’s 8th Symphony
London Symphony Orchestra at the Barbican Gianandrea Noseda conducting Tchaikovsky’s 6th Symphony
London Jazz Orchestra at the Vortex, Dalston Big Band orchestrations of Art Blakey’s “Moanin’”
Jazz at the Oxford, Kentish Town Rachael Cohen Quartet Robbie Ellison Septet
Here’s what I’m listening to at this very moment, a baker’s dozen of tracks finishing with the gorgeous Brenda Lee version of “Break It To Me Gently” that helped to break my heart in 1962/63.
The Jeep is Jumpin’ : Duke Ellington from Ellington ’56
Someday Baby : Bob Dylan from Modern Times
C Jam Blues : Duke Ellington from Blues in Orbit
Under the Ivy : Tracey Thorn from Solo: Songs & Collaborations
Too Darn Hot : Ella Fitzgerald from The Cole Porter Songbook
Too Far Gone : Emmylou Harris from Pieces of Sky
Opening (35 Rhums) : Tindersticks from Claire Denis Film Scores
Maybe We’ll Just Disappear : Kimmie Rhodes from West Texas Heaven
You’re No Good : Betty Everett from The Sound of the City – Chicago
Gold : John Stewart from Gold
Ask Me Now : Thelonius Monk from Genius of Modern Music, No 2
I’ve Just Seen a Face : The Beatles from Help
Break It To Me Gently : Brenda Lee from 1962 British Hit Parade
The writer Jack Trevor Story once told me that he checked the Birthdays column of The Guardian on March 30th every year to find out whether he was still alive. A lovely, contrary man and the most individualistic of writers, Jack was to die in December, 1991, at the age of 74. I’ve been checking the same source for the last few years also, more for some assurance I hadn’t slipped from view than anything more sinister. And, as I’ve said elsewhere, there is something oddly pleasing to find oneself squeezed, if only in print, between Jane Fonda and Samuel L. Jackson with Chris Evert hovering close by. Long may we all survive.
85, said the Clinical Nurse Specialist, when I went for my regular check-up earlier in the week, that’s quite a significant birthday, isn’t it? And I suppose it is. That’s the way it feels, at least. But significant or not, as birthdays go it was a good one.
It began with my partner, Sarah, and I, together with our daughter, Molly Ernestine, going for breakfast to my favourite local café, Cinnamon Village, where, in addition to the excellent coffee, I eschewed my usual croissant or pain au chocolat for a mountainous plateful of French Toast, busy with banana and, of course, cinnamon, and drenched in maple syrup. A fearless way to begin the day.
Then it was back home to open cards – a really beautiful, well-chosen selection – and a small number of equally welcome and well-chosen presents, ranging from a twin pack from The Sauce Shop – Buffalo Hot Sauce & Srirachi Chilli Sauce (Thanks, Tom!) – to a wonderfully atmospheric photographic print by the Palestinian photographer, Hanane El Ouardani. (Thank you, Sarah.)
Amongst the cards was a letter from my friend Mel Cox, whom I’d first encountered back in the early 60s, when I was living in Nottingham and teaching at Heanor Aldercar Secondary School and Mel was one of the pupils. We’d met since in various places, including the terraces at Meadow Lane, the most recent occasion being at Five Leaves Bookshop in Nottingham when I was reading alongside the poet Julie Lumsden to launch my new poetry collection, “On Balance”. Mel took a photograph of me and sent it to the small group of former Aldercar students with whom he’s in touch, and along with his card he sent me their responses. Standing in the kitchen reading them had me hovering on the edge of tears.
I hope the individuals concerned won’t mind if, anonymously, I record their comments here.
“Great photos, Mel. Thanks for sharing. Good to see ‘Mr Harvey’ still doing poetry readings. I think he turned us all on to modern poetry at school. Remember ‘The Mersey Sound’”?
“Hi Melvyn. Wow! It is so lovely to see a picture of Mr Harvey. John was so different to all the other teachers.”
“As form teacher for 216, I still remember his playing records during registration – Waterloo Sunset, Silence is Golden …He was the coolest form teacher!
I think we were very privileged to have been at Aldercar when he was there.”
After that, somehow the day scrambled round towards late afternoon – there was probably a nap in there somewhere, but I’m not sure – and time for Sarah and I to take the bus into town for an early Asian supper at The Hare and Tortoise and front row seats at the Curzon Bloomsbury to see Wim Wenders’ documentary about the German artist, Anselm Kiefer.
Listening in the comforts of home, that is. A list of most enjoyable live performances will follow in a few days, along with, as usual, favourite books, movies and exhibitions of the year.
After perhaps a longer gap than usual, BBC Radio Drama have delved back into their Resnick archives and on Wednesday, Thursday and Friday of this week (December 6-8) will be broadcasting the three part dramatisation of the third Resnick novel, Cutting Edge, first published by Viking in 1991. Produced by David Hunter from my script and featuring Tom Georgeson as DI Charlie Resnick, Nottingham’s finest, it was originally broadcast in May 1996. Other actors featured include Paul Bazeley (currently on your TV in Such Brave Girls), Sean Baker, Kate Eaton, Gillian Bevan and John Simm.
Up to this point, Resnick had been portrayed by Tom Wilkinson, both on television and radio, but for this production he was unavailable, and so we turned to Tom Georgeson, who had been in the BBC TV version of Rough Treatment and so was aware of the overall set up and Resnick’s character.
The three episodes will each be aired on Radio 4 Extra several times a day and can all be listened to later on BBC Sounds. Details here …
When Ross Bradshaw, head honcho at Five Leaves Bookshop in Nottingham, introduced last Wednesday evening’s reading to launch my new Shoestring Press poetry collection, “On Balance”, as the final leg of my two-legged World Tour, he got it just about right. London and Nottingham: just about the extent of my world these days.
The previous evening I had been at the Owl Bookshop in Kentish Town, North London, the nearest independent bookstore to home.
I was sharing the evening with another local author, Woody Haut, who would be reading from his new book of Film Noir poems, “On Dangerous Ground”, the poems taking off from carefully chosen black and white stills from films ranging from John Huston’s “The Asphalt Jungle” to Norman Foster’s “Woman on the Run”. Forty eight films and I think that, at one time or another, I had seen forty of them, some many times. None, I’m sure, as many as Woody.
When my daughter, Molly Ernestine, and I arrived at the bookstore twenty minutes or so before we were due to start, Woody was already there. Woody plus a small group of people sitting close together and a lot of empty chairs.
‘Nervous?’ ‘Just a little,’ I conceeded. Woody didn’t look the least bit nervous at all.
After a short while, more people began to drift in; with five minutes to go, the booksellers were having to put out more chairs. Someone who follows me on Twitter came up and introduced himself as the only other Notts County fan living close by in Tufnell Park. I saw a bunch of friendly faces, people wishing me luck. Two Goldsmiths alumni from back in the early sixties took their seats in the front row alongside Molly Ernestine, whose art work is on the “On Balance” cover.
6.30pm. Time to begin. Woody and I had tossed a coin over coffee a few days before to decide who would read first. 6.34 or 35 and he was on his feet.
It seemed to go well. The contrast between our work – mine more personal, Woody’s more political – “jazz-inflected and linguistically fractured” as it says on his book’s back cover – felt positive. The applause was generous. Standing around afterwards, chatting, signing books, bidding folk good night and safe journey home, I felt that mixture of relief and mild elation that frequently follows readings. On our way home, Molly and I dropped into newly revamped and renamed Parakeet, formerly The Oxford Tavern and home to Monday night jazz. The prawn toast on the bar menu had sold out but otherwise it was fine.
Woody and I at Owl – if there’s any doubt, he’s the one with the hat
The following day I took the train up to Nottingham, where I met my partner, Sarah, who had made the infinitely longer journey cross country from Redruth in Cornwall, where she had been working, to Derby and a quick change of trains for the final few miles.
Our first call was on our friend, Clare Brown, since 2022 the Director of Bromley House Library, a fine independent library situated in a Georgian townhouse in the centre of the city … and quite close to The Bell, which features later. Time then to check into our hotel, get a quick bite at Wagamama (actually, lots of little bites – delicious) and rock up at Five Leaves, just a little way past the Left Lion on the Market Square.
After casting a glance over the packed proceedings, it was difficult to think of an occasion on which, one way or another. I knew so many of those present. There were my son, Tom, and his partner, Karen; fellow writers Dave Belbin and Michael Eaton; friends from my time studying for a masters and then doing a little teaching in the department of American Studies at the University of Nottingham. One of the relatively few strangers was my fellow reader, and fellow Shoestring Press author, Julie Lumsden.
I’d read and enjoyed Julie’s most recent collection, “Dog Days”, but hearing her read gave the poems an extra life, an extra dimension, especially in bringing out the humour. So good to hear people laugh!
Perhaps unsurprisingly for someone who studied drama, I think some of Julie’s strongest poems are those which take on the voices of others, in particular a six-part, six-voice set based around Ruth Ellis, who shot and killed her lover outside the Magdala pub in Hampstead, North London, and was the last woman to be hanged in the United Kingdom.
As it had been with Woody, I think, as readers, Julie and I complemented one another quite well; in this instance not by being quite different, but in being somewhat similar though not too much.
I’d asked Dave Belbin beforehand if The Bell might still be a good place, not too distant, for a wind down drink and he said that was still the case. So that’s where Sarah and I pleasantly ended our evening, with Dave and others, before a slow stroll uphill past the Theatre Royal and then down between various Nottingham Trent University buildings to the Premier Inn. The “On Balance” World Tour finishes here. Breakfast and coffee with more friends at Yolk on Goose Gate the following morning still to come, then platform 7a and the London train.
That’s Tom Harvey at the centre, his partner, Karen, to his left, and further left photographer Graham Lester George; to Tom’s right, our friend Graham Nichols in talking to my partner, Sarah; then it’s me in the Agnes B cap and finally Graham’s wife, Helen. Photo: David Belbin.
Every once in a while circumstances suggest a degree of slimming down in the overloaded book shelves, an occasion which gives Harvey aficionados the chance to fill in any gaps in their collection, at the same time as making a very worthwhile donation to Medecins Sans Frontieres.
It’s easy to do. Simply email info@mellotone.co.uk with your postal address and check that copies of the book(s) you want is/are still available; that done, please make a donation to https://msf.org.uk/secure/donate and I will mail out the item(s) you requested, signed should you wish.
GOING DOWN SLOWand Other Stories Five Leaves Publications, Nottingham, 2017 Seven Short Stories: ‘Not Tommy Johnson’; ‘Second Chance’; ‘Going Down Slow’; ‘Fedora’; ‘Handy Man’; ‘Ask Me Now’ & ‘Dead Dames Don’t Sing’.
‘Fedora’ was awarded the Crime Writers’ Association’ Short Story Dagger in 2014.
Few copies remaining!
TROUBLE IN MIND Five Leaves Publications/Crime Express, Nottingham, 2007 Few copies remaining!
80 page novella in which DI Charlie Resnick and North London based PI, Jack Kiley, go in search of solider who has gone missing while on leave from Iraq and may have taken his estranged wife and children as hostages.
NICK’S BLUES Five Leaves Publications, Nottingham, 2008
Sixteen year old Nick, living on a tough housing estate in North London, searches for the reasons that would have driven his folk/blues singer father to have taken his own life nine years previously.
BLUE WATCH Troika, 2019
At the heart of WW2, Jack, just fifteen, serves as a Fire Brigade messenger during the London Blitz, becoming involved with Lilith, a young refugee, and a vicious gang of black market thieves.
TEN YEAR STRETCH No Exit Press, 2018
A collection of 20 short stories edited by Martin Edwards & Adrian Muller, celebrating a decade of Crime Fiction at CrimeFest. Includes a Jack Kiley short story, “Blue & Sentimental”, set in and around the Vortex Jazz Club in Dalston, East London.
A distance now from summer, quite deep into autumn, a long way from the Sierra Nevada and the prospect of snow; the blue of the sky this morning paler than yesterday; the wind, from the south-west I suppose, moving the upper branches of the trees just enough that they shimmer a little in the November sun.
Much like Robert Hass in his poem, ‘Happiness’, I took myself off to the morning café early, a book of poems as my companion, and read quietly. The sun was coming in over my shoulder making small shadows across the table.
The poem I was reading, “Stanzas for a Sierra Morning”.
“You couldn’t have bought the sky’s blue. Not in the silk markets of Samarkand. Not In any market between Xi’an and Venice.
Which doesn’t mean that it doesn’t exist. Isn’t that, after all, what a stanza is for, So that after night of listening, unwillingly,
To yourself think, you can walk idly, Through some morning market, sipping tea, An eye out for that scrap of immaculate azure.”
One thing the poem does so well, it seems to me, is mix the distant with the everyday, the exotic – the silk markets of Samarkand – with the mundane, so that, somehow, the act of sitting here reading seems both commonplace and somehow special, more intense.
After a little while, I return the book to my shoulder bag, push the chair back and leave. The sun on my face is warm for November, the wind, as I set off downhill, is cold. Before I stop at the pavement’s edge and glance up – an eye out for that shade of blue – I plant my stick firmly on the ground, gripped tight.
Just occasionally, in one of those moments when my mind is free-floating, I get an idea which nags and won’t let go. Some way of passing the time, perhaps, and passing it fruitfully. Like cataloguing – well, listing – the contents of our home library shelves. Not all of them at once, just Fiction & Memoir to begin with. I mean, that has to be useful, surely? At some point in the future if not now.
Usefulness aside, I was interested – and sometimes surprised – to see which authors featured most strongly; which, in terms of the number of books by certain authors that I have read over the years, are under represented on the shelves.
The final count – that’s final before either Sarah or myself pay another visit to the Amnesty Bookshop in Kentish Town – we have just shy of 1,000 books of Fiction & Memoir. 22 books shy.
The authors most strongly represented are these …
Elmore Leonard 29 D H Lawrence 26 Virginia Woolf 25 Larry McMurtry 22 Graham Greene 19 K. C. Constantine 17 Ernest Hemingway 16 Thomas McGuane 16 Henning Mankel 14 Jack Trevor Story 14 Ross Thomas 13 Jill Dawson 11 Stella Duffy 11 Jim Harrison 11 Daniel Woodrell 11 Raymond Chandler 10 Richard Stark 10 Peter Temple 10 John Updike 10
The numbers include books about, diaries, letters etc as well as the prime works themselves. So that the 25 books by and about Virginia Woolf, for instance, include both volumes of Quentin Bell’s Biography, two volumes of her letters, one of her diaries and critical works by Julia Briggs, Elizabeth Wright and Frances Spalding. D H Lawrence is a smiler case, while Hemingway has Paul Hendrickson’s wonderful ‘Hemingway’s Boat’, remembrances by three different members of his family, and the Special Edition of ‘A Farewell to Arms’ that includes all 47 alternative endings.
What next? Non-Fiction? Too varied and unclassifiable. Visual Art? Film? Photography? Books about writing? Time – and energy – will tell.
Some Days You Do ... 