Burley Cross Postbox Theft. Nicola Barker
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1, The Old Cavalry Yard
The High Street
Burley Cross
Wharfedale
WD3 4NW
20/12/2006
Dear Mr Vesper Scott-Jones,
I am writing to you, care of your publishers, because I have contacted you via your website www.sky-turns-black.com on three separate occasions and have received no direct answer to my enquiries. Instead my questions (and my email) have ended up – in bastardized form – on a ‘fans’ forum’ to be chewed over and debated by other ‘fans’, which isn’t at all what I’d had in mind (and, to put it bluntly, their various contributions have, by and large, been nothing short of asinine).
If I had wanted to know what Joe Bloggs thought on a variety of issues relating to your ‘oeuvre’ I suppose I could always have strolled out on to the High Street, right here in Burley Cross (West Yorkshire), and conducted a small random poll myself (I don’t doubt that it would have taken me considerably less time and been infinitely more illuminating!).
It might interest you to know – by the by – that you have an Australian fan who haunts your site called AUSSIEHARDASS (I’m guessing he’s an Australian – of course this can’t be definitively proven) whose provocative views and coarse language I find especially difficult to stomach, as do many other contributors (I believe he answers to the general description of what they like to call ‘a troll’ in the lingo). I would suggest that his presence on the site is counter-productive and that all traces of him should be expunged from it as a matter of some urgency.
Perhaps this letter may serve to draw your attention to some of the other problems with the website: it’s slow to download, the graphics seem a little amateurish – far too much lime green for ‘average tastes’ – and there’s an irritating, somewhat gratuitous home-page which you need to double-click – several times, in my case – to gain proper access to the contents (I am presuming that you have some flunkey from your publishers running the show, or – worse still – that you are actually paying some wet-behind-the-ears graduate a living wage out of your own pocket to take care of it. I don’t know. But either way… etc.).
May I now just say – to start my letter, proper – that I enjoyed the four books in your ‘Sky Turns Black’ series a great deal, although I thought the last book, Chute to Kill, took some of the ideas and themes explored in the earlier novels a stage too far – into the realms of the surreal in some instances, e.g. the girl, Lola, who dressed and acted like a circus poodle (to try and exorcize her experiences of childhood abuse at the hands of her dog-breeder uncle) was stretching a point, I felt, but the boy who spoke only in garbled rhyme? Way too much! I realize that he served as a kind of modern-day Greek Oracle figure, but I found both his use of the vernacular and his ability to conveniently pop up (muttering a tired, little ‘rap’ – apparently to order) whenever a new corpse was unearthed from one of the various high-rise blocks’ many rubbish chutes a tad unconvincing, to say the least.
The book just didn’t hang together as well as it might have – and I’d guessed the final twist by chapter four (having said that, I am very quick on the uptake. It sometimes drives my wife Moira around the bend when I leap up, ten minutes into a film or television drama yelling, ‘The transvestite did it! He killed his father to fund his breast surgery…’ etc. etc. I just can’t help it. It’s simply a knack I have).
But all credit to you for trying something different. A lot of young(er) writers don’t seem to have the gumption for that, nowadays – especially after a period of success (when a sense of complacency often tends to set in, and they end up churning out any old trash).
Of course like most people I came to your work through the TV series, which – to be frank – I thought was arty-farty and over-directed. I only watched it because my daughter, Elise, who was visiting us at the time, twisted her mother’s arm into giving it a go.
That said, I did rate Kenneth Hursley’s cartoonish portrayal of Tim Trinder, the failed private investigator turned estate manager, solving crimes on the job (while a group of idiotic coppers and social workers weighed in with their size twelves, making the already delicate racial and social relations on the estate in the swinging sixties/early seventies even more parlous than they already were!).
As a matter of interest, I saw Hursley in the new Kenneth Branagh vehicle recently and thought he looked strangely out of his depth rubbing shoulders with more ‘established’ actors (which was a shame for the poor lad. The conclusion I was forced to reach was that he was one of those actors who performs at his best when playing a role very close to his own personality – not that this is entirely a bad thing: it’s always worked for Scotland’s Sean Connery).
Now I hear they’re toting his name about as the new Dr Who! Who’d have thought it?
I suppose we’ll just have to wait and see what he comes up with for the role; although he’ll have his work cut out to do a better job than Christopher Eccleston, who brought a much needed measure of northern grit to the part (he’d be hard pressed to do a worse one than the effeminate boy they’ve had in the role since!).
In truth, I’ve never really made much of a habit of watching the show, myself. My wife watches it, on occasion. The BBC love to over-hype it – but it’s just for kids, really, isn’t it?
The TV series of Sky Turns Black was filmed in Coventry, whereas the location of the original books was Manchester’s Hulme estate. Presumably this change was necessitated by the demolition of Hulme’s (by then) notorious crescents in 1993. As a Coventry lad, born and bred, who later lived in Manchester for some years, I was naturally keen to see if this drastic southward shift would prove successful. In the end, sadly, I felt it wasn’t.
I read in a question-and-answer slot (in the Radio Times, I think it was – or possibly in something more down-market which I paged through at the dentist) that you were on a Media Studies course at the Polytechnic College in Coventry for almost a year (I know they like to call them all ‘Universities’ nowadays, but they’re not kidding anybody, are they?). I wondered if this formative experience might have been a factor in your choice of a new location?
Either way, it seems you didn’t enjoy the academic life and headed down to London to work as a runner for a film company before later moving into advertising where you worked on campaigns for Dairylea Cheese Triangles, and, later, Dove moisturizing underarm deodorant (I can’t distinctly recall the adverts for either of these products, although I do remember partaking of the odd cheese triangle when my children were young, and while they weren’t anything spectacular they were certainly perfectly edible).
Not only did I grow up in Coventry, but (cue the drum roll!) my father was the caretaker on a housing estate near the city centre for several years! I have extraordinarily strong childhood memories of the post-war geography of the town, and was a first-hand witness to the radical changes that took place from the late 1950s onwards (although I was lucky enough to move further north in 1964).
I won’t pretend that there is much of the Coventry I knew so well as a boy present in your TV series – or, indeed, of the Manchester I knew later on in your books. It’s obvious where the gaps in your knowledge are, but I like to think that this isn’t simply a lack of good, detailed research on your part, but rather an author’s artistic prerogative to reinvent a location (or setting) to better explicate their character and their plot.
When it comes to the ‘caretaking’ aspect of the books, I also have (as mentioned above) a special insight into this particular area of endeavour, although of course my father, Ken, was nothing like Tim Trinder; he didn’t suffer from childhood polio, for starters (his hand was not malformed, and he didn’t walk with a limp), nor was he given to dramatic flights of fancy on the job. He was, as you might expect, a very sensible, responsible member of the Coventry community (a stalwart of the Rotary Club), a much liked local figure with a great talent for plumbing (something he later exploited by becoming a plumber, full-time).
It never ceases to amuse me how little practical