Monday, 15 April 2019

Boleskine For Sale



Aleister Crowley's magical retreat by the side of Loch Ness, ravaged by fire in 2015, is now for sale. I went there a few years back - it's in a beautiful atmospheric location, but it takes over an hour to get to along a narrow road that winds along next to the loch, once you leave the main road.

Estate agent's brochure here - no mention of AC of course.

An interview with the reclusive owner here.

See also here

Wednesday, 10 April 2019

Spring Into Action

A lot of my time is being spent revising one of my earlier books for republication - hopefully in the summer. The rights to my early books have now reverted to me. This one will be published by Accumulator Press (like Secret Tunnels and Netherwood) and we'll see how things go and consider republishing one or two of the others. I am also considering publishing, or re-publishing, non-fiction (no fiction or poetry) by other authors.

At present I have only one talk arranged - it's for Salon in the City in September on Decadent London (can you guess which book I'm republishing?). Also appearing at that event is Nina Antonia, who amongst other things has recently written a book about Decadent poet Lionel Johnson called Incurable. See here.

Jack-in-the-Green will be with us shortly. See here.

A book I very much enjoyed reading recently was Hollywood by Garson Kanin, a highly readable and amusing account of his time as a screenwriter and film director in Hollywood, mainly for Sam Goldwyn, who is brought to colourful life in the pages. What is impressive is that it's told almost entirely in dialogue - although as with any such account you have to question how accurately these conversations could possibly have been remembered - but it's all hugely entertaining. I also found interesting the account of 'Mae's' an LA brothel where the girls were lookalikes for film stars of the period, surely the inspiration for the similar operation in James Ellroy's LA Confidential where they were 'cut to look like movie stars'.