The Website of Novelist  Derek Robinson

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Readers Write #93 March 2024


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    For years, Britain was hamstrung by censorship. 
A novel could be banned by a law court.  In 1915, D.H. Lawrence wrote a novel called The Rainbow and was prosecuted for obscenity.  The court went farther: they confiscated one thousand and eleven of the book and burned them in the street.  In 1939, Twentieth Century Fox sued Graham Greene.  He had written a review about Shirley Temple - Hollywood's biggest child star - in her latest movie, Wee Willie Winkie, in the British magazine Night and Day.  Greene had written of her 'dimpled depravity' and her 'dubious coquetry'.  It was too much for the Chief Justice, who awarded damages of £3,500, of which Greene's share was £500.  (For modern money, multiply by 20.)  Night and Day went bust.  Greene went to Mexico.

    There were a dozen Acts of Parliament that exercised censorship on the public, especially the Obscene Publications Act of 1857.  In addition, the Customs and Excise did not hesitate to seize books or art they considered obscene.  In 1953, the Customs confiscated copies of Donleavy's The Ginger Man and Nabokov's Lolita; they were unpublishable in Britain.  The Lord Chamberlain's office had powers of censorship over every British theatre and playhouse, and he used it often.  There was no appeal.  In 1948, the Lord Chamberlain forbade a line in a play where an actor mentioned 'hips'.  The producer protested; it was an everyday word; everyone had hips.  He was told: 'The Lord Chamberlain cannot permit it in a British theatre.'  No explanation.  Total censorship.

   Hidden censorship was as bad.  Nobody knew how many novels, scripts and screenplays were rejected by publishers and studios, simply because they challenged the norms that censors preserved.  Certainly, four-letter swear words were unknown in the novels that British authors wrote in the Thirties, Forties and Fifties - even in the novels about World War Two when servicemen spoke the same word endlessly repeated.

    Then came 1960 and the trial in Britain of Lady Chatterley's Lover.  Penguin Books challenged the censorship and won and the sun came out.  Before 1960, the novel was banned; after 1960, Penguin sold three million copies of Chatterley.  This was a watershed.  It led to the abolition of the Lord Chamberlain's office and the liberalisation of every publisher everywhere.  Certainly I could not have written Goshawk Squadron under the old regime.  Instead, I have full freedom to use the maximum of dialogue in the seven other RFC/RAF novels.

    I was lucky to get the boost of freedom.  I have total faith in the reader, who does half the work, and not in censorship.  It has been a long road since the bonfire of The Rainbow.


    Derek Robinson

                                            

Previous Readers Write




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It's 1919. The  Great War is over but a civil war is raging in Russia.  Bolshevik Reds are fighting White Russians, and a volunteer R.A.F. squadron, flying clapped-out Sopwith Camels and DH9 bombers, arrives to duff up the Reds.  But the 'splendid little war' they are promised turns out to be big and brutal, a world of armoured trains, anarchist guerillas, unreliable allies and pitiless enemies.  There is comedy, but it is the bleakest kind. A Splendid Little War shows war as it is: grim, funny, moving - but never splendid.

Reviews of A Splendid Little War
      The Daily Express
             American edition of GQ Magazine 
                               The Independent                         
                                            










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DR_Who He?  When someone at a party asks what I do, I say I write Ripping Yarns.  It's a quick answer but a very incomplete one. I'm best known for my novels about the Royal Flying Corps and the Royal Air Force in the two World Wars and some might say the books are highly readable adventure stories.  Nothing wrong with that, but there's more than combat in the high blue yonder   -   there's also memorable characters, there's unexpected twists and turns of warfare,  and there's aircrew humour.   Especially the humour.  I did my National Service in the Royal Air Force.  I was never airborne; I was in a Ground Control Interception Unit, deep underground in a concrete bunker.  But I learned a lot about the special humour of flying people,  and it emerges naturally and unavoidably in my novels. Humour is one of the essential colours in the spectrum of life. You don't make a story more serious by removing the humour; you just make it less true.

The longer I do this job, the luckier I know I am.  For a start, I'm English and the English language is global. That's pure luck of birth. I might have been born in Hungary.  There are good Hungarian writers,  but it's a lot easier for me to find readers throughout the English-speaking world.  And I was lucky to have literate parents.  When I grew up there were always books and magazines about the house, unlike some other kids' homes. There was a good public library at the end of the street.  And there was the 1944 Education Act which created State Scholarships for bright lads and helped me get into Cambridge.
 
That's where I learned to write boringly. I was writing to impress, not to inform. Twelve years in advertising agencies (London and New York) kicked the crap out of my style. Every word had to work hard. I wrote ad copy and commercials for everything from Esso petrol to The Wall Street Journal.  Always I knew I wanted to move on, to be a fulltime writer  -  but I had nothing to say.  Nothing worth reading, anyway. (I was a late developer.) I wrote two bad and unpublishable novels and finally got it right with a story called Goshawk Squadron. Might have won the Booker Prize if Saul Bellow, one of the judges, had had his way. Not important. "The most readable novel of the year," Nina Bawden said of Goshawk in the Daily Telegraph. "I laughed aloud several times, and was in the end reduced to tears." That's worth more than any prize. The first novel bought me enough time to write the second, and so it goes. Lucky me.
                

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                                  MacLeHose_Logo             
MacLehose Press (an imprint of Quercus Books) has published all of my flying novels  -  four Royal Flying Corps books and four Royal Air Force books.  Here are the new covers:  
 
      pce cake       hullo russia        A Good Clean Fight       Damned Good Show_new 

                war story_new              hornets sting_new            goshawk squadron_new              

Click here to go to the MacLeHose website. where you can click on their individual covers for  purchase options, including e-books.
 
This will be the first time that all my flying titles are in print from the same publisher:  something that gives me great satisfaction. Equally satisfying is the work of Tony Cowland, who has painted the cover illustrations for all the books. Each cover looks dramatically different, yet together they have a family likeness. They form a splendid collection, and they appeared at The Mall Galleries (near Admiralty Arch)  in the Aviation Paintings of the Year Exhibition by the Guild of Aviation Artists. The standard was high. My congratulations to Tony on a memorable achievement.
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Artist and Author  
Photograph: Chris French

SALES

MORE GOOD NEWS
All four of the Luis Cabrillo novels (following the career of  probably the best WW2 double agent and later con-man) are now available as eBooks from Amazon/Kindle. Here are the covers:

                               Artillery                  RedRag                 OpBam  
                            Click on a cover to go to the Amazon sales page.

The R.F.C. trilogy and the R.A.F. Quartet are also available as e-books.
                                                                                     


OPERATION BAMBOOZLE

 

        'Operation Bamboozle' is a fastmoving black comedy about what happens when a high-stakes con artist takes on the Mob in Los Angeles.  The result is a heady brew of disorganised crime, hot dollars, triple virgins and dead bodies in the begonias.   

         Luis Cabrillo is the con artist, Julie Conroy is his squeeze, and here's the opening sentence:   

      For a man who had been hauled out of Lake Michigan in 1949, headless, his legs and arms broken, and stabbed in the heart with a red ballpoint pen, Frankie Blanco was in pretty good shape in 1953.  

  
Click to see the News of the World Review

              FIRST TIME IN PAPERBACK

                        RED RAG BLUES                                                  

  He's a heel, bless him. 

 Luis Cabrillo rides again in this "dashing tale of Nazis and Mafiosi", as The Observer called it. 
In fact, Nazis and Mafiosi play second fiddle to the real dynamo in this story.  It's 1953, and Senator Joe McCarthy's witchhunt for Reds under beds is scaring America witless.

Cue Luis Cabrillo, ex-double agent, now con artist supreme. Dollars flow, hotly pursued by bullets. Luis doesn't know it, but FBI, MI5, KGB and CIA have him firmly in their sights. Not to mention Stevie, the only three-times married virgin in New York City.  This is a rich, fast and very black comedy.



(To read the full Observer review, click here.) 



                                                         Copyright
MacLehose Press (an imprint of Quercus Books) owns the book rights to all my RFC and RAF novels.  Sam Goldwyn Jr  owns the screen rights to Goshawk Squadron. In 1988, LWT made a six-part television series ofPiece of Cake and they own the rights to that production.  I own the screen rights to any remake of Piece of Cake.  I own the screen rights to all my other novels. Quercus Books owns the e-book rights to all my fiction backlist, available through Amazon/Kindle.  Derek Robinson

Contact       I welcome comments and views about my books, though as a working writer I can't guarantee to have sufficient time to answer everyone.  

Click here to send me an email 

Main publications     Click any group heading to see details.

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         pce cake          A Good Clean Fight          Damned Good Show_new           hullo russia           
                             The RAF Quartet (WW2)
                 
                           why1914thmnl     Holy Smoke     
       
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                      PureBristleCvr

Availability of the books.   

All my fiction is available as e-books.  Maclehose Press publish (in print) all eight of my flying novels, available from any good book seller (who may have to order a copy). Or you  could try the websites listed below, often useful for tracking down both new and used books. 

 The two Bristle books, and A Darker Side of Bristol are published by Countryside Books .

     Amazon UK    Amazon USA    Fantastic Fiction  

Other websites you may find of interest:

    Wikipedia



Major books and original publication dates:

1971 Goshawk Squadron 
1973 Rotten with Honour
1977 Kramer's War
1979 The Eldorado Network
1983 Piece of Cake
1987 War Story
1991 Artillery of Lies 
1993 A Good Clean Fight

1999 Hornet's Sting
2002 Damned Good Show
2002 Kentucky Blues

2005  Invasion 1940
2005  Red Rag Blues
2008  Hullo Russia, Goodbye England
2009  Operation Bamboozle
2013  A Splendid Little War
2014
 Why 1914?

2017  Holy $moke


2019  Never Mind the Facts

2020  Odds and Sods


2021   Odds and Sods Mk2     







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