My friend John Lucas,  who died last September, would have been 89 today. John was a poet, professor, publisher, essayist, memoirist, novelist, anthologist, critic and jazzman (not necessarily in that order). There are many tributes online and a Guardian obituary by our mutual friend, Michael Eaton. I was too shaken by John’s death to write about him when asked back then. John decided to stop writing obituaries after doing one too many about a friend much younger than him. He was more than twenty years older than me, but had such zest for life that a world without him in it seems unimaginable.  John playing his cornet, at the Guitar Bar, 10.35pm 19th June 2013 by Graham Lester George. John was born in Exeter and moved to Ashford, Surrey, when he was…

This annual festival, organised by the Graham Greene Birthplace Trust charity, is a labour of love by Greene enthusiasts, and this was my third visit. I wrote about last year’s here and this year I’ll also give a brief account of the festival. Note that, while I’m putting this on my blog this year (search Graham Greene in the bar on the left if you want to see my earlier posts about Greene), my Greene writing from now on will appear on Substack, where there’ll be a longer version of this post. Bonus pieces there will complement the serial novel I begin to publish in a month’s time, each post appearing a hundred years to the day after the one on which it is set, during the…

I first read Graham Greene when I was nineteen. The University of Nottingham had a full run of his novels in the library. I spent much of my first term reading them when I should have been studying dull classics of early literature for my joint honours degree. His fiction fed my suspicion that what I wanted to do with my life was write novels. It wasn’t until 1990, the year of my first novel, and the paperback publication of Volume 1 of Norman Sherry’s Life of Graham Greene when I realised the author had lived, briefly, in Nottingham. Moreover, this city, where I’ve lived for nearly fifty years, played a crucial role in Greene’s development. That’s the opening paragraph of my introduction to Greeneland,…

Back in the 80s, I read Charles Willeford’s Hoke Mosley novels as they came out in the UK. They’re bleak but brilliant crime novels written in a stark style – the nearest European equivalent might be Jean-Patrick Manchette. Back in the 80s, they felt like they belonged with the American literary writers known as ‘dirty-realists’, my favourites of whom were Raymond Carver, Richard Ford and Jayne-Anne Phillips. Willeford was older and had been around longer. He could be controversial, as in the novel ‘Cockfighter’, but I hadn’t heard of his most controversial book, the original second Hoke Mosley novel, ‘Grimhaven.’ That remained the case until a week ago, when a post on Bluesky informed me of a place where I could read this book, which…

I go to gigs most weeks. Every year there tends to be a week where I have several. This week, it was five (nearly six, as I originally planned to see Nadia Reid at The Bodega on Monday). That’ll seem like overkill to some, but last year I was at the South by Southwest festival in Austin, where I would sometimes see five acts in a day, and I’m a regular at Green Man festival, where I’m likely to see even more. The week was bookended by shows from two bands whose front-men are 58, a few years younger than me: Mercury Rev’s Jonathan Donohue at the Rescue Rooms and saxophonist/band leader Tony Kofi at Peggy’s Skylight. I’ve seen both many times before. Each band…