Grafters' Gelt

A generous and thoroughly readable review of Cheapjack by Fiona Gruber in the week's TLS (April 30th 2010). Fiona is a freelance journalist working in both England and Australia. She lives in Melbourne and is the founding hostess of a monthly salon there. (Perhaps Francis will get a look in when he visits Melbourne in September?) Fiona also presents a weekly arts and music radio show. Her current project is a biography of Alice Cornwell,  goldmine owner and former proprietor of the Sunday Times. Something to look forward to.

Chavvies and Homeys

D.J. Taylor picked Cheapjack as the book he's most enjoyed reading this week. He writes in the Independent on Sunday, 'Though full of incident and first hand observation of life on the Depression era road, his (ie Philip Allingham's) memories of telling fortunes at fairs are also remarkable for their luxuriant use of interwar slang [...] Who would have thought that the average Romany traveller of the 1930s liked hanging out with his "homeys" (ie men) or habitually referred to children as "chavveys"?' To read the whole piece, click here.

Guardian review of Cheapjack

Cheapjack 
by Philip Allingham

Philip Allingham came from a family of journalists, and was little brother to the crime writer Margery Allingham. She titivated for publication his youthful memoir of lowlife on the showgrounds of Britain in the 1930s, and later pinched its weird tone for a few of her novels. Phil had realised early in the great depression that entry-level office jobs were asphyxiating him, and so he chanced it round the circuit of the last great fair weeks, when all of a county was en fete simultaneously, out for a lark on the rides and shies or in the booths and among the crowds. He was almost a toff, and at first traded on it, wearing his dinner suit to "read palms" - Phil had a novelist's gift for character and so told people about their present selves, a revelation before the age of pop psychology. Then he realised he was a natural at the stand-up comic routine cheapjacks used to sell novelties, and went on to flog hair curlers with the help of young teen assistants and their lovely if nitty locks. Original, unpatronising dispatches from a world you never suspected had existed.

Vera Rule         (Guardian March 13th 2010)



Cheapjack - finished copies due Feb 10th

Running sheets arrived on Friday - thrilled with the way the photos have turned out. You can see the dimples on their knees! Only sad that no-one - other than Francis, Roger and I will truly appreciate what a fabulous job Lesley did to get such wonderful clear scans from the yellowing pages of the 1934 US edition. She devised a method of scanning every page in colour then using paint shop pro to turn all the yellow to white. Then changed to grayscale. The result is a joy to look upon.    (Good to read as well)

countdown to the Essex Book Festival

Tickets to the Essex Book Festival go on sale today so Francis (in his capacity as Patron) was on BBC Essex's Dave Monk show giving a plug to Joanne Harris (who's appearing at our children's school in Dunmow) and to our joint event at Essex University but modestly saying nothing, as far as I heard, about his own talk at the Essex Record Office. I meanwhile was looking at the programme drooling with anticipation at various nautical events - Richard Woodman & his 'Nathaniel Drinkwater' novels  being but one treat on the horizon. Then I discovered Steven Russell writing in the East Anglian Daily Times about the headline appearance of Alastair Campbell and other Book Festival news and I realised just how much had happened since this time last year. In January 2009 The Adventures of Margery Allingham was a file on a printer's system - as her brther Phil's Cheapjack is now. I hadn't been to America or met Jim Huang and Jennie Jacobson of the Crum Creek Press and Francis's Strange Days Indeed was still scarily unfinished business. Steven Russell and Neil D'Arcy Jones were the first journalists to take an interest in the re-publication of Margery's biography and I was so grateful to them. For me it was the start of a quietly wonderful year.