Tunnel of Love: a downbeat update

Posted on February 9, 2026 by theskyscraper

So here we are, a few weeks into 2026, and what have I done so far? Not much, apart from working long hours in the sleet, coming home half dead, then lying in bed with the electric blanket on, drinking black Yorkshire tea [with the bag still in the mug] and reading my way through the DC Compact Comics series, eventually recovering just enough to eat crumpets and watch Seinfeld. Peaks and troughs.

I spent much of last year’s elusive free time nailing down Tunnel of Love, Book XI in the Dan Rhodes franchise [unsurprisingly, it turned out it wasn’t nearly as ready as I thought it was when I dramatically announced its existence a year ago, and it still needed a ton of work.] It comprises my three collections of stories [Don’t Tell Me the Truth About Love, Anthropology & Marry Me], interwoven with notes that amount to a kind of meandering memoir. After more than three years of effort, it’s really ready to go this time. I’m pleased with it, and I think the new material would interest and entertain the right kind of people. You, for example. It was surprisingly enjoyable to check in with my younger self, and revisit the stories, the writing of them, and what happened next.

Regular readers of these dispatches will be wondering when the wheels are going to come off. I don’t want to keep you waiting, so here goes. [Before I proceed I would like to reassure you that I’m not going to pester you with a podcast, I don’t have a Substack (whatever that is – don’t ask me), and I don’t panhandle with Ko-fi or Patreon, or any of that. All I ask of my readers is that they read (and preferably buy) the very occasional books I put out, and indulge me by enduring these infrequent jeremiads. I consider myself to be, by today’s standards, low maintenance. Still, make yourself comfortable because this will take a while.] What follows begins on familiar ground, but a chilling turn is taken and I’ll end on a cliff-hanger.

The new material is jam-packed with behind-the-scenes industry anecdotes, of which, it turns out, I have plenty. There are gossipy stories of awkward backstage encounters with a galaxy of stars ranging from Harold Pinter to Cuddles the Monkey. Almost all the book is upbeat – call me old fashioned, but I want my readers to have a good time. That said, I’ve included a few accounts of battles I’ve fought along the way; they make up a minimal percentage of the material, but they’ve been a huge part of the story of the books, and my life, so it would be peculiar to leave them out. Missing money! Bleak corporate takeovers! Cretinous reviewers! Shitty reprints! All that dismal stuff, but told – if I’ve got it right, and I think I have – in a witty and stylish way. Not everybody is going to be happy about this – some of the people I’ll be singling out for special mention are extraordinarily vain, and in at least one case litigiously so.

As one or two of you may remember, my bête noire in the biz is the board of my former publisher Canongate Books. Batman has the Joker, Superman has Lex Luthor, you have [insert your own arch nemesis], and I have that lot. Exhausting, isn’t it? [Pocket-size summary for newcomers: they didn’t pay any royalties on my best-known book for thirteen years, insisting that nothing was amiss. This clearly wasn’t right, so I went in like a dyspeptic ferret and rooted out thousands of pounds in unpaid earnings – it turned out substantial chunks of my hard-earned cash had indeed been resting in their account. They wouldn’t acknowledge my contracts’ arbitration clauses, and they refused to get anyone in from outside to check over their records to reassure me that there hadn’t been any more bookkeeping discrepancies, peevishly demanding that I be content with them marking their own homework. I was not content. With trust in tatters, I had to pull my first eight books away from them, and they’ve been out of circulation ever since. Everything ravaged, everything burned. I went, and remain, ballistic. It was a tawdry and traumatic end to a years-long association, and the damage is ongoing. I can’t see an end to it. You are at liberty to take sides.] Naturally they feature in some of the true stories in the new book; not all of them are flattering. I’ve been careful to make sure that anything I say about them can be verified – both sides have left an amusingly comprehensive paper trail – and I can stand by every anecdote. This is old news, on its nth time around the block. However… here’s the chilling twist I promised earlier on:

Some of you may have read a recent story about them in the national press. One of their titles – a collection of light verse by Len Pennie – was the victim of a horrible review in the Sunday Times, an unseemly savaging by someone called Graeme Richardson. Critics will be critics, and sometimes they get overexcited. He ended his wretched piece by noting a close similarity between one of Len Pennie’s poems and that of another poet, Sarah Doyle. It was, sad to say, a fair point, and having spotted these likenesses it would have been odd for him to draw a veil over them. And he didn’t. Canongate Books’ response to this managed to be both pathetic and sinister at the same time: they lodged a legal complaint against the newspaper.

For a publisher that has expended a lot of bandwidth telling the world how wonderful they are, this move offered a rare glimpse of their true colours. It’s a Toytown equivalent of Trump vs. the BBC – hurling lawyers at someone who has said something you don’t want to hear, never mind that it has a solid foothold in reality. They would have had a meeting around the top table, and come to this decision together. Next time you see one of them simpering away on a book festival’s Amnesty International panel as they sound off on the importance of auctorial freedom, it might be worth raising your hand. [If you think I’m biased against them you’d be right, but you have enough key words to search for other takes on this story – it’s been widely reported and blogged about, and they’ve not found a great deal of cheerleaders. It turns out not too many people want to be seen parading around in a Make Publishing Great Again baseball cap.]

For years I’ve been like a broken record, saying that they aren’t as cute and cuddly as their PR machine would have the world believe, so it’s helpful that they’ve made my job a bit easier. It’s been a relief, and admittedly quite enjoyable, to watch people who aren’t me tearing them new arseholes for a change. I’m all in favour of literary scraps, and reviewers not having the last word [to this day Private Eye’s resident dingy double-dipper DJ Taylor can get stuffed, for example], but sending in the lawyers? No. Just no. Neither side of this dispute has covered itself in glory, but still, credit where it’s due: it takes a special talent to lose the high ground in a scrap with a Murdoch rag.

I don’t see how any self-respecting book reviewer could touch any of Canongate Books’ titles from this point on, knowing there’s a chance that the publisher will be rushing to the Inns of Justice if they decide they don’t like a perfectly valid point that had been made. You shouldn’t have to worry about the possibility of a court appearance when you’re doing a paperback round-up – how can you tell the world what you really think of the new Matt Haig when you’re staring down the barrel of a ten stretch in the slammer? I would say this amounts to intolerable working conditions, and there should be an across-the-board indefinite moratorium. [You’re right of course, there aren’t any self-respecting book reviewers, and they all hate each other so there’s no solidarity. Even if one of them was to feel a pang of conscience and turn a commission down, others would swoop in – herring gulls fighting over a dropped chip. And don’t get me started on the editors who decide who gets reviewed – those same people give full-page coverage to the serially discredited Johann Hari when they could be spotlighting reliable journalists or proper scientists. Integrity Hotel is not down at the end of New Grub Street. Everything will trundle along as if nothing has happened.]

So where does all this fit in with Tunnel of Love? In the absence of allies in the trade, my plan has been to print a short run of hardbacks – somewhere in the very low hundreds – and flog them directly to my long-suffering readers. The outlay would come out of my meagre savings, and I would need to make it back. With no economies of scale I wouldn’t be able to afford the necessary discount to get it into the shops, and even with direct selling I would have to shift pretty much all the copies to break even; if it was to turn a profit, it would be infinitesimal. A labour of love. All of which is fine – it would be reward enough to get it out there – but with enemies lurking in the long grass [a cast of characters so swivel-eyed that they set lawyers on poetry correspondents] I’m not sure I can take the risk. I can barely afford baked beans, let alone the services of a solicitor – no way could I mount a courtroom defence if they were to decide to go in heavy.

Even though they’re currently something of a laughing stock, they are still dangerous people. They’ve fired warning shots to let the world know they are ready to use the law to pick off their critics, and I’m taking this seriously – I’m gearing up to challenge them in print, and they won’t like the idea of my true stories being lodged in the British Library. Me and my book will be in their crosshairs, and it’s genuinely unnerving. This is a tiny, marginal project, but there’s no saying that would stop them. Legal letters to poetry supplements, for crying out loud. Legal letters! To poetry supplements! They’ve gone full J.D. Vance, and have access to money and lawyers in a way I don’t.

While I was writing it I felt fairly safe. After all, these are the same people who’d sent a pantechnicon full of cash – hundreds of thousands of pounds, much of it doomed – to the hideout of Julian Assange, the Whistleblower General, so they would have struggled to complain about having a whistle blown on them. Bad optics. These days, though, they don’t seem to care about bad optics. If anything, they seem to be actively pursuing the worst optics available. Perhaps they’ve decided they’ve ridden the #bekind bandwagon as far as it’ll go and it’s time for a full 180.

I don’t see why any grievances against my book wouldn’t be dismissed by any sensible judge as egregious piffle, but even so you hear horror stories about people who win legal cases but still get saddled with crippling costs. I’m not in a position to take a risk like that. If it was just me, maybe I would grasp the nettle, but other people are in harm’s way. I can’t drag my family down with me. So what to do?

I suppose I could reluctantly send them a copy, or at least the relevant passages [they don’t deserve to have the whole manuscript in their lives, and only a modest fraction of its pages concern them], and give them the opportunity to identify any objections prior to going to press. If it turned out there were any points raised where I couldn’t find the paperwork to back me up [unlikely] I could remove that particular line. But even though I have a dossier of hard evidence [which they share – it’s all based on our correspondence, as well as public domain material like their own press releases, reports in the trade press, etc.], might they still be able to insist on the removal of unflattering content, anything that is counter to their preferred narrative? In light of recent events, I wouldn’t put it past them to try. I’m really not sure how these things work.

I would, though, be prepared to offer them a right of reply, like in those documentaries about Scientology where they periodically pause the action and show a card saying something like, “The Church of Scientology gave this statement: ‘Oooh, none of this is true – we’re a proper religion, and we’re really nice, and anyone who says we’re not is lying, and we definitely don’t have our own prisons.’” I could agree to include their responses in the text. A compromise I suppose, but not without merit – the poetry fiasco has shown us that there’s enjoyment to be had in watching them slam custard pies into their own faces.

And yet… I shouldn’t have to do any of this tedious bollocks. I should be sending the book off to the printers about now, and you lot should be gearing up to have the time of your lives reading it. The serious point here is: how much of a person’s life story belongs to them, and how much of it can be commandeered and smothered by people with lots of money? I suppose we’ll find out. For the good of my health I’ve not had dealings with them for several years. Whenever I think of those people, which is many times a day, the black dog growls. The thought of being back in direct contact makes my flesh crawl, but if I’m to get this book out it looks as though I don’t have any choice.

I know I said this earlier, but it bears repeating: Tunnel of Love is not about the senior management of Canongate Books. Nowhere near – they merely pop up here and there, to be cheered or booed at the reader’s discretion. It’s about my stories – how they came to be, and the adventures and misadventures I had because of them. It is, at its heart, a romp. Considering my current mood you may not believe me, but the book contains a good deal of authentic joie de vivre. Even the dark bits will, I hope, have enough gags along the way to be a fun ride. I had a blast writing it, and I hope that shines through. Apart from some final technical nano-tweaks, I’m not going to work on the manuscript any more, no matter how tempted I may be. None of this poetry scandal business is going in, for example. It’s ready to go, and I hope you’ll get to read it before too long.

I would rather not publish it at all, though, than send it out watered down at the insistence of my antagonists. It all comes down to cold hard cash: I can’t afford to escalate this to a full-on battle, and they know it. I would have to back down at the appearance of a credible threat. I’m bracing myself for the possibility that the book won’t happen – if anything, this is the outcome I’m expecting: Prognosis Negative. Three years of work up in flames. If Dark Forces^TM put it in shackles, I expect it’ll be the end for me as a writer. Everything apart from the writing itself is such a wretched slog. If it stays in the vault I don’t see myself having enough left in the tank to keep going. It’ll be time to walk away. Morale is a factor. Exhaustion too. Time and money (lack of). Isolation in the biz takes its toll. There comes a point. If I go to ground, you’ll know what’s happened. At least I’ll have gone down fighting.

There you are. Downbeat. You can’t say I didn’t warn you. Perkier authors are available if that’s your thing. It isn’t though, is it? Good.

So it looks as though I’m going to have to send them the relevant passages. This is the cliff-hanger. You’ve probably gathered that a gauntlet is being thrown down. I’ll keep you in the loop [though don’t hold your breath – the Winter Olympics is on, and our printer’s on the blink. These things take time.] The next time I write an update it’ll either be with a spring in my step and a buy-it-now button, or plugging a crowdfunder to cover my bail.

We’ll find out together what happens next…

I hope you’re all doing well.

[P.S. Do yourself a favour and read Bad Traffic by Simon Lewis. As well as being the most thrilling thriller I’ve ever read, the follow-up is out any minute. Buy your copy today. My other cultural recommendation is the Beavis and Butt-Head reboot. I don’t say this lightly, but I think it’s at least as good as the first run. Start with the comeback film, Beavis and Butt-Head Do The Universe, and go from there. And if you’ve not read Sour Grapes, sort it out.]

Showbiz Silver Jubilee

Posted on February 14, 2025 by theskyscraper

[Since you ask, Tunnel of Love is a nod to the Fun Boy Three single that I bought from Woolworth’s in Tiverton in 1983.] Frustratingly, though, we’ve hit a snag. A publisher came on board last year, telling me they were up for putting it out in 2025. Months went by with no further news, and when their silence started to become ominous I chased them up, at which point they told me they’d decided that the book was too long and they couldn’t afford the paper. Oh.

Maybe this is the full story – times are really tough for small presses – or maybe they also had cold feet about the content of the book. I don’t know, and I’m not going to press them; I would rather move on with a minimum of hard feelings. The problem may stem from the notes in the omnibus amounting to a kind of memoir in which I tell stories about the stories, as well as going into the books’ publication histories. It is, I hope, a light and enjoyable read, but anecdotes about my dealings with publishers were inescapable if I was to do this properly, and the picture it paints of some of the characters in and around the book trade is not wholly flattering. I know from experience that the biz is pathologically inward-looking and wretchedly cautious (often to the point of coming across as a shower of snivelling cowards), so finding a home for this book was always going to be a struggle. I can’t see a big house touching it with a barge pole, so its only hope is to be taken on by a pugilistic independent publisher. If you happen to be a pugilistic independent publisher who digs what I do and can afford the paper, feel free to get in touch.

If no pugilistic publisher is forthcoming I’ll have to weigh up my options. I’m hoping it won’t become a Great Lost Book. Even if you already have the story collections there’s a ton of new material in there (60,000+ words), so it counts as the 11th instalment of the Dan Rhodes franchise and will consequently be an essential purchase for everybody, if and when it does finally appear. I would have preferred this update to have trumpeted a release date, but what can you do? I don’t know how all this is going to unfold, but I’ll keep you posted on any major developments. In the meantime, stay optimistic and save up your pocket money just in case…

Thanks for tuning in.

Skopje Calling

Posted on November 6, 2023 by theskyscraper

In news that will come as a shattering blow to my enemies, I’m still in the game. For starters, Sour Grapes has just come out in paperback. I expect you’ve already read it, but if not you’re running out of excuses: buy it from your favourite bookshop today. [And I don’t know exactly how these things work, but I would like to think that international shipping costs will be slightly less terrifying now it’s smaller. Who knows?]

And what’s the green one on the right? Give yourself a prize if you identified it as being the North Macedonian edition of Anthropology. Needless to say I’m very chuffed about this – it’s my first time ever in Macedonian, and the first time I’ve sorted out a foreign deal by myself. It’s published by Antolog Books, and they’ve been a dream to work with. I would love to give the translator a shout-out, but to be honest I can’t work out what they’re called. I’ll get back to you on that. That’s the thing about translations. I always pass my details on to the translator – sometimes you never hear a word from them, and sometimes you get a good amount of back-and-forth. My Finnish translator even turned up on my doorstep with a bundle of Moomins memorabilia. Nice.

Whenever a new edition of Anthropology comes in, I amuse myself by trying to work out which story is which. This is definitely one of the trickier translations…

In other news… there isn’t much. I’m struggling to find the time to write, what with work and other things, so my plan to get a book out in 2025 is looking less and less likely. But you never know.

I should probably leave it there, while I’m still relatively upbeat. If I stay here any longer the wheels will come off.

Happy reading.

Anniversary Frenzy

Posted on April 14, 2023 by theskyscraper

When you’ve been in showbiz as long as I have, landmark anniversaries come around thick and fast. Put up some bunting, pour yourself a beaker of pop, then buckle up and read on. To begin with, we’re celebrating the 20^th anniversary of my first novel, Timoleon Vieta Come Home. I wrote this one between 1997 and 2002, and it came out in early 2003. I found it very hard, which is why it took so long. The first people who were supposed to publish it passionately disliked it – they said it would ‘not stand up to critical scrutiny’, and refused to put it out unless I made some really lame-arsed changes. I wasn’t having that, and after a long and ugly scrap I managed to wriggle out of their grip and shop it around the biz.

A few years earlier I’d bought a small and superbly produced hardback edition of Fup by Jim Dodge, and thought my Anthropology stories would sit nicely in a similar volume. In 1998, when I felt the time had come to send them out, its publisher – Canongate Books – had been top of my list. They never got back to me though, and were consequently added to my blacklist, but after I read the brilliant John Fante books that they published I forgave them, so when Timoleon Vieta was free again, I approached them for a second time. I liked the idea of being published alongside John Fante, and the great Sylvia Smith’s Misadventures. I’d also read Laura Hird’s Born Free, and Be Wise, Be Otherwise by Kevin MacNeil, and wanted in. When they told me they liked it, and offered £4000, I jumped at it.

The London publishing scene was stuffy and square, but Canongate Books was different. They were based in Edinburgh for a start, they played music in the office, and the people who worked there were, mainly, a groovy bunch; I have fond memories of getting shitfaced with them in The City Café after work. While London had been dominated by posh people who worked in publishing because that’s what posh people do, this lot gave the impression of having blown in off the street because they loved books and wanted to get involved. It was a relief to get away from the Sloan Ranger side of things – while that wasn’t entirely absent here, this office was mainly the preserve of balls-out Scots, and as a hapless Englishman I had to squint my ears to keep up. These were my new colleagues, and I was happy again.

They did a great job on the production, taking one of the Vien Thuc paintings I’d included and slapping it on the front of a good-looking brown paperback with flaps. The very first ones had a kind of texture to them. Superb. And then it came out. Its awesome publicist helped get it some great coverage, it sold well, it won prizes, and it picked up some cracking reviews, including a belter from Michiko Kakutani in the New York Times – all of which made my former publisher look stupid. Mission Accomplished. It was translated all over the place, and I hit the road more or less non-stop for a year and a half.

It was a hard book to talk about, though. I’m always uncomfortable answering questions about my writing; this is partly because I’m a bit thick and can never think of a clever answer, but also because I’m old-fashioned enough to value plot, and don’t want to risk giving anything away. Perhaps more than any of my other books, this one has an ending that really defines it, and I struggled to talk about it because without touching on how it ends, I’m not really talking about the book at all. [I still get grief about the ending from lucky people who haven’t understood it.] And yet I ploughed on, mainly because I got to go on some amazing trips to places I had never been to before. I toured America with DBC Pierre, and England & Scotland with Jim Dodge; DBC & I were the warm-up act for the Flaming Lips in the Hague; another night I found myself singing Foreigner’s I Want To Know What Love Is while Brian Eno fed me helium to help me hit the high notes. They were good times, and inevitably they fizzled out.

[I was going to write a bit here about how the wheels came off shortly afterwards, how after they’d had an inexplicable hit the trustafarian who ran the show decided they should be more ‘professional’, and people I’d really enjoyed working with kept vanishing, while sleek execs were headhunted from the big houses in London, and the whole scene became less Scottish. You’d visit and it would be deathly quiet, with no music and everyone with their heads down in case they were given the chop for talking in class. They also spent a fortune changing their excellent logo to something that looks like it belongs on a 1980s revision guide. I decided to leave all this out, though – I’ll focus on the positives instead, and besides, breaking the publishing omertà is a lonely and thankless business, and right now I can’t be bothered with it. I was also going to make mention of how the royalties for the dog book stopped coming in around this time – all those shiny new execs, but somehow they couldn’t keep their accounts in order – but I’ve gone on about this in extraordinary detail before, and won’t bother you with that story again. I worked with loads of excellent people during those later years, but the spirit had gone. The squares had taken over.]

It’s out of print now, and will probably remain that way. It puts me too much in mind of the bad times, and is dead last on my list of novels I would like to revive. I can’t remember much about it, but I do remember how it ends. No matter how many people give me grief about it, I’ve always known that ending was the right way to go. Oddly, the 1980s boarding school casualties in charge of the company were exactly the kind of people I was railing against. I wonder what was going through their minds as they read it, and decided to publish it… I suppose they would have been cheering-on the baddie as he commits his atrocity. The reader’s not meant to be on his side, but they must have found a kindred spirit in him as he causes devastation in other people’s lives, then carries on without a backward glance – just as Jeff Bezos roots for Lex Luther when he reads his Superman comics. It takes all sorts, unfortunately.

It had a good life – it starred in Knocked Up, and Cate le Bon wrote a song about it. And I never did find out how to pronounce Timoleon Vieta.

The other anniversary is for my poor, neglected Marry Me, which is now ten years old. I love this book. Hardly anybody has read it, and that’s humanity’s loss. It was my sort-of-follow-up to Anthropology, and if you forced me to choose, I would say it’s the better book. We launched it at Clapham Grand, on a bill with Tim Key, Aidan Moffatt and a pre-inflatable-suit Sam Smith. When the American edition came out it had the most amazing review any book has ever had – an epic in the Washington Post. They loved it, and wouldn’t stop going on about how much they loved it. Sadly, though, it was launched as a Valentine’s Day title, and because nobody reads Valentine’s-themed books, let alone reviews of Valentine’s-themed books, it went unnoticed and had no impact on sales. Gutting.

Now it’s time for some commerce:

You should finally buy a copy of Marry Me. Just click here to do so in a way that makes me a couple of quid. When it arrives you’ll see that I’ve hand-corrected the typo in the bio.

You can buy the dog book as well, if you’re so inclined. The remaining copies live here.

And when I did the long piece about This is Life they sold out pretty quickly, but I found another box of them in the cellar so they are back in stock now.

And they’ve revived the hardback-for-a-fiver offer on Sour Grapes. Let’s face it, if you don’t take them up on this, there’s not a great deal of hope for you as a human being.

Commerce over.

Don’t worry, I think this is the only time you’ll be hearing from me this year. I’ll be back at some point though, with more of the usual. Hopefully I’ll have new stuff to report. I’m trying to get something together for 2025 – my Showbiz Silver Jubilee – but it’s hard to find the time. I just don’t know.

Happy anniversary.

Cheap Grapes

Posted on December 1, 2022 by theskyscraper

Look at them. Don’t you wish you had one? Even if you do have one, see how good they look piled up. It’s been out for over a year now, and in spite of my enemies’ best efforts it’s ticked over surprisingly well. This comeback was all a bit of a leap into the unknown, and I wasn’t sure anybody would remember me so it’s a relief to know that there are still some people out there with incredibly good taste: people like you. Business-wise I tried out something new too – a profit-sharing deal offered by Eye & Lightning Books, where you don’t get an advance but if the book shifts you get a much better royalty rate than a normal publisher would offer. It was all very experimental, but so far it’s worked – I’ve had my first cheque for it. [It’s almost enough to make you wonder why authors put up with the crumbs-under-the-table model that’s offered by most of the rest of the biz…] Call me a breadhead, but I like getting paid; not least because it helps to fund my debilitating addiction to Japanese detective novels, but also because it’s a palpable signal that there are still people out there who dig my trip, and after a pulverising few years that was a much needed morale boost. Big thanks to everyone who’s bought a copy, and who’s helped us get word out that it exists – you’re a true patron of the arts. And if you haven’t bought it yet, read on…

We still have a pallet of hardbacks to shift, to make way for a paperback edition which will hopefully be out at some point next year. Here’s where you come in: instead of sending them off to the mincer like a normal publisher would, we’re banging them out at a fiver a pop. Even with postage added it’ll be the same price as your average paperback. And if you’re overseas, even with international postage it’ll make it a slightly less intolerable price than it was before. This offer runs through December, and it’s while-stocks-last, so grab ’em while you can. It’s a superb illustrated edition that would be a credit to anyone’s bookshelf. If you bought it at full price, please don’t be aggrieved – some of the money will have gone towards my new dehumidifier and/or the latest Keigo Higashino novel, so you’ve secured your place in heaven. All you have to do is click here, and before you know it this glorious object will be yours to keep. Why not get two – one to read, and one for best? If you spend over £15 at their shop they throw in free UK postage too, so go crazy.

Thanks for putting up with this unseemly self-promotion. As a reward for your patience I’m going to get through an entire update without complaining about Private Eye or C*******e Books. Bollocks to them still, of course, but I’m not going in deep this time. Enjoy the respite, and have as excellent a festive season as you realistically can.