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.

DR