I was born in
1948, in Sussex, and lived until the start of my teens mostly in Brighton and in
Hove. My parents separated when I was about 7 and subsequently divorced. Both remarried,
and I moved with my mother to London when I was 13 and which has been my home ever
since.
Writing
I have always
written - at least, that is how I remember it. One of my most vivid memories from
my childhood was sitting in the window seat of the block of flats we were then living
in, waiting and watching for the postman, waiting for the present promised by an
uncle, a portable typewriter. It seems now that I waited for months - I remember
the waiting far better than the typewriter’s eventual arrival. I remember, too,
being in Paris with my step-mother, spending most of the time in my hotel room writing
a play. I spent much of my young teens writing - poetry, plays, short stories. None
of the early work has survived, I am glad to say. With digital technology, many
aspiring young writers will be tempted keep their work forever: it may be less of
a blessing that it seems at the time it is saved!
My relationship
with my father was bad. My first novel, published by Talmy Franklin in 1975, The Motive Not The Deed, the trial of a young man who killed his father, drew heavily on it.
I left school
when I was 16; for the whole of 1965, I worked in the London offices of the pirate
radio station, Radio Caroline (“Number Six, Chesterfield Gardens, London, West One;
I’ll say that again, Number Six...”). It was an exciting job for a youngster, especially
under the charismatic and benign leadership of Ronan O’Rahilly; memories of visiting the ship rushed back recently (2009) with news of the death of disc jockey Simon Dee. He was reputed to be arrogant, but I never saw it - to the contrary, he was charming and helpful to me.
This was followed
by a number of fairly meaningless jobs, then by a period in Paris writing, then
wandering Europe ending up in Oslo, where (flat broke) I signed on as a merchant
seaman on the cargo (not passenger!) ships of the Fred Olsen Line, with whom I sailed
for most of 1967: I spent that summer of love scraping rust of metal and repainting
it, or on four hour lookouts at night.
With hindsight,
it seems odd to me that none of these periods generated any fiction - in some
ways, though, they were the periods of my youth that I enjoyed the most and I suspect
that has made them quite hard to detach from and describe.
Law
After I returned
to England, I decided to go to a college to get my A levels. One of these was Law,
more because of the personality of the teacher than anything else; the other was
English. I went on to do Law at University: I feared
at the time that being taught English would cut across my actual writing, so Law
seemed like the only alternative. I started at University College London in 1969.
For all that it
was so little - and so ill - thought out, it was a fatal choice: I have studied
or practised law ever since - 40 years and counting.
Of course, that
wasn’t all I did. Indeed, as I had for most of my University years no intention
of practising law, hoping still to become - and earn a living as - a published author,
it seems to me that I was less at college than hanging out in various different
places, including - for a period - the coffee lounge of a London cult, which led
to my last novel, published in 2001 by Aramis Books (a company set up by myself
and another previously published author), The Programme.
The Object
Man
Long before that,
in 1986, my third novel - The Object Man - had been
published by Allison & Busby. It is probably my strangest novel - a sort of reverse
The Collector, John Fowles’ novel - in that it tells the story of
a young man, a writer, who is captivated by a woman and stalks her, only for her
to turn the tables on him and imprison him. Not - I hasten to add! - anywhere like
as autobiographical as the origins of The Motive Not The Deed, it nonetheless emerged from the confused, sexual smörgåsbord of the
1960s and 1970s.
Housing
Law
I had qualified
as a barrister in 1974 and soon began to specialise in housing law: although I continued
to write fiction, encouraged by the publication of The Motive
Not The Deed, I also wrote extensively on housing law in the pages of a Bulletin
published by the Legal Action Group, aimed at providing support to the increasing
number of lawyers who were - in law centres, advice centres and private practice
- undertaking legal aid work, trying to redress the imbalance between those who
could afford (and knew how to access) lawyers and those who did not, particularly
in areas like housing, employment, family law, social security, consumer rights
and so on.
Although I practised
- and still practise - from Chambers, I took a two-year time out to go up to Birmingham
and establish and manage its first Law Centre, in Small Heath.
What I found as
I began to take on work for tenants was that the laws which could protect them were
spread thinly through Acts of Parliament and legal text books designed for landlords
- principally for business and agricultural lettings - and local authorities, who
administered the largest block of rented housing in the country. In my articles,
I - and others writing in the area - began to describe the law not as “landlord
and tenant law,” redolent of an essentially private, commercial relationship in
which the key factors are financial, or as “local government law” with its implication
of administrative discretion, but as “housing,” with an inference of basic human
rights. The subject is now established in its own right.
I was fortunate
because the leading legal publishers - Sweet & Maxwell - made an active committment
to support what I was doing and, over the next 10 years or so, I built up with them
a portfolio of works focused on housing: the Encyclopaedia of Housing Law and Practice,
the Housing Law Reports, the Journal of Housing Law, Arden & Partington’s Housing
Law, the Manual of Housing Law, and so on. I edit or author all of them still, as
I also continue to produce new editions of two books for the Legal Action Group,
originally derived from my articles for its Bulletin in the 1970s - Homelessness
and Allocations (the 8th edition of which will come out in 2010) and
Quiet Enjoyment (the 6th edition of which was published in 2002).
I continued to
write fiction, though. Apart from The Object Man
in 1986, in 1985 Allison & Busby had also published my second novel,
No Certain Roof, which, as its title implies, drew
on my experiences working in housing law. It was the tale of the repossession of
a long-standing family home by its new landlord, and the eviction of the family
as a result of his development plans - gentrification. I was trying to tell the
human side of what I was otherwise writing about as legal theory.
Wellington
Street Chambers
Initially, my
practice was - the two years at Small Heath aside - from the left-wing Chambers
that started life as Bowden Street Chambers and then became Wellington Street Chambers:
we were the first set of Chambers ever to establish ourselves outside of the ancient
Inns of Court; we were trying to get away from the rarified, collegiate atmosphere
and work somewhat closer to where our clients lived. At any rate, that was the original
intention, when we went to Bowden Street in Lambeth, although once we had moved
to Wellington Street in Covent Garden we were closer to more shops and restaurants
than clients.
I stayed at Wellington
Street until 1983 when I departed on anything but good terms. In 1989, writing as
Bernard Bannerman, Sphere books published my thriller, The
Last Wednesday, the first of the Dave Woolf books, in which Dave investigates
the death of a number of members of a left-wing set of barristers chambers, which
some people believe contains the story of my fall-out with those Chambers. You’ll
have to decide for yourself how much of it is rooted in fact, how much in fantasy
and how much in wishful thinking.
To all intents
and purposes, Wellington Street Chambers as I had known them ended business by the
mid-1980s.
Local Government
Law
Because so much
housing was and is provided by local authorities, there was a considerable overlap
between the emerging subject of housing law and local government law. In time, therefore,
I found myself working for some of the local authorities who were most interested
in improving conditions for their tenants - and for people more widely - including
the Greater London Council.
In 1982, the GLC
asked me to conduct an Inquiry into its funding of housing associations, two of
which had recently collapsed financially. It became the biggest job I had ever undertaken,
stretching over 15 months into 1983. It was followed in 1985 by Inquiries for Bristol
City Council, into its housing improvement grants, and Hackney London Borough Council
into - initially - whether freemasons had an improper influence over its affairs.
The first took only three or four months but the second was another lengthy job,
running for 18 months into 1987, not so much because of the freemasonry but because,
once I began, I realised that the problems at the council were far less likely to
be about freemasonry than about a body which allowed rumour and gossip to run rife,
and was so badly organised that it was commonly impossible to tell what had actually been
happening. The council asked me to address those wider issues as well, its “institutional
deficiencies”, as we called the new brief. It overtook the GLC Housing Association
Inquiry as my biggest ever professional task and it probably so remains, although
the hearings on the Homes for Votes scandal at Westminster Council - which took
up most of 1994 in preparation and presentation - gives it a good run for its money.
The Hackney Inquiry
did, however, feed into fiction: Controlling Interest,
the second Dave Woolf thriller published by Sphere in 1989 simultaneously with
The Last Wednesday, and which was also set within
the legal profession, not only drew on the knowledge of freemasonry that I had acquired
but gave cameo roles to Hackney’s Chief Executive and my Inquiry Report.
I have continued
to work extensively in local government. My GLC Inquiry led to the greatest friendships
of my life, with John Fitzpatrick, the last Solicitor to the GLC, and Maurice Stonefrost,
its last Director-General, both of whom died in their early 80s in the last few
years. For more than 20 years, we met regularly at Manzis Seafood Restaurant behind
Leicester Square - also now gone! - for all-day, boozy lunches which were the mainstay
of my life, professionally and personally. The relationships more than made up for
the yawning gap left by that with my father.
As well as guiding
me towards much of what I have come to believe and understand about life, and supporting
me through some spectacularly bad times, they instilled in me an unqualified admiration
for those who work in local government, who do the most of everyone - certainly
well beyond central government - to try to stretch insufficient public funds to
meet the bottomless well of need of so many people in every community. They are,
to my mind, the real and unsung heroes of modern society.
Maurice - who
was in his day one of the leading figures in local government finance - wrote the
introduction to the first of my legal works on local government (Local Government
Finance Law) and I was pleased to dedicate to them both my other major work in this
area, Local Government Constitutional and Administrative Law (both also published
by Sweet & Maxwell).
Dave Woolf
There were two
more Dave Woolf thrillers, published in 1991 by Sphere, each also set within the
legal profession: The Judge’s Song and
Orbach’s Judgment.
A friend once
said that I had - outrageously - taken two roles in each of the books, or modelled
two characters in each of them on myself: Dave Woolf, the hard-drinking, hard-smoking,
hero and Russel Orbach, the aloof and distant, manipulative sometime anti-hero who
is Woolf’s principal nemesis.
Actually, there’s
a fifth Woolf novel, which I have never published, entitled Final Act, in which
Dave finds himself on the yacht of a character called Stuart Stone - admittedly
and unashamedly based on Robert Maxwell - talking away the last night of Stone’s
life. Given the financial scandals which have followed those associated with Maxwell,
which pale beside more recent events, there is a certain contemporary relevance
in the novel, and re-reading it recently I was pleased to note not a little prescience,
but that is what it is - a novel, a framework for telling Maxwell’s extraordinary
story, not a thriller, which is why it remains unpublished. Perhaps one day...
There’s a couple
of others in the making, too...
Arden Chambers
After Wellington
Street, I drifted through a couple of other sets of barristers chambers, about which
there is nothing to be said, before, in 1993, starting my own -
Arden Chambers, specialising - naturally - in housing
and local government law. Now with nearly 40 members, it is rated in professional
directories as a top set in housing law and one of the best in local government.
Bernard
Bannerman
The first question
is why I wrote the Dave Woolf thrillers under a pseudonym; the second, how I chose
it.
As to the first,
some people have speculated that I did it in order to write about the Bar without
needing to worry about defamation. I don’t think that’s true. The Bar - like most
professions - is a relatively small world. I have never met anyone who has read
one of the books who has not guessed that I wrote them.
Today, I am a
QC - Queen’s Counsel - a senior barrister entitled to confine my practice to the
more complicated cases and the higher courts. When the Woolf thrillers were published,
however, I was still applying for “silk,” as the status of QC is known, and - given
the subject-matter (the legal profession) - I wrote them under a pseudonym in order
to duck the risk of disapproval of my fiction getting in the way of my profession.
The choice of
name was equally expedient. When people shop for books in a particular genre, they’re
likely to go to the relevant section in a bookshop or library and start at the beginning,
something from which I benefitted as Andrew Arden. Sadly, my publisher at Sphere
rejected my first choice - Aaron Aardvark (and even my second choice - B B Badasz) - so Bernard Bannerman won the day!
Re-issue
There were two
main factors which led me to re-issue the books.
Initially, I was
influenced by the emerging market in book-readers, which seems to be on the upsurge,
even if I have yet to find one that suits me. Yes, I love the feel of a book - but
when I go on holiday, I get through 10 or more a week (at a time when airlines are
penalising people for taking more than hand-luggage on board with them) and even
at home, who has the space to store them all? While they are still ahead of us in
the States, the critical technical problems have now been solved and we will see
a growth in their use in this country too.
This opens the
door to various forms of self-publishing - just as musicians can now launch their
work on the Internet without needing to find a record company. It means, ultimately,
that - if and once available digitally - books can “last forever” without being
so successful that they remain in print. It may not be the route to infinity that
I anticipated when I started writing fiction, but it’s there...and I could take
it.
That was the first
reason for the re-issue.
Of course, I could
only do it with help. Nor, equally of course, am I the only one to think this way.
AuthorsOnLine were already producing books for digital
re-use - not only for downloading but for Print On Demand, another innovation which
takes the pressure off the need to achieve a high level of sales in order to be
(or to stay) available at all. Thus, people who wanted one of my books - whether
because they had read them on a book reader, or for any other reason - can order
a single copy, and that is what AuthorsOnLine will produce (pretty well instantly)
and send out, just as quickly as any other on-line book supplier, which is how many
people now buy - and are used to buying - books.
In turn, that
opened up the second reason for re-issuing the books.
Over the years,
my annual return from Public Lending Right - the government-funded scheme which
measures loans in public libraries (and pays a small royalty for them) - seemed
to me to have borne out my theory of book selection (see under Bernard Bannerman,
above). At any rate, based on the PLR analysis of library loans generally each year,
I was “doing well” in relation both to the novels under my own name and the thrillers
as Bernard Bannerman. On the other hand, as the years went on, the books themselves
began to disappear - not to say disintegrate - and, of course, loans fell off. This
was not, candidly, of financial concern: the overwhelming majority of writers receive
less than the cost of a good night out in PLR money each year! I was, however, extremely
proud of the fact that upwards of a thousand people a year still read my fiction
- an audience like that is, to my mind, well worth writing for.
Anecdotally, the
books had not all disappeared. In preparation for the re-issue, I wrote to
local authority libraries throughout the UK asking if I might draw the books to
their attention once the re-publication process had been completed, and for the
name of the right person to contact. More than one librarian wrote back to tell
me that they still had some of my books on their shelves. Of course, given how old
they were by then, they can’t have been taken out very often!
Reflecting my
general view of local government, it is pleasing to record that out of some 200
local authorities with libraries, more than half replied to my enquiry providing
me with the information I had asked for, an astonishing high response rate to a
“cold e-mail”. My thanks to each and every one of them - knowing how busy local
government officers, including librarians, are, it was an extraordinary courtesy
and kindness.
Accordingly, the
possibility arose of getting my books back into libraries by means of Print on Demand
(and, as some libraries are just now beginning to explore, by way of downloading
to computers as well).
Initially, I re-issued all the novels, although I only revised - and therefore closely re-read - The Programme and The Last Wednesday. More recently, with an eye to converting the titles to be accessible on Kindle, I re-read the others and decided no longer to keep the first three novels available: they were of their time! The other five titles are currently (July 2011) being prepared for Kindle, and will be available in that format in the Autumn.
Last Word
I hope you enjoy
reading my fiction as much as I enjoyed writing it. I hope that within each book
you read, you find at least one idea or thought which is new to you or which provides a set of words for something that strikes a chord in you. I hope
that reading each book stimulates you, or brings you peace or enjoyment or relaxation
for a few hours. I hope that, after reading one of the books, you come back and
read another! What more is there for a writer to hope for?
