20 Books of Summer 2022: The Book of Forgotten Authors by Christopher Fowler

Absence doesn’t make the heart grow fonder. It  makes people think you’re dead.

In The Book of Forgotten Authors, Christopher Fowler digs up 99 authors of whom most people have never heard and provides a concise summary of who they were and what they wrote.

This in itself would be enough to draw me to this wonderful little book. After all, I only have 500+ unread tomes on my shelves, so obviously I need lots more, and there are few things I like better than to spend an afternoon trawling through the library catalogue (followed by charity shops and online sites) to see if I can pin down a copy of something that looks interesting.

But Fowler doesn’t just give us a list of names; instead he tells us about each author’s life, their eccentricities, foibles and strange experiences. And he does so with such wit and enthusiasm, sometimes making connections to incidents in his own life, that The Book of Forgotten Authors is a joy to read for its own sake, even if you don’t follow up any of these authors at all.

Though I can’t imagine that you won’t – I’ve ended up with a list of 46, including one T Lobsang Rampa, whose memoir of life as a Tibetan monk shot into the 1956 bestseller lists. The press exposed him as a Devon plumber called Cyril Hoskin – but that didn’t deter his adoring public, who went on to buy another eighteen volumes of the stuff, one of which Rampa/Hoskin claimed had been dictated by his Siamese cat.

There’s also one Fredric Brown, whose short story titles included The Cheese on Stilts, and Thirty Corpses Every Thursday, and Thomas Burke, who published a map of London’s public urinals, ‘noting in particular their sexual possibilities.’ 

Of RM Ballantyne’s The Coral Island Fowler remarks;

What drew the Scots to literary tropicana? Did they just enjoy reading books in which nobody wore a jumper?

Well probably....

And of the once popular and totally tedious Jonathan Livingston Seagull (by Richard Bach) he acidly, and so accurately comments;

The slender square tome was to be found poking out of backpacks the world over. It concerns an anthropomorphic seagull that yearns to fly higher instead of just worrying about where its next whiting is coming from.       Millions swallowed the inspirational Christian parable which, at 120 pages (lavishly illustrated), took about twelve minutes to digest. It was so successful that it became a film consisting of shots of seagulls floating about to whiffly Neil Diamond songs, the overall effect of which was like lapsing into a coma caused by getting a paper-cut from a Hallmark card…tendentious, artery-hardening New Age sputum…

Don’t hold back there, will you Christopher? Brilliant!      

But Fowler can be serious too; in The Forgotten Queens of Suspense he makes an interesting point about the ‘claustrophobic, trapped atmosphere’ of stories by women writing just after the war;

…many wives…found themselves back behind the ironing board after a war during which they performed tasks equal to men…heroines were frequently told not to worry their silly little heads and take a few pills…

(This made me think also of Mad Men, and of Betty Draper in particular.) 

Literary snobbery and pretension annoy me very much, so I particularly enjoyed Fowler’s attacks on these; of Dan Brown’s hugely popular but much maligned The Da Vinci Code he says;

The real sin of bad writing is being boring, and Mr Brown is certainly never that.

Exactly. I've been a lot more bored by 'Literary' authors, who may be clever but seem to have no idea how to keep the reader turning the pages.                                                                          

I was especially pleased to see some of my own favourite authors included here – Patrick Dennis, Frank Baker. Hazel Holt, Winifred Watson, Patricia Wentworth (about whose detective Miss Silver Fowler is deliciously caustic;

In comes Silver, full of her horrible Little England opinions…endlessly knitting or moaning about foreigners.)

and Marghanita Laski are all here, as are some authors I’d never have classed as ‘forgotten’, such as Barbara Pym and EM Delafield – but this book was published five years ago, and things can change very quickly in the backlist world. It only takes a publisher like Persephone or Virago to reissue a book for its fortunes to improve dramatically (viz Watson’s Miss Pettigrew and Delafield’s Diary of a Provincial Lady.)

And now of course there are also some wonderful podcasts re-evaluating novels from the mid-20^th century and earlier – Backlisted itself, Slightly Foxed, The Mookse and the Gripes, and Tea or Books to name a few, (though I am frequently surprised by other podcasters who tell us they’ll be 'reading from the backlist', then produce a book published in any year beginning with 20….that’s modern to me…)

In between the sections on named authors Fowler inserts some excellent chapters discussing more general themes; I particularly enjoyed The Forgotten Rivals of Holmes, Bond and Miss Marple, Lost in Translation: The Forgotten World Authors, and the priceless Justly Forgotten Authors – I’m sure we could all make a few suggestions for that black hole.

In his closing chapter Fowler says;

The love of books is an obsessive and dangerous passion.

Well perhaps it is, but there are far worse obsessions. This little book may fuel the flames of your passion, but I guarantee you will enjoy every minute of it, so what’s wrong with that?

The Book of Forgotten Authors by Christopher Fowler is published by Riverun, an imprint of Quercus Editions