Rough Jump

Cowboys, soldiers, drag queens, fantasy, reality, delusion and self delusion. Sometimes they all come together ...

Two novellas published together in one paperback.

Novella 1. Sudden Redux! Middlemarch in the Wild West. In WWII.

In the 1930s and 1940s an Englishman called Oliver Strange wrote many novels about a cowboy named Sudden that were set in the Wild West. Oliver Strange had never set foot outside of England. So his knowledge of the West can only have been based on the pulp cowboy fiction of Zane Grey and the hundreds of Western B-movies that poured out of Hollywood at the time. That much is true. This novel, Sudden Redux! imagines what a weird man Strange must have been, and how extraordinary it would have been when real Americans flooded into England during WW2. These soldiers would have been only a generation or two removed from the Wild West, would have come from places like Arizona and, culturally, have been actual cowboys. The novel explores the fallout from the collision of the fantasy that sustained him for years - both on himself and the people close to him, who were suddenly able to see through his delusions. To complete the picture, we can see clearly strong elements of his motivations and fantasies that would have been completely invisible to him but obvious to a modern eye. The novel contains within it, unfolding in segments, another Sudden novel that Strange is writing. Much of that material is actually plagiarised from the real novel Sudden Strikes Back. A small amount of material I plagiarised from Zane Grey. I had intended to steal a lot more, but reading it alongside the work of Oliver Strange made me realise it is very good! Good writing, interesting plots and character I now share Tarantino's respect for Pulp Fiction.

Novella 2. My Parents Named Me Darren.

This is a very dark comedy with a feel-good ending. Darren is a young man who lives in an institution because he is intellectually disabled. Or is he? The people around him never engage with this question because they have their own preoccupations. Darren sees, and learns about the world through the prism of The Jeremy Kyle Show. Father Mike and Billy become close to Darren, see him as he is, and form bonds of affection that let Darren emerge into the world. This world is, in fact, not far from what he has learned about it from the Kyle Billy is a recovered addict working in the kitchens and Father Mike goes to jail for reasons which are never stated but are obvious – he is a paedophile. But through them Darren discovers that the world contains acceptance and love.
Some readers may be offended by the casual treatment of Father Mike's implied offences. There is a very small about of bad language.

The novellas go together because they are about the collision of fantasy and reality. It is not just that truth is often stranger than fiction, it is that the distinction between them is actually meaningless. The world is a chocolate layer cake of real and unreal, the layers are nothing on their own, it is the combination that is meaningful - and interesting!

Audie Murphy is my hero, which tells you who I am as a person. Not for his movies, which I have never seen, but for his life story – a real American Hero. The biographical details of my life are on the web and in my books. The broad features are that my life has been a series of bizarre jump cuts: punk at CBGB, Oxford don, Berber in Mecca, fire fighter in Northern Canada and more. Exhausting, but fun.