Author: Stuart Campbell

I'm a former Professor of Linguistics who nowadays writes quirky novels about love, redemption and revenge.

Review Joy

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DPS - BoxCover & E-Book - Francis Guenette

Amazon book reviews are vitally important for self-published authors. This cannot be stressed enough. A review of one’s work means, first and foremost, that someone has read it. Yippee. Without a large promotion budget or the ability to get featured in print or televised media, Amazon reviews become the gold standard of how one’s work is being received. A large number of reviews gets noticed and opens the door to high level promotion opportunities.

Disappearing in Plain Sight has received approximately thirty-five reviews across all Amazon sites. I have heard that fifty is some kind of magical number.

Today, I received a review that lifted my spirits and made me feel that all the time and effort expended to bring the Crater Lake Series to the reading world had been worthwhile.

January 17, 2016

Format: Kindle Edition Verified Purchase

A few pages into Disappearing in Plain Sight, I knew I…

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John MW Smith – a born story teller

After six months of reading and re-reading  British and American classic works*, I packed some carefully selected independent writers onto my battered Kindle for the summer break.

Englishman John MW Smith was a quirky surprise: A writer hard to categorise, he has a ripe sense of the bizarre and the storytelling knack of a barroom raconteur. He reminds me somewhat of my fellow Australian writer Robert Salisbury, whose work I describe as ‘Spike Milligan meets Don Quixote’.

My five-star  review of Smith’s An Unlawful Act in Libya can be found here. Strongly recommended.

 

*The three standouts were Hardy’s Jude the Obscure, Faulkner’s Soldier’s Pay, and Katherine Anne Porter’s Ship of Fools. I’m thinking of writing a novel that places the basic plot of Jude the Obscure in a future dystopia when western societies have largely forgotten how to do mathematics. Mad? Maybe.

And here’s a request: I saw the movie of Ship of Fools some time in the last century, around the time that Cuban heels were in fashion. Does anyone know where I can find a copy or a streaming source?

Buy Stuart Campbell’s books in paperback and ebook on Amazon by clicking on these title links:

An Englishman’s Guide to Infidelity

The Play’s the Thing

Stuart Campbell’s covers are designed by Rachel Ainge .

“Sydney authors conned me” – editor’s final words

by Lesley Latte*

cover frontIn his final interview, the late Raymond Saucisson, editor of Charcuterie Monthly, made the shock allegation that a group of Sydney authors tricked him into writing an introduction to the book With Gusto!.

“I was informed that the book was about the joy of food,” said the former cold cut supremo. “Most of the stories depict revolting meals, some with no meat at all.”

Asked why he had provided an introduction to the book, Saucisson said, “I am a man of honour, a knight among meat lovers. I would not renege on a promise”.

It is understood that Saucisson made a similar complaint about an introduction that he agreed to write for Stuart Campbell’s On Becoming a Butcher in Paris. Campbell was not available for comment

With Gusto! is an anthology of food stories by members of the Write On! writers group in Sydney. It is available in paperback here.

The cover design is by TribeCreative.

 

*Lesley Latte reserves the right not to disclose h** gender.

Buy Stuart Campbell’s books in paperback and ebook on Amazon by clicking on these title links:

An Englishman’s Guide to Infidelity

The Play’s the Thing

 

 

Shock passing of editor one week after book publication

cover front

By Lesley Latte*

Raymond Saucisson, the noted gourmand and long-time editor of Charcuterie Monthly, passed away unexpectedly yesterday. His close friend Stuart Campbell said that Saucisson’s death comes just a week after the publication of the anthology With Gusto!, for which the charcuterie supremo wrote an introduction. “I’m devastated,” said Campbell. “He was always at the cutting edge, as an editor and as a small goods expert; he was a man who took on life one huge slice at a time”.

Saucisson was born into poverty in Marseilles in 1945. He learned the art of sausage making from his mother, who sold her wares in the alleyways off Le Canebière. As a child Saucisson listened to the stories of the sailors who haunted the area, and in 1960 took a job as a ship’s cook.

After ten years at sea he jumped ship at London, eventually obtaining residence papers and gaining employment as a bus conductor with London Transport. Stuart Campbell remarks on the formidable standard of his English, considering he had virtually no formal education. “During his fifteen years on the buses he read voraciously: Georgette Heyer, The Times, Charles Dickens, The Beano, Thomas Hardy. He consumed everything that was left behind on a bus seat. The 142 to Watford Junction was his university, he once told me.”

In 1985 he was offered the editorship of Charcuterie Monthly. In a recent article he reflected on the magazine’s success: “A piece of writing is like a sausage. It has form, content, texture. And in the same fashion, what turns a quotidian article into an exceptional article is that inexpressible je ne sais quoi, the literary counterpart of a bead of glistening pork fat or a perfect balance of herbs.” His nephew Gilbert Saucisson will take over Raymond’s duties at Charcuterie Monthly.

With his trademark cravat, four-day stubble and haughty stare, Raymond Saucisson will be missed around the French markets that have become de rigueur among Sunday bruncheurs (a neologism of his own invention) from Aylesbury to Auckland.

Raymond Saucisson is survived by his wife Solange, an author of vegan cookbooks. “While our dietary tastes differed, we complemented one other perfectly like ham and peas. If he was my bubble, I was his squeak,” she said yesterday.

*Lesley Latte reserves the right not to disclose h** gender.

With Gusto! by the Write On! writers group is available in paperback here.

Buy Stuart Campbell’s books in paperback and ebook on Amazon by clicking on these title links:

An Englishman’s Guide to Infidelity

The Play’s the Thing

Call me a perfectionist …

perfectionist 1953 quiffI’ve issued a revised version of An Englishman’s Guide to Infidelity in e-book and paperback that corrects some typos and fixes some punctuation issues. The e-book also now includes a clickable table of contents. You can find the revised versions here.

Sarah Bourne launches ‘Two Lives’

mini book launch
Stuart Campbell missing Sarah Bourne’s book launch

Congratulations to my good friend Sarah Bourne on the recent Sydney launch of her novel Two Lives, available here. Unfortunately I couldn’t be at the launch because at the time I was fighting off the fans as I signed copies of one of my novels in San Francisco (well I signed four books at my wife’s aunt’s house), but you can read about Sarah’s event here, and you can read my review of her book here.

Being a fan of book launches, especially the well lubricated variety, I couldn’t resist including one in my novel An Englishman’s Guide to Infidelity. Here it is, narrated by my character Fiona Salmon.

My time as a widowed gym-addicted police officer hadn’t left time for anyone outside professional contacts, let alone friends or casual acquaintances. But my author’s book launch crowd were a stratum of cathedral town society I’d never known existed: Earnest students – the kind who look like Che Guevara and Janis Joplin, whichever era they are born in; elderly amateur intellectuals – the women with close cropped hair and large red framed glasses, and the men with embroidered waistcoats and brown trainers; comfy young couples in conservative wear paired together like lovebirds; assorted old lecturers and young tutors from the university, looking harassed and twitchy from marking essays into the early hours; and the old codgers and their mates on the scrounge for a plastic cup of Rioja and as many cheese cubes as they could snaffle up. My author greeted them at the door and I milled around shaking hands and topping up the plastic cups. I couldn’t remember when I’d last spent time with forty or so people who demanded nothing of me.

My author had appointed a stand-up comic – a friend who didn’t expect a fee – to MC the event and launch the book. The comic rang a small bell and stood on a shelving stool.

“Fank you ladies and gentlemen. I note that all the wine has gone so you can fuck off ‘ome,” he said, and walked out of the door and into the street, at which a couple of Che Guevaras rushed outside, captured him and stood him back on the shelving stool. And that set the tone for the rest of the evening. The wine did indeed soon run out, but I gave two Janis Joplins fifty quid, and they came back with half a dozen bottles of something exiled from the New World. My author autographed and sold fifteen copies of the novel and listened philosophically as the old codgers lectured him on using the f-word on the first page.

###

Buy Stuart Campbell’s books in paperback and ebook on Amazon by clicking on these title links:

An Englishman’s Guide to Infidelity

The Play’s the Thing

A villainous brew

I ordered a cappuccino for my Mum on a recent visit to England, and she was presented with this baby’s potty of suds. It wasn’t unlike the coffee that Francis ordered in the following extract from An Englishman’s Guide to Infidelity. The narrator is Thea.

megachhino

I pointed to a coffee shop and we went in. He ordered what looked to be a litre of coffee foam, a supermegaccino I think it was called. I had Earl Grey. I waited for him to speak.

“I never forgot you Thea.”

“Why did you pick on me all those years ago? You did target me, didn’t you? It wasn’t just random?”

“I did. I picked on you on purpose. I wanted what Jack had. What they owed me.”

“You wanted me as part of his chattels?”

“No, it wasn’t like that. First of all I just wanted a life like his, wife, children, some kind of future. But when I saw you I …” He faltered. “I fancied you.”

“Fancied me? What, fancied me like a greyhound? Fancied me like a set of golf clubs? Anyway, there was no money in those days. Jack’s parents were still alive. You couldn’t have had his life or his future. You couldn’t just bundle his life up and put it in a van.”

“There wasn’t any money, sure, but there was you, but you’re not getting my meaning. I really fancied you.”

“I see,” I said. “I think we might be talking about lurv, like in the pop songs … you wanted me to be your lurv. You lurv me. I fall in lurv with you. It’s all lurvely. Stop messing me around.”

Francis sucked on the huge coffee cup. He wiped a foam moustache away with a napkin and looked at me balefully. “Don’t take the piss. I mean it. It’s you I wanted all the time. I do love you.”

 

Buy Stuart Campbell’s books in paperback and ebook on Amazon by clicking on these title links:

An Englishman’s Guide to Infidelity

The Play’s the Thing

A half of bitter and a bit of solace

half of bitterThis delicious half of bitter that I enjoyed at a pub in Kings Langley put me in mind of the verger in An Englishman’s Guide to Infidelity:

I wandered through cobbled yards and across muddy playgrounds, replaying the ghastly scenes, and rehearsing what I should tell Thea. After an hour I found myself back near the shop and on the doorstep of the Bear and Fox. I slipped in, ordered a double Scotch, and found a seat half hidden behind a timber beam. My meditation was broken by the verger, who had his half of bitter at the bar each evening before going home.

“Not poorly are we?” he asked in social workerish tones.

“Just a little overwrought.”

” I say. Don’t think I’m being pushy, but you know that even if you aren’t a friend of Jesus, the cathedral is a splendid place to just sit and reflect …”

I could have kissed the verger. The certainty of his faith shone from his little currant bun face, and I saw at once that I had to go home and tell Thea everything. Well, almost everything. I swigged off the Scotch, thanked him and went home.

 

Buy Stuart Campbell’s books in paperback and ebook on Amazon by clicking on these title links:

An Englishman’s Guide to Infidelity

The Play’s the Thing

Places of terror that we must never forget

kdw sign2This large sign greets passers-by as they walk from the KaDeWe, Berlin’s top department store, into the Wittenberg Platz U-Bahn.

That’s more or less equivalent to outside Selfridges in London or Galeries Lafayette in Paris.

The words at the top say ‘Places of terror that we must never forget’.

Berlin confronts its history boldly and openly, from the memorials to murdered Jews and Gypsies, to the carefully preserved sites of Stasi terror during the division of Germany.

Tram ride to evil

tram2The M13 tram snakes its way from Warschauerstrasse station through the uninspiring suburb of Lichtenberg. There are no signs for the Stasi Museum when you get off at the town hall. We had to ask directions in a bakery, and had almost given up when I spotted the modest sign.

The headquarters of the Stasi secret police – now a museum – is in a dull office block at the back of a medical centre where old folks have their knees and hips fixed.

The interior of the museum seems fixed in time, expect that the spookiness is tempered by the almost apologetic air of the staff – are they volunteers, perhaps? There’s no fancy till or flash tickets. In the café, a kindly lady serves filter coffee and marble cake as if at a church craft market.

In the entrance is a Stasi prison van, a people mover containing tiny cells, each with a hook for the prisoner to hang their jacket. Banal detail seems to have been the hallmark of the Stasi.

The middle floor comprises the offices of Stasi boss Erich Mielke and his senior staff, all fitted out in blonde timber and woolly seated chairs. The office technology looks dated even for 1989, when the Stasi was disbanded; it reminded me of the huge vanished wood radiograms I was proudly shown in Moscow in 1974.

The last exhibit we saw before walking back to the tram was a file card with a sketch showing how the monstrous Erich Mielke’s breakfast egg and coffee were to be set out each morning at his desk.

 

Buy Stuart Campbell’s books in paperback and ebook on Amazon by clicking on these title links:

An Englishman’s Guide to Infidelity

The Play’s the Thing