Backlisted - Rerun: All The Devils Are Here by David Seabrook

Episode Date: May 1, 2023

Rachel Cooke, Observer writer, New Statesman TV critic and author joined John, Andy and former host Mathew way back in 2016 to discuss All The Devils Are Here, the astounding travelogue through Kent and the depths of human behaviour from David Seabrook. Plus, the drinking habits of Carry On stars, and what to read in Iceland. Timings (may differ if adverts are included) 07'44 - Dalva by Jim Harrison 12'48 - Life and Death of Harriet Frean by May Sinclair 22'10 - All the Devils Are Here by David Seabrook * To purchase any of the books mentioned in this episode please visit our bookshop at uk.bookshop.org/shop/backlisted where all profits help to sustain this podcast and UK independent bookshops. *If you'd like to support the show, listen without adverts, receive the show early and with extra bonus fortnightly episodes, become a Patreon at www.patreon.com/backlisted * For information about everything mentioned in this episode visit backlisted.fm This is our last rerun for a while as normal Backlisted service will resume in a fortnight. Thanks for you patience. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

This is an advertisement from BetterHelp. Everyone knows therapy is great for solving problems. But turns out, therapy has some issues of its own. Finding the right therapist, fitting into their schedule, and, of course, the cost. BetterHelp can help solve these problems. It's online, convenient, built around your schedule, and surprisingly affordable, too. Connect with a credentialed therapist by phone, video, or online chat. Visit BetterHelp.com to learn more.

That's BetterHelp.com. free. Yes, you heard that right. From the crispest lettuce to the juiciest apples, Loblaws is committed to fresh, so you get the best fruits and veggies. Look for new value programs when you shop at Loblaws, in-store and online. Conditions may apply. See in-store for details. Hello, it's Andy Miller, the co-host of Backlisted here, and welcome to another episode from our archives. On this occasion, you're going to hear a show we recorded in 2016 about David Seabrook's unique non-fiction book, All the Devils Are Here. One of the nice things about making backlisted over the last eight years has been the occasions when a book that we have covered for reasons of personal enthusiasm

becomes something that our listeners discover, enjoy, tell one another about, and in the case of All the Devils Are Here, is actually brought back into print, partly because of being featured on Backlisted. Our guest on this episode, Rachel Cook, and I share a real love of this strange, nightmarish, three-part essay collection. Well, I'm struggling to describe it. As you'll discover when you listen to the episode, there is no other book like All the Devils Are Here. The way in which Rachel, John, Matthew, Matt, our original producer, and I sound so happy to have met three or four other people who have read this book and who are astounded that such a thing could be in the world, be so glorious. And we all bring different interpretations of it to the conversation.

And we all bring our enthusiasm and our bafflement. enthusiasm and our bafflement, and as Rachel says in the episode, the sense that you are reading a man having a nervous breakdown before your very eyes. David Seabrook would have been astonished, I think, that this book, following its republication by Granter a few years ago, following its republication by Granter a few years ago has gone on to be a word-of-mouth bestseller in a way that it certainly was not when it was first published. And if we have played a small part in that, it makes me tremendously proud. I also can remember when we recorded this episode,

I had the feeling that I always get when we make a good show, it's tremendously satisfying to think, well, people will listen to this and they will need to read this book. And the show still stands up. I think you can hear in my enthusiasm and john's and rachel's uh quite what a special and strange book all the devils are here is anyway this is the last show um that you'll be hearing from our archives we We're back soon with new episodes of Backlisted and a new season,

which we're really looking forward to. Some really exciting guests coming up, some really interesting books. But in the meantime, please enjoy our attempt to connect something with something in this discussion from 2016 of David Seabrooks, all the devils are here.

What should I eat? You should definitely eat puffin while you're there. I've got a taxidermy puffin that I took delivery of about three weeks ago and it's the best thing ever. They're a bit salty, but apparently they're delicious. No, don't ignore what Rachel just said. Where did you source... It's Edwardian.

OK. Where did you source your puffin? I got it from a shop called Hunter and Rose, which sells lots of taxidermy, which I'm obsessed with. But I'd always wanted a puffin, you know, because of the puffin books. But they're so little. Were you all in the puffin club? Yes.

Oh, yes. Totally. Totally, I was. I've got all my back issues in a plastic folder. Do you remember you got a plastic folder? Brilliant. The first time I attended a happening at the ICA, which was something I was to do, obviously, often in later life,

but the first time was for the Puffin... It was called the Puffin Jamboree. Oh, wow. I queued up for Bernard Cribbins' autograph at the ICA. I seem to remember that, Quentin Blakes. His first and last appearance at the ICA. Yeah. The first author event I ever went to was Michael Bond,

the bookshop in Tame. I thought it was the most amazing thing. I never thought you could meet authors. It was really exciting. Is your puffing kind of vertical, or is it in an action shot? It's vertical, and it's in a glass dome and it's it's absolutely brilliant i'll take a picture of it when i get home and i'll tweet it and then you can all look at it brilliant we put it on the on the page are they sought after stuffed emeraldian

it was quite it was quite expensive yeah um but it was one of those things where i felt i had a momentary sickness when i realized how much i was going to have to pay, but then I thought, fuck it. And I was really happy when it arrived. And it's so cool. But I'm really nervous about it. So when people come round, they come in and they go, oh, oh, a puffin! And they run towards it, and then I'm just like,

step away from the puffin. Yeah. You know, because I don't want anything to happen to it. It's not in a glass dome. It's in a glass dome, but it's slippy-slidey, the dome on the base, and, you know. But they are supposed to be quite tasty, but they used to, on St Kilda,

they'd catch them and they'd flatten them, and they'd, you know, put them in a salted barrel. It's Gannets they do that with on Kilda. They do, they do. They still do it on Lewis, don't they? But if you were, for kids, Gannets Club, if you were a kid, a special treat, birthday treat on St Kilda

was to get a puffin in your porridge, which you can imagine would be delicious, flattened, salty, greasy, fishy tasting. That's a memoir. Puffin in the porridge. Hello and welcome to Backlisted, the podcast that gives new life to old books. As usual, we're gathered around the kitchen table in the luxurious offices of our sponsors, Unbound, the website that brings authors and readers together to make fabulous books. I'm John Mitchinson, publisher at Unbound. And I'm Andy Miller, author of The Year of Reading Dangerously. And with us, as usual, is author and hip priest, Matthew Clayton. Hello, Matthew.

Hello, Andy. Thanks for that. And joining us today is journalist, critic and author, Rachel Cook. Her most recent book, her brilliant career, Ten Women of the Fifties, was published in 2013. And we're here today to talk about David Seabrook's All the Devils Are Here. Hello, Rachel. Hello. But John, what have I been reading? That's what you're going But John, what have I been reading? The sad news this week

of the death of Jim Harrison, the American writer. I hadn't read a Jim Harrison novel for a long time, which made me sad because he's one of those writers that you dip into and dip out of, and he's amazingly prolific. I think 21 novels, something like 18 volumes of

poetry. He's also a foodie, writes really well about food, great friend of Anthony Bourdain. But he's best known, I suppose, for his fiction, which is often compared to Hemingway. One of the things I wanted to read or reread, which was one of his novels, sort of first period of his novels, a book called Dalva, which I think was first published in 1988. And the reason I wanted to do it is it's the most un-Hemingway-like of his novels.

He looks, he lost his eye in childhood. His head looks like a classic American, hard drinking, hard living, living out in Montana, fly fishing before breakfast, walking his dogs, drinking massively. I read that he, amongst his achievements in his life, was that he had successfully eaten a 37-course meal. Yeah, whatever, bring it on. I love food, I can eat. He was really loved in America and really loved in France. He's loved in France, right, but he's barely published here. He was published by Second Warburg for a long time.

His great publisher in the States is Morgan Entrican of Grove Atlantic, who wrote a very good obituary this week. But I don't think we really produce writers like Harrison in the UK. I mean, Thomas McGuane is another one. I mean, he writes about nature, and it's very easy to reach for Hemingway. He rather wonderfully once wrote about Hemingway, that Hemingway was a stove, a wood stove that didn't give out much heat, which I sort of feel is true. Whereas Harrison,

he's sort of a deeply admirable novelist. At Dalva, the book that I've been rereading, is about a 45-year-old part Sioux woman who has got to a stage in life where she wants to go back to the place where she grew up and to find her son. Her son was taken from her when she was young, and also the son's father. And the way it's structured is it's in her voice. And she's a fantastically centred, strong, independent woman. She's never been seduced by anybody insofar as there's ever been relationships in her life. She's done the seducing. The middle section of the book is then an alcoholic professor called Michael, a rather kind of creepy, unpleasant sort of narrative

about his obsession with the young waitresses. And he's writing about Dalva's great-grandfather, who was a Civil War hero and also one of the great historians. He was on the sort of side of the Sioux in the Battle of Little Bighorn. So it's American history, it's wilderness, it's family drama, and he kind of navigates that. His prose is never flashy. I think he's just a great storyteller.

All the things that you would want from a novel, it's sort of here. I've never read him, but when you talk about him, I remember seeing his books stacked up in compendium in Camden. And I remember when I worked for Waterstones in the early 90s, we used to import them. They were staples along with the Bukowskis. And every year there'd be a new Jim Harrison novel

and nobody would read it, except for those people who love this kind of American fiction. I mean, he's got this great environmental, ecological thing going as well. So Gary Snyder, the poet, is also another writer he kind of American fiction. I mean, he's got this great environmental, ecological thing going as well. So Gary Snyder, the poet, is also another writer he kind of gets compared to. Jim Harrison didn't much like academia, and he was constantly turning down lucrative offers to teach creative writing.

And when he was asked once why he kept turning them down... Somebody's got to stay outside. Brilliant. I love that. But also, again, just because it's amusing to me, I couldn't find it, but Dalva was made into a TV movie starring Farrah Fawcett.

Was it? Farrah Fawcett. Farrah Fawcett Majors, as we used to know back in the day. But as Dalva, which sounds like a total car crash, but it's really good, life-affirming, proper grown-up fiction, which is why I think he's so popular in France. Do you know a French magazine, a famous French magazine, called Les Unroquets Petit Bleu?

No. There's no equivalent magazine of it in the UK. It's fantastic. Like Apostrophe, the TV show that everybody would go on. Oh, we have Apostrophe. But it's a really brilliant equal split between music and film and books. And there were always big profiles of Jim Harrison in Lausanne Rock. Well, I suspect also it probably translates really well

because the language is definitely non-flash. He writes beautifully about nature, but he doesn't write in a kind of fancy pants way. Well, I've never read anything by him. Matthew, have you read anything by Jim Harrison? I've never heard anything by him. Matthew, have you read anything by Jim Harrison? I've never heard of him before. Rachel, have you read anything by Jim Harrison? No, not exactly my sort of thing.

Not up your street, no. The Man Who Eats 37 Courses. Well, that I'm more in favour of. Actually, his food writing is good. He's a bit of a gourmand. Somebody said he was writing Dalvin with one hand, what, killing rattlesnakes with his other. That's what I've been reading.

Andy, what have you been reading? I've been reading, well, what have I? Okay, so very, I read a novel. Yes, I did read something by Elizabeth Taylor because I'm always reading something by Elizabeth Taylor, as you know. I also read Life and Death of Harriet Freen by May Sinclair. Have you ever read that? No, I haven't, but I've heard it's depressing, that's all right.

Yeah, I mentioned it when I was in the office last week, and one of your colleagues said, that is the most depressing book ever written. And indeed, it's very bleak, but it was really, really good. May Sinclair invented, was very well known in her lifetime. This book was published in 1919, and it's the story of a woman's life from birth to death. It's very short. You could read it in a couple of hours. But May Sinclair invented the term stream of consciousness.

Oh, Lord. And so is one of these people who in her day... May Sinclair. And in her day was considered an important writer, an avant-garde writer, almost entirely forgotten. And the unmistakable green livery of old school. There's nothing so cheering about livery. No, I agree.

And I miss it still. I bought this in a pile of BMCs for Argo Modern Classics from Oxfam in Canterbury about a month ago. And clearly some feminist had either died or repented and got rid of everything to Oxfam. But I came back with this and, as it happens, ate Elizabeth Taylor. Talking of Oxfam and people returning things,

there was the single most successful tweet, the QI account, this week. You perhaps saw it. It's got thousands and thousands of retweets. It was at Folkestone, I think it was. Folkestone second-hand bookshop. So many returned copies of Fifty Shades of Grey that they actually built a fort in the shop at it.

And they photographed it. They, quote, begged customers not to hand in copies. We've done everything we can to cope with it. It's quite, but the picture is, it's proper. It's not a, you know, not a small thought. Have any of you read Fifty Shades of Grey? I've read the first 20 pages. I have not read any of Fifty Shades of Grey.

I ran out of steam. Have you? Well, I had to interview Erica James. Is it Erica James? Yeah, James, yeah. I had to of steam. Have you? Well, I had to interview Erica James, is it? E.L. James, yeah. I had to interview her, so I'm very conscientious, so I knuckled down, as it were, to read it. And even the Protestant that I am, I just couldn't get through it.

It's quite astonishingly bad. It's not sort of, this is fun bad, it's sort of, help me bad. It's fan fiction. It's as well written as a lot of fan fiction is. And yet, mysteriously, as is the way, well this is, let's choose to accentuate the positive. That's what makes

publishing so interesting, because the public decide what they want to read. And I, you know, I love the madness of five million people in the UK.'s that strange thing isn't it about erotica publishing which is actually it's all about bdsm they've all got that element they've all got an element and those are the books that people like reading when black lace yeah launched whenever it was 20 years ago that virgin launched it they Didn't they close Black Lace down the year before Fifty Shades came out? Did they?

It's very weird. It's weird that that worked in literature. Why is that particular... I didn't know what fan fiction was and I was at the hairdresser and my hairdresser said, she said, everyone in the salon is reading Fifty Shades of Grey and I said, oh, you know,

and she said, it's fan fiction and I said, well, what is that? And she said, well in the salon is reading Fifty Shades of Grey. And I said, oh, you know, and she said, it's, you know, it's fan fiction. And I said, well, what is that? And she said, well, like any character from anything has sex with another character from anything. And I couldn't quite understand what she meant. And she said, she went on this website on her phone. My hair was all like in foil. So we had plenty of time. And she said, she said, like, OK, here's a character from eastenders and he's gonna

what's a character from literature that you like and i just said you know some random figure from you know like the hobbit or something and sure enough you know there's one of the mitchell brothers frantically having it off with you know some wizard or something i mean it's just bizarre it's quite bizarre i met someone, her thing was that she wrote sort of erotic fan fiction, and it was Vikings and Navy Seals. So... I can't remember whether it was the Navy Seals

that went back in time to shag the Vikings, or the Vikings, but it was like... It was quite particular and, you know... Do you know where fan fic starts? Do you know the programme which birthed it? No. Go on.

Of course, it's Star Trek. Yeah. And specifically, it was Kirk and Spock. I've read unconvincing arguments that the whole of literature, you know, the kind of, you know, the anxiety of influence Harold Bloomian vision, is that all fiction is fan fiction to an extent. There was an article that appeared online about last month

which said, what is Jean Rees' wide saga so see if not fan fiction? Well, that's certainly true in that case. Operating at a very high level. They just overstate their claim, as does, I would suggest, Harold Bloom in Anxiety of Influence so also I'm going to talk about this anyway briefly so I'm going to Iceland next week

I've never been to Iceland, we're all going together it's going to be very, my family, not you I was going to say no one told me that was part of it anyway it's going to be so I put a thing up on Twitter two days ago saying, I'm going to Iceland next week, I'm very excited, can anybody recommend me a great Icelandic book?

Several people recommended the same books. So several people recommended Burial Rites by Hannah Kent, several people recommended Independent People by Haldor Laxness, and indeed, or Fish Can Sing Which your lovely wife Rachel Kerr recommended over Independent People So I've started reading Fish Can Sing Somebody here recommended Letters From Iceland by W.H. Auden and Louis Magnese Names For The Sea by Sarah Moss

Oh, I read that Names For The Sea, it's not called that, but there is a very good Sarah Moss. Her first novel is set in Iceland. Well, this is a non-fiction book about her moving to Iceland. Well, her first novel is about a group of archaeologists who are digging up some ancient site, and it all gets very terrifying, and it's rather gripping. Yeah, it's rather gripping.

And also, I was recommended a very short book called The Blue Fox by Sion, which John, I think you would love. Sounds great. Which is a book about, it's set in the 19th century and it starts with an unnamed man hunting

a fox. It then goes back to explain who the unnamed man is. The unnamed man is. The unnamed man, as he shoots at the fox, causes an avalanche, and once the snows have buried him, extremely strange, gothic and psychedelic things start to happen. God, that's great. With swapping of identities and such like.

It was terrific. The reason why I mention that is I put that tweet out about three o'clock. By half past three, I was reading the book. And by half past five, I finished it. Who says the 21st century is... Well, no, it's wonderful. You know, ten years ago, that whole process, it would still only take you two hours to read the book, but it would take you two weeks to get the recommendation and find it.

We don't have it, but we can order it for you. I've never been, I've always wanted to go, and love also the Orton McNeice, which is one of my great, I mean, go back to the lot. And the other one is Burne-Jones and William Morris. Oh, yeah, I've got that here. It has this weird sort of position in our imagination. It's sort of strangely, it's kind of not really part of our culture,

but it kind of is. I mean, you go, most of Ireland and Scotland are genetically Vikings anyway. But the thing, other than their strange belief in fairies, which they seem to really genuinely do, if you get up north, they really do believe. The other thing is that the Ashlandic phone directory is organised by first name,

because basically everybody has to... LAUGHTER Surnames are son of... And daughter and son. Yeah, so... So we're going into the interior, we're going whale watching and we're going to the Witchcraft Museum and the Hot Springs and we're going to the Phallological Museum.

I was going to say, the Phallological Museum has got the largest preserved blue whale penis, I think. It's the largest one in the world. The gift shop is incredible. I was going to say, we're almost teetering on the edge. Would you like me to bring you back a badge or a rubber? Which would you prefer?

It's always been top of my list on where to visit if I find myself in Reykjavik. So that covers the waterfront, doesn't it? The shark, the buried shark disgustingness. We'll pick this up again after some adverts. Stay tuned to this.

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Well, we should probably move on to the subject of our podcast, the actual subject of our podcast, which is All the Devils Are Here by David Seabrook. Should we start by asking Rachel to say why you chose this remarkable book for the podcast, other than the fact that it is remarkable? Well, the thing about it is people always say that there's no book like this and it's just never true. But in this case, I really think there isn't another book like it.

I certainly can't think of one. And to me me it's a kind of minor masterpiece that no one knows about and I would like people to read it when did you first read it can you remember well there's something spooky about this book which we will talk about but for me personally it's been quite spooky when it came out in 2002 I read a review of it and the review made a great impression on me. But it was one of those things where I, it was only an impression, I couldn't remember the name of the book or the author. And I kept googling and I must be a really crap googler because I type in like, you know,

Kent, murderers, weird things, you know, and this book would never yeah and the book would never come up and it was driving me mad and this went on for years and then uh in 2011 so yeah quite a long time after yes nine years later massive name drop coming up i was at a dinner to celebrate claire tomlin's Dickens biography, which was appropriate because Dickens is in this book, as we all discussed. And I was sitting next to Claire's publisher, who was then Tony Lacey from Viking.

And he was doing that old school publishing thing of slightly boasting about his second home. Someone did that to me last week. Very old school. Them were days. Them were the days. He divides his time. He divides his time between Chiswick and...

Deal. I always think when that says that on a jacket, I always think tosser, but anyway. And he was talking about Deal, and I said, gosh, Deal, you know, and I said, you must read Roger Lewis's book about Charles Hortory, The Man Who Was Private Whittle. It's brilliant. And he said, yes, I've heard it's very good. It's a great book.

Yeah. He said, I've heard it's very good, but I'm actually reading a really good book about Thanet and the coast. Can I just interrupt you? I recommended that book to Tony Lacey. Did you? Yeah. Well done, Andy. The interconnectedness of all things.

Well, anyway, and he said, I'm reading this book. It's called All the Devils Are Here. And as he said it, I became, you know, I had this goosebump thing of thinking, this is the book I've been looking for nine years. I've been trying to find out what this book is, and here it is. So I went home. I went on to A Books. I bought it.

And I suppose all of us in our lives you do occasionally have that feeling where a book comes to you and you feel like it might have been written almost for you it maybe happens maybe two or three times now it says something very weird about me that I felt bad about this book but I did and I'm going to read the blurb in a minute. You can make up your own mind. I'll just briefly say why. I have a very powerful feeling about faded seaside towns. As a kid, my granny used to take me to Bridlington and Withernsea.

No one's heard of Withernsea. And even once we had a week at Pontins and Morecambe. And I had very intense experiences in these places, which I perhaps won't describe here. So I love those depressing seaside towns. To me, a weekend in Eastbourne is like the best thing that you can do, really, and going around charity shops. But also, a lot of the people in this book are people, it sounds so weird to say this, but from my childhood. So, for instance, Richard Dadd, the first painting that I ever knew was The Fairy Fellows Masterstroke because I had a big postcard of it in my bedroom. I don't know where it came from.

Also, Dickens was our household god. My dad and my granny were that thing that might not exist now which is working class fans of Dickens and they didn't really think that any other novels were like worth reading my granny was blind so she'd only ever listened to them but they'd read Dickens what you did was you read Dickens and when you finished you started again and in our hall there was a big picture of Dickens my dad just worshipped Dickens and when you finished, you started again. And in our hall, there was a big picture of Dickens. My dad just worshipped Dickens. My sister was called Florence for Florence Dombey.

So there was Dickens and Richard Dad and Seaside Towns. And I just had this feeling of awful kind of recognition. And to me, a lot of books, people say, this is such an interesting book. And then you start to read it. And actually, there are interesting bits, but there are loads of longers. This book, there's something interesting on every page, in every paragraph. I'm going to read the blurb in a minute, because I think it's important that people tell people what the book is about, to the extent that one can do that.

But one of the things that's brilliant about this book, I felt... The Sound of Young Victoria. I felt rereading it was that Seabrook stays on the subject as long as he is interested in it, and then bolts to the next one. And it layers and layers and layers as it goes on, which actually is a really high-risk strategy because you would think you would be left with a feeling of superficiality,

but actually I don't feel that at all. And also it's a short book. It's a short book. So let me just read the blurb because we can assume that lots of people listening may not have heard this book. I think almost no one. Well, here, this is what... I know for a fact that this blurb was written by...

We should say it is available on Kindle. It's available on Kindle at the moment, yeah. I'd very much love to see it available again. Come on, Grant, do the right thing. Anyway, let me... Someone else, like, unbound, someone like that. This blurb was probably written by David Seabrook's editor, Neil Belton.

The great Neil Belton. The great Neil Belton, who is an author in his own right, of course. So just let me read the blurb was probably written by David Seabrook's editor, Neil Belton. The great Neil Belton. The great Neil Belton, who is an author in his own right, of course. So just let me read the blurb here. In his first book, David Seabrook takes us on a deranged exploration of the Kentish coastal towns of Thanet and Medway. He fuses his observation of these depression landscapes, city centres full of unemployed young men and asylum seekers and dodgy characters, with literary and historical associations that seem through his eyes more like bad dreams than

heritage advertisements for the local tourist board. He sees the desperate jollity of Margate where T.S. Eliot stayed after the Great War as a key element in the making of the wasteland. He sees the desperate jollity of Margate where T.S. Eliot stayed after the Great War, as a key element in the making of The Wasteland. His Rochester and Chatham crawl with the ghosts of Dickens and the parricide Richard Dadd. In Broadstairs, site of John Buchan's The Thirty-Nine Steps, he uncovers a weird network involving Lord Curzon, Buchan, William Joyce and Audrey Hepburn's father. In Deal, he stumbles on the true sordid story that lay behind The Servant, Robin Maugham's novel later turned into a film by Joseph

Losey and links it to the milieu of not-so-gentle gay retirees to the coast, a network that touches on the murder of the boxer Freddie Mills and the self-destruction of the carry-on actor Charles Hortry. Written with high energy and seriousness, disturbingly personal and surprising, this is a unique book. There are devils here, and the reader will remember them. Now I hope that makes everybody

pause the podcast and go and download a copy of this book, because it's absolutely wonderful. I'm just going to say to Rachel that the circumstances under which I read this book are slightly different. I remember reading a couple of reviews of it, as you did, and thinking, oh, that sounds interesting, but not doing anything about it. And then my family moved in 2005 to the East Kent coastal town of Whitstable, where we still live. And I walked into the Remainder Bookshop, the excellent Harper Books,

Hello Harper Books, if you're listening, and there was a pile of copies of All the Devils Are Here, reduced in price, with a sign next to them saying local interest. Which is such a turn-off. Local interest are my worst words. And especially when you know what the book is about and how steamy and feverish it is. So I picked it up and read it on the train journey into London and the train journey back. And I remember putting it down

at the end. And we will have to say something about the ending of the book, thinking what did I just read? What was that book? And I found that it really stayed in my head for the next few weeks. So I read it again and then thought, wow, this is the energy of it. I'm definitely going to read it again.

I finished it this morning, in fact early this afternoon. It is just it is so generous, I think. I think there are things that we, obviously, that you can say that it's like. There are connections, perhaps, to Ian Sinclair's work. It reminds me, in some ways, of W.G. Sebald's The Rings of Saturn journey through Suffolk on foot.

But it's, in its kind of mixture, it's strange, as you were saying before, Andy, the way it doesn't make any attempt to be coherent in the way that most books do. The thesis, if there is one, he never really reveals what it is. It seems to me I've never quite had the kind of hair stand up on the back of my neck in the same way. It's like demonic possession. It's like he's exploring demonic possession without ever saying that's what he's doing. Well, also, it is a bit like House of Cards

when Kevin Spacey turns and says something. So he's going along. It's quite sort of scholarly and factual. And you're thinking, oh, yes, this person murdered this person. This person had sex with this person. And then all of a sudden he goes, and he tells you something about himself it's a bleak it's not clear you don't know that much about him and then you have this chilling feeling you feel i think frightened of him and frightened for him yes absolutely and you think what's he gonna do is do? Is he mad? Is he sick? Is he a pervert?

And of course, by the time I read this book, David Seabrook was already dead. He died young, as they say. And so to have this feeling of being afraid of him and afraid for him, it was a very unnerving thing. It reminded me very much of when you're reading as a child. When I was a kid, i was mad on those books by peter haining that the pan book of vampires and and those books were full of things that you couldn't really understand when you were a kid you knew you liked them but you couldn't understand

them and that's i feel that about this there are lots of things in this book that i understand i understand that richard dad killed his his father and he was a fantastic painter and he went to a loony bin i know that but there are so many things i don't understand about this book why are they in here why is david seabrook like this or that what's happened to him is he gay is he straight, what? Why was he drawn to these? Yes. That whole sense of places, the house. In broad stairs. In broad stairs that becomes the home to. There's a house called Naldera, which is the scene of the 39 steps, which he then brilliantly moves slightly along the coast to a nearby house,

which is the home of Oswald Mosley. The whole way he kind of connects that story. Well, no, it's not the house of Oswald Moseley. The whole way he kind of connects that story. Well, no, it's not the house of Oswald, no. Naldera was the house of Curzon, and Curzon's daughter, Cynthia, was married to Oswald Moseley. She was the first Mrs Moseley. And then Naldera then became the home of this man, Arthur Tester, who was a leading light in the British Union of fascists.

Yes. And then the story that enables the story of Lord Hawthorne and Audrey Hepburn's dad who turns out to be a fascist as well. And you just, you don't know where he's taking you, but you don't mind him taking you even though you, you know, as they say,

you have a bad feeling about this. I had a really interesting conversation earlier in the week. I rang Neil Belknap because it was comparatively difficult to find out things about David Seabrook. So I rang Neil up and he told me that the book came to him via David Seabrook sending one of the essays in whatever form to Ian Sinclair. And Ian Sinclair, who at that time was published by Neil,

passed it on to Neil with no agent involved saying, I think you should look at this. And that thing, Rachel, that you were saying about Seabrook being someone you were, a narrator you were afraid of and afraid for. This is a thing that Ian Sinclair wrote about David Seabrook. He describes him in a very Sinclair-ish way as a dull Q de Quincy. And then he goes on to say, refusing to allow the area he inhabits, the banishment, to become a noose, Seabrook has decided to celebrate it with a virtuoso exhibition of Sardony. His franchise, the area he describes raiding and returning,

is anywhere that can be reached in an hour or so by bus or train from Canterbury. It's true, isn't it? He gives his readers an ear-bashing they won't forget. And when Seabrook died earlier this year, it was a horribly premature loss. Now this mysterious author is fated to become part of the zone he described to such effect. An anecdote, a rumour, a legend.

Isn't that brilliant? But a process which Seabrook is complicit in. He's absolutely right about the fact that he doesn't want to move far from Canterbury because in the book he'll be talking to someone really fascinating and he says, well, my bus is due in a minute, I've got to go. That's right. And you think, let's just go now.

It's funny because he doesn't quite do it. It doesn't really lay on kind of the humour or the irony, although there's a great letter at one point where somebody writes to him and says, your book of essays on Kent and its history should make interesting reading. Oh yes, I was going to read that. So yes, I'm writing a book of essays on Kent and its history, which is true, but so not what the book is. Yes, absolutely, he goes to Gillingham. That's the daughter of Lord Hawthorne who says that.

Which is a great interview. Rachel, do you want to read the first page? I mean, the book's divided into four. So there are three chapters. The first chapter is Rochester and Chatham. The second chapter is North Fall and Broadstairs. And the third chapter is, what is it? Oh, it's Deal, of course it is.

But there's what he calls a prelude, which is Margate, and it's about T.S. Eliot's nervous breakdown and he goes to Margate to write. And I don't think I realised this at the time, but it's really obvious to me now why Seabrook used that as his prelude because I think this book is his nervous breakdown. Yeah. And these sort of fugitive voices, bits of poem and Bible and half echoes, half rhymes, it's all kind of from the wasteland. I think the main thing, though,

is that feeling of madness and being on the edge of... So this is him in Margate. There are hunched, sedated souls lingering in cafes and souped-up milk bars. There are groups of squabbling Albanians outside. There are the young men of the front, this front, all bare arms, body art and fast-working, furious faces, faces that ought to be spouting water from the walls of Gothic buildings. But they're here and they speak, spraying spittle. I drift past the entrance to Dreamland. Margate's main attraction opened its doors in 1920, importing the name for an amusement park on Coney Island and the main ride, the Caterpillar from Germany. While you queued for the big thrill, you could look up at your kids

looking down at you through a grill set in the huge horned head of the snail man a tall wooden structure with stairs the park was also the place to get your pocket picked and probably still is i mean it gives you a flavor of it although you can't quite do it justice unless you just devour the whole thing i think you know you're saying uh this isn't a book like you know you mistrust this isn't a book like any other yeah i mistrust that you will want to read it in a sitting and then turn straight back to page one and start it again. Yeah. Right?

That's a thing, isn't it, that people say. But this book, I feel maybe you wouldn't want to go straight back. Maybe you want to open the window and take a deep breath or two. But the benefit of reading it straight through in one go, which you could do, I think you could do in three hours if you put your mind to it the kind of accumulation of images and the feverishness of it and i mean each of the chapters has a distinct mood so the chapter about richard dad and charles dickens i mean that's the most sort of scholarly and straightforward then it kind of ratchets up

so he goes to investigate his fascists and there's this bloke who is the bloke following him he's dressed as a vicar what's going on the vicar yeah I mean it's terrifying it's like something out of The Prisoner and he's going down the steps yes exactly it definitely has fit Prisoner I also felt that the only person i could imagine who could film this book and it is unfilmable is nick rogue it has that same sort of strange yeah that's

certainly if we come to the ending that the ending has a real sort of nick rogue feeling to it the pink duffel coat and the oh yeah that takes pink duffel coat. Oh, yeah. That takes place in Deal. We have a little clip here of the section in Deal deals partly with the late Charles Hortry, the carry-on actor who, as you said, Roger Lewis's book lovingly paints

a horrible portrait of... Could you... Matt, could we just hear what I believe is a taxi driver describing his dealings with Charles Hawtree in the period we're talking about? Sometimes we used to get a call from his house and he'd give us a little list saying what drinks he'd like delivered there. It was normally bottles of sherry or gin, sometimes some mixers.

So I got the impression it wasn't just for him, but maybe he was having people down as well. But I don't remember ever having actually picked anyone else up from his house apart from himself. And that's from a BBC documentary about the lives of carry-on stars and specifically how unhappy they all were, which is a must-watch. I love this line from the book about hawk tree said reeling round like an old wasted weasel turfed out of toad hall

he performed at the drop of a hit flask for any tabloid hack who happened to be passing through they used me and dumped me shat all over me i could have been as famous as sid james he does that sort of sayyboldian thing of putting black and white photos through the book, which adds to the oddness of it. Duncan Fallowell said the book was carry on Margate, rewritten as Dracula, which is

quite good. I mean, the final section is just so bizarre because the stories are basically all connected by this chap Gordon who Seabrook goes to talk to. Who is an old queen. He's a massive old queen who's sort of shagged all these people

and it's like a sort of spider sitting in his web and it takes him out to Robin Worm, to Charles Hawtree, and it's just... And Freddie Mills, the boxer. Freddie Mills, the boxer. Who he's had sex with. Yeah. It's just the most extraordinary sort of tangled web.

And the way he narrates that is because he firstly says, well, a lot of people thought Freddie Mills was gay, but obviously a lot of the people who the mills kind of historians don't they discounted altogether and then he says you know well good for them and then tells the story of the guy who's had sex with freddie mills yeah which is a very odd kind of not terribly you know he talks the guy who had sex with him talks about how hard Freddie Mill's body, he'd never had sex with anybody like that, but it was a sort of empty encounter. So this is going on, isn't it?

And you're reading this and you're thinking, this is a web of, what is this? And then what happens? And this is how the essay ends and how the book ends. Matthew, what happens at the end of the book? Well, occasionally there are references to his wife or his fiancée in the book, aren't there? And she's died.

And she's died. And the book, and so you kind of, there's a little echo of this that comes through occasionally in the book in these little sections that are more personal. And then at the end, why don't you describe what happens, Rachel? Well, he's on his way home from having seen Gordon. They've had a long chat in Gordon's cottage. That's not how it happened.

He's going to get his bus. He's going to get his bus. And he says, you know, it's clear that he's broke. And he says, it's a question of rent. And we all know what rent means in that context. And he goes into the pub and he gets himself a bitter lemon. And he sits down and he waits and some blokes come in. And he gets talking to one of the blokes.

And this bloke tells him a story about how when he was a younger man he liked boys and there was one boy he was particularly fond of and then he anyway to cut a long story short he thinks that this favorite boy of his was on the beach at deal and when he goes down to see him he's wearing a pink duffel coat and he pulls back the hood and it's Charles Hortory. And then you cut back to the pub where Seabrook's listening to this. And it's obvious that they're going to go off and have sex and Seabrook's going to be paid for this. Or at least that's what he implies. And that's how it ends.

Which is, it's just a very strange ending, isn't it? I mean, even that little bit about bitter lemon. So when he goes into the pub, he orders a bitter lemon, but then a few paragraphs later, he's clearly drunk, and he talks about being drinking gin. So that's even kind of weird. Even the set-up for that particular scene. Well, I think the guy's been giving him

gin, hasn't he? And he just thinks, well, I'm going to drink it because it's going to make it easier. Because he doesn't really have an appetite for what he's about to do. He just wants the cash. But then there were a couple of bits earlier on where he's talking to people about stuff and his first question is, tell me about his cock. They're quite in your face. Forgive the pun. But suddenly he snaps straight into this very direct question, which, again, thinking about the earlier section about Dickens or even T.S. Eliot, they're completely...

What I was saying earlier, Matthew, is the ending leads you quite discombobulated, I think. Yeah. But also, what were you saying, it sort of changes what great endings do, which is make you think, what have I just read? Rethink, recalibrate, recontextualise what you just read. It's a sort of major focus ball and you suddenly think, hell

I need to go back. There's a section towards the end of the book, isn't there? The Freddie Mills section, which is also, he kind of elides that into the murders, eight women who were murdered in London in the 60s. Jack the Stripper murders because they were all murdered

by being choked to death. They were strangled and stripped. Then he goes on Andy Seabrook's next book, his second book. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Well, basically, I'm going to say a little bit about Seabrook based on what I could find out about him and what Neil Belton told me, which was really, really interesting. Basically, Seabrook was born in 1960. This is where he grew up,

this area. So he grows up in Kent. He had quite a strict and Christian upbringing. He studied at the University of Kent. He did an MA in Proust. Neil told me that he was never quite sure what Seabrook did for money a lot of the time. But he definitely operated on the edge of legality and off and over the other side of it. That he had, at times, done stuff he didn't feel too good about, which indeed you can... It was seeping through this book

i think and he told me that david seabrook would come into the granter office and monologue about either things that he was fascinated by which is very much what what this book is like listening to that person or ranting at length about how much he hated nearly all other contemporary authors, like most authors do. His two favourite writers were Gordon Lish as a writer, famous as an editor. He's Raymond Carver's editor, a writer of his own right, and also the ghost stories of Robert Aikman.

And Neil Belton said that he had never read, nor for that matter heard of Robert Aikman, that Seabrook lent him these, at that stage, very rare first editions of some of Aikman's books. And Neil loved them and in turn got them republished by Faber because the Aikman backlist came out a few years ago. David Seabrook did that. Amazing.

Isn't that fascinating, that kind of, those little links that you were talking about that you can discern. There are definitely ghosts in this book, aren't there? And, you know, it's a corpse-ridden book. Yeah. Literally and metaphorically. Could we, I just want to listen to something first we talk a bit about the Richard Dad

section, Richard Dad is probably best known for killing his dad he's probably not best known for that, he's best known for appearing on the Antiques Roadshow so we're going to listen to a clip of a Richard Dad painting being uncovered on the Antiques Roadshow.

Well, the first item we saw of really enormous value, I remember, was in Barnstable in 1986. It was very strange the way it turned up. The couple who owned it didn't know the first thing about it and thought it was valueless. And they weren't even going to bother to come to the show. But the dog needed a walk, and the dog's favourite walk was in the park, right by our front door.

So as they reached for the dog's lead when leaving home, they said, ''Why don't we take that picture? ''We don't know anything about it. Just on the off chance. ''We'll take the picture.'' So they took the picture off the wall and brought it in with doggy and the expert that day was peter nahum now it is an extraordinary painting i don't know who this painting is by i know it's a wonderful painting i would hope that some indications i mean it would be too much to hope really that this was a lost painting by richard down obviously i've only had a few minutes to look at this um and it needs some investigation so what i would like to ask you to do is if we may take it to london on your behalf and investigate it further oh yes certainly we'd

be interested as well so with the owner's permission we took the picture back to london took it to the expert we said look is this the long lost richard dad and she said yes it certainly is so then we had to go back to the couple in barnstable went to their bungalow with a film crew and that's when peter gave them the good news and the valuation it is an international treasure in a lost picture and I feel that it could possibly make somewhat over £100,000. Ooh! Hugh Scully, that's proper antiques roadshow, not Fiona Bruce. The old school.

So the painter Richard Dadd, we were talking about this as the most orthodox essay. What does Seabrook do with Richard Dad in the essay? Well, he first of all tells the story of Dad's madness and the fact that he murdered his father. And, of course, what happened was that Dad was taken to an asylum and he spent the rest of his days there and that's where he painted all of his great masterpieces but then Seabrook he starts to think about you know what sent dad mad and dad went on

this extraordinary journey across Europe to Egypt so Seabrook goes off on this kind of digression about opium about the Victorian passion for Egypt and then he does one of his strange kind of, you know... That's enough of that. Yeah, and then he posits this extraordinary theory about Edwin Drood, Dickens' final unfinished novel. I mean, I don't know how convincing it is. I'm not a Droodist. But... Which you sense that Seabrook wasn't terribly keen on the Druidists.

But he makes a link, doesn't he? He thinks that Dickens may have had the dad story, may have been somewhere in the mix, and he picks up all these clues. But I think what he does, which is really interesting, is it's almost like he makes dream connections. He's not interested in making causal connections. He lays things that have strange shapes that are similar next to one another and leaves it to the reader to make those kind of connections he's interested in sort of folk memory yeah and things that feel familiar even though they can't possibly be familiar

because you've never been there before or whatever that kind of weird it's all about the uncanny isn't it a lot of it i also think that that of weird. It's all about the uncanny, isn't it, a lot of it? I also think that that essay is important in the structure of the book too because it's the most orthodox one. It's sort of reassuring. I was just going to say, it's a bit of a pat on the back. You're going to be interested in this. I'm interested in Victorian painting.

What you find out later is I'm massively interested in paedophilia and buggery as well. Murder and murder. And I can use the skills I demonstrate in the Richard Dad chapter to link Dad and Drood but don't linger over to a more subversive effect as the book goes on. Stick with me. And he's very good about the Dickens industry

in Rochester, isn't he? And he really takes the mickey out of the sort of Mr. Pickwick waddling down the high street and all of that. The heritage. Yeah. So David Seabrook died in 2009. This was his first book. His second book is called Jack of Jumps.

I have a copy, but I hadn't read it until a few weeks ago when I knew we were going to be covering All the Devils Are Here. And as I started reading it, I I hadn't read it until a few weeks ago when I knew we were going to be covering All the Devils Are Here. And as I started reading it, I was thinking, wow, this is great too. And actually, as it goes on, you can feel Seabrook getting weighed down by it. It's a book about the Jack the Stripper murders. He had been given access to the police files for the first time. But there's a terrible sense of, first of all, he's pretty unpleasant about quite a few

of the people talked about in the book. And the second thing is there's a weariness about it. It's a 350-page book. By, unfortunately, murder number three, you can feel him thinking to himself, fucking hell, this is murder number three. I've still got five to go. It's a slog, unfortunately.

But when he died, he was working on another book about the... David Jacobs. Yes, David Jacobs, the 1960s show business lawyer who was Brian Epstein's lawyer, who hanged himself in his garage in Hove in 1968. I mean, I think that... Have you read Jack of Jumps? Well, yeah, and I think that... Have you read Jack of Jumps? Well, yeah, and I don't want anyone to read Jack of Jumps

because I just think it's pure, distilled misogyny. I mean, I find it almost unreadable. He's so vile about the women. The women were all mostly prostitutes and he's so vile about them and it becomes intolerable i mean he's very very good at evoking the seedy side of 60s london he's brilliant about you know milk bars and clip joints and all of that but the way he talks about the women is just he he seems to

identify with the murderer even though he doesn't know who the murderer is. Andrew Mayall, he agrees with you completely, Rachel. He basically said the thing that's wrong with it is the misanthropy and misogyny have both been allowed to grow wild and go crazy. And I suppose because it's uncoupled, he says something in All the Devils Are Here right at the beginning about T.S. Eliot, which really struck me,

which is the famous line on Margate Sand, full stop, I'd never noticed the beginning about T.S. Eliot, which really struck me, which is the famous line on Margate Sand, full stop, I'd never noticed the full stop before. Yes, I know, I think that's brilliant, that bit. I think that's really good. I connect nothing with nothing. And then he says it's the first and only time that T.S. Eliot transcribed something that was in front of him, which is incredibly powerful because it because this idea of Elliot recovering.

But in a way, that's what Seabrook does throughout this book. He kind of transcribes what's in front of him and he starts Hare's run. Whether it's there or not. Whether it's there or not. He doesn't ever check anyone's story either, does he? I mean, Gordon says, I had sex with Freddie Mills. He doesn't try.

He doesn't say, did this happen? He just leaves it there, as it were, for you to... That's what makes this book. And I think it's extraordinary. It's like one of those sort of dark flowerings that English literature throws up, sort of Death's Jest book by Thomas Lovell Beddows, which almost nobody's read,

or Confessions of Scottish Literature, Confessions of a Justified Sinner by James Hogg. You know, these are really odd, strange, not get-roundable books. This book, it will haunt me for a long time. The thing about this book I noticed, when I told people that we were doing this book on Backlist, what you find is that most people haven't heard of it,

but the handful of people who have heard of it are passionate about it. So Andrew Mayle, who I mentioned, he really likes it. passionate about it like so andrew male who i mentioned he really likes it um jason hazley currently britain's best-selling author because he is the co-author of the lady bird parody books he is obsessed with this book i was delighted that anybody was giving it some time and space which is brilliant what i would say is that it's a great antidote to a lot of things that are very prevalent in our literary culture. So it's not, I mean, this comes from the time

of psychogeography and now we're into the new nature writing and a lot of those books are so overwritten. This book's the opposite of that. He doesn't try. He doesn't try. I mean, he's a good writer inherently. He doesn't try. He doesn't try. I mean, he's a good writer inherently. He doesn't work it up. And sometimes there are repetitions and clichés and things like that,

and that's almost a part of it. Because you get a sense of the author from it. With lots of the New Nature writing books, you don't get any sense of the author at all. With this, you get a real sense. I mean, you said earlier on, Andy, that the book's about him, and it is about all these other people but it's kind of about him that's right that's its strength i think that's

what gives it that edge and makes it feel wild and weird and kind of wonderful it's an antidote to is this obsession that people have about likability you know i didn't like that book because no one in it was likable that there's no one in this book that's likeable, not a single person. And Seabrook's not likeable, and that's why I like it. The books it really reminds me of, Nigel Richardson. Have you ever read Nigel Richardson? It's a kind of less dysfunctional version of this. He wrote a book called Dog Days in Soho.

He wrote a really wonderful book about Brighton called Breakfast in Brighton, which is wonderful. It starts with him walking in Brighton, painting in someone's house, and and he gets obsessed by this painting and he hangs out in his pub in Brighton and meets all these people that swirl in and swirl out and tells all the kind of strange stories about Brighton they're very similar but not as crazy Matthew have you got a tenuous link this time?

The weird thing about this book is there are so many threads in it that literally like Rachel was saying earlier that thing about you pick it up and you think it's written for you you know i had exactly that sense as well so there's it was really impossible to find anything because on every page is something really from donald sinden's memoir i'm probably the only person under 70 who's read donald sinden's memoir which is wonderfully called a touch of the memoirs wonderfully called A Touch of the Memoirs.

Stephen Toast. That's referred to in this book. Or 39 Steps, talking about John Buchan. I work with John Buchan's grandson, Toby Buchan. Toby. Wonderful Toby Buchan, kind of fantastic editor. And really everywhere you turn there's stuff like that. The other person it reminds me of, I don't know if anyone's read Jonathan Rendell.

Do you like Jonathan Rendell? Yes. Yeah. There's something about Jonathan Rendell. Yeah. Jonathan Rendell. Yeah. He's, I don't know, something about Jonathan Rendell's personality. Yeah. He's very fragile. Also, yeah. He wrote that amazing book, This Bloody Mary's the Last Thing I Own.

Yeah. I think you're right about that, definitely. Also, Died Sadly Young. Died Sadly Young. One thing I would say is this book kind of gets into you and it becomes, I mean, it had a huge influence on me when I wrote my book about the 50s. And that book has a lot of footnotes. Some critics hated that, but I love footnotes. And that was all entirely down to this book because I decided I wanted to

write a digressionary sort of book. And I managed to put a little tribute in to David Seabrook because one of the women in my book had worked for Lord Northcliffe, the owner of the Daily Mail, and he had a house at Broadstairs. And I put this in the book for no other reason than for David Seabrook, really, because it hadn't pertained not at all to my thesis. But one day, Lord Northcliffe was on the beach with one of his editors, Hamilton Fife, and Hamilton Fife was very, very shocked because Lord Northcliffe picked up his walking stick and he bashed a seagull and then he beat it to death on the sand. And I thought that was so Seabrookian.

That should be in here, shouldn't it? It will always be with me, this book. Funnily enough, I found it very influential. When I reread it this week, I realised that I had inadvertently, I mean, I'd name check it in the year of reading dangerously, but I'd lifted a couple of things. But I love books, of which this is a great example of the thing that you were talking about, Rachel, where the author becomes impatient, seemingly with the reader, even as they are writing the book, with the reader, even as they are writing the book,

and will turn to the reader to say, but what about this? Or there'll be some little piece of grumpiness or bad temper. And Roger Lewis, you mentioned, in the Private Whittle book, we've talked on this podcast about Roger Lewis's Peter Sellers book. That's a brilliant example of it. Footnotes which are there purely to allow Lewis to bang the table and tell the reader how gross he is. I could talk about that book all day because I was at the Sunday Times when we serialised that at the Sunday Times,

that Sellers book. I was a very young girl then and, oh, Roger Lewis. Well. You can't see it but Rachel's holding her head in her hands as she says that. Bye everyone. We probably ought to draw it to a close.

We should also say this is the first full podcast that we've done on a nonfiction book. So thank you, Rachel, for certainly introducing me to it. I can't believe. I love that story about you. This is exactly why we do this. The fact that this book haunted you for all those years until you found it. It's going to haunt me now forever as well. Thanks to Rachel Cook, to Matthew Clayton, and once again to our sponsors Unbound. You can get in touch with us on Twitter at BacklistedPod,

on Facebook at facebook.com forward slash BacklistedPod, and on our page on the Unbound site at unbound.co.uk forward slash backlisted. Thanks for listening. We'll be back with another show in a fortnight. Until then. Bye everyone.

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