BOOKHOUSE BOY #28 / Matthew Stokoe

Le Feu Sacré Publishing’s “Bookhouse Boys Questionnaire”.

Eleven questions asked each week to a writer, a publisher, a bookseller, a musician, a director, a friend, about the relationships we have with our books and our library collections.

Today, Matthew Stokoe, one of my favorite noir english writer !

| Which books did you buy lately for your own collection ?

Recently I’ve been buying books to help research my next novel - five or six books from the eighties and nineties about ninja - the ones with the blurry black and white photos of supposed ninja (some of them obvious nutcases) demonstrating various techniques. I’m not so much interested in the fighting aspect as in a spiritual discipline they were supposed to practice called kuji or kuji-in. I’ve also just bought The Magician, His Training and Work by W.E. Butler and Learning Ritual Magic by John Michael Greer, Clare Vaughn and Earl King Jr. These books are again for research, although I’ve always been fascinated with the notion of ceremonial magic and the enormous body of spiritual architecture that surrounds it.

| Which striking book did you discover during your teens, that you still have ?

In my teens I read a lot of Alistair MacLean and Desmond Bagley and I think I still have one of MacLean’s kicking about somewhere. Though I never really think of those two guys as influences, as I write this I realise that they probably taught me a lot about what keeps a novel rocking along. They also taught me about the necessity of appearing to have convincing knowledge of whatever subject you’re writing about, and by that I mean, at least sometimes, how to fake something convincingly! The most influential book, though, that I ever read, I read in my early twenties - Last Exit to Brooklyn by Hubert Selby Jr. It was this book that really opened my eyes to the potential beauty of language, even more so as Selby use his wonderfully lyrical prose to describe a very grim and violent world.

| Regardless of its intrinsic qualities, which one of your books has the greatest sentimental value, and why ?

One of my own books? Of course they are all sentimental to me, but Empty Mile is the one that really cut the deepest. It was harrowing to write as I had to access a lot of the less pleasant stuff I had done, or been through in my own life in order to create the story. Though it is not autobiographical, there is more of me, a lot more, in that book than in the others and the process of writing it is a dark ghost that haunts me still.

| Which one would you lend to someone you would like to seduce ?

Something very long and very slow in the hope that they’d end up fucking me out of sheer boredom.

| Do you have any book that you feel “ashamed” of keeping in your library ?

I have a couple of signed books by a rather inferior, but well known, horror writer that I keep in the hope that they might be worth a few bucks one day. But basically, the only book I’d ever really feel ashamed of owning would be one that was poorly written or which espoused hate crimes. Graphic content, as you might guess, is not something I take much offence at.

| What books did you inherit from your relatives ?

The Oxford English dictionary, a book that still faintly smells of my dead sister’s perfume and which I take out on occasion to turn the pages, to feel the paper, to remember….

| The very book you did read and re-read the most ?

The Alexandria Quartet by Lawrence Durrell - I’ve never actually quite finished it, but I have read about half of it at least 7 or 8 times. I love the evocation of Alexandria in the 1950s, the strands of madness and nymphomania. But most of all I love the beauty of its prose. The story is slightly spoiled for me as the edition I have lists “work notes” in the afterward - points that Durrell figured he might use to expand upon the story - what fucking idiot editor made that decision, I don’t know, but it effectively destroys the idea of the novel as an account of a real world that exists somewhere, with real people and real problems, and turns it into an intellectual exercise instead. Even so, it’s fabulous writing. The other books I have most re-read are by Raymond Chandler - particularly The Big Sleep and The Lady in the Lake. Again, a very lyrical writer and I just love that Southern Californian world of the 30s and 40s. I dip into his books regularly. While writing Colony Of Whores my computer monitor stood on an omnibus edition of his works. He is, I think, the writer who has influenced me the most. Plot, beautiful language, California, a view of society as an essentially corrupt mechanism bent on ruining the common man, and a view of the common man as essentially honourable and worthy and therefore constantly at odds with the society in which he lives…. Wow, what more could you want from a writer?

| The book that makes you want to do an auto-da-fé ?

You mean pronounce sentence and carry out a punishment? Well, I always thought American Psycho was a bit overrated, but I wouldn’t go so far as to say it makes me want to perform an auto-de-fe.

| If you were proposed to live eternally in the novel of your choice, which one would that be ?

Less Than Zero by Bret Easton Ellis

| Which is the incunabulum that you dream of owning, your personal bibliophilic Holy Grail ?

Well, they are not incunabula as they miss the cut-off by five hundred years, but I’d love to own first editions of all of Chandler’s books. Either that, or some obscure text on alchemy.

| At the end of a reader’s life, if there should remain just one last book ?

You mean, if I could take one book with me when I die? Or something like that? I wouldn’t bother - if we are still in a state where words on a piece of paper are necessary when we pass over, then I’m going to be seriously disappointed.