Table Of Content

serendipity ToeCiai'TrresBcctoll\eNStcrias edi:!dl:lf~ann •rau<•n•/,..•y•,ot,,anG!.IPfa,•<,uo/!tyrNd,.Mc~p,obHinto rhoHr,omHafwho!ltiotaboo goymon•BE.t-.1 Praise for Burton's previous anthologies: "Deliciously demented" - Frontiers magazine "By turns disturbing, hilarious, unsettling and satirical ... a satisfying anthology of nonformulaic mayhem" - Q Syndicate USA I Book Marks "An old-fashioned collection of murder stories served up with a cool modern blend" - Time Out "Something for every reader with a taste for blood" - OX International "Unputdownable!" -ReFRESH **** "Superb" - Out in Greater Manchester "A chillingly good read" - The Big Issue SERENDIPITY: THE GAY TIMES BOOK OF NEW SHORT STORIES Edited by Peter Burton First published 2004 by GMP (Gay Men's Press) GMP is an imprint of Millivres Prowler Limited, part of the Millivres Prowler Group, Unit M, Spectrum House, 32-34 Gordon House Road, London NWS ILP UK www.gaymenspress.co.uk www.gaytimes.co.uk This collection and introduction © Peter Burton 2004. Copyright of individual stories and poems rests with each author. The moral right of the authors has been asserted. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, including mechanical, electronic, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior written permission of the publishers. A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library ISBN 1-9028S2-48-6 Printed and bound in Finland by WS Bookwell Distributed in the UK and Europe by Airlift Book Company, 8 The Arena, Mollison Avenue, Enfield, Middlesex EN3 7NJ Telephone: 020 8804 0400 Di~tributed in North America by Consortium, 104S Westgate Drive, St Paul, MN SS114-106S Telephone: I 800 283 3S72 Distributed in Australia by Bulldog Books, PO Box 300, Beaconsfield, NSW 2014 By the same author Gay Portraits Amongst the Aliens: Some Aspects of a Gay Life Vale of Tears: A Problem Shared (with Richard Smith) Talking to ... Writers Writing on Gay Themes Parallel Lives Rod Stewart: A Life on the Town As editor Death Comes Easy: The Gay Times Book of Murder Stories Bend Sinister: The Gay Times Book of Disturbing Stories The Mammoth Book of Gay Short Stories The Art of Gay Love The Boy From Beirut and Other Stories Some of the Things Said by or About Kenny Jones and The Faces Some of the Things Said by or About Ronnie Lane and The Faces Some of the Things Said by or About Ian Mclagan and T11e Faces Some of the Things Said by or About Rod Stewart and The Faces Some of the Things Said by or About Ron Wood and The Faces T11e Black Tent and Other Stories For Neil Bartlett and fames Gardiner, Io hn Haylock, Francis King, and Tony Warren with professional regard and personal affection Contents Introduction Peter Burton ix The Trouble with Dreams Hugh Fleetwood 3 1949 Tim Ashley 7 Collecting Remains David Patrick Beavers 29 A Triptych Geo C Bourne 39 A Small Triumph Perry Brass 57 Mysterious Ways Scott Brown 87 Abdul Aziz and the Intifada Jeffrey Buchanan 101 Glimmer Richard Cawley 111 Loot Bryan Connon 131 Funeral Rites Jack Dickson 137 Essence Simon Edge 155 Body Parts Drew Gummerson 163 Playing It By Ear John Haylock 181 Aaron Godwin Randall Kent Ivey 195 Common or Garden Alan James 217 Sunrise at Salmon Pool John Sam Jones 237 Dreams Francis King 251 Our Last Night Together Reuben Lane 263 Fourth World: Notes for the Unauthorised Biography of Andrew Rolliard-Trowe Simon Lovat 277 Hunter and the Hunter David Mckintosh 287 Stamp Out Your Cigarettes and Pull Down Your Pants Stuart Thorogood 293 Finding Danger Boy Michael Wilcox 311 Portrait of a King Graeme Woolaston 319 A Boy's Book of Wonders Ian Young 337 Stealing Memories Richard Zimler 347 Further Reading About the Authors vii Introduction Writers have for years been mourning the demise of the short story but, if the number of anthologies and single-author collections on the shelves of bookshops and libraries is anything to go by, like the reports of Mark Twain's death, those reports of the death of the short story have been grossly exaggerated. What has undeniably happened is the almost complete banishment of short fiction from magazines and newspapers, thus destroying what was once a flourishing market for both new and established writers (often the first step towards a literary career) and leaving a large void that is unlikely ever to be filled. The rise of the short story coincided with the rise of the middle class, the rise of literacy, the rise of the working class's desire for self improvement, the spread of the railways and the appearance on the station platforms of W H Smith's book stalls which supplied newspapers and periodicals for edification and entertainment to a wide range of travellers. The twenty-first-century equivalent of those publications seems to be those ubiquitous puzzle books that accompany so many people on flights or rail journeys. Perhaps the most famous of those nineteenth-century periodicals was The Strand Magazine, founded in 1891, in which Arthur Conan Doyle's Sherlock Holmes made his first and so many subsequent appearances. Over nearly sixty years (The Strand closed down in 1950), the magazine published stories by everyone from Conan Doyle and H G Wells to P G Wodehouse, thus covering the complete spectrum of genres and thereby satisfying a reading public with a voracious appetite. However, short stories didn't just appear in magazines: publications such as the long-defunct London Evening News ran a story in every issue, each of these stories running to around two thousand words. I well remember the excitement with which I read a tale by Kenneth Martin, whose first novel, Aubade, written when he was sixteen, published when he was seventeen, is now something of a gay classic. ix Peter Burton Magazines like John Lehmann's New Writing, which became Penguin New Writing and ran between 1936 and 1946, and Lehmann's The London Magazine, which he founded in 1954 and edited until 1961, and Joe McCrindle's Transatlantic Review, which ran between 1959 and 1977, allowed writers a little more space to breathe, though few were as generous with their space as The New Yorker, which gave complete issues to such celebrated nouvelles as Truman Capote's Breakfast at Tiffany's (1958) and Muriel Spark's The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie (1961). Of course, the brevity of both the Capote and Spark nouvelles does raise the question of just what constitutes a short story. Christopher Isherwood is another novelist whose reputation was built on nouvelles ('Sally Bowles' being the most famous) that could easily be classified as short stories. Sometimes I think that words like nouvelle and novella are simply the posh alternatives to 'long short story'. When contributors ask me to what length they can write when planning a story for consideration in one of my anthologies (this is the fourth I've edited), I tend to suggest that a story take as long as it takes. But that's not entirely true and is possibly too flippant a response. The short story is a particularly difficult discipline and, before setting metaphorical pen to metaphorical paper, the writer must be certain that the tale they are about to tell really is a short story and not something altogether different: a novel. One contributor to this present collection found that the short story he was writing for inclusion had somehow turned into his next novel. Other submissions that didn't make the collection included pieces which strained uncomfortably at the constraints of the short-story form and pieces that were of the requisite length but were so underdeveloped as to preclude inclusion. That said, there are long short stories in Serendipity and there are short stories that are as neat and happily anecdotal as any of the shorter magazine or newspaper pieces by the likes of O Henry, W Somerset Maugham or 'Saki' (H H Munro), all of whom were masters of the brisk and neat tale. X Introduction These days there are specialist publications for just about every interest, though it is surprising that so few (if any) of the world's gay periodicals have any interest in publishing short ficion. But in the past things were rather different. Intensely important in promoting homosexual literature were a number of essentially literary magazines, including Horizon, New Writing and Penguin New Writing, The Windmill, The London Magazine, Evergreen Review and Transatlantic Review. And there were a small number of gay publication which percolated throughout the world: Der Kries, founded in 1932 and running until 1967, Swiss-based, published in English, French and German; One, the magazine of the American homosexual law reform group The Mattachine Society. In all but the latter two titles, gay writings were eased into print because of gay publishers, gay editors or editors who were gay-sympathetic. Magazines over which John Lehmann held sway were a welcome haven for writers as distinguished as Paul Bowles, Christopher Isherwood and Denton Welsh. Writers who are gathered together in this collection, Hugh Fleetwood, Francis King and myself among them, were published in Transatlantic Review. The Windmill, co-edited by the lesbian Kay Dick under the pseudonym Edward Lane, published material by T H White, James Hanley, Sylvia Townsend Warner and the New Zealander James Courage, whose A Way of Love was a gay hit in 1959. For anyone who enjoys short stories there are plenty to investigate (from the past, from the present) and many of the finest writers have themselves been gay. The interested should look out for collections from Clive Barker, Alan Bennett, E F Benson, Truman Capote, Noel Coward, Rhys Davies (a forthcoming biography of this Welsh writer who in his heyday was a New Yorker stalwart should bring about a revival), Hugh Fleetwood, E M Forster (all his gay fiction was published posthumously), Patrick Gale, Adam Haslett (his debut collection You Are Not a Stranger Here cannot be too highly recommended), L P Hartley, Christopher Isherwood, Henry James, John Sam Jones (especially his second slim collection, Fishboys of Vernazza), Francis King, Robin Maugham and his immeasurably superior uncle, W Somerset Maugham, Donald Rawley (two superb collections, one novel, an untimely death), David Rees, Peter Robins, xi