Books that inspire – Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland

Lewis Carroll’s story of a young girl entering a strange dream world has delighted and entranced adults and children alike.  It is a tale of a world turned upside down where logic and words are played with and juggled to remarkable effect.

Stories work well when the narrative seems illogical.  Alice’s wonderland has a disappearing cat which defies all logic.  Peatmore’s Cogrill’s Mill has a cat which does not exist.  The reason for this is logical.  The Wonderland character is magical and defies all logic but was the inspiration behind the Cogrill’s Mill cat.

Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland has been adapted to film, animation, TV, radio and live performance and all these media have gloried in bringing it to life.  I have heard that the latest digital effects in cinema and the iPad are stunning although I have yet to see them myself.  The magic is there in the words but is at its best when they are read for the first time to a small attentive child.

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Books That Inspire – Memoirs of Sherlock Holmes

Sherlock Holmes is arguably the greatest fictional character ever created.  He is the original master detective able to outwit and bring to justice the most devious criminals.  His creator Arthur Conan Doyle became a major innovator in the field of crime writing using forensic science and painstaking methods of deduction to thwart Holmes adversaries and astound his readers.  His model of the clever detective has been copied by countless crime writers ever since, but the power of the original character lives on.

The new BBC series, “Sherlock”, is a case in point but it must be hoped that Monday’s episode, “A Study in Pink”, will drive audiences back to the original title where “pink” is “scarlet”.

Conan Doyle’s collection of short stories under the title “Memoirs of Sherlock Holmes” was meant to be the last featuring the famous detective.  It is ironic that the penultimate adventure in this series, “The Navel Treaty,” featured the town Woking, home of Peatmore Press, as the final story describes the confrontation between Holmes and his arch enemy Moriarty above the Reichenbach Falls, since it inspired a similar scene in Peatmore’s first publication, “Cogrill’s Mill”.

The final story, called the Final Problem, was also Conan Dole’s Problem as he wished to be rid of his tiresome creation.  But such was the public clamour on reading of Sherlock Holmes’s demise that he was forced to bring him back to life.  Thus the character became transformed from mere hero to a literary god.

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Books that inspire writers to write

Writers are always readers first.  Novelists write fiction because they love stories and story telling.

At the foremost of these stories is the Odyssey.  It has everything action, adventure, humour and romance.  Most of all it has a fallible hero who is up against it.  I read it many times as a teenager and in my early twenties.  I have lost count how many times but it must be at least twenty years since I last read it.  I will read it again but as I get older I realise there are so many wonderful tales waiting to be read and enjoyed.

The first book I remember reading that was not a picture or comic book was “The Dog Caruso and his Master” by R. M Ballantyne.  I found it in the library at Hanham Church Primary School when I must have been nine or ten years old.

At the time westerns were the most popular genre for small boys on TV and Saturday morning cinema.  I played cowboys and Indians with my brother, sisters and friends, on my own or with toy model figures.  My imagination was often in the Wild West.

Popular on TV at that time was Champion the “Wonder Horse; a series about a boy, his cowboy uncle, his dog and the magnificent wild stallion he befriended.  Therefore it was easy for Ballantyne’s story about Dick, his bold Newfoundland dog and tamed mustang to hold me entranced.  I knew then that I wanted to know about more adventures.  I wanted to live them myself and if I could not do that I would make them up.

Keith Jahans

Editor, Peatmore Press