Last Wednesday
About this ebook
About the author
BERNARD BANNERMAN IS THE PEN NAME OF ANDREW ARDEN, WHOSE BOOKS ARE ALSO PUBLISHED BY AUTHORS ONLINE
Background
I was born in 1948, in Sussex, and lived until the start of my teens mostly in Brighton and in Hove. My parents separated when I was about 7 and subsequently divorced. Both remarried, and I moved with my mother to London when I was 13 and which has been my home ever since.
Writing
I have always written - at least, that is how I remember it. One of my most vivid memories from my childhood was sitting in the window seat of the block of flats we were then living in, waiting and watching for the postman, waiting for the present promised by an uncle, a portable typewriter. It seems now that I waited for months - I remember the waiting far better than the typewriter's eventual arrival. I remember, too, being in Paris with my step-mother, spending most of the time in my hotel room writing a play. I spent much of my young teens writing - poetry, plays, short stories. None of the early work has survived, I am glad to say. With digital technology, many aspiring young writers will be tempted keep their work forever: it may be less of a blessing that it seems at the time it is saved!
My relationship with my father was bad. My first novel, published by Talmy Franklin in 1975, The Motive Not The Deed, the trial of a young man who killed his father, drew heavily on it.
I left school when I was 16; for the whole of 1965, I worked in the London offices of the pirate radio station, Radio Caroline ("Number Six, Chesterfield Gardens, London, West One; I'll say that again, Number Six..."). It was an exciting job for a youngster, especially under the charismatic and benign leadership of Ronan O'Rahilly; memories of visiting the ship rushed back recently (2009) with news of the death of disc jockey Simon Dee. He was reputed to be arrogant, but I never saw it - to the contrary, he was charming and helpful to me.
This was followed by a number of fairly meaningless jobs, then by a period in Paris writing, then wandering Europe ending up in Oslo, where (flat broke) I signed on as a merchant seaman on the cargo (not passenger!) ships of the Fred Olsen Line, with whom I sailed for most of 1967: I spent that summer of love scraping rust of metal and repainting it, or on four hour lookouts at night.
With hindsight, it seems odd to me that none of these periods generated any fiction - in some ways, though, they were the periods of my youth that I enjoyed the most and I suspect that has made them quite hard to detach from and describe.
Law
After I returned to England, I decided to go to a college to get my A levels. One of these was Law, more because of the personality of the teacher than anything else; the other was English. I went on to do Law at University - I feared at the time that being taught English would cut across my actual writing, so Law seemed like the only alternative. I started at University College London in 1969.
For all that it was so little - and so ill - thought out, it was a fatal choice: I have studied or practised law ever since - 40 years and counting.
Of course, that wasn't all I did. Indeed, as I had for most of my University years no intention of practising law, hoping still to become - and earn a living as - a published author, it seems to me that I was less at college than hanging out in various different places, including - for a period - the coffee lounge of a London cult, which led to my last novel, published in 2001 by Aramis Books (a company set up by myself and another previously published author), The Programme.
The Object Man
Long before that, in 1986, my third novel - The Object Man - had been published by Allison & Busby. It is probably my strangest novel - a sort of reverse The Collector, John Fowles' novel - in that it tells the story of a young man, a writer, who is captivated by a woman and stalks her, only for her to turn the tables on him and imprison him. Not - I hasten to add! - anywhere like as autobiographical as the origins of The Motive Not The Deed, it nonetheless emerged from the confused, sexual smörgåsbord of the 1960s and 1970s.
Housing Law
I had qualified as a barrister in 1974 and soon began to specialise in housing law: although I continued to write fiction, encouraged by the publication of The Motive Not The Deed, I also wrote extensively on housing law in the pages of a Bulletin published by the Legal Action Group, aimed at providing support to the increasing number of lawyers who were - in law centres, advice centres and private practice - undertaking legal aid work, trying to redress the imbalance between those who could afford (and knew how to access) lawyers and those who did not, particularly in areas like housing, employment, family law, social security, consumer rights and so on.
Although I practised - and still practise - from Chambers, I took a two-year time out to go up to Birmingham and establish and manage its first Law Centre, in Small Heath.
What I found as I began to take on work for tenants was that the laws which could protect them were spread thinly through Acts of Parliament and legal text books designed for landlords - principally for business and agricultural lettings - and local authorities, who administered the largest block of rented housing in the country. In my articles, I - and others writing in the area - began to describe the law not as "landlord and tenant law," redolent of an essentially private, commercial relationship in which the key factors are financial, or as "local government law" with its implication of administrative discretion, but as "housing," with an inference of basic human rights. The subject is now established in its own right.
I was fortunate because the leading legal publishers - Sweet & Maxwell - made an active committment to support what I was doing and, over the next 10 years or so, I built up with them a portfolio of works focused on housing: the Encyclopaedia of Housing Law and Practice, the Housing Law Reports, the Journal of Housing Law, Arden & Partington's Housing Law, the Manual of Housing Law, and so on. I edit or author all of them still, as I also continue to produce new editions of two books for the Legal Action Group, originally derived from my articles for its Bulletin in the 1970s - Homelessness and Allocations (the 8th edition of which will come out in 2010) and Quiet Enjoyment (the 6th edition of which was published in 2002).
I continued to write fiction, though. Apart from The Object Man in 1986, in 1985 Allison & Busby had also published my second novel, No Certain Roof, which, as its title implies, drew on my experiences working in housing law. It was the tale of the repossession of a long-standing family home by its new landlord, and the eviction of the family as a result of his development plans - gentrification. I was trying to tell the human side of what I was otherwise writing about as legal theory.
Wellington Street Chambers
Initially, my practice was - the two years at Small Heath aside - from the left-wing Chambers that started life as Bowden Street Chambers and then became Wellington Street Chambers: we were the first set of Chambers ever to establish ourselves outside of the ancient Inns of Court; we were trying to get away from the rarified, collegiate atmosphere and work somewhat closer to where our clients lived. At any rate, that was the original intention, when we went to Bowden Street in Lambeth, although once we had moved to Wellington Street in Covent Garden we were closer to more shops and restaurants than clients.
I stayed at Wellington Street until 1983 when I departed on anything but good terms. In 1989, writing as Bernard Bannerman, Sphere books published my thriller, The Last Wednesday, the first of the Dave Woolf books, in which Dave investigates the death of a number of members of a left-wing set of barristers chambers, which some people believe contains the story of my fall-out with those Chambers. You'll have to decide for yourself how much of it is rooted in fact, how much in fantasy and how much in wishful thinking.
To all intents and purposes, Wellington Street Chambers as I had known them ended business by the mid-1980s.
Local Government Law
Because so much housing was and is provided by local authorities, there was a considerable overlap between the emerging subject of housing law and local government law. In time, therefore, I found myself working for some of the local authorities who were most interested in improving conditions for their tenants - and for people more widely - including the Greater London Council.
In 1982, the GLC asked me to conduct an Inquiry into its funding of housing associations, two of which had recently collapsed financially. It became the biggest job I had ever undertaken, stretching over 15 months into 1983. It was followed in 1985 by Inquiries for Bristol City Council, into its housing improvement grants, and Hackney London Borough Council into - initially - whether freemasons had an improper influence over its affairs. The first took only thee or four months but the second was another lengthy job, running for 18 months into 1987, not so much because of the freemasonry but because, once I began, I realised that the problems at the council were far less likely to be about freemasonry than about a body which allowed rumour and gossip to run rife, and was so badly organised that it was commonly impossible to tell what had actually been happening. The council asked me to address those wider issues as well, its "institutional deficiencies", as we called the new brief. It overtook the GLC Housing Association Inquiry as my biggest ever professional task and it probably so remains, although the hearings on the Homes for Votes scandal at Westminster Council - which took up most of 1994 in preparation and presentation - gives it a good run for its money.
The Hackney Inquiry did, however, feed into fiction: Controlling Interest, the second Dave Woolf thriller published by Sphere in 1989 simultaneously with The Last Wednesday, and which was also set within the legal profession, not only drew on the knowledge of freemasonry that I had acquired but gave cameo roles to Hackney's Chief Executive and my Inquiry Report.
I have continued to work extensively in local government. My GLC Inquiry led to the greatest friendships of my life, with John Fitzpatrick, the last Solicitor to the GLC, and Maurice Stonefrost, its last Director-General, both of whom died in their early 80s in the last few years. For more than 20 years, we met regularly at Manzis Seafood Restaurant behind Leicester Square - also now gone! - for all-day, boozy lunches which were the mainstay of my life, professionally and personally. The relationships more than made up for the yawning gap left by that with my father.
As well as guiding me towards much of what I have come to believe and understand about life, and supporting me through some spectacularly bad times, they instilled in me an unqualified admiration for those who work in local government, who do the most of everyone - certainly well beyond central government - to try to stretch insufficient public funds to meet the bottomless well of need of so many people in every community. They are, to my mind, the real and unsung heroes of modern society.
Maurice - who was in his day one of the leading figures in local government finance - wrote the introduction to the first of my legal works on local government (Local Government Finance Law) and I was pleased to dedicate to them both my other major work in this area, Local Government Constitutional and Administrative Law (both also published by Sweet & Maxwell).
Dave Woolf
There were two more Dave Woolf thrillers, published in 1991 by Sphere, each also set within the legal profession: The Judge's Song and Orbach's Judgment.
A friend once said that I had - outrageously - taken two roles in each of the books, or modelled two characters in each of them on myself: Dave Woolf, the hard-drinking, hard-smoking, hero and Russel Orbach, the aloof and distant, manipulative sometime anti-hero who is Woolf's principal nemesis.
Actually, there's a fifth Woolf novel, which I have never published, entitled Final Act, in which Dave finds himself on the yacht of a character called Stuart Stone - admittedly and unashamedly based on Robert Maxwell - talking away the last night of Stone's life. Given the financial scandals which have followed those associated with Maxwell, which pale beside more recent events, there is a certain contemporary relevance in the novel, and re-reading it recently I was pleased to note not a little prescience, but that is what it is - a novel, a framework for telling Maxwell's extraordinary story, not a thriller, which is why it remains unpublished. Perhaps one day...
There's a couple of others in the making, too...
Arden Chambers
After Wellington Street, I drifted through a couple of other sets of barristers chambers, about which there is nothing to be said, before, in 1993, starting my own - Arden Chambers, specialising - naturally - in housing and local government law. Now with nearly 40 members, it is rated in professional directories as a top set in housing law and one of the best in local government.
Bernard Bannerman
The first question is why I wrote the Dave Woolf thrillers under a pseudonym; the second, how I chose it.
As to the first, some people have speculated that I did it in order to write about the Bar without needing to worry about defamation. I don't think that's true. The Bar - like most professions - is a relatively small world. I have never met anyone who has read one of the books who has not guessed that I wrote them.
Today, I am a QC - Queen's Counsel - a senior barrister entitled to confine my practice to the more complicated cases and the higher courts. When the Woolf thrillers were published, however, I was still applying for "silk," as the status of QC is known, and - given the subject-matter (the legal profession) - I wrote them under a pseudonym in order to duck the risk of disapproval of my fiction getting in the way of my profession.
The choice of name was equally expedient. When people shop for books in a particular genre, they're likely to go to the relevant section in a bookshop or library and start at the beginning, something from which I benefitted as Andrew Arden. Sadly, my publisher at Sphere rejected my first choice - Aaron Aardvark (and my second choice - B B Badasz) - so Bernard Bannerman won the day!
Re-issue
There were two main factors which led me to re-issue the books.
Initially, I was influenced by the emerging market in book-readers, which seems to be on the upsurge, even if I have yet to find one that suits me. Yes, I love the feel of a book - but when I go on holiday, I get through 10 or more a week (at a time when airlines are penalising people for taking more than hand-luggage on board with them) and even at home, who has the space to store them all? While they are still ahead of us in the States, the critical technical problems have now been solved and we will see a growth in their use in this country too.
This opens the door to various forms of self-publishing - just as musicians can now launch their work on the Internet without needing to find a record company. It means, ultimately, that - if and once available digitally - books can "last forever" without being so successful that they remain in print. It may not be the route to infinity that I anticipated when I started writing fiction, but it's there...and I could take it.
That was the first reason for the re-issue.
Of course, I could only do it with help. Nor, equally of course, am I the only one to think this way. AuthorsOnLine were already producing books for digital re-use - not only for downloading but for Print On Demand, another innovation which takes the pressure off the need to achieve a high level of sales in order to be (or to stay) available at all. Thus, people who wanted one of my books - whether because they had read them on a book reader, or for any other reason - can order a single copy, and that is what AuthorsOnLine will produce (pretty well instantly) and send out, just as quickly as any other on-line book supplier, which is how many people now buy - and are used to buying - books.
In turn, that opened up the second reason for re-issuing the books.
Over the years, my annual return from Public Lending Right - the government-funded scheme which measures loans in public libraries (and pays a small royalty for them) - seemed to me to have borne out my theory of book selection (see under Bernard Bannerman, above). At any rate, based on the PLR analysis of library loans generally each year, I was "doing well" in relation both to the novels under my own name and the thrillers as Bernard Bannerman. On the other hand, as the years went on, the books themselves began to disappear - not to say disintegrate - and, of course, loans fell off. This was not, candidly, of financial concern: the overwhelming majority of writers receive less than the cost of a good night out in PLR money each year! I was, however, extremely proud of the fact that upwards of a thousand people a year still read my fiction - an audience like that is, to my mind, well worth writing for.
Anecdotally, the books had not all disappeared. In preparation for the re-issue, I wrote to local authority libraries throughout the UK asking if I might draw the books to their attention once the re-publication process had been completed, and for the name of the right person to contact. More than one librarian wrote back to tell me that they still had some of my books on their shelves. Of course, given how old they were by then, they can't have been taken out very often!
Reflecting my general view of local government, it is pleasing to record that out of some 200 local authorities with libraries, more than half replied to my enquiry providing me with the information I had asked for, an astonishing high response rate to a "cold e-mail". My thanks to each and every one of them - knowing how busy local government officers, including librarians, are, it was an extraordinary courtesy and kindness.
Accordingly, the possibility arose of getting my books back into libraries by means of Print on Demand (and, as some libraries are just now beginning to explore, by way of downloading to computers as well).
Last Word
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