William S. Burroughs: A Life
What follows is an extended review of Barry Miles’s biography: William S. Burroughs: A Life (American title: Call Me Burroughs: A Life), which was published in February 2014 to mark the centenary of Burroughs’s birth.
The review first appeared in the Psychedelic Press magazine Vol IV 2014, and has never before been online. It is reprinted now because of its in-depth quality and the fact it provides a whistle-stop tour of Burroughs’s life through the lens of Barry Miles’s updated facts.
Barry Miles is no stranger to writing about William Burroughs or the wider Beat scene. He had known Burroughs and been part of his circle since the mid-1960s, when Burroughs lived in London, and has catalogued his work, collaborated with others on restored texts of his novels and has written a portrait of Burroughs, El Hombre Invisible, which for many years has served as the standard primer or introduction to the life and work of the man. Miles has also penned biographies of Kerouac and Ginsberg and other works related to the Beats, such as The Beat Hotel. He therefore seems ideally equipped to write this new definitive biography of Burroughs, published to coincide with the centenary of the author’s birth in 1914.
As he tells us in the introduction, Miles had a hand in the making of the myth of Burroughs, a phenomenon which has now become so powerful that it has ensured Burroughs a place as a character in history independent of his place in the hall of great writers. It was in 1984 that Miles discovered a lost Burroughs manuscript, Interzone, which together with another from the past that he’d previously uncovered was instrumental in getting Burroughs a new publishing deal. That other manuscript was Queer, Burroughs’ second novel, written in the early ’50s but never published at that time. In the ’85 edition Burroughs supplied a short introduction, a few pages of autobiographical background that were to prove seminal in establishing the Burroughs ‘myth’.
Read more on: Medium
The Man and the Legend: An Appreciation of Howard Marks
My in-depth study of Howard Marks, originally published in Issue XXI of the Psychedelic Press journal, is now available online.
Dennis Howard Marks, cannabis smuggler extraordinaire, died from cancer in 2016 at the age of 70. Born in 1945, he belonged to that generation who came of age as the alternative society and psychedelic drug culture really began to flower in the second half of the 1960s, and like so many who are now venerated icons he rode that wave for all it was worth. He looked like a member of a hard rock band and he brought pop star glamour and celebrity sheen to the world of drug crime like no other figure. In this he was harking back to earlier, more romantic ages, taking the form of a 20th century Robin Hood, Dick Turpin or Captain Kidd—in fact in Señor Nice he claims family connections to the Welsh buccaneer, Sir Henry Morgan. Howard also acted in several films, and had he been given the chance, he would have fitted perfectly into the Pirates of the Caribbean franchise, alongside Johnny Depp and Keith Richards.
Howard’s Facebook pages are crammed with fan’s proud selfies taken alongside the man, and there and elsewhere he is continually referred to as a ‘legend’. The creation of the Legend that surrounds him was very much his own doing, and intriguingly he cultivated fame as a dope smuggler even though he knew he was playing a Faustian game—receiving publicity and avoiding law enforcement do not go hand in hand! He had a very good run and a number of close shaves with the law until his eventual downfall in 1988, leading to a sentence of 25 years at Terre Haute prison in Indiana, though he was released in 1995.
Read more on: Psychedelic Press UK
The Real Literary Stalkers
Guest post for Morbidly Beautiful, on a subject that I’ve had in mind for some considerable time, as there is a wealth of interesting material, and it ties in well with the story in Literary Stalker.
Stephen King constructed the most famous fictional literary stalker ever, in his novel Misery. But he had several real ones too!
Find out more about the stalking of Stephen King, Peter James, James Lasdun and other authors. Morbidly Beautiful have done an excellent job with the layout, text headings and quotes, and have furnished a wealth of great photographs.
My novel Literary Stalker constructs a fictional scenario where a writer/fan becomes embittered by a series of negative encounters with others in the writing game, and in one particular case he tips over into becoming a stalker, heading inexorably towards bloody revenge.
In fiction, a variation on this theme has been explored most famously by Stephen King, who gave us literary stalker Annie Wilkes in Misery, and brought to life every paranoid writer’s worst nightmare. But what about in real life? Are there actual literary stalkers out there, preying on illustrious scribes? You bet there are!
Read more on Morbidly Beautiful