Blackwell’s Writers At The Fringe has become an established event over recent years, running each Thursday night in August as a complement to the International Book Festival itself. The format is simple: five writers, usually but not invariably Scottish, each showcase their work for 15-20 minutes, after which the audience mingles with, and of course get their newly-purchased books signed by, the authors.
 | Introduced as ever by the cheerfully eccentric Ann Landemann from Blackwell’s, tonight’s show began with Staffordshire poet Bert Flitcroft. Flitcroft is an old hand at these events amd it showed – he’s a wonderful performer of his own poetry, much of which celebrated the ordinariness of life, especially long-term love and marriage. Poems such as Little Ways, are surely love-poems for his own wife. Despite that, he also used that ordinariness to described a sudden death, the body having “legs askew like awkward children”. |
| Flitcroft was a fabulous act, and a hard one to follow. Harrison Hickman understandably struggled. At least his show was different, simply reading the first two chapters from his book followed by a short extract from a later chapter. He was nervous, and actually apologised for the fact that his dystopian debut novel The Lost Brotherhood wasn’t that good but were worth putting up with to make sense of the better (unpublished) sequels. He came across as a really nice guy, though, and we wish him well in his career. The book sounded OK, actually. |  |
 | He was followed by Comely Bank Publishing’s very own Jane Tulloch, talking about Our Best Attention, her novel set in a fictional Edinburgh 1970s department store. Jane announced that she was following Ms Landemann’s strict instructions to split her time between talking about the book’s inspiration, its background, and a reading itself. That formula worked well, the only hiccup being that when her time was up, the host had vanished. Jane filled the time by reading an excerpt from her new book. Having watched her develop since her first show, it was interesting for this observer to see how much more confident and assured she was with such an audience, who lapped up all of the reminiscences. |
| She was followed by Martin MacInnes, who talked about his novel Infinite Ground. Again, MacInnes simply outlined the plot then read from the novel, a curious mystery set in South America about a disappearing man called ‘Carlos’. His prose was clearly high-quality, but it didn’t really grip me until he leapt to a later section which offered 29 possible solutions to the puzzle – an intriguing trick which allowed him to read entire sections. At that point I was reminded that MacInnes had previously won a huge award for short fiction, and I wondered if what we were hearing was a series of short stories inserted into a novel. His book intrigued me enough to look at it further. |  |
 | I didn’t think Bert Flitcroft could be matched as an act, but William (Billy) Letford demonstrated otherwise. Equally effective at reading his own poetry, Letford actually performed by heart. Like Flitcroft his poems came from the heart, too: they spoke of love and marriage, of ordinary people, of real people. Letford can be wonderfully waspish, too. Interview starts with the line “A middle-management centaur, half-man, half-desk” – haven’t we all met those? Yet his poems lifted the heart. |
Overall, the poetry sandwich worked for me, for which Ms Landemann deserves credit. I actually left with three signed volumes of poetry, and a smile on my face.
Gordon Lawrie
Gordon Lawrie
