Keith Mansfield

Reviews and articles about my first novel are beginning to be written, so I’ve created a space at JohnnyMackintosh.com where you can read everything together. So far the book’s been very well received. A few highlights are:

“The story is great … The characterisation in this book is fantastic and Mansfield paints some exceptionally believable, lovable and fun characters. The writing is engaging and accomplished. Mansfield succeeds in cutting out all the parts that children tend to skip over. It’s reminiscent of Rowling, yet still maintains an individual style … Johnny Mackintosh is a great read.”

The Bookbag

“Move over Harry Potter, there’s a new kid on the block - Johnny Mackintosh makes his mark in the first instalment of an explosive intergalactic trilogy.”

East End Life

“Mansfield has taken created a brilliantly original and multi-dimensional story which I recommend whole-heartedly.”

Amazon Vine Voice

Yesterday I took a train to Crystal Palace (the fresh air suburb) to visit a brilliant independent bookshop called The Bookseller Crow on the Hill. It was heaving, partly because Mousehunter author Alex Milway was in there signing copies of his new book, The Curse of Mousebeard, but also because it’s clearly just a great place for kids in the local community to go.

Alex (occasionally sporting a mousebeard of his own) signed seemingly dozens of copies, as well as giving masterclasses in the art of drawing mice. Sadly, despite his expert tuition, I don’t think I’ll ever be in a position to illustrate the Johnny Mackintosh stories. A children’s author’s got to know his limitations…

Alex (Mousebeard) Milway

The brain, apparently the fourth greatest mouse of all time, was also on hand in the shop window to lure people in. If you’d like a signed copy of The Curse of Mousebeard or its prequel, The Mousehunter, and you’re not near Crystal Palace, you can probably buy them from The Bookseller Crow’s online store.

I’m fascinated by the process of turning a book into a film. Dan Weldon’s just written the screenplay for his mother’s 1980 novel, Puffball. Although it’s difficult to believe I’m now in such distinguished company as Fay Weldon, she’s a fellow Quercus author and we had a lovely chat at the preview of the film on Friday night at The Rich Mix. She then joined Dan, actress Rita Tushingham and legendry director Nic Roeg (the man who made a film featuring Albert Einstein, Marilyn Monroe, Joe Diaggio and Joseph MacCarthy and still labelled it “Insignificance”) on stage for a Q&A, followed by a sneak preview.

Puffball opens with a city couple beginning a major renovation project at an unspecified rural Irish location. For the generation brought up on Grand Designs, the sense of doom in the audience is immediately palpable. Never fear though – main character Liffey (played by Kelly Reilly who has a great line in hats) is both architect and project manager. With that and a large crew of Polish builders, even Kevin McCloud might expect the build to run smoothly.

Naturally, it doesn’t. That’s mainly due to the mystical forces at work in the area, focused on the thousand-year-old Odin’s stone, a mystical site so powerful even Liffey and her boyfriend Richard (Oscar Pearce) get carried away allowing their passions to get the better of them. Though not without using a condom – after all, she is an architect. But modern rubber proves no match for ancient magic and soon Lifey discovers she’s pregnant.

Roeg’s small (and impressive) cast, is largely divided into warring pairs. Rita Tushingham’s Molly clearly has “gifts”, but they’re weighed against those of her grand daughter Audrey (Leona Igoe). It’s Miranda Richardson, Audrey’s mother Mabs, whose jealously of Liffey and desperation for a son lie at the heart of the locals’ resentment of Liffey (whose boyfriend Richard comes to blows with Mabs’ husband Tucker played by William Houston). The local doctor (Pat Deery) is good as gold and helpful to all, but his assistant, Mabs’ sister Carol (Tina Kellegher) makes sure everyone knows what’s going on at the surgery. It seems that to get on with your partner in the film you have to share the same DNA, and only Audrey’s younger sisters, the twins, live in harmony. Cleverly, having foreign builders means they don’t need to be involved, so the odd one out in the film, the one character able to control his destiny and come and goes at his own choosing, is Donald Sutherland’s Lars.

Lars is head of Liffey’s architectural practice, but his supposed Scandinavian roots imply there may be more to him than that – is he the modern day personification of Odin on Earth? The twinkle in his eye as he gazes at Liffey suggest he’s had more to do with her pregnancy than might first appear, even if the fatherhood of the unborn child is the main source of tension throughout the film.

By the end the house is finished. I don’t think Kevin McCloud would be much of a fan – it lacks the soul and stamp of individuality that any grand design needs to be carried off successfully. Might the same be said of the film? Maybe, but I’d say the jury’s still out on Puffball. And I would like to read the book to see how Dan developed his mother’s work. Roeg’s films have a habit of growing in importance as you slowly digest all that surrounds them, much like the giant puffball mushrooms of the title (which feature a little too heavily in the film’s scene-setting moments). I don’t know if they’re edible or not, but I’m going to chew this one over for a while before reaching a firm conclusion.

According to the European Space Agency (ESA) website, they received 8413 applications to become astronauts, of which mine was one. Considering they’ve not recruited for 16 years, I’m surprised the number’s not higher, but certainly not complaining.

The French are keenest to leave this island Earth, with 1860 of those, edging out the German’s 1798. While you might expect only a handful of candidates from Luxembourg (14), it’s strange to see only 35 Danes apply. I’m apparently one of 822 Brits – of whom almost 700 are men.

How can it be that so few people are keen to see this view for themselves?

Image courtesy of NASA Johnson Space Center (NASA-JSC)

What happens now? ESA have said they’ll contact me by early August to say if I pass to the next stage – a whole week of psychometric and medical tests. When I’ve taken tests like these before, the response normally comes back saying “you’re the sort of person who enjoys taking psychometric tests”, which is very true, so I’m even more eager to get through.

How many readers realize that it’s perfectly possible to travel in time? Physicists have known ever since Einstein published his Special Theory of Relativity in 1905, but somehow the word still hasn’t leaked out to the general public.

Over at JohnnyMackintosh.com, I’ve created a new section called The Science of Johnny Mackintosh. So far there are only a couple of entries, but more will follow and, if you want to know how to travel a million years into the future, I promise the information is all there. It’s just we don’t know how to bring you back.

Back in 2004, Chris Anderson wrote a piece for Wired magazine on the Long Tail. In an age of online retailing, your shop space becomes effectively unlimited so anything and everything can be made available for sale that way. Johnny Mackintosh and the Spirit of London can be bought on the web from all manner of retailers, but over the weekend I took to the high street to see how widely it was available there.

Hatchards new fiction display

Hatchards on Piccadilly had half a dozen copies of Johnny out on a table displaying new children’s books. As a writer you don’t travel anywhere without favourite pens for jotting down the flash of inspiration that arrives when you least expect it, so at the invitation of the shop I was able to whisk it out and add my moniker to the title page of each edition.

Books Etc Broadgate Circle

I was delighted to find two copies of Johnny in Broadgate Circle’s Books Etc. In Chapter 2 Johnny travels through Liverpool St Station so it’s lovely that other people can also read about him there.

Blackwell Charring Cross Road

Blackwell on Charring Cross Road also had two copies in their Children’s Hardback Fiction section. This area is the unofficial bookselling centre of London so a big thank you to the store for making it available in the very heart of London’s book traders.

Waterstone's Piccadilly

Last, but absolutely not least, thank you to those lovely people at Waterstone’s who had a display of eight on the shelves of their flagship Piccadilly store and also four at the Gower Street branch (which, again, I was asked to sign). On publication day itself, I saw that there were a couple of copies at the Leadenhall Market branch, but the first shop I went into this time, on New Street near Covent Garden, is quite a small one. Without me having to do it myself to try to get my book noticed, there was Johnny Mackintosh already facing out on the shelves attracting attention with its beautiful cover. Over-excited, I went up to the Bookseller and thanked him, at which point he asked me to sign the copy. He was still busy placing the sticker on the front cover when a particularly discerning customer came along and bought it off him.

Waterstone's New Row

Waterstone's Gower Street

It wasn’t all great news, but of course it’s very early days. Hopefully, Borders, Foyles and WH Smith (who have three outlets in Liverpool St Station) will be stocking up soon, and it is wonderful to know there are copies available out there if people do want to buy them. It’s not just London either - friends scattered around the country are also reporting Johnny Mackintosh sightings.

If you do go into a bookshop and can’t see the book on the shelves, please ask behind the counter for it. The more often people hear the name, the more likely they are to start stocking up. And if you let me know, I promise I’ll sent lots of badges as a reward.

Twenty years ago I could never have gotten away with saying it, but today there’s no shame in declaring ABBA to be a great pop band. By the early 1980s, some of the public had grown tired of them but, more importantly, they looked tired of each other – the breakups of Bjorn and Agnetha and Benny and Frida had taken their toll. Although the band never officially split, they went off to work on solo projects and now, even the lure of a billion dollars hasn’t brought them back together, for which they deserve huge respect.

The winner takes it all and, in the music business, the winners are the songwriters. Benny and Bjorn have reaped the rewards of their songwriting talents, their personal fortunes dwarfing that of their former partners. One of the reasons for that has been the success of Mama Mia! the musical, a stage production since 1999 and now a major film. I’ve never seen the musical, but last night I went to a preview of the movie in London’s Leicester Square.

As part of the event, we were presented with souvenir brochures and the cinema’s Compton organ rose from the depths to play a medley of Abba numbers. A DJ from Heart FM introduced the show before we were treated to special messages from Benny and Bjorn and then one of the film’s stars, Bond himself Pierce Brosnan.

I would love it if Bjorn and Benny got in touch to ask me to script a musical based on their songs. And I think I could make a fair stab at it – there’s a wealth of great material to work with. As a storyteller you recognize when your tale works and when it’s clunky and you’re trying to force it to fit within the original scaffold you’ve erected to fill. For instance, right now I think I’m forcing a section of the second Johnny Mackintosh novel that I may well end up throwing away to be replaced with a major rewrite. As a story, Mama Mia! is simply too contrived and clunky – the audience is frequently forced into groans or bouts of embarrassed laughter as a song that’s only half-suitable is shamelessly rammed into a scene where it just doesn’t fit properly. Then there’s the overall story itself, which is plain daft.

The acting in the film version is, though, nothing short of magnificent. Only Dominic Cooper’s Sky fails to convince while Meryl Streep’s Donna is superb – and her version of Winner Takes it All steals the show when it comes to the singing. It seems a long time ago that she was lauded as the finest actress of her generation. I don’t know what she’s been doing lately, but here she takes the flimsy material and makes it almost believable. I think part of the reason is her apparent love of ABBA and determination to do their songs justice.

Elsewhere, Benny and Bjorn both make cameos. Also, there’s a structural flaw that suggests to me that the editing hasn’t quite worked – either I fell asleep or someone cut a crucial couple of minutes from the film’s hen party that would have explained a lot.

However, in the end, what shines through most is the five months of fun the cast and crew had creating the movie – it’s infectious, and that’s is probably enough to make it the feel-good film of the summer.

Today, 3rd July 2008, Johnny Mackintosh and the Spirit of London was published. Coincidentally, it’s also exactly a year to the day since my publisher, Quercus, told me they loved the Johnny Mackintosh manuscript and made me an offer to write a series of books.

With fear and trembling, I visited my local Waterstone’s to see if I would find the book on the shelves. As it happens, Johnny was proudly on display and keeping very illustrious company. Here he is, by a coincidence of Waterstones’ shelf structure, right next to JK Rowling’s Harry Potter and Philip Pullman’s His Dark Materials trilogy.

To celebrate, today I ordered Johnny’s favourite meal at a London riverside restaurant: fish ‘n chips followed by sticky toffee pudding. I don’t know if it’s because today’s so special, but the food was incredible – my only disappointment being that I forgot to take a photo. Instead, here I am on the restaurant’s terrace, with the Spirit of London peeking through between the span of Tower Bridge – which makes an appearance in the final chapter of the book.

Food’s never far from Johnny’s mind, so it was important to have some cakes for last night’s launch party: some came with the book cover, others with just the logo, and then Bentley the Old English sheepdog, Ptery the Pteradon, Johnny’s locket and the Milky Way galaxy all made an appearance.

The launch could hardly have gone better. It was lovely to have a big team from Quercus there – from left to right we have me, my editor Roisin Heycock, Parul Bavishi (holding the champagne by my right ear), Nicci Praca and also Suzy Jenvey who signed me up originally before leaving for pastures new.

Roisin gave a great speech that I had to try to follow, and I also read a piece from the book where Johnny is chased by a T Rex. The location was the roof terrace of Sir John Cass’s Foundation School in the heart of the City of London. It must be a wonderful place to go to school, and how lucky are those kids with a giant spaceship right outside their building?

Sadly all good things must come to an end though, but as darkness fell and the Spirit of London lit up our surroundings, at least I had the consolation that in only a few hours time my debut novel would be in the shops.

Two days and then people will be able to flock into every bookshop in the country and demand a copy of Johnny Mackintosh and the Spirit of London. In theory anyway…

Happily, my beautiful badges arrived today, just in time for tomorrow night’s rooftop launch.

This evening my flat becomes a mini-bakery, churning out all sorts of different Johnny Mackintosh cakes for tomorrow’s party. Before they’re all eaten, I hope to take a few pictures to show you what you could have had!

The weather forecasters are still saying storms and rain tomorrow, despite today’s glorious baking hot sunshine. But they don’t know I’ve done a deal with Bram…