Harry Harrison R.I.P.

I can’t believe that Harry Harrison has passed away.

If there was any justice, the untimely death of an author would result in a rush to buy his or her books and stories the same way that the untimely death of a singer results in an increase in sales of their music.

This would mean that the death of Harry Harrison would have at least one good effect, knocking ‘fifty shades of shite’ and its spawn off the top of the bestseller chart.

But the death of an author does not have the same effect because those that already know and love them have their books and so reread them instead of reading them for the first time. Because while Mr Harrison’s sad passing may not have a beneficial effect, his life certainly did, as even my feeble collection of his books can attest.

Harry Harrison wrote grand science fiction for boys. The Stainless Steel Rat books were rattling good yarns. They had space ships, they had ray guns, they had humour and subtle social satire lost on me, lying in my bunk in a caravan during the summer holidays, reading with the intensity that only a young boy can, devouring adventure. Maybe it’s just the pages getting yellow, or the glue getting brittle, but I like to think that that paperback actually has that caravan-in-the-summertime smell, like hot Tupperware and air so hot and still you have to fan it to breath.

Reading ‘The Stainless Steel Rat’ was more fun than going to the beach.

And Slippery Jim diGriz wasn’t just confined to the pages of a paperback, he was a comic book hero. 2000AD, my staple stapled reading, was home to the comic book adaptation. Because I got my 2000AD on a Saturday morning my back issues smell predominantly of bacon roll and grease rather than caravan and sun cream, but I still thrill at the spaceships, the ray guns and the hero who is a crook and more moral than any upright citizen.

Harry Harrison wrote dystopian visions. A trilogy of books: ‘Homeworld’, ‘Wheelworld’ and ‘Starworld’. Read decades ago for the first time and then re-read in a burst of literary gluttony a couple of years ago and seeing the books with adult eyes, the effect like seeing a painting restored. The social commentary, and not just any commentary, but my kind of commentary. Highlighting injustice and prejudice and seeing science fiction reading like an edge of the seat thriller, with ray guns!

‘Technicolor time machine’, ‘Bill the galactic hero’ and ‘Star smashers of the galaxy rangers’ are to me the literary equivalents of favourite movies, ones that you ration yourself watching, but from which random scenes pop into your head at the oddest moment - and from which scenes you recognise in other books, in movies, in comics or on television.

Any science fiction fan learns after the first ten or twelve times not to explain to their date that the scene where the hero does that thing, with the girl…that’s from (insert short story written in the 1970s here). Any science fiction fan knows that Hollywood screenwriters spend 10% of their time at a typewriter and the remainder playing Dr Frankenstein with bits of genre stories they think nobody else has read.

Mr Harrison was influential.

He influenced me, at least. Made me a more voracious reader, probably made me a better person, or a more tolerant one anyway.

Everyone will be suggesting the best Harry Harrison story, or their favourite, so let me be no exception and join the celebration. There’s a story from 1965 called ‘Mute Milton’ which, in my collection of ‘The best of Harry Harrison’ (I pity the editor who had to make the choice of what constituted that, back in the day when I bought this, when a paperback cost £1.50 band new in a proper shop when the NET book agreement was still in place, before you could just publish a 10,000 pager in kindle edition). Mr Harrison himself introduces it as ‘an angry story’.

I read it, I got angry, I was a better person by the time I finished reading it.

Harry Harrison, Rest In Peace.

Horror comics

Children today have ready access to many different ways of terrifying themselves, be it craftily watching forbidden DVDs, slipping 'Resident Evil' into the playstation, discovering that grooming is not just something that happens to their 'my little pony' collection or being told that with the economy the shape it's in, they will have to walk to school instead of being driven the 500 yards in a 4x4. Just a few short decades ago, things were very different, when I was a kid one had to put real effort into terrifying oneself, and by that I don't mean the sort of fear that was visited upon you in the supermarket when, upon looking up, you realised that you had been following the wrong set of legs for the last five minutes and your parent has misplaced you, or that you had forgotten your PE kit and pant related humiliation beckoned, rather I mean premeditated terror when you set out to scare yourself.

For instance, before VHS meant that every under supervised kid was one short 'play' button away from watching a movie resulting in their having to sleep with the light on for the next two years, horror was most freely available in book form. Available, but not easily available. Stephen King, for instance, wrote books roughly the thickness of breeze blocks, and about as penetrable.

That's why the preferred literary chiller of choice was the horror comic.

And the best way to come across these was when they were to be found rolled up and on offer at some seaside tat shop. Titles such as 'Dracula' and 'Werewolf by night' featured characters previously safely confined to a European village located a safe distance away, the Universal back-lot to be precise, appearing in black and white and doing horrible things to ugly blokes and good looking women before being pulped by angry villagers, so no great threat. The horror comic though, usually relocated the character to the present day and while this was usually still somewhere in America, the threat felt more immediate, especially after the sun went down.

While traditional stories about well known but handily out-of-copyright characters were good stuff, even if the way the comics were purchased meant that the sequential nature of the longer story arc couldn't be fully enjoyed (although the reader could probably guess that each edition was pretty much the same, featuring comics-code approved gore and a lot of shadowy suspense), the real finds were the anthology comics, where lesser supernatural threats such as demons and gouls lurked. This was great as, while the average kid had no trouble at all torturing themselves with fresh horrors based on existing monsters, adding new characters to the bedtime bestiary took things to a whole new level.

But it was British horror comics that really made the breakthrough. While most stories had supernatural threats handing out some sort of justice to those who deserved to be punished, and even had avenging ghosts or spirits revenging their earthly forms, occasional stories about evil preying on the innocent crept through.

It's a shame really that, even effective as they were, this was never perfected. If the comic publishers really wanted to scare the hell out of kids, then they should have published stories about dreadful creatures inhabiting the toilet block at the caravan site, a story sure to fix on the imagination of any impressionable youngster and no doubt leading to wilting bushes in caravan sites around the nation.

Maybe it's time for horror comics to make a return. Hollywood had turned monsters into harmless teens that come in two varieties; pouty (vampires, must be the teeth that make their mouth form into the shape of a massive sulk) and brooding (werewolves, bushy eyebrows make for a perpetual frown). What's needed is much less Glee meets Hammer and more kid-taunts-reclusive-bloke-who-lives-in-caravan, who beats the kid to death with a hammer. (Moral: don't taunt nutters.) Or a few more haunted appliances; there has to be something in a story about a possessed washing machine, fridge or car. Although I think Stephen King may have got there first. Possessed Bop-it?

Haunted household objects

Unless you’re a collector, an enthusiast or a nutter, it’s more than likely that the things that fill your home are a mixture of the essential, the useful and the occasional luxury. If you have extra soft quilted loo paper then you’re covering all three categories there.

If you have a chest of draws full of Barbie dolls still in their boxes then you are collector. If you have a chest of draws full of Barbie doll heads that have been wrenched off their bodies, then you are nutter.

For most folk though ordinary, everyday households are, by and large, filled with ordinary, everyday objects that are, on the whole, fairly innocuous. Occasionally something has the capacity to be odd, creepy or sinister, if you have something that’s antique, or stuffed, or both, then this can often be the case. Folk had a different aesthetic and the Victorians in particular thought that no home was complete without a stuffed raven or a hunting scene diorama. Such items look a little incongruous today when placed on Ikea furniture.

Then there are things that are just too jolly to ever be creepy, like clockwork chickens! What’s not to love?


Paintings though, can be odd, in any number of ways. There’s the portrait where there’s something just not quite right; on the plus side, it may hold the key to a puzzle that will point the way to lost treasure (if you’re lucky it’s a figure pointing to the base of a familiar tree while holding a spade, if you’re unlucky it’s a figure sitting at a chess table which has been set up with a problem, in an unfamiliar landscape, with notes in mirror writing in a foreign language and you just have to hope beyond hope that the painter wasn’t a practical joker). Occasionally of course paintings provide useful places with assassins – with exactly the same eyes as the person in the painting – to lurk behind, peeping and awaiting their pouncing opportunity.

Or the painting of somewhere that turns out to have something of a gruesome history, which you only find out about after you’ve bought it. Or, always my favourite, the painting that actually changes appearance when you’re not looking.






M.R. James combined these to great effect in his short story ‘The mezziotint’. If you thought the scariest thing about buying art was the price tag, think again.

Art, of course, is all about provenance. That creepy washed out sketch on the wall, the one that’s signed ‘Vincent’, that’s worth something. But giving an object an interesting back story can also boost value, and nobody wants any romantic crap – it’s got to be action, adventure or, best of all, horror.

Clocks are another good example of an ordinary object that can, with the twist of a pen, become far more interesting as you note that it has, on more than one occasion, struck thirteen. Grease in the mechanism or something more sinister?

The oddest object I know of? A mass produced camera from the 1930s.


Why? Well, it’s all because of a comic. ‘The Collector’ was a British horror anthology comic that ran for precisely one issue in 1977. The story goes that it was beset with misfortune from the outset. Competing with an already crowded comics scene, not only did a distribution cock up mean that only a few copies made it into the shops (the remainder somehow being delivered to a chicken rendering plant where they were put to a use that is as baffling as it is unappetising), but it was released in the summer of Star Wars, and if your comic didn’t have wookies, robots, glowing swords and space ships, you were toast.

Frankly, an old fart who owned a junk shop making Hitchcock-like appearances in comic strips about haunted, cursed or otherwise macabre objects wasn’t cutting it, and The Collector sank after just one issue.

But not without a trace. The comic came with a free gift – allegedly the very same cursed poker chip that featured in the lead story.

Not long after, gruesome tales started circulating the playgrounds that kids who had been lucky, or unlucky, to get hold of the issue had come to bad ends, just like the owners of the chip in the story. The only thing that kids like doing more than teasing other kids is delivering tales of misfortune about their peers with more relish than you’d find in McTavishe’s House of Condiments.

Not many people remember ‘The Collector’ these days, (it’s unlikely you’ll even find a reference to it on the web) and the only time you’re likely to see an issue is bagged at some comics fair. The copies with the free gift still attached don’t sell well.

As for why this makes the camera creepy? One of the other stories was about an investigator of the paranormal brought in to investigate a mysterious death at a church, where the warden has apparently been scared to death. The investigator, armed with a camera to collect evidence, spends a night in the crypt and is found, the next morning, stone dead, a look of terror on his face. The camera has taken one shot; could it be that a photograph exists of something with the power to kill men with sheer terror. Is there a photograph of the devil himself? The collector isn’t saying.

Spooky enough? Well, the thing is, the story itself is based on a local myth from the area where I grew up. Okay, so I’m sure that just about every postcode with an old building of some sort has a story like that issued by the Department of Tourism. Heritage ghost stories are probably handed out to churches just like anyone with an interest in promoting tourism near a body of water bigger than a puddle can whip up a story about the creature in the lake. If you have a hotel on a moor or heath, it’s a difficult balancing act between making sure there are regular blurred photographs of ‘The Beast’ to intrigue visitors and hoping that nobody recognises that for the last one, you forgot to take Mr Tibbles’s collar off.

Thing is, and a friend of mine picked up a camera, just like the one in the story, at a church fete many years ago.

He’s never opened it but apparently it’s taken one exposure.

So the question I like to tease him with is this: did he buy a camera or did he buy the camera?

Does he have a camera, sitting on a shelf in his shed, that has a photograph of whatever was in that crypt?

He’s fairly pragmatic about it. Apparently he was expecting to pick up an antique, collectable, camera at the fete and flog it on Ebay, netting a tidy profit. Unfortunately the cameras were mass produced, are incredibly hard wearing and, as a result, they go for peanuts on auction sites. What he needs, he assures me, is a rumour that it’s not just a camera, it’s a camera with a story, a camera with a secret.

I asked him: do you really think I’ve got nothing better to do with my time than make up some tosh about a haunted camera and post it on my blog?

Tut.