Pip Granger

Pip Granger is not a household name, but if I had my way she would be. (Plus all of her books would made into movies or a long, long series on PBS.) Calling them mysteries is a bit of a stretch – and it may keep non-mystery readers away from them. That would be a shame because Pip Granger’s books are just plain terrific. They’re funny, irreverent and fast-paced, with colorful (often eccentric) characters, situations and settings. The stories take place in the Soho neighborhood of London during in the 1940s and 1950s. Readers are treated to a bit of time travel, seeing real people and how the war’s lingering effects color their lives. I can’t say it strongly enough: READ PIP GRANGER’S BOOKS!

Books:

Author Bio: (from http://www.pipgranger.com/ -- used with permission)

Pip Granger was born in Cuckfield, Sussex, in 1947. Her parents split when she was five, and her childhood was divided between her teacher mother’s homes in and around Dagenham and her father’s top-floor flat above the Two Is coffee bar in Old Compton Street, Soho. The singer Annie Ross lived on the floor below with the jazz drummer Tony Crombie, but Pip’s memories of Soho are not so much of the famous people who drifted in and out of her life as of the people at the heart of the community, the shopkeepers, market traders, craftsmen and sex-workers.

Her father, who had made and lost one fortune publishing pulp fiction in World War II, sold erotic literature from above Parmigiani’s delicatessen on a corner of Old Compton Street and wrote for television, a life-style that allowed him to fly light aircraft and holiday regularly on the French Riviera. Later, he became a mail order astrologer. He died in 1981.

Pip followed her mother’s career choice and went into teaching. Her first job was with the City of Westminster, teaching children who had been excluded from school because of emotional and health problems, and she worked as a literacy and special needs teacher in Stoke Newington and Hackney in the 1970s and 1980s. After quitting teaching she wrote for a while on non-fiction partworks, including My Garden and My Child.

Her first marriage ended in divorce. In 1988, she married Ray Granger and they set up home together on the south-eastern outskirts of Bristol with a succession of dogs and cats – currently Kez, a bouncing barrel of barks, and Katzi, a slinky white and tabby cat with enormous ears. All Pip’s books but the first were written in a shed in the wildlife garden she has created.

Pip’s father always told her she was a natural writer and story-teller, but she began to write fiction only in the 1990s. Her older brother, Peter, was diagnosed with brain cancer, and she wanted to memorialize their extraordinary childhood. The resulting book, Not All Tarts are Apple, was the unanimous winner of the first Harry Bowling Prize for London

Author Website: http://www.pipgranger.com/ 

Author Interview:

Cozy Library: I love that you’re writing your books out of sequence chronologically. One and two are set in the 1953 and 1954, and three is in 1945, giving the back story for some of the characters readers already know. Then fast forward to 1956 for four and I understand five will be set in 1951. Was that your plan from the beginning, or did it just happen?

Pip Granger: Plan? Plan, what plan? My editor despairs of me because I won't or can't stick to a plan. She says for each book, 'You'd better give me a synopsis or outline for the next one, but we all KNOW it'll bear no relation to the book you finally present.' And sure enough, it doesn't. Even as a child, I'd leave space at the beginning of an essay, then I'd write the thing, then  shove the essay plan in the space when I'd finished the story. Basically, I set my books where they feel right.

CL: You have a wonderful ensemble cast that moves in and out of your books, with a minor character in one moving center stage in another. Was that part of your plan?

PG: As far as I ever planned anything, I think I did have a sort of hazy notion of creating a little, self-contained world of characters that I could discover as I went from book to book. I’ve always been interested in people and I love to read books where their personalities, their lives and what makes ‘em tick is revealed. I also like to see how their lives intertwine one with another. So, yes, I think I probably did have a plan for once.

CL: Anyone who reads your biography and your books can’t help but wonder whether Rosie modeled after Pip Granger. Is she?

PG: Yes, I suppose Rosie has more than a dash of Pip Granger about her, or so my husband and friends tell me, although I think she's more confident and brighter than I ever was as a child. She certainly looks like I did as a child, but that was deliberate so that I wouldn't forget what she looked like and give her blue eyes on page 5 and brown ones on page 125. She was in my first ever book and I was afraid of making that elementary mistake.

CL: My friend Sue, who reviewed Trouble in Paradise for Mystery News, and I, the reviewer for the same publication of No Peace for the Wicked, both feel that your books are classified as mysteries only the definition of mystery is stretched almost beyond recognition. When you were writing Not All Tarts Are Apple, did you think of it as a mystery? If not, what genre, if any. Or doesn’t it really matter?

PG: Ah, genre! No, I didn’t have genre on my mind when I began writing and it shows. Not All Tarts Are Apple did the rounds of the publishers, who loved it, but not one of them could see where to put it in their lists, so they turned it down. Then it won a literary prize over here, The Harry Bowling Prize. Harry, bless him, wrote SAGAS, so it was classified as a saga and several publishers overcame their worries and wanted it. Then, in America, Barbara Peters of Poisoned Pen Press wanted to publish it simply because she liked it, I believe. Barbara really does love books and doesn’t seem to see them as a commodity, like soap powder, as some publishers do, therefore she stretched a point so that she could publish Tarts. Penguin in America decided my first two books fell into the ‘modern classic’ genre and now, No Peace For The Wicked has been nominated for a romantic novel prize, even though I was unaware of its romantic leanings when I wrote it. So I think it’s a case of you pays your money and takes your choice.

CL: I’m not usually a big fan of children as narrators of adult fiction. But Rosie is such a likeable little tyke who’s speaking, I believe, as an adult about her remembered childhood. Why Rosie as narrator in books one and two and not in four? (She couldn’t have narrated three, as she wasn’t yet born.)

PG: The trouble with children is that there are places they can’t go, things it’s better that they don’t see or get involved in and anyway, children in the 50s went to bed early, so any action that took place after 7p.m. would be out of bounds. Therefore the writer, is forced to have  them sneaking around listening at doors and peeping through keyholes so that they get to witness adult things, but they’re not able to be in the centre of the action. That’s very limiting and there would come a point when Rosie would seem like a little creep with her ear always stuck to a door, so I needed to write from and adult perspective to overcome that problem.

CL: It seems to me that American authors are more likely to try to interject humor into their writing with witty, sometimes biting dialogue. Brits, on the other hand, are more subtle and willing to wait for the big payoff. In your books, humor develops more naturally as part of an overall scene –sneaking up on readers. I laughed out loud while reading your books. What is your secret to writing humor?

PG: Blowed if I know. When I wrote for a non-fiction magazine, years ago, I was asked to write an article about developing humour in children because I was their funniest writer, which came as a bit of surprise to me because I wasn’t usually trying to be funny. I think it’s simply the way I look at the world. Seeing the funny side of things is the best survival technique I know.

CL: My husband and I are fans of the Foyle’s War series that runs on our public television station. The series is set in Britain before America entered what became World War II. Your books evoke the same wonderful sense of the period you’re writing in as Foyle’s War does. Whom do you envision playing Rosie when Not All Tarts Are Apple is filmed for television or the movies?

PG: I haven’t a clue, sorry. But I like the ‘when’ in your question, rather than an ‘if ‘, I’m very flattered, thank you. Funnily enough, I’ve only just discovered Foyles War, I saw my first episode last week and liked it a lot.

CL: Who are your favorite authors?

PG: My favourite authors? There are so many. Walter Mosley, Armistead Maupin, Maya Angelou, James Lee Burke, Paule Marshall, Rosa Guy, Damon Runyan, Robert Block, Anne Tyler, Carol Shields, Marge Piercy, Peter Robinson, Barbara Pym, Eoin Colfer, Terry Pratchett, Jane Austin, Charles Dickens, Conan Doyle, Wilkie Collins, Philip Pullman, Kerry Greenwood, Donis Casey, Miss Read, John Keats and Shakespeare...but not necessarily in that order. There are many more that I can’t think of at the moment, I’m rotten at remembering names and even worse at spelling them, feel free to correct my spelling, although Paule really is Paule and not a mistake.

CL: Which authors influenced your writing?

PG: I would have to say that everyone I’ve ever read has influenced my writing in some way, but I was much influenced by Armistead Maupin’s Tales Of The City series and Damon Runyan is another favourite. The main influence though was Frankie Howerd, a British stand up comedian of the 50s, 60s, 70s, and even later, who drew you into his world by making it seem as if you were having a lovely gossip over the garden fence. I wanted to get that feeling into my books, as if it was a chat between friends. Don’t know if I managed it or not, but that’s why I write in the first person, to break down the barrier between writer and reader, to make it feel more intimate.

CL: What are you reading right now?

PG: Judy Clemens’ Till The Cows Come Home.