Joseph Connolly: inspired by his one-time drinking partner Kingsley Amis

The ‘hell trap’ of being a writer of comedy

Joseph Connolly, favourite of the French, talks to Gerald Isaaman about his latest novel – a ‘rattling good story’ set in the Blitz

Jack the Lad and Bloody Mary. By Joseph Connolly. Faber £12.99 order this book

IN France, Joseph Connolly is famous. The handsome comic writer with a big beard is seen as some literary Dauphin as he tours the bookshops signing copies and being interviewed in a far more serious fashion than ever happens in literary London.
Maybe Charlotte Rampling is the curious reason. For the French took an option on his typically English novel, Summer Things (1998), set in the London suburbs and the seaside and transformed it into a French farce set in Paris and Le Touquet, called Embrassez Qui Vous Voudrez (2002) starring Rampling.
“Quite extraordinary, and very funny too,” declares Joseph Connolly, the more so because Summer Things was set to become a BBC television series with Joanna Lumley.
He had even written two of the six scripts. “Then along came Greg Dyke and killed it,” Connolly reveals. “He pronounced it elitist, which meant it was white middle-class, I imagine. But the French made it into a movie very quickly.
“My [French] book sales are better than in English now. And it’s so strange. I don’t speak French, alas, my French is very poor. I understand the questions but I can’t reply properly.
“Do they think I’m Gallic with this beard? It must seem a strange look to them. I suppose they like artists to look like artists.” Connolly, who has just returned home to Hampstead from a promotional tour in France, is an undoubted conundrum after a famed career as the young publisher-turned Flask Walk bookseller, journalist and author inspired by his one-time Hampstead neighbour and drinking companion Kingsley Amis.
He wrote the first study of modern British first editions, has added biographies of P G Wodehouse and Jerome K Jerome to his impressive CV, as well as his novels that have earned him the epithet of comic writer, which he now tries to shrug off.
“Kingsley wasn’t called a comic novelist,” he insists. “The danger is that once you’ve been tagged with that then when you write something that is not overtly comic people start saying, ‘Well this one isn’t very funny – he must be going off!’ So it’s a hell of trap.”
There is excellent comedy in his new novel, Jack the Lad and Bloody Mary, but it is a much more serious affair. It is the first he has set in a time he never experienced but can only imagine, the London days of the wartime Blitz, and it will be fascinating to see if the French fall for that too.
His Jack the Lad is very much Mr Everyman and his characters ordinary working-class people caught up in the moral and physical corruption that war inevitably brings. “They are people who before would never have dreamed of breaking the law in the slightest way,” he explains.
“It’s like a lot of my books, actually. It’s about the seeds of corruption. Nobody knows they’re even sown until they begin to flower.
“It’s truly shocking to see Jack going from being a carpenter set on earning so much a week and having a little house in Golders Green to suddenly wearing beautiful clothes bought on the black market and carrying a gun, a knife and fleeing from the law – and the villains.
“It’s just such a rattling good story. You have got everything: villainy, spies, guns and, of course, the looseness in morals that came with that. Up till the war nice girls didn’t. But suddenly nice boys could be dead tomorrow and nice guys looked at things differently in a way they wouldn’t have thought of but for the war.”
One reviewer has demanded to know why he isn’t more famous. He is in his native Hampstead, where he was born 56 years ago, in a nursing home in Fitzjohn’s Avenue that later became his classroom at St Anthony’s School.
His father, a property dealer, died when he was three and his Italian mother worked remorselessly to give him an education, which he scorned by refusing a hard-won place at Oxford. Instead, he took the last apprenticeship in British publishing with Hutchinson, where he met his future wife.
Books by then had become his passion. “I thought literature was going to be deadly dull and horrible,” he recalls. “I became a voracious reader. I was very influenced by the look and feel of books, very, very sexy things. Before I even read a book I would be fondling it.”
Perhaps inevitably, he opened the Flask Walk Bookshop in 1975 and turned it into “the most thrilling place to be in” as customers queued at the door.
He became part of the local literary scene as bibliophile, bookseller and Times journalist during enjoyable years making enough money to pay the school fees of his two children.
When the bookshop closed in 1988 he decided he had stayed too long, his passion to write his own novels having been thwarted.
Now he writes at home in Netherhall Gardens, still slowly spinning his tales by proper pen, finding anything a distraction once his characters take over.
“The story is growing within you like a bastard child – exactly – and you’ve got to get it out,” he declares.
“I resent the phone ringing, resent having to go to the lavatory, it’s all so annoying. I don’t understand writers who make it a nine to five job.
“And when I’m finished I feel, ‘That’s it, I’m drained’. I can’t think of another adjective. I’m over. But I’m not – until the next time it all clicks into place.