John Bleasdale may be one of our most acute commentators on film, but there is another notable entry on his curriculum vitae: he’s also a novelist of skill with a keen vein of sardonic humour. This new novel is inspired by Sean Connery (who, of course, became the second but most influential 007 – the first was Barry Nelson in a TV Casino Royale). As Bleasdale noted in a piece for Crime Time: ‘When I came to write Connery: a Novel, I used a lot of my own memories. The main character Sam Coleridge comes from the same area of England and is roughly my age, but unlike me – hopefully – he’s a psychopath. I’m not saying that children are psychopaths, but they have certain psychopath tendencies and I made him by imagining that a lot of my childhood fantasies had continued through into adulthood and had in fact been the deciding factor in my major life decisions’. This intriguing genesis makes for a particularly quirky piece of fiction, boasting a unique structure, enhancing. The achievement of the book (which is essentially a roman-a-clef in which a young boy’s meetings with – as the novel’s blurb has it, ‘The world’s most famous Scotsman’ leads to minatory conclusions). And given Bleasdale’s expertise in the area of cinema, it’s no surprise that the novel sports something of a cinematic sweep.
Connery by John Bleasdale is published by Plumeria Pictures
