Stephen Leather's Blog

Two of my favouriote writers. Val McDermid and Ken Follett. Very different writing styles, but.....

I've just had my fourth coloncocopy. All good, it's just something I do every few five years or so. You start by drinking a laxative to get yourself nice and clean inside. That's probably thw worst part of the whole experience!

This year it was green. It was a pretty enough colour, but still tasted hottible.

Then they sedate you. They want you as relaxed as possible as they put the camera in. I was so relaxed I was out for the count!

Then they put the camera in and have a good look around. This time there wasn't much for them to do, they only found one pesky polyp which was easily removed. So now I'm good to go for another five years!

Colon cancer is nasty, it's the fourth most common cancer in the UK. Almost 43,000 people are diagnosed with bowel cancer every year in the UK. Around 268,000 people living in the UK today have been diagnosed it and more than nine out of ten new cases (94%) are diagnosed in people over the age of 50.

I started having colonoscopies in my forties after a doctor spotted that my CEA levals - a marker for bowel cancer - were high. They didn't find anything amiss but suggested that I have it done every five years or so, and over the years they have found dozens of polyps, which they remove and test for cancer. I've always been clear, which is good news.

Several friends of mine have had colon cancer, but have responded well to treatement. But I also know people who have died from it, which is one of the reasons I have regular colonosopies. It's a slow growng cancer, and providing you have a check every five years or so, there isn't really chance for a polyp to develop and then turn cancerous. A colonoscopy isn't fun, but I definitely recommend them as a way of staying healthy! Oh, and I had an endoscopy at the same time, which is another story! I made sure they used a differenmt canera, obvioiusly!

I was so excited when Amazon Prime announced that the second series of Reacher was ready. I loved the first series, especially the performance of Alan Ritchson who I thought was the perfect Jack Reacher. But having watched the first episode last night all I can say is that I am disappointed, confused, and possibly even angry at what they have done to the show and the character.
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Early in the episode, Reacher explains why the dead body they were investigating couldn't have been thrown out of an aeroplane. He said there were no wounds on the body to suggest that it has hit the tail of the plane, and if the body had been thrown from a plane that would've happened. Now, okay, at this point from the prologue we already know the body was thrown from a helicopter, but that’s not the point. Reacher clearly doesn't understand how momentum and gravity work. I did actually ask that question prior to my first parachute jump with the RAF parachute display team, I kid you not. I was told that by the time the tail reached the jumper, the jumper would already be more than fifty feet below the plane because the jumper is travelling at the same forward speed. There is zero possibility of jumping from a plane and hitting the tail. If that was a possibility, obviously skydiving would not be the popular hobby that it is.

I don't understand how something as basic as that could get into a final script and be broadcast. It makes Reacher look stupid.

Not long afterwards. Reacher gets the opportunity to play Sherlock Holmes again. He's waiting outside a post office and wants to check the post office box that belongs to the dead guy. First of all Reacher says that because the dead guy was right-handed he would've rented a box on the right. LOL, no it doesn't work like that but okay give him a pass. Then he says that because he was getting such a lot of mail he would've rented one of the bigger boxes. Okay nice logic, I can go with that. Then he says because the guy has been dead for some time the mail would've backed up in the mailbox so he'd look for a mailbox that was full. What? You can't see inside mailboxes, I've never seen a post office box that had a clear cover. Why would the post office want just anyone to look inside the boxes?

Anyway he goes inside, goes to the right and starts trying to open the boxes with the key he has. He finds the correct box and inside there about 20 letters - certainly not the big pile he had predicted. He takes them outside and his companion asks what was in the mailbox and he says bills and flyers. No way. Certainly in the UK utility companies, phone companies, banks, financial services, none of them will send email to a PO Box, it has to be to be a real address. And what about his deduction that the box will be full - it clearly wasn't and again it just makes Reacher look stupid.

Earlier on, we are told that Reacher doesn't have a driving license. But when he's in a thrift store, he's quite happy to hand over his passport while he pops over the road to use an ATM. I don't understand why he does have a passport but doesn't have a driving license. Can he not drive? I assume he can, so why not carry a driving licence? To conceal his ID? But he has a passport which he later uses to get on a plane. I did think that he only ever took buses, but now he seems happy to fly.

Oh, then his friend passes him a message by paying money into his account and he spots the transaction on the slip he gets from the ATM. Give me a break. Really? In what world could that possibly happen?

And what is the business of him not allowing enlisted men to call him Major or Sir? He makes the point several times, he wants them to call him Reacher. Just Reacher. That doesn't happen in the US Army. It doesn’t happen in any Army. Enlisted men do not call their officers by name. Maybe in special forces, maybe but his team aren't special forces. At one point he says “you don’t have to call me Sir, but you do have to do what I tell you.” Idiotic.

Then he decides that as a team building exercise he's going to take them to the officer’s club and get into a fight with another group of soldiers. In what world does that happen? He's drinking in uniform, which is a complete no-no, plus he's drinking with enlisted men who shouldn't be in the officers’ club. A fight ensues and the team is now stronger. Who writes this drivel? In the real world there wouldn’t be a fight, the MPs would be called and Reacher would be arrested and his career would be over.

And how can there be no repercussions to this fight? I don't understand how the series went down the street. That's not the Jack Reacher that I know and love. The Reacher I know avoids conflict wherever possible but in this first episode he seems to deliberately go out of his way to start fights.

And don’t get me started on the British guy we first meet entering the country. The immigration officer calls him Mr Whatever, to which he replies ‘Please, call me Adrian.’

WTF? In what world does this happen? In all my years travelling to the US I have never been addressed by name by an immigration officer. And it’s not a British thing to tell a Government official to call you by your first name. We need to know someone for at least a year before we’re on first name terms LOL.

Then the immigration officer asks him if he has anything to declare? Why? That’s not his job. His job is to stamp the passport, it’s a Customs officer who will want to know if he has anything to declare.

Having got into the country, what is the first thing our Brit does? He pops along to the airport toilet and sets fire to his passport. Yeah, passports don’t burn that easily (don’t ask). They are quite sturdy with lots of plastic and a chip. Why stand in a toilet watching it burn when anyone can come in? Why not just dispose of it when you are away from the airport?

Having disposed of the passport he used to get into the US, he buys some more. Then he kills the guys he bought the passports from. Yeah, in the real world that doesn’t happen. If it did, it’d very quickly become impossible to buy fake documents. It’s lazy writing, but it is a staple of thrillers, so we can maybe let that go. But how does he kill the guys? Well, he whips out a concealed knife which has a blade all of an inch and a half inch long. He uses that to slash the throat of one of the guys, who goes down. Now that it doable, but it takes a lot - and I mean a lot - of practise. But he kills the second guy - who is built like the proverbial brick shithouse - by stabbing him once in the gut with the tiny blade. WTF? It wouldn’t even have penetrated the blubber. He could have stabbed the guy a dozen times with that knife and done no serious damage. But the big guy goes down. Dead.

One of the things I really, really hated involved the actor Robert Patrick, who we meet early on in episode one. He plays an ex-NYPD officer who now works for a defense contractor and is trying to track Reacher. He is told that Reacher's hotel room has been found and that Reacher checked into the hotel under the alias of MLB All-Star player Starlin Castro, while his female companion checked in under the alias of "Sarah Connor.” Patrick knows that Castro is actually a baseball player; but when he is asked who Sarah Connor is, his response is an unequivocal "I don't give a shit." 

Ha ha, hilarious. Because of course Robert Patrick played the terminator in Terminator 2: Judgement Day so he knows exactly who Sarah Connor is. Except of course in this series he isn’t the terminator, he’s a shadowy bad guy working for a defense contractor. So am I supposed to find this funny? I’m supposed to be watching a thriller, I am supposed to believe in these characters and what they’re doing, but the writer, and the director, and the producer, are now telling me it’s all a joke. That one infantile frat-boy joke has pretty much ruined the series for me. If the writer can’t take it seriously then why the hell should I?

I mean, who writes that stuff? It’s just insulting to the viewers. And why didn’t Lee Child go through the scripts to point out all the things that just wouldn’t happen in the real world. I guess he has just stopped caring about the character, which is why he gets his brother to write the books these days. And he never spoke up when Tom Cruise announced he was going to be the movie Jack Reacher. He did long after the event, but by then the damage had been done. I love Tom Cruise, great actor and a great producer, but he’s no Jack Reacher and Child should have said that at the time. And he should have spoken up about the damage that is being done to Reacher by this current series. I’m not sure if I’ll continue with it or not, because I feel it’s going to get worse and not better. I still love Alan Ritchson’s performance, the fight scenes are awesome and it’s well photographed and the sound is great, but the slack writing is making it pretty much unwatchable for me. For me, TV like this is all about plot and dialogue, and both are pretty shoddy so far. Any thoughts?

This is Stephen Fiztpatrick, the boss of OVO Energy, which is consistently rated as one of the worst energy providers in the UK.

Anyone unfortunate to have their gas and delectricty supplied by OVO will know what a truly awful company they are.

In my experience, and the experience of thousands of other customers, they care only about profits and nothing about their customers who pay their wages.

Ovo has been fined nearly £9m for sending inaccurate bills over three years. My bills from OVO have consistently been wrong, always in their favour, of course.

While OVO was recording losses, he took a couple of million quid from the company to buy a mansion in the Cotswolds. Nice.

And Fitzpatrick faced questions over taking £17m in furlough money during Covid after making £40m of payments and loans to other Fitzpatrick companies

Money, money, money, that's all he cares about.

Anyway, here's a copy of my latest letter to him. I am no longer a customer of OVO, and if you have any sense, I would suggest you avoid the company like the proverbial plague. Octopus is a much better bet! A great company that cares about its customers, and is the only energy provider recommended by Which? magazine.

ATTN: STEPHEN FITZPATRICK

CEO OVO ENERGY

Dear Stephen,

I have been having major problems with OVO over the past six months so as one Stephen to another I am reaching out to you directly in a last ditch attempt to reach a resolution before I take the matter to the small claims court.

I never chose to be an OVO customer - I was forced into doing business with your company when you took over SSE.

I am sure you are aware that in 2022, OVO Energy was ranked second worst (only behind Utilita) in customer service by Citizens Advice. I wanted to switch to Octopus - the only utilities firm that is recommended by Which? Magazine.

But before I could switch, OVO hit me with a demand for £33,000. OVO made a mistake when it migrated my account from SSE. I tried for three months to get your customer service people to resolve the issue, but failed. It was only when I approached the wonderful Helen Crane at the Daily Mail that OVO apologised, canceled the debt and gave me £100 in compensation. I have to say the £100 didn’t come close to reimbursing me for all the time and trouble OVO caused me.

You can read about that here - https://www.thisismoney.co.uk/money/b...

I would have hoped that would have been the end of my problems with OVO, but I was wrong.

I put the flat on the market at the end of 2022. My daughter moved out at the end of December and the flat was unoccupied for most of 2023. I moved the furniture out in June and the new owners took over the property on July 2.

I supplied a meter reading when I moved out, and a photograph of the meter.

Unfortunately OVO refused to use my meter reading and insisted on using its own estimate - 9895. As a result OVO is claiming that I owe them money when in fact it’s the exact opposite - by my reckoning you owe me close to £600.

Latterly I have been corresponding with Simone Watts, who describes herself as an Advanced Resolution Specialist, which is nice, but while she is lovely to deal with she is as much use as the proverbial chocolate teapot. This is one of her recent emails.

Simone never did get back to me as promised. In fact she has been on holiday for the last two weeks and no one dealt with her emails in her absence so I have been emailing into a void. I phoned on Friday and had a long conversation with another charming Advanced Resolution Specialist but she was unable to assist me and was not prepared to pass me on to a manager.

She did, however, tell me that according to her computer, I now owe OVO more than £500.

That is impossible.

The flat was empty for most of 2023, with OVO continuing to take more than £220 a month from me by direct debit. Over that period you took more than £1,300 from me with very little gas or electricity being used.

Take a look at the statement you sent on June 28 this year - I was almost £600 in credit.

How do I go from being almost £600 in credit to more than £500 in debt, when the flat is empty? No one at OVO seems to be able to explain that to me!

Look at this -

As you can see, OVO is using an estimated reading of 9895 to close the account.

The true final reading was 9723 - I photographed the meter to make sure there was no mistake!

The difference is 172 cubic feet. 172 cubic feet is equivalent to 5531 KWh. At a price of 10.9p per KWh, you owe me £602.88

I am clearly getting nowhere with your customer relations people, and I am reluctant to bother the Daily Mail again. My intention is to raise a claim in the small claims court to recover the money that you owe me. If you are unable or unwilling to resolve this to my satisfaction within 48 hours, I will raise the claim, and we can both explain to the court where we stand. Stephen, neither of us floated up the Lagan in a bubble, let’s put this to rest now. We both have better things to do with our time.

Best wishes,

Stephen Leather

I've always found 'journalist' Nick Cohen to be a nasty piece of work. He once used his column in The Spectator magazine to launch a personal attack on me - I've never bought the magazine since.Great to see him finally get his just desserts. He has left The Observer "for health reasons" but the true story behind his departure can be read here. CLICK HERE FOR THE REAL STORY This has been a long time coming, the story actually broke last year. CLICK HERE TO SEE HOW THE STORY STARTED He is described as a total creep, which I think is a pretty good summation of the man.Cohen is now eking out a living on a website called substack, where he hopes to persuade people to pay him £6 a month to read his ramblings. Incidentally, there is a very good article about the Nick Cohen affair on another substack page. CLICK HERE TO READ MORE ABOUT COHEN. It's well worth a read and it's free!There is also a Twitter thread worth reading - SEE IT HEREI am a great beliver in karma. What goes around, comes around. Watch this space!

You can read this terrid review of the latest Jack Nightingale thriller - Rio Grande Night - by clicking HERE

I had my DNA analysed a few years ago. They keep updating the results, which is an eye opener. Initially I was mainly English and Irish with a bit of Vioking in me. I was happy with that. Sadly over the years I have lost the Viking connection and gained a Welsh one. Not sure how I feel about that LOL. Less rape and pillage, more sheep and leeks.

 

Getting an agent these days is difficult. I hesitate to use the word impossible, but for most first time writers I am sure it feels that way. In my experience, most agents lack even basic courtesy and don’t even reply to most writers who approach them. And it’s been that way for many years. I wrote to five agents after I’d written my first thriller - more than thirty years ago - and not one even bothered to reply. Even when I had three books in print and was trying to get an agent for The Chinaman, only two agents out of six replied to my letter. If they won’t even reply to a published author and former Fleet Street journalist, what chance does a first-time writer have? 

I get contacted regularly by frustrated writers who are simply being ignored by agents. I wrote to seven agents late in 2022 about a new novel I had written - only three replied.  And I have sold millions of books! You’re just going to have to accept that getting an agent is no easy task, no matter how good a writer you are or how good your book is. I’m sorry, but that’s the cold hard truth of modern-day publishing.

Most agents these days have websites and on those websites they will explain their policy on submissions. When I first started you had to send a pristine typed manuscript. That's all changed, these days it’s all done by email. So send the manuscript, but bear in mind that you also have to sell yourself. You need to convince them that they need to read your work. If you’ve written a thriller, then push your military background if you have one. If you’ve written a book set in a school and you were a teacher, mention that. If you’ve written a crime novel and have spent time in prison, sell that. Push yourself as much as you push your book.

The Writers and Artists Year Book has a comprehensive list of agents in the UK, Ireland and the United States. Or you can Google ‘Literary agents who take submissions’. Write to them all. Every one. That’s the beauty of the new technologies, you can send a hundred emails as easily as one. Agents would prefer that you approach them one at at time, but as most don’t reply they have no right to ask that. Write to every agent you can. Dozens. Hundreds, if you want. Emails are free. If an agent really wants to represent you, he’s not going to care who else you approached.

In your email, promote yourself but flatter the agent. Find out who they represent and tell them what a great job they are doing for such-and-such a writer and that you think they’d be the perfect agent to handle your book. That’s how I got my first agent – I wrote Gerald Seymour’s agent a flattering letter and he took me on. He eventually sold The Chinaman and The Vets for a good six-figure sum. He went on to become an absolute nightmare - about which, more later!

Please don’t blame me if agents don’t write back. Most won’t even acknowledge receipt of your email. They can be very frustrating people to deal with. Just keep trying. Keep pushing. Work your contacts. Do you know anyone who works for an agency in any capacity? Did you go to school with someone who works for an agency? Start asking all your friends and relatives if they have any contacts. If it’s any comfort, the publishers I’ve spoken to all tell me the same thing – that if a book is good then it will be published eventually. 

Don’t forget that every literary agency has several agents, so if one agent says no it’s still worth approaching other agents at the firm. Writing is very subjective, and what one agent hates another might love. So keep on trying!

If you are rejected by every agent in town then there are two possibilities – either your book isn’t very good, or the agents are just incompetent. Either is a real possibility. But it might be worth having a closer look at your work, and try to be objective. Maybe the brutal truth is that your book isn’t as good as you think it is. Maybe it needs a total rewrite or maybe you need to start a new book. I think anyone who actually finishes a book deserves a pat on the back for that alone, but just because a book has been written doesn’t mean that it’s publishable.

There was a time when publishers refused to look at unsolicited manuscripts. I came through the slush pile at Harper Collins, back in the days when publishers used to love trawling through piles of manuscripts.

What changed? Technology changed. I wrote my first novel on an old manual typewriter. It was bloody hard work. And if I made a mistake I had to retype a whole page. Rewrites were a nightmare! As a result, most would-be writers gave up. The process itself sorted out the wheat from the chaff. But then came computers and printers and writing a book became physically much easier. Anyone could write a book. And they did! And publishers were flooded with manuscripts, the vast majority of which were unpublishable. There was so little wheat and so much chaff that publishers shut down their slush piles and handed the selection process over to agents. Agents didn’t have the staff to deal with the tsunami of manuscripts, which is when the rot really set in. Agents abused their power as gatekeepers by simply ignoring most writers. 

Nowadays publishers are looking at unsolicited manuscripts again so it is worth writing to editors. Just bear in mind that it is a long shot. Again, sell yourself and flatter them and maybe, just maybe, they might look at what you’ve written. But do bear in mind that your email might not get to the editor, it might be intercepted by an eager assistant. And don’t try phoning them – that is a total waste of time. Again, it is worth working any contacts you have. But don’t ask me or any other writer if we’ll read your work – we just don’t have the time and also won’t put ourselves in the position where we could be accused of plagiarism down the line! I know it’s frustrating, but the thing to remember is that nothing worth having comes easily.

One thing you must always remember is that agents are the middle-men in the publishing world. They are acting for writers (their clients) but the actual money comes from publishers. A writer has only one agent, but an agent has dozens, often hundreds, of writers, and will be dealing with all the major publishers. At the end of the day, an agent is not going to jeopardise his relationship with a publisher for the sake of one writer. Publishers are far more important to agents than writers are, and the writer is always going to come off worst in any conflict unless you have the clout that comes with being one of the really big sellers. That’s a sad fact of life, and all writers should remember it. But, there’s no doubt that there are advantages in having a good agent in your corner. The agent can act as a buffer between you and your publisher, so that problems can be resolved without anyone taking it personally. It’s better to have a moan at your agent and let him or her negotiate with your publisher rather than you letting off steam yourself! And it’s definitely true that an agent is better placed to negotiate the financial arrangements – there’s more to a book deal than the advance, and often it’s in the small print that a good agent can really earn his commission. The trick is to find an agent who believes in you and who believes in your work.

The worst agents by far are those that I have come across in the States. Awful people. I had one who told me he didn’t think he could represent me ‘because I don’t think I would walk through walls for the book’. It was a stupid thing to say – a good agent is a salesman and a good salesman should be able to sell anything. I had another agent from a large agency grinning with pleasure when he told me that he wasn’t going to take me on. They seem to take pleasure in belittling writers, an attitude I’ve always been unable to understand.

So, my advice would be to get an agent if you can. Once you have a deal and the big money starts rolling in, watch your agent like a hawk and if they start to take you for granted, sack them and get another. Once you have a revenue stream on offer, you will suddenly find that they will reply to your emails!  Most writers I’ve been are unhappy with their agents but few ever move. It’s like banks. People are reluctant to change banks but they should do so at the first sign of a problem. There are plenty of banks out there and there are plenty of agents.