People think it’s strange if you write a book in your 60s, but it’s the best age
The former Herald TV critic David Belcher speaks about his first novel, fittingly entitled The Newspaper Man
I’VE been expecting David Belcher’s debut novel, The Newspaper Man for a long time.
I’d first noticed his work in my fledgling days in journalism, as I sought out seasoned stylists to emulate. “Read David Belcher’s television listings in The Herald,” I’d been told, “they’re worth the price of the paper on their own.” This encomium had been handed down by a silvern veteran of our old trade who normally viewed plaudits as a sign of emotional weakness.
In the old Herald of the late 1980s there was a lot of good writing being produced by some gourmet writers, but it still seemed top-heavy with reportage that could have done with being put through a threshing machine.
Mr Belcher though, sprinkled those television listings with fairy-dust, peppering them with cheeky 20-word apercus that were much more vivid than the programmes they described.
Some years later, I encountered him in a professional capacity when I became an executive at The Herald. His writing had a style all of its own, in which vivid phrases popped up where you least expected them. Mr Belcher was still there when I departed.
For a few years he was the Herald Diary editor, imbuing it with some of the subversive wit of past luminaries such as Tom Shields and Colm Brogan. And then, in 2009, having been lumbered with one of the more sluggish of this paper’s past editors who viewed originality and elegance as malfeasances, he moved on.
There really ought to have been a book bearing David Belcher’s name long before now. So what took him? Certainly, there had been a couple of plays and an attempt at a comedy drama series which Radio
Four was eyeing up before a Home Counties adjudicator deemed it to be not quite pucka, what.
The action unfolded around the work of a Scottish Community Council. It failed to clear the final selection hurdle when the man who created the Vicar of Dibley, the BBC’S long-running and insufferably unfunny comedy drama, was called in to adjudicate.
If BBC Scotland could escape the control of its London mothership they should be giving this a look.
“It’s not as though I haven’t been busy,” he said. “Some projects worked; others didn’t. I actually began writing this novel in 2010 and then paused it because, well … life sort of intervened.”
One of the projects that did work was his 2018 play The Pieman Cometh, co-written with Bryan Jackson, about the madness and insanity of small-town Scottish football. It had a run at the 2019 Edinburgh Festival Fringe, attracting critical praise and toured small theatres across the country.
Mr Belcher’s book is called The Newspaper Man, but it’s not really about the print industry. Mr Belcher and his wife had holidayed often in Barga, the small Tuscan town from which most of Glasgow’s Italian community have their roots.
“I wondered what it might be like if you retired here as a Scots/italian. I’d first imagined the scenes, characters and dialogue as a film and initially featuring the adventures of a retired detective.
“And then when we all went into lockdown in 2020 I began to tire of my feeble attempts at DIY and thought I’d have another go at completing the book.
“It’s about stupid men, who always seem to grant themselves licence to do stupid things and smarter women and there’s a love story at its root.
The main protagonist is a retired Scots/ Italian journalist called Tony Moscardini who encounters a woman from his past over the course of a weekend during a return visit to Glasgow.
“People in Barga are fluently bi-lingual in Glaswegian and Italian. I once tried haltingly to ask a shop assistant there the cost of a food item. Immediately divining where I was from, she replied in broad Glaswegian: ‘Aye that’s about three euros, son’.
“Tony also meets up with some former newspaper colleagues. Although, in truth, he never quite enjoyed the world of newspapers during the time he worked there. He felt he never quite fitted in and this sense of being a square peg in a round hole continues in his retirement when he returns to the Italian town of his forefathers.”
The spirit of the book is captured in a joyous, though poignant exchange that takes place in Italy between Tony and an elderly Scots/italian . “The old man went on to reveal – using Scotland’s lexicon of undeleted expletives to its full – that he’d lived his adult life far from the sun-ripened vines of Tuscany, amid the redundant miners.
“Laid-off chemical factory workers and displaced cabinet-makers of Dalry in Ayrshire’s perennially chilly, rain-soaked and unromantic-sounding Garnock Valley”.
We discuss the fortunes of other former journalists who write books. Few of us who do newspapers for a living haven’t been told “You should write a book about that”. For some of us, an element of professional pride gets in the way. People think that, as we write stories for a living, any book we were ever to produce would be a belter. But what if it turns out to be mince?
Mr Belcher’s book though, is not mince. In fact it’s one of the best and most original books from a new Scottish author I’ve read in many years. And like his journalism it defies easy categorisation.
“By Christmas 2020, I’d amassed around 115,000 words. And after some adjustments and criticism that I needed to hear from my publisher’s wife I applied some rigour and discipline to its structure. I read lots of books, but that doesn’t mean you can actually write one.
“I love American crime fiction and this certainly isn’t written in the style of American crime fiction. However, I suppose that extensive reading does give you a heightened sense of what constitutes good novelistic practice.”
Mr Belcher is five years older than me but looks 10 years younger. A question lingers between us, and it’s about the effect of time on debut novels. It’s widely assumed that if you haven’t written a decent first novel by the time you’re into your mid-30s that you’ve missed the boat. Last month though, I was reminded that the gifted Scottish sculptor, George Wyllie began chiselling at 59.
Jeff Torrington was 57 when he wrote Swing Hammer Swing which won the Whitbread Book of the Year in 1992. Yet, Scotland’s literary salonistas in their patronising conceit seemed just as mesmerised by the age of the author as his book’s raw industrial themes.
“I’m curious as to why people find that amazing,” says Mr Belcher. “Jeff Torrington worked in real industry and among real people. Like many people then, he had a big brain, but perhaps lacked the finances and opportunity to attend university.
“You have far more literary tools at your disposal at 60 than 30. I tried writing novels in my 20s, but I simply didn’t know enough about people or even myself.
“The awful circumstances of lockdown gave me the impetus to do it: that and the gnawing fear of emerging from lockdown with nothing to show from it.”
He says that he found the writing of The
Newspaper Man to be “very hard work: much harder than I’d expected” and that this was partly due to having to fictionalise everything: characters, locations and assorted Glasgow newspapers. He felt he couldn’t just re-visit and draw on people and events that had actually happened in the old-time journalistic way.
He cites one exception, though. Glasgow Highwater House which appear in the book is based on the real Highwater House in Norwich.
“Both of these Highwater Houses,” he says, “are charity-run residential care homes aimed at helping people address the ongoing mental health problems caused by drug or alcohol issues.
“In the book, Tony Moscardini’s alcoholic brother ends up in the invented Glaswegian version of Highwater House. In reality, my sister-in-law wound up at the end of her life in the original Norwich Highwater House. There, she was enabled to regain a measure of dignity and purpose after having been damaged by an addiction to alcohol.
“If The Newspaper Man were ever to make it to the big screen, I know where the movie rights proceeds will go.”
His tone betrays hope more than expectation. And so, I’ll dare to be bolder. I’m already compiling a list of potential actors to play Tony Moscardini.
You have far more literary tools at your disposal at 60. I tried writing novels in my 20s, but I simply didn’t know enough
The Newspaper Man by David Belcher, published by into books (£10.99)