Playwright, Doctor Who author, man with beard – Rob Shearman has done it all. Big Finish is about to publish his third collection of short stories so now seemed as good a time as any to go back and read the one collection I had sitting upon a dusty shelf – his first book, Tiny Deaths.

I’m interested in short stories as a format. I want to like them. No, I want to write them. I have little ideas that I would like to do something with but never quite know what. If I could master the short story format then – great – my brain would be just that little bit freer. Having read Tiny Deaths I’m not sure I’m any the wiser.

Each of the stories has death as a theme and a tangential world where things are similar to our reality but somehow different as a setting. There is the one where a deceased husband manages to fill an attic trunk with everything connected to his life with the recently widowed Mrs Deceased Husband. Up to and including the time she found the trunk, some weeks after his death. Or the one where Jesus is reborn in different bodies and learns something profound, though I’m not quite sure what it was.

I wanted to like Tiny Deaths because I like Shearman and was genuinely interested in his collection of stories. But I didn’t. The stories felt lightweight and unimportant. Which is fine if they’re then clever or unexpected or funny. There were some like that of course. The one where a man goes to Hell and ends up sharing a room with Hitler’s dog stands out as a highlight and shows the imagination that Shearman has at his disposal. The whole story – the dog, Hell itself, the reason why Wuffie was condemned to eternal damnation and the eventual payoff – was what I really wanted this collection to be like. But it was the exception not the rule.

The stories were well told and his writing style is good as far as I can tell (being about as inexpert as you can get without actually wearing a hooded sweatshirt) but a pleasant writing style is no good on its own. The occasional flashes of genius that we get just reinforce how much filler there is in this collection. Maybe its because it was his first and the other two are better. I see just enough in Tiny Deaths to want to try Love Songs For the Shy and Cynical but whether I actually will or not I don’t know.

The thing with short story collections is that if you read three or four stories one after the other it really makes it obvious when the book doesn’t sparkle. Three or four mundane chapters in a book can be put down as a lull but that many dull stories makes you question the value of the whole collection. If this was a novel then the good bits would outweigh the bad and leave me with a good feeling about it. Because it is an anthology, I’m more inclined to dwell on the stories I didn’t like and feel bad about it. And I do feel bad because I like the author, I like the concept and I wanted to learn how to write short stories from a masterful collection.

Sidebar, one of the endorsements on the back ranks Shearman alongside Roald Dahl and Douglas Adams as a great short story writer of his age. Correct me if I’m wrong but Douglas Adams never actually published any short stories except possibly in charity annuals.

I am, as Eddie Izzard once put it, thinly read. You’d be hard pressed to name a single well known book that I’ve actually started let alone finished. I could blame school – it was a fine and old institution but literature seemed to be reserved for those that chose to do English Lit for GCSE and I wasn’t one of them. So when this book – and the accompanying TV series that I’ve recorded but haven’t watched yet – came along it seemed a good chance to spark a bit of literary fire in me. I love my Kindle and the best thing about old books – and old books are officially better than new ones – is that they’re freely available for the Kindle and don’t take up any space while the (non)reader procrastinates.

The book is divided into 28 chapters and each deals with a particular character. Faulks has chosen to discuss not the novels themselves but the most interesting character within the books he selected. These characters are divided into four types – heroes, villains, snobs and lovers – with a certain amount of arbitrariness as to these classifications. James Bond, for example, is not a hero or a lover, he’s a snob. The division seems to have been done to satisfy the four-part TV series which isn’t really a good enough reason to carry it on to the book.

That said, the chapter-per-character format works for me. Rather than bouncing back and forth as he follows a theme (confusing those of us who don’t know anything about anything), it keeps him neatly hemmed in. I always knew which book he was talking about even when I thought he was talking nonsense. Well, maybe not nonsense as such but over-analysing in the manner of the literary criticism he starts the book by scorning. Literally criticism, by the way, sounds awful. Do people really spend their lives writing ever more detailed papers dissecting characters from old books in the same way physicists dissect the first millionth of a second after the big bang? I fear they do. And with modern perspectives that read things that would never have been in an author’s head into what he wrote. A more pointless waste of time I can’t imagine (outside of Bendaton’s written records archive, naturally).

Where the book fell down for me is in the chapters where I knew what he was talking about. Of the 28, I’d only read 5 – Jeeves, Holmes, Diary of a Nobody, Bond and 1984 – and in four of them I didn’t feel Faulks told me anything I didn’t already know. The insight I imagined he was imparting during the earlier chapters that were a mystery to me evaporated when he just sort of recapped the Jeeves and Holmes books, covered the major humorous incidents in Pooter’s life and ran through the obvious themes of 1984. Only in the Bond chapter did the book come alive and that was because Faulks didn’t take us through the Bond canon, he took us through how he wrote his Bond book ("Devil May Care") based on Fleming’s works. It is by far the best chapter in the book even if he does occasionally return to why he’s labelled Bond as a snob rather than a hero.

Ultimately, although it did inspire me to download a couple of books to my Kindle it probably did more harm than good. The only books that sounded good were the ones I’d read. The rest either didn’t appeal full stop or they had so much praise and importance heaped on them – much like the TV series, The Wire – that I couldn’t possibly read them because I’d end up looking like a moron for not liking them. It also proved that any form of literary criticism is too pretentious for me. The idea that "heroes" or even "stories" were deemed too old fashioned to be included in a "proper novel" says all you need to know about what happens when people think too much about something that is meant to be fun.

I read this about six or seven years ago and it has been there ever since. This book changed the Dennis Brent saga forever as the original format was running out of steam and Diary of a Nobody showed me how to do it properly. In came Wicks and Grantham, Dennis and Francois became a lot more like a married couple and the word "roared" became the standard term for finding something that isn’t especially funny absolutely hilarious. Reading Diary again now – via the soulless medium of the Kindle – I was surprised how much this slim volume still influences me today.

The book charts the life of Charles Pooter – the heroic Nobody of the piece – his wife, Carrie and his son, William (who chooses to be known by his middle name, Lupin) as they cope with middle class life in the suburbs of London. Pooter does something in the City, Carrie stays at home and looks after the household while Lupin has spells of reckless abandon and periods of respectable servitude. Pooter has two friends – Gowing and Cummings – and they come and go as they please. Both annoy Pooter from time to time but nothing a game of dominoes can’t solve.

The book doesn’t have much of a plot – it was originally published as a regular feature in Punch, the humorous magazine – and the ending comes out of nowhere when it feels time to bring the story to an end. But the story is only a tiny part of why this book is so great. It’s all about the details of Pooter’s life. His enthusiasm for enamel paint is an early highlight. Having discovered the marvels of red enamel he can’t help himself and is soon painting shoes, books and his bath tub just for the joy of enamel paint. It comes to an abrupt end when the enamel comes off the bath while he’s in it and he gets the shock of his life when he believes he’s bleeding to death.

Pooter has some social ambitions and does occasionally venture out into London society, usually with embarrassing results. Whether it’s falling over on the dance floor because his new shoes have such shiny soles, being lumbered with fake theatre tickets when a dodgy whisky seller turns out not to be a man of his word or his being left to pick up the bill when the strangers he thought he was merely dining with scarpered and it emerged this wasn’t the sort of party where it’s all on the house. Again, nothing obviously brilliant but quietly amusing none the less.

It’s easy to dismiss it as nothing but fluff but it’s actually a fascinating insight into what 1890s London was like for someone on a reasonable wage, living in a reasonable area and with the good sense to be happy with ones lot. Scandal can be caused by wearing the wrong hat or addressing a man’s wife with the wrong degree of formality. Pooter worries incessantly about things we today would never even think about. Not because his future rests on them – as the futures of characters in more serious books of the period often do – but because he believes they matter and it’s his diary.

I adore this book. Pooter knows he is an insignificant little man but he’s happy with his lot – exasperating as circumstances, comrades and sons can often be – and simply wants to chronicle what he perceives to be an ordinary life in an ordinary age. As a snapshot of 1890s life it is fascinating, as a work of comic fiction it is amusing and as an inspiration to me personally it has been immense.

Hippo is Fry’s second novel and the first I went to see him reading from at Waterstones. The book was introduced by the manager as containing everything you ever wanted to know about shagging a horse. Fry came out before us and read a passage which I can still remember today, not least because it was the same opinion, expressed using more or less the same words, that caused such a fuss last year after Fry was accused by some cretins on the internet of appalling sexism for daring to suggest that women and men may have different sex drives.

Hippo starts with Ted Wallace – once an angry young man of British poetry and now a writer of theatrical reviews for a trashy Sunday newspaper – being fired for hurling abuse at a playwright from the stalls when his latest work was not quite to Ted’s liking. He meets his goddaughter in a bar and she invites him – with the aid of £250,000 – to visit his old friends Michael and Anne Logan at their country house to investigate something remarkable. She doesn’t go into details for fear of prejudicing Ted’s investigation but it soon becomes obvious that there is indeed something very peculiar going on at Swafford Hall.

Hippo is written largely in the form of letters from Ted to Jane, from Jane to Ted and occasionally from other characters’ point of view. There are also a few bits told in more conventional ways by a third person narrator, usually when the action is taking place in a nook or cranny too tight for a second character to squeeze into. It works well and much of the enjoyment in the book comes from Ted Wallace’s rantings and ravings about the modern world, other people, his own failings and anything else that happens to annoy him at the time.

The story gradually unfolds and we learn that Michael and Anne’s son, David, is believed to have magical healing powers. Wallace – like Fry himself – is a rationalist and doesn’t believe in such nonsense. But as the number of people apparently cured by David’s gifts gets longer he begins to doubt his own scepticism. We, the audience, learn the methods by which David cures people before Ted (and many of the other characters) does and there is a certain amount of delicious awkwardness as he blunders around the place investigating.

The book never slows down and never goes off on the sort of ultimately bootless tangents that "The Liar" did at times. Much as I love the Liar I have to concede that Hippo is a better novel. Ted’s detours run for pages rather than chapters and it is clear almost from the outset what we – the readers – should be wondering about and trying to spot the clues for. When the payoff comes it is a thoroughly satisfying one that is both unexpected and utterly plausible. He doesn’t cheat, he doesn’t disappoint and he doesn’t take the lazy way out. Everything is wrapped up neatly and, if not for everyone, certainly for us happily.

One final, random thought - if the Liar was Fry seeing a possible version of his younger self in Adrian then maybe Hippo is Fry seeing a possible version of his future self with Ted.

"Geek Tragedy" by Nev Fountain

Geek Tragedy is the first of three books by comedy writer and several-time Big Finish author Nev Fountain. They feature his script-editor-slash-detective Mervyn Stone who is best remembered as script editor on the BBC science fiction series "Vixens From the Void" which ran for several seasons in the late 80s and early 90s and featured many of the technical and financial limitations that its predecessors like Doctor Who, Tripods and Blake’s 7 had endured.

Geek Tragedy takes place at a Vixens convention that is being held at a chain-branded hotel in the middle of nowhere. There are actors, props, back stage personnel, fans, super-fans and uber-fans all packed into the soulless and faintly wretched happy premier travel inn lodge. Fountain’s descriptions of the goings on at a convention show a level of knowledge and wit that most portrayals of sci fi conventions simply don’t have. He doesn’t shy away from the weird behaviour, obsessiveness, personal hygiene and general tactlessness of some of those in attendance but he does make it clear that such people are the minority and most people in attendance are perfectly normal and no different from those who dress up to go to a football match every weekend.

The story of Vixens From the Void is nicely filled in as the story goes on. It never feels like we’re having unwanted information dumped on us but nor do we feel like there is an important world going on in the book that we – living in the realest world we can – know nothing about. This isn’t a book about Vixens but it is a book about people whose lives have been touched (or even created or ruined by) Vixens From the Void. The guests at this convention have differing relationships with the series but all are there because it was a bigger part of their lives than they dare to admit. None seems to be there entirely by choice – for some it is all they have, for others it is a financial necessity – and the resentments and machinations of the convention circuit are what drives the story on and causes the bodies to pile up.

It’s clear after about fifty pages that people will die – no one, save Mervyn as our hero, is obviously safe. Everyone has reasons to kill, be killed or both. It’s no more and no less sophisticated than an Agatha Christie country house murder and that’s what makes it fantastic.

It would’ve been easy to write a book about a sci fi convention and added a murder mystery as an after thought. Equally, it would’ve been easy to write a murder mystery and set it at a convention. But Fountain manages to weave them so tightly together that neither aspect feels tacked on and the book needs both to exist.

My only real criticism is that the whole idea of Vixens From the Void doesn’t quite work for me. I know it’s meant to be an absurd pastiche of BBC sci fi but the wanky little nerd in me dislikes the late 80s, early 90s setting and wishes it was actually produced in the 70s which is when something like Vixens would fit more snugly. It sounds like a sexed up Tomorrow People and belongs to the same 1970s that gave us Carol, John, Kenny and Stephen Jamison. Even the BBC – bless them – wouldn’t have made something as tacky as Vixens in the 1990s, the decade of Star Trek TNG, Invasion Earth and even Star Cops.

That aside, Geek Tragedy is a funny, well constructed, well written murder mystery which is clearly written by someone who knows the world about which he’s writing. It doesn’t stop him being savage but it does stop him being clichéd. The super-fan who boasts about how he "improves" episodes of Vixens to the people who made it is so wonderfully plausible but is the sort of stereotype that a lazy writer from outside fandom would never pick up on. The way this character ultimately fits into the mystery is inspired.

Big Finish has released three Mervyn Stone books simultaneously and while this may sound odd I’m very glad they’ve done it. Having finished Geek Tragedy I was very keen to start the second one – DVD Extras Include Murder – but have had to force myself not to. That’s how good Geek Tragedy was. It is a hugely enjoyable novel which combines an excellent murder mystery with an amusing insight into the bitterness, banality and just plain weirdness of sci fi conventions. I can’t recommend it highly enough. Buy it, buy the lot – anything to get Big Finish to commission more of them.

"Timewyrm: Genesys" by John Peel

It must be the first New Adventure I’ve read in about fifteen years. I was never a big fan of the novels and only read a handful of them, the earliest of which was book 2 – Exodus – so when the internet provided New Adventure goodness it seemed only logical to start at the very beginning with a book that kicked off a run of original Doctor Who fiction novels that continues, albeit from a different source and aimed at a different audience, to this day.

It may sound like a cliché but Timewyrm: Genesys really is too broad and too deep for the small screen. Those words – about the broadness and deepness – are all I remember about the launch of the NAs back in 1991. Over the years they came to mean different things to different authors. Sex, drugs, swearing and even all three at once (probably) symbolise a time when the BBC cared so little about the Doctor Who brand that they exercised absolutely no control at all over their licensees. Or at least that’s how it appeared at the time. John Peel, author of Genesys, writes a story that couldn’t have been shown on BBC1 for several reasons. He delves into characters minds, he presents quite a lot of bloody violence, there are naked breasts, naked under-age breasts too while we’re at it, descriptions of Ace getting dressed in the morning and there’s the small matter of effects that would’ve tried JNT’s purse strings somewhat. This is clearly a new slant on old Doctor Who and right from the start it doesn’t feel like a new Target novel – it feels like something else.

But – equally – there are a lot of "old" references too. Far too many actually. Barely a page goes by without an allusion to the Chase here, a mention of the Brig there, a spot of sadness for the passing of Katarina over yonder and at least one reference to each of Ace’s TV stories sprinkled liberally throughout. There are even cameos by two – not one but two – old Doctors. The Fourth appears at the beginning (complete with various mentions of "The Invasion of Time") and the Third actually takes over the Seventh Doctor’s body near the end. Neither is relevant and the latter is just stupid. Are we really supposed to believe that the Seventh Doctor needs his former self to help him operate the Tardis’s telepathic circuits?

While I’m here, can anyone explain what the point was of having the Doctor accidentally wipe Ace’s memory right at the beginning? I kept expecting it to be of some importance but it wasn’t, was it? It just happened to fill a bunch of pages while we alternated with local back story. Had it been used as an introduction to Doctor Who for anyone who hadn’t seen it on TV (absurd as that sounds, but books do travel the globe in ways that TV can’t always) it would’ve been a clever idea but it just felt pointless. Maybe it was a joke that wasn’t funny. Or a point that wasn’t worth making. Or something that went over my head entirely. Or just an author playing around with new toys who was having too much fun to get to the point.

Overall I enjoyed it. It’s hard to appreciate now what it must’ve been like to read in 1991 as then there was no new Doctor Who – and barely even any on video – while now there is almost too much to keep up with. The references to old stories, monsters and characters are almost laughable these days as they make the book sound like bad fan fiction but I can sort of understand that they were there to help the readers move from cosy old TV Doctor Who to (hopefully) broad and deep literary Doctor Who. They don’t spoil the story – which is thankfully original and not just a ruse to bring back an old favourite – and shouldn’t detract from a very good first effort.

"The Liar" by Stephen Fry

The last time I read the Liar must’ve been in the mid-90s as I distinctly remember reading it in the sixth form common room before tea and cakes with the headmaster and his wife. Since then I’d listened to the abridged audio cassette version a couple of times and – most importantly – read his autobiography "Moab is my Washpot". At last, unabridged audio versions of most of his books have been released on CD and Audible and I’ve been able to listen to Fry reading the whole thing for the first time. And you know how much I like listening to Fry SJ.

The Liar begins with a warning that none of what follows is true. It’s a nice phrase to look back on at the end of the book because its meaning has changed over the years. I suspect, at the time, it was meant to sew doubts in the audience’s mind because the story is – as the title suggests – about a liar. These days it serves a double purpose of sewing doubts while also referring to the similarities between Adrian Healy, the book’s main character, and Stephen himself at that age. Whole sections of the Liar feel very familiar because they are based on incidents from Fry’s life. Indeed, Fry even quotes a passage from the Liar in Moab because it perfectly describes his (Fry’s) love for Matthew Osborn as well as Adrian’s love for Hugo Cartwright. Adrian is an exaggerated version of the young Stephen Fry but the basics are all there – his home life to boarding school to cockiness to expulsion to bunking off the local college to prison to Cambridge to acting and so on. The big difference is – as far as we know – Fry never had a Trefusis.

Donald Trefusis is an aging don who sees through Adrian immediately and toys with him for a while before making him a pawn in a much bigger game that is afoot. Trefusis was originally a character Fry played on "Loose Ends", a Radio 4 stalwart of mid-morning wit and culture, and here he’s fleshed out into a lover of good wine and cigarettes, a hater of cliché and ordinariness and an ex-Bletchley Park code breaker with suspiciously fresh ties to the murky world of espionage.

I love the Liar. Heard in all its glory it is a masterpiece of invention and wit. Adrian Healy is a character that’s its impossible not to like even though he’s not a terribly likeable person. He’s all façade but who wouldn’t want to be able to project such a façade? But beneath all that there is a very real truth – that there is a type of person that can sail through school and university because they understand how to do it and can do everything that is required of them with some ease. Such people fear departure from academic life and being forced into the real world because the real world is completely different. Far from being the making of them, University gives them an artificial understanding of what the wider world is like and bad things can happen when they realise it isn’t. At least that’s what happened to me.

The actual plot of the Liar unfolds slowly through a series of scenes scattered through Adrian’s life at school and university. The scandalous school magazine, the fake Dickens novel, the cricket match – all these character building episodes are told non-consecutively and in a way that isn’t at all confusing or distracting. Fry turns out to be an excellent novelist at his first attempt. Who knew?

It’s a funny book, at times a very clever book, at other times quite a moving book and ultimately a very satisfying book. It has an extra dimension now we know how closely Adrian is based on the equivalent Fry (albeit the Fry of Moab rather than the Fry of his recent "Chronicles" because Fry and Healy do begin to deviate quite markedly mid-Cambridge). There’s apparently a film version on the way which I’d be very interested to see. Cutting the story down to 2 hours – as the cassette did when cutting it down to 3 – would lose much of its charm. The ultimate story as revealed at the end is the least of its virtues but is the most filmable so I fear we’ll get a slightly dandified spy story rather than the showoffy and frequently staggering coming of age story that the unabridged novel gives us.

Definitely one of my all-time favourite books and inexplicable how I’ve left it alone for so long. And that’s not a lie (geddit?!?!)