Telling tales of our great city

Jul 11 2008 by Laura Davis, Liverpool Daily Post

Laura Davis talks to the driving force behind a new collection of Liverpool stories

THIS is a city of stories – of a man with fire in his eyes leaping over warehouses, of waifs barefoot on cobbled streets, of the twin boys separated at birth who died on the same day.

Every pub has a tale of its own ghostly apparition, every radio caller a yarn to spin, every Beatles fan an account of a connection – however intangible – with John Lennon.

Words thrive here, carried on the saline breeze of the Mersey and twisted round agile tongues into sentences as resilient as the sandstone blocks in the Town Hall walls.

And the stories find their way around the world, some even to Hollywood, where they are prised out of Liverpool and placed in anonymous American towns.

“It’s a place made up of stories – it seems to reinvent itself every couple of years, writing its own story all over again,” agrees Maria Crossan, co-editor of a new collection of short stories set in the city.

“Maybe it has something to do with being a port city and having a constantly shifting and changing population. It’s a creative place because it’s had to be. Stories are one of its industries.”

The Book of Liverpool, the second in a city-focused series that began with Leeds, features work by famous authors, including horror writer and Hellraiser creator Clive Barker, Frank Cottrell Boyce, Beryl Bainbridge and Brian Patten.

In some of the tales, the buildings and places take a central role, in others they are simply a backdrop to the action.

”We tried to avoid all those things that Liverpool writing has been saturated with already – footballing greatness, the musical success of the 60s and so on – and we did reject some stories that covered this material,” explains Maria.

“It’s not that they’re not valid and important parts of the city’s identity, but they’re already part of the mainstream view of Liverpool.

“We asked writers to set their stories at some significant point in the 20th or 21st century, against specific, recognisable moments in Liverpool’s history. A couple of obvious examples of recognisable moments might include the dockers dispute, the riots of the early 80s, the Hillsborough disaster, and so on. We didn’t want stories about these events, but more personal narratives instead that unfold around them.”

In the case of The Forbidden, Allerton-born writer Clive Barker’s piece that was the inspiration behind his film, Candyman, the setting is a fictional housing estate on the outskirts of the city.

It is visited by Helen, a middle- class postgraduate student writing a thesis on “Graffiti: the semiotics of despair”. Her unemotional view of the estate as the subject of her academic research is quickly tainted by the whispers of terrible murders passed on through gossip and scratched into vandalised walls.

When the Candyman finally comes to claim her, it is to reassert his presence in the mythology of the streets.

In the film version, the action moves to Chicago and we learn more about the Candyman’s history, left unexplained in the short story.

“We’d already decided that we really wanted to reprint Clive Barker’s classic Liverpool horror story as it deals brilliantly with the anxieties around the new estates built in the early eighties, as well as the horror standards of ghosts and haunted buildings; but then the supernatural began appearing in other stories too,” reveals Maria,

“Beryl Bainbridge’s story, for example, features a haunted building, and she isn’t usually known for her horror writing. There’s a certain darkness about the stories that we hadn’t anticipated, some sort of anxiety about the old and the new not quite co-existing harmoniously in the city.”