On Dead Boy Detectives Day

25 April 2024

A week ago, I posted this around the place —

I’ve struggled to explain my connection to the Dead Boy Detectives. I’ve finally got it — if Neil Gaiman is their dad, I’m their stepdad.

They lived with me for a while, I introduced them to some new friends, and now they’re off doing their own thing.

And I’m proud.

I added —

Their other step-parents, of course, were Shelly Bond, Mark Buckingham, Jill Thompson, Bryan Talbot, Ed Brubaker and several more.

It was a fun time.

All captured here —

Today is Dead Boy Detectives Day — at 8am this morning, the eight-part series was released on Netflix.

This is very very exciting.

Last night, I joined on online screening of the first episode and smiled the whole way through. The writing, acting, directing is a funny, scary, queer, addictive joy.

The show has been reviewed (mischievously, favourably) in the Guardian, so my friends now know it exists as a thing, rather than a thing to which I try and fail to explain.

(I’ve not ever been connected to anything this big, and I think it’s going to be very big, so forgive me going into it. There is a takeaway for you.)

The review said ‘this ghost sleuth show is silly, spooky and wicked fun’.

But when I tried to link to it this morning I found —

This article was removed on 23 April 2024 as it breached an embargo. It will be reinstated on the correct date.

Spoilers.

It’s back now.

My claim of stepfatherhood to Charles and Edwin (the Dead Boys) was reposted by Neil Gaiman who graciously said —

Best of stepdads.

He later responded to a question about the show —

More than anything it’s @tobylitt.bsky.social and Mark Buckingham’s take.

When my copy of the DBD’s Omnibus arrived, a few months ago, I was a bit overwhelmed to see that my name got top billing on the cover. There can only be one reason for this — I’d written and co-written a greater number of the 775 pages than Neil Gaiman had.

Enough of the ego fuel.

I’ll be honest. Let’s talk about failure.

When my and Bucky’s (and supereditor Shelly Bond’s) run on the comic was cancelled in 2014, after only a twelve issues, I very much felt we’d failed.

I’d failed.

The comic was dead.

This wasn’t where I’d meant it to end. We’d planned the arc of another year. In fact, the first year was really a preparation for the events of the second — which now would never get the chance to happen.

I’d spent — wasted? — a couple of years writing a comic that not many people would ever read or care about or know existed.

It was a low point. I was no longer a Penguin author — that had ended, too.

So I did the thing writers are advised to do, I wrote exactly what I wanted to write.

I wrote a supernatural adventure story, Lilian’s Spell Book. No-one wanted to publish it, so I put it out on Wattpad, then on Kindle.

And I wrote a trilogy of upper middle grade novels, Possessions. (The closest thing I’ve done to Dead Boy Detectives.) No-one wanted to publish it, so it’s on my hard drive.

And then all this time I was writing Patience, which Galley Beggar — bless them — did publish.

It’s not a supernatural story. It’s slow, and there is almost no dialogue. But if I hadn’t written the tender not-quite-love-triangle of Charles and Edwin and Crystal, at the heart of Dead Boy Detectives, I wouldn’t have been able to write about Elliott and Jim and Lise, the children of Patience’s cosy and frightful Long Corridor.

The moral being — we none of us have any idea of the long term fate of what we write.

Our failures can become our successes.

The dead can come back to life.

Or at least run around being beautiful, stylish, witty — and solving crimes.

On Changing Your Mind

Essentially

Recently, I’ve come up with a question most people seem to have trouble answering —

When was the last time you changed your mind about something significant?

Give it a moment.

Think about what that change was, and why it came about.

If your answer is, I haven’t changed my mind about anything substantial since I became an adult, isn’t that amazing?

And if you can easily say, It was this big shift, last week, and it was because of this, doesn’t that say something interesting about you?

I’ve been asking this question in the context of environmental activism. It’s always the big question —

What can we do to change people’s minds? How can we bring people along with us?

Not people as an abstract but this or that idiosyncratic person.

Peter Boghossian and James Lindsay’s How to Have Impossible Conversations has been useful reading.

They insist that the first thing you need to do, if you want to persuade someone of something, is absolutely not to try to persuade them — it’s to try to establish rapport, commonality.

Talk about anything but The Subject. Get them to see you as human.

Sharing stories is a way of doing this.

Quite often, I am asked to speak about writing, or storytelling, in the context of climate.

If you want to change someone’s mind, tell them a good story.

That’s what a lot of activists believe. But when I ask whether it was a story convinced them to become an activist, they don’t all say yes.

Usually, if it was stories at all, and not facts or images, it was a number of stories over a number of years. Which means that every one of those made a small contribution. Therefore stories are worthwhile.

There’s hope in that.

Here is a small example, from my own life.

I have always hated the music of Brahms.

I found it completely unlistenable — brassy, brash, in some way psychopathic although overtly emotional, and with obsessive intervals (fourths, I think).

This wasn’t because I didn’t hear him, growing up. My mother loved Brahms.

When I spoke to her in the hospice, during her two weeks, she asked for part of Brahms’ Ein Deutsches Requiem to be played at her funeral. And it was.

I think the words were a message to those she knew she was leaving.

As one whom his mother comforteth, so will I comfort you.

Here is the recording she wanted —

This must be one of the reasons I decided to listen to all five episodes of Radio 3’s Composer of the Week series on Brahms, written and presented by Kate Molleson.

And those programmes changed my mind completely.

Some of the pieces Kate Molleson played will, I know, be music I listen to until the end of my life.

I heard every note in a different way.

It wasn’t the Requiem did it; I’m not sure if I will ever be able to like that. It was going from Brahms’ life to his music and back. It was recognising what he wrote out of immediate emotional need, rather than a coldly deliberate attempt to be a great composer.

My conscious reason for putting myself through something I thought I’d hate (five hours of Brahms) was not the memory of my mother, it was that I always — when the opportunity is there — try to look closely at my antipathies.

Why does this disgust me?

I hated and dismissed D.H.Lawrence, until I went back to him, again and again. My hatred troubled me, because I knew there was something in him that other people valued. (I’ve spoken about this in a talk I called ‘Souls’.) Am I wrong? Is this my blindspot?

Starting to write this entry, I thought that’s what I’d say. That I’ve often made a deliberate effort to change my own mind when I felt it might need changing.

I didn’t plan to mention my mother’s death.

But the reason I’m the kind of person I am is because of her. She brought me up to question my own opinions. (Perhaps this was the scientist in her — she studied Biology.)

Isn’t this a necessary skill for children to learn? Isn’t it a beneficial humility and flexibility, even if it doesn’t seem to be about validating them or building their confidence?

No, I really didn’t mean to write about this.

(I was wrong about Brahms, Mum.)

You’ll have to put the other bits together yourself.

On Coffee

And Writing

Yesterday, my son asked me if I’d ever written anything while on drugs.

I said I’d tried to write while drunk, but it hadn’t worked.

And then I added that writing well — really well — on drugs is, as far as I could tell, rare.

I didn’t give examples, but there’s amphetamines. W.H.Auden depended upon Benzedrine (swallowing the cotton balls from inside of nasal inhalers). And it’s hard to think of the Brat Pack writers of the 1980s without thinking of massive cocaine consumption.

(This is leaving aside the huge subject of alcohol, as brilliantly covered by Olivia Laing in The Trip to Echo Spring.)

My son sounded disappointed. I see it as my job to disappoint him. Especially on the subject of drugs.

But since our conversation, I’ve been thinking about coffee.

Perhaps I should ring him back and say, It’s almost unheard of for anyone to write anything without drugs of any sort. We’re all on a mild buzz.

Coffee is everywhere.

And the links between coffee and writing are constantly enforced.

In countless memes —

And positive reinforcements —

The entire Starbucks brand seems based around imaginary novelists who need caffeine and somewhere scruffy/bougie to write.

If I feel forced into any kind of monoculture, coffee-consumption is it.

Don’t misunderstand, I love coffee.

I anticipate the next cup, sometimes before I’ve finished the current one. I treat myself to expensive — cough — oat flat whites. (I know, I know — the shame of such obviousness.) In fact, expensive oat flat whites are my main afternoon treat.

And after I drink a strong cup, I can sit there and write four or five pages in my notebook.

My spine has been straightened, my eyesight clarified, and my heart has been readied for throbbing.

But then, a couple of hours later, there’s the gloom, the generalized anxiety, and the growing sense that whatever I manage to do with the rest of the day, it will never be enough to justify my existence.

Tea at four o’clock, save me.

Perhaps I’m blaming coffee for my existential crises, but my existential crises are really very jittery.

At some point, says the addict, I will give it up.

But I am suspicious of the monoculture. And I don’t like habits I can’t give up.

Maybe I’d write better, or at least differently, if I weren’t mildly buzzing.

In fact, here’s a promise.

This summer, I’ll stop drinking coffee, at least for a couple of weeks.

And I’ll report on it here.

On Despair

On X and Elsewhere

It would be cheap just to write —

I despair

and leave it at that.

But I do.

I despair, just like you do.

(I assume.)

So, let me be more specific.

If I turn on the radio in the kitchen and listen to the news headlines at 7am, I despair.

And if I pick up my phone and look at what’s trending on X/Twitter.

Therefore I delay encountering either of those things before I’ve got some hopefully undespairing work done.

I go to my desk and start writing and rewriting. On paper.

I do this on days I’m teaching as well as weekends.

But this is a problem, isn’t it? The conscious avoidance of despair.

Doesn’t that mean I’ve bracketed off the world, in order to keep it from bothering me?

Meanwhile, something else. Something safe. Some garden where I feel secure.

I realise that we each have to find a way to keep going, and yet I really don’t want to find myself saying or thinking right now, I’m prioritising my self-care.

(Even if, essentially, that is what I am doing.)

For this hour, then, I have decided not to see or think about the horrible specifics, because I will work better — be more productive — that way.

Clearly, the slightest possibility of this choice and this time is a privilege.

Straight off to the commute, or to comforting a crying baby, or to a hospital appointment — that’s more than likely. (Or fetching water or looking for food.)

But it’s not just writing. All these things can be gone through despairingly or not. And that despair can have been sought out, or it can have proved unavoidable.

It is perhaps good advice, to suggest that the first mindspace a writer inhabits after waking from dreaming be their own, be their fictional one. That way it isn’t a return from elsewhere, it’s a centre of its own. It gains that integrity.

Is it honest, though? Is it going to result in honest work?

On this, I don’t have answers.

[Image credit: Virginia Astley, Hope in a Darkened Heart album cover.]