The Godfather: Peter Corris on giving up the grog
Not for the first time I’ve been advised, for the sake of my health, to abstain from alcohol. I was not too alarmed. To adapt Mark Twain’s aphorism: ‘It’s easy to give up drinking, I’ve done it lots of times.’ In fact the quip has some point. I’ve always found it...
The Godfather: Peter Corris on his first writers’ conference
In 1981 with only two crime novels published (The Dying Trade and White Meat), I was invited to attend a crime-writing conference in Sweden. The organisers wanted the event to be international and, casting about for an Australian, they would have found that I was...
The Godfather: Peter Corris on his music
Hail, hail, rock and roll Deliver me from the days of old – Chuck Berry What are the records you play over and over again? What are the ones you had on vinyl, cassette and CD and (I’m way behind the technology if not the jargon) now on other platforms? And why...
The Godfather: Peter Corris on Robert Goddard
Jean introduced me to the work of Robert Goddard when she was working as fiction editor for Transworld and Goddard’s first novel Past Caring (1986) was being heavily promoted by the company. I was mightily impressed by it. Set in the Edwardian era with the Boer War...
The Godfather: Peter Corris on science fiction, astronomy and the next Big Bang
Few subjects interest me less than astronomy and space travel. I can’t be bothered with what’s happening light years away, the Big Bang or dark matter. I watched the moon landing with some interest but, with the Vietnam war raging, I saw it mainly just as another...
The Godfather: Peter Corris on his father
I recently had an email from a friend saying he’d written his autobiography and wished he’d recorded his father’s memories of the area where they’d both grown up. He saw it as an opportunity missed for his project and the implication was that it would have been...
The Godfather: Peter Corris on Bertrand Russell
In a book I was reading recently I came across a mention of Bertrand Russell as convenor of a conference of intellectuals and others protesting against the war in Vietnam. Russell was then 94. I hadn’t thought about him for years, but was abruptly reminded of what a...
The Godfather: Peter Corris on Hazel Rowley
Tomorrow, 1 March 2014, is the third anniversary of the death of Hazel Rowley, who died of a cerebral haemorrhage in New York (where she had moved a few years before), at the age of 59. She was born in England but came to Australia as an eight-year-old and was...
The Godfather: Peter Corris on ‘What’s in a name?’
When I was about 35, with three children of my own, I decided to stop calling my mother ‘Mum’. Henceforth I called her Jo, as all her contemporaries did. She was then in her mid-60s, which didn’t seem such a big gap. I felt like a contemporary. It took her a while to...
The Godfather: Peter Corris on beards
I’m growing a beard, again. The first thing I had to do was seek Jean’s agreement. Some women dislike beards. Others prefer them. I’ve known several men who, on shaving off their beards, have their wives or partners request them to grown them again. Jean offered no...
The Godfather: Peter Corris on literary biography
I’ve been reading biographies of two writers I admire in part – Norman Mailer and George Orwell. Literary biography is something I enjoy and the best examples of it, such as Richard Ellmann on Oscar Wilde and Norman Sherry on Graham Greene, have given me enormous...
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