Tuning in…
Tuning in…
Castaway
2 appearances
Thriller writer whose worldwide bestseller The Eagle Has Landed made him a multi-millionaire storyteller, still writing at 76.
On the island
Eight records
Laura takes me back to my teenage. Towards the end of the war, I was an army cadet in a training camp just before the end of the war on the Yorkshire cliffs.
Al Bowlly with Lew Stone and his Band
I find it magical, and it's a special association for me because I used it in a book called The Savage Day, which was the first Jack Higgins book to get into the best-seller lists
Gone with the Wind, always brings that period in the late 50s when my whole life was changing back to me very, very vividly indeed.
I have loved movies all my life. So I've chosen one of the great evocative things for me, um that sequence from Casablanca, where we get that wonderful piano music, Dooley Wilson playing as time goes by.
going back to that film The Wrath of God with Robert Mitcham, simply because it obviously was again very important to me and that it was my first major film, the music in that film much impressed me.
Love Theme from The Eagle Has Landed
six or seven years later, I still can't get away from The Eagle Has Landed. And so I think appropriately something from the film we should hear now.
Piano Concerto No. 4 in G minor, Op. 40Favourite
Rafael Orozco with the Royal Philharmonic Orchestra
record number seven is linked directly to my daughter in that she's also um a very gifted pianist.
my last record's a very nostalgic one for me. It's Fred Astaire singing one of the great songs and the great lyrics of all time, A Foggy Day in London Town
They Can't Take That Away from Me
I say in my life, and we're back with my first choice. They can't take that away from me. It's true.
And it used to be my mother's party piece at parties and wakes and whatever. And it used to have people crying and so on. It's uh and it therefore o takes me back to my early years in Northern Ireland and the kind of life I went through.
It's a particular resonance for me for two reasons. First of all, when I went to do national service and I was posted to household cavalry, you must realize that for a lad from Leeds this was a terribly exotic thing to happen ... But also for someone who'd never been to London and this kind of thing. I used to walk for miles, just taking everything in and thoroughly enjoying it.
The Mounted Band of the Blues and Royals
That just takes me back to that period of being in the household cavalry. in what's now the Blues and Royals. In my day it was just the Blues. I wouldn't have missed it for anything. But this is the Grand March, the march past of the regiment.
It's um a beautiful small piano piece. And I should point out that my eldest daughter from a very early age exhibited huge talent for the piano. But I remember her playing this piece. when she did grade five or something, Royal College of Music, and got a distinction with it.
In this Mexican village the people haven't been married or baptized or anything like that for years, and they all beg him. To do this. And there's this wonderful middle of the film where this marvellous mass is played, and against the chorus, the camera keeps fading and coming in on Mitchum marrying people, baptising babies, and so on.
What I remember is my friend and others said, you know, when we were all going down on the big boat, The QE two, and so on. It became a kind of anthem to the soldiers sailing. They used to sing it.
Let's Face the Music and DanceFavourite
And it broke into it's heartbreaking actually, let's face the music and dance. And it was so fantastic. And also to me, it's kind of uh An anthem really, there may be trouble ahead, but while there's moonlight and music and love and romance, Let's face the music and dance. And that's the way to look at it, folks.
In conversation
Presenter asks
0:52Could you endure isolation for a long time?
Oh yes. You know, people are uh are either extrovert or introvert. I don't know that I'm all that introverted, but I've always been a bit of a loner. … So there's no question about it. Um I think I could endure isolation.
Presenter asks
4:56What was your first job [after leaving school]?
Leeds cleansing department. I was a sort of junior clerk, messenger boy, by the canal. … I realised very quickly that it was um a dull, boring, totally dead-end job and that there could never be a future in it for anyone, so it was a question of marking time because army service was coming along anyway.
Presenter asks
7:48Where did you serve [in the army]?
Well, in England and a brief time at Knightsbridge Barracks in London, and then in various places in Germany it was a very interesting time to be doing it because 1947 into 1948, 1949 was the Cold War. And we were in Berlin during the airlift … and we were involved a lot with security work on the East German border because they didn't have walls and things in those days. And again, a lot of the things that happened then come into my books later on.
The keepsakes
The book
The Complete Works of Charles Dickens
Charles Dickens
Being practical, I should also ask for the complete works of Charles Dickens. ... I've always been a great Dickens fan.
The luxury
I would like a mobile phone. ... Really, it's the only reason I would want to would be on the level of being able to say, Is there anybody out there?
Presenter asks
9:59To what extent had the army changed your ideas in two or three years?
tremendously. I'd been involved in some physical things, dangerous incidents and so on. So I came out at the other end, very fit, very tough, knowing certain capabilities.
Presenter asks
16:56Why did you choose to write under the name Jack Higgins?
Higgins was one of my mother's names. … I was always rather prolific. And most publishers will only touch one book a year, you see. If I wrote two in a year … And as I wanted the money for them, it meant I had to go to another publisher and he would ask for another name so that he could market the book, you see.
Presenter asks
19:45How did you make the decision to become a full-time writer?
I had the equivalent of two or three years' salary, and I had the chance of a two-book scheme in America. … And my wife said, why don't you give up and try and write this second book that the Americans want properly without having to worry about all your college work and university and things. … And we sat down and discussed it [with the local rector]. And he said to me, Well, I always say, do what Churchill used to say in the war. If you have a problem, get a sheet of paper, draw a line down the centre. Put the pros on one side, the cons on the other, add them up, and whichever comes out top, that's what you do. And I went back to the cottage that night, put the pros and the cons down on paper, and it came out heavily that I should resign. And I wrote out my resignation letter and walked through the night in the rain to the village post box and posted it so I couldn't get it back.
Presenter asks
2:24Did people laugh at you when you said you wanted to write?
um they actually call me Daft Harry. And did laugh at me because within my environment and the working class level I was at, it just wasn't ... the sort of thing that people could take seriously.
Presenter asks
8:10Why have those memories [of Belfast in the 1930s] continued to have such an influence on you?
Well, I lived in Deshankle. I went to school there. But in Ireland, the thing about it was, in 1938, the IRA declared war on Britain again. And they started bombing. And I went out with my step-grandfather one night ... And my step-grandfather, who was a World War I veteran of the trenches and so on, he grabbed me kind of almost on his shoulder and he ran like hell down the street and that was it. And I think if I inhale now I can smell the cordite and what it was like.
Presenter asks
12:25I get the impression that you weren't particularly welcomed by [your stepfather], were you?
I was a big nuisance. Yeah, he he simply didn't want me round. And um It wasn't a good experience at all. It was the worst kind of feeling you get in a situation like that ... It's just this heavy. feeling of knowing that you're uh not wanted in a way.
Presenter asks
15:39Why so many different names [pseudonyms]?
The cosso is too prolific. And if publishers doing one book In a particular year, if you've turned out two more. As far as host publishers are concerned, you've got to wait till next year and the year after that. Well, that was no good to me because the kind of money I was earning wasn't huge money or anything. I was trying to make a living.
Presenter asks
21:32What effect does [great success] have on the partner in your life, on your wife?
you can become a huge success. What effect does that have on the partner in your life, on your wife? What effect is it going to have on your children? ... I really was number one in the world. Really, genuinely. It was. get over to Hollywood. It was stretch limos. It was st stay at the Beverly Hills. And that's the kind of thing where relationships erode. Not in a nasty way or anything like that, but it's just the kind of Osmosis, it's things seeping through, and in the end, oh well, I can't really go on here, you know, etc.
Presenter asks
27:34What's it like standing on that peak [of your personal Everest]?
Well, I think you're always slightly feeling you're gonna fall off. I'm very lucky. In with my partner at this stage of my life, we've so much in common. That that does mean um A great deal to me.
“I always wrote in my spare time. I couldn't sell a word. … radio plays. Even early television stuff, I couldn't get anywhere, and I also tried one or two novels, so I'd done an awful lot and not got anywhere. So looking back at it, it's a miracle I still kept trying.”
“You never know how much you can help another person and how importantly. You can do it with tremendous importance and yet never know what you did for someone.”
“after a period of suddenly finding after forty to forty one years, that one had been working to a time schedule, getting up in the mornings and going to work at a fixed time, suddenly I was my own boss, a wonderful and yet terrifying feeling.”
“I think I was rather like uh Marlon Brando in the famous film when he sits in the back of the car and speaks to his brother and he said I could be somebody.”
“The smartest thing I ever did in my life was to take the advice which told me to leave the country as a tax exile.”
“in some ways the terrible thing about being a writer, he said, even if your father was dying in bed And you'd sit on the bed to hold his hand. He said there's part of you that's thinking I can use this.”
“I'm a gloomy Orange Protestant Presbyterian from Northern Ireland there, you know what I mean. But temp Part of that. Somehow, um It takes life too seriously. and constantly queries what you're doing and what you're achieving.”