Paris Fantastique
by Nicholas Royle
When I came up with the idea for three collections of short stories set in the three cities I’ve lived in, Paris was always going to be the one that would require most work, after London and Manchester. I only lived there for a year – and it was forty years ago. Was a year long enough? Yes, to allow Paris to qualify for the series, but no, if the question was to do with ideas, research and writing. I would just have to increase the frequency and regularity of my trips to France. It’s a hard life. Living part of the time in London, I was pleased to see that it’s the same distance from St Pancras to Paris as it is from Euston to Manchester, and the trains are better.
Where do you get your ideas from? It’s the question that writers joke about being asked more than any other. In fact, the one I get asked most often is some variation on Would I have read any of your books? Well, I don’t know. You tell me. But there’s also Are you still writing? Which sounds a lot like Are you still banging your head against a brick wall? Or Are you still screaming into the void? Yes and yes.
To answer the question, however, I get my ideas from spending a certain amount of time in whatever place I want to write about, and getting around on foot. Paris is a small city, easy to walk across in a couple of hours. I like the metro and used it a lot when I lived in Paris, but now I generally prefer to walk. Keep your eyes and ears open and the ideas will come. That’s the theory.
I’ve had to write more new stories for this book – which I’m still writing, as I write this – than for London Gothic or Manchester Uncanny, as I’ve published fewer Paris stories over the years that are good enough to reprint. When I look back at the stories I wrote when I was living there in the mid-1980s, I cringe. I thought they were fine then, but they won’t do now. In forty years’ time, will I look back at the stories I’m writing now and cringe? Well, if I’m lucky enough to be alive when I’m 100, I imagine I’ll be mostly cringing, as I attempt to get to my feet, given the state of my knees today.
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I have been asked if I’ll do more books in the series. I spent a month in Brussels towards the end of 2024. Would that count? Maybe the pertinent question is whether I could come up with a better title than Brussels Sprouts and I’m not sure there is one. What I mean is, any title would be better than Brussels Sprouts, but I’m not sure there is one that works. I lived in Whitley Bay from when I was three months old until I was eight, so how about Newcastle Noir? I would have said I was too young in the 1960s to be thinking like a writer, so I’ve got no material from that time and no ideas from now, because I visit the north-east only rarely, but then I came across something I had forgotten about. All About Me must have been written in 1968 or early 1969, and when I think about it, while I would maintain that London Gothic, Manchester Uncanny and Paris Fantastique are all about the cities in which the stories are set, maybe I have to admit that, in fact, they are all about me.
London Gothic and Manchester Uncanny are available from Confingo Publishing. Paris Fantastique will be published later in 2025. White Spines and Shadow Lines, as well as volumes in the Best British Short Stories series, are available from Salt. Nicholas Royle also runs Nightjar Press.