I've just been re-reading Anthony Frewin's novel,
London Blues. Not as well known as it probably should be - although I'm pretty sure it'll be cited as a classic of the British crime-fiction genre when he's dead. It's an existential thriller (well, so the blurb say - I'm never entirely sure about that definition; I kind of associate it with French crime fiction - that is,
Existential = all the characters are wankers, barely a plot, and the author couldn't be arsed to work out an ending) set in the 1960's against the background of the Soho porn industry and the Profumo affair - and ranging in milieu from central London to Bayswater to the Kent coast.
Frewin wrote another conspiracy centred novel at around the same time -
Sixty Three Closure - which involves the discovery of a photograph of Lee Harvey Oswald taken in, of all places, Hitchin, at a time when the historical records indicate that he should have be in Russia. (Yes, I know - but it kind of works; Frewin has a kind of Home Counties and Thames Estuary noir thing going on - which also kind of works.)
I mention this here because Frewin was personal assistant to Stanley Kubrick for over twenty years (and is - or at least was - a representative of the director's estate) and his creative interests add another facet to the Kubrick conspiracy mill.
But it doesn't end there.
It was Frewin who busted the infamous TV Times interview with Stanley Kubrick. The other one, who wasn't actually Stanley Kubrick, but was in fact bankrupt estate agent and serial fantasist Alan Conway.
The interviewer was himself another serial fantasist and author of shoddily researched (if at all) reference books, unfinished episodes of
Dr Who, and convicted burglar of photographic archives: one Adrian Rigelsford.
The combination of supposedly reclusive director and attractor of bizarre theories, with not one but two rather seedy little individuals who seem to have made fantasy a basis of their lives - to the point where you're not sure whether either of them realised that it was fantasy any more – could make you feel a bit like you're tipping over into one of Frewin's (or, for that matter, Kubrick's) narratives. Conway was so immersed in his myth that his friends actually took to calling him Stanley - and you can't help wondering if the one con artist knew the man he was interviewing was himself a con-artist, or indeed, if the latter realised that he was being interviewed by someone who was himself full of shit - in which case, who was conning whom? Or does it balance itself out? If one liar tells a lie to another liar, who then lies about it, could they end up telling the truth by accident?
The atmosphere of oddness isn't helped by the fact that although Conway was found to have died of a heart attack, the police noted unexplained bruising on his neck. And also that some time after Conway's death his son discovered a rather sinister answer phone message had been left for his late father:
'Hi Stanley...I'm going to get you this time. I'm going to get you.'
A rather eclectic muddle of facts, I grant you - but I find them somehow satisfying.
Articles here (the former is Frewin's description of his investigation into the fake interview):
[URL='http://www.theguardian.com/film/2004/nov/20/features.weekend']What Stanley didn't say.[/URL]
The counterfeit Kubrick.
Possibly worth the effort even if you aren't much of a fan. The idea of Joe Longthorne appearing in one of Kubrick's movies is probably worth the bus fare alone.