Rollercoaster , livre ebook

The Conrad Press - James Essinger

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111 pages

English

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Wacky, outrageous, imaginative, bonkers, Rollercoaster is also really rather fun. Written by James Essinger in 1979 when he was a virgin, it tells the story of how warm-hearted would-be hippie Rod Coaster teams up with illustrious senior policeman Chief Superintendent Pickling Fox-Foetus, who has never made a mistake, to try to thwart a terrorist attack on one of West Germany's most pretentious hotels. After many adventures, Rod finally finds true love with a charismatic Finnish beauty.'Rollercoaster' is a book you won't easily forget, even if you're no longer a virgin.

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Thriller

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Publié par	The Conrad Press
Date de parution	01 mars 2021
Nombre de lectures	0
EAN13	9781839781810
Langue	English
Poids de l'ouvrage	1 Mo

Informations légales : prix de location à la page 0,0200€. Cette information est donnée uniquement à titre indicatif conformément à la législation en vigueur.

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By the same author
Fiction
The Mating Game
(with Jovanka Houska)
The Lost City of Cantia
The Ada Lovelace Project
(with Jovanka Houska)
Non-fiction
Jacquard’s Web: how a hand-loom led to the birth of the information age
Spellbound: the improbable story of English spelling
Ada’s Algorithm: how Lord Byron’s daughter launched the digital age
(also published in Finnish, Polish and Spanish)
Writing Fiction: a user-friendly guide
Charles and Ada: the computer’s most passionate partnership
Frankie: the woman who prevented a pharmceutical disaster
(with Sandra Koutzenko)
Libretto and lyrics
Ada’s Algorithm: the Ada Lovelace musical

Rollercoaster
Published by The Conrad Press in the United Kingdom 2021
Tel: +44(0)1227 472 874 www.theconradpress.com   info@theconradpress.com
ISBN 978-1-839781-81-0
Copyright © James Essinger, 2021
The moral right of James Essinger to be identified as author of this work has been asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
All rights reserved.
Typesetting and Cover Design by: Charlotte Mouncey, www.bookstyle.co.uk
The Conrad Press logo was designed by Maria Priestley.

Rollercoaster
a 1970s comedy thriller for the 21 st century!
James Essinger

In affectionate memory of the brilliant and inspiring literary agent David Bolt
(November 30 1927 - November 16 2012)
Many thanks, David, for all the encouragement and help you gave me with my writing.
Rollercoaster was David’s suggestion for the title of this book.
Also for Päivi Aho of Finland,
and for Elaine Varty, who back in 1979 enjoyed me reading to her the scenes featuring ‘Pickly’.
My warm thanks to Francesca Garratt for checking the transcribed typescript of Rollercoaster for typos and verbal infelicities from 1979, 2019 and 2020.

Preface
Y ou don’t need to read very far into Rollercoaster to suspect that the author is (a) a virgin, (b) somewhat bonkers and the further you read into the novel the greater your conviction about (a) and the more inclined you are to think that in (b) the word ‘somewhat’ may be superfluous.
Reading the novel now, I don’t really recognise the author at all. Which is something of a shock, as the author of Rollercoaster is, in fact, me.
Silja’s parents’ traumatic life stems from events in the winter of 1939, a few months more than forty years before I wrote the first draft of this book, in the summer of 1979. Another forty years passed before I re-read Rollercoaster and decided to revise the novel and get it ready for publication.
When I wrote the first draft I was twenty-one and living in a bungalow-type cottage in the village of Weston-on-the-Green, near Bicester in Oxfordshire, England. It was the summer holiday between my second and third year at Lincoln College, Oxford University, where I was studying English Language and Literature and consistently failing to find a girlfriend.
I’d moved into the cottage with some friends who weren’t there most of the time, so I was quite lonely, although I did have other friends who came to visit. I’d fallen in love with an extremely beautiful lady student called Frankie the preceding summer term. Frankie wasn’t interested in me, though I don’t really blame her as I had no idea in those days how to woo women. I used to serve them Lapsang Souchong tea and would read D.H. Lawrence to them. It didn’t work. It was only later in my life that I learned that the best way to woo women is to listen to them; well, assuming they want to talk to you in the first place.
I’d spent the previous two summers working for three months in West Germany: in the summer of 1977 with a restaurant and catering firm called Stockheim in Düsseldorf and in the second summer of 1978 at the Düsseldorf Hilton as a houseman, which meant I hoovered the rooms before the chambermaids cleaned them and did other jobs in and about the hotel, such as moving furniture.
Those two summer stays in West Germany made a massive impression on me. During my first summer there I met Finnish people, including a young woman called Päivi Aho. As I’ve grown older, I’ve come to believe they made me much more emotionally healthy than I was after my upbringing in the emotionally rather suffocating atmosphere of Leicester, in a household without any sisters and educated at a single-sex grammar school. My darling brother Rupert, who died in what was very likely a grotesque accident - while deeply upset about marital problems he drowned on 22 January 2019 in the Grand Union Canal in Leicestershire, about four miles from where he was visiting our mother in Leicester - never had the equivalent of my West Germany stays, and I think he could have benefited from a similar experience.
During my first stay in West Germany, I lived at a Stockheim-owned residence, sharing a room with one of my colleagues, William McCurry or ‘Ginger’ as we called him. He is still a good friend. That summer of 1977, when I was emptying some bins at the back of one of the Stockheim firm’s outlets, I met a chap called Tim Connell from Keighley in Yorkshire - his German is and was great and at first I thought he was one - and we became close friends. Tim had much expertise with women and I learned a great deal of theory from him about how to get on with women, though it was some years before I could actually try to put this into practice. Tim wasn’t working at the hotel during that second summer but he did visit Düsseldorf and we had some great times.
Rollercoaster wasn’t the first novel I finished; I’d written one called A Canterbury Tale about two years earlier. I don’t have that novel any more: I threw it away at some point. It was essentially an autobiographical novel based on the few months I lived in Canterbury in 1977 before going to university. I don’t remember it as being very good or very interesting and I don’t think the literary world is any the worse for its loss.
Rollercoaster was never put onto computer disk until I decided to publish it with The Conrad Press, the publishing firm I set up in December 2015 and which now has more than 160 writers. The daunting task of typing out my typescript of Rollercoaster was carried with characteristic efficiency by my good friend and colleague Margaret Dowley MBE. Margaret used to work for the police and so was used to pretty much anything. The original typescript, rather clumsily typed by me while I worked on it, was sitting in my various homes between 1979 and the spring of 2019, when I re-read it, intending to publish it if I thought it was worth publication and not if I didn’t.
In many ways, after I wrote Rollercoaster , my literary career, such as it was, actually regressed for quite some time, partly, I suppose, because I actually went to live in Finland from 1980 to 1983. There, I spent a lot of time learning Finnish, a language I’ve deliberately kept up and am proud of being able to speak, though when I was living in Finland I did do quite a lot of writing - mostly short stories, as I recall - in my spare time.
As for being a virgin, I was fated to remain in that state until November 1982, when, in my second nine-month teaching stint in Finland, I went to live in the Central Finnish city of Jyväskylä. Despite having a name that sounds as if you’ve got a fishbone stuck in your throat - it is actually a wonderful university city. I lost my virginity there to a lady writer and editor. I was incredibly lucky; she was extremely passionate about me from the beginning. She was thirty-nine, I was twenty-four. I found our sexual relationship inconceivably exciting and vividly remember writing postcards to tell my friends in England afterwards how wonderful I thought sex was. For me, sex has never been something over-rated but was always remarkable and indeed continues to be so to the present day.
The short stories I wrote in Finland weren’t very good and I don’t have them any more. Basically, pace Dickens, Byron, Shelley etc, etc. I was a very late developer as a writer. I’m sixty-two now and still in the learning phase.
In the late 1980s and during the 1990s I made some of my living from writing non-fiction business books and management reports. I still wrote novels during that time but they weren’t of a publishable standard. I don’t think I ever re-read Rollercoaster at that point, although I never forgot it existed. I became a reasonably competent writer of non-fiction business books and management books and made a reasonable living focusing on those areas. I’ve been a professional freelance writer since 1988 and still am, though as I say I now run The Conrad Press too.
It was only in the early years of the twenty-first century that I finally wrote a reasonably successful non-fiction ‘trade’ book, by which I mean one suitable for the mass market. It is called Jacquard’s Web and is the true story of how the Jacquard weaving-loom was central in inspiring the computer revolution. Since then I’ve written a fair number of narrative non-fiction works, including two books about Lord Byron’s daughter, the computer pioneer Ada Lovelace, someone who greatly fascinates me. The first is Ada’s Algorithm (2013), which has been optioned by Monumental Pictures for filming, and published in the US as well as the UK and also in Spanish, Polish and - coincidentally - Finnish. I’ve also published Charles and Ada: the computer’s most passionate partnership (2019) about Ada and the nineteenth-century mathematician Charles Babbage, who designed the world’s first computer. The second book contains lots of new findings.
One spring evening in 2006 I began writing a novel which after a ridiculous number of iterations and revisions was finally published in 2019, under the title of Josh Moonford and the Lost City of Cantia . By 2019 I had written two