The story behind the story

And so we enter the Christmas books season, a phase in the publishing calendar so terrifying, so utterly without hope, that more sensitive bookbuyers may wish to hide in second-hand bookshops, or under their beds, until it’s all over. But amidst the piles of useless non-books in Borders and Waterstones, probably right at the back where they think we won’t find them, there will be a handful of genuinely good titles. They may not be very serious books, you may not necessarily buy them for yourself, but if you were given them for Christmas you would be more than pleasantly surprised. You might even read them all the way to the end.

Tracking these books down, though, is the challenge. Why Not Catch 21? arrives from a small publisher and neither title nor subject matter suggests that it’s anything special. As it happens, it’s a splendid and enjoyable piece of work, which deserves a wider readership than it may receive.

Gary Dexter is essentially a truffler for literary fancies: he is always after the story behind the story, and sometimes even the story behind that. His occasional Spectator column, ‘Alternative Reading’, investigates little-known works of famous writers, such as Lecherous Limericks by Isaac Asimov. A wonderful one recently was an early work by E. Annie Proulx, Plan and Make Your Own Fences and Gates, Walkways, Walls and Drives (1983) — exactly the sort of book you can imagine her writing before the novels took off. The cowboys in Brokeback Mountain may be up to all sorts in that log cabin, but I think we all know that, in their hearts, they are really thinking about making their own fences, gates, walkways, walls and drives.