Facts about my fiction
From Vernon Coleman
Sir: 'I think he's about 62," writes Rachel Johnson in a piece about me which managed to be both bitchy and patronising (You have been warned, Mr Blair', 6 March). If your beleaguered proprietor can't afford the price of a phone call, pub
lic libraries do still provide free access to reference books and my age is not and never has been a secret. For the record, she wasn't even in the right decade. Still, it was closer to the truth than much of the rest of the piece.
For example, your eagle-eyed readers will know that the advertisement for Rogue Nation, which she describes as 'new' and as first appearing 'last month', has been appearing in a variety of national newspapers since April 2003. Fewer readers may know that my book Alice's Diary was written five years after I left the agents Curtis Brown (so they can have hardly disliked the 'pitch', as Ms Johnson puts it) and a decade before I met my wife (so she can hardly appear in it). Actually. I don't appear in it, either. It's fiction. She's right that Pan published some of my early books (both fiction and non-fiction) but Penguin published non-fiction, not fiction.
Those were by no means the only factual errors, but the omissions are as revealing. For example, why did she fail to mention that, apart from having sold two million in the UK, my books have been published in 22 languages by publishers abroad? Why miss out the fact that one of my self-published novels (Mrs Caldicot's Cabbage War) was recently made into a successful feature film? Why did she forget to mention that my books have appeared in the Sunday Times bestseller lists? Why mention that I've written for the Sun and the People but forget to mention that I have also written numerous articles for her beloved Daily Telegraph and Sunday Telegraph? (Actually, I've written for The Spectator too.)
Perhaps these easily checked facts didn't suit her purpose — though I'm not quite sure what her purpose was.
Vernon Coleman
Barnstaple, Devon
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