Each time I say to friends that I never read a line, let alone, a book by James Hadley Chase, I get a look a kook would get.
I never read one.
Why?
I don’t know. I’m probably a bit off-the-wall or had some strong, unexplainable immunity to the contagion his books were. The latter was more likely, as almost all my friends of that era read him. Hungrily. There were those who only made attempts, really exaggerated, to appear like they read him.
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At holiday-time coaching classes, which we called summer school, friends rhapsodized about Chase and went about with his books. I think doing so made them feel hip, especially as many sought to catch the eyes of the girls, who were largely into stuff like Mills and Boon or Betty and Veronica published by Archie Comics.
Next to Chase’s books as the rage in my orbit were Nick Carter’s. I read none. I didn’t even try despite my friends’ attempts to tell me thrilling stories from the ones they read. Of course, I read other things. Pacesetters were to my taste. I binged on comics, which made agemates view me as a little less developed. It was a habit I didn’t shed until my university days. Some confession: We stole comics as primary school kids from some importer called Kunle Abdul, whose outfit was named News of the World and was beside my primary school.
Oluyomi Sowemimo, Dele Oketoki, answer your names.
At other times, we went on his waste heap to pick discarded ones. Abdul was a very big importer of foreign newspapers, magazines and comics.
To my mind, comics taught how to use words – in very lively, less serious ways.
I’m not given to too much seriousness and it wasn’t until much later in life that I could tolerate serious writing, which came across as frigid. I read Reader’s Digest because my dad bought and insisted I must read, but it offered a bit of tedium. The racier, the better it is for me.
I read SHOOT, MATCH, World Soccer and Football Monthly. They were to my taste. The language, especially that of World Soccer’s Brian Glanville, was fizzy, not dead serious like in Reader’s Digest. There was something I found drearier than Reader’s Digest. It was a monthly mag, Soviet, that my dad forced me to read.
He was aligned, somewhat, to socialism. I didn’t give a toss and found the writing almost funereal.
In between, I discovered Irvin Wallace via “The Fan Club”, Jacqueline Susan via “Valley of the Dolls”, Sidney Sheldon via “The Other Side of Midnight” and the goddess, Jackie Collins, whose writing had what I consider real personality.
Real zip.
Delightful wackiness. Intoxicating nonchalance.
Those authors, Jackie in particular, were perhaps responsible for making me regard the earliest actual literary works to which I got exposed as something like the expectoration of an ill tramp.
That’s an excuse, not a reason. There were kids who gorged themselves on the same or similar authors as I did and smashed literature, probably wrote poetry and whatever else is available. I was and still am a philistine.
**Johnson, a journalist and writer, first published this on his Facebook page
