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| Rupert Smith | |||||
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FICTION
Find out more about my novels and short stories by clicking on the covers below. For more information about my alter ego James Lear click here.
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I Must Confess (Hamish Hamilton 1998, Cleis Press 2007)
My first novel is a satire on showbiz biographies, written after years of interviewing
celebrities for Time Out and Radio Times. The character of Marc LeJeune, the self-mythologising,
self-deluding hero, was an amalgam of hundreds of stars from the 60s onwards who all believed
that they had basically invented the wheel, and been denied their proper credit.
Only one critic, the ever-perceptive Peter Burton, noticed that I Must Confess owed an
enormous debt to Patrick Dennis’s Little Me, one of my all-time favourite books.
The publication of I Must Confess was helped enormously by Jonathan Coe,
who provided a generous cover blurb which I still like to quote at every opportunity.
"Rupert Smith offers us nothing less than a comic history of British popular culture,
from 1960s pop fashions through to the soaps and game shows with which we anaesthetize
ourselves today. His eye and ear are acute, his parodies lethally accurate."
What the critics said:
"Hugely ambitious and deliciously witty." Paul Burston, Time Out.
"Hilarious showbiz satire ... A riotous romp." Christina Patterson, Observer.
"Lethally accurate, spitefully funny and occasionally genuinely chilling." Charles Spencer, Sunday Telegraph.
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