Who any more reads Neville Shute, born a hundred years ago this week? Fame-struck writers of the 1990s would do well to bear in mind the fickleness of fashion and how it can obliterate the reputation, even the name, of a novelist as popular as Shute was in his day.
Indeed, when I think back to my childhood, I recall Shute's books among a range of titles on my father's shelf: A Town Like Alice, Blaze at Noon, The Stars Look Down, Tobacco Road, The Green Hat, Lost Horizon, The Constant Nymph, The Fourers, A Breeze of Morning, Peter Abelard, Precious Bane.
All of these were best-sellers in their day, and their authors enjoyed considerable fame, some of them for decades: Shute, Ernest K. Gann, A.J. Cronin, Erskine Caldwell, Michael Arlen, James Hilton, Margaret Kennedy, A.E.W. Mason, Charles Morgan, Helen Waddell, Mary Webb.
And all of them, in their different ways, were good writers, with a sure grasp of character and plot and a solid prose style that - unlike much of today's popular fiction - didn't make the reader wince. And the fact that none of them was esteemed by the critical establishment or taught in the academies doesn't take away from their modest but undeniable achievement, which was to give pleasure to a wide public that was literate if not literary.
Shute, who gave such pleasure, was born in Norway and educated at Oxford. Having served in both world wars, he worked as an aircraft engineer in England before becoming managing director of an aeroplane factory - his 1948 novel, No Highway, draws on these experiences and manages a fair degree of suspense from such an unlikely subject as metal fatigue.
His first novel was published in 1926, with many more to follow before his death in 1960. A Town Like Alice (1949), which concerned women prisoners in Japanese-occupied Malaysia, was his best-known book, and it made a decent 1956 film with Virginia McKenna and Peter Finch (and also had its basic plot lifted for the TV series, Tenko), but On the Beach (1957) was quite striking, too - even if its atomic-radiation scenario (set in Australia, where Shute finally settled) was a bit too earnest and messagy in its execution for its own good.
Now he's unread, along with Ernest K. Gann, A.J. Cronin, Margaret Kennedy and the others mentioned above. Will the same fate happen to John Grisham, Wilbur Smith, Danielle Steel, Sidney Sheldon, Tom Clancy and the rest of today's best-selling novelists? Time, that final and unkindest of arbiters, will tell.
The new young Irish writers collected in the anthology Shenanigans, published by Sceptre/Lir and launched in Maguire's of Burgh Quay on Tuesday night, will hardly be worrying about that - at this early stage, the aim of most of them is simply to be read and, with a bit of luck, noticed.
There are a few well-known names here - Mike McCormack, Lana Citron, Colum McCann - but the majority of the nineteen fiction-writers have still to make an impact.
I hope they do so, but I'm a bit bemused about the claims made in the press release that accompanies the anthology. These new writers, it trumpets, "don't wallow in slums or moan about emigration" (hmmm, wonder who's been got at there). "The new school has learnt more from the bizarre, sometimes sadistic humour of Joyce and Beckett than the intervening doom merchants who built careers on painting Ireland as a land of woe. There are alien abductions, lunatic politicians, gay clubs and gangsters rather than famine, drunken priests and vengeful farmers."
Yes, yes, yes, but is that necessarily a good thing? Decide for yourself by forking out a modest 6.99 for Shenanigans, which is edited by Sarah Champion, who is already responsible for the anthologies Disco Biscuits and Disco 2000, and Donal Scannell, who runs Dublin's Stereophonic and Quadrophonic club nights and record labels.
Mind you, I'm still recovering from a sentence in Donal's introduction: "There is no young literati in Ireland, they don't hang out, do lunches, write newspaper columns about who they sniff what with." Even when I translate this into English, I'm not sure what it means. Next time I'm clubbing I must ask Donal.
Denis Sampson's Brian Moore: The Chameleon Novelist (Marino), which was published only a couple of months before the novelist's death, has already been warmly reviewed in these pages, so I'll do no more here than simply add my own praise of a scrupulously researched and absorbingly written book.
Now another biography is on the way, this time from Patricia Craig. The Independent on Sunday last weekend ran a story on it, breathlessly claiming as news that Moore "would never have written any of his fiction but for failing a maths exam, a posthumous biography will reveal. The Irish writer considered himself a failure as a young man because he could not pass the exam required to gain a place at Queen's University, Belfast."
This information would be even more newsworthy if it wasn't already well documented in the third chapter of Denis Sampson's book.