Memories, dreams, reflections… it became, above all, a labyrinth. A rabbit hole riddled with rabbit holes

The Saddling Mahmoud project started around the turn of the century as an article, for a business magazine, about the squandering of Britain’s pre-1960s celluloid heritage. It soon became something richer, stranger, more obsessive, definitive.

     It evolved over many months into a book (part meditation, part critique, part compendium of whimsical trivia) about one work in particular, a Hitchcock production released in 1935. Inevitably, as the book grew, it acquired not just structure and form but a narrative voice. In short, it mutated into a fictional quest... and along the way it acquired a protagonist: part cultural archaeologist, part echo detector, he's a seeker driven to discover if anything tangible has survived: a 35mm print of the film perhaps or scenery or props, maybe even a pair of handcuffs.

     And so, inevitably, its narrative drifted ever closer to home: it became a book about someone who has begun to haunt the corridors of hospitals, someone whose circle of friends is falling apart. It’s about love. It’s about the ghost of an affair.

     It became a ghost story (whatever I write turns, inevitably, into a ghost story) in other more important way too. It was, is, the partial biography of a man I’d grown up with, the man who’d suggested to me all those years ago that The 39 Steps was a peerless work of art. He’d seen it so many times, he knew every intimate detail of every set-up.         He helped me to see, really see, though his own eyesight was failing.

Thus my book (let’s call it now, in hindsight, a first draft) became a book about one of the film’s most remarkable characters, Mr Memory. Perhaps indeed it was my fond hope that I was in some small way becoming Mr Memory.

     Memories, dreams, reflections… it became, above all, a labyrinth. A rabbit hole riddled with rabbit holes.

     As a book, it aspired to breathe the same air as Around the Day in Eighty Worlds by Julio Cortázar or Labyrinths by Jorge Luis Borges or The Tattooed Map by Barbara Hodgson or Lights Out for the Territory by Iain Sinclair or The Rings of Saturn by W G Sebald.

     In printed form it attracted the attention of two ideal readers. If this site grants me a third, it has succeeded handsomely…