Liars' League

Mr Cromerty of Boston by Richard Smyth

Mr Cromerty of Boston MP3   Full podcast here: (3rd story)   Bonus Xmas podcast story here!

Read by David Mildon 

Outside, a cold, clear evening, men going about bundled in woollens, steam rising from a rubble of horse manure in the road, the air steeped in stovesmoke – a hard frost in the night mail, if I am any judge. Inside, a table by a fire, ink and a pen, two heaps of paper, a mirror trimmed with a little holly. A glass on the table beside the paper, and in it a measure of bourbon whisky.

Between them the fire and the whisky almost keep the cold at bay.

It’s queer to think that before last spring I had barely ever written a word (aside from the dry documentation I assembled, the legal letters I drafted, the contracts and covenants I compiled in my work at at the real-estate office). Oh, as a young man I had attempted poetry, awful stuff, as young men do, but I always knew I had no aptitude for it, and soon gave it up. And then in more recent years I never seemed to have the time.

Now – tonight, last night, the night before that, a string of nights and days reaching back into darkness – time seems to be all that I have.     

Santa: Judgement Day by Dennis Zaslona

Santa - Judgement Day     Full podcast here: (5th story)       Bonus Christmas podcast story here!

Read by Rich Keeble

‘Merry Christmas, motherf**kers. Here I co-ome!’

The wind ripped away Square Jaw’s yell as he dived from the stealth bomber and into the belly of the Mexican night sky. Two thousand feet below, the lake was a silver puddle, a second moon. S.J. hugged his Takana sniper rifle tighter to his chest. He was diving into the moon, a Christmas eve angel of death. A Wenceslas warrior. ‘Yeeeeha!’

At eight hundred feet above the villa where Hector Cabello and his cartel leaders were gathered, he pulled the release ring. But before the canopy fully opened, his feet smashed into something solid. His knees jammed into his chest and he was slammed onto on his back.

For a moment he just lay looking up at the stars while he caught his breath. His legs were bent so far over his head that his knees were touching his ears. The moon swayed as the platform, or whatever it was he had landed on, gently rocked. Absurdly, he thought he could hear the snort of animals and the tinkle of bells.

Christman's Present by Lauren Van Schaik

Christman's Present MP3

Read by Lois Tucker

Inside, Christman’s department store was shimmering and the same, smelling of wax-polish and tinsel. I wasn’t sure why I’d brought Sinclair here – a drunken impulse, maybe – but I’d always loved it: the chill marble of the first floor, how my pumps clinked on it like teacups. How the glass cabinets glimmered and mirrored into forever. The necklaces, draped on velvet hillsides like the Hollywoodland sign; the hundreds of gloves folded in prayer. I used to think they got Christmas from this place. At least my Christmas morning stockings from Aunt Mill always came in the same battered Christman’s box. But the stockings, always worsted and thick, not silk, were never from here; I’d never known the dress that was, that had come in that box when it was new.

I’d only been to Christman’s for the first time with Inez, when we were thirteen. I remembered it as clear as today. She’d bought a broderie blouse with money her parents had given her. The blouse was beautiful, and cool as a dollop of sour cream on the baked potatoes we ate in the third floor café afterward, tucked among her boxes. The whole time, I hadn’t known where to put my hands.

Gluten Tolerant by Mike Clarke

Gluten Tolerant MP3

Read by Amy Neilson Smith

‘Fuck you, Jack. Merry Christmas.’ That’s what I should have said.

Instead I mutter ‘See you later, then – at home’ with a calculated passive-aggressive cutting edge. It’ll be wasted on the pissed-up arsehole.

We’re in Bermondsey, last Friday before Christmas. Done the Beer Mile. Again. With mates – mostly Jack’s. You know the place – a mile-long strip of craft breweries under the railway arches? If you’re too basic to know it then you’ll never work for my PR agency.

Jack swears virtually all his social media deals are sealed here over a pint of craft IPA on a Friday afternoon. All free-range and fair enough. But the evenings inevitably end with contracts celebrated at someone’s new-build flat in Rotherhithe or Limehouse – the boys in a daze of drugs and videogames and their bored girlfriends bonding over competitive stories of sex and shoes.

Not this time.

The Man Who Brought Gold by Mark Sadler

The Man Who Brought Gold MP3

Read by Sophie Cartman

From a seam of molten gold, on the wounded bed of the Adriatic Sea, a curl of magma, drawn from the earth on a serpentine current, was warped into a bottom-heavy S-shape. It hardened as it cooled on a rising stream of bubbles; breaking the surface a few minutes after it formed, where it assumed the bobbing silhouette of a swan in profile. By late afternoon it had entered the Venetian lagoon, nudging itself unnoticed along the battered walls of the interior canals that reflected murky cross-sections of buildings, garnished with Christmas lights.

A pair of large hands, the colour of mahogany, the flesh welted with buried shrapnel, reached down, raising it from the channel, water pouring from the honeycombed rock.

The man's name was Melko. The object that he held was called a lava swan. He had lived in the city long enough to know that the people considered them lucky and displayed them in the windows of their homes and businesses. He left it leaning upright against the green door of Della Cava, a seaport vintner that traded medicinal wine, made from salt grape. Wiping his scarred palms on his trousers, he ambled across the plaza towards a pair of towering double doors made from dulled, embossed metal, with a smaller wicket gate for pedestrians inset at the bottom.

My favourite Christmas story: Mike Clarke on Posy Simmonds's "Cassandra Darke"

My Christmas story is both very new and very old.

It’s new because the book, Cassandra Darke by Posy Simmonds, was only published on 1^st November this year (sorry, only a few sample pages can be found online). It’s old because it’s inspired by (if not a faithful reworking of) the classic seasonal story, Charles Dickens’s A Christmas Carol.

Cassandra Darke is also a graphic novel. Actually, novel might be pushing it a little as, at under 100 pages, it can be read in the time it would take a long short story. But it is told mostly with pictures – and wonderful ones they are too.

Cassandra herself is a curmudgeon on a par with Ebenezer Scrooge – a wealthy septuagenarian West London art gallery owner. She’s as mean towards others as Dickens's protagonist, but her solitary Sloane Square existence is considerably more indulgent – she has a cook (whom she reprimands for being “heavy handed with the dill”) and polishes off bottles of Chateau Haut Brion during weekday dinners.

My Favourite Seasonal Story: Rachel Karyo on Shelley Jackson's "Snow"

Rachel Karyo writes: This short story is written in snow, one or two words at a time, photographed, and then published on Instagram. Shelley Jackson has been writing “Snow” (now in its twelfth sentence) since 2014. The story is still in progress.

William H. Gass writes that when we read works by authors such as Kafka, Beckett, Barth, and Borges, it’s “as if we’d stepped into a two-pound puddle of mirror glass and come out as wet as Alice.” This is how it feels to read a Shelley Jackson short story.

Her prose is graceful, playful, inventive, and poetic. An example: “There are snows made of clock faces and circular slide rules, of maps to undiscovered countries, of the shattered breath clouds of those who have cried out for help unheard on a clear winter day.” I love the beautiful strangeness of “shattered breath clouds,” the paradox of the map, those unexpected, evocative, analogue objects, and the music of the sentence, its consonance and repetition.

My Favourite Christmas Story: Mark Sadler on Saki's (H. H. Munro's) "Reginald on Christmas Presents"

Reginald, the narrator of this short meditation on unwanted seasonal gifts, wastes absolutely no time at all in stating that he does not want a "George, Prince of Wales" Prayer-book as a Christmas present. In this opening sentence Saki uncannily identifies a trend that has endured for over a century since the story was first published. The author was a casualty of the battle of Ancre in 1916, where he fell prey to a sniper's bullet, and sadly did not live to see the better world that followed the war, where no-one would ever think of gifting a loved one a copy of a "George, Prince of Wales" Prayer-book without being expressly asked to do so.

Equally enduring is Reginald's account of the dread that accompanies the arrival of a tie from a well-meaning, country-dwelling, female relative - “some spotted horror that you could only wear in secret or in Tottenham Court Road”. As with the "George, Prince of Wales" Prayer-book, the undesirable nature of such a gift is as relevant in 2018 as it was when these words were first committed to paper.

Christmas event: NAUGHTY & NICE at The Albany on Tue Dec 11th

We made our list, we checked it twice ... and here are the winning stories which were read at our tinsel-tastic Christmas show NAUGHTY & NICE (click for Facebook event) on Tuesday December 11th, downstairs at The Albany, Great Portland Street. We had seasonal shoplifting, sexy sourdough, kidnapped presents, one VERY naughty little girl and what happens when Santa meets the Special Forces ...

UPDATE: All the videos from the night are now up on our Naughty & Nice YouTube playlist and the texts and podcast will be online very soon. 

WINNING STORIES for NAUGHTY & NICE

Christman's Present by Lauren van Schaik NEW AUTHOR - read by Lois Tucker

 

Santa: Judgement Day by Dennis Zaslona NEW AUTHOR - read by Rich Keeble

    

Mr Cromerty of Boston by Richard Smyth - read by David Mildon

 

The Man who brought Gold by Mark Sadler - read by Sophie Cartman

 

Gluten Tolerant by Mike Clarke - read by Amy Neilson Smith
 

As usual, doors open at 7pm for a 7.30 start and tickets are £5 on the door (cash only, sorry, but there is a cashpoint across the street). Drinks and food will be available at the bar, though there are also free sweets and the infamous interval quiz features fabulously festive books to be won! There's no pre-booking, but tables for four or more can be reserved by calling 07808 939535.

The venue is the downstairs bar at:

The Albany
240 Great Portland Street
London W1W 5QU

St John's, 23rd December - Forgiveness by Anna Savory

St John's - Forgiveness MP3

Read by Paul Clarke

Welcome. Welcome, everyone, to St John's. And, goodness, look at you all! It’s heartening, really it is, to see so many faces here tonight. If there’s one thing I’ve realised in the past few weeks it’s that there’s nothing like Christmas to wake that latent religious urge, which in many of you has lain dormant at all other points in the year. Why, only in September I was stood in the Bishop’s living room expressing doubts about our dwindling congregation, and what did he tell me? He told me to have a little faith.

‘Don’t worry, David,’ he said, like the Lord addressing Thomas ‘Don’t fear. Just you wait until midnight fucking mass, it’s like the bloody Hammersmith Apollo.’ Famously obscene our Bishop, one of his many charming quirks. But indeed, how right he was! Attendance tonight is gratifying and I can only assume it signals a sea-change in the spiritual direction of this parish, which I trust will continue long, long into the new year.

It Never Snows at Christmas by Peter Higgins

It Never Snows at Christmas MP3

Read by Gloria Sanders

‘Every year, she comes, and every year it’s the same.  “Have you been on holiday, Laura?”  “Yes. Greece, actually.”  “Greece?  Really?”.’

‘Esme.’

‘“Oh, and I’ve brought you a bottle of Greek wine.”  “Oh, Laura, you shouldn’t have.”’

‘Phoebe!’

‘It tastes like wee.’

‘How would you know?’

‘Girls, please stop bickering, please.  Greek wine does not taste like wee.’

Flitter by Emma Hutton

Flitter MP3

Read by Annalie Wilson

Maggie didn’t think the snowman would punch back. The others hadn’t. Their heads had just rolled off and landed with a thud that made her hate the night a little less. But he landed a hook on the jaw that sent her body to the ground.  

‘Weren’t expecting that, were you?’

‘Jesus!’ 

‘Nope. Not Jesus.’

She stared up at two lumps of coal and clicked her jaw back into place.

Strange Heart by Jean Rover

Strange Heart MP3

Read by Max Berendt

For the most part, Dave kept his mother in his closet except on her birthday when he would set her on the fireplace mantel so she could get some sun.

Now Miriam, his sister, was going to spoil all that.

For Dave, a mild-mannered, bespectacled high school history teacher, life was going along at an even pace. Then, he met Sharon. Last month, he turned forty and planned to marry her in December.

That’s when Miriam had jumped in. “It’s time,” she announced in her matter-of-fact way via a telephone call from her condo in the Deep South. “No bride in her right mind wants her mother-in-law’s ashes hanging around, especially at Christmas.”

The Corollary Museum by Joel Blackledge

The Corollary Museum MP3

Read by Louisa Gummer (MVP Acting, 2017)

Welcome. Gather round. Gather round, please. Good. Ahem.

If one person were to spend one minute looking at each item in the British Museum’s permanent collection, it would require a visit of 15 uninterrupted years. To do the same in the labyrinthine halls of The Corollary Museum would take almost a century.

But don’t worry - today I will show you just some of the Museum’s catalogue. Please stay together and don’t touch the items. If you have a question then please speak loudly, I’m older than I look.

The Museum was founded by Porfirio Maldonado Jambrina, to house the private collection of objects he acquired on his extraordinary travels. How can one man have collected so much?

Christmas event: SACRED & PROFANE (and post-show Xmas party!) Tuesday 5th December at The Wheatsheaf, Rathbone Place

From swearing vicars to Yuletide arson, via a museum of sacred & profane marvels, awkward Christmas visits and belligerent snowmen, our Christmas event at The Wheatsheaf is a mouthwatering selection box of short story goodness! Click here for the Facebook event & let us know if we'll see you there.

WINNING STORIES for SACRED & PROFANE

Strange Heart by Jean Rover *NEW AUTHOR* 

Flitter by Emma Hutton *NEW AUTHOR*

Forgiveness by Anna Savory

The Corollary Museum by Joel Blackledge 

It Never Snows at Christmas by Peter Higgins

Plus!
- Mince pies!
- Crackers!
- A stockingful of festive fiction to win in our Christmas book quiz!

Because the Wheatsheaf is more intimate than our usual venue, tickets are STRICTLY LIMITED to 40 and cost £10 (which, please note,  includes a complimentary glass of prosecco). As usual, actors & authors who have been featured in 2017 get to drink for free, so it's well worth the price of admission if you are one of those ...

 

Tickets can be bought in cash on the door (if there are any left) or, preferably, in advance by donating £10 (or £20 for 2 tickets, etc.) via the Paypal Donate button on the right ------> and including under "add a note" your name and the number of tickets you require, eg NICHOLAS CLAUS, 2 TICKETS.

 

NB individual seating is first come first served - so best to get there a bit ahead of time if you want a good seat. (Accessibility details: access to the upstairs bar is via stairs - there's no lift, alas.)

 

PLEASE NOTE CHANGE OF VENUE FOR DECEMBER ONLY!

 

The Christmas venue is upstairs at:

The Wheatsheaf
25 Rathbone Place
London W1T 1JB

Nearest tubes Tottenham Court Road (5 min - Central/Northern lines), then Goodge Street (7 min - Northern Line)

The Gift by Michael Mann

Read by Most Valuable Player (Acting) 2016, Jim Cogan (Full podcast here)

Snowmen, with top hats, making jazz hands. 

Is this really what Christmas has come to?  The snowmen seem to think so.  Their black button-eyes are grinning, and they’re practically crawling all over the wrapping paper.

I look at the paper again.  It’s cheap, but folded precisely.  The sellotape is smudgeless and cut with scissors.  I know who did this.  There’s only one person this neat in my family. 

But I don’t look up.  Instead, I feign ignorance and weigh it in my hands. Rule number one of Secret Santa: stretch out the suspense.  So I shake it, I “hmmm” and I squeeze it in my fingers.  It’s firm but gives slightly.  A book of some sort, but thin and almost the length of my arm. Too big to sit on any respectable coffee table that I know of. 

I use my nails and rip a thin, tapering slit.  It’s barely off when my brother says, “I know what it is.”

Christmas Star by Sherry Morris

Read by Josie Charles (Full podcast here)

‘I wouldn’t like to mention this,’ Mrs Henderson from next door said to my mom, ‘but your Christmas decorations are a bit too…non-standard this year. I’m not sure the neighbourhood appreciates it.’ It was clear the nosy busy-body did like mentioning it, couldn’t wait, in fact, and had most likely been sitting at the window for some time, twitching the curtains back and forth in anticipation of Mom’s arrival. She hadn’t even reached the house when Mrs Henderson pounced.

‘Non-standard?’ Mom said and looked around the yard. There was a lot going on: six Santas, several sets of reindeer, rows of candy canes, armies of elves, circles of snowmen, plus two full-sized inflatable snow globes containing waddling penguins. There was even a nativity set complete with wise men and camels, though we weren’t particularly religious. ‘It’s what Jesus would do,’ my brother Kenny said.

The Gospel According to St Hamleys the Elf by Alan Graham

Read by Paul Clarke (Full podcast here)

In the beginning there was the Word. And the word was Santa.

And Santa stared out into the dark, cold void and bellowed “Let There Be Christmas”, and there was.

And on the first day of Christmas, Santa created the Heavens, the Earth and “Hungry, Hungry Hippos”, the Greatest of All the Christmas Presents.

And on the second day He created us Elves, to serve Him. Then he fashioned the North Pole as a place for us to live. Which was kind and mighty of Him. Even if the place was a bit cold.

On the third day He created Toys, and also Parents to be the giver of Toys. And those first parents, in gratitude at their creation, invented giant barrels of Sherry to thank the Mighty Santa.

The fourth day, sadly, was a write-off because the Mighty Santa had the mother of all hangovers.

Tigg Montague's Ponzi Pyramid Scheme by Liam Hogan

Read by Clive Greenwood

He counted the stack of coins on his desk, sorting them as he did. The larger piles were a dull brown, some tinged with green: copper farthings, halfpennies, and pennies; all well used. Of silver coins there were few, of half-crowns there was but one. Carefully, he noted the total in his ledger and then, leaning back, rubbed a bony hand across his chin and sighed. It was going to be a thin Christmas.

The chests that had taken so long to fill had taken a far shorter time to empty. True, the contents were technically out on loan and the repayment of even a small part would make him financially assured. But that wasn't the way it worked: what little came back went straight out again, the need far greater than his reserves. As for interest; none of the poor he lent to were in a position to pay even a penny in the pound. There was, it seemed, no profit in being good. Ebenezer Scrooge had a serious cash flow problem.

Christmas with the In-Laws by Quintin Forrest

Read by Robert Welling (Full podcast here)

In the days leading up to the announcement, I found myself watching a lot of cartoons. The dilemma of the Roadrunner; what would Wile E Coyote do, if he ever caught the bird? What would give his life meaning, without the chase? I guess this is something a lot of chaps think about. No more death traps or explosions.

Thoughts of an idle man, though. By this point in our relationship, it was no secret to the UK public that Delilah and I were to be married in June. That this would be the next royal wedding, England flags all over the shop, and there was nothing I could do. That even if I'd run off to Bolivia, or somewhere with no extradition treaty, it would be no escape from my obligations to Delilah, and her son, little Elton.