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Tony Miksak

WORDS ON BOOKS by Tony Miksak for KZYX&Z-FM, 90.7 Philo CA
Airs Sun. January 8, 2006 at 10:55 am, repeated Monday, Jan 9 at 8:30 am

(copyright 2006 Tony Miksak)

Title: Found: John Biggins

(MUSIC UP)  This is Tony Miksak with a few Words on Books.

After years of desultory but dedicated searching I've located the wonderful and long lost English author John Biggins. We've corresponded. I'm happy, and all the people who helped me find him are happy, too.

You may be wondering why I've been searching for him. Here's how I explained it in a previous Words on Books:

"The Two-Headed Eagle." "The Emperor's Coloured Coat." "A Sailor of Austria." "Tomorrow the World." Who could forget these great historical novels by John Biggins and his amusingly intelligent hero Otto Prohaska, Future Hero of the Habsburg Empire?

Almost everyone, apparently.

How COULD a contemporary author, writing a series of spectacularly well-reviewed historical novels published in two countries to great acclaim, disappear so completely that not even Google can find him?

That was a year ago. In December I was busy sweeping spam from my In Box when I stopped short at this message:

"I have just had a letter from the alumni department at my old university, Swansea, telling me that you would like to get in touch with me...

"As you've probably gathered by now, I'm out here in Poland (the old East Prussia...) teaching medical English for three years. I don't know what I can tell you about my books that would be of any use or interest to you, but if there's anything you want to know then please ask away and I shall do my best to answer. I have to warn you however that I am an achingly dull fellow, so if you're expecting Hemingway-style exploits in the Foreign Legion, professional bull-wrestling in Guatemala, alcoholism, drug addiction and bordello-crawling then prepare to be disappointed.

"With best wishes, John Biggins."

Oh the joy of finally exchanging letters with the real John Biggins!

He continued: "The main reason for my not having published anything for over ten years is quite simple: that I was dumped by my UK publisher in 1996 and the US one the following year because my four novels had sold so miserably that they just couldn't go on losing money on them.

"My then-agent asked me some years back, couldn't I just try to be a little more debauched and colourful, for the sake of sales? But I had to refuse.

"The sales figures admit of no self-deception here: the first novel just about earned its advance in the UK (but not in the States) while each of its successors netted even less than the one before it to a point where St. Martin's Press eventually declined to publish "Tomorrow the World" because they couldn't afford to lose any more money on the series. I did write a fifth novel -- not about Austria-Hungary this time -- but the enthusiasm dribbled out of me as it became more and more apparent just how lamentably it would sell if anyone ever published it.

"Of course people said to me, persevere because if you keep at it long enough you'll be appreciated one day. But how can you persevere if you can't even get published? And if you've set sail anyway on a falling tide, with declining readerships, declining adult literacy, a spreading culture of triumphalist ignorance and a book trade dominated...  by a few multiple bookstores who won't look at anything that can't sell a guaranteed 16,000 copies?

"There we are though: the fortunes of war and there's nothing personal about it.
Many far better writers than me are in exactly the same boat - and far worse off in fact since they gave up careers to do it full-time whereas for me it was always a supplementary source of income, carried on in the gaps between technical-writing contracts. But as to writing again, we'll just have to see."

The reading public this year will have a second and perhaps better shot at discovering the work of John Biggins. McBooks Press in New York is republishing two novels: "A Sailor of Austria" and "The Emperor's Coloured Coat."

Biggins' main character, Otto Prohaska, is a naval lieutenant in what one of his mates calls "the most deliciously, gloriously useless fleet the world has ever seen – the Imperial, Royal and Cataleptic Navy of the imperishable, petrified, landlocked Austro-Hungarian Monarchy."

In one memorable scene Prohaska, now a pilot in the Austrian Naval Air Force, crash lands his fragile wooden aeroplane into the Emperor's picnic, that is, the picnic of Franz Ferdinand von Habsburg-Lothringen, Archduke of Osterreich-Este, Heir-Apparent to the Imperial Throne of Austria and the Apostolic Crown of St. Stephen of Hungary.

Now it's up to you to crash the party. Read John Biggins. You will not be disappointed.

(MUSIC UP) You can subscribe to the email version of Words on Books by writing to amiksak@mcn.org. You always can reach me directly at (707) 937-2215.

Notes:

My original WOB on Biggins:
http://www.gallerybooks.com/bkm/wob050313.html

The two McBooks paperbacks:

"A Sailor of Austria" by John Biggins. McBooks Press paperback $16.95. ISBN: 159013107X. Now available. From the publisher: "For Lieutenant Otto Prohaska of the Imperial and Royal Austro-Hungarian Navy, life can be awkward to say the least. As a submarine captain of the largest, almost-landlocked empire in history, Otto faces a host of unlikely circumstances from petrol poisoning to exploding lavatories and an angry dromedary! With clever writing and a wry sense of irony, John Biggins shows us an unlikely empire on the wane and a well-meaning man caught on the brink of World War and the end of an era."

"The Emperor's Coloured Coat" by John Biggins. McBooks Press paperback $16.95. ISBN: 1590131088.Publication Date: May 2006. By the way, Prohaska was flying an Etrich Taube. "Taube" means "pigeon," Biggins explains on page 34. "A monoplane designed by an Austrian called Igo Etrich and notable for the fact that it had wings and a tail quite deliberately shaped like those of a dove, on the grounds (which I must say struck me even at the time as being logically questionable) that, if a bird flew looking like that, then so would an aeroplane."

Read about McBooks Press here:
http://www.mcbooks.com/index.nelson3.html

 

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