J Nash

School stories are exc, but you have to know your way around. For example, if anyone recommends something who also says "Tom Brown's Schooldays is a classic," push them into a boating-lake because that book is, in fact, a suet-ily unreadable squawking religious polemic with a cast of gleaming simpertons you want to bounce the end of a flexible stick off.* It may be the first ever recognisable school tale, but that doesn't stop it being spongey rubbish; it ends with nobly postured Tom, now a purposeful manly man, weeping with gratitude for the lessons of his youth over the grave of his fierce yet kindly headmaster, and you can pretty much guess the rest backwards from there.

(It still receives a million points though, because without T Brown's Schooldays we'd never have had Flashman. CRIB FOR NEW BUGS: G Macdonald Fraser, famous author, was so taken with the only char in the book to display any life, cowardly bully Flashman, that he's written (so far) eleven fantastically great adventures of Flashman's later life where he becomes the Empire's foremost war hero despite being exactly the same scaredy-cat wrongdoer. In a particularly cherishable story Flashy meets his old schoolchums who are now fine, upstanding officer types; they're all killed off totally pointlessly in a brutal border skirmish while Flash legs it out the back, subsequently receiving a medal because there's no one left to dispute his version of events.)

The chap instead you'll be wanting to saunter towards is Charles Hamilton, of whom you will not have heard. He wrote for the weekly school-story papers in the early part of the 20th century, crashing through ripping yarns ish in, ish out. He's widely regarded as the most prolific author of all time, knocking out (at a conservative estimate; complete records do not exist) one hundred million words over a sixty-plus year career - a minimum of 25,000 published words a week for his entire working life, which was just about all of it. The bloke had more pen names than most authors' total quota of sentences (often writing entire issues as half a dozen different people, week after week; all as work-for-hire for a company who later did him right over. Tch) and invented out of nothing a planet of style that's easily the equal in imagination and internal consistency of those endless interchangeable award-winning sci-fi wiz-orc doorstops.

(Ol' Charles's world, the BRITAIN'S BRITON'S rolling-heathland public school of the 1900s, with its cast of strong character types, language as valid a dialect as any of the isle's official, changing seasons but unadvancing years, and thrilling adventure and topping entertainment around every corner, shot through with an unintruding morality, was entirely his own creation, unencumbered by disappointing reality. He's streets ahead of his rivals, most of whom, splendidly, were inspired to take up writing by Chas's work, and has a better eye than most to foreigners, with several rounded overseas chars alongside the roster of sinister exotics and comedy fallabouts. There's even a cheerful tone to his urchin besniffery. And this is all large-cast multiple-plotline character-driven stuff, cleverer than you'd at first imagine; in a typical storyline, a well-established bully agonisingly redeems himself over five years of episodes.)

Most famously, as Frank Richards, The Hamster wrote umpteen Greyfriars stories in The Magnet about Billy Bunter, a horrible character who wrecks all those tales; the squeaking oaf is utterly meritless, background comedy relief tragically promoted to starring role by positive box-office response. Better by nautical miles are the St Jim's tales (written as Martin Clifford), which have sharper characters, a tighter group dynamic, a better twit in Arthur Augustus "Cwikey!" D'Arcy, and, tellingly, a Bunter analogue who's correctly kept at arm's length, popping up now and then solely as an eavesdropping catalyst or comedy punchbag. It's these I recommend as solid, rattling yarns (hang on - solid, rattling - never mind, press on, nobody noticed); and, hurrahably, a deranged publisher named Howard Baker decided in the 60s to reprint as many school papers in hardback annuals as he could before he died, which turned out to be a right old chunk of them.

They regularly turn up fairly cheaply in second-hand bookshops and it's the The Gem editions you ought to look out (usually called Tom Merry's Something; T Merry being the star of the paper, obv). By the mischance of everyone wanting Bunter instead (the clots) there are only about 20 Gem books all told; I'm still missing a few. (ALERT: the original publisher used "substitute" writers now and then, these deceptively appearing under Chas's house names. I think this happened only for the Greyfriars set, but it's worth checking the first page of any book for a notice; H Baker reprinted everything for completism, but assiduously marked up the non-Chas entries. They're all rubbish.)

Excellently, when double-checking this next bit (which was going to be a rapid, approving glance at C Hamilton's strenuous anonymity, which involved, for example, writing an autobiography that began with him already aged 17 and just made up a whole lot of things he knew would never be challenged because everybody was safely dead) I discovered there's been a flurry of investigative research by fans over the last few yonks, so you can read all about him elsewhere. The best thing is that Chas kept writing not only for the love of it but because he frequently found himself short of funds: whenever this kindly old bloke, the supreme storyteller of his generation, yarn-spinning chum to urchins the world over, who lived super-quietly in a rose-bedecked clifftop cottage, had cash in the bank, he'd hare over to Monte Carlo and blue the lot in the casinos. I laughed for 7.2 minutes.

All the parts of Charles Hamilton: I salute you.

G Willans' and R Searle's Molesworth books are an entirely different sort of thing, but equally trem exc, as any fule kno.