‘I see some folk enjoyed South By so much they decided to stick around,’ James McMurtry said from the stage, spotting me in my baseball cap near the front of Austin’s Continental Club, the best music venue I’ve come to know. I was watching saw him perform for the second time in eight days. Indeed, I enjoyed myself so much that I went back a third time on my last Wednesday night out in Austin, to see a double bill of his solo show at the club’s upstairs gallery, followed by a raucous show by Jon Dee Graham and his band downstairs. I wrote about Graham a few months ago (scroll down) and now feels like a good time to write about McMurtry. There’s a big catalogue…

At the end of August I took voluntary redundancy from my Creative Writing lectureship at Nottingham Trent. Lack of teaching commitments meant that I was able to attend the annual Graham Greene festival from the very beginning (last year I dropped in for an afternoon, and heard Greene’s nephew Nick Dennys discuss Greene as a book collector and seller). As longtime readers will know, I have a deep interest in Greene, stretching back to my first term of doing a literature degree, back in 1977, when I read just about all of Greene’s novels during the space of ten weeks. My novel The Pretender features Greene on the cover. I invented a scene where, just before his death, Greene mischievously validates a forgery by my…