We’re lucky enough to have a visitor to the caves this week, in the form of Jamie Rix, author of… well, of too many books to list here. Check out the link at the bottom of this post for more info.

Jamie has been shortlisted for this year’s Roald Dahl Funny Prize, where he is up against – among others – our very own Sorrel Anderson. I managed to convince Sorrel not to attack Jamie with her slop bucket, long enough for him to write us this post.

A Message from Jamie Rix

Big week this week. My latest book The Incredible Luck of Alfie Pluck has been shortlisted for the Roald Dahl Funny Prize. This was a competition set up by Michael Rosen in 2008 to celebrate that much ignored book – the funny one! You know, the one with a pair of pants on the cover, or (if you’re Alistair Fury) the one which contains instructions on how to take revenge on your big brother using only a hungry piranha fish and your brother’s todger.

I have discovered during the twenty years I’ve been writing jokes for several publishers that finding an editor who ‘gets you’ is extremely hard. Generally funny books are looked down on as something a bit grubby. I heard Daisy Goodwin on Radio 4 this morning saying this: “Just because a book is not about a serious issue doesn’t mean the author isn’t a serious writer.”

Sometimes, from the gasps of disbelief that greet my books, it feels as if there are some in the publishing world who think ‘comedy’ is not fit for small-human consumption. Personally, I’ve yet to meet a child who isn’t engaged by a great joke about a constipated granny, or a much-maligned boy called Alistair who gets his own back on his horrid family by freeze-drying dog poo, painting it gold, attaching a ribbon and handing the Golden Medallions out as Christmas presents.

Picture the scene…Three o’clock in the afternoon, the Queen has just opened her mouth, the log fire is roaring and hanging round the families’ necks, the Golden Medallions begin their slow inexorable slide into liquidity.

I think comedy makes books memorable. It brings characters to life, injects a little light relief after some particularly gruesome torture, and has a propensity for cruelty. And I love cruel! Take Alfie Pluck, for example. He eats the luck gene and becomes the luckiest boy in the world. I could have written a perfectly ‘nice’ book about how his life is transformed through great big dollops of good luck, but instead I chose to tell the story of his misfortune. How, once he is recognised as the luckiest boy in the world, everyone wants to steal the luck gene for themselves, and the only way they can get it, is by eating his brain. Yum yum!

It’s what you would expect from the mind of someone who has written over one hundred Grizzly Tales; stories in which bad little children are taught a lesson by something unspeakably horrible happening to them.

A cheat of a girl embraces genetic engineering in order to win The Sleepy Backwater On The Mould fruit and vegetable competition, but creates a super-breed of genetically enhanced weevils that consign her to the compost heap; two brothers fight tooth and nail and start a Nuclear Wart that sucks out their life force and takes the rest of the world with them; a girl who can’t spell enlists the help of a real Queen Bee in a spelling bee and ends up with a hive for a head; a jealous brother has his hair topiarised by fairies with hedge trimmers; and Gorgeous George has her bad blood changed for pickling vinegar!

Actually, that gives me an idea for what I might do to the judges if I don’t win the Funny Prize on Wednesday…

Want to find out more about Jamie? Go check out his Amazon Page to see a selection of his books.

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