Code 17 by Francis Booth BLOG TOUR #Code17 #FrancisBooth *Ten Things About Me*

BANG. . . 
Jonty spins round, holding on to the church gate, trying to stay upright. He looks across at me, startled. 
BANG. . .BANG. . . 
Jonty crumples to the ground. . . I jump out of the Bentley and run over to him as fast as I can manage in my wedding dress. . . Jonty is bleeding from the head, the chest and the tummy. . . The last words he says to me before he dies are ‘Code 17.’ . . . . 

Code 17 by Francis Booth was published in March 2019.  As part of the #RandomThingsTours Blog Tour, I'm delighted to share a special 'Ten Things About Me' from the author here today on Random Things.

Francis Booth talks about the idea for Code 17 

Code 17 was originally a musical idea. 
Ten years ago I made an album that paid homage to the theme music of 1960s British TV spy series like The Man from UNCLE, The Baron and Department S, and to films like Modesty Blaise and The Ipcress File. The music on the album was from an imaginary TV series called Code 17, featuring the glamorous art dealer/spy Lady Laura Summers. 
She was imagined as a cross between Sharron Macready of The Champions, Emma Peel of The Avengers and Lady Penelope Creighton-Ward of Thunderbirds, though none of these women was the lead character. 
Ten years later I thought I could make a novel out of Code 17 and Lady Laura, set in the Swinging London of 1967. 
I kept to the format of a twelve-episode TV series and tried to imagine each chapter as a fast-moving thirty minute episode, split into short scenes.
I hope you can imagine it that way too. 
You can hear the music at mixcloud.com/planckmusic/code-17

Ten (Literary) Things About author Francis Booth 

1. My favourite book is Maldoror by Lautréamont. 

2. My favourite book title is By Grand Central Station I Sat Down and Wept by Elizabeth Smart. 

3. My favourite literary character is Frankie Addams from The Member of the Wedding by Carson McCullers.

4. My favourite literary character name is Sabbath Lily Hawks from Wise Blood by Flannery O'Connor.

5. My favourite literary villain is Steerpike from Mervyn Peake’s Titus Groan series.

6. My favourite author name is China Miéville (it’s his real name). 

7. My favourite literary quote is: ‘At this point the narrator inserted a tobacco-stained finger into the narrative, thus causing a lacuna in the palimpsest.’ From At Swim-Two-Birds by Flann O'Brien. 

8. My favourite erotic novel is The Fermata by Nicholson Baker. 

9. My favourite novelist named Murakami is Ryu Murakami. 

10. My favourite Nobel Prize winning novelist is Elfriede Jelinek

Francis Booth’s novels are all available as eBooks and paperbacks on Amazon. They include:
· The Watchers series of Young Adult fantasy novels: The Charlotte Strain and The January Legacy;
· The Nevermore novel sequence Nevermore, Evermore, Gone Before and Nothing More, a series of dark revenge tragedies;
· Code 17, a fast-paced, female-led thriller set in the art world of Swinging Sixties London.
Francis is also the author of several academic books on modern literature and culture, also available on Amazon:
· Amongst Those Left: the British Experimental Novel 1940-1960 (to be published by Dalkey Archive Press);
· Everybody I Can Think of Ever: Meetings That Made the Avant-Garde;
· Girls in Bloom: Coming of Age in the Mid Twentieth Century Woman’s Novel;
· Text Acts: Twentieth Century Literary Eroticism;
· Comrades in Art: Revolutionary Art in America 1926-1938.

As a translator, Francis Booth has published English versions of the Marionette Plays of Maurice Maeterlinck and produced libretti adapted from Akutagawa, Strindberg and early Sanskrit and Buddhist texts, several of which have been set to music and recorded.

Francis also produces music under the name Tektonix, all of which is on YouTube and at mixcloud.com/planckmusic. 
He is currently at work on Code 17.1, the sequel to Code 17.