Rocking with the king

A rock'n'rollercoaster of a novelist! Stephen King on his Harley. Photograph Eamonn McCabe.

It was the publishing month's hot ticket: the evening Stephen King finally made it back to London. The venue was the spectacular Middle Temple Hall, in the Inns of Court, a lavish setting more familiar to barristers, solicitors and other legal eagles than mere publishing and writing folks.

Now, there are publishing parties and publishing parties. Premiership authors get good champagne and a non-stop march of tasty canapes, while your average first and lower divisions run-of-the-mill scribe has to satisfy himself with publishers footing the bill for lukewarm white wine with crisps and Twiglets in a pub or at the Groucho Club.

Needless to say, Hodder & Stoughton gave Stephen King the top notch treatment, not only good champagne but also live music from the Alabama 3, who actually numbered four musicians. And Stevie even joined them for one song, despite suffering from flu. And what a sight for sore eyes it was to see a posse of publishing executives clapping along to his out of tune effort. But then, the harmonica player in the band happened to be the son of notorious Great Train Robber Bruce Reynolds, so maybe he'd made them an offer they couldn't refuse?

All the junior Hodderettes had put on their party frocks and the occasional literary agent had slipped on her little black dress, but the accent was very much on casual un-chic with King - who released new novel Lisey's Story last month - leading the fashion fray with old jeans and a baggy tee-shirt. You can't take the rock'n'roller out of the man...

Curiously enough few horror writers appeared to be present (or to have been invited), although a full complement of Hodder crime authors were there (Margaret Murphy, Peter Robinson, Meg Gardiner), and the ebullient Martina Cole who had shamefully if proudly kept King off the number one spot last week, alongside an assortment of leading reviewers like Mark Timlin, Barry Forshaw, Stephen Jones, Mark Sanderson, Roz Kaveney, John Dugdale, etc ... It was also nice to see that most of King's previous publishers had come along, including the legendary Bob Tanner and Nick Webb, once of New English Library, where King first made his bow.

And, after King's departure, folk were even seen dancing, a spectacle Middle Temple Hall has surely not witnessed before. What is literary London coming to, I ask you.