Home of The Naughty Stories Series
Born in Poole, Dorset, in 1965, Sedley Proctor grew up in London and was educated in Winchester and Nottingham. In the 1990s, he worked in fringe theatre and was involved in productions of Macbeth and Bertolt Brecht’s In the Jungle of Cities. His own play, Salt Lake Psycho about the notorious murderer, Gary Gilmore was put on at the now defunct Man in the Moon theatre in London, Chelsea. From the mid-nineties until 2013 he lived and worked as a teacher and translator in Southern Italy. In Italy he continued to experiment with his writing, devising an invented dialect, writing a blog satirizing the international politics of the early 2000s, collaborating on a screenplay with French writer, Claude Albanese, and performing his poetry in front of bemused locals and amused ex-pats. Apart from his own books, he writes under the aliases F. M. Frites and M. T. Sands.
October 3 I start my new job with Mr Jaggers. I will describe his office where I spent most of the day copying his notes of one of the cases into a ledger book. In spite of the fact that we are in the heart of the City, there is nothing of the décor and …
Amid the whiplash curves and tangled miseries of the fifth arrondissement Merle espied her. The young lady who came out of the old Louis townhouse was wearing a long black cloak and beret in a becoming shade of green. Her heels clicking on the cobble stone street, Merle followed her with critiquing eyes. If it …
This idea comes from a dream I had on the morning of 12th September, 20-. The date itself is not significant other than the fact I wrote it down on a piece of paper that subsequently ended up in my diary. I woke up thinking of a sketch involving the said title. The idea was …
One day, Xi’s friend, Tai began to tell him about a secret society; Xi was intrigued. “If you like,” said the Tai, “I’ll take you to meet the Master.” “Who is the Master?” “He is the Master of the Wei Society, but you must never call him that.” “What rubbish are you talking about?” “Listen,” …
I met professor Cornelius Ryan, author of The Dante Shock, while I was holidaying, last fall, in the Aegean Sea; it was Ryan who told me this story regarding a fellow academic, Helen Gardinor. Gardinor was a linguist, a brilliant Greek and Latin scholar. Her reputation was established by a scholarly as well as populist …
Mr Larsen was one of those enthusiastic teachers, who must have been boning up on all the modern techniques. He wanted to do this dumb show of Hamlet. It was going to be a mime. He wanted to invite the Head Tornsen. No one wanted to do it. What would you expect from a lot …
The priest was in his cell, praying; he knelt on the wooden step of the small desk. He put the book mark in the bible and stood up. Though his knees were aching, he did not consider it any greater than his other ordeal. He poured water from the jug into the bowl. He washed …
As a rule, Doctor Robert did not approve of Valium or for that matter, any of her cousins. It was not that he was against proscription drugs, obviously. But in matters of the mind he was keen to explore alternatives. In the case of self-diagnosed depression, insomnia and other evidence of patient intransigence, he would …
Amy George was a bar girl from Norfolk County. She’d been working up and down the coast well on seven years when she met Ben Summers one evening at the Crow Bar. Ben’d flown down from Florida because he’d heard they were looking for swordfishermen. Ben come in the Crow with his duffle bag over …
During the course of his supreme act, the Shaman would call upon members of the audience to try their hand in his box, which was placed at the centre of the stage. The box was a traveller’s trunk (worn, beaten, and labelled by the marks of its owner’s travels and travails) that went up and …