Twelfth night has passed; the Christmas tree is out, decorations are taken down, the last of the sherry is finished. Around the country there are floods and now the weather has turned cold; the outlook for fishing is poor. Time to sit out dark January indoors, thinking of better days to come and flipping through some old fishing books or maybe one recently received as a Christmas present.
Regular readers of this blog will know that anglers are not well served, in my view, by the books and magazines written for them. There are only so many extended accounts of breakfasts and coffee stops, exhaustive details of geography and fishing tackle, domestic arrangements, love lives, banter with mates that I can wade through, even before the bending rods and screaming reels get going.
But lately I’ve started reading something different, Fishing’s Strangest Tales by Tom Quinn. It’s obviously different to the typical fishing book. As the name implies, it is a collection of stories that at least purport to be unusual, if not in all cases especially strange. Instead of the usual fishing verbosity, the writing is very concise and written in the tight prose of a journalist, which is not surprising because the author is a journalist and also writer of many other books on topics such as the Royal Family, countryfolk, and other titles in the ‘strangest tales’ series. The diversity of Quinn’s publishing suggests that he is not an angler, or not necessarily an angler, but a professional author who follows the market, a journeyman writer if you like. And being part of a series of books, it may not be aimed just at anglers but at a wider market, a stocking-filler kind of book.
Is it any good? Certainly an easy read; each chapter is short, some less than a page. There is not much to absorb the reader for long, however. The stories are more often bland than strange, some already familiar, written so sparely as to be threadbare. A curious feature is the inclusion of metric measures in brackets after the imperial. So fish weights in pounds are always noted in kilograms too. Perhaps the publishers had a continental market in mind. Clearly the tales in the book are drawn from a trawl through old sources so there is no sense of the personal here, merely a rather dry retelling. I find I can only read a couple of stories before I lose interest and have to put it down in favour of something else. Definitely a coffee table kind of book.
The Secret Angler 