Anansi Boys

As with my last adult novel, American Gods, I was given two bolt-holes while I was writing this novel. I started writing it in Tori’s spare house in Ireland, and I finished it there as well. She is a most gracious hostess. At one point in the middle, hurricanes permitting, I worked in Jonathan and Jane’s spare house in Florida. It’s a good thing to have friends with more houses than they have bodies, especially if they’re happy to share. Most of the rest of the time I wrote in the local coffee house, and drank cup after cup of terrible tea in a rather pathetic demonstration of hope over experience.

Roger Forsdick and Graeme Baker gave up their time to answer my questions about the police, and fraud, and extradition treaties, while Roger also showed me around the cells, fed me dinner, and looked over the finished manuscript. I’m very grateful.

Sharon Stiteler kept an eye on the book to make sure the birds passed muster and she answered my birding questions. Pam Noles was the first person to read any of the book, and her responses kept me going. There was a small host of other people who lent me their eyes and minds and opinions, including Olga Nunes, Colin Greenland, Giorgia Grilli, Anne Bobby, Peter Straub, John M. Ford, Anne Murphy and Paul Kinkaid, Bill Stiteler, and Dan and Michael Johnson. Errors of fact or of opinion are mine, not theirs.

Thanks also go to Ellie Wylie; Thea Gilmore; The Ladies of Lakeside; to Miss Holly Gaiman, who turned up to help whenever she decided I needed a sensible daughter around; to the Petes of Hill House, Publishers; to Michael Morrison, Lisa Gallagher, Jack Womack, and Julia Bannon; and to Dave McKean.

Jennifer Brehl, my editor at Morrow, was the person who persuaded me that the story I told her over lunch that day really would make a good novel, at a time when I really wasn’t sure what the next novel was going to be, and she sat patiently when I phoned her up one night and read her the first third of the book. For these things alone she should be sainted. Jane Morpeth at Headline is the kind of editor writers hope to get if they’re very good and eat all their vegetables. Merrilee Heifetz at Writers House, with the assistance of Ginger Clark, and, in the U.K., Dorie Simmonds, are my literary agents. I’m lucky to have them all on my side, and I know just how lucky I am.

Jon Levin keeps the world of movies running for me. My assistant, Lorraine, helped keep me writing and made really good cups of tea.

I don’t think I could have written Fat Charlie without having had both an excellent but embarrassing father and wonderful but embarrassed children. Hurrah for families.

And a final thank you to something that didn’t exist when I wroteAmerican Gods : to the readers of the journal at www.neilgaiman.com, who were always there whenever I needed to know anything, and who, between them all, as far as I can tell, know everything there is to be known.

Neil Gaiman,

June 2005

E-Book Extra One

The Adventures of Spider

by Neil Gaiman

(a deleted scene)

Think of this as being one of those odd scenes that normally turn up as extras on DVDs—the scenes that everyone liked, but that made the film work better without them. It’s one of them.

I really enjoyed writing it, and my editor at Headline, the redoubtable Jane Morpeth, was sad when I told her it was going, because she liked it. And for that matter, I liked it too, only it messed up the pacing of the chapter it was in, and once I was prepared to grit my teeth and cut it, everything worked rather better.

I firmly believe that cut scenes are best left cut.

Even so, it had Spider in it, doing what Spider does best. And it had birds in. And in my head, it was the bit of the novel that was almost a Warner Brothers’ cartoon.

So when Jane asked if I would be willing to let it appear—just this once—in the back of the UK edition of Anansi Boys, I found myself, slightly to my surprise, saying yes, and now here it is in the electronic version.

I’ve let it run into an earlier version of the scene that’s still in the novel, at the end of Chapter Eleven. (This scene would have been in Chapter Eleven, split into two or three segments, and occurred between Fat Charlie arriving at the hotel, and the end of the chapter.)

Neil

The Adventures of Spider

(a deleted scene)

Spider was imagining himself elsewhere. He was flicking, in his mind, through places he knew, or remembered, or imagined, willing himself there. Nothing happened. He remained precisely where he was, held by the chain of bones in his feathered cell.

He tried doing it the other way, thinking of a person, and trying to make himself be with them. This tended to be a fairly unreliable method of travel for Spider at the best of times: Spider had trouble with other people. He had trouble remembering their faces or their names, or sometimes even that they really existed at all.