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Capital's magical statues
Evening Standard 27 Aug 2008The last instalment of a best-selling trilogy of children's books inspired by the statues of London is published next month.
In Charlie Fletcher's Stoneheart series, the sculptures of the capital come alive and do battle. Now, a trail of the statues in the books is being developed for fans and visitors.
The stories were originally inspired by the statue of a gunner on the Royal Artillery Memorial at Hyde Park Corner, designed by Charlie Sargeant Jagger.
Fletcher, 48, a Hollywood and TV screen writer, imagined the gunner coming to life - and decided to write the story for his two children, Jack, now 15, and Ariadne, 11.
That first story has become three popular books: Stoneheart, Ironhand and conclusion of the tale, Silvertongue.
They tell of schoolboy George Chapman, who enters Un-London, another layer of reality, after breaking a carving at the Natural History Museum.
His arrival sparks a war in the hidden world between Spits - the good statues - and Taints - the evil carvings. George, with the gunner who acts as his guide, and a girl named Edie, are embroiled in a battle to save Un-London.
Other statues in Silvertongue include the Sphinx in Embankment and the Black Friar at the pub of the same name in Queen Victoria Street.
Also featured is a sculpture of explorer Ernest Shackleton outside the Royal Geographical Society in Kensington.
It appears on the front of the novel and is another work by Jagger. The artist, who was born in 1885 and died in 1934, was awarded the military cross in the First World War, and is known for his stark vision of warfare.
The Stoneheart books have been optioned for film by Paramount: the producers are Scott Rudin, the man behind No Country For Old Men and Sleepy Hollow, and Lorenzo di Bonaventura, who was head of Warner Brothers when it backed the Harry Potter movies.
Fletcher is now working on the Stoneheart screenplay - but he said it was the frustrations of being a screenwriter and seeing what happened to his work in the filming process that drove him to write the books.
"I wanted to write something that was either very good or very bad but entirely my own fault," he said.
He and his family had just returned from Los Angeles when he began work on the books, which made London seem almost like a fantasy city with "almost 1,000 years of built heritage still being lived in".
The writer, a former BBC Newsnight assistant whose screenplays include Red Cap and Taggart, grew up in Leatherhead, Surrey, and has been fascinated by London's statues since childhood.
As he now lives in Edinburgh, Fletcher used script meetings in London to hunt down carvings he could use for the trilogy. He said it was "very weird to reach the end of the journey" with the characters he created, adding: "They're pretty real to me."
Stoneheart was described by the Sunday Times as "intelligently and elegantly written, with pace and suspense and big themes of loyalty, sacrifice and emotional growth. Stoneheart will make readers see London with new eyes".
Silvertongue is published by Hodder Children's Books on 4 September.
