The Life-Before-Rowling department

Oh, good, the Boston Globe has profiled Brian Jacques. “Redwall novels are long — 350 to 400 pages — and while critics marveled that kids would read the doorstop Harry Potter novels, it passed unnoticed that they have been reading Redwall since 1986.”

I’d read the books ages ago, in my longlost youth, but had no idea that the man was such a character:

“I like the good old yarns,” he said. “My dad would say to me, ‘You want to read that, lad; that’s a good yarn.’” In the 1960s he and his two brothers, along with their father and friends, performed traditional music in Irish pubs in Liverpool.

“I was the spokesman,” he said. “They were all great singers but didn’t talk to the public. So I would get up and say, ‘Good evening, we’re the Liverpool Fishermen, and this is a little song we used to sing at my mother’s knee, or some other low joint,’ and carry on like that, ‘a little song titled, Don’t Go Down to the Shrimp Boats, Mum — Dad’s Coming Home with the Crabs.’”