Before Getting Rid of Gil and Josh & About a Boat Trip, a Hold Up, a Strip Show and You

by Stephen Benatar

Before Getting Rid of Gil and Josh is both a love story and a comedy-thriller, rather than any stark account of homicide. It is set in 1954, before it was legal for two men sexually to love one another and follows the attempt of an MP’s twin to blackmail him. The MP and his partner decide they have to scare off this sibling but when their tactics unexpectedly result in death, they have to resort to desperate measures to avoid suspicion falling in the right place.

About a Boat Trip, a Hold Up, a Strip Show and You can be seen as a latter-day Brief Encounter, occurring some forty years later, in 1986. It concerns Stella McCabe, an attractive middle-aged woman who is thinking of leaving her husband and becoming the sort of person she would like herself to be - independent and far less conventional. Her world is diverted when she meets a man of half her age who turns out to be a Chippendale-type stripper - and, ridiculously, starts to fall in love with him. Is Vince the catalyst she needs or can a selfish husband undergo a change of heart?

Both books are lively, entertaining, and transport the reader to a world of light-hearted fiction, and once begun, will grip its reader until the final pages have been turned.

352 pages, Paperback

Published November 28, 2018

About the author

Stephen Royce Benatar (born 26 March 1937) is an English author from London. His first published novel, The Man on the Bridge, was published in 1981. His second novel, Wish Her Safe at Home, was published in 1982 and reissued in 2007 and 2010. He is known for self-publishing and self-promoting his novels.

His first novel, written at the age of 19 and titled A Beacon In the Mist, was rejected, as were 11 subsequent novels. At the age of 44 his novel The Man on the Bridge was accepted by Harvester, and edited by Catharine Carver. He received a £400 advance for the novel. His second published novel, Wish Her Safe at Home, was published by The Bodley Head the following year. The book was inspired by the 1947 film The Ghost and Mrs. Muir. It was runner-up for the James Tait Black Memorial Prize. He also won an Arts Council bursary. One novel, Such Men Are Dangerous, was published by Scunthorpe Borough Council. However, sales of his published books were poor, and he took to self-publishing subsequent novels, including Father Of The Man, Recovery and The Golden Voyage Of Samson Groves.

In 2007, he tried to get Wish Her Safe at Home republished as a Penguin Classic but they turned him down despite an introduction by Professor John Carey hailing it as a masterpiece. He was turned down by 36 other publishers, so after slightly rewriting some of the passages he self-published 4,000 copies under his own Welbeck Classics imprint. He bumped into a man when returning some leftover wine from his book launch, and asked him to look at his book; that man was Edwin Franks, the managing editor of The New York Review of Books's publishing arm. Franks "read the book straight away and was knocked out", and The New York Review of Books published the novel in January 2010. Screen rights have been bought by a screenwriter who met Benatar in a bookshop, Henry Fitzherbert. In March 2011, Capuchin Classics will re-issue When I Was Otherwise in the UK with an introduction by academic Gillian Carey. Manuscripts and proofs of plays and novels by Benatar are archived by the Howard Gotlieb Archival Research Center at Boston University, along with drafts, short stories, notebooks, research material, book review, and letters.