Frank Norman - Writing Career

Writing Career

Released from prison in 1957, he started writing what was to become his best known book. Norman's own accounts of how he came to write are at variance with one another, but within a year of his release, he had published in Encounter magazine a 10,000 word extract from his prison memoir, Bang to Rights. Championed at first by the editor of Encounter Stephen Spender, and subsequently by Raymond Chandler, who wrote the foreword to Bang to Rights, Norman's literary success was assured.

After the success of Bang to Rights Norman wrote a draft of what was to become the musical Fings Ain't Wot They Used T'Be. This draft found its way Joan Littlewood who produced it for the Theatre Workshop at the Theatre Royal, Stratford, with Lionel Bart writing the music for the songs. The play transferred to the West End, and Norman won the Evening Standard Drama Award for best musical in 1960.

Around the same period Norman was writing Stand on Me, an autobiographical memoir of his life in Soho in the 1950s before imprisonment. His next book The Guntz was a follow-up to Bang to Rights, relating stories from his life as a successful writer. Soho Night and Day (1966) was a collaboration with Jeffrey Bernard whose photographs enlivened Norman's text. Two novels followed in quick succession: The Monkey Pulled His Hair in 1967 and Barney Snip - Artist (1968).