Penknife

03/10/2023

All good things must come to an end - even the third season of !

While we kiss our dear Hans Fallada goodbye, please meet Penknife’s favourite cats - Babooshka and Covfefe - pictured here laying on Corey’s desk, the very place where Season Three was written and edited, under the watchful eye of our beloved Patricia Highsmith.

Thank you for listening!

12/09/2023

🎙Episode 5 delves into Hans Fallada's fascinating post-war novel, 'The Nightmare in Berlin'.

🖋 Written during his voluntary committal at a medical clinic, the act of writing the novel was Fallada's attempt at recovery from addiction.

📖 'The Nightmare in Berlin' is an extraordinary novel that provides a unique perspective of post-war Berlin from a German who stayed. And believe us, it's well worth reading.

📚 Published by and translated by Allan Blunden

🎧 Listen to this week's episode now. Available wherever you get your podcasts!

11/09/2023

Episode 5: The Nightmare

On April 8th, 1943 Otto and Elise Hampel, a working class couple from Berlin, are guillotined for leaving hundreds of postcards containing anti-N**i messages in public places throughout the city.

They, and their small everyday acts of futile resistance, are in many ways the opposite of Hans Fallada, who continues to do just enough to appease the N***s in order to survive under their regime. If anything, he sees the Hampel’s deaths as proof that his capitulations to N**i demands were the right course.

But after the Third Reich falls and Fallada is forced to try to survive in bombed-out Berlin without money or food and with a new wife (who is also hopelessly addicted to morphine), it's the Hampels’ story that he turns to in order to write the first novel about domestic resistance to the N***s. He writes the 550 page novel in 24 days - it’s an absolute masterpiece, and it kills him…

05/09/2023

Ever dreamed of moving to the country, clean up, have a family and be happy for ever after? Well, Hans Fallada definitely did, but it didn’t turn out so idyllic - hear all about it in…

Episode 4: Desperate Literature

Fallada hunkers down in his farm, where he plans to wait out the war writing and tending to his vegetable garden in sobriety. But the bomber jets buzzing overhead and the N**i censors, who only allow him to publish idyllic “memoirs” of his country life, prove too much for him. He retreats to the bottle and descends into an alcoholic madness in which he brandishes a gun at his now ex-wife Suze.

The incident lands him in a N**i psychiatric hospital, which he chronicles in a novel entitled The Drinker. He also writes a memoir about his life in the Third Reich, with the belief that both the war and the nightmare he’s been living in since the N***s took power will soon be over. He’s right about the first part, but not the second…

31/08/2023

Slide to see a small sample of some of our favourite covers of Fallada’s first few books.

Season three of Penknife, Little man, what now? The life and times of Hans Fallada is out now, wherever you find your podcasts.

29/08/2023

Out now wherever you get your podcasts!

Episode 3: All Men Are Cowards

In 1932, Hans Fallada releases his big hit, Little Man, What Now? a somewhat autobiographical novel about a young middle-class family trying to survive in an age of mass unemployment and hyperinflation.

As the novel can be read as an indictment of the Weimar Republic, the N***s spare it once they take power and begin mass book burnings in April 1933. But to stay in print, Fallada agrees to change the novel’s highly unsympathetic N**i character into a “footballer.”

In his next novel, Once a Jailbird, he bends to pressure to write a forward saying that the inhumane justice system described in the novel is now, thankfully, a thing of the past – thanks to the N***s. Doubly ironic, because at the time he writes this forward, he’s already been a N**i prisoner and will most definitely be one again…

14/08/2023

Penknife Season Three: Little Man, What Now? starts today.

Season 3 is a five-episode series that explores the life and times of Hans Fallada, a writer whochronicled life in Germany during WWI, the Weimar Republic, the rise of the N***s, WWII, andbombed-out postwar Berlin. He is arguably the only significant writer who stayed in Germanyduring the Third Reich. His detractors say he stayed because he was a N**i, and point to
concessions he made to N**i censors as proof. The truth though, is much messier. Andstranger. Hans Fallada was not a N**i but he was a criminal who shot and killed his friend in a
botched su***de pact and years later shot another gun while fighting with his ex-wife. He spenthis life lying, cheating and stealing to finance his morphine and alcohol addictions, and time and
time again, through regular visits to jails and sanatoriums, he lost everything. But he alwaysmade sure there was ink in his pen. With it, he bore witness to perhaps the most horrifyingcollective nightmare in human history…

14/08/2023

Season 3, Episode 1: Lucky Hans
Now available wherever you get your podcasts!

Early morning October 17 1911, Two teenagers climb a hill outside of Leipzig, Germany with the intention of killing each other in a duel. Rudolph Ditzen fires his gun and hits his mark but his friend Hans misses. Ditzen turns the gun on himself but survives and stumbles down the hill covered in blood. Years later Rudolph Ditzen will publish his first novel under the pseudonym Hans Fallada. By then he’d already killed a man, attempted to kill himself a number of times and been institutionalized nearly as many. His new name will go on to acquire just as much ignominy as the old one: multiple jail stints for theft and embezzlement, another attempted murder charge, and constant visits to sanatoriums for alcohol and morphine addiction. But Hans Fallada will also be responsible for publishing some of the greatest novels about life in Germany before, during and after the Second World War.

14/08/2023

Penknife Season 3
Little Man, What Now? The Life and Times of Hans Fallada
starts today!

Season 3 is a five-episode series that explores the life and times of Hans Fallada, a writer who chronicled life in Germany during WWI, the Weimar Republic, the rise of the N***s, WWII, and bombed-out postwar Berlin. He is arguably the only significant writer who stayed in Germany during the Third Reich. His detractors say he stayed because he was a N**i, and point to concessions he made to N**i censors as proof. The truth though, is much messier. And stranger. Hans Fallada was not a N**i but he was a criminal who shot and killed his friend in a botched su***de pact and years later shot another gun while fighting with his ex-wife. He spent his life lying, cheating and stealing to finance his morphine and alcohol addictions, and time and time again, through regular visits to jails and sanatoriums, he lost everything. But he always made sure there was ink in his pen. With it, he bore witness to perhaps the most horrifying collective nightmare in human history…

07/08/2023

Season three of , Little Man, What Now? The Life and Times of Hans Fallada begins August 14.

You can subscribe and listen to it wherever you get your podcasts.

15/09/2022

Joe Orton, with a backdrop of Kenneth Halliwell…

Episode 6: A Deliberate Form of Frenzy

Kenneth Halliwell’s mental health is deteriorating. After he and Joe return from Tangier in July of 1967, a producer friend of Joe’s calls Kenneth a “middle-aged nonentity” to his face. This stings particularly, because after failing as an actor, a writer, and finally as a collage artist, Kenneth can’t really deny it. His value, he believes, is in his contributions to Joe’s career, but he’s felt for some time now that he’s losing Joe. And that’s not something he’ll be able to stand.

On August 9th, 1967, in a desperate effort to ensure that Joe never leaves him, Kenneth uses a hammer to bludgeon Joe to death before swallowing a fistful of pills…

09/09/2022

If you’ve listened to Episode 5 of Season Two of Penknife, you might have heard Ramona challenging the narrative that says that Joe was good looking and that Kenneth was ugly… you be be the judge!

And if you haven’t yet listened, what are you waiting for?

Episode 5: Diary of a Somebody

In December 1966, Joe Orton begins keeping a diary that he maintains for the final eight months of his life. Along with plenty of cottaging in public lavatories, the diaries chronicle the death of his mother, the success of Loot, and the writing of both a film for the Beatles and his final masterpiece, What the Butler Saw.

They also cover his s*x tourism trips to North Africa and the breakdown of his relationship with Kenneth Halliwell. At one point while in Tangier, feeling great about his fame, his pocketbook and his s*x life, Orton worries that he and Kenneth will soon be struck down by some disaster because they are, perhaps, too happy…

03/09/2022

Joe wrote the play, Ken made the collage for the poster - one became incredibly successful, and the other did not… hear all about it on Episode 4 of Season Two of Penknife, Crimes of Passion: The Joe Orton and Kenneth Halliwell Story.

Episode 4: A Necessary Amount of Filth

Beginning in 1964, conservative England is shocked and outraged by Joe Orton’s work. In his radio play The Ruffian on the Stair and then in his stage plays Entertaining Mr. Sloane and Loot, Orton attacks church, state and family, and taunts his enemies by putting s*xual ambiguous characters on stage. For some of the first times ever, g**s in the theater can’t be stereotyped as effeminate queens or tragic cases.

And while this brings Joe more hatred and censorship from the right, another group of people, namely those who’re putting the swing into Swinging London, and leading England through a cultural revolution, absolutely adore him. Orton sells the screen rights to Loot for a near record-breaking £100,000, and 1967 begins with Joe Orton on top of the world…

31/08/2022

Guerilla art? Gorilla art? No! This is…

Episode 3: Malicious Damage

At his local library branch,
Joe Orton is enraged to find out that they don’t have a copy of Edward Gibbon’s “The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire”.  In retaliation for this grave injustice, he and Kenneth Halliwell begin a multi-year campaign of stealing books from the library, artfully doctoring them, then smuggling them back to their rightful places on the shelves.

Eventually, the police and the local law clerk deploy undercover agents and a sting operation in order to entrap them, and Joe and Ken are sentenced to 6-month in jail. Ostensibly, it’s for their crimes against the library - but really, as Joe puts it, “it was because we were queers.”

While inside, Orton is finally separated from Halliwell, and from any remaining desire to fit in. The result is liberating, particularly to his writing...

28/08/2022

News regarding the planned Orton Statue in Leicester, through the link in our bio.

25/08/2022

Golden Syrup? Treacle? If you’re like Corey or Santi, you’ll probably have no idea what this tin contains - but worry not, in Episode Two of Season Two of Penknife, Ramona explains.

Episode 2: Golden Syrup

By 1953, Orton and Halliwell are both realizing they don’t have what it takes to make it as actor - but no matter, Halliwell is going to be a famous novelist and Joe, the less-educated and cultivated of the two, well, he’s going to be Kenneth’s secretary.

In time, though, Joe recognizes his own passion and talent for writing and the two men start writing collaboratively, determined to make it big. Shunning society and material comfort, they spend the better part of a decade locked in their bedsit writing and living off rice, sardines and golden syrup.

By decade’s end they’ve written a handful of novels and plays, all of which have been promptly turned down by publishers. The men not only feel rejected, they feel angry.  And they’re going to do something about it…

23/08/2022

What might Sylvia Plath, Morrissey, Joe Orton, and have in common? Well, not that much to be honest, but they're all featured in the first episode of Season Two of Penknife, Crimes of Passion: The Joe Orton and Kenneth Halliwell Story.
Episode 1: A Shave and a S**g

One morning, in 1949, Kenneth Halliwell comes downstairs for breakfast and finds his father’s dead body awkwardly protruding from the stove. He turns off the gas, then steps over the body to boil water for tea. When he finishes his tea, he shaves and calls the neighbors to report his father’s su***de.

Nearly two decades later, when Joe Orton’s mother dies, his response is to pick up an Irish laborer and screw him in a derelict house. Joe and Kenneth have different ways of coping with their parents’ deaths, but as young men growing up in dreary industrial England, they both have the same dream: before either considers writing, they’re both convinced that they belong on the stage.

In 1951, they buy one-way tickets to London, and begin a journey that will fail to bring them any success as actors but that will lead them to each other.
The first episode of Season Two of chronicles the bleak childhoods that shape the pair, inspiring one of them to become the most iconoclastic English dramatist of he 1960’s, and the other to become a murderer…

22/08/2022

OUT NOW! Crimes of Passion: The Joe Orton and Kenneth Halliwell Story.

Season Two of is an eight-part series about the iconoclastic British dramatist Joe Orton and his boyfriend and writing partner Kenneth Halliwell. Using interview excerpts and splashes of creative-nonfiction, Penknife follows Orton and Halliwell from their humble beginnings and prison sentences to Orton’s mid-60’s literary stardom and their tragic ends.

Their story has been told numerous times before in a biography, a biopic and two documentaries. But somehow one of its most controversial aspects has always been glossed over or left out completely. Until now...
penknifepodcast.com

20/08/2022

We’ve spent the last few months reading, writing, conducting interviews, recording, editing and re-recording in order to bring you this story the way we thought it deserved to be told.

Coming very soon, Crimes of Passion: The Joe Orton and Kenneth Halliwell Story.

And if you really can’t wait, you can always become a patreon (link in our bio), where the first few episodes have already been posted!

26/07/2022

Interview on The Rumpus. Big Thanks to Ben Nadler!

I personally find this myth of authenticity extremely insidious and damaging, because it often leads to purity tests and the constant need to prove one’s cred . . . rather than leading to construct…

10/06/2022

We’re getting ready for !

Here are some of the books we’ll be displaying on Podcast Row…

08/02/2022

Penknife is very excited to attend CrimeCon UK in London on June 11th and 12. Join us there! CrimeCon UK

27/01/2022

This is Sarah - reader, chocolate connoisseur, bookseller. The most important women in her life are: Virginia Woolf, Posh Spice, and Tracy Anderson.

She’s also the person who’s helped us reach lots (if not most) of our listeners, and the most avid reader we’ve ever met - check out her recommendations through !