Bryan Stanley William Johnson was an English experimental novelist, poet and literary critic. His early stories used several innovative devices, the second including cut-through pages to enable the reader to skip forward. His work became progressively even more experimental. The Unfortunates (1969) being published in a box with no binding (readers could assemble the book any way they liked, apart from the chapters marked “First” and “Last”, which indicated preferred terminal points. Johnson became depressed by, among other things, his failure to succeed commercially and, aged 40, took his own life. The day before he died he told his agent “I shall be much more famous once I’m dead”. Christie Malry’s Own Double-Entry (1973) is his penultimate novel. It is the metafictional account of a disaffected young man who applies the principles of double-entry bookkeeping to his own life, “crediting” himself against society in an increasingly violent manner for perceived “debits”. Made into a 2000 film directed by Paul Tickell.
