Kubrick, Karno and the haunted world of '76'

My novella, 76, finally surfaces on 20 June – and if that makes it sound a bit like the end of Deliverance, well, they both have canoes in them... and each leaves certain things open to interpretation.
But what this 'supernatural memoir' does try to do is to evoke real locations, even if not all of them have survived to this day.  Which brings me to one of the settings for the novella, Taggs Island, and to the 'Karsino', which hadn't even survived until 1976.

Adam37, CC BY-SA 4.0 , via Wikimedia Commons

This was the grand hotel and Palm Court ballroom built on the island by the great impresario Fred Karno, before the First World War. 
It was also the ‘derelict casino’ in which Alex’s droogs fight the rival gang in A Clockwork Orange. It was pulled down soon after Stanley Kubrick finished filming there. By the time in which the novella is set, with the latest developers going bust, it was just an abandoned building site.

The ballroom in the 1940s. Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons

Scene from 'A Clockwork Orange', with Billy Boy's gang on the stage.

It’s here, in 76, that Delle says she found her trademark bowler hat – and fantasises about how it might once have belonged to Charlie Chaplin, whose mentor Fred Karno was.
It’s more likely to have been left there by the Kubrick production. But she doesn’t know this (a little Easter Egg for cineastically-minded readers).

The arrival of the bowler-hatted Droogs in the Karsino, in Kubrick's film

Although it's predominantly a coming-of-age story, 76 can be interpreted in terms of the past haunting the present and the future (if you like) haunting the past.
​This causes glitches, in memory and (perhaps) in perceived reality. In the book, the Karsino …the absence of which seemed to hover in the air like a cloud of midges... is almost a ghost hotel. 
And sometimes I find myself wondering whether or not the location might have been on Kubrick’s mind when he started formulating his new project towards the latter part of the '70s. You know. That one.
'Come and play with us... forever and ever'

A short clip from a forerunner to the current www.taggs-island.co.uk 

Jack Hylton's Riviera Band at the Karsino, 22 June 1928; © 2006 M J Baker and S A Baker, from 'Thameside Molesey', Rowland G. M. Baker, 1989

76 A Novella is available for pre-order in kindle edition here.