WHEN the Leicester-based writer Graham Joyce died of cancer last September, we lost a great writer and committed, lifelong socialist. 

Joyce, who grew up in a Midlands mining community, quit his job as a youth worker in the dark days of Thatcherism and set off for Greece to try to forge a career as a writer. 

He went on to win the British Fantasy Award for best novel six times, the O Henry Award for short fiction and the World Fantasy Award. Joyce hated the Tories as a young man and his position never shifted. Last year, in spite of being terminally ill, he drew up an online petition calling for the sacking of Michael Gove as education secretary which gathered nearly 150,000 signatures. 

Back in 2001, I interviewed Joyce at his home in Leicester and the conversation drifted onto the London-centric nature of publishing and the challenge this presents to writers based in the provinces. He expressed profound irritation at a publisher’s reader who suggested his latest book Smoking Poppy would struggle to find an audience because it was about “fat people from the industrial Midlands.” 

“Oh fuck,” I told him, “I’m a chubby object of limited appeal.” Joyce took a copy of his book from a shelf, wrote something I couldn’t read on the title page and set it aside.  

Joyce’s stories were rich, varied and crammed with paradoxes. So was his conversation. Interviews tended to lurch from profound to playful and back again. We first met in spring 1998, just before the publication of his sixth novel The Stormwatcher. We talked about socialism, experiences of “in-betweenness” and the psychology of group dynamics. 

Then, somehow, we drifted onto Keresley Newlands Primary School’s victory in the final of the 1965 Coventry and District Football Shield. Joyce was the team’s goalkeeper. Later, aged 52, he became goalkeeper for England Writers, an experience he captured in Simple Goalkeeping Made Spectacular (2009), runner-up for William Hill Sports Book of the Year. Football mattered to Joyce. He once had a heated argument with Louis de Bernieres about its historical role in bringing artistry, passion and “a bolt of electricity” into the lives of people who lacked the opportunity to access other forms of culture. 

Joyce was intensely proud of his roots and once said: “I’ve taken a conscious decision to explore the lives of people who are still ignored by a majority of writers.” He enjoyed his success but expressed sadness at feeling “educated out” of the environment and culture into which he was born. 

The sense of erasure that comes with the getting of wisdom is a key theme of The Tooth Fairy (1996), one of Joyce’s most popular books. Set in Redstone, a fictional version of Joyce’s west Midlands hometown Keresley, it blends a sharply observed and touching rites-of-passage story with a narrative strand concerning a mythic being that represents the creative and destructive aspects of the unconscious. 

It’s a book which leaves an aftertaste of limitless possibility and a tang of melancholy. 

In a talk at the University of Derby in 2010, Joyce revisited this idea of cultural displacement as a form of collateral damage in the quest for enlightenment and, at a particularly poignant point, he veered into an acerbic anecdote about the psycho-sartorial trauma he experienced at a poetry awards event. Joyce claimed the sight of a fellow poet in socks and sandals was responsible for derailing his promising career in poetry. 

He had a gift for shepherding seriousness away from solemnity. One minute he spoke about fantasy as a para-rational approach to mapping the human psyche, the next he delivered a cutting impersonation of a famous football manager. 

The same tendency is evident in his writing. Indigo (1999) blends traditional elements of horror, folk myth and detective novel to explore corrupted dreams, dangerous eroticism and the quest for a divine presence but the mix is leavened with idiosyncratic humour and witty evocations of characters, locations and events.  

Joyce made everyone laugh but no-one doubted the intensity of his commitment to his craft. He told his students: “Writers don’t have a life, they sit in a room making up other people’s lives and it’s bloody hard work.” 

But behind the graft there was a sense that fiction can be a form of magic, a quest to create symbols and metaphors that work unconsciously to open up new understanding of human experience and potential. 

On one level The Stormwatcher is a tense tragicomedy of manners yet on another it highlights the controlled chaos beneath the veneer of social order in late-period capitalism. 

Joyce examined the absurdity and insignificance of society’s obsession with hierarchy, authority and acquisition by setting human affairs against the backdrop of a “nine-mile high theatre of weather.” 

The satirical elements of the book are subtle and open to interpretation. Joyce’s lifelong socialism, based on an instinctual sense of fairness and compassion, informed all his work but he never turned off his readers by bolting polemical passages into his narratives. 

From his first book Dreamside (1991) to his most recent The Year of the Ladybird (2013), his fiction melded accessible storytelling with philosophical speculation. 

Early books such as Dreamside, Dark Sister (1992) and The Tooth Fairy reworked the well-worn techniques and traditions of popular genres. As his writing became more sophisticated in books such as The Stormwatcher and Indigo, the supernatural elements became subtler and the symbolism more complex and ambiguous. 

Set during the postwar rebuilding of Coventry and layered with meticulously detailed period background The Facts of Life (2002) is regarded by many critics as Joyce’s masterpiece.  The book could have been read as a literary novel but the supernatural powers of the key protagonist, a child conceived during a bombing raid, led the book to be classed as an understated dark fantasy. 

Joyce couldn’t have cared less how readers approached the book as long as they read it from cover to cover.

The Limits of Enchantment (2005) is a tale of a troubled young girl and her adoptive mother — a hedgerow midwife — who wanders even closer to the literary mainstream. 

There’s a ritual of alleged psychic transformation — “The Asking” — but the focus is on the way everyday events, ordinary places and apparently unexceptional people are invested with symbolic resonance.

And yet, once again, Joyce conjured magic at the limits of perception. It is a moving, gripping and underrated novel. 

Joyce’s final novel The Year of the Ladybird is a powerful portrayal of an era of discontent, a picaresque adventure and a love story. Like his narrator David, Joyce worked as a “greencoat” at a miners’ holiday camp in Skegness in the mid-1970s. 

He often shared anecdotes about the experience, none of them as unsettling as the events in the book. A scene of high misadventure involving a National Front meeting is one of the funniest and most disturbing he ever wrote. 

David’s haunting, by a glass-eyed child and a man in an electric-blue suit with a face of smoke, may be real or a product of psychological disturbance but it doesn’t matter which interpretation the reader allows. 

The book is an exhilarating exploration of a period that played a formative part in Joyce’s life and shaped the psychic landscape of contemporary Britain. It’s a wonderful epitaph for one of the finest storytellers of our era.

At the end of that 2001 interview, Joyce and I said goodbye at his front door. As we did so he shoved the copy of Smoking Poppy into my hand. 

I opened it as I walked back to the car. The inscription on the title page read: “For Andy, a good Midlands chubster.”  

It’s one of my most treasured possessions. 

Andy Hedgecock is a freelance writer and co-editor of Interzone, Britain’s longest-running British SF magazine. His story The Loki Variations, exploring the possibility of a technologically mediated socialist revolution, appears in Beta Life (Comma Press).