Neil Gaiman's Journal

There's an Italian coffin-makers who have put their "sexy calendario" on line. Why does Miss November have the words "Mike Leave Me Alone" on her back? (I think I'd be more impressed if they actually got some models to pose with their coffins, rather than crudely photoshopping them in.)

Anyway, on with the motley...

Mr. Gaiman,

Why are so many wonderful parts cut out from the American version of
Neverwhere? I've found the Escort Service bit, the Stout Fellow bit, and
"Bloody Gabriel, for a start" to be missing, and am looking for more. Is
there any logical reason for their absence? It's as if a large part of Mr.
Croup and Mr. Vandemar's character's were edited out.

Thank you,
Emily

PS, those scenes are not missing from the new Headline edition, so it's not
just a re-Anglicising of the US one, despite the missing second prologue.

Hmm... now I'm confused. I thought the Headline edition was the US edition. Oh dear.

Anyway.... any lines that went between the UK and the US version of Neverwhere tended to have gone because my US editor felt, rightly or wrongly, that American readers would have problems with something that was serious having funny lines in it. I fought for each and every one of them... won some battles, lost others.

I was never entirely comfortable with the vanished lines, so I put them back in for the International Version (printed in France, where it won the Julia Verlanger award, and the Netherlands, where it didn't). The Headline edition was meant to have been set from the international version, but for reasons I'm not sure about it wasn't... Or at least, I thought it wasn't. I'll investigate.