R.J. Lynch's Blog, page 14

Reading Behind Closed Doors I found myself thinking, “I hate you, Jill Marsh”. That is probably the greatest compliment one writer can pay another.

Behind Closed Doors is a Beatrice Stubbs novel by JJ Marsh. Beatrice, a Scotland yard detective with problems of her own, is loaned to Interpol in Zurich to help with the pressing problems of others when a Swiss policeman notices resemblances between a series of deaths of fat cat enemies of the people (in some eyes, at least) which have all been classified as suicides. Characterisation is sometimes rudimentary but I’m not recommending this book for its deep psychological insights ­– what marks this out as a gripping “must read” is the pace and believability of the writing. I regularly read reviews that say, “I was gripped from page 1 and I couldn’t put this book down” and think, “Well, I wasn’t and I could. And did. And I couldn’t pick it up again”. But Behind Closed Doors gripped me from page 1 and I couldn’t put it down. JJ Marsh is a British author who lives in Switzerland and the setting and local habits are completely convincing. The plot grips. The restaging of the apparent suicides, seen from the viewpoint of the person who dies, are writing of the highest quality. You know well before the end who the killers’ final target is going to be, you desperately don’t want it to happen and you are on tenterhooks as the action unfolds. I hate giving five star reviews because they should go only to the very best books ­– five stars should mean “This is a superlative read and there are very few like it”. Well, this is a superlative read and there are very few like it.

Read two of the best paperbacks you’ll see this month and save $12 or £9

Zappa’s Mam’s a Slapper by John Lynch is this month’s highlight launch for Mandrill Press. Order it in paperback from Amazon for US$12.25 or £9.08, send a copy of the purchase confirmation to [email protected], and we will send you absolutely free a paperback of A Just and Upright Man by John Lynch’s alter ego, R J Lynch, absolutely free (normally retails at US$12.28 or £8.99).

This offer is good for all purchases of Zappa’s Mam’s a Slapper from Amazon up to and including 25th January, but make your purchase no later than midnight UK time on Saturday, 17th January and we’ll throw in an eBook, .mobi or pdf copy of another of John’s books, Sharon Wright: Butterfly, also absolutely free. Don’t delay – bargains like this don’t come along every day

In 1985 I read Every Day is Mother’s Day, a first novel by the unknown author Hilary Mantel, and I knew I wanted to read more by her. A year later I read Vacant Possession and I was hooked. Three days ago I picked up The Art of the Imperfect by unknown author Kate Evans, and I felt the same sense of discovery as I had known thirty years earlier.

The book begins with a quote from the late Petruska Clarkson to the effect that the only way a therapist can let down a client is by dying. I met Petruska Clarkson (probably at about the same time as I first read Hilary Mantel) at Metanoia, the therapeutic practice she ran with her partner at that time, Sue Fish. Kate Evans clearly knows a lot about the therapeutic process, but whether there is any connection between her fictional “Dr” Thelmis Greene (baptised Thelma Green) and Petrusca Clarkson is her business – and nor does it matter, because (a) the book stands on its own as an entertainment and (b) reading it will do you at least as much good as being in therapy.

The setting is Scarborough. Dr Thelmis Greene’s murder is investigated by DS Theo Akinde who suffers from being: an outsider (he’s not even a Yorkshireman, let alone a Scarborough native; black in a predominantly white skinned and white thinking town; and gay. He isn’t short of suspects, most of whom demonstrate forms of what Yorkshire folk would call madness ranging from post-natal depression through obsession to simple, out-and-out barminess and one of the pleasures of the book is the way in which characters’ mental fragility is not spelled out from the beginning but emerges over time. The way we see character development through watching what people do is far more accomplished than is usual in a first novel. Akinde is fortunate to have the help of a local woman in threading his way through Scarborough family connections but it takes a coincidence of an unsatisfactory kind (the only weak point in the book) before he is able to identify the killer. That, though, is hardly the point; The Art of the Imperfect is an absorbing and sometimes hilarious romp through a seaside resort that still thrives as many today do not but maintains its individual character. Thirty years ago, I recognised Hilary Mantel as a name to watch. Today I give you Kate Evans as another.

Billy McErlane is the protagonist of Zappa’s Mam’s a Slapper. I got to know Billy quite well while I was writing the book, and not just because he came into the room where I write (the one I laughably refer to as my office) and talked to me until the book was finished. Between Billy and me we decided to make him (a) a celeb and (b) a photographer. An old friend of mine, who really is a photographer (and a really good one) – his name, if you’re interested, is Jeff Drabble and he’s in New Zealand – asked me this morning why I had made Billy a photographer. I tried to explain how the demands of plot development had required that Billy take pics rather than, say, write novels (which had in fact been his first ambition) but I hope I also got across that it isn’t really that simple. Be that as it may, a photographer is what Billy turned out to be and while I am also a keen snapper (though nothing on the Jeff Drabble scale) I felt I needed to get closer to Billy’s life. So I went with him. This passage appears in the book (which is written in the first person in Billy’s voice):

McErlane’s agent, Jessica Robinson, has assembled a line of prints featuring some of the best of his recent portraits and is making them available through retail outlets at prices that mean no home need be without its McErlane. The example shown here, The Future, is one of these and is available, framed and ready to hang, at only £60.

The picture she’d chosen was one I was particularly pleased with. It showed a man on a hillside, back to the camera, looking into the distance. Nothing of his face was visible, and the idea you got was of someone staring towards what might be. He was wearing a hip-length red coat, black jeans, white trainers and a brown hat with an absolutely flat brim. Two dogs were close to his feet.

That description didn’t come out of nowhere; in fact I had taken that pic on a hillside about 3 miles from where I live. Here it is:

A little later, we get this:

I turned from the track and we walked along a broad belt of grass with trees to the side until we came to a fence, at which point I had to get the camera in both hands again because beyond the fence was a group of buildings in an open field that said everything the editor paying for my trip wanted to know about how the past could exist harmoniously in the present.

Once again, Billy is describing a photograph that I took (very early on a frosty morning):

I don’t know to what extent every writer does this but I can’t write without getting inside the head of my characters and sometimes that means living the lives they lead – walking in their shoes. From time to time, I do wonder whether I’m entirely sane. But, then – who is?

It’s a few weeks since I last posted a short story on my blog for readers to download free of charge so I sat down to write another. I don’t know where the idea came from but the words flowed quite easily:

It was Bone a Crone Night at the Coed-y-Go Country House Hotel and Constable Emlyn Davies was in the shrubbery with Mary Flynn when a chair was thrown through the ballroom windows and he heard the sound of raised voices.

Torn between Mary’s charms and his duty as a police officer, Emlyn made to pull his pants up but Mary had not been seen to for weeks and she was not letting go now. When Mary Flynn lies on you, you get up when Mary lets you and not before.

When she was done she eased back onto her haunches, reached for her pearlised hessian evening bag and took out a packet of Silk Cut.

Emlyn, an astonished look on his face, was staring into space. ‘I could do you for rape,’ he murmured.

She held out the pack. ‘Want one?’

Emlyn took a cigarette and waited for Mary to light it for him. ‘Hell of a row going on in there,’ he said. ‘I should go in and find out what’s happening.’

‘I’d let it calm down first. You’re off duty, aren’t you? If he needs help, the landlord has a phone.’

‘That could take some time. From here, he’ll call Oswestry. There’s no-one there. So the call will be switched to Shrewsbury. There won’t be anyone there, either, so it’ll route on to Telford or Wolverhampton. I can’t see any cars getting here for an hour or so.’

‘We can be gone by then. Why don’t I show you what my husband used to like?’

‘I didn’t know you’d been married.’

‘Common law. You want to try his way? Or not?’

“His way” demanded concentration. When it was over, flashing blue lights were visible in the inky blackness above Emlyn’s head. It took him a moment to realise that they really were caused by his fellow officers from West Mercia Police and not by the experience Mary had just led him through.

‘Come on,’ said Mary.

‘What?’

‘You want your colleagues to find you here?’

‘They’d want to know why I hadn’t done anything.’

‘We’d best go, then.’

‘They won’t be letting anyone out of the car park.’

‘Let’s take a look.’

But Emlyn had been right. When they emerged from the bushes on the edge of the car park, it was to see a note pinned under one of his windscreen wipers. ‘Constable Davies. See me.’ It was signed by an inspector Emlyn had never heard of.

‘He’s in there.’ One of the two PCs assigned to prevent cars from leaving pointed at the porticoed main door to the hotel.

‘Can I go?’ asked Mary.

‘Have you got any ID?’

Mary pointed at Emlyn’s retreating back. ‘He’s just taken down my particulars.’

‘Better clear off then. Before you get in the same mess he’s in.’

When I reached that point I was quite pleased with the way things were going but a little voice somewhere in the back of my head was becoming ever more insistent. ‘What do you think you’re doing? Sixty per cent of your readers are women. You had someone object to use of the word “slapper” in the title of Zappa’s Mam’s a Slapper. What the hell do you think they’re going to say when they read the first line of this? Okay, you know and I know that Bone a Crone is merely the local take on Grab a Granny – but your readers don’t know that. You’re asking for trouble; you’ll lose the lot of them with one story. A story you won’t even have been paid for.’

I don’t know who it belonged to but the little voice was right. I put Constable Emlyn and Mary Flynn to one side and started a new story with:

She’d known for weeks he had something to tell her. Married forty years, most of it okay and some of it – more than most people had, she thought – actually happy, you know when there’s something you’re not being told. She had a damn good idea what it was, too. What she hoped was that when he finally found the courage he’d tell her straight. Not, “I’m checking out,” sounding like Barry O’Brien when he told them he’d accepted a new job. There was no new job in prospect here. A big adventure, perhaps. Unless that turned out to be fiction, and all you did was lie there in the ground and rot. Not, “I’m a goner,” like some actor in an old time Western. She’d never forgotten that joke Terry had told her, back in the days when jokes like that weren’t told to nice girls like her. The one about the Lone Ranger being bitten by a rattlesnake right on the end of his word a young man couldn’t use in those days to a well brought up girl and he’d had to gesticulate but she’d got the message and he sends Tonto into town to find a doctor. And the doctor says the only cure for a rattlesnake bite is to suck the poison out through the same hole it went in at, and without that there is no escape from death. And Tonto rides back to camp, and when the Lone Ranger asks what the doctor said Tonto says, ‘He say you gonna die, Kemo Sabe.’

I’m pleased with where this one is heading and I’m going to stick with it. I can’t quite shake the sadness, though, that I may never know what happened after that chair came flying through the window of the Coed-y-Go Country House Hotel. Perhaps someone else will take it up and finish it for me.

A friend of mine in California read an Advance Review Copy of Zappa’s Mam’s a Slapper and told me how much he’d enjoyed it. ‘Did you shed a manly tear towards the end?’ I asked. I realise now that I should have said at the outset that though he lives in California and has a US passport this friend is originally from England. We’ve known each other since we met on Soc Culture British more than twenty years ago, so anyone who was around that place at that time will have a feel for the sort of relationship we have.

Anyway, he assured me that the bittersweet ending of Zappa’s Mam’s a Slapper had brought no sadness to his breast and he went further to tell me that “manly” and “tears” were incompatible words. Men don’t cry.

Surely this can’t be right? I wrote Zappa’s Mam with a clear picture of my reader and as I typed the last twenty thousand words I was thinking, “You think you know where this is going. Don’t you? You think you’re reading a Happy Ever After/Boy Meets Girl/Boy Loses Girl/Boy Gets Girl tale. Don’t you? Well, my dear reader, do I have a surprise in store for you.” When I wrote the last line I thought, “If that doesn’t dampen the cheek of even the malest of men, I don’t know what will.” And now comes the message from California – California of all places – Men Don’t Cry.

I’ve written in the past on this blog about the story I read to pupils and parents from the stage of Benton Park Primary School when I was ten but that is not really where my desire to be a writer started. In my mid-teens I read Wuthering Heights and when I reached the end I was aware of a prickling at the back of my eyes. (No, not at the quality of the writing – it was my reaction to the story’s emotional impact).  I decided then that this was what I wanted to do. I don’t mean that I decided to write about people and their lives in a way that would tug at the reader’s heart-strings because fourteen year olds don’t think that way; what happened was that I realised for the first time how the written word could move the reader and I thought, “I want to do that”.

I still want to do it. And I’m not sure what all that California sunshine has done to my old friend’s humanity. Men don’t cry? Your child is ill, seriously ill, ill to the point of death and recovers – and you don’t cry? You watch a parent grow old and frail and the inevitable end comes – and you don’t cry? You’ve wanted for years to achieve something that has always seemed just beyond your capabilities but you worked and worked to study where you were going wrong and put it right and finally you get there – and you don’t cry?

I’m glad I’m not you.

It’s strange how sometimes we (that is to say, I – but I doubt that you’re any different) only want to read something new and contemporary while at other times we go back to what I suppose is the mental comfort food of books we have loved in the past. That’s certainly the mood I was in when I picked up Rudyard Kipling’s Collected Poems. I stuck to the early stuff, before he became the laureate of Empire, not because I don’t like his later work but because that was the mood I happened to be in. And I came across The Story of Uriah.

I’ve loved this poem since I was seventeen and in the first year of the Sixth Form and it was painstakingly explained to the English A-level class. If you know the background, pass on to the end where you will find the poem; if not, this might touch you as it did me all those years ago.

The title comes from the Book of Samuel which tells how David wanted Bathsheba so much and so illicitly that he sent her husband, Uriah the Hittite, to die in battle. Kipling leaves us in no doubt that that is the background to his tale because, as well as calling the poem The Story of Uriah, he quotes the words, “Now there were two men in one city; the one rich and the other poor” and the Bible tells us that the prophet Nathan used these words to begin a parable with which he rebuked David for arranging Uriah’s death. In that parable, the rich man has an abundance of domestic livestock while the poor man has only a single lamb, yet when a visitor needs to be entertained it is the poor man’s lamb that the rich man feeds him on. When David expressed disgust at the rich man’s actions, Nathan said, ‘You are that man.’ We are not, then, in any doubt about the poem’s subject.

And nor were Kipling’s fellow-expatriates when he published The Story of Uriah in The Civil and Military Gazette on March 3rd, 1886 because a quote from the time says, ‘Those who had known the real “Jack Barrett”, good fellow that he was, and the vile superior and faithless wife who sent him “on duty” to his death, felt the heat of the spirit which inspired Kipling’s verse in a way that gave those few lines an imperishable force.’

So that’s why I like it. And here it is:

Jack Barrett went to Quetta

Because they told him to.

He left his wife at Simla

On three-fourths his monthly screw.

Jack Barrett died at Quetta

Ere the next month’s pay he drew.

Jack Barrett went to Quetta.

He didn’t understand

The reason of his transfer

From the pleasant mountain-land.

The season was September,

And it killed him out of hand.

Jack Barrett went to Quetta

And there gave up the ghost,

Attempting two men’s duty

In that very healthy post;

And Mrs. Barrett mourned for him

Five lively months at most.

Jack Barrett’s bones at Quetta

Enjoy profound repose;

But I shouldn’t be astonished

If now his spirit knows

The reason of his transfer

From the Himalayan snows.

And, when the Last Great Bugle Call

Adown the Hurnai throbs,

And the last grim joke is entered

In the big black Book of Jobs.

And Quetta graveyards give again

Their victims to the air,

I shouldn’t like to be the man

Who sent Jack Barrett there.

I’d really like to know how Jack Barrett’s wife and her powerful lover felt at seeing their infamy displayed for all to see, but if anyone recorded that story I have yet to find it.

I am not someone who likes to get up people’s noses. Left to myself, I’d prefer not to upset anyone. Sadly, that isn’t possible. The title of Zappa’s Mam’s a Slapper comes from a passage in the book—this passage (from the beginning of Chapter 8):

I chose the name Billy when I was eleven. It was 1999, I’d had eleven years of answering to the one my stupid mother gave me and I wasn’t going to do it any more.

You can imagine the stuff I got. “Zappa’s on the crapper.” “Zappa’s mam’s a slapper.” You can probably make your own up and I’m telling you, I’ll have heard it.

Zappa McErlane. I ask you.

People home in on stupid names. People in authority. Every time I changed class or we got a new teacher I could see her eye going down the register and she’d be thinking, “Oh, yes. Zappa. He’ll be the one. I’ll have trouble with him.”

And if they think they will, they do.

That’s how the book got its title—but a few weeks ago a woman told me she wouldn’t read a book with the word “slapper” in the title, and nor would a lot of other women. Well, I hope you can see from the passage above that my use of the word was not meant to be demeaning to women. What’s more, everyone connected with the book so far—three editors and an agent—has been female and not one of them has been upset by the word. And, while I don’t seek to offend, I like the title and I’m not going to change it. It isn’t only the title, though. You can read the whole of Chapter one here, but here’s how it begins:

All I’d said was, I wouldn’t mind seeing her in her knickers. I wouldn’t have thought, being honest, that that merited a showdown with her brothers.

I tried to explain. She’s a bit on the chubby side, Kathleen, which I like. Not a grotesque fatty; just a bit of a plumper. Real fatties, I don’t care for. I’ve got a pic I took of a thumper sitting on one chair when three would not have been too many. I took it from behind, which is the only way you could really bring yourself to look at her. Great blue denim bulges hanging down on each side. You’d wonder how anyone could let herself get like that.

Jessica made me leave that one out of the exhibition. ‘It’s an interesting eye you have, Billy,’ she said, ‘but it wouldn’t please everyone.’

I said, ‘That’s not what the instructor told us in Young Offenders. He said you should nurture your own unique vision.’

Jessica’s eye twitched. She didn’t like being argued with, and she had this ambivalence towards my time inside—it was what made me a celeb but she said it was her job to publicise it and not mine. Which is all very well, but if I hadn’t been in Young Offenders I’d never have got into taking pics. They’d run this course on digital photography (and how stupid is that? To do digital photography you need a digital camera and how did anyone think a Young Offender was going to get one of those once he was back on the street?) and I’d signed up to deal with the tension of not knowing whether I’d get out. I’d loved it.

No, with Kathleen I’d pictured her sitting on a bed in nothing but a pair of those knickers Marks & Sparks had in their adverts when they were going after the smart young people who wouldn’t be seen dead in Marks, you might as well ask them to shop in Milletts. Everyone remembers those knickers. Every man, anyway. Lot of lezzies, too, I should think. The ones coming a couple of inches down the leg and cut square. Nice patterns, interesting colours and a dark edge to waist and leg. And the models they used hadn’t exactly been short-changed in the upper body department.

Lovely. Kathleen would be sitting on the bed in these and nothing else, one leg pointing straight out in front and the other drawn up under her, arms crossed at the elbow and hands clasped so that you saw nothing more revealing than a bit of flesh squeezed each side of the arms. And she’d be looking straight at the camera and smiling. That’s one of the things I liked about Kathleen—that she was always smiling. That and not being skinny. She had a lovely smile, Kathleen.

Jessica said I had a fantastic eye for a pic, “a real intuitive grasp for composition,” which was exactly what the instructor at Young Offenders had said.

And that’s all it was.

But I’d said it out loud and some mischief-making twat had told Kathleen’s brothers and they were offended. Or pretended they were.

So there you are. I’ve probably outraged fat people, thin people, lesbians and who knows who else? Maybe people who don’t smile.

But it can’t be helped. It seems to me that a willingness—in fact, an active desire—to be offended has become part of our culture; people go looking for things to complain about. And what I had to decide was: am I going to write what I want to write in the way I want to write it? Or should I tailor my writing to make sure I don’t offend anyone?

I think there’s only one answer to that question. It will probably lead to a lot of one and two star reviews from people who want to take revenge for what they see as a slight, but I have to let Billy tell his story his way.

I was 36 when this happened and this is very much how it was:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Kyos-M48B8UI

It staggers me even more today than it did then.

I’m asked where the character of Sharon Wright came from in a way that no one ever asks about Billy, the central character in Zappa’s Mam’s a Slapper. I don’t find that puzzling; it reflects the unwillingness of people to accept the pursuit of self-interest in a female character when it would not trouble them in a male. It’s clear that some people find Sharon disturbing. Personally, I love the woman :-)

When my daughter was nine, we moved house. For the previous year or so she had told us that her ambition was to be a doctor; she returned home on the first day at her new school and said she planned to be a nurse. I said, ‘What happened to being a doctor?’ ‘Oh,’ she said, ‘Boys become doctors. Girls become nurses.’ I took her out of that school and sent her to one that accepted only girls and they set about the business of reinstating her ambition and sense of self-worth and making sure she kept it. I had better make it clear right now that I mean nothing derogatory towards nurses – my problem was with people who accepted that there must be limits on a person’s ambition for no other reason than that the person lacks testicles.

I actually wrote Zappa’s Mam’s a Slapper before Sharon Wright: Butterfly but Sharon Wright was published first for reasons that don’t matter here. Zappa’s Mam is the story of a young man who overcomes the disadvantages of an appalling home background, achieves his ambition and shines in the world. I wanted to write a similar book about a young woman and that book became Sharon Wright: Butterfly.

It’s true that Sharon puts herself first but that wasn’t always so – it’s learned behaviour. If she had always put herself first she would have taken the opportunity to go to college and lead, far from the place where she grew up, a life of the kind her schoolmates could only dream of. Just like Billy does. She would not have made her sad marriage to Buggy, the Loser’s Loser, and might instead have found someone to love with whom she could share a rewarding life. Just like Billy does. Only when she sees what other people are getting out of life does she begin to plot a better future for herself – but when she does begin, no holds are barred. She plans her wooing of Jackie Gough the way a female mantis might stalk the male, with every intention of consuming him for lunch when he has served his purpose. She’s helped by the fact that she understands the men in her life much better than they understand her. She says,

‘Jackie. You know what I’ve learned? Started learning when I first went to school, and went on learning? Men need to think I’m dumb. Because I’m a woman, and I’m blonde, well, men think I’m blonde, and I like to spend a lot of time on my back with my legs in the air, and I like men for what they have that makes them men, I have to be dumb. Well, I’m not dumb.’

And Jackie has begun to realise that dumb is the last thing she is. Then she says,

‘I pretend to be, if that’s the game the man needs me to play. But what I really want is to play the game where we’re both smart and we both know we’re both smart. Think you can play that game with me, Jackie? Please?’

And Jackie says he can. Because Jackie thinks he understands Sharon and he thinks she’s going to play the game his way.

Poor Jackie.

I’m on Sharon’s side. How about you?