R.J. Lynch's Blog, page 6

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You have to have a genre

There’s a question that every writer has to answer about every book. The question is: What genre is it? Readers want to know, because readers have firm opinions about the genres they like and those they don’t. If you ask me, for example, I’ll tell you I don’t like dystopian fiction although it isn’t really true because Margaret Atwood is one of my favourite authors. But it isn’t just readers – whoever is responsible for marketing your book also wants to know what genre it is because that’s the central plank in the marketing platform they build.

So I have been asked the question: What genre is my new book, Darkness Comes? In fact, I’ve been asked that question rather a lot. And I always try to give some sort of answer because that’s what you do. But the fact is: I haven’t a clue. I don’t know what genre you’d call it.

Usually, I do know

When I wrote Zappa’s Mam’s a Slapper, I was pretty clear that I was writing a coming of age novel. And when I wrote Sharon Wright: Butterfly, I knew it was essentially a book about the criminal classes and two contract killers, so if anyone asked I’d say it was a crime novel. But this one? Darkness Comes? I can’t place it in a genre. Which wouldn’t bother me, except that it makes selling the book to readers difficult. Before they buy a book, readers want to know what kind of book it is. And I suppose that’s a reasonable wish. So let me try.

Horror it is not

When I first uploaded Darkness Comes to Amazon, I was shocked to see that they put it in the Horror genre. Shocked because, however much trouble I have saying what genre it IS in, I find it easy to list a whole bunch that it isn’t in. And it isn’t Horror. It isn’t Romance, either, or mystery, or crime (although there is a lot of crime in it).

The Story

So let’s take a look. The hero is Ted Bailey. Something bad happens to Ted Bailey when he’s still in his teens. Then something else bad happens to him when he’s just out of them. There’s no question that those bad things affect him in his later life, but really Ted’s problem is that he goes with the flow. He lets things happen. And the things that happen include fraud, and selling drugs, and living in Marseille with a woman who has sex with other men for money, and working for the French security services, and setting up a company to sell goods at an immoral profit margin to people who should not be allowed to buy them. Not infrequently, those goods are arms and, when he sells them, he’s breaking an embargo. Oh yes – and he kills one or two people. Well, more than one or two when you come down to it.

But while he’s doing those things, he also does other, more normal things. The sort of things that I do and you do. He falls in love – sometimes he doesn’t choose the woman he falls in love with very well, but there’s nothing unique in that. He helps people facing bad times and he tries not to let them know who it is that helps them. And when he has someone he thinks of as his daughter, he gives her all the love and all the care that the best human beings among us could come up with.

But that stuff – all of that stuff – is, in a way, beside the point. Because the story opens when Ted has an out of body experience after a heart attack. And what follows is a trial for his immortal soul. You might think, after what I’ve told you about his life, that he has no chance – but Saint Peter has enough doubt about that to send Alex, who was Ted’s fiancée and was murdered for it, back from heaven to conduct his defence. And we learn some things about heaven, and about God, that are nothing like the things humans have been taught for the last 2000 years.

There’s More! The Chat Show

Is that it? Not quite. For reasons best known to my imagination (an imagination that has landed me in trouble many times in the past), the trial takes the form of a chat show. And chat shows have guests. In this case, the guests include Peter Sellers, Barabbas, Henry Blofeld, John Betjeman, Ras Tafar, the one-time Emperor of Ethiopia, and a few other people. Some of the guests are still alive; most of them are dead. When you put all that together, and you say we HAVE to have a genre, you end up (and I did end up) saying that the book is about the supernatural.

So there you are: Darkness Comes is a novel about the supernatural. But this, for me, is the difficult bit. Because what seems supernatural to you is probably what seems quite normal to me. I’ve always been aware of another world on the edge of this one, shading into it and sometimes letting itself be seen. When Ted is in his suspended state on the edge of death, he sees things he’s never seen before – but they’ve always been there. They simply aren’t visible to most of the living most of the time.

Available for pre-order now

Right now, the book is available here to preorder before it’s released in paperback and for Kindle on February 1. If you read it, and if then you know what genre it is, tell me. I really would like to know.

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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. I mean nothing derogatory towards nurses (and in fact a senior practice nurse is what my daughter became, and I’m proud of her); my problem was with people who limit a person’s ambition for no other reason than that the person lacks testicles.
I wrote The Making of Billy McErlane before Sharon Wright: Butterfly but Shazza was published first for reasons that don’t matter here. Billy Mac 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.

You don’t need testicles to put yourself first

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 having him for lunch when he’s served his purpose.

Sharon: I’m a woman, and I’m blonde. Well, men think I’m blonde

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?

Find Sharon Wright: Butterfly here.

[image error]Reading about sex should make you smile – not gag

5-star writer Jill Marsh recently drew attention on Facebookto a Guardian link to the Literary Review’s annual awards for the worst writing about sex (Bad Sex Awards). I wouldn’t have seen this because the level of dishonesty in this country since the referendum has reached a level that means I no longer read newspapers, but I was grateful to be pointed at this article.

There is a description of the sex act as a vaginal ratchet swallowing a boa constrictor. Frankly, I hope I never meet a woman with a vaginal ratchet. Just imagine the damage something like that could do. And the thing about a boa constrictor is that it bends and wraps itself in loops, which at the moment this writer is describing is the last thing either party wants to happen. James Frey thinks the bathroom sink is a good place to have sex (I refuse to use the expression ‘making love,’ because that’s not what they’re doing). For Julian Gough, finding a female nipple in his mouth as an adult recalls being breast-fed as an infant. (Giving away more about yourself than you intended there, Julian). Haruki Murakami describes an ejaculation so powerful the sheets are sticky. (You have to spend the night in those sheets, Haruki. Unless, of course, you’re planning to clear off as soon as you’re done – which would not be nice behaviour, Haruki). Luke Tredget imagines being ‘slurped’ like a stick of rock. And so on…and on.

 In my house, ‘What dis shit, ma’an?’ has become the standard response to something not understood

But why? It’s many years since I lived in the West Indies, but I still cherish the memory of a question asked by a surprised Trinidadian: What dis shit, ma’an? In my house, that has become a standard response to something someone does not understand. And I don’t understand what these writers think they are doing – or why they are doing it.

Are you a novelist? Or a sex therapist?

If you have either been commissioned or have decided to write a sex manual, then explaining the mechanics of the act is likely to be necessary– though I suggest you don’t refer to vaginal ratchets because that would call your knowledge into question. If you are writing a novel, then sex is quite likely to come into it – but that doesn’t mean your reader is looking for a detailed description. As well as making love, your characters will eat, shower and urinate. And you can make it clear that all of those things happen without the need to explain how they do it.

As it happens, writing about sex is something we discussed at the November ALLi meeting in Cheltenham. My offering was from my book The Making of Billy McErlane. There are two things you need to know as background:

Billy and Poppy were boyfriend and girlfriend at school, and the relationship was chaste. They were separated by events but have now met again after several years, they are in love, and they know that they would like to consummate their relationshipWay back then, Poppy asked Billy, ‘How much do you love me?’ and Billy didn’t have an answer. He couldn’t think of any way to measure love, so he asked, ‘How much do you love me?’ and Poppy answered, ‘Up to the sky and down again a million times.’

So here they are, and they know that they want to get it on, and so does the reader. This is how it happens (the book is written in the first person):

She walked round the flat looking at things while I made coffee. After she’d taken her first sip she said, ‘It’s decision time, Billy.’
‘That makes me very nervous.’
‘Oh, I’ve made mine. It’s you, Billy—you’re the one who has to decide. Is this for ever? Or just a nice interlude?’
My heart beat fast. ‘It’s for ever, Popps.’
She nodded. ‘When you got out of prison, did they give you your condoms back?’
‘Eh? Oh, I…’
‘I’m asking if you’ll keep me safe, Billy. I still don’t want a baby.’ Her eyes came up to hold mine. ‘Not till I’m married.’
‘I’ll take care of you.’
‘You’ll be gentle, won’t you?’
I wrapped my arms round her. I kissed her: on the forehead; on the cheek; on the throat; on the lips. She kissed me back. She eased herself out of my grasp, took my hand and led me towards the bedroom. Just before she gave herself to me she said, ‘How much do you love me?’
‘Up to the sky and down again, a million times.’
‘You’d better, Billy Mac. You’d better.’

“Just before she gave herself to me.” That’s the sex scene. That’s it. That’s all the reader gets. It’s all the reader needs. My job as a writer is to get inside the characters’ heads and show what they are thinking and feeling in a way that the reader will understand. My job is not to describe the nuts and bolts of the sex act. I assume that the reader knows what people do when they go to bed together with love in their hearts but, if the reader doesn’t know, it isn’t my job to explain it.

And it certainly is no part of a writer’s job to talk about vaginal ratchets and boa constrictors. To the question, Why do people write that stuff? I would add, Why do people read it? I don’t know how many copies that book sold and I don’t know who bought it – but I’m fairly clear that I don’t want those readers.

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I’ve been an Elvis fan since Heartbreak Hotel and a Beatles fan since Love Me Do. The number of books and articles I’ve read about both of them should probably embarrass me. You might think that I wouldn’t need to read any more, but John and Elvis by Matthew Langford takes a different approach and I recommend it to anyone interested in those times and those guys. What Langford has done that is different is to get inside the heads of both John Lennon and Elvis Presley in a way that makes you feel you understand why they did what they did in a way you hadn’t understood it before. I guess the best way of describing the book is that it’s a cross between a documentary and a novel – though a very fact-based novel.

It would be difficult to read this book without coming to the conclusion that Presley was as mad as a hatter and Lennon (to put it mildly) differently sane – but that’s probably inevitable when you reach that level of fame. Lennon pooh-poohs the very idea of religion but thinks it entirely rational to plan major life events on the basis of a study of numbers. Presley meets Ronald Reagan and finds himself wondering whether Soviet brainwashers have got at the President. (That’s right – Ronald Reagan. It would be difficult for most of us to imagine a less likely candidate).

When you get to the end of this book, you feel you’ve learned something about both Lennon and Presley that you didn’t know before. (You’ve also learned a few things about Paul McCartney, and a few others from that time). That doesn’t happen very often nowadays when you’re reading about people who have already been so thoroughly explored in print.

Strongly recommended.

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This could be the best non-fiction book I’ve ever read.

I bought this book because I had previously bought and enjoyed History’s Greatest Deceptions and Confidence Scams. That book wasn’t perfect, but it was good enough that I wanted to see what they’d written next. And I am so glad I did. Where Are They? shows what happens when writers gain confidence in what they are doing. This book soars to the heights – both in its subject matter and literally, as a masterpiece in conveying information.

The title comes from physicist Enrico Fermi who said, about theories that Earth should already have received extraterrestrial visitors and yet no convincing evidence of a visit existed, “Where is everybody?” The universe should be teeming with civilisations at one level of development or another – so where are they?

The book examines all the current theories that have been developed to answer this question. It takes no sides. It simply sets out the present state of knowledge. But it does so in the most brilliant, beautiful prose. So brilliant that I would recommend this book even to readers with no interest in the search for alien intelligence, simply because they will enjoy the limpid prose and the humour with which the arguments are presented.

Here is an example:

‘Imagine that you are in the same position as one of those alien astronauts being tapped up for a journey to Earth from the galaxy MACS0647-JD. It’s 13.3 billion light years away, so – if your civilisation has developed a form of transportation that will travel at the speed of light – the time spent on the journey is unimaginable. Would you want to do it? Leave the kids, your husband and your book club knowing that at the end of your journey you would encounter a civilisation a few hundred millennia less developed than yours? And that you couldn’t get home for nearly 27 billion years at the earliest, by which time your planet would in all possibility have come to the end of its life? And that, when you arrived on Earth, your body would have been renewed some eighty times, so you wouldn’t really still be you at all?’

Not a single prominent theory about the evolution of life forms has been left out. It’s also clear that the authors take a dim (they would probably say “realistic”) view of humanity’s fitness to receive visitors from another civilisation.

I’ll say it again: this could be the best non-fiction book I’ve ever read. Do yourself the most amazing favour and READ IT.

Return to Reviews of Other People’s Books

 

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I read Required Writing by Philip Larkin when it came out in 1983. It’s been sitting on my shelves ever since and a couple of days ago I decided to read it again. It was a good decision, because there was so much I had forgotten. Like this, from an interview he gave to Paris Review. He had been asked whether he shared his manuscripts with anyone before publishing them and whether he had any friends whose advice he would follow in revising a poem:

I shouldn’t normally show what I’d written to anyone; what would be the point? You remember Tennyson reading an unpublished poem to Jowett; when he had finished, Jowett said, ‘I shouldn’t publish that if I were you, Tennyson.’ Tennyson replied, ‘If it comes to that, Master, the sherry you gave us at lunch was downright filthy.’ That’s about all that can happen.

I read that last night, sitting outside after dinner (the summer here has been wonderful so far and I’d much rather sit outside reading until the sun goes down than spend the time indoors) and I couldn’t stop laughing. When I read it again this morning to write this, I was laughing again. I think it’s wonderful. Don’t you?

(I was also very taken with his answer to the question, “Is Jorge Luis Borges the only other contemporary poet of note who was also a librarian, by the way? Are you aware of any others?” Larkin’s answer? ‘Who is Jorge Luis Borges?’ Honestly, people regard Larkin as the poet of melancholy but he had a wonderful sense of humour.

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How do you choose the next book to read?

If you’re anything like me, it’s a fairly random process – but you do have a small number of authors whose books you know you’re going to want to read as soon they come out. For example, I’ve just finished The Dark Angel, the latest in the Ruth Galloway series by Elly Griffiths. I pre-ordered it the day it was announced, because I’ve read all the earlier Ruth Galloway books and I knew I’d want to read this one. (I’ve finished it now, and it did not disappoint).

There aren’t many authors like that – names that are so reliable that you know the book is going to be a great read. Elly Griffiths is one. Jane Davis is another. I first came to her books when I read, I Stopped Time. On 12 April 2018, she’s releasing her new book, Smash all the Windows and you can pre-order it here at a special price. I’ve never met Jane (I’ve never met Elly Griffiths, either), but we have corresponded a couple of times (she put me onto the designer of the cover for The Making of Billy McErlane) and that gave me the courage to ask about the new book – where it came from, and how she went about writing it. Those are interesting questions in Jane’s case, because – unlike most authors – she doesn’t write the same book again and again. Since winning the Daily Mail First Novel Award 2008 with her first book, Half-truths & White Lies, everything she has written has been a new attempt to tell her own truth in her own way. This is what she had to say.

Jane Davis talking about Smash all the Windows

My advice if you’re embarking on a novel? Stick to fantasy, sci-fi, dystopian fiction, anything. Just don’t meddle in current affairs.

My novel began with outrage. I remember that so vividly. I was appalled by the reaction of the press to the outcome of the second Hillsborough inquest. Microphones were thrust at the families of the victims as they emerged from the courtroom. It was put to them that, now it was ‘all over’, they could finally get on with their lives. ‘What lives?’ I yelled at the television. Were they talking about the lives that the families enjoyed before the tragedy? Because they clearly no longer existed. And neither did the lives that they might have expected.

For those who don’t know about the Hillsborough disaster, a crush occurred at Hillsborough football stadium during the 1989 FA Cup semi-final, killing 96 fans. Particularly shocking at a time that pre-dated the internet was how the disaster played out in real-time in living rooms the length and breadth of the country. The moment the severity of the incident became apparent to senior police officers, there was a cover-up. With no reason to doubt incoming information, sports commentators simply repeated the lies they were fed. Liverpool fans were to blame. From that time onwards, everything done perpetuated a myth, making scapegoats out of victims and survivors alike. It would be twenty-seven years before the record was set record straight.

Elizabeth Strout, an author I greatly admire, warns her writing students, ‘You can’t write fiction and be careful. You just can’t. I think actually the biggest challenge a writer has is to not be careful.’ And I agree. I really do. But none of us exists in a vacuum. The pain I saw on the faces of family members in the aftermath of the second inquest, twenty-seven years after the disaster, was raw. My favourite description of fiction is ‘made-up truth’. Making things up is what I do. And so I combined two of my fears – travelling in rush hour by Tube, and escalators – and created a fictional disaster from which to tell my story.

The previous year, I had suffered a fall on my way to a book-reading in Covent Garden. I was overloaded, having just finished a day’s work in the city. I was carrying my laptop bag, my briefcase, plus a suitcase full of books. The escalator I normally use was out of order. Instead we were diverted to one that was obviously much steeper but I wasn’t prepared for how much faster it would go. I pushed my suitcase in front of me and, holding onto the handle, was dragged off-balance. Fortunately, there was no one directly in front of me. A few bruises and a pair of laddered lights aside, I escaped unscathed. But I can still recall the moment I knew I was about to fall and the recognition that there wasn’t a damned thing I could do about it.

Even while avoiding writing about Hillsborough, I intended that my fictional disaster would share many common elements. Because both incidents happened before the explosion of the internet, people’s voices weren’t heard as they would be today. Photographs weren’t taken on mobile phones and posted online. In both instances there was someone in a position of seniority who was new to the job. There were elements of institutionalised complacency. (It’s said that the most dangerous sentence in the English language is ‘But we’ve always done things that way.’) Facilities dated from decades when the relationship between pedestrian traffic-flow and human space requirements wasn’t as well understood as it is today. Risk assessments had failed to consider the possibility that more than thing might go wrong at any given time and how multiple-casualty emergencies would be dealt with. Both disasters blighted the lives of many hundreds – survivors, witnesses, families, friends and the police, doctors and nurses who had to deal with the aftermath. I wanted to reflect the extraordinary pressure endured by the Hillsborough families following their treatment when searching for loved ones. Similar insensitive treatment was seen in the aftermath of tragedies such as Lockerbie/PanAm and The Marchioness). This has led to a report calling for three crucial cultural changes: a charter for families bereaved by public tragedy; provision for proper participation of bereaved families at inquests and the creation of a ‘duty of candour’ for police officers.

But even when writing about a fictional incident, I soon found myself facing difficulties of a different kind. Broadcasts and broadsheets were dominated by large-scale disasters, many of them terrorist attacks. Paris was already on my mind, but Nice, Berlin, Manchester… Then in May 2017 came the London Bridge attack, an incident that took place within the setting for my novel. I witnessed first-hand the bouquets of red roses that spanned the full width of the bridge. Handwritten messages to loved ones gradually blurring in all that London’s weather could throw at them. And the photographs of the victims, all those devastating, beautiful obituaries.

Susan Sontag said, ‘Every fictional plot contains hints and traces of the stories it has excluded or resisted in order to assume its present shape.’ I couldn’t avoid that imagery overlaying my research. There is no doubt that some of will have made subtle inroads onto the pages of my novel, no matter how hard I resisted. But I had to make conscious decisions about if, and then how, I should let these disasters change the shape of the story I was writing. I had already realised that I didn’t want to write a book about blame. I felt this would do an injustice to the many individuals who behave heroically in the most terrible circumstances. Added to which, all of my research about accident investigation told me that any finding that an individual to blame is not only likely be biased, but the investigation will have failed to get to the root of how the disaster happened. Corporate Manslaughter remains an option, but I’m not sure there has been a single successful conviction since the concept was introduced, and there are dangers in blaming organisations. Unwittingly, in setting my disaster in an Underground station, I picked one of the best examples of an organisation that is subjected to crippling external pressures, London’s rapidly growing population being the most obvious. Add to this the inherent difficulties in expanding the Tube network. And nowhere are these problem more concentrated than in the City of London. I certainly didn’t hold London Underground to be responsible for my fictional disaster.

Then in June 2017 came the Grenfell Fire, the most heart-breaking tragedy of recent years, not only because of the enormous scale of the devastation, but because facts quickly emerged to suggest that the spread of the fire and its horrific consequences could have been prevented. Inadvertently, in avoiding writing about Hillsborough, I now risked creating the impression that I was commentating on two London disasters and, given that I live in London rather than Liverpool, wasn’t this more likely? Of course, having made a decision to write about unblame rather than blame, I was also seriously out of step with public opinion.

Fortunately, the focus of my novel isn’t the disaster, but human drama. My real challenge was to translate the emotional fallout onto the page with delicacy and honesty and in a way that gave the characters dignity. That meant capturing all of the guarded memories, the survivor guilt, the hidden sorrow of a man whose wife will no longer leave the house, the man who mourns not only the loss of a daughter but his unborn grandson and the end of his family line, a woman who beats herself up for having been a bad mother, the daughter who must assume position as head of the household, the sculptor who translates all their grief into art, the sheer heroism involved in the act of getting up day after day and going out into a world that has betrayed you. Then there’s the perseverance, all of that drive and fight for justice, getting it down on the blank page and delivering something that gives cause for hope. There always has to be a story. Mine is about human resilience and the healing power of art.

What’s Smash all the Windows about?
It has taken conviction to right the wrongs.
It will take courage to learn how to live again.

For the families of the victims of the St Botolph and Old Billingsgate disaster, the undoing of a miscarriage of justice should be a cause for rejoicing. For more than thirteen years, the search for truth has eaten up everything. Marriages, families, health, careers and finances.

Finally, the coroner has ruled that the crowd did not contribute to their own deaths. Finally, now that lies have been unravelled and hypocrisies exposed, they can all get back to their lives.

If only it were that simple.

Tapping into the issues of the day, Davis delivers a highly charged work of metafiction, a compelling testament to the human condition and the healing power of art.

Written with immediacy, style and an overwhelming sense of empathy, Smash all the Windows will be enjoyed by readers of How to Paint a Dead Man by Sarah Hall and How to be Both by Ali Smith.

So who is Jane Davis?

Hailed by The Bookseller as ‘One to Watch’, Jane Davis is the author of eight novels.

She spent her twenties and the first part of her thirties chasing promotions at work, but when she achieved what she’d set out to do, she discovered that it wasn’t what she wanted after all. It was then that she turned to writing.

Her debut, Half-truths & White Lies, won the Daily Mail First Novel Award 2008. Of her subsequent three novels, Compulsion Reads wrote, ‘Davis is a phenomenal writer, whose ability to create well-rounded characters that are easy to relate to feels effortless’. Her 2015 novel, An Unknown Woman, was Writing Magazine’s Self-published Book of the Year 2016 and has been shortlisted for two further awards.

Jane lives in Carshalton, Surrey with her Formula 1 obsessed, star-gazing, beer-brewing partner, surrounded by growing piles of paperbacks, CDs and general chaos. When she isn’t writing, you may spot her disappearing up a mountain with a camera in hand. Her favourite description of fiction is ‘made-up truth’.

Also by Jane Davis

Half-truths & White Lies

I Stopped Time

These Fragile Things

A Funeral for an Owl

An Unchoreographed Life

An Unknown Woman

My Counterfeit Self

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I came to this book, the first in the Professor and Mrs Moriarty Mystery Series, because I so much enjoy the author’s Francis Bacon historical fiction series. The Moriarty books are different from the Francis Bacon books, as you would expect from such an accomplished writer, and it’s a mark of just how accomplished she is that – with just a couple of niggles, which I’ll come to – she manages so well the switch from Tudor times to the late Victorian age.

This book turns on its head the relationship between Sherlock Holmes and Professor Moriarty. In Anna Castle’s version, Moriarty is an upright citizen of impeccable moral standing and honesty, while Holmes is a conceited, self-regarding bungler. Holmes is out to get Moriarty and to pin on him a series of murders, the unravelling of which is at the heart of this book. As with her Francis Bacon books, Castle brings us an outstanding heroine who would inspire in any man the thought, “My dear woman, just say the word.” And she does say the word (to Moriarty) and he responds as any red-blooded man might be expected to.

The niggles? They are not enormous, but they do matter. Anna Castle is American and writing a book set in Britain among British people is no easier for American writers than the reverse is for British writers. All the big, important stuff she gets right, but I found myself unwilling to believe that a London club of the quality Moriarty belongs to would serve its members American whiskey – and, sure enough, a few lines later she confirms that he is, in fact, drinking Scotch so it’s whisky and not whiskey. There are a few similar examples and, while they don’t detract from the quality of the book, they are there. There’s also a tendency, when her characters get into a real mess and you are wondering how on earth they are going to get out of it, to resort to the “With one bound she was free” solution. Finally, as a long-time fan of AE Housman, I was delighted in the early stages to discover that – like Housman and the object of his unrequited love, Moses Jackson – Moriarty is employed in the London Patent Office. Sure enough, Jackson turns up quite quickly and Housman immediately afterwards and I had great hopes that they would feature prominently in the novel, but that doesn’t happen. Perhaps in later books? We shall see.

Those are the reasons why I give this book four stars and not five, but I repeat that they do not detract from the enjoyment. I recommend this book without reserve to anyone who enjoys historical fiction, the unravelling of a crime, characters who emerge alive from the page and have completely believable motivations, a good love story, and/or first-class writing.

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I’ve said before, and a lot of people know, that I wanted (and want) to extract myself from Mandrill Press. I’m happy to go on having them publish my books, because someone has to, but I don’t like the close association with two lady writers who write what they call erotica and I can’t help regarding as soft porn. And now Mandrill Press’s rude ladies are to be joined by a third, because we’ve agreed to take on Helen Simkin, who was introduced by Susie Hopkins.

I’ll still do the admin, because that was the original agreement and because I get 10% of everything everybody else sells and, if I’m honest, they usually sell more than me. The main change will be that, as Helen Simkin moves onto the Mandrill Press website, I’ll be moving off it.

How do you get to know your characters?

I wrote a review a day or so ago of Roz Morris’s book, Writing Characters Who’ll Keep Readers Captivated. As I said in that review, it was one of the few books about writing that had such value that I thought I’d be rereading it in the years to come. Roz Morris has a lot to say about making actions and dialogue fit the character. It’s good stuff. Maybe it was reading that book that caused me, when Helen sent her first book in for editing (no link, because it hasn’t been edited yet and it certainly isn’t ready for publication), to ask where she got her characters from.

Pics in the public domain

When she told me the answer, it was one of those “Aha” moments, when you think, “Well, of course. What else?” Helen doesn’t write about people she knows. What she does is to browse through Public Domain picture sites and download pictures of people that capture her attention. Ultimately, she is looking for CCO images – pictures available under Creative Commons to be used for commercial purposes (like a book cover) without payment. Sometimes they need to be attributed to the person who made the picture, and sometimes they don’t. She showed me some examples:

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Getting to know a stranger

Having downloaded them, Helen simply stares at them. What she’s trying to do is to get inside the head of the person she’s looking at. See what makes them tick. Imagine how they would react to this event or that remark. These are people she doesn’t know and has never even seen before she downloads the pic, but she says that, after carrying a face around in her head for a few days and imagining interactions with the person whose face it is, she has a fully rounded character that she can do something with.

Your take may vary

I can see the value of this approach, and I might very well use it, but I don’t think I’m going to react to some of those people in the way that Helen Simkin does. Look at this one:

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Helen used that to inspire her first book, The Girl Next Door. I don’t know what those words mean to you, but to me they suggest someone wholesome – virginal, I suppose. What Helen Simkin, pornographer of this parish, has going on inside that sweet-looking head is something I’d prefer not to share with you.

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First, a disclaimer. I’m a member of the Alliance of Independent Authors (ALLi), and so is Roz Morris. That’s as far as the connection goes; I’ve never met her, though I’ve seen plenty of her posts and know quite a bit about what she has to say about writing. I did not get this book free; I paid to download it, and I downloaded it because I wanted to read it. I have read a number of books by ALLi members; I’ve reviewed some of them and not others. My general rule is that I don’t publish a review unless I can give the book at least three stars (I made an exception last week for the latest Louise Penny book), but for ALLi members I increase that to 4 stars – if I can’t give an ALLi member’s book at least four stars, I don’t review it. (If you are an ALLi member, you know I’ve read your book, and yet I didn’t review it, now you know the reason).

I have read a number of “How To” writing books – I imagine most writers have. Not many stick in the mind. Some were not very good at all, most were reasonably informative but forgotten after a while – and a very small number were absolute winners. This is one of those.

I write about people. I mean, I also write about events, and ideas, but people are what come first. People are what most interests me. (If I weren’t a writer, you might even call me nosy). I think that comes across in my books; a number of people have told me how invested they became in my characters. Nevertheless, I learned an enormous amount from Roz Morris’s book. She’s very good on “show, don’t tell” and she has some great stuff on how you can show things through what your characters do, what they say and how they look. She is also very good on handling minor characters, which is where a lot of people fall down. Her background as a ghost writer and editor has equipped her, first to know how to create the characters she wants to portray and then to tell other writers how to do the same.

This, obviously, is a book for writers. That doesn’t mean non-writers will get nothing out of it – even if you are not a writer, reading about how good writers create and portray characters will probably help you get more from the next book you read. But if you are a writer then, unless you are among that tiny, tiny minority who never get a character portrait wrong, you need to read this book. You need to absorb what it says. And act on it.

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