Detective novel as geography lesson

Many people class detective novels as trashy, throwaway fiction; ok for passing the time in hospital or on a long journey, but adding nothing to the reader’s life or intellectual development. I won’t get into an argument here about doing the Times crossword vs solving fictional crime before the end of the book, and I won’t try and persuade anyone of the elegance of prose in, say, a Ross Macdonald or Stephen Dobyns novel. However, I will try and show how culturally enlightening it can be to have wide-ranging tastes in crime fiction.

Proust and a handful of nineteenth-century Russians aside, in my family the most-read works in translation are undoubtedly detective novels. From Simenon’s Maigret to Andrea Camilleri’s Montalbano via Henning Mankell, my dad and I have travelled the world on the back of a crime novelist’s pen. OneMonkey’s dad has been watching French, Swedish, and Danish crime series on TV recently, now dismissing the British adaptation of Wallander as second-rate, and barely stomaching the first episode of an American remake of one of the other Scandinavian series. Would he even be tempted by a subtitled European sitcom? Unlikely.

Crime fiction more than any other genre seems to be rooted in a sense of place, more often than not a real place. Read enough of them and you too can walk the streets of 1990s LA with Robert Crais or 1930s San Francisco with Dashiell Hammett, the deserted canyons of 1940s California with Raymond Chandler or the backstreets of Paris with Georges Simenon. While the settings are often fictionalised versions of a real town, or even a fictional town placed within a real area, some writers do use real locations quite faithfully, which is where the modern miracle of Google maps comes in.

Noting that Saratoga Springs was a real place while reading a Charlie Bradshaw book by Stephen Dobyns, I looked it up on a map. That gave me a sense of where it was, and how far from Albany and other locations sometimes mentioned in the books, and is as far as I would have been able to go in the past. Enter Google and its street views. I can walk down the main street following Charlie from the pool to his mother’s hotel, or see the race track entrance as Victor sees it. I can immerse myself in the town and its make-up. Of course I’m not expecting all the streets that Dobyns mentions to be real, I’m not even expecting him not to take liberties and make the town hall visible from a street where actually all you’d see is the looming library. However, that extra element, beyond his descriptions, of seeing the width of the streets, the trees, the age and style of buildings, the jostling of old and new – it’s certainly more entertaining than any Geography lesson I had at school. I don’t think I’d use a detective novel as a guide book to a foreign city, but they can open up an easy doorway to a different world.

In short: the art of the synopsis

This is not going to be an expert how-to article on writing a killer synopsis. If I could write an article like that, I could write a good synopsis and I’d have cracked this novelling lark and be off living the high life somewhere. Or living the same life I’ve got now, with the warm glow that comes from seeing your book in a shop occasionally. However, I have just finished the synopsis for my CWA debut dagger entry (what am I going to blog about once I’ve sent it off on Saturday?), and I can share a few insights.

First I’ll point to places I’ve used for reference: the debut dagger advice itself, a page I found a while ago when I was trying to put together a synopsis for the unpublished (and commercially infeasible) serial novel Wasted Years, and a page which is largely directed at romance novelists but has lots of advice that seems transferable.

Writing a synopsis should be so simple. It’s short (1000 words maximum for the debut dagger), you don’t have to know exactly how the cunning twist comes about in all its detail, and all you have to do is say what your novel’s about. I found it very helpful to follow the advice from Marg Gilks and do a short chapter summary. Every week or so I went back and skim-read the chapters I’d written since the last summarising session, and wrote in a document kept purely for this purpose a few sentences outlining main plot points. Since this is a detective novel I made sure I wrote down key facts that had been discovered or relayed, so I could keep up with who knew what. This has been useful during the writing itself, never mind the synopsis – you can’t have a big revelation if you glance down your summary and remind yourself that he knew that 3 chapters ago.

So organisation seems crucial for writing a synopsis. The other main ingredient is of course editing, and the amount you have to do for this might even make you reasonably good at it. Even the brief chapter summaries probably add up to something substantial, and certainly my version with the who knows what when element is far too detailed for a synopsis. This is a good test of how ruthless you can be, you will cut out entire subplots, characters and probably some of your neatest summing-up phrases. Not only are you trying to convey the plot but you’re also supposed to convey something of the flavour or style of the book, which is the bit I found hardest, my early drafts were the right length but more like dry bullet points than a flowing abbreviated tale.

My main breakthrough came when I realised (not just knew that this was said to be so, but really realised) that the person reading the synopsis doesn’t know how accurate you’re being – if you’re cutting corners, using sleight of hand, oversimplifying, it doesn’t matter. As long as the synopsis itself makes sense, which is where OneMonkey (or your personal equivalent) comes in – having someone else read it is invaluable and it’s not like it’s going to take them long. The detached eye will not only pick up on the usual typos etc, but on points at which the ruthless editing has chopped the linking sentence, the first appearance of someone you refer to familiarly later on, or the only other plot point that made what you wrote in paragraph 3 make sense.

In short, then:

Get organised. Get good at editing. Get yourself a friend who’s not afraid to ask why on earth Theodore would be so bothered about dropping his apple pie.

Editing: hard work but someone’s got to do it

You may have noticed I keep banging on about the Debut Dagger and my possible entry to it. This is partly because talking (or writing) about doing it is much easier than the bit I should be doing: editing.

We all know editing’s a necessary part of writing, but it’s not always seen as the fun part, the rewarding part. So much more pleasant to rack up that wordcount (look at the popularity of NaNoWriMo) than make anything properly finished out of it. I was seduced by rising wordcount in 2011; in the second half of the year I wrote over 80,000 words of detective novel and believe me, it felt good. I can point to the wordcount graph (what do you expect from someone who used to read Physics World?) with its steep slopes or steady inclines, or I can point to the pile of first draft pages (or I could if I’d printed them all out) and anyone can see what it is I’ve been doing.

Not so in this phase. I spend hours working and either have the same number of words, or less than I started with. I write copious notes about scenes to be slotted in, conversations to be staged between characters, facts that have been lost. But I can’t point to any concrete achievement. The first chapter may be substantially better than when I sat down half an hour ago (such is the plan, anyway) but at a casual glance it looks no different. The synopsis (of which possibly more later) is growing but only agonisingly slowly, and anyway it’s a synopsis, it doesn’t count as writing.

It’s at this point that I need to remind myself (and may as well also remind any fellow writers reading this – think of it as a bargain from the January sales) that this is the crucial bit, the bit that makes the difference between tens of thousands of coherent words on a related subject, and a novel. As I proved last summer and autumn, it’s not as hard as you think it’s going to be, to sit down regularly and gradually amass enough words to fill a couple of hundred paperback pages. Unless you edit ruthlessly, however, it will never be a novel. There is nothing for it but to knuckle down, with only a cup of tea and the faint hope of future pride to keep you going.

That wasn’t me talking: the perils of autobiographical writing

If you read creative writing books, there are usually several exhortations to plunder your own life and soul for inspiration. I agree that most characters, including the narrative voice, will have some element of the author in them – it’s inevitable. I also know that I plunder small details from real life all the time – phrases or mannerisms from my family, everyday incidents at work that can be generalised, as well as observations from being abroad in the city. However, the suggestions to start with something real from your past (Recall an argument you’ve had and write about it from your opponent’s point of view. Take one of your own memories and write it in 3rd-person) fill me with horror.

The problem with an exercise like that is, you might write something good. If the glimmer of a decent story emerges from it, you’ll want to use it, and how much can you change (to make it unrecognisable to your nearest and dearest – or worse, colleagues and bare acquaintances) without spoiling it? This is particularly a danger with short stories, where one incident can make up nearly the whole thing, and if it’s recognisably true, some people will of course assume the whole story is. There will then follow one of the following responses:

You didn’t tell me you’d been to the V&A when you went for that job interview.
(I didn’t; I made that bit up. I do remember seeing a poster for it at the time)

So that’s what happened to my gold pen! Return it by tomorrow morning and I won’t call the police.
(Nope, didn’t even know it was missing. Seems I’m not the only one to have noticed you leave it lying around when your office door’s unlocked)

You should be ashamed of yourself.
(Maybe, but only because I have a mind that works that way; I have never actually done that, nor would I wish to)

I can’t believe you could be so awful about Uncle Ken. I’ll never speak to you again.
(No, you see, a character with a similar job to mine said that about another character with a similar history to Uncle Ken. I don’t agree with her – but you’ve already slammed the phone down)

Note that the above examples are themselves fictional: though I have encountered responses along some of these lines, I have never had a job interview in London or an Uncle Ken, nor do I know anyone with a gold pen. But you get the idea.

Most writers probably have at least one pivotal moment, the kind where every time you think of it you shudder, and/or breathe a sigh of relief. If they were already in the writing mindset at the time it happened, even then (or shortly afterwards) they were probably mulling over the ‘what if’ scenarios, and it would almost certainly provide a rich store of material for heartfelt stories – the emotions would be real because they’d still be vivid years later (given the type of event we’re talking about). But if the events had that kind of resonance, would it be a sensitive issue for friends or family? Would they read the resulting tale and, recognising its source, assume that the character’s point of view was that of the author? Dangerous territory, and so far, I’m too much of a coward to wade in.

Postscript: since writing this and putting it aside to use in a few weekends’ time, I’ve read Smoke and Mirrors by Neil Gaiman. In the introduction he mentions that one of the stories in that collection (I forget which one, and the book is upstairs) is close enough to the truth that he’s had to explain to a few relatives that it didn’t quite happen that way. Which sort of proves my point, and reinforces my stand.

The festive excuse note

It looks like the post a week thing has finally crumbled, but I’ll let myself off because over the whole year I’ve missed very few weeks. It’s the festive season, specifically that weird bit between Christmas and New Year when everything’s on hiatus. Including, apparently, me.

I’ve been avoiding writing since I’ve been on holiday, too much like hard work. I’ve got the Debut Dagger entry to put together, which is frankly terrifying, and I should tidy up some mostly-finished stories to send off to places. Inevitably of course I’ve been eating mince pies, doing vastly important rearrangements of the newly reinstated bookcase, and generally filling up my days such that I go to bed wondering where the time went.

Thankfully, Neil Gaiman has set me back on track. Not personally, of course, and I haven’t even been reading his usually absorbing journal lately. I have been travelling on trains a lot though, and yesterday I picked up a book almost at random (it had a purple cover, which was enough to catch my eye) from the To Read pile. It was Smoke and Mirrors, a collection of stories and poems by Neil Gaiman, which has a long introduction with notes on each piece.

One of the things I like about Neil Gaiman’s journal is its feeling of honesty (I’m not saying it is honest, I’d be surprised if it wasn’t filtered and buffed up and slanted in particular ways); the illusion that here is this perfectly ordinary Englishman, with the same problems of self-doubt, occasional laziness, lack of inspiration, and looming deadlines as the rest of us. Here, we think, is something I could aspire to, it’s not entirely beyond my reach, no superhuman powers needed. Of course that’s glossing over the ability to write gripping stories well, but that’s not necessarily relevant at this point.

And so to Smoke and Mirrors. I’m about halfway through and though I confess I’ve been more puzzled than anything by the poems (I think I knocked my poetry Off switch a couple of years ago and I can’t seem to accidentally elbow it back into life), almost all of the stories so far have made me berate myself for letting such a book languish on my shelf for six months. Though if I’d read it immediately in the summer, it wouldn’t have been available to provide that much-needed spark of inspiration now. Which it has. The stories themselves have fired me up, but the notes in the introduction have been useful in an Ah, he does that too sort of a way, like a narrowly-focused version of his journal.

Not having a hat with me, I’ll raise my sister’s jaunty Christmas-pudding-shaped hat to Mr Gaiman and wish him a marvellous festive season and all the best for 2012. And that goes for you, too.

This book should be consumed within six months of purchase

I read a lot, but not as much as I’d like, or rather, not as many books as I’d like, which isn’t quite the same thing. New books emerge every week, I hear about old ones or get recommendations, and my To Read pile (which has now taken over the original cupboard and a small bookcase) keeps on growing. Inevitably some books get pushed to the back – I get a new one that attracts me more immediately, or I borrow a book so I only have a short window of opportunity. There are books on my shelves that I’ve moved off the To Read pile because I’ll get round to them when I get round to them, and they’re taking up room.

Which brings me to my current problem, which isn’t so much a problem as a pang of regret with a lesson attached. Some books have a Read By date.

By this I don’t mean some flavour of the month bestseller that wasn’t very good anyway, so needs to be read during the hype period while all your friends are insisting it’s ironic and subversive – so bad it’s bloody marvellous. What I mean is there are books you grow out of, and not just the ones whose puerile humour appealed at 14 and appalls at 40.

The book I’ve been slowly reading on my daily commute for the last couple of weeks is an abridged (but still hefty) edition of Gibbon’s Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire. I bought it, as far as I can remember, with a Christmas book token 13 or 14 years ago and had I read it then I’m sure I would have enjoyed it a whole lot more. I had more uninterrupted reading time, I could remember a lot more Latin (Gibbon assumes, no doubt perfectly reasonably for the time, that if you’re reading his book you must be educated enough to translate the Latin quotes and inscriptions, so he doesn’t patronise his readers by doing it for them), and I had more of an idea which order the Roman emperors came in and what each was usually remembered for. Even 8 years ago when I did a couple of open learning courses on the early middle ages at my (then) local university, I would have been immersed in the period though my Latin was already patchy.

The lesson to take away from this is: don’t keep shoving things to the back of your To Read cupboard.

Unless it’s: don’t buy more books than you can manage.

November ended a few days ago

NaNoWriMo resulted in just over 23,000 words of detective novel, so no winner’s certificate but I’m still counting this as a win of sorts, and so should you if your NaNo activity didn’t make the 50,000 but did get you writing. As well as 2 days selling comics, which I’d planned for, I was ill for a while so in all I had 10 days where I didn’t write a single word. I’ve kept up my habit of lunchtime writing, and I’ve now conclusively shown I can write lots, regularly, without becoming a total stranger to OneMonkey. I am feeling rather pleased with myself.

I lost track of time a bit towards the end of the month, where I was frantically making up for the lost days. So I never got round to blogging last weekend, and I missed 2 short story deadlines right at the start of December, which I’m really kicking myself for – the story submissions have been almost non-existent while I’ve been concentrating on detective novels.

And now we’re counting down to Christmas; I’m limbering up for full-on bah humbug mode, and in the meantime I’m filling up on mince pies and dry roasted peanuts. And planning the long writing sessions I’m hoping to get in over the Christmas break. We’re due our first snow tomorrow, though it’s already been sleeting, but instead of worrying about the rose trees I haven’t planted yet, I’ll focus on the prospect of getting stuck at home – I have a cupboard full of mince pies and teabags, a laptop and a head-full of ideas. Sounds like heaven.

One last thing: my detective story is now up on the Comets and Criminals website if you’d like to check that out.

Those who don’t want to know the NaNo score, look away now

This is turning out to be ScriptFrenzy all over again… But hey, there’s only one (two at the most) more of these NaNoWriMo posts to go, so grit your teeth and it’ll all be over soon.

As this post goes out, I will actually be at (or on my way to – I haven’t set the time yet) the Thought Bubble comic convention in Leeds. With luck, I will be selling comics, but at the very least I’ll be with friends in interesting surroundings and I should be able to find some new comics to get interested in (these events can get expensive).

Where does this leave my frantic novelling, I hear you ask (look, just pretend you asked). It pretty much wipes out two days, but since one of the aforementioned friends is also in the midst of NaNo frenzy, we may goad each other into amazing literary feats on Saturday evening. My total should be at around 16,000 words by Friday night (Friday night itself being scratched out due to the Damned gig – got to get your priorities right) so fingers crossed for a decent total by the end of the month.

I’m enjoying NaNo – after ScriptFrenzy I thought I probably would. I’m taking it slow and steady, not worrying too much about the final total as long as what I’ve got is usable, and it’s taking me down some interesting avenues. I’ve already uncovered a weird antagonism between two secondary characters that needs exploring further, and I may even have got the wrong murderer (how can the author get it wrong?). Very much an enjoyable Sunday drive rather than a satnav-planned A to B dash.

Best of luck for the second half of the month to all those participating, further apologies to anyone who’s being neglected (more than usual). Back to the fray.

The bright side

I’m cultivating a positive outlook at the moment; maybe it’s the cold affecting my inner curmudgeon, but there you go.

Strange, Weird & Wonderful has published its final issue, just before the one that my story was due in. So while that’s a sale I won’t make (payment on publication, not acceptance), a credit I can’t chalk up on my scoreboard, and a story that’s back to doing the rounds, if I was looking on the bright side I’d say at least I don’t have to produce that audio version after all (though I’d actually started to feel good about the challenge).

NaNoWriMo is going slowly, probably even slower than I’d anticipated, but if you know you’re not going to make it to 50,000 words, any number’s an achievement and you don’t end up feeling stressed and guilty if you do other things for a while during November. Such as a 2-day comic convention.

Thought Bubble is less than a week away which is a bit scary (in an exhilirating way). I also know that I’m not going to get an early night before it, and I’ll probably have had to put up with a late-night long-distance taxi ride. The bright side of that one is positively dazzling though: we’re off to see The Damned on Friday. Excuse me while I touch up my black nail varnish.

It’s November and there’s too much to do

Time ran away with me last week and I never made it to my blog. We had a friend to stay for a few days, then suddenly it was November and I had a novel to write. Another one. I haven’t even quite finished the last one yet (a couple of thousand words away from a complete first draft, I reckon) but it’s been put aside so I can participate in the madness that is NaNoWriMo. I’m already behind schedule and it’s only day 4.

However, as those of us who listened occasionally at school may remember, it’s not the winning it’s the taking part. NaNoWriMo is a good excuse to write furiously, without giving yourself enough time for the self-doubt to creep in. I’ll settle for 20,000 words I can work on later. A belated appreciative moment for the support crew of friends and family that make these intensive writing challenges possible – once again, I take my hat off to you all.

And while I’ve got my hat off, consider it also doffed to Chris Packham – anyone that can manage (with a straight face) to work so many Damned titles (but particularly Machine Gun Etiquette) into a BBC Wildlife Programme deserves recognition. Well done Chris, and I apologise for considering you a poor second to Terry Nutkins way back when.

Dystopian inspiration is all around

No, not a comment on the economy, global or otherwise. Though it’s true it should be prodding your muse up the backside with a sharp stick if near-future sci-fi is your thing. What I actually meant was the (presumably temporary) giant bronze statue of Freddie Mercury that’s appeared in Leeds. It’s advertising a musical at a local theatre, but it dominates the square, vying for attention with a long-dead horse-bound royal, fist aloft and looking like something intended to inspire the workers behind the Iron Curtain. The posters that put the statue in context are low down and easy to overlook; visitors would be forgiven for thinking it’s a perfectly serious tribute to a departed icon. Which got me thinking about dystopian SF and the use of revered celebrities as pacifiers of a restless mob – you can have that spark of inspiration on me, I haven’t the time to use it at the moment.

For those who may be vaguely interested, the detective novel slid past the 50,000 word mark this week, and the Crime Writers’ Association Debut Dagger award is now open for entries. Hmm, worth a shot I think.

Bradford based fantasy – I’m not alone

Either I’ve found a kindred spirit or lost some of my uniqueness this week, depending how you look at it. There is someone else out there writing speculative fiction set in Bradford (no, really). Elizabeth Hopkinson writes fantasy rather than sci-fi, and some of her Bradford-based stories have been published whereas mine tend to be either doing the rounds or sitting in the unfinished pile, so in some sense she’s leading the way – I can rest easier knowing that Bradford already has a purple-headed pin on the speculative fiction map and isn’t relying solely on the fate of Self-aware and Living in Bradford (my near-future AI homage to Julie Christie’s performance in Billy Liar). A Short History of the Dream Library, a story I heard Elizabeth read this week, won the James White Award in 2005 and was in Interzone; it’s comic fantasy explicitly set in Bradford, whereas some of her other work is less comic and less explicit in its setting (but with much inspiration from the city and its buildings).

I had two revelations, listening to Elizabeth Hopkinson read. One was that all may not be lost as far as me doing an audio version of The Whitewing Fallen goes: hearing someone with a similar accent stand and read in front of an audience was quite reassuring, though I’ve still got to get round the fact that I have a character who in my head sounds like a Tudor Glenn Danzig. The other was that I’ve been reading Robert Rankin books for years, and I don’t think I even realised Brentford was a real place for a while, and even when I did, I assumed the streets etc were mostly made up – you can be as parochial as you like and as long as there’s enough of a feeling of solidity for your readers to imagine the setting, it doesn’t matter if they’ve never heard of it, so in theory I could take a leaf out of Rankin’s book and set every piece of speculative fiction I write in future in and around Bradford with no alienating effects on the potential readership.

On that cheering (or possibly horrifying) note, I’ll get back to slaving away over a hot keyboard.

Wet weekend words

After an unseasonable week more summery than most of the summer, we’re now in full-on autumn. The curtain of rain hides the other side of the valley and gives me a good excuse not to leave my bureau to work on the garden, and I can break out my favourite jumpers again. Unfortunately it’s discouraging me from participating in the local literary festival – I hadn’t been organised enough to buy any advance tickets so I was planning on heading to the free events and some of those I thought would have tickets on the door, but twenty minutes’ walk which can be so pleasant and invigorating on a fine evening becomes much less so when you get chilled and wet on the way, and spend an hour sitting still, acutely aware of damp shins.

NaNoWriMo looms large on the horizon, and I’m wondering if I’ve bitten off more than I can chew, though I’m still determined to give it a go. The first draft of the detective novel, which I’d planned to complete by the end of September, is limping towards 50,000 words at the moment, disrupted continually by predictable distractions. Writing at home more or less came to a halt, first with clearing out and packing, then the move itself, followed by unpacking, DIY, gardening and suchlike. I realised yesterday that I don’t have a single short story doing the rounds, in fact I haven’t made any submissions since July (which is when I started the detective novel; I don’t think that’s a coincidence). Time for a reassessment of priorities, a flurry of submissions, maybe a break from the novel-writing to finish up some nearly-there shorts which can then be sent out, before I start the other detective novel at the beginning of November. Phew! Who’d have thought such a relaxing and peaceful hobby could be so hectic.

The criminal career takes off

Or, I have a detective story available in the brand new e-zine from New Zealand, Comets and Criminals. I urge you to check out the issue, it has some good stories in, an interesting mix of thrilling genres from authors whose other work has already appeared in some quite impressive places. My contribution is The Dovedale Affair, in which a murder in a small Yorkshire town causes panic in the mother of a disturbed young man – what does he know about it, and how?

Can I use moving house as an excuse?

You may not have noticed, but I forgot to blog last week. The two weekends prior to that I’d scheduled pre-written posts because I knew I’d be without broadband for a short while (and pretty busy) in the week before and after I moved house. What I’d forgotten (because it’s been all of two years since I last moved) is that I’d be busy for a while after that too, all normal routines would be cast aside, and I’d forget there was ever any life before I lived here. Writing? Oh yes, that’s the thing that used to fill my hours before I had a big garden that’s been neglected for a while and needs a lot of work before the winter sets in. OneMonkey and I have spent more time in wellies since we moved here than I would care to admit.

Needless to say, the detective novel’s slightly behind schedule (just over 40,000 words written) as I’m only writing in my lunch-hour at the moment, and reading is something I do to fill in the commute, but I have (slowly) worked my way through Revelation Space by Alastair Reynolds in the past few weeks and I enjoyed it so I’ll share. It’s the first in a series, and is set in the 26th century. A self-important archaeologist, Dan Sylveste, is working on a dig which seems to relate to his life-long obsession, the Amarantin, a long-dead race. What he discovers changes the way the Amarantin are viewed, and his single-mindedness tries the patience of the colony he’s supposed to be in charge of. Meanwhile in another part of the galaxy, a soldier-turned-assassin, Ana Khouri, is selected for a covert mission which involves infiltrating the crew of an interstellar ship, who are scouring the galaxy for a cure for their sick captain. Everyone has their own agenda, their own secrets (sometimes hidden even from part of themselves), and there are some pretty long games being played, with lifetimes of waiting for the payoff. Manipulation is rife and nothing is quite as it seems, with strange loyalties forming and shifting. As an astrophysicist himself, Reynolds also gets the science seeming plausible, which is always a nice touch.

I’m looking forward to starting book 2, Redemption Ark, in the morning but for now, back to garden design.

Feersum Endjinn by Iain M Banks

Feersum Endjinn is one of the few non-Culture sci-fi novels by Iain M Banks; I’ve already reviewed one of the others, The Algebraist. This is a much thinner novel than the Algebraist, at only 275 pages, but Banks packs a great story in nevertheless (possibly with a few loose ends, or possibly I didn’t pick up on something subtle).

Each chapter is split into 4 sections, each following one of the four main characters (or small connected group of characters). One of these is Bascule, a sort of lovable rascal of a novice monk who lives in a brotherhood and communes with the dead (or rather, their downloaded representations). OneMonkey was put off the whole book, unfortunately, because of what he saw as the ‘textspeak’ in which Bascule’s first-person sections are written. However, given that Banks is British and probably around Big Brother’s age I’ll take a guess that they’re more likely to be influenced by Whizz For Atoms and the like, by Geoffrey Willans and Ronald Searle (he of St Trinian’s fame). If you’ve ever read those you’ll have little trouble with Bascule, but as he says himself ‘I tolkd farely normil but I thot a bit funy’ so it might not be that easy to grasp straight off.

It has overtones of Gormenghast in places; there is a whole landscape within a huge castle, and for a while I wasn’t sure if the people were miniature or the rooms were huge. As you might expect from a contained society like that there is murder, intrigue, civil war, a possibly corrupt government and various conspiracies. Add the downloaded personalities of the dead, who live through eight lives in the speeded-up time of the cryptosphere, and you have a rich construct woven around a gripping story.

Paris Noir anthology

I’d seen a couple of the other anthologies in this series from Akashic Books in the library before but Paris was the first one that prompted me into borrowing it, as I’ve actually been there. I figured that part of the idea behind a one-city setting was that you could immerse yourself, and it helps if you can picture the streets, hear the sounds. All the stories were translated from French, which adds an authenticity (and sometimes a confusion, though no more than I occasionally get from, for instance, American writing).

I nearly gave up on this book, I will admit – the first 2 or 3 stories I dipped into were, to my mind, more monosyllabic brutality than richly atmospheric crime fiction. However, I persevered and the next couple were OK, and then I hit upon The Revenge of the Waiters by Jean-Bernard Pouy. It takes a theme I often play around with (but have never yet finished a story on), that of the familiar stranger and particularly the way we notice their absences and wonder what’s become of them. With a welcome injection of dark humour, Pouy sets a band of bored waiters on an investigation into such an absence, with escalating consequences.

La Vie en Rose by Dominique Mainard makes good use of a technique that’s sometimes seen as old-fashioned, that of having our main character sit down and listen to a long and almost unbroken exposition of the back-story from the other main character. As an interesting twist, the listener is a proto-crime-writer pretending to be a private detective in order to gather material, but he soon finds he’s out of his depth.

I’m not sure if I’d read other volumes in the series, but if I do dip in, I’ll let you know how they measure up.

A History of the Protestant Reformation by William Cobbett

A history of the Protestant Reformation sounds like it should be dry, dull, of narrow interest, and not at all relevant today. Which is why I’d like to tell you about this book. William Cobbett is marvellous, sadly not as widely-known as he should be, and an inspiration. If he were alive now he would be blogging and tweeting every moment of the day, trying to bridge the ever-present gap between truth and the population at large. This book is written in Cobbett’s usual style, not so much conversational as like the man who corners you at a gathering and begins a lot of sentences with ‘And I’ll tell you another thing about…’; it’s certainly not formal and dusty, though he does like to cite references (primary sources if possible so you can go check for yourself) and he gets himself wound up to a pitch and repeats things sometimes (this was serialised, too, so no chance for him to change his sections around later).

The main spur for this book was the ridiculous and appalling anti-Catholic laws still existing in England in the early 19th century (some, like no Catholic or spouse of a Catholic can be the monarch, are in place even now). The point that tells you the most about Cobbett is that he and all his family were members of the Church of England, he had no personal axe to grind but he saw an injustice and he couldn’t resist bringing it to public attention, questioning it in a reasoned and logical manner, and campaigning for its end. Although the book, and the creation of the Church of England, are nominally about religion, Cobbett argues persuasively that it’s all about greed, power, corruption, and land-grabbing. Everything rides on a political agenda.

It’s the same today, which is why Cobbett’s book is still relevant. Not only did I learn some unsavoury things about the Tudors, but it made me think in a joined-up way about the things I already did know, which was part of Cobbett’s point – you don’t have to hide unpleasant truths, you just have to present them in such a way that people are unlikely to go ‘but hang on, didn’t he also do…?’ and want to dig deeper. How many contradictory things do governments say on a regular basis, and how many laws or policies are formulated ‘after careful consideration of expert evidence’ meaning ‘we read it, it didn’t fit our pre-formed ideas or political goals so we discarded it’?

If you’re not interested in religion, or you’re not British (or Irish – they came under the same heavy-handed laws at the time, of course), or you’ve never heard of William Cobbett, it doesn’t matter – you might not be familiar with all the players but the game itself may be enlightening. I would also suggest that if you enjoyed Josephine Tey’s unusual detective novel ‘The Daughter of Time’, this might appeal to you in that same spirit of painstakingly uncovering historical facts that weren’t hidden, but have just been publicly contradicted so often that ‘everyone knows’ the complete opposite.

New genre excitement

It’s reasonably apparent to anyone reading this blog that (Anthony Trollope aside) I go for genre – count the references to sci-fi, fantasy, the occasional bit of horror, and detective stories, and…actually you’d be bored quite quickly so I wouldn’t bother, but you get the gist. OneMonkey likes a similar mix, and my dad got me into both Raymond Chandler and Philip K Dick. So for all of us, and those with similar tastes, Comets and Criminals sounds like a good plan. Starting in October, this New Zealand-based outfit will be offering up sci-fi, crime, adventure and westerns in a quarterly package. Why am I telling you this? Well, the eagle-eyed will have spotted earlier in the week the new ‘forthcoming’ line on my list of successes, though this post is scheduled for my usual weekend sort of time (at the weekend I will probably be writing the detective novel: 24,000 words and counting). Ladies and gentlemen, I have sold a detective story; all that wearing of a trilby at a rakish angle was not in vain.

Two more books about writing

Procrastinating as I often do, I went book-hunting in the city library recently, looking for how-to books on writing. What tips could I pick up, what had I missed, where was I going wrong..?

Among the books I brought home was This Year You Write Your Novel by Walter Mosley (author of, among other things, Devil in a Blue Dress, later made into a Denzel Washington film which I haven’t seen but should – detection in 1940s LA, just my kind of thing). You can tell from the title that this is a no-nonsense book from a man who is not prepared to take any of your pathetic excuses, like the one that mentions how many writing books you need to read before you get going. It’s a short book (about 100 pages) but he could have made it shorter, maybe one page that said ‘Shut up and write. No-one else is going to do it for you’.

I don’t mean to make Mosley sound harsher than he is, I think it’s a good book. This isn’t a book full of exercises (in fact I think there’s only one), but it does give you pointers and lots to think about. Including the importance of poetry in writing fiction – not something I’d thought much about, and I don’t read poetry very often these days, but it’s true that it’s a good way of learning how to use just the right number of words in just the right combination to say what you mean (preferably with additional layers), as well as getting a feel for the rhythm of language. He uses an example story to keep coming back to throughout the book to illustrate different things, stresses the importance of a regular writing routine and gives useful, detailed advice on redrafting. Crucially for me, he also mentions 3 months (the deadline I’d given myself for the first draft of my detective novel) as a reasonable time in which to produce a first draft.

A complete contrast to Mosley’s angle is Writing Fiction by Linda Anderson and Derek Neale; it’s an Open University book, and you can tell. It’s two hundred pages packed with exercises and points to consider, enough to generate years’ worth of inspiration, and it sets about it all in a systematic teacherly sort of way which I found reassuring. Although I loathed and detested English Literature at school, I even found the sections of this book where they present an extract from a novel or short story interesting. A couple of paragraphs, or an exchange of dialogue, are laid before the reader with questions to have in mind beforehand, then a brief analysis afterwards. The key (for me) is that there’s no picking every word apart for meanings that aren’t really there, just a study of rhythm, pace, and technique which you can learn from. Even on a first read-through, without doing any of the exercises, I found myself jotting ideas down, and I know I’ll come back to this book when I’ve got more time to experiment.

Of course we all know by now where I was going wrong: I was reading about writing, not just sitting down and doing it. Back to the typeface.