creative writing

Desert island author

/ Caron Allan / 6 Comments

‘I thought this was voluntary?’

I’m thinking of doing my own mock-up version of Desert Island Discs. For those of you who don’t know, there is a long-running radio show called –you’ve guessed it—Desert Island Discs. Each week a guest selects their favourite music along with a book and a luxury item to take with them to be stranded (I assume deliberately) on a desert island. It’s a fresh (even now after over 3000 episodes) way to interview celebrities of all kinds and find out what makes them tick.

A certain amount of belief needs to be suspended here as we are assuming a minimum level of survival comfort and apparently electricity on this desert island… Try not to worry about the details. (How did the stranded person get there? What if they need medication? A special diet? How long will they be there for? What furniture/food/shelter/clothing do they have? Are they alone? Where is the fresh water supply? What about a loo? Ignore all that.)

Just out of curiosity I Googled the show and it’s been running since 1942!! I was astonished. Hugely famous and influential people have guested on the show, here are just a few names to wow you:

Ivor Novello, Humphrey Lyttelton, Leslie Howard, Arthur Askey (at least twice), Wing Commander Guy Gibson, Claire Luce (who took the original part in Gay Divorce when it was a play, before Ginger Rogers made it her own in the movie, I based my first Dottie book, Night and Day on this version.) Michael Redgrave, Celia Johnson, Deborah Kerr, Stewart Granger, Peter Ustinov, Ian Fleming, Alfred Hitchcock, and so many, many more. The castaways were not just British actors, musicians, Members of Parliament, war heroes and other popular names, but there were many, many others including US stars and notable figures: Tyrone Power, Count Basie, Blanche Thebom, Earl Hines, Paul Robeson, Dave Brubeck, (quite a few musicians, I notice), Paul Gallico, Regina Resnik, Tallulah Bankhead, Louis Armstrong, Andre Previn, and James Stewart.

Me playing the piano in my ballgown as my leggings dry on the sand…

James Stewart chose a piano as his luxury item. Actually most people seemed to choose notebooks and writing implements, or canvases and paints to take as their luxury item. Perhaps there is a sense in all of us that thinks that, given enough time, we’d get through all our routine basic duties or tasks and finally have a moment to do what we really want to do – be creative. Others wanted to take photos of their family, or their favourite tipple: plenty of good quality claret was requested!

Don’t ask me to do without this…

It’s odd, isn’t it, discovering what is most important in our lives? If we know our loved ones—and the cat/goldfish/gerbil are safe, what else is important? If you’re going somewhere with no shops, businesses or commerce, do you need money? Or jewels? Or designer clothing?

Here are my own 8 choices of music. I should just say, I like most kinds of music, but some are dearer to me than others. I cheated by going for albums rather than individual tracks 😊.

  1. Corinne Bailey Ray’s album called ‘Corinne Bailey Ray’.
  2. Riverside’s ‘Out of Myself’.
  3. Nina Simone: ‘Feeling Good: The Very Best of Nina Simone’
  4. Handel: Messiah (this is a big compromise as I like different versions of this by different orchestras/choirs depending on the track…)
  5. Paul Weller’s ‘Modern Classics’.
  6. The Very Best Of Jimmy Somerville, Bronski Beat & The Communards (You can get a lot of extra mileage with ‘best of’ compilations, just a little tip for you, in case you’re ever in this situation.)
  7. Simply Red: ‘Men and Women’.
  8. Can I bring the whole set of ‘The Marriage of Figaro’? I don’t think I can choose just one track… It won’t take up much room, I promise. Oh, and the libretto so I can sing along – there’ll be no one around to scare with my voice.

And for my book—Again, to show just how times have changed, and also, to bend the rules a wee bit, I’ll take my Kindle eReader. Hahahahahaha! (charging point is assumed…)

Which means, my luxury item is going to have to be a bottomless tub of Options white hot chocolate too. Then I’d truly be happy.

Oh wait, I forgot my notebooks and pens. No, it’s okay, my Kindle has got my Evernote note-making app on it. Phew. For a moment I almost got out of the boat and went home again.

And that’s it. I suppose what I wanted to say really was, wow what a huge number of really special people were on Desert Island Discs. It’s no wonder it’s considered an institution. I would love to have spent half an hour talking to so many of those people, sadly no longer with us. If you want to know more, you can take a look on Wikipedia:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Desert_Island_Discs

Or on the BBC’s page:

https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b006qnmr/episodes/player

Who would you want to interview?

If you were the castaway, what items would you take with you? What music would you choose? It’s a dilemma!

***

Ten (awful) things about me

/ Caron Allan / 4 Comments

Of course, I don’t wear the anorak all the time. It’s for special occasions.

I thought I’d tell you ten things you might not know about me. Why? Well, we’re all besties now, right, so that means I can off-load some of my mess special characteristics and just—you know—really be myself with you.

  1. I got a 10-yards swimming certificate when I was ten years old. So if I’m ever on board a boat that sinks really, really close to the shore, I’ll be fine.
  2. When I was out for a walk with my family in a park when I was eleven years old, I needed to go to the bathroom, and there were no bathrooms, so I went behind a tree, and a man and his dog came over and asked if I was okay. (I didn’t realise there was a path behind the tree as well as in front of it.) I was too embarrassed to say I was peeing, so I made up a totally unlikely story about losing my pocket money behind the tree and said I was looking for it. Crouched there as I was, I half-heartedly raked through the  leaves by my feet. The only problem was, this kind man decided to help me look for it…. It was about five long minutes before he must have realised what was going on, and with a panicked expression got up, said goodbye, and that he hoped I’d find my ‘pocket money’, then he and his dog ran! Aww. My parents laughed, but I was mortified.
  3. I failed my English Literature ‘O’ level. Though I later went on to complete a Bachelor’s degree in English and History so I certainly showed them!
  4. I also failed my Sociology ‘O’ level. Ironically, it was the only subject I really studied hard for. I must have guessed how bad I was at that subject. To make matters worse, my teacher told my parents I wasn’t going to pass and so they had to pay for me to be allowed to sit the exam. All for nothing. Is it too late for a resit?
  5. I love cats and dogs but I’m allergic to fur and dander.
  6. I love learning new languages, but I am hopeless at it. I always get the different languages muddled in my head, and I may start a sentence in French, but I’ll just as likely end it in Spanish or German…
  7. I once peed myself laughing with my cousin, then had to throw myself in a handy nearby river to disguise my ‘accident’ so as not to get into trouble with the dreaded parents. I was about twelve at the time. I was a horrid child! I also fell into a river on Boxing Day, then sat in a tree in my underwear hoping my clothes would dry in the breeze and went home an hour later frozen half to death in sopping wet clothes. Me and bodies of water do not get on.
  8. My work experience week coincided with my sixteenth birthday, and I was sent to spend a week with the local newspaper. I spent my sixteenth birthday covering court cases as a junior reporter. It was fascinating and I got well and truly bitten by the true crime bug!
  9. I once rode my bike into a fence and smashed it. And I took myself to the front door of the fence owner to confess all. He was so astonished at my honesty that he let me off. (Another pre-teen escapade!)
  10. I got thrown out of our school’s church service for asking too many questions about God. I wasn’t even a disbeliever, I just was asking tricky theological questions, which apparently was not okay. (Still eleven!) Oh well. I also got a prize in school prize giving for Religious Education, so maybe they forgave me after all.

So yeah. That’s me. I can kind of see how I ended up being a writer.

***

A New Book is Taking Shape #newbooks #writinganovel

/ Caron Allan / Leave a comment

Notebooks for A Wreath of Lilies: Miss Gascoigne mysteries book 2

I’ve mentioned a couple of times this year that I am writing a new book. Three new books, to be precise. (four really, but that’s a secret, shh!)

Most people, when I meet them for the first time, stare at my silver hair and ask if I still work, or am I retired? And I tentatively tell them I write novels – ‘Just cosy murder mysteries, a teeny bit like Agatha Christie,’ I say. Usually their response is, ‘I’ve often thought about writing a book.’

Sometimes people who are nosy, bored or just desperate to make conversation, ask me how I do the actual writing, do I have a system, use special software, and so forth. I’m not sure my very simple, low-tech approach could be called a ‘method’ or a ‘system’ as such. But my ‘system’ is very simple, straightforward, and I always do things more or less the same way. And anyone can do this, it’s not a natural gift, I don’t believe. You can learn how to write.

This is what I do in eight easy steps:

  1. I love books, and stories and I read a lot, and have done so since I was very young. This makes me imagine stuff, and create ideas and more importantly, plot ideas, in my head. I spend a LOT of time staring into space or doing sudoku etc as I mull stuff over in my mind. That’s stage 1, if you like.
  2. I make a few notes in a notebook. Mine are actual paper notebooks, but other people use virtual notebooks on their computer, laptops, kindles or phones, or on the back of cigarette packets, till receipts or loo roll. Later I transfer these to a Word doc on my computer (see below, point 4) by tedious typing or even more tedious dictating.
  3. Then, at some point (between a week to twenty years later), I get a set of matching (this is very important) (not really, I’m kidding!) notebooks, and I

    Just because I’ve got a lot of notebooks doesn’t mean it’s a fetish out of control… Everyone has fifty or sixty ‘spare’ notebooks, don’t they?

    start writing my story. Longhand. It’s like, sooo old-fashioned it’s not true. Actually writing with a real life pen on actual paper: for me, this very physical or manual sensory experience is what helps my creativity. This is the first draft.

  4. Once I reach the ‘messy’ stage–where I can no longer remember what I’ve written, who the characters are, or I’ve lost track of the timeline, I then type or dictate these into Word docs on my computer. I set up 54 documents per book: one for ‘the whole thing’ which is my second draft master document, then: one for characters, one for notes inc research and ideas, one for useful ‘of the era’ stuff, eg for my 1960s books, I have lists of top ten pop songs, most recent TV shows, movies, movie stars, that kind of background detail. Then finally, I have 50 Word docs numbered 1 to 50, and these are where I type up my handwritten first draft scenes.

    Dirty Work notebooks: the new fourth book in the Friendship Can Be Murder ‘trilogy’.

  5. I know this sounds like a tedious process, but as I am doing all that typing up, it is giving me a chance to a) reacquaint myself with my story and what I’ve written so far and who everyone is, and b) I can amend dodgy phrases or waffley bits as I go, resulting in a better, second, draft which usually contains lots of questions to myself listing things to check up on or to remember later, and c) I can see what’s missing, duplicated or just plain not working or not necessary.
  6. I then copy each of these 50 docs into the master ‘whole thing’ document, and ta-da! I’ve got a full second draft, ready for revising and rewriting.
  7. Then, ‘all’ that’s left to do is: first, go through and check for typos and inconsistencies. Second, to go through and answer all my own questions, double-check all my ‘don’t forgets’, and delete those all from the master copy. Third, reread, rewrite, rewrite, rewrite until it’s as smooth and gorgeous as I can possibly imagine it. Then, when I’m at the point I feel like throwing it out of the window and running away to join the Foreign Legion (I’m 62 and creaky, so they wouldn’t take me, anyway) I rewrite it again.
  8. Then it’s time for editing. Eventually I will give a last proofread, kiss it goodbye, and upload it to You-Know-Where, amongst other platforms. See? Easy!

Putting it like this on the page or screen, it certainly sounds fiddly/dull but hopefully you can see that it’s not hard. The idea of writing a book, in and of itself, is not the hard bit. The bit people often struggle with, especially if they are one of the people who say ‘I’ve often thought about writing a book’, is the persistence: keeping on with it past the time when it is fun and exciting, past the self-doubt, the ‘why am I doing this?’, past the angry, resentful, and anxious, ‘Who do I think I am, thinking I am good enough to write a book?’, past the ‘but I’d rather watch TV or smooch with my OH’, and on into the calm, resigned waters of ‘Well, it’s too late for regrets, I’ve done it.’ And finally you emerge into the ‘OMG, I did it’ sense of achievement that comes way, way after all the difficult bit is over.

Persistence is what you need. That is actually the tricky bit. Overcome your mind and you can do anything.

A couple of pages from A Wreath of Lilies

***

Point of view: a crucial tool in telling a story

/ Caron Allan / Leave a comment

She was never born in 1945. More like 1885.

Point of View – or POV as it’s usually called – is an important consideration when writing a story. Sometimes the POV is a foregone conclusion: if you are writing your autobiography, then it’s all going to be from your point of view, written in the first person: ‘I was born in 1945, the war had just ended…’ And then, if it’s a book about someone else, then it’s going to be third person more often than not. ‘He/she/they were born in 1945, the war had just ended…’

Sometimes writers like to experiment with strictly limited points of view, and this can be a huge challenge. It is quite a task to write everything based around what ‘you’ did. ‘You were born in 1945, the war had just ended…’  If you’re not careful it can end up sounding rather like an episode of ‘This Is Your Life’ – even if you’re writing fiction. But it can be very controlling and a bit voyeuristic and sinister, so works well if used in small doses in psychological thrillers.

Very often writers will combine POVs to show the viewpoint of different characters. For example, there might be a scene which is written from the point of view of a stalker, watching someone, and the writer might employ the second person POV here, as I’ve just mentioned. There might be a scene which starts, from the stalker’s POV, ‘You were born in 1945, the war had just ended, but you never knew poverty or hardship because of your family’s wealth and your privileged lifestyle.’

I spy a plot twist coming…

Then, the writer might switch to a third person POV and show the life of a wealthy oil magnate and his family, who are calling in the police due to receiving threats or realising that they are being stalked. The advantage of using these two differing viewpoints is it saves the writer from being forced to use the dreaded, reviled ‘little did they know, but..’ ploy. We, as readers, are able to ‘see’ what is going on, and the pressure builds as we wait, helpless, to see what will happen as these two opposing POVs come closer and closer together. It’s a great way to increase tension, make the story feel claustrophobic and to give the reader those chills down the back of the neck that are the hallmark of a terrifyingly good thriller with everything to be played for.

Getting ready to check my new story for inconsistencies, blunders and plot tangles

Although most of my books require the use of the traditional third person POV, I like the first person POV. I once read that this is the tool of a new or inexperienced writers, but I disagree with that. I love the first person viewpoint because it immediately plunges the reader into a more intimate involvement with the story, it’s as if the action is all happening to ‘me’. It can be quite a tricky one to write as there are a few things to bear in mind with this POV. It can be hard to be consistent with tense and viewpoint. A writer can drift into a third person POV without realising they’ve done it until later when they reread, and then they are stuck with a lot of rewriting! And because the first person POV is very limited, the reader can only ‘know’ what the first person POV knows. It’s a useful way to drip-feed information to the reader, but there are difficulties in enabling the reader to know what’s going on if the narrator themselves is in the dark, so to speak.

This is also a great way to get the reader taking a wrong turn. It’s the writer’s job to draw the reader into the story in such a way that they forget that the narrator, with their crafty use of the first person POV, may not, in fact, be telling the truth. The unreliable narrator is a wonderful plot device especially in mysteries or thrillers – this will always lead to a huge twist at the end of the book as the reader suddenly sees clearly how they have been misled. Think of (spoiler alert) The Murder of Roger Ackroyd by Agatha Christie. These days it’s heralded as a stunning piece of misdirection, but at the time of its release, Christie was accused of not playing fair with the reader, and of cheating. I’m definitely in the first camp – I think it’s an incredibly cleverly constructed story. Even knowing how it’s done doesn’t diminish the pleasure I get from rereading what I feel is arguably Christie’s best work.

When a writer sits down to begin work on a new story, the POV is the first thing they need to decide. POV determines the course of a whole story.

Read it – it’s fab!

***

Finding the source of inspiration #creativeinspiration

/ Caron Allan / 3 Comments

‘So. Where do you get your ideas?’

This is one of the first questions people usually ask me – and I’m pretty sure it happens to other writers all the time. It kind of makes me want to groan, because it’s next to impossible to give a sincere and considered answer to this question without boring the pants off everyone by talking for an hour. The short, somewhat trite answer might be: ‘Everywhere!’

But if we really want to answer the question, it takes a minute or two longer. Because really there’s no single answer. Ideas don’t come from one unique, unvarying source. Nor do they come in the same way each time. Anything from the world seen or unseen can randomly come to my attention and lead me to think, ‘Hmm, that’s interesting…’

Inspiration, which is what ideas really are, comes from everywhere and nowhere. A snatch of song, a news story, a little patch of colour on a card in the paint section of the DIY store, the turn of a person’s head making you think just for one split second it’s someone else – someone from another time, someone who should be dead. An unexpected view of yourself in a shop window at an unusual angle, that odd moment before you recognise yourself, that brief second when you think, slightly puzzled, ‘I know that face.’

An overheard snatch of genuine conversation: ‘Don’t lose my hat, man, my hat’s my identity,’ and ‘Of course she never did find out who’d sent it.’ A film, a book, a taste, a smell, a memory. What about a story your mother told you – you’ve known her all your life yet this is the first time she’s ever mentioned this particular incident. People-watching is endlessly fruitful. I’ve written about beloved family friends recalled from my childhood.

I have based two full-length stories on dreams. Three short stories and one novel on songs. One novel (The Mantle of God) based on two documentaries I saw on TV. One was about ancient tapestries: Opus Anglicanum which is Latin for ‘English work’, and the other was about the Reformation. I’ve written a short story about an arrowhead, and another about ancestral bones and the relevance they might have to a Neolithic man, about a trip to Skara Brae in the Orkneys. I’ve written a whole series of stories about the fact that all too often people think it’s okay to take the law into their own hands. (I’m looking at you Cressida, main character of Criss Cross etc, from the series Friendship Can Be Murder.) I’ve written about work situations, about hopes and plans for the future, about family tree research, about children, and pets, and parents. About love. About the absence of love. About faith. About fear. About books I read as a child. And books I read as an adult. I’ve written about identity and what it means to be who I am, who you are. I’ve written about death – loads.

I saw a gorgeous man on the bus many years ago and wrote a story about him, (The Ice King – it’s still not ‘available’, but if you’re intrigued, here’s a link to a short bit about him.) I’ve read news reports and been inspired to create my own story around some of those. I’ve written in hospital having just given birth, in hospital awaiting treatment for cancer, at work during my lunchbreak when I felt so depressed I just wanted to run away and hide. I’ve written when sitting on the loo, sitting in the garden, on holiday, in bed with flu, and in cafes all over Britain, Europe and Australia. I’ve written on buses and trains and planes. I’ve written when someone I cared about has died. I’ve even got inspiration from sitting down at my desk every day and just making myself write. Sometimes I’ve written a whole page that just says, ‘I don’t know what to write’, like the lines that we had to do at school when we got into trouble, and still nothing has come to me and I’ve gone away desperate, feeling that the well has not only dried up, but was only a mirage to begin with, that I’m an imposter and just fooling myself.

If you are a writer, you squirrel away in the eccentric filing cabinet known as your brain EVERY single thing that you ever experience, and a bit like doing a jigsaw puzzle or creating a patchwork quilt, you keep trying pieces together every which way until thing one fits with thing two and makes a pleasing, meaningful picture. There’s not really a pattern to it, there’s not a system or a set of regulations to follow. You just do it.

That’s where I get my ideas.

***

Extras… the minor characters every mystery story needs

/ Caron Allan / Leave a comment

Extras complaining to the author about not having a name – again.

Last week was all about the main characters – the detective, the villain, the side-kick and of course the victim(s).

This week, I’m interested in thinking about the minor characters – or extras – in my head I see these as a kind of walk-on part, much like those in any TV show or movie. They don’t always have lines. Sometimes they don’t even have names. They might be described as ‘an elderly dog-walker’ or ‘the woman behind the shop counter’. They crop up everywhere the story goes – in shops, houses, on village greens, in museums, and at dinner parties.

But why are they there?

Extras fulfill a number of criteria and needs for the author and the reader.

  • they can deflect attention away from the culprit or villain.
  • they can provide the reader with useful clues or snippets of information.
  • equally, they can provide us with (less useful, sometimes) red herrings and wrong-turns.
  • they enrich the story so it doesn’t consist of just your four main characters, unless that’s the whole point of the story.
  • they can give us a sneak-peek of something that might happen in a later book if this is a series.
  • they act as a kind of commentator or dramatic chorus to comment on the action or criticise or laud the ‘hero’.

But life as an Extra can be tough and is often unpredictable.

Police or other people in authority (completely unaware all too often that they themselves are Extras, can bully them or wrongfully arrest an Extra and accuse them of terrible things they haven’t done.

You need a huge range of skills as you may be called upon to perform almost any task from forensic assistant to chambermaid.

As an Extra, you might be completely overlooked by the reader who doesn’t even notice you, let alone what a magnificent job you do pretending to be an elderly dog-walker when you’re really a young woman in her twenties on her way to college and you don’t even like dogs.

Alice was at the party with two friends. Who were they? No one knows.

And they never remember your name, which is why you have to have a description attached: Miss Jones, the games mistress at school where victim used to teach. You might even find yourself very near the bottom of a long list of characters, a list designed to help readers remember all the people in the book they’ve met but don’t remember.

No one asks your opinion. ‘Tell us, Poirot,’ they cry, at the end of the book. ‘Who did this dastardly deed? and why?’ I mean, all the Extras probably know this information too, don’t they. But no one ever asks them. They just come in with the tea tray and leave without anyone noticing.

Likewise, no one ever asks an Extra if they’re okay and how they feel about being shut up in a big country house with loads of stairs, and a murderer roaming about bumping people off willy-nilly.

And as if all this is not enough, when the author gets bored, you might even end up as the next victim, just to ‘spice things up a bit’.

How is that fair? It’s not just a policeman’s life that’s terrible hard. Try being an Extra for one book, let alone a whole series. I’m only surprised they don’t have a union.

‘I hate being in crowd scenes,’ said the person in the red outfit. ‘So do I!’ said another person in yellow. ‘It’s so anonymous.’

***

The Big Four: the four main characters in a murder mystery

/ Caron Allan / Leave a comment

I love murder mysteries. I doubt this comes as any kind of a surprise to most people reading this blog. Characters in a murder mystery fall into one of two categories: they are either part of the Big Four, or they are Extras. This week I want to quickly chat about the Big Four.

Who are the Big Four?

The Big Four are the main characters without whom we would have no murder mystery. They are: The Victim(s), The Villain(s), The Side-kick(s) and The Detective(s).

And yes, they often come as a pair or even more, not just as a lone individual. Detectives, for example, often come as a pair – one an amateur and one a professional. Villains too, can sometimes deliberately confuse the reader by sharing the limelight with another villain, and share the crimes too.

And who doesn’t love a high body-count? Why stop at one Dastardly Deed when you can have two, or three, or…

Let me introduce you…

The Victim(s)

Victims, as avid mystery lovers know, are always bumped off for a reason. And obviously it is The Detective(s)’s(s’)(??) job to discover why and bring the perpetrator to justice.

The richer, the more arrogant, cruel, cold, grasping, greedy and crafty our victim is/was, the better we like it, don’t we? We can then take a vicarious pleasure in their demise as we would never, ever do such a thing ourselves in real life. And the worse they are, the nastier and more creative their all-too-timely death should be. BUT.

They can’t be so bad that we don’t care if their killer evades detection.

In my view, ideally there should be two or three of these demises per mystery because, if I’m honest, I’m always a bit disappointed if there’s ‘only’ one.

The Victim is there for one reason only–to make us, the reader feel clever:  to provide something for The Detective to detect, of course.

The Villain

Whenever I hear the word ‘villain’ I always think of a man in a swirling black cape and top hat, twirling his moustaches menacingly (or smugly, either will do)and saying ‘Mwah haha’.

Sadly, the days of Dick Dastardly have gone, (drat, drat and double drat) and nowadays The Villain can look like anyone:

A little old lady.

A priest.

A stalwart Major-type.

A handsome young man on his honeymoon. (I’m looking at you, Death on the Nile.)

A nurse. (Sad Cypress)

Even a child. (Crooked House)

The Villain is often charming, often invokes our sympathy due to baggage and issues, and can even make us think, ‘Aww well, she/he’s had a tough childhood, maybe we should kindly overlook those four grisly murders and let her/him have a new chance at life.’

We must be on our guard at all times throughout the book until the moment this villain is unmasked.

The Side-kick

The Sidekick has a demanding role. They are there as a kind of placeholder/proxy for the reader.

They must be clingy to the point of irritating, sticking by The Detective’s side when they really should go away and leave him/her alone to think things through. But no, they stick around at all times, asking stupid, inane and tedious questions, so that we don’t have to. We sit at home in our comfiest armchair and loudly exclaim, ‘Rookie mistake, I already knew that…’ but really we’re thinking, ‘Ooh I wasn’t sure, but now that you mention it…’

The side-kick – desperately needed to help us survive the journey

So they are there to help The Detective and the reader to find the evidence and the clues and to arrive at the truth of the mystery.

In fact they don’t create a dialogue, but they are the dialogue – through The Side-kick, the reader can talk to The Detective and The Detective can talk to us.

And finally:

The Detective*

The Detective can be anyone.

Rather like The Villain, The Detective can be a law-and-order professional, or someone from an associated profession (forensics, psychology…), or an amateur with a gift, a nurse, a priest (The Complete Father Brown stories) a stalwart major-type, a nurse, a handsome young man on his honeymoon or even a child (The Sweetness At The Bottom Of The Pie).

The Detective has one job and one job only: to find out whodunit and bring them to justice.

It’s essential that her or his main characteristics include:

Passionate desire for justice, even at risk to self, it goes without saying, I hope.

Incredibly close attention to detail: ‘Sacre bleu, this dust is 3.14159 milimetres in ze thickness, therefore the killer was the maid and the crime was committed on Tuesday afternoon.’* The whole case may depend on just this kind of minuteness.

‘Mesdames et messieurs, allow me to reveal at last, the identity of the criminal’.

Very keen observation skills: ‘Zut alors, the footprints in the mud are of a depth of 3.14159 milimetres, therefore we must find a person of 6 feet 1 inch who weighs 189lbs.’

From the two above attributes, we can also see that they must be good at mathematics too. 

Lastly, the Detective must have a huge ego: We readers love to have all the suspects in a room at the end of the story, and to be taken step by step through the crime to learn the identity of The Villain, and to have the satisfaction of them being led away in handcuffs. Therefore it is essential that our Detective loves to show off just a little and to deliver a lecture on how clever he/she is and how many different things we missed.

So next time you are reading a mystery, keep a handy notebook and pen by your side, so you can check for all these points!

*must supply own white hat

*sorry btw, for me all fictional detectives are Hercule Poirot, even when they’re not

***

Come back with me: It’s 1935 #timetravel #daydreaming

/ Caron Allan / 3 Comments

Coming soon to a posh drawing room near you…

Let’s play a game of ‘what shall we do this weekend’.

I’ve been thinking about how amazing it would to travel back in time to the actual 1930s* instead of just daydreaming/writing or pretending/obsessing about it…

This is what I’ve come up with:

Things I’d be excited to do/try:

A posh weekend at a country house with lots of people who are glamorous and speak nicely.

Ditto the big frocks and hair-dos.

And gloves and hats.

And the four/five/six course dinners.

Bridge evenings.

Going to the house of someone posh for ‘drinks’.

Dancing to the radio in a kind of impromptu disco at home with dinner guests.

The excitement of talkies – films with speaking actors!

Meet Gary Cooper when he was young and gorgeous…

And knowing there is a study or library, and perhaps even secret passages.

And bell-pulls to summon people from the depths of the house. I’d be like a child, ringing the bell then have to run away as there would be no legitimate reason to ring for them…

Maybe a maze? Or a rose garden? Or both? What about a croquet lawn? I am certain I’d be an amazing talent when it came to croquet. I can always bowl a great croque.

It might be nice to – very occasionally – have all the men stand up out of politeness when I come into the room. Or stop using bad words because I am in the vicinity and am a ‘lady’ (until they get to know me better, of course).

Travelling by steam train in the actual era they were used, not just on a preserved line in my usual jeans/t-shirt combo.

Things I’d miss terribly:

Being able to say all those bad words that are so good for stress relief when things go wrong. In the 1930s, I’d probably be vilified for my potty-mouth. Though to be fair, most of my rage is triggered by modern technology so it wouldn’t be an issue in the 1930s, when a telegram was still pretty exciting, and indoor plumbing was all too often a thing reserved for the gentry.

Sorry if I’ve destroyed your illusions about the way a writer speaks/acts/looks, btw.

My freezer, and my microwave.

Going to a cafe ALL the time to sit and watch the world go by whilst pretending to write.

The Internet (sorry to all you nay-sayers).

Nipping to a supermarket – even on a SUNDAY to get the bits and pieces I completely forgot I urgently needed.

Books by all my favourite post-1930s authors such as Ann Cleeves, Helena Dixon, Julie Wassmer, Helen Forbes, Emma Baird…

TV: Midsomer Murders/Death in Paradise/Vera/Madame Blanc/Strike/Van der Valk/Darby and Joan/Three Pines/The Chelsea Detective/Dalgliesh/Whitstable Pearl… (can you spot a trend here?) 

All my modern vaccinations – I don’t want to catch diptheria/small pox/scarlet fever etc

Being able to slob about in jeggings and a baggy jumper – because I reckon there could be times when looking posh 1930s-style might just be too much effort…

Being allowed an opinion about anything other than babies, flower arranging or hair-dos.

So what do you think? What would you be desperate to see/try/person to meet? Or what would you miss the most? Or what about another era? What would be your perfect era to visit if that were possible?

*obviously I’m dragging my poor family along with me – I wouldn’t dream of going anywhere exciting without them.

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And so it begins… confusion, mayhem and reminders to myself #writinganewbook

/ Caron Allan / Leave a comment

I’m a few days into my new writing now, and things are starting to get muddled interesting.

Like an idiot, I decided to keep writing the story I was already writing, which is of lower priority than the new one. And, at the same time, I’m wrestling with THE NEW BOOK and trying to keep my head clear – and the right characters and scenes in the right book. I must admit, my brain is beginning to complain about the hard work it’s having to do.

One of my main problems is names. Place names, character names, I forget most of them apart from those of the major characters. I resort to writing an X as a placeholder for the character’s name. the trouble is, by the time I’ve written a few pages, this can be complicated. it’s not as though my characters exist in isolation, they are a sociable bunch and soon they are out of the house and wandering along the street to have tea and cake or a pint of beer with loads of other people, all also known as X.

Occasionally, in a bid to keep things straight in my mind, I might put ‘write Pete’s mate’s name here’. But this doesn’t work either, as Pete – annoyingly, has several ‘mates’ and sees them all as often as possible.

And then there are the places, the settings. At the moment they are variously recorded as ‘Pete’s mate’s pub‘ or ‘Pete’s mate’s lock-up‘ or Cemetery/Graveyard/which one do I mean?

Now if I was more like you, dear reader, and properly organised, I’d probably have remembered to create myself a list beforehand.

Well, in fact, in my defence, I did write out a list, but I can’t find it. I think it’s in a notebook, but I’m not sure which one and by the time I’ve found it, the fabulous idea for my scene might have fizzled away, so I plod on with my Xs and my hints. I like to do things my way. It may not be tidy, elegant, efficient, or even sensible, but it’s worked for me, kind of, so I stick with it. By the time I come to rewrite, I will have fixed all these little annoyances and – theoretically – created a nice, polished draft.

Though once I forgot and Mr Amazon had to email me and say, ‘This book you’ve uploaded looks like it might not be your final version, would you like to check and make sure?’ Nice chap. he was right. There were the ‘Pete’s mate’ and Xs. Oops, good thing this was spotted by Mr A!

So what am I writing?

Well, I’m working on the not-at-all-urgent book 4 of the Criss Cross trilogy (go with me here) as I decided I would extend the series to a ‘ten years later’ scenario, I just felt suddenly inspired. Book 4 will be called Dirty Work, and I have no idea when it will be out, sorry.

The more pressing new book is book 2 of the new series, the Miss Gascoigne mysteries. it will be called A Wreath of Lilies, and you can find out a teeny bit more here. It’s going to be a while before it’s finished, so don’t get too anxious. It’ll be October, I should think, a year after book 1.

So that’s my February sorted.

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The film of the book…

/ Caron Allan / Leave a comment

Here’s a reimagined post from three years ago, slightly updated for you. I still need your help with this big problem!

Writers are at heart, fantasists, and for many of us, there is no more entertaining fantasy than to ask yourself who would play your main characters if some movie mogul had the urge to transform your book or series into a blockbuster movie or a Netflix/Acorn TV/Prime/Paramount/You-get-the-idea weekend TV binge.

I think we all know that there can be a massive difference between how each of us pictures our paperback ‘hero’, and how that is translated to the big screen. For fans, and no doubt, writers, this can lead to a terrible sense of disappointment.

Movies/TV Series from books that I loved:

Inspector Gamache from Louise Penny’s fab Canadian-based crime series, now known as Three Pines on TV streaming services. Alfred Molina has brought the most wonderful gravitas, compassion and depth to the role. You’ll need a tissue or two for this series, though.

The Harry Potter series: I felt they nailed all the characters perfectly – Yay!

Dial M For Murder or the remake The Perfect Murder both sensationally wonderful adaptations of Frederic Knott’s stage play Dial M For Murder: a collage for voices. (It helped that the sexy Viggo Mortensen was in The Perfect Murder.)

Murder on the Orient Express now obviously there have been several versions of this, and I’ve loved them all, although for me, Peter Ustinov was always a little better at portraying Poirot at his most mournful and ridiculous, and also managed the quality of moral indignation much better than others, although David Suchet was truly excellent in the TV series. I remember when the first episode aired, I held my breath as it began, waiting to see how this ‘new’ chap would manage the character, would it be everything I hoped for? It was, and more!

Sorry but I am not at all a fan of Kenneth Branagh in this role. At all. He’d have made a great Hastings. Ish.  I mean, Hugh Fraser really nailed that part and made it his own. For me the new movies are all panorama and no substance. I hate them.

Dalgliesh: There has been a new outing for this with Bertie Carvell (Jonathan Strange and Mr Norell, remember? Also lots of other stuff including Midsomer Murders…) and in the title role of Inspector Dalgliesh, created by P D James.  Bertie gives us a beautifully nuanced role, and the opening credits are sooooo beautiful to look at, I could have them on my wall and gaze at them all day long. Feels slightly out of its era, with a sense of being in the 60s rather than the 70s, but that’s easily overlooked as you get stuck into each story.

Whitstable Pearl: Kerry Godliman, whose stand-up comedy I absolutely love, plays the title character, a private detective with a restaurant in this series based on Julie Wassmer’s fabulous series. I love this show!!! It helps that it’s set in Whitstable on the North Kent coast in the UK, which is very close to where many of my ancestors come from. If you haven’t read it or watched it, there’s no excuse, stop reading this and do it now.

Anyway, this is the game I’ve been playing at home. ‘Someone Wants To Turn My Book Into A Film’.

I’m talking now about my 1930s Dottie Manderson cosy mystery series.

My main characters are:

Dottie Manderson, aged 19 at the start of book 1 which is Night and Day. She is 5’ 7, has dark wavy hair, hazel eyes, lovely skin and a gorgeous, slender figure. She comes from a wealthy background, and lives in London with her parents. She is a wee bit shy, loves her family, loves dancing, and works as a mannequin for Mrs Carmichael. She’s idealistic and a little naïve. In the books, we see her maturing as she learns about the world, and about relationships between men and women. She is nosy and gets into murder-related situations. She is compassionate and detests bigotry and moral ideas that put appearance before compassion and respect.

The original image I used for the covers for the Dottie Manderson series. Apart from the blue eyes, she was the perfect match for Loretta Young. Image by Artsy Bee from Pixabay.

William Hardy is the detective she frequently ‘runs up against’. (Yes that is a double-entendre, if not a triple…) He is a little older at 28. He is a policeman working his way up the ranks after his father died and left the family penniless. They had to leave their privileged lifestyle and he had to leave his law studies to earn a living. He is (of course) six feet tall, if not a bit more, and well-built. He is fair-haired, and blue-eyed. He quickly develops a penchant for a certain dark-haired young lady which makes him awkward and embarrassed at times. He has a slightly different attitude to women than the majority of men of his era in that he is respectful and does not think of women as inferior or as domestic drudges or as potential conquests. He is determined to improve his family’s fortunes by sheer hard work and devotion to his work.

There are other recurring characters too:

Mr and Mrs Manderson, Dottie’s parents: Her father Herbert is largely to be found behind a newspaper. Her mother Lavinia is brisk and no-nonsense and all about etiquette and social niceties, but as the series develops we see that there is a deep love between these two, and that Mrs Manderson has a marshmallow heart under the stern exterior.

Flora, Dottie’s older sister is married to George, a very wealthy young man. In book 1, Night and Day, they are about to become parents for the first time. They are devoted to one another and to Dottie.

So here’s the big question: Who would play these roles if my books were made into a TV series or a movie? I’ve been thinking about his quite a bit. But I’m somewhat hampered by the fact that I really don’t keep up with who’s who in the acting world, so my ideas are probably really out of touch.

Make sure you tell me who would work better, in your opinion. Obviously I need all the help I can get here!

Dottie: I’ve got a couple of ideas. I originally based Dottie on the 1920s actor Loretta Young, but you know, time doesn’t stand still, does it?

1. Claire Foy

2. Flora Spencer-Longhurst

Though I must admit they are both a bit older than Dottie is in my books. What do you think? Do you know of another actor who might be better?

Gary Cooper…

William: the problem here is that I originally based William on the young Gary Cooper acting in the 1920s and 1930s…  So I’ve got almost no contemporary ideas for William Hardy. Except for Alex Pettyfer.  Or maybe Rick Edwards, who isn’t even an actor… Can you take a look and tell me what you think? I urgently need help here: you never know how soon someone might knock on my door or flood my email with requests , pleas and big fat cheques.

 

As for Flora and Mr and Mrs M, what about these lovely people:

Tuppence Middleton for Flora, she’d be brill…

Herbert Manderson: What about the omni-gorgeous Jason Isaacs? He’s a little older now (sorry Jason, but you know it’s true) and he’s nicely craggy.

Mrs Lavinia Manderson: Well there’s Kristin Scott Thomas, I think she’d work really well in this role: the only problem is, can we afford her?

So, dear readers, please help! We need to get this cast list sorted before MGM or 20th Century Fox or Nertflerx come knocking on my door.

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