Putting a foot on the handbrake

I was at an event yesterday that involved a very cold ferry, some very nice pasta, a bottle of 19  Crimes wine and a very nice bookshop.

And cake.

Him indoors decorating a cake in the digital age.

The usual suspects were involved - me, Michael Malone and Douglas Skelton. Dina, who runs the bookshop, was getting a train to Paris that night on her way to holiday in the south of Spain. The most difficult part of the journey was getting the ferry back to the mainland. Well, not really the mainland, cause it's not an island. But it is a very long drive round.

I use the term 'long' in a Scottish way, bearing in mind that last week we were calling a 35mph wind a 'hurricane'. Although other weather types are available we do only excel at rain.

Scottish yearly forecast

 

During the chat Douglas used the phrase  'the handbrake moment', which is when something happens in the book which is neither plausible nor probable. I presume it’s the same point that I throw the book across the room. It’s a more extreme reaction than the phrase 'that pulls you out of the narrative' when you hear the author’s voice intruding.

So on the ferry home we were talking about the handbrake moments. Typical themes were police officers doing very silly things like getting out of bed in the middle of the night because they hear a noise in the graveyard and they ignore their baton (in the UK), their gun (other territories), the rottweiller sleeping in the corner, the mobile phone and head out unarmed into the graveyard wearing only their pants (British pants). If you have to do that to make your plot work, you should have thought about it a bit harder.

This cover is here because of something relevant to the blog- something I had to made fit to avoid a handbrake moment. It's so beautifully, seamlessly woven into the plot that I can't recall what it was.

A few others that came up were, this happening more in film than in books – the pursued running in front of the chasing car. Why do they not just jump to the side? In the TV series The Tourist with Jamie Dornan, he was running along a single track road being pursued by a car.

A dry stane dyke.

 There were dry stain dykes on either side of the road. All he had to do was jump over. And if the car tried to follow him it would come to a sorry end. Dry stain dykes can stand up to Highland Cattle being annoyed. So a Toyota Rav4 would have been pulverized. 

Others are big CGI war scenes that go on and on to increase the running time of the production and the junk morality contained therein. The other half wants me to write in here  ‘with great power comes great responsibility’ and use the word proselytize in a proper sentence.

Signing and more signing

My personal pet hatred in a film is when somebody goes to walk out the room and with their hand on the handle they turn round, they make a face as if they’ve just found a wasp in their rum and raisin ice cream and say,  'thanks'. 

There’s also splitting up to search the haunted house, never a good idea. And, running out of bullets at exactly the wrong moment. Or, indeed not using bullets when you’ve got them. If they had just shot James Bond rather than trying to feed him to the sharks, dangle him over a volcano etc the franchise would have been over very quickly.

Talking about this blog to a patient, they said that they had been reading a book by a very well known author, where a man staggers about on a broken leg for three chapters or more. This patient actually had the exact same fracture and he couldn’t stagger from the snow on to the stretcher which was six inches away.

I'm looking at self help books. Don't know what the other two are doing...

I think one of my pet hates is when the author gives a well known character a talent that they’ve never mentioned before but they have it now because the plot needs it. In the Anderson and Costello books Mulholland has a Russian mother, so he speaks fluent Russian. You know that about him in book 1, and it comes in handy in books 4 and 5. But as it’s a well established fact it comes as no surprise. The ability to lip read fluently? The ability to speak New Testament Greek? It's all just a bit suspect if its only there to make the plot work.

Me and knife... what could go wrong?

At the event somebody said 'There's two Glaswegians in here, that's enough for a fight.'

I remember flinging the book across the room when a certain well known crime fighter came across a body trapped underwater. So, they just went to the boot (Trunk??) of their car, opened it  and lo and behold their SCUBA equipment was right there. And that’s another one that comes to mind, the ability to fly a helicopter. The amount of time a man goes running towards a helicopter, jumps in and away he goes, is ridiculous.

Skippy  diffusing a bomb with her paws is more believable.

Skippy was wise.

I think I remember a reader of this blog saying that a screen full of computer code while someone types furiously was his particular bug bear.  

Occasionally,  there’s the opposite effect. When you mention something that happens a lot and you put it in a novel because it's second nature to you. The ferry we were on last night goes from A to B. Our driver was saying that most people try and take the ferry. It's not the length of the drive round that’s the problem, it’s the fact you have to go along a road called the Rest and Be Thankful. It's closed again for the fourth time this year due to yet another landslide. The military road at the bottom of the glen has never been closed for any reason because cattle drovers knew the safe way through the hills. At the moment the military road is being used, but the traffic is going through by convoy and the wait can be a very long time indeed. The latest idea, as the cages haven't  worked, is to build something like an avalanche roof over the road so the landslides go over the top--- and will probably then block the military road as well.

Michael wondering why he gets himself involved in these events.

I used this convoy scenario on that road at the start of book 5, somebody being held at the red light on that spooky road in the small hours of the morning due to yet another landslide. Big red pen from my editor down the side 'Yes, but how often does this actually happen!' It's more a case of when is the road actually open!

What’s your particular handbrake moment?