With Peter, Sarah and Joy

Yesterday I was supposed to be moderating a panel on writing the series, something I think the bloggers on MIE  will be interested in. All writers have a very different take on the best way to keep the series fresh and engaging without forgetting the name of the the main detective's next door neighbour's dog.

So here is a written version of what would have been a fascinating panel. And being a participating moderator, I do butt on every now and again. No surprise there and  my 'butt' will be italics.

The interview will continue over two blogs as it does make entertaining  and informative reading.

The panellists are Peter Guttridge,  Sarah Hilary and Joy Ellis.  More about them next week, but for now.... on with the interrogation. 

Joy Ellis at home with her co-conspirators.

C If you had to introduce your two main characters to friends in the pub, what would you say?


P Detective Inspector Sarah Gilchrist would be in her element in this pub – most pubs – or more likely a wine bar – having a good natter with mates.  She’s quick to stand her round – in fact she probably would have bought the first one.  She says she’s not a brain-box because she’s not a reader and not up on a lot of stuff so feels ignorant but she’s confusing intelligence with knowledge. She’s good at her job through tenacity and meticulousness.

She likes to keep fit but eats too much pasta and probably drinks a bit too much sauvignon blanc so she’s best described as ‘statuesque’.  Very attractive but unfortunately attracts the wrong men or perhaps is attracted to them.  She likes nice men but not as lovers. 

The exception is her ex-boss, Bob Watts, with whom she had a one-night stand at a police conference that broke up his marriage.  She is ever guilty about that if for no other reason than she had a rule about never knowingly going out with married men or men involved with someone.  He’s decent, upright, gentle and a bit boring but even so…

You’d want her sidekick, Bellamy Heap, in your team in the pub quiz.  He’d be a know-it-all except that he never shows off the fact that it seems he does know it all.  Gilchrist calls him her personal Google.  Well-educated, voracious reader, curious about everything.  Dry sense of humour.  A forensic thinker and analyst.  Bound for the top but shows no ambition other than to do his job to the best of his ability. 

          Another nice guy.  Unfailingly loyal and respectful to Sarah Gilchrist.  Always polite and even-tempered.  Especially gallant towards women when you thought the age of gallantry was dead.   Nimue Grace, the reclusive Hollywood actress he encounters in The Lady of The Lake, calls him her Sir Galahad.  She probably means Sir Lancelot but what can you say – she’s an actress.

          He’s Little to Gilchrist’s Large, as other officers gleefully call them behind their back.  He’s short and slight but don’t be fooled – he’s put down much bigger men and knows how to handle himself.  Gilchrist finds it endearing that he blushes.  Pretty much constantly.  He’d be quick to buy a round but he’d probably nurse his half a bitter all evening.





J  They are two dedicated detectives, and although from very different backgrounds, their drive and commitment to their work makes them highly compatible. Jackman comes from a more privileged position and did arrive into the job via university, but even so, he didn’t fast-track, he did his time in uniform before moving into CID. Marie Evans, half Welsh, half Fenlander, who always retains a soft Welsh lilt in her voice (that intensifies if she gets heated!) has no academic background, but is shrewd and has a sharp intuition that rarely lets her down. Physically, Jackman is good-looking in a smart country casual way, and Marie favours motorcycle leathers. She is tall, has long rich brown hair, is something of an Amazon, and rides a powerful motorcycle. Jackman also rides, has done since a child, but his favoured mount, is a horse. Through honest respect for each other, they have forged a lasting friendship, and both, because of past happenings, put the job first.

S This is Marnie Rome, she has demons but she deals with them; you don’t have to buy them drinks.

And this is Noah Jake, he likes tequila and dancing but he’s our designated driver for the night because he needs to know we’ll all get home safely.

                                     
                                                           Joy Ellis



C Do you have to like your main characters?  Do you need to respect them?


J   In the case of Jackman and Evans, in the first two counts... absolutely. I have to care about them and what happens to them or the book would be without substance and I couldn’t expect the reader to care either. Preferences? Not really. I probably feel more for Marie, because of her desperately sad history, and the fact that women still have to work harder to prove themselves in a predominantly male environment.

S   Personally, yes, I have to like and respect them. That doesn’t, however, mean they have to be ‘likeable’ characters. Marnie started out very spiky and abrasive because that was part of her arc – she needed to learn how to be vulnerable, to let people in. By the time Never Be Broken takes place, she’s softer than she’s ever been and at the same time far stronger (‘Blessed are the hearts that can bend; they shall never be broken.’ Albert Camus).

Noah is my favourite, nothing sneaky about that. For one thing, I’ve always found him easier to write than Marnie. They are both incredibly courageous in their separate ways, but Noah’s courage comes from a place of near-constant conflict and danger. He’s a gay black man in the Metropolitan Police. In Never Be Broken, he’s battling grief – for his brother, but also for his city as London has become such a hostile, alien place.

P   I think to keep a series going you definitely have to like them. Or maybe you have to like writing about them.  (Is that the same thing?) I guess you need to respect them too – I’ve never really thought about that – but I could envisage creating a main character who I disapproved of.

This crime series was originally conceived as a trilogy -City of Dreadful Night, The Last King of Brighton and The Thing Itself – in which ex-Chief Constable Bob Watts was the main character, supported by ex-SAS friend Jimmy Tingley and Sarah Gilchrist, at the time a Detective Sergeant. 

When I decided to extend it into a series with Book 4, The Devil’s Moon, I reduced Bob’s role, increased Sarah’s role and introduced Bellamy, who appeared pretty much fully formed, including the silly first name, in my subconscious one morning.  I like Bob, I respect Bob but I was bored with him as I felt I’d exhausted him.  He’d certainly exhausted me. 

I’d decided not to go for the clichéd loner cop with issues and a drink problem so I’d gone the other way and realised around The Last King of Brighton I’d been influenced in the creation of Watts by my friend, Quintin Jardine’s Bob Skinner -  sorry and thanks, Quint.

But now I realise I was actually creating a template for a future leader of our country: Keir Starmer – upright, moral,decent, reliable, a brilliant leader but not all that charismatic. 

Do I have a sneaky preference for one of my two main characters? I honestly don’t – I see them as two halves of a satisfying whole.

                                              
                                                        Peter Guttridge 
            


C  And have you ever written something about a serial character and then regretted it two books down the line?


P Good question.  In my previous series, a comic-crime one, I thought it would be funny if my main male character, Nick Madrid, was lousy in bed since male protagonists in crime novels were always great lovers however much booze they’d consumed.  But it got increasingly difficult to think of amusing ways to demonstrate his lack of prowess as the series went on.   Plus at book events there would always be some clever clogs in the audience asking with a nudge and a wink if Nick was based on me.

Talking to many much better writers over the years I learned what pitfalls to avoid with the current series. Having said that, I’m getting a bit bored with Bellamy’s blushing and wonder if I can find a cure for it – maybe give him a sudden shock or is that just for hiccups?

The last name I gave Bob Watts irritates me because I forgot my own rule of never using a last name that ends in ‘s’.  He was originally called Robert Peel but my agent didn’t like that for some reason so I came up with Watts in a rush. I hate having to write Watts’s – ‘Watts’s office’ etc – always think it looks so ugly.


J  Oh yes! Many times. In fact, I’ve just experienced that in a new book that I’m working on right now. A problem of logistics, of where I’d located a character’s birthplace, that made it very difficult to fit into the new story. However, this mainly occurs when a ‘regular’, but not a main character, suddenly takes centre stage for a time in a particular story-line of a book. On one occasion I needed the character to be very independent and self-sufficient, stemming from her history of being an only child, only to check back and discover that in an earlier story I’d given her three sisters!



S    No, although I’ve often feared doing this. The closest I’ve come is giving Marnie her tattoos, as I can’t always remember which ones are where and what they all say. (I remember reading a detective series in which the hero’s eyes changed colour twice in the course of three books, so I’m ahead, in that regard.)

                                     

                                                  Sarah Hilary

C How do you keep track of your serial characters?

S  This sounds fanciful but they’re very real to me. They do a lot of whispering in my head in-between books so that helps. And I’ve written a book a year since I started the series, so there’s not much chance of forgetting.


J    In a very old fashioned way! I have an A-to-Z card index. Each book, (22 of them!) has colour-coded cards... pink for female characters, blue for males, yellow for animals and pets, green for place names and locations, and white for vehicles and other incidentals. This helps me track my characters, their relations and friends, dog or cat’s name, where they live, name of their house and what they drive.     C - I'm impressed!


P    Ha!  With difficulty.  I do a lot of checking back in earlier books. For each new novel I have a list of the characters – new and old – on a whiteboard by my computer because I’m rubbish at remembering names.  I created a teenage thug three books ago who recurs and I called him Darren jones.  Or was it Darrel?  I can never remember the first time he appears again.  I’m forever mixing up my Cathleens and Catherines in real life so try not to use those names.   C- I really regret calling one character Archie Walker as he needs to stroll or jog everywhere. And I recall Craig Robertson saying that he had issues after calling his character Winter for obvious reasons.





                                                             

C Without naming names, what would make you throw a book at the wall in frustration?  (Mine is serial fiction where the kids grown older but the parents stay the same age!)

P  The author not playing fair with the reader by holding back essential information for no plausible reason. b) A frustrating ending.  In my late teens I went island hopping on ferries around the Aegean and took The Magus by John Fowles with me.  Totally absorbing, all these strange experiences for the central character on a Greek island and all the time you’re dying to find out why they are happening to him.  Fowles leaves the reveal late.  And later.  On the last page you’re seeing maybe only four paragraphs to go and you’re no wiser.  Final paragraph the protagonist is waiting on a park bench for someone to explain to him (and the reader) why it has all been happening.  (Spoiler alert!)  Fowles leaves him there and – to add insult to injury – the final sentence is in classical bloody Greek.  I immediately threw the book over the side of the ferry into the Aegean.


J   When a character who you have never met before, and hasn’t even been mentioned, turns up at the end to be the murderer! C  The Taggart Effect!

S See above re the changing eye colour. Also, characters who are terminally incapable of learning a lesson. Marnie and Noah make mistakes because that’s only human, but they don’t tend to make the same mistake twice.

                                           



C   Is one character easier to write than the other?


J   Not with Jackman and Marie, I am completely inside both their heads and find their reactions and emotions easy to ‘read’ in all the dire situations that I place them in. I would say that Marie is more fun to write, as she is more forthright and daring (and definitely more amusing) than the serious Jackman.



P  I guess Bellamy is because he’s a man and the know-it-all aspect of him is a bit me.  Although, actually, I’m looking stuff up all the time.  The easy part for me is the dialogue between Gilchrist and Heap.  I have a lot of fun when she asks him to explain something – perhaps a phrase that we all take for granted. E.g. ‘It’s a mile as the crow flies,’ Heap said.  ‘Does a crow fly straighter than other birds?’ Gilchrist said. That kind of thing.  (You’re going to have look it up – I had to.  But don’t get sidetracked by ‘making a beeline’.)


S   Noah is far easier to write than Marnie. I think it’s because he springs purely from my imagination. With Marnie, my inner editor is always asking, ‘Is that how you’d behave, as a woman? Is that what you’d be feeling?’ There is none of that with Noah, who at the same time is immensely real to me. I have huge empathy for him.  C  That empathy really hits  home in the books. In the best possible way, Never Be broken was difficult to read in places because of the huge struggle with bereavement and loss that Noah is going through. 


                                           



7) Did you always intend to write a series?


P Not this one!  As I said earlier I conceived it as a trilogy then I was going to go back to my comic crime series, which I had always intended to be ten novels.  (I did six.)  When the second of the trilogy – The Last King of Brighton – came out and was doing quite well and I’d delivered the third my publisher said, ‘when are you delivering the fourth?’ I explained it was conceived as a trilogy where the story would be satisfyingly complete at the end of the third, all loose ends tied up.  ‘We want a fourth.’  I explained that I was an artist and couldn’t compromise my artistic vision by even contemplating a fourth.  They mentioned a certain sum of money.  I’ve just delivered Butcher’s Wood, the 8^th in my trilogy…   


J  Yes. I had in my head a complete set of police procedural mysteries set within the jurisdiction of the Fenland Constabulary (fictional for obvious reasons). My idea was to have at least three divisions, each with their own set of main characters and all covering different areas of the Fens. As in real life they would share a Home Office pathologist and certain other official bodies, like the Force Medical Officer and the psychologist. I thought that writing different characters would give variety to the writing, and also allow each area to have a slightly different tone. As it is, the Jackman books are more psychological than the Fen Series, and often come from the perspective of the perpetrator of the crime. The Matt Ballard books are grittier, sometimes have a more sexual element, and are evolving so that every book is very different to the last.

S  No, but I was advised by my agent that it was the way to go. This was seven years ago, however, and times have changed since then. 

Thank you all.  Next week we shall be discussing character arcs and killing off characters!

Caro Ramsay