Showing posts with label Noir at the Bar. Show all posts

Sunday, March 24, 2019

The Bay—new ITV crime drama set in Charlie Fox’s home town

A new six-part crime drama series started this week in the UK on ITV. Set in Morecambe and called The Bay, it stars Morven Christie as a Detective Sergeant, Lisa, who is assigned as Family Liaison Officer when fifteen-year-old twins go missing in the seaside town. Her job is to support the family and be on the inside for the police investigators.

As soon as the distraught father, Sean (played by Jonas Armstrong) arrives home, however, she discovers that he’s the bloke with whom she had a quickie while on a girls’ pub crawl the night before. Much complication ensues.

Morven Christe in ITV's The Bay

Morven Christie’s recent TV credits include Grantchester, Agatha Christie’s Ordeal By Innocence, and The A Word. Jonas Armstrong’s recent outings include Ripper Street, Troy: Fall of a City, and Line of Duty. The work of playwright and screenwriter, Daragh Carville, The Bay has been mooted as ‘Broadchurch in Morecambe’—which I’m ashamed to admit that I haven’t yet got around to watching.

I confess, though, that I do quite like TV dramas where one story is told over a number of instalments. You do seem to get more depth to the characters and, ultimately, more sympathy for the victim—and in some cases for the perpetrator as well.

Of course, I’m equally a fan of TV series made up of standalone stories—more like the way a book series is structured. At least if you miss one, you can still follow what’s happening in the next episode. Although, now we’re in the age of catch-up and box set TV, that’s not as much of a consideration anymore.

When it came to The Bay, one of the reasons I was keen to see it was because I lived around that area for many years, and briefly in Morecambe itself. The drone camera footage of the area was particularly effective, I thought. Apart from one climactic scene on the sands, they did seem to manage to pick filming times when the tide was up, which always makes the place look better! Even the famous statue of Eric Morecambe made a brief cameo appearance.

Stunning drone camera shots like this one are now well within the budget of most TV shows.

The other reason, of course, was that the first two books in the Charlie Fox series, KILLER INSTINCT and RIOT ACT, both take place around Morecambe and Lancaster. Indeed, the first scene in KILLER INSTINCT is outside an ageing Morecambe hotel right on the prom. I took a real building and renamed it the Adelphi—soon to be refurbished as the New Adelphi nightclub. The original was knocked down years ago.

I still find the area fascinating and full of dramas of its own, so it’s wonderful to see it playing such a major role in a new TV drama. And even though I had to bite my tongue at some of the decisions she made, I look forward to seeing how DS Lisa Armstrong manages to extract herself from the tangled web she’s unwittingly woven.

As for Charlie Fox, she fought her way out. What else did you expect?

Sorry, I couldn't resist!

This week’s Word of the Week is gaslighting, which is a term I’d heard but not clearly understood. It means to psychologically manipulate someone to the extent that they begin to doubt their own sanity. The term has only come into common usage in recent years but originates from the 1938 stage play ‘Gaslight’ by Patrick Hamilton. In the play—and two later film adaptations—a man dims the gaslights in his home and then persuades his wife that she is imagining the change.

May 2

NOIR AT THE BAR NEWCASTLE—the Town Wall pub, Pink Lane, Newcastle NE1 5HX

Doors open 19:00

Organised by the inimitable Vic Watson, the line-up is Neil Broadfoot, Mik Brown, Ashley Erwin, Derek Farrell, Jónína Leósdóttir, Gytha Lodge, Judith O’Reilly, Zoë Sharp, Lilja Sigurðardóttir, plus a wildcard chosen on the night.

May 9-12

CRIMEFEST INTERNATIONAL CRIME FICTION CONVENTION—Mercure Bristol Grand Hotel, Bristol

Friday, May 10, 13:40-14:30 Contemporary Issues: Reflecting How We Live Candy Denman, Paul Gitsham, Cara Hunter, Amanda Robson, Zoë Sharp (Participating Moderator)

Saturday, May 11, 11:20-12:10 Ten Year Stretch: The CrimeFest Short Story Anthology Peter Guttridge, Caro Ramsay, Zoë Sharp, Michael Stanley (Stan Trollip), Kate Ellis (Participating Moderator)

Sunday, May 12, 09:30-10:20 The Indie Alternative Beate Boeker, Adam Croft, Barry Faulkner, Lynn Florkiewicz, Zoë Sharp (Participating Moderator)

Sunday, October 21, 2018

The Sound of Silence - the wilds of Finland

Zoë Sharp

Finland in October. I’ll be honest—I was hoping for snow. Maybe not in Helsinki itself, but certainly out in the wilds of Karelia where I spent the second half of my brief trip. Alas, it was mild, even by UK standards, and there were only a couple of days when gloves were a necessity, never mind full polar explorer wear.

Finland is known as the land of a thousand lakes, and for good reason. In fact, there are just shy of 188,000 lakes, so flying into Helsinki it was like looking down onto an intricate paper doily. I expected fir trees—nearly 70 per cent of the country is forest, after all—but not the amazing amount of silver birch, with their startling pale bark and their leaves turning shades of yellow and copper and gold.

And the silence.

The silence had a quality all its own.

Helsinki was as busy and bustling as you’d expect any major city to be. It’s easy to forget, when you’re there, that for a country that is in area the eighth largest in Europe, it has only around 5.5 million people. (To put that into perspective for me, there are over 8 million people in London alone, and 66 million in the UK.)

Out in Karelia, to the east, I was less than a hundred miles from the border with Russia. It felt remote, perhaps because I was intentionally without a car, although there was a canoe and a rowing boat at my disposal.

The small wood cabin where I was staying was incredibly well insulated, which made it very warm—and quiet—inside. But even outside there was little to be heard. Across the whole of Finland, there are only 17 people per square kilometre. I doubt I saw more than half a dozen in the time I was there, and that includes the pair fishing on the lake outside my window.

Normally, I like quiet. I’ve spent time in the middle of the Jordanian desert, and at sea where you’re days away from the nearest land and at night the stars go all the way down to the horizon in every direction. But I confess I found the isolation on this trip a little unsettling as far as getting on with writing was concerned.

Perhaps it was the woods that surrounded the cabin, or the still water of the lake, reminded me too much of all those Scandi-Noir thrillers and I kept expecting the Worst to Happen. Or perhaps I’m too used to pet-sitting on these foreign trips, so was unsettled by not having something with four legs and fur to divert my attention.

Either way, it was a fascinating exploration of another culture, and one which will, no doubt, find its way into a book in the near future…

This week’s Word of the Week is adumbration, which is to give only the main facts about something, a broad outline, particularly something that will happen in the future. From the Latin adumbratus, sketched or shadowed in outline. It can also mean to overshadow something or partially conceal it.

Events

I have been invited to take part in Noir @ The Bar London ‘Chilled To The Marrow’, which takes place on Monday, October 22 from 7:00–10:30 p.m. (doors open at 6:00 p.m.) at The Urban Bar, 176 Whitechapel Road, E1 1BJ. The line-up is Susi Holliday, William Shaw, Mark Hill, Derek Farrell, Jay Stringer, JA Marley, Alex Caan, Barbara Nadel, Zoë Sharp, Liz (Elizabeth) Mundy, Caroline (Caz) Frear, Felicia Yap, and a Wildcard chosen on the night. It’s hosted by Nikki East. There will be the usual book giveaways for the audience, and also a raffle in aid of medical expenses for Evie, daughter of crime author Duane Swierczynski.

Sunday, October 7, 2018

Writing Output—Is Size Important?

Zoë Sharp

I came to the conclusion years ago that I need to write faster. Actually, I should qualify that by saying, ‘faster without degenerating into rubbish’ because I’m sure I could rattle out thousands of words a day, if I wasn’t bothered about which words…

All I need are more words...

The quality of what I do is always uppermost in my mind, however. It’s the thing I worry about most (probably) as I write. I’ve heard all the advice that says you can fix a page but you can’t fix a blank page, but find this hard. Once I’ve written a scene, I find it incredibly difficult to pick that scene apart and slightly alter the slant of it. Far easier to point it in the right direction to start with. (In this case, the word ‘easier’ is used in its loosest sense—in the same way that it’s far easier to prevent the glaciers melting in the first place than it is to reverse global warming. You get the idea.)

The result of this is that I tend to manage around a thousand words on a good day when I’m in the midst of a book. I have writer friends who can apparently produce ten times that amount. And yes, amazingly, they are still my friends!

Some of them use dictation software to achieve this. I’ve tried this method, but my somewhat mongrel accent seems to utterly confuse it, plus the delay between words spoken and some form of them appearing on the screen is disconcerting. I find myself quickly distracted.

When I learned to touch-type they still had manual typewriters in college classrooms. This is back in the days when the word ‘carbon’ was followed by the word ‘copy’ rather than ‘footprint’ and Cut and Paste involved a printed page and a pair of scissors.

The result of this is that I’m a fast typist who doesn’t need to look at my hands while I do so. Indeed, there have been times when I’ve been typing at my keyboard while turned away having a conversation with someone else at the same time.

Also, when I’m working on a book I perhaps think in written words not spoken ones. I like to pick up a word, see how it feels, try it on for size, then maybe backspace and nudge the sentence in a slightly different direction instead. I self-edit as I go, so thundering through sentences on the grounds of knocking them into shape later goes right against the grain.

Plus, did I mention that I get distracted?

Ooh, look! Red squirrels!

I’ve tried reading writer self-help books that promise to get you up to 5000 words an hour by starting in five-minute timed stints of writing without doing anything else—no editing, researching, social media browsing, etc—and then working up. I shall persevere with this, as even 500 words an hour would be a big improvement.

I find it does help if I have a clear idea of where I’m going and what happens next in the story. I need the structure worked out in detail beforehand, and I also find I work better from pencil notes about the scene ahead. Even just the back-and-forth of the dialogue, which I can flesh out with narrative as I put the words on screen.

But sitting down and just winging it, with no clear idea of where the scene needs to go in order to move the story forwards, that doesn’t seem to get me anywhere on a regular basis. That doesn’t mean to say, of course, that there aren’t the odd occasions when inspiration strikes, leading to unexpected twists in the story. Sometimes, these even make it into the final draft.

Back when I was a motoring photojournalist, I remember watching motorsport and being told an old maxim about racing drivers. “You can tidy up speed, but you can’t speed up tidiness.”

You can tidy up speed...

If you are writer, which camp do you fall into? The ‘get it down as fast as possible and tidy it up later’ or the ‘self-edit and polish as you go’ method? What is a good word-count day for you? And to what do you attribute your output?

This week’s Word of the Week is enchiridion, which is a handbook or manual containing all the words on a particular subject. It comes from the Greek en-meaning within, and kheir hand.

Events

I have been invited to take part in Noir @ The Bar London ‘Chilled To The Marrow’, which takes place on Monday, October 22 from 7:00–10:30 p.m. (doors open at 6:00 p.m.) at The Urban Bar, 176 Whitechapel Road, E1 1BJ. The line-up is Susi Holliday, William Shaw, Mark Hill, Derek Farrell, Jay Stringer, JA Marley, Alex Caan, Barbara Nadel, Zoë Sharp, Liz (Elizabeth) Mundy, Caroline (Caz) Frear, Felicia Yap, and a Wildcard chosen on the night. It’s hosted by Nikki East.

Sunday, October 8, 2017

Guest Post: John Lawton on 'What Makes A Spy?'

Zoë Sharp

I'm delighted to welcome, as my Bouchercon Hiatus, another guest post by the inimitable John Lawton, whose erudite espionage thrillers make compulsive reading. His latest Inspector Troy novel, FRIENDS AND TRAITORS is hot off the press this week.

What makes a spy was the subject of a panel discussion at the Bristol (England) Crimefest in May this year: Michael Ridpath, Mick Herron, Matt Richardson, James Silvester … and me. This is an attempt to assemble comments and thoughts uttered and thunk almust at randum into summat a tad more coherent. Here goes ...

The original title was ‘what makes a good spy?’ As I’ve no idea what makes a good spy I quietly dropped the adjective. I’ve had a little experience of dealing with real spies … I was briefly the literary agent for the suppressed memoir ‘Inside Intelligence’ by former MI6 agent Anthony Cavendish — indeed he is largely the basis of my character Roger Bentinck, although I hasten to add so fictionalised as to be almost a nice person; Cavendish wasn’t — and very early on in my days at Channel 4 I was roped into the Peter Wright affair, quite possibly because I’d dealt with Cavendish.

We would have loved to put Wright on camera, but with his book still banned the resulting legal mess would, quite obviously, not be worth it. However, there was nothing to stop us talking to his lawyer, a very bright young Sydney eagle named Malcolm Turnbull. Malcolm had not yet run for political office, but the glint was in his eye.

One day in 1988 – I think it was spring in England and the monsoon season in Sydney, as I’ve never seen rain quite like it – I plonked myself down in Malcolm Turnbull’s office for a run through on the subject of ‘Secrecy’. I bought myself a moment by pushing my copy of Wright’s ‘Spycatcher’, co-written (is that different from ‘ghosted’?) with Paul Greengrass, for ages now the writer/director of the Jason Bourne franchise, but in those days just another TV director like me (thinks: must try harder.) across the desk.

“What do you make of Peter?” Malcolm said.

Well … I’d given that one a lot of thought on a 22 hour flight.

“It’s a peevish work. A quite distasteful read. He’s bitter and angry. He’s a man who’s spent his life on the outside and is now pissing in because he can’t be the man on the inside pissing out.”

“That about sums him up. He sees MI5 as a club he’s been in without ever being allowed to join. Desperate to belong but never really has.”

(You will appreciate that after thirty years that’s a paraphrase.)

Belonging or not belonging has, ever since, struck me as being crucial to the nature of the spy. I logged that one in the mental Rolodex without which any novelist is lost.

Several years passed. I had just finished my second Troy novel, ‘Old Flames’, and needed an apt quotation on the matter of belonging. I stumbled across a line from Kim Philby, uttered in an interview (quite possibly the only one he ever gave in Russia) in 1967:

“I was never a traitor. To betray you must first belong. I never belonged.”

The interview had been given to one Murray Sayle of the Sunday Times Insight team (if you’ve never heard of them, they were the cat’s pyjamas of journalism in the ante-diluvian, pre-Murdochian sixties and I urge upon any reader their insightful Penguin Special ‘Ulster.’). I’d worked with Murray at Channel 4. Every so often he’d roll up at our offices in Tottenham St. on his folding bike, with a Mac Plus, strapped to the rack, grab a desk, ask me an impossible question (eg. ‘What is the role of interest in a capitalist economy?’ Duuuuh.) and then proceed to answer it himself. This time I was ready for him.

“Did Philby really say that?”

“Yep. And I can give you a transcript of the entire interview if you like.”

“Did he believe it?”

“Most likely. But then we all kid ourselves about something.”

The pattern seemed complete – the snake had swallowed its own tale.

Wright, outraged and enraged, first by the defection of Burgess and Maclean in 1951, and then by Philby’s defection, after many years of suspicion, in 1963, had become MI5’s witchfinder general. It’s tempting to say ‘self-appointed’ but I’m not at all sure that he was, although I’m pretty certain that both Roger Hollis and Dick White found him a pain in the arse. In particular Wright held that ‘the queers’ were a security risk. He based this on the fact that one of the three Cambridge spies had been, in the words of Alan Bennett, ‘one of the most notorious buggers in London,’ and had time but mellowed him all his prejudices would have been revived and confirmed by the arrest of William John Vassall in 1962.

Of course the ‘notorious bugger’ was Guy Burgess, and now the snake spits out its tail. Spy and spycatcher each driven by a common sense of exclusion?

Did Guy Burgess belong? Did Guy Burgess think he belonged?

As he’s the subject of my next novel (Atlantic Monthly Press Oct 3^rd), I’ve pondered this over many a glass of claret and even turned off the Archers from time to time of an evening to muse.

Can any gay man ‘belong?’ I’m clueless on that score, but I will assert softly that Burgess did belong and knew he belonged. The old Etonian tie was no affectation. When it wore out – there’s only so much fried egg you can scrape off before the fabric gives up – a new one was posted to him from London. And while there’s a contrast between his membership of London gentleman’s clubs and the quasi-orgiastic private parties he threw at his flat in Bond Street the one did not preclude the other – the society he was born into represented by the RAC Club in Pall Mall (incidentally the last place he was ever seen in England) and the society he opted for represented by rough trade and cottaging (the only offence with which he was ever charged.)

Perhaps it’s time to ditch Murray Sayle and pick up Dr. Spock. What makes a spy?

Mum … and Dad … would be my answer and in all likelihood Spock’s too. It’s just that no one ever asked him.

There’s a marvellous scene in the first film in the revived Bond franchise, Casino Royale. Daniel Craig and Eva Green meet in the dining car as a eurotrain snakes its way into Montenegro – how they have avoided running into each other in the twenty or more hours since London St. Pancras baffles me, but no matter – and each dissects the other in terms of childhood, and of course they are both orphans, ending with:

“How was the lamb?”

“Skewered. One sympathises.”

(Dialogue courtesy of Wurvis, Hade and Paggis)

Neither relates to a parent. The first dislocation life has to offer, the first step to not belonging.

Both my spies fit into this, although it’s a pattern I’ve discerned after writing not before.

Charlie Leigh-Hunt, my fictional fourth or fifth man (I forget which) in the Cambridge spies is the sexually precocious only son of a very merry widow, always wondering which new ‘dad’ she will turn up with on school sports day.

Joe Wilderness is the son of an alcoholic mother and a violent war-deranged father who commits suicide in front of him. Neither belongs, neither feels they belong. Leigh-Hunt becomes a willing traitor ... Wilderness a willing spy always on the look out for ‘something interesting on the side’, who would never let loyalty get in the way of profit.

Mick Herron’s Jackson Lamb, in the Slow Horses series, doesn’t seem to have much of a back story (don’t take my word for this – read the books) but his character River Cartwright fits the pattern I’m trying to assemble as well as James Bond does… an absent father, a feckless mother and an overly-influential grandfather. And I begin to wonder about the childhood of Kim Philby, son of a too-famous father, either dragged around the world or abandoned to English public schools.

But … Guy Burgess loved his mum. Treasured her letters from England, endured five years of silence before the Russians would let him tell her where he was, and was finally rewarded with visits to Moscow. Bang goes me theory.

But Dr. Spock is still with us. So let me end on summat as succinct as I can make it.

If you haven’t read John Le Carré’s collection of essays ‘The Pigeon Tunnel’ yet, let me plug the one called ‘Son of the Author’s Father’, an engaging sketch of Ronnie Cornwell who is at least as outrageous as the fictional dad, Rick Pym, in ‘A Perfect Spy’. What makes a spy? Le Carré knows better than anyone. And I fear it is the psychological tug of war between defining oneself in opposition to a parent – never a happy parent, and never both parents – and the inevitable inheritances of character, all heightened by a cultivated mistrust, by growing up in a world where there are no fixed identities or irrefutable truths.

Oh Ivanka. What fate awaits thee?

P.S. : There's a postscript to this. Several weeks after the annual Mullerfest I was in the audience for the Chelmorton Festival’s Crime Night, run by the tireless Sarah Ward, in a Derbyshire village not far from my own bucolic retreat of Futtocks-in-the-Peak (one pub, one shop, one chapel, one church … er, that’s it.)

On the panel was another ‘local’ — Martin Pearce great-nephew of Maurice Oldfield (the ‘M’ of his day) and his first biographer of any note.

The point of Anthony Cavendish’s brief book, as I saw, it was to defend the reputation of Oldfield — in my fictional version of this, ‘Bentinck’s Agent’) Roger Bentinck just scrawls ‘Maurice Oldfield was not poof!’ across his abortive memoir.

I asked Martin if he’d interviewed Cavendish. But Cavendish had died just as Martin began his research. So I quickly sketched for him the man I knew in all his blustering upper-crust Englishness. Martin replied, and here I paraphrase, “You know there’s doubt he was English at all. He might have been Austrian or German.”

If that really is the case then Cavendish sat on more secrets than I’d ever imagined and his impersonation of an Englishman knocks Robert Maxwell’s into a cocked hat, and there was a far, far better book to be written than the one he finally published.

FRIENDS AND TRAITORS

It is 1958. Chief Superintendent Frederick Troy of Scotland Yard, newly promoted after good service during Nikita Khrushchev's visit to Britain, is not looking forward to a Continental trip with his older brother, Rod. Rod was too vain to celebrate being fifty so instead takes his entire family on 'the Grand Tour' for his fifty-first birthday: Paris, Sienna, Florence, Vienna, Amsterdam. Restaurants, galleries and concert halls. But Frederick Troy never gets to Amsterdam.

After a concert in Vienna he is approached by an old friend whom he has not seen for years - Guy Burgess, a spy for the Soviets, who says something extraordinary: “I want to come home.” Troy dumps the problem on MI5 who send an agent to de-brief Burgess - but the man is gunned down only yards from the embassy, and after that, the whole plan unravels with alarming speed and Troy finds himself a suspect.

As he fights to prove his innocence, Troy finds that Burgess is not the only ghost who returns to haunt him.

This Week's Word of the Week is velleity, meaning an inclination or wish not strong enough to be acted upon, from the Latin velle, to will.

Events:

Wednesday, October 11th

Sharp: 9-11pm, Noir @ The Bar, the Rivoli at 334 Queen Street West, Toronto, ON M5V 2A2