Test Of Character

Where do your characters come from?

It is a frequently asked question that many people are keen to know the answer to. The possibility intrigues people, that something of someone they know or maybe even something of themselves appear in a character.

The characters in the Reluctant Detective have many sources, some of them rooted in reality, others purely figments of my fevered imagination.

The person who is closest to a real person is the office cleaner. She is very strongly influenced by a cleaner we had when I worked for Railtrack. Other characters can be inspired by a simple gesture, tick or habit of people I have met in passing. The two women in the scene in Costa coffee are a subset of a group of women I watched laughing and talking as if they had reverted to their teenage years. It was a positive image that stuck with me and before I knew it they had made a cameo appearance in the story.

Some characters are an amalgam of people, little bits pulled from the edges of a person to come together like Frankenstein's monster, given life by a series of taps of the keyboard. Stumbling into creation and slowly coalescing into, hopefully, a believable person. It is a fine balancing act, bringing the traits together to make a complete fictional being.

The majority of the antagonists in the book are where my imagination is allowed the greatest scope. I have been fortunate in life to have met few people that I dislike, therefore creating a fictional villain has to come from the darker parts of my imagination. I hope that the people in the book, even the bad guys, have traits with which the reader can empathise or at very least sympathise with. Only then will they be engaging characters that you can relate to. A large portion of crime fiction is now populated by villains that are portrayed as being purely evil but there are, thankfully, very few truly evil people. I have tried to make criminal behaviour be grounded in the circumstances that people find themselves in or the mistaken belief that they were doing it for good reasons.

I hope that you find the cast of the novel to be interesting. I would like to know which characters you think are captivating and which are maybe not as believable as they should be. 

Influences - Part 3

Having looked at inspirational authors from both the U.S. and U.K., in this final part of my influences, I thought I would look to Europe.

Sweden is fast becoming one of the top producers of crime writers. At the top of the pile stands Henning Mankell. His chief character, Kurt Wallander, has helped to make him one of the most successful authors in the world. Wallander is another senior detective who lacks in social skills but it doesn't stop him being a fine policeman. Mankell creates a vivid and occasionally grim picture of life among Sweden's criminal fraternity but it is never less than compelling.

Stieg Larsson didn't live to see the phenomenon that his Millenium Trilogy would become. The protagonist, Lisbeth Salander, is surely one of the greatest characters ever to appear in any crime novel. As "The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo" plots her way through life, the reader swings between sympathy, to disgust, to admiration as she deals out justice in her own inimitable way. With her journalist partner, Mikael Blomqvist, she takes on the corruption in the Swedish political and business system. If you haven't read them, I would heartily recommend that you do.

Another shining light of Swedish crime writing is Håkan Nesser. His books are set in a fictional North European country, that encompasses Dutch, Swedish Danish and German influences. The main character, Van Veeteren, begin as a Chief Inspector but retires during the series to become the owner of an antiques shop. Both the setting and the career path of the policeman, makes the series an interesting change from the majority of detective fiction.

My final European is a little bit of a cheat. Michael Dibdin was born in Woverhampton but his detective series was set in Italy and featured Aurelio Zen. A member of the Italian State Police, Zen is called to cases across the country. Dibdin's skill was to evoke all of Italy's contradictions. The history, the buildings, the beauty of the landscape, the corruption, the political machinations and organised crime. If you love Italy, you'll love Dibdin.

That brings an end at my look at the people who have influenced and inspired me, I hope you enjoyed it and it inspires you to read something new, after you've read The Reluctant Detective, of course.

Influences - Part 2

In the first part of this article on my influences, I looked to the old school, U.S. hard-boiled genre. In this second part I would like to fly back across the Atlantic, to look at the British crime writers that have both inspired and enthralled me.
In many ways the notion of a "private detective" was born with the creation of Sherlock Holmes. Sir Arthur Conan Doyle's hero considered himself a consulting detective but he was essentially outside the normal police structure and worked to his own rules. Doyle's use of forensics in the stories, combined with a hint of the supernatural, made Holmes a huge hit with the Victorians and his popularity remains undiminished today; a film and a TV series both being released within the last few months.
Holmes relationship with Watson, his friend and slightly less brilliant mind, is something that appears in much of modern detective fiction in the U.K.
Inspector Morse, Colin Dexter's fantastic Oxford police detective has Lewis. The much put upon, yet relied upon Sergeant, played the Watson role to Morse's Holmes. Morse could have been a brilliant academic, yet he works as a Chief Inspector in the Thames Valley police. He investigates the crimes of the Fellows and Dons of Oxford University who could have been his colleagues. I love Dexter's characters, who are all interesting and flawed human beings. None more so than the socially awkward Morse, so brilliantly played by John Thaw in the TV series.
Another detective who relies on a partner to stop him straying too far from police procedure is Ian Rankin's John Rebus. Rebus is the epitome of the maverick detective. He riles superiors as often as he annoys the criminal fraternity of Scotland's capital city. Detective Sergeant Siobhan Clarke is the person tasked to work with Rebus, to keep his genius on track. Rebus moves through the heights and depths of Edinburgh's society with the same disdain for the people who step out of the boundaries of the law. Rankin is a master of the complicated plot, painting magnificently, Edinburgh, in all its shades of dark and light.
Moving further south, to Nottingham, we find John Harvey's Charlie Resnick. Resnick is of Polish descent, has a love of jazz music and strange sandwiches. The Resnick series of books are among my favourites and his sergeant, Lynn Kellog, is one of the key elements. She is a brilliant foil for Charlie as they investigate the seedier side of the city in the East Midlands.
I'll finish this part by looking at another "private detective". It's not a middle-aged, tough ex-cop but a demure lady of late middle-age in the heart of Home Counties England. I am, of course, referring to Miss Marple. Agatha Christie's unlikely nemesis for the murderers and thieves that came across her path. I must admit, I didn't always get the appeal of either Miss Marple or Christie's other great detective, Poirot. I always struggled with the idea of the well-heeled, middle-class culprits committing crimes of passion. However, as time has passed, I have discovered Christie to be among the very best at plotting a novel in a way that leaves you guessing up to the very end. A skill that I hope to get better at over the coming years.
In the last of this series, I will look at some continental writers that have captured my imagination.

Who is The Reluctant Detective?

The story of the Reluctant Detective has been rolling around inside my head for a long time.

My love of the hard-boiled detectives of the best American writers, made me think about what a Scottish private-eye would be. My two favourite novelists, Raymond Chandler and Ross Macdonald, gave their detectives a very personal voice. Written in the first person, the reader discovers the evidence at the pace of the protagonist, the mystery unravels with the clues he collects. I always felt it to be an interesting way to develop a story and now I have tried to give my detective that same personal voice.

That's not to say that I have transported the format from California to Glasgow and changed the accents. The first difference is the age of Craig Campbell, the hero of the story. He is in his late twenties, naive in some respects and definitely not the cynical middle-aged man who takes the lead in a great deal of detective fiction. I considered how a young man, with no real experience of police work, would react to the pressures of the difficult situation he is thrust into.

In this book, he is forced to come to grips with his own emotions as he is given a personal motive to uncover the truth and to deal with the criminals.

In some ways this is not a whodunnit, it is more of a look at how people become criminals. There are several characters who commit crimes and they all have their own reasons. From desperation to greed, for family or friendship, it is an attempt to give them a genuine rationale for slipping into criminal behaviour.

I hope you at least give the first chapter a try and spend some time in the company of the Reluctant Detective.

Influences - Part One

My love of mystery stories started at an early age. My mother would take me to the library every couple of weeks and it was there that I borrowed an Enid Blyton "Secret Seven" book. I was hooked and I graduated from there to "The Famous Five" and then to the Hardy Boys, loving the search for the culprit and their motives.

It was my drama teacher, Alison Graham, who changed my love into an obsession. When I was about 13 years old, she gave me Raymond Chandler's "The Big Sleep", I was captivated and drawn in to the world of the American private detective, a world I still love to visit.

Chandler's genius lay in the voice he gave Philip Marlowe. The novels are written from Marlowe's perspective and some of the descriptions are completely wondrous.

In "The Big Sleep" Marlowe prepares to meet a client. "I was neat, clean, shaved and sober, and I didn't care who knew it. I was everything the well-dressed private detective ought to be. I was calling on four million dollars."

1940's "Farewell My Lovely" has him describing a woman as "A blonde to make a bishop kick a hole in a stained glass window."

There are many examples of his use of humour but that was not the only thing that made me a fan. He had the ability to create complex and compelling characters, believable people whose motives were the base emotions that drive everyone. His plot lines were often built from many strands and sometimes he wouldn't quite tie them all together at the end but that is part of the attraction, you are left to form your own opinion.

Chandler's own influence was Dashiel Hammett. Hammett was the first to give a voice to the real criminal underclass and Sam Spade, the detective in "The Maltese Falcon", defined what a private-eye should be.

Another less well known writer, one who deserves to stand beside these two greats of the hard-boiled detective genre, is Ross Macdonald.

Macdonald was in the next generation of writers, working from the late forties through to the early seventies. His detective, Lew Archer, is hewn from the same hard granite as his predecessors but there was added depth to the books as he pondered the psychology of criminality. He works in the fictional city of Santa Theresa, a setting that also appears in Sue Grafton's novels. Macdonald's stories are often poignant tales of the shattering of family relationships, raw emotion stripped of its civilised cloak. They are easy to relate to and frightening in how easy it is for ordinary people to become criminals as they get caught up in circumstances that spin out of control.

Unfortunately, many of Macdonald's novels are now out of print and are difficult to find but if you do come across him, I would heartily recommend that you read some of the best detective fiction ever written.

In the second part of this article, I will look closer to home at some of the British crime writers I admire.