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.