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.