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At last, another very welcome contribution from my brother Ron.  His slant on the link between writer and reader is perceptive although, in the final two paragraphs, disturbingly lubricious . (By the way, if I did, as he claims, use the expression ‘inferential perception’, I should be (and am) ashamed of myself. I shall, however, use it frequently in the future .) All yours, Ron.

Here’s Bill, at the family dinner table, some fifty odd years ago. Out from the usual competitive banter, which centres on topics as diverse as the colour of Manchester United’s away strip or weighing up the desire for the last roast potato against winning the race to finish eating first, comes this:

“What it’s really all about is inferential perception.”

He might have gone on to unpack the concept and quote his sources…I don’t recall but, evidently, I remember those words. They stayed with me because they had an allure, promising access to something that might feed my empty teenage mind.

I’m still just as impressionable, a sucker for a well-turned phrase. For instance, I’m washing the dishes and wondering if I’ll remember to reload the bird feeder I can see when, out of the thousands of words on the radio news, an interviewer says to some middle eastern diplomat,

“So, you condemn this act unreservedly,” and the diplomat answers, “I’m going to have to give you an answer of constructive ambiguity.”

And the birds are going to have to go hungry because I go straight for my pen and note that answer down, firstly so I can relish it as a seductive piece of avoidance and secondly to commit it to memory in the hope of being stopped in the street one day and asked to comment on some major issue:
“Excuse me sir, what do you think of the colour of Manchester United’s away strip?”
“I’m going to have to give you an answer of constructive ambiguity, innit.”

My admiration for this diplomat shrank when I later learned he hadn’t plucked those words from his creative intellect to meet the context but had stolen them from Alan Greenspan, former chairman of the Federal Reserve, who was describing the ‘art’ of appearing to say something about the financial markets but in such a way that traders would not over-react and set prices rising or falling in response. Never mind, the words still carry a lot of power.

And here’s Will Self on the radio recently, being asked what Psycho Geography is and, seemingly without taking a breath or consulting his notes, answering:
“Psycho Geography is the idea of purposeless transits across the urban context in order to deconstruct the commercial and political imperatives of contemporary space.”

Another emaciated sparrow drops from the bird table as I reach for the pad again. Of course Self’s words are pretentious and sound like one of Bill’s examples of jargon intended to screen the ignorance of the speaker but I don’t care: I want to talk like that. (Incidentally, I suspect it’s that word, ‘purposeless’ which really attracts me. After a career in education, with its aims and objectives and targets and goals, I am drawn to the notion of aimless meandering).

For different reasons, I was struck by these words, written to an online chat room, in response to Google’s new sorting system in its Gmail service.
‘You fulfilled my desire which I am feeling for the last few months and gave immense joy when I saw it after opening my inbox.’
These words don’t promise the illumination of Will Self or Alan Greenspan but they are so inappropriately gushing that I find myself admiring the intention of the writer, whilst at the same time wondering if he might benefit from getting out a bit more.

What you writers and readers need to know is that there are people like me out here who are susceptible to the bon mot or the mot juste and who will swoon and buckle if you can find those combinations of words that press our buttons. I wonder if it might be useful or even inspiring to sit at your desks in the knowledge that your audience is gagging for it.

If you live anywhere near Aberdeen, you have a chance this weekend (19-20 October) to visit the scene of a crime committed 168 years ago. Well, not really. It’s a crime I invented as part of Unsolved – Aberdeenshire’s Crime and Mystery Festival. I explained the background to it in an earlier blog. At that time I was thinking of going back hundreds of years but various clues and aspects of the location (Leith Hall) made me bring it all a wee bit closer.

In case you haven’t read the link, the idea is to create a murder scene in a property belonging to the National Trust for Scotland. Visitors are given the basics of the crime, invited to question suspects and, after due deliberation, come up with a culprit using only the evidence and techniques available at the time. They then get access to today’s techniques (fingerprinting, DNA, fibre analysis, ballistics) and see whether they reach the same conclusion.

When visitors arrive, they’ll be given this:

It’s 1845. Lord & Lady Fairfax are part of a shooting party visiting Leith Hall in Aberdeenshire. Lord Leith is in the grounds with the rest of the party reconnoitring for the following day’s shoot.  They’re also shooting now and again. Leith’s daughter, Arabella, is playing the piano in the music room, his wife, Lady Leith, is resting in the Leith bedroom. In the dining room, Ferguson, the butler, is preparing for the evening meal. He’s being helped by Angus, a footman, and a housemaid, Molly, who is also Angus’s girl-friend.

The highly unpopular and unpleasant Lord Fairfax has been left behind by the others. He’s wearing his military uniform and is in the drawing room with Lady McMarne, another female guest. He’s been drinking a lot. His wife has gone for a stroll around the lake. He makes advances to Lady McMarne which she resists. His idea of being playful is to load his new pistol (of which he’s very proud) and pretend to threaten her with it. He quickly tires of her and, when she excuses herself to go to the bathroom, the sound of the piano in the music room makes him decide to try his luck with Arabella. He mutters something about hearing someone in the library and leaves.

Some 5 minutes later, a shot is heard and he’s found lying dead in the library, with a gunshot wound in his upper chest.

Your first task is to investigate the death by questioning the witnesses and using only the techniques available at the time of the event (1845) to pick up clues, motives and proofs.

Once you’ve done that and decided the culprit, you’ll be given access to more modern investigative techniques to see whether you reach the same conclusion.

Another of the weekend’s activities is for schoolchildren in Aberdeen and Aberdeenshire. I’ve written a 500 word opening to another story set in Leith Hall and they have to complete the story, which must be up to 2000 words long in total. There are great prizes for the winners. I’ll probably blog about the results when the competition’s over and maybe include the opening to see whether any of you want to try it – just for fun.

So, if you’re in the vicinity, Leith Hall’s a great place to visit, and there’s a murder to solve as well.

Before I started writing novels, I used to write plays for radio and stage. It’s a completely different discipline and I’ve been feeling that I’d like to get back to it for a change. The thing that’s set me thinking about it, though, is the fact that I’m writing a sequel to The Figurehead and part of the action concerns the visit of a theatrical troupe to Aberdeen in 1842. It’s meant that I’ve had to revisit 19^th century drama, which was the subject of my Ph.D. thesis and I’ve been reminded of how passionate audiences were then about plays.

The most popular form was melodrama and, in France in the 1830s (when revolutionary spirits were high), the theatre was a literal battle ground between the Romantics and the Traditionalists. The opening line of Victor Hugo’s Hernani (famous for the ‘Battles of Hernani’ that erupted in the audience night after night) throws down a gauntlet because the play’s written in a verse form called alexandrines which followed strict rules (until Hugo started loosening them). They were self-contained lines of 12 syllables and their meaning should never run on into the following line. But Hugo’s play begins with an old servant asking:

Serait-ce déjà lui? (Un coup.) C’est bien à l’escalier
Dérobé.

Which, very loosely translated, is :

Is he here already? (A knock on the door.) That’s certainly from the hidden
Staircase.

Splitting the noun and adjective in that way was a direct challenge and there was uproar immediately. Different parts of the audience threw cabbages and even worse things at one another.

In another part of the play, the king asks a courtier ‘What time is it?’ Cue more uproar because that’s not how kings speak. And when the courtier replies ‘Nearly midnight’, the traditionalists go bananas because courtiers would never be so familiar with monarchs. A contemporary English melodrama showed the way with the same sort of Q & A.

– Is midnight passed?
– Long since. Just as we crossed the glen the monastery chime swang heavy with the knell of yesterday.

Melodrama had its own language, its own range of gestures. Audiences knew what characters were thinking (or, more often, emoting) without any words being said. But the interesting thing is the degree of passion the theatre aroused. There’s one anecdote which illustrates it perfectly.

Antony was a play written by Alexandre Dumas. It was a huge success and had full houses every night. The character of Antony, played by the famous actor Bocage, loves Adèle d’Hervey, played by the sensational Marie Dorval. Adèle is married with a daughter but Antony wants her to run away with him. They’re madly in love but Adèle refuses to leave her daughter. In the last act, Antony tracks her down to an inn and enters her room. Her husband’s on his way to join her and, just as Antony is about to drag her away by force, there’s a knock on the door.  It’s the husband. If he comes in and finds them together, she’ll be dishonoured (even though they haven’t done anything). Adèle says Antony must kill her to save her honour. He kisses her and stabs her, the door crashes open and the husband sees his dead wife. Antony says ‘Yes. Dead. She was resisting me. I killed her’. Whereupon, the curtain falls to thunderous applause. End of play. That last line became famous and crowds continued to flock to the theatre to see and hear it.

But …

One night, an over-eager stagehand dropped the curtain when the husband came in and struck his horrified pose. There was no time for Bocage to say the line. The audience went crazy, screaming and yelling for the curtain to go up again, threatening all sorts of mayhem and refusing to leave the theatre. The trouble was that Bocage was already getting changed. He’d started taking off his makeup and refused to go back on stage. But the gallant Marie Dorval saved the day. She told the stagehand to raise the curtain again. He did and she staggered to her feet from her prone position, limped to the front of the stage and said ‘Yes. Dead. I was resisting him.  He killed me’. The audience loved it and went home even happier than if they’d heard the line spoken by Antony.

You don’t find baying crowds nowadays except at football matches, so that sort of passion has disappeared even though theatre is still capable of generating intense catharsis. But the anecdote demonstrates how theatre can, at the same time, be unbearably intense and fundamentally absurd. That really was a willing suspension of disbelief.