A new guest blogger this week. At this rate, I’ll soon be able to retire. This one’s from a good friend, Bill Daly. He’s a Scottish writer who, very wisely, a few years back, decided that living in the south of France was probably a good idea. In a previous blog, a while ago, I used a quote from one of Bill’s books, The Pheasant Plucker,  as an example of how to craft humour. That book and his latest, Black Mail,  a much darker look at crime in Glasgow, are excellent reads. Here, though, he’s offering our PR-spouting, politically inept Prime Minister some advice on following the French approach to relations with Europe. All yours, Bill.

 

 

Here we go again! David Cameron is about to renegotiate Britain’s relationship with Europe. Well the best of luck with that one, mate. Will the British never learn how to play the European game? Back in the 1960s, when De Gaulle was throwing his toys around, it was six against 1. In the Thatcher/Major era it became eleven against one and Cameron has succeeded in making it twenty-six against one, thus consolidating Britain’s place as The Thick Man of Europe. As George Bush might have said, the French don’t have a word for déjà vu.

You don’t have to be a committed Europhile to cringe every time a British politician gets involved with Europe. However, it’s interesting to observe the different approaches that come into play on either side of the Channel whenever Brussels sprouts. Without waiting to find out whether the bureaucrats have come up with a sensible proposal or a harebrained edict, the British tabloids generate a torrent of abuse and the politicians feel obliged to explode into self-righteous indignation while issuing threats of vetoes and retaliation.

In France, there’s nary a ripple. The French have non-confrontation down to a fine art and it’s with a beaming smile and a flourishing doff of the proverbial cap that the responsible civil servant will intone the Gallic equivalent of: ‘Yes, sir, yes, sir; three bags full, sir’ – and then proceed to implement the directives that suit his political masters while studiously ignoring the others. Consummate bureaucrats to their fingertips, the French portray themselves as the epitome of model Europeans, knowing full well that Brussels is competent to monitor only the acceptance of directives, not their implementation. ‘Of course, Monsieur, if it’s straight bananas you want, we’ll pass a law ordering all bananas to grow straight – and rest assured that any banana found not to be conforming with this very important directive will be consumed forthwith’.                       

In the 1990s, when John Major was getting his knickers in a twist over restrictions on British beef exports following the BSE crisis, the French quietly finessed their problems. While Major was the centre of attention, bouncing around the European stage like a jack-in-the-box on speed and threatening to grind the markets to a standstill with interminable vetoes, the French identified a few rogue cases of BSE in the north of the country – for good measure seeding the implication that perfidious Albion was to blame. They then culled a few cattle and declared their house to be in order while Brussels was preoccupied with stuffing Major back into his box.

The British work themselves up into a lather over trivia, such as the European directive requiring fruit and vegetables to be sold in metric quantities – a diktat of no practical benefit to either the vendor or the customer – and when the courts prosecute a few hapless costermongers for non-conformance, another round of tabloid-led, anti-Brussels invective is triggered.

If there happens to be a particular edict from Brussels that the French can’t stomach, they handle it low-key. When Brussels sprouted that the season for shooting migratory birds had to be shortened by three weeks, there was no public rhetoric or posturing in France. Although the proposal was anathema to the hunters – a lobby almost as powerful as the farmers – the politicians didn’t turn a hair. Instead, in a late-night parliamentary session, when there were only a handful of members in the chamber, a law was passed which overrode the Brussels’ initiative.

I’m-all-right-Jacques Chirac and his prime minister of the day stood aloof: ‘Awfully sorry about that glitch, chaps. It was nothing to do with us, you understand. Just a few of the lads getting frisky late at night and exercising their democratic rights. A bit unfortunate, but there’s nothing we can do about it now, I’m afraid – the constitution’s the constitution. Anyway, not to worry. We’ll have a word with them and make sure they don’t step out of line again. You know you can rely on us for unwavering support. After all, who was the first to have legislation about straight bananas on the statute book?

Now, where were we? Ah yes, you were about to ratify a twenty per cent increase in payments to French farmers under the Common Agriculture Policy…..’ .

This is mainly a request for opinions and it’s aimed principally at those who’ve read my stories about Stanley, the miserable, misanthropic fairy who lives under a dripping tap in the bedroom of a man called Jack in Aberdeen. But before we get to Stanley, a wee introduction to the reason for this request.

Regular(ish) visitors will be familiar with my brother Ron but now a new family member creeps in – Ron’s son, Joe. I’ve been collaborating with Joe on another children’s book – the words are by me, the illustrations by him. The book’s called Rory the Dragon and Princess Daisy and, for a very special reason, all proceeds from sales will be going to The Daisy Chain Fund. The reason is that one of my nieces had a daughter called Daisy Elizabeth Warn, who was diagnosed with a rare and most severe (Type 1) Spinal Muscular Atrophy. It’s a horrible, incurable neuromuscular condition causing weakness of the muscles. She lived for only 16 weeks and, although I never saw her myself, the photos and videos show a lovely, smiling baby with bags of personality. You can imagine how distressing it must have been for her family to live with the knowledge that she wouldn’t be with them for long and they were full of praise for the help and support they got from the Children’s Hospice South West. It’s a very special place – the only organisation in the South West of England which offers help and support to children and their families who are living with life-limiting conditions. And Daisy’s family set up The Daisy Chain Fund in her memory to raise money for it.

This is Daisy:

And here’s Rory:I’d written the story about them a couple of years before she was born but I wanted somehow to associate it with the real Daisy, so I suggested to my sister Gill (Daisy’s grandmother) that we publish it ourselves and sell it for The Daisy Chain. My 3 sisters’ organisational and fund-raising skills are astonishing so they were enthusiastic about it. All I needed was a willing illustrator.

Enter Joe, who proceeded to produce characters and sketches which didn’t really resemble what I had in mind but, the moment I saw them, I knew they were perfect for the story. The book’s nearly ready for publication and I’ll write some more about it when it actually appears.

Meanwhile, Joe knew of my Stanley stories and was quite happy to have a go at illustrating them, too, and here’s where we get to the request. As you can see from the freedom of his Daisy and Rory drawings, he has a distinct style and he’s sent me some draft sketches for a potential Stanley. I’ve shown them to a couple of people and opinions have varied so this is me trying to cast the net a little wider and fix on Stanley’s new image. If you know of him, or even if you don’t, I’d appreciate your reactions to Joe’s first two ideas on how he might look.

So really, this blog is little more than a begging letter. Which Stanley do you prefer?.

My cop-out blogs are getting more and more blatant. This one, in fact, is lifted straight from my old blog and dates from June 2009. But I have a good excuse. This weekend (Saturday 26 and Sunday 27), the Kindle version of my novel The Darkness is free in the USA here  and the UK here   and I remembered writing specifically about its genesis and about how a significant part of my reason for writing novels seems to be revenge. This is what I wrote back then.

Recently I was one of several writers pitching their new books to some readers in a lovely wee independent shop in Glasgow called Lost in Fiction (sadly long-since defunct). Anyway, my three-minute pitch went like this:

The question we’re always asked is ‘Where do you get your ideas from?’ In the case of The Darkness, it’s central to how I wrote the first version and how it developed into this one. Many years ago, I was having dinner with my wife and friends at a restaurant just outside Aberdeen. The waiter serving us had a West Country accent – English West Country. I said to him ‘You’re a long way from home’. He said ‘Yes, I needed to get as far away as possible’. I asked why and he told me his wife and two young daughters had been killed by a drunk driver. He’d been caught, sentenced to eighteen months, but got twelve months off for good behaviour. As the waiter said, ‘That’s two months for each life’.

I felt so sorry for him, and the story stayed with me. I wanted revenge on his behalf.

The first version of The Darkness was exactly that. My agent sent it to Piatkus. They liked it but didn’t want a stand alone thriller at that time but said they’d be interested if I had any police procedurals. So I wrote one. They bought it. And I wrote some more.

I started thinking about making The Darkness part of the series, but it was crude. It was me, red in tooth and claw. My own vigilante tendencies bother me. When it comes to capital punishment, imprisonment and so on I’m a liberal, I’ve corresponded with a prisoner on Death Row, and yet I know for a fact that if I could get my hands on some of these paedophiles and so on, I’d do very nasty things to them. And I’d do it knowing it was wrong, but I’d still do it.

So, in the end, I wrote and rewrote The Darkness over and over again, exploring the balance between the law and justice, revenge and compassion. The motives and the personnel changed. It’s now the third Jack Carston novel and it’s taught me so much about my characters and the whole business of crime and punishment that, before I send off the next two, which are already written, I want to change them. Then, there’ll be just one more. I already know its plot and structure and it’ll have an even darker ending than this one.

Given what I’m claiming for the book, it was nice to read in one of the reviews that ‘When you read The Darkness be prepared to be manipulated and have your moral compass reset’. And the same review ended by saying ‘get yourself a copy of The Darkness and ask yourself this; what would you do?’

OK, that was my spiel – and I meant it, and it was true. But yesterday, reading an article about books being made into movies, I suddenly remembered reading First Blood, which is the first of the Rambo stories. I haven’t seen the movies and have no desire to, but that was a well-constructed thriller and a good escapist read. At the end, though, I felt frustrated and cheated by a choice the protagonist made. It was about revenge. But his ‘failure’ to exact the full revenge, while morally ‘correct’, was out of character in the context of the story. This isn’t a criticism of the writing, it’s just my take on the morality involved. I won’t reveal the specific incident to which I’m referring because some people may not have read it so I wouldn’t want to spoil the ending for them.

The point, though, is that it made me want to write a novel in which the revenge impulse was allowed its full scope. I imagine that many if not most people experience the visceral eye-for-an-eye urge and it doesn’t do to pretend that it’s not there. I’m not proposing a free-for-all, but it’s honest to acknowledge that it’s a factor, even in the most liberally-informed debates.

All of which is a pitch for you to go and pick up your free copy of The Darkness this Saturday or Sunday.

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