All Posts in Uncategorized

Yet another cake

By Bill on 4 Replies

A couple of years ago, I wrote a blog enthusing about the energy, creativity and sheer joie de vivre of my three sisters, Gill, Ginge (who’s really called Christine and who’s never been Ginger but that’s what we call her), and the youngest, Lesley. I wrote of their extensive charity work and the way they manage to enjoy nearly everything they do. I also wrote about the cake Lesley, the youngest one, made for my birthday and, last weekend, she repeated the exercise for Gill.

I won’t bore you by describing the evening itself, spent in the rooms of the Royal Corinthian Yacht Club overlooking Plymouth Sound and dancing to a terrific band. It was boozy and happy, but you had to be there. On the other hand, once again, the cake deserves to be acknowledged, summarising as it does the essence of Gill’s pleasures, pastimes and interests. The picture doesn’t do it justice so I’ll just give a few details. The figure lying in her beloved garden with its palm trees and other plants, each of which represents a specific anecdote or memory, is Gill. She’s reading a tiny book through even tinier glasses, both made, as is everything else in the picture, by Lesley. The book has readable text in it, as does the card on the table beside her and the choir book on the nearby hammock (the 3 sisters sing in a choir). She likes cricket, hence the stumps and ball, but the pièce de résistance is the knitting. Gill is a highly skilled knitter, so Lesley actually knitted a few rows of cotton thread using cocktail sticks as needles. On top of all this, she compiled a terrific photo album chronicling umpteen phases of Gill’s life and still had time to get all the family to record themselves in various guises and locations miming to songs from South Pacific. She then edited the footage into a compilation video which was unveiled during the party.

And, just to give you an idea of how much work that editing entailed, the family consists of 6 adults and 3 spouses (or should that be spice?),  14 children and 9 spice, and 15 grandchildren – a grand total of 47, all but 14 of whom sent videos to Lesley. The evening was a joy for Gill and a triumph for Lesley. It also managed somehow to raise £543 for charity.

And Lesley was rewarded just a few days later by tripping, crushing a bone and being taken to hospital. Walking is now very painful and she may have to miss a planned trip to China. God must have been looking after a golfer, a footballer, or a Republican candidate at the time..

Jack Carston and Me

By Bill on Comments

A recent interview with a good friend, the highly talented and perceptive journalist Sara Bain, forced me to think about my relationship with the main character in my contemporary crime novels, DCI Jack Carston. I’ve known him for about 20 years now and I think he’s getting ready to retire. He first came into my head in the early 90s and now, 5 books later, the compromises he’s had to make are beginning to get to him.

He started because the UK publisher, Piatkus, liked a stand alone thriller my agent had sent them but wanted a police procedural instead, so I set about writing Material Evidence. The ending/solution was based on an actual case I read about in a book on forensic medicine, but the interest came from Carston and the team I found around him. I say ‘I found’ and that seems to be how it was. They all emerged, with their tics, foibles, ways of speaking and relationships ready formed.

Carston himself is curious about things, a creative thinker; he’s interested in people but routines bore and frustrate him. His opinion of some of his superiors is relatively low but his wife, Kath, makes sure that his self-esteem doesn’t get so high as to make him obnoxious. In fact, the love and humour in their marriage is one of the strongest themes running through the books.

Why did he choose to join the police? Well, he’s always wondering what makes people (including himself) tick and likes solving puzzles. At first he joined because he was idealistic and wanted to be on the side of the good guys – but the job has made him more aware that ‘good’ and ‘bad’ are relative terms, especially when it comes to people’s motives for what they do. His high success rate derives from the fact that he’s not only fascinated by people, he cares about them, too. He’s not obviously ‘flawed’, has no particular rituals, doesn’t drive a flash car, and his only addiction is his wife. He has a temper, is sometimes childish, doesn’t tolerate fools, despises people who don’t respect the rights of others and is driven mainly by compassion.

I’ve followed him through five books so far and, without any conscious plan on my part, he’s definitely evolved – and in a specific direction. The job has taken him more deeply into the psyches of other people (and his own) and, if he had any moral certainties to start with, he certainly doesn’t now. When I first wrote about him, he solved the case by using the testimony of the various suspects to get into the mind of the victim. The picture he saw there was pretty bleak. But the way he did it – using the physical evidence, but building a picture of who the dead woman was – told me I was dealing with someone who trusted his insights into behaviours. In the next book, things were clearer because there was a definite ‘baddie’. Even then, though, the murders and the motives were surprising and not at all clear cut.

It was The Darkness that signalled the real change. He found himself sympathising with someone who was living a normal life helping others but who was also guilty of very serious crimes. It had quite an impact on him and when, in book four, his investigations brought him in contact with highly intelligent people in a university and hospital, the pettiness, self-importance and corrupt nature of some of the people there put another dent in his certainties.

And in the latest book, Unsafe Acts, at the same time as he’s trying to solve two murders and unravel a plot to sabotage an offshore platform, a vindictive superior officer decides he’s had enough of Carston’s unconventional approaches and he faces a charge of indiscipline. It makes him wonder whether he should actually leave the force.

I’m not yet sure of the answer to that, but I will be when I start book six, which might well be the last in the series..

Comma power

By Bill on Comments

This blog’s been provoked by a recent exchange with some of my fellow-Pfoxmoor authors on the subject of commas. I think I use too many. It’s probably because lots of my sentences are too long and, as part of the editing process, I read them aloud and recognise the need to put in some pauses. We all make choices in grammar and punctuation (consciously or otherwise), to suit the stress we want to put on something or alter the flow and rhythm of a piece. But I do respect the rules and when I break them it’s usually because I want to achieve a particular effect.

I used to be much more pernickety but I’ve mellowed. I can see that splitting infinitives sometimes makes sense, especially in dialogue or ‘reader-friendly’ passages, because the ‘correct’ alternative sounds stilted. By luck, I’ve an excellent example of how the process works in the hands of a writer who knows exactly what he’s doing with it. It’s from The Pheasant Plucker, a thriller written by a friend, Bill Daly. Unaccountably, it’s out of print at the moment but there are still some copies available through sellers on Amazon. Here’s the relevant bit:

“The beam from his discarded torch catches his knife and I can see drops of my blood glistening on the blade. He lobs the knife in the air and expertly grabs the spinning blade by the handle as it falls, then he lurches forward, knife arm fully extended. ‘If you don’t back off, Dumas – or whatever the hell your name is,’ he snarls, ‘I’m going to fucking kill you.’

It’s ridiculous, I know, but the split infinitive upsets me more than my split cheek. My brain takes time out to analyse where fucking should go in that phrase. Normally, the adverb would follow the infinitive, but ‘I’m going to kill fucking you’ doesn’t sound right and ‘I’m going to kill you fucking’ doesn’t bear thinking about. As I launch myself again at his throat, I fleetingly wonder whether I might be the first person ever to meet his maker while parsing.”

I wish I’d written that.

Rules and arguments about them are fun. I don’t want to see the anarchy of a laissez-faire attitude to language triumph, but I do want language to have its freedoms. When a singer praises ‘April in Paris’ and asks ‘Whom can I run to?’ it’s admirable that he/she has remembered that ‘whom’ is an indirect object qualified by the preposition ‘to’ and therefore needs the ‘m’ at the end. But if she/he also remembered that you mustn’t end a sentence with a preposition, the rhyme (with ‘what have you done to …’) would be completely buggered. (I also think that singing ‘To whom can I run?’ would detract significantly from his/her credibility as a passionate lover.)

Anyway, the wee debate I mentioned at the beginning concerned whether you put commas in when you write a sentence such as ‘The captain of the Enterprise, Jean-Luc Picard, is bald’. (Incidentally, I don’t see the logic in the American convention of putting that final full stop INSIDE the inverted commas. It punctuates the whole sentence, not just the bit in quotes. Discuss.)

Well, these things are called nouns or phrases in apposition and, according to my equivalent of the Bible, a little book by Jan Venolia called Write Right, you can have restrictive or non-restrictive appositive phrases or nouns. The restrictive ones (such as the one beginning ‘a little book’ in the previous sentence) need commas; they either identify or add information to the thing to which they’re in apposition, so:

David Cameron, a Prime Minister in name only, never answers questions.
Or:
Bill Kirton, author of breathtakingly good crime novels, frequently pontificates about grammar.
Or:
Two of my writer friends, Ben and Jerry, are very careful with commas.

On the other hand, the non-restrictive ones don’t add anything to the meaning of the sentence and aren’t necessary for identification, as in:

My friend Vladimir couldn’t care less about grammar, spelling, editing or any of those time-wasting activities.
Or:
Crime-busting north-east cop Jack Carston is getting fed up with his so-called superiors. (NB NOT ‘fed up OF’)

So there. And let’s end with a little exercise to show that commas do matter. What’s the difference between the following two sentences?

My daughter who is a pilot enjoys classical music.
My daughter, who is a pilot, enjoys classical music..