Jay Stringer's Blog, page 10

Runaway Victims

Last time I waxed lengthy-like about some of the issues that spring from the setting I choose to write in. These are the things that you can’t ignore. They might not be the story you first set out to tell, but if you pick a setting and then ignore that settings voice, you’re going to fail. This time I wanted to talk about what first set me writing the book. And I better give out a trigger warning, just in case.

“Some say land of paradise. Some say land of pain. Which side are you looking on?”

-Uncle Tupelo

Violence in fiction and the media seems to be a very relative thing. We have no problem seeing people being beaten, tortured, stabbed or shot, but if someone swears or -yikes- shows a little nudity we lose our shit. There is a debate to be had on the casualisation of violence. We know this because blogs have spent years having that very debate. I’m not talking about that, and I think violence has an important part to play in fiction. What sets my spine itching is the casualisation of victims.

We live in a world full of victims. There are children, women, men, ethnic minorities and immigrants across the globe being turned into commodities, or beaten, or starving, or used as scape-goats. And in fiction we do some extremely violent things to these people, and often skate on by to the next bit in the story. I’m sure we’ve all heard of that million-selling book that purports to be about how men hate women and how they are used and abused. The same book and film that then goes on to depict a graphic scene of the woman being reduced to a victim. (But hey, it’s okay, she gets a revenge scene later, so that excuses it.) Just as we see crime fiction that wants to talk about human trafficking (which is a valid issue to explore) but only in terms of impossibly attractive and well-lit women being forced to do kinky things on screen or page. If the choices we make in talking about exploitation are to exploit, are we examining the issue or using it? And it often seems to be the way. I watched the film Seven Psychopaths and there’s a scene when the writer played by Colin Farrell is criticised for having terrible female characters. It feels like the films writer is speaking directly of his own work. Farrell thinks for a moment then says what his script is saying is that it’s a terrible world for women. And it is. I’m sure I’m not the only one who has used that excuse at one point or another to excuse a blind spot in our work. But if you’re aware enough to know -as it seemed the films writer was- that your work is weak on female characters, maybe just set about fixing that rather than cracking a joke?

 “They’re making it easy not to try.”

-8-Bit Ninjas

Victims also seem to be relative.

The media tells us that the aggressors are the real victims and that the real victims are to blame. We don’t have to go far right now to see that at work. and this isn’t just me being on a soapbox about the treatment of women, this is about the treatment of all victims. McFet would probably write a very interesting bit here about the treatment of the working class in fiction and the media, and he’s right. We take away the human faces. It’s all too casual, all too easy.

There was a time when crime fiction didn’t deal with grief very well. It was the dirty secret that all of the actions we wrote about would produce grief in the real world, but that got in the way of getting to the next bit of the story. Then we started to talk about this a lot, and writers started exploring grief. There are great writers out there who’ve been doing that very well for a while now.

When I sat down to write Runaway Town I couldn’t help but think about the other kinds of grief. Not just of someone we’ve lost, but of parts of ourselves that we’re losing day by day, and of the parts of themselves that a victim never gets back after the event.  How does violence change us? What does it say about us when we choose who to inflict our violence upon? And how do we get back up again after having violence inflicted upon us?  I wanted to try-It’s for others to decide whether I succeeded- to put my story eye to eye with these people. To let them talk about what happened and to not be looking for excuses to do anything else.

“When this world was made, it was never meant to save everyone in kind. I don’t believe God much had me, had me much in mind.”

-Ben Nichols

 

Runaway Town Single

A little bit of bidness. My second crime novel Runaway Town is out now. You already knew that, right? Did you know that the song of the same title is also out now? For Old Gold I released a Spotify playlist that acted as a soundtrack to the book.

I’ll be doing the same for book 2, but I wanted to try something else. I even tried writing a song myself, but I’m so many years past being a song-writer that I don’t think that skill is in my toolbox anymore. I was talking to a friend of mine -who writes catchy songs under the name 8-Bit Ninjas- and the book’s title gelled with something he had in mind.

We discussed the themes of the book, and he channelled some ideas that had been kicking around his head. We share a hometown, though we’ve both moved away,  and the song he wrote perfectly caught the mood I’d had in mind while writing the book. He writes of being being used and abused, and of a town going wrong, and does it with a melancholy voice that could have belonged to the narrator of the book, but sets it to a driving chord progression and, and course, some 8-Bit catchiness.

And it’s less than a quid in UK money. It’s less than some kind of monetary term in US money.

BANDCAMP.

ITUNES.

SPOTIFY.

Runaway Setting

So, I have this whole book thing happening.

My second crime novel -RUNAWAY TOWN- Is out now.

I spent much of the first book -OLD GOLD- establishing my hometown (or home-region, as it’s more accurate to say. The Black Country is a collection of towns) as a setting that could carry a crime novel. One of the obstacles I had to overcome was that the region usually doesn’t get to be the setting for, well, anything. It’s ignored in the national media. It’s ignored in fiction. Hell, the football team I support is on the brink of financial meltdown and a second successive relegation -when teams from “cooler” parts of England have suffered like this it’s been national news and the subject of much debate. My team don’t merit a mention, it seems. (In this instance that is perhaps a blessing in disguise- why would I want the wound made any more raw?)

I’ve spoken on this at great length before. I only raise it now to make this point; that was the first challenge. That was one of the thing I needed to accomplish with the first book.

What next?

Deal with it. Earn it. Turn up the volume.

I was done telling the world to pay attention to the Midlands, and it was now my turn to pay attention. What was the region trying to tell me? What was the story that I’d fought so hard to tell?

I grew up in a very racially diverse area. Some parts of the UK have remained blind to immigration (they tend to be the areas that produce our government ministers.) Some places have had one or two eras of immigration that still define it (you don’t have to be in the west of Scotland for long to see that the Irish diaspora is still a key issue). The Midlands -because of it’s place in history as the centre of the industrial revolution and the 200 years that followed- has greeted every wave of immigration to hit the island.

To talk about this in one sense is to embrace multi-culturalism. I can talk of the vibrant parts of the city and of the many positives to be gained from the constant influx. It’s a region where you will find countless different ethnic backgrounds all united by being the same social class. But I’m a crime writer, so it’s more often my job to look past the surface and see what issues need to be dragged out into the light.

Racism. Racism is often the ugly flip side of the coin to multi-culturalism. Find me an area where successive generations of people have learned to live and work with new cultures, and you’ll also find the groups who feel threatened by the very same thing. Hopefully their numbers get fewer with each generation, but that also seems to raise their resolve, and they gather together in pockets of hate. When I moved away from the region I found that other (and frankly ‘whiter’) parts of the UK had more ‘casual racism.’ That is to say, I found that people would use terms and hold opinions that were not meant to be offensive; they were based on ignorance rather than hate. I’d grown up in an area where much of this casual level of racism had been worn away over generations. What that process reveals though is the people who mean it.  There were people back home who knew that their opinions and words were offensive, and they meant each of them.

In the Midlands you’ll find many activists and people willing to stand up and fight for multi-culturalism, but you’ll also find the groups on the opposite side, people who want to return their ‘homeland’ to a mythic state of ‘purity’ that never existed. And I decided I needed to admit that if my work was going to stay honest. I recall a conversation before I left the Midlands, when someone pointed to a freshly built mosque and said, “how would they like it if we went to their country and started building churches?” There were so many levels of fail in that one line that I didn’t know where to begin.

Fortunately, when you write novels, you don’t have to know how to begin, because you can spend 70-80 thousand words exploring the conversation. I wanted to do just that.

What becomes clear is that the battleground for this issue is the working class. People who’ve grown up with very little, and who were conned into increasing that from ‘very little’ to ‘some,’ by taking out unsustainable mortgages and credit. Whenever the economy takes a dump, these concerns become even greater, and in these times we all look for people to blame. This is the chance for people to stir up fear and hate and, boy, are they good at it.

Over the past few years I’ve seen people who I’ve known all my life, people who have never uttered a racist word or argument, start to fall prey to this fear. They build fences around their thoughts and look to see who is to blame for the loss of money and possessions that they never truly owned in the first place. And slowly the words they use change. Slowly they go from being one kind of person to another, whilst still being the same person in every other way.

As a writer I found that both fascinating and troubling.

In our rush to talk up the positives of modernity, and in our eagerness to fight for the great things to come from immigration and multi-culturalism, we perhaps become afraid to discuss and present the darker side. We want to point to the good and hope that the bad goes away.

I argue the opposite. I think what we need to do is open the conversation up rather than attempt to moderate it. That’s what we can do with crime fiction. We can drag the thorny, ugly and troubling issues out into the light and explore them. (While also telling a fun story and occasionally blowing shit up.)

I decided to make sure my writing was a mirror rather than a travel brochure, and that was one of the starting points for Runaway Town.

God Is In The Lack Of Detail

I seem to spend a lot of my time in discussion defending Medhi Hasan. I find him to be an interesting figure. He doesn’t always say things I agree with, but I like disagreeing with people. I find that we learn more in disagreement than we do nodding our heads in agreement.

He made comments earlier in the year that were far more controversial than the ones I’m reacting to now. I defended him then. He chose his words poorly on that occasion and waded into a loaded issue with no sensitivity for the offence it brings, but I could see an honesty in his opinion. I’ll always defend that. Even if I disagree strongly, I would rather have a conversation with someone who is stating an honest opinion than someone who is saying what he or she thinks people like to hear. I strive for an intellectual honesty in that regard.

‘Intellectual honesty’ is not a term I’m comfortable using, but it’s at the very core of todays post.

I’m not religious. Over a pint or a coffee in private company I enjoy stating my full opinions on religion, and bringing facts and history to the table to show how I formed that opinion. But I hesitate to attach myself to any ‘ism’ and so it follows that I also hesitate to call myself an atheist. There is no place in my life for a God and so I see no need to define myself by my relationship to one. This is already a step further than I usually take into publicly nailing myself to anything, but I felt it was important to state where I was coming from.

Last week Hasan posted this piece as a follow-up to his discussion with Richard Dawkins. I should also say that I don’t tend to pay much attention to what Professor Dawkins says on the subject. Even as someone who could be said to be “on his side” I find his approach patronising and feel he often overlooks that he is leading an organised non-belief that attacks organised belief.

Hasan’s piece, however, reads as someone who has thought of the wittiest and sharpest come-back to a question the day after it was posed, and just needs to tell the world. But also shows that nothing reduces an intellectual heavy-weight to a light-weight quicker than a discussion on religion.

He accuses atheists of “intellectual dishonesty,” when they claim that there is no evidence for the existence of God. Okay, fine. Perhaps there is a point to be made there. But if it is to be made, then he utterly fails to make it. To elaborate he states that atheists fail to make the distinction between proof and evidence. Again, okay, show me and I’ll agree. And again, he fails to do so. This is the kind of smoke-and-mirrors argument that makes for great stage magic. State something is the case, convince your audience of what you are saying, then slip in some utter humbug once you’ve distracted them. It would also be great for a snake-oil salesman, perhaps, but not a political blogger on a nationally respected website. He makes broad points before failing to prove or follow-up on any of them.

Under the heading, The Science Bit, he points out that we cannot scientifically prove that the Taj Mahal is beautiful, or that the Nazi’s were evil. Firstly neither of these have anything to do with the proof (or lack of) of a God. They are merely snake-oil level distractions. Secondly, I’m sure a scientist probably could come up with a solid argument for the former, based on the effect the Taj Mahal has on our eyes, on the electrical impulses that follow through to our brains, and to the release of certain chemicals and hormones into our body. It’s not a point I’d want to dwell on, but it is one that shows there is already a lack of thought in his words. Can science prove that Nazi’s are evil? Well, a follow-up question would be why would science be involved in questions of good and evil? ‘The science bit’ indeed.

From there he really exposes himself by quoting “philosopher”  William Lane Craig to state that;

Whatever begins to exist has a cause.
The universe began to exist.
Therefore, the universe has a cause.

 

To which, many scientists would nod, then shrug and ask what the point of this little three-step exercise is. The whole point of science it to accept that there are things we don’t know, and things we will never know, before setting about trying to close that gap with evidence (and proof.) The scientist looks at that three-step thought process and (aside from picking semantic holes in the “whatever begins to exist,” issue) says that step four is currently a big black hole in our knowledge and what can we do to fill that in. 

Could step four turn out to be “God”? Sure. It’s possible. But we can’t claim to know that answer at this point. All we know is that we don’t know. But the argument of William Lane Craig, and now of Medhi Hasan, is that 1,2 and 3 suggest that 4 is God. Furthermore Hasan goes on to state that this is;

..a valid deductive argument, a genuine appeal to reason and logic.

This is where I start to worry. Hasan accused a great many people of intellectual dishonesty before then going on to claim that a leap of faith is a “genuine appeal to reason and logic.” My point here is not to ridicule anyone who shares that leap of faith. If you look into the vast emptiness of our knowledge and fill it with a god, or the God, or gods, then that is your personal choice and we are all grown up enough to respect that. But I take a major issue with people who pretend that these leaps of faith have anything to do with reason or logic.

Why do I take issue? Because it’s that kind of thinking -or fraud- that leads to children being taught things as “facts” for which there are no basis, that lead to wars, to fights and to bigotry. It also raises the question of whether someone can be trusted on other issues of fact-based logical discussion when they have such poor grasp of logic.

All that the three steps prove is that we don’t yet know what the fourth is. And for Hasan to state that this is proof of anything else, or that it is intellectually dishonest to point out his thought process involves a leap of faith is…well….dishonest. Or it’s based on honesty, but one that simply doesn’t understand logic or reason. I don’t know which of those options I find more troubling.

If you’re reading this and you are a person of faith, I’m not belittling you. Perhaps someday over a drink we will debate the issue, and perhaps you will provide an argument that changes my mind. I would welcome the chance for that debate. But I would hope that you, theoretical believer, are also embarrassed by the form of snake-oil argument that I’m railing against.

And as a final thought, let us indulge this idiocy and pretend that it is logic. If steps 1, 2 and 3 lead to a logical theory that the fourth step is God, do we not then apply the same three-step process to God and ask, what caused God? And if the attempt to answer that is ‘God never began to exist,’ then I would think it is fair -since they want to engage us on logical and reasonable grounds- to ask them what the proof (and evidence) for that claim is. Then probably be accused of being dishonest by a liar or a fool.

 

Battles Fought And Lost.

This is not the piece I hoped to write. I hoped to write of a new perspective, of a climb-down on my previous views. First you may be served by reading them, so that I don’t go back over old ground. The quick version; me and patriotism have issues. Also Chris T-T got in before me here with a piece that renders much of mine redundant. But I have snark and I’m not afraid to use it.

I missed most of the Olympic opening ceremony. It was competing against my chance to see Batman battle Bane on an Imax screen. I knew what I was going to get from the opening ceremony -crass jingosim and nothing reflective of my Britain- and I knew what I was going to get from Batman -three hours of greatness. I caught the first 30 minutes of the ceremony and it somewhat reinforced what I’d expected. It was clumsy and crass and full of some dodgy symbolism in the rush to get from a depiction of middle earth to the modern day via the scouring of the shire. Then James Bond jumped out of a helicopter with a monarch that I don’t support, but the image carried with it the promise of something I might want to see. We went to watch Batman and realised three hours later that we had made the wrong choice.

We heard that after Bond the ceremony began to do some interesting and remarkable things. There was a love letter to an NHS that is being destroyed, there were moving tributes to victims of tragedy, and the overall message that this was a ceremony aimed at all of us. There was the feeling -one I’ve cobbled together from hearing others talk of it- that perhaps this was a ceremony made specifically for those like me; those disenfranchised with nationalism or patriotism and removed from any need to wave flags.

I am a skeptic rather than a cynic, and deep down all skeptics want to have some form of faith restored. Even with a sneer in place and a wall of snark, I still began to get the feeling as the games progressed that perhaps there was something here. In seeing not just the success of Jessica Ennis and Mo Farrah on that great evening, but also the reactions of the public, I started to feel tempted to join in. For the first time in my adult life I felt this was something I could get behind. That the Britain of Ennis and Farah was a Britain that I could argue for, a progressive, exciting and hopeful place. Moreover in seeing the bigots and the reactionista becoming increasingly isolated and mocked, I saw progress. And even in London, in a city that I’m so often quick to dismiss, I started to see an open and inclusive capital that might be worth defending over the next few years as political lines are drawn by those who want to redraw the map of the UK. Even in my current frozen home of Glasgow, I saw a thawing. People who shared my sneer -if not my motivation- at the outset of the Olympics were prepared to jump for joy at the victories ‘we’ achieved.

I set out to watch the closing ceremony to make up for missing so much of the opening, to join in on the new experience and see if I could follow through on the troubling little feeling of hope that had been building. Could this be the perfect closing? Could this be the message that said, this is who we are in the 21st century, all of us, deal with it?

Fortunately, if the opening ceremony and the event had been a fist-pump for a modern inclusive Britain, the closing ceremony was a hasty and repulsive step backwards.

Come world and look at us, the land where rich white people can perform their new singles to a captive audience, where women are only there to wear glittery shite and where any sense of multicultural progress has to be a tick-box excercise. Whereas everyone worked in the opening ceremony in celebration of something bigger, they only worked here in celebration of themselves. The athletes? They were just an inconvenience in the middle who took too long to hit their mark in an event that was supposed to be all about them.  How dare they take so long in the limelight.

Timothy Spall gave a speech as Winston Churchill and that was the red rag to my bullshit metre. Not only that, but they had an actor portray Winston Churchill reciting Shakespeare. Why not have an actor portray Shakespeare quoting Shakespeare. You know, that working class writer from the provinces, that image of Britain that deserves to be far more long-lasting than a millionaire reactionary bigot, who hated the working class almost as much as he hated being out of the limelight?

They followed that up with Madness. I’m from the Midlands, and we love us some 2tone and Ska. And I’m also (mostly) white and of an age when I’m not afraid to dance to a few Madness tunes. But we can’t escape that they are the clean-cut, white and shite pop version of what was a very open and inclusive movement of socially driven music. The Selecter and The Specials sang of poverty and desperation, Madness sang of buying condoms and living in a house. Fun, safe, dull. Early on the feeling set in that never left; this was the  Top Gear version of an Olympic ceremony.

I’m also not afraid to say that George Michael is a pop artist who is capable of doing interesting and subverting things. When he’s in the right mood, and has a target to aim at, he can produce as much venom as any punk-rocker. But that wasn’t in the script, so we got a half-baked rehash of an old hit and then a confusing and plodding new single, all while he did his best Bono impression. An unfunny comedian mimed to The Beatles while a middle aged white dude mimed djing one of his own songs. Jessie J sang about money, and the Spice Girls sang about, well, whatever they sing about. All of the interesting acts who may have had something of value to contribute were kept to video montages or audio loops. And then Imagine. Fucking  Imagine. The most condescending and patronising song in history, placed firmly at the centre of the event. One of the few songs that has struggled manfully to take imagine’s title is Park Life. But never fear, we got to hear a brief snippet of that, too.

Nothing of interest happened until the Brazilians turned up. I may well have a Brazilian counterpart right now complaining that their contribution was a cliched tick-box exercise in itself, and he may have a point, but in contrast to the rest of the show it felt vibrant and celebratory.  This was then followed by some more ageing white-dudes singing about ruling the world, before some further aged-white dudes turned up to, uh, “Jam in the name of the Lord.” Whilst Roger Daltrey’s 68-year old vocal rasp about people trying to put his generation down would, perhaps, suggest a route to solving the impending pension crisis, it felt like the final apologetic whimper to an event that had nothing progressive to say.

The best achievement of the night was forcing Liam Gallagher to squirm in self hatred as he sung the most famous song written by his brother, from that band that neither of them are in. Thankfully Supergrass and Pulp would have too much self-respect for such things.

This is our statement on Britain in 2012, then. Women know their place, ethnic groups belong to tokenism, and white men can make all the good noise. The athletes -the figures who we all agreed had created such a liberating experience- were an inconvenience to be penned in, and Boris Johnson was there to dance. All that was missing was the fucking Stig turning up to machine gun some hippies while Jeremy Clarkson talked about bombshells and we all agreed how horrible it would be to be anything other than British.

We are back where we were a month ago, and it stinks.

 

The Dark Knight Rises – A Review

Now that a safe amount of time has passed since the release of The Dark Knight Rises, I thought I’d offer up my thoughts on it. Still, if you’re someone who has yet to see it and doesn’t like the idea of spoilers, give this post a miss, eh?

How to solve a problem like The Dark Knight?

That’s a question that must have given Christopher Nolan more than a few sleepless nights. The ‘problem’ here being that the 2008 film -even with it’s rough edges and flaws the reveal themselves over repeat viewings- set a superhuman standard for comic book films. How to follow it? Should it be followed? How to cope with the tragic loss of that film’s main asset?

None of these questioned troubled me all that much though. Despite Nolan’s insistence on only planning one film at a time, and The Dark Knight’s looming shadow, it always felt to me like the middle act of a story. And I had utmost faith that the man at the helm would finish out that trilogy by hitting all the right notes.

Did he succeed?

No. Not for me, anyway, though you’ll find numerous glowing reviews elsewhere. And also, it should be said, not for lack of trying. None of the problems with The Dark Knight Rises are down to a lack of ambition or effort. It’s a film that reaches for the stars, and it should be applauded for that, just as it also deserves fair criticism for stumbling in the attempt.

But first, let’s talk about some positives. The film looks amazing. I can think of few films that have been so masterfully shot, with such total control over the screen. There are also passages in the film that are just about the most immersive experience Nolan has ever crafted, which is no mean feat for a director often noted for creating cold and clinical worlds. Two of the actors -Gary Oldman and Joseph Gordon-Levitt- put in perfectly human performances that carry the film through many of it’s roughest patches. A third performance of note is put in by Anne Hathaway. Her Selina Kyle may never be as convincingly human and real as the other two, but Hathaway manages to sell us completely on the idea of the words most famous comic-book cat burglar. It’s a performance from a slightly different film to Oldman and Gordon-Levitt, but it’s a very strong one nonetheless.

Tom Hardy’s Bane is interesting. I wouldn’t say he ever convinced me that he was a character who was actually in the film with everyone else, but he did interesting things that managed to stay on just the right side of hamming it up. And he had probably the hardest challenge of everyone in the film; how do you follow Heath Ledger’s Joker? Answer, as Hardy showed, is that you don’t. Don’t even try to. Just use the time you’re given on screen to try new things and try to be interesting. He succeeded on that level. I could never quite get past the feeling that his was the voice of a very angry man having his balls tickled.

I don’t want to criticise Christian Bale’s performance, because he did superb work with what he was given, but so many of the films flaws revolve around things relating to his character that he can’t help but come off looking weaker than some of his supporting cast. And Michael Caine? Well, at least this film reminded us that he can cry. A lot.

And this is where the film started to trip up over itself.

The story is a combination of some of the most un-filmable Batman stories of the past thirty years. It starts off with a large chunk of Knightfall before transitioning into a truncated version of No Mans Land by way of including a few elements of Contagion, Legacy and Cataclysm. It’s bookended by beats lifted straight out of The Dark Knight Returns. And it seems to me that this is the basis of the problem. The film is too self conscious about all of this- it’s too busy priding itself on how ambitious it is, to stop and work on a few basic moments of storytelling.

Character arcs whimper and die, three (or four, or five) act structure goes out of the window, and themes begin to eat their own tails. Something that has become increasingly apparent in Nolan’s films as his resources have increased has been the diminishing returns of subtext. One of the few (I still insist) flaws in The Dark Knight is that too much wasn‘t left unsaid. Take a moment to think how much shorter and more economical that film could have been if all the unnecessary monologues were taken out. We would still have gotten the point, because that’s what our brains do when we’re watching a film. This problem has reached breaking point with The Dark Knight Rises. The film has no subtext, because everything is on screen, given to us in dialogue, by actors who looked like they were cringing as they delivered the lines. There are times when Checkov’s gun is not so much loaded as built right in front of us. But this apparent knowledge of how to structure and foreshadow is undercut by moments that go the other way, when really obvious and important elements of act one are forgotten about by act three.

The strangest thing I can say about this Batman movie is that there was probably a great film in here that didn’t have Batman in it. The version of the film we got, though, with Batman in it, falls short.

My hope is that the film marks a crossroad in Christopher Nolan’s film making. Thus far he has given us several different versions of the same basic story. He’s returned to Captain Ahab over and over, each time with a different lick of paint and a different level on of insight. In my opinion his career so far reached it’s peak with The Prestige, a wonderful puzzle box of a film, and he followed it with the exceptional The Dark Knight. But he’s taken the driven, obsessive, ambitious protagonist as far as he can. The ending of The Dark Knight Rises saw one character step out from under that shadow, while another man, more mature and well-adjusted, stepped into the role. It was a hopeful ending it it’s way, and I hope this was the directors farewell to that era of his life. He’s a filmmaker of rare ambition, and seemingly with the even rarer ability to sometimes realise those ambitions, and I would love to see him move onto a new story.

As for Batman, the big screen will get another one in a few years. There will be another actor and director to take up the mantle and no doubt it will be with a studio mandate to veer a little closer to the super-heroics of The Avengers, which was a much more cohesive film. In fact, a certain director by the name of Joss Whedon pitched his own Batman film to Warner Bros just before they green lit Nolan’s vision for Batman Begins, so I wouldn’t be surprised to see fate crack another fun little joke. But my time with Batman ends here, I had decided that the completion on Nolan’s trilogy would be a good spot to mark my closure with the character, so whatever big screen fun comes from Gotham next will be for another generation of super hero fans.

If films were judged by ambition alone, The Dark Knight Rises would be one of the best we’ve ever seen. And we should salute that. There are too many filmmakers in mainstream cinema today who have craft without ambition. But ambition and ideas go hand in hand with failure more often than success. It’s not how you fly the plane that counts, it’s how you land it, and unfortunately Nolan doesn’t quite manage to land The Dark Knight Rises.

Old Gold

Old Gold is my first novel, and the first in a trilogy of Eoin Miller crime stories. It’s available on both sides of the big wet Atlantic thing, in both kindle and paperback original. You can get copies here;

Here’s the bit where I try and sell it to you;

Half-Romani gangland detective Eoin Miller finds people for a living. If you’ve stolen from a mob boss, or held up a dealer, Miller is the man who’ll come and knock on your door. He’ll find you for money, then walk away before the violence starts. He doesn’t do caring, and he barely does living. Miller has done all he can  to lose himself in a downward spiral that has cost him his job, his respect, his wife, and anything else that ever mattered. 

But He’s forced out of this comfort zone when Mary, a woman he barely knows, is killed in his house. Fearing the cops will only see a gypsy with a dead body, he runs. But the only thing he hates more than himself is a mystery, and he is driven to discover the truth  behind Mary’s murder,  even if it means putting his own life on the line. Before long, Eoin’s tangled up in a ferocious turf war that has him playing his former allies and employers—crime lords, drug dealers, cops, and politicians—against each other.

Set in the English Midlands, Old Gold is a novel that asks us questions about grief, love and the war on youth. Above all else, Old Gold is asking us how broken something has to be before it can no longer be put back together.

And here’s the bit where I give you some of the things other people have said;

“This is a helluva good book and a helluva debut. I can’t wait for the next one!”  - My Bookish Ways.

“If you’re a fan of Lawrence Block or George Pelecanos you need to buy Old Gold right now.” -Crime Fiction Lover

“[Old Gold] shines an unflinching light on Britain’s very real social problems without ever patronising or parodying it’s characters.” – Claire E, Five Star Amazon review.

“[A] novel with something to say – there are interesting and thoughtful observations on British society as it stands in 2012.” – Aidan Skinner, Five Star Amazon Review

Here’s the bit where I sell you something else as well;

To give people a taster of Old Gold I put together an ebook prequel. It’s called Faithless Street and is available for less than a cup of coffee on Kindle. It contains four short stories that each tie into Old Gold.

 

Here’s The bit where I give you something for free;

One of the stories in Faithless Street is called The Lost Profits and you can listen to an audio version, with my very own dulcet tones, here;

The Lost Profits

 

Share The Free

My novel OLD GOLD comes out in under a month. You already know this, because I’ve been mentioning it in every other post since December.

The story takes place in the region where I grew up, in the Black Country of England. It’s a region that took it’s name from coal mining and industry, so you can imagine how kind the last thirty years have been to the people there.

I’m aware that buying a book by a first-time author can be a bit of a thing. The reader is having to place trust in that writer in a way that they don’t have to for an established author, and at hard times like these that’s a choice to gamble with your hard-earned money.

I decided to give people a primer. I’ve had work published online and in print, short stories here and there, and I’ve been blogging and writing for websites for a few years now, but I wanted to give people something specific to OLD GOLD.

 

 FAITHLESS STREET is a prequel of sorts. It contains four short stories that set the scene for the novel. Each one features a character (or characters) who show up in OLD GOLD. It adds back-story to these people, and fleshes out the world that you’ll be walking in if you buy the book. The novel is narrated in first person by Eoin Miller, a particularly mixed up individual, but he only shows up in one of the prequel stories, so it’s a chance to get into other peoples heads. Do we trust Miller as a narrator? Well, that’s up to you.

In THE DARK KNIGHT, Heath Ledger’s Mr J says, “If you’re good at something, never do it for free.” But that begs the question, how can people judge if you’re good at something? People on my mailing list have already had a week to take a look at an ARC version of the collection for free, and now I’m opening it up to you guys. You’ll see it’s priced at 0.99 at the moment, but from tomorrow until tuesday it will be 0.00 (unless I’ve set it wrong….) so that everyone out there can share the free.

Why start out straight away with free? Why not try and make some money first? Well again, I want to get this out to people. And, let’s be honest, I want people to buy the novel. I figure giving you all a chance to try out my writing for free for a few days now is better than asking you all to buy a whole book just on faith. Try it out, and if you like it, tell other people while it’s still free. Let’s share the free with as many people as possible.

And while we’re talking about that magic price point, Dave White’s brilliant Witness To Death is free right now. Action? Spies? Torture? Go click, do it now.

And one final thing. I’ve prepared a Spotify playlist. I have to stress that I don’t have permission from any of the musicians (although Franz Nicolay kindly allowed me to use his words as the epigraph to the book) so I can’t claim this is in any way the official soundtrack album. But it’s music that reflects the moods and flavours of the book. Most of it, you could imagine, is the kind of moody guitar music that Eoin Miller would pick, but thrown in there are selections that reflect each of the main characters and the region of the Black Country.

If you don’t already, follow me on twitter (@JayStringer) because that’s where I’ll be announcing when it’s gone free tomorrow and when the promotion ends.

If you don’t have a kindle but still want in on the free stuff, tweet me before Tuesday and we’ll see what we can sort out. 

Learn How To Fail

Not for the first time, my day has been changed by reading something that the mighty Chuck Wendig has written. His words will tip your head over onto your ass. It’s also a scary thing; I have his novel Blackbirds next to my bed, but it has to remain unread until I’ve finished the first draft of my own novel, because I know his prose style and decisions would creep into my own work.

But on this particular day, it’s a little different. He’s posted on the subject of a meme that’s doing the rounds on the facebook, and (whilst I’m in full agreement with him on the issue) It was inspiring a long reply from me. But hey, why post a reply on Terrible Minds when I had a post to write? Cheers, Chuck!

And sure, some of my thoughts will overlap with things he’s already said. But when he says them he has a beard, and when I say them I have an English accent. When he says them, he still has a beard, but I have the full authority of William Shakespeare and Alan Rickman. To be or not to be, thrown off the Nakatomi building. I might be rambling, have you noticed? Anyway. Here’s the meme that Chuck points to-

 

 

I’m not here to weigh in on the whole “indie author” thing -nor to try and grapple with what that phrase actually means- because I think it’s a silly conversation. And that’s not a dig at Wendig, he agrees on that too, I believe. And I’m not here to point out that the meme disproves it’s own position. No, I’m here to weigh in on rejection. Did I miss a memo? When did this become a bad thing?

One of my worries with the ease of publication in the modern age is that we’re beginning to think that rejection is a step to be avoided. An inconvenience that we can all sidestep at the touch of a button. On this very subject Paul Cornell once wrote; “a boxer doesn’t learn to fight by avoiding getting punched in the face.” Show me a comedian who has never faced rejection and I’ll show you one who has never told a joke. We learn to succeed by failing. We learn to walk by falling over often enough that we learn to miss the ground.

Looking at that list, the easiest thing in the world is to say, “pfffft, 22 people didn’t know what the hell they were talking about when James Joyce showed them his work.” But the honest professional writer looks at that list and thinks, “I wonder what state Dubliners was in for those first 22 submissions.”

Here’s the (open) dirty secret in writing; You don’t sit down and write a good book. You sit down and fail at writing a good book. You show your work to people, you take criticism, and then you fail better. The first person to whom I showed a completed first draft of Old Gold told me exactly what was wrong with it. (I won’t name names, but he was an agent and novelist, and has recently added publisher to that list, and also is Scottish. And may or may not be named Allan.) After seeing a sample of the book he lead off with a compliment, “the writing is, on the whole, excellent.” That got my ego up and told me what I already knew- I had written the best book of all time. But after luring me in with the praise he gave me a list of all the ways the book failed. (The word “failed,” wasn’t used, but only because he was being polite.) After another edit, and after many of those problems were fixed, he gave me another list. This one contained one of the most important pieces of criticism I’ve ever received, “if you want people to read it, you need to learn formatting.” He the had to explain to me some very basic conventions of formatting a book. Until that moment I hadn’t realised I was using my learning difficulty as an excuse- my brain doesn’t do certain things and therefore I had decided I should get a free pass on them. Nuh uh.

The first short story I placed online at a crime fiction webzine was one that had already been rejected twice. Not because the first two people were idiots, but because the story wasn’t ready. On the third attempt, and with some additional editing input from Elaine Ash at BTAP, the story got an award nomination and saw me wind up in a print anthology beside Rankin, Guthrie and Banks. Professor Weddle rejected a story of mine for Needle, and he was right- it wasn’t a very good short story. It’s looking like it may be a good opening to my current novel instead.

Hearing, “no,” in any of it’s forms is not pleasant. It’s not a happy experience. But it’s also vital. The meme above seeks to rob us all of this. It states that, “the readers opinion is all that matters,” and suggests that each of the numbers in the list represents a failure of taste or decency. I look at each of those numbers in the list and see opinions that may well have helped the author, or strengthened to book. Even if it was an opinion that wasn’t taken on board (because we each develop a sense of when to listen and when to hold firm) it’s still a test, a moment that has helped the story stand on it’s own to feet either through change or resilience*.

It would be lovely to sidestep all of this. It would be nice to sit and write thousands of words then simply walk away from them and call it finished. It would be lovely, but it wouldn’t be writing. The above meme is really advocating not trying.

I give out writing advice as rarely as I can get away with, but here’s one that I think needs to be said; If you want to be a writer, you need rejection. You need to fail. Only then can you fail better.

 

*I’m pretty sure the list is wrong. As far as I know it’s a total misrepresentation of the publication of The Diary Of Anne Frank. Though it would be odd to think -even after everything I’ve just said- of 16 editors saying that the book lacked drama and tension.

 

Lord, I’m Discouraged

I’m no fan of international football, so while the rest of the world goes into overdrive at the Euroland Challenge Cup, I continue my rehabilitation as a fan of the club game. Last time I wrote about a teddy bear that crossed one of England’s most heated club divides. My faith is returning, but it’s coming in baby steps; in remembering things I loved about the game in the first place.

Right now this very second the North Bank is being rebuilt at Molineux. Actually, right now this very second a workman is probably sat looking at the North Bank while eating a balti pie, but work with me here. When I first attended the Mol in the 80′s, the Northbank was an abandoned reminder of former glories, much like the club itself. It was soon condemned after a health and safety inspection and eventually gave way to the Stan Cullis Stand. And that’s brings me finally to my point.

A statue of Stan Cullis stood outside that stand up until the rebuilding process started last summer, and it feels somehow right that the club fell apart while the great man was no longer standing watch. The statue marked something of a pilgrimage point for me for many years- each time I brought someone new to the ground they would be taken to see it. It was inscribed with one of the finest football quotes;

You only get one life, and I gave mine to Wolves.

On the wall behind the statue was a plaque that told of some of his achievements, including the part he played in the creation of the European Cup. He was one of great -and often overlooked- visionaries of the English game. But I could care less about all of that. In truth, I hold the man in much higher regard than the legend. I took people to visit him not because of any of the awards, medals or innovations, but because I was -and am- proud to have his name in the clubs history.

I’ll give you the two things I tend to trot out at parties, and let you decide for yourself.

In May 1938, in an event that has become infamous, the England national team  played a friendly against Germany in Berlin. There are a number of striking things about the game; the 110,000 attendance, the fact that it was the last international friendly before the second world war, and also that it was the last time a unified German team would take to the field until the 1990′s. But the single element of the game that has sparked the most discussion has been that the England team performed the Nazi salute. This event has been written and rewritten to suit several agendas in the years that have followed, with the act being described as everything from respect to propaganda. Whatever our views, and whatever the views of the players at the time, there is no doubting it was a political act; the team were ordered to do it by the foreign office against a backdrop of a British political class that had mixed feelings about how to respond to the rise of Hitler. The act is often held against the players, and is regularly cited as a stain on the national team’s history. I don’t really see the need to jump into that thorny issue with both feet, other than to say this- one player refused to do it. One player was dropped from the team as a result. Stan Cullis.

The second reason is a sporting one. Cullis, described by Puskas as the best centre-half of his time, lost the best years of his career to the war. He had come close to the championship with Wolves on a number of occasions without winning it, and after the end of the conflict he decided he had enough in his legs for one last year. One last try. On the final game of the season, in front of a packed Molineux crowd, Wolves only needed a draw to take the title ahead of visitors Liverpool. In his final game Cullis could captain his side to the trophy that had eluded him so many times. Liverpool won the game 1-2, and all of the post-match talk was of one moment; with the scores level at 1-1 and the title in Wolves hands, Liverpool’s Alf Stubbins ran past Cullis. The retiring defenders legs were gone and he had no honest way of stopping the younger player, who went on to score the deciding goal. But when asked, by just about everybody, why he hadn’t done “the professional thing” and fouled the player, Cullis said he would rather retire as an honest player without the medal, than end his career as a cheat.

That same drive no doubt fuelled his rise to become the club’s greatest ever manager, and the silver wear that had stayed out of his grasp as a player filled his trophy cabinet as a manager. But that’s not important. The measure of the man isn’t what he went on to achieve on the touchline as “the iron manager,” it’s what he achieved in that one final moment as a player. Life comes down to these things; we tell ourselves little lies each time to excuse doing things we know we shouldn’t. We tell each other big lies to excuse players doing these things for our clubs, and we covet trophies regardless of whether the competition has been honest.

A wise line in moral philosophy tells us to live each moment as if we’re going to have to relive it forever. It seems to me that even in doing that, we don’t get to choose which of those moments are the ones that will be remembered. History makes that choice for us. But I’m proud that history chose that moment for my club, for that man, and that his statue will soon be standing watch over Molineux again.