Bruce Beckham's Blog, page 4

Lost in translation? It’s a fair cop.

I just read in The Daily Telegraph about JK Rowling and the so-called ‘sensitivity police’. It seems my Edinburgh neighbour ruffled a few feathers when writing about Native Americans in her ‘History of Magic in North America’.

The gist of the article was that writers would be well advised to employ a ‘sensitivity reader’ – a new industry springing up to help authors avoid causing offence on the grounds of race, sex or religion.

Recently a reader asked me if I would refrain from taking the Lord’s name in vain – ie. using versions of it in exclamations. (She also commended me on only doing it once in each of my books that she had read.) I must admit – these had slipped through the net, for it was my intention not to do so – but the request did make me reassess the principle.

Of course, it is possible to argue that when the author is representing a fictional character, the writer should be true to that character – indeed without certain language they cannot properly be portrayed. But when I revisited the offending sentences, I found it easy enough to substitute ‘crikey’ or ‘gosh’ (which I think are acceptable).

Moreover, I’ve long known that readers of the Inspector Skelgill series don’t appreciate profanities. So there aren’t any. Skelgill is a tough cookie from a poor background – but he has found a way around his natural inclination.

The situation becomes slightly more complex when a word is authentic in the context of the writing, but may still offend the reader. In Britain (I’m not sure about North America) the word ‘twit’ spelled with an ‘a’ is considered impolite. But in Cumbria, from where Skelgill hails, it simply means ‘to hit’.

Then there is the old classic. As a TV anchor enthused at the close of one of the legendary Mrs Craddock’s cooking demonstrations, “May all your doughnuts turn out like Fanny’s” – which has variously uncomfortable interpretations depending upon which side of the pond the audience resides.

RESOLUTION: LISTEN

More extraordinary in 2016 than Brexit and Trump was that Eskimos have now heard of Leicester City FC. At the start of the season the odds of this unfashionable provincial team winning the English Premier League were 5000/1 against. It was a feat considered less probable than Elvis being found alive, the Loch Ness Monster finally revealing itself, or Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth achieving the Christmas Number One.

As a lifelong Foxes fan this minor miracle will do wonders for my 2017 Reading Challenge. I can now retire as a football supporter and devote more time to books. I estimate 38 episodes of Match Of The Day is the equivalent of at least 6 novels.

Sadly, that still only puts me on a target of 30 for the year – when the average Goodreads pledge is 49 – and I note with awe that many of my friends manage three figures.

Clearly I need to identify other aspects of daily life from which to step down. I reckon between them, washing the dishes, giving lifts to town, and walking in the woods is worth a good 30 books a year. The question is whom can I least afford to upset. The wife? The kids? The dog?

Hmm... I think I’ve just sold myself a subscription to Audible.

GIRLED OUT - REALLY?

I came across this quote last week on a publishing industry website:

“Yes, we are always seeking exciting new novels... but we are rather GIRLED OUT.”

Certainly the ‘Girl’ bandwagon seems to have ram-raided the zeitgeist and hijacked our bookstores and cinemas.

The Girl On The Train is hitting box office heights right now; in 2015 it was The Danish Girl; the year before, Gone Girl.

And it feels like only yesterday that The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo tore the place up, hot on the heels of the The Other Boleyn Girl... and, of course, The Girl With The Pearl Earring.

Now these are 21st Century Girls – so you would be excused for believing that the entertainment world has only latterly succumbed to such feminine charms.

But, then I thought – hold on – what about Gregory’s Girl? (My second favourite film of all time.) It might not be a book – but it’s got ‘Girl’ in the title. And that was way back in 1981.

In any event, there was ‘The Queen of Crime.’ Agatha Christie wrote Third Girl in 1966.

Earlier still – what about Edna O’Brien’s Girl With Green Eyes? First published in 1962. (And she wrote The Country Girls in 1960 – the same year that Kingsley Amis penned Take A Girl Like You.)

But it doesn’t stop there.

In fact, to cut a long story short, the ‘Girl Tradition’ dates back almost a century; it was pioneered by some of our greatest classical authors. To name but two: PG Wodehouse (The Girl on the Boat –1922) and DH Lawrence (The Lost Girl –1920).

Search ‘Girl’ on Amazon.com and you get 400,000 hits. (There’s even 731 ‘Girl’ titles in Goodreads’ listopia.)

So where does this leave us? Girled Out? That might be a good title for a new novel – but I don’t believe it’s yet a permanent state of affairs.

A Borrower Be

I just worked out how to borrow 'free' books with my Prime membership.

Here’s what to do if you want to give it a try.

Switch on your Kindle and make sure you have a WiFi connection.

Tap the top of the screen so that the menu bar comes up.

In the top right-hand corner is a symbol with 3 horizontal bars. Tap this. A drop-down menu appears.

On the drop-down menu, tap “Shop in Kindle Store”.

Wait a few seconds until it takes you to Amazon.

Again, tap the icon made of 3 horizontal bars in the top-right corner.

Another drop-down menu appears.

Tap “Lending Library” (it’s near the foot of the list).

Now you can browse through the genres that appear on the left-hand side, or you can search for a specific author or character.

Let’s just say you were interested in Inspector Skelgill.

Tap the search box at the top of the page. This activates the keyboard. Type “Inspector Skelgill” and press the arrow that appears to the right of the name.

Now you’ll see all of the Inspector Skelgill novels. If your desired book has a “Prime” logo with a checkmark next to it (and they all do) – Bingo! You can borrow it for free.

Tap on the book to go to its page – there you’ll see a button that says “Borrow For Free”. One final tap and it’s yours!

Read a book a month and you could easily recoup a third of your $99 Prime annual membership fee.

The back-story - strictly for viewers?

I’m fairly sure that if I were writing a TV detective series the back-story would be de rigueur. Not only must the cop catch all the crooks, but he or she must cop off, too (whether it be with their partner in solving crime, the victim they have risked life and limb to save, or even the master criminal with whom they have traded blows). And it will probably end in tears.

But for books – I’m not so sure.

There are various pitfalls of the back-story, not least the risk that it becomes the front-story. Since whodunits don’t really work on TV, there has to be some easy underlying drama to sustain the viewer’s interest. Lazing on the sofa, it soon becomes all-consuming.

Nonetheless, I constantly anguish over how much back-story there should be in my books. Then I lean for support and reassurance on the great Agatha Christie. For her, ‘The Mystery’ was pre-eminent, all else – despite the immense fame of her detectives – was subsidiary.

Frankly I’m quite entertained by how little I know about Hercule Poirot. One can go through an entire novel and learn no more than he has a massive ego, smokes tiny cigarettes and harbours a penchant for syrop de cassis.

And even Ms Christie perhaps regretted giving him what little back-story she did.

Of course, she can’t have known when she wrote the first ‘Poirot’ in 1920 that she would call upon his services for the next 55 years – but it was a lack of foresight which had those poor little grey cells toiling well into their nineties!

Journey or Destination?

They say life’s a journey, not a destination – but what about a novel?

Lately I have been alternating between Patricia Highsmith and Agatha Christie. I find them equally enjoyable, yet they could hardly be further apart on this roving scale.

To read a Highsmith is to ride a stagecoach through bandit country, hot and dusty, bumpy and uncomfortable, the sights compelling if obscure, nose pressed to the glass, in constant fear of attack. There is no destination, only eventual escape from such badlands.

In contrast a Christie is all about destination: simply, whodunit? Of course, there is a journey of sorts, but it is an undemanding affair, soothing upon the nerves, frothy and frivolous, light entertainment from Poirot and the Edwardian mores of the English upper-middle classes.

It is the classic dichotomy: Suspense and Mystery, those two great nations of popular fiction, Highsmith and Christie their respective queens.

The contrast got me thinking. I like them both – so what if they were to combine? Murder On The Orient Express meets Those Who Walk Away (set in Venice, as it happens): a journey to remember, a destination to take the breath away. The trip of a lifetime!

Perhaps this book exists. Any recommendations much appreciated!

Are e-books too expensive?

In bed a few nights ago I found myself thrown into a panic.

I opened my Kindle to discover I’d finished my last book.

There ensued what in marketing jargon is called a "distress" purchase.

Next morning I woke to an email from Amazon informing me I’d spent £5.99 (roughly $8.50).

Later I discovered the paperback on sale for as little as £1.99 ($2.82), including delivery.

Now, I’ve been hearing that sales of e-books have peaked – and when I noticed ‘15th Affair’ by James Patterson for $14.39 (e-book) and $13.43 (paperback) – I began to think, “No wonder!”

The first ‘Jack Reacher’ I found for $7.14 (e-book) and $7.19 (paperback).

And the opening ‘Harry Potter’ on the UK site for £5.99 (e-book) versus £3.49 (paperback).

Sure, without Prime membership there could be some freight costs to add for the hard copies – but you probably get the gist.

Personally, I think digital reading has a long way to grow – but it looks to me that, as yet, the big publishers have not wholeheartedly embraced the free market.

Cover to Cover

Did you know when you borrow a book from Amazon the author gets paid by the page? While your Kindle is online, Amazon monitors your reading progress. The more pages read, the more the royalties.

It didn’t take long for some sneaky publishers to invent ways to trick Amazon. For instance, putting the Contents at the end of the book, with a hyperlink at the beginning. Apparently Amazon’s supercomputer can’t tell the difference between the speed of normal reading and the speed of light!

Recently Amazon began suspending books partaking of such shifty practices. And all hard-working authors would say, ‘Here, here’ to that. But I think it highlights a more important matter – and that is delivering the promise to the reader.

According to a formula devised by Wisconsin mathematics professor Jordan Ellenberg, only 1.9% of people finished Hard Choices by Hilary Clinton. As for Stephen Hawking’s A Brief History of Time, the figure was 6.6%. And just a quarter of readers completed Fifty Shades of Grey – although perhaps one can draw other conclusions for why that might be the case!

Okay, we’ve all been defeated by certain books (in my case it’s Middlemarch, twice – hard to believe, I know) – but surely the one true measure of an author’s achievement is that their works are read to completion?

Sir Walter Scott, Caledonia’s literary giant, noted that: “the author must pay heed to the time and patience of the audience.” Nowadays, when the writer fails in this regard, it’s not just the reader who is disappointed, but also the author who takes a hit in their pocket.

No tense like the present

“I am only 16% into the book, and I am very, very irritated by the use of the present tense.”

Yes – it’s a review of my novel, Murder in School, taken from Amazon’s British website. (One star, naturally.)

I’m afraid I do write in the present tense, and ‘deservedly’ lose a percentage of readers!

But there is some method in this apparent madness.

It all began when I read John Updike’s Rabbit is Rich.

I became totally hooked by the long opening description in which car dealer Harry ‘Rabbit’ Angstrom watches contentedly from his showroom window as Middle America drives by, guzzling gas, soon to be queuing for his miserly Toyotas.

My reading experience could best be described as ‘filmic’ – I felt like I was in a movie, standing right beside Harry, watching, wondering what was going to happen next. I didn’t know, he didn’t know – but more intriguingly, neither it seemed did Updike.

Then the penny dropped. I thought, “Hey – this is the present tense!”

Like a blinding flash of light it struck me that here is the way to narrate a mystery. (Because, frankly, how can you honestly narrate a mystery in the past tense, when you know the outcome?)

I tried it – and made a second remarkable discovery. Not only as narrator can you convincingly pretend not to know the outcome – you don’t actually need to know it at all! You can wait until your characters provide the solution.

So, if you ever guess one of my whodunits in the first 25,000 words – congratulations! You beat me to it!

Dreaming of a Paperwhite Christmas?

In the UK, leading bookseller Waterstones has recently discontinued the Kindle from its stores.

Personally, I have always found it curious that the device was merchandised alongside real books in the first place. Isn’t it a kind of Trojan horse? At best it misreads the customer’s very motivation for visiting a wonderful bookstore.

Now, before I say any more, I ought to confess that my author’s colours are pinned firmly to the Kindle mast. Were it not for Kindle, there would be no Bruce Beckham, no Inspector Skelgill.

But I prefer to read real books, and do so at every opportunity. I love to be surrounded by them in my study. I can’t imagine how the room would look with just a lonely Kindle propped on a shelf. (Tidy, I suppose.)

However, the Kindle (or e-reader generally) does have its advantages. And in a small way I am a convert.

Preeminent among these benefits is finding one’s way to the bathroom in the middle of the night. (You need one with a backlit screen.) Having a youngest daughter that randomly camps on our bedroom floor in the early hours, such a device is a great boon.

You can read in the dark without disturbing your partner, and when you drop off the screen shuts down and it remembers your page. (Unless you do ‘sleep reading’ like me, when you continue to ‘swipe’ despite being otherwise unconscious.)

And there is the convenience factor. All the books you need for a holiday in a slim volume. Plus the battery seems to last forever, especially compared to today’s greedy mobiles.

So, are we heading for a world without bookshops?

Well, if Waterstones are right, perhaps the tide is beginning to turn. A friend of mine in Edinburgh is going gangbusters with her indie store. And, Christmas is coming.

Today I’ve been panicking and ordering presents galore. Oh, yes – from Amazon. But... the books... I bought real ones. I mean – how can you give an e-book for Christmas?

Well, you can, actually, it’s quite easy – but what I’m saying is an e-book lacks a certain essential gift quality. Call it substance. You can’t wrap it (this is actually a benefit for anyone receiving a gift from me), you can’t cram it in a stocking, and you can’t convey the trouble you’ve gone to (despite, in my case, an inability to chose anything remotely appropriate).

So it has to be solid, rectangular, ergonomically rewarding, artfully designed, functional, and pleasing to receive.

Wait a minute – that sounds like a Kindle Paperwhite!