R.J. Lynch's Blog, page 8

Life, Interrupted by Death by Robin Peacock

Made for TV!

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This is the first Robin Peacock book I’ve read, and as soon as I finished it I went online to buy the next in the series. That’s how much I enjoyed it. And yet, I’m giving it only three stars. I debated that in my head because I really wanted to give it four but, in the end, I decided that there were two factors that meant I couldn’t. (Five was out of the question, because that is only for exceptional books, and three stars, at least as far as I’m concerned, means, “I enjoyed this book and I recommend it). The two factors were: the lack of proofreading – or, at least, inadequate proofreading; and a little twist which I’ll describe like this. There’s a plot device common to crime fiction in which the suspect says something and the detectives miss it at the time. It’s a good device, because it’s a lot better than what we see increasingly now in crime fiction when the crime is solved and the criminal identified as a result of a piece of information that we as readers never had. That’s cheating, and Robin Peacock does not cheat. There are two problems with the device in this book: the first was that I noticed it immediately, thought, “Why haven’t they picked that up?” and realised that this would be key in unravelling the mystery. That’s fine – but it was only after I finished the book that it came to me that the whole point of what the suspect had said was that only the murderer could have known it – but the suspect was not the murderer!

In the great scheme of things, it doesn’t really matter, because you don’t notice that sort of error in a TV programme and the whole point of this book is that it is itching to be adapted for television. If Robin Peacock gets the breaks he deserves (yes, Robin Peacock is a man), then Detective Superintendent Veronica Reason could become as popular on the box as Vera. The characters are real and you believe in them; the same goes for the events. It’s just a pity that the proofreading lets the book down – it isn’t so obvious early on, but by the end the errors are far too frequent.

Nevertheless, I’m delighted to have discovered Robin Peacock and to have become a fan. I shall devour the rest of the books.

Return to Reviews of Other People’s Books

Nobs or Nobodies?

THE historical fiction debate

Should we write about kings or commoners? About nobs or nobodies? I know where I stand on that question — and you can hear my side of the argument here.

The  book I talk about in that video is here.

I Stopped Time by Jane Davis

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Jane Davis won the Daily Mail First Novel Award with Half-truths and White Lies. This is, I believe, her seventh book. For some reason, it’s ranked by Amazon under Historical Fiction (which it is) as Women’s Fiction – which it is not. There’s no shortage of female characters, but that doesn’t make a book into Women’s Fiction. The themes of this book will be, or certainly should be, of interest to anyone – male, female, or somewhere in between.

The book tells the story of Lottie Pye, who believes for the first 30 or so years of her life that she is an orphan, only to find that her mother is still alive. Her father too, probably, though she never learns who he was. It also tells the story of Lottie’s son James, who believes for the first 80 or so years of HIS life that he was abandoned by Lottie; the end of the book sees him making his own discovery.

On one level, it’s a satisfying unravelling of a complicated story. On another, it’s an exploration of what it is to be human. On whatever level you choose, it’s a perfectly written book in which the author never puts a foot wrong. As each mystery is solved, each question answered, and each piece of the jigsaw falls into place, you think, “Ah, yes. Of course. That’s what happened. That explains everything.”

I don’t like giving books five stars. I do it reluctantly, because five stars should mean, “This book is quite exceptional.” If I could avoid giving this one five stars, I would.

Return to Reviews of Other People’s Books

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A video about Sharon Wright: Butterfly

How Sharon Wright: Butterfly came to be written
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I just published a new video on YouTube. I’m posting the script here, just in case you’d rather not go to YouTube to watch it:

Hello. I’m John Lynch, and I’m here to talk about my book, Sharon Wright: Butterfly. Writers get lots of questions about their books. Maybe this will answer some of them.

The first and most obvious question is: Where do you get your ideas? I always say the same thing: I have no idea. And sometimes that’s true. And sometimes it isn’t. What is true is that I never know when I start writing a book how it’s going to finish. An idea comes into my head. Maybe it’s a conversation. Maybe it’s just a person. And I put the words down on paper and look at them. Which isn’t actually true – I put them on a screen – but readers like to think about it going on paper. Writers say a lot of things that aren’t true. You might want to remember that while I’m talking. Or while any other writer is talking.

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Remember when you were young? And you said something that wasn’t true? And your mother told you “Don’t tell stories”? Well, that’s what writers do. We tell stories. Sometimes they’re true. And sometimes they’re not. If you can tell the difference when I do it, let me know. Because I usually can’t.

Anyway. Sharon Wright: Butterfly. I fell in love with Sharon while I was writing the book. Even though [image error]I knew that falling in love with Sharon would be a stupid thing to do. Because Sharon is an interesting sort of young woman. When she woos – as she woos Jackie Gough – She does it the way a female mantis might. Knowing that, when he’s served his purpose, he may have to die.

When the book was written, we talked about covers. And I was sent this picture.

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I looked at it and I thought, “I don’t believe it! That’s HER! That’s my Shazzer!” Now, I am to graphics [image error]what Wayne Rooney is to the violin. So I left the cover design to someone who designs covers. I’m the writer; she’s the designer. It’s a good idea always to remember what you’re good at. And what you’re not.

And what Sharon Wright is good at is getting her own way. The tagline of the book is: “Nobody gives Sharon a chance. Except Sharon.” Shazzer comes from a very unfortunate background. Men think… Well. Let Shazzer tell you in her own words. This is an extract from the book:

She moved forward and smoothed the collar of his shirt. She kissed him gently on the lips. ‘Jackie. You know what I’ve learned? Started learning when I first went to school, and went on learning? Men need to think I’m dumb. Because I’m a woman, and I’m blonde, well, men think I’m blonde, and I like to spend a lot of time on my back with my legs in the air, and I like men for what they have that makes them men, I have to be dumb. Well, I’m not dumb.’

Gough shook his head. ‘You’re not, are you?’

As I said, while I was writing the book, I fell in love with Sharon. I hope you will, too. You can find out more about her here. And you can buy the book at any newsagent (ISBN: 978-1-910194-10-2). Or, of course, from Amazon.

 

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Film to Book & Book to Film

How do you turn a film script into a novel?

We hear a lot from writers about their experience when someone turns their novel into a film. In this post, I’m focusing on something I’ve developed a little niche interest in: turning a film script into a novel. Typically, this happens when a filmmaker has a fully developed script, has begun the casting process, and decides that it would be good to launch a novel at the same time as the film. They need a ghostwriter; if you are asked to do this, you may like some answers to the question: how do you turn a film script into a novel?

It’s often said that film and novels are two aspects of the same thing and there’s a sense in which they are – they are both ways of telling a story. Making too much of the similarities, though, can blind us to the differences, and those differences tend to be in the way the script is written and not in the way the film is directed and acted. A novel can tell the same story as a film, but it cannot do it in precisely the same way as it is written in the script. There are many differences in technique, but the two most important are:

Show, don’t tell; and
Presentation of location and physical appearance (including clothes).

“Show, don’t tell”

The first of those two main differences may not seem like a difference at all, because “show, don’t tell” is as vitally important to film as it is to a novel. It is not, though, always in the film script, because it doesn’t need to be. Now, some scripts could pass straight into a novel without amendment. Take this, from Quentin Tarantino’s Pulp Fiction (NOT one I worked on):

An old gas guzzling, dirty, white 1974 Chevy Nova BARRELS down

        a homeless-ridden street in Hollywood.  In the front seat are

        two young fellas — one white, one black — both wearing cheap

        black suits with thin black ties under long green dusters.

        Their names are VINCENT VEGA (white) and JULES WINNFIELD

        (black).  Jules is behind the wheel.

That will take its place just fine in a novel. But that’s about setting up the scene. It’s a little different when the scriptwriter is advising actors on how they should speak.  Like this:

“He says this matter-of-factly, not cruelly, but she seems put off anyway, as if he’s being overly defensive.”

In the film, viewers will see the male character apparently stating something in a straightforward way without any underlying intention, but they will also see a negative reaction from the female character. It takes the screenwriter 18 words to make that clear, and the action on the screen – another 23 words, this time of dialogue – will take only seconds; the screenwriter relies on the skill of the people on screen, and of the director who has to get the required performance out of them, to convey the two characters’ emotions. That’s not how it works for the novelist.

“Show, don’t tell” is second nature to good novelists. You don’t describe what is in someone’s mind by spelling it out, because readers don’t want that – they want to see what the character is thinking from the way the character acts. Imagine the above script writer’s instruction popping up in a novel as dialogue:

“Look, I said that in a matter-of-fact sort of way. I wasn’t being cruel.”

“Well, I’m put off in any case. I think you are being too defensive.”

Okay, that gets the message across, and in the hands of some novelists (not very good novelists, is what I’m trying to say), you might actually find it on the page, but I think most readers would sniff at it, and good writers would stop reading at that point and not pick the book up again.

One of the things that novelists do so that the reader can understand what is happening is to enter the head of one of the characters and describe what’s going on there. My novel, Sharon Wright: Butterfly, starts like this:

The outside tables would have given a better view, but sitting outside in the growing dark would attract attention, and not attracting attention was one of the things that kept Carver out of jail. He watched the girl as she walked down the road. Tart. Look at the length of that skirt. Asking for it.

She turned between the stone pillars. There would have been a gate once, a handsome gate for this had been a moneyed people’s street in the days before they turned the houses into flats. She fumbled for her keys.  Carver hadn’t needed a key to get into her flat. A tart’s flat. Cupboards full of drink. It wasn’t womanly. Carver’s mother had drunk Cyprus sherry, and that only on special occasions.

Carver’s mother hadn’t lived alone, either. Not at that age. It wouldn’t have been proper. She’d lived with her family, been a wife and mother, enduring. She’d stayed with her husband till he died, and she’d gone on looking after Carver until he went south, looking for a place where people would pay for good service, properly executed. Properly executed! It still made him smile. There were people who thought he wasn’t the full shilling, he knew that, but he’d dreamed up his own slogan, good as FCUK any day.

Let’s look at all of the things that that short passage tells the reader:

This character’s name is Carver, and he has some reason for being aware that he could end up in jail, which means that he is involved in villainy of some description – and the reader will expect the nature of that villainy to become clear as the story unfolds in the novel.
Carver disapproves of women in short skirts, which tells us something about him and his view of life. Also, Carver thinks alcohol in a young woman’s apartment is not womanly – another clue to his thought processes.
The girl he is watching lives in a house that has once seen better days but has now been broken down into apartments.
Carver has been in her apartment, almost certainly illicitly, and he let himself in without a key, which tells us something else about the kind of person he is and the things he does.
Carver’s mother’s life is described as “enduring,” a clue to the relationship she had with Carver’s late father.
The reference to, “a good job, properly executed,” when added to the other hints, makes us almost certain from the beginning that Carver is someone who kills people for money.

Novelists can’t, however, show us everything we need to say by putting us inside the character’s head. More often, there will be a combination of action and thought, as in this description from my novel, Zappa’s Mam’s a Slapper, of the first time a rather innocent 14-year-old boy makes love – actually, he doesn’t, he has sex – with an experienced girl a year older:

The first time was a disaster, because it was over before it started and I was really embarrassed and I wanted to cry but Kylie wiped the mess off her stomach with my Y-fronts and then she hugged me and said we’d be able to do it again in a minute and it would be fine the second time, I’d see.

And it was.

And sometimes it’s pure description, with almost no addition of anyone’s thoughts (I have highlighted the two exceptions in black) (this comes later on in Sharon Wright: Butterfly):

Jackie arrived at Ealing with thirty minutes to spare. He went into Waitrose and bought a bottle of water and a sandwich for the journey. Before he reached the checkout, he went back and bought another bottle of water and another sandwich. There was no certainty Sharon, in her current state of excitement, would remember to provide for herself.

He walked to the station. Here a problem presented itself.

‘The Penzance train doesn’t stop here,’ said the ticket seller.

‘It must do.’

‘Well, it doesn’t. The 12.05 from Paddington gets to Penzance at five past five. But it doesn’t stop here. If you want to go from here, you need the 12.33, change at Reading, arrive seven oh two. You want a ticket?’

‘I don’t understand.’

‘You want me to say it again? Is that man looking for you?’

Gough turned round. Five yards behind him, grinning obscenely through a mostly toothless mouth, was the biggest, nastiest, craziest person of Gough’s acquaintance.

‘Jackie. Jackie Gough. Fancy seeing you here.’

‘Dan. How…how are you?’

Ablett stepped forward and grabbed Gough’s arm. Without apparent effort, he wheeled him away from the ticket office and towards the platform. ‘I’m fine, Jackie boy. Considering. Considering I done five years I hadn’t needed to do if some little shit hadn’t grassed me up.’

‘I…Dan…’

They were now on the edge of the platform.

‘How could you do that, you little shit? How could you grass me up? What harm did I ever do you?’

‘I…me? Dan, I don’t know who’s been talking to you, but…’

‘No-one’s been talking to me, Gough.’ He pulled a tape from his pocket and waved it under Gough’s nose. ‘I’ve been listening to this.’

‘I…oh, God. Oh, no. Dan, I…I didn’t…I couldn’t…Dan!’

‘So why tell the bloody Bill you did? Eh?’

The track approaching Ealing station is straight for some distance. Trains that have eased and edged their way through the inner and outer reaches of west London hit their stride as they gather pace for the run to Reading. Fast trains to Wales and the west country, in particular, are closing on their top speed as they streak through Ealing. The 12.05 from Paddington to Penzance is a fast train to the west country. Gough had his back to it, but Ablett could see it clearly, still half a mile away but approaching rapidly.

‘Dan, I swear to you. I said those things because that bloody Prutton woman told me to.’

‘Liar.’

At that speed, it takes a train less than forty seconds to cover half a mile. The train was now two hundred yards away—a distance that would occupy it for nine seconds. Ablett leaned forward, heaved Gough’s body over one shoulder, took his arm in one huge hand and his leg in the other. He swung the helpless graduate and failed criminal in a huge circle. At the top of the arc, he hurled Gough up and out into the path of the onrushing locomotive.

Gough screamed. He fell onto the tracks, turned, saw the train all but on top of him. He gathered all the strength he had for a desperate leap to safety before three hundred tonnes of accelerating steel hit him in the chest and threw him sideways. He fell on the track under the unforgiving wheels. As the train hurtled over him, his severed head and one hand were flung to one side. The rest disappeared below the speeding train.

There was silence on the platform. Then began a screaming that those who heard it swore they would never forget. The ticket seller rattled down the blind across his window and locked his door.

Mad Dan Ablett turned, grinned at his stunned audience and wandered forth into the street.

No-one made any attempt to stop him.

There are 634 words in that passage. It would be less than half of that in a film script, because significant parts of it (The track approaching Ealing station…) would not appear in the script at all, and other parts would be reduced to a fraction of the number of words they have in the novel, not least because of:

Clothes and locations

Very brief descriptions of where the action takes place are all a script needs, because the director will make her/his own decisions about locations. Nor does the script need to describe the people, because what they look like will depend on who is cast. And there’s no need to describe the clothes beyond saying that his suit is cheap and worn out, or that she is wearing a black T-shirt, because all of that will be settled between director and cast.

That won’t work in the book of the film. Readers like pointers on what the characters look like. They like to have some idea of what sort of place the action is happening in. So the novelist writes:

They had food, wine, cigarettes and coffee. The boat travelled slowly and the locks arrived only after long stretches of nothing to do but smoke, eat, drink and watch the passing woods and farmland. Once in a while, a cyclist passed on the route de halage, outpacing the boat and leaving it behind. Sometimes, the canal bent far enough to the west to be in earshot of cars on the N5 or, more rarely, a passing train. Mostly it was quiet.

Buggy was content.

and:

The stone houses turned in on each other. The few men they saw were dressed in thick woollen check shirts and woollen trousers belted high on the stomach, the women in black dresses and headscarves. Closed, weather-beaten faces glanced away as they passed.

and:

Doyle stared hard at the magnified view of his mark. His heart began to beat with the excitement of an impending kill. The man looked to be in his late fifties, solidly built, a face reddened by the wind and good living but without fat or puffiness. Well-groomed grey hair. An air of authority. A hard man, probably—not in the scrapper’s sense, though Doyle felt he could probably hold his own, but the hardness of the man accustomed to being obeyed. Given another birth, another upbringing, a successful captain of industry. Beneath the unzipped yellow jacket, a white shirt covered a flat stomach. Doyle focused hard on pockets and armpits. He was prepared to bet the man wasn’t carrying.

Practical steps

For those reasons and some others, the “book of the film” will always be longer than the “film of the book.” When the script is in your hands, you need to rough out a chapter by chapter outline of the way that – at present – you think the book might be likely to go. That outline will always change as the book is written. If you’re signing a contract, and the filmmaker is in a hurry, don’t agree to write the outline in less than three days – not because you’ll be working at it for that many hours, but because it needs to sit in the back of your mind while your subconscious works on it.

It’s a large market, and an attractive one, but it doesn’t seem to be one that most freelancers think about. If you decide that you want to get involved, I strongly recommend contacting agents in the film business. They know who is looking. Which means they know where the deals are.

The 3 Best British Contemporary Crime Novelists Writing Today

Why Elly Griffiths, Ann Cleeves, and JJ Marsh are the best British contemporary crime novelists writing today

There’s a huge number of British novelists writing today about contemporary crime. A search of Amazon throws up a lot of them. Some are not much cop, as you’ll find if you open the Look Inside that Amazon so helpfully provides, but some are good. Quite a few British writers of contemporary crime are well worth spending a few evenings with – you’ll get a lot more pleasure and satisfaction from them than you will out of the average evening’s television schedules.

But the best three?

Elly Griffiths, Ann Cleeves, and JJ Marsh

I’d put these three ahead of Peter James, Ian Rankin, Val McDermid, and a number of others with a good following. What they all have in common is:

They write about real people, and however bizarre the plots may sometimes be (and Elly Griffiths has some dillies), you believe in the story as it unfolds because you believe in the people. More than that – you recognise the people. They have characteristics, strengths and weaknesses just like those of the people you know. Just like your own, in fact;
While the authors may have – in fact, they do have – political leanings, there is no virtue signalling in their books. They know what they think; they don’t attempt to tell you to think the same thing. That is a lot rarer than I would wish;
The plots are well worked out and none of the three ever leaves you thinking, “You cheat! You hid that from me! If you’d told me that earlier, I’d have known who done it”;
They are in control of the back story; they realise when they need to reprise something from an earlier book but, unlike, say, Rankin, they ease it skilfully into the telling of the story. And I guess that’s it; they’re on this list because, good as some others are, these three are the best technically as well as in all the other attributes a crime writer needs.

[image error]Ann Cleeves

This is not a blanket endorsement. Ann Cleeves has four series in print; Shetland and Vera are both very good indeed, and well deserving of their TV success, but I’m less enamoured by her George & Molly and Inspector Ramsay offerings.

As for the other two:

Elly Griffiths

I can recommend both series by Elly Griffiths (that’s not her real name): she has the Dr Ruth Galloway[image error] books about a forensic archaeologist in

Norfolk and the Detective Inspector Edgar Stephens and Max Mephisto books; both series are excellent, but Stephens and Mephisto isn’t actually contemporary, because it’s set in the years immediately following the Second World War. Max Mephisto is a magician, which can lead to some plot points that challenge the reader’s willingness to believe; come to think of it, one of the central characters in the Ruth Galloway books is a druid called Cathbad, so both series have a strong magical element, but that does not detract from the sheer joy of reading these books.

JJ Marsh

[image error]Jill Marsh is a Welsh woman living in Switzerland who writes in a room on the top floor of her home there so that she can gain inspiration from looking into the cemetery next door. Yes, well…we are talking about crime fiction, after all. She is about to publish the final book in the Beatrice Stubbs series and promises that a new series with a new protagonist will follow. Given the quality of the Beatrice Stubbs books, I have every confidence that the new series will be excellent. For anyone who has not yet come across Beatrice, there’s a review of the first book in the series here.

It’s the story? What IS the story?

There have been times when I’ve regretted publishing Sharon Wright: Butterfly. I can’t escape the feeling that it needed one more rewrite. I’m a compulsive rewriter, and often more unwilling than I should be to let a book go, but in the case of Sharon, I sometimes wish I’d written a fifth draft and not stopped after four. Why? Because I hadn’t quite understood what the story was.

I realise that probably sounds ridiculous. I’d written the damn book four times – how could I not know what the story was? Well…

It’s clear when I talk to other writers that every writer works in a different way. Some work out the entire plot and write it down, scene by scene, before starting work on the book. We call that kind of writer plotters; I’m a “pantser” because I work by the seat of my pants. For example, when I started on the book that eventually became Zappa’s Mam’s a Slapper, I wrote the sentence, All I’d said was, I wouldn’t mind seeing her in her knickers. Then I sat for half an hour staring at the screen and thinking, “Where on earth did that come from?”

Zappa’s Mam eventually became a 96,000 word novel, and if I hadn’t a clue when I wrote that first sentence what it was going to be about, I knew by the time I’d finished the fifth draft. The fundamental theme of Zappa’s Mam is summed up in a single sentence – only 20 of those 96,000 words:

“When you come right down to it, it isn’t the hand you’re dealt that counts, it’s how you play it.”

That’s what I mean by “the story.” I didn’t know when I set out to write Zappa’s Mam that the theme was going to be that what matters is not the cards life deals you, but how you play the hand – but I did know that by the time I was finished. I understood what the story was. There was all sorts of other stuff in there – a murder, drugs and prostitution, love, a tragic death, inadequate parenting, a dedicated schoolteacher and others who were anything but dedicated – but in the end it all came down to that fraction of a sentence: it isn’t the hand you’re dealt that counts, it’s how you play it.

And what that has to do with Sharon Wright: Butterfly is that I didn’t really know what the story – the theme – of the book was when I published it. I realised later; talking to people about my books at book signings, when I came to Sharon, I would say, “While I was writing this book, I fell in love with Sharon. And falling in love with Sharon would be a very stupid thing to do, as Jackie Gough finds out. Because, when Sharon woos – as she woos Jackie – she does it the way a female mantis might. Knowing that, when she’s done with him, the male may have to die.”

That’s the story of Sharon Wright: Butterfly. Once again, there’s all sorts of other stuff in there; two hired killers, more than one murder, a bent policeman and several straight ones, depressed south London and a canal in the sylvan Nivernais. I thought at one time that the book’s tagline might be:

In the Nivernais, no‑one watches you. But everyone sees what you do.

It didn’t turn out that way; the tagline I ended up with is more suitable:

No-one gives Sharon a chance. Except Sharon.

Sharon is a very damaged young woman and her most pressing need is simply to survive. She’ll do anything to achieve that. And by “anything,” I mean ANYTHING. If letting Jackie Gough think they’ll be together and happy ever after to spend the money he helps her steal, she’ll do it. Why not? Poor Jackie!

It’s all in the book, but if I’d written just one more draft, I’d have made that central theme clearer. I don’t know why I rushed it. I wasn’t bored by Sharon. I did have a signing coming up, and I was keen to have another book on the table. Perhaps that was it. I’ve regretted it many times.

Which brings me to When the Darkness Comes. I started writing The Darkness ten years ago. It’s been through five complete rewrites, and the hands of a number of editors, agents and beta readers. Some of the rewrites have been responses to suggestions those people made. The protagonist is Ted Bailey and one of the questions I’ve been asked again and again is, “Are we supposed to like this man?” And the answer to that is: “I don’t see how you could. What is there to like?”

The response is always: “But you can’t write a book about someone it’s impossible to like. No one will read it.” And I accept that that is received wisdom. But is it true? Are there no popular, successful books about someone deeply unlikable? I can think of several. And while you might say, “Oh, well, but they all have some character aspect that makes us warm to them,” I would answer, “So does Ted Bailey.”

In any case, I’ve decided to publish it. I’ve got one more rewrite to do and I’ve fixed on the second Tuesday in February 2017 as publication day. But what’s the story? It’s a fairly incident-packed book. Drug running, espionage, and an incident that Ted’s best friend (if he had one) could not describe as anything but rape, though it’s fixed in its context in what amounted to courtship in those days; the girl herself, talking about it much later, says,

“I did not feel as though I’d been raped. This is nineteen sixty-two we’re talking about. It’s a world that’s gone, swept away and quite right too because it had very little to do with the way people really are. It was more the end of the Fifties than the beginning of the Sixties and the Fifties in Britain was a very dishonest decade. But it was real then and we all knew what the rules were. The man…what am I saying, the boy, they weren’t men in those days, not at nineteen, they were boys, the boy would push as hard as he could without hurting you, and if you were a decent girl you had to resist him. If you actually got him to the altar without giving in you got extra points for that but if you’d kept him at bay as long as you could and then passion got the better of the pair of you, or of just him if you couldn’t fight him off, then it was a matter for shame, you couldn’t avoid that, but it wasn’t the end of the world so long as he married you. He had to marry you.”

Her complaint was not that Ted had had sex with her when she didn’t want him to, but that he had not afterwards done his duty and married her.

There’s also murder, police corruption (no, I don’t know why I’m fixated on that. And, if I do, I’m not telling you) and, once again, France is there as well as the UK – but so are several other countries.

And there’s a chat show which is unusual in that one of the guests is on the verge of death and at least three of the others are already dead, so that we get this scene:

Dolan is looking more than a little brassed off and it seems that Betjeman has taken control in that effortless Marlborough College way. To the aristocracy of his day he may have been a parvenu, and foreign with it, but to most of us he was what an upper class English gent should be. ‘When we talk about the Church,’ he is saying, ‘we normally mean the people in it. Starting with the Archbishop of Canterbury and embracing all of the clergy and the laity. But when the man on the Clapham omnibus says “the church,” chances are he means his local parish building. Church architecture has influenced the development of the English character as much as the language of the King James Bible, and certainly more than any Jesuitical philosophising.’

Barabbas has been listening to this with an expression of undisguised contempt. He turns sideways and spits on the floor. Not an Italian “pah” type spatter; this is a full blown, greasy hockle, the type of expectoration a miner coming off shift might have used to clear the coal dust out of his mouth and nose before the days of the pit-head bath. Dolan looks at him in silent horror; Betjeman merely wrinkles his nose.

‘What we have to remember,’ Betjeman says, ‘is that the great monotheistic religions—Judaism, Christianity, Islam—took root in lands as harsh and inimical to human life as it is possible to be, where every day was a struggle for survival. Imagine if God had spoken to us through an Eskimo. The teaching we received from the Son of God as mediated through Gospels written…’

’I was the Son of God,’ says Barabbas.

‘Yes, of course, dear boy, in a sense you were…’

‘In a sense?’ I can see rage simmering behind the goatskin wearer’s purple face.

‘As Bar Abbas, the Son of God, of course you were. But I was referring to the Son of God who we know as Jesus of Nazareth.’

Barabbas spits again, as full throated as before, and Dolan half rises from his seat. ‘Will you please stop doing that.’

‘The Son of God who we know as Jesus of Nazareth,’ Betjeman repeats. ‘His teachings came to us first from men for whom every day was a battle simply to stay alive. They are black and white. There is no room for shades of opinion, only what is right and what is wrong. It is the same today in Saudi Arabia. People regard Wahhabism as some form of extremist creed, but what Wahhabis want is adherence to what they see as the pure, original teaching of Mohamed. No shrines, no priests, no mysticism of any kind. They may be seen as simply the Particular Baptists of Islam. There is a difference, of course. If he knows you recognise the authority of a bishop, a Particular Baptist will walk past you in the street without speaking. A Wahhabi meeting a dervish or a sufi will feel entitled to kill him for the greater glory of Allah.

‘And this is how Christianity came to us, at least before the humanising influence of Rome with its wine and its beautiful food and its art and its adultery. But God is an Englishman, and what He wants are English things. Compromise. Tolerance of difference. Politeness. Look at the cathedrals of Ely and Gloucester, the minsters of York and Southwell and you will see God’s will made manifest.’

Barabbas is on his feet, his short hairy skirt swaying. ‘Jesus of Nazareth was a Jew!’ he screams. ‘Like me. The People of God are the Jewish people! You want to know what God wants? He wants this!’ And his clenched fist slams into Betjeman’s face, splatting the nose and shaking loose a tooth. Then Alex says, ‘Oh, my God,’ and I see Haile Selassie emerge from the shadows and stride onto the stage, if a man with such short legs can be said to stride. He is quivering with anger. Barabbas turns to face him, his chin thrust out, looking for a fight.

‘The Jews were the People of God,’ says Haile Selassie. ‘You gave that away when King Solomon violated the Empress Makeda, whom the ignorant call the Queen of Sheba. She was searching for his wisdom, but he was what he was and he jumped her. His own people were so disgusted by the way he treated her, the way he broke faith and his promise, that they escorted her back to Abyssinia and they took the Ark of the Covenant with them. It sits where they left it, on the beach in the Ethiopian province of Eritrea. Which remains an Ethiopian province today, whatever those benighted savages may say. Our province, our beach, our coastline. My province, my beach, my coastline. On that day, the people of Abyssinia— my people— became the People of God. If anyone is to say what God wants, it is me.’

There is something ridiculous about this short man, midget would be only slightly too unkind a word, puffed up like this and Barabbas looks as though he will strike him, too. But Haile Selassie, physically unimpressive though he may be, has more presence than any man I have ever seen and his cold eyes face the old terrorist down. Barabbas turns and stalks from the room, shoving me and Alex out of his way.

Dolan stands. ‘We will take a short intermission while the floor is cleaned of this disgusting mess. Someone get these two out of here.’ And off he goes, no doubt for another cigarette. Hotel employees rush forward to help Betjeman to his feet. As they pass us, slowly because Betjeman is white, shocked and hobbling, I put out an arm to hold him.

‘What a dreadful man,’ he says. ‘Quite without breeding of any kind. And as for Haile Selassie…I wonder what all those Jamaicans with their knitted hats and their strange hair would say if they knew what their beloved Ras Tafar really thinks of them. You know he refused to think of himself as African? He thought he shared a continent with a bunch of monkeys.’

Yes, yes, I think, never mind all that. I say, ‘You talk about church buildings as the embodiment of God. Do you actually believe in Him?’

‘Oh, look,’ he says. ‘Man is a spiritual being. For all the crackpot lunacy of believers in intelligent design and those criminal madmen who think war between Islam and Judaism will lead to the Rapture and their ascent into Heaven, our need to believe in Him goes to the very heart of our human make-up. And as for Dawkins… If he had the brain he’d like us to think he has, he’d have taken a proper degree. The man’s a biologist, for God’s sake. That’s one step up from an astrologer. Does needing to believe in Him mean He exists? How should I know? It doesn’t mean He does not, you may be sure of that. Please excuse me. I need to find somewhere to lie down.’

It wasn’t until I was writing the book for the fourth time that God took that prominent place in it. And that was when I realised what the story of the book actually is. The tagline is:

Bore God at your peril

and the story – the theme – isn’t about murder and prostitution and rape and drug running. What unfolds (and it’s St Peter who explains it to us, so we can take it that it’s correct) is this: You can live a righteous, saintly and unblemished life for seventy years, but if you bore God you won’t get into Heaven. One more quote, and then I’ll leave the subject, at least for now:

God has favourites. Some people get away with murder, and I do mean that literally, and some people live like angels for seventy years and end up discarded. It isn’t just. It isn’t fair. So what? The atheists, which I used to be, are right when they say that Man has created a model of God that suits them. They abandon logic when they go on from there to say that there is therefore no God.  One does not follow from the other. There is a God. He just isn’t the God people think he is.

And there we are. That’s the story of When the Darkness Comes. And I’m going to tell it. I’m going to ignore the idea that you can’t have an unlikable protagonist. It will be out in February, and I’ll find out then whether anyone agrees with me.

Narrating Your Own Book. Harder Than It Seems

I recently finished narrating Zappa’s Mam’s A Slapper. Jim Williams, the owner of wowandflutter, which is the recording studio I’ve used for my last two books, tells me he’s almost finished the editing and I should expect to be able to upload the finished audiobook to ACX within the next week. If all goes well, that means it should be on sale two weeks from tomorrow. I’ve no idea how much it will sell for – ACX decide that.

I narrated the book in three-hour sessions, because I find my performance deteriorates hopelessly beyond that time limit, and it took me a week. I started on Monday morning and finished at lunchtime on Friday. It was hard work.

I’m a writer. I’m not an actor. I’m probably better equipped than many writers, because in a forty year international sales career I gave more presentations than I can count to rooms full of people, but narrating still didn’t come easily. Zappa’s Mam is written in the first person, so for a lot of the book I was speaking as Billy, the protagonist, but there are quite a lot of other characters, some of them are women, and I had to make at least a stab at letting the listeners know, from the tone and pitch of the voice, who was speaking.

So, I had to give voice to chavs, the wealthy middle-class, the educated and the uneducated; to social workers, teachers, prisoners, criminals, students…the list goes on. Concentrating on which voice to be using is one of the things that limit how long a session can be.

There’s a commonly expressed view that writers should narrate their own books because people who buy audiobooks like to know that it’s the author they are listening to. Well, maybe. I’ve no evidence to support that view or contradict it. The reason I narrated Zappa’s Mam, and the reason I narrated A Just and Upright Man before it, is that I know the book. I know what I intended – how I meant the reader of a paperback or e-book version to speak the words inside their head. So that’s what I did: I spoke the words (and not just the dialogue, but especially the dialogue) as I had intended they should be read on the page.

A little while ago, I paid an actress to narrate Sharon Wright: Butterfly for me. I did that because the central character is a young woman and I didn’t feel I could do justice to her. It was a terrible and expensive mistake, and that audiobook will never be published. I’ve had to write off the cost. It isn’t that the narrator wasn’t capable; simply that she didn't "get" what was intended – why a character spoke particular words at a particular time.

Whether I’ll now narrate Sharon Wright: Butterfly myself, I don’t know – it will probably depend on how well Zappa’s Mam’s a Slapper performs.

But I do have some advice for any writer who thinks they may at some point in the future decide to produce an audiobook version of their work in progress:
At the end of each writing session, read what you have written aloud. How does it flow? Make whatever improvements you need to to make sure that you have removed any obstacles to easy narration.
Otherwise, you’ll find yourself – as I did – making textual changes on the fly when you get into the recording studio because what looks great on the page simply can’t be read with any fluency.

A Rising Man by Abir Mukherjee

It’s 1919 and Sam Wyndham, a Scotland Yard policeman who had a traumatic time in the trenches in WWI and then lost his wife to the peacetime influenza, has been recruited to join the police in Calcutta. He is thrown straight into the deep end when a senior civil servant is found murdered. Efforts to prevent him learning the truth and direct his investigation into channels acceptable to the authorities come right from the top.

Abir Mukherjee paints what I’m sure is an accurate picture of the British in the Raj with their snobbery, violence towards the natives, cupidity and indifference to justice and fair dealing. The book is carefully plotted. And yet I feel able to grant it only three stars. There are signs here of a great deal of promise and I shall certainly want to read Mukherjee’s next book in the series, but it isn’t possible to ignore the shortcomings of A Rising Man. The characterisation is thin – the main characters are more than cardboard cutouts, but not much more – and Mukherjee relies too much on the Deus ex Machina; long-standing readers of detective fiction have become tired of the hunch that tells the detective what the answer to the mystery must be. We demand more than that, and Mukherjee does not – yet – deliver it.

It’ll make a good TV series, though, and I’m sure someone is working on that right now.

Return to Other People’s Books

Save money on How To Make Money As A Freelance Writer

My latest book, How To Make Money As A Freelance Writer, has been nicely received:

 “In essence, this book is like being taken to the school gate, but not inside. Lynch has put the satchel with all the necessary gear on your back. . .the onus is upon you to get on and act upon it.”

— Rosalind Minett

 “There is enough information in this book to set any potential freelancer on their way if they follow the steps outlined.”

— Martin Brown

 That’s exactly what I wanted to write: a book that says,

This is what you do
This is how you do it
This is what can happen if you don’t.

A practical guide for practical people.

There’s a Kindle version and the paperback is carried by Gardner’s in the UK and Ingram Spark everywhere else, so you can get it at your local bookshop – but you can also get the paperback from me at a special price (£5 instead of £7) from now till 21st May. Just go here and enter the code “may offer” at checkout