Alex Woolf's Blog, page 4

New story

I wrote the following story during my holiday in Italy earlier this month. Although the story’s narrator does not reveal his name, he bears a close resemblance to a character who’s featured in quite a few of my stories over the years, a professional finder by the name of Waldo Mars. In fact, I suspect it is Waldo, though I have no proof of this. If I’m wrong, then I hope both men will accept my apologies, and we can move on.

So, without further ado, here is the story…

 

THE GIRL IN THE CREAM DRESS

King first set eyes on her in April 1992, on a crowded platform at Paddington Station in London. She was getting on a train to Bristol. He fancied their eyes met for a second, maybe two. Then she disappeared. The memory of her in the cream dress, hair falling in a dark wave down her back – upturned face, parted lips, curling eyelashes – stuck with him in a way that most things didnʼt.

Ten years later, King was standing in a queue, waiting to board the Intra-Laveno ferry on Lake Maggiore with his second wife and their four children, when, suddenly, there she was again – the girl – standing on the deck of another ferry just docking. Same cream dress, same wave of dark hair, same face. She was there for a heartbeat, then she descended a stairway and was gone.

Another ten years went by, and King, now in his mid-forties, had become a man of means, having clawed his way to the top of the escalator business. During his rapid ascent, heʼd found time to divorce his second wife, marry a third and father three more children. Wife number three was currently suing him for divorce – none of the latest crop of children had been hers. Most things didnʼt stick to King, but money did, and so did his memory of the girl. He was heading towards the departure lounge at JFK, about to board a flight to Dubai, when he glimpsed her for the third time. This time they were moving in the same direction. She was ahead of him, passing through security. Same cream dress, same wave of dark hair, same face. He charged after her, but was held up in security, and by the time he got through, she was gone.

King did not explain to me how he thought it could be the same girl each time, nor how he thought she might have maintained a perfectly constant appearance across a span of twenty years. Privately I put it down to romantic delusion. In the chaos and disappointment of his personal life, the girl represented something of a holy grail – the prospect of true and everlasting love.

King was offering me good money to find this mythical girl – a hundred pounds a day, plus expenses. In return for this generous fee, he did not explicitly demand success. His only requirement was a ʻweekly progress reportʼ. Progress is such a beautiful word, I find. For me, getting up in the morning is progress; progress is that first sip of freshly brewed coffee. So elastic as to mean virtually anything, it is used a great deal in my line of work. For the purposes of my reports to King, progress could mean ʻgoing to a library and borrowing a book about Lake Maggioreʼ, or ʻinspecting Platform 3 at Paddington Stationʼ.

King did not impose anything so onerous or unpleasant as a timescale for the job. There was no sense of hurry or impatience as he laid out his terms. For him it was enough to know that ʻprogressʼ was being made. If I played things right, I cheerfully predicted that this case might just see me through to retirement. The trick was to maintain an appearance of industry and endeavour – to demonstrate ʻprogressʼ – while achieving precisely nothing.

I wish I could boast of my ability to perform this balancing act. It is certainly a skill that I have worked hard to perfect over a period of many years. Unfortunately, my attempts are usually undone by one inconvenient fact: I am cursed with success. Before long, and through no fault of my own, I almost invariably stumble upon the person or thing I am pretending to seek. This is good in one sense: the curse of success has swelled my reputation to the point that my name has come to the attention of all manner of well-to-do obsessives, of which King is just one example. But success can also be most unwelcome when youʼre charging by the day and the job ends before itʼs even paid for the monthʼs coffee bill.

Nevertheless, I was optimistic this time. Even with my rotten luck, I was sure I could keep this case going for a period of years, or for as long as the clientʼs patience held out, for the simple reason that the object of my search could not possibly exist. This goddess of eternal youth was plainly a middle-aged manʼs fantasy. More precisely (and charitably), she was three different women, all of them coincidentally similar in facial appearance, hairstyle and dress, conflated by King into a single person.

Statistically speaking itʼs not improbable for a seasoned traveller, who spends a great deal of his time passing through the worldʼs transport termini, to spot three very similar looking women over a period of twenty years. And one should not overlook the romantic aspect inherent in such places: all those strangers, thrust happenstantially together in one location for a brief moment of their lives, all mysterious to each other. Whether King realised it consciously or not, every sea port, airport or train station heʼd ever visited must have reminded him of that girl. She would have always been there, just out of sight, behind every portersʼ trolley, pillar or steamy cafe window. And if, for the briefest of moments, a young and pretty brunette in a pale dress did happen to step into view, his heart would already be primed for the encounter. His eyes and brain would do the rest, turning her into the timeless girl of his dreams.

I spent several happy weeks on the first stages of my ʻsearchʼ, travelling the route of the Great Western Main Line, visiting places like Maidenhead, Twyford, Goring-on-Thames, Chippenham, Bath and, of course, Bristol. I purposely avoided such destinations as Southall, Slough and Swindon. Pleasant as Iʼm sure those towns are, I instinctively felt they did not fit with Kingʼs image of where the girl had been travelling to that day. The jetsetting young woman of New York, Italy and Dubai did not belong in such places – at least King wouldnʼt think so, and one of the things I always try to do is to sustain my client, for as long as possible, in his or her delusions. It keeps them happy, and a happy client is a paying client.

As I wandered the streets and parks of these towns, I kept half an eye out for an attractive middle-aged woman with brown hair. There were quite a few that crossed my path, usually with dogs, children or husbands in tow. Any one of them might have been Kingʼs girl. Sheʼd never know it, nor would he, and neither, God willing, would I – and that thought pleased me greatly.

That summer, I also frittered away several equally enjoyable weeks in northern Italy, New York and Dubai, people-watching and letting my imagination get the better of me. Between these jaunts, I did some genuine sleuthing – for appearanceʼs sake. Through the services of my old friend at the Met, Detective Inspector Fox, I managed to get hold of the passenger list of the relevant Great Western train from 3 April 1992, the date of the initial encounter. A contact at Interpol provided me with equivalent lists for the Intra-Laveno ferry of 17 April 2002, as well as the Emirates flight from New York to Dubai on 10 April 2012.

I compared the three lists, and, unsurprisingly, failed to find a single matching name. I had to be very careful about how I presented this news to King. Inevitably he would be disappointed. My overriding concern was that disappointment did not turn into despair and the early termination of the case. So when I broke it to him, I quickly added that people often used false names when travelling – for all sorts of reasons. It could be that she was running away from something – her family, a crime scene, a man. King immediately latched onto this. It fitted perfectly with his image of the girl, and added to the aura of romance and mystery already surrounding her. In fact, I was surprised by how elated he turned out to be. He seemed to treat the news as some kind of breakthrough in the case. I told him Iʼd start working through the names. With over six hundred of them, this could be a yearʼs work – more, if I took my time.

The other genuine bit of sleuthing I did was to employ a former police artist (charged to expenses, naturally) to concoct a likeness of the girl from Kingʼs description. Inevitably, and through no fault of the artist, the result was rather ethereal and doll-like. King could not provide any of those earthy details – the birth marks, squints, pimples, frown lines and other minor imperfections – that distinguish all real people and are the bread and butter of identification work. The artist produced an honest likeness of what the girl actually was: a fantasy.

The girl in the portrait looked about twenty-five, with a pale, oval face, a delicate, pouting, slightly nervous smile, and bright wide eyes that seemed to shimmer with secrets. Her hair spilled around her face in dark, curling waves. She looked like a fairytale princess, vulnerable, alone, waiting to be saved. King was delighted with it – of course he was. It was confirmation of everything he believed about her. He insisted on having the original framed and placed in his bedroom. I had to make do with a print.

While acknowledging its fantasy qualities, I had to admit that I liked the image. Like King, I kept it near me and looked at it often. When I was in the office, it was pinned to the wall next to my desk, and on my trips abroad it became a fixture on my hotel bedside tables in Lombardy, Greenwich Village and the Sheikh Zayed Road in Dubai. It would not be an exaggeration to say that the image grew on me. Maybe… maybe that was the time when I started looking for the girl, not for King, but for myself.

Summer turned to autumn, and each week I diligently sent in my reports, itemising all the ʻprogressʼ I had made. I listed the leads that had come to nought, the people I had unearthed from the names on the passenger lists, who turned out to be children at the time, or old ladies, or mothers or nuns. King seemed satisfied. His reserves of patience were as deep as his pockets, and the money kept flowing.

Curiously, the moment I was secretly bracing myself for never arrived. I kept wondering when the next name on the list would fit, and was relieved when it never quite did. The 25-year-old Italian girl whoʼd been on the ferry that crossed Maggiore that day in 2002 turned out to have blonde hair, and the 20-year-old brunette who travelled from Paddington to Reading ten years earlier turned out to have been on crutches at the time, following a riding accident.
 As a result, I never had to tell King a direct lie, which is what I would unquestionably have done if a real match had ever shown up. To do otherwise – to tell him that Iʼd found a match – could easily have ended up wrecking ʻmy pensionʼ, which was how I had privately come to think of the case. But I wasnʼt only thinking selfishly here. Whether King was insane or just extremely vain – whether he actually wanted me to find this girl (proof, surely, of madness), or he simply wanted me to search for her like some medieval knight- errant on a self-indulgent quest for a mythical sacred chalice – the discovery of any one of the three girls would have been a calamity for him. By this reasoning I persuaded myself that it was my duty to King as a man that I should fail in my search – and it was my duty to him as a paying customer that l should fail diligently, conscientiously and painstakingly, leaving no stone unturned and no passenger unchecked. Happily for me, the case was allowing me to do this, and I never had to tell King an outright lie.

Autumn turned to winter. I continued to send in the reports, though by now my enthusiasm for the case had started to ebb. I was going through the motions, and most of what ended up in these weekly summaries tended to be what one might euphemistically term ʻcreativeʼ. The reports were usually concocted late on a Sunday night by the fireside, with a glass or two of port for inspiration. Partly to stave off boredom, they gradually became more escapist in nature, not to say racy. Rarely, if ever, could the 16.06 from Paddington to Bristol Temple Meads have been filled with a more colourful clutch of characters than the one that ran on 3 April 1992 – from the transexual card sharp to the crossword compiler moonlighting as a stripper; from the failed radio actor turned astronaut to the cocaine-addicted maths teacher and mother of three.

There was no question: I was finding it hard to sustain enthusiasm for the case, and the increasingly bizarre nature of my reports was merely a symptom of a deeper problem. I thought it would be easy, but shamming is a talent in itself, and one not given to all. Clearly there are professional cheats and conmen out there who could maintain this sort of thing for years. For me, sadly, my ʻpensionʼ was never going to be so easily won. The charade was becoming stressful. In January, with great regret, and not a few last-minute misgivings, I tendered my resignation to King. I told him Iʼd done my best, but Iʼd reached a dead end, and in all conscience, I could not keep taking his money.

King was as disappointed as Iʼd ever seen him. He took a large bar of chocolate from his desk drawer and began breaking off squares and stuffing them into his mouth. (King once admitted to me that his love of the brown stuff predated even his obsession with the girl.) Between mouthfuls, he tried to persuade me to think again. For him, I finally understood, the search really had been everything. He wanted to be able to say to himself that he was doing everything he could to find the girl. He had hired a real-life finder and paid him real-life money, but this wasnʼt real life, and he knew it as well as I did. Heʼd actually been happy with the sham. Well, in that case, I said to myself, let him find a professional cheat or conman – someone, anyway, more accomplished than I at taking other peopleʼs money and offering nothing but lies in return. I could be a party to it no longer.

Besides, there was another layer of shamming beneath all this – one that I was almost scared to admit to myself. The truth was, Iʼd fallen in love with Kingʼs fantasy girl. I had become besotted with her, and it felt wrong on so many levels that I should be taking his money, pretending to search for her when, even if she did exist, Iʼd never tell him about her anyway – because Iʼd want her for myself.

One Monday afternoon, some fifteen months after Iʼd resigned the case, I was coming out of my local supermarket. It was raining hard and I was hurrying towards my car. I couldnʼt see too well in the downpour and I ran straight into the path of a large black car that was backing into a parking space. My trolley overturned and the carefully packed contents of my shopping bags bounced and rolled all over the tarmac. The driver leapt out and rushed over. She was wearing a cream dress and her hair fell in a dark wave down her back. Raindrops collected like tears on the tips of her eyelashes as she stared up at me with bright, wide eyes. ʻAre you okay?ʼ she asked. She evidently thought I wasnʼt when I failed to reply.

The young woman turned out to be very kind. She helped me pick up all my fallen shopping and even took me for a coffee to make amends (she insisted the whole thing was her fault). Her name was Clare. She was twenty-eight, worked as a project manager for Hoople Construction Ltd, and had a steady boyfriend. I asked her if sheʼd ever been to New York, Dubai or Paddington. She laughed and said no, though she admitted to passing through Paddington on the Underground a fair few times. She never thought to ask me why I asked this question.

Clare was not ʻthe girlʼ. Of course she wasnʼt! On closer inspection, her hair had a coppery sheen and she had a mole on her left cheek. Her dress was actually yellow. Still, for a brief moment, Iʼd seen her, the girl in the portrait, and in that moment I knew all the hollow yearning that King had carried with him for two decades.

When I got back home, I did a trace on Clare. I canʼt explain why – it may have been a compulsive desire for completeness; a need to follow a story through to its conclusion, even when there is no story. I checked all the employees at Hoople Construction. It turned out that none of them was called Clare. This was odd and a little disappointing, though not inexplicable: lots of people lie when talking to strangers.

But then things got weirder. Two days later, I was sitting in my kitchen, leafing through a colour supplement when I chanced upon an article on the building industry that quoted a project manager at Hoople Construction. I was still marvelling at this coincidence when my eye dropped down the page to an advert at the bottom from the Irish Tourist Board, showing a stunning piece of coastline. The photo was captioned ʻThe Cliffs of Moher, County Clareʼ. Another coincidence – or was something else going on here? I flicked forward a few more pages and found an advert for coffee. It featured a girl in a yellow dress with long dark, coppery hair and a mole on her left cheek.

The magazine had been lying on my kitchen table since the previous Sunday. The incident with ʻClareʼ had happened on the Monday. I had no memory of looking at the magazine on either of those days, but perhaps I did. I suppose I did.

This revelation did not make me ashamed. On the contrary, it deepened my respect for my unconscious mind, that had managed to conjure from these pieces of magazine ephemera a fantasy girl of my own – not only that, but it had contrived to make her far more disappointingly real (skin blemish, boyfriend, little in common with me) than King had been willing to permit with his own version – a mark of my greater maturity, perhaps? – or else my smaller ego, Iʼm not sure which.

The incident posed some intriguing questions, however, which I was now determined to try and answer. I began placing orders on some obscure websites. Within a few days, parcels began arriving containing magazines – colour supplements and other glossy leisure journals from March and April 1992. There were a lot of them, and it took me a few hours to go through them all, but eventually I found what I was looking for. It was an advert for chocolate, featuring a girl in a cream dress. I compared the image to the portrait I still carried around with me. The similarity was remarkable. No wonder King had been so pleased with it. For a moment, I was tempted to send King the advert, but then changed my mind. Somehow I doubted heʼd share my amusement.

 

If you enjoyed this story and would like to read more featuring Waldo Mars (who I strongly suspect is the narrator of this one), then can I recommend my ebook,

‘The Finder’, which you’ll find at most online bookstores, including Amazon, at http://www.amazon.co.uk/The-Finder-eb...

Short Story Collections

I’m excited to announce the publication of not one but four new short story collections. These are stories I’ve written over the past decade. They’re about all manner of things – love, betrayal, obsession and many other contortions of the normal functioning mind. For those with a taste for the surreal or spooky, there are tales of haunted swimming pools, cursed typewriters, zombie mother-in-laws – I could go on (but probably shouldn’t). Some are very short, some extremely long, but hopefully they all say something unique about the human condition, or, at the very least, they’ll tell you something you didn’t know about typewriters.

All four volumes are available on Kindle and other ebook devices:

The Typewriter (surreal stories)

The Steel Kiss (tales of twisted love and obsession)

Whispers From Behind the Cellar Door (horror)

The Finder (surreal adventures of a finder, Waldo Mars)

Sleeping with the Enemy

What do you do when you fall in love with the antagonist in your novel? I've never heard of this happening in any of the writing manuals I've read, but it's just happened to me, and it's caused me a really tricky plot dilemma. I'm 25,000 words into this novel and it's going great. I'm happy with the writing. I'm especially happy with the hero, who I find endearingly nerdish and obsessive, but with hidden depths and strengths he's only beginning to discover.

The trouble lies with the bad guy. I made him deliberately charismatic to contrast with the hero. But now I really like him, and I'm getting very uneasy with the downward, increasingly violent trajectory I've got planned for him. For one thing, it doesn't feel quite true to his character, as it's developed during the writing.

Escape route?

There is a possible escape route: a shadowy organisation that exists in the background to the story. I could turn it into an evil, shadowy organisation, and make that the antagonist. I have a believable, ready-made motivation for why it should turn evil, so that's no problem. This could make for an interesting gear change in the novel. So far most of the tension has been generated by my bad guy's mischief-making. Now, maybe, he and the hero could join forces to fight this organisation.

Hitchcock did it!

It's a little like the way Hitchcock killed off Janet Leigh halfway through Psycho. In that case, the antagonist (Norman Bates) remained the same, but the protagonist changed. Hitchcock killed off his protagonist. I don't want to kill off my antagonist. So my big fear with going down this route is that it could overcook things. Suddenly we'll have protagonist + former antagonist joining forces to fight new antagonist. There's also a girl – there has to be a girl! – and she has complex and interesting relationships with both of the main characters. Too much maybe? It could end up as a big overblown, full-fat blancmange, when what I was aiming for was a low-cal Angel Delight.

But the blancmange might spawn babies…

This is a big danger, admittedly. But it could be outweighed by one major benefit of going down the evil organisation route: sequels. It opens up the enticing possibility of more adventures starring my two former enemies, now best buddies. They've vanquished evil organisation, so what's next? In my original storyline, bad guy would have had to perish, making the book by necessity a stand-alone. I don't want to give anything away, but the entire hook/USP of this novel would vanish without the bad guy – so no sequel would be possible.

What do I do? Good question. Have a cup of tea, I think.

The Final Chronosphere?

Tomorrow sees the launch of the final book in the Chronosphere trilogy. It's called Ex Tempora, which means 'Outside Time' in Latin. I chose the title for a very particular reason, which should become clear when you read it. Ex Tempora is set six months after the events described in the first two books. It features all the old characters in a new, exciting adventure in the Chronosphere.

I wrote Ex Tempora a few years after the first two books and it felt quite nostalgic revisiting Raffi and co and finding out how they were getting on. It's a fast-paced story with lots of action, much like Book 2, not to mention some weird and wonderful 22nd-century technology. You get to hear some more about Londaris and the world beyond Chronosphere, and there's even space for a bit of romance.

I added a question mark to the title of this post, not because I'm planning more Chronosphere adventures, but because I feel one should never close a door completely on such possibilities. Ex Tempora feels like the final episode, but that's not to say there won't be another one one day. In the world of the Chronosphere, almost anything is possible…

I hope people will get as much pleasure from reading Ex Tempora as I did from writing it. You can buy it on Amazon and all book outlets from 1 March.

A Kindle for Christmas

The commuter train was unusually empty for a Tuesday morning. We were in that odd hiatus between Christmas and New Year when many firms decide to remain closed. In fact, as far as I could tell without standing up and looking about, the carriage contained no one but myself and the gentleman opposite.

I'd grown to know this gentleman's face very well over my ten years of travelling on the 8.05 from Hertford North, though we'd never once exchanged a word. I had long ago decided that he had a front-office sort of face, by which I mean the face of someone who meets and greets the public, rather than the type who hides himself away behind a computer screen all day. He had friendly wrinkles, which had gradually deepened over the years of our non-speaking acquaintance, and he had beautifully combed hair, which was now greying at the temples. Along with these normal, physical signs of ageing, I thought I'd also detected a certain depletion of the spirit, as if the burdens of life were gradually, by degrees, defeating him. His eyes had dulled, the skin beneath them sagging.

This morning, he was sitting there with his Daily Telegraph as usual propped before his nose, while I perused my new Christmas present, and it appeared at first that we were destined to spend yet another journey in companionable silence.

Then, suddenly, he spoke.

'Is that a Kindle?' he asked with polite curiosity, indicating my Christmas present.

I looked up, surprised and pleased.

'Yes,' I said. 'My wife gave it to me. It's her solution to the problem of my books.'

'Ah,' he twinkled knowingly. 'You have too many, and they're cluttering up the house?'

'Guilty as charged,' I nodded. 'I'm a compulsive book buyer, and I can never bring myself to throw any of them away.'

'I know how you feel,' said the man. 'I have the same issue with music. I love my LP records, but so far I've managed to resist all my wife's attempts to buy me an MP3 player.'

The man was evidently impressed by the slim black rectangle in my hands. He was now peering closely at it.

'Classical music?' I asked.

'No longer, sadly,' he said, looking up. 'I've developed an unfortunate aversion to its upper ranges. Violin particularly. These days I prefer jazz.' He returned his attention to the Kindle. 'Pretty little thing, isn't it?'

'I suppose it is,' I said. 'I have to admit it has its advantages over ink and paper.'

Of course the Kindle could halt the traffic of books coming into our house, but could do nothing about the books already there. Carol's solution to that problem had been much more drastic. I was sure I'd never forget the sight of all my precious darlings boxed up in the entrance hall, ready for dispatch to the charity shop.

The man was evidently intrigued by the Kindle. I held it up for him to look at.

'It's the latest version, you know,' I said, '– complete with voice recognition technology.'

'Voice recognition technology!' he said. 'Well well. What will they think of next?'

'Indeed,' I replied, and I couldn't resist recounting an amusing incident that had befallen me on Christmas Day. 'Something happened to me,' I told him, 'that proves there are hidden hazards as well as unexpected bonuses in voice recognition. You see, as soon as my wife gave me this Kindle, I knew exactly what I wanted to read on it: The Interceptor, my favourite thriller by my favourite writer, Harold Mortimer.' – this being one of the many, many books Carol had obliged me to give away! – 'So, with the device barely out of its wrapping, I said to it in a bold voice: "I would like to buy a book from the Kindle Store", and this soft, rather lovely female voice immediately replied: "Which book would you like to buy, Mr Foster?"' It knew my name because my wife had already linked it up to my account. I told it what I wanted. "The Interceptor," I said, "by Harold Mortimer", to which Miss Kindle smoothly responded: "The Interfector by Herod Mortier is now in your basket. Say 'yes' to confirm your purchase."'

I paused to allow John to absorb what I'd said, and was slightly disappointed not to see him smile. Undeterred, I continued with my tale: 'I couldn't believe it,' I said. 'Perhaps I'd had one too many glasses of bucks fizz that morning, but when I heard this, I simply burst out laughing, and so did my wife. "Yes!" she cried. "Oh yes indeed!"'

I was laughing myself by this stage, as the memory of that moment by the fireside came back to me. I was particularly pleased with my impersonation of Miss Kindle's voice. '"Purchase confirmed" the voice said, and sure enough, this completely unwanted, unasked for and hitherto unknown book, dropped into my Kindle!'

'Well I never,' said my companion. 'How strange. Fancy there being two books with such similar titles by such similar-sounding authors. What are the chances of that?' He put down his paper and held his hand out to me. 'I'm John,' by the way. 'John Axelquist. Pleased to finally meet you after all these years.'

'Likewise,' I said, wiping laughter-tears from my eyes before shaking his hand – the retelling of the story had given me much unanticipated pleasure. 'Alan Foster. Oh dear!' I gasped, wiping my eye again. 'Very pleased to meet you.'

'And this book,' asked John, '– this Interfector. Is it any good?'

I nodded vigorously. 'That was the unexpected bonus I was talking about earlier. The thing is, it is good. In fact, it's rather brilliant. I'm so engrossed in it, I've completely put off buying the Mortimer book. I want to finish this one first.'

'So what's it about?' enquired John, his paper now lying forgotten on the table.

'Well,' I replied, 'this Herod Mortier chap seems to have been a type of early self-help guru. He wrote this book at the beginning of the last century and, according to Wikipedia, he was known in those days as a rather dodgy mystic and occultist. But as far as I can make out, his advice is really very, you know, straightforward. There's nothing mystical about it, so far as I can tell.'

'What sort of advice does he give?' asked John Axelquist.

I frowned, trying to think of a way of encapsulating the flavour of the two hundred or so pages I'd read. 'It's quite hard to summarise, but I suppose you could say, in essence, it's about taking control of your life. Not letting people or events deflect you from your purpose.'

'Sounds quite modern.'

'Yes, I suppose it is really. But it's helped me already, in some little ways… I'm looking forward to trying it out at work.'

This prompted John to ask me what I did for a living, and we spoke about that for a while, but I noticed his eyes kept returning to the Kindle resting in my hands. Eventually he nodded at it and said: 'But tell me, Alan, in practical terms, what's this chap actually saying?'

I didn't welcome this question, as the book was so damnably hard to summarise. 'Well, you see,' I began, 'he talks – well he talks about training yourself to see the world differently – he says we spend most of our lives rather like, uh, little boats in the ocean, getting buffeted by winds and tossed around by waves and suchlike. We have to – to become masters instead of slaves to what he calls life's, uh, elemental forces. He says, well he says… uh.' I was floundering like a little boat in the ocean. 'Look,' I eventually suggested, 'perhaps it would be best if I read you some of it. Or, better still, I'll let Miss Kindle read it to you.' I chuckled. 'That's another clever little optional extra on this version – you can be read to in any voice you like. It's like being a child again!'

John didn't object, so I laid the Kindle on the table between us, turned to a page I'd found particularly memorable, and switched it to 'read aloud' mode. 'This is the default voice,' I explained, 'which reminds me rather nostalgically of a schoolteacher I once had, but we can always change it if you'd prefer something different.'

'I'm sure it's fine, Alan,' he said. 'Please continue.'

The lady began to read, and as he took in her words, I watched John Axelquist's face gradually change. His eyes widened and a slight flush became apparent on his cheeks. That saggy, careworn expression I had grown accustomed to in recent years faded, giving way to a younger look that I recalled from our earliest journeys together. His eyes sparkled and his jaw became firmer, as if a new energy and purpose had suffused him.

When it was finished, he looked me straight in the eye and said: 'Thank you, Alan. I see exactly what you mean. I really think this might help me.'

'At work?'

'Perhaps, but mostly at home.'

Soon after this, the train drew into Old Street Station, and John Axelquist stood up to leave. As he stood, he offered me a little smile and a bow of the head. 'Until tomorrow then, Alan,' he said, and then he left, while I continued on my way to Moorgate.

I didn't see John on the train the following morning. That evening I arrived home, as usual, at six o'clock. As I was hanging up my coat in the entrance hall, I caught a whiff of something from the kitchen. I was pleased to see the boxes filled with my books in the hallway. It had been expensive buying them all back from the charity shop, but worth every penny. I would enjoy returning them to their shelves after supper.

I went into the living room and switched on the evening news. There was a report about a talented female musician who'd been found dead in her Hertford home, strangled by one of her own violin strings. Her name caught my attention. Mary Axelquist. How funny!

On the screen, a reporter was standing outside a semi-detached house saying: 'The victim's husband, John Axelquist, confessed to the crime at Hertford police station this morning. According to a police spokeswoman, Axelquist claimed to have been influenced by a book called The Interfector, also known as The Killer, by Herod Mortier. The book, which he apparently discovered as an ebook on a friend's Kindle, has been subject to a worldwide ban – a ban that came into force only a few years after its publication in 1901 because of its allegedly pernicious effects on any who read it. Amazon have announced they are launching an internal investigation to discover exactly how an ebook version of this work became available–'

I switched off the television. That's quite enough of that, I thought. Time to go and say hello to Carol. I found her in the kitchen, sitting at the table, knife and fork in hand, ready to tuck into her plate of Christmas dinner. It was funny to see her sitting there with her party hat still on. The hat had fallen over one eye. I straightened it and kissed her on the cheek.

My Existential Crisis about God (and Publishing)

Forty years ago, at about this time of year, a schoolfriend of mine (now a prominent human rights lawyer) told me that there was no such thing as Father Christmas. We were both seven at the time, and I remember standing in his entrance hall – we'd just got home from school and I hadn't even taken my coat off. I was still reeling from this pronouncement when he added, almost as an afterthought: 'Oh, and there's no such thing as God, either.'

To be honest, I'd been harbouring doubts about the existence of Mr Claus for some while, purely on the grounds of logistics (number of children in the world versus number of hours in the night, narrowness of most chimneys, etc), but until that moment I'd never considered the possibility that there might not be a supreme being. I didn't know one could even be an atheist, and I was half expecting my friend to be struck down for his impudence by a celestial thunderbolt.

When he wasn't and everything just continued as normal, I felt a queasy sort of weightlessness. A crucial strut in the world view I'd been carefully constructing for myself during the short span of my existence had been casually knocked aside. As I stood there in his entrance hall, the world suddenly felt like a darker, colder place. If there was no God, there might be no natural justice: good people could suffer; bad people could thrive. So what was the point of being good? What, in fact, was the point of life? I felt a terrifying loneliness at that moment that was quite a lot like vertigo and made me almost physically sick.

I can't compare anything that's happened to me since then to that existential crisis in my friend's entrance hall, but from time to time in my life, I've experienced pale echoes of that feeling. For example, when I've been dumped by a girlfriend or been made redundant from a job, or had my brilliant novel rejected by a publisher – basically any time that certainties or assumptions about myself and my value are put to the test and found wanting.

The most recent example of this concerns my fears about the current state of children's non-fiction publishing. I have made a decent living for the past fifteen years writing and editing non-fiction school and library books, mainly for 11-14 year olds. But in the last couple of years, this market has almost completely collapsed. Whereas when I started in the mid-1990s, print runs for these types of books would regularly be four or even five thousand, they're now likely to be no more than four or five hundred – which basically means that we can't afford to do them.

Of course the reason for this is that teenagers are getting their information from the Internet. At first I and my colleagues assumed that this change wouldn't affect us too badly. After all, we're creative people, and the medium through which we express that creativity shouldn't matter. As the market for printed books declines, there ought to be a corresponding rise in demand for digital materials, and we'll just switch our energies to that, right?

Wrong! There has been little or no expansion, as far as I can tell, in subscription-based websites in the wake of the collapse of the printed book market. Publishers do not feel confident about investing in digital because they fear that students won't want to pay for information – not when there's so much free stuff available.

Some of the free material is good, but much of it is dodgy, and it's unlikely that the average student will be able to distinguish between the two. I was talking to a publisher friend yesterday, who told me he'd recently been researching a book on castles and found a smart-looking website devoted to the subject. The website talked quite authoritatively about 'moat-and-bailey' castles.

The books we used to produce weren't always perfect, but we had fact-checkers, editors, consultants and foreign publishers all checking the texts. No one is checking the online stuff, and unless and until the culture changes and people recognize that if they want reliable information, they'll have to pay for it, the consequences will be disastrous, not just for myself and my colleagues – but for the entire world.

As I joked with my friend yesterday, it's like a scenario for a dystopian fantasy in which ignorance gradually creeps up on us without us even realising it. I can almost hear the voiceover to the movie trailer: In a world where facts can no longer be trusted, everyone knows everything, but no one can be certain if any of it is true!

So, this sense of vertigo I have now is worse than the one I might have had at previous times in my life on being rejected by a girlfriend, employer or publisher – that was only about me, after all. This is more like the feeling I had in my friend's entrance hall forty years ago. What's going on now in children's non-fiction publishing could, if it continues, ultimately send us all back into the dark ages. Now that would be an existential crisis!

The Art of Ventriloquist Fiction

I've now finished the first draft of book one of my new YA spooky series. I'm quite pleased with it, but am worried about my central character (a 14-year-old girl). I'm a man in my 40s. I've never been a 14-year-old girl. Yet I'm writing in the first person. But, I keep trying to reassure myself, people are basically people. I know we go on about the generation gap and the gender gap, but we're not so different. And writers are actors. We're used to inhabiting roles. As long as the character is engaging and internally consistent and doesn't say 'utilise' when she means 'use' or 'facilitate' when she means 'help' and never uses 'one' as a pronoun, that should be enough. Right?

Well, hopefully. But I have another problem with all this…

Basically, I'm relying on a kid to tell my story! I mean would a car mechanic or a flight controller or a brain surgeon let their son or daughter…? Well, you know where I'm going with this. My young narrator has got to (a) describe her fellow characters and the scenery to a standard I'm happy with, (b) make the story suspenseful, entertaining, scary, etc, (c) make the reader jump at the bits when I want them to jump. Basically she's got to do my job. But she's still got to act and sound like a teenager! What was I thinking?

Okay, so there has to be something else going on here. All is not quite as it appears. Agreed, our teenage heroine must sound authentic; the reader must believe in her. But that doesn't mean we can't do a little bit of behind-the-scenes manipulation along the way.

Essentially I see my role in this exercise as a ventriloquist, with the narrator as my dummy. When she speaks, the spotlight will be on her, and the audience will believe that she is saying the words. The words will sound like hers. They'll be done in her accent with her intonation.

I just hope that no one will see my lips moving.

And, of course, the best exponents of ventriloquist fiction are those who turn these apparent drawbacks to their advantage. They will deliberately exploit the limitations of their narrator to heighten the effects they are trying to achieve. In my case this means exploiting the relative youth and innocence of my heroine to achieve even bigger suspense and scares – work with the grain and not against it. I don't think I'm quite there yet!

 

 

 

The P Word

Many decades ago, when I was about 15, I read a horror story in an obscure paperback anthology. I've long since forgotten the title, author and most of the details of the story, but the final sentence – when the form of the monster is revealed – stayed with me. As a piece of fun, I wrote a similar-themed story a few years ago that used the same final line. I didn't use the same wording – I couldn't remember it anyway – but the thing described and the intended effect were basically the same. I read the story to my writing group and, to my amazement, someone recognized the line. Like me, she couldn't remember much about the story itself, but she remembered the final line. I've never submitted this story for publication. It's not only fear of being found out, it's also a matter of principle. The final line, which forms the pay-off, the reveal, the twist in the tale, was written by someone else. Even if the other 99.9% of the story is entirely my own, and even if my version of the final line is only similar, not the same, the principle still holds – because that line is so critical.

During the 1990s, I started writing an experimental novel, long since abandoned, based on the central character in the J D Salinger short story, 'A Perfect Day for Bananafish'. If the book had ever been finished, and published, I would have had to acknowledge the debt. But it wasn't, I'm glad to say, so I never had to face such an issue. But it did start me thinking about the issue of plagiarism, and what it actually is. I'm not talking about the legal definition; I'm talking about plagiarism as a moral issue, as a matter for writers.

Many stories are derivative in one way or another. Characters, plots and themes are often recycled. Some would argue that there is no such thing as originality, and plagiarism is a continuum. I would disagree. There are millions of words in the English language and countless trillions of ways of inventively combining and recombining them. There never has been, nor ever will be, a definitive way of expressing a thought, emotion or action. The recycling of universally loved themes, plots and character-types is inevitable and desirable, and certainly not what is meant by plagiarism. Genre writers, especially, find themselves returning again and again to familiar territory. It is the challenge for them, as it is for all writers, to constantly seek fresh ways of telling their stories, employing different styles and new, compelling voices. Cliché, after all, is just a legal form of plagiarism.

Plagiarism is an undervaluing of oneself as a writer and of writing as an art form. It's equating writing with manufacture, with formulas and systems, and once it comes down to that, it's a short walk to plagiarism. Why not? If another set of words does the job, why not use them?

There are no hard and fast rules on this subject, and every writer must make their own judgements. I tend to avoid reading other people's work while I'm writing a novel, as I know how easy it is to unconsciously adopt another writer's style. For me, the whole joy of writing is finding new and different ways of saying familiar things; to trigger a reaction – be it laughter, sadness, pleasure or fear – and do it through words that are entirely my own. That's where the fun lies.

Starting a novel

Today I'm starting work on a new novel. I'm in a state of nervous, caffeine-fuelled, slightly fearful excitement. My fear is not of the blank page or a shortage of ideas. My problem lies in the other direction: I probably have too many ideas, and at this early stage, keeping them in check is especially important and difficult. The novel is not even an embryo yet, it's a blastula of non-specialized stem cells. I know, broadly speaking, the species of animal it will turn into, but not yet its type or colour or character. I know the genre and the target readership. I have the broad outlines of the plot. Beyond that it has the potential to turn into almost anything, and its precise fate will be determined in the next few hours and days. Characters will be formed and gradually fleshed out, plot lines developed, rejected, revived and reworked. My fear is that I may take a wrong turn: my blastula might develop a genetic flaw, hampering its eventual development into a healthy beast. I may decide my central character is too weak or too pretty, or that deformity I gave her in the opening paragraph is seriously threatening to undermine her emerging role as an action or romantic heroine. All the decisions I make at this stage are utterly critical, and this is the source of my nerves, fear and excitement. I want it to be the best it can possibly be, but how can I be sure it will be when there are so many possible paths to choose from? My awareness of this will, I'm sure, infect my writing style. I will go back again and again over every sentence as I write it, agonizing over each adjective, each comma, until I feel it's perfect. And then, alea jacta est, I shall pass onto the next sentence, hopefully with a feeling that something solid has been laid down, a flagstone in the footpath. There is a ghost that will be hanging over me during all this: the novel I didn't write. The paths I didn't take. And the nagging suspicion that some of those paths might have been equally or possibly more interesting. I should remember that when I'm doing readings or interviews, once it's published. I should remember that this novel was an accident in many ways. I never really intended it.

Brighton dreams

Just got back from a brief day-trip to my favourite city in all the world. I spent six fabulous years in Brighton in the 90s, and I've made innumerable trips back there since, for work and pleasure. It's changed a little since those days – new shops, beautiful new library – but the atmosphere is at it always was – city-sophisticated, yet small-town friendly. A coastal resort that feels like a metropolis. Seedy, brash, urbane, adolescent, worldly. A bit Graham Greene. A bit Steve Coogan. I've travelled a little in my time, around Europe and the Americas, but I've never seen anywhere with such a unique, almost cocky sense of itself as something special. You can hear it in the loud voices conversing in the streets, not caring who overhears, and see it in the eccentric shops with their bright, colourful awnings. I was there for a meeting with my publisher. We had a good, long chat about Chronosphere, Aldo Moon, and possible themes for future projects. After that, I met an old friend for lunch, and the time just went, as it always does in this city. I almost forgot I didn't still live here, and that I had a train to catch. But I caught my train and here I am, back at my North London desk, feeling as I always do after a trip to Brighton: weary, hung over and very happy.