Motivation
In every novel I've written I've tried to keep the writing fresh by taking on a new fictive challenge. In The Lucifer Chord, this was making supergroup Ghost Legion and their frontman Martin Mear seem an authentic part of rock history. I want readers too young to recall the 1970s googling them, convinced that they must have existed in actuality.
This wasn't in the writing, a straightforward process. Inventing Ghost Legion's history and creative output and supposed cultural legacy was easy. Martin himself, though, was much trickier. He was enigmatic. He was profoundly - and paradoxically - private. He was a keeper of secrets. And he was someone different to everyone who knew him. A Russian doll of a man, in the words of the Legion's veteran manager Carter Melville. Layers uncovered until there's almost nothing left.
But that's one of the reasons my researcher heroine Ruthie Gillespie takes on the commission of sorting man from myth at the outset of the story. There's a long essay to write about Martin to accompany the definitive box set containing every recording he ever made. There's a generous fee involved. But in the opening chapter, Ruthie needs a distraction from her own emotional predicament. That, and the fact that she likes a challenge, are her real reasons for bidding for the job. She also has a talent for solving mysteries, which in this novel, is tested to its fullest extent.
'Cottam is adept at creating an atmosphere so disquieting that a sliver of ice lodges in your brain and remains until the final twist.' So said Kirkus Review, reviewing The Lucifer Chord. At the start of this piece, I said I try to do something different in every book, and that's true. But I always, always try to scare you. That never changes and I don't think it ever will.
This wasn't in the writing, a straightforward process. Inventing Ghost Legion's history and creative output and supposed cultural legacy was easy. Martin himself, though, was much trickier. He was enigmatic. He was profoundly - and paradoxically - private. He was a keeper of secrets. And he was someone different to everyone who knew him. A Russian doll of a man, in the words of the Legion's veteran manager Carter Melville. Layers uncovered until there's almost nothing left.
But that's one of the reasons my researcher heroine Ruthie Gillespie takes on the commission of sorting man from myth at the outset of the story. There's a long essay to write about Martin to accompany the definitive box set containing every recording he ever made. There's a generous fee involved. But in the opening chapter, Ruthie needs a distraction from her own emotional predicament. That, and the fact that she likes a challenge, are her real reasons for bidding for the job. She also has a talent for solving mysteries, which in this novel, is tested to its fullest extent.
'Cottam is adept at creating an atmosphere so disquieting that a sliver of ice lodges in your brain and remains until the final twist.' So said Kirkus Review, reviewing The Lucifer Chord. At the start of this piece, I said I try to do something different in every book, and that's true. But I always, always try to scare you. That never changes and I don't think it ever will.
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