The Pleasures and Pains of Pastiche

Writing pastiche – what a cop-out, eh? You don't even have to think up your own characters and plot, you just piggy-back on someone else's. It's cheating, really. It's a lazy choice of genre.

Seriously though, it's not all plain sailing, you do have to put in a bit of effort. For one thing, you have to get the style as close to the original author's as possible – the best compliments I've received about My Dearest Holmes have been along the lines of 'you really do think you're reading Arthur Conan Doyle!' For another, you have to deal with any little anomalies that crop up in the original story – sometimes you can have fun with these! I enjoyed thinking up an explanation for Watson's wife suddenly addressing him as 'James' in The Man with the Twisted Lip, and having Holmes remind Watson in (my version of) The Adventure of the Final Problem that he HAS heard of Professor Moriarty before (referencing The Valley of Fear, which Doyle wrote later, but set earlier).

No need to wrestle with an unfamiliar style in my current venture, 'The Cat In The Bag'. In The Summer House: A Trilogy, Alice Thomas Ellis uses a different voice for each of her three narrators - the young, pious, traumatised Margaret, the world-weary Mrs Monro, and Lili, the culture-hopping tart-with-a-heart – so I have carte blanche to give my character, Cynthia, her own style. I've endowed her with native intelligence, spiritual curiosity, a Grammar School education and secretarial qualifications, and her vocabulary betrays her working-class roots. I've had particular fun with her conversations with Mrs Raffald, her predecessor's cleaning lady, whom she clearly prefers to her hostess when staying at The Oaks in the run-up to Margaret's wedding.

But when it comes to tidying up the odd anomaly, I've had my work cut out. The three books that make up the trilogy were published in 1987, 1988 and 1989 respectively, so it's fair to say that Alice Thomas Ellis took a short break between each novella, and in doing so she seems to have muddled the time frame of Cynthia and Derek's visit to Croydon considerably! In The Clothes In The Wardrobe, Margaret writes 'My father arrived with his wife and children two days before the wedding' (elsewhere she seems to imply that it was the day before, but we'll disregard that, it's already going to get complicated enough). This means they arrive on the Thursday. At some point on that same day, Margaret goes down to the summer-house and finds 'some torn scraps of red crepe paper on the floor'. We know it's the Thursday, because that evening they phone Syl at his house and he's not in; on the Friday evening, he's having pre-wedding drinks at The Oaks with his mother.

In Lili's narrative, The Fly In The Ointment, she describes finding the children's red paper party hats discarded under the kitchen table on the morning AFTER their arrival and pocketing them ('I did it the next morning, when I was still not entirely sober'). If they arrived on the Thursday, this would be the Friday – so how does Margaret find scraps of paper from these stolen hats the day before? And it gets worse - Lili then pays several visits to Mrs Monro (Syl's mother), travels up to London to meet her errant husband Robert and her friend Celestine, and finally goes to her assignation with Syl - which we know takes place on the Thursday evening. This means that in Lili's version, Derek and Cynthia arrive on Wednesday at the latest (are you keeping up?)

Then we come to Mrs Monro's narrative, The Skeleton in the Cupboard, in which Lili appears to turn up at her house bringing red crepe paper to make into artificial flowers the day BEFORE Derek and Cynthia arrive! How did she get hold of the children's paper hats before they'd even left Southampton? You see my dilemma!

So how have I dealt with all this? Well, I've decided to stick with Margaret's version and have Cynthia and Derek drive up from Southampton with the children on the Thursday morning. The paper hats are left in the kitchen after supper that same evening, for Lili to discover on the Friday. Although Cynthia observes Lili going back and forth along the lane behind the garden hedge from the guest room window, the purpose and timescale of these shenanigans is not her problem, or mine! As for Mrs M, she's old and forgetful – Cynthia only meets her once, at the Friday night drinks party, and would obviously have no idea about Lili's visit with the filched paper hats, whenever it occurred. Phew!

And with that sorted, I've completed a first draft. Now for the polishing and editing process ...