Vive La Difference

Out dog-walking this week, with a woman from the village I know
reasonably well, I spoke without thinking. 'You're so refreshingly
nuts,' I told her. She laughed nervously, and then went quiet for a
while. Perhaps I should have been less direct.

But I meant it as a great compliment. Of all the people I see on
a regular basis, she is someone whose company I particularly enjoy.
She has her own way of doing things and is happy with that, but
wouldn't dream of judging those who take a different approach.
She's happy to talk about dogs, children and home decorating (she's
perfectly normal and these things are interesting) but she's also
passionate about alternative medicine, the environment and
accessible arts. Conversations with her can go in any direction,
but I always leave her company feeling that my mind has been
stretched and I've learned something new.

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Nuts, to my mind, means interesting, entertaining, unusual,
maybe a bit zany, but above all different. And different is
good.

I've been thinking about this a lot in the last few days. Partly
because the reviews for Dead Scared have started to appear on
Amazon. As a rule, reviewers are pretty kind to me but, invariably,
those negative adjectives creep in: "implausible", "far-fetched",
"outlandish".

I don't like it, but it's a fair cop. I am a bit outlandish. I
don't write classic police-procedurals in which a killer with a
predictable motive is both hunter and hunted at the same time. I
don't do cosy, rural mysteries where an assembled cast of
characters are judged and found guilty, or not, by the reader. I
write snakes and ghosts, inanimate figures that come to life and
crawl around an abandoned abbey, detectives with more to hide than
the killers they're pursuing.

When I'm criticized it's invariably because, as crime writers
go, I'm a bit different.

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I've tried to toe the line, honest I have. Now You See Me was my
attempt at the classic city-based police procedural. I planned it
to be gritty, urban, with a simple plot and a believable story
line. Of course, being me, it didn't quite work out that way; the
outlandish ideas and Gothic influences crept in, one by one, until
as Andrew Taylor wrote in The Spectator: 'You don't so much suspend
disbelief as chuck it gleefully out of the window.'

I can't do it you see. I can't write mainstream crime. For
better or worse, I'm different and I've come to terms with
that.

What I haven't come to terms with, yet, is how different I can
"allow" my ten year old son to be. He has slightly wacky genes
(inevitably) but at the same time a fragile self-confidence and a
child's inherent awareness of the desirability of the norm.

He wants the support and camaraderie of the team, but not at the
price of spending every school break playing football. He craves
the acceptance of others and popularity within the group, but not
at the expense of the quiet voice inside him that speaks for his
true self.

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It's hard, steering a child along the steep and precarious path
of discovering his place in the world. I will not tell him to
always do what he wants, because there are times when going along
with the crowd is the natural and right thing to do. Following the
herd occasionally, to my mind, is no worse than a stubborn
insistence on being different purely for the sake of it.

And left behind by the herd is a lonely place to be.

It's all about balance, judgment and, ultimately, wisdom. And
here is where I find myself encouraged. Because my nuttiest friends
(you know who you are) are, strangely, also my wisest, the ones on
whom I can always rely for honest and considered advice. Weird
people, I've noticed, are invariably inherently sensible, as though
the first step to wisdom is understanding and accepting who you
are, even if what you are is a little alternative.

My son played in a football match yesterday, and merited special
mention in the post-match report circulated by the club manager. He
is proud as punch and so am I. It's good to be different, but
sometimes it's better to gain the acceptance and approbation of our
peers.