N is for Naughty Language

 

There isn’t any. At least, not what you’d call naughty language.

The STAC Mysteries are cosy crimes. The accent is on the mystery, not a graphic depiction of real life, so there is no need for strong language.

It’s over fifty years since the famous Chatterley trial brought the word ‘fuck’ onto the printed page. It’s now so commonplace that it’s lost much of its power, and most of its ability to shock. And yet, as far as I’m concerned, it has no place in the STAC Mysteries.

That is the extreme to which I won’t go, but stepping back from that particular boundary, it’s sometimes difficult to decide what is and is not acceptable. I even stressed the point in the text of The I-Spy Murders, when the producer and her assistant discuss Brenda’s irritated language.

In the control room, Helen blanched. “Should we bleep that out?”

“What? Arse?” Katy demanded. “That’s nothing.”

“I still think we should bleep it out.”

That’s nothing, Katy insists, but to some people it can still be construed as rough language.

The good people at Crooked Cat also take this matter quite seriously. There’s a gag in My Deadly Valentine, where Joe is recalling having told Chief Inspector Vickers to get a dog so he can tell the difference between a bark and berk (berk is common a English word for a someone behaving like an idiot).

In the original draft, however, Joe had been talking about typographical error whereby Vickers had left the letter ‘o’ out of the word ‘count’. Crooked Cat were (rightly) concerned that it was a step too far for a cosy crime novel, so I changed it.

I write material which is much darker than the STAC Mysteries, and I have no hesitation in using ‘industrial language’ in those texts, but such words have no place in the world of Joe, Sheila, Brenda and the Sanford 3rd Age Club.

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The STAC Mysteries are available as paperbacks and as e-book downloads in all formats, or direct from Crooked Cat Books in MOBI, EPUB and PDF formats