Kitabı oku: «Howdunit», sayfa 4

Getting Started
Janet Laurence

You may have an investigative character or a fiendishly clever way of disposing of someone buzzing around your brain. If this is the case, what are you waiting for?

Maybe you enjoy reading crime novels and feel that you could write one as good if not better than the ones you have come across. That is how Colin Dexter started during a wet holiday in Wales. His chosen setting was Oxford, a city he knew very well. The outcome was Last Bus to Woodstock, which introduced Inspector Morse and Sergeant Lewis. The rest is history. All you need is the right idea.

Ideas are everywhere, you only need to open your mind to the possibilities. Read the newspapers, browse the library, listen to people talking, in the train, in the office, at social gatherings; there will be stories that can form the basis of a crime novel. Look for motives, methods, and how crimes are solved. Do beware, though, of opening yourself to being sued through not disguising the source of your plot and characters.

The best crime novels provide characters that grab the reader and drive the story. They need to have attractive qualities but also flaws. Think about your friends, what makes you like them enough to forgive their drawbacks? Who are the people you meet or read about in your daily life that you remember and why? We are not talking background or appearance here, but inbred qualities. You need characters who will behave in ways that will take your plot in interesting directions and that the reader will enjoy spending time with. The investigator you create, whether a member of the CID murder squad, a forensic pathologist, or someone unofficial, needs to be interested in the human psyche, someone who can explore questionable situations and puzzle out unexpected answers.

There must be suspects with a motive for murder, one of whom actually is the murderer and must occupy a reasonable space in the action. No bringing in the culprit just before the end. Finally you need the victim, or victims. Often there will need to be a second victim, or even a third. There may be one or two subplots which somehow link in with, or reflect in some way, the main plot.

The actual crime doesn’t have to be complicated: it can be a blow to the skull with a blunt instrument; a hit-and-run with a car; a push off a balcony or through a window. Less simple will be poison; a gangland kidnap and torture before death; a fire that makes identification of the victim difficult; and so on. Your imagination can provide any number of other examples.

Every crime has a motive. What has driven someone to kill? In your novel there should be several candidates who can have a motive for wishing the victim dead. They are the suspects. It is difficult to keep the reader guessing as to which one was responsible with fewer than four suspects, though Minette Walters has in one instance done an excellent job with only three. However, more than six suspects and the reader, sometimes even the writer, can get confused.

Alongside motivation your investigator has to consider the evidence surrounding the murder scene. These days the official investigation involves forensic teams minutely scanning both body and area and sending samples to a laboratory for analysis. Personally, I don’t feel equipped to enter this world and these days much prefer to set my crime novels in the past, with three novels featuring the Italian artist Canaletto and two more set in the Edwardian era with Ursula Grandison as the lead character. I like to make my investigator use eyes, ears and brain to assess what the scene offers as evidence, rather than looking to science. It is possible, though, for a modern unofficial investigator to manage without the forensic science aspect.

Crime novels rose to popularity in the Twenties. Most relied on the puzzle element in their story to keep the reader engrossed. Some were fiendishly clever. In the Thirties, what is known as the Golden Age of crime writing, female authors such as Dorothy L. Sayers, Margery Allingham and Josephine Tey wrote detective novels with strong and memorable characters. Their investigators Lord Peter Wimsey, Albert Campion and Inspector Grant, have remained popular; new editions of their books are constantly being produced and their influence has continued into the present day.

Some element of puzzle, as superbly demonstrated by Agatha Christie, continues to have appeal. It is taken for granted that readers will look for clues to enable them to work out who ‘did it’ before the writer reveals the answer. There will be ‘red herrings’, clues that suggest the perpetrator is one of the other suspects, alongside subtle references that keep the reader in the dark until the denouement. There will usually be a number of ‘twists’, turning what has been suggested as the answer to the mystery on its head, maybe more than once, with a stunning ‘revelation’ providing the climax to the book. When I told P. D. James that I’d be hopeless at writing a crime novel as I could never sort out who ‘did it’ in any of the books I so enjoyed, she said, ‘It’s easier when you know who “did it”.’ This is true, though sometimes the writer will change their mind as to which suspect was the murderer. Ruth Rendell once said she had sometimes changed the perpetrator as she approached the end of a book: ‘If I can fool myself, then I’ll fool the reader as well.’

The setting and background to a crime novel can be anything that fires the writer’s imagination; it can look at a social problem such as knife killing or forms of dementia, reveal how a cruise ship is run or a television programme put together, or consider the need for food banks. Readers love to learn while enjoying a good read.

Most good crime novels will involve a theme, usually subtly suggested rather than shouted out. Writers such as Philip Pullman and Val McDermid say that they discover their theme while they are writing the book.

The denouement of a crime novel has to offer a resolution, one that will satisfy the reader. Many of today’s most successful crime novels work on a number of different levels but the ending has to bring the various strands together. Subplots should be settled before the final revelation. The main questions that have been raised need to be answered but there can be others left to the reader’s imagination, or that may provide hooks for another crime novel that includes a character or two from your initial one. Many authors find the kernel of their next plot emerging as they get towards the end of writing the current book.

To sum up, you need an interesting setting for your story, a strong plot, believable characters and a resolution that surprises whilst it makes sense of everything that has gone before. Writing a crime novel is hard work – Ian Rankin once said that being a crime writer was absolutely great, apart from the actual writing. There will be times, though, when the characters come alive, the plot explodes with new ideas, when that elusive ending is staring you in the face and you know that writing crime novels is the best thing in the world.

‘Ideas are everywhere’, Janet Laurence points out. Patricia Highsmith, who said in her fascinating book Plotting and Writing Suspense Fiction that she was driven to creativity ‘out of boredom with reality’, recommended writers to keep a notebook. You can jot ideas down before they are forgotten. Highsmith also argued that emotions, both positive and negative, could be a fertile source of ideas. In her view, it is almost impossible to be out of ideas, and the usual reason why writers sometimes feel bereft of inspiration is that they are suffering from fatigue or external pressures.

One of the most successful writers during the Golden Age of detective fiction between the wars was Freeman Wills Crofts. His work suffered neglect for half a century following his death, but has recently enjoyed a revival. Reprints of his novels have brought him back into the public eye after a long absence from the shelves, and his work has even been optioned for television. Resolutely traditionalist in approach, he outlines five types of ideas for crime stories.

Finding Ideas
Freeman Wills Crofts

If we’re lucky we shall begin with a really good idea. This may be one of five kinds. Firstly, it may be an idea for the opening of our book: some dramatic situation or happening to excite and hold the reader’s interest. The standard way of finding a body in the first chapter, if hackneyed, is hard to beat.

Secondly, our idea may be for the closing or climax of our book. This must also be dramatic. As an example I suggest the well-known situation in which Tom, who thinks Jack is dead and has impersonated him, is unexpectedly confronted with Jack in a police office or court of law.

Our idea, thirdly, may be for a good way of committing a crime, probably a murder. It should be novel and ingenious – but not too ingenious – and if possible concerned with things with which the man in the street is familiar. This is probably the most usual way of starting work on a book. Every detective fan will think of dozens of examples.

A fourth kind of idea on which to build a book is that we shall write about some definite crime, such as smuggling, gun-running, coining, arson, or frauds in high finance.

Lastly, our idea may be simply to place the action in a definite setting, such as a mining setting, or a golf or fishing setting, or to lay our scenes in a certain place: a bus or an office, an opium den or Canterbury Cathedral.

We may of course build our book on some idea which does not fall under one of these heads. For instance, Dr Austin Freeman’s book, The Red Thumb Mark, was probably built on the idea that a fingerprint is not necessarily convincing evidence.

This then is the first stage in our work: getting the idea to start on. Our second stage is more difficult: we have to build up the plot on our idea.

We do this in a very simple, but very tedious way: we ask ourselves innumerable questions and think out the answers. One question invariably leads to another, and as we go on our plot gradually takes shape.

Nicholas Blake – the poet Cecil Day-Lewis – began writing ingenious Golden Age puzzles to earn some extra cash in the 1930s, but as time passed became increasingly ambitious as a detective novelist. Introducing an omnibus edition of his finest stories, he explained their diverse origins. Unluckily for him, one clever idea had already occurred to another crime writer, who later became a colleague in the Detection Club.

Sources of Inspiration
Nicholas Blake

Imagination at full stretch: emotional involvement … During the Thirties, I saw my little son narrowly missed by a road hog. Suppose he had been killed, and the police were unable to trace the hit-and-run driver? Such was the germ of The Beast Must Die. I tried to imagine myself into the mind of a man – a widower whose only child had been killed like this: how would he find the culprit, and how might he set about destroying him? Revenge, incidentally, seems to be the motive in quite a few of my detection novels, though I am not an overly vindictive person. Perhaps, if I had lived in the early seventeenth century, I would have turned out revenge dramas after the Jacobean pattern. But the point is that, if The Beast Must Die has a sharper edge than most of my thrillers, it is because it sprang from that initial involvement of my emotions, and because I was enabled thus to take the hero’s plight at a more serious imaginative level. This book has the one first-rate plot I have ever invented – a plot, by the way, which was no great shakes till, halfway through the book, I suddenly saw how the hero could use his diary.

The plot of A Tangled Web, on the other hand, was given to me gratis – by ‘The Case of the Hooded Man’, as Sir Patrick Hastings called it in his Memoirs, the first case in which that celebrated KC led for the defence. At Eastbourne early this century a policeman was shot by a burglar – a clergyman’s son who bore the most remarkable resemblance, in temperament and actions, to Hornung’s ‘Raffles’. Sir Patrick was chiefly concerned, in his book, with the legal aspects of the case. So I could exercise all my imagination in reconstructing the character of this young burglar, of his beautiful and innocent mistress, and of the ‘friend’ who proved to be their downfall – a man who, even through Sir Patrick’s factual account, shines out luridly as the nearest thing to Iago I have ever heard about in real life. My emotions, even at the distance of 45 years, became thoroughly involved with the burglar’s girl as I interpreted her. After the book was finished, inquiries among retired policemen who had taken part in the case discovered that several things I had imagined about the Iago character, though not mentioned at the trial, were in fact true.

The germ of A Penknife in my Heart was also given me. A friend suggested a story in which two men, previously unknown to each other and both needing to get rid of certain human encumbrances, meet by chance and decide to swap victims. Neither my friend nor I had read Patricia Highsmith’s Strangers on a Train, or seen the film Hitchcock made of it. Later, I found that Miss Highsmith’s treatment was entirely different from mine; but its starting-point was identical – and, horror of horrors, I had given two of my characters the same Christian names as she had used for two of hers. The plot of A Penknife in my Heart is the most ‘fictional’ of the three presented here, and the most diagrammatic. To put flesh on it, I had to work myself into the minds of two very different men – a coarse brute and a weaker, more sensitive character, plunge as deep as I could into their weird relationship, and be each of them as he made his murder-attempt (upon a complete stranger), and live with them through the aftermath. It needed a pretty strenuous stretching of the invention.

Even before the plot is constructed in detail (or not constructed, in the case of authors like Eric Ambler, who regard writing a crime story as a voyage of discovery) there comes another question. Which type of crime fiction to choose? How to put it all together? Anthea Fraser and Ann Granger, two highly experienced novelists who both worked in other genres before specializing in crime fiction, describe their personal approaches.

Making Choices
Anthea Fraser

Crime writing is a broad church, offering a choice of police procedural, supernatural, hard-boiled, ‘noir’, psychological or romantic suspense, espionage, thrillers or whodunits, though sometimes the sub-genres can blur at the edges and overlap. I came to crime writing myself by way of paranormal books, which were enjoying a vogue at the time. When public interest started to wane, my agent asked if I’d like to change genre, and realizing there’d been a crime in each of the paranormals, I found I’d already made my choice.

It’s important to remember that although you’ll be writing over a period of months, the reader might take only a few days to read the entire book, so the same ‘tone of voice’ should be kept throughout. Sometimes I can tell where I’ve stopped for the day by a very slight but noticeable change of style, so I always begin by rereading (and heavily editing) what I wrote the previous day to ensure it flows without a break.

The main aim, of course, is to grab the reader’s attention from page one, and there are various devices to achieve this. You could start with a prologue covering an event that, unknown to the characters, has already happened. Or begin with an explosive incident that hasn’t yet happened, but which the reader is awaiting with trepidation until it occurs later in the book. Or you could have a catalytic event taking place in ‘real time’ which is the actual starting point of the story – such as the discovery of a dead body.

Conflict is, of course, a necessary component to a good story, whether between lovers, police colleagues or family members, and can pave the way to any number of situations, often resulting in murder. However the maxim ‘Write about what you know’ just isn’t possible when you’re dealing with murder, and anyway, what price imagination? I turn it round to ‘Know about what you write’, and try to make sure I check my facts – thoroughly – easy these days with the internet. When writing a police procedural, however, there really is no substitute for personal contact with a friendly officer who is prepared to answer any number of queries you might raise. What’s more, they seem to enjoy it, and I used to send my contact a copy of each book to thank him for ‘helping with my enquiries’!

If you’re lucky, you might find your characters already waiting in the wings, fully formed and ready to go, but failing that it’s useful to keep a ‘Faces and Places’ file containing photos torn out of magazines or newspapers of interesting faces (preferably not anyone well known) and the interiors of houses, or town or village streets along which you can imagine your characters walking. If any of these are applicable for the plot you have in mind, you can stick them up on a cork board in front of you. It’s helpful to look at them and think, ‘What would you do in this situation?’

Character names are extremely important and often people won’t come to life if you choose the wrong name. Sometimes, as the characters develop, it might be necessary to change one halfway through – no problem with the Replace All key. Since names go in and out of fashion, consideration must be given to the age and social status of the character. I also try to avoid any that are unisex or begin with the same letter, which might cause confusion.

The setting you choose is crucial; personally I’ve found it gives me more freedom to use imaginary locations. I do, however, picture them in a particular part of the country, and try to ensure the made-up place names fit in with those in the appropriate locality. Then I draw town plans, filling in shops, police station, church, etc., so that I know in which direction a character will turn when he comes out of his gate and – important in establishing an alibi – how long it will take to get from A to B. I also do plans of the main house in the story, again with the aim of being able to ‘see’ the action taking place. The reader should feel completely at home there, able to follow the characters as they move from room to room.

A series might require the invention of a complete county, in which case I draw a map of it, positioning towns and villages at random and working out the travelling distance between them in both mileage and time. I can then choose the one that best fits the plot, and if there doesn’t happen to be a town in a suitable place, I can always add a new one!

It can be quite a challenge to invent someone who’ll mature and develop and whose personal life will progress through an indefinite number of books – someone, in short, whom you could live with. Your characters will, of course, age and develop as you go along. Relationships will be formed or ended, family members might die, couples divorce and children be born.

One problem with a series can be timing – how much has elapsed between the end of one book and the beginning of the next. My DCI Webb series lasted for sixteen books and it became increasingly difficult to keep track of children’s ages and how long ago a certain event had taken place. So I invented my own time zone, in which the first book took place in year one and the second in the following year. The characters had met each other in year minus one or two. I could then check back in later books and life became easier.

After those sixteen books I wanted a rest from police procedure so wrote a stand-alone for the first time in years. And since I intended to limit police presence to the minimum, it had to involve a cold case that wouldn’t tread on their toes, a past murder in the family that had never been solved. Families fascinate me, the dynamics between the different members, the tensions and unsuspected jealousies.

After this book I wrote another stand-alone, but when I embarked on what was intended to be a third, I began to miss the comfortable familiarity of a series and decided to expand it into a new one, which became the first of the Rona Parish books. I didn’t want to return to police themes – in any case forensics had moved on in the past couple of years and I was out of date – but I wanted my protagonist to have a legitimate reason for repeatedly coming up against crime, so I made her a journalist and biographer. Both these seemingly harmless occupations led her, over the course of ten books, into considerable danger.

I have continued to slot stand-alones in between the series books. There’s a sense of freedom in being able to visit an entirely different location with totally new characters who will obligingly tidy up their problems within the covers of that one book.

A perennial question every writer faces is ‘Where do you get your ideas?’ They can, of course, come from anywhere – a snippet in the newspaper, an overheard conversation – and don’t discount dreams! I dreamed the idea for one novel and several short stories, so I keep a notebook and pen by my bed and make a quick note of any that might be useful before they fade.

If the title comes to mind first, that’s a great advantage and points you in the right direction. There are various ways of choosing a suitable title. I occasionally use quotes – and was berated by no fewer than three fellow crime writers for choosing A Necessary End, when their own books, also under that title, were still at the proof stage.

The title of Whistler’s Lane, one of the paranormal novels, actually evolved from looking at the portrait of Whistler’s Mother, when I toyed with the fantasy that the whistler referred to was not a proper name. Ghostly figures in a dark countryside came to mind, and the plot developed from there. Another time I heard someone on the radio refer to a Macbeth prophecy, i.e. a self-fulfilling one, and filed it away for future use.

In terms of choosing titles, my easiest ride was with the Green Grow the Rushes series. The song itself has appeared in many forms in ancient and modern languages from Hebrew onwards, and the first time it was written down in English was in 1625. Whatever the original meaning of the verses – and they’ve become distorted over the years, like a game of Chinese Whispers – I’ve always thought they were most evocative. Who were the April Rainers, the Nine Bright Shiners, the Lily-White Boys?

I’d originally intended to use two at most, but as I wrote, more ideas offered, until I realized I’d have to use them all. They weren’t written in order, but as ideas presented themselves. It was pure chance that the final three were Ten, Eleven and Twelve, and I have to admit Eleven that Went Up to Heaven was quite a challenge! Short of killing off an entire cricket side, it took me some time to come up with a hopefully convincing mass murder.

I used to plan my books meticulously, knowing how far the plot would progress in every chapter, though obviously changes were made as I went along. (In one case an old lady was due to be murdered, but I became fond of her so I spared her and killed someone else!) Then the time came when I was in such a hurry to start writing that I couldn’t be bothered planning and jumped straight in, pushing the plot ahead of me chapter by chapter. It all worked out in the end, and that is basically the way I write now – a rough idea of what’s going to happen, but letting the details emerge as I go along. Unlike most of my fellow writers, I never do drafts. I prefer to stick to the original, though since I can’t read a page without making alterations, it will inevitably have changed considerably by the time I reach the end.

It has been said that writing is 10 per cent inspiration and 90 per cent perspiration, and certainly it’s no good sitting back and waiting till you feel in the mood. If inspiration doesn’t come, I write anything, however unsatisfactory, like working in a new biro. Then, when the flow is re-established, I go back and polish it. And I always try to stop for the day at an interesting point, which will give me the impetus to get going the following day.