Is this how they do it? Those crime writers with a whole series of books to their name, you know, the ones that always star a hard-drinking, maverick with a heart of gold?
Or do they just go - "Umm, how about a hard-drinking, maverick with a heart of gold? That can't have been done before. And you know what, I'm going to give it a spin, add a little something new. Hey, how about making him bisexual? Or tee-total? Or someone who never washes his clothes, just throws them away and buys new ones? Oh, I've got it, call off the search - how about a 6ft 4 black basketball player?"
Sadly, it turns out Duffy, Scudder, Reacher and Bolitar have already been invented.
Still, all is not lost. For the day after I e-mailed Karin to suggest we do a two-hander series of detective novels, I was back walking Bobby through a soggy Shropshire morning when I thought to myself apropos of nothing - "What really did happen to Andrew Ridgeley?" You know the other bloke from Wham.
And there he was - my own cardboard detective. All I had to do was move him from Ridgeley to someone, um, sexier. So he's now a blazing star from the early eighties pop music scene, who has apparently done nothing of note since. He left the band having been ousted as straight, and has since lived from the proceeds of a couple of hits. The rest of the band have gone on to be connected with everyone who is anyone. He'll spend the books telling tall stories about his life since, touching the lives of the good, bad and ugly - or are they tales?
In the first book he loses (has lost) all his money in a Ponzi scheme, and that's how he accidentally becomes a sleuth, having fallen into the company of a sassy professional with control issues. All he needs now is a name...
Oh goody, names. I love character naming plus it's a truly stupendous excuse to not actually write anything at all. After all, how can I write about someone if I don't know about whom I'm writing? Although it is a mark of where I am at the moment that I'm more concerned with not writing than writing. Humph.
ReplyDeleteOf course, I forgot to mention in my previous post the other inspiring thing to come out of your extremely productive walk - the idea of our two sleuths dispensing their own justice. This appealed to me no end. I quite often spend a happy half hour imagining inflicting gruesome torture and agony on people who piss me off.
I shall enjoy coming up punishments to fit the crimes. It's possible that my character is borderline psychopathic (especially when she's premenstrual). Maybe 'Andrew' can be the voice of reason.
PS I know Myron is Jewish, but I had no idea he is black.
ReplyDeleteHe isn't? That really is something. I've read two of those books and both times took him to be black. Blimey, racial stereotyping is alive and well in my Guardian-reading bleeding-heart.
ReplyDeleteWe're going to have to kill a load of bankers via nefarious and grotesque means just to make up for that...
well, I have just looked up Ponzi schemes because I'd never heard of such a thing and what a tremendously fertile idea to have in a plot. It struck me as being a particularly male scam - roll up, roll up, invest your wads of hard-earned readies with us because our dicks are bigger and swing higher than the rest and we know just how to manipulate investments to pay whacking great returns - when really they're just robbing Peter to pay Paul (or sometimes even to pay Peter himself). The sheer front of it!
ReplyDeleteI also liked the explanations of why Ponzi schemes eventually collapse - the first (and by far the most exciting) being that the scheme promoter simply vanishes with all the money. Cracking plot device...