Picnic Books

 A couple of weeks ago I was asked an interesting question in the Big Bull’s Head (pub) in Digbeth, South Birmingham.  Someone asked me why, in writing a novel about the miners’ strike, I’d written it as a crime thriller rather than a straightforward account of the strike?  Why had I made the protagonist a cop rather than a striking miner?  The novel that this guy (Tommy) was referring to was ENEMY WITHIN, my crime thriller retrospective that was short listed for the Dundee Book Prize in 2004. After several rewrites this is now being published by Picnic Publishing and accounts for my appearance on this blog site.  But Tommy’s question is valid enough to merit a more worthwhile answer than I gave him over a pint of Brew XI two weeks ago.  So, hope you’re reading this Tommy.

I’ve always been a big fan of what is sometimes called kitchen sink drama because I think it places concerns with themes such as alienation, centre stage in British literature and film.  There was always so much more to the films of Lindsay Anderson and Tony Richardson than that they were about the working class.  Rather, they represented the alienation and deepening social crisis of a working class community in decline.  These are themes I revisit in Enemy Within.  But I also truly believe the themes of kitchen sink realism worked best when they were synthesised with other genres (and particularly crime) that imposed an Aristotelian structure on these stories. Hence, the best kitchen sink film in British history is actually GET CARTER, based on the crime novel by Ted Lewis, that can be essentially seen as the alter ego to the novels of Alan Sillitoe. 

After GET CARTER, British film and TV experienced its golden age under the same conditions of open class warfare that gave us punk rock.  This all revolved around the fusion of underworld crime fiction with kitchen sink and can be seen in TV series such as THE SWEENEY and XYY MAN, as well as in the novels of GF Newman and Kenneth Royce.  These are all major influences on the way I write.  Sadly the miners (and wider working class) were defeated in the miners’ strike and this epoch changing event gave us the Thatcherite nightmare that we live under today.  It also changed the nature of the British state form from post war social democracy to conditions of the coercive state.  The importance of the retrospective crime drama as street history is that it can map these events and show how the present social crisis (typfied by rising crime) is based on the historical defeat of the working class. There was also another important reason for making my protagonist a cop – albeit one from a mining family whose brother was a WRP activist.  Most young people today have no lived experience of the class struggle and can only view it as outsiders.  Terry, the cop in my novel, is also an outsider who views the strike and its consequences as an outsider, while he tries to hunt down the brutal killer of a number of young girls.  This is an example of Brechtian distancing which, I think, works well in the book.

I’m impressed my stuff is already being compared to that of David Peace who was a contemporary of mine at Manchester Polytechnic.  It’s funny that Jake Arnott, David Peace and myself are all the same age.  But I’dlike to think there are differences in my work.  For example, in his Red Riding Quartet, Peace maps the approach of Thatcherism through the sinister appearance of the Reverand Dawes.  He’s like a prophet of the coming Thatcherite nightmare.  In my novel, the prophet of advancing Thatcherism is the killer himself – the Pimpernel who sees himself as a latter day Jack the Ripper giving birth to the 21st Century.  I also deal with parapoloitical concerns and the involvement of the secret state in the miners’ strike to a greater extent than either Arnott or Peace.  Finally, I take the reader to the heart of the corruption of the left itself, particularly of the WRP, to show how this contributed to a tragic and historical defeat.  In this I am indeed informed by the fact that I was a WRP activist and central committee member in the 1980s.  And it was for this reason that I wanted to make my protagonist a cop.    

 Monday, and my first blog for Picnic about my novel Sacred Site. I think I should start off by saying what the book is about. Sacred Site is a thriller set in an Australian Aboriginal community. A mining company believes there’s gold under Mt Parker and to get to the gold, it needs to destroy it. However, Mt Parker is a sacred site for the Aboriginal people who live there, and their permission is needed before the mountain can be destroyed. An anthropologist is sent to investigate the claim, but she also discovers there was a massacre of Aboriginal people there about a century before. She’s horrified when an Aboriginal woman reveals that child abuse is rife in the Aboriginal community. As she uncovers more, she receives threatening letters, her colleagues are attacked, and finally she is left fighting for her life in the outback.

 My last blog, but that sounds a little final so I’d better add ‘in this series’. If I measure output against time spent then, to my surprise, I’ve found writing a blog to be quite hard work. If worked over too much, then it can come over as studied and artificial: if ‘you go where the muse takes you’, then we’re back to the ‘self indulgent ramble’ again.  I’ve probably been guilty of both.

Even if I can’t hope to emulate them, I’m always interested in ‘how’ other writers set about writing.  The office situated well away from your home has its attractions. Of course, theoretically, you are liberated from domestic distractions and so can focus your mind totally on the work in hand.  In my case I rather suspect the ‘focus’ would shift fairly naturally to ‘I really must oil those door hinges’ or, ‘isn’t it time for a cuppa?’

Certainly I do my ‘best’ thinking whilst out walking.  The problem is you do keep meeting other walkers and they will persist in chatting.  What do you do? Carry a sandwich board saying ‘author at work – do not disturb!’ Cultivate a permanent, menacing grimace and hope people will be put off?  You may write a best seller, whilst at the same time, collecting your local ‘curmudgeon of the year’ award.

Another option – regrettably not open to all – is to get right away from it all.  The other day my paper carried an extract from Arnold Bennet’s diaries who, while staying on the Riviera and admiring the view, congratulated himself on completing two thousand words before lunch.  Ah, chance would be such a fine thing!

Of course, working abroad carries with it, its own problems.  Laurie Lee lost the whole of the initial m/s for ‘As I walked out one midsummer morning’, while travelling in Spain.  Obviously he managed to reconstruct it, but it must have been a hammer blow.  Could I reconstruct if such an accident happened?  Probably . . . but it would be a different book . . . maybe an even be better one.  Somehow, I don’t think I’ll travel any further down that particular road.

Then there are those insomniacs who claim to rise at 4 a.m. and complete God knows how many thousand words before breakfast.  Well good for them I say.  Personally I would find that worrying about door hinges can be done just as easily in bed as out of it. 

Interesting as all these approaches are, there is nothing I can ‘poach’ to help my own writing process.  I suppose superglue on the seat of the computer chair might help to concentrate the mind on the task in hand, but that carries with it its own problems – generally involving the local fire brigade.  No, I’ll just have to carry on as always with long periods grinding out pitiful dribs and drabs interspaced with frenetic but all too infrequent bursts of creativity.  It’s not particularly romantic, but I think it’s probably how most of us work.

Next week it’s the turn of Dr Kim Fleet.  She will be blogging about her thriller ‘Sacred Site’ which will shortly be appearing on the website as a 2009 title.

For those of you still following the blog, thanks for sticking with me – I just hope it hasn’t been too painful.  I have replied to Caroline and Ben, and thank Andrew and Rick for their comments too. The way we are all supporting each other is wonderful.

 What motivates authors? Well in my case various historical episodes caught my imagination, fixed themselves there and then refused point blank to leave. Although I had written non-fiction, the thought was ever there that, using these events as a basis, I could write a novel or novels.   Equally, I also knew that it would have to wait until I had more time.  So the first thing I want to say is that I have unqualified admiration for those younger authors who, when faced with this dilemma, have decided not to wait – despite the frenetic juggling of personal, professional and family life it must have entailed.

The truism has it that you ‘write about what you know’.  In most cases yes, but . . .  some successful books have been written using places, scenarios and situations totally foreign to the writer.  When that transpires, I can only applaud the author’s confidence.  I find I need to have some personal knowledge, however limited that might be.  In most cases it doesn’t markedly reduce the research load, but it does inject that extra scintilla of confidence into your writing.  Or, at least, I hope it does.

One thing that writing has also brought home to me is increasing admiration for writers in the pre-computer age.  Nowadays we edit as we go along, changing punctuation here, excising there, moving text at will. Consider the output of literary giants such as say, Dickens, producing what would now be termed ‘blockbuster’ after ‘blockbuster’. It was all done in longhand and consistently under the pressure of publishers’ deadlines. Also, since some of his work appeared in magazines, deadlines could often be monthly or less. As a word, ‘admiration’ begins to feel a little inadequate.

Of course there is a plus side to this, in that modern technology has opened up the practicality, not to say the possibility, of writing to many more would-be authors..   Theoretically, this should enhance the literary gene pool by granting access to publication to a much wider range of individual ‘life experiences’.  Unhappily, as we all know, this coincides with a downturn in the economics of publishing.  It’s a case of Sod’s Law raising its head again.

As far as the difficulties of getting published is concerned, we’ve all been there, done that . . . but unfortunately didn’t get the ‘T’ shirt at the end of it.  Ben talked in his blog about the almost impossible task facing first time fiction authors wishing to be seriously considered by agents/publishing houses.  I’m perfectly happy to outline my experience which I’m sure is typical. I must have approached between fifty or sixty houses before my first novel was published.  In the main, the experience was soul destroying, but there were occasional chinks of light. Standing out from the ninety plus percent outright rejections or ‘no replies’, were three editors who took the time and trouble to contact me.   They said what they liked about the book and why, for a variety of reasons, they couldn’t take it on. It was these positive responses which kept me going.

Then, after this first novel, I ran into an absolute blank wall.  In fact I put my second novel to one side for a while and concentrated on other projects.  So I would like to echo Ben’s comments about Picnic and its willingness to take on non-established authors. It deserves to succeed. As to other publishing houses – let’s hope he is right about the faint glimmerings of a change in attitudes.  This is particularly important in respect of first time authors.  They are, after all, the seed corn of future fiction writing.

When I started this blog, my feelings about blogging in general were that it could all too easily degenerate into a self indulgent ramble.  I know that, from time to time, I have come dangerously close to this.  So tomorrow I intend to switch to the much more interesting subject of the techniques other writers use to get through the writing process.

 In a mystery novel it is taken for granted that the plot is supreme and, whatever else happens, the author must never lose control.  The plot in this novel is, as they say, ‘multi-layered’. From time to time certain aspects will be touched upon but, even if I wanted to, I couldn’t do it justice in the form of a blog.

As to the characters who appear, the principals are the engine driver involved in the fatal crash and a junior reporter on a Bristol newspaper, together with his girl friend, later his wife. Other, mainly fictitious, characters do make an appearance, but there are also some real people of that period including one very prominent person. (Note to publishers.  I’m assuming there is no statute of limitations as far as libel is concerned, so I’ve been very careful as to how these people are portrayed.)

Having got the main dramatis personae out of the way, let me say something about times and places.  The novel is set mainly in London and, to a lesser extent, the West Country.  The period covered dates from the late nineteen-twenties, through the thirties and includes the early years of the war and the blitz.   

Now the well worn aphorism has it that, ‘if you remembered the sixties you weren’t there’. Paradoxically, most readers were not around in the thirties either, yet from reading and TV documentaries, most people feel they ‘remember’ the decade.  The images come all too readily to mind: dreadful unemployment, hunger marches, fascist and anti-fascist riots. Since, at the time, London tended to be the focus of most of these movements, there is a tendency to conflate the capital with the economic depression of the time and its consequences. In general this was not so. Unfair as it might have seemed to people in the provinces, relatively speaking London was doing very nicely.  Tube lines were being extended, suburbs were expanding, car ownership was growing and business, once the crash of twenty nine was out of the way, was flourishing.  If you were in work (and most people were) it was an exciting place to be, offering the opportunity to move onwards and upwards. Economics apart, the literary world also helped to confer something of a rosy halo on life in pre-war London and the South East, as poets such as Betjeman and novelists like Delderfield (‘Dreaming Suburbs’) used this ‘feel good’ factor to paint a picture of the period.

As the thirties went on and particularly as war approached, the mood changed.  Baldwin’s much quoted remark that ‘the bombers will always get through’ merely reflected the growing realisation of the vulnerability of big cities and their inhabitants. At the same time, there was a desperate hope that the ‘Great Powers’ would not, could not, let war happen again.

Eventually, of course, war did come. It came first as a ‘phoney war’, then as a full scale blitz on big cities.  Of course bombing was not confined to the capital, but because of its size, transport infrastructure (deep tubes) and numbers of casualties, London tends to be synonymous with the blitz. I have studied the period, but of course I was not there. Relatives, however, have passed on stories and these tend to centre around fear, lack of sleep, homes destroyed and damaged, together with casualties.  An uncle of mine disappeared during that time.  He left his brother’s house with the intention of seeing him the following week, but never came back.  His brother kept up the search until long after the war only to conclude reluctantly that he must have been in one of the tube stations that had been hit.  No doubt there are all too many sad stories like that.

The thirties started with the aftermath of a great economic crash, moved on to more hopeful times, began to turn darker with the approach of war and finally ended with the trauma of war itself.  I know I’ve said quite a bit about these times, but it provides the essential backdrop against which those involved play out their lives and hopes.  So what I have tried to do is to recreate the sense, feel and, above all, ‘taste’ of a society during a life changing period.

Well I think I’ve gone on quite enough about the novel, so for the remaining two days I’ll take a break and say something (don’t worry – not much) about myself and my approach to the writing process.  Last week, Ben made some very interesting points about new (or nearly new) authors and the publishing process.  So I hope to add my two pennyworth to that debate also.

 As I wrote yesterday, the theories which floated round the identities of the dead children were legion.  There had been an inferno after the crash (the train lighting was still powered by gas), so some remains were difficult to identify.  In fact a coroner’s inquest pronounced a verdict of accidental death on one man based purely on circumstantial and witness evidence.  Therefore the first question asked was, had these children really been on the train? Once again witness statements and clothing (including remnants of school uniform) seemed to confirm this.  A school motto ‘Luce Magistra’ was found on the remnants of one garment.  This was (and is) the motto of a girls’ school near York and, since the train started from Leeds, it was a first line of enquiry.  The school very firmly denied all knowledge.  Over the years, droves of amateur sleuths must have passed this way and I know from experience that eighty years on, the school is still sensitive about the unfortunate conjunction of events.

Of course all this happened in an era of empire, when many parents lived and worked abroad while their offspring were educated here.  A great many theories sprang up around this particular fact: kids packed off to friends/relatives; breakdown in communications, family disputes etc, etc.  The fact remains that, in subsequent years, no distraught parents returned from abroad, demanding to know where their children were.  It was never tenable as a theory.  Some families have always been poor at communicating, but with not so much as a Christmas or birthday card over the years, alarm bells must have started ringing somewhere.

The mystery also generated an avalanche of letters to newspapers. It was from amongst these that the truly ‘off the wall’ suggestions emerged.  One was that a ventriloquist had been a passenger with his dummy sitting beside him (thus being mistaken for a child).  The suggestion was that the unfortunate ventriloquist had perished and his wooden dummy was totally destroyed.  No explanation was ever proffered as to how the dummy managed to present his ticket and pass muster with the inspector.  But if true, it must have been a class act. Yet another ‘explanation’ was that a jockey was on the train (still, apparently, dressed in his racing silks, which in turn were mistaken for a school uniform}.  I could go on, but I won’t! 

To this day no solution to this mystery has been found.  Almost ten years after the event, a woman came forward claiming that the children were her two brothers.  Since it was accepted that the children were a boy and a girl, her claim was dismissed and her story not followed up.

Of course, as in all good mysteries, myths started to take shape.  A local solicitor was supposed to have crucial information which he died without divulging.  Two years after the accident, a chief Constable of Bristol disappeared.  He was found dead in a London hotel with his throat cut, allegedly after speaking to the same solicitor. Perhaps the most persistent story was that, several times a year, a woman dressed in black arrived in a limousine.  Apparently she laid flowers at the memorial in the local churchyard and these visits lasted until the late forties. Also, as in all good mysteries, no one attempted to speak to her.

So there we have it.  A fascinating real life mystery, never solved and by now probably unsolvable.  Which is all very well but, based on these bare initial facts, I had a novel to write.  The thirties were a fascinating decade so, without revealing the plot, tomorrow I plan to say more about where and when most of the action takes place.  Of course,  I’ll be happy to take questions, but on the question of Charfield, it’s no good asking me who these children were.  I just haven’t a clue.