All posts by Paul

I am a self-employed writer, which means I’m working for an idiot who doesn’t pay me enough – but the holidays are great. I’m ex many occupations, from the respectable ‘career-ladder’ to disreputable “somebody’s- got-to-do-it”. All a good way of seeing someone else’s point-of-view. Best job, apart from writing, was dispatch-riding on a motorcycle in the 70s, though I’ve also enjoyed teaching, librarianship, counselling and helping to run a community-centre. Sometimes I’ve looked respectable in a suit, other times a bit more wild and woolly (though still stylish) as a biker. It’s strange how differently people treat you, depending on what you’re wearing. A suit means I’m sometimes addressed as ‘sir’, but in motorcycle leathers I’m always referred to as ‘mate.’ The worst job that I’ve done ? You really don’t want to know, but it was in a processed food manufacturer’s factory – put me off bacon, sausages and quiches for a long time, and made me look at pet food in a new way. I’m very glad that I don’t have any pictures. I’ve been writing since I was eight, when I penned a story about a desert island and attempted to compile a dictionary – as Clarissa does in my short story ‘The Moon Is Out Tonight’. I’ve written for magazines under a variety of pen-names, ghost-written a couple of biographies and had a column in a local newspaper. I used to concentrate on non-fiction of an informative, how-to instructional nature, as I’m a firm believer in the dissemination of knowledge to enable people to do things for themselves. Knowledge is power, and in these troubled times of economic downturn and increased intrusion into our lives by government agencies, its vital to know how to get through. My fictional stories also show people coping and finding ways to survive. I’m based in a Celtic nation, the county of Cornwall or Kernow. I’ve been here for twenty years, and have lived all over the country, as well as abroad in France, Germany, Switzerland, Spain and the U.S.A.
Writing

Animals as Symbols

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Last year, I read a crime novel by John Hart called The Last Child, which is a grim tale of child abduction, paedophilia and murder; the sexual abuse is skated over, but the violence isn’t. I previously enjoyed the author’s Redemption Road which was very dark, so I knew his style.

Incidentally, The Last Child is now being touted as the first in a series featuring protagonist 13-year-old Johnnie Merrimon, who rather hijacked the story, making the lead detective look like a plodding irrelevance. My British copy doesn’t mention that it’s the first in a series, so I’m guessing that reader feedback prompted this move, for Johnnie Merrimon is a believable and charismatic character. Any writer of MG/YA would do well to read about his search for his abducted twin sister and missing father—even if they don’t normally read crime novels.

Image result for John Hart The Last Child,

The cover shows two menacing crows, which initially made me groan, as it seems as if every other crime novel has a cover with crows wheeling around the sky, even if they don’t feature in the story. John Hart does include crows as a symbol of dread and death, as well as a false clue in how an antagonist mispronounces the word ‘crow’.

As a creature crows have appeared in myth, legend and literature countless times. For one thing, they’re eerily intelligent birds, able to remember peoples’ faces and how they were treated by them, but reading The Last Child made me contemplate how to handle the animals who appear in my crime novel series for their roles as symbols. For a start, my protagonist detective shares his life with a feral silver tabby, a cat he rescued from a crime scene. Bastet has similar characteristics to his host—something that cat owners might appreciate more than the detective does at the moment.

I’ve also been using seagulls as symbols, for the last story was set in the art colony of Saint Ives, which has a notorious colony of thieving gulls. The antagonist is a murdering art gallery owner, who’s haunted by one gull in particular, which nests on the roof of his property and appears to be following him around, as he sees it all over town. Sinisterly, its yellow beak has a huge blotch of scarlet, instead of the usual small spot, as if it’s been dipping it in blood. Sailors have long held the belief that seagulls and seals are the reincarnated souls of drowned sailors.

It’s always surprised me when authors don’t include any animals at all in their stories, especially if it’s located where there’d be flocks of birds and herds of wild and domestic mammals. Some writers frequently mention wildlife, such as Henning Mankell in his Swedish Detective Wallander series, in which his hero often sees hares around the town of Ystad, sometimes hitting one in his car. The behaviour of the hares reflects the detective’s state of mind.

Have you used animals as symbols in your stories?

Are there any books you’ve read which use creatures well?

Writing

Are Authors Arrogant?

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Hilary Mantel reckoned that:

The most helpful quality a writer can cultivate is self-confidence—arrogance, if you can manage it. You write to impose yourself on the world, and you have to believe in your own ability when the world shows no sign of agreeing with you.

Wise words indeed, after all, why the hell should anyone want to read your book? You’re an unpublished nobody—how dare you think you’ve written anything good enough to be enjoyed by readers? When submitting queries to cloth-eared literary agents, the whole world of publishing is one big question mark, forcing the author to become an exclamation mark of cockiness! Damn, I’ve just infringed someone’s copyright (see below).

I recently stumbled across a word new to me, which sums up the characteristics needed to be an author who doesn’t give a damn for the opinions of others—menefreghismo.

As a word, I doubt it’ll enter common usage in English…which raises another point—are authors being arrogant by using long words in their stories, or are they demonstrating their love of language, which they hope will be shared by their readers?

As an example of supreme arrogance, in 2018 an author applied to trademark the word ‘cocky’, to protect her romance novels, which include it in the title. To my jaundiced eye, this is more of a clever ploy to gain free publicity, rather than genuine concern about readers buying other authors’ books.

The thing is if you don’t believe in your story, why should anybody else?

I don’t think that’s arrogance. It’s more self-confidence. Quite where delusion fits in depends on the ambition of the author for their story.

Being a writer is lonely and bruising to the soul. Writing guru Steven Pressfield summed it up well: The artist committing himself to his calling has volunteered for hell. whether he knows it or not. He will be dining for the duration on a diet of isolation, rejection, self-doubt, despair, ridicule, contempt and humiliation. (From The War of Art)

To counter such misery, he gave this advice (which mentions that word again!)

I’ve no way of knowing the fate of my Cornish Detective novels, but if they have any success, attracting readers who like them, then it would inevitably bring me a certain amount of attention. I’m too stoical to become arrogant from being in the public eye, which is largely a hoopla of marketing, trying to flog books.

If people love my books, then great, I’ll be glad to have given them a few hours of entertainment—and maybe make them think about things in a different way.

This poem describes the sort of fame I’d like:

Famous

The river is famous to the fish.

The loud voice is famous to silence,   
which knew it would inherit the earth   
before anybody said so.   

The cat sleeping on the fence is famous to the birds   
watching him from the birdhouse.   

The tear is famous, briefly, to the cheek.   

The idea you carry close to your bosom   
is famous to your bosom.   

The boot is famous to the earth,   
more famous than the dress shoe,   
which is famous only to floors.

The bent photograph is famous to the one who carries it   
and not at all famous to the one who is pictured.   

I want to be famous to shuffling men   
who smile while crossing streets,   
sticky children in grocery lines,   
famous as the one who smiled back.

I want to be famous in the way a pulley is famous,   
or a buttonhole, not because it did anything spectacular,   
but because it never forgot what it could do.

Naomi Shihab Nye

How cocky, self-confident or arrogant do you feel about your writing?

Are there any arrogant authors that you can’t stand the sight or sound of?

(I find Martin Amis, Jonathan Franzen and Salman Rushdie hard to tolerate)

Have friends and family members ever treated you as being big-headed, for being a writer?

Writing

Talking to Myself

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Living alone, I talk to myself a lot. If I haven’t said anything for a while, I’ve even made myself jump on hearing human speech! We all have internal conversations with ourselves, for that’s how we work out what things are, but actually saying things out loud apparently has value too, according to a scientific study.

It seems that vocalizing the object you’re searching for, helps you to find it, for speech focuses your consciousness on the task in hand. I suspect that all writers do a form of this—I know that I do when searching for a word—I prefer exhausting the options in my mind, before turning to a thesaurus, in the hope that it will better fit the mood of the writing.

Talking to yourself used to be considered a sign of madness, where lunatics were hearing the voices again. These days, with people connected to invisible entities by mobile phones, it’s common to see someone walking along having an animated conversation with no one else in sight. A separate scientific study found that one’s inner voice helps self-control, preventing us from impulsive behaviour. This partly explains the idea of an angel on one shoulder trying to drown out the devil on the other shoulder.

Authors chat to themselves and their characters with familiarity. Edward Albee observed: “I write to find what I’m talking about.”

Dorothy Parker was less modest: “Of course I talk to myself. I like a good speaker, and I appreciate an intelligent audience.”

An author needs to find their ‘voice’, which establishes their style of writing, revealing their attitudes and personality through the characteristics of word choice, punctuation, dialogue and character development. In finding our voices, it sometimes helps to read our stories aloud, and while we’re bringing them to life, is it any wonder that we also give birth to a doppelgänger, who’s part creator, part reader and part critic? That might sound spooky to someone who hasn’t attempted to write a story, but writing techniques include such things as how the tale sounds:

“Rhythm. A play of syllables and even sounds. I hear sounds in a sort of indescribable way as I write.”

Don DeLillo

It’s normal that we talk to ourselves. I’m not claiming that my solo chattering is in any way profound, and I’m sure that if I carried a voice-activated tape recorder, that I listened to at the end of the day, there’d be a load of gobbledygook punctuated with swear words!

Do you ever get funny looks from family, friends and strangers, when you realise you’ve been talking to yourself about your story?

Have you ever achieved a breakthrough in your WIP by talking to yourself?

Writing

Typing Skills

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I’ve never had any training in how to type, so am what is known as a ‘hunt and pecker’…which sounds rather rude, now I think about it! 

My primitive technique entails using one finger on each hand to hit the keys. I think that other fingers may sometimes get involved, but only when I’m in full flow. I’m of an age to have once used old fashioned mechanical typewriters, which was an ordeal owing to the pressure needed to depress a key. I dare say that writers of old had stronger fingers than modern authors, who are spoilt by soft touch computer keyboards.

Typewriters were so heavy! I was given a Smith Corona desktop cast iron model, that weighed 35 pounds. It felt more like a potential bludgeon than a tool to help me write.

As is the way with obsolete technology, typewriters have become collectable. Tom Hanks, of all people, recently published a collection of short stories called Uncommon Type, with each story being written on one of his favourite typewriters.

Will Self is also a fan of typewriters:

“Writing on a manual makes you slower in a good way, I think…You don’t revise as much, you just think more, because you know you’re going to have to retype the entire thing. Which is a big stop on just slapping anything down and playing with it.”

Other authors agree with him.

I briefly knew a secretary, who’d been trained to touch type, and her hands were a blur. She averaged 75 words a minute, and eerily, knew exactly where she’d made a mistake when she finished typing.

When I’m in the groove, I can churn out 40 words a minute, with only a few mistakes. Looking at the keyboard slows me down, though I’m always surprised that my fingers have any sense of where the correct keys are when I concentrate on the screen.

My writing method starts with making copious notes on my laptop about everything from forensic details to characters’ motivations, to words and phrases and conversation snippets that I want to use. I don’t compose a formal plan of where the plot will be going, preferring a pantser approach by letting my characters’ actions propel the action. However, I always know what the climax of the story will be, including the mood I’m trying to achieve for the end of the action.

I write directly to the screen. Any speed I have in typing was slowed when writing my last novel, as I changed technique by staying on one chapter for several days, backtracking and reworking.

I’ve known a couple of authors who write the first draft in longhand, using their lucky pen, before typing it out on a mechanical typewriter. They spend much time scanning and printing out their novels. Strangely, both of them own computers but don’t like using them for creative writing. They like the racket that an old metal typewriter makes, and they’re proficient at typing, making few mistakes…which might be a benefit of this way of writing, as errors are harder to correct.

How do you write your stories?

Are you a trained typist, or is one finger on each hand blunted and calloused?

Marketing, Publishing, Writing

Pink & Glittery Book Covers

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This article draws attention to a peculiarity of publishing, that could justifiably be labelled ‘sexist’—though, no one’s doing exactly that yet.

(click the BBC link for more of Jojo Moyes’ opinions on chick lit writing)

Many cover designs are formulaic and lazy. If you’ve ever thought that silhouettes were left behind in the 18th- and 19th-centuries, then you’ve never looked at a display of contemporary fiction in a bookshop.

Jojo Moyes makes some strong points about how books written by women are marketed. I’ve always found the pink and glittery approach to be patronising, but I feel the same way about action novels aimed at a mainly male readership—depicting guns, battleships and jet fighters—this is sometimes referred to as dad lit. How butch can you get?

For my own Cornish Detective novels, should they ever be published, I’d prefer something that wasn’t pigeonholing them as being for male or female readers, and I’d also like to avoid overt suggestions that they’re crime writing. I’m fairly skilled artistically and have designed the covers for all of the titles I published online.

I also created a cover for the second story in my crime series The Perfect Murderer, which shows an anonymous figure cycling at night; the serial killer used a bicycle to stalk victims.

Image result for paul whybrow the perfect murderer

I somehow doubt that my designs would be acceptable to a book publisher. The only author I can think of, who’s got his own way with book design is Alasdair Gray—who uses his own typography and illustrations within the text and for the book cover.

What do you think about the clichéd use of colour, glitter and weaponry on book covers?

Is it an acceptable form of targetting an audience, who know what they’re after and don’t care about the packaging?

Are you put off by such book covers, maybe missing a good story? After all, many readers are already deterred by a book being of a genre they think they don’t like.

Hold the front page!

Forget pink and glittery book covers, what we really need are pulp makeovers of classic titles, as this amusing article shows.

I particularly like the Immortal Madame Bovary A BRILLIANT AND CYNICAL STORY OF THE WOMAN WHO FLOUTED THE MORAL LAWS OF HER DAY COMPLETE AND UNABRIDGED which has the price of 3 shillings and 6 pence printed on the title character’s bum!

On a serious note, I wonder how many fans of pulp fiction were introduced to serious literature by this marketing tactic?

Image result for chick lit cartoons

Writing

Sensitivity Readers

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I’ve previously posted on clumsy writing about minorities and members of the opposite sex to the author, but it’s an issue that won’t go away, as this Guardian article explains.

Reading it, I found myself agreeing with much of the outrage while being exasperated with the illogicality of some objections. One of the biggest problems with politically correct writing is that it’s one-way traffic. Would a book publisher with a roster of only ethnic authors vet their clients’ writing for sensitive treatment of white characters? Almost certainly not. Do publishers of gay literature ensure that straight characters are not portrayed in a demeaning way? What do you think?

If you’re not of the group being described, whatever the difference is, then you get pulled on your choice of words. To use one example from the article, one sensitivity reader suggested to white author Anna Hecker that, she be ‘more creative with descriptions, saying her initial description of “light brown skin, a wide nose, and kinky dark hair” was both cliched and boring…’ That’s pedestrian writing to me, showing a lack of imagination rather than covert racism. If a black author had written those words nothing would have been said. How ultra-sensitive can you be, before it becomes ridiculous? The character may well have had a wide nose…people of all races do—and they have narrow ones too—so what!

In 2018, I came across an odd case of a publisher evading accusations of cultural appropriation, and though I’ve got no way of proving my theory, it reeks of duplicity. I enjoyed reading a novel called Underground Airlines, published in 2016, which is Alternate History based on the notion that slavery never really ended after the American Civil War. I’m normally a bit wary of this genre, finding it hard to suspend disbelief, but I was gripped by the story which has a complex, tough and cunning protagonist. Author Ben H. Winters came to my attention, as he wrote a trilogy of detective novels (my chosen genre of writing) which I’ve requested from my local library; they had Underground Airlines on the shelves, so I grabbed it.

The thing is, the hero of the story is a black bounty hunter, who for murky reasons, is hunting down black slaves who’ve run away from their white masters. Ben H. Winters is resolutely white!

Related image

While I believe that it’s entirely correct that he should be allowed to write about whatever he wants to, as should we all, his novel was published without an author photograph on the flap of the book cover, which is rather unusual for such a successful writer. Of course, there’s no mention that he’s Caucasian in the brief description of his publishing history. I’m sure they omitted his photograph to help sales….

Are you nervous about tackling anything that might need a sensitivity reader to evaluate?

 (This could be the fate of my crime novels if oversensitivity continues.)

Writing

Where Do You Get Your Ideas From?

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People who haven’t written a story are often mystified by how authors come up with their ideas. Even regular readers are in awe of the process.

A friend recently asked me if I had a criminal mind, as I write crime stories. She’s acted as a manuscript reader for me, and after critiquing my second novel in which a serial killer was dispassionately taking victims as part of an online roleplay game, she was understandably nervous about having anything to do with me! I answered her, by saying that criminality showed the extremes of human behaviour, so was memorable, for going beyond what is acceptable by society’s rules immediately implies the stories of the perpetrator and the victim need exploring.

It’s difficult to make a story based on the status quo, on peace and quiet: a tranquil sea is boring—we need waves to draw the eye and stir the emotions.

Writers are observers, noticing things that others don’t and storing them away for future use. Any skills I have as a writer were partly influenced by my father, who was a noted industrial photographer, quite a shy man who used his camera as a way of interfacing with people; it was his shield and his magic wand. He noticed the strangeness of what people did, commenting on these aberrations almost as a visitor from another planet sent down to make a sociological study of human beings.

After he died, I came across a poem that made me think of his attitude to people, written by Sir Walter A. Raleigh—not the famous Tudor writer, courtier and explorer, but rather a 19th/20th-century English professor:

 “Wishes of an Elderly Man, Wished at a Garden Party, June 1914”:

I wish I loved the Human Race;

I wish I loved its silly face;

I wish I liked the way it walks;

I wish I liked the way it talks;

And when I’m introduced to one,

I wish I thought “What Jolly Fun!”

Sir Walter A. Raleigh (1861-1922)

I think that writers have this slightly detached stance, observing people and mentally recording their activities with a view to devising stories that rewrite what really happened. Writers remember unusual names, strange news stories that somehow swiftly disappear from the media, and amusing incidents that made them laugh and which might entertain their readers.

My ideas come from all over the place, including the news. For instance, there were a series of killings in Bombay & Calcutta from 1987-1989, with the victims being homeless people. The murderer was never caught, which in itself is attractive to a writer, for who knows where he is now?

With so many British people homeless nowadays, living on the streets, what if an anonymous killer decided to do clean up?

As a child in the 1960s, I was terrified at the prospect of meeting an escaped inmate of a mental institution, a doctor who’d been incarcerated for killing his patients. The newspapers called him Doctor Death, which was bad enough, but what really scared me about him was that he was 6′ 6″ tall, wore a floor-length raincoat and apparently walked without swinging his arms, owing to shoulder injuries. Imagine how spooky that would look. I watched every man who walked past our house, checking that he was swinging his arms! They caught him after a few weeks, but what a great character to resurrect in a story.

When I lived in America, a local mortuary did a stocktake of their inventory, including their dead clients, and found that they’d somehow got two extra corpses that they couldn’t account for….One would have been bad enough, but two looked even more suspicious—were they connected, and how were they sneaked into the cold storage vaults? They’d both been murdered, from the wounds on their bodies, so presumably, their killers had somehow accessed the mortuary—a real case of hiding something in plain sight. One of the regular characters in my Cornish Detective series is a forensic pathologist with a morgue so I may give her a mysterious guest.

I got the idea for the title of my last novel, The Dead Need Nobody, from a Jo Nesbø novel in which his protagonist Harry Hole thinks just that as he leaves an autopsy of a murder victim. My next novel in the series will be called Kissing and Killing, which was a phrase I stole from a throwaway comment by a member of my writing forum, The Colony. I hadn’t heard it before, but it will be an ideal title for a plot in which my detective is in love for the first time since being widowed.

While planning a story, I make loads of notes, including reminders of expressions my characters use, as well as descriptive passages of how the weather, wildlife, vegetation and sea state would be at that time of year. Ideas are will o’ the wisps, so it helps to pin them down in a document. Having a store of ideas helps my grey matter come up with more while in the throes of typing words on the screen.

Where do you get your ideas from?

Did a childhood memory re-emerge to fertilise a story?

Have you been inspired by a news story?

Or, by an unguarded comment that you overheard?

Even by the lyrics of a song?

Writing

On being Quotable

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I’ve long been a collector of quotes, poetry and excerpts from novels and speeches. I have several ring binders full of them, and they’ve been a source of comfort and inspiration to me over the years.

Some of the aphorisms are pithy observations on the human condition, while others are specifically about writing and reading. Writers like commenting on what they do, and reading a famous author’s wise words about the process of creating a story, makes you realise that you’re not alone.

Words of encouragement are fuel to the fire that sometimes wanes inside of us, and they can also be a call to arms, as with So you want to be a writer? by Charles Bukowski.

More genteel is Barbara Kingsolver’s poem Hope; An Owner’s Manual, with which she closed her commencement address to graduates of Duke University.

Hope; An Owner’s Manual

Look, you might as well know, this thing is going to take endless repair: rubber bands, crazy glue, tapioca, the square of the hypotenuse. Nineteenth-century novels. Heartstrings, sunrise: all of these are useful. Also, feathers.

To keep it humming, sometimes you have to stand on an incline, where everything looks possible; on the line you drew yourself. Or in the grocery line, making faces at a toddler secretly, over his mother’s shoulder.

You might have to pop the clutch and run past all the evidence. Past everyone who is laughing or praying for you. Definitely you don’t want to go directly to jail, but still, here you go, passing time, passing strange. Don’t pass this up.

In the worst of times, you will have to pass it off. Park it and fly by the seat of your pants. With nothing in the bank, you’ll still want to take the express. Tiptoe past the dogs of the apocalypse that are sleeping in the shade of your future. Pay at the window. Pass your hope like a bad check. You might still have just enough time. To make a deposit.

More laconically, William Saroyan stated:

Writing is the hardest way of earning a living with the possible exception of wrestling alligators.

Quotes taken from the text of a novel intrigue me, for it’s obvious in many cases, that the author was making a stand in what they wrote, deliberately catching the reader by the ear to make them think about something.

Whether the noteworthy observation seems to come from the omniscient author, as in It was best of times, it was the worst of times from the opening of Charles Dickens’ A Tale of Two Cities, or when a character makes a comment that draws the eye, as in Bilbo Baggins saying All that is gold does not glitter. Not all those who wander are lost, the words touch the reader and they want to read more of them. It’s vital to keep the reader hooked with such unexpected barbs.

Occasionally, while writing my own Cornish Detective novels, I’ve had my protagonist and supporting characters think or say something that feels reflective or portentous—though, hopefully not pretentious! I’ve sometimes wondered if these witticisms might have a life beyond that of the novel, but that’s as much down to fate as attracting readers in the first place. Some of my lead copper’s advice seems throwaway, but carries weight: “The longest journey begins with one step—so does falling off of a cliff.”

Humour also works. In my last novel, The Dead Needy Nobody, a streetwise tart with a heart of lead, has just distracted my hero detective by flashing some cleavage at him: “Men were all the same—they thought with their balls, pointed with their cocks and talked out of their arseholes.“ I’m well aware that, in the light of recent criticism by females of how male writers describe women that I’ll be similarly condemned, but that observation was actually said to me word for word, by an 80-year-old retired madam of a Portsmouth brothel, who was one of my customers on a milk round in rural Hampshire in 1986; her quip went into my memory banks to be regurgitated 42 years later.

Do you have any favourite quotes from novels?

Or wise words from authors?

Have you written anything quotable?

Reading

Nobody Does It Better

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Which writer’s work do you eagerly anticipate reading, impatient for their new novel to be published?

It could be someone who writes a series of novels featuring the same characters, or an author who takes years to pen their new story, which finds itself shortlisted for major literary awards. You might be working your way through a writer’s back catalogue, enthralled by their skills, while still taking glee from the occasional stinker of a title, that simply didn’t work.

We’ve all got our favourite authors, and some of them aren’t highly regarded by the critics, but who cares? If books are like food, why not have the occasional naughty treat?

My own list of got-to-read authors includes Walter Mosley, James Lee Burke, John Connolly, Michael Connelly, Barbara Kingsolver, Andrea Camilleri, Annie Dillard, Alice Hoffman, Dennis Lehane, Henning Mankell, Elizabeth Strout, Jo Nesbø, Justin Cartwright, Haruki Murakami, C. J. Sansom, Ann Patchett, Joe R. Lansdale, Don Winslow, Donald Ray Pollock and Jane Harper.

I read two hugely impressive debut novels in 2017, which whet my appetite for the second titles by Lars Mytting and by Kim Zupan.

My list of authors I seek out is based on those that I like. There are plenty of novelists whose books I admire, but don’t particularly like. As an example of this, I recently re-read Virginia Woolf’s To The Lighthouse, which was written in a complex way, with long sections devoted to streams of consciousness. Woolf was experimenting with ways of writing a novel, as part of the Modernist movement, but it doesn’t make for easy reading.

Who floats your boat?

Which author makes you forget what you’re doing, to read their story?

Writing

British & American English

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This article in today’s Guardian fuels the notion that American and English people are separated by a common language.

I lived in Atlanta, Georgia for three years, so picked up some colloquialisms, such as Y’all, Copacetic (completely satisfactory), Fixin’ to, If I had my druthers (Given the choice, I’d rather not), All Get Out, as in the phrase “He was as funny as all get out” and Too big for his britches.

My favourite Southern expression was, “No shit, Sherlock,” meaning you’ve just stated something that’s totally obvious to most people.

My English accent was popular with women while seeming to make some men think I was behaving in a superior way, or that it was proof all English men were gay! I had a bumper sticker on my Chevrolet Camaro, that said CORNISH MEN DO THINGS DRECKLY. This caught people’s attention, and they asked me if it meant the same as the Southern expression Directly. It kind of does, but the rebellious Cornish meaning is more “I’ll get around to it when I feel like it.”

Interested in language, I was startled to find how archaic words and pronunciations had been retained in America. I’d thought that Fall for Autumn, was an Americanism, but it’s what Brits used to say, as it derives from the Old English word ‘feallan’ meaning to fall or die—perfect for describing falling leaves.

Even more surprising to me, was how Americans had retained the French pronunciation of some words, which is why they said “Erb” for Herb, and that what an English person would pronounce as a Fill-it for a fillet of fish was said in the French way for filet—with an accent on the last syllable—Fil-ay. The spelling was also different.

I have an occasional American character in my Cornish Detective novels, an FBI agent, so I make sure that he speaks differently enough to be noticeable.

Separated by the pond, do you have any favourite American or British English expressions?