Perhaps I should start the PPPP—Pedantic Paul’s Punctuation Patrol, after previously posting about disappearing dots and praiseworthy semicolons, but I’ve noticed another trend affecting the squiggles that we use to show the nature of a word.
Diacritical marks or glyphs indicate how a word is meant to be pronounced, changing the sound of the letter which has the accent mark. In an increasingly bland world, where dumbing-down has triumphed, it’s refreshing to see something that offers both accuracy and a stylistic flourish.
Thus the double dot of the diaeresis over the letter in naïve indicates that it should be said as if it were a double e (ny-EEV). Most books print the word as naive—which could be pronounced as nave—it’s strange how removing these foreign punctuation marks requires extra knowledge from the reader…it’s complicated the reading process, rather than simplified it.
Other common examples are clichéwhich is often written as cliche, and café usually becomescafe.
I read a fair few foreign novels in translation, and I’ve noticed that in these diacritical marks tend to be retained, whereas books published in English-speaking countries omit them—even if the plot takes place abroadwhere they’re used.
Scandinavian novels are replete with diacritical marks, though this doesn’t stop British and American publishers from altering even an author’s name…presumably to make them look less foreign (and intimidating). A good example of this is hugely successful crime writer Jo Nesbø from Norway, whose surname is usually printed without the slashed o. His name should be pronounced as nez-bOO…rather than nez-bOW.
Other author names that cause confusion are Irish novelist Colm Tóibín (CULL-um Toe-BEAN)
and fantasy author China Miéville (mee-AY-vill) and French erotic writer Anaïs Nin (Ahn-EYE-ees).
I‘m fond of diacritical marks, using them when writing, even though it means pausing for a moment to insert them via the Special Character function in my LibreOffice Writer software.
It’s probable that book publishers have their own policy in handling such glyphs, but for the moment, I’ll continue to use them. Of course, in the language of their origin, diacritical marks appear on the keyboard…and in the written alphabet, they’re usually treated as separate letters and listed after Z.
One that I’m particularly fond of, which has largely disappeared in written English, is a glyph created by merging two letters into what’s known as a ligature. This makes Æ or æa dipthong—an amusing word for a gliding vowel—a combination of two vowel sounds in one syllable. I first encountered it, when studying Latin as a teenager (it was that sort of school), and it’s still commonly used in modern Scandinavian languages. These days, æ usually gets typed as two separate letters, though pleasingly it does remain in Encyclopædia Britannica.
The French, who actively do everything that they can to preserve their nation’s identity, have been anxious about relaxed rules about spelling, that sees the disappearance of the circumflex as being acceptable; for example Aoûtmeaning August.
Do you use glyphs or diacritical marks in writing your stories?
Have you invented your own…for fantasy or science fiction?
Do you like seeing such marks printed in a book you’re reading, or do they irritate you?
I’d argue that anyone raised in the 20th-century is so immersed in moving images, that it’s impossible for them to read or write a book without picturing the action as a film. In a way, we’re all cameras, recording what we see every day in our memories, but the proliferation of smartphones means that snaps and videos have become an interface—one that doesn’t necessarily aid an understanding of events—it captures a moment but obscures context.
I first became aware of the power of graphic novels when I readThe Road to Perdition, written by Max Alan Collins, after noticing that the 2002 Hollywood movie adaptation had been based upon it.
In the last few years, I’ve borrowed about 100 graphic novels from my local library. I’m fairly averse to superheroes in Lycra bodysuits, constantly fretting about practicalities…like how do they go to the loo. One unexpected boon of graphic novels is as a reminder of, or an introduction to, classic novels.
Another graphic representation of a story is through storyboarding a film project, a technique that’s been around since the 1930s, with key scenes drawn resembling the illustrations of a comic. Seeing illustrations of action yet to be filmed helps set designers, cameramen, sound and lighting technicians and the director to plan what’s needed.
When writing stories, I sometimes visualise how a scene would be filmed, or at least drawn for a storyboard or graphic novel. I’ve deliberately written my Cornish Detective novels in such a way as they’d transpose to a television adaptation. Maybe it’s a consequence of growing up in a household dominated by photographic images, for my father was a noted industrial photographer (for British Aerospace—many publicity shots of Concorde were taken by him) and I quickly came to memorise events in a visual way, sometimes altering camera angles and lighting levels, while another part of my brain churned out words for the script.
As an example of how visual artists adapted the written word, look at Charles Dickens’ Great Expectations, where the protagonist Pip first meets Magwitch, an escaped convict, when visiting the graves of his parents and brothers; later, unknown to Pip, Magwitch becomes his benefactor. In the novel, their meeting is described in this way:
“A fearful man, all in coarse grey, with a great iron on his leg. A man with no hat, and with broken shoes, and with an old rag tied round his head. A man who had been soaked in water, and smothered in mud, and lamed by stones, and cut by flints, and stung by nettles, and torn by briars; who limped, and shivered, and glared, and growled; and whose teeth chattered in his head as he seized me by the chin.”
The graphic novel version adapted by Jen Green, published by Classical Comics and illustrated by John Stokes, pictures their first encounter this way:
Film director David Lean’s 1946 adaptation of the novel is highly atmospheric, with great use of sound, including bird calls and moving vegetation.
In my last Cornish Detective novel, I wrote a comical car chase scene, which takes place through Cornish lanes that are only 10′ wide, too narrow to allow two cars to pass side by side, so every few hundred yards there are passing places carved into the banks. The coppers in their patrol car are pursuing thieves driving a Ford Transit van. Lanes around here are not only narrow, with grass growing down the middle of the tarmac (untouched by tyres), but also winding with many blind bends, so the chase never exceeds 30 m.p.h. Every so often, the baddies slam on the brakes and reverse towards the police car, forcing them to accelerate backwards to avoid a collision. I started to visualise the pursuit as an excerpt from The Simpsons or Wacky Races! Cartoon violence concluded the chapter when the criminals put up futile resistance more for the sake of form than any hope of getting away.
Stephen King, in his memoir On Writing, gave some great advice about how to describe a scene through visualising it, putting in what you want a reader to experience.
How do you ‘see’ your book, as you write it?
If you’re using a multiple viewpoint, do you pan around the scene?
If writing an epic fantasy or historical tale do you imagine scenes as large oil paintings?
Do cartoonish images add to the humour of what you’re writing?
All of writing is full of doubt. We journey along a lonely trail, beaten by phantom pillows that come out of nowhere, making us agonise over such trivial things as which font to use, should there be a comma there and is that word one word or is it hyphenated or even two separate words?
When it comes to larger issues, such as deciding on the theme of your story, pondering whether that would appeal to readers, then you’re entering fortune telling territory. Apart from the blows that sap your ego, it’s easy to stray into booby trap territory. Giving yourself leeway over plots is a wise attitude to have from the outset, for, after all, there are only so many stories that can be told, but what about details you think are original? In a fit of apprehension, I checked that my protagonist detective Neil Kettle’s name hadn’t been previously used in a crime series I’d never heard of, pleased to find it was mine alone.
Mind you, with the lack of perception that sometimes envelops me, in my last novel I only noticed that I’d called one character Mungo and another Bengo 70,000 words into writing the story. Typical Cornish young men, one was a surfer, the other a scuba diver. I felt like an idiot for not noticing the similarity of their names, realising that that itself was the solution—I made them cousins—doubt evaporated!
As for finding anything certain to believe in, when it comes to the totally imponderable side of publishing that actually decides the fate of my book, it feels to me like forcing myself into a warehouse stuffed from floor to rafters, with the very pillows of doubt that have been biffing me about as I wrote the manuscript. I can’t see which way to go, and all I can do is tackle what is in front of me at the moment, eviscerating various pillows to find a load of largely irrelevant stuffing about blogging, tweeting and the best way to crawl to query a literary agent. Should I return to self-publishing, (which I first did in 2014), even though it feels like emptying a bucket of water into an ocean of other ebooks?
The weird thing is, that even successfully published authors who’ve made a decent living from their work are still stricken with doubt. As dogmatic as ever, Ernest Hemingway said a couple of things that acknowledge his own and all of our uncertainties:
“We are all apprentices in a craft where no one ever becomes a master.”
“It took me fifteen years to discover I had no talent for writing, but I couldn’t give it up because by that time I was too famous.”
Sylvia Plath rationalised:
“And by the way, everything in life is writeable about if you have the outgoing guts to do it, and the imagination to improvise. The worst enemy to creativity is self-doubt.”
Brian Patten wrote an enchanting love poem called ‘Doubt Shall Not Make An End Of You’ whose opening lines I sometimes recall when faced with doubt about the progress of my WIP and what will happen to my Cornish Detective series:
Doubt shall not make an end of you
nor closing eyes lose your shape
when the retina’s light fades;
what dawns inside me will light you.
I console myself by remembering that I’ve got this far in my writing by determination and whatever glimmer of a talent I have; I can go further, even though I’m unsure of which direction to take. It’s up to me to illuminate my stories by using my imagination, dragging them out into the light for others to see.
Essentially, doubt is a cloud on the horizon. Sure, it may rain on you a bit, but what if it blows away to reveal the sun?
Blimey, I’ve just this moment realised that I’m channelling the spirit of 1969 era Joni Mitchell!
Much has been said about the limited attention spans of modern day audiences for every form of show business, be it music, television shows or Hollywood films. It takes an inexperienced author a while to realise that they too are entering the cutthroat world of show business, and that their act—which is their book—needs to perform in a way that grabs and keeps the attention of a fickle mob of readers, who appear to have the attention span of a goldfish with attention deficit disorder!
I recently readBored and Brilliant by Manoush Zamarodi which argues the case for being bored as a way of increasing creativity and productivity; this means controlling excessive use of social media.
In one chapter, Zamarodi examines what she terms Reading Incomprehension, whereby dozens of readers contacted her to say that they were unable to get through all of a novel or even a magazine article. Even professional journalists admitted problems to her, with their eyes skipping around the page—as if scrolling on Facebook or Twitter—finding it hard to focus on the meaning of the text and looking for a quick payoff. With a book, this can be a long time in coming.
Before the Web, reading was primarily a linear activity. The Internet has hyperlinks, scrolling screens, photographs and sometimes an immense amount of information, that’s impossible to take in, which encourages nonlinear reading. Our brains haven’t adapted to this new way of reading, even if it’s supplanted the traditional method, meaning that our comprehension has declined, as has our patience—we move on too quickly. Various scientific studies have been done, that prove readers’ recall of a story that they read in printed form is better than those who read it on a Kindle.
This is partly due to the depth at which people read. With a book in your hand, you can pause to think, re-reading a sentence to savour its meaning; it may be a slower process than scanning a page on an electric screen, but it ultimately brings more enjoyment and satisfaction.
All the same, being faced with huge paragraphs can be intimidating. In the last year, I’ve read a few novels that were originally published in the 1950s and 1960s, where paragraphs were more than one page long; they looked like mountains to climb.
It appears there’s a trend towards making the pages of a printed book imitate the appearance of a smartphone or Kindle. Journalist Constance Grady, who writes for the Vox website, recently came across a novel that was structured like a season of a television series, with each chapter being one episode. This is a deliberate marketing ploy by an outfit called Serial Box.
By coincidence, I read a highly-praised crime novel by a debut author, which has a modern way of laying out the pages, to include pages of social postings gossiping about the investigation into a missing child.
Close to Home, by Cara Hunter, has police interviews of suspects and witnesses printed in italics, the questions and answers widely spaced, as are newspaper reports on the case, which appear in a separate box. There are very few long paragraphs, with most averaging 4-5 lines. Each page has a lot of white space…making it look easy to tackle—as well as resembling the screen of an electronic reader. The format means that the paperback version has a few more pages than is usual for a debut crime novel, at 361 pages, and I’m surprised that it still comes in at a typical-for-the-genre 85,219-word count.
It certainly has a modern look in how the printed page is arranged, which presumably came from the publisher’s marketing and design departments putting their heads together.
All of these studies and developments in publishing have made me reconsider how I’ve been arranging my Cornish Detective novels. Although I’m a veteran reader, I’ve noticed, over the last few years, that I feel a bit weary when I turn a page to see that there are very long paragraphs facing me, so do I really want to inflict such obstacles on my readers? When being taught how to write, as a youngster, the advice was to discuss one topic in a paragraph and to begin a new paragraph when the topic changed. The same thing applies to when a new speaker starts saying something.
I largely stay true to these rules, but sometimes when my detectives are chewing the fat over, say, on a complicated subject, such as money laundering, the paragraphs expand to look enormous. I’ve sometimes introduced another speaker, just to chop them up!
What do you think of these new ways of laying out the pages of a novel?
Have you noticed any trends that look like they’re aimed at readers with limited attention spans?
Is your own writing affected by worrying that you’ll bore your readers with overlong paragraphs, or even lengthy sentences?
Repetition, when it’s done unintentionally, is one of those bugbears of writing that only comes to light when editing your precious manuscript. It’s part of the sneaky family of ‘Why-didn’t-I notice-that?’ errors that creep in, which includes missing words, spelling mistakes, punctuation gaffs and wordiness.
Annoying as it is, to discover repetition, I’m sanguine about it, as I’ve always thought that it was more important to get the story down, with effective characterisation, believable dialogue and an engrossing plot. My story is a garment I’m sewing from a pattern in my head: I’ll iron it later!
Sometimes, I’ve used repetition deliberately using the same descriptive phrases in different books in my Cornish Detective series, hoping to encourage familiarity in my readers, and maybe loyalty as they enter a world populated by characters they already know. One passage that I’ve used in each of the five stories indicates the personality of my protagonist:
‘This was why Neil loved his job. Always motivated by setting wrongs right in catching villains to see them punished, he couldn’t deny the thrill of the chase, of defeating a warped mind.‘
In writing dialogue, a writer can have fun with ignoring the rules of orderly writing, if it’s their characters who are using incorrect grammar, repetition, split infinitives, double negatives—which can be attributed to their poor education—not yours!
Having said that, repetition can certainly sneak in without me noticing, while lost in the throes of creating more chapters. The other night, I typed ‘hammering’ into the Search function of my LibreOffice software, as I knew I’d used that noun to describe a sculptor working on a block of granite…and I needed to find out what I’d said her age was. To my alarm, from highlighted examples, I saw that I’d used ‘hammering’ eight other times in the manuscript, which I was completely unaware of; I changed some for other doing words!
One thing that happens in real life, but which is tricky to convey in fiction, is known as ‘Mirroring’ In this behaviour, people copy the behaviour of who they’re talking to, with similar non-verbal gestures. But, they also use the same words when participating in a conversation, to build a rapport. If an author does that in their prose, there’s a risk it will look like they’ve lost their powers of imagination.
A useful tool to root out unwanted repetitions is Wordle, which is described by its designers as “a toy for generating “word clouds” from text that you provide. The clouds give greater prominence to words that appear more frequently in the source text.”
I write crime novels, and there’s only a certain number of ways of describing the illegal death of a victim, so it’s inevitable that murder and manslaughterappear a lot. I haven’t often used word repetition as a stylistic flourish, other than when a stressed-out suspect was being arrested, and he launched an angry tirade of abuse, using variations of the word ‘fuck’ a lot.
Some writers are famed for their use of repetition, in particular, playwright and screenplay writer David Mamet. Here’s an example from his 2008 martial arts film Redbelt:
“You know the escape,” he purrs, as Joe yields to hypoxia. “You know the escape. Breathe. There’s always an escape.” And again: “There’s always an escape.”
The use of repetition in poetry can be powerful, as in one of my favourite poems ‘One Art’ by Elizabeth Bishop.
One Art The art of losing isn’t hard to master;
so many things seem filled with the intent
to be lost that their loss is no disaster.
Lose something every day. Accept the fluster
of lost door keys, the hour badly spent.
The art of losing isn’t hard to master.
Then practice losing farther, losing faster:
places, and names, and where it was you meant
to travel. None of these will bring disaster.
I lost my mother’s watch. And look! my last, or
next-to-last, of three loved houses went.
The art of losing isn’t hard to master.
I lost two cities, lovely ones. And, vaster,
some realms I owned, two rivers, a continent.
I miss them, but it wasn’t a disaster.
–Even losing you (the joking voice, a gesture
I love) I shan’t have lied. It’s evident
the art of losing’s not too hard to master
though it may look like (Write it!) like disaster.
Elizabeth Bishop (1911-1979)
It’s all a question of balance, for repetition can emphasize setting, reinforce a character trait and lead the reader towards noticing what, at first sight, appears to be an irrelevant detail. On the other hand, saying the same thing over and over again can drive readers mad! Your aim should be to lead them on, further into your story, not throw obstacles carelessly in their way. Certainly, repetition can be used to create the sense of monotony your character is experiencing, but multiple use of the same word over a few pages only shows how bored you were while writing!
Iwrote a gory fight scene at the end of my fifth crime novel, in which my hero copper gets stabbed several times, before overpowering his assailant and repeatedly beating him with his extendable baton. He wants to put him out of action, as there’s a hostage’s life at stake, but he slips into oblivion from blood loss. He faints as he’s beating, beating, beating away.
How do you use repetition in your writing?
Do you have any favourite examples from literature?
I’ve learned a lot about the techniques of writing, since returning to creating stories six years ago. I’ve admired many authors, from boyhood, savouring how they transported my imagination. I like howthey did it, as much as the story they told.
As I aged, I decided that life was too short to waste it reading badly written books. Persevering with novels that annoyed me, seeing them through to the end, made me disappointed in myself and contemptuous of the author. I tend to avoid writers who don’t engage me in some way. That’s not to say that they’re second-rate, for there have been bestsellers and literary prize winners that simply leave me cold.
I’m suspicious of the hoopla that surrounds authors who are household names, and of challenging novels of literature that takes a committee of eminent writers to decide which is best. I’m glad that books are getting recognition, but not so gullible as to believe that reading these much-lauded authors will be a pleasant or character-improving experience.
It’s possible to admire a work of art, but notlike it very much. I admire the movie Citizen Kane, but don’t enjoy watching it. I admire the technique of Paul Auster, but don’t get any pleasure from his novels.
I recently started reading a highly-praised crime novel You Will Know Meby Megan Abbott, an author new to me. The opening chapter was bewildering, a confused hotchpotch of one sentenced conversation between partygoers, as witnessed by a drunk mother. I didn’t know who any of these characters were and had to read paragraphs a couple of times to get an idea of what was going on.
I immediately recognised what Megan Abbott was trying to do, by introducing an unreliable narrator, but it came across as a poor copying of Paula Hawkins’ Girl On A Trainand Gillian Flynn’s Gone Girl. I scanned pages further into the story and was similarly confused and unimpressed. Considering how much we’re advised by writing gurus to grab the reader’s attention with our opening five chapters, this was a dismal failure.
I gave up on it, turning to one of my favourite authors Dennis Lehane. Reading his World Gone Bywas like entering a beloved restaurant where I knew I was going to enjoy the meal. Then, I noticed signs of a run-on sentence, which Lehane had rewritten, to make three shorter sentences. It still read clumsily, but…hang on, I’ve forgotten the storyline…what was it he said? So I reread the paragraph, annoyed with myself for dissecting writing technicalities rather than enjoying the whole.
So, does being a writer spoil your enjoyment of reading?
On the British television service Freeview, there’s a channel called Talking Pictures, which shows old films from the early twentieth century, as well as later cult classics. This morning, I watched a low budget hot rod/ monster/ science-fiction film called The Giant Gila Monster.Whatever happened to that sub-genre?
It was less than terrifying, the monstrous lizard being rather amusing, but the acting was fine, the script surprisingly true to life and the characters were easy to root for. Curious about its making, I looked online, and found this comment in the Wikipedia article on the film:
Dave Sindelar, on his website Fantastic Movie Musings and Ramblingsgave the film a positive review. Sindelar wrote in his review of the film: “whatever flaws there are with the story, I find myself drawn to the regional feel of the movie, and especially to the likeable characters that inhabit this environment…. It’s rare for a movie to have this many likeable characters, and I think the reason I watch the movie again and again is because I just like to spend time with them.”
This set me to thinking about which literary fictional characters I’ve enjoyed spending time with, especially repeatedly in a series of stories. As a writer, it sounds like an obvious prerequisite that readers should like your characters or at least bond with them to the extent that they want to know what happens to them. Thus, the fate of villains is compelling; a character doesn’t have to be a clean-living paragon of virtue to be admirable.
With my own Cornish Detective series, my protagonist Detective Chief Inspector Neil Kettle is likeable, though he’s definitely weird, and his left wing, green and arty approach to life will alienate some readers—which is fine with me—they might read on to see him get his comeuppance.
Books themselves can become friends and the characters in them become allies to us in the loneliness of life; we want to know how they’re getting on after we were last together.
In my chosen writing genre of Crime, some of my favourite likeable characters include:
Of the three, Commissario Salvo Montalbano would be the most convivial company, for the other two are rather tortured souls. Harry Hole is a trouble-seeking nutter!
In cinema films, the characters I relate to the most, and who I’ve watched repeatedly, are The Outlaw Josey Wales, played by Clint Eastwood, Blade Runner Rick Deckard, played by Harrison Ford and the Alien series Ellen Ripley, played by Sigourney Weaver. It’s arguable that all of these movies are Westerns, with an antihero as the protagonist—which might be a clue to my own bolshy character!
Who are your favourite fictional characters in print and on the silver screen?
Some time ago, I posted a homage to the semicolon, but just recently, I’ve noticed another endangered punctuation species…they’re not really Full Stops or Periods or Ellipses, so I’m going to call them Dots—as used in abbreviations.
I first noticed their disappearance when writing one of my Cornish Detective stories. My protagonist detective’s investigation into a serial killer was interrupted by the secret services of America and the United Kingdom, who took an interest, as some of his victims worldwide had been employed by them. I went to type F.B.I. and M.I.5 and the U.S.A. and the U.K. and it all looked too dotty—interrupting the flow of reading—typing the abbreviations without dots looked wrong too! To check, I accessed the FBI and MI5 websites, and sure enough, they’ve dropped the dots, as have most government sites!
When I was taught punctuation and grammar, back in the 1960s, abbreviations were always dotted. These days, they’re fading away, though m.p.h. for speed, and the common a.m. and p.m. to denote before or after midday correctly hold onto their dots, but mm is acceptable for millimetre, and a simple C and F for Centigrade and Fahrenheit suffices.
I also found that PAYG is now used for Pay As You Go mobile phones. And, BDSM does without dots, but keeps its knots!
Overall, the trend in punctuation is for a cleaner look, partly through laziness, avoiding having to hit an irksome key by pressing Shift. This simplification has affected other punctuation marks. It’s long been common for American speech marks to be a single ‘, while Brits used a double “. I was taught that the single ‘ mark was specifically for use when quoting what someone had said in the past, while double “ marks indicated speech for those present in the scene. Nowadays, it’s unusual to see double speech marks.
No one wants to put readers off by a page filled with a blizzard of squiggles, dots, curves and dashes so the simpler way of writing things might be a good move—provided it doesn’t cause confusion over the information being imparted.
Have you noticed any trends in punctuation?
I’ve discovered where the missing dots are going! Japanese contemporary artist Yayoi Kusama is famed for her colourful paintings, sculptures and installations featuring thousands of dots!
his Evening Standardarticle discusses writing courses and three recently published how-to guides.
The £4,000 fee for the Faber Academy course Writing A Novel is a strong indicator of how to make money from writing—run a course, writers’ retreat or online pay-for tuition or editing services. Remember, far more suppliers of mining equipment, clothing and food supplies got rich during a gold rush, than hard-working miners themselves.
What a reader finds shocking, even objectionable, is going to vary, though unusual and excessive forms of sex and violence are the best ways of attracting attention to a book, especially for a debut author.
A writer can have fun with ignoring the rules of orderly writing, if it’s their characters who are using incorrect grammar, repetition, split infinitives, double negatives—which can be attributed to their poor education—not yours!
I’m in two minds about self-censoring dangerous information…after all, it’s no excuse to say that it’s available to anyone who searches the internet when you’re presenting it in an easily digestible form in your fictional story.
Not every creative artist agrees, as this interview with Quentin Tarantino demonstrates, when he tears into Krishnan Guru-Murthy, for daring to suggest that the violence depicted in his movies encourages copycat crimes.
Shocking novelists include Irvine Welsh, whose stories feature grotesque scenes full of foul language. Sometimes a novel can be deemed to be so obscene or controversial, that it gets banned, even provoking a criminal trial—as happened with D.H. Lawrence’s Lady Chatterley’s Lover.
Salman Rushdie pissed off Iran’s Supreme Leader Ayatollah Khomeini so much with his The Satanic Verses, which supposedly contained blasphemous references against the prophet Muhammed, that he pronounced a fatwa calling for his death…which theoretically is still in place. It’s estimated that it’s cost £1,000,000 a year to protect him.
In my Cornish Detective series, I’ve written about some shocking things, including murder, human trafficking, incest, prostitution, rape, drug addiction, kidnapping and detailed descriptions of autopsies. These elements are part and parcel of modern-day crime novels—readers expect them—what would have outraged the public fifty years ago is now commonplace entertainment. Some readers will still be shocked by the bare details, though I try to unsettle the others by describing the perpetrator’s attitude to their crime—which can be disturbing for their lack of empathy and any sense of guilt.
One thing that I like to do with my stories, is to wrong-foot the reader, by making them sympathise with a villain. A serial killer was an ex-sniper, used to spending days camouflaged in the landscape, waiting for his target to appear, and he’d developed a love of wildlife, especially birds. I also gave him some physical ailments, that readers could relate to.
Another serial killer, who’d taken a victim once a year for forty years, only eliminated hardened criminals, some of whom had escaped justice through legal technicalities. He slaughtered paedophiles, rapists, drug dealers and terrorists—did that make him evil or an unacknowledged superhero of justice?
The antagonist in my latest story is a cultured art gallery owner, who’s killed three people, including his brother, to protect his paintings. He interprets life through his art collection, shunning people socially and only interacting with wealthy collectors. He’s a misanthrope, more specifically a misogynist who detests women—always thinking the worst of them, and his thoughts are vile. They’re the opposite of my own attitude, as I was raised surrounded by warm and nurturing female relatives; I’m sure that some readers will interpret my story as meaning that I’m a male chauvinist hog, but such are the risks any writer runs.
I’ve not justified my villain’s prejudice against females, though I have gone some way towards explaining it. When he was 10 years old, his mother disappeared to New York with her lover, totally abandoning her family, never contacting them again. His father is a withdrawn concentration camp survivor, who works as a funeral director embalming corpses. He offers no emotional support. One time, as a teenager, my villain unexpectedly encounters a naked female corpse in the embalming room, before being ejected by his father—who punishes him by making him write a religious essay based on a painting called The Light Of The World, by William Holman Hunt. This pushes him away from any hope of religious redemption, and he turns to the dark side.
I based this scene on real-life crimes, where boys, who went on to become serial killers, spent too much unsupervised time with the bodies of close female relatives, laid out in the parlour of their homes—as was once common practice in the early 20th-century. They became acquainted with death in female form at animpressionable stage in their emotional and sexual development.
Anyhow, my baddy thinks things such as:
“The painter served her purpose and had been fairly paid for her daubs. With just enough skill to imitate an untrained artist from the 1920s, she’d become a liability. Her disappearance would be put down to a return to drug addiction. She had to go: she’d been trying to see through the shutters of the shop. The mop-headed boy she’d been dating asked around about her, but had taken up with an old flame…easy come, easy go. Temptation was everywhere, with so many alluring holidaymakers in town for a week or two of pleasure.
The killer had tupped a boatload of them, when young, dumb and full of cum, but that was a distraction he’d abandoned, now that he was an established member of the art colony. He still appreciated a good-looking woman, and he had admirers, but they were all gold-diggers, divorcees and widows mainly, on the hunt for someone to provide them with an easeful old age. Peddling pussies that were past their sell-by date, they’d spread for bread, offering gash for cash, with not a smidgin of sincerity in their soul or an ounce of love in their hearts.
The wind on his face was refreshing. He spent too much time indoors, which had given his skin a pallor but prevented the sunbaked wrinkles of sun-worshippers. How being the colour and texture of an ancient tan handbag could be considered healthy, was beyond his understanding.“
He’s a supposedly civilised man, who’s extremely uncouth; undoubtedly a sociopath.
Of course, the things that characters say can be shocking in a humorous way. Sitting in a pub one evening, minding my own business, I overheard a group of women in the next booth talking about their partners’ physical attributes. One called her husband “Tripod”, which made her friends giggle as they asked if he was that well-hung? “Not really,” the woman replied,“it’s just that the important third ‘leg’ keeps collapsing and letting me down!”
Part of the problem with modern stories is judging the balance between describing the reality of how people live and endeavouring to narrate a story that has literary aspirations. Critics like to shuffle realistic depictions of 21st-century urban living into the vague category of Working Class Fiction. Most people have ignoble thoughts, from time to time, imagining the worst and sometimes saying things that they regret, or pretend to regret, or won’t take back. Capturing such outrage in fiction is tricky.
Do you have any favourite famous novels that shocked you with what the author expressed from their own standpoint or through what their characters thought and said?
Have you written any characters who are absolutely vile?
Or, who say outrageous things in a funny ‘you can’t say that’ way?
