Top Five Writing Tips from Christopher William Hill, Author of ‘Playwriting’

Christopher William Hill is an award-winning playwright and radio dramatist. He was writer-in-residence at Plymouth Theatre Royal and tutors regularly for the Arvon Foundation. His latest book, Playwriting: From Page to Stage, is published at the end of August.

Here, Christopher shares his top five tips for any budding playwrights…

1. If you sit around twiddling your thumbs hoping for divine inspiration to strike you may well be waiting for the rest of your life without once putting pen to paper (or finger to keyboard). As a wise man once said – if you can’t get it right, get it written.

2. Don’t put off until tomorrow what you can start today. Even half an hour’s solid writing can produce immediate results. If you write just 200 words of your play in thirty minutes, that’s 2,000 words in ten days, or 20,000 words in a hundred days (roughly equivalent to a full length play). See how quickly it all adds up?

3. If you find it brain-crushingly scary to start with Act One, Scene One – find another way. Start in the middle of the play if you want, or even at the end. So long as you end up with a complete play it doesn’t matter how you go about constructing it.

4. Without conflict there is no drama, so make the lives of your characters as difficult as you can – thwart their aims and ambitions at every turn. There’s no reason why your play can’t have a happy ending – but it should be a hell of a ride getting there!

5. Don’t let anybody bully you into thinking there’s a right way or a wrong way to write your play – you have to find the way that’s best for you.

Playwriting: From Page to Stage will be published on 31 August 2012. It is available to pre-order now with a limited time only discount of 30%.

Jill McDonald-Constable On Writing Westerns and Her Love of the Genre

Under the pseudonym of Amos Carr, Jill McDonald-Constable has written numerous westerns for the Robert Hale Ltd Black Horse Western series. A passionate writer for many years, she tells us why she loves the western genre and just how she ended up being given an Indian name herself.

Where did your love of Westerns come from?

I’m an outdoor girl, that’s probably why I like Westerns. I was brought up surrounded by animals, and spent more time with horses than with people, which may just be why I put so many ‘horsey’ details in my books. I loved watching Western films and series, but never read a Western book. I was always really rooting for the Indians though. I have spent all my life writing in various genres, but the way I finally broke into Westerns is a series of strange occurrences.

My husband, Cris, never knew who his real father was, and often expressed a wish to find out. One birthday, I bought him a DNA test - it was eventually published on an ancestry web site. Within a few weeks, we had a match with someone in America, who, it turned out, is Cris’s second cousin, their fathers used to play together! Then, we discovered their great, great-grandfather had been a Chippewa chief! So from being a fan of Indians all my life, I am now married to one, and we have both been bestowed with Indian names!

Then, a little while after that discovery, I had a dream one night, which gave me the title; and almost the whole plot for a Western. I wrote it down, and sent it off to Hale. It was accepted almost immediately. When I told my mother I was at last going to be published, she asked what the book was. When I told her, she paled. Her father had never read anything but Westerns. (He had died before I was old enough to know what he was reading, and Mum had never been ‘bookish’). My second book was written, and accepted, very quickly, and now I can’t seem to stop writing Westerns. Maybe Grandad Harold is guiding my pen? I like to think so, as, somehow, I am able to write them quickly, and directly onto the computer, whereas everything else I write has always, for years, been done in longhand, then entered into the computer.

And the final, spooky coincidence is this – I live in a little place named Clayton-le-Moors, and the actor who played the original Lone Ranger was named Clayton Moore! This sounds more like the Twilight Zone than the Wild West!

What attracts you to writing about the Wild West?

I believe that it is the freedom of the age. There were very few frontiers then, and people were free to roam all the wide open spaces without constraint. I like that.

Westerns are traditionally written by men. What do you think the differences are between those books and your own?

I think that maybe my Westerns are a little ‘softer’ than those written by men, with more of a feminine presence, and dare I say, some romance? Those written by the men tend more towards violence, and for the most part, their women, if any, are still very minor characters.

What are your favourite characters from Western books, films or tv?

As a young girl, my favourite Western character was Little Joe, from Bonanza (just because he looked pretty!) Tonto was a favourite too, because he always saved Lone Ranger’s hide! It really depends what I am watching at the time.

Although there is one older Native American actor, Graham Greene (Dances with Wolves) – he’s a brilliant actor, and always has a twinkle in his eye, and his tongue firmly in his cheek. I find that very attractive.

What’s next for Amos Carr?

Next is my second book Crazy Man Cade, due out in October. Then I have three other Westerns at various stages of production, hoping for at least one or two out next year. (My alter ego is also working on three other books in different genres.)

If you would like to read excerpts, or more about McDonald-Constable, go to www.womanwholeads.webs.com

For more information on Robert Hale Ltd’s Black Horse Western series, check out our website.

E. V. Thompson on Writing Historical Novels and ‘The Bonds of Earth’

I am often asked why I chose to write Historical Novels when there is much in my own background that would be of interest to readers. The easy answer is that I am essentially a private person who prefers to keep work and home life separate. Were I to set my stories in the present day I feel readers would imagine they could detect some of my own exeriences in the novels – and they could well be right!

As it is, by having my characters living more than 100 years ago the time gap is too much to be put down to personal experience. Nevertheless, my research shows time and time again that those who lived, for instance, in the Victorian era, had emotions and experienced situations that had quite as much impact on their everyday lives as they would have today – however improbable such situations may seem to be.

For instance, in my book The Bonds of Earth, to be published by Robert Hale in November this year, a farm on which the young hero has worked since he was a boy is given to him by a grateful farmer. Far-fetched and stretching imagination too far?

Well, when I returned from Africa to live in Cornwall some forty-odd years ago I bought an old cottage from an 83 year-old farmer. As a young boy he began working on two farms, one from dawn until midday, the other from midday until dusk, seven days a week.

When one of the farmers died childless, leaving behind a seriously disabled widow, the now newly-married farm labourer and his wife took her in and cared for her until she too died, but before doing so she made a gift of the farm to the young man who had done so much to help her and her husband.

When I knew him the one-time farm labourer was an old man, but he was still as indomitable as he had been as a boy, despite living in a world that had changed almost beyond recognition during his lifetime.

The life of that old man planted the seed of a story that remained with me until I felt able to embellish and make use of it in The Bonds of Earth.

- E. V. Thompson

E. V. Thompson has written numerous novels. His latest, Beyond the Storm is out this month in paperback and available to pre-order now. The Bonds of Earth is set for publication in November 2012.

Wendy Perriam Author Interview: Part One

Credit: Frank Baron

Wendy Perriam has not one but two books out with Robert Hale Ltd this month. Her novel Broken Places is out in paperback following on from its tremendous success in hardback. Her collection of short stories, I’m on the Train!, is also out on Monday. 

In the first part of her interview with us, Wendy talks about writing from an early age, her long journey into publishing, getting kicked out of convent school and just where her ideas come from.

Don’t forget to check back later for part two …

Have you always enjoyed writing, from a young age?

Absolutely! I wrote my first poems and stories from the age of four and my first ‘novel’ at eleven. The latter was sheer wish-fulfilment. Entitled A Pony at Last, it featured an ordinary girl like me, who longed to own a pony – highly unlikely in my own case, since we lived in a suburban semi, in a cul-de-sac, miles from any field or stable. The only horse in evidence was the milkman’s decrepit nag. However, my heroine and alter ego becomes the proud possessor of a thoroughbred chestnut mare, so, before I’d even reached my teens, I had realized the power of writing to remake an unsatisfactory world.

I was a sickly, unsporty child, so, while my siblings went skating and cycling, I preferred to curl up with a book, or pen my own variations on Black Beauty or the Famous Five. In fact, I spent much of my childhood with imaginary companions or in imaginary situations – as do several of the characters in my new short-story collection, despite their being adults. In the story Michael, the office dogsbody, Carole, finds strength and support in an Archangel, who becomes her guide, her protector, her shopping-consultant and even her alarm clock. And then there’s eighty-eight-year-old Connie, in Thick Hair, who re-enacts her wedding day, tragically aborted in 1941, when her fiancé’s ship went down; while Jodie, in Hope and Anchor, not only conjures up an imaginary dog, but also transforms her unloving, absent father into a proud and doting dad.

‘I spent much of my childhood with imaginary companions or in imaginary situations’ – Wendy Perriam on a childhood love of writing.

Although now in my seventies, I still draw on the power of the imagination, both in my life and in my work. I find it both consoling and compensatory; an alternative universe where anything can happen.

What was your journey into getting published like?

Well, I’d dreamed of being an author from early childhood, but a series of reverses prevented me from achieving publication until a much later stage. Firstly, I lost my once-all-important Catholic Faith and was expelled from my convent boarding-school. Told I was in Satan’s power, I lived in terror of damnation, which precipitated a long period of depression, followed by physical illness, fertility problems and a painful divorce. So it wasn’t until my remarriage – and the ripe old age of forty – that I saw my first book in print.

I’d been taken on by a literary agent, on the strength of my short stories – written more as diversion than in the hope of publication. This agent said that, if I wrote a novel, he’d publish it. Despite my own deep-seated doubts, he proved true to his word. Absinthe for Elevenses was accepted by Michael Joseph, the first publisher he tried, and came out in 1980. After that, I just put my head down and produced the next book – and the next – scared that if I stopped, my lucky break might come to a precipitous end!

How do you spend your average writing day?

I always start early in the morning and postpone household chores, emails and phone-calls till later in the day. It’s all too easy to waste vital energy on such trivial distractions! But, first, I make a cup of coffee in my special ‘writer’s mug’ – a Peter Rabbit one I’ve had since babyhood. Perhaps all those busy bunnies, racing round the rim, provide me with a good example of enterprise and exertion!

‘I just put my head down and produced the next book – and the next – scared that if I stopped, my lucky break might come to a precipitous end!’ - Wendy Perriam on the fear that comes with finally being published.

With my earlier novels, I’d start at page one and keep going till I reached the end, not stopping to revise until the first draft was completed. Now I’ve changed my method and tend to revise continuously – rewriting each chapter or each short story over and over, until I’ve licked it into reasonable shape.

I prefer to write by hand, in the same red notebooks I favoured as a child and using the same messy, slapdash scrawl. This seems to free the sub-conscious and thus aid the imagination, and I always encourage my creative writing students to swap the computer for a pen. Certainly in my own case, I find composing on a computer inhibiting and unnatural – perhaps because I didn’t own one until I was in my sixties. I didn’t even know how to type and had to enrol on a beginners’ course – the oldest student in the class!

But, once I’ve done my writing-stint, I do - reluctantly - go to the computer and turn my messily scrawled pages into a neat typescript. Then I spend the afternoon revising this typed draft, continually retyping and re-revising, until my mind is soggy and I realize it’s time to call a halt. At that stage, I turn my attention to emails and household tasks, although making the beds at 5p.m. seems appallingly sluttish and I hear my long-dead mother’s voice in my head: ‘Any decent housewife does the chores first thing!’

Where do your ideas come from?

My ideas spring from anywhere and everywhere, especially those for short stories. In my new collection, a pub sign swinging in the wind gave me the idea for Hope and Anchor, while The Little Way arose from viewing the relics of St Therese of Lisieux, on display in Westminster Cathedral. Baggage was prompted by my own total inability to pack light. Even for a weekend-break, I’ll take a cabin-trunk.

I plan to start on an eighth collection of stories, once I’ve completed my new novel, so I’m already on the lookout for ideas. Wherever I go, I keep my senses primed, ready to pounce on even the smallest incident – a puppy in the park, a punk’s flamboyant hairstyle, a fracas on a bus – and then let my imagination get to work and turn this tiny seed into a story.

‘Wherever I go, I keep my senses primed, ready to pounce on even the smallest incident…’- Wendy Perriam on where her ideas come from.

Ideas for novels tend to come less randomly and need much more working out. I may start with a character, like Catherine in Second Skin, who feels she’s never been the person she was born to be, or with a concept such as fear – as in my last novel, Broken Places, or with a situation, such as Lorna’s bungled bunion operation in Tread Softly. Yes, even an unsightly bunion can kick-start a novel!

Check back later today for part two of the interview, when Wendy discusses the digital age and what’s next for her books…

Theresa Le Flem on Writing ‘The Sea Inside His Head’

 A daughter of the artist Cyril Hamersma, Theresa Le Flem was raised in London and married at nineteen. After having three children in quick succession she trained as a hairdresser, took up pottery but ended up working in a factory to pay the bills. After her eventual divorce she married again in 2006. Finally, having the support of friends and family, and with her children settled in New York and Kent, Theresa is able to follow her passion for writing and express her strong views about social injustice. She is an avid listener of Radio 4 and a keen gardener, growing all of her own vegetables. The Sea Inside His Head is her first novel.

In this interview, Theresa tells us where her ideas come from and how she goes about writing a book.

Where did the idea for The Sea Inside His Head originate from?

When the idea for The Sea Inside His Head first came to me, it was Christmas Day 2006, and I was sitting by a roaring coal fire. Feeling so happy and secure, my thoughts turned to the past when my life was far from easy. The atmosphere of the old mining-village came back to me, and I remembered not so much the tension of the miners’ situation but the peace of the churchyard nearby. It was the contrast of the anxiety, poverty and aggression associated with the strike, set against nature, in all her timeless freedom, which gripped me. A phrase came into my mind, I reached for my notebook and I was away!

What sort of process do you follow in your writing? Do you plan in advance?

I don’t plan at all until I get to know my characters, and they themselves create the novel. I have glimpses of scenes and I write these on scraps of paper and lay them out – like stepping stones – across the floor. Then I move them around until I have the plot. Writing fiction gives me freedom to re-visit the past and meet characters who might otherwise be just faces in a crowd. I can wander through rooms I remember as a child, and recall arguments from a safe distance. Writing acts like a scrapbook for my memories. It’s also a great healer… I hardly ever watch drama and shy away from violent scenes on TV and film because I don’t like being on the receiving end of someone else’s imagination. But when I’m the one in control it’s not scary. My writing is very visual.

Once an idea for a book strikes me – just a feeling, an atmosphere, or anything really – I begin to research and the bare branches gradually produce buds, leaves and send down roots. It’s a three dimensional organic experience. I use books for research mostly, although the internet is useful. But without having faith that there is a reader out there, who will read what I’ve written, I don’t think I could write. I need to voice my imagination, but more than that, I need to know someone is out there listening. I can easily imagine The Sea Inside His Head as a film.

What books do you read in your spare time?

I read mostly classics, my favourites being D.H. Lawrence, Thomas Hardy and Charles Dickens. Their portrayal of characters is just stunning.

The Sea Inside His Head is published on 30 April 2012 in hardback and is available now to pre-order with a 30% discount for a limited time only.

Wendy Perriam on the Differences Between Writing Novels and Short Stories

One of my friends asked me recently, ‘Are writing a novel and writing a short story much the same process, apart from the matter of length?’

For me, the answer is no. And, with a new short-story collection and a paperback novel published simultaneously, it seems a pertinent question. I actually feel I’m a different person when writing in each format. For the stories, I’m a flitting magpie, seizing glittering trinkets on a whim; for the novels, a laborious builder, laying stone on stone and brick on brick, in a careful, structured fashion. The former process is easier – more playful, more instinctive, more in tune with the unconscious – whereas novel-writing requires discipline, rigour, rational thought and continual re-thinking.

With a novel, I’ll map out the plot in advance; draw up biographies and backgrounds for my characters; decide on settings, seasons, weather and the whole time-scale for the book, and do a lot of preparatory research. It may be weeks, or even months before I’ve penned a single word, whereas I might write a whole short story in a day. Stories can arise from some tiny incident: a chance meeting with a stranger; a weird object in a charity shop; a snatch of overheard conversation. They don’t need in-depth research, elaborate advance planning, a large cast of characters, or complicated plot-twists.

For example, the title-story of my new collection (I’m on the Train) was prompted by a garrulous fellow passenger, glued to her mobile on a train to Kent. I was going to my cousin’s funeral and my mood of meditative grief was totally disrupted by the woman’s breezy, giggly, one-sided conversation. For the purposes of the story, I changed the whole situation: instead of me and a funeral, there’s a harassed man, recently made redundant, travelling to London for an all-important job interview. He’s maddened by the woman’s incessant prattling, at a time when he needs silence and a chance to prepare and rehearse.

The crematorium itself ‘provided’ another story – Survivors. By mistake, I attended the wrong funeral: a most bizarre experience, involving party-poppers, red tin-whistles and a shower of red balloons. And, although, once again, I used the situation for a story, I altered everything else: the character, the setting and, most importantly, the end, adding a sense of resolution, often lacking in reality.

Several other stories in my new collection ‘presented themselves’ in this same spontaneous way. Second Sex, for instance, began in the Curzon Cinema, when I got talking to the man taking tickets for the film: a radical young philosopher who had thought profoundly about every aspect of life. In the story, his views deeply influence my character, Alice, who begins to see her own lifestyle as shallow and materialistic, and to regard her own boyfriend in a new, unfavourable light. This story involves two guys and a girl, a violent movie and a Rolex watch - that’s all - and those few elements came together with very little pre-planning.

However, writing my novel, Broken Places, was a very different process – much slower and more tortuous. All I had at the outset was the character of Eric – a man prey to many fears. But, aware that readers might dismiss him as a wimp, I had to give him some reason for his fears; make him more sympathetic. Only at that point did I decide he would be a foundling; a baby abandoned at birth, who spends his entire childhood in care, with constant unsettling moves from one institution to another, and no sense of security or ‘home’. That would excuse him, I felt and explain his many hang-ups.

But first I had to research the whole subject of foundlings and the intricacies of the care system. And it was while interviewing an ex-Barnardo’s boy, who’d had much the same experience as my protagonist, that I hit upon the notion of Eric working as a librarian. The Barnardo’s boy told me that the only place he’d felt safe as a child was in his local public library; an oasis of quiet calmness compared with the noise and chaos of the children’s home. Having ‘stolen’ this idea, I added a kindly librarian who takes Eric under her wing and even persuades him to train as a librarian himself.

That meant more research into the whole complex world of librarianship – far more daunting than it sounds. I also needed to decide which particular library Eric would work at, since every borough runs its libraries differently. After much debate, I eventually chose Balham, in the Borough of Wandsworth, and that, in turn, led me to add Eric’s role in running Wandsworth Prison’s Book Club. The latter also needed researching, of course, but after two visits to the prison, the members of the real-life book club kindly read these passages, to check I’d got things right.

Despite all this work, I was nowhere near even starting the first chapter. Indeed, if I took you through the whole long-winded process of writing and rewriting all twenty seven chapters – including a plane journey from Hell, a section set in Seattle, and Eric’s dramatic rescue of his teenage daughter from a soccer champ intent on seduction – it might require another book!

So let me end, instead, by explaining that, however different my methods for each format, the themes in both my long works and my short are often similar: the clash between duty/rules/conformity and hedonism/wildness/rebellion; the crucial influence of mothers - whether good, bad, absent, dead or imaginary; the importance of fantasy to fill gaping holes in lives, and an interest in the miraculous and in what I call ‘moments of grace’. And often, in both forms, I combine humour and sadness; since comedy has always been used, in both literature and life, to assuage the sting of grief and loss. And, finally, the benefits of writing in both forms are also much the same: a truly therapeutic sense of absorption and engagement in the task, and a whole set of new friends made along the way, be they librarians, prisoners, crematorium officials, Barnado’s boys, or Curzon Cinema employees. But not – I repeat not – those whose incessant chatter on a mobile can shatter the peace of a journey and incite one’s fellow passengers to violence!

- Wendy Perriam

Wendy Perriam‘s novel Broken Places and collection of short stories I’m on the Train! are scheduled for release 30 April 2012. Both are available to pre-order now.

Check out Wendy Perriam‘s website at http://www.wendyperriam.com/

David Hodges on the Importance of Location in Crime Writing

For me, the ever changing moods of the Somerset Levels have provided the ideal inspiration and my last three crime novels have been ‘penned’ in the six years I have lived with my wife, Elizabeth, on the edge of this beautiful, haunting semi-wilderness in the south-west of England.

The glorious sunsets, which touch the lattice-work of rhynes with glittering shards in the autumn twilight, the spectacle of thousands of starlings weaving their weird, intricate patterns across the darkening sky before vanishing mysteriously into the waterlogged fields like smoke returning to the Genie’s magic lamp, the heron rising like a ghost through the swirling dawn mist towards the dismembered, phallic-like symbol of Glastonbury Tor.

Sights and sounds that cannot fail but to awaken the primeval spirit in all save the most insensitive observer, harking back to mankind’s very beginnings – thrilling the senses and firing the imagination.

Small wonder then that I have chosen this wonderful evocative landscape as the backdrop for my latest novels – what crime writer could resist that captivating influence?

Setting a crime novel in an identifiable location, rather than some fictitious place that is the product of the author’s imagination – as I did in my earlier novels – has its advantages too. Not only does it project the illusion of reality by blurring the distinction between fact and fiction, enhancing the credibility of the plot, but it tends to heighten the interest of the reading public as well.

People enjoy stories about the places in which they live or work. They get a kick out of being able to recognize this or that street in this or that town or village, which, in turn, has the effect of drawing them into the action of the story to the point where they can begin to feel personally involved.

When living in Oxfordshire, prior to moving to Somerset, the exploits of Colin Dexter’s celebrated fictional detective, Inspector Morse, in and around the dreaming spires of Oxford certainly had that effect on me and I am quite sure Ian Rankin’s Rebus novels, set in Edinburgh, and those featuring Peter James’s Roy Grace in Brighton work the same way for their resident readerships.

So the local touch is certainly popular, which is why I have now gone down this route with my own novels. ‘Slice’, my first crime thriller with Robert Hale, may not have actually named names, but it was primarily set in the Bridgwater area and I chose my own local church in Mark village for the grisly climax. With my current novel, ‘Firetrap’, however, the local connection is very evident and the sequel, ‘Requiem’, due out later this year, follows the same line, as my feisty woman detective, Kate Hamblin, and her public school boyfriend and colleague, Detective Constable Hayden Lewis, pursue ruthless psychopathic killer, Larry ‘Twister’ Wadman along the mist-shrouded droves of the Levels and the shadowy urban streets of Bridgwater and Highbridge.

Twister could still be out there too, hiding in the gloom and flexing his powerful hands, as those cold dead eyes of his search the neighbourhood for his next victim. Time to lock those doors and windows, pour a stiff drink and keep the poker handy. And above all, don’t answer the door!

- David Hodges

Slice and Firetrap by David Hodges are available to buy in hardback now. 

Slice is also available to buy in ebook format from all good ebook retailers, while Firetrap is scheduled for ebook release in August 2012.

Requiem is scheduled for release in hardback October 2012.

Crime Writer Roger Silverwood on How to Plot a Thriller

Roger Silverwood is the creator and writer of the Inspector Angel mysteries. The eighteenth book in the popular series The Cheshire Cat Murders is out this month in hardback.

The only valid reason to write is because you want to. There is no golden way to success. It is not a luxury hobby or something to pass two hours on a wet Sunday afternoon. It is hard work, but persist, find the right market, and you have a chance of success.

Below I show you how you might structure (or plot) a story that could be quite chilling. This plot idea of mine was first published in WRITING NEWS and shortly afterwards in RED HERRINGS, the Crime Writers Association’s house magazine. Perhaps it might help you.

Firstly, I need a super ending; one that has to have lots of opportunities to produce chilling/interesting/mysterious/entertaining reading.

‘How about an amateur taxidermist who adores his dog so much that when the old pet dies, he stuffs it? Then his grandmother dies … He adores her too, so he stuffs her and puts her down the cellar. Then his mother, then his wife … It becomes so intriguing that he might (or he might not) go out at nights looking for subjects. Say the girl next door brings a parcel of cosmetics that the postman left, sees the light in the cellar and goes down there … he sees her looking … what does he do? The taxidermy is starting to get out of hand. I’d already decided that if I wrote this, it would be from my pet policeman character’s point of view.

‘The next important thing is to look for a motive. I wouldn’t pursue a storyline if I couldn’t find a strong, valid motive. A history and a fear of loneliness … can’t be away from his loved ones … memories of a super caravan holiday in Mablethorpe … it might work. I would need to fill out the storyline with more nostalgic reflections …

‘Then I’d add a subplot … say there is a woman, Nerissa, who fancies him. One afternoon he gave her a lift to a shop or paid for a cup of tea, or she tripped and dropped her shopping and he helped picking it up … momentarily touched her arm … something trivial. She thinks it’s serious. She cooks, brings him cakes, apple pies, offers to cut his hair … she’s always at the door … in the house …she won’t go away. She mustn’t discover his secret, how can he get rid of her? Is there only the one way?

‘I’d complicate the narrative by having another plot running. Say he used to be a policeman. The regular coppers will talk shop to him about the missing people, confide in him a little maybe … he can “help” them.

He realizes he’ll have to move the bodies, his house might be searched – very dangerous – he has to take them somewhere. It’ll have to be at night …

‘I would introduce another crime. Something close by, so that the “investigation” around him (or of him) possible. A serious traffic offence, fiddling the firm’s petty cash or something … also to provide red herrings.

‘Then I’d want a running tag. He’s driving the neighbours potty learning to play the violin. He keeps taking the exam and failing. Or he’s in the Slim Quick Slimmer’s club, competing hard to lose two stones and become slimmer of the year.
‘All that, is what I know as the writer. Now I have to look from the perspective of the reader (and my pet policeman character).

‘The plot would be fed out to the reader in dribs and drabs … people keep disappearing, lots of chemical, wax, cosmetics and unusual substances are being delivered to number 17 Cheyne Walk. A man annoying his neighbours by playing the violin. Funny smells from the cellar. He says he’s varnishing his violin to improve the tone. Neighbours say they saw his wife in the front seat of his car. He says she’s gone back to her mother.

‘Although they can’t find a single body, the police interrogate him … the answers are not acceptable. They interrogate him again. He can’t answer them satisfactorily. He is arrested. He is eventually tried and found to be insane and sent to Broadmoor. Then the authorities learn he has passed the violin exam, or won the Slim Quick prize.

‘The last lines of the final page of the book might read like a newspaper report:

A Mablethorpe caravan site owner was treated for shock after he found five dead bodies and a dog in a static caravan round a table like a family tea party; they were all wearing excessive make-up.

Will it work as a book? Is it too far fetched? Would it make a good read? I wonder … There is still a lot of work, research and rewrites to do before I finish, celebrate with a bottle of champagne and vow it’s the last book I’ll ever write.

The next day I’ll start another. It’s agony, but I like it.

Actually, after much deliberation, I decided not to go ahead with this plot because I couldn’t make an Inspector Angel story out of it, and everybody wants me to write about him. I gladly forsake the copyright to any reader who wants to take the plot and write a book round it. Why don’t you have a go?

- Roger Silverwood

Previously Published in: Red Herrings/Writing News

Copyright: Roger Silverwood

The Cheshire Cat Murders is available to pre-order now in hardback.

The Snuffbox Murders is out now in ebook.