WEEK 38--Finishing Writing a Detective Novel

If you are in a nit-picking mood, you could point out that this doesn't actually qualify as a New Thing, because I didn't nominate it in advance.  I have no time for small-minded pedantry of this stamp.  Go away and read the blog of the Apostrophe Preservation Society, if that's the kind of mood you're in.  And yes, that sentence did end with a preposition.

So, New Thing no 38.  You know what, I think that's a pretty big new thing--huge though the whole tartiflette episode was.  Obviously, I've finished novels before.  Many more than I've had published, in fact.  A lot of very kind people have asked me over the years why I don't write another novel.  Perhaps they thought it hadn't occurred to me.  But anyway, a detective novel is different.  Especially if it's a fantasy detective novel.

To tell the truth, I opted for a fantasy setting because I could not be arsed to research police procedure and the entire criminal justice system.  And I think you really have to do that, or your more well-informed readers are going to mutter their way through your book: 'That would never happen!  He didn't have a warrant!' etc.  Plus you probably have to set it somewhere gritty and urban, like Sheffield.  Which would mean visiting Sheffield.  (An observation, not a value judgment.)  The minute you try and set a detective novel somewhere like Lichfield, it tilts into slightly camp comedy of manners.  Deepest clergy-sleuth territory.  And it instinctively wants to be set in the 1920s, not 2011.

So there we are, it's finished.  Waiting to hear back from the agent.  I thought that would feel brilliant.  But somehow I'd forgotten what it's like.  Here's what New Zealand writer Janet Frame has to say: 'When the work is finished and the nothingness must be endured, the self may take a holiday.'  The nothingness.  That's what you feel at the end of a big writing project.  I keep telling the self to take a holiday, but it keeps fretting on, trying to do stuff.  So the self had a migraine instead.  That way the self could take to its bed with a clear conscience.  An afternoon in bed is a mini-break, if not an actual holiday.

The Novel I'm Writing

It's a fantasy detective novel.  I've always wanted to write detective novels, but the thought of all that research has always put me off.  Police procedure.  Forensics.  The legal system.  Then having to set it somewhere plausible. Write what you know.  A chilling psychological thriller, set in the grim underbelly of Lichfield.  Hmm.

I read quite a lot of detective fiction, and part of the thrill is reading about places I know next to nothing about.  Southern Louisiana.  California.  New York.  I love not getting the cultural references.  What's a twinkie bar?  What's dirty rice?  What's naugahide?  What are cordovan loafers?  I have no idea--but that's all part of it.  It's the crunchy textural detail that makes this other world vivid.  It's alien and exotic, but I absolutely believe in it.

Maybe this is why it occurred to me one day that I could sidestep all the forensic research if I invented a fantasy setting for my detective.  I still have to convince the reader that this actually happened, of course, that this is how people behave, what they believe, eat, drink, how this society functions.  But nobody is going to sit there harrumphing about my ignorance of the Crown Prosecution Service.  I'm heartened that Word seems to have been fooled.  It keeps underlining my made-up place names and giving me smart tag options.  Palatine Square--add to Contacts?  display Map? display Driving Directions?

I'm in the home straight now.  My wondrous narrative arc and chapter-by-chapter plan has crumbled to dust, I'm sorry to say.  It bore so little resemblance to what I ended up writing that I've abandoned it.  It crossed my mind halfway through that it would be helpful to know who the baddie was.  Genre convention says you can't just pull your villain out of the hat in the penultimate chapter.  You have to put him or her in early on, then cunningly fool your readers into trusting them.  If your fiction is essentially character driven, as mine is, then plotting is always going to be a challenge.  The subconscious knows (you tell yourself).  Unfortunately, the subconscious is not very articulate.  There's a lot of staring blankly at the wall involved.

Here are some of my favourite detective novel writers: Janet Evanovich, Robert B Parker, Harlen Coben (especially the Myron Bolitar books), James Lee Burke, Sara Paretsky, Sue Grafton, Carl Hiaasen.  See?  Furriners, every one of 'em.