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Excerpt from my journal
My dad, Jim. A better father is hard to imagine |
[Warning! Contains spoilers about ‘The Broken Ones’ … but not many]. The process of writing my second novel was quite different to my first. The first draft of ‘The Dead Path’ was written in about three months and (after my little false start by writing first the scene that ended up around page forty – see my notes here) was a pretty linear process. Start at the start, end at the end. Writing ‘The Broken Ones’ was not so straightforward. But I get ahead of myself. As I’ve done, I realise, writing both novels. So, some stage-setting. Despite exorcising some ghosts in the writing of The Dead Path, I remained fascinated by hauntings (I have a recurring dream of being trapped in a house that is also home to an invisible, malevolent spirit). Waking from that dream one night, and as its effects mercifully faded, I began wondering how dreadful to be actually haunted: to live with a ghost every moment of every day. And a ghost whose presence was not merely sensed, but actually seen – in ghastly detail. How dreadful to wake in the morning and the first thing you see is a lifeless face staring at you? If this spirit followed you everywhere, unshakable, would it drive you mad? Would you lose interest in food, sex, life itself? Or would you cope? How? These questions intrigued me. As luck would have it, I soon after read Karina Machado’s marvellous first non-fiction book about hauntings ‘Spirit Sisters’. Its sometimes heart-lifting, sometimes heartbreaking accounts of real hauntings decided me that I had to write another ghost story. Around this time, I was tuning in to news about the Large Hadron Collider – the particle accelerator built under France and Switzerland. The first particle collisions in the device were scheduled, and the press was reporting all manner of fearful stories about what might happen, including the Earth being sucked into a black hole of humankind’s making. These two ideas – permanent haunting, mysterious cataclysmic event – jangled around in the (usually emptyish) pocket of my head like disconnected magnets until they clicked together and wouldn’t come apart. What if in the near future something happened – maybe an experiment at the LHC or maybe something less obvious – and we all became haunted? Every single person in the world suddenly and instantly got stuck with a ghost that they couldn’t’ shake. What would happen to the world? Lovely. I began scribbling notes in my journal. I had a setting, and (I think) a fairly unusual one. But I didn’t have a story. And whose story would it be? For an age, I’ve wanted to write a detective novel. One of my first screenplays (optioned, but never produced) involved a female police detective, and I truly enjoyed writing it. Like approximately seventy trillion other writers, I love the work of Raymond Chandler, and about this time I re-read ‘Farewell, My Lovely’. Inspired, I thought: I need a protagonist, so why not a detective? Done! But: a private eye, or a police investigator? The question: ‘what would I do if I were haunted 24/7?’ provided the answer. In my broken world, some people would kill and blame the murder on their ghost: my ghost drove me to it. The police would have to investigate the veracity of these claims. Oscar Mariani, lead detective in a unit that investigates ‘ghost murders’, was born. I scribbled more notes in my journal (writing my hand seems to help me get thoughts straight in my head – I hardly ever refer to them again, but the act of writing them down is important somehow). I knew whose story it was, but I still didn’t have … well, the damned story. It came from exactly the same question about what I’d do if I were haunted all day every day. Answer: I’d try and get rid of it. Others would, too. And some of those others would go to extraordinary lengths; perhaps they’d even try and summon supernatural help to rid themselves of their spectres... Snap. I don’t think I actually said, ‘Snap’, or even clicked my fingers and pointed triumphantly at the sky, but I felt pretty good. I had a story: someone was killing people in order to rid themselves of their ghost, and my new, embattled detective has to investigate. I’ve included here nascent the thirteenth page of my journal notes about the nascent ‘The Broken Ones’. Here, you can read (if you are a pharmacist or a cipher expert) in the top paragraph the scene that pretty much became the start of the book, where Oscar and his partner Niamh (later renamed Neve) interview a woman who has claimed ‘my ghost drove me to murder'. The next para what became the so-called ‘inciting incident’ that really gets the story humming: the discovery of the victim that Oscar becomes obsessed about seeking justice for. In for a penny, in for a pound, I figured, and decided to salt in heaps of detective genre tropes – the loner investigator, the disbelieving police chief, the beautiful heiress – trusting this would make the story accessible and that the milieu would help set it apart. The supernatural element of the story provided a lot of fun, researchy stuff for me. Where I dug into readings about The Green Man writing 'The Dead Path', here I looked into Mesopotamian mythology, especially about human sacrifice. Yucky stuff. I came across the Phoenician deity Moloch, a nasty piece of work to whom children were sacrificed by being thrown alive into a furnace-like altar – shocking, horrible gear. While there are parts of the Moloch mythos that I drew upon, I didn't choose to involve him in the story. I was worried that pure evil (does evil get eviler than harming a child? I don’t think so) was too uncomplicated; I wanted my villain to be understandable, and while the actions associated might be dreadful, the motivation should be neither black nor white, but grey. (As an aside, this conclusion about the crime helped me give a name to the mysterious event where everyone in the story becomes haunted. ‘Grey Wednesday’ was a moniker that I liked, and it stuck.) Instead of Moloch, I investigated other characters from mythology associated with death. Kharon, the ferryman of the underworld; Anubis, the jackel-headed god of the afterlife; Nebthet, Egyptian goddess of death and her Babylonian counterpart Ereshkigal. It is always illuminating to see how the stories of the world’s great religions intersect and share common wellsprings. So: I had a detective story with ghosts and ancient gods. Where I more-or-less winged ‘The Dead Path’, I heavily plotted ‘The Broken Ones’. A crime novel needs to both follow a logical course and be full of surprises, so I found the easiest way was to use some screenwriting know-how and employ 5”x7” index cards on my whiteboard. They got shuffled around, re-written and tossed out quite a bit. My hair got shuffled around, a bit harried, and I suspect a bit greyer. In the end, though, the story took shape. Oscar introduced a few unexpected things to me as I wrote. My father passed away while I was midway through writing this book. I miss him very much. He was simply the best man I’ve ever met; a truly good man. His death was not unexpected, and in a way was a mercy, but it still hurt. So, it is perhaps unsurprising that Oscar confronts issues with his own father in the book. Not my issues, but perhaps rooted in a common love. If you’ve read ‘The Broken Ones’, and want more detail on anything I’ve written here, drop me an email. If you haven’t read it, I hope this little behind-the-scenes doesn’t spoil it for you! I don’t think it will. |
The veve of Baron Samedi – aspects of this voodoo insignium play a part in the story |
