Writing Comics Is Easy.....well sort of.

Writing Comics Is Easy

Quick let me qualify that before the other comic book writers come round my house and have words. 

Writing comics is just as hard as any other form of literary endeavour but with one caveat - your only really talking to one person - the artist. You see when you're writing prose you've got to think about how every damn word will impact your entire readership. Every damn word! This means that if you're of a nervous disposition you can find yourselves agonising for hours about the placement of every comma.

You'd think film scripts would be better. After all a script is not aimed at the general audience - in many ways it is a technical document like a blueprint or a recipe it exists to provide a framework for other, hopefully talented, crafts people to build around. Alas a script has also to excite people with money or at least people who know people with money so you've always got to write with them in mind. This wouldn't be so bad if so many in the industry didn't combine ignorance with an innate sense of certainty(1).

But comic scripts are beautiful - you write them essentially for one person only(2) - the artist. Since they're a fellow professional you don't have to entice them with your prose or come up with six new ways to say the hero runs past the camera in an exciting fashion. In fact once you've established a working relationship you can use short hand, or offer the artist different approaches in the same document and, if your imagination has totally failed you, ask the artist to make something up.

In this way writing comics is easy.

In all the others ways, character, plot etc, it's just as hard as all the other ways to write.

(1) There's a famous case of a writer pitching the true story of how Elliot Ness's, famous for bringing down Capone,  next case was the torso killer - generally considered to be America's 1st genuine serial killer. The movie executive rejected the pitch because Elliot Ness was clearly under copyright to Paramount (who'd made The Untouchables). The writers tried in vain to explain that as a real historical figure it was, in fact, impossible to copyright his name and his adventures. The movie executive was unmoved - Elliot Ness was a fictional character and under copyright and that was an end to it.

(2) Well alright there's your editor and your colourist and the letterer but in the first instance you're writing for the artist.

The Deadline Song

It’s not easy writing your novels to deadlines.
Keeping up those plot positions
Watching out that they all transition
Plot and rewrite both at the same time.
Smells like subplots I’ve forgotten
Curled up died and now their rotten

I’m not an editor tonight
Don’t want to lose that word count
’m getting careless, baby
And you’re not in the last third

CHORUS
I can’t decide
Whether this scene lives or dies
Oh, it’ll prob’ly be in the sequel
Or a short story on the side
No wonder why
My brain feels dead inside
My thoughts are all emulsified
Lock the doors and close the blinds
We’re running out of time.

It’s a bitch convincing people to read you
If I stop now call me a quitter
If I wrote less I’d be much fitter
Pleasing everyone isn’t likely
Banging keyboards till I’m crippled.
Read reviews until I’m fickle

I’ve got to hand it to you
You’re in all the outlines
But my characters surprised me
And you’re no longer necessary

CHORUS

Oh I could throw you in the bin
Or just simply do you in
But the readers might miss you when you’re gone
I could spin you off a series
But the publisher might query
Whether anyone would buy them…
That's why….

CHORUS

The Next Big Thing

1) What is the working title of your next book?

Broken Homes

2) Where did the idea come from for the book?

From the real life scandal during the 1980s when Tesco heiress and uber-grifter Dame Shirley Porter deliberately housed poor families in asbestos ridden blocks of flats as part of her criminal plot to rig the local elections.

3) What genre does your book fall under?

Well I call it a Crime/SFF hybrid but Urban Fantasy fits.

4) What actors would you choose to play the part of your characters in a movie rendition?

I have a whole Fantasy Casting page.

5) What is the one-sentence synopsis of your book?

Architecture can be murder.

6) Will your book be self-published or represented by an agency?

No the book will be distributed by bananas.

7) How long did it take you to write the first draft of the manuscript?

It's not quite finished yet - nearly there.

8) What other books would you compare this story to within your genre?

I like to think that my books are incompatible incomprehensible incomplete incomparable!

9) Who or what inspired you to write this book?

I can't stop writing them now. It's too late for me but it might not be too late for you. Save yourself! Choose life. Choose a job. Choose a career. Choose a family...

 10) What else about the book might pique the reader's interest?

 Come the zombie apocalypse it will make a useful source of firelighting material. Unless you get the eBook version of course - in which case you're screwed.

But but but...You're reading it wrong. Again!

....Or the strange case of Dr Walid's phenotype.

Last week I idly started a fantasy casting blog/twitter thingie which not only provided many happy hours of procrastination but also threw up loads of names that I’d never considered before. But the really interesting result was what happened when I asked for suggestions for the character of Dr Walid.

I got many suggestions for many fine actors, amongst them Ben Kingsley, and the one thing they all had in common was they were all ethnically Asian(1), Arabic or Middle Eastern. Hooray for diversity I hear you say and hurrah indeed were it not for the fact that Dr Walid is neither ethnically Asian, Arabic or Middle Eastern.

Here is the passage where Peter first meets our illustrious Cryptopathologist.

I was introduced to Abdul Haqq Walid, a spry, gingery man in his fifties who spoke with a soft Highland accent. (Rivers of London, p67)

Dr Walid is a white Scot from Oban, his family are observant members of the Church of Scotland, and he converted to Islam when studying medicine at Edinburgh. I often refer to him as ‘Gastroenterology’s answer to Cat Stevens,’ after Yusif Islam who likewise converted in the late 1970s and like Walid he took an Arabic name when he did so.

Readers read books much faster than writers write them and can miss details as they go. Obviously many readers read the name Abdul Haqq Walid and immediately superimposed Ben Kingsley on the character before they’d even finished the sentence. They did this because western culture has a hard time separating Islam, the religion, from a bundle of distinct ethnicities (Asian, Middle Eastern and Arab).

So now a quick digression followed by some waffle.

A Digression

My favourite TV drama example of this kind of stupidity comes in The State Within by Lizzie Mickery and Dan Percival during which the US Government decides to lock up or deport (I forget which) all British Muslims. Now leaving aside the constitutionality of such a move – how the fuck would they know of which British passport holders are Muslims? Religion is not specified on the passport and that information is not gathered for any British (or as far as I know US) form of identification.

There’s a scene where a British Muslim couple nervously approach a checkpoint, we know they are Muslim because they’re Asian and nervous, but how would the officer’s at the checkpoint know they were Muslims. By their ethnicity – they could have been Hindi’s, Jains, Christians, Sihks, Jews or, god forbid, atheists. By their names? Many Asian Muslims have Arabic names but many do not, many non-Muslims have Arabic names – my son for example – you run across many non-Muslims with Arabic names especially if they or their parents are from West Africa.

None of this is raised by any of the characters in the TV series because for the writers and production crew Islam was an ethnicity not a globe spanning religion. Once the US Government had made the decision to deport them they’d be easy to spot – no worries.

Some Waffle

I can't help wondering that I could have avoided the confusion if I had written the sentence as... I was introduced to a spry, gingery Scot called Abdul Haqq Walid. Would the whole gingery Scot stereotype have overcome the Muslim as ethnic group stereotype? I can't tell and that's the problem. 

You see I deliberately made Dr Walid a convert in part to work against that stereotype (in other part because he insisted on looking like Robin Cook in my imagination) so should I have hammered the point home a bit harder? Some argue that a writer has a responsibility to judge their audience reaction when tackling sensitive topics like religion and ethnicity but by what margin of overkill do you need to put into your writing to ensure everyone gets it? Is it even desirable that everyone gets it?

As my friend Andrew says - it'll just be a lovely surprise for everyone if they make a TV series.

(1) That’s South Asian in American English.

At Last The Truth! They Wrote What?

Readers often ask me whether such and such a book was an influence or not. Occasionally people can be quite insistent that obviously such and such a book was obviously an influence and can provide close textual analysis to back up their claim.

For my last blog about the influences on Rivers of London I thought I'd talk about those books that would have been an influence if only I'd read them before I wrote it.

Neverwhere (and Anansi Boys and American Gods)

Neil Gaiman is one of the writers most frequently attributed to me as an influence. Alas I'd caught about ten minutes of the original TV series back in the 1980s but I've never read the book. Like alot of books on this list I read Anansi Boys a while after I'd started writing Rivers of London after someone pointed out, in those fatal words - that's a bit like what your book sounds like innit?

Kraken
I had thought China Mieville had struck out for the more lucrative shores of literary fiction and the good opinion of the broadsheets but he surprised me by producing his own London based mystery - the bastard.

61 Nails

I was about halfway through the first draft of ROL when Mike Shevden came strolling into the Covent Garden branch of Waterstones, where I worked, bold as brass and slapped an ARC of 61 Nails down in front of me. 'Get a load of my new book,' he said. 'It's an urban fantasy set in Covent Garden and draws heavily, and rather brilliantly if I say so myself, on the mythology of London especially stuff you've never heard of because your research mojo is just that pathetic - I pity the poor sod that tries to follow in my footsteps for he shall be subject to much ridicule.'(1)

The Sweet Scent of Blood

I mean you wait ages for an urban fantasy centred around Covent Garden and then two come along at the same time. Suzanne McLeod was another of those reminders that however original you think you are somebody else has already arrived and grabbed all falafel off the buffet table. Although in Suzanne's case she ran off with the kitchen sink as well.

Bryant and May

Fortunately the Bryant and May books didn't register with me until after I'd finished the manuscript otherwise it might have been all over for yours truly's literary career.

Christopher Fowler's Roofworld was an important influence on Rivers of London but while I'd gone onto read Rune, his next book, I'd sort of lost track of him. I remember shelving the Bryant and May books and thinking I should get round to reading them but there's so many books, so little time. We share a similar obsession with the nooks, crannies and secrets of London but luckily a different approach to writing about them. well different enough anyway.

Street Magic
Obviously at some point in time, presumably a couple of years prior to me working in a bookshop, a memo had gone out suggesting that what the world needed were fantasy police procedurals set in London. Caitlin Kittredge hearkened to this call and produced the Black London series in order to throw me deep into a depression. Fortunately, just as with Bryant and May and Felix Castor, London is a diverse enough city for me to get away with being Johnny come lately.

The Wine of Angels

I heard about Phil Rickman's rural fantasy/mysteries when his agent rejected me and cited him as the reason. They said that they already had their supernatural mystery writer, thank you very much, and wouldn't be needing another. I immediately rushed over to the relevant shelf in my crime section and plucked the lone Phil Rickman that had been languishing there and read it. Then I ordered his back catalogue - they sold quite nicely as well.

The Atrocity Archive

This really would have been a seriously major influence had only I had heard of it in time. Charles Stross' fantastic mixture of office comedy, spy thriller and Lovecraftian horror is how I like to spend my afternoons.

(1) He didn't really say any of this because he is, in fact, a very nice gent but that's how it sounded to me.

At Last The Truth! What Do You Mean I Don't Get a Bulk Discount?

I never intended this series of posts to be so long but the more I thought about the influences on Rivers of London the more I found. So relax, this is possibly the second from last in the Now At Last! series... unless I think of new stuff or just decide to ramble on indefinitely.

Making the World Work

The 87th Precinct Stories

Ed McBain's novels of the detectives of an imaginary precinct of an imaginary city serves as the elephant in the room for Peter Grant, Nightingale and all the other London flat-foots that populated my books. Not only to the blind men who take away different impressions of the beast but also because you just can't get that fridge door to close properly when he's in there.

In an essay at the start of my old edition of Cop Hater Ed McBain explains why he chose police detectives over lawyers, private eyes or little old lady amateur sleuths: Disbelief must be overcome, first by the author himself, then by the reader. This isn't the case with a police detective. He is supposed to investigate murders. 

It's also clear, from the same essay that the fictional city is as a lovingly wrought secondary world creation as any that has graced the pages of a three volume epic fantasy. The police procedure used by McBain's cops is closely modelled on actual American procedures (of the time) explaining why the city maintains a sense of reality despite being entirely imaginary.

The Curse of Chalion

Lois McMaster Bujold was careful to create a completely consistent theology to underpin this brilliant fantasy novel. The book itself can be read, if your feeling suddenly come over all English teacher, as an examination of what it would be like to be a saint in a universe where the gods were real and yet strangely powerless in the face of free will. 

What's impressive is the amount of effort Bujold has taken to think through the consequences of her world building and the subtle way she shows the separation between the practicalities of everyday religion, the rarefied theories of the professional theologians and the hard grind, uncertainty and stark existential terror of trying to do your god's bidding.

Heroes who work for a living

The Sweeney

Or the series that launched a thousand 'guvs'. When a police officer calls his senior officer 'guv' it is as likely to be because he grew up watching The Sweeney as to any long tradition in the Metropolitan Police.

The Sweeney, created by Ian Kennedy Martin, not only invented the 'guv' it was the first British policier which gloried in the working class culture of the police. Dixon had always been annoying differential and the boys in the Z-Cars knew their place but give Reagan and Carter some lip and it didn't matter who you thought you were - you was in trouble. There's more than a hint of Regan and Carter in Peter Grant, some of hidden under a respectable 21st Century vaneer and some of it proudly displayed. Because you're going to make something of that? Are you? Are you? Didn't think so?

The Ipcress File

The thing I've always liked about Len Deighton's heroes is their air of understated competence. Even when they do something extraordinary, such as snatch a threatening gun out of the hands of an opponent it's described in the same tones that a professional blacksmith would apply to bending metal. I'm probably misquoting but I remember a sequence that goes:- he was standing too close to me, within the range where it becomes possible to take weapon out of someone's hands before they can fire. The clue is the name given to the skill-set required by a professional spy - trade-craft.

It's by making the extraordinary skills of a spy ordinary that Deighton highlights what we often overlook - how extraordinarily skilled many of the people around us our. Not just the obvious candidates, the doctors, nurses, electricians but the less obvious geniuses like crane drivers and health inspectors. I wanted Peter to be like a Deighton spy, competent (most of the time) in an understated way.


Honourable Mentions

There are still a couple of influences that have as yet gone unlisted. Because there has to be a finite limit even to my capacity to waffle I thought I'd give them a quick mention before moving on to the final part of At Last The Truth! They Wrote What?

London: The Biography by Peter Ackroyd
The role of this book must be fairly self explanatory.


Randall and Hopkirk: Deceased

Created by Dennis Spooner this was one of a number of supernatural/SF shows of the late 1960s early 1970s, Jason King and UFO being two others, that I grew up watching live or in later repeats.

Widows and Prime Suspect by Lynda La Plante

Lynda La Plante redefined the British crime thriller in the 1980s by taking it away from the boys (mostly the Kennedy Martin brothers) and letting the women step up to their rightful place in the genre. 

In Widows those belligerent but cowed working class women, previously only seen timidly opening the front door to the policeman de jour, finally get out of the kitchen to seize the plot, the moment and the loot. 

Prime Suspect gave UK TV its first credible female murder detective as the fallible yet determined DCI Tennison got the job sorted in the teeth of institutional sexism.

At Last The Truth! We're Going To Need a Bigger Truck!

I tried being carefree but all that resulted was a list of influences in no particular order - those halcyon days are over, ORDER must be imposed.

N.K. Jemison recently asked: But, but, but — WHY does magic have to make sense? To which the answer, of course, is that the magic works the way that the magic needs to work to further the aims of your story. Genre is a description not a prescription and in the final analysis the trappings of a story are not what sets the good stuff apart from the bad.

 In Rivers of London I decided that while I understood the way magic worked, I am the creator after all, the practitioners of magic both Newtonian and natural, had to work within an incomplete and, in some cases, erroneous theoretical base. 

It's still possible to achieve great things with an erroneous theory. Bazalgette's sewer system in London was built on the understanding that bad smells caused disease but still had the required effect of ridding the city of cholera. And bad smells as well.

But these ideas didn't just pop into my head like a slightly irritating know-it-all prophecy or the warrior in Jet and Gold they were influenced by the work of the giants(1) that came before me.

Making Magic Work

Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic. - Arthur C. Clarke(2)

The Incomplete Enchanter

L. Sprague de Camp and Fletcher Pratt's 1941 book of magic and dimension hopping was the first time I was exposed to the idea that magic might be determined by the underlying rules of the universe.

In the first novella 'The Roaring Trumpet' our hero, transported to a world of Nordic myth, confidently steps forward to slay a dragon with his pistol only to find that it doesn't work. There's nothing mechanically wrong with his gun it's just that in this particular universe the chemical reactions that facilitate firearms don't work.

When you're 11 years old this is heady stuff but more importantly it teaches you to think critically about how magic will fit into your world. 

A Wizard of Earthsea

Ursula K. Le Guin once said in an interview that she wrote A Wizard of Earthsea (1968) because she'd always wondered where all the wizards that populated fantasy actually learnt their magic. The answer is the school on Roke which is, as far as I know, the first wizarding school in fiction.

As Jemison points out in her blog that the magic they learn at Roke is more than memorising the true names of things and that being both conditional and situational was much more an art than a science. And while it's explicit that 'rules change in the reaches' I always got the impression that Ursula knew why(3).

Ars Magica 

It's been just under thirty years since I played an RPG in earnest and yet I still have several shelves full of them. I can claim a certain utilitarian value for things like the GURPS historical source books and Call of Cthulhu supplements and some of them are beautiful artefacts just in themselves.

But the truth is that you'd be hard pressed to find a more concentrated form of ideas anywhere else. For writers of a certain bent they are the crack cocaine of research materials. You know it might be bad for you but the hit is so...so... fast.

It was Ars Magica's use of Latin words to describe the building blocks of Hermetic magic was a direct inspiration for the formae Nightingale teaches Peter in Rivers of London. This set me thinking about what exactly is it you are doing in your brain when you speak a magic spell and the idea that the words were abstract labels, like musical notes, whose purpose was to regulate the way you formed the shapes in your mind.

The Science of Discworld II
The founding of the Folly and the codification of magic by Isaac Newton owes itself to a throwaway remark in this book. In it they discuss Newton's interest in religious philosophy and alchemy, which the writers make clear is a waste of Newton's time, one of them, in the footnote, does point out that if anyone in the history of science was going to discover the principles of magic it was Isaac Newton.

A light-bulb went off in my head and voila. The moral is be careful what you say in your footnotes lest some jobbing writer rebuild his entire career on the basis for your throwaway remark.

Making Magic Wild

     Madouc performed a prim curtsey, and Shimrod bowed. ‘It is a pleasure to make your acquaintance. I do not meet princesses every day!’
      Madouc gave a rueful grimace. ‘I had rather be a magician, and see through walls. Is it difficult to learn?’
       ‘Quite difficult, but much depends upon the student. I have tried to teach Dhrun a sleight or two, but with only fair success.’
    ‘My mind is not flexible,’ said Dhrun. ‘I cannot think so many thoughts at once.’
     'That is the way of it, more often than not, and luckily so,’ said Shimrod. ‘Otherwise, everyone would be a magician and the world would be an extraordinary place.’
       Madouc considered. ‘Sometimes I think as many as seventeen thoughts all together.’

Lyonesse III: Madouc

Magic in Jack Vance's fantasy has always been exotic, extraordinary and deliberately obtuse. Vance makes it clear that magic has rules, lots and lots of rules, it's just that they are as vague, contrary and fantastical as the strange beings that practise it. 

As with much else in  a Vance novel success in magic is as much a question of negotiation and verbal dexterity as it is adherence to formulas. From Vance I not only took the notion that the magic of the genius loci, and others, was wilder and more fabulous than the structured magic of the newtonians but also a looseness of definition to avoid that 'got it out of the monster manual' feel.

The Lord of the Rings 

By some Oxford professor whose name escapes me(4). The magic in Tolkien's work is subtle and often works at an intangible, spiritual level. As when the Black Riders are driven into the river by Glorfindel(5) despite there being no physical battle as such or the lack of distinction by the elves between 'craft' and 'magic'. 

I drew upon both aspects for Rivers of London where craft lies at the heart of human magic and the power of the Rivers is often intangible and difficult to distinguish from the natural world.

Before anyone asks I have no intention of explaining that in any more detail - spoilers. Let's just say that human agency and activity is a key part of the way magic is produced.

Quatermass and the Pit 

By Nigel Kneale. Some of you are no doubt saying - 'But Ben, surely this is science fiction not fantasy?' Which is what makes it interesting. In this story of man's discovery that his evolution has been shaped by aliens some three million years before the release of Ridley Scott's Prometheus  Kneale artfully weaves together science and folklore in a way far beyond that of your purveyor of tired second hand tropes(6).

At one point the legend of the wild hunt is explicitly linked to the culls of ancient Mars and then to the increasing mob violence of an overpopulated contemporary Earth. In this instance science (or rather biology) becomes the instigator of the wild magic itself.

Once again this blog has got too long and will be continued in next weeks instalment - Now At Last! I Can't Believe I Don't Get A Bulk Discount.

(1) They weren't all giants. The best that could be said of some of them was that they were dwarves with step ladders but they tried hard and that's the main thing.

(2) The corollary; that any sufficiently advanced magic is indistinguishable from technology, was coined independently by me in 1988 for the Doctor Who story Battlefield - only it got cut from the broadcast version and I can't find my scripts. You're just going to have to take my word for it.
(3) In fiction it is entirely sufficient for an author to give an impression that they know what  what they're doing regardless of of whether they do or not - the exact opposite of Engineering. 
(4) Definitely not the one who wrote the Narnia books though. 
(5) I can't believe his name was preprogrammed into my factory standard spell checker. 
(6) However beautiful it looks.

At Last The Truth! The Back Of The Lorry...

Where All The Ideas Were Nicked From
The Influences on Magic Cops Rivers of London
Here are a selection of my stock answers to the number one question I get asked:

Where do your ideas come from?

Everywhere.
I buy them on the internet.
Tell me more about this thing you earth people call ideas?
Aghhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh!
Bananas!
Ideas? I've got your ideas RIGHT HERE!

This is a continuation of the blog started here and continued here.

First the Fallacy of the Media Specific Influence

A common mistake amongst critics and commentators is to narrowly attribute influence primarily within the media of the work they are looking at. Thus novels are usually cited as the influence for novels, films for films and graphic novels for graphic novels. This is, of course, a total absurdity - a writer is no more constricted in his influences than anybody else. Rivers of London was as much influenced by Ars Magica, a role playing game, as it was by any single work of fiction.

Second the Fallacy of the Most Similar Influence

Another mistake is to rank influences by how similar they are to the finished work. Thus it's often assumed that The Dresden Files, Neverwhere and the Felix Castor novels were strong influences whereas I actually came across them once Rivers of London was already conceptually developed. Some of the strongest influences came from works far outside the Urban Fantasy genre.

Third the Fallacy of the Three Part List

Sometimes I can't think of a third thing.

Is there any chance of us moving on to some influences at any point?

Okay, okay. In no particular order here are some of the main influences on the Rivers of London series.

Rentaghost

If your mansion house needs haunting just call Rentaghost... (1976)

For those of you raised in a cultural wasteland or born after the fall of the Berlin Wall Rentaghost was a BBC Children's series about a company which hired out ghosts to people that might need one. Its influence lies in the casual way the fantastic is treated by both the ordinary people running the company and the ghosts who make up its staff. There's also the technological and social culture clash humour of some of the ghosts as they try to cope with the modern world. The theme song is one of the worst ear worms ever composed which is why I haven't included it in this blog.

Jerry Cornelius

 It was a world ruled these days by the gun, the guitar, and the needle, sexier than sex... (1969)

Michael Moorcock's hipster agent of Entropy Jerry Cornelius exerts an insidious influence over the Rivers of London books, so subtle is it that it wasn't until I picked up my copy of The Final Programme that I realised its extent. Sometimes when I'm turning one of my books over in my mind I catch a glimpse of a figure in harlequin's motley capering through the dust sheeted rooms of my memory. I can't say for sure whether J.C. was a direct inspiration for Punch's role in Rivers of London but I strongly suspect he's responsible for blowing the head off the Hare Krishna guy.

The Doubtful Guest

It joined them at breakfast and presently ate, all the syrup and toast, and part of the plate. (1957)

This was one of those books that impinged upon my childhood by dint of lying around the house and then exerting a strange fascination on me when I was barely able to read. This is something we may lose as books shift into the electronic cloud - that wet afternoon discovery that intrigues despite our inability to understand it. Edward Gorey's Doubtful Guest radiates a wonderful melancholy humour as the Doubtful Guest imposes itself on a grand Edwardian family whose good manners prevent them from throwing it out. The Edwardian tone, the palpable sense of menace, the silence - now who does that remind me of....

Roofworld

The author realised that a quote would have to wait until he unpacked his copy from that pile of boxes...

Christopher Fowler's 1988 novel is probably the first modern Urban Fantasy novel that I read that didn't involve Vampires moping around Paris. The authors detailed description of a secret society living in parallel with our own is an obvious influence but unique, I think, in that it takes place at roof level rather than under ground. I found Fowler's next novel, Rune, less satisfying perhaps because I'm less interested in horror than fantasy but having recently discovered his blog I think I may have been missing out.

Mona Lisa Overdrive

Here it seemed the very fabric of things, as if the city were a single growth of stone and brick, uncounted strata of message and meaning, age upon age, generated over the centuries to the dictates of some now all but unreadable DNA of commerce and empire. (1988)

There's a whole London sequence in the third of William Gibson's sprawl trilogy that has stuck with me ever since I read it. I like the sense of bustle, of an alien city giving up secrets, of its exoticism - made all the more sweeter because it's talking about my home town. That snow smothered landscape returned to me when London got its first proper snow in years and fed through into several sequences in Whispers Under Ground.

Jazz

Daylight slants like a razor cutting the buildings in half. In the top half I see looking faces and it's not easy to tell which are people, which the work of stonemasons. Below is shadow where any blasé thing takes place: clarinets and lovemaking, fists and the sorrowful women. (1992)

Toni Morrison's novel is set in Chicago just after the First World War but its roots lie in the tangled history of the characters as they form part of the great Black migration from the south. Like Mona Lisa Overdrive this book is an influence through the subtle arts of mood, phrase and metre.

The Owl Service

"No. It's something trying to get out, the scratching's a bit louder each night..." (1967)

Alan Garner weaves layer upon layer into this tale of old myth reiterating itself through the lives of three children on holiday in a Welsh valley. Garner gradually allows information from the past to seep into his narrative so that like a man asleep in a sinking boat we wake from a troubling dream to find ourselves half drowned already. I've tried to take two things away from the Owl Service and Alan Garner's other work, the notion that you can leave things unsaid and unarticulated and that the readers will respond to them subconsciously and that it's better, where possible, to use real myths and real names.

This post has got way longer than I planned for so tune in next week for At Last The Truth! We're Going To Need A Bigger Truck!

At Last The Truth! The Curiously Unavoidable Harry Potter

Last week I blogged about Magic Cops the TV concept that laid the foundations for Rivers of London but there were other projects that contributed to the final book. I say contributed but what I really mean is cannibalised because if there's one thing I hate more than celery it's a good bit of writing going to waste.

A habit I, and I suspect other writers(1), have is idly playing with ideas. Often you're on a bus or a train or a walk and you have an idea which you then prod or invert or try to hammer into the wrong shaped hole. Often your not planning to do anything serious with it it's a more a form of mental exercise(2). Occasionally one of these idle thoughts will join up with another idea or accrete substance in the same manner a small child accretes dirt and suspiciously old boiled sweets. One of these metaphorically sticky children started with the idea of 'what if there was a Comprehensive(3) version of Hogwarts(4)'. This project never even had a working title as such it always existed in my mind as...

The Harry Potter Goes To Comprehensive School...thingy

The basic story idea, such as it was, followed a posh guy, who I'm going to call James, whose father is done for embezzlement and is taken out of his posh life and forced to live in his granny's council flat in East London. Once there a social worker turns up and says he has to go to a special school which turns out to be a state day school catering to the magically gifted. You can tell this is a basic TV idea because it's made out of clichés bolted together.

What Magic School (well I've got to call it something) did generate were a number of ideas that made it into Rivers of London and Moon Over Soho.

The first concerns the social worker who arrives to tell James he has to go to school, I made her an authoritative Nigerian woman but because this was a story about magic I wanted to give her an unconventional background. That's when I decided that she was the spirit of a small river in Nigeria who had emigrated to the UK and having found the Thames abandoned by its native spirits had moved into that niche. The parallel to the many immigrant groups who moved into London and took over small businesses, corner shops and food outlets is obvious(5). She moved over into Magic Cops relatively unchanged but when I came to write her in the book she became a proper Mama Benz(6) -  grander and much more formidable. This was because in the book I wasn't constrained by casting limits (TV executives get nervous if there are more than 3 non-white characters in a series) and once you have Lady Ty, Fleet, Effra and Beverley Brook Mama herself becomes the matriarch of a large and powerful family.

More surprisingly was the effect on Nightingale's background. In Magic School the headmaster had once been the head of a posh boarding school where the British wizarding elite sent their sons to be raised to take their place in the magical establishment. Only World War Two had destroyed that generation and left him mourning a 'lost' Britain. Some of those characteristics were eventually blended into Nightingale's background and a scene where the Headmaster takes James to the old school, now defunct, and shows him the wall of the honoured dead turns up in Moon Over Soho.

Now some of you are thinking, Magic Cops, Magic School you were seriously on a magic jag back in 2005 but these were not the only speculative projects I was working on at the time. There was Arthur Returns in which King Arthur wakes up in modern times; A Lethal Education which was a putative YA project which could be best described as Len Deighton for kids; Burning Cross a thriller about a serial killer who targets the white elite in a Southern Town during the 1960s; Primate City Blues a short story that I swear I will get round to writing about a bug (think Starship Troopers) detective sent to investigate why a colony is getting weird; Owen the Librarian a swashbuckling fantasy in which our hero is kidnapped by flying pirates and used in their quest for a macguffin; Space Princess which was my attempt to cash in on Disney's obsession with high schools and teenage princesses(7) and finally The Nerd which was my autistic detective show.

On top of that there were all the other notions that bounced around in my brain during that period, some of it fruitful most of it... less so. And that brings us neatly to :- One of the questions in a recent German email interview I had recently was: What do you reply when people say that Constable Peter Grant was a Sherlock Homes in the costume of Harry Potter?

My answer to that question and questions of a similar ilk is: you guys need to get out more! Next week we shall have a look at where the ideas come from in an instalment I like to call: At Last The Truth! The Back Of The Lorry.

(1) You never know with writers though so it's best to add some caveats when making generalisations.

(2) That is to say 'procrastination'.
(3) A Comprehensive is a non selective state school and is where most British people go to school - although not all to the same school... that would silly... obviously.

(4) Inverting an idea like that is always a fun first thing to do it's like upending a shoplifter - you never know what's going to drop out of their pockets.

(5) When I was at school you went to the Chinese chippy, there were four within walking distance of my house and my favourite was the Sun Do who did chips covered in barbecue sauce. Last time I looked the chip shops were all run by Kurds but it might have changed again by now.

(6) Mama Benz is a West African term for successful market women and traders - the Benz part comes from their supposed penchant for buying Mercedes.
(7) My favourite line from that came near the end;
Teenage Protagonist: It's all right for you you're like Queen of the Galaxy.
Space Princess: The Empire's only three percent of the inhabited galaxy, that less than eleven hundred planets and barely sixty three trillion citizens. When are you people going to learn to put things in perspective.

At Last The Truth! Where the Story Really Starts

It is an epic tale of one man's quest to feed his family(1) and restart his career no matter what the odds. It all starts back in the far of days of 2005 when I still thought I had a career in scriptwriting(2). There will be spoilers for both Rivers of London and Moon Over Soho so if you're spoiler averse look away now....

Magic Cops - Does what it says on the tin.

Memory is the weirdest thing. For the longest time I thought that I'd got the initial idea from an early Sci Fi Channel promo for The Dresden Files TV series. But looking at my diary the other day I saw that I was working on the idea as far back as 2005. In fact I a couple of sample scenes written and the start of an outline blue tacked to my walls. Since the series didn't air until 2007 I've had to go rummaging around in the carelessly stuffed spare room of my memory and my best reconstruction is simply this...

Prime Suspect meets Ars Magica - now there's a pitch you couldn't make to a British producer. In this version Peter was a black woman with Jamaican parents but Lesley and Nightingale were pretty much how they ended up in the books. There was going to be a whole team of wizards in the classic ensemble cop show style including a new age witch and someone practising a Non-European tradition from China or India.

At one point I toyed with the the idea of Simone (Peter as was) discovering or, more precisely, being afflicted by an ancestral spirit - that bit was strongly influenced by Due South particularly the episode where Constable Fraser opens his cupboard to find that his dead father and a bunch of Native Canadian elders have taken it over as a sweat lodge. I liked that intrusion of the fantastic into the mundane - I also liked Fraser's matter-of-fact acceptance of the situation.

When I start a project I often find myself with a few scenes or sequences that are, for want of a better term, vivid. Moments of narrative in which I can almost see, taste and smell what's going on. It's easy enough to take a concept, turn it into a pitch and then mechanically spin it out into a plot but unless you have these brilliant beads to hang on that thread you can never be sure the book, series or film is going to live. Magic Cops had several such moments right from the start - some of which survived all the way to Rivers of London.

Moshi Moshi

Simone trying to take a witness statement from a ghost while guarding a crime scene. Not in Covent Garden, because producers hate central London locations, but in Worship Street near Liverpool Street Station. This scene, even down to the "Pisst, guv, I saw the whole thing," line was consistent all the way through to Rivers of London.

Another survivor was Nightingale 'recruiting' Simone in a Japanese restaurant - although the restaurant in question was the Moshi Moshi in Liverpool Street Station. 

You can't see it from the picture but the Moshi Moshi is essentially a Sushi Bar inside a transparent perspex box suspended ten metres above the platforms of Liverpool Street station. If you can imagine Paul McGann in there talking about ghosts and werewolves to a black Londoner with the 19th Century roof vaulting overhead while thousands of commuters stream past oblivious to the strangeness - then you can imagine why I thought that was a visually arresting scene(3).

While not a set piece another thing that survived all the way to Rivers of London was Lesley May as golden girl and apple of the police forces' eye. In fact not changing Lesley to male when I switched Simone would lead to some very interesting meta-thematic confusion amongst my editors and many of my readers. 

While Magic Cops is definitely the seed that led to Rivers of London its roots spread out further to another project which I will discuss in next week's exciting(4) instalment 'The Curiously Unavoidable Harry Potter.'

(1) Well just the Evil Monster Boy really but trust me - that was expensive enough.

(2) My career had been effectively dead since 1997 but it's amazing how far you can go on hope and a stubborn refusal to face reality. 
(3) If you can't then you're probably a gibbon.
(4) Well probably not exciting per se but interesting...to me at least.