SHOTSMAG CONFIDENTIAL |
| On becoming a real author by Alan Johnson Posted: 01 Sep 2021 10:00 PM PDT
 Alan Johnson is a former MP for Kingston Upon Hull West and Hessle. His memoirs have won the Royal Society of Literature Ondaatje Prize and the Specsavers National Book Awards "Autobiography of the Year". The titles of his four memoirs all come from the titles of songs that the Beatles have either written or performed. When I once told a book festival audience that I wanted to write fiction some wag responded by suggesting I write my Party's next election manifesto. I was still an MP and thick-skinned enough to withstand the gentle humour of someone who'd paid good money to hear me talk about my four volumes of memoir. The desire I'd expressed was genuine. Apart from the fact that I'd practically exhausted all the available material, I was sick of writing about myself. My memoirs had done well but I didn't feel entitled to consider myself a proper author until I'd done the really difficult bit; developing plot and character. I was already enamoured with the actual process of writing. Politics doesn't involve much in the way of creativity and it's practitioners rarely have the luxury of seeing an idea through to fruition. Former Prime Minister Harold Macmillan, when asked by a journalist to identify the greatest threat to his administration, famously answered "events dear boy, events". I was always buffeted by events as a politician and to an even greater extent as a trade union leader before that, which is why I so valued the almost complete control that writing gave me. I say "almost complete" because, although I was solely responsible for the way I told my story, the story itself was preordained. I could describe the characters but not invent them; follow the plot but not create it. Writing fiction is much harder but infinitely more satisfying. Suddenly I was the dictator I'd so often wished I was in my previous life (although I'd have been a benign one - obviously). So, I wanted to write fiction but why crime fiction? I've devoured a lot of mysteries, particularly in my formative years. It began with a battered paperback copy of a Georgette Heyer detective story that somehow found its way into my bedroom. It wasn't very good. Heyer's forte was, of course, the Regency novel but the book was good enough to encourage me to further explore the genre. Before long I was taking my precious collection of 'Charles Buchan's Football Monthly' magazines to the Popular Book Shop in Shepherds Bush to swap them for a bagful of paperbacks by inter-alia Agatha Christie, Raymond Chandler, Ngaio Marsh, Leslie Charteris and Margery Allingham. By the time the Beatles released their twelfth single in June 1966 I really did "wanna be a Paperback Writer" (but only if I failed in my bid to be a rock star). I was a sixteen years old shelf stacker at Tesco having left school the year before. In a way school stayed with me because my brilliant English teacher, Mr Carlen had given all his pupils a list of 40 books they should read. The actual list hasn't survived but I remember Bleak House (with the wonderful Inspector Bucket) being on it along with Rogue Male and The Moonstone. Dickens, Geoffrey Household and Wilkie Collins wrote thrillers that seemed to escape narrow categorisation. They were just good books. It wasn't until about five years ago that I read my first Maigret, 'Inquest on Bouvet', a slim, green Penguin Crime paperback which could easily have been in that Popular Book Shop selection. Published in 1963 with the price (2'6 in old money) printed on the cover, I picked it up in another second hand bookshop whilst on holiday. Like almost all Maigret books it's more novella than novel running to just 152 pages. I read it on the beach in one day and I've read about five Maigret's a year since. All 75 are newly available, reprinted and retranslated, in a wonderful initiative by Penguin/Random House. It is Georges Simenon's creation, rather than Conan-Doyle's that I consider to be the greatest of all fictional detectives. I hope 'The Late Train to Gipsy Hill' carries at least a modicum of what I learnt from so many great crime novels (although I also hope it's not derivative of any). I'm not hoping for the Nobel Prize that Simenon so bitterly resented failing to win. I just wanted to write a book that is as pleasurable for it's purchasers to read as it was for me to write.'  The Late Train to Gipsy Hill by Alan Johnson is published in hardback by Wildfire Books on 2nd September 2021 Gary Nelson has a routine for the commute to his rather dull job in the city. Each day, he watches transfixed as a beautiful woman on the train applies her make up in a ritual he now knows by heart. He's never dared to strike up a conversation . . . but maybe one day. Then one evening, on the late train to Gipsy Hill, the woman who has beguiled him for so long, invites him to take the empty seat beside her. Fiddling with her mascara, she holds up her mirror and Gary reads the words 'HELP ME' scrawled in sticky black letters on the glass. From that moment, Gary's life is turned on its head. He finds himself on the run from the Russian mafia, the FSB and even the Metropolitan Police - all because of what because this mysterious young woman may have witnessed. In the race to find out the truth, Gary discovers that there is a lot more to her than meets the eye...  |
| Posted: 01 Sep 2021 01:39 PM PDT  She's Mine, my debut psychological thriller with Hera Books, is my first foray into writing in the first person, having used the third person narrative for my Kramer & Carver legal thriller series. I always enjoy exploring the mindsets of my characters – who and what is motivating them to behave in the way they do. Even with The Scribe and The Abduction, I made a conscious effort to do this, i.e., not just take my readers on a straightforward mission to unearth and track down the culprits alongside my lead protagonists, but also allow them to see things through the culprits' eyes, just because I feel this adds substance to the story, enabling readers to connect with and relate to all of the characters on a deeper level; even induce them to feel some level of sympathy for the wrongdoers, having been offered an insight into their inner turmoil and often painful backstories. There is no hard and fast rule that psychological thrillers should be written in the first person, however, just because the genre is primarily focussed on the characters' states of mind. Least of all the first-person present, which is what I chose to do with She's Mine. So long as the novel contains key elements of the genre – the lead character perhaps having a dark secret or flaw which makes them potentially unreliable – it is of course perfectly possible to effectively portray them within a framework of disquiet and mystery, as is the typical mood of this genre, through the third person narrative. Having said that, I chose not to do this with She's Mine, principally because I felt the crux of my novel, which centres on a mother's (Christine Donovan) grief for her missing child, and the ensuing dark and twisty turn of events that swiftly unravel after she receives a note revealing her daughter is not dead, along with the pervading sense of unease, mistrust and tension that exists between her and other characters, called for a more personal approach. Christine's guilt for her neglect, but more so revolving around a secret she feels contributed to her child's disappearance, also lies at the heart of the novel, and so I felt it imperative to see things through her unique perspective, and that of those closest to her, so as to give the reader a deeper and more profound insight into the excruciating pain and turmoil she is forced to endure day after day, as well as the first-hand effect her behaviour has had on others. I didn't feel this could be conveyed as powerfully via the third person narrative which, by definition, is more detached and reliant on the author's description of a character's behaviour and speech rather than via said character's natural stream of thought. Moreover, although readers may, understandably, blame Christine for losing her child owing to her past misdeeds, it was crucial to me that they should also feel some compassion for her, and I found the first-person narrative – hearing her voice, her suffering in their heads – to be a more effective way of achieving this. Obviously one can describe a character's pain and emotions through the third person narrative, but there is always a danger of it coming across as contrived and lacking in depth and heart, the author sometimes 'telling' too much of the story, rather than 'showing' it through a character's own distinct voice and actions which, admittedly, can be deceptive because we as readers don't know if what he or she is saying can be trusted. But then again, isn't that the point of the psychological thriller genre? To be unsure of what you are being told is the truth, thereby heightening the intrigue on the part of the reader and their impetus to keep turning the pages? I think that fans of psychological thrillers rather enjoy the feeling of being deceived by the author – the sense that they're not being given the whole story but rather a skewered version of the truth. This uncertainty is what adds to the overall experience and addictive nature of the genre, and I think this can often be better achieved by only seeing events through the eyes of a particular character at any given moment. Writing in the first person also allowed me to connect more deeply with my characters even though I, unlike my readers, know the outcome of the story and what my characters are hiding. With She's Mine, I became so invested in my characters, I really felt like I was living every moment with them, feeling their pain and inner turmoil, which was important given the subject matter of a lost child; something that was often hard to write about being a mother myself. Similarly, because the events of the book move along fairly swiftly, constantly switching between different characters' viewpoints, I chose to write in the first person 'present tense' with a view to ramping up the pace even further, as well as intensifying the prevailing sense of claustrophobia and uncertainty my characters operate in. I really enjoyed my first experience of writing in the first person and feel sure it won't be my last.  She's Mine is published by Hera Books in e-book on 18th August and paperback on 26th August: Her missing daughter was just the start of the nightmare. Twenty years ago, Christine Donovan took a call she should have ignored while shopping. In those few seconds while her back was turned her toddler, Heidi, was kidnapped. She's never been seen again. Despite having two other children with husband Greg, Christine remains guilt-stricken that her neglect caused her child to be stolen, while haunted by a secret that consumes her. Just as she takes measures to finally heal, a note is posted through her door, with the words she has always longed to hear: Heidi isn't dead. Christine might finally get the answers she craves - but what she doesn't know is that finding her daughter will uncover dark secrets close to home. In seeking the truth, Christine might destroy everything that she loves … so how far is she willing to go to find Heidi? AMAZON: https://amzn.to/3ua6Oxa Kobo: https://bit.ly/3ffj4rM Apple: https://apple.co/3yyqe2a  |
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