Character building

“How much of you is in your characters?”

That’s a question often asked of authors. Along with ‘where do you get your ideas?’ Both are good questions and we’re always happy to answer them. Let’s face it, most authors are attention-seekers and we’ll talk about our shoe size if we’re asked.

Anyway, how much of me is there in my characters?

Naturally, there are bits and pieces, here and there, hither and yon, throughout the vast panoply of my character list. Look at me, using the word panoply like a grown-up. It’s actually a complete suit of armour but I’m using it in the figurative sense because the people we create can be a crime writer’s defence against the world. We wrap them around us in order to explore the darker sides of human nature. The bad stuff happens to them not us. Again, get me!

There isn’t much of me in Davie McCall, to be honest. He has my awkwardness in social situations. He has my inability to express real emotion. He has my love of animals.

I’d like to be more like him but I’m not.  I’d like his stillness and his ability to not say stupid things and make a fool of himself. I’d also like his physical prowess. In short, there are some people I’d really like to batter seven shades of stuff out of. I know that’s not very 21^st Century of me but, to quote Die Hard 4, I’m an analogue guy in a digital age.

There’s a lot more of me in Dominic Queste. A hell of a lot more.

Let me count the ways…

His mouth runs before his brain has even turned the ignition. Frankly, I can blurt for Team GB. Dom, though, is a lot faster with a one-liner than me, because I often think of the perfect sting sometime after it was needed.

His fashion sense is, shall we say, stunted. I’ve been mocked by an unmade bed.

He loves movies and often thinks he’s in one. I once thought I was in the film version of 50 Shades of Grey but it turned out to be a black and white Three Stooges film in need of a digital clean-up.

He loves film music, listens to it all the time. So do I. In fact, I often find I can’t write without a fitting score in the background.

I’ve even found Dom an unofficial theme tune:

It’s the theme to the 1975 version of Raymond Chandler’s ‘Farewell My Lovely.’ Written by David Shire, it was perfect in my mind for Queste, because beneath all the glib wisecracks there lurks a melancholy soul. Something else we share.

Davie McCall also had an unofficial theme tune:

Like Dom, I don’t JUST listen to film music. It’s always been one of my favourite tracks from The Who and the lyrics seemed to fit Davie to a T.

While writing the next book in the series, ‘Tag – You’re Dead’, I used the score to the 1962 film ‘The List of Adrian Messenger’.

I’m a huge – H-U-G-E – fan of composer Jerry Goldsmith and his music to this off-beat black comedy thriller was just the job for what I hope is my off-beat black thriller with humour.

I don’t share Dom’s predilection for controlled substances. I’ve never experimented with drugs and that’s the God’s honest, guv’nor. Apart from an ill-advised encounter with a cigar when I was a teenager, which led to Exorcist-style vomiting, I’ve never even smoked! Neither has Dom, come to that.

Dom is suspicious of posh nosh. He’s a fish supper and instant coffee kind of guy. Not for him nouveau cuisine and fancy beverages. I even had to look up nouveau to see how to spell it. I often feel I need a language degree to order an Americano, Latte, Espresso or double nut, non-caff mocha with a sprinkling of organic, fat-free fair-trade chocolate and just the merest whisper of cinnamon. I typed that last one like Niles Crane in ‘Frasier’. I even dusted off my chair.

I remember a friend giving me some Earl Grey Tea. It was like drinking perfume. Gimme a straight cup of Tetley’s any day (other brands are available).

Perhaps it’s because Dom is so like me that I find him easier to write.

And I’m all about making it easy.

Now, if I could think of an easy way to round this off, that’d be cool!