Let’s talk about sex, baby.
The fourth and final Davie McCall book is due out next February. As with the previous three I had a sex scene. As with the previous three, said sex scene was dropped before it reached my editor.
You could say it was prematurely ejected.
Why?
Well, they were badly-written but that’s not uncommon in sex scenes, apparently.
But really, when I came to read them, I was just embarrassed.
To paraphrase ‘Shirley Valentine’, there was a lot of pushing and shoving and I still came out with very little.
I’m no prude. People can do what they like as long as they don’t involve children or frighten the horses.
And don’t get me wrong – I like sex (from what I can remember).
I’m very much an innocent abroad, you see. There are things that people get up to that are beyond my ken. For instance, there were phrases in Matt Bendoris’s book ‘DM for Murder’ that were foreign to me and I had to get a pal to explain them.
I blushed.
I think this naivete extends to my writing.
Which means that the only uglies Davie McCall gets to bump are the thugs he’s chastising.
I’m writing something new at the moment and I put a sex scene in the very first chapter. Yup, I went for it. There was rumpy. There was bumpy. There were all sorts of bits being grasped and groped.
It’s already gone. I was ashamed of myself.
It must say something about my psyche that I’m happy to have scenes of violence and kill characters off when the notion takes me but I balk at the idea of presenting the act of physical lurrve.
I read an article today about an up-and-coming writer called called Ian Rankin, who is destined for huge success. He said that when it came to doing the wild thing in print, his editor argued that it’s best left to the reader’s imagination.
Thank God, because my writer’s imagination just isn’t up to the job.
It could be argued there is no place for it in thrillers, but that’s not necessarily true. As long as it’s integral to the plot, as they say. Ladies and gentlemen, I give you ‘Basic Instinct’ as exhibit one.
I’m not saying that’s a great film, because it’s far from that, but the naughty bits were important. Actually, that’s what it was all about.
Exhibit B would be ‘Fatal Attraction’. Of course, in times gone by the movies would’ve presented the passion that gets Michael Douglas into such trouble in both films in a more chaste way, but by the 80s and 90s, the wild thing had to be shown, not inferred with crashing waves, fireworks going off or, as Hitchcock did after Cary Grant hauls Eva Marie Saint up into his bunk in ‘North by Northwest’, a train going into a tunnel.
I’m starting a new series next year. The first is ‘The Dead Don’t Boogie’ and it introduces Dominic Queste. You’ll hear more of this anon but suffice to say they are lighter than the Davie McCall novels. (The book I mentioned earlier – the thing I’m writing just now, the one that started off with a (coughs) bang – is something else entirely.)
I’ve been planning the second Queste novel and the first line will be something like this:
“I find it very difficult to refuse an attractive woman anything.
“I find it even more difficult when she’s naked and in my bed.”
Rest assured there will be no graphic description of what they’ve been up to. By the time the reader happens by, the deed has been done, the earth has been moved and the lampshade has stopped swinging.
I have an idea at some point in the series to take Queste into a thriller plot with a BDSM aspect. I didn’t know what the BD stood for until I looked it up. It’s Bondage and Discipline, if you don’t know.
And in the course of looking it up, I discovered the sort of thing they do. I mean, you put that clamp where? And tie what to your ?
Each to their own but I do wonder if I’d rather have a nice cup of tea and a wee dunk of a digestive.
Which raises the issue of teabagging. One of those phrases I’d never heard of. I’m still not terribly sure what it is.
Fear not, though. The sexual side will be very much in the background, while I concentrate on the plot and the humour, which is important to this series. Even so, I may abandon the entire notion.
That embarrassment thing may win again.
Now – where’s the kettle?
And maybe a ginger nut.