As the dust settles – part 4
And just like that #NN19 was over! But if you weren’t able to make it or you want to re-live those criminally fabulous memories again, here’s Louise Fairbairn’s roundup of the week-end that was #NN2019!
4.30pm – What Lies Beneath?
Johana Gustawsson, Thomas Enger, Louise Beech and Simone Buchholz
Chaired by Jacky Collins, this international panel of Orenda authors specialise in things that are not always as they seem on the surface… They also have varied journeys into publishing and into the crime genre.
Simone Buchholz is a former journalist on women’s magazines who got bored and wanted to try something new, so she hit on the idea of bringing an old-style hard-boiled noir character into the present and making them a woman – which worked so well she is now deep into a series about Chastity Riley. Louise Beech said she is “a bit of a genre floozy” who doesn’t think of genre as she writes and won’t fit into one box easily. She was involved in a murder inquiry after her grandmother died as a result of a housebreaking, and knew she would eventually write about it, and write crime. Some of her childhood experiences also inform her latest novel, Call Me Star Girl.
Thomas Enger said his was a long journey into crime writing – he made up words as a child and when, bored of the classics, he explored the library and discovered crime fiction, it seems his fate was sealed. He wrote four novels that were never published which he described as “my schooling”, and has written YA titles as well as the Henning Juul series for adults. Johana Gustawsson was a reluctant reader as a child – until she discovered Agatha Christie. For her first novel, she knew she wanted to write about her grandfather, and find out what made him into a poor father to his son – it is partly set in Buchenwald in 1943; she said discovering what happened to people there gave her a whole new vision of why he was who he was and did what he did.
Discussing whether the authors self-censor when they write, Louise said as long as something is part of the story then “anything goes” – if it’s done the right way, any topic is fine. Thomas agreed, saying that if the story warranted something, he would do it. When he started writing there was an expectation there would be gruesome murders as that was the genre, but he doesn’t seek out these scenes unless he has to, feeling the characters and the relationships between them is more interesting. Johana’s second novel, Keeper, includes a serial killer, but she aims to see through feelings rather than graphic description; she does not want to be gratuitous. She said the first one, Block 46, only had about 10% of what she had researched, as she had to make the book readable.
On what’s next, Louise said she is half-way through a crime novel set in a theatre, which includes unrequited love and a haunting. Simone’s next book will require research as it will be set in Glasgow, instead of her usual Hamburg. Thomas is working on a YA series, set in a slightly dystopian world. And Johana’s third book is out in September, with the backdrop of the Spanish Civil War.
From the audience was asked what they know now that they wished they had know at the start of their writing journey. Simone said she cared less and took more risks now, while Louise said little had changed for her – and she’s still not a plotter. Both Thomas and Johana do plot, though have changed their approach slightly over the years. Thomas said he used to plan in intricate detail, but now he does so more loosely and changes as the characters develop. Johana still plans scene by scene after doing her research, but trusts herself more when the characters surprise her.
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5.30pm – Deadlier Than The Male
CJ Tudor, Jacqui Rose, Margaret Kirk and Ashley Erwin
Ashley Erwin (who gave a storming performance at Noir At The Bar on Thursday) was a late addition to this panel chaired by Vic Watson, but brought a very different and welcome perspective to the conversation.
Vic started by asking about the strong focus on family and relationships in the four writers’ work. Ashley, discussing A Ballad Concerning Black Betty, or, The Retelling Of A Man Killer And Her Machete (yes, really!), said that she drops the reader into a series of unknowns and disorientates them. Ashley’s style is “Southern Pulp” and Black Betty leans towards the Western tradition of a small town with an outside coming in and meddling; both character and author are questioning the cultural norms of extreme situations in the piece.
Margaret Kirk sets her stories in Inverness and the Highlands, a place with a strong sense of history and family, and she examines how the past feeds into the present – and how the affects of crime ripple out to affect people. Jacqui Rose said if you only write about the crime, then readers can’t relate to it, you open the door via the family characters so people can connect with them and the story. She added that it’s exciting to write emotional layers. And CJ (Caz) Tudor agreed that characters are what draws you into a story; there is no mystery or tension without that, and family and relationships are the entry point.
On how the past influences the present, Caz said both of her books have something in the past that happened to her characters as children that affects them as adults – what happens in childhood always affects us later in life. Jacqui added that everyone has issues and makes choices due to what has happened in the past, good or bad. Margaret agreed, and said that history also ripples into the present. Ashley said the reader enters the town with Black Betty as the ripples of a war are being felt, with people making bad decisions and trying to cover them up, but we are anchored as Black Betty chooses her own family in a group of women she meets.
Discussing the strong sense of place in all the varied works, Ashley said that she was drawn to the tribal element of small towns, where an outsider is immediately questioned. She aims to let readers feel the wind whistling, see the isolation of the town, and experience the paranoia of such settings. The isolation is also felt through a lack of knowledge about the place and situation.
Jacqui said in Toxic she uses the physical isolation of being on a travellers’ site and then adds to it with the emotional isolation of a domestic abuse situation to bring the reader to her protagonist. Margaret’s detective, Lucas, has moved from London back to Inverness as the series begins, another outsider coming into a town. He also went to school in England, and has a German parent, so is even more isolated. But this also gives Margaret the opportunity to show how much the city has changed, which will also be seen in book two, which “tends towards the Gothic“, she said. Caz created a small village with strong traditions where lots of people have never left, choosing a former mining community which has a richness to it but does not welcome strangers.
With four strong woman writers, it’s no surprise there are strong female voices in their books. Jacqui said of the character Ma, her voice “just arrived” – and she felt “OMG, let’s see where she can go”, not realising she could go that far! She’s 99% bad but fun to write. Caz said there is a feeling that evil women are more terrifying as it goes against expectations that they will be kind, nurturing, etc. But as Margaret pointed out, you can’t just have one type of strong woman character. Caz also said she used central male characters that were weak in some ways, so she wanted to surround them with strong, sharp female characters. Ashley said she got the inspiration for Black Betty while in Italy studying the topic of women in the Mafia and thinking about pirates! She said she wondered what it would be like if instead of dutifully raising sons, the women were actually the Mafia? There was a ripple of delight when she said “all women are warriors in their own right – they can do what needs to be done!”
Asked by the audience what was the book that triggered their wanting to write, CAS said Stephen King, as did Margaret, who also added the Sherlock Holmes stories and reading about the dark deeds in Scottish history. Jacqui said she was an actress who got scripts so bad she wanted to write her own! But she also was inspired by the strong women seen in Shakespeare. Ashley said Donnybrook by Frank Bill, which is about bare knuckle fighting [it was also made into a film in 2018 starring Jamie Bell], and a Southern Gothic novel called Scar Lover by Harry Crews.
7.30pm – Saturday Night Showcase
Going Back To My Roots: John Harvey and Gunnar Staalesen
There was something of a scheduling conflict on the Saturday night of Newcastle Noir, as a certain football team were in action at home, but considering the final scoreline, I think those of us in the audience for this conversation, overseen by Miriam Owen, got the better deal… For the record, Gunnar Staalesen’s UK football team is Nottingham Forest, “because of Robin Hood”. Meanwhile, John Harvey’s team, Notts County, had just lost their status as the world’s oldest Football League club after being relegated down into the National League. Thankfully, talking about books and writing was a more positive experience!
Briefly, Gunnar’s main series – of which there are 19, with about half translated into English – features a private detective called Varg Veum. The Bergen that they are set in is realistic, he said, but his character is not so realistic! He has also written standalones and other short series, and writes extensively for the theatre, which he tries to intersperse with fiction as they are two very different styles of writing. John’s Charlie Resnick series of a dozen books is set in Nottingham, with Resnick a detective inspector who is “on the side of the losers”. He has more recently created the Frank Elder series, after writing a string of standalones and short stories. John has published around 100 novels during his career, including a period writing pulp Westerns and thrillers, plus YA titles, some under pseudonyms – all of which he said he did for the money, but equally that he learned how to write through doing this.
Both are interested in writing real things about real places, and believe the crime genre is the best place to do this – and that writers should do this; should say something about the world around them. On relationships, John said that in the last Elder book, Body And Soul, family plays an important role, with the relationship between a father and estranged daughter. Gunnar said that in the first book, Varg finds he has a half-sister, and there are many family secrets, including about his father.
Miriam asked what they most enjoyed about being writers. John said it varies with time – satisfaction used to be about writing a certain number of words per day, now it comes from writing a smaller amount of words that are really good. He added that once you get to grips with how to structure a novel, you can relax and enjoy a sentence, a piece of dialogue, a reference to something you love – incidental pleasures of the day to day. Gunnar said he takes pleasure in the dialogue between the writer and the reader that happens on good days. There is big pleasure to be found in the first draft of creating the story, the hard work comes in the rewrites, editing and polishing.
An audience question about the process of writing linked to this – they both said getting the story down in the first draft was most important, then correcting later to improve sentences, dialogue and rhythms of language. Gunnar described it as looking to “tell the story between the lines”.
