Life back then: The King of Clubs

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I’m rather fond of Agatha Christie’s short story, “The King of Clubs”, which centres around a glamorous dancer stumbling into the midst of an ordinary middle-class English family after witnessing a murder. It’s great. Go read it. The family’s name is Oglander, and the lawyer in Unnatural Ends was named James Oglander as an homage to this story.

But what I want to talk about here is something so prosaic that it normally flies under the radar of literary discussion, and that’s the family setup we’re presented with. The “ordinary middle-class” Oglanders consist of a married couple and their two adult children (a son and a daughter) living under the same roof; both father and son work, while mother and daughter stay home. They also have a maid. It’s impressed on the reader that this is all very ordinary and typical. Doubtless, the kids would have left home when they married, or if circumstances drew them elsewhere, but it wasn’t expected of them. To leave or not to leave, both are not so much “socially acceptable” as socially unremarkable.

Expectations are different now. Today, the adult children would assuredly not be living at home. Daughter would also be working. There would be no maid, though there might be other modern expenses to take her place. In 1923 when the story was first published, this was a family drawing two salaries while paying for one residence. Today, it would be a family drawing three salaries while paying for three residences.

I suspect that expectations changed because of western prosperity in the years following WW2. It enabled young people to leave the house not because their work demanded it or because they were starting a new family, but simply because they could. Moving out became a rite of adulthood, with the implication that one who still lived with their parents was not a proper adult.

Now, however, I’m seeing on social media that it has become increasingly difficult to leave the family home. Earning power has not kept up with inflation or the cost of housing. Are more young people today remaining at home with their parents as a result? Perhaps, like young Oglander, saving up their pay cheques and establishing their careers first? If not, they probably should. I rather get the impression that the new financial reality is less a matter of “things getting harder” and more a matter of “things returning to normal despite expectations born of an abnormally prosperous era.”

Story Structure: Appointment With Death

Agatha Christie’s Appointment With Death is an interesting study of the form. In a genre that’s supposed to be all about the resolution of a murder, the murder doesn’t occur until about halfway through the book; meanwhile, Poirot appears only briefly in the opening chapters — perhaps three pages in all — and then disappears from the story until after the murder. And yet the story works.

The issue, I think, is not that the story is doing things wrong, but that the elements fill different roles and perform different functions from what is usually expected of them.

Let’s begin with Poirot’s absence through nearly all the first half of the book. Look. We must abandon this idea that the detective in a detective story must be the protagonist. They frequently are not. In the classic Holmes-and-Watson dynamic, the protagonist is Watson, not Holmes: Holmes, like his predecessor Auguste Dupin, is a performer under observation. In Appointment with Death, we are less concerned with how Poirot is affected by the story, and more with how other characters are affected by Poirot. He is not the protagonist of this story: Sarah King is.

This is, incidentally, a thing that Christie does a lot. Many of her mysteries feature a young, single woman who actually functions as the story’s protagonist — that is, she is the character we follow and whose fortunes we get most invested in. The Mystery of the Blue Train has Katherine Grey. Taken at the Flood has Lynn Marchmont. Death in the Clouds has Jane Grey. And Then There Were None has Vera Claythorne. The character type is easily recognisable, but beware of assuming that she always fills the same character role. Murder on the Orient Express opens with Mary Debenham, but quickly abandons her viewpoint. Death on the Nile has both Cornelia Robson and Rosalie Otterbourne, but follows neither.

As for the murder … People usually expect that to occur within the first 20% of the story. One popular format is to introduce the reader to the setting and characters, and then drop the murder into it. In such a format, the murder functions as the Inciting Incident. It is the thing that galvanises everyone into action. That is not the case in Appointment with Death. By the time we get to the murder, we are well beyond introductions, and the characters have already chosen their respective courses of action. The murder here functions instead as the Midpoint Climax. This story is actually about the trials of the Boynton family, and the murder comes as the final breaking point, the result of everyone’s shenanigans up to that moment.

A similar thing happens in the first season of Bridgerton (I admit to not having actually read the books) where the marriage, usually the resolution of a romance plot, functions instead as the midpoint climax. Julia Quinn, the author, was able to do this by recognising that while love and marriage are linked, they are by no means synonymous; and if the midpoint climax represents a point of no return in a story, so too (in a period when divorce was both rare and stigmatised) is marriage a point of no return in a relationship. Christie, meanwhile, was able to formulate a mystery in which the murder functioned as a midpoint climax because she understood that the murder is usually the culmination of a great deal of interpersonal drama, much of which is at least as interesting as the detective’s efforts to unravel the mystery.

And this gives a writer more flexibility in the construction of a story. All that’s required is an understanding of how things work as opposed to what they are.

La Strana Morte

I’ve mentioned it elsewhere, but somehow never gotten around to mentioning it here: Unnatural Ends is getting an Italian release next month as La Strana Morte di Sir Lawrence Linwood.

It’s a little bit more 1890 than 1920, but it is beautiful, I think. I wonder if I can get it embossed on a leather hardcover.

Happy Christmas

I know, “Merry Christmas” seems more usual, but I’ve come across “Happy Christmas” a few times, I think mainly in British literature. So … is this a British thing? Anyway, here’s wishing a happy Christmas and merry holidays to everyone.

Work proceeds apace for A Pretender’s Murder. After some discussion with my publisher, they’ve pushed the release date back to early 2025. Would have been autumn 2024, but apparently there’s an election happening in the US at that time which might get in the way of a book launch. Early 2025 works for me, though: it’s even more breathing room, and we seem to be digging even deeper now into the characters and the motivation and all that good stuff.

As it so happens, A Pretender’s Murder opens on New Year’s Eve 1924 (though it’s mostly set in March 1925) so it seems a bit apropos now to share this early passage:

Eric breathed in the welcome aroma of roast goose rolling in from the dining room, the high spirits, and the laughter from the lounge upstairs. He’d missed Christmas Day itself, thanks to an obligation to a former sergeant, but New Year’s Eve was only the seventh day of Christmas, and the Britannia Club celebrated all twelve in a grand fashion. Under wreaths of holly, the walnut panelling gleamed as though soaked in oil, and the polished brass fittings flared in the flicker of candlelight. This was the one time of the year when guests were allowed up the grand staircase to the club lounge, so the marbled hallways echoed with the unfamiliar joy of those normally left behind.

Despite best intentions

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I swear that I began this month with good intentions. The annual IFcomp is underway, and the plan was to play at least one IFcomp game each morning, write through the afternoon, and then spend the evening reading some of the books I picked up at Bouchercon and Crimefest. So far, I’ve played one: The Whisperers, a simulation of attending a sort of “audience’s choice” stage play in Stalinist Russia. That is pretty much it.

(The Whisperers is a fine work of interactive fiction, by the way. Relatively short, puzzleless … the point, I think, is to explore the social expectations of Soviet “educational” entertainment and weave together an interesting story. I did think the subplot about the religious icons could have been pushed further: it gave us a nice speech about the USSR’s treatment of Ukraine, but the consequences amounted to a couple of sentences gravely overshadowed by the main plot.)

Anyway, wandering through Amazon last week, I discovered that Peterkin 2 is now available for pre-order there as A Pretender’s Murder — the title I was considering (and which still heads my working document) before I decided the more anonymous-seeming “Peterkin 2” would serve better as an official working title. I guess there’s no such thing as a distinction between “official” and “unofficial” when it comes to working titles. At least it appears we’re not doing the usual Inkshares pre-order campaign, which is a bit of a relief.

The release date has been set at 30 July 2024, which means I need to get the current draft done by the end of this year. Honestly, though, I have very little confidence in my ability to meet that 30 July deadline. I mean, even if I finish and submit the current draft next week, surely I’m going to need to do yet another draft after that, and how long would that take? But who knows. Maybe I’m selling myself short. Maybe I don’t actually need some time hyperventilating into a brown paper bag. One can hope.

Edit: I should probably clarify that I should have seen this thing with Amazon (and, presumably, other retailers) coming. Inkshares did mention the proposed release date to me beforehand, and they did ask me to do that writeup for what the book’s to be about; but I misunderstood all this to be an internal, industry thing — perhaps they needed to impress an investor, and I should therefore mention a few OMG!highbrow literary themes … which I’d have been a bit more shy about if I were describing the book to readers. As it is, well, what’s done is done; and maybe I shouldn’t think of “selling to readers” as all that different from “selling to investors”.

Blue Monday

About a year and a half ago, I went to check out Twitch. There, aside from the expected video gaming broadcast streams, I found a bunch of writers sharing their process. And among these writers was Neal Bailey. I’ve been hanging out on his streams ever since, and we met in person last weekend when he swung by Calgary in his exploration of Western Canada.

You know that I value attention to craftsmanship when it comes to writing, and that was what impressed me about Neal’s Twitch stream. The guy writes and edits and writes and edits … He understands that the first thing you put down on a page isn’t necessarily a perfect little gem, and that art requires polish. Editing exists for a reason. So I picked up a couple of his books — the Hal Taylor series is right up my alley, being crime thrillers with a refreshing touch of exuberance. They’re pretty darn good and deserve better attention than they’ve gotten so far.

Anyway, after talking about our experiences with the industry, he’s decided to give Inkshares a shot. Not with the Hal Taylor books, however, much as I would love to see that series given some proper marketing push: he’s going with Blue Monday, a science-fiction ensemble piece about a community that’s decided against accepting a gift from visiting aliens — a gift that changes human physiology to eliminate various ills while also conferring superhuman powers. Basically, these are the folks who have chosen to remain “normal” … but as “normal” now means something more, they find themselves marginalised in the wider global community.

I get the sense that this is going to have a bit more of a literary edge to it.

Science fiction isn’t really a genre I know too well, but I trust Neal on the strength of the Hal Taylor novels. And when the pre-order campaign opens on Blue Monday, I’m going to be among the first in line to back it.

Do better

Here are a couple of my favourite quotes, though they are going need some explanation as to why they’re important to me:

I think I am beginning to understand something about it.

– Pierre-Auguste Renoir

It was no rapid revolutionary change in manners that brought about the difference that now exists between the Elizabethan and present eras; no polished mentor came forward to teach that it was not the nicest and cleanest thing to do, to put knives into the salt, to dip fingers into plates, or to spread butter with the thumb; on the contrary, these things righted themselves little by little, step by step, until the present code of manners was arrived at. But it is quite possible that a hundred years hence it will be discovered that the manners of the present century offered wide scope for improvement.

– Manners and Rules of Good Society (1915 edition)

Peterkin 2: What’s in a name?

It is now two weeks since Bouchercon, and life is easing back into its old grooves. I’ve been working on what I shall call Peterkin 2 for now — I have rather rotten luck with titles, I find. Not so rotten that I regret them after publication, but there always comes this moment in the late editorial stage where I find myself having to change them for something less unfortunate. You can still find references to Unnatural Ends‘s working title, Cat’s Paw, here and there. So I’m not going to worry about what this new work is going to be published as until the time comes.

So, what’s this, then? What is Peterkin 2?

The fruits of Bouchercon

I am home from Bouchercon — five days of rubbing shoulders with people whose thoughts turn constantly to murder most foul. It was awesome. My throat is killing me, though I’ve tested negative for the plague both yesterday and today. Unless I’m doing the test wrong … but there are other nasty germs you can pick up at these big conventions which aren’t that particular plague. I’ll need rest, but it’s been worth it.

One thing I found out only because someone at Bouchercon looked me up online: apparently Audible and Raphael Corkhill have been busy while I wasn’t looking, and the audiobook for Unnatural Ends was set for release on the 5th — yesterday. Audible has filed it under “historical”, which is obvious; and “noir”, which … really? Well. It is a bit on the dark side, and I guess this just goes to show that these arbitrary genre subdivisions are a lot fuzzier than we think.

I need to work on my web presence. When I first started this writing lark, I thought I’d be writing Eric Peterkin and nothing else … I tried to set up peterkin-investigates.com as an alias for the specific part of my website where my books would be at, but somehow the security encryption thing doesn’t extend to that URL …? Well. Unnatural Ends isn’t a Peterkin book, so it’s time I owned ricordius.com instead. That is me. Me is misericordius. Any “look at the books, not at me” modesty is absolutely misplaced. So I spruced up the website a bit yesterday … doubtless, there’s more that could be done, but it’s a start.

Also, I really ought to be updating this blog more often. Or more regularly.

Edit: And I’ve added a link to the audiobook because why not.

When is a genre most at home?

Here’s a thought: have you ever noticed that certain genres have a “native time period” that just feels right for them, even though they could be set at any other time?

I bring this up because I’ve been writing “Golden Age Mysteries” — detective stories set in the period between the two World Wars — and it seems there are quite a few of us out there. Of course, most people set their stories in the “here and now”, but for the purposes of this post, I’m talking about the historicals. And while a few people might go for the late Victorian era and one or two might go elsewhere, it really does seem as though that interbellum era is the “native period” for Mystery.

Likewise, it feels as though historical Romance gravitates towards the British Regency of the early 1800s. As with the “Golden Age Mystery”, the “Regency Romance” is its own special term. Perhaps it’s Jane Austen’s fault.

Fantasy can technically be set in any period, too, and since a lot of it isn’t actually set on Earth, it could be argued that Fantasy doesn’t really have a period. But most people, when they think “Fantasy”, usually think of something that looks a lot like mediaeval Europe. Similarly, SciFi typically goes to the far future even though it could technically also be set in the present day, or (I suppose) in the past. I mean, Frankenstein counts as SciFi, doesn’t it?

One assumes that Westerns are pretty irrevocably tied to the era of the American “Wild West” — that is, the 1800s — but I wonder. I’m told that Firefly was basically a Western set in space, and then that old BraveStarr cartoon had all the trappings of a Western while also being set on an alien planet. What is it that makes a Western, anyway, and can you write a Western set in … I don’t know, Roman Britain? Roman pioneers try to settle this distant outpost of the empire, braving raids from disgruntled local tribesmen … This is, admittedly, not a genre I know much about.

And one assumes that spy thrillers would find their native period in the Cold War, thanks to James Bond, but somehow I do not feel like that is the case.

In what time period does Horror feel most at home?