The Challenges of Character: Guest Post by Alex Marwood

Alex Marwood:
The Challenges of Character

One of the joys of the crime genre, and one of the reasons I think it’s one of the greatest places for discussing the human condition, is the huge freedom it contains. Ten years ago, I was another sort of writer, straddling “chick lit” (oh, how I hate that phrase) and literary writing, and the pressure, in those genres, to present protagonists with whom the reader would identify was immense. In theory, of course, one wants one’s readers to recognise themselves – or the broader human condition, at least – in the characters one writes, but the practice often forces one into a deadened pedestrianism, afraid of giving offence to those
who regard minor character flaws as major sins.

The glory of the crime genre is that even our heroes, our central protags, are allowed great gaping chasms of failing, limitation, of prejudice and stupidity – for the Crime genre is as much concerned with how things go wrong as with how they can be put right. Our world is one where terrible outcomes are as much the product of human weakness as they are some Manichean narrative of Good vs Evil. Sometimes reviewers complain that my books contain no role models or people they personally like, and though that makes me a little sad (the way I’d be sad if you didn’t like my children), I think I’d be far more upset if they complained that they were bores. To me, the psychology of failure, of bad decision-making and false assumptions, will always be more interesting than the honestly-all-looks-a-bit-the-same of the blandly virtuous.

But then, there’s the downside. For if you’re writing about failed and flawed and even wicked human beings, that also means you are choosing to live with them. Because that is literally what writers do: we live at close quarters with our characters. To write these imaginary individuals, I have to inhabit their psyches, delving further and deeper into them until I understand what drives them, and I have to learn to treat them with sympathy, with kindness. And the people a reader spends 10, 20 hours with live with me, their progenitor, for a couple of years as I wrestle their story from the grey and learn to forgive them their failings.

I mean, seriously – you didn’t identify with anyone? Try being me. These imaginary friends (and enemies, and villains) may be entirely the product of my own florid imagination, but to work on the page, they really do need to start walking and talking and making their own decisions, and that can make for uncomfortable companionship.

Some of them are frankly horrible – but still I have to learn who they are rather than walking away as I would in real life. Some of my central protagonists – Mila, or Cher and Vesta in The Killer Next Door – I have loved dearly. Mila, who’s complicated and flawed, and has many unattractive characteristics, was quite easy, for me; I enjoyed her company. We had situations and family dynamics very much in common, right down to the not-so-well suppressed internal rage and tendency to self-sabotage. Both Cher and Vesta, plucky and brave in an unhospitable world, always made me feel protective however frustrating they were, and I had to get to the end of that book simply to make sure that they would be okay.

Romy, though – the central character of my new novel, The Poison Garden – now, there was a challenge. She fascinated me more than any other character I’ve written and, I think, drove me to the edge of insanity from time to time. Raised in a cult and, though her belief in her leaders has been destroyed, still a slave to the beliefs that that cult has planted in her, I found her both the most frightening and yet the most pitiable character I’ve had to live with in my years of writing. And, as in many ways we are diametrical opposites – I’m a contrarian to a degree that is in itself a character flaw as well as a strength, and which has certainly made me unpopular from time to time – the challenge of learning how it felt to be her was immense. People tend to think of cult members as emotionally deadened, invested only in their beliefs, and discovering the overwhelming emotions Romy also kept buried deep inside was a surprise, and a disturbing one. But that’s what happens if you stop and listen, a habit that’s woefully little practised in our current febrile political atmosphere. We need to stop and listen. Stopping and listening doesn’t mean you have to agree. But if you want to go beyond simple, destructive narratives of Good and Bad, of in groups and out groups and Us and Them, you have to listen, because only by listening will you see the other’s point of view and understand their humanity.

And this is one of the things I love the most about the writing process: that characterisation makes you more empathetic. Writers are selfish, self-obsessed, driven people; we have to be because honestly there are literally a million easier ways of making a living. And yet, if we’re doing our jobs as well as we can, we are at the same time forced to understand people who don't think like us – to root, despite it all, for their survival, their resolutions. It’s a strange dichotomy in the writerly personality, but I think ultimately a healthy urge, for without it we’d simply be self-obsessed and part of the problem. I started out disliking Romy, wondering why I had ever chosen to write someone whose thinking was so two-dimensional and goals so unchanging. After wrestling with her for a couple of years, and seeing her do some truly terrible things, I think I love and pity her more than anyone else I’ve ever imagined.

***

Alex Marwood won an Edgar for her first mystery novel, The Wicked Girls, and a Macavity for her second, The Killer Next Door. Her new novel, The Poison Garden, which follows what happens to the survivors of a cult suicide, will be published January 14, 2020. She lives in London, England and mostly works in bed.

When Life - and Death - Intrude on Writing: Guest post by Alex Marwood

Alex Marwood is the author of the Edgar-winning The Wicked Girls and the Macavity Best Mystery 2015, The Killer Next Door. Set at a paternal funeral, her third mystery, The Darkest Secret (out August 30th), took on a whole new shape when she found herself writing it in the aftermath of her own father's death. 

Alex Marwood:
When Life - and Death - Intrude on Writing

William Wordsworth opined in the preface to the Lyrical Ballads about how the best poetry comes from “emotion recollected in tranquillity”. The old fraud clearly never had to work to modern commercial deadlines. Then again, perhaps the smart old bard had more sense than to write a novel about a parental funeral while hurtling towards not one, but two, of his own.

In fractured families, your siblings are the flotsam to which you cling in the hope of surviving the storm. And it continues as life progresses – even as it comes to an end. They’re the only ones who remember how it was, how it felt in the Then, who have some understanding of the complicated emotions that come with the death of a parent who was, in many ways, unsatisfactory, but whom one loved, and who loved one back within the limitations of their own flaws.

When I started writing The Darkest Secret, a tale of a funeral at which the much-married deceased’s daughters slowly uncover a terrible secret at the heart of their family history, I had two parents. By the time it was published, I had neither. I suppose that the subject of familial loss must have been to the forefront of my mind when I started planning the book, but the speed and the savagery with which the natural order descends upon one never fails to shock, however prepared one thinks one is.

Two years ago, on one of those blazing days you rarely see in the far north east of Scotland, a lone piper played a string of laments as we lowered our father into his grave. Afterwards, we changed into bright summer clothes and walked the younger generation down a rutted cart track to swim in the river Dee. We sat on the same rocks where my father and uncle stand in the photo that hangs on my living room wall – children eightysomething years ago, hurling pebbles into the peaty waters. I remember this spot well from my childhood, as my grandmother will have remembered it and her forebears before that. There are none of us left in Scotland now; globalisation and worldly ambition have carried us away. Our long history there is at an end, and all my father’s descendants are English.

Back in London, my own spiritual home, I attempted to throw myself back into work. I was halfway into the book when he died; too late to back out, deadline too close to put it aside and write something else. Instead, I sat in front of my screen, staring at the blankness and remembering. Remembering back to way before this era of bereavement, back to the first bereavement, the time when my father discarded his family in pursuit of self-fulfilment. As Mila says in my book, there aren’t too many tears in me now. I did most of my grieving when I was a child.

I couldn’t have chosen a better theme for self-sabotage, really: my father was increasingly ill as I decided to structure this book the way I did, and no amount of denial could excuse me for pretending that I wouldn’t be facing his death soon. At the time I told myself it was a device, an excuse to gather all the guilty parties, Golden Age style, in the same place, for their secrets to be uncovered. But I must have known what I was doing, deep down. I’ve always avoided bringing my personal experiences into my books, but with this one, they wanted to force themselves onto the page.

The Jackson family, the focal point of The Darkest Secret – one pernicious narcissist, four wives, five daughters, one of whom disappeared in mysterious circumstances at a party long ago – is profoundly dysfunctional. In comparison my own, with its simple history of divorce, drink and disgrace, was a stroll in the park. My parents did what they could manage after their own disastrous childhoods, but it wasn’t very much, and eventually the whole shooting match collapsed and we children became surplus to requirements. And these things leave their mark on you, however much you try not to let them. Mila, the primary narrator, has more of myself in her than any other of my characters. She has my diffidence, my hoarding habits, my cynicism masked by a veneer of bonhomie. And with the death of her father, she has a lifetime of unanswered questions.

But the difference between us, I realised as I slowly worked my way through – I’m not a plotter, I’m a total pantser who survives entirely on my editor’s nerves of steel – is that I have my sister. It’s so stupid. It has taken me until my fifties to realise that my sister has been the source of my survival in so many ways. So different in personality that we would never have been friends had we not been thrown together in adversity as we were, we got each other to school, through school – another place in our lives that was cold and unforgiving – and through the long sleepless nights as dramas, and there were so many dramas, unfolded.

Mila’s full sister has gone to the far side of the world, disowned her past, and her half-sisters, much younger, are virtual strangers, one vanished as a toddler; they’re little more than an unpleasant memory. Mila has struggled through essentially on her own. And I realised through my own sadness that the sadness of her existence was unbearable. So I gave her back her teenage half-sister, Ruby. I was well over halfway through the book before I discovered that what it was about – what it was really about – was family, and love, however faulty, and the surprising moments when those things will save you.

The last time I saw my mother, she believed that she was having a picnic by Lake Bala in northern Wales, with her own long-dead siblings. I knelt on the carpet in their living room and joined in, passing imaginary sandwiches and tiny pretend teacups, and was rewarded with the most open-faced, kiddish smiles I have ever seen on her often-troubled face. She died a couple of weeks before The Darkest Secret came out in the UK, her mind lost to Alzheimer’s, and I held her hand as she left. I dedicated the book to her. She never knew.

The Killer Downstairs: Guest post by Alex Marwood

Today I welcome Alex Marwood. "Raised by wolves, Alex Marwood passed her formative years in the lands beyond the Arctic circle, developing pack skills, excellent night vision and an ability to survive on raw protein. Ideally equipped for a life on Fleet Street, she then became a journalist. Her first novel, The Wicked Girls, was published by Sphere, in 2012. In 2013 it was shortlisted for an ITW award, and included in Stephen King's Ten Best Books of the Year list. It was published by Penguin in the US in 2013, and was shortlisted for an Edgar Allen Poe award, and is up for a Macavity Award.  The Killer Next Door, described by The Sun as "nasty, compelling and original", was released as an ebook in 2013, and came out as a paperback in June 2014. Alex herself is a figment of the imagination of the novelist and sometime journalist Serena Mackesy. If you're interested in a more truthful biog, an FAQ and other books, visit her website, here"

Alex Marwood:
The Killer Downstairs

One of the entertaining by-products of being a novelist is how many people seem to be unable to distinguish between fiction and memoir. In the same way that soap actors get harangued in the street for something the character they play has done, novelists will often find people will talk to them completely differently depending on their packaging. Even the most lighthearted of literary novelists will find themselves sucked into leaden discussions about deconstruction when all they really want to talk about is the Real Housewives franchise. When, writing under my real name, my work was being packaged under the egregiously damning ‘chick lit’ label, strangers often spoke to me patronisingly, and asked if I were married myself. And now I am on the crime lists, I will find, every now and then, that people suck air in through their teeth when they hear what I do, and look nervous, as though I’ve just actually said that I am a professional criminal. A woman once crossed herself at me; I’m not kidding.

That said, and although most novelists would deny that their work is autobiographical, it’s almost impossible to stop the things that are going on in the world around one from leaking onto the page. I ate my first (and probably last, I must say) Korean bibimbap while I was writing The Killer Next Door and couldn’t avoid it turning up as a descriptor for something else. I don’t suppose for a second that the theme of The Wicked Girls wasn’t driven by the fact that it was my first foray into writing under a pseudonym, and I was facing a brave new world of becoming someone else. And then there are the times when the life-imitating-art thing gets so twisted up in itself that it’s hard to tell which is which. Authors like to pretend that our inspirations come from a higher plane, but usually, in all truth, they’re Whatever Is Weighing on My Mind Right Now. And what was weighing on my mind as I started The Killer Next Door was the fact that Clyde’s drains were blocked.

I was thinking a lot, that summer, about Dennis Nilsen, one of Britain’s most prolific serial killers. I think if you’re British and live in a built-up area, Nilsen inevitably flits through your mind from time to time. Nilsen murdered twelve young men, possibly more, in two flats of which he was a tenant. The first had a garden, and ridding himself of the inconvenient evidence, once it became too corrupted even for him to keep around for company, was less of a problem for him there than it became after he was unwillingly moved to a top-floor flat. He’s far from the only serial killer to operate at close quarters with his neighbours, but for Londoners, particularly, he raises a shiver, because, while everyone wonders out loud how he got away with it for so long, a little bit of all of us knows exactly how.

I live in one of those enclaves of south London where the terraced houses consist of three apartments, one on top of the other, carved out of relatively modest Victorian brick buildings. Clyde, on the ground floor, has a little patch of garden up against the house. I, on the second floor, have a balcony, a staircase and the sunnier patch of garden away from it. Alessandro and Imogen, on top of us, have a little balcony with a lovely view of the Dickensian rooftops. The houses on either side are the same: fifteen or so of us, who manage to live completely on top of each other and maintain cordial relations while, most of the time, pretending that we are completely alone. It’s less a reflection of the standoffishness of Londoners than of a strange sort of courtesy. We all say hello when we’re out in the evenings, help each other out if help is needed, and some of the best friends of my life have come from this living arrangement, but you’d go mad if you didn’t just pretend.

But Clyde: it’s difficult to pretend that Clyde doesn’t exist, because – there’s no kind way of putting this – he stinks like old eggs frying in hell. Or his flat stinks, at least. He’s a nice enough man, a bit suspiciously muscular, but each to their own, and he never seems to stink when you meet him in the street. But oh, when he opens his windows, a fetid stench of old cooking oil, warm steroid-enhanced armpit and cheap air freshener explodes into the neighbourhood and all the windows around slam down. The smell is so bad it actually feels hotter than the air it’s replacing. I have been known, on bad days, to go to the shop and buy cigarettes to improve the air quality, holding my breath as I dash past his front door, which he often leaves standing open for ventilation. And I work in my bedroom, which overlooks the gardens.

Clyde’s habits began to bleed into the book. If I ever felt that I was flagging descriptively, losing the sense of oppressive suffocation that would come from sharing a house with a bunch of corpses in a heatwave, all I had to do was blow out my scented candle and inhale deeply through my nose. And yet, like a good Londoner, I never complained. I never have. He’s a nice guy, and otherwise a good neighbour. The tenants before were students who liked to party all night and, it being a non-smoking flat, would do so in the garden. The ones before him had prolonged rows, and eventually did a midnight flit leaving piles of unpaid bills and a stream of bailiffs knocking on our doors in error. I’d rather have Clyde than many neighbours. And he’s away a lot, which helps.

Halfway through the summer, his drains got blocked. Not, fortunately, the ones attached to the toilets, but the ones carrying the bathwater, the cooking water, the cleaning water down to the sewers. Every time someone had a shower, a puddle of greasy greyish gunge would bubble up onto his crazy paving and take an hour or more to drain away. I came down to his garden to do that thing the middle classes do when something to do with maintenance comes up: we stood side by side, scratching our heads. ‘How long’s it been doing this?’ I asked. ‘At least a couple of weeks,’ he said. ‘Didn’t you notice the smell?’

Nilsen was eventually unmasked because the drains at his own shared house got gunked up by adipose tissue from the dead young men whose corpses he was boiling, bit by bit, in a big pot on his two-ring stove. When the tenant downstairs told him that Dyno-Rod were consulting the police, he reacted by rushing up to Cricklewood High Street and buying a Bargain Bucket of Kentucky Fried Chicken. He peeled off the secret recipe crispy coating and threw the flesh and bones down the manhole, in the hope that PC Plod would be fooled. PC Plod was not.

I thought about this while I gazed down at the small pile of grey-black gunk that Clyde had scooped from our own manhole and considered replying ‘no, I didn’t notice because you smell so bad on a day to day basis that there really isn’t much difference’. And of course I bottled it and offered to split the cost of rodding instead. After all, it’s the frying-pan scrapings of three flats going through that little pipe, and it only seemed fair.

‘Funnily enough,’ I said conversationally, as I began the process of hyperventilation that would see me back to my own front door, ‘I’m writing a book about all the people who were living in the house with Dennis Nilsen at the moment’.

Clyde looked at me blankly. Then he looked a nervous.