Through the Past, Darkly: Guest Post by William Shaw

Play With Fire is set in London in 1969, the era when everyone used typewriters and carbon paper. It was written on a Mac.

I like to think about that difference sometimes between then and now. I imagine a room full of beat-hardened constables from London’s Metropolitan Police one-finger typing, fight-scabbed hands angrily stabbing the keys, one at a time.

Back then, the Metropolitan Police force of the late sixties was staffed with men from a totally different era; it was a force that was institutionally corrupt and contained more than a few officers who thought nothing of fabricating evidence to convict whoever they assumed was guilty. This was a force in which the newly formed Drug Squad would later be discovered to be selling drugs they’d confiscated back to drug dealers. As for procedure, in those days there was almost no forensic evidence gathered at a crime scene beyond finger prints. Officers would happily trample mob-handed all over the evidence.

Play With Fire is also set in an era 20 years before the demise of the Soviet Union, which nobody could ever imagine collapsing back then. It seemed monolithic; unstoppable.

The book features a real-life spy exchange that happened that year - members of the infamous Communist Portland Spy Ring were exchanged for an unfortunate British lecturer who had been caught in Russia with anti-Soviet leaflets. The KGB spy ring, who were connected to the Rosenbergs in New York, worked with short wave radio and microdots to pass on secrets about British nuclear submarines. The Cold War was very present in London around that time; it was just one of the facts of life along with red phone boxes, thruppeny bits and double-decker buses.

On one level it feels like 1969 was such a long time ago. And yet, the book also opens at the Rolling Stones Hyde Park concert of that year, when Mick Jagger recited Shelly and released thousands of white butterflies into the air as a memorial for ex-Rolling Stone Brian Jones.

Jones had died in a swimming pool only a few days later and the mystery surrounding the 27-year-old guitarist’s death is part of my story too. Was he deliberately killed, or was it just what happens to young people if they take too many drugs, drink too much and then decide to swim on their own?

On the set list that day in Hyde Park were songs like Jumpin’ Jack Flash, Satisfaction, Honky Tonk Women and Sympathy For The Devil, songs you can still hear any day on the radio, songs that still sound as alive and modern and abrasive as they did fifty years ago. In amongst that old world was the soundtrack for our new one, shiny, new and outrageously arrogant.

That’s what I enjoyed, writing this book and the others in this series so much. In some senses 1969 was such a long time ago, and yet in others it was a year that was still very present in our lives. There was a war going on in 1969, and it wasn’t just in Vietnam. The clunky old certainties of the post-war world were doing battle with blaring, cocky individualism of the rock generation; and that makes for a great backdrop for any crime story.

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William Shaw is an award-winning music journalist and the author of several non-fiction books including Westsiders: Stories of the Boys in the Hood. Prior to becoming a crime writer, he worked at the post-punk magazine ZigZag and a journalist for The Observer, The New York Times, Wired, Arena, and The Face. His latest novel Play With Fire is a gripping police thriller set in the ever-intriguing world of sex, drugs, and rock and roll. Think Prime Suspect 1973 meets a throwback episode of Law and Order: SVU set in the ’60s!

The Importance of Getting Up and Walking Around: Guest Post by William Shaw

William Shaw is an award-winning pop culture journalist, who has written regularly for the UK's Observer and Independent, as well as the New York Times. He is the author of the Breen and Tozer series and THE BIRDWATCHER. Shaw lives in Sussex, England.

William Shaw:
The Importance of Getting Up and Walking Around

You can’t overestimate the importance of getting up and walking around a little.

If you think writing is all about sitting at a computer and banging out words, you’re wrong. My kids, when they see me wandering around the house, or strumming an instrument with a vacant expression on my face, snigger and say, ‘Yeah. Writing again, is he?’

But most of the ideas don’t happen when you’re sitting down at a desk.

And it’s doubly true of crime writing, because crime writing is as much about creating an atmosphere as it is about problem solving. How do you get your protagonist from A to B without C knowing? Surely C would know that B murdered A because he was in the next room. When I wrote The Birdwatcher I let people know right away in the first two paragraphs that William South, the hero and good guy, was a also murderer. This was a fantastic opening, but it left me with a host of structural problems to fix about how long I could delay the reader knowing who he had killed. As a result, I had two plots, one in the 1970s and one in the present day and for a while they were tangling together without really working.

The Birdwatcher took a lot of getting up and walking around, but it worked.

I finished the book at a writing shack I have down in the English county of Devon. It’s off-grid and there are a lot of low-level tasks that need doing, like stoking the fire, or putting rainwater into the filter. I write for a while, putter around, write some more. There is a limit to the amount of writing I can physically do there because my laptop works off a single solar panel. I was doing the washing up which requires getting rainwater and heating it on the stove first when realised I had figured out a way in which the two plots came together like I had meant it all along.

The thing is, I can’t even remember thinking the thought. It was just there.

Psychologists call it the creative unconscious. They’ve even proved how well it works. Back in 2006 two Dutch scientists, Ap Dijksterhuis and Teun Meurs, did an experiment in which they gave participants three minutes to think of as many uses as they could for a simple object like a brick or a paperclip.

Half the group were given the chance to complete the job uninterrupted. The other half were given a second task – such as counting backwards in threes. Both groups produced a similar number of ideas, but the ones who were distracted produced ideas that were more divergent – or, to put it another way, more creative. In other words, not thinking directly about something can produce more interesting results.

We haven’t a clue how this works; we just know it does. It’s reassuring to realise that the brain is much weirder than you might imagine it is. Fans of Artificial Intelligence who imagine we’re approaching the singularity take note.

That day I ran out of the shack whooping with glee. What a great ending, I thought. The funny thing is, it’s not even like I can give myself credit for thinking of the solution. It just happened.

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From Book Reporter:

 

The Birdwatcher by William Shaw

A methodical, diligent and exceptionally bright detective, William South is an avid birdwatcher and trusted figure in his small town on the rugged Kentish coast. He also lives with the deeply buried secret that, as a child in Northern Ireland, he may have killed a man. When a fellow birdwatcher is found murdered in his remote home, South's world flips. The culprit seems to be a drifter from South's childhood; the victim was the only person connecting South to his early crime; and a troubled, vivacious new female sergeant has been relocated from London and assigned to work with South. As the hero investigates, he must work ever-harder to keep his own connections to the victim, and his past, a secret