William Monk 02 - A Dangerous Mourning

borrowed from the libraries? Imagine that you’d no longer be able to borrow whatever you wanted without people leaping to wild conclusions. If you read
Mein Kampf
—possibly if you were learning German or were a student of history—people could come to any conclusion. And what about phone tapping—we had that here, too. Doesn’t a citizen have the right to have a private conversation without the wire being tapped? During Victorian times bombings made the police want to have the power to question anyone’s servants privately without anyone knowing, so I connected the present-day concern with privacy to that. Think of the power that would have given servants to misinterpret and blackmail. If a conversation was overheard outside a room and one person’s voice carriedand only half the discussion was heard, what sort of a twist could be put on that conversation, innocently, ignorantly, or perhaps maliciously? I think it’s quite a good Victorian parallel to what could be done today. It’s rather fun and very interesting to put the same problem in a different light and maybe see it more clearly.
    M : You obviously enjoy writing very much.
    AP: Writing is a lot of fun. It is work, yes, but there is nothing wrong with work. I never have writer’s block because I plan with great care. I know what any given scene must show, who’s there, when, and why. Often I write rubbish, but I just go back and rewrite. Sit down and write words—that’s how you get over writer’s block. It will work itself out.
    M : How do you compose the anatomy of a crime? I’m wondering about the actual nitty-gritty of fashioning a mystery; do you sketch out the crime, motive, and suspects at the outset, or does the whole thing evolve?
    AP: You start with a crime in the middle of your composition because you may enter the story just before or just after the crime. Then you are unraveling what happened to lead up to it but doing so in real time, from the crime forward. The narrative thread goes in both directions: unraveling the past and creating the future. One mark of a mystery writer who’s new at it is having a villain who’s static. A character is going to react to what’s going on, to the investigation, and not wait for you to unravel it. He may commit more crimes or interfere with the investigation. All of the other people are doing something as well, reacting to the situation. And you’ve got to have at least two reasonable suspects—better still, three—and then to narrow down to one. It’s very difficult to mislead the reader without ever lying, but you mustn’t lie.
    Carefully, bit by bit, you have more ideas as you go along and you rewrite as many times as necessary. Often I think of great ideas at the end of the book then go back to weave them in from the beginning.
    Also, no character is unimportant. No matter how peripheral, everyone should be a real person who came from somewhere beforehe walked onto your page. Give him a face, a name, interests. Don’t make him cardboard. Even if he’s a postman delivering a letter, give him a blister, a limp, a new shirt—something that makes him real. All people are real.
    M: Do you ever see any bits of yourself in your characters, for instance in Hester Latterly’s gumption or William Monk’s inquisitiveness?
    AP: There are little bits of me in everybody, even that postman with the blister. If you are not on the page then you’re in the wrong job. Your characters are not a reflection of you but a little of your empathy or emotion should come through them. But I don’t have any self-portraits in my books and I don’t want to write one.
    M: What about Hester’s interest in history, the Crimean War, and Florence Nightingale? And Charlotte Pitt’s as well? Surely that bit—this genuine interest in history and a woman’s place in it—must be close to your own heart.
    AP: Yes, I hadn’t thought of that. Well, Florence Nightingale’s situation certainly appeals to me, but not her personality. She was pretty awkward, difficult, neurotic, a hypochondriac, but boy did she have guts. Mary Seacole was very good, too, but you don’t hear much about her. There were lots of wonderful women in that century: explorers, collectors of botany and species of birds, teachers, women who went up the Congo in skirts, women who crusaded for social reform in Britain.
    M: You have a talent for different dialects, from the accents of the underworld patterers and toshers, to working men and