Deep In The Woods Flash Fiction

Went a bit morbid for New Year's Friday Flash, so have gone for a bit of knockabout humour this week. My one and only venture into Fantasy.



Once upon a time, not that long ago, well really rather recently - and actually it happened on more than the one occasion, at least thrice that I can think of, in fact if you look on a map of the world I bet you can find some place where it's happening right now even - anyway there was this idyllic forest. Or, if the local landowner was to be believed, a wood, since there were all sorts of Prince's tithe and mulct implications. His Madison Avenue lawyers were pushing the boat right out and trying to get its status downgraded to a coppice, after the landowner had spurned the advances of OJ's team who had tendered that they could get it recognised as a mere shrubbery. But none of this concerns us, for the non-human interest story lies with the denizens of this enchanted forest/wood/coppice (TBC).

One fine sunny day dawned and in came Macho the Fairy hurtling in at 3 fmph (mach one in human velocity). "Folk of Sylvania gather round. I have some great news of terrible danger afoot" she panted. "Shouldn't that be 'terrible news of great danger'?" chided Grammarian the hobgoblin with a stutter. Macho made the universal sign of 'W' with her dainty fingers, before eliding like two graceful swan necks diving for food into a pair of 'L's'. (Their secluded woodland arcadia had played host to many teenage human couplings, which inevitably ended with such an exchange of sign language and the pair stomping home in different directions from one another).

"Ooh, I'm all on tenterhooks at yet another of Macho's proclamations" sneered Proam the boggart, as he stretched his mighty frame out over the grass, thereby creating a necrotic zone at a stroke. Then he picked his nose, rolled over on to his side and flicked the mucal yield into the space just vacated. Instantly sprung up a fairy ring (so now you know!) "When you've finished your nasal horticulture Pro ..." scolded Macho, stamping her little foot impatiently, while her gossamer wings resonated to the rhythm. "All right keep your wings on. Would you prefer I just swallowed it?"

Suddenly there was a tremendous howling emitted from the bowels of the forest/wood/coppice. "What's that?" quivered winsome Losesome the dryad. "That is an omen for our future and it is not good I'm telling you" replied Macho. "No, that is just our neighbourhood banshee getting her oats" tittered Easy the nympho nymphette. "The banshee is a disembodied spirit, therefore she is unable to enjoy carnality of any sort" intoned Grammarian. "The luckless status for most of us women, full bodied or not, when it comes to you men" opined Fudge the brownie.

"I know absolutely what that sound portends" shouted Macho. They are the implements of death wielded by the town dwellers. Norm you're a gnome, used to handling minerals. Don't you detect a metallic timbre behind that scream?" "Well I spose ..." "The sound of their axes may not carry this far, but that categorically is the whine of an electrified chainsaw". The exhalations and cries of 'No' and 'Surely?' rang out from this serrated circle. Even Proam was moved to raise his hand from scratching his broad behind, up to his head (and he didn't even pause to smell his fingers).

"Whatever for? What do they want with our home?" asked Riddim the half-elf. "Golf course, car park, logging, Ikea flat-pack furniture, who knows? What difference does it make ?" Macho declaimed. She was so vexed, she crossed her arms and inadvertently stilled her wings so she ceased hovering and fell into the jungle of Proam's fairy circle. No one laughed though. "We've got to get ourselves organised" Otiose the Sprite said sprightly. "Chain ourselves to the trees" she added. "I'm eight inches tall, how's that going to work?" said Macho dusting herself down. "And where's the metal going to come from to make chains? Since we gnomes got cast out of our cast iron foundry. Didn't see much fraternal solidarity when we were out on strike trying to save our jobs". "At least you were offered retraining" snapped Sugarplum the embittered kobald. "Oh yeah right. Do you really see me as a social worker? Family division, with my gnarled old miner's face? Now they've lumbered me with all the changeling cases to stop me scaring the kids".

"Ahem, if I could return us to the immediate business at hand. Otiose might be on to something. We can unionise oursleves. Make it a wider struggle" reasoned Macho. "Oh yeah, Woodland Folk Local 666. Shoulder to shoulder with the Teamsters. Secondary picketing from the Mailmen, I can just see it all now" hissed Sugarplum. "Don't mention 'picket' please I implore you" begged Riddim. "Whyever not?" quizzed Losesome. "I ask you just to think what picket fences are made from? We're all doomed!"

"If I may be allowed to interject a moment here" breathed a voice that sounded like it had smoked 60 a day since the dawn of time. "Yes, what are we scotch mist?" echoed a sister voice. "You will be if their chainsaws get here" snorted Easy. "Let the trees speak" Macho declared. "After all, they have been here longer than any of us". "I challenge that assertion" asserted gormless Norm gnome. "Hey, count my rings stumpy!" "I'd have to cut you down first wouldn't I? How wise does that make you wrinkle features?" "Hark who's talking, have you looked in a mirror recently?"

"Please, this squabbling isn't getting us anywhere. Venerable tree, please give us the benefit of your wisdom". "Thank you fairy spirit. My ancestors were allowed natural deaths, since there were no humans around. But even they were not permitted to rest in peace, once the humans disinterred them and burned them as oil and coal. Humans just cannot abide anything green, anything more permanent and long-lived than they. We all have to be bent to their will. Well, let them do it I say -" "But then we will all perish. For how can we survive without the woods to support us?" "Hear me out. You yourselves may pass on, but your species will survive. Somewhere in the world, preserved in the ether, your spirits will remain. In the meantime, all the fauna will gradually disappear as humans snatch their habitats from them. With no animals, humans will not be able to teach and instruct their young how to read. How to speak even probably, for it is these wonders that first fire their infant imaginations. Without communication, the human race will stagnate and wither and die. I grant this is a long-term strategy, but I am a tree so this is my time scale. But your kith and kin will, believe me, inherit the earth."

The colloquy was brought to a sudden halt with a fearsome wailing and a tree crashing to the ground right in the middle of their gathering. A dishevelled banshee loomed, hand grasping a stout oak for support. "Wow, that was quite a seeing to I've just had!" I'm not going to be able to stand for a couple of days I reckon" she cackled. And with a cry of "Timberrr!" she collapsed to the ground.

Two Anthropomorphic Tails

NOT FOR ALL THE GULF FISH IN THE SEA


US Military courtroom. Two naval officers sit at the presiding
judges’ table. An empty chair between them. They rise and salute
as the Chief Brass comes in and takes his seat. One sits, the other
stands and reads from the charge sheet.


OFFICER
United States Military Court Martial, presiding
Naval Commander R. Roger Cofax


COFAX
What are the charges ?


OFFICER
Breach of article 85 of the military code, that being
desertion. And/or article 86 that being absence
without leave. That on the 30th April of this year, the
accused abandoned his mission at Umm Qasr and
headed out for the open sea and was only
apprehended by naval forces following the signal
from a transponder that was supposed to have been set in place as
the purpose of the original mission


COFAX
Procee-


A huge jet of water lands on the floor in front of their table, causing
them to recoil.

Pan to DEFENCE ATTORNEY, also in military uniform, albeit with
shorts and flip flops. She stands in front of a large, indeterminate
(water) tank.


ATTORNEY
My client refuses to acknowledge the validity of this
kangaroo court !


COFAX
He’s not your client. You aren't contracted to him. You are merely representing-


DEFENCE turns to pick something out of a bucket by her table
and throw it into the tank behind her, where it lands with a small
splash.


COFAX
- And anymore of that behaviour and I will hold the
accused in contempt -


A dolphin chewing on a fish pops his head over the rim of the tank
and wafts its flipper in dismissive contempt


COFAX
- ... He is a serving member of the US Navy and
therefore will recognise the authority of this court


Dolphin squeals its high pitch talk.


COFAX
What’s that ? What did he say ?


DEFENCE
He firstly is a she, which leads directly into the fact
that she never enlisted in Uncle Sam’s military


COFAX
No, she was drafted ...


Dolphin flaps its flippers sending water out the tank, soaking
DEFENCE attorney.


DEFENCE (spluttering water)
Press-ganged you mean ! There was no consent in
this. As you said, no contract by dint of being a citizen


OFFICER
If I’m not mistaken, she formerly resided at Marine
World Florida, which when I last checked was part of
the United Sates. I also noticed that her father
rendered our country service in Vietnam, as part of
our Viet Cong swimmer nullification programme


Dolphin points flipper accusingly at judges and squeaks at such a
pitch, all the humans have to put their hands over their ears.


DEFENCE
She says to leave her late, lamented father out of
this. You corrupted his and all their species’ goodwill
towards human beings, by teaching them how to
attack certain others of your species they used to hold in high
regard


OFFICER
Hey, that’s war sister


Dolphin does a somersault.


DEFENCE
War is a human conceit, not a cetacean one


OFFICER
Oh really ? And what of the brutal attacks by her mob on lone
porpoises ? We have them on film


DEFENCE
Blackmail only reinforces our contention that military
service cannot be said to be voluntary


COFAX
I don’t see any conscientous objection to those
military fish rations currently being provided for. In
fact that have been provided for since birth by the
generosity of the US Navy. All we were asking was
a little quid pro quo. Some service to offset her
upkeep. Lending us her sonar abil-


DOLPHIN does a jump and lands with a huge splash.


DEFENCE
The only thing likely to be offset, was the explosion
of a mine on these suicidal missions


COFAX
Listen Miss- what rank are you anyway ?


DEFENCE
I’m only attached to the Navy as her trainer -


The judges confer.


COFAX
I have to warn you that I won’t have insuburdination
within my courtroom. Nor within my Navy. That
creature obviously has too much a mind of its own to
be relied upon in combat conditions. I recommend
immediate dishonourable discharge with loss of
pension ... and for it to be returned to the wild, rather
than the comfort of an aquarium -


DOLPHIN claps its flippers together in applause.


DEFENCE
You can’t ! She’s only ever known captivity -


COFAX rises from his seat. DEFENCE attorney tips whole
bucket of fish in tank. Large foam trail as dolphin goes on feeding
frenzy.


COFAX
Dolphins are supposed to be so smart, she’ll figure
a way to adapt


DOLPHIN ‘whispers’ something in her DEFENCE attorney’s ear.


DEFENCE
My client states that the same intelligence that led
you to train her into indentured service, came to the
self-evident conclusion not to go nosing around high
explosive. That is not insubordination, that’s self-
defence. She also would like to point out, if you
didn’t dump so much jetsam in your harbours, which
incidently take a high toll on her brothers and sisters
in the ocean, then you’d be able to scan these
bombs for yourselves


COFAX walks up to the tank and draws his ceremonial sword.


COFAX
Save it for the Vets’ association ...


DEFENCE
If you cashier her, she won’t be admitted will she ?


COFAX
No, I was referring to the vetenarians. The bleeding
heart animal brigade ... Fish ?


Dolphin sheepishly hands back a half-eaten fish. Props the front
half of its body up on the rim of the tank. We clearly see now 2
cameras attached to each flipper.
COFAX takes his sword and severs each camera from the fin.
Dolphin bows its head and slips slowly back beneath the water.


* * * * *



STAN COLLIE MORE


Tail-end view of a (Terrier) DOG as it saunters merrily along
a suburban street. Following it as it sniffs scents in the air and on
the ground. As it chases momentarily after a butterfly. As it bounds
up to another larger dog and they engage in their mutual identifying
ritual. The tail wags in close up, the dog is happy.

The DOG arrives at the entrance to a park. There is a sign up with
a silhouette of a dog on a leash and another silhouetted dog
running free, with a big X through the picture. The DOG pauses,
wees on the mounting pole, then looks around and enters the park,
tail still wagging. More of the same sniffing and scenting in this
green setting.

DOG jounces over to flower bed and tree area. There is another
sign, silhouetting a dog’s rear ejecting excrement, with a pooper-
scopper shovel poised underneath. The DOG barks at the sign,
then looks around manically til he spots the bin for doggy-do. He
wafts his nose up into the air to test the bouquet. He excitedly
circles on the spot, his wagging tail thumping the stanchion of the
bin with each circle.Then he puts his paws on the bin, but can’t
reach inside. He holds this pose in silence for a period, before
meekly jumping back down and trotting off.

Arrives in front of a kiddy playground, wire fenced off. DOG
begins to dig, but looks up to ‘see’ a sign with a circled silhouette
of a dog and the red line through it. The DOG gives a sighing
whimper, before bounding off.

DOG leaves the park via crawling through some bushes. Back on
a street. Night is falling. Walks pass a Korean restaurant without
reacting. Chases after a cat half-heartedly and soon gives up.
Stops for a scratch. Walking along the kerb of a deserted road.
There is a road sign with ‘Sharp Bend’ hazard (ie a dog leg). Dog
walks up to it, sniffs it and starts humping the pole mount. A car
passes and a beer can comes flying out of the window
accompanied by a gruff male voice.


V.O.
Gerrouta it ya dirty mutt !


DOG runs off further into the night. He passes a sign reading ‘NO
FLY TIPPING’, with a swarm of flies buzzing around it. Soon
picking his way through cars parked on the verge, with their
headlights dimmed. Now he picks his way through a gaggle of
people who seem to be staring at a single car parked up ahead.
Voices mutter as DOG passes through them.


VOICE 1
Blimey, there’s a dog here !


VOICE 2
Yeah, who let the dogs out ?


(laughter)


DOG barks


(Subtitles scroll across screen with each bark) ‘Make Way’,
‘Coming through now’, ‘Watch yourself there’.

Eventually DOG arrives at the car that they seem to be focussing
on. The windows are steamed up. There is some slight vibration
of the car chassis, visible at the DOG’s ground level. DOG barks
once more.

Beat.

Rear door of car swings open and DOG jumps up inside. Cheers
and wolf-whistles from spectators. Car door shuts.

MAN steps forward from crowd and advances to rear window and
peers in under his hand.

Window winds down electronically and beer can flies out and hits
man on forehead. He staggers back. Window shuts. Car resumes
gentle rocking.

The Names - Friday Flash

Sanchez (SS), Rodriguez (CF), Palmeiro (DH), Valdez (2B), Guerrero (1B), Reyes (LF), Castillo (3B), Martinez (C), Cruz (RF). The Dominican daily newspaper faithfully reported the baseball box scores. Day after day the players dreamed of a fat contract in the Major Leagues just across the ocean. The numbers against their name would be the key factor to securing that new life.

Morris (x4) 8.15. Carhart (x2) 9pm. O'Shaugnessey (x5) 8.45. Davidovich (x8) 8.30. Somers (x2) 9pm. Vickers (x4) 10pm. The Strickland party has just cancelled their reservation. That's eight meals the restaurant is out on, unless we get some walk up custom. Vickers, once a year on their anniversary; if you look back in the book exactly one year, there they'll be. Complementary drinks for them. Put the O'Shaugnessey party on the table for eight. Then we won't look so bereft...

Francoise Mauriac, Francis Jeansen, Jean-Paul Sartre, Guy Debord, Andre Breton, Marguerite Duras, Andre Masson, Alain Resnais, Simone Signoret, Maurice Blanchot, we the undersigned wish to state our opposition to the present governmental and national policy. We hope that the value and weight of our names on the spines of our books, on the credits of our movies and on the corners of our canvasses will help sway the minds of countless of our countrymen to apply their own names to our petition. Merci et vive la Republique!

Wayne Crawford Perth, Australia. Carla Baldelli, Bari, Richard and Diane Wood, Bath, UK. Angelos Charisteas, Thessaloniki. Radoslaw Murawski & Dariusz Glowacki, Wrocklaw, Polska. We love your holy cathedral, it is very inspiring. But we don't understand why people scratch their names into the wall when we are happy to sign this book of visitors. They spoil its beauty we think. You must take better care of the holy.

J.Clark 607701, 3 books history. N.Hardiman 644093, 2 books fiction, 1 book literary criticism. V.Stanger 688156, 1 book popular science. G.Oswald 633271, 3 audiobooks. K.Guptil 649757, 2 books renewed cookery /house and garden. L.Simmonds 656920, 5 books, romance (overdue fines paid in full)

Merrick L, Merrill N, Merry D, Merryman K, Merryweather B, Merryweather H, Mervyn P, Line after line, column after column, the ranks slaughtered trying to rush the enemy trenches of the First World War. The men drawn from this modest village into a worldwide conflict. Commemorated on the marble plinth bearing a white obelisk atop. The Church that played host to it now without a congregation as the youth have all long since left the area.

8.15 Miller B to D. 9.15 Coleman Brow Lift. 11.30 McCallister C to E. 13.30 Kavanagh Tummy Tuck 16.00 Reed Liposuction 17.45 Vincent B to DD. The names on the notes change, but not the hankering to be somebody else.

The Unreality of Death

I had long-lived grandparents. And long-lived cats too, one was bought 6 months before my birth and lived to the ripe old age of 23. So I wasn't exposed to death at a premature age. Well, not directly anyway.

Five years before my birth, my parents had a baby girl who died at one month of meningitis. Of course I wasn't witness to this, though its shadow lay over our household, having lit the most slow-burning of fuses of guilt and recrimination that contributed to the eventual dissolution of my parents' marriage. 

I can't remember exactly how old I was when I first encountered death from a distance. Our family were on holiday in one of the Spanish island resorts. A speedboat had ploughed towards two swimmers and the propeller had fatally sliced on of them. We saw the aftermath from our hotel balcony, that is to say we didn't really see anything. So my experience was aural really, all the buzz in the air of rubberneckers staring out to sea and a police recovery boat. One of the popular theories was that the pilot had been recumbent and was steering the boat with his feet. I can't even remember if we saw a covered stretcher or not. If we did, it  certainly wasn't stained red by blood. Nothing to see here, yes absolutely. 

The next occasion was also while on holiday, this time in a city. My parents were friends with a Suffolk County, NY pathologist and he gave us a tour of his workplace, including a small black museum. It was a pretty sanitised tour, I think because 14 year old me was present. However, passing an open door, I did see a man laid out on the slab awaiting autopsy. I wasn't walking right at the boundary of the door, so saw it from mid-distance in the corridor. The man looked plastic, unreal. Maybe it was the muted lighting in the room rather than his death pallor, but it was a death that left no impression on me, because it didn't look like anything corporeally human. No wonder people who come across dead bodies often mistake them first for shop mannequins. I've mused on this in my new novel "The Death Of The Author (In Triplicate)" 

When I was 19, my father attempted suicide inside the family home. Again I had the unreal sight framed for me by the disposition of doors. He had attempted the act in the kitchen, which was accessed via a laundry room with washing machine and dryer. So I was looking through two sets of door lintels, that of the laundry room and then that of the kitchen. Added to this sense of the filmic, he was wearing an all-white towelling robe. The whole scene was like a black and white art movie. He had tried to open up veins in his neck and his head had fallen backwards, but the blood must have flowed down the from of the robe, because again, the incontrovertible evidence of blood wasn't visible to me from my angle. However, it became all too present when I was the one deputed to clean up the floor after he'd been taken to hospital. Our kitchen lino was patterned with orange hexagons. The blood when it landed was also hexagonal. I marvelled when a blood hexagon fitted entirely within a floor hexagon, like a kid's colouring book that stays within the lines. It was the way of protecting myself from the awfulness of what it all meant. It was my father's anatomical and medical ignorance that saved his life (plus the speedy response of the emergency services), since he had cut in the wrong, non-fatal location. As speedy as the ambulance crew were, they were beaten to our front door by two plain-clothes detectives who were responding to the 999 call of knife wound, before satisfying themselves it had been self-inflicted. A lot of this made it into my Kindle novel "Not In My Name", comparing the mindset of domestic suicide to that of suicide bombers. 

And after that, my grandparents and pets did start dropping off their perch. I lost a teenage second cousin who had barely made it into teenagehood. I was in no position to process death beyond grief, which is not the same thing. We have the cognitive load capacity to process either grief or Death (as in our own future one), but not simultaneously. I am now 59 years old. My next book, almost complete, will be a consideration of death, as in my own, or anybody else in the first person, rather than the third person death embodied in the form of grief. There are books a plenty on grief, to go along with out personal experiences. There is no personal experience of one's own death and very little literature about it accordingly, because no one ever gets to come back and write up their notes on the subject. 

We are so protected from confronting death head on. My experiences as above, maybe more down to happenstance, but for example I wasn't allowed into the pathology suite with the dead body, and I was forbidden to go closer to my father in the kitchen. But is it just down to circumstances? One of the question the book considers, is how much of our inability to comprehend death, is an existential (emotional) problem, or a linguistic one? 

Watch this space...

In the meantime you can read my latest novel,  "The Death Of The Author (In Triplicate)" available from the publishers Corona/Samizdat

Blurb: 

A trine cycle produced by three authors. A Senior Investigating Officer is on his way to a fresh murder. In his crisis of faith, he questions the material nature of evidence and the abstract judicial system they are put towards as proofs. The somatic dead body signposts a crime scene staged with symbols of the divine interred in one of the four elements constituting the material universe. In part 2, a widow and a literary agent are having a heated phone exchange about the fate of her late husband’s unfinished manuscript. In part 3, an author is taking down all his sticky notes, twine and graph paper for the book he has just completed, as he ponders the next steps and tries to anticipate some of the questions that will be thrown at him. Where does he get his ideas from, a paradox when set against the unremarkable act of sitting down at a desk, sticking notes up on the wall, crossing them out again and lighting up forbidden cigarettes and hiding the evidence from his wife. In showing his mundane workings, we are asked to trace the leap into a work of creative imagination. Until his literary future too is threatened. 

For more content on the novel go here

When a novel sneakily reveals itself to be inspired by a music album rather than other books...

 In my previous post, "Most Novels Are In Conversation With Novels That Have Preceded Them", I talked about 5 books which either influenced or at least echoed my current novel "The Death Of The Author (In Triplicate)". But it wasn't just literature which influenced my book. The author character in the final part of my novel in increasing despair as he reviews the book he has just finished for a final time, wonders if it's merely a monograph to his favourite album, "Three Imaginary Boys" by The Cure which was released in 1978. 

Here are my thoughts on the album.

Remember the self-proclaimed lo-fi genre of the late 80s early 90s, bands such as Pavement and Sebadoh? Well Robert Smith and The Cure got there a decade earlier with their album "Three Imaginary Boys". 

What could be more callow than taking the set text from your recently completed school A-Level French syllabus and turning it into a song “Killing An Arab”? Or there you are stuck in the studio needing to come up with a new track, picking up the Tate And Lyle sugar pack as you’re drinking your cup of tea tea and reading the details on the back of the packet, of how to apply for a free icing tool and then setting that to music? The track was called “So What?”, and it didn't even even omit the exact closing date for applying which has stuck in my mind some 38 years later and is of course, an offer that is now 38 years out of date. Did someone say 'timeless art'? 

There’s a cover version of Hendrix’s “Foxy Lady” which is unrecognisable from the original as any good cover should be, principally down to Robert Smith’s deep South (England) drawling vowels. It ought to be pointed out that “Foxy Lady” was just a band soundchecking in the studio and never intended to be part of the album, but the record label put it on much to Smith’s chagrin. He was never to surrender artistic control again, which in light of the Cure’s future 'Goth' output was a pity. Apparently the front cover was not Smith’s choice either, which is amazing as it's my favourite album cover of all time. Props to whoever designed it.

The album is offbeat, charming and yes, lo-fi. That’s not to say it doesn’t have some excellent guitar playing, since Smith is a guitar whizz with oodles of reverb and echo, but held in check by a tight rhythm section. Unlike Gang of Four, the Fall or Public Image Limited, this record is readily accessible. It’s non-conformist musically, but it’s not abstruse.

But for me ultimately, it’s the strength of its individual tracks. It starts with “10:15 Saturday Night”, which was the B-Side to their debut single “Killing An Arab”. What band open their debut album with a B-side? And then don’t put the A-Side anywhere on the album at all? Then comes my favourite track “Accuracy”, a song about a couple failing to communicate, with the pleasingly lyric delivered almost pleadingly by Smith, ‘Kill you without trying/ That’s ac-cu-racy’. There is edge in some of Smith’s words, such as in the song “Meathook”, ‘He really stole my heart/ Hung me up on a meathook/ A real piece of/ Slaughterhouse Art’. Ugh and that’s an image that has stayed with me I can tell you. And to cap it off, a hidden bonus track in which The Cure sort of play themselves off stage with a coda. If you have never heard this album and are keen on tracking it down, try and get hold of a version that includes their superlative early singles such as “Killing An Arab”, “Boys Don’t Cry” and “Jumping Someone Else’ Train”.

How does it feature in my novel? 

In part 1 of the novel, the detective character's favourite music genre is Easy Listening, so that the author character in part 3 who created him, has had to subject himself to an unending play list of Easy Listening standards, from Dionne Warwick to Frank Sinatra. By the time he has completed the book, he is desperate to play his actual favourite songs which he has starved himself of for so long and to clean his palate of asinine Easy Listening. He weighs up which should be the first to celebrate the completion of the novel and is inundated by songs from the Cure album. 

Was that the situation I, as the actual author also found myself in, having had to listen to an interminable play list of Easy Listening while writing part 1 of the novel? That would be just be a touch too metafictional wouldn't it? 

The song "Object" with the inimitable lyric "You're just an object in my eyes" points up the eternal philosophical dilemma between mind and matter, which is central to the detective character in part one of my novel as he goes about a murder scene looking for evidence to unlock the identity and mind of the killer. The title of the song "So What" as described above, forms the final words of the novel as the author is in complete despair about his book and his profession. 

"The Death Of The Author (In Triplicate)" is directly available from the publishers Corona\Samizdat

For more content on the novel visit https://sulcicollective.blogspot.com/2023/02/the-death-of-author-in-triplicate.html

Most Novels Are In Conversation With Novels That Have Preceded Them

 

When a musician is interviewed, very often they take the interviewer through their record collection for the music that inspired and influenced them. Authors are less directly forthcoming, since they tend to prefer to save such quoting for the body of their actual works themselves, burying references in the text to see who will spot them and who won't. 

The author character in my latest novel "The Death Of The Author (In Triplicate)" is having none of this game playing (though me as the 'invisible' author behind him, could conceivably be up to such metafictional games). He is committed to showing his literary workings, though he is also struggling not to reveal too much behind his work and explain it away completely.

So in the spirit of the author character, I thought I'd share some books that either directly fed into my novel, or at least echoed it in some ways. Some of them I'd read before I sat down to type the first words of my novel, others I read during the novel writing process and one I have yet to read but am aware at least of its (non-fictional) argument. 

A man has suffered so traumatic a brain injury, that he has lost all memory and has to be trained to walk again by his physios. We get a forensic treatment of that process of relearning basic everyday functions we take for granted. Into the void of his memory also comes these mental images he can't place. When he's released back into daily living, he has a sizeable compensation settlement and decides to devote it to recreate these visions inside his head in every tiny detail. From the architecture, to people paid to play the roles of the passersby in the street, doing precisely scripted things and the clothes they wear. Again this focus on a a forensic level of detail, which echoes the murder detective's process in my novel. McCarthy raises an interesting distinction, between a scene in a film which can be shot innumerable times until the Director is satisfied that it's right; versus the one-take of live performance and the protagonist of this novel trying to nail his image exactly in his live recreation. A detective is not dissimilar, in that at the start of an investigation, there are unlimited ways in which the crime unfurled and the task is to narrow that down to just one possible way the action of the event could have taken place. 

Georges Perec's final novel, as he raced against time to complete it before his life was claimed by cancer. A novel in three parts; the first being a mystery thriller around a disappeared writer in French colonial Africa, using his abandoned manuscript as a clue to his fate. Part 2 turns to an historical event of betrayal among the French Resistance in World War 2, which completely flips Part 1 on its head, as we see that story was a code for this actual incident that was too incendiary to write directly. Part 3 supposedly is the uncompleted part choked off by Perec's death and is presented as the fragmentary source material and documents that informed the story in Part 2. These were curated by two of Perec's writer friends who were members of the same Oulipo movement as him. HOWEVER, the Spanish author Enrique Villa-Matas in his novel "Mac And His Problem" posits that this too is smoke and mirrors on Perec's part; that in fact Part 3 is exactly as Perec intended and that the legend of his friends completing his book deliberately masks this fact. Through such a disguise, Perec was giving the middle finger to Death, because he DID finish his novel before Death claimed him, but veiled that fact, so it was just between him and the Grim Reaper. And Perec won (or at least went to his grave conceiving that he'd won). I also mirrored this tripartite structure, in that my novel moves from a crime thriller Part 1, through into Part 2's fevered argument over the ownership of the unfinished manuscript that was Part 1 between widow and literary agent and into Part 3, centring around the author who is responsible for penning Parts 1 & 2. 

This is the book I haven't actually read. But my own title clearly pays homage to this and I also touch on the central concept, as my author character muses on how he loses all control of his text once it is out in the world. Readers and critics will remake his text in whatever way they choose to read and interpret it, no matter what his original intentions for the story were. I do have fun with the concept as, per the "In Triplicate" of my book's title, three authors 'die' during the course of the novel, though an author can die, per Barthes, in metaphorical ways as well as in actuality. 

The first remarkable thing about this novel from 1937s, is that it was written by a 19-year old German refugee and yet encapsulates eve of war London and its nascent film industry so expertly and authentically. In a second language to boot! A movie actress is murdered, two different men confess to the crime. A film editor called Cameron McCabe, the nom de plume of the real author, is co-opted by the investigating detective and by two-thirds of the way through the book, we get a successful court prosecution of the murderer having unravelled the labyrinthine truth from all these false confessions and a murderer existing in plain sight. But it's a post-modernist epilogue that turns the novel on its head, in the form of a literary interrogation of the character Cameron McCabe from the first part of the book, which takes the opportunity to discuss the present (1930s) state of detective fiction. It uses real critics' words, only inserting Cameron McCabe for the names of the other crime thriller writers, so that it appears to be critics discussing this book "The Face On the Cutting Room Floor" in the book "The Face On The Cutting Room Floor". In this way, the book was called 'the detective novel to end all detective novels' at the time. I loved how it inserted itself into predicting it's own literary criticism and my author character does similar. 

So for my final book choice, it's one I didn't particularly enjoy as a reading experience. It's another book about a forensic description of the details of which the human eye sees in a city, as a detective is on the top deck of the bus as he follows the wife of a missing person he's ordered to get on the trail of. It's almost mathematical in its precision of describing people and objects interacting with one another, but ultimately one I found a little cold and dry emotionally. I much preferred the early works of Nicholson Baker, such as "The Mezzanine" and "Room Temperature", where he too looks at everyday objects and describes them and their taken-for-granted interior workings in minute detail, but there is greater warmth and humour than with Okotie I feel. Why is this forensic level of detail significant to me and my novel? Because there are presumptions about the material world which entirely lead and shape our thinking about it and the objects contained within, that detectives and forensic scientists have to get to the bottom of as the fundamental part of their work. Yet what happens if the investigative detective queries the very nature of matter and criminal evidence and refuses to accept those presumptions in the first place? 

"The Death Of The Author (In Triplicate)" is available direct from the publisher Corona\Samizdat.

For more content on the book, including thematic discussions and quote cards.

Crime Scene Reconstruction, Literary Scene Deconstruction

 When a murderer stages a crime scene, they are doing it for one of two reasons:

1) They may simply be trying to throw off the police from the evidence trail, such as stripping the victim's clothes to suggest a sexual component of the crime when no such act occurred

2) They are setting the police a puzzle to solve, over and above the identity of who killed the victim.

There is a further possible scenario, that the killer's psychological predilections are strong enough to demand the scene is arranged to fit with their fantasy that likely to drove them to murder in the first place, such a posing the deceased in a humiliating manner, as an expression of the killer's sense of superiority, or wish to mark the victim as 'deserving' of degradation beyond taking their life. 

A dead body is processed for clues as to the cause of death. Corporeality speaking to materiality, as science brings its analytical tools to bear. Evidence at the scene can be anything from bullet fragments, blood spatter, discarded cigarettes through to DNA traces and transferred fibres or plant material. All derive from the world of the material. However, in a staged scene, the realm of the symbolic is also engaged. The symbolic is not analysable by the same hard and fast facts as material evidence yielded by science. Rather, they are very much accessed through interpretation.

In my latest novel, "The Death Of The Author (In Triplicate)", there is a staged murder scene which is littered with deliberate symbols set up by the killer. To solve his or her identity, the detectives must first unravel the meaning of the field of symbols. Within the four elements of the material world, as constituted by the ancients all the way through to alchemists, that is fire (ashes), earth (garden soil), water (a jacuzzi) and air (a greenhouse), are discovered statues of gods and idols from every human mythology. Each divine is interred in their appropriate element. Gods of thunder, wind and cyclones are found in the greenhouse. Fertility and harvest gods in the potting shed's mound of soil. 

The latest scientific forensic techniques are being asked to go up hard against ancient belief and the precursor of science in the form of alchemy. Of course alchemy's primary search for the philosopher's stone, which would supposedly turn base metal into gold, was a fool's errand and yet many of the processes and equipment employed, such as boiling admixtures in glass retorts, led the way to many discoveries that helped usher in the modern world and modern chemistry. Many of the statues uncovered no longer have adherents and believers, rather humbly now just existing as exhibits in a museum. What is the murderer trying to say with this symbology? They believe themself much smarter than the forces of law and order, hence the setting out of the challenge of a puzzle. And yet they also want that cleverness, that self-perceived genius, to be acknowledged. 

In many ways, all fiction is a form of detective fiction. What is a novel if not a series of clues? A code to be cracked. The author carefully layers their work with whatever it is they want the reader to uncover and take away from their book. If it is made too obvious, the book is likely to be a poor read. If too oblique and difficult to discover, then the author's intentions go largely unfulfilled. In this way, the author shares a facet with the murderer above; they want their cleverness acknowledged. For the murderer it might be a boast or a public taunting of the police that brings about their downfall, as it gives away who they are and how to find them. For the author, it is talking about their book in interviews, struggling between the poles of revealing their art. as against not giving too much away. 

“The Death Of The Author (In Triplicate)”  is available direct from the publisher Corona\Samizdat