The Death Of The Author (In Triplicate)

 

My new novel "The Death Of The Author (In Triplicate) is out now direct from the publishers Corona\Samizdat.

It's a novel in 3 parts, with a Russian Dolls set of authors responsible for the production of the previous part. Part one is a police procedural/mystery thriller. A Senior Investigations Officer is on the way to a fresh murder and is having a crisis of faith as he questions both the nature of justice and the role material evidence plays in it. Part 2 is a heated dialogue between a widow and a literary agent as they argue over who should own an unfinished manuscript of the widow's late author husband, a battle for the memory and soul of the dead man. Part 3 sees an author having just completed his novel, tidying away all his noted stuck on the wall and clearing up his desk, as his thoughts turn towards the marketing of his book and trying to anticipate the response of critics and interview questions he'll likely be asked. As he determines not to reveal the magic behind being a creative person, the very mundane nature of sitting in a room typing on a keyboard betrays his intention and serves to demystify the mystery of thriller writing. 

I call it a novel of crime scene reconstruction and a literary scene deconstruction. 

Here are 3 short videos discussing some of the key themes. 

Justice is an abstract concept that doesn't exist anywhere else in Nature. It is codified in written laws and cases of infractions of those laws are tried on the basis of material witnesses and material evidence, which represent an entirely different register of language from an abstract concept.

                                         

The relationship of abstract justice to material evidence underpinning it, is resonant of the age old phenomenological inquiry into the nature of reality: the materialist versus idealist debate. Is there a single, verifiable objective reality rooted in matter, or is everything ultimately determined by our language, naming and idea of things? In the novel, the Senior Investigation officer is having a crisis of faith in accepting the rules of evidence as being sufficient to prove anything.

The third and final section of the novel, is through the eyes of a third person author who has just completed writing his book and is thinking about its critical reception and the likely interview questions he will be asked about the process of writing it. Behind his grappling with these questions and revealing his own thoughts, lies the true first person author, that being Marc Nash who wrote part three as well as parts one and two and the tension between the truth of the author in part three with Nash's own personal truth.

Author reading from the opening of the book. 

Here are some quotes from the book.

Part 1: The Senior Detective is having a crisis of faith...

             

"Like the 2011 riots, using Blackberries in order to organise riots for looting Blackberries. Man, we had both our hands and testicles tied behind our backs for that infantifada. Even so, we did secure our dreary, desultory requital sure enough. Months spent scanning faces on surveillance footage from the shops they hadn’t pillaged, plus more numbskullery advertising their ill-gotten gains on social media. Our techies palpating facial recognition software while we, the ones who had formed the anaemic thin blue arterial lines on the night, twiddle our singed fingers, as they swipe right on Match-dot-Con. We took the streets back, sat there behind our desks. The thin end of the fibre optic wedge, where we are adjuncts, mere auxiliaries of technology".

 

“When is a gun not a gun? When it’s a replica. But if a replica is pointed at a human target in a hold-up, then does it not operate with the exact same ramification of a gun? And further, when that replica has been retooled to make it functional, then it’s no longer pseudo, mock, nor a simulacrum, (all words I’ve heard defence QCs {pseudo, mock, or simulacra human beings} use in court), since now it actually fires bullets & can draw blood. Apparently, you can even manufacture one on a 3-D printer. Oh Mercy Mercy Me as Marvin used to sing. And that poor beautiful bastard was shot to death too. On April Fool’s Day, in the year of Orwell’s “1984”. Can there have been a more ill-omened date on which to die?” 

“Forensics, I have come to realise, is phenomenology writ large. Or microscopically small as is more often the case. I do not instinctively know what looks out of place. Any objects in front of me could bear significance. Initially I have to make myself take notice of them all and not filter a single one out as quotidian, neutral and innocent. I have to crowbar into my consciousness, an awareness of everything that populates a scene. A sort of mental cubism, as I plot the lie and locus of everything simultaneously. This is a field through and through, yet with most things remaining unintegrated with one another. This is not a web of connection of objects. 

Part 3: Someone seemingly having a better day is the author who has just completed his novel.

"He reached for the wire mesh bin beneath the desk. It was empty. His wife must have emptied it. How she would have honourably separated out the recyclables, the coke cans and half-measure spirit bottles, from the lolly sticks and cigarette stubs. Anything that basically had made an appearance on the traffic calming roundabout scene, first made their bow in his litter bin. All writers adopted the methods of Kaiser Söze. Whether they cared to admit it or not." 

"Oh god, there was also the prospect of having to get active on his social media accounts once again. Bad enough trying to compose a two hundred word blurb. On Twitter he had just two hundred and eighty characters. With spaces. On Instagram he had to make it so that someone viewing it on their phone, wouldn’t be obliged to scroll down and risk contracting repetitive strain injury. Unlike him, typing away eight hours a day for almost a year to deliver a novel. Wrists of steel. All the fun of the fair, of perpetual swiping right on an app, from shoes, through take-away dishes, to lust at first pixelated sight. How could any work of literature compete?"

He hadn’t experienced much in the way of transference with her, save for the transfer of funds from his bank account into hers. He could console himself that at least he had unsettled her momentarily from her upright (uptight?) poise, when he challenged her to specify how many sessions in her professional experience, it would take to cauterise, suture and heal the gash of a therapist-shaped hole in his life? Turned out to be a poor choice of imagery. Since the imagery of wounds had been invoked, Kafka was inevitably brought up. Which itself allowed her to sweep in with the whole Oedipal thing between Franz and his father and how he himself obviously related to that. By what means had he become embroiled in a literary discussion with his therapist? Since he received fees, (or more accurately expenses), for appearing on literary panels, he should be charging her for his expertise, for that session at least”. 

 

No authors were harmed in the making of this book

an endorsement from Kurt Vonnegut Jnr (puppet)

 

Reviews:

Never Imitate Book Blog "Murder, death and betrayal are mere ingredients around which Nash cooks his literary feast. The starter may appear to be a police procedural but this proves a red herring, an opening to something completely different."

Bob The Bookerer video review (8mins 37 secs in)