Harrogate, Friday

Friday 22 July...

We leap up out of bed the moment the alarm rings, obviously. Or possibly we
don't. Anyway, we have breakfast - full English for Carol, very nice
pancakes with lemon and sugar for me - and walk up to the Cedar Lodge in
time for the 10.30 slot.

Mildly alarmingly, the hotel is full of small people clutching Anthony
Horowitz books, as he's talking about his young James Bond series.
Unaccompanied adults are going to the Sex and Violence panel, which is in
another room. This allows the ticket collector to declare, loudly, "No, you
want to go over there for the sex and violence" to general amusement.

And so we have panel number 1:

Sex & Violence - Where's the Line?

Val McDermid, Natasha Cooper, John Fullerton and Simon Kernick; moderator
Mark Billingham.

So the discussion of sex and violence starts with Mark quoting the mission
statement of an American publishing firm who intend to only publish
cheerful, pleasant, entertaining and wholesome tales of murder, and asking
what everyone else thinks of it. Natasha reckons it's dishonest to write
about murder without people getting hurt; Simon doesn't like reading about
extreme violence and begins claiming that his writing is "not as nasty as it
sounds"; John says there isn't a line and if there was one it should be
crossed, as long as someone is prepared to read the book, and everything is
in context and in character; Val says you can't write about psychopaths
without a certain amount of gore, but you need to show the effects of the
crime on victims/relatives/friends/investigators. Natasha points out that
it's not compulsory to read every word "one can always skip" and suggests
that women started upped the violence as a reaction to assumptions that they
wrote cozies (even if they secretly prefered to write about cooking). John
ignores any complaints; Mark gets more complaints about swearing than
violence, while it's the smoking that annoys Val's readers. Slightly more
than half way through the session, Mark realises that they haven't mentioned
sex yet. So they do. Mark can't see the point of it if it doesn't move the
plot or reveal character; Simon doesn't want his mum and dad to read sex
scenes he's written (for some reason this causes general amusement); Val
reckons it's easier to do good sex than write it, and you can always annoy
the reader; Natasha thinks it's good counter to the horror, but the writer
doesn't have to go all the way and can leave something (the climax, I
suppose) to the reader. The general feeling seems to be that as most readers
have either had sex or plan to have sex they know what it's about and are
more likely to point and laugh than when you write about violence;
statistically, fewer readers are actually murderers than have sex. And, Val
reckons, you can wirte about as many murders as you want without anyone
thinking you're a killer, but write one word about sex and everyone assumes
it's all personal experience. Finally there's a brief mention of books that
cross the line: Natasha cites Birdman, but notes that the violence of Tokyo
was in context; John dislikes medical processes; and Mark intensely dislikes
Dan Brown and the immensely distasteful first words of the DVC "Renowned
curator"*.

We decide we're hungry and that we're not interested Why Carers Kill (pure
squeamishness based on Harold Shipman working just over the hill from
Carol's parents), and scamper into town in search of food, stopping at a
place on the less steeper parts of Montpelier Street called Hedleys. I have
goat's cheese won-tons in a cranberry sauce, Carol has a chicken and
stir-fried vegetable wrap. We bicker mildly over baskets of bread and chips.
After a while we realise we're being a little bit overly leisurely, and that
we've only got about 20 minutes to get back to the Cedar Court in time for
the New Blood panel, which is less time than it will take. Faced with the
prospect of having to run, we order coffee. We also work out that this is
the only time we'll have free to go to the Godfrey and Watt gallery to see
the small but pretty perfectly formed exhibition of tin sculptures by Lucy
Casson. These are smallish creatures, somewhat like Gorey's Doubtful Guest,
made of used tins. We hang around looking at them for a while, and the
gallery owner talks to us a bit, and we look a bit more and suddenly we own
one. Well, technically, we've paid a deposit of mumble pounds, and there's a
red dot next to Funnel, and we'll swap the rest of the money for the
sculpture in August, when the exhibition ends. As we exchange emails he
queries the 'orangemonkey' in ours so I reveal the monkey - and the gallery
guy recognizes him from when he searched the web for Lucy Casson. At this
point we have to admit that we took a couple of pictures in his gallery when
we saw Lucy Casson's work the first time...

We scamper back up to the Cedar Court in time for the 5pm panel:

Serious about Series

Mark Billingham, Frances Fyfield, John Sandford, and Cath Staincliffe;
moderator Simon Brett

Discussion is started by Simon quoting Ruth Rendell to the effect that all
series characters are ideal versions of the writer, only 10 years younger.
Frances says of Helen West "she was me" and that Sarah Fortune was "the
person I wanted to be" (an aside: Sarah Fortune seems to spend a lot of her
in-book time visiting judges in their changes and 'entertaining' them. Mr
Brett seemed to find this a sourse of great and repeated fascination
throughout the session); Lucas Davenport was "carefully engineered to be a
hero", almost totally unlike his creator; Sal Kilkenny is Cath's alter-ego,
while Janice Lewis' character (Blue Murder TV series)was changed by a
meeting with TV people before the first book was published; Mark had always
wanted to write a series because he liked reading series, and chose a
character a year older and with the same tastes in music (not Phil Collins,
then). Discussion then moved to the importance of supporting characters.
These were important to Cath, as her work is all really about the work-life
balance**; Frances claims that the physical background is more important to
her as everyone is influenced by where they live - and it's easier for a
writer to change a characters house than her relationships; John didn't plan
such a long series, and found that the supporting characters are a problem
in a long series. When he realised Lucas had had 17 relationships in 16
years he suspected women readers would find Lucas "less than sincere", so he
married Lucas off, then sent the family away. An editor banned any
suggestion that Lucas might have an affair. Mark points out that the hero
doesn't have to be likable all the time.

Aging: DI Thorne ages in real time and will have to retire soon, leaving
Mark with a problem; Frances' characters are ageless and therefore stay the
same age; John and Cath age their characters and families, but not in real
time and not consistently.

Reading order: Cath reads other peoples books in random order, and hopes
hers can be too; John's books should be read in the right order; Mark always
reads series in the right order, and points out that he's gone to a certain
amount of effort to traumatize his characters and he can't have them ignore
bad things from book to book; on the other hand the trauma needs to be
vague, to avoid spoilers***.

Disadvantages of a series: Mark - other people assuming you'll get stale;
John - maintaining freshness, and readers demanding the return of minor
characters; Cath - thinking of stories that won't fit in the series, and
readers that start thinking they own your characters; John can't really
think of any, but says that of 18 books he's written, only half were series
books, and he didn't write the series books sequentially.

Ending series: John's editor opposes killing Lucas; Frances wants her
characters to live happily ever after, but wants to kill them during the
writing; Cath likes her characters too much to kill them off.

Realising that I've taken overly extensive notes, we leave the Cedar Court,
trot back to the hotel to change, and venture out to eat. Above the Bleus
Bar on Montpelier, there seems to by an Egyptian restaurant called the Blue
Nile so we venture up to see what it's like. We start with hummus and Blue
Nile dip (feta, cucumber, tomato, olives and yoghurt), then Carol has shish
kofta and I have falafel. Nice food, but the waiter seems inexperienced and
we only have to pay because we wait specially to do so (the next day they
have a sign saying they're closed for an annual holiday, so possibly this
night was abnormal).

Then we scamper back up to the Cedar, habg around in the bar for a bit, then
wander in to see the evening entertainment

Foul Play

Investigators: Frances Fyfield, Cath Staincliffe; chairman : Simon Brett;
cast of several: Mark Billingham, Stella Duffy.

This is a version of the radio quiz series Simon Brett hosted a while back
(probably on Radio 7 somewhere as well), and was largely notable for the
wide range of accents Mr Billingham fitted into one character performance as
an LAPD detective, the peircingness of Ms Duffy's shrieking, and the
problems both had when having to remember previous ad-libbing, or which
whose line it was. And Cath Staincliffe actually got the right murderer,
which is most unusual.

And then we all sit or stand around in the bar until it's time to go back to
the Studley.

[Did I give too much detail on the panels ?]

* This causes laughter amongst everyone who ever heard me talk about the
book, obviously :o)

** I put 'work-life balance' in my notes before Cath said it, but she did
say it. Maybe we read the same newspaper.

*** On the other hand, the third book in Rosemary Aubert's Ellis Portal
series reveals pretty major parts of the plot of the first book, yet in such
a way as to leave you still wanting to read the whole series.


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