DAVID HODGES ON WRITING REAL CHARACTERS

Sax Rohmer, or Arthur Henry Ward to give his real name, has always featured strongly in my life. I first began reading his brilliant Fu Manchu crime novels as an eleven-year-old and then in my early teens he became the inspiration for me to embark on a crime-writing career of my own. It took a while and quite a few rejection slips to get there, but after my ambitions were fortuitously interrupted by a thirty year career in the police service, my dreams were finally realised with the publication of my first crime novel in 1999. Now, twenty-eight years later, feel the need to reflect on my direction of travel in pursuing the route of the ‘series’ novel rather than the standalone alternative. I’ll start by asking myself a question posed by one of my readers recently: do the principal characters in my novels seem real to me?

This is certainly something that provokes thought. It has been said of Sax Rohmer, for example, that he became so obsessed with Fu Manchu that in the latter years before his death he came to believe the arch villain was not just a fictional character drawn from his own vivid imagination but actually existed in real life. Whether this is true or not in his case, it is certainly a plausible scenario and one, which, when applied to writers of series generally, could be an interesting subject for debate. After all, if a writer doesn’t find his key character(s) credible, how could he write convincingly in the first place? He or she has created them and to do that surely they must see them as real people? But if the answer to that is ’yes’, there is a downside here too. For Conan Doyle, Sherlock Holmes allegedly became such a household name in the late 1800s — with many people believing he was a real person — that when Doyle tired of his character and tried to kill him off at the Reichenbach Falls in order to concentrate on his Brigadier Gerard novels instead, there was a public outcry. Doyle was forced to resurrect his creation. At one time Agatha Christie is also said to have detested her larger-than-life sleuth, Hercule Poirot, but stayed her hand from killing him off because of his popularity with the reading public. My old friend, the late great Colin Dexter’s  famous detective, Inspector Morse, also established himself in the public mind as a real person and though Colin never actually complained to me about tiring of him, there is no doubt that the two were so inextricably bound together that writer and character became inseparable.

For my part, the two principal characters in my Somerset Levels murder series, Detective Sergeant Kate Lewis (née Hamblin) and her detective constable husband, Hayden, do seem like real people to me. In fact, Kate herself was modelled on a young sharp-tongued, rebellious policewoman I once worked with in the force and Hayden on our very own former prime minister, Boris Johnson. In a way, therefore, I suppose it is not difficult for me to see them as real flesh and blood, even though the characters in the stories themselves are fictitious and differ in many respects from the ‘originals’. In my view, a large part of the success to creating a fictitious character who is not only believable to the author, but more importantly to the reading public, is not primarily in the drama of the storyline (which will go its own way whatever). It is in giving the characters traits that it are easy to identify with — personal idiosyncrasies, flaws in behaviour, errors of judgement, likes and dislikes, all the things in life that can be applied to us all — together with key references to their lives and backgrounds behind the scenes. I often think that subplots running in tandem with the overall storyline can be just as important as the main thrust of the action. We all have our hangups and prejudices and I often smile to myself when a review of one of my novels criticises a key character for negligence, sexism, bullying or some other form of prejudiced behaviour, because that is life and we are all guilty of such things at one time or another. I well remember one comment that took exception to the fact that Kate forgot her police radio and left it in her car by mistake. That would never happen in real life the reviewer said. Wouldn’t it, I thought, thinking back to my own police service. Sorry, my friend, but in my personal experience it has already — several times.  We are all human and no one is perfect except in fantasy fiction . . .    

With the latest novel in my Somerset series, Watcher on the Levels, scheduled for publication on 12 April this year, I am now well into completing the next case for Kate and Hayden. Do I ever feel it is time to end my association with the intrepid duo in order to try my hand at something new? The plain answer to that is only if my readership gives up on me, or my publisher, Joffe Books, calls time on the series, or I run out of ideas — and at present my imagination is full of them.

ABOUT DAVID HODGES

David Hodges is a former police superintendent with thirty years’ service. He is the author of seventeen crime novels, including twelve in his Somerset Levels murder series, plus an autobiography on his long police career. He is currently published by Joffe Books and Lume Books and lives in the UK with his wife, Elizabeth.  

(A version of this article will appear in Red Herrings, the monthly publication of the Crime Writers Association)