A Note on
Notes
When I realised I’d published twenty books in twenty years
(or, more accurately, will have twenty published or ‘in press’ by the time the
anniversary arrives in a few weeks), my next goal was to have all twenty
available in one form or another. Thanks to a belated and reluctant engagement
with Kindle, I’ve now done that, with the five books that were published as
large print paperbacks from 2008 to 2011 available on Amazon as of last
month. They are all short and belong to two trilogies of short books. The Captain
Jackson crime and espionage thrillers were all published in 2008 (ignoring
my two amateurish attempts at self-publishing): The Secret Policeman (a
novella), The Secret Agent (a collection of six short stories,
originally published from 2007 to 2008), and The Secret Service (another novella). The two Forgotten Stories short horror collections form a
trilogy with John Hall’s Five Forgotten Stories (published by
Theaker’s Paperback Library in March 2010): Eight Weird Tales (September
2010, tales originally published from 2007 to 2010) and Six Strange Cases
(February 2011, two of the cases originally published in 2009). These have been
available on Kindle since 2024.
As I was putting the finishing touches on The Secret
Agent, I realised that the three short story collections were published
before a habit I subsequently adopted in imitation of Stephen King, including notes
as a postscript. I prefer this to a foreword as there’s no need to avoid
spoilers and I love reading other writer’s notes because they often mention the
inspiration or origin of the stories – something about which most
writers (and many readers) are curious. I wrote a short introduction to Eight
Weird Tales, where I identified Conan Doyle, M.R. James, Anthony Hope, and
H.P. Lovecraft as my inspirations, but it was so dull that I left it out of the
Kindle edition. Instead, I thought I’d present the notes I never wrote here,
excluding those on the two Roderick Langham stories, which were collected in The
Adventures of Roderick Langham (published by Theaker’s Paperback Library in 2017, complete with notes). That leaves all six stories from The
Secret Agent, seven from Eight Weird Tales, and five from Six
Strange Cases.
The Secret
Agent
Two: The Captain Jackson stories were all
written in a two-year period from 2004 to 2006 and professionally published
from 2007 to 2008. As such, they are my oldest work, fiction and nonfiction
included, and full of the usual mistakes one associates with a novice author. ‘Two’
was my first published short story, appearing in Hardluck Stories at the
beginning of 2007 and is the only one in this collection not to feature Jackson
(though I made a weak attempt to frame it as what might now be called a spinoff).
It was never intended to be part of the collection, but I needed a sixth story
to include and the one I was working on, which would have seen Jackson in
Boston, was taking too long to write. I started another one, set in Geneva, but
didn’t finish that either and decided to use what I already had, i.e. ‘Two’.
The inspiration for the story was something that nearly happened, didn’t, and
made me think about what might have happened.
Clock Work: At the core of each of the stories in The
Secret Agent is a single action scene and, in retrospect, I was very naïve
to assume that writing these well would be enough to sell them for professional
rates. The scene at the centre of this story was inspired by the assassination
of Reinhard Heydrich by two Special Operations Executive agents, in Prague-Libeň
in June 1942. I learned about it from a military history magazine that would
inspire several short stories and articles, which I first read in a Starbucks
in Oxford, which explains the setting. Heydrich was probably the most dangerous
of all of Hitler’s inner circle and would later be the subject of a Roderick
Langham memoir, The Naval Cadet. The story was also published as ‘Murder by
Numbers’.
Contre Temps: Many of the locations in The Secret
Agent (and The Secret Service) were places that my wife and I
visited while on holiday in our first few years of living together. (We lived
near an airport in the days of the 99p ticket.) This narrative was inspired by
a disappointing trip to Quebec. (In fairness, Quebec was fine; it was Quebec
City that was a disappointment.) ‘Contre Temps’ was the first time I tried
something different with the Jackson short stories because the action scene at
its core never happens: Megan misses Jackson in consequence of her
monolingualism, which almost certainly works out better for both her and Ashley
(yes, this is the spinoff connection). While I don’t think it’s the best, it is
the most widely read of all the Jackson stories courtesy of its appearance in a
trade paperback collection of crime fiction.
Fall Guy: I think it’s fair to say that most
inspiration for stories, whether they end up being long or short, requires a
minimum of two sources, a literal coincidence of some sort. In this case, the combination
was a misadventure while skiing and reading Tess Gerritsen’s The Apprentice
(2002), the second novel in her Rizzoli & Isles series. I can’t remember
which came first, but it doesn’t matter because the second event resonated with
the first and I had enough to start writing. Subsequently, I was lucky enough
to meet Dr Gerritsen briefly. A clever, kind, charming woman who is very
generous with her time and was treated appallingly by Alfonso Cuarón and
Hollywood with regard to the blockbuster feature film, Gravity (2013).
Her chapter in Hollywood vs. the Author (2018) is quite harrowing.
The Secret
Agent: This is the
longest Jackson short story at eight and a half thousand words and might be
more accurately categorised as a novelette, i.e. somewhere in between a short
story and a novella. ‘The Secret Agent’ is the first and only time I’ve set out
to write a narrative of that length and it was also the first of all eight of
the Jackson stories to be professionally published (The Secret Policeman
and The Secret Service were both initially self-published, in 2005 and
2006 respectively). The scene at its core is a story told to me by a colleague
some years before the writing and to this day I’m still not sure if he made it up or not. The coincidence that turned a scene into a story was the 7/7
bombings, during which my wife and I were in London (albeit very far from
harm).
Hit and Miss: The last Jackson story to be written
and published and the last in the chronology, which is: The Secret Policeman,
‘Clock Work’, ‘Contre Temps’, ‘Fall Guy’, ‘The Secret Agent’, and The Secret
Service. The inspiration is the most banal of any of these notes. While
possessed of many virtues, not the least of which is putting up with me for so
long, my wife is indeed messy. She left a hammer outside the garage one day. I
picked it up with thoughts of how it could have been used to break into the
garage or house and then reversed direction, thinking how fortuitous it would
have been if it had been left on the other side of a break-in. By the time this
happened, I’d already been considering how many of Jackson’s enemies might want
to interrupt his retirement and how they would go about it.
Eight Weird
Tales
The Letters
of Reverend Dyer: As
will be apparent from both The Adventures of Roderick Langham and The Memoirs of Roderick
Langham (forthcoming from Theaker’s Paperback Library), I’ve been
fascinated by Whitby, the Yorkshire Coast, and North-East Yorkshire in its
entirety for a long time. This story was inspired by Whitby, Lovecraft’s
Cthulhu cycle, and Caitlín R. Kiernan’s ‘The Drowned Geologist (1898)’, which
was first published in Shadows Over Baker Street: New Tales of Terror!
in 2003. I spent a very enjoyable day researching it at the Whitby Museum,
which was then and is still run by the Whitby Literary and Philosophical
Society. ‘The Letters of Reverend Dyer’ was my first attempt at writing
speculative fiction.
Fleet: The inspiration was a curious
combination of unrelated things: my return to university as a mature student, James’
ghost stories, a comment I’d read about one of his stories (I can’t remember
either which story or where I read the comment), and an interest in medieval
military orders. Though I visited the location of the final scene, I couldn’t
see any sign of the Templar priory at all and remain unsure as to whether I was
in exactly the right place. After my wife and I moved to the East Riding of
Yorkshire, I spent some time exploring the surrounds, but many of these
excursions were conducted in haste and at a time when information on the
internet was relatively limited and smartphones restricted to the rich.
The Signal
Station: One of the
locations I did manage to find and visited several times over many years of
days and occasionally nights spent in Scarborough. Not the least of the fascinations of
North-East Yorkshire for me is the Roman occupation, although very little evidence
of it remains. The inspirations are Lovecraft again, the series of comics and
graphic novels that feature the Irish hero Sláine MacRoth and were first
published in 2000 AD in 1983 and in Warrior’s Dawn in 2005, and
the first year of my postgraduate studies. I did attempt to visit all of the
signal station sights in my travels, but – once again – can’t be certain if I
wasn't in the wrong place for one or two of them. The story was also published as
‘The Chapel on the Headland’ and is revisited in ‘The Screaming Man’.
Devil’s Own: Another location I visited, though my
tour of the Towton battlefield was very haphazard and probably missed at least
one important site. While the UK’s most brutal battle can hardly be called
banal, the coincidence that inspired the story was, simply, that either shortly
before or shortly after my excursion, I saw a military history book with
‘blood-soaked soil’ in the title. (I can’t remember which title and I’m sure
there are many anyway.) A more insightful observation might be that another of my
fascinations with North-East Yorkshire is the way in which there is so much
under the soil – foundations, fossils, gemstones, and…bones. The story was also
published as ‘Black Mac Sween’ and is revisited in ‘The Red Trees’.
Spurn: The geography and history of Spurn (the
Spurn peninsular) and Spurn Point (Spurn Head) are both intriguing and I won’t
bore readers with either here. Like Towton, I know I found the right place but
am less certain that I saw everything I came for. The location aside, the
inspiration was a combination of several things: a pamphlet I picked up
somewhere in the East Riding about the drowned city of Ravenser Odd, Mark
Valentine’s notes on one of his Connoisseur short stories (I can’t remember
where the notes were published), and some very shoddy historical research on my
part. In 2022, the precise location of Ravenser Odd was discovered and there
was an exhibition at the Hull History Centre in 2024. Unfortunately, by that
time I was living on the other side of the country and wasn’t able to visit.
The story was also published as ‘The Stones at Spurn Point’.
Murder in the
Minster: This is a
Ruritanian pastiche and its inspirations are: Hope’s originals, The Prisoner
of Zenda (1894), Rupert of Hentzau (1895), and the lesser known The
Heart of Princess Osra (1896); the various homages that have followed,
including John Haythorne’s The Strelsau Dimension (1981) and John Spurling’s
After Zenda (1995); and a website called The Ruritanian Resistance.
If anyone notices a correspondence between Rassendyll and Bauer on the one hand
and Forrester and Jackson on the other, it’s because this story could – and
perhaps should – have been another Jackson outing. At the time of writing, I
was disappointed with the lack of commercial success I was having and thought
I’d try something different. The location is based on a visit to Howden Minster,
which also appears in ‘Spurn’.
Letter from
the Helmand: This is the
most unlikely source of inspiration I can imagine and also the most shameful. I went
through a brief stage of reading the autobiographies of retired generals, which
were usually disappointing as most had prioritised promotion over action and most toed the party line in their narratives because they had too much to lose. One
of my selections was It Doesn't Take a Hero: The Autobiography of General H.
Norman Schwarzkopf (1992), which I read shortly before or after reading
about the first combat death of a British soldier during the War in Afghanistan
(in 2006). Schwarzkopf mentions a story he wrote while at West Point, in which
he deliberately and cleverly conflated two wars nearly two millennia apart. I
pretty much plagiarised the whole thing, compounding my crime by plagiarising Doyle,
who begins his most famous series with a military doctor returning
from…Afghanistan.
Six Strange
Cases
The Short
Spoon: This was
originally intended to be the first in a mystery series that would feature a retired
police detective and have more of a commercial appeal than the Jackson short stories.
The problem was that even in its leanest version the story was a novelette, significantly
limiting the paying markets to which it could be submitted. At about the same
time, I started what was intended to be a noir novel, one that might end up as either
a crime thriller with an occult atmosphere or an occult thriller with a
detective protagonist. The retired detective mystery was absorbed into the Titus
Farrow novel, which gave me about sixteen thousand words of work-in-progress.
When my literary agent couldn’t sell Bloody Reckoning (eventually
published by Lume Books in 2017), I suggested The Short Spoon, but she
wasn’t interested in anything that crossed genres. I didn’t want to waste all
that writing, however, and thought it could be published in a collection rather
than a magazine, which was how Six Strange Cases was conceived.
Meet El
Presidente: ‘The Facts
of the Demon Barber’s Demise’ aside, ‘Meet El Presidente’ is probably my worst
short story and its origin is at least partly responsible for that. In
contrast, there is nothing wrong with the inspiration: over a decade, I kept
coming across the phrase ‘el presidente’ in unusual and incompatible
contexts (unusual if you don’t speak Spanish, which I don’t) and started
thinking about whether there was a thematic link. I could have made a respectable
narrative out of that idea given enough time, but I was in a rush to publish Six
Strange Cases. So I combined the offcuts of The Short Spoon that I
hadn’t used in ‘The Short Spoon’ with parts of an unfinished story that was
called ‘Knight of the Black Cross’ and threw it all into something that was
more pot than plot. All unfortunate because the inspiration was promising and ‘Knight
of the Black Cross’ was shaping up to be one of my better tales.
The Month of
the Wolf: Very obviously
inspired by my many visits to and stays in Whitby and my longstanding interest
in the Black Dog phenomenon. Less obviously, the story has its origins in a
cycle of stories that begins with Lovecraft’s ‘The Haunter of the Dark’ (first
published in Weird Tales in 1936), continues with Robert Bloch’s ‘The
Shadow from the Steeple’ (first published in Weird Tales in 1950), and
concludes (for now) with Hall’s Five Forgotten Stories. Like almost
everything in this collection and much of what I was writing at the time, this
was rushed to publication and I felt I’d once again wasted a promising premise.
I was thus very pleased to have a revised and improved version, ‘The Barghest’,
published several years later. I have a third version planned, though I doubt
I’ll ever write it.
Blue Mail: Notwithstanding the Roderick Langham adventure
in Six Strange Cases, this is the only story that was previously
published. Notwithstanding a different Roderick Langham adventure, ‘Blue Mail’
is also the best short fiction I have written. That surprises me for at least
two reasons. First, I’ve already explained the dubious origins of Farrow in my
notes on ‘The Short Spoon’ and ‘Meet El Presidente’. He was my attempt to write
noir, which is not my forte, and the first and third narratives in which he
appeared were bits and pieces cobbled together from unfinished work. What were
the chances this outing would be any better? Second, I have absolutely no
idea what inspired ‘Blue Mail’ other than several pleasant visits to Cornwall and
St Ives. What turns another pedestrian outing for Farrow into something that I
hope is quite good is the ‘twist’ in the middle, who is blackmailing whom, and
I just can’t remember how or why it came to me.
The Facts of
the Demon Barber’s Demise:
I’m pretty sure this is my worst short story. It was rejected everywhere I sent
it, including by a publication that was specifically seeking absurd, nonsense,
bizarre, or surreal stories (whose title escapes me now). It is also my only attempt
to write flash fiction and that’s probably for the best. Having said all that it
hardly seems to matter what my inspiration was, but I may as well finish the
full set of notes. Once again, there was a coincidence and this particular
combination was learning about Russell’s paradox (sets that are not sets of
themselves) in a logic class shortly after watching Tim Burton’s Sweeney
Todd: The Demon Barber of Fleet Street (2007), which my wife enjoyed but I
didn’t. No, I didn’t force her to read the story as payback and no, I still don’t
understand Russell’s paradox.
