THE END IS NIGH
When I started writing BLOOD ON THE DUNES I began, as always, with a germ of an idea but no definite plan of where the story was going or, indeed, how it was going to end. This is quite normal for me, as I write like a reader - to find out what is going to happen next. The trouble was, by the time I was approaching 20,000 words (about a quarter of the way through), I knew, not only the path the story was going to take but, more alarmingly, how it was going to end. This was definitely not good as either it was going to be a very short book or, more worryingly, I would have to start again from scratch.
By way of a diversion I had introduced a side story concerning the disappearance of a boy from a children's home. (This device is known as a MacGuffin*). DI Sonny Russell is sent to investigate. He is reluctant as he'd rather be involved in more serious crimes, but his boss, Superintendent Stout, insists it's important. Russell thinks that's because the man in charge of the children's home is one of his golfing buddies.
Then it dawned on me. This diversion was actually a rich seam that I could mine. Suddenly the boy became pivotal to the whole plot and now, as I approach the conclusion to the book, he's taken on a life of his own, which was most unexpected.
In my first DI Russell novel, BLOOD ON THE TIDE, one of the main characters was a German, called Wolfgang. He wasn't a vey nice man but he was disabled and his childhood was rather unhappy. Talking to readers I've since learned that they felt sorry for him. It made me realise that I'd accidentally created a rather complex person that people related to quite differently from how I'd anticipated they would. With this in mind, I've now deliberately written a character, who is far from nice, but who has arrived at where he is because of past circumstances. Hopefully, I've pulled it off.
If you would like to know more about Wolfgang and haven't already discovered my series of books, set mainly around Rye and Romney Marsh in the 1950s, they are available in paperback and Kindle on Amazon and in paperback direct from the author
*In fiction, a MacGuffin is an object, device, or event that is necessary to the plot and the motivation of the characters, but insignificant, unimportant, or irrelevant in itself. The term was originated by Angus MacPhail for film, adopted by Alfred Hitchcock, and later extended to a similar device in other fiction.
