No-one Can Tell

 

You are too violent.

Really?  I always thought I was rather a kind and gentle person, but do go on…

Alright then, your writing is too violent.

Ahh, now we’re getting to the truth of it.  And as a small consideration I will concede that there are certain elements of my writing that lean towards the violent, but isn’t that the whole point of crime fiction?  We deal in death.

Granted, but must you insist on dealing in such violent and bloody death?

If the death is not violent or bloody, it has no place in crime fiction because it is a death by natural causes, and therefore of little or no interest to anyone not related to them.   

It certainly would have no place in my fiction.

So you created a violent and bloody world to explore the nastiness of violent and bloody death?

Not deliberately.

Then what were your intentions?

I wanted to create a world where undercover cops could roam free, taking on some of the biggest and most evil corporations known to the entire planet.   

And it stands to reason that they would be populated with people hell-bent on accumulating as much power as they can gather to them, through any means necessary.

And when their power is threatened, they become nasty and violent.

I’ll be honest, though, I had no idea that the first book would come out quite as violent and nasty as it did.  

 When the primary antagonist appeared on the scene, I was really just writing him slowly and carefully to see what he would do.

He was the Head of Security.

A perfect target for my team of heroes to go after, particularly in terms of the information he would have access to, if they were able to get it past him.

It was well known that he was in charge of identifying and disposing of traitors inside the corporation, and that he was also known to torture them for information about other traitors.

I just had no idea until he started to torture them, just how much he would delight in it.

It worried me.

Not just because this character scared me, and still does.

Or because I had no earthly idea how my heroine was going to firstly get close to him, secondly get the vital information away from him, and thirdly get away again.

It was more how easy I found it to write him.

Writing is not an easy thing to do.

And if you are a fellow writer, you know exactly what I am talking about.

But when it came to writing the scenes where the Head of Security was torturing and maiming people for information, or even just for the pleasure of it, they flowed out of me so easily.

Was this really coming from me?

If I had this readily available inside of me to call upon at any time, then how did it get there, and how had I kept it under control for so long?

Give it up for the awesome abilities of the English to suppress our emotions.

Were it not for that, our country would be teeming with killers.

As it is, there are too many already.

When I gave the pages to my trusted readers, I was a little concerned what they would make of them.

They were surprised, not unlike me.

I don’t know if it altered their attitude towards me, knowing that I had these buried thoughts inside of me somewhere.  When the book was finished and I read it again as a whole I began to understand where they came from.

And breathed a sigh of relief.

It seemed clear that many years of first-hand torture courtesy of my high school compatriots had been building up for quite some time, and were dying to be released, if you'll pardon the pun.

And now they were.

At least for the time being.

When it came to starting the second book I wondered who would appear, who would pick up the mantle of evil gatekeeper to the vital information, and what they would do.

I tried to keep it simple.

The first chapter of the first book had so much going on in it that there was almost too much for an introduction to the world of the undercover cops.   

And while it had a suitably gruesome death scene at the end of the chapter (death by train), it felt convoluted.

Fair enough.

So I simplified it down to three characters, two of them conscious, and one of them ending up on the ouchy end of the dagger before they died.

And, oh my, how they died.

If I’d thought that the first book’s torture scenes were bad, they were nothing compared to this.

It even put off one of my previous readers.

They said it was just too full-on violent for their liking.

Okay, I thought, but clearly you have never read Val McDermid’s Tony Hill novels, because if you think mine are full-on, they are nothing compared to hers.

Absolutely nothing.

Perhaps it’s best they get out now, because it’s going to get a whole lot worse before the end.

And who knows what will happen in the next book?

No-one can tell.