He did this numerous times, at a fraction of normal speed, and still we couldn’t actually catch what he did.

Jim’s books were full of such tips and tricks. One of the things I love about reading any book is picking up those little snippets of inside information. Any information – it doesn’t matter what it is, as long as it’s something that isn’t obvious, that dispels a commonly held belief, or is just one of those nuggets you store away for future use.

I recall reading a post years ago in which the writer detailed the sensations and feelings and knowledge that you collect in the filter of your daily life. You might not think it’s the stuff thrillers are made of, but it is. It’s the glue that holds the whole thing together. The aspect that gives a work heart as well as flash.

The bits that make the whole thing ring true.

Obscure knowledge
In the course of my own writing career, I’ve picked up all sorts of obscure knowledge – how to dislocate someone’s shoulder; how to tell if a mirror is in fact one-way glass; how to steal a motorbike; how to tell immediately if a Glock semiautomatic has a round in the chamber, even in the dark; what to add to gasoline to make the perfect Molotov cocktail; what style of suit to wear on a close-protection detail.

All useful and highly entertaining stuff.

In fact, there was a book that came out about twenty years ago called The Worst-Case Scenario Survival Handbook. I still have a copy and it contains all kinds of similar information, like how to win a sword-fight, fend off a shark, land a plane, or escape from killer bees. Just one thing though – ignore the advice to lie down if faced by stampeding horses. It’s not true that they will avoid trampling you. In my painful experience, horses will put their clumping great feet anywhere they damn well please!

But all this is pretty esoteric stuff. Most of the time, even in fiction, your characters will be going about their normal daily lives. Even if they’re not a professional alligator wrestler, or a bullfighter by trade, this can be just as interesting, if not more so. Although the Internet is a wonderful tool for research, there’s no substitute for chatting to real people who actually do the things you want to write about. It’s all about the vital bit of colour that gives a work authenticity. Just as silly mistakes of any kind – like a flower blooming at the wrong time of year – will throw a reader out of a story, so those little snippets I mentioned earlier will help to draw them in.

Those tricks of the trade.

Tricks of the trade
And until you think about it, you don’t realise what you know. To this end, I phoned my sister, who’s been a professional gardener for years. “Give me some tricks of the trade,” I said to her. “Things that people wouldn’t know unless they’re involved in your line of business.”

There was a long pause, and then she came out with a couple of belters:

“If you don’t want to use slug pellets to keep slugs away from your plants, tip used coffee grounds round the base of the plant instead. Got to be fresh coffee, though – instant doesn’t work.”

“To stop squirrels digging up your crocus bulbs, plant the bulbs with dry holly leaves and chilli powder. Curry powder also works, but they really don’t like chilli.”

For myself, working as a photographer for years allowed me to come up with one or two interesting factoids of my own:

“If you want to take a soft-focus shot, breathe onto the lens just before you press the shutter. It will clear from the centre outwards, giving an instant soft-focus effect, and saves coating the lens with Vaseline, which will take forever to clean off.”

“Resting the camera on a bag filled with rice or split-peas will take up a surprising amount of vibration and will dramatically reduce camera-shake during action shots. I used to use a bag of pearl barley or dried split peas for all my car-to-car tracking photography to keep it pin-sharp.”

“If you’re taking a female portrait shot in black-and-white rather than colour, cosmetics will create shadow rather than provide highlights. Hence blusher should be applied into the hollows beneath the cheekbones, to add definition, not on top of them.”

And that led me onto another make-up tip I read in an in-flight magazine:

“Professional make-up artists heat up mascara before applying it, to give a much fuller effect and increase the even coverage.”

I’ve no idea where that will come in useful, but I’m sure it will somewhere. And, as a motorcyclist, here’s an invaluable one:

“Always carry the metal lid of a jam jar with you on the bike. You never know when you’re going to have to park up on grass. The lid can be placed under the foot of the side-stand to stop it digging into the soft ground and causing the bike to fall over – which is not only extremely embarrassing, but can also be costly in repairs.”

And as for these others, they were picked up all over the place:

Graphic designers: “If you have a client who is unable to approve a proposed design without putting their stamp on it, just put an obvious error in the proposal – a logo that’s too large, a font that’s too small, or a few judiciously seeded typos. The client requests the change and feels they’ve done their part, and your design, which was perfect all along, sails through to approval.”

In a parking lot: “Improve the range of your car alarm remote control by putting the remote under your chin. It uses the whole of your body as an extension of the antenna.” (Wouldn’t do that too often, though, if I were you…)

Horse owners: “Baby oil works wonders to de-tangle a horse’s knotted tail, without pulling out lumps of hair by the roots and getting yourself kicked in the process.”

In restaurants: “If you’re serious about your food, eat in big city restaurants between Tuesday and Thursday, when the chef’s not just interested in turning over weekend covers, and he’s had his day off, so both he and the produce are at their freshest.”

For those with a delicate stomach
For those with a delicate stomach: “Don’t order anything in hollandaise sauce. The delicate emulsion of egg yolks and clarified butter can’t be refrigerated or it will break when spooned over poached eggs. Unfortunately, this lukewarm holding temperature is the perfect breeding ground for bacteria. It’s also very likely not only to have been made hours before serving, but also from the heated, clarified butter that’s been collected from the tables, with other people’s bread crumbs strained out.” And you can thank Anthony Bourdain’s Kitchen Confidential for that nugget… as well as for:

“If you’re worried about the hygiene standards in a restaurant, check out the restrooms. If they’re dirty – and those are the bits the customer is allowed to see – imagine what the kitchen’s going to be like, away from public view.”

One for wine buffs: “It’s no longer necessary to allow wine to ‘breathe’ by pulling the cork and letting the open bottle sit for an hour or two before serving. This is a throwback to the days when wines were stuffed full of chemicals at bottling. It can still make sense for vintages earlier than approx 1980, when letting a wine stand dissipates the charmingly named phenomenon known as ‘bottle stink’. But, today’s wines are much cleaner and healthier than a generation ago, and exposing a surface area of wine the size of the bottleneck to air is unlikely to have any effect on the great bulk of the wine in the bottle.”

Wildlife documentary makers: “If you want to replicate the sound of polar bears rolling around in the snow on your latest documentary, but don’t fancy getting close enough to actually record the real sound, replicate it by scrunching custard powder inside a pair of nylons.” (Seriously, it worked for Sir David Attenborough!)

Car drivers: “If you live somewhere with a very hot climate, always fill your tank on the way to work in the morning, not on the way home. This way, the ground storage tanks will be at a lower temperature so the fuel will be at its densest, giving your more bang for your buck.”

Airline cabin crew: “A fractious infant can be quickly quietened by the addition of a helping of gin in the milk formula.” (Hey, don’t blame me, I’m just reporting what I heard!)

If you’ve got an ant problem, but have pets or small children in the house: “Put down bicarbonate of soda instead. It makes them explode, apparently.”

Cigar smokers: “Don’t dunk the end directly into the flame when lighting the cigar. Rotate the cigar gently above the flame. Do not inhale the smoke, just taste it in your mouth and blow it out. And don’t smoke it too fast, or it will burn hot and ruin the flavour.”

I should point out at this stage that all the above are comments and snippets picked up from a variety of sources and, should I ever feel inclined to use them in a book, I’d certainly double-check the facts before I used them.

What do you know?
OK, your turn. What little snippets can you pass on from a day-job, past or present? What do you know?

This week’s Word of the Week is legerdemain, which is the skilful use of one’s hands when performing conjuring tricks, deception or trickery. The word comes from the French, léger de main, which means light of hand, or dexterous.

You can read this blog, or comment, at Murder Is Everywhere

The post Tricks of the Trade appeared first on Zoë Sharp: Author of the Charlie Fox series and the Lakes Thriller series..

After all, they reckon there are only seven basic plot themes— overcoming the monster, rags to riches, the quest, voyage and return, comedy, tragedy, and rebirth. Everything else, we are told, is just a variation on those themes.

Nevertheless, even if you took exactly the same story idea and gave it to, say, nine or ten different authors who were noted for writing books set in very different parts of the world, can you imagine how different those stories would turn out to be?

The contrast between the same basic plotline, when it’s set in 1920s’ Bombay, Buenos Aires in 1945, modern-day Paris, or one of the deceptively idyllic islands of the Aegean would be enormous. I am no expert on Africa, but I can imagine that setting a tale in Ghana is utterly different to setting one in Botswana, or any of the East African nations.

Sometimes location dictates plot
Sometimes, the location heavily dictates the plot in the first place. I usually say that one of my Charlie Fox novels, FIRST DROP, could only have been set in Daytona Beach, Florida, during Spring Break. But if it had to be set in another city—in another country—over another weekend festival where teenagers were predominantly involved, then I wonder how the final book might have been changed by that.

Likewise, when I chose Appleby-in-Westmorland in Cumbria as the location for my second Lakes crime thriller—BONES IN THE RIVER—not simply because I was looking for another Lake District setting, but because of the Gypsy and Traveller gathering that has taken place there practically every year since the Middle Ages. And because it’s well known among the locals that the influx of forty or fifty thousand strangers into a small town is a very good time to settle old scores.

When I set out to write the first in my new mystery thriller series, THE LAST TIME SHE DIED, I had the storyline I wanted but it wasn’t tied to a particular location. I wanted a rural area where everybody knows everybody else’s business—or thinks they do. I wanted a relatively sparse population, but with urban conurbations nearby. I needed woodland and seclusion, but somewhere that was in reasonably easy reach of a seat of power.

In some ways, Scotland would have been ideal, but other writers—not least of which is our own Caro Ramsay, of course—have a far better claim on the area north of the border than I do. (I blog regularly on Murder Is Everywhere with Caro and her Anderson and Costello series has Glasgow sewn up.)

Derbyshire good fit for story
I decided on Derbyshire because it’s somewhere I’ve come to know well over the past few years, and the more I worked on the story, the better it seemed to fit into the landscape. It was an hour and a half from London by train—the kind of distance a Member of Parliament might be comfortable travelling for weekends in the country, for instance. There were plenty of steep drops to catch out the unwary, careless motorist, too. And plenty of space for certain manor houses to be within reach of the nearest village, but at the same time completely out of sight of their neighbours.

In some ways, the more restrictions I have when I’m working out a plot—and the more creative I have to be to work around them—the more fun it is to write. I’ve always liked to play with preconceptions. You think you know where the story is going, but you don’t.

In the case of THE LAST TIME SHE DIED, I wanted to start with an idea that might sound vaguely familiar, and then take it off in a more unexpected direction.

The book begins with a funeral. Family patriarch Gideon Fitzroy has died and his second wife Virginia, his stepchildren, and brother-in-law have gathered for the occasion. They think they know exactly what will happen next, as far as the division of Fitzroy’s estate is concerned.

Then somebody claiming to be a missing heir turns up. Blake—the daughter who vanished ten years previously and has been assumed dead.

For certain people, there is no ‘assumed’ about it. They know she’s dead. Because they killed her and hid the body on the night she disappeared…

Didn’t they?

Who is this imposter?
So, who is this ‘imposter’, and what does she want? It can’t be as simple as the money, because Gideon Fitzroy made no provision in his will for the only child of his first marriage. (His second wife has read the document in question, and there’s absolutely no doubt about it.)

Is there?

But if the young woman now claiming to be Blake is indeed a fake, then how does she know so much about the vulnerable fifteen-year-old who went missing? Or the quirks of the family home? Not to mention the layout of the village where events take place. That village I mentioned, where there always seem to be secrets that are never quite as well buried as people hope.

Having spent the last six years or so living in a small village in the Derbyshire Peak District, I really wanted to set a book here—or somewhere very like it. I compromised by not actually naming the place, and I’ve played fast and loose with the geography for the location of the Fitzroys’ country estate, although not entirely. The lane exists, but the manor house called Claremont does not, which is a shame. I have a very clear picture of it in my head.

On a walk through local woodland I found a rutted track leading off the lane into an old plantation, with a stone gatepost at the latch end of the five-bar gate. The track continued on into the trees, leading to the edge of a gravel pit, long since fallen into disuse. It was eerie even in daylight.

But at night, in the dark, it would be perfect.

Good way to stir things up
Bringing an outsider into this situation to ask awkward questions, and to stick his nose in where it isn’t wanted, is always a good way to stir things up a bit. Enter Detective Superintendent John Byron of the Met. Right from the start, it’s obvious that his role is not that of a straightforward mourner at the funeral. One of the youngest detectives to achieve such a rank, he’s now on a long leave of absence for reasons initially unspecified.

His interest in the life—and death—of Gideon Fitzroy seems anything but casual, so is he there on official business or not? And his interest in the young woman claiming to be Blake is something neither of them can quite define.

Anyone who’s read any of my books will know that I favour female characters who are… self-sufficient, shall we say. I’m beginning to hate the term ‘strong’ because it’s become almost meaningless. Strong as oppose to what—weak? And does anyone feel the need to define their male protagonists in such terms?

Male characters are ‘tough’ and ‘uncompromising’ if they’re likely to answer a difficult question with a punch or a bullet. (Charlie Fox can be a bit like that, but she’s usually referred to as ‘kick-ass’ or—my pet hate—‘feisty’. Either way, she will always try to talk her way out of a fight when she can manage it, and only stand her ground when there is no other option.)

An asset and a flaw
So, if my female characters are strong then it’s because they refuse to rely on anyone else to dig them out of trouble, and occasionally this leads to a stubbornness that’s to their own detriment. In the case of the young woman who is claiming to be Blake, her inability to trust others is both an asset and a flaw.

One that might just get her killed.

The reason I’ve talked so much about THE LAST TIME SHE DIED is because it comes out on Wednesday, October 20. I hope you will forgive the BSP, but Wednesday is put up or shut up day, when I find out what people think of my take on this particular storyline, set in this particular area of the country, with this particular pairing.

I’m keeping my fingers, eyes, and legs crossed that readers like it. Because I’m already writing book two!

This week’s Word of the Week is querencia, a Spanish word that describes a place where we feel safe or at home, even if it isn’t where we actually live. It’s from where we draw our strength and inspiration.

THE LAST TIME SHE DIED is published by Bookouture in eBook, print, or audio format, on Wednesday, October 20. Or pre-order now. You can read or listen to an excerpt here.

You can read this blog or comment at Murder Is Everywhere.

The post Setting the Scene appeared first on Zoë Sharp: Author of the Charlie Fox series and the Lakes Thriller series..

When Charlie Fox became a professional bodyguard—which she did in book four in the series, having spent all of book three at a bodyguard training school in Germany—I knew I couldn’t always have things going Horribly Wrong for her. Not without her becoming the Typhoid Mary of the close-protection world. So, occasionally I made mention in the narrative of other jobs—the ones that took place in the cracks between books—when everything went like an oiled machine.

The jobs when nothing went wrong, there were no ambushes or kidnappings, no attempted heists, no natural disasters, and nobody gets butchered.

The boring ones, in other words.

Likewise, when a character disappears from one story and crops up again later in the series, I need to know what they’ve been doing in the meantime. They don’t just hang about in cryogenic suspension, waiting to be defrosted and fed back into the plot.

Hence, a character from book two, private security contractor Ian Garton-Jones was running a business that involved a horde of glorified security guards, trying to bring order to a north of England sink estate ravaged by violence and racial tensions. When I decided to bring him back, it wasn’t until ten books later. By that time, he’s progressed to the far more lucrative private military contractors’ market in Iraq.

Hopefully, though, if you read book twelve without having read any of the other books, you wouldn’t feel like you were missing an inside joke. At the same time, I tried hard to reintroduce Garton-Jones in such a way that I wasn’t repeating myself too much for people who’d already met him before.

When Charlie was almost run off the road on her motorcycle by a van driver with more than the usual homicidal tendencies in book five, she sought shelter at the nearby workshop of a bike customising Hell’s Angel called Gleet, on his sister’s farm, with destructive results. I made a return visit to the siblings’ farm two books later. A new reader to book seven might take that crackled stone gatepost as merely a bit of description, rather than a memento of their previous encounter. As was mention of the expertise with a crossbow of Gleet’s morose sister, May…

But, there’s one character who has been notable by his absence from the latest book, and that’s Sean Meyer. He’s been a part of the series—and Charlie’s back story—right from the beginning. And, I confess, that over the course of the series I’ve certainly put him up a number of trees, and thrown the largest rocks I could find at him. He spends almost the entirety of book nine in a coma, and only appears in book eleven in flashback.

Still, readers do ask what’s happened to him. Where is he now? And what’s he up to? I mean, when you’re an ex-Special Forces soldier who’s suffered serious head trauma and realised you want a complete break from life as you know it, what do you do next?

Until recently, I had to say I’d no idea.

But now I know.

And the answer is—something completely different.

After the events in the Middle East and Bulgaria, Sean dropped off the grid. Several military contractors working in Iraq got the idea into their heads that he’d killed one of their own. Not to mention double-crossing a crime lord in Bulgaria with ties to the Russian mafia. The close-protection world in which Sean had always moved with such self-assurance had already become alien to him.

In the back of my mind, I have the idea that Sean is now in the Mediterranean, travelling, sailing, seeing the world notthrough a gun sight for possibly the first time in his life. He’s trying to keep a low profile, to stay off the radar and out of the way of trouble.

(Yeah, like that’s going to last for a guy like Sean.)

And will he ever get back together with Charlie? Well, never say never. I try not to plan more than a couple of books ahead, and there’s nothing to say their paths won’t cross again. It will be interesting to see whose side they’re on, as and when it does, won’t it?

I think I may feel a new story coming on. When I can leave the UK long enough to do the research, of course.

In the meantime, there are always videos like this one available on YouTube—Tristan Mortlock, aka Super Yacht Captain, taking the motor yacht AWOL into a very tight berth in Portofino Harbour in Italy, with the assistance of the harbour authorities, several crew members, and a drone. Enjoy!

This week’s Word of the Week is horripilation, meaning goosebumps—having the hairs on your body stand on end due to fear, excitement, or cold. From the Latin horrere, to stand on end, to bristle with fear, or to tremble, and the Latin pilus, meaning hair.

You can read the fully illustrated version of this blog, and comment on it, over on Murder Is Everywhere.

The post Characters Off Camera appeared first on Zoë Sharp: Author of the Charlie Fox series and the Lakes Thriller series..

A couple of weeks ago, I went up north to do some refurbishment work to my house (the house I own but not where I live—it’s a long story).

What should have been a three-day trip away turned into two weeks—blame the pandemic. You see, when lockdown happened across the UK in March 2020, the construction industry was allowed to continue. Manufacturing, however, was largely shut down. This has meant that all the manufactured materials associated with building, or repairing anything to do with a property, are now in very Short Supply.

Fortunately, I rarely travel anywhere without my laptop, and I also had all my notes for the book on which I’m currently doing structural edits. So, between waiting in vain for things to turn up or be delivered, I was still able to work. The house is furnished, but otherwise empty.

And it has no phone or internet connection.

Because I’ve been away so rarely over the past year, I have around 3Gb a month of data allowance on my mobile phone. Normally, that’s plenty. But, I also have free access to a wi-fi connection when I’m at my desk.

No problem, thought I. People go on writers’ retreats in remote locations all the time, where they luxuriate in the lack of distractions such as phone signal or internet access in order to really get into the creative zone. They come back with oodles written, thoroughly refreshed and relaxed.

Hah!

It seems that I am not one of those people.

I hadn’t realised how often I just nip onto my browser to look up a quick fact, mid-chapter—sometimes even mid-sentence. What I find can often alter what I write, or the way that I write it.

A few examples of questions from my current work-in-progress include:

What headgear is worn by female uniformed police constables in the UK?

What is the minimum and maximum time you can serve in the Royal Navy?

How fast is average walking pace, and how long would it take to walk 1.3 miles?

What make of motorcycles are used by British police motorcyclists?

Is there a flower that symbolises justice?

Who said, “The only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is for good men to do nothing”?

Of course, back when I first started writing, it was pre-Internet, so I collected reference books, dictionaries, and encyclopaedias. It’s rather sad to note that charity book stores in the UK have largely stopped accepting encyclopaedias because everyone has been throwing them out. How things change. Makes me wonder how will we do our research in the future?

–ooOoo–

This week’s Word of the Week is bibliosmia, meaning the act of smelling a book for pleasure.

The post Going Internet Cold Turkey appeared first on Zoë Sharp: Author of the Charlie Fox series and the Lakes Thriller series..