lying for a living

Shepherd’s Bush tube station in London is set to close for refurbishment. Transport for London says the improvements are necessary; commuters are griping because the station will be closed for eight months. The station, in the middle of a busy shopping and residential area in west London, can definitely stand a facelift. It may have looked spiffy in the 1920s, but today it’s scuzzy around the edges. Still, I feel nostalgic about the place.

When I was researching Kill Chain, the Husband and I spent several days tromping around London with a tube map and a camera, scoping out settings for the book. We rode the Underground extensively, checking out the layout of stations above and below ground. I don’t want to include spoilers here, so I’ll just say that we did all the things normal tourists do when riding the tube. We checked to see how easy it would be to vault the turnstiles if one were being chased by a psychotic hitwoman, for instance. And whether the escalators lend themselves to being used as a slide, in an emergency. And we investigated where on a tube platform it would be possible to hide, and how to keep from being seen by CCTV, convex mirrors, and the transport police. We worked it all out in detail.

We’re lucky we weren’t arrested, or worse.

Here are a couple of photos I snapped on the expedition. This one was taken from the entrance to Shepherd’s Bush tube station, looking across the green. Seeing the police van reminded me that perhaps I shouldn’t ask my husband to time me as I sprinted down the stairs, wearing a heavy backpack and clutching a small electronic device with a button I kept depressing.

And here’s BBC Television Centre, at White City, one stop up the Central Line from Shepherd’s Bush. It gets a mention in the book. No sign of any journalists… maybe they were all inside walking through raspberry jam.

Sometimes I just love this job.

The Guardian is my new favorite newspaper. Saturday’s review:

Gardiner is brilliant at making the over-the-top seem utterly convincing. Her heroine, Evan Delaney, is a paragon for our times: tough, funny, clever, brave, tireless and compassionate. In the very readable Kill Chain, she chases round the world to save her father from kidnappers, and is pitted against worthy opponents - especially the pair of chemically altered whores with the bodies of children but “eyes stained with age”. The pace and inventiveness never flag, and the climax, which takes place in the terrifyingly impersonal container depot in the port of Los Angeles, is both nailbiting and moving. But the brilliant writing is what puts this thriller way ahead of the competition. As Delaney sprints across central London to rescue 11-year-old Georgie from a horrific fate, she notices a neighbourhood “like a scene from Peter Pan, brick Georgian buildings with dormer windows along the rooftops, from which children should fly away, first star to the right and straight on till morning”. Reading the fifth Evan Delaney book first is not a problem, but you’ll probably want to go back and read the others. Intelligent escapism at its best.

Joanna Hines

Okay, time to go dunk my head in the back-to-normal bucket.

Just back from Palo Alto. About to fall face down on keyboard. Mission debrief will have to wait. More later.

From My Weekly magazine:

“The action is high octane from the first page…Meg Gardiner is a class act at the top of her game. Once you pick it up, it’s a very hard book to put down.”

I’m still at the writers’ special ops ninja weekend, but have taken a break from the assault course to read my email. Two more reviews for Kill Chain:

“A rattling good read” - News of the World

“If you like Sue Grafton and Janet Evanovich you ought to have discovered Gardiner by now. She hard boils her American crime with the best of them. Here, her PI heroine Evan Delaney is pitched into a very personal fifth assignment that’s too close for comfort. When her father disappears, Evan learns he was involved in something very dangerous. Now she’s a target for a killer. Brilliant.” - Peterborough Evening Telegraph

Kill Chain has just come out in paperback, and I’m particularly happy about two things. First, the changes to my text, which an overeager proofreader had inserted into the hardback galley proofs at the last minute (and which I worried about here), have now been fixed. Thank you, Hodder & Stoughton.

Second, it’s gotten a string of pleasing reviews, including this one in the Sunday Express:

“The feisty Evan Delaney makes a welcome return in Kill Chain, Meg Gardiner’s fourth thriller. This time it’s Evan’s own father who disappears, as she looks for clues Evan hits trouble. She is attacked, her assailant ends up dead and transpires to be a federal agent – Evan has no choice but to take her search for her father on the run. As ever, the plot is pacy and tight.”

Fifth thriller, but I’m not complaining.

In Kill Chain the methamphetamine abusers have a really rotten time, because meth abuse is not funny. But this is: Meth Addicts Demand Government Address Nation’s Growing Spider Menace.

(From The Onion, of course.)

Also known as “Violence and double standards” or “Did you hear what you just said?”

On an escalator in the London Underground the other night, movie posters for Smokin’ Aces were posted every three feet. They had a cool edge, and quotes from reviews in blood-spatter red. We passed “Outrageous violence!” and then “Mayhem!”

I shook my head. “Is this what public entertainment is being reduced to? Ads now actually brag about a film’s gory violence?”

I don’t know whether I sounded more snarky or self-righteous. My husband gave me a look that said You have got to be kidding.

“Tell me again,” he said, “exactly what is the shout line on the front of Kill Chain? ‘Guns, hookers, money…’”

I couldn’t back up fast enough. I mean, hey, I was on an escalator, with my foot now jammed deep in my mouth. “No. ‘Hookers, guns and money.’ Totally different.”

The escalator dumped us into the Tube station. He walked away laughing.

“And it says, ‘Everybody pays.’ See, that’s narrative. With a moral,” I said.

The moral being, when you write commercial crime fiction, self-righteousness about how it’s marketed is unbecoming and unworthy.

And snark bites back. In atonement, I’m giving it up for Lent.

Further to the post below, about how every reader pictures the characters in a novel differently, daveg asks:

if someone played Evan well in a film, really nailed the character, do you think *then* that it would affect the way you write about her in the future? Is she enough a part of you that you could still ’see’ her the way you do now?

Authors handle this issue differently. Tom Clancy complained when Harrison Ford was cast as Jack Ryan, because he saw his character as a younger man. (Though Ford is by far my favorite Ryan.) Sue Grafton, who wrote for television before becoming a novelist, didn’t want Kinsey Millhone brought to the screen, precisely because she feared that Hollywood would mess up her heroine.

Michael Crichton, on the other hand, revised his narrative to accommodate a successful screen casting. (Spoiler alert for the three people on the planet who haven’t read Jurassic Park.) In the book, mathematician Ian Malcolm dies. In the movie - the fabulously successful movie - Jeff Goldblum’s Malcolm survives. So how did Crichton handle this discrepancy when he wrote the sequel The Lost World? By completely eliding the events of the first book. Malcolm walks into the plot, still talking fractals and women and dressed in black. He notes as an aside that he’d been injured down at DinoDisney, and that there was even a rumor in some quarters that he’d died. Good, that’s sorted, then. Bring on the raptors!

Which brings me back around to my characters. I live with these people day and night for many, many months at a time. I see them, hear them, try to know them. And, frankly, I’m possessive about them. I want them to be mine, all mine.

But I can’t. And it’s actually good to hear others’ opinions about your characters. Because one of the dangers for any author is that characters will become static - that they won’t change. Characters who don’t change become one dimensional. Character development is a good thing.

Time out while I write that down and post it above my desk. Character development is a good thing! GOOD thing!

Long way round to the answer: I’ll always see my characters my way, but through feedback I hope I can see into them more deeply. If an actor helped me do that, more power to ‘em.

The Winnipeg Free Press reviews Kill Chain, astutely gloriously kindly calling it “a hit” that’s “begging to be made into a movie.” The reviewer adds:

You just want to see what Rachel Weiss could do as Evan Delaney, a Santa Barbara freelance journalist whose father has gone missing.

Rachel Weiss is awesome. And not just because of her great work in The Mummy. But this is the first time I’ve heard anybody say that they see her as Evan. I’ve heard people mention Sarah Michelle Gellar and Keira Knightley. (Which gives us gals who fight mummies, vampires and ghost pirates. Should I like this trend?) I’ve heard Sandra Bullock, in her Speed incarnation. And I’ve heard Sarah Connor, or rather Linda Hamilton, from the Terminator movies.

This is all great. Because, of these fabulous women, not one is the Evan of my own imagining. That’s the wonderful thing about fiction - after I write the book, readers do creative work of their own, and imagine the world of the novel fresh in their own minds. So Jesse Blackburn is crystal clear in my head, and he’s not Christian Bale or Jude Law - but he is to some readers. Likewise Phil Delaney is not exactly Mark Harmon or Sam Elliott. Yet he is.

Everybody has their own mental cast list. And everybody - everybody - has their own personal family edition of the nosy, bossy, obnoxious relative. The world, I’ve learned, is rife with Cousin Taters.