I read it, enjoyed it, and contacted the author - I wanted to be well briefed before discussing the book with Caroline. I didn't want her telling me I had got it all wrong. I was also hoping I might learn something of use for my own efforts in the fiction department. Mr Rigby was sympathetic to my situation, and provided the following answers to my questions, for which I am very grateful.
Harry
Vos, your amateur detective is a rounded character with lots of life
experience. How did you get to know him?
His name was my starting point. I saw it in a newspaper
and thought it was a good mixture of a very English sounding first name and a
Flemish / Dutch sounding surname. Because I’ve holidayed in the Flemish area of
Belgium quite a bit, I decided to base him there. I thought it would be good to
have a man in his sixties as the central character, retired (like me) and not a
professional crime investigator. That way I don’t have to learn about police
procedural stuff. I can just allow Harry to make it up as he goes along (as I do!).
I had a strong idea of his character from the start (unlike the plot which
unrolled as things developed). Basically I envisaged a solid man but with a
number of strong character traits. He’s dogged, stubborn, gets annoyed quite
quickly and can defend himself if he needs to. But he knows when he needs help
from others - such as Katerine and Ryck.
Shoreline has a distinctive sense of place and
gives the reader something of a tour of Flanders. How did you create such
convincing locations for the action? And why Belgium?
Having holidayed over a number of years in Brussels,
Brugge, Gent, Antwerp and Leuven, I picked up a bit of a feel for Flanders and
felt reasonably confident about basing the book there. Harry lives in a small
town called Heist-op-den-Burg. A few years ago I visited the town with a friend
(when we were staying in Antwerp) to watch the local football team playing
Aalst. I thought it was an appropriate location for Harry. I think his heart is
still in Antwerp where he lived until his mid-teens. But then there were
particular reasons why the family moved away from the city to a rural area.
Heist fitted the bill for their new location.
Flanders is small enough to be able to move round quite
quickly from city to city so it allows for rapid changes of scene. Having
written the book in draft, I visited a number of specific locations including
the beach, near De Haan, (where the body of Moise, the migrant, is found) and Zeebrugge
where the character Rodenbach is based, to get a better feel for these places.
I made some changes to the draft as a result of these visits.
I haven’t been to the Matonge area of Brussels, which
features in the book, but I found some useful information via the internet on
this part of the city.
The
plot is contemporary and highly believable. How did you research the African
end of the story?
When I started writing Shoreline, I didn’t know much about people smuggling – other than
what I’d read in the papers. I did my research online for this aspect of the
book, firstly to get a clearer idea of how smugglers operate and secondly to
improve my knowledge of the Democratic Republic of Congo. I decided to focus on
the DRC for this part of the story, because of the colonial link with Belgium
and all its implications. I gathered quite a lot of information on geographical
and historical aspects of the country, the languages and the mining. Then it
was a question of what to use in the book in order to assist the story, without
overloading the reader with too much detail.
Do
you have a regular writing regime or do you write when the mood takes you? Do
you always write in the same place, or can you write anywhere?
It’s a regular routine. I write between two and six in
the afternoon – not the whole four hours, I hasten to add, but probably two to
two and a half hours. I write four or five afternoons each week. I always sit
at the dining room table and write straight onto the laptop, with breaks for
cups of tea and newspaper reading. My typing is fairly slow but it’s about the
same speed as my thinking! I sometimes work with music on – but only
instrumentals, nothing with words as that’s too distracting. I very
occasionally write in the morning but never in the evening. (I’d never get to
sleep if I wrote in the evening.)
Harry
Vos has a fondness for Belgian beer and strong coffee. Which is the greater
help to your own creative process, beer or coffee?
I have a great fondness for both! But I don’t drink
either when I’m writing. The reward for finishing the afternoon’s writing will
be a beer (Belgian or otherwise) – but only when it’s a drinking day. I have a
coffee or sometimes two every day, but this is always in a café. For some
reason I never drink coffee at home. So basically it’s tea that keeps the
writing going.
The
story has a wide variety of characters, male and female. How do you come up
with your characters’ names? Do you ever change a name as the character
develops?
As I mentioned earlier – Harry’s name came from a
newspaper article. The other names are the fruits of researching Flemish first
names and surnames. I made a long list of possibles and then selected from
that, trying to match the name to my idea of each character. I do sometimes
change names part way through. (Thank goodness for the ‘find’ facility on the
laptop.) The change is generally because I’ve come across a better name in my
readings / viewings / travels.
Plot,
character, setting, theme, and genre: which do you start with?
I usually start with a main character and a setting. With
both Harry Vos in Shoreline and Ellis
Landsman in Darkstone, I thought
about their character traits and how they would react in specific situations. I
knew what the setting for each book would be before I started writing. I always
like reading books with a strong sense of place and try to create this in my
writing.
For Shoreline,
I knew it would start with the discovery of a body on the beach but I hadn’t
planned what would happen after that! I decided fairly quickly to focus on
people smuggling, partly because it’s such a high profile issue.
I don’t really think specifically about genre. But the
murder mystery genre must appeal to me instinctively and it’s a good way of
building a framework for the plot. Having said that, my third book, Disconnected, which I’ve just finished
writing, is not a murder mystery.
I’ve left plot until last because I find it the most
difficult. I learnt on my creative writing course that you should have a begin,
middle and end clearly in mind before you start to write and that this helps to
develop a plot outline.
As I don’t do this – I have to try and work out the plot
as I go along and then go back and re-work it where necessary. I do quite a lot
of walking and find these times very helpful for working out plots and solving
plot difficulties.
Will
we be able to read any more of Harry’s dangerous investigations? Any chance he
might come to the UK?
I deliberately added the wording “A Harry Vos
Investigation” to the front cover of Shoreline,
because then I knew I’d have to write at least one more! I’ve got some ideas for
book two in my head – but not quite a plot yet. As Harry’s daughter Kim lives
in London, he may very well come to the UK, but the story won’t be set there.
