The Rise of the Little Guy

(A tip of the hat to Warren Clarke—1947-2014)

Picture this: You have finished your novel, and as the euphoria evaporates, the publishers say, “How about a sequel?” By now the euphoria has been sucked into the stratosphere because … you haven’t the faintest idea what to write next.

What does the honest writer do? He lies.

“No problem. I have this great idea.”

Just don’t ask me what it is.

Occasionally I get cornered into speaking on creative writing to a readers/writers group. Churl that I am, I agree to this with bad graces, wondering why—and what I have to tell them boils down to just three things:

1. You are always told to write about what you know. But first you have to ask ‘what do I know?’ And it isn’t dates, times and places … it’s thoughts and feelings and rather than looking at creating a factual accuracy you need to find what Eliot called the Correlative Objective, that is, a form and style that will let you record those thoughts and feelings in an otherwise foreign context.
2. Cancel your Twitter and Facebook accounts. Mindrot. Every word you type on those sites is a waste of a word you could be writing “for real” and just serves to make Fukkerberg and Muskrat richer.
3. No minor character is ever wasted if you’re doing it right. You “inhabit” all of them.

Now—back to the point.

The “great idea” hardly ever lands on your head as though St. Job, the guardian angel of novelists, had just lobbed down a sabot from heaven. It takes some diligence. What I have done many times, and my new novel Moscow Exile is no exception, is look back at earlier books and look at the minor characters, wondering what potential I might have missed, what loose thread is there waiting to be pulled—in part, diligence notwithstanding, this is a quasi-unconscious process.

Thirty years ago I’d all but finished my first Troy novel, Black Out, and the last fifty or so pages didn’t seem to be working. There was no one to bounce Troy off. The face and voice of a great English actor was orbiting in my mind—Warren Clarke, who’d come to prominence in Kubrick’s A Clockwork Orange (1971) after spell in the UK’s longest running soap, Coronation Street. He was also the star of one of my favourite spy dramas, Sleepers (1991), written by Andrew McCulloch and John Flanagan. (Note to any Hollywood producer who might be reading this … Sleepers cries out for the big screen). Warren Clarke became Eddie Clark—a miserable, short, stout Brummie, assigned as a driver/ translator in Berlin after WW2, who “makes life interesting” with a second strand as a black marketeer.

I promoted Eddie in the second Troy novel, Old Flames, as Troy’s sidekick at Scotland Yard, and there for some hundreds of thousands of words he remained, making perfect coffee, dishing up the panettone and trying very hard never to leave his desk. In the 2010s, I forget when exactly, I wanted to start a new series based on a reluctant spy, Joe Wilderness—conman, burglar, smuggler, putting all those talents at the service of MI6 simply because the alternative was prison. Yet … I didn’t want to separate it wholly from the Troy series and the obvious way to create a sense of continuity was to promote Eddie, yet again, to Wilderness’s sidekick in Then We Take Berlin. He’s still there. Miserable as ever.

Three Wildernesses on, the same question was asked, “How about a sequel?” Fair question—not as fair as “Would you like a cheque for $3,000,000?” but OK. 

If there’s such a thing as a cliffhanger (literal in the original Italian Job), then perhaps I invented the bridgehanger when I left Wilderness on the bridge of spies in Berlin with a bullet in his back at the end of Hammer to Fall. And I did so with no thought as to what happened next. Big mistake, you might say.

But soccer came to the rescue—World Cup, European Cup, I neither remember nor care (I will do anything to escape soccer). Escape wasn’t easy. My village held a street party to watch Italy kick the crap out of England and they held it right outside Il Barrino, so a retreat to the bar with a bottle of Podere 414 Morellino and a bowl of olives was impossible. I went home to the necropolis, sat at Qwerty, wondering howdafukkdoidothis? How to create a backstory that would take Wilderness to the bridge and beyond to a sequel?

Another minor character began to orbit—Charlie Leigh-Hunt, old schoolfriend of Troy’s, who first appears in Old Flames. Charlie was a laconic, sophisticated, promiscuous, spendthrift charmer whom I had made defect to the USSR in A Little White Death. Logically, Charlie, by 1969 (the setting of Moscow Exile), would be wallowing in Russia and vodka. I decided against that … any more would be a spoiler. 

The trick, as such, would be to merge Charlie’s story with Wilderness’s and with Troy’s and create the backstory that leads to them meeting in Moscow. This takes roughly half the book. Risky, to put off Wilderness’s appearance in his own series for over two hundred pages, but I was happy with it. After all I’d done this before in A Lily of the Field. 

You may well ask, “Isn’t this against the rules?” And I’d reply, “What rules?” and point out that the title refers to both Charlie and Wilderness. Along the way I created Coky Shumacher and Bob Redmaine, both new to my novels. I hope you think they’re worth two hundred pages. If so, and you persevere, you will find Wilderness a little further on. You’ll also find Troy, the third Moscow exile, but he’s not a policeman anymore. I have slowly introduced Troy into the Wilderness series for a simple reason—I want no one to think I’ve abandoned him.

As Larry Sanders used to say, “No flipping.”

About Moscow Exile by John Lawton:

In Moscow Exile, John Lawton departs from his usual stomping grounds of England and Germany to jump across the Atlantic to Washington, D.C., in the fragile postwar period where the Red Scare is growing noisier every day. 

Charlotte is a British expatriate who has recently settled in the nation’s capital with her second husband, a man who looks intriguingly like Clark Gable, but her enviable dinner parties and soirées aren’t the only things she is planning. Meanwhile, Charlie Leigh-Hunt has been posted to Washington as a replacement for Guy Burgess, last seen disappearing around the corner and into the Soviet Union. Charlie is soon shocked to cross paths with Charlotte, an old flame of his, who, thanks to all her gossipy parties, has a packed pocketbook full of secrets she is eager to share. Two decades or so later, in 1969, Joe Wilderness is stuck on the wrong side of the Iron Curtain, held captive by the KGB, a chip in a game way above his pay grade—but his old friends Frank and Eddie are going to try to spring him out of the toughest prison in the world. All roads lead back to Berlin, and to the famous Bridge of Spies…