Child of Vengeance

David Kirk on his quest to find the real Musashi Miyamoto

            In Fukuoka prefecture, upon the westernmost island of the Japanese ‘mainland’ Kyushu, stands a dojo hall where men and women practice an art four hundred years old: that of swordfighting. In this particular dojo they study the techniques of Ni Ten Ichi Ryu – the Way of the Two Heavens as One – unique in that it prescribes wielding a sword in either hand, the methods and secrets of which have been passed down through generations, leading all the way back to its progenitor the samurai Musashi Miyamoto.

            It is an art entirely useless in the modern world, but still they practice; because it is an art, because it is Musashi. A kind of ancient and obstinate jazz almost, unloved and irrelevant to most youth today but hammered out in smoky basements on ill tuned pianos nevertheless by the devout that refuse to let it die.

            Perhaps I am being too harsh (on both samurai and jazz): reverence for and interest in their history is more pronounced in Japan than in the west. Musashi himself has a kind of place in the Japanese cultural pantheon similar to the one Robin Hood has in ours, both being roguish legendary warriors. As we know of feats of archery and the Sheriff of Nottingham, so the Japanese know of the man who walked masterless in a time of clan and Lord, who killed sixty men in duels as he sought enlightenment and who wrote a philosophical treatise (The Book of Five Rings) in his dying months that is still studied to this day.

            However Musashi is infinitely more quantifiable than Robin Hood, as we have his writings, his school, his legacy. Though it is sometimes difficult to separate definite objective truth about him from apocryphal elements added through the embellishment/creation of stories over the centuries, at the very least we know some of the way the man thought and felt. Thus the author that chooses to write about him has a broad outline he has to adhere to.

What appealed to me about Musashi was his sense of pragmatism. The classical Japanese culture of the nobles and the samurai was one sodden with ritual, pomp and forced adulation, castle halls ringing with the didactic praise of Lord and Lady by thousands. Sword schools promised unrivalled ability with the blade only through blood oaths and secret rituals. Any outsider unlucky enough to catch sight of such rituals would be killed. Musashi, by contrast, lived in the woods and evoked self-sufficiency as paramount. He said: ‘Here’s how I do it, try it a hundred times. It might not work for you as it does for me. If so, tweak it.’

Yet despite these traits that I admire it is hard for me to see Musashi as a ‘good’ man. In his supposed quest for enlightenment he likely killed much more than ‘only’ the sixty men he formally duelled. In his old age Musashi himself made cryptic remarks about his temperament before the age of thirty being questionable, though states no outright regret or apology. Certainly it seems clear he had an innate predisposition towards violence, or ‘savagery’ if you will, but you cannot portray him as a thoughtless psychopath because that would be patently untrue (as well as making a terrible protagonist).

The instinctive response to this, to me at least, was to assume that he was merely a product of his times and culture. Then you dig deeper and you start to wonder. You remember that he lived in a realm of where two lifestyles were taught. One where monks gently brushed spiders out of their path, refusing to harm even insects, such was the sanctity of life to them. And conversely the samurai preached death, both of their enemies and themselves. Maybe Musashi followed this creed, you think, but then you remember that he renounced the traditional ways of samurai when he chose to wander masterless.

Who was at ‘fault’ here? The society, or the man? Neither? Both?

Exploring this objectively became the main challenge of Child of Vengeance, as well as the planned subsequent novels. Where first I perhaps wanted simply to tell the details of his swordfights, I found the scope of it growing. Examining both internally and externally; though Child of Vengeance remained a story largely told from Musashi’s perspective, the sequel Hours of the Dog (hopefully coming in 2014, 90,000 words in and still only half done...) is far more holistic in nature.

But even so, the protagonist in both books ultimately remains ‘my’ Musashi. It is not a definite biography because there can be no such thing in the English language; the language of the samurai and modern English are so wildly different that the act of simple translation becomes sort of a guessing game, so vague and full of allusions is ancient Japanese. What I know as ‘fact’ could very well be erroneous.

The realization of this is somewhat liberating, as rather than worrying about sticking to some non-existent dogma, you take what he did and run with it, make it work for you  – maybe a little like how Musashi taught the sword. I hope that if I do not always present him flatteringly, I at least present him fairly on his quest for meaning.

After all, the man still has disciples who are really, really good with swords; these are generally not the kinds of people you want to go around pissing off.

David Kirk explores the life and story of Musashi in his debut novel, CHILD OF VENGEANCE, out now.

Guns and Drugs and Other Literary Things

Guns and Drugs and Other Literary Things

By Urban Waite – author of Dead If I Don’t

I’m pretty sure I’m on the FBI watch list. I spend a lot of time researching guns. Looking for the perfect fit. Trying to picture how they’d feel in the hand, the weight, the way the gun bucks and recoils, the smell as the chamber claps open to eject a casing. In the first few days of writing DEAD IF IDON’T I looked over a Ruger handgun, I moved onto a hunting rifle with a telescopic sight, picturing the scene, trying to recreate it and feel the way the character holds the stock to his shoulder, the cold hardness of the rifle pressed close into his cheek. I think about another character holding a pump shotgun in his hand, loose at his side, the matte finish barely visible in the early morning light through a locust thicket in southeast New Mexico.

But the truth is I’ve never done those things. I’ve never looked down at another human being and seen into their future, or more aptly, seen there is no future for them. I try to imagine it. The closest I’ve ever come was when I spent a week walking the shores of Kodiak Alaska, a shotgun on a strap over my shoulder and the big slugger shells loaded up in the belly of the gun. Lead slugs big and dangerous enough to stop a 680 kg Kodiak Bear from charging. Lucky for me I spent most of my time simply walking the shores and watching the cool dark shadows beneath the trees. Waiting and wondering and hoping I would never need to take that shotgun off my shoulder.

I travel a lot as an author and I think this too keeps me on the watch list. I spent two weeks this past January huddled in a tent close to the New Mexico/ Mexico border because I thought it would help me nail down the facts for my novel. I traveled out there from San Diego with a couple friends and to many I’m sure we looked a little strange. The only tent set up in all that wide, open flatness. Simply being there, looking south, waiting with a warm cup of cider steaming in our hands and our hats pinched down close over our brows, watching the thin clouds stream across the sky. It’s a truly beautiful place to write about. But I’m sure people saw us—crouched over a small wood fire, combing charcoal with a stick, our hair wild and unwashed, wearing the same worn pair of jeans all the while—and thought us suspicious. 

I don’t know what it is about the books I write, but they seem to get people thinking I’m actually one of these guys out there smuggling drugs across the border. I’ve spent a good amount of time recently going up to Vancouver, sometimes simply just to go, and the last time to meet up with a director putting together a film based on my first novel, The Terror of Living. It’s a nice little trip for me. Two and a half hours away from my home in Seattle. Easy enough to drive, but better to fly. And of course they keep tabs on me whenever I cross the border. Quizzing me to see if I can remember the last time I left the country and seeing if I can duplicate my story. Often the story changes, I sort of like giving those border agents the run around. Sometimes it’s business, other times pleasure. I wonder what they think of me. All that travel. The drug dogs sniffing at the bag I’m carrying, or running their noses by my shoes. Once even sitting next to me and then moving on again. Of course that’s what they’re trained to do when they smell drugs on you. Sit and wait. Silently saying what everyone is thinking.

Urban Waite’s brand new novel, Dead if I Don’t, set in the gangland territories of the Mexico border, is out now.

The Curious Case of the Trademarked Doctor

By Robert Ryan 

Me and my big mouth. I have to confess that as I sat down to write Dead Man’s Land I had a moment of self-doubt about what I had engineered. I was about to start writing a novel using someone else’s creation. I had never done that before. The central character in Dead Man’s Land is Dr John H Watson, as penned by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle. True, plenty of people had written ‘continuation’ Holmes and Watson stories (heavy hitters such as Horowitz, Dibdin, King, and Chabon among them), but few had tackled a solo Watson. I found the idea daunting. And it was all my own fault.

If we rewind a few months, I was in discussion with Maxine Hitchcock, editorial director of Simon & Schuster, when she said the company were looking for a work of fiction featuring a 'detective in the trenches of WWI'. I said it was interesting idea, but I had a story that took place just before war broke out, which could be continued into the trenches. I gave her an outline and sample of a novel based around a (genuine) Royal scandal and a disgraced detective. We both felt, though, it didn’t quite hit the mark (although, waste not want not, it now forms part of the backstory of Dead Man's Land). So we went back and looked at the original concept. I gave my objections – that any civilian investigator would be difficult to place in the trenches and that most military policemen were charged with tackling desertion and ‘cowardice’ rather than solving crimes. That’s when I opened my big mouth: 'Actually, it would be better if he wasn't a policeman, but a doctor, just behind the lines, a man who might recognize a murder when he sees one. And why not go one step further and make it Dr Watson, who, we are told at the end of His Last Bow, is to rejoin his 'old service'. That would be the Royal Army Medical Corps at that stage.'

Ms Hitchcock didn’t actually say ‘Bingo!’ but it was words to that effect.

In truth, I had been incubating this idea for some years, ever since I stumbled across the fact that Watson had served in WW1 in Jack Tracy’s Sherlockiana encyclopedia. I had hesitated because of my reluctance to take on another man’s character. But, with fresh versions of Holmes on film and TV in the offing, it seemed a judicious time to bring Dr Watson from out of the great detective’s very long shadow.

However, as my agent explained patiently, although the Conan Doyle canon is out of copyright, Dr. Watson has been trademarked (the way Disney trademark Mickey Mouse etc.) by the Conan Doyle Estate, along with Holmes, Moriarty and Professor Challenger. Would this really stand up to legal scrutiny? I wasn’t sure. But the whole Holmes copyright issue is murky – not here but in the USA, where the situation is blurred because of various Holmes movies. The legal representatives of the estate of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle insist that as The Case Book of Sherlock Holmes is still in copyright, which means Holmes himself (and Watson) is protected until 2023. The New York Times described the situation as ‘a tangled web’. I had no desire to get caught up in it.

  

So, it seemed worth getting the estate's blessing to proceed and, after a nervy pitch on the phone and a couple of emails outlining plot and characters, permission was granted to say that Dead Man's Land was officially sanctioned worldwide (including the USA) by Andrea Plunket, Administrator of Conan Doyle Copyrights. It might have been unnecessary, legally and strictly speaking, but it made me sleep easier and also distanced Dead Man’s Land somewhat from the mass of Holmes–related fanfiction on the Internet.

And my misgivings about sitting down to tackle another author’s creation? Well, the breakthrough came when I realized I had dealt with real people before in my fiction – Lawrence of Arabia, Captain Scott, Winston Churchill, Admiral Canaris, Ronnie Biggs and Bruce Reynolds – and I was well aware that many people (especially those who still write letters to 221b Baker St) consider Holmes and Watson to be actual historical characters. That was the approach I would take. Somehow, treating the Holmes stories as if they were genuine reportage by Dr Watson made it more straightforward.  Plus, once I had decided to tell the story in the third person (as was His Last Bow, the story that kick-started this) and not to try and mimic Conan Doyle, the task of getting plot on paper became much more straightforward. That just left the little matter of getting World War One right….

Lee Weeks - On Research

When writing crime, it pays to do your homework

Lee Weeks

There are some stages in novel writing that are a teeny bit exasperating, frustrating, laborious even! But research isn’t one of them. It’s the fun part – maybe because most crime writers are nosy by default; we love getting deep down and dirty in the sediment of things. I was lucky enough to have a nose around one of the Murder squads operating today. I got a foot in the door because my dad was a copper. For most of my childhood he was a detective. He told me:

‘You have to be a good listener to be a good detective. You have to listen to the things people don’t say as well as the things they do.’

Inside MIT11, I was shown around each department and met the officers and civilian staff who worked in it.  I drew diagrams of the layout, jotted down anything that caught my eye and did a lot of listening.

It’s an extra challenge getting a police procedural right because Crime readers are experts on every aspect. You just have to keep up because if you don’t know how to use a smart phone, then you can’t give your cop one. Police work is always changing, adapting to modern crime. The intelligence department has now become a massive part of a murder enquiry team: facebook, mobile phone data, twitter and so on. The Cyber world is impregnated with a seemingly infinite amount of clues for a detective to sift through.

I still use reference books of course, I have several forensic and police procedural books to call on, as well as books on firearms, on serial killers and how to defend yourself against a man armed with a machete! I have a folder on my PC of useful articles I have downloaded from the Internet. I keep a lever arch file for each book I do. When I download an article I print it straight off and file it there. It’s still always better to have a hard copy to flick through now and again and make sure you haven’t missed anything.

Looking through the file now, at the end of writing Dead of Winter, it has become fat with articles on subjects as diverse as growing orchids to intensive care nursing of a coma patient.

Researching locations has become a breeze with programs like Google Earth. When I’m choosing locations, I do as much research online as I can before I actually go to an area to have a look for myself. Just make sure you choose a prime location that you know well. If I want to have my murderer dump a body in the Thames I’d better make sure I know tide times and ferry schedules and accessible slipways because one of my readers will definitely know all that information and more. The internet can give me those facts, but it can’t tell me if the slipway’s downwind from a fish market on certain days or who comes every day to feed the pigeons. There’s no substitute for going there.

I don’t know anyone who can do without the internet now.  It’s an invaluable time-saving tool and has transformed reader and writer alike into instant experts. In the end, meticulous research is always worth it because then you don’t have to waste your imagination on the factual stuff, you can let it loose on the rest. Apply the Iceberg theory and know that for every piece of information visible above the surface, seven-eighths of the story is still below the surface.

Never be afraid to ask an expert but find out as much as you can by yourself before you do so, so that you don’t waste their time. Meet them armed with as much basic knowledge of their job as possible and so free them up to be able to talk past the humdrum and get to the nitty-gritty. People will nearly always be really happy to help you. They like to be thanked in the acknowledgements and to know they had a small hand in making your book great.

See how Lee’s research is brought to life in the gritty new crime thriller, Dead of Winter