Today's guest blog is by Mark Wright who was born in Leicestershire and worked in
the music industry before changing career to become a Private Investigator.
He retrained in 1989 and spent the next twenty years in the mental health and
probation services in the UK.
The origins of my Bajan
detective, Joseph Tremaine Ellington and the genesis of Heartman were born on a
different continent. In the autumn of 2003 I had travelled to New York and then
took a flight on to the state of Louisiana and New Orleans. The two American
cities could not be more different. Manhattan feels huge and modern, it is an
iconic place and even after visiting on numerous occasions, amongst all the
wonder of its skyscrapers and iconic municipal buildings, I still find its
vastness intimidating and impersonal. New York has always given me the ‘Joe
Buck’ – Midnight Cowboy kinda of feeling.
Like I was a fish out of water
in a city way too fast for me. New Orleans is the polar opposite. Its French Quarter
to this day still has back streets that, when you walk down them, give off the
aura of bygone, hedonistic southern times. Live oaks, palms and Cyprus moss
hang from the ornate balconies of the veranda gardens of elderly buildings.
There is heady tropical scent that permeates every part of the quarter and whether
it be dusk or dawn you get a strong and eerie feeling that the ghosts of the
American civil war are never more than a hairs breath away from you as you are
drawn along its time worn sidewalks. Both New York and New Orleans have seen
there fair share of crime over the years and crime writers have took
inspiration from the mutually seedy criminal underbellies that can be found in
both cities. This old port town on the edges of the Gulf of Mexico with its
creepy aura and timeless feel helped me to create the foundations of my book, Heartman.
I found my inspiration in the
Abbey Bar in Decatur Street in the French quarter. J T Ellington was born on a
real hot day and in a heavy storm that was hitting New Orleans one Tuesday
afternoon in September 2003. Outside the streets ran with rain and I was happy
to be sitting out of the downpour with a long necked bottle of ice cold Dixie
beer which had been served to me by a diminutive but hard looking Louisianan
bar man who was sat across the bar from me dressed in a grubby white vest and who
was happily reading a Harry Potter hardback. Brownie McGhee’s Good Morning
Blues was playing on the juke box and I had a copy of James Lee Burke’s Neon Rain for company. On my travels I’d
always took a couple of Burke’s Dave Robicheaux crime novels along for the ride
and now in New Orleans, home state of my favourite crime writer it seemed only
fitting to be reading one of his books. But in that New Orleans bar, rather
than read, I found myself writing.
I seem to remember that the
bare backbones of Heartman’s story came to me quickly, a flash of inspiration
that was born more from the copious amounts of Dixie beer I was drinking than
through artistic endeavour. I wrote my ideas in pencil, in the back of a small
black day to day diary that I’d been carrying in the back of my rucksack. I
wrote for a good hour, and forged from my booze-addled imagination what was to
become my wily Bajan inquiry agent. I
called him Ellington after the great jazz musician, Duke Ellington and I set
the story in my home town of Leicester. Outside the rain had stopped, I knocked
back the rest of my Dixie, put the diary back in to my bag then walked out of
the bar into the sunshine and then quickly forget about J T Ellington...
Just less than ten years later
in the spring of 2011 the idea of Heartman
came flooding back to me. I’d enrolled in a creative writing course at
Leicester University, tutored by the brilliant Guardian columnist, Damien G
Walter. I took the bare bones of my book to him in screenplay form and Damien
advised to restructure it, telling me it had the makings of a good novel. I began
work in earnest, thrashing out the first draft in around four weeks, Heartman’s
original title was; Rock a Bye Blues.
After lengthy research I’d decided that Bristol rather than Leicester was a
more historically expansive city for Ellington and my story to exist in. In May
2011 I pitched the book to literary agents, David Headley, Broo Doherty and
Camilla Wray at the ‘Pitch to an Agent Slot’ at Crimefest in Bristol. All three liked
it, all three asked to see more. During my first Crimefest experience I was
lucky to be introduced to my wonderful literary agent, Philip Patterson of
MARJACQ Scripts. Phil took Heartman away
with him and in September of that year kindly offered me representation, the
rest, as they say... is history.
I write in the first person,
through Ellington and the voice of Heartman
is very much of its time. The book is set in 1965 and I hope the mores of the
era are captured authentically. In a literary sense I have been influenced by
the writing of Ross MacDonald, Dashiell Hammett and Raymond Chandler and of
course I tip my hat to the brilliant LA Noir crime writer, Walter Mosley. But
despite those great influences I hope readers of Heartman will see J T
Ellington as being a character that stands out very much on his own. He is not
super human, he is a man who struggles with self doubt but at the same time on
the street, has an out ward cocky confidence that hides insecurities. He is plagued
by the demons of his past and misses the Caribbean life that he has been forced
to leave. Ellington is Barbadian, an ex colonial police officer, and a man with
secrets who is barely existing in a country he really does not want to live in.
The sense of prejudice and
hostility to both Ellington’s colour and his past as a disgraced police officer
permeate through the book. This was deliberately structured from my early
drafts and I hope has added to my detective’s personal sense of social and
cultural isolation. As a character, Ellington has lived with bigotry and
intolerance for as long as he can remember and this is reflected within the
book. The ugly face of racism in the 1960’s in Britain towards the immigrant
population is never far away in Heartman and its unwelcome presence will be a
reoccurring theme in my future Ellington books. To recognise and address such
truths within my stories is both important to me as a writer and I hope it
keeps the books grounded in both social and historical fact.
Telling it how it is (or was
back then) is something I know would dearly matter to my man J T... and I’d be
a damn fool to upset him.
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The trailer for Heartman can be seen below -
Heartman by M.P. Wright is published by Black & White
on the 1st July 2014, price £7.99 in paperback original
You can follow M P Wright on Twitter @EllingtonWright or on Facebook.
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