Digression alert: this post may have absolutely nothing to do with crime fiction. Then again (see para 3) it may touch on it now and again.
Truth and lies. It’s a truth not at all universally acknowledged – certainly not by me – that writing fiction is a licence to tell lies in print. My theory is that fiction is a way of telling truths in a palatable way that might make people listen. And lies are not the same as fantasy. There has to be intent to deceive, either for personal protection or gain, or with some malign intention.
So fiction is fantasy rather than lies. It doesn’t have to involve swords and sorcery in order to fantasise. Romance fantasises about happily-ever-after endings. Crime fiction fantasises about cosmic justice; the basis of the genre is the triumph of good over evil, even if the bad guys don’t get their just deserts by rule of law.
On the other hand, when I’m told I have to lie about myself publicly (people do read this blog, don’t they? It is available to anyone who knows where to look for it?) for the entertainment of others, I’ll go along with it, with no malign intention whatever.
More interesting stuff about the nature of lying: one theory is the closer you stay to the truth, the less chance there is of being found out. Maybe.
So when the warm, witty and wonderful Jeff Cohen told me I’d been invited to lie through my teeth twice, then tell the truth once, I decided to stay as close to the truth as I could on all three occasions.
The things is, all three of the statements attributed to me on Monday are true. But the first two aren’t entirely true. They both happened; they just didn’t happen to me.
The Vegas story: we were in a slow-moving queue for the restaurant in some casino or other; eating at the casino is cheap, as long as you can resist the machines you have to walk past to get to the food. The queue came to a halt, leaving me beside a franchise selling silver and turquoise jewellery. I can resist the machines (we were only in Vegas because that’s where the Grand Canyon flight took off) but I’m a sucker for silver and turquoise. I bought a ring, and the change included a handful of quarters. Well, it would; this was Vegas.
My daughter, much younger then, has always had a healthy curiosity; she wanted to see what would happen if she fed a couple of quarters into one of the machines. I succumbed. The ring wasn’t expensive.
What did happen was a stream of silver coins poured out of the machine. Not a major, tomorrow-I-tell-the-boss-what-I-really think-of-him jackpot, but a jackpot nonetheless. It overflowed one of the convenient plastic pots the casino supplied, and to me that says jackpot.
So I didn’t win the jackpot in Las Vegas, but my daughter did. I’m sure there’s a plot in there somewhere. Please, passing crime writers, make free with it.
The soap character is also named after… my daughter. She has an unusual name; I’ve only ever met one other in real life, thought it does pop up in fiction now and again. Most recently in a delicious crime series. But I won’t contravene the Data Protection Act by revealing that name and exposing her to public view.
Here’s the story: I knew this guy when I was at university; and many, many years later his name popped up in the scriptwriting credits of a popular soap. I checked it out and found it actually was the same guy, not just someone with the same name, and a little while later we had a long catch-up lunch, during which we exchanged news of the families we’d acquired along the way. Including my daughter’s unusual name.
A year or so later (they plot storylines a long time ahead) up popped the new character: a mischievous five-year-old. With my daughter’s name. Although the scriptwriter would never admit it.
The birthdays? Yeah, that’s true. Even the Cardassian. Marc Alaimo. Played the evil Gul Dukat in Deep Space Nine. Not really something to brag about, but he did get his just deserts, courtesy of cosmic justice (in this case you could say literally) rather than rule of law.
