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Synopsis

It’s 1934, and the decaying London cul-de-sac of Bleeding Heart Square is an unlikely place of refuge for aristocratic Lydia Langstone. But as she flees her abusive marriage there is only one person she can turn to - the genteelly derelict Captain Ingleby-Lewis, currently lodging at No. 7.

However, unknown to Lydia, a dark mystery haunts 7 Bleeding Heart Square. What happened to Miss Penhow, the middle-aged spinster who owns the house and who vanished four years earlier? Why is a seedy plain-clothes policeman obsessively watching the square? What is making struggling journalist Rory Wentwood so desperate to contact Miss Penhow?

And why are parcels of rotting hearts being sent to Joseph Serridge, the last person to see Miss Penhow alive...?

Legend has it the Devil once danced in Bleeding Heart Square - but is there now a new and sinister presence lurking in its shadows?

» Read the first chapter of Bleeding Heart Square by downloading the Penguin Taster here

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Interview

An Unsuitable Job for a Man? by Andrew Taylor

Here are a few traveller’s tips from the exciting world of literary transexuality. Readers who are men will find lots of handy hints. Readers who are women will be able to contemplate some of the many things men don’t understand about women.

One thing I’ve learned the hard way is that if you’re a man who wants to write women characters who are even halfway plausible, you have to listen to what women say. Real women. This is true in two senses. First, and most obviously, you have to listen to how women talk among themselves, when men either aren’t there or are somehow part of scenery. At my Pilates class, for example, I am sometimes the only man among ten women. At first they were a bit wary of me, then I became a sort of token male, then a mascot like Paddington Bear, and now they don’t really notice me as long as I keep my mouth shut.

Just shut up and listen. One evening, I was sitting in the Senior Common Room of an Oxford college, listening to the conversation of three highly qualified, high achieving women. Were they talking about Wittgenstein? The third law of thermodynamics? No. They were having an animated discussion about painting their toenails. Real men, on the other hand, generally chat about manly things such as last night’s football on the telly, lawn-mowers you can actually sit on, transferring memos to your iPhone via Bluetooth, etc.

Incidentally, the differences between the sexes are often discernible in dialogue - and not just in what they talk about, but how: many women speak in the conditional mode, as if cautiously advancing a suggestion or intention in a manner which will allow it to be withdrawn. Men blunder in. Men grunt. Men tend to speak only when they feel they have something to say, not that it’s always worth listening to.

But there’s another way in which I’ve found it’s useful – well, to be brutally frank, vital – to listen to what women say. This is when they mention something concerning one of my women characters. A female member of my family or friends clears her throat and says “Well, Andrew, just a small query about that woman character, but have you ever thought of….” Now if you translate that into Standard English Manspeak that would come out as “I just cannot understand how you can be so stupid as to think that a woman would…” Fortunately, many women have to a fine art the technique of the tactful suggestion, so essential to preserving the fragile shell of masculine self-respect. (Women know instinctively how vulnerable we men are: even Arnold Schwarzenegger is crying somewhere deep inside.)

So, now for a few general observations on writing from the point of view of a sex other than your own. First, it’s often much harder than we anticipate. It’s easy to make the fatal mistake of assuming that because you know individuals of the opposite sex reasonably well, you actually understand how they work. But that’s simply not the case. Men and women live in parallel universes: they overlap, of course, and the degree of overlap varies enormously. But it’s frighteningly easy in fiction to make women behave as men.

The second point is that it’s not just men who suffer from this problem dealing with the other sex’s viewpoint. Women are equally prone to what is either a failure of the imagination or a bit of wishful thinking or both. It’s noticeable that when women write from a man’s point of view, the man in question tends to be sensitive, agonised and frightfully articulate about his feelings. In the world of crime fiction think of Tey’s Allan Grant, Ngaio Marsh’s Alleyn, Sayer’s Lord Peter. Two out of three have nervous breakdowns, which is significant, because it allows them to talk about their feelings, which men, especially the British with their Stiff Upper Lips, don’t usually do in public or even in private. Campion is the most lifelike of those Golden Age heroes, if only because Allingham scrupulously guards his emotional privacy, which is exactly what a public school-educated chap like Albert would have wanted; alternatively perhaps she merely knew her limitations.

Nor is it just the Golden Age authors who give their men those womanly characteristics. Patricia Highsmith’s Ripley, for example, is preternaturally alert to other people, how they act, what they wear. Often you have the sense that a woman is looking out of Ripley’s eyes.

Women often forget that in physical terms the majority of men are only really sensitive about one small area of their body. No prizes for guessing which. Another common source of error is how a character responds to his or her physical appearance. When a real man looks at his reflection in the mirror he tends to like what he sees - that beer belly is [a] sign of maturity, and gosh look at those rippling muscles, not bad, eh? - he tells himself, and after all he knows that women like a man of experience (probably because his mother told him so when she was trying to cheer him up after his first girlfriend dumped him). On the other hand, when a man-created-by-woman is in front of a mirror, there’s none of this glow of confidence. Instead he’s a mass of insecurities: have I cut myself shaving? Is that a spot coming? Is my tie straight?

When men write about women, they often concentrate on externals to remind you of the femininity of their characters: thus breasts, which are invariably large, will bounce; periods flow; you get a lot of information about the inconvenience of wearing tights and having to wax legs. As you’d expect, men are also big on wishful thinking when the women they create are involved in sex. (Women should always remember that it’s hard to overestimate the amount of wishful thinking that men bring to the subject of sex.) The sex itself, when a man’s describing it from the woman’s viewpoint, is generally devoid of humour or tenderness. Emotions of that sort are instantly zapped by the white-hot heat of carnal passion. A man’s women characters tend to admire the sexual organs of their male partners to such an extent that at the moment of penetration an instantaneous orgasm is almost inevitable.

But, as my wife observed when we were talking about how men so often write about women, “But women just don’t think that way.” That’s the key, perhaps: you have to try to find out how the other sex thinks. It’s partly a question of empathy, partly one of research. And of liking. It can be very hard to write well about people you dislike or despise or are scared of. One day I’d like to write two stories, the same one: a set of events seen by a woman who was involved in them, and seen by a man. Finally, in fairness I must say that some of my colleagues approach this whole vexed question from another angle. For sake of completeness and objectivity, I include a useful tip which allegedly comes from another male crime writer. I’m informed that when he wishes to write from a woman’s viewpoint he sits down at his computer wearing women’s underwear, and it puts him in the right frame of mind. I’ve not tried this myself – and it may be one of those things that it’s best not to try at home – but who knows, a man reading these notes may find this simple technique opens the door to a whole new world. I suppose it’s a bit like acupuncture: a bit of pressure here has a miraculous result elsewhere.

More

In Search of Lost Plots by Andrew Taylor

Recently the Cheltenham Festival of Literature asked me to run a workshop on plots, presumably on the assumption that I must know something about the subject since I make my living writing crime novels. But, as many novelists will confirm, the one doesn’t necessarily follow from the other. You can drive a car without necessarily having the faintest idea about how to design and build the mechanics under the bonnet.

Still, the organisers had a touching in faith in my powers so I did my best to assemble a few ideas that I and other novelists have found useful. But the hard truth is this: each novel is a different journey, and each author must make his or her own road map for it – and sometimes this can be done only afterwards, because we may not know our destination when we start.

Plot is a bugbear for many fiction writers, and a common source of writer’s block. Characterization, theme, setting and dialogue seem to flow naturally and often enjoyably. But plot is where the process gets painful. There are no simple remedies – it’s one thing to write a wonderful opening to a story but, to continue it and bring it to a satisfying ending, you need a plot. Your story needs a plot as your body needs a skeleton.

We are often told that there are only a handful of plots in the world – for example, woman meets man, they quarrel, they reconcile. But for a practising writer, that’s just a formula, in this case for Jane Eyre and thousands of other stories…

E. M. Forster famously wrote that: “…a story [is] as a narrative of events arranged in their time-sequence. A plot is also a narrative of events, the emphasis falling on causality.” It’s more complicated than that but Forster does suggest a useful distinction between narrative – i.e., how a story reaches its audience, and how its events are ordered – and the story itself. Most writers think of the plot as a combination of the two: it’s the underlying sequence of events together with how you filter those to your reader. Of course it is inextricably entangled with the other elements in a story.

Some writers plan their plots in detail before they start writing. But too much preliminary planning sometimes sucks the juice out of an idea and results in a bland and flavourless book. Many novelists start writing with only the first few chapters mapped out in their minds and a vague idea of where the story will be going after that. E.L.Doctorow memorably summed up this approach: "Writing a novel is like driving a car at night. You can only see as far as your headlights, but you can make the whole trip that way."

Even crime writers often work like that, though you’d think they of all people would need to know where they were going. But it can be easier to do much of the plotting as you write the first draft, allowing characters, setting and theme to develop a joint momentum with that of the story – and then tidy the result up when you produce the second draft. Reginald Hill, author of the intricately plotted Dalziel and Pascoe novels, once said that the plot is something he puts in afterwards. Some crime writers will tell you they have changed their minds about the identity of the murderer as they neared the end of the book.

Many first novels have overcomplicated plots because their authors are desperate to keep their readers interested. But a good plot doesn’t have to be complicated. It doesn’t even have to be fully resolved. Perhaps the best plots give you the sense that their stories continue beyond the covers of the book. Indeed, Chekhov said that you’ve written your story you should cross out the beginning and the end because “It is there that we authors do most of our lying."

Good comic writing, like good crime writing, needs particularly tight, careful plotting – P.G.Wodehouse wrote and rewrote his books until he felt they were right. Timing and misdirection are both crucial, just as they are for stand-up comedy and conjuring. A plot needn’t be plausible but it does need to aim for internal consistency especially if you’re writing for a print medium. (You can afford to be a little more slapdash if you’re writing for film or TV because it’s much harder for the viewer to pause to analyse what’s happening.)

Memorable plots tend to have elements of surprise and originality. Once you’ve read Flann O’Brien’s brilliantly surreal The Third Policeman, you are unlikely to forget how it ends. Readers like books whose stories come at them from unexpected angles. As John le Carré puts it, "The cat sat on the mat is not a story. The cat sat on the other cat's mat is a story." A predictable plot is dull, however well constructed, which poses a particular problem for writers of genre fiction.
There are no hard-and-fast rules in writing fiction, only guidelines, opinions and suggestions. Few people turn to In Search of Lost Time or The Waves for the quality of their plots; Proust and Woolf provide other attractions. We read Chandler for his language, not his convoluted and improbable plots. A good publisher’s editor would savage the plot construction of Wuthering Heights.

Genius can get away with anything, even technical incompetence. The rest of us need to remember the importance of plotting, where the art of a story becomes a craft. But the important thing that I and many other writers have found is this: that sometimes you have to write the story, letting it find its own rhythms and develop its own themes, before you can find the plot.

Some aspiring writers try to plan their plots beforehand with elaborate flow-charts with coloured felt-tips, or special computer programs (Plot Your Own Bestseller Today!), or meticulously organised leather-bound notebooks. If that works for you, fine. But all this preliminary “plotting” can amount to little more than an elaborate excuse not to sit down to the sheer hard graft of writing your story.

When in doubt, start writing and see where it takes you. Writers don’t spend their time constructing plots. Writers write.

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