Out of the Debauched Sloth

Origin Stories, #1: THE SAMARITAN, Part One

It wasn’t, in fact, my first published novel. (I’ll come to that, but later in the series. Possibly last. The first line of that book, my first-ever sentence in a published novel, is “It ends with a woman, looking into a mirror,” which would be pleasingly recursive. I have a mild hope that I can contrive a way to end my final book with a woman looking into a mirror, for in my end is my beginning, etc.)

It wasn’t even the first novel published with my own name on the cover. (Again, thereby hangs a tale; and again, I’m going to make you wait for that. Sorry not remotely sorry.)

Nevertheless: when I talk about my first book, it’s almost always THE SAMARITAN that I mean. It’s the one you’ll most commonly see listed first in bibliographies and “Also by Chaz Brenchley” lists and so forth; it’s the one people expect to hear about when they ask how I broke into publishing, though I’d actually been making a living as a writer for a decade and more before it finally appeared. There is no norm in publishing, and especially not in authors’ origin stories, but if there is an abnorm, I am it.

I was twenty-three; I had an agent and a track record, but no current contract and indeed no current project. My agent summoned me down to London for coffee and a talk. What did I want to write? I genuinely didn’t know. Well then, what did I read? I read everything, or at least the best of everything. I read Dick Francis (“Cousin Dick” to me, whenever we met, for he had married a Brenchley), but I didn’t want to write about horses. I read John le Carré, but I didn’t want to write spy stories. I read Stephen King and Peter Straub (whom she used to agent, when he and Susan lived in London), but I didn’t want to write horror. (Heh. This became somewhat ironic, later in my career.)

When my list was exhausted, she said, “Have you read Thomas Harris?”

Reader, I had never heard of him.

“Here,” she cried, “take this,” which was a copy of RED DRAGON. She’d agented it in the UK, and it was doing rather nicely, though he wouldn’t become huge in that market until THE SILENCE OF THE LAMBS came out. “Read it on the train going home. I think you could write something like this, an English take on serial killers, you do villains so very well...”

So I did as I was told, and read it on the train back to Newcastle. And adored it, and yes: I too thought I could do something like that, although it would be very, very different.

Okay, so now I had a genre: dark thrillers, right up my street. I had a setting, for all my life was in Newcastle then, all my friends. I knew the city intimately; if I was going to write something contemporary and realistic, it only made sense to fix it there. I didn’t need a plot, because plot is just what characters do. I didn’t need characters yet, because characters emerge from the mood and the setting and the context of the story. What I did need was a hook, a theme, a reason for the book to exist.

So I went for a walk. This has always been my habit, ever since I was a teenage romance writer in my own teens, in Oxford; I’d take the family dogs to the park up the road, walk a lap or two, and think up storylines as I went. In Newcastle and absent the dogs, I just walked. It’s why I knew the city so very well, because I’d walked almost every street and path and alleyway.

Back then, in the early eighties, I had two standard routes that my feet would just follow while my mind strayed all over. One took me left from my front door and uphill, to the hospital grounds; the other took me to the right and downhill, to a long-established graveyard.

On this particular day, I might have taken either. As it happened, I turned left, towards the hospital. If I’d gone the other way, my career, my whole life might have been entirely different.

Whatevs. Left it was, up to the West Road and along to the Victorian edifices and sprawling grounds of Newcastle General Hospital (closed now, alas, and sold off for development, grrr). A stone wall enclosed the grounds, and there was a bus stop right outside the gate. Bus stops in Britain, as often elsewhere, are adorned with large advertisements. At that stop, on that day, there was a poster advertising the services of the Samaritans.

For those of you unfamiliar with this particular institution, it was the UK’s first suicide hotline, founded in the early 1950s by a vicar with the splendid name of Chad Varah. It was and is staffed entirely by volunteers, open to callers twenty-four hours a day, a registered charity funded by donations. It is honestly something of a jewel.

People, I stopped walking. I stood right there, gazing at that poster, while my mind raced; then I turned around and went straight home, and sat up very late that night, very slowly working my way into the mind of a killer, and writing as I went. Two pages, which took me two hours or more; they became the opening of the eventual novel, though that hadn’t really been my intent at the time. Then I went straight from typewriter to bed, and had the nastiest dreams I have ever had in my life. It was truly like someone else was using my head to dream with. Not at all nice, 100% do not recommend, and now I’m always careful to take a break between work and bed, those rare nights that I still sit up writing; but I had my hook, I had my theme, and of course I had my title.

[to be continued: in our next chapter—which will be for paid subscribers only, just a heads-up—the process of writing, the passage of time, the numerous disappointments and the occasional thrill of a writer with an agent and a novel to sell...]