Hi Pants,

The notebook and camera approach may not be such a hot a idea if your plot includes a London crackhouse or a Greek military airfield.

Tony

... although you may well gather enough material to write another book that way

Jon

Well... it does include dodgy saunas, a couple of nightclubs fronting as sex dungeons and one or two torture rooms. Hmm, I guess imagination would be best here

Have you considered Pants on Fire as a title for your novel?
Congrats on getting the agent to read the whole thing btw.

cheers Smudger, I spoke with the agent on the phone this week and he thinks it has real potential. I have some re-writes and areas that need fleshing out (hence the thread) but he's keen to see it again. It was a real confidence booster and I came off the phone buzzing and raring to crack on with the story. Never felt that way about editing before!

L

I think JB with his wandering camera has the right idea. I have a novel with New York as a vital part... at first I thought research would be sufficient but realise that a personal visit is essential, even though I have found a site that provided me with loads of photographs of New York, I need to experience the 'beat' of the City, the noises and the overcrowded streets, the music, the laughter and the tears.

So, New York is on my travel schedule as a definite destination.

Len

Like the sound of that Len.
Although for me, I don't think south east London is the place to be wandering around with a camera looking like a tourist!

A reader recently told me 'you've captured the atmosphere of Rome so well, as only a frequent visitor could'.

Nice to know, seeing as I've never been there. I think that imagination and research can fool people, for sure. But I still think that to capture the essential essence of a place in fiction it should be visited. Depends how purist you want to be about it. London was easy to research as it's down the road. I do feel Jerusalem is so alien to me that I couldn't possibly write about it and make it authetic without a visit.

JB

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Pants - ditto for Jerusalem. I think I'll have to be careful when I go next year.

I don't have any problems with looking like a tourist in SE London. Greenwich, for instance, has so many you'd be invisible. I suppose you are thinking of grungier spots - well, where are you thinking of, if it doesn't give away any plot details?, I can't think of anywhere that you'd have problems. As I do homeswaps and think my fellow exchangers need to see the warts-and-all side of South London I'm often hanging around with a camera. People can get the wrong idea of SE London, when the top crime borough is Westminster - ironically enough, tops for tourists, too. I remember once driving a friend through Peckham and New Cross on a summer evening when the locals seemed to be on the street all at once. She was quite nervous everytime we stopped at lights - quite unjustifiably so in my view.

Sheila

Some of us look like tourists wherever we go. Tourists from another planet.

JB

I don't mean to offend anyone who lives in SE London Sheila, that's not my intention at all. However, I live on the edge of a fairly notorious council estate in south London / Kent and I wouldn't want to draw attention to myself too much.
My book is set mainly on the council estates of Lewisham / Plumstead / Bermondsey - the agent I've been talking to is keen for me to introduce a real sense of place.
This was part of his email to me:

I know it is set in London but this was only due to a few references to places. Think how Rankin makes Edinburgh really come alive. If you can do this, you will give the book so much more weight and colour

so it's really a case of taking what I know and experience everyday (I work and travel through S London) and making it stand out that bit more.

L

If you don't take a camera no one will look at you twice. I live down the road from Peckham, and go to college in New Cross. Buy a coffee and a paper and sit outside a pub or on a bench or at a bus stop, with your ears, nose and eyes open. Make what notes you can on the paper as if you're doing the crossword, and remember the rest, at least till you finally get onto a bus to go home. Good training for memory and observation, too. It's an impression that you want and that you can best remember, and only enough concrete references to trigger the reader's imagination to fill in the rest. You can work out maps and street names at home afterwards - they'll be more real to you too then.

Emma

With the the greatest respect, I think you are being overcautious because you don't live in these places. To a South Londoner (which I'm not, although I've lived here for 40 years) Lewisham, Plumstead and Bermondsey are quite different places, although they can be lumped under the 'South London' banner. I've live in Penge, Herne Hill, Selhurst Stockwell,Richmond, Greenwich and Lewisham, and each has its distinctive feel and flavour. I guess what your agent means is that Ian Rankin writes about locations in Edinburgh he's lived in and knows very well. Even Rankin doesn't write about council estates - Rebus's flat,as I recall, is in one of those buldings in the New Town.

I'm a fan of 'The Bill', and am astonished at the breadth of their South Lndon 'patch'. One minute they are chasing villains round the Wimbledon shopping centre, called Centre Court, where I used to take my grandchildren, and the next they are investigating in Docklands, some miles north. There was a watery location tonight I could have sworn was in the East End,where I used to teach. However, a lot of their work takes them into council estates, so I recommend you take a look.

Sheila

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A call to a housing estate is usually prefaced by someone at Sun Hill saying 'There's trouble at the Jasmine Allen', alternating with 'There's a domestic on the Canley'. With such an extensive 'patch', I wonder that they only have two really notorious estates. The 'Jasmine Allen' is, I think, in Morden, not of the same name. The other on looks very like the place where that young Nigerian boy was stabbed in the leg.

I don't know if anyone saw the interview with Elmore Leonard on the Culture Show last week? He said that he never described characters but let it all come out in the dialogue. He also said he never used anything more descriptive than 's/he said' for dialogue. I'm sure this is true of places too - that a sense of place is created in the rhythm of speech, what is spoken about and which minor characters are included to give the flavour of an area. I guess it is also about what the characters eat, drink, wear, and smoke and what kind of smells linger and music sounds in the stairwells. What kind of groups meet at the community centre? What about the street cleaners, traffic wardens and other people that linger about on a daily bases?

I guess the difference between us Sheila is I can't stand the Bill!

But I would recommend Rankin's 'Fleshmarket Close' to see how he really tackles social issues in Scotland today. Rebus doesn't wander around Edinburgh peering through netted curtains like a Tartan Morse. FC is set in and around the deprived areas of Edinburgh and features, among other things, the terrible treatment of asylum seekers placed in a dismal council estate called Knoxland.

I feel pretty strongly that crime fiction is overlooked as form of social documentary and, to be honest, comparing the modern British crime novel to something as episodic and fluffy as The Bill just doesn't do the genre any favours at all.