Mersey Mojo
As ‘Moscow Drive’ nears completion and the first three chapters are posted on this site, I wanted to take a moment to say a few words about the novel and how it developed.
Since moving to Liverpool, I have been increasingly aware of its potential as a setting for fiction. This city has everything, locations, humour, darkness and characters abound wherever you are. There is a sense in this city that anything could be possible at any time. So, I knew I would be writing something before long with the city at the heart of the piece.
Dogs Chase Cars came together quickly for a first novel. Although the initial ideas for Harry and Caleb Pink came years before, I wrote the majority of the first draft within a couple of months. This developed over the next three months and it took roughly the same time to revise and edit through Andrew Oberg at Drugstore.
‘Dogs’ had been set in Takoma Park, Maryland partly because I just got a feel for the place when I was based there for a few weeks years ago and partly because my brother lives in the U.S. and I am always fascinated by the vast cultural differences that lurk just below the surface, despite apparent similarities and reference points.
At some point, I will base a novel in Preston, which is, after all my home town. Or at least it was a town before it acquired city status at the turn of the century. I haven’t felt as warm about the place since, it sometimes feels like a town borrowing some big ideas but never quite pulling them off.
Liverpool isn’t like that. It can look any city in the world in the eye and know who it is. This is partly what informs Moscow Drive and the characters that inhabit it.
They are not crushed by small town doubts, although those doubts can make a decent novel too, they are caught up in a city much bigger than them and everywhere they go, there is always someone who knows something you don’t or is ready to drop the bomb.
This novel has a very different feel to Dogs Chase Cars. It is not a cosy, feel good story and nor is it supposed to be. Hopefully, it still supplies the requisite number of laughs and some surprises. The main feature of this book however, should be its pace. Dogs is languid and takes its time to move anywhere because it reflects the character of Harry, whose voice is used to narrate the story.
When I started Moscow Drive, I initially wrote in first person from the perspective of Alex Rifkin. It wasn’t working. I didn’t hear Alex’s voice as clearly as I could Harry’s. I wasn’t inside his head, or he inside mine. The other problem was the sheer number of characters and plot twists needed to achieve what I was looking for. I couldn’t feasibly write this novel in first person. I couldn’t tie the threads to each other in that mode. When I started again and wrote in third person, it freed me to change point of view as often as I needed to tell the story. I really enjoyed the fact that I could get to know each of the characters gradually. This is not Dogs part two, the action is sustained, and people die. Lots of people die. There are somewhere in the region of fifty characters but the story doesn’t hang around in any one place long enough to get to know their inner most thoughts. It isn’t supposed to. Moscow Drive is supposed to be a beach book, a quick read with a fast pace and a shed load, if you pardon the pun, of violence and profanity. It was designed that way. I hope that it still appeals to those who liked Dogs Chase Cars. The hallmarks are still there but the methods have changed. This isn’t a book for those easily offended by “bad” language or extreme violence.
One of the unexpected bonuses of writing in this way is that I feel like my female characters have more substance than previously. I’m thinking here of Judith Barry and Alex’s Nan.
Meanwhile, the sequel to Dogs “The Lost Cause Collective” is 22,000 words in and beginning to take shape nicely. For Harry, Reuben, Lambert and Meg fans I’m hoping it will see the light of day either late this year or very early 2012. There is also a sequel to Moscow Drive in the works and two stand alone novels that are ongoing