Mi Casa, Su Casa: KT McCaffrey

The continuing stooooooory of how the Grand Vizier puts his feet up and lets other people talk some sense for a change. This week: KT McCaffrey (right) on casting fiction.

Casting Characters in Fiction

As a writer, the question I get asked most frequently is without a doubt, ‘Do I base my characters on real people, i.e. acquaintances, or do I conjure them up from my imagination?’ My answers are never as clear-cut as I’d like them to be. I could say that for the most part my characters, as the disclaimer at the beginning of my books claims, are fictitious and that any resemblance to real persons living or dead is purely coincidental. Well yes, that’s the necessary legalistic position, but of course as an observer of the human condition I am influenced by the people I interact with on a daily basis, so it follows that these same people inform the characters that inhabit the pages of my books. In essence my characters are created from an amalgamation of the crowd I hang with, taking various personality traits and physical shapes from each and blending them so that they form a believable whole.
  Only in one instance did I base a character almost entirely on a living person. In my second novel, KILLING TIME, the fictitious character Jacqueline Miller has been involved in a serious car accident that has changed her life irrevocably. Half her face had been badly damaged in the accident, and evidence of cosmetic surgery remained visible beneath the carefully applied make-up; her left eye looks strangely out of line with the right one. In a court case resulting from the accident, Jacqueline is awarded enough money to allow her give up her teacher’s job and to purchase two houses in Leeson Park.
  Here’s the reality: back in 1969, as a student in the NCAD I got to know a Cork-born woman named Lean Scully. She’d been a teacher before a horrific road accident almost brought her life to an abrupt end. The accident had seriously disfigured her and she needed a series of extensive skin grafts to her face. Arising out of the accident and subsequent court case, she received enough compensation to buy two magnificent houses, numbers 49 and 50 in Leeson Park. She opened a public relations practice in No. 49. Sounds familiar? Even though I was just an art student back then she sometimes hired me to design brochures and corporate publications for her clients. The money I earned ended up in the tills of The Pembroke, Toners and The International Bar. Happy days!
  Lean Scully, this woman I was later to morph into the Jacqueline Miller character, kept lodgers in the second house – among them a young American student from Milwaukee named Peter Straub (right), who would become famous many years later for novels like GHOST STORY, THE FLOATING DRAGON, and THE TALISMAN (written with his friend Stephen King). Straub was attending university at the time, struggling to write poetry and studying for a Ph.D. I knew him on a nodding basis and attended a few poetry readings he gave in various pubs popular with us students (The great traditional musician Donal Lunny who, incidentally was a fellow traveller of mine in the NCAD, took up residence at one stage in the same rooms that Peter Straub once inhabited.)
  Throughout the ’70s, ’80s and ’90s I continued to do occasional design work for Lean and was always delighted when she invited me to attend the lavish, boozy parties she threw in No. 49. In 1999, when I decided to write my first book, REVENGE, Lean offered to read the manuscript before I offered it to a publisher. Unlike me, she was one of those people who knew every rule and regulation in regard to the proper usage of the English language. She was aghast at what I’d given her. ‘It seems to me,’ she said in her deep throaty voice, ‘you have a bucket full of commas, semicolons, apostrophes, and all you do is throw them at the page.’ In my defence, the manuscript represent my very first attempt at writing, though there are some people today who claim I’ve still got that bucket. Once Lean had managed to teach me to turn my text into what she called ‘acceptable English’, she enjoyed reading my books. I remember being concerned about giving her KILLING TIME to read, wondering what she’d make of Jacqueline Miller character. To my surprise, she didn’t make the connection. There is of course the possibility that she didn’t want to make the connection on account of the unsavoury actions I had the fictitious character enact in my story.
  Lean loved reading and listening to classical music but her great love, her passion, was for the theatre. She had become a permanent fixture at the Edinburgh Festival, where her support and opinions were taken seriously and greatly appreciated. In contrast, certain well-known theatrical heads in Dublin viewed her as something of a nuisance and dismissed her with rude indifference. When Lean died in 2004, she had the last laugh, taking revenge on those in Dublin theatre land who had subjected her to such shabby treatment. In her will, she directed her executors to sell the two houses in Leeson Park, and after a bequest to a friend and the Carmelite Fathers, the proceeds from the property was to go to the Edinburgh Festival. I understand it amounted to the guts of €5 million. Don’t you just love it?
  During her lifetime, Lean mixed with the movers and shakers, the glamour set, the golden circle, but I was one of only a dozen people in attendance at her burial in Dean’s Grange cemetery. How sad is that? Since her death all my characters have remained fictitious and any resemblance to real person, living or dead, is purely coincidental. Yeah, right ...

KT McCaffrey’s THE CAT TRAP is published by Robert Hale

Mi Casa, Su Casa: KT McCaffrey on Literary Snobbery

A Grand Vizier writes: The motives behind ‘Mi Casa, Su Casa’ are twofold. First, the idea is to give guest bloggers the few molecules of oxygen of publicity Crime Always Pays can provide. Secondly, even we’re sick of listening only to ourselves, and we reckon some new voices will provide fresh perspectives on crime fiction in general, and Irish crime fiction in particular. And so, with minimum fanfare – a tiny tootle there, please, maestro – here’s KT McCaffrey (right) on – boo, hiss, etc. – literary snobbery.

Several years ago, I attended a literary gathering in the Hume Street HQ of Marino Books, my publishers at the time. Being new to the game and greener than spring cabbage, I experienced what I’ve now come to call Literary Snobbery. I should explain that Marino Books – an imprint of Mercier Press – tended to specialise in literary writing with a special emphasis on poetry. As an experiment, Marino, under the astute guidance of Jo O’Donaghue, decided to dip its toe in the mass market segment of the book trade. As I recall, myself and Terry Prone were the first to be taken on board to test this new strategy. Did it work? Well, I was never given sight of the actual sales figures so it’s hard to tell. I do know, however, that given the size of the print run, the exercise appeared to be relatively successful.
  And so it happened that all the Marino authors, staff and associates, were invited to a pre-Christmas get-together to celebrate the success of the year’s output. That particular year, my second crime fiction paperback, KILLING TIME, had notched up impressive sales, edging its way into the bottom half of the Top 10 Irish best-sellers and attracting a handful of laudatory reviews. Damn it, I had arrived. There I was, chin up, back straight, chest out, vol-au-vent in one hand, glass of red in the other, holding my own with the best of them ... or so I thought.
  Three glasses in, I was giving it large with the verbals when a tall female author, well known in literary circles (though I didn’t know that at the time) asked me if I was happy with my publisher. I said yes, in general I was happy, but annoyed that a few typos and spelling mistakes had made it on to the printed page. She seemed surprised at this and asked what kind of books I wrote.
  “Crime fiction,” I replied, my confidence boosted by the intake of wine.
  She looked at me as though I’d just farted in her face and said, “Oh, crime fiction, well of course it doesn’t really matter in that case.”
  For me, this represented the beginning of a steep learning curve in regard to the differing attitudes I’ve since encountered on planet Literati.
  I think it was about this time that playwright, Hugh Leonard, in his Sunday Independent column, bestowed his ‘Gobshite of the Year’ award to all those readers who’d bought copies of Robert James Waller’s THE BRIDGES OF MADISON COUNTY, consigning them to the status of Philistine. Never mind the fact that Clint Eastwood, who may or may not be as bright as Mr Leonard, read the book and liked it enough to turn it into an award-winning film. More recently, in similar vein, game show host Henry Kelly penned an article in which he took issue with all readers who had the audacity to read and ‘enjoy’ Dan Brown’s THE DA VINCI CODE.
  I accept that there are good books and bad books, same as there’s good art and bad art, good music and bad music. Few would argue with that. What gets me is the sheer arrogance and snobbery of those who would presume to chastise the rest of us who succumb to popular culture. I like to think I belong to the Melvyn Bragg ‘broad cultural church’ when it comes to the arts; I love the South Bank Show’s habit of showcasing such various disciplines and artistic divergence as, say, Ian Rankin and J.K. Rowling alongside Mohsin Hamid and Adam Thorp. Unlike some of his contemporary arts commentators, Bragg does not relegate crime writers to the second-division or reject a book simply because it is ‘popular’, ‘a page turner’ or God forbid, ‘plot driven’.
  Is it too much to ask for a little humility, respect and understanding from those who should know better? Yes, of course it is, and besides, what the hell would I have to gripe about if that were to happen? Sorry, did I mention John Banville? – KT McCaffrey

KT McCaffrey’s THE CAT TRAP is published on February 29