A Hundred Thousand Dragons

The big news of my week is that copies of my new book, A Hundred Thousand Dragons turned up. Yo! Much Rejoicings! It’s actually published on the 27^th May.  I knew that, and didn’t think there was any reason why it shouldn’t be out by then, but it’s terrific to hold the actual book itself.  It all seems a lot more real, somehow, when you’ve got the “proper” book in your hand.

Dragons is a little bit different from Jack’s earlier adventures because Jack himself is the focus of the mystery.  In one way that seems like a dumb thing to say, because, off the top of your head, you’d think that the detective always has to be the hero, right? A “rule” of literature is – classic literature, that is – that the hero/heroine/main character has to be changed by their experiences by the end of the book.  Jane Austen’s Emma, Hamlet, David Copperfield etc. (insert a famous literary character of your choice here)  are all changed in some way.  Perhaps they’re older, sadder, wiser, married or dead, but they’re certainly changed.  It’s all very satisfying for the reader as we accompany Elizabeth Bennet, say, through her various vicissitudes and, as Oscar Wilde would say, in that wonderful two-edged way of his, “The good end happily and the bad unhappily.  That is what Fiction means.”

However, when it comes to serial characters, there’s a hitch.

Serial characters, such as Sherlock Holmes (and thanks to Dr Watson for his observations last week) Hercule Poirot, James Bond, Bertie Wooster, Richard Hannay and Fu Manchu have to be more or less whole and entire for their next excursion.

If Elizabeth Bennet decided to ditch Mr Darcy and have another go at the matrimonial stakes we’d think a) she was off her chump (especially if Colin Firth is Mr Darcy) and b) short-changed by Pride and Prejudice. Hercule Poirot dreamed of jacking in detection and growing vegetable marrows; Agatha Christie was far too fly to let him have his own way.  When he did escape to the country in The Murder of Roger Ackroyd? she gets him in back in line pretty sharply when the aforesaid Roger turns up  wearing a dagger in his neck.

I suppose the ultimate in Comeback Characters is Dracula.  He might be a pile of dust, Van Helsing might hang up his stake and relax about drawing the curtains in the evening, but we know that you can’t keep a good vampire down.  Somewhere, somehow, violins are shrieking a scary tune as blood drips on the dust… And Van Helsing has all the weary work to do again.

Serial characters can marry but being the spouse of a serial character tends to be a dodgy career move.  Bumping off Her Indoors is always an option (James Bond took this route) but spouses can be threatened, kidnapped or tread their own cloth-headed path, such as keeping the date with the one-eyed Mysterious Stranger down the fog-filled docks under the impression that it’s the partner of their joys and sorrows who has summoned them to the meeting.  Sherlock Holmes took a sterner view of women.  He permitted them to marry Watson but never took the plunge himself.

So how to square the circle?  In detective stories, desperately exciting things happen to other people and the detective gets drawn into the action that way. However, every so often, the character and the story come together so the detective is the story.  It can’t happen often, as there is a limit to how many life-changing events a protagonist, however willing, can go through without straining a reader’s credulity, but it can happen occasionally.  It happens in A Hundred Thousand Dragons – and I do hope you enjoy it!