Paced Out

I’ve just got off the phone from my old pal, Jane Finnis, and I’m very pleased to say that she’s going to do a guest blog here next week about her new Roman mystery, Danger In The Wind.

I really enjoyed Danger In The Wind. The story cracks along, the characters are excellent and Jane’s got an ability to set the scene so you’re really pulled into the story. If you want to get a copy, go onto Jane’s website, http://www.janefinnis.com It’s also available from Amazon and on Kindle, too. For my money. it’s that sense of pace, of really wanting to know what happens next, that makes a book truly readable.

I’m not at all sure that it can be taught, but it probably can be caught, if you see what I mean, from reading enough yourself.  Even the books that you think don’t move very fast are worth thinking about, if only to ask yourself why it’s not working.  This doesn’t mean, by the way, that only all-action thrillers and baffling mysteries have pace.

Pride and Prejudice isn’t a mystery or a thriller, yet it reads like greased lightning.  To Kill A Mockingbird, another old favourite, is another book that, once picked up, is very hard to put down. When Scout sets out on her Halloween walk, we just know something’s going to happen. I think it’s got more to do with having one event follow another event naturally, so that even the surprises (such as Lydia’s elopement with Wickham) don’t seem bolted on, but occur naturally from the events so far and, granted what we’ve got to know about the characters, is a perfectly believable way for them to behave.

I think, by the way, that’s why “real” people and “real” events sometimes seem so utterly out of place in fiction.  Agatha Christie discusses this in the introduction to The Body In The Library. She was inspired by the sight of a well-off, healthy looking middle-aged man in a wheelchair she saw, surrounded by his family in a hotel.  She left the hotel before she could find out what the man and his family where like in real life, as the real people wouldn’t – couldn’t – fit into the story she had bubbling away.  They would have their own characters and concerns and they wouldn’t be at all the ones that Agatha Christie’s creations  needed to make the story work.

Pace doesn’t mean, as Bertie Wooster says somewhere that it should be like life, which is  just  one damn thing after another.  As all comedians and actors know, pace is a sense of timing, so a properly paced book has inbuilt pauses that allow you the chance to stop and savour what’s what.  For instance – I don’t want to give too much away until you’ve read Danger In The Wind – there’s a great “pause” moment when Aurielia wakes up from a dream and realises that the gravely voice of the scary lion she heard in her dream is actually the voice of the murderer…

When an author really pulls it off, then, as Jeremy Clarkson, that lover of all things fast and unexpectedly good literary critic said, the book becomes slightly more important than life itself.  Ok, so perhaps nothing’s that important, but you must have experienced that desire to simply read and keep on reading and to hell with the ironing.  Or washing.  Or feeding the cat.  Or any of the other daily inconveniences that are currently getting between you and finding out what happens to Dumbledore on top of the Astronomy Tower even when you know what happens to Dumbledore on top of the Astronomy Tower.  It’s not that this time it might be different (after all, you’re reading a book, not lost in a coma!) but this time you can see how beautifully it all fits into place.  And, wow, does it work!