Today I'm on the Blog Tour for They Shoot Corpses, Don't They by CS McLean. My post is a content extract.
Pat O’Hare is the only (living) private detective in Farrelton, a crime-ridden city still recovering from the ravages of an undead uprising. Pat is hired to find the missing granddaughter of a rich industrialist. But, what starts out as simple enough job turns into a fight for survival as he finds himself pulled into a deadly mystery where nobody can be trusted. Helped only by a trigger happy ex-cop and a washed up boxer with a pathological fear of trees, Pat has to use every trick in the book just to stay alive. Caught between corrupt police, gun-wielding hitmen and a ruthless crime lord, Pat soon learns that the zombies are not the most dangerous creatures in town.
Why my characters annoy me
Characters are a pain in the ass.
As a writer, you create them. You help them to grow. You nurture their development, turning them gradually into the people that you want them to be.
And then, just as you are ready to send them into the world, they turn into the world’s surliest teenagers, sticking up two fingers at their creator and declaring loudly that you don’t understand, they want to do their own thing.
My own character, Pat O’Hare, is one such creation. I originally imagined him as a straight arrow, a do-gooding private eye and earnest writer of wrongs. To quote from Raymond Chandler, he would be ‘a man who is not himself mean, who is neither tarnished nor afraid.’
The trouble is, Pat didn’t agree with me. As the story progressed, certain aspects of his past life began to emerge. Unsavoury dealings and criminal activities. Pat O’Hare, it seemed, was not as lily white as I had originally imagined.
He was much darker,
“You really robbed a gas station when you were a kid?’
“Yeah. Lots.”
“You never told me this before.” with a shady past that I hadn’t expected. I was shocked. It had never occurred to me that he wasn’t the same cherub that I’d birthed onto a clean, unsullied, page of A4 paper.
I wanted to sit him down and discuss what he’d been up to. I felt like I need an intervention.
“You never asked.”
“Your mother would be ashamed.”
“I don't have a mother. You killed her in the backstory, remember?”
He’s not the only one. I’ve had other characters change race, gender, slip from being good guys to evil bastards, without once giving me notice of their intentions.
That’s the trouble with characters. Sometimes the assholes just slip away and do their own thing. You may think that you are God of your own fictional universe, but sometimes, even God loses control of his creation once in a while.
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