The Price of Love and Other Stories

Afternotes

“Going Back.” This novella has never been published before in the U.S. It appeared first in the Canadian and U.K. expanded editions of Not Safe After Dark and Other Stories. I wrote it early in 1999, so it falls between In a Dry Season and Cold Is the Grave in the Banks chronology. At that point, I didn’t know that I was going to send Banks back home to deal with his old school friend’s disappearance in Close to Home (2003), and I wanted to show him interacting with his family and responding to the place where he grew up. In manuscript, it reached 106 pages, too long for any of the magazines or anthologies that regularly published my stories, and too short for separate book publication. And so it sat there gathering dust until I came to write Close to Home, when I incorporated parts of the novella into the novel — mostly details about the street where Banks grew up, his relationship with his parents, the music he listened to and the books he read in 1965. When the story was first published, I made some revisions to shift it chronologically. Now it sits somewhere between Close to Home and Playing with Fire. I also tried to avoid too much repetition of details I had cannibalized for the novel without spoiling the original conception. I haven’t touched it since.

“Cornelius Jubb.” This grew out of researching and writing about the Second World War in In a Dry Season. When Karin Slaughter came up with the idea of a series of stories linked through time by a charm bracelet, she asked me to set mine in this period, and it became the second story in Like a Charm. It’s really about the title character and racial injustice. By naming him Cornelius Jubb and making him a black American GI stationed in Yorkshire in the Second World War, I was able to stress both the differences and the similarities between him and the locals. He might seem strange and exotic, but he has a Yorkshire name. Naturally this perplexes the local people. I had also written a couple of stories featuring Frank Bascombe, as “Special Constable” in the war, and this was intended as a third, though I couldn’t use his name in the anthology for copyright reasons.

“The Magic of Your Touch.” For some reason this is one of my favorites, though I have always felt a little guilty that it was probably not quite as long as editor Robert J. Randisi had hoped for. It would be hard to see how it could be longer. This is an example of a story that really had no genesis other than the desire to sit down and write something to do with music, as the anthology was called Murder and All That Jazz. I had no idea where it was going. Obviously the variation on the Faustian “deal with the devil” (Robert Johnson at the crossroads!) was in my mind, as was the nature of obsession, and the corrosive nature of guilt, as in Poe’s “The Tell-Tale Heart.” But I didn’t know any of that at the time I started writing. All I knew was that a man was wandering lost in an urban landscape that resembled something out of David Lynch’s Eraserhead. What he would do, what would become of him, I had no idea until several hours later when the story was finished. Another thing I like about it is that it contains elements of horror and the supernatural that do not usually appear in my work. I have always thought that if I didn’t write crime I would write horror, so I was pleased to be able to include at least a little touch of it here.

“The Eastvale Ladies’ Poker Circle.” When Otto Penzler asked for a story connected with poker for Dead Man’s Hand, I balked, knowing little about the game and certainly never having won any money at it! But it’s not easy to say no to Otto. Part of the challenge was finding ways around these inadequacies, of course, and my initial research showed me that the game was quite popular with British women. It wasn’t a long stretch from that to the idea of the “poker circle,” where a group of career women get together once in a while for an evening’s fun. After that, it was the getting together that came to matter to the story, and the personalities involved, not the game of poker itself. They could have been playing cribbage for all I cared! I also got to venture into one of Eastvale’s more privileged and exclusive areas for the first time, an area that became even more important in the recent Banks novel, All the Colors of Darkness.

“The Ferryman’s Beautiful Daughter.” Though the title is a homage to the Incredible String Band’s 1968 album The Hangman’s Beautiful Daughter, the ghost of Syd Barrett haunts this story. The order, from editors Claudia Bishop and Don Bruns, was rather taller than usual. Not only did they want a short story for their Merry Band of Murderers anthology, they also wanted a song to go with it. As it turned out, I had just finished Piece of My Heart, set partly in 1969, and I had invented a rock band called the Mad Hatters. It seemed to me that they could do double duty here, so I ended up writing a song by a rock band I had invented! Don Bruns set the words to music and recorded it for the CD that went with the book.

The sound I wanted was a cross between Nick Drake and the late 1960s pastoral Pink Floyd’s More sound track and “Grantchester Meadows” from Ummagumma. Ethereal organ, flute and acoustic guitar. Because I was still stuck in the 1960s time warp, one thing I wanted to write about was the clash between a very straitlaced traditional community and the new hippies, with their revolutionary ideas and communal living. An island in the Pacific Northwest seemed an ideal place to play this out, as it is a fairly remote and self-contained region. Originally, I was going to tell the story from Mary Jane’s viewpoint, but I soon found that Grace was a more natural storyteller. Mary Jane was a bit too flighty and would hardly have stuck to the point, but the song is about her:

“Walking the Dog.” The request for this story for Toronto Noir reached me while I was on a cruise around South America. Somewhere between Cape Horn and the Falkland Islands, I could hardly have been much farther away from Toronto, or from the sort of atmosphere I associate with noir. I must admit that, at first, the whole idea of Toronto and noir didn’t seem to work for me. I generally see noir as a story about lust and greed in which most people get exactly what they deserve and nobody cares. They are usually not stories with a “hero,” like a private eye or a cop (unless he’s a bent one!), though there are some exceptions, and many people seem to use the terms noir and “hard-boiled” interchangeably. However gritty and violent the Banks novels become at times, they are never noir, so it is also not the kind of style I’m used to writing.

I also think of movies more than books when I think of noir, of spare dialogue, a certain kind of lighting, use of shadows, atmospheric music and unusual camera angles. Movies like The Postman Always Rings Twice, Laura, Out of the Past, Double Indemnity. Of course, certain authors spring to mind, too: James M Cain, Cornell Woolrich, Jim Thompson. But on the whole, I find the term is overused and little understood.

Anyway, reminding myself that the whole business of writing a short story should involve exploring new territory, I agreed and set about it almost right away, asking only that I be allowed to set the tale in my own little part of Toronto, the Beaches, which is about as noir as a Yorkshire Dales village! We spent a number of days at sea traveling vast distances between ports, and I would sit every morning with my laptop, looking out over the limitless ocean ahead and tap away. I’m pleased with the story, yet it turned out not quite so much pure noir as a bit of an homage and a bit of a parody, and those with some interest in the subject may find some pleasure in spotting the book and movie references.

“Blue Christmas.” Doug Greene from Crippen & Landru asked me for this as a gift for friends of the publishers at Christmas 2005. It was published in a special edition of 353 copies. Doug wanted an Inspector Banks story without violence or bad language. A tall order for me! But a challenge. In the end, I came up with a Banks story without a murder, and I enjoyed writing it very much.

“Shadows on the Water.” This one was for John Harvey’s anthology Men from Boys. I had been writing quite a bit about the Second World War and had even touched on the First in a story called “In Flanders Field.” When I was trying to think of something that might be a defining moment in a young man’s life, the point at which a boy becomes a man, I thought of this childhood betrayal and of what its effects might be in later years.

“The Cherub Affair.” This story has a long and unusual pedigree. In 1985, I took a year off teaching and decided it was make or break time as a writer. I had already become interested in crime fiction and attempted one or two novels that I quickly consigned to the basement. I wanted to write about Yorkshire, partly because of nostalgia, partly because I knew it far better than I did my new country, Canada, and partly because I liked the sort of regional English detective story that uses crime and its detection to look at the character and foibles of a particular area of the country.

I had recently finished A Dedicated Man, which was with a publisher, and decided first to write a follow-up, Gallows View. They were eventually published in reverse order. After I had finished Gallows View my “sabbatical” wasn’t quite over, so I began another novel, this time a private eye novel set in Toronto.

I had to travel quite a long way to teach, and on one of those bus journeys I remembered passing every day a small private investigation office above a strip mall. I could see a few dusty cabinets and stacked files through the window as the bus passed by, but I never saw who worked there. That made very fertile ground for the imagination, and so “Jones Investigations” was born, Old Jones being the grizzled old founder who was usually too drunk to investigate but passed on all he knew to his young protégé Colin Lang, an English student with a PhD who couldn’t get a teaching job and didn’t want to drive a taxi.

Around the time I finished the novel, called Beginner’s Luck, I heard that the Inspector Banks series — at least the first two — had been accepted for publication. After that, it seemed, nobody was interested in a private eye novel written by me and set in Toronto, so Beginner’s Luck languished in the bottom drawer of my desk. I occasionally dusted it off, and even had vague ideas for a sequel, but Banks occupied all my time, so nothing ever became of them.

When the Toronto Star asked for a story they could serialize over a week, I thought again of Beginner’s Luck. While writers might dream of turning a short story into a novel, here I was turning a novel into a short story. In the end, it was easier simply to retain the key plot elements and main characters and dump everything else — subplots, minor characters, a lot of background and exposition. I don’t think I even mention the detective’s name in the short story! It was published in seven installments, each one with at least a minor cliff-hanger to heighten anticipation for the next. In a small way, I got to feel a bit like Charles Dickens must have felt writing his works for serialization, though I already knew how my story was going to end. I have inserted an eighth part for this edition, a scene I particularly liked in the novel but wasn’t previously able to use because of length restrictions.

“The Price of Love.” Written for a Mystery Writers of America anthology called The Blue Religion, edited by Michael Connelly, this story was another big challenge for me to do something different. The anthology was meant to deal with the “burden of the badge” that is a policeman’s lot, and as most of the contributors were American crime writers, I expected a high-testosterone mix of tough guys and action. As it turned out, that isn’t the case, and the anthology is full of variety in everything except its quality. Not a bad one in the bunch. Anyway, I still wanted to shy away even from Banks and his feelings about being a cop, so I decided to use a different kind of hero and a different kind of badge.

“Birthday Dance.” Some of the subjects for these themed crime anthologies can be most challenging, and I have been involved in a number of such projects, including poker, American football, Shakespeare and, in this one, the Bible, for Anne Perry’s Thou Shalt Not Kill. Well, the Bible is certainly full of murder and mayhem, but again it was a matter of avoiding the obvious, or putting an unusual twist on something. I had recently seen Strauss’s opera Salome, so that story was fresh in mind, and when I started to research its origins I found more doubt and obscurity than I did certainty, which suited me just fine. Writers thrive much better on doubt and uncertainty than on facts and self-evident truths. Nobody was even sure how old Salome was, or whether she was old enough to perform the dance of the seven veils for which she is so infamous! The idea of a sort of innocent Salome appealed, and in the end the story turned out as a sort of cross between a Bible story and an episode of The Sopranos.

“Like a Virgin.” My publishers asked me for a new Banks story for the collection, and I wrote a novella. This is it.