On the right track for literary success
Feb 4 2008 by Peter Elson, Liverpool Daily Post
Stephen Done author of Smoke Gets in Your Eyes _100
“I’ve no idea where the characters and plot come from. My earliest recollection is being read to as a child and my father was an English teacher and later a head teacher.
“I know I’m quite good on observing language and mannerisms, so it’s quite easy for me to picture the way people talk and convey, say, joy, or sorrow, or nervousness.”
A movie buff, Stephen’s influences include Orson Welles, Alfred Hitchcock and the smoky mysterious world conjured up in post-war film noir cinema such as Raymond Chandler’s The Big Sleep.
“The book’s set in 1946 when everyone smoked – as well as the steam engines. I’m a passionate anti-smoker, but people have smoking mannerisms; they fiddle with cigarettes or pipes to buy time or aid thought.
“I spent a lot of my time around railways, assimilating their smell and sound, and I raid that rich vault. Hopefully, anyone familiar with railways should feel this is a convincing world.”
As a child of the 1960s, it was a very bold step setting the book in 1946, a time very far away, but one with plenty of survivors set to pick him up on anachronisms.
“I’m extremely interested in that period. I’m very sympathetic to Clement Attlee’s Labour government when big, big ideas were put forward almost as a social experiment,” he says.
“It was terribly exciting. It didn’t all work and some of it was a disaster. Just about everything – bar the NHS and free schooling – has been dismantled.
“In 1946, the railways were about to be nationalised and, of course, since then have been de-nationalised.
“This was set against one of the most difficult periods for Britain. There was also the black market with people taking chances and trying to get by, which is great material to set your book.
“While the railways were still spread across UK, they were worn out by the war and kept going by the sheer skill and dedication of the workforce.
“In my book, you find that rarest thing, a couple of bad guys trying to do something utterly selfish which happens when you’re short of everything,” he says. “They’re hapless criminals who are hardly the most evil in the world, but get deeper and deeper into trouble.
“Because of my natural interest in the period, I’ve not done that much research but have tried to give the story a gentle sepia wash of the time.
“Characters refer quite obliquely to an event happening at that moment, without explaining great details. Just as today we refer to the credit crunch without giving detailed explanations.
“I’ve mentioned products or foods in passing, just to capture a flavour and also show how things were done at that time. Watching films of the period helps. British films were more down to earth than Hollywood, even a railway-set rom- ance like Brief Encounter.”
While avoiding obvious anach- ronisms like mobile phones, most people did not have washing machines, and televisions were barely known.
“I took a lot of time studying fashions of time, finding photo- graphs that fitted what I imagin- ed. Men always had a hat and would never leave without one.
“My father and uncle gave me a lot of guidance over language that almost seems quaint now. You have to get cursing to a level that existed, which was still regarded as strong.
“If people back then swore like you openly hear now, the effect would have been like a neutron bomb going off.
“There were other interesting pit-falls. The word buffet didn’t arrive until the early 1950s, and certainly wouldn’t have been common in provincial England.
“I used a historic language forum to check this, so we went for refreshment room. It’s a small detail but important and captures a lovely flavour of the period.
“I like my crime as a vehicle which allows you to learn about characters and place, not as an excuse to go into such surgical detail to be shocking and repellent.
“For me, crime is the vehicle to see how people work together and how things are made to happen.”
Stephen’s setting was chosen sub-consciously, but it metamorphosed into his East Midlands childhood home by the former Great Central railway, which ran from London Marylebone to Manchester and Liverpool Central.
“It is a very familiar location and rather special, having lost my father, Harry, in August, 2006. He was very supportive reading my drafts and my mother Shirley still lives in the area at Brackley.
“It’s tragic that this beautiful railway, which could have been so useful to the country, was destroyed by Dr Beeching’s network closures, but in my imagination it comes back to life and is full of vitality.
“I’m very touched that it’s tapped into other local people’s memories and I’ve had a lot of gratifying comments about how touched they’ve felt.”
* SMOKE Gets In Your Eyes, by Stephen Done, Hastings Press, £7.50
