Week 13 - The Scene of the Crimes

The term “research trip” has always held a fascination for me.

Visions of searching through dusty archives in some long forgotten room in the British Library; or spending weeks in an Oxford college, reading through erudite dissertations with a Casaubon-like commitment to the purity of research always spring to mind when I hear that phrase.

Especially so this week as I have been on the first research trip for my novel.

Did I discover some long lost work of literary genius? Aristotle’s treatise on comedy, or perhaps a lost Sherlock Holmes story?

Sadly not. But I did eat some lovely fish and chips.

Earlier this week I visited the town where my novel is set. Although I know it well, there is nothing like actually being there. I walked the streets my characters walk, I drank in the pubs, I looked at the views. I even took pictures of where they live.

This showed the extremes of fiction writing. One character lives in a flat that is very real and has a quite unsuspecting occupant; another lives in a house that in reality is an empty muddy farmer’s field.

Both are equally real to me, although only one is visible on Google Earth (unless you have a very special edition).

Walking in my characters’ footsteps was inspirational and also suggested new roads - literally and metaphorically - that they might go down.

It also showed the problem of using one’s memory to set scenes when I discovered the quiet courtyard I had set a murder in, is in fact overlooked by a pub.

But perhaps best of all, I got to hear the locals talk. No book can help here, you just have to experience it. The subtleties of local dialect can breath life into a book and there is no better way to experience this than by going to the location.

Of course, if your book is set in Sydney this can be a problem. On the other hand, if it is set somewhere like Scarborough (mine is not set in either place) - it’s not such an issue.

And it doesn't have to be all work. I went with my wife, we dined out, went for walks on the beach and generally had a good time. And if I occasionally broke off from dinner to scribble a note on a napkin, she didn’t mind.

She also bore up well when I mentioned that one of my characters was a bit of a whisky connoisseur and the pub we were in had a large selection of malts.

It was a research trip after all.