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As I did for my short story collection, Dragged
Into Darkness, I thought I'd let you in on
the story behind the story and what inspired me to write
the stories for Working Stiffs.
So please enjoy these tales behind the tales.
Feel free to share your thoughts on these
inspirations with me.
I’ve been in the US approaching eight
years now and during that time, I’ve gained a bunch of
friends, but this has been at the expense of my friends back
home. I’ll be digging through some box of junk for something
and come across something else that will make me all nostalgic,
and I get to wondering about all the people I’ve lost touch
with. What are they doing? Have they changed? Are they married
or divorced or both? In my mind’s eye, they haven’t
changed. They’ll always be the same people I knew back
in England, forever frozen in 1998.
But these people can’t be the same.
During my brief trips back to England, even my friends I still
see have changed. Their lives have moved on and I haven’t
been around to witness it. I don’t think I’ve changed,
but I’m sure those people see differences in me too. It's
odd to think about, but true.
But with the writing, there’s a chance
I may re-encounter lost friends. It’s happened already.
Now and again, I’ll get an email along the lines of—aren’t
you the Simon Wood I used to go to school/beat up once/stole
my cat?
I still have hopes that I’ll bump into
these lost friends and that was the inspiration of Old
Flames Burn The Brightest. Colin Hill encounters
a never-was girlfriend, Denise. He hopes to rekindle something
that never existed, but Denise isn’t the same person Colin
used to know and unfortunately for Denise, neither is Colin.
This was an easy story to write because Raymond
Chandler told me what to write. I have an old BBC recording which
features Ian Fleming interviewing Raymond Chandler. Fleming and
Chandler discuss the differences in their work and what inspires
them to write what they do. During the interview, Chandler describes
how mob hits were arranged in the U.S. I thought, wow, what a
great idea for a story.
I used the mechanics of a mob hit for the
skeleton of the story, but I added the complication of the relationship
between father and son. Don’t go reading anything into
the relationship between my own father and me. Rarely does anything
from my own personal experiences make it directly to the pages
of my stories. Rather, certain facets of life and people tug
at my sensibilities.
So thanks, Ray. I owe you a gimlet.
Where do you get your ideas from?
It’s a familiar question I’m asked.
Literally anything can inspire a story. With Parental
Guidance, it was a TV advertisement. It just goes
to show that TV advertising works—just not the way they
hoped.
The ad was for credit consolidation. It was
one of those cheesy, homemade adverts that do the product or
service being pimped no favors. The ad was simple. A family,
consisting of husband, wife, and two kids, sit in front of the
camera while the father tells how his life was out of control
because of credit debt until he turned it all around thanks to
blah-blah credit counseling. The ad ends with the father saying, “I
took control and my life has never been better.”
It was such a creepy line to end the advert
on that it gave me the chills. There was just something about
the actor’s delivery, like he was trying to let us in on
his real secret. The story came to me before the ad break ended.
I wanted a tale of keeping up with the Joneses with a difference.
I wanted a tarnished tale about what it means to keep up with
not only the Joneses but the world in general, but I wanted darken
it with the uneasy sentinment I felt after hearing the father’s
last sentence.
I people watch and I have a nasty habit of
giving the people I watch a whole history. A Break
In the Old Routine began life that way. I was riding
BART into San Francisco and there was this striking women sitting
several rows over from me. Watching her, I came up with a character
prfolie for her. Wasn’t that nice of me?
I got an attack of the guilts when I went
to get off the train and she got off with me. For a frightening
moment, I thought this woman was going to call me out for staring.
She didn’t and she went on her way, but I thought about
what if she had called me on it? What then?
I have to give credit to Working
Stiffs’ editor, David LaBounty for the
success of this story. He took what I thought was a decent
enough story and turned into something special. He read my
draft and said that he felt the story should end differently.
And he was right. I hope you agree.
The Real Deal, like Parental
Guidance, was inspired by television. And no,
I don’t spend all day in front of the TV, just most
of it. I watched an episode of Night Gallery which featured
an old gangster trying to preserve his legacy. It was an
interesting story with a lame ending. But the crux of the
story, trying to preserve one’s own mark on history,
stuck with me. A couple of years later, I watched an episode
of Lonely Planet and travel icon, Ian Wright, traveled to
Peru and went through a bizarre witchdoctor ceremony to cure
him of all his ills. These two things clashed to create a
story about an ailing businessman trying to save his equally
ailing business empire.
This was one of those story ideas that once
it came to me, I couldn't dislodge it. This image popped into
my head of a police officer getting shot in the line of duty,
but surviving because of his kevlar vest. The key thing that
stuck with me was that tiny moment before being shot where you
believe you're going to die, only to survive.
I was fascinated by how someone would cope
with that juxtoposition of living when you believed you were
going to die. Could a person continue under those circumstances?
For the character in Officer Down,
I decided he couldn't.
To pile on the pain, the police officer is
shot with his own gun after he loses it in a tussle with a thief.
The cop can't move on with his life until he gets his gun back
and in doing so, he breaks the rules he was sworn to uphold.
This story started life as the short story, Fender
Bender, that I wrote for a crime anthology
called Small Crimes. The theme
of the anthology was that small crimes lead to big things.
I love these sorts of scenarios. My story was the tale of
Todd Collins, a down-on-his-luck guy, who backs into a drug
dealer's car and to pay off his debt, he has to steal a car
for a drug kingpin which triggers a whole series of events.
Blue Cublicle wanted to do the book, and they
wanted Fender Bender in it—but
bigger. This gave me a great canvas to work with. I took the
concept of escalation and I took it another stage further. I
load the problems on Todd's shoulders and he has spend the rest
of the story trying to resolve them. The problem is that every
action has an unequal reaction. Todd is forced to go outside
of himself to cope with the tumbling dominoes he started by reversing
into someone's car.
That's the thing that tickles me most about The
Fall Guy. All Todd did was back into a car
and drive away, but he ends up traveling half way around
the country, becoming embroiled in a number of people's lives,
their grudges and desperate situations in order to solve
his own. When the story reaches its dizzying climax, it seems
unreal that it all originated from a single and minor infraction.
Now that's escalation baby! J
Todd does a lot of things throughout the story,
but there is something that he doesn't do. I didn't realize it
until the end of the story. I even went back to double-check
and it was true. See if you notice what it is. If you think you
know what Todd doesn't do, email me and If you're right, I'll
send you a prize.
I sincerely hope you enjoy The
Fall Guy and all the stories in Working
Stiffs, because it was a lot of fun to write.
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