Some detectives belong to their cities so completely that it’s impossible to imagine them anywhere else: Morse is defined by Oxford, Rebus can only stalk the streets of Edinburgh. When they leave their home turf, we’re itching for them to return. Detective fiction is all about imposing order on chaos, so it’s no wonder readers like their detectives to be in the right place.
But author Sophie Hannah has told Dubai’s literature festival that she uses an invented county (Culver Valley) for her stories to avoid just such over-familiarity. Readers are so obsessed by the idea that a certain kind of person lives in a certain kind of place (no poverty-stricken junkies in Hampstead, for instance) that she preferred to invent somewhere free of preconceptions. “I wanted to be able to tell stories without people thinking ‘Oh I know what people in Nottingham, or wherever, are like’.” It also reduced complaints from readers who noticed mistakes in real-world descriptions.
It’s dispiriting to think we’re so fond of criticising that it’s become easier for an author to invent somewhere than to describe a real place to its inhabitants’ satisfaction. I set my last novel in Edinburgh and loved the process of researching it: walking the city across the seasons, so the weather and the light and the landmarks all fitted. And people have (so far) resisted the urge to write and tell me I got it all wrong. I do have far fewer readers than Hannah, though.
But the question then arises: what happens when readers know a fictional world with the same obsessive attention to detail? JK Rowling couldn’t mess around with Hogsmeade, or her fans would soon complain. Perhaps it’s only a matter of time before maps of Culver Valley are drawn by Hannah’s readers. And then she’ll need to invent somewhere new.
Single to insanity, please
One thing I would not have predicted, had I been researching a novel set in the distant future of 2020, is the end of train tickets. But that’s what transport secretary Patrick McLoughlin is planning – we’ll pay by smartphone or card, and paper tickets will be a distant memory.
He’s decided to end the “complexity which makes buying a train ticket much harder than it should be”. But it isn’t the paper that makes train tickets complicated. It’s the insane number of ticket options available, many of which are only valid on one specific train whose identifying code you have to murmur into a mirror three times to make it appear.
And even that would be manageable if the train companies didn’t enforce their baffling restrictions beyond all sense (that your ticket is technically invalid if you have booked from Edinburgh to Peterborough, but get on at Berwick – one stop after you originally planned to – for example). Train tickets have been in use for 170 years. The sense that every passenger is probably a criminal is relatively recent.
Dodging the dopey cyclists
I have spent the past week in bed with flu, and the thing I have resented most (besides the lost income that accompanies illness for the self-employed) is being stuck indoors. I’ve missed walking through the park – something I usually do every day – more than I can say. But I haven’t missed dodging some of the cyclists who ride around the park at weekends, the minority who behave as though pedestrians are wandering through the Tour de France route. Now I discover that they really are in it to win it, as doping has been declared “endemic” in amateur cycling. Apparently, professional cyclists are now skipping events that are open to amateurs because the doping has made it too competitive.
Something has gone wrong when people who competed against Lance Armstrong are bowing out of races because of too much doping. Isn’t sport supposed to be fun?
