Her Cheating Heart - - a video reading

By Russel D McLean

I seem to remember that Her Cheating Heart was commissioned by Spinetingler Magazine although I can't remember what the reason was - - it was a special series of stories they were running that had to be around 1k words. Anyway, they asked and I delivered. It was a mood piece, really, and the the running joke behind my writing it was that there is no better soundtrack to murder than country music; all those broken hearts and dead flowers are just too good to waste.

Anyway, I've been meaning to record the story for a while now, so we set up a camera and did a quick and dirty shoot. I won't tell you whose room that is or why they have a Steve McQueen poster festooned with lights. But if this works, I might start thinking about doing more direct to camera pieces. Maybe actual posts and ramblings replete with my face in your monitor.

As of writing this, The Death of Ronnie Sweets (the collection this comes from) is free in Kindle. I think once this post goes live you'll have one more day of free and then its up to 77p or free to borrow for Prime Members (whatever that means). I love the stories in the collection. I love the character of Sam Bryson, who was a fore-runner to J McNee (the protagonist of my first three novels). I hope that you might, too. And I apologise profusely for the pimping.

Anyway, enjoy:

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If you want to know more about Sam, check out Thrilling Detective

Revisitations

By Russel D McLean

As we speak, I’m working on a collection of short stories. Yes, if you haven’t been following me on twitter or keeping your eye out for me on Facebook, I’ve been collecting old stories for an e-volume to be titled, THE DEATH OF RONNIE SWEETS (and other stories). The collection will include every Sam Bryson story I wrote for the likes of Alfred Hitchcock’s Mystery Magazine and Thrilling Detective. It won’t include the standalones (they might get an airing sometime) or the two Sam Bryson stories that appeared a long time ago in Crime Scotland Vol 1 (because they present a wildly different character to the one who would eventually appear in the pages of AHMM). But they include a lot of stories that I’m proud of.

And I can say that with conviction because, in order to put the collection together, I had to read each one of them carefully. My plan – and this was something that the editor of Thrilling Detective, Kevin Burton Smith, urged me to do when he heard about the project – was to leave each story warts and all. And for the most part I have.

Why only “for the most part”?

Because sometimes you see things that should never have sneaked through, particularly in early works. A silly typo or a horrific repetition that you can’t get out of your head. And you can’t let it go. Because you have the chance to correct it. In all, I made maybe six changes to all the stories. They were justified, and mostly confined to one story in particular.

It’s strange to look back at old work with new eyes. Particularly the first published works you wrote. These stories are still ones that I am immensely proud of and, while some may say that their early work is “juvenilia” and that they feel they have moved on, you have to think about such things from a reader’s point of view. Clearly these early stories meant enough to readers and editors who wanted to read and publish them. So why are they suddenly not good enough? Are you saying those readers and editors were in some way “juvenile” too? And if your style has changed, that’s fine. But what you have to remember is that you have lived with your work for years, but there are always going to be new readers who will see your through the same eyes that your first readers did. And why would they not have the same reactions?

Reading the stories was fascinating for me. I could track where I was at certain points in my life I could see what I had learned about storytelling. I could trace my obsessions and ideas. I could track an evolution.

But by far one of the most interesting aspects to the collection has been writing a new story about Sam Bryson. The story will be published not only in this collection, but also in a multi-author collection that will be forthcoming soon (I don’t know if I can say anything about it yet). It takes place in 2006, the year where last left Bryson. After all, if we are to believe the opening of THE GOOD SON, in 2008, Bryson has left the PI game and sold his offices on to some bloke called J McNee. Going back to Bryson’s voice after so long – the last Bryson short was written in 2007 – was a strange experience. I worried about the voice changing drastically, about my being unable to write the same character; that perhaps I had changed too much and would no longer know who he was.

But I found myself returning with ease to his fictional world. The old touchstones remained the
same. Perhaps there was something a little easier about his voice; a more confident and mature version of the same character. But it was like seeing an old friend and realising how much you still have in common. My memory hadn’t been lying to me; Sam was still as interesting to me as he had been so many years ago.

Not that I’ve allowed him to stagnate or remain in some state of suspended animation. Every short I wrote was written with the intent to advance Sam in some fashion. And this new one is no different. But if you want to know how… well, I guess you’re just going to have to wait and see.

Passing The Torch

By Russel D McLean

In 2004, my first professionally published short story appeared in Alfred Hitchcock’s Mystery Magazine. It’s a story that still makes me proud. One scene in particular, set in a nightclub (loosely based on the downstairs at the Student’s Union) still feels very real to me when I look back over it.

It was the beginning of what could be loosely termed a “series” of short stories centred around Private Investigator Sam Bryson. Sam was a man with his own morals that set him apart from the police force on which he had once served. He left in circumstances that were never fully explained and still had a contact on the force in the form of Sandy Griggs, a copper with a strange past whose own experience with domestic abuse as a child made him very hard on a particular type of criminal. Sam’s centre in life was his girlfriend, Ros, a philosophy lecturer at the university who hailed from the US. Ros covered two bases as a character – one, she maintained Bryson’s moral centre and, two, she explained why he had a more American idiom to the way he spoke than most other characters. This was my insurance since at the time I was reading so much US crime fic that the slang and speech patterns had started to bleed over into my own writing.

Somewhere around 2006 I got my first agent.

I said I wanted to write a novel with Sam at the centre.

They said: “Give us someone new. Not someone with all this backstory.”

If I’m honest, this response irritated me. I didn’t see why they wanted me to drop this character who many readers had received well. I liked him. I liked him a lot.

So what was my response?

You want a character who has to build his life, I’ll give you him.

So I stripped Sam of his name. And all his support network. Took away everything he had earned and looked at what was left.

He became McNee*. A man with no first name. So I took that away from him. I took away his support in the force, making him an outcast (by choice, you could say) and then I took away his support in the real world by killing off the love of his life.

What emerged came from the same basic archetype as Bryson but was darker, harder and I think more believable. His reasons for leaving the force suddenly became concrete. His antipathy towards his former colleagues was understandable given the new circumstances in which this archetype found himself.

And then my agent and I parted company.

I didn’t know what to do. But I had this character and this manuscript. And I liked them. If I was honest, I had grown to love McNee more than I had Bryson because McNee’s pain felt more honest and real to me than Bryson’s ever had.

But still the idea of Bryson lingered at the back of my mind. I was still writing short stories about him, and figured that I had to pass the torch somehow. I did this as indirectly as possible, with McNee having “blink and you’ll miss it” cameo in one of the last Bryson stories published, and a few hints about “the other guy” who used to work out of McNee’s offices in the first few chapters of THE GOOD SON.

I admit I’ve always wanted to explore more in-depth what happened to Bryson, what soured him on the PI gig, made him leave. I always had an end point in mind, after all. I always do. After all, regular readers of this blog will know how I feel about series.

And maybe one day I will tell that story. But until then, despite my initial misgivings I’m glad to have got to know McNee over the course of what is now two novels. In my mind, he is the more realistic of the pair, the more believable, and probably the more noir as well. There is something about him that is, I think, genuinely human.

But, of course, my American friends – many of whom will already know Sam Bryson, especially if they subscribe to the wondrous Alfred Hitchcock’s Mystery Magazine – now have the chance to judge the new boy as THE GOOD SON hits their shores this week. He’s already had Sam’s approval. I hope he’ll have yours.


*For the first draft, his name was McRae until I realised that fellow Scot and bearded God Stuart MacBride had already taken this name for his protagonist.