Brit Grit Alley features news and updates on what's happening down British crime fiction's booze and blood soaked alleyways.
This week down Brit Grit Alley, I have a great guest column from
'Amazing how a train of thought works, isn’t it? In this
case it was a visit to an air show, or to be more precise, the annual Air Day at RNAS Yeovilton.
I went not only to see the usual amazing flying displays, but also in the hopes
of being able to crawl all over the interior of a Lockheed C-130 Hercules. Very
useful for the new Charlie Fox
novella, ABSENCE OF LIGHT, in
which one of these venerable old heavy transport planes plays a role.
Also flying at the Air Day was an amazing Avro Vulcan B2
bomber—the first to be delivered to the RAF in 1960, and now the last complete
one in the world. Watching the Vulcan perform in the air—and more importantly,
HEARING it—was a remarkable sight. And after I returned home I was reminded
that the Vulcan in the plane that is at the heart of the plot of one of my
favourite James Bond movies—Thunderball.
At the time Thunderball was made in 1965, the Vulcan was
still a state-of-the-art aeroplane, and James Bond—on only his fourth cinematic
outing—was the height of sixties’ cool.
So, in a fit of nostalgia I dragged out my DVD of the
movie and sat down to watch, as I’ve no doubt done numerous times in the past.
I was immediately flabbergasted by the casual sexism, even more so than I
remembered in other Bond films. And, when I consulted my print copy of Ian
Fleming’s book, a little more than the source material as well.
There’s a scene near the beginning where baddie Count Lippe
attempts to rid himself of Bond at a health farm by increasing the force of a
mechanical traction device. In the book the doctor in charge apologises
profusely and asks Bond not to let word of this ‘accident’ get out.
But in the
movie Bond more or less blackmails his physio, Patricia Fearing into having sex
with him to avoid taking the blame and losing her job (although it’s dressed up
as seduction).
Thunderball is notable for having a strong female baddie
in the form of SPECTRE agent Fiona Volpe. Not quite Rosa Klebbe with the
poison-tipped shoes of From
Russia With Love but Fiona has the distinction of managing to spend the
night with Bond without the experience convincing her to turn traitor to her cause
and throw in her lot with him.
And, of course, being a baddie she has to die, but being
a woman she has to die at the hands of her own bungling bodyguards rather than
Bond himself, when our hero deftly turns her into the path of a bullet meant
for him.
These days Bond women tend to be portrayed in a slightly
more enlightened way, but back then they were a product of their time. The time
when I was absorbing these social mores in order to find my place in the world.
And, if I’m honest, beginning to find things just a little unbalanced.
So, it was movies like Thunderball that led me to come up
with a strong female protagonist like Charlie Fox. Canned from the Special
Forces training she was undergoing in the army and muscled out of her career,
Charlie was a fish out of water. She was, as her old training instructor tells
her when they meet again, ideally suited for the task, having the mindset and
the guts to be a professional soldier. Finding her own place in the world, in
which these innate abilities could play a part, has been her journey ever
since, from self-defence instructor to close-protection operative.
And now I’ve branched out from Charlie and told the story
of another strong woman, who’s equally been down at the rough end of life and
has had to fight her way back. In my first standalone mystery thriller, THE BLOOD WHISPERER, we meet
ex-CSI Kelly Jacks, now a London crime-scene cleaner who went to prison for a
crime she can’t remember committing.
Somebody makes the mistake of trying to
make history repeat itself, but Kelly learned a lot during her time inside, and
she’s not going to be an easy mark for anybody.
Charlie and Kelly have a lot in common, but writing the
new character gave me a chance to explore new avenues that have meant I
returned to Charlie for the novella refreshed and reinvigorated. But I have
other strong women in my head who are starting to clamour to have their stories
told, too and my notebooks are filling up with scribbled ‘what if’s.
And it all started with an invite to an Air Day …
Word of the Week: deuteragonist
meaning the actor taking the part of secondary importance in a drama, or a
person who serves as a foil to another. In the early days of Greek drama, when
the idea of having a dialogue between two characters was first devised, the
players were designated the protagonist
and the deuteragonist. The
deuteragonist’s role was to highlight or emphasise the opposing traits in the
protagonist’s character. From the Greek deuteron
meaning second, and agonistes meaning
a person competing at games.'
Thanks Zoë!
