My good friend Rhys Bowen has a new book out, ROYAL FLUSH, so I've invited her to talk about it here (and give me a day off):
Thank you so much for inviting me, Lee. We share a lot of background in common.
My first professional experience was with the spoken, rather than with the written word. Right out of college I was lucky enough to be one of 30 graduating students chosen from 3000 applicants to join the BBC in London. And after stints doing everything from playing requests for a housewives’ morning show to the night shift as announcer on the World Service I managed to get the assignment I wanted in radio drama. What a medium that was! No scenery, no glamorous stars to distract the audience, only the spoken word to convey tension, emotion and sense of place. It is a media of cooperation—a joint assignment between listener and writer to create a world. As one small listener once said, “I like radio because the scenery is so nice.”
I agree with her. There is no stage set as wonderful as the one you create in your imagination, no actor as handsome as the one your mind assigns to the sexy voice. And as for tension—what could be more scary than the sound of a door creaking open and then slow footsteps getting closer and closer…
I started off at the bottom—making the spot sound effects. Yes, this was the good old days when a lot of the sound effects were made live on mike. We were a little past the coconuts for horses’ hooves days, but still we were called upon to invent the strangest sound effects. I once had to come up with a sound for a guillotine cutting off a head. So what did I do? I ran a knife down an iron bar and into a cabbage, then dropped the cabbage into a basket. It sounded so real you could actually hear the bones breaking.
After I’d been in drama for a while I rose to studio manager
and I found that I was coming up with ideas of my own. I wrote a radio play,
and with the bravado of a 22 year old, I walked into the head of drama’s office
and gave it to him. He called me in two days later. He liked it and he was
going to produce it. As easy as that! More radio plays followed, then I tried my
hand at TV drama. New challenges there—how to reveal character in a few words
and actions, how to get characters in and out of a scene, how to mix dialog and
action.
Everything I learned has served me in good stead as a writer of mystery novels. I am highly aware of the power of words. I still think of my novels in terms of scenes rather than chapters. I am still very aware of pacing, when to cut away from a scene, and I rely on dialog to reveal character, create setting and carry forward plot. I am a huge proponent of show not tell and I have learned to involve all five senses to make an era come alive. I’d love to produce my new Royal Spyness book as a radio play—it’s called Royal Flush and in it my heroine Lady Georgiana (34th in line to the throne and penniless) is sent home in disgrace to the Scottish Castle. I’d have gone to town with the sound effects—the wind whistling down the corridors and flapping the tapestries and moaning in the chimney—the footsteps echoing across the great hall, the sounds of a grouse hunt on the moor… but the rising of a monster from the loch and the sound of someone falling from a mountain when a rope breaks—they’d be more of a challenge!
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