by
Tim Steven
Like many thriller readers and writers, particularly of the
male variety, I grew up on the novels of Alistair Maclean. What appealed to me
about his books wasn’t just the exciting adventure plots, but also how they
nearly always contained a ‘whodunit’ element. The best of them had a disparate
group of people trapped in a life-threatening situation, and you always knew
from early on that one of them was a traitor or a saboteur of some kind; part
of the fun was trying to work out which of them it was. It was like Agatha
Christie with military weapons.
In my début thriller Ratcatcher I wanted to do something
similar. A group of disaffected former soldiers are planning to assassinate the
Russian president at a summit meeting in Estonia on the Baltic Sea. Which of
the three British MI6 agents trying to foil the plot is actually working with
the terrorists? To complicate matters, I made the treacherous MI6 agent one of
the point-of-view characters. To complicate them further still, I included both
women and men among the suspects, so the sex of the traitor was in doubt.
I got round the problem of hiding his/her identity in the
point-of-view scenes by referring to our rogue agent throughout as ‘the
Jacobin’, a nickname allocated by one of the other characters. Trickier was the
task of disguising the person’s sex, and it involved a fair amount of stylistic
and grammatical gymnastics to avoid all reference to ‘he’ or ‘she’. Not that
this has any bearing on the finished product – readers want to enjoy a good
story, not marvel at how cleverly the author has wielded the language, unless
they’re fans of Martin Amis – but I actually found this quite a stimulating
exercise as a writer.
The other element of mystery in my novel was the method of
assassination chosen by the terrorists. In an odd way, it was like one of the
central puzzles in a country-house murder mystery, except the question wasn’t,
‘How could the murderer possibly have done it when the room was locked from the
inside?’ but ‘How are the terrorists going to kill the president when every
point of access to him has been anticipated and closed?’ This posed a serious
problem. I had an idea how to pull it off, but it took extensive (and
admittedly very haphazard) research online to find out if a particular piece of
technology existed that might serve my purposes. And I did want to stay within
the bounds of plausibility; I wasn’t writing science fiction.
Once I’d discovered that the technology needed by my
terrorists did in fact exist, I needed to find out more about it. And
everywhere I looked, I found the same basic information, but not the in-depth,
down-and-dirty detail I wanted. I asked a couple of ex-soldiers I knew, but it
was beyond them. I joined a few online forums to pick the brains of the
military eggheads there, but had no luck. One person even emailed me with a
friendly warning that I had to be careful about asking questions like this
online, as they might come to the attention of shadowy outfits monitoring the
web for signs of terrorist activity.
In the end, I decided it didn’t matter. If detailed
information about a particular weapons system was so secret that only the
manufacturers and their military sponsors were aware of it, then I could safely
speculate about the nuts and bolts in my book without worrying about looking
sloppy in my research to the average reader. This works as a general principle
for writers of fiction, I think: do your research, but don’t be so terrified
you might get a few details wrong that it takes your focus away from writing a
good story.
Oh, and if anyone reading this is an insider in the armed
forces or intelligence services of a certain Middle Eastern country and decides
to read my novel, I’d welcome your feedback and corrections. With not a little
trepidation, I should add.
