RESEARCH

No, I’m not going to trawl you through all the forensic tomes I mentioned elsewhere. I just wanted to say that some research can’t be book-based. My historical novel is set in Aberdeen in 1840 and features a figurehead carver as its central character. Research obviously involved reading various histories of Aberdeen and books about early Victorian dress, manners, customs and so on. Studying ordnance survey maps of the time and reading the Aberdeen Journal for 1840 helped me to orientate myself and wander around streets knowing that they’d changed little in the years since then. The Journal even had letters from irate readers complaining bitterly about the bottlenecks formed by all the carriages and carts on a bridge over the river Dee – a problem which still hasn’t been solved, even though the carts have been replaced by Fords and Ferraris.

Much of the novel centres around shipbuilding and I also, as the notes on my short story Death Ship mention, wanted to know what it was like to sail on a square rigger, so I joined the crew of the Christian Radich for a short trip across the North Sea. But, in addition to all this, I was curious to know how it felt to create a figurehead. Figureheads were meant to catch the essence of a ship, to be its soul in the southern oceans and the China Seas. So I joined a wood carving group and, while I’d never make any claims as to the quality of the things I produce, I have experienced the pleasure of seeing shapes emerge from formless blocks of elm, oak and ash. The picture is the first piece I ever made. It’s primitive, anatomically dubious, but it taught me an awful lot about my main character, John Grant. This extract shows how I used the experience.

John was back in his workshop and, gradually, the rhythm of his mallet, the demands of the grain and the slow emergence of folds and shapes from the wood had begun to catch at his mind and turn it away from the questions that his day’s visits had multiplied. He hadn’t yet done enough to see the whole figure in the wood but he was beginning to know that it was there and he eased his gouges through the surface in search of it. It was as if the tree had grown around the woman; his task was simply to release her. By late afternoon, he was ready to start working on the curves of the head and the planes of the face. As they began to appear, he chose a smaller mallet, tapping at the surface with even greater care, fearing that if he bit too deeply, the wood might bleed.

Hacking lumps out of timber has become a very pleasant displacement activity. It’s also let me produce some figures of which I’ve become rather fond. So the corpses in a future novel will be those of the unknown guys who stole this gargoyle from above my garage door. It won’t bring the gargoyle back, but it’ll be very satisfying to imagine my hands around their throats, or skewering them with … well, I’ll decide later.