Well I am back on the blogging saddle and I would like to share with you how I write and what inspires me. I started out some years ago writing poetry when I joined the wonderful Crescent Arts Centre Creative Writing class. Then I moved onto writing short stories and then in short movie making. But inside, I felt that all my creativity to date were like those little geysers that bubbled and steamed from little vents on the sides of the mountain. I knew that deep down, there was a volcano of stories, novel in fact. It was this well that I needed to tap into and let loose.

I have always been fascinated by crime, mystery and noir. I know there are many definitions and theories of noir and what it means but as far as I am concerned, the very first noir story was uttered when language itself was invented. It is the vicissitudes of life, the random events, the butterfly wings of seemingly small insignificant events that can cause a cataclysmic effect on the life of an ordinary character that always chimed with me. It’s the ordinary man, or woman, who has the normal set of foibles that most of us have e.g. a dash of greed, a dollop of envy, a drop of lust ; who fate puts under the microscope and puts to the test in a way or ways that most of us luckily are not subjected to. It shows how such commonly held human foibles can lead the hero/heroine down seemingly glittering avenues that ultimately lead to pain, darkness and destruction.

Are all crime stories really secular versions of morality tales? When we finish reading a Martina Cole, a Daschell Hammet, a Cornwell Woolrich, a Lee Childs or one of the many many wonderful examples of crime fiction; do we  not consciously or unconsciously sigh ‘there for the grace of God go I?’

Even if your God is God or fate or whatever.

The heroes and heroines of crime literature are the unfortunate souls who fate have chosen for special but dark reasons. Even the innocent victims in noir, are never quite innocent; well not totally. This however can be debated. The real criminals, the psychos, the murderers, the blackmailers etc, well they were once smiling babes in the arms of a loving mother – once upon a long ago.

So something happened along the way.

Could that something have happened to us?

If not, there  for the grace of God/Fate go we.

And that’s why we read crime.