Author Charles Harris tells all about researching his latest novel, Play Me – which unfortunately included falling off a mountain!
You know you’re serious about researching your next novel when you find yourself falling off a mountain doing it.
They say you should write what you know. But the stories that hook me are about people and places I don’t know. I want to be taken out of myself when I read and when I write – but while much of a novel is made up, there has to be a bedrock of truth. The reader needs enough accurate detail to believe. And that takes research.
That comprises mainly having coffee with experts, chatting over Zoom, reading a lot of books and web pages, filling notebooks with scribblings that I try to decipher afterwards. In the process, I’ve smuggled myself into tabloid newsrooms, hospital wards and police cells.
So, how did I find myself falling off a mountain?
Play Me!
My latest novel, Play Me!, is a comedy crime set in the world of international conspiracy and rock music. At its heart is AxMan Flynn, a well-meaning if fading British rock star who wants to do good in the world but gets entangled in a deadly plot in the Caribbean.
But it didn’t start that way. The first seeds were sown when I heard a shocking report on the radio during the Ethiopian famine that Ethiopia was exporting food to our supermarkets instead of feeding its own people. Indeed, as I investigated further I learned this was normal across the developing world. International bankers and consortia would go into poor countries and lend them money for projects they didn’t need, putting them into debt they couldn’t pay off, forcing to sell food their own people now couldn’t afford.
This was a real international conspiracy, taking place under our very noses – indeed on our own overstuffed plates.
There was a story here. One that lent itself to satire. But even comedy – maybe especially comedy – needs the hard work of rooting the story in reality. And Play Me! was going to involve an international conspiracy abroad. Where? And how to get there?
The Dominican Republic
By chance, the BBC were looking for documentaries about third world issues. I pitched the idea and three months later I was filming in the Caribbean, in the Dominican Republic.
The DR was an ideal place to research what become in Play Me! the fictional island of Benkuda. It was on the drugs circuit, supplying to the mainland USA, which gave me my feuding gangsters – Freddie, who wants to retire from crime, and Lucky Strike Morton, his sworn enemy. The islanders also have the odd habit of naming their children after their favourite brands. A fun fact I could never have made up, but gave me the names of many of my favourite characters, not just Lucky Strike, but the criminal duo Pontiac and Edsel, and feminist rebels PanAm and Sprite.
I talked to men and women in the “barrios” (slums) in the capital Santo Domingo, which would have been enormously difficult to get to any other way. It was dangerous going into the barrios as a foreigner, not least with thousands of pounds of film equipment. But meeting the people there was an eye-opener.
They had no money, but their slum shacks were spotlessly clean. They had TV and the women were immaculately dressed. They showed me their collections of fashionable shoes. They were proud people – each TV, each pair of shoes, meant going without food, possibly for days. Insights that can’t be got from Google.
The time I spent in the Santo Domingo barrios fed into and gave life to barrios scenes when AxMan’s hiding from the Benkuda army.
One underlying theme of the documentary – and ultimately the novel – was the way the island’s farmers were being pushed into starvation by the low prices paid by the major corporations. In the DR, the major brands, in consort with rich landowners, paid farmers less for their crops than the cost of growing them. They could only survive if they sold to Fair Trade. This was to become an important part of Freddie’s character background, pushing him to leave his parents’ farm and fall in with the capital’s mobsters.
So we went to film a farmer, high up in the mountains at the centre of the island. We stayed with his family overnight – which itself was an important experience for AxMan’s flight into the unknown – no electricity here at all, darkness at night darker than I’ve ever known it. Next day we trekked even higher, carrying all our gear to where he grew his coffee plants.
Stepping out into nothing
These turned out to be on a virtually 90 degree slope, yet the farmer and his family seemed to be able to run up and down as easily as if it was on the flat, my cameraman following them, clambering around, lining up his close-ups. Well, as the director, I wasn’t to be shown up by my own crew. So, I stepped out. And found myself standing on nothing.
I’m not sure how long I fell, sliding, slipping, trying to grab hold of bushes, earth, anything that would stop my fall. And then I slid into a coffee bush and managed to hold on.
I survived with only a few nasty cuts. But all research, even falling off mountains, reveals something of use.
Falling off the slope gave me an invaluable key to AxMan’s character, foolish yet brave. It helped me write realistic action and danger. And also comedy. Because if you can’t laugh at a man stepping off into space to research a comedy crime novel, what can you laugh at?
(c) Charles Harris
About Play Me! by Charles Harris:
The most dangerous gig of his life.
AxMan Flyn is desperate to make his mark.
A fading British rock-star, he grabs a chance to front a high-profile charity concert in the Caribbean and do some good in the world. But hardly has he arrived than he stumbles in on the assassination of the island’s president in a coup. And, to his horror, the new gangster-president frames him as the killer.
AxMan has to go on the run, chased by a police force which is determined to stop him revealing the truth.
A real softie, despite a tough stage image, now he’s forced to come out of his shell and fight for his life. And the only person who can help him is another gangster.
But of course nothing is ever straightforward and AxMan’s pride and hunger for fame keeps getting in the way – along with his over-eager fans.
If stories of fish out of water, unlikely heroes and twisty plots strike a chord with you, you’ll love this rollicking witty tale where celebrity rock meets a dangerous underworld of violent mobsters, desperate guerrillas and unscrupulous politicians – and death is on the playlist.
Order your copy of Play Me online here.
And read more Meet the Author articles on Writing.ie here.
