Short stories have origin stories too

As of 22 November, ANIMUS is published and available in kindle and paperback editions.

So what was the inspiration behind this collection?

That came in two parts, one more welcome than the other…

Firstly, I wanted the freedom to write a genre-roaming range of otherwise disparate stories, unified only by the presence in each of an object – something that might plausibly pass from hand to hand and participate in noteworthy moments throughout the 20th Century and beyond.

Of course, you could argue that anything can become a personal talisman. But I reasoned that certain objects, making their appearance at times of heightened emotions, take on a power that reaches beyond the purely symbolic. One might almost say that they become vessels. A wedding ring, for instance: loaded with hopes, fears, potential deceits and inescapable regrets.

Since I knew that some of the tales I wanted to write were likely to be detective stories, others more in the espionage/political thriller arena – and others perhaps grappling for something less genre-restricted to say about crime and punishment, war and peace (!) –  a pistol seemed a promising choice.

Dramatically, after all – and as a certain other Russian said – a gun is a promise to the audience. Plus, in the quest for dramatically diverse scenarios, it's handy in that it can readily span good or bad intentions and characters, as well as different countries, cultures, even centuries. (The Walther PPK, for example, is not only still wielded on page and screen by Britain’s best-loved secret agent but was also the weapon – reputedly – with which Hitler took his own life.)

But I didn’t want something so (in)famous. Nor simply to feature a particular model of handgun. Rather, it seemed important that it was literally the same artefact in each story: the only recurring character.

So I chose this old Soviet service pistol, the Tula Tokarev.

Or, yes, perhaps it chose me...

Because that’s when the less-welcome inspiration started creeping its way in. It was impossible to pick up the gun – loaded with history as well as dramatic possibilities – without thinking about the scenarios in which it had found itself and the deeds it had done. They were still there, echoing through each crude milling mark and blood-pitted blemish, every worn-smooth striation in the cracked Bakelite, every lingering odour and clinging residue.

It had a particular resonance, and I listened to it.

(Note to myself: next time, or rather, in an alternative time line, if you’re going to explore the idea that certain inanimate objects can not only embody their users’ intent but also somehow materialise a spirit – an animus – and even retain memories... maybe don’t make it an object made for murder!)

Anyway, the stories came to me, one way or another. And as they did, my attempts to track the exact same gun through history fell apart. Narrative requirements began to trump archaeological intent. If I was to tell its stories, the timeline required it to have had different owners at the same point and to have been in two places at once.  Or was it playing with me?

No matter, I thought. It’s only a loose theme designed to animate a free-ranging collection, not the defining structure of a novel. So I let the stories take their own paths, for now.

I say ‘for now’ because I suspect that some day, they will all converge again.

No, I can’t say when yet, or how. It’s just a feeling.

You could say that something’s telling me.

          *          *          *          *          *          * ​

Anyway, long story short... here's how the individual stories got started:

Targets
Blokhin was real, an extraordinary monster. Perversely, his tally of 7,000 murders in 28 days during the Katyn massacre even got him into the Guinness World Records as ‘most prolific executioner’. When I read about him I found myself wishing I could send someone after him – an ordinary monster. So I did.
                               
Kom-bat
FlashBack Fiction was (and hopefully will be again) a beautifully edited online journal that enabled someone like me to explore the short form's ability to re-inhabit moments from history. This, the only real example of flash in the volume, was written for that journal and benefitted greatly from the input of one of its editors. The website is still up and I urge everyone to explore it. You can even hear me reading the audio version of this story (cringe!)

Shooter
My uncle was BAFTA-nominated for the screenplay he wrote for a movie, Yield to the Night, that helped turn public opinion against capital punishment back in the late 1950s. This story was at least partly inspired by his work on that movie, as well as by memories of Camden Town from my childhood.
                              
Kosmos 57  
A locked room murder mystery set in a one-man space capsule… could it be done? As is often the case, the ‘parlour game’ aspect was just the starting point – and this one certainly broadened its horizons.
                                
The Illusionist  
I used to work on a barge on the Regent’s Canal in Shoreditch. I’d walk there every day up the City Road and turn right at the Eagle. Sometimes I’d pop in and out… and it was in there one day that I came up with this idea for a story set at a very different junction, where the ‘smoke and mirrors’ of the magic and secret worlds converge.
                           
The Liberation of Vaclav Voracek   
Another story with a personal connection, which I’ve mentioned before here. When the Warsaw Pact invaded Czechoslovakia and brought a shocking end to the ‘Prague Spring’, friends of our family were shooting a Hollywood movie in the country and had to get back across the newly reinstated Iron Curtain. But I always wondered about the Czech students on the crew who had no means of escape. Although it's set in an unnamed country, this story is for them.

Stockholm
Inspired by some of those controversial psychology experiments that were conducted in the 1960s and 70s – the Stanford Prison Experiment being an infamous example – and by cases such as that of Patty Hearst, who was endlessly debated as I was growing up, this story is itself a study: what is the passive voice really hiding?
                                   
Animus 
The title story is very much my reaction to the let-down of 'Cool Britannia', New Labour and the supposed victory of Western liberal values… seen through the eyes of a compromised private investigator who has spent even more time in the pub than I did.
                              
Departures  
Two people, a man and woman, sit and talk about something offstage. Yeah, Hemingway did it with Hills Like White Elephants, to which this is a bit of a homage. But it also demonstrates how, if you have a particular theme to a collection of stories and there’s a story in which the theme hasn’t yet revealed itself, and it’s the last story… a certain, inevitable tension builds – and, like Hemingway but in a different way, you don’t have to show or tell it.)

           

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