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Do you feel lucky? Well, do you? by Alison Morton
The perpetrator in the Dirty Harry film wasn’t sure – and that was his bad luck. Clint Eastwood’s character, Inspector Harry Callahan, who spoke those words, got his man. In real life we experience sudden happy moments or unexpected positive outcomes, or perhaps we count ourselves fortunate in the lives we are living. Is it good luck? Then the roof blows off in a storm, the drains leak or travel restrictions fall on us due to Covid-19. We feel hard done-by – or is it bad luck?
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In our writing we can borrow all of this. Of course, we want our protagonist to win through, learn a valuable lesson or at least accept their lot. On the way, they can have doses of luck. If your character is doing well, knows the people they need to and makes their way to a satisfactory conclusion of the story, we are pleased for them. But if it’s fair sailing all the way, something vital is missing.
In a thriller, there’s usually a villain and various obstacles such as awkward superiors and incompetent or unreliable colleagues and witnesses but our hero/heroine fights on with grim determination, defeating each problem. But what about injecting some downright bad luck? A burst tyre, post not delivered, falling over the kid’s Lego when rushing out to work – you know the thing. Sometimes it’s more serious – a witness having a heart attack, forensic evidence contamination, no spare ammunition clip.
In romance, the heroine’s train could be cancelled leaving her fuming on a freezing platform. The hero could be stuck in traffic or forgot to charge his phone so he can’t contact her. Historical novels abound with bad luck – plague, lame horses, ships sinking.
Good luck such as a chance meeting, an unexpected opportunity or a legacy can be celebrated and woven into the story. This is especially so when the character lives in an age or setting where superstition is rife. In the past, much good fortune was put down to the number of Hail Marys you recited, or for the Romans, what the auguries said when you sacrificed a lamb or a bull. Many of us cross our fingers for luck and if salt is spilt, throw a few grains over the left shoulder where the devil sits. Let’s not even start on black cats!
Our character can be a superstitious type who always takes notice of omens, numbers, and tea leaves, but who could in the course of a story come to see that it’s they themselves who make their own ‘good’ luck through hard work/loyalty/ being kind to others/a courageous deed. Opposite that is the completely logical, Spock-like cool analyst who thinks that fourleaf clovers, lucky charms, and prayers to the gods are for the birds. But if something beyond their ordered world seems to influence their case or cause, they may be forced to reconsider. And what fun that is, making a character ‘turn’!
However, a warning! ‘Stroke of luck’ should only be used once in a book and you must make it plausible. If the solution or resolution to a story flies in out of nowhere, readers can be disappointed, disbelieving or even angry. A few clues, however obscure, dropped in along the way should pave the way for the ‘lucky’ development.
Happy writing!
Alison has compiled a selection of articles from this column in ‘The 500 Word Writing Buddy’, available as an ebook and paperback. She is now drafting the sequel to her latest thriller, ‘Double Identity’.
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Problematic Proverbs
This month’s proverb is:
Generally assumed to be a warning against being too curious or inquisitive, due to the potential for misfortune or danger, in actuality the proverb finishes with “but satisfaction brought it back”. It highlights that, at times, having an inquiring mind is worthwhile if it leads you to discover something new. This was first printed in 1912 and may also refer to the idea that cats have nine lives.
This Month’s Book Reviews
The Secret Recipes of Sophie Valroux
by Samantha Verant Review by Jacqui Brown
This book starts on a high. The buzz of excitement and anticipation in the kitchen of a prestigious New York restaurant can be felt as the chefs await an important phone call. Then wham! In an instant it’s all taken away and Sophie sees her dream of being a Michelin-recognised chef disintegrate around her. As her name is ruined, I felt the dull ache of pain in my chest at the injustice of what had happened to her. Sophie spirals into despair as she loses her way, both in life and in the kitchen, and the risk of turning into a broken woman, like her mother, suddenly seems very real.
A little bit of French magic can help to heal even the most broken of hearts and that is just what is offered to Sophie. Although it has been many years since she spent any time in France with her Grand-mere Odette, a telephone call to say Odette is not well is enough for Sophie to pack her bags in New York and fly into Toulouse to be with her. She may have pushed her happy memories of summers in France to the back of her mind since her mum died, but being back in the chateau and seeing familiar faces brings them alive once more, and she begins to realise what she has sacrificed to follow her dream. There was a lot to keep me entertained in this book, including a fun and sometimes quirky cast of characters. Sophie came to life through the emotionally charged moments, from the despair at the beginning to the understanding and acceptance that came with the family secrets revealing the missing pieces of her life. I found it easy to visualise the chateau, the markets and the streets of Toulouse, as well as the smells of the kitchen and the produce from the garden and vineyards, and as an added bonus there are recipes included for some of Sophie’s favourite dishes. The more I read, the more I was filled with hope that she would find herself and her home. If you enjoy novels with strong characters, a sense of place and a little bit of French magic, you will love this one. The great news is that the second book in this series, Sophie Valroux’s Paris Stars will be released in October this year.
The Lies She Told
by Lynda Renham Review by Jacqui Brown
When Kate is attacked in her kitchen, the quiet Oxfordshire village of Stonesend is thrown into a state of chaos. The once safe, friendly village, where community spirit was evident everywhere, is fractured by a seemingly impossible investigation whose scrutiny spares no-one as we visit the past lives of some of the characters and tackle some difficult topics and relationship issues. As Beth Harper and Tom Miller try to piece together the events and find the evidence they need, she is forced to reveal secrets about her recent divorce and his arrival in the village is shrouded in unanswered questions. He has little understanding of village life and unfinished business in London, which often hampers their investigation, but I had full confidence in Beth from the beginning. Despite her personal problems, I knew there was an inner strength just waiting to surface. I enjoyed following the effects of the shock waves that rippled out after the attack, affecting everyone in the village in a different way, and at some point, most of the characters became guilty in my head. This book totally took over my mind as I tried to work out who did it, and why.
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Relaxing in French – Can reading books in French be enjoyable?
by Howard Needs
This article has its origin at the beginning of our French period, some 20 years ago, during an exploratory shopping trip in Niort, and was prompted by a recent conversation about books and literature with a British woman who had just moved to France. When I explained to her my experience of reading in French, her reaction was, “You could help other people if you wrote an article on what you have just explained.” The reason for writing this article is not to blow my own trumpet, but to encourage others.
Before relating my relationship with books in French, I need to explain my relationship with foreign languages. At school in the UK, I had very poor marks for French, and taking an O level in French wasn’t even a remote possibility. When I was 21, I met a Dutch woman who would become my wife. A few years later, I emigrated to Holland to live with her and take up a position as an engineer . I stayed there until we were pensioned and we emigrated to France.
During that period in Holland, I quickly picked up Dutch, to the point of being able to use it competently as a second language in conversation and reading; writing was more laborious. My colleagues at work had said, “We are not going to speak English to you” and, to a lesser extent, my Dutch family-in-law did the same – and so I learnt. Language education in the Dutch school system was, and is, extensive; many Dutch people can speak Dutch, English, French and German, and enthusiasts add on a couple more. I had thought to emulate this and started on German but failed miserably – partly due to the method of instruction, which was “learning as a child does” and involved fast spoken German from tape recorders, and no grammar. However, English was and is the language of engineers, and so on foreign business trips I had no real problems knowing only English and Dutch. I still remember a French engineer who was put into a working group because of his technical competence but who had almost no English at all – I felt very sorry for him and could well understand how he must have felt.
Towards the end of our working life, my wife and I realised that we had the choice of staying in the house where we had lived for 25 years or moving. We felt we needed a change and so the idea of emigrating to France germinated. This led to my wife saying (stipulating?) that we both needed to get our French up to speed, and so we started on a computer-based course with one-to-one lessons. The lady giving the course was Swiss, and the base language was Dutch, but since the majority of the brainwashing was done by computer, in French, this did not really form an impediment. The course was grammar based, with merciless interrogations from the computer on verbs and their conjugations and tenses, genders, pronouns, numbers, days of the week, and so on. This course actually
helped a little, and a year or so later, when we were purchasing our dream house in the Deux-Sèvres, I could read and understand some of the documentation, albeit with difficulty. Spoken French was and still is a problem, compounded by deafness and age in general, and, to be honest, leaves me with a feeling of inferiority.
I came to France expecting to follow the same rapid learning process for French that I had experienced for Dutch so long ago, but this was not to be. Without making excuses but naming factually a number of causes, I can say that it proved impossible for me to achieve any really proficient level of spoken French. The reasons are many, but deafness limits any conversation even in English, because we interpolate a lot of what we hear and because in our replies we reuse vocabulary and grammar. If you don’t hear well, then this whole process, including learning, breaks down. Add to that the difference in social life between that of a young working person with children at home and all the interactions that implies, in the Netherlands, and that of a retired person with a very small circle of social contact with his environment, in France, and you can see that attempting to become fluent in an additional language under those conditions is very much uphill work.
As many of you will have done, I started with French lessons once we had settled in. At that time, the Centre Socioculturel in Bressuire had commenced a course of lessons, and the lady instructing us gave the lessons using grammar as the base. She required written homework from us, in French, and this worked very well for me. I was there for three years, I think, and I learnt a lot – she was a very good teacher. But the course came to an end, and I did not search for another – a mistake, perhaps, but it leads me to the start of this article.
I read a lot for relaxation and whilst in Niort that day shortly after we’d moved to France, we went into a bookshop (which has since moved or gone out of business), to browse as we were used to back in Holland. The English section was small. But there was a vast selection of French books, and I realised that if I was to continue reading, I needed to have a big choice available at hand, and I thought what a pity it was that I could not read all those French books. I resolved there and then to see if I could develop a pleasure in reading in French. Once home, I took out a French copy of Marcel Pagnol’s Jean de Florette and started to read, with a dictionary on my knee (later I bought a dedicated electronic dictionary, which helped enormously). That first book was not easy, and nor were the subsequent books. I soon realised that there was a learning process involved – not so much one of vocabulary, but one of assimilating, first, what a phrase meant, then, later, a sentence and then, a lot later, a paragraph. Going through this process took more than a year , but as bigger and bigger groups of words began to make sense, my pleasure in reading increased, as did my speed. Weirdly enough, a newspaper such as Le Monde proved hard to understand, to the point that it was very easy to lose interest in articles, whereas a magazine such as Pour la Science, dealing with facts in the present tense, was quite understandable from the beginning. I think that the turning point with reading in French was when I nearly fell over a pallet of books in a Le Relais shop in Gare Montparnasse returning from a family visit. The pallet was fully loaded with a selection of detective paperbacks by a French author, and on the spur of the moment I bought a couple, after which I settled down in the TGV to Poitiers to read one. To my surprise, I enjoyed them both, even though I had to guess at a lot of the French police jargon. But that is the way it is – every new undertaking in a foreign country requires new vocabulary. From there onwards, I started reading other French authors and authors in translation, including some British ones. A lot of the books were parts of series, and I have tried to read all the books per series, in sequence, because life is easier if you understand and know the characters and the way the author expresses him- or herself (or should I say themselves these days?). I graduated after a few years to a Kindle e-reader and benefited from the built-in dictionaries, which allowed consultation on the fly. The enrichment I found in this process of reading French has included gaining self-respect; learning a lot about French history, about the French and their attitudes, and about the French countryside; and increasing my French vocabulary. I also found that I read books a lot more thoroughly in French than in English, although more slowly – no skip-reading in French. All very positive indeed. All in all, having access to a large source of authors, most of whom would not be translated into English, is an enrichment and the variety of information, ideas, and explanations allows a better comprehension of the society around us.
This article was actually an introduction, because, if our editor and publisher agrees, I will every so often write about the books and particularly the various series I have read in French. To kick off, I would mention Marie-Hélène Texier, an author whose books I discovered some years ago. She writes historical fiction covering a thousand years, from Charlemagne to almost the present day. The language is not complex, she leaves the worst violence of bygone ages out, and the historical accuracy seems excellent to me. I will return to her books later, but one that stays in my mind was about late 19th century London and the Post Office messenger boys scandal, which was unknown to me (later I found reference to it in the TV series Ripper Street). She approached the subject from an unusual angle, and that made the book for me.
