Building a Lead – How I Created DI Harry
Evans
As a popular
question from readers is, “How do you create your characters?” I thought I’d
use this guest post to answer that very question and I’ve chosen the main man
himself to be my sacrificial lamb.
Before I start,
I’m going to look at some of his qualities. Evans drinks too much, smokes too
much and drives like the hounds of hell are pursuing him. He’s also very
clever, he cares about people he’s never met. An insult or an enquiry about a
family member’s well-being are the words most likely to tumble from his lips.
He’s irascible, contradictory, lonely, loved and despised in equal measure.
There’s no rule he won’t break to get a result, authority means nothing to him
unless he’s wielding it and he’s earned a reputation as a fighter by the only
means possible.
When I first
started thinking about writing Evans I was binge watching Life on Mars in which
a modern cop – Sam Tyler - gets transported back to the seventies and has to forget
all the advances in policing and societal attitudes. His boss – Gene Hunt – was
a complete dinosaur who’d pick a suspect at random and then beat a confession
from them. I loved the idea of the
series and decided to do a little role reversal and have my character as the
last of the dinosaurs fighting to avoid the meteorite.
Before anyone
rolls their eyes or shouts cliché. I’m gonna tell you that I know it’s a
cliché. I’m also going to point out clichés exist for reason. Namely they are
truisms.
Obviously I
wanted to avoid clichedom as much as possible and I had a few ideas on ways to
do this. One of the first things I did was give Evans my paternal grandparents’
local knowledge. (They were farmers and on childhood Sundays they’d take me on
drive out through the local countryside. Whichever way they went they’d point
out farms, houses and businesses and discuss the generations of people who
lived, owned or worked in the places they passed.) Gran and Grandad knew
everybody and everybody knew them. I wanted Harry Evans to be the same and so I
made him that way. This trait in some ways hearkens back to the days of the
village bobby who knew all the locals and is a level of policing you often hear
being called for again. With Harry Evans, I delivered it to Cumbria.
Another thing I
chose to do with Harry was to give him the usual kind of troubled life you’d
find in the big bag of clichés about Detective Inspectors. Only I mixed it up
in my own twisted way and gave him a reason to feel anger as well as loss.
(That was close. I nearly wrote a spoiler there)
To make matters
worse for him (And me through a huge lack of foresight) I put him at the tail
end of his career, thus threatening to deprive him of the one thing he had left
to get up for in the morning.
His language is
earthy to say the least and he doesn’t suffer fools gladly. Some of his
put-downs are withering to say the least, yet he has a real sense of decency
and will always sacrifice his own feelings for the greater good.
He berates his
team and has insulting nicknames for them, but he also has their utmost
loyalty.
He’s a do-as-I-say-not-as-I-do kind of guy and always will be.
He’s
contradictory in every sense of the word. He’s a cop who is on friendly
speaking terms with the local gangster family. He spends his days breaking procedural
rules and his nights reading crime novels looking for procedural errors he can
inform the authors’ about.
Most of all,
he’s loyal to those he cares about, to the people of Cumbria he’s paid to
protect and regardless of who else is there, DI Harry Evans is the smartest
person in the room.
If that's made you want to get your hands on a copy of Matching The Evidence you can do just that right here!
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| Photo courtesy of Noelle Holten |
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