Writing – word-play – chapter headings

Not every book has chapter headings; some authors and publishers settle for only numbering chapters; a very few don’t even have chapters, just scene breaks. There are no hard and fast rules about it. Some readers and writers like them, others don’t, and probably the majority don’t care one way or the other.

As far back as I can remember, I’ve been fascinated by chapter headings – whether one-liners or several sentences revealing what the chapter was about: authors like R.M. Ballantyne (The departure--The sea--My companions--Some account of the wonderful sights we saw on the great deep--A dreadful storm and a frightful wreck – Chapter 2, Coral Island.) Then there were the clever or witty ones, playing with words: Ian Fleming (‘He disagreed with something that ate him’ – Chapter 14, Live and Let Die.) There are the succinct headings, such as those from Adam Hall in his Quiller novels – single words plucked from that chapter’s text: Dazzle, Scorpion, Motorcade, Caviar – Quiller Balalaika.

The arguments against using headings are varied. It breaks the flow, somehow; it’s disruptive. And of course for the writer it can prove difficult to settle on an appropriate title, particularly if there are over fifty chapters! Yet naming a chapter in some manner can act as a bookmark – leading the reader to a particular event or scene in the story.

I feel providing these headings adds another layer of interest; besides, I enjoy the word-play involved. Take for example Catalyst, just published.

Chapter 1 – Cat among the pigeons. This is a well-known saying, the cliché meaning to cause havoc, and it’s taken literally here since Cat, the heroine, is scaling a tall building and disturbs some pigeons! Her motivation is indeed to disturb the smooth working of the company, Cerberus.

Chapter 2 – Cat and mouse. This chapter is about Cat and Rick verbally jousting. It also contains the odd intentional cliché, such as ‘raining cats and dogs’ since this is ‘The Avenging Cat’ series and all the book titles include 'Cat'!

Chapter 4 – Cat’s tail. Here, Cat is being followed…

Chapter 5 – Cat’s fish. I resisted simply writing ‘Catfish’ which was even more contrived! She ate fish (Thai fish cakes, sea bream) in the hotel, that’s all.

Chapter 8 – ‘Cat got your tongue?’ While interrogating Rick, the villain Zabala uses the phrase.

Chapter 9 – Cat on the roof. A variation, perhaps; not the hot tin roof. Cat is up to her climbing antics again.

 
Chapter 12 – Catananche. This is very relevant to the plot, but I won’t say more, other than it begins with ‘Cat’!
 
Other chapters are suitably headed as well, of course, but don’t have the word ‘cat’ in them.
 
Next time, I’ll take a look at the Tana Standish series’ chapters, which emulate Adam Hall’s approach.
 

 

CATALYST
The first in ‘The Avenging Cat’ series

Catalyst, a person that precipitates events.

 
That’s Catherine Vibrissae. Orphan. Chemist. Model. Avenging Cat.
 
She seeks revenge against Loup Malefice, the man responsible for the takeover of her father’s company. An accomplished climber, Cat is not averse to breaking and entering to confound her enemies. During her investigations, she crosses the path of Rick Barnes, a company lawyer, who seems to have his own agenda.
 
Ranging from south of England to the north-east, Wales and Barcelona, Cat’s quest for vengeance is implacable. But with the NCA hot on her tail, can she escape the clutches of sinister Zabala and whip-wielding Profesora Quesada?
 
 E-book from Amazon UK here

E-book from Amazon COM here

'Stole pigeon'

Spanish Eye contains 22 cases from Leon Cazador, half-English, half-Spanish private eye. Published by Crooked Cat Publishing in November 2013.

The vast majority of these cases are based on true events…  The short story ‘Pigeon Hearted’ was first published in magazine format in 2009: here is a very brief excerpt:

 

Pigeon-Hearted

 “I’d just witnessed the first cracks in a breaking heart.”

Fireworks in daytime are not particularly spectacular, but that doesn’t deter my Spanish compatriots from setting them off. The clear blue sky was momentarily sprayed with silver and red stars as the single rocket exploded above the town square. Minutes afterwards, a profusion of colours darted above our heads, but this display wasn’t the transient starburst of more pyrotechnics. The palette that soared in the sky came from garishly painted pigeons released from patios, balconies, rooftops, and gardens. In the next few minutes, the number of male birds increased to perhaps seventy.

“My prize bird has been stolen!” a man shouted from a balcony on the opposite side of the street. He gestured at us and added, “Pilar, tell your brother I need his help!”

Pilar leaned on her balcony’s metal railing and waved acknowledgement. “That’s Lorenzo Sousa, last year’s champion,” she said. “It seems a bit drastic, to steal his prize-winning pigeon, don’t you think?”

Resting my forearms on the rail next to her, I smiled. “All part of the competitive spirit, I imagine.”

This pigeon business, organised by the Federacion Española de Columbicultura, was highly popular. There were competitions at various levels: the comarcal, the inter-comarca, the regional and comunitat, and eventually on to the Spanish championships, where the winner could come away with a prize of €30,000.

*

Pigeons are big money, here in Spain and elsewhere. From time to time news reports echo the Cazador tales, and this is but one of them. In Burnley, England, arsonists destroyed a pigeon fancier’s loft, killing 100 of his best racing birds worth thousands of pounds. In Cartagena, Spain, a man was arrested for stealing 210 pigeons in the area. From such reports stemmed this tale, part humour, part romance, part crime… To learn how Leon Cazador gets involved, please read the book…

 

Image courtesy of Derek Workman – See his website ‘Spain uncovered’ - http://derekworkman.wordpress.com/spainuncovered.net/

[Derek moved to Spain in 1999; ex Merchant Navy, antiques restorer, muralist, exhibition organizer, and audio magazine producer, he settled in Valencia city and worked on regional and international newspapers and is a freelance writer. He has written two guide books – Inland Trips from the Costa Blanca and Small Hotels and Inns of Eastern Spain.]

 

 

Spanish Eye paperback can be bought post-free worldwide from here

 

Kindle UK here

Kindle Amazon com here

 

Beginning – the hook

I’ve said it a number of times, but it’s worth repeating: beginnings of stories and novels are important. They’re the hook for the reader. 

Many film directors appreciate this too. Pull the audience in quickly and then never let go. I’ve sat through a number of movies where the start was inauspicious, plodding, revealing nothing about the characters, the environment or the story theme – and then found that eventually the story (at last!) takes hold. Nowadays, that leisurely approach rarely works in the written word. The audience, the reader, needs to be sucked in by the first paragraph or two. He or she isn’t going to invest precious time in something that doesn’t intrigue, excite interest or raise questions.

That doesn’t mean the writer should spend ages on the beginning, honing it, striving to ‘get it right’ – the beginning might well not resolve itself until the work is completed.

I’m pleased to announce that I have signed a contract with Crooked Cat Publishing for Spanish Eye, a collection of short stories about Leon Cazador, private eye. The image is taken from the Crooked Cat Facebook page announcement (it isn’t the cover): https://www.facebook.com/crookedcatpublishing

Spanish Eye makes a great companion volume to my book Blood of the Dragon Trees, set in Tenerife, also published by Crooked Cat.

These stories were previously published by Solstice, but the contract expired; an extra short story has been added, so now there are twenty-two first person tales, a couple of them award-winners, all of them previously published in magazines (though lengthened in most cases). Here below are samples of a selection of beginnings from the collection (this post would be too long to include all of them!).
 

Relic Hunters

Angel Ramos held his breath as he carefully unlatched then lifted the ornate lid off the rosewood box. A distinctive smell emerged like a palpable thing, together with a fine miasma of dust that floated in the sunbeams slanting through the hotel window. It was the aroma of old parchment or vellum that harboured the dust of centuries.

Night Fishing

Dusk fled quickly, as it does out here in the south of Spain. The warm night air was humid and still. The full moon’s reflection glinted from the calm Mediterranean. Behind me, cicadas chirruped but I barely heard them as I was concentrating on the little fishing boat out at sea, with its nightlight casting a circle of white around the stern. From the cliff top, I watched the three of them through 10x50 binoculars, and my fears were confirmed. Old Salvador Molina needed his strong sons to haul the net in because it seemed to contain a heavy object. My heart sank.
            Sometimes, the night of unreason lurks in dark recesses, waiting to cloak the good earth, and it would seem that even this honest fisherman was not immune to the importuning of this evil night.

Grave Concerns

The mass grave by the roadside was not the first in Spain to be unearthed in the last four years and it wouldn’t be the last. On each side were carobs and bright yellow and blue wild flowers, a tranquil contrast to the macabre sight before us. Men in the trench wore gauze masks over their mouths as they lifted out human bones and strips of clothing and placed them reverently on a length of tarpaulin. Behind them stood an idle mechanical earth-digger, while beyond the fields of rosemary and artichokes rose the rugged mountains, mute witnesses to what had happened about sixty-seven years ago.
        
Off Plan
I was wearing a false moustache, grey coloured contact lenses, and my hair was dyed black. My brother, Juan, wouldn’t recognize me. In fact, I had difficulty recognizing me. I was no longer Leon Cazador but Carlos Ortiz Santos. Sometimes it was necessary to wear a disguise and take on a fake name to hoodwink the ungodly. This was one of those times.

Endangered Species

He had large eyes, big ears and, surprisingly, his middle finger was very long on each hand. “He looks cute,” I said, lowering the photograph of the little aye-aye. His hair was black, and he had a long bushy tail. His eyes seemed to be expressing surprise at finding himself in a cage rather than the diminishing rain forests of Madagascar. Perhaps the daylight conditions affected him, too, which wasn’t strange really, as his kind is nocturnal. “But,” I added, shaking my head in mock concern, “my fiancée wants something a bit more exotic. Know what I mean?”

Big Noise

“You’ve come to the right person, Mr. Santos!” Darren Atkins said, speaking louder than was necessary in the tapas bar that overlooked the Plaza Mayor. “My product is the best on Spain’s south coast, take my word for it! I’m the big noise around here!” Every sentence tended to end with an exclamation. This self-styled important person was big in other respects as well. Even when I use my real name, Leon Cazador, rather than my undercover alias of Carlos Santos, I stand six feet high in my open-toed sandals; yet Atkins was a couple of inches taller than me. His Hawaiian-style short-sleeved shirt bulged because he had big muscles and shoulders. Because he had shaved his head, his big ears appeared more prominent and tended to press forward like little radar. I wondered if that feature prompted him to go into the acoustics business.

Duty Bound

A mountainous landscape populated by dragons strode out of the swathes of sauna steam and approached me. Hiroki Kuroda was tattooed over his entire torso and down to his wrists and calves. At a glance, he gave the impression that he was wearing long johns; instead, he was a walking exhibition of yakuza body art. Ray Bradbury’s Illustrated Man sprang to mind, but this was no fantasy. As a member of the yakuza, a Japanese criminal organization similar to the Mafia, Hiroki endured hundreds of hours of pain simply to show that he could. He waved with his left hand. The little finger was missing at the first knuckle.

Burning Issue

Landscape defines some towns and cities. And even the people and the small mountain town of Cocentaina were perhaps typical. So I thought as I drove Jacinto Alvarez and his wife Puri along the A7 on our approach. The town had been under siege more than once in its history and I reflected that that was how the Alvarez couple felt right now.

Pigeon Hearted

Fireworks in daytime are not particularly spectacular, but that doesn’t deter my Spanish compatriots from setting them off. The clear blue sky was momentarily sprayed with silver and red stars as the single rocket exploded above the town square. Minutes afterwards, a profusion of colours darted above our heads, but this display wasn’t the transient starburst of more pyrotechnics. The palette that soared in the sky came from garishly painted pigeons released from patios, balconies, rooftops, and gardens. In the next few minutes, the number of male birds increased to perhaps seventy.

I hope they've given you a taster for the book, due out later this year!

The late Elmore Leonard famously stated ‘never begin any story with the weather’. He meant get into the character or the action immediately. I’d agree with that – though there are other considerations. Raise a question that the reader wants answered, create a visual image that lodges in the reader’s head. The above examples probably do some of that, I believe.
 

So, that’s the end of the beginning – for now.

 

 

Leon Cazador, private investigator in Spain

I've just completed my 21st short story featuring this guy; it's a story I've been wanting to write for a couple of years but didn't have an angle on... The previous Leon Cazador story was written about 18 months ago and it was great to get reacquainted.

Nineteen of his stories have been published commercially and a couple earned prizes in competitions. At present I'm going through the collection and beefing up the stories for a collection; most commercial word counts don't allow for much in the way of atmosphere, character description and detail that provides additional realism; I'm hoping that my editing can enhance the existing stories. The collection is tentatively called Spanish Eye. I expect I'll be writing another four or five stories to get to an appropriate wordcount. Here's the Introduction to the Collection:

INTRODUCTION

In the middle of 2005, I received a telephone call from a Spanish private investigator, Leon Cazador. He’d heard of my efforts with a novel, Pain Wears No Mask, and wanted me to write about some of his cases in a similar vein – first person narrative. I’ve lost count of the number of approaches I’ve had from people wanting me to ghost write their autobiographies; it’s gratifying but any such venture entails many months of intense work and distracts me from other planned projects. I was inclined to turn down Señor Cazador, until he said, ‘I thought you captured the voice of Sister Rose perfectly. I feel you could do it for me, too.’ Suitably flattered, I arranged a meeting. I found that he was a fascinating raconteur and, more importantly, he had a good story to tell. As a result, I began writing Leon Cazador short stories, all of which seem to have been well received.

For thousands of years, evildoers conducted their business during the dark hours. Night offered concealment. The innocent and god-fearing slept in their beds while unsavoury characters went about their nefarious business under the cloak of darkness. But in recent memory all that seems to have changed. Now, muggers are quite blatant, attacking their victims in broad daylight. Burglars boldly break in during the day when the house owners are out at work. The law’s sanctions against criminals no longer appear to be a deterrent.

Darkness not only obliterates light, it permeates the mind and soul too. Is this an enlightened society we’re living in or one that’s about to implode? I don’t know, but I do feel that the silent majority will only stand for so much and when that limit is reached they will turn like the proverbial worm and rebel. Until that time, the world needs brave souls like Leon Cazador who is not afraid to bring the ungodly to justice and so help, in his own words, ‘to hold back the encroaching night of unreason.’

‘My allegiance is split because I’m half-English and half-Spanish,’ he says. ‘Mother had a whirlwind romance with a Spanish waiter but, happily, it didn’t end when the holiday was over. The waiter pursued her to England and they were married.’

Leon was born in Spain and has a married sister, Pilar, and an older brother, Juan, who is an officer in the Guardia Civil. Leon Cazador sometimes operates in disguise under several aliases, among them Carlos Ortiz Santos, his little tribute to the fabled fictional character Simon Templar.

As a consequence of dealing with the authorities and criminals, Leon has observed in his two home countries the gradual deterioration of effective law enforcement and the disintegration of respect.

At our first meeting, he said, ‘When I was growing up in England, I never imagined there would be no-go areas in those great cities, places where the shadow of light falls on streets and minds. Now, at weekends, some sections of many towns seem to be under siege.’

Now that he has returned to live in Spain, he finds that it is not so bad here, though he admits that he has seen many changes over the last thirty years, most of them good, yet some to be deplored. ‘It is heartening to see that family cohesion is still strong in most areas; but even that age-old stability is under threat. Yet some urbanizaciones more resemble towns on the frontier of the Old West, where mayors can be bought, where lawlessness is endemic and civilised behaviour has barely a foothold. Even so, most nights you can walk the streets and feel safe here in Spain.’

Leon has led an interesting life. As Spain’s conscription didn’t cease until 2001, he decided to jump rather than be pushed and joined the Army, graduating as an Artillery Lieutenant. About a year later, he joined the Spanish Foreign Legion’s Special Operations Company (Bandera de operaciones especiales de la legión) and was trained in the United States at Fort Bragg, where he built up his considerable knowledge about clandestine activities and weapons. Some months afterwards, he was recruited into the CESID (Centro Superior de Informacion de la Defensa), which later became the CNI (Centro Nacional de Inteligencia). Unlike most western democracies, Spain runs a single intelligence organization to handle both domestic and foreign risks.

He is one of those fortunate individuals who is capable of learning a foreign language with ease: he grew up bilingual, speaking English and Spanish, and soon learned Portuguese, French, Arabic, Chinese and Japanese. Part of his intelligence gathering entailed his transfer to the Spanish Embassy in Washington, DC. Here, he met several useful contacts in the intelligence community and at the close of the Soviet occupation he embarked on a number of secret missions to Afghanistan with CIA operatives. By the time that the Soviet withdrawal was a reality, Leon was transferred to the Spanish Embassy in Tokyo, where he liaised with both intelligence and police organizations. Secret work followed in China, the Gulf and Yugoslavia.

In 1987, Leon was attached to a secret section of MI6 to assist operatives in Colombia. Although he has been decorated four times in theatres of conflict, reports suggest his bravery justifies at least another four medals.

A year after witnessing the atrocity of the Twin Towers while stationed with the United Nations, he returned to civilian life and set up a private investigation firm. During periods of leave and while stationed in Spain, he had established a network of contacts in law enforcement, notably the Guardia Civil. One of his early cases resulted in him becoming financially set up for life, so that now he conducts his crusade against villains of all shades, and in the process attempts to save the unwary from the clutches of conmen, rogues and crooks.

These then are some of Leon Cazador’s cases, in his own words.

Nik Morton, Alicante, Spain

The beginning of the latest story goes something like this:

PIGEON HEARTED

Fireworks in daytime are not particularly spectacular, but that doesn’t deter my Spanish compatriots from setting them off. The clear blue sky was momentarily sprayed with silver and red stars as the single rocket exploded above the town square. Minutes afterwards, a profusion of colours darted above our heads, but this display wasn’t the transient starburst of another firework. The palette that soared in the sky came from garishly painted pigeons released from patios, balconies, rooftops and gardens. In the next few minutes the number of male birds increased to perhaps seventy.

‘My prize bird has been stolen!’ a man shouted from a balcony on the opposite side of the street. He gestured at us and added, ‘Pilar, tell your brother I need his help!’