Curtains

And when it's time to ring them down.

When I got a publication deal for the first book in a detective series - or rather when I got a publication deal for a detective novel and was asked whether it was a series (see below) - my agent told me loud and clear that I had to write at least six. 

(Below.  When an interested publisher asks you if you see it becoming a series, it's the crimewriter equivalent of a Hollywood casting director asking if you can ride horses.  You say yes without missing a beat and work out how later.)

Why six?  Because, my agent told me, that's how many episodes there are in a serving of BBC Sunday night telly.  (Do US agents tell new American writers to shoot for twenty two?)

It was a bit of a joke to my friends and family, but then fan me flat if, just after No. 6 came out, the BBC didn't go and option it.  I'd mess that neat bit of plotting up with a problem or two if I was in charge.  I'm glad I'm not.

So the first half of my answer to the question of when to retire a series character is not until you've written six (if it's British and/or has any kind of bonnets or shawls about it anyway.)

How about the other end?  How long can you rumble on? 

I wouldn't want to end up like Agatha Christie.  In Dead Man's Folly (1956), thirty six years after she introduced her Belgian detective Hercule Poirot, she introduced the character of Ariadne Oliver, a writer of detective stories, who is pig sick of her Finnish detective, Sven Hjerson and wishes he was dead or at least not Finnish anyway.

I started Dandy Gilver off in 1922 and I'm just editing the 1930 story now.  I've got a great idea for 1936, which looked a hilarious distance off when I started and now seems like it might be just round the corner.  I've got a cracker for 1972 too.  Dandy would be eighty six.  Just a spring chicken compared to Poirot.

A Dandelion by one particular other name . . .

. . . is "pee-the-bed".  Something that didn't occur to me until after I'd called my new series detective Dandelion (aka Dandy) Gilver, because her parents were devotees of William Morris and the Arts and Crafts movement, the type who'd think a wildflower was a wonderful thing.

Gilver, Dandy's name since she married Hugh Murdoch Cathellen Gilver, is believably Scottish (I know McGilvers and Gilverys) but not actionable, since I made it up out of GIL (Scots for servant) and VER (Latin for truth).  So she's a dandy servant of truth i.e. good detective.

Be assured I don't go into that much depth and cunning for everyone.  Ordinarily, I love naming characters precisely because flashy results for little effort are the best bit of writing.

So for the first names - what Dandy in Scotland in the 1920s would call Christian names - I use Naming Baby by Eugene Stone, a fine little volume inherited from my grandmother after she used it (presumably) to come up with James,Walter, Peter, Annie and Minnie.

For what I call second names, US speakers call last names and Dandy would call surnames, I used to flip through the weekly Galloway News.  There was much fun to be had with McSporrans and McHaggises, McGurks and McGoggs and McGilihooleys.  I couldn't use them all, obviously; that many micks and macks would send readers cross-eyed, so the second names in the books are never an accurate reflection of what a batch of Scottish names would actually be.  (Think California towns starting with San or Santa and you'll get the idea). 

A related - if irrelevant - problem is that if I buy an address book outside Scotland it never has enough space under the Ms and I have to steal some of the N pages to cram in clan McPherson, clan-in-law McRoberts and all my McKenzie, McKie, McLean, MacDougall, MacKay and McKinnon pals.  It must be the same in Ireland with Os.

These days I do it online.  There are no fewer daft Scottish names but there is always the danger of finding yourself, two hours later, deep in the bowels of Youtube, watching a cat stuck in an urn.

The most fun I ever had naming characters was in a circus setting for The Winter Ground: Topsy Turvey the acrobat, Tiny Truman the dwarf clown and the flying Prebrezhenskys, a Risley act. 
Tiny Truman was named after what was called, at the head of a paragraph on the Finger Lakes in the Rough Guide to New York State, Tiny Trumansburg.  I know the town was named after the president and the guide was commenting on its size, but I loved the idea of a big town named after someone called Tiny.

The most frustrating bit of naming characters is that, in being realistic, you have to ignore endless real-life examples just too outlandish to appear in fiction: I used to have a colleague called Zip Dominion; a mature student whose parents, in the 1950s, saw no reason not to call her Gay Cocks (but get these feminist credentials - she didn't change it when she married!); the local indie bookshop in Davis is run by the magnificently monikered Alzeda Knickerbocker; or what about Madison Bumgarner of the Giants?  (I'll tell you what about him - Go, As!)  And I'll never forget the day I learned of Diana Ross's decision to grace her beautiful little girl with the fragrant . . . Chudney.  Oy.

Let's finish off back in fiction; Chudney couldn't happen there.

My favourite fictional name of recent times is the hero of Daniel Friedman's stellar debut Don't Ever Get Old.  He's a curmudgeonly octogenerian Memphis Jewish ex-detective and his name is Buck Shatz, which makes me laugh every time I see it.  I'm just sophisticated that way.

Broth by more than one cook?

by Catriona.

Hello, everyone.  I'm delighted to be here and honoured to have been asked and since I'm oh so very much not one of the mehegamoths (how I wish that was actually a word) who can employ minions to "co-author" their books, I'm going take a bit of this first post to introduce myself.

But to stay on-topic for a wee while . . . I love some co-authored (with no scare quotes) books: PJ Tracey, the mother and daughter team behind the MONKEEWRENCH series; PJ Parrish, the sisters who gave us LOUIS KINCAID and JOE FRYE, and Nicci French, the husband and wife team (how will they manange to co-author after the inevitable divorce, is what I wonder) responsible for a slew of creepy stand-alones including the fabulous KILLING ME SOFTLY.

But as far as I know I've never read any "co-authored" by mehegamoth and minion books - although Joyce Carol Oates is pretty prolific and she's got that sinewy look of someone who could kill you with her pinkie - so you never know.

Would I do it?  An ever-expanding universe of no.  I write with my office door shut, locked and duct-taped round the edges.  Never been in a critique group, never shown my first draft to anyone, never told anyone, including my agent and editor, what it's about until it's finished. Control freak?  Until the first draft is chipped out of the ground, as his Kingness puts it, freakishly and controllingly so.

With one exception.  Years ago my father told me he had an idea for a children's picture book, but thought I'd make a better job of writing it up than him so he was going to hand it over to me.  I thought for a minute about employing the standard response I give my mother when she asks me for something:  "What have you ever done for me?"

But, A. who could say no to either of these two and (ii) I'd never written a picture book and how hard could it be?

Quite hard.  Mark Haddon, author of THE CURIOUS INCIDENT OF THE DOG IN THE NIGHT-TIME once said, in one of those endless snarkfests about whether writing for children is easier than writing for adults (nearly as bad as the one about whether genre fiction is as good as literary fiction) that only an idiot would say there's no skill difference between Ulysses and Here Comes Spot.  But I found telling a story in thirty-two pages with no more than twenty words on each page a lot harder than knocking out a chapter of prose.

Maybe I shouldn't have had a societal breakdown arc, a heart-warming buddy arc and a climactic fire scene all in a seven-hundred-word story about talking buckets.  You tell me.

It's as yet unpublished, after going into development at Usborne and never coming out again.  It joins a radio sitcom that went into develpoment at the Comedy Store in the UK, and is still in there as far I know, and a monograph of my PhD that went into development at Routledge, painted itself the same colour as the wall behind it and stood very still for ten years until everyone had forgotten and stopped looking.

Development is a bad place for me.

But if mehegamothdom ever comes a-calling, and I turn into one of those lucky sods with publishers begging for their shopping lists to bring out as a Little Book of Groceries for the holiday season, I won't need minions to help me cash in.  I've got four picture books all hot to trot and three sitcoms with treatments for the first season and scripts for episode one, as well as that page-turning PhD.

But I was supposed to be introducing myself.  Recovering academic, born blonde (but a lot has happened since then), co-owner of the ugliest ranch-house ever built and twenty scruffy acres in northern California (people from home say: "Oooh, California!" with shining eyes, and I say: "Did you see Erin Brockovich?  That was California.") cat-lover, Project Runway enthusiast, dumpster-divin' fool,  novice cake-maker, master cake-eater.  What else?  Trek, Beatles, Spike (as opposed to Wars, Stones, Angel) and not even as high-brow as all that sounds, I'm sad to say.

Pleased to meet you.