The Absurd and Abuse
A recent exchange on Facebook reminded me of one of the more absurd episodes of my life. For reasons which I won’t go into I had become involved with the Cambridge Settlement in the east end of London. I had never been to Cambridge University but the project needed a woman lawyer as a group of women wanted to establish a Battered Wives Centre and it was to be a rule that no man would be allowed over the threshold. As the Cambridge Settlement didn’t have a woman lawyer I was volunteered by a friend. 
So it was that one February night I found myself climbing over the wall of a large property in the East India Dock Road and helping to force an entry into the house. The building had been the home and surgery of a local doctor who had been provided with better premises from which to work and the property had been purchased by the now defunct GLC , prior to redevelopment of the site. They were not averse to unused properties being squatted and I duly arranged for us to pay rates and for the services to be reconnected. That was the easy bit.
The group of about four women who were the first group of wives trying to escape their abusive husbands moved in and with them came a number of social workers assigned by the local authority to ensure the children were not at risk. A number of house rules were agreed including that there was to be a meeting every Monday which all the residents had to attend. The idea of the meeting was to enable any issues surrounding the running of the house to be aired, the finances to be discussed and if there were disputes between the women for them to be resolved. Some of the social workers attended as well as me.
The women living at the house each had a separate room in which to live and sleep, but they shared the kitchen, bathrooms and a downstairs living room where the only TV was installed. It was here that the Monday Meeting was to take place. One of the mantra’s repeated all the time by the social workers was ‘There is no excuse for violence.’ Sure I thought although not without some reservations.
As the hostel began to fill up – if my recollections is right there were twelve rooms – the inevitable tensions arose. Someone would jump the queue for the bathroom or spend too long under the shower; not everyone was as good at washing up their plates as they should, the fridges rota wasn’t being adhered to. I’m sure you can think of many more of the small irritations that can arise in such cramped conditions.
Then, well let’s call her Pat, arrived. She had three children all under six, who ran wild around the house. They were always filthy and I found myself bathing them more than once. She always left the kitchen in a mess, the bathrooms dirty. She was disruptive, a heavy smoker who shouted and screamed all the time. She became the centre of heated debate at the Monday meeting and each time she was threatened with having to leave she would promise to behave.
One evening her husband came to the door and I went out to speak to him. He asked about the children and asked if they were OK as his wife was a very poor carer. He volunteered that he had slapped her across the face when he had come home from work to find the children hungry and very grubby. I had some sympathy for him and said so to one of the social workers we called Etty. She was furious with me and told me there was no excuse for violence.
A few weeks later when the Monday meeting was about to start, Pat was in the living room watching Coronation Street. Her behaviour had not improved despite the many promises. Etty asked Pat to turn off the TV, and she refused. Etty asked her again to which Pat replied, ‘I don’t want to attend your f….. meeting. I’m watching TV.’
Etty got up and turned off the TV. Pat retaliated by turning it back on. Etty turned it off again, only for Pat to turn it on. This was repeated another couple of times and then as Pat went to switch the TV on for the fifth time, Etty got up, grabbed Pat by the arm, swung her round and hit her across the face with the flat of her hand as hard as she could.
So, no excuse for violence then.
John Grisham and class actions
I’ve been away and out of contact with the internet again, but at least it has given me enough time to read some books and to do some thinking about my next novel. I’ve written the first 22,000 words so a long way to go on that. As far as the reading, I found a copy of The King of Torts by John Grisham and read it in a couple of days. It’s an awful title but seems to derive from the way class actions are brought in the USA. The protagonist is Clay Carter, a youngish lawyer working for the Office of Public Defender in Wasington DC. He is assigned the case of Tequila Watson who, inexplicably, has become a killer and murdered an acquaintance known as Pumpkin. Carter begins to explore Watson’s backgound and is puzzled by the lack of motive and the absence of any history of violence. Watson is a drug addict who has been in a rehabilitation program and when Carter makes enquiries at the project he is not convinced he is being told the whole truth. 
Overworked and underpaid, Carter is ripe pickings for Max Pace who tells him a major Drug Company is willing to pay compensation to Pumpkin’s family and his legal fees if he is acting on their behalf. The secret he must keep is that Watson along with others were treated as guinea pigs with a drug that ‘cures’ addiction but has a side effect in about 8% of the addicts that makes them a killer. Carter quits his job with the Office of Public Defender and earns himself about $15 million. He justifies his actions to himself by arguing that Watson has no defence to the charge of murder. I don’t know if that would be the case in the US but I think under English Law he would have a defence to murder of not to manslaughter. If the drug that turned him into a killer was given to him by the staff at the rehabilitation project as part of his care program then he would be able to claim his mental state was not self-induced and therefore he was not responsible. I had a similar case when Diego Cogolato killed the dress designer Ossie Clark, under the influence of a combination of illegal drugs and prescribed drugs that made him believe Clark was the devil and he heard voices telling him to kill.
Carter is then told about another drug that is widely prescribe and has the side effect of causing growths in the bladder. He files a claim against the Pharmaceutical Company and advertises for other users to contact his law firm so that a large number of complainants are joined in the same action against the company, a class action. These actions enable lawyers involved in the proceedings to earn large sums of money. The novel describes the way these proceedings take place and the dangers in them. I won’t say anymore because it will spoil the story. In the UK these type of actions are rare although the courts can give consent for what is called a Group Litigation Order but the proceedings are controlled by the Judge. Also cost capping orders are made which limit the amount lawyers can earn. There are no juries in civil cases of this type in England so exemplary damages are rarely given. Although there are proposals to have this kind of collective action in certain cases at the moment any move towards that is very slow.
This book perhaps under scores why American writers of legal thrillers have so much more to write about as the US system provides more drama than the UK one. I was certainly told that it was very difficult to sell a legal thriller/mystery to the publishing industry and that only John Grisham can write them. Are there any writers using the English Criminal Justice System as Grisham uses the US one?
Salem Literary Weekend
I wasn’t able to attend the whole of the weekend but on Sunday afternoon I spent an enjoyable few hours in the company of some fantastic writers in a very unusual venue, the Salem Chapel in East Budleigh, Devon.
The speakers were Graham Hurley who writes thrillers and crime novels. He told us how he spent six weeks with the police in Portsmouth where he then lived to try and understand how policing really works, before writing his Faraday novels beginning with Turnstone. Perhaps just as interesting was his description of how publishers operated and how little input an author often has in the production of his novel. ‘We know best’ is the mantra they trot out when the author says he wants a different cover for example and apart from the editor none of them will have read the book. Graham is an Essex boy (I’ll say no more) educated at Cambridge and was a scriptwriter and then a TV director making documentaries but all the time harbouring a desire to write novels. He has certainly had his dream fulfilled
This was followed by some heartfelt poems by John Payne on the theme of nature and farming. The poems sounded with his own experiences of the world he grew up in and his regret at the changes our modern world has brought about.
Rosemary Smith who is the inspiration behind this weekend, it’s organiser and, I suspect the general dogsbody as well, has written a number of romantic novels set in and around Budleigh Salterton. Some extracts from one of her published novels were read by one of her appreciative supporters and friends. They recall a bygone era when life was more gentile and were written in a manner consistent with that period.
After tea and biscuits and what Sunday afternoon would be complete without it, Mal Peet talked about his novels which, for marketing purposes are described as Young Adult, a description he deplores. His novel ‘Tamar won the Carnegie Medal. He began writing at the age of 52 about things he says he knew nothing about- ‘writers make things up -don’t they.’ He too was critical of the way publishers try to take charge of the book, and like Graham had changed his publisher in order to find someone more sympathetic to his writing.
All of them were upstaged by CL Raven, actually twins called Cathryn and Lynsey who write comic ghost stories and much more. They read sections from their doom laden apocalypse story and had the audience laughing all 
the way to oblivion and back. Their clothes were fantastic, just like their imagination.
Reviews 2
A librarian friend commented that he thought the plot of my novel Crucial Evidence was ‘dodgy’ because he couldn’t see why the police had arrested Barker for the murder of Shelley Paulson and why they were so convinced he was guilty just on the basis of a witness identifying him as the killer. It’s an interesting comment and I have questioned myself as to why he thinks that is a fault in the plot. Is it because when a reader opens a crime novel they expect it to begin with a murder followed by a detective following up clues which lead to the identification of the killer and his arrest? Of course that is what many crime stories do, but I wanted to write something different and my story begins after the investigation has finished and at the point where lawyers have been instructed to represent Barker and the trial is about to begin. It is written from the point of view of the barrister, Cassie Hardman and she would not be concerned with why Barker was arrested only whether there was enough evidence to support a prosecution. 
Do crime novels present an unrealistic view of policing and of their powers of arrest? Don’t police officers act on anonymous tip offs and informants whose names they don’t reveal? They would be criticised if they did not and programmes like Crime Watch would have little or no part to play in investigation. An identification of the perpetrator of an offence is good evidence and if the accused has admitted he was close to the scene of the murder it seems reasonable for the police to believe he is the killer. Again on the basis of that evidence the relatives of the deceased would expect the accused to the prosecuted and let the jury decide, wouldn’t they?
Colin Stagg the man accused wrongly of killing Rachel Nickell on Wimbledon Common was arrested because they had information he frequented the common. They arrested him and decided he was rather strange and therefore he must be guilty. There was virtually no evidence against him apart from a forensic psychologist’s assessment made on the basis of letters written to an undercover policewoman offering sex if he admitted to the crime. He did not make any admissions, but was charged with the murder because the police were convinced he was guilty. I remember well the TV shots of Rachel Nickell’s grieving parents as they were interviewed outside the Old Bailey, saying if only the jury had heard the whole story, They were clearly convinced their daughter’s murderer was walking free, and that conviction can only have come from their conversations with police officers.
Is truth stranger than Fiction?
Under Milk Wood
Last night I went to a production of the Dylan Thomas play Under Milk Wood by Clwyd Theatre Cymru at the Northcott Theatre Exeter. I have always loved this play since I first heard the recording with Richard Burton playing the first voice. I rushed out to buy a copy and still have it. Last night’s production was memorable with an imaginative staging and I know has had some very good reviews. It is on tour so look at the website http://www.undermilkwoodtour.com for places and dates and go and see it if you can.
The real interest for any writer is Thomas’s use of language. Almost the first line ‘It is a spring, moonless night in the small town, starless and bible black, the cobblestreets silent and hunched, courters’-and rabbits’ wood limping invisible down to the sloeblack, slow, black, crowblack fishingboad-bobbing sea.’ makes the hairs on the back of my neck stand up. The magic of a master of the English Langauge, whose descriptions paint such vivid pictures that there is no need of anything else.
And what about the imagination needed to create characters like blind Captain Cat, Rosie Probert and Mrs Ogmore-Pritchard. Apparently Thomas was worried because there was no plot, but he didn’t need one, just following the lives of these characters for a day is enough. It is the centenary of his birth this year and so it seems appropriate to dig out your copy, or if you haven’t got one, buy or borrow one, and read this magnificent work
Free Time and Popcorn
I rewarded myself with some free time away from a computer on Friday when I went to the Exeter Food and Wine Festival. It provided some opportunities to watch people in a different environment from cafes and bars. In the large marquee’s the emphasis was all about the food. The behavior of individuals as they approached the various stalls varied; some were diffident and declined to look at whoever was manning the stall, others talked confidently about what they liked and why they were interested in a particular product. Among the crowds were the professionals looking for new products for their shops or restaurants, They listened carefully to the stall holders and also to customers who came up to buy. But the most fun was watching the professional chefs show off their skills in the cookery demonstrations. The top chefs are showmen, wielding knives as a stage prop and talking incessantly. They seemed to find it easy to build a rapport with their audience despite spending most of their time behind the scenes in their own restaurants. The one we watched Peter Gorton was a great raconteur and as he worked told tales about doing private dinners and on one occasion he had set the kitchen alight. The hostess was disappointed he hadn’t done more damage as she was trying to persuade her husband to buy a new one.
Exeter Festival of Food.
On the train home I watched a young man writing a letter -yes a real letter on real paper. When I sat opposite him, he was reading a letter written on pale cream paper with a decorated border. I assumed it was written by a young woman on notepaper given to her as a Christmas present. My imagination decided the contents were a plea to resume their relationship, a plea that from the firmness of the man’s jaw and the lack of any sparkle in his eyes I assume he was about to reject. He took from his brief case a folder containing notepaper and began to write. He was left handed and I noticed how his left hand curved round the top of the notepaper as he wrote, quite quickly from left to right. He held the pen between his thumb and forefinger with the hand above the pen. The position gave the appearance of hiding the contents of the letter as I remember children trying to protect their schoolwork from prying eyes. I recall that the word sinister comes from left handedness, and it did indeed seem a strange and secretive way of writing.
So my day out provided characters for my writing. Do other writers give themselves time just to observe?
Oh the popcorn. Well my favorite stall at the Festival was the Portlebury Popcorn Company.
#BBCSilk Series 3 Episode 5 & 6
I was away and without TV or internet access for over three weeks,so I have just caught up with the last two episodes. As they are both about the same story line I thought it was appropriate to write about them together. Although the story line made great drama, any attempt to be realistic was abandoned in these episodes. 
Martha takes on the case of Seam McBride, a former boyfriend from her home town, who is charged with murder. At the beginning of episode 5 she tells him no barrister would agree to represent such a close friend, and then proceeds to ignore her own advice. The reason for not representing somebody you know well was illustrated when the names of people booking rooms at the hotel where the murder took place were those of other pupils in the same class as Martha and McBride. It was a piece of evidence that pointed to his guilt. She knew that, yet in order to keep defending him she had to keep quiet about it. The effect of that would probably be to mislead the court and that is unethical and puts her in breach of the professions’ code of conduct. Of course she would have known that information before the case started as the hotel’s register and bookings list would have been part of the prosecution case.
She also is so sure of his innocence. ‘I can tell by looking in their eyes if they are guilty or not,’ she says. She is so committed to the idea that the police make the evidence fit the case for guilt that she loses all objectivity. The discovery of the gun and of McBride’s jacket add to the weight of evidence against him and Martha really doesn’t know how to deal with this apart from accusing the police of framing her client. She really should have asked for the jury to be discharged so that the jacket and the gun could be forensically examined. She might then have found out that the gun was fired by a left handed man rather than the right handed McBride.
Recalling bent solicitor Micky Joy to testify he says that lawyers just play games in court and the first casualty is truth. Coming from a dishonest lawyer that was a bit of a liberty. I am sure though it’s what many people believe, but jury trial is not meant to find the truth but to establish guilt or innocence, in the belief that the system we use of testing the evidence by cross examination ensures that the guilty are convicted and the innocent go free. Most lawyers believe it works and that is the reason they so passionately defend our adversarial trials.
For the rest of the two episodes they reflected some of the life of a set of Chambers. For example the interest in boxing was quite common as young men were taught to box, often in clubs supported by Oxbridge Universities, in order to divert them from criminal activity. The allegation of sexual harassment against Billy showed the strong loyalty in the clerks’ room to a flawed but tremendously humane personality like Billy.
So is this the last of Martha Costello and Shoe Lane Chambers. Perhaps not, but I think most barristers even if they find the series too flawed to really enjoy it would applaud Maxine Peake’s support of their cause in fighting for justice4all against the current Lord Chancellor.
Celebration Party for Crucial Evidence
The party at Slightly Foxed Bookshop on Gloucester Road London SW7 was a great success. I really felt like an author as I read some small sections of the book for the guests. I’ve already had some great feedback from people who have read the book and it’s been getting 4 and 5 star reviews on Amazon.
Publication Party
Party to celebrate the publication of my novel Crucial Evidence tonight at this wonderful independent bookshop inthe heart of London.
London Book Fair 2014
After listening to the talks in the Author HQ at LBF and hearing the questions people ask the commercial aspect of writing is very much to the fore- I suppose that’s not really surprising.
A successful writer of commercial fiction needs to write at least two books a year. I don’t think I can do that. I know if one writes a thousand words a day, in theory, one could finish a book in about three months, but then there is the redrafting and the editing and I suspect I am quite hard on myself during that process. Certainly Crucial Evidence took me over two years to write and eight drafts before I felt ready to publish it, and before the feedback I was getting from other writers, agents and publishers suggested it was well written enough. What they were unsure of was if there was a market for a courtroom drama/ legal mystery. I think what I want is to write something that other people enjoy reading. So far my novel is getting 4 and 5 star reviews and I do find that very satisfying, so perhaps that will do for me.
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