My detective character Archie Cavendish did not spring into life on the day I scribbled the first few lines of what grew into A Consequence of Sin. I didn’t sit down with a blank sheet of paper and write down his qualities and characteristics, or his back story, and then start writing. He emerged, partially formed, before I started writing his first case, and he continued to form as I chronicled his first murder investigation on St. Lazarus and continues to grow as I write The Man Who Had It Coming.
So how did I dream him up? How much was a decision, and how much was a consequence of a prior decision?
I always knew that I wanted him to be a series character. Being reasonably sane, I wanted him to be a popular character and I wanted people to be enthusiastic enough about him that I could write books and books featuring him and that readers would keep enjoying his company. Therefore, I wanted to be sure that I enjoyed his company. After all, I was going to spend a lot more time with him than the readers. He would be consulting with me over the decisions he made in his murder inquiries and in his life. He would spend time bending my ear about his concerns over being a good parent, his anxieties about his daughter Sophie following in his footsteps, and his pride that she seemed to want to do so.
My first consideration: I had to like him enough to spend a lot of time with him. Sir Arthur Conan Doyle grew so disenchanted with Sherlock Holmes that he pushed him off a cliff, only to grudgingly revive him because his audience demanded it. Agatha Christie created one of my favourite detectives to read, Hercule Poirot, but herself grew to find him insufferable. Eccentricities can be fun when you visit a detective for a little while, the lesson seemed to be, but as an author they might become exhausting. My detective would not be an eccentric.
The separate reason for not making him eccentric was the exceptional eccentrics that went before – I think that the world is full of eccentric detectives and I didn’t feel that I had a compelling fresh take on the detective.
Archie Cavendish would be a more average fellow. Special in terms of commitment to his craft, and of above average detection skills - but without the extreme eccentricities of a Poirot or a Monk.
I knew two things. I wanted my fictional world to be in the Caribbean, but much as I have spent time there, I didn’t feel like I knew it well enough to write as an insider. Archie Cavendish needed to be an outsider. I wanted him to be a professional detective, and good at his craft. I decided he would be ex-Scotland Yard who had made a life change. I considered having him somehow get hired as a detective on a Caribbean police force, but I don’t like the trope that says a local police force can’t cope on its own, and that it needs a great mind from the Colonial heartland to come and save the day.
So, he became a private investigator. Why would a Scotland Yard detective who was good at his craft abandon such a career and go work in the Caribbean? I decided that some kind of traumatic experience was the most likely reason. Perhaps he had a life-threatening injury. Perhaps there was a difficult case. What troubled me about these types of experiences meant that he had run away from that life changing experience. This was the first point in the evolution of Archie Cavendish where he spoke back to me. It was not in his nature to run away. He loved being a policeman. It was who he was to the core, it was a true calling. He would not have quit the force. And he would not have quit with unfinished business – I also decided that before he left, he had resolved things to the best of his ability.
Maybe, instead of running away from something, he needed to try to build something. That’s when he “told” me about his daughter. Then I knew that there was a trauma, it was not something that happened to him. It was the death of his wife. Probably violent and sudden. Then I understood that he had not moved to the Caribbean to flee something, but because he needed to build something. Something new for his daughter because he loved her more than he loved his career.
These are the things I knew before I started writing the book. That and his name. I have written several books (mostly they will never see the light of day. Let’s call them “practice”) and I always agonized over the name of the detective character. The first name of the character took about a day of discussion with my wife as we batted suggestions back and forth. I had already decided the last name – we’ll come back to that because that will be my endpoint for this blog. She suggested the name “Archer.” Archer Cavendish. I liked it. It sounded smooth, sophisticated – skilled and professional though Archie is, I felt he was not smooth. He was probably a little awkward. He wasn’t charming, but he was decent. He was self-confident, perhaps to the borderline of arrogance, but only in his professional arena. I realized he didn’t like the name. So, he goes by Archie.
His last name, Cavendish, actually stems back almost forty years. My mother – if you’ve read enough of my blogging or biographical data, you will know she was a huge murder mystery fan herself, started writing a mystery when I was twelve. She never finished, and I don’t know where the pages are. She may have destroyed them. I remember the first line – “It don’t add up” – and I remember that body was found in a wall. Scotland Yard detective Philip Cavendish is called in to investigate – and I named Archie in honor of my mother’s detective that never got to work in the light of day. In my secret universe, Archie Cavendish is related to Philip Cavendish. I think he is his grandson.
So that’s what I knew about Archie Cavendish when I started writing his first adventure. Anything else I learned during that book as we traveled the roads of St. Lazarus together in search of a murderer. Now he is his own person – he even pointed out to my wife something I had written badly.
“I wouldn’t do that,” he told her, and she told me, and I fixed it. Now he is his own man, which creates narrative opportunities and obstacles. But fingers crossed, I am enjoying his company and I think we will enjoy a long and mutually beneficial partnership – as long as my readership enjoys spending time with him as much as I do.
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