Last week I ended thus...“1940s, where a blind man can see more than he...” —an unintentional cliff hanger.The ongoing saga of the Spectral Detective is set in the 1940s, where a blind man can see more than he should.Sometimes typos or indeed spelling mistakes make sense. Here a C+P error. Other times I wonder how...?To err is human, and err I do, and I am just making stuff up, but doing so within a historically reasonable pastiche of a place and time.Not just me, all works of fiction are simulations in this way, in The Number of the Beast, 1980, by Robert A. Heinlein, encounter universes based on Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, Oz, and even Edgar Rice Burroughs’ Barsoom—John Carter of Mars.

The challenge is to ensure suspension of disbelief by keeping the simulation relatable, especially when extraordinary things happen. Even a vanilla story, played straight, set either yesterday, today, or even next week, must pass this test.

The dialogue I imagine in the narrative happens in my mind, meaning the back and forth between characters occurs as an extension of my voice.

A true story involves my maternal grandfather and another gentleman in the Yorkshire Dales. Granddad, a native, spoke the dialect and often delighted in teasing those who didn’t, by using words they did not understand; still, confusion could ensue—a joke or genuine misunderstanding?

The gentleman commented on the thickness of the fog seen on his drive north. My grandfather insisted his field had the thickest fog the man could ever see. The issue being fog is a dialect term for a flush full fresh growth of grass, not just a thick mist that reduces visibility.

Some expressions might sound right for the period, but aren’t; take ‘cool,’ for instance, in the context of the 1940s. It’s a tricky example because it did exist in Jazz culture at this time, but not in the mainstream, at least until the 1950s.Other times, I have to start with a modern turn of phrase and research what the historical, thought-for-thought translation might be.Let’s consider a story with English speakers, such as my Vampire tale, but set further back in time. In this case, the Seventeenth Century.

Speech should evoke the sense of time and place. Still, if I tried to be literally authentic, the dialogue of the 1600s would sound like the King James Bible. As familiar as that is, it’s not really accessible for today’s readers in the context of a modern novel.The result is then more like a translation from a foreign language.

That’s another question. In my Spectral Detective story, there are occasions where a foriegn language is in play. Most of the time, I choose to use English and indicate that the speakers are using, say, German, but not always.Private Tom Hicks, gripping his M1 Rifle, pointed. “What’s that, Sarge?”Doyle read a German word stencilled onto a crate—Heereswaffenamt. “Means Army Weapons Agency. Nazi eggheads cooking up some Big-Bertha to keep their war going.”

In this example, I went to some length to check my language choices.So, take “eggheads”. My first choice would be boffin, but that’s my Britishness coming through; I checked and felt an American speaker in the 1940s wouldn’t use it.Wonderweapon, or Wunderwaffen, are relatively well-known descriptors of German innovations, such as the V1 and V2 rockets. While we use the term today, in 1945, I couldn’t find evidence of it being used by GIs in Berlin.Whereas “Big-Bertha” came into use from WWI onwards. At first, a nickname for a large German Howitzer, which developed into a more general term for something big, powerful and perhaps cumbersome, often of weapons, and then other things too.

I won’t get my word choice right every time, and its always a challenge how to integrate words that will be alien to some or even most readers, in in interesting and natural way, equally I think without a seasoning of “King James Version-esque terms in a C17th story, or the odd foreign word to pepper a story taking place in a different land, the story would be blander.

| The Spectral Detective

The prequel: Into Darkness
 

Still available to those wanting to be Beta Readers

The novel King in the Dark will arrive in two parts, the first is almost finished, and will be available for Beta Readers, soon, hopefully.... next week!