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****Nick Sweeney’s A Blue Coast Mystery: Almost Solved is #169 in the never-ending series called INSIDE THE EMOTION OF FICTION where the Chris Rice Cooper Blog (CRC) focuses on one specific excerpt from a fiction genre and how that fiction writer wrote that specific excerpt. All INSIDE THE EMOTION OF FICTION links are at the end of this piece.
Name of fiction work? And were there other names you considered that you would like to share with us? A Blue Coast Mystery: Almost Solved
I don’t think I considered any other names for it. In early drafts, I referred to it as the ‘Blue Coast story’, or the ‘Blue Coast tale’, but they were just temporary titles.
I knew it would be set partly in Nice and the towns around it (and partly in Camberwell, in the hospital in which I was born, and in the streets in which I first became aware of my surroundings). The South-of-France location has more of a ring to it than the grubby South London area in which I was brought up. Nice, like any big city, has its grubby areas too, of course. I think ‘Blue Coast’ may appear clunky, as we often call it the Côte d’Azur even in English, but clunky has a certain comedy to it, and I think comedy is always pleasing… to somebody, somewhere.
Apart from the odd short story, this novella will be the fastest thing I’ve got from inception to publishing. It will be published by Addison & Highsmith, an imprint of Histria Books, in November 2020.
What are the dates you began writing this piece of fiction and when you completely finished the piece of fiction? I started it in the autumn of 2017, and finished it, as a complete first draft, in mid-2019. For a long time, it seemed complete, but was missing a suitable end chapter to make a sort of conclusion. One part of the story is a true mystery, open to speculation, so I had to give readers the possible conclusion to another.
Where did you do most of your writing for this fiction work? And please describe in detail. And can you please include a photo? All over the place. Some of it was written by hand in the garden at the house where I was living in South London, and some of it in notebooks while on the go – in cafés, for example. Transcribing the handwritten passages into a Word document was of necessity done in our study in the London house, and some of it in our study here in Whitstable. (I always feel a bit pretentious calling it a study… or office… or anything like that, but ‘the room we work in’ is lumpy, and tedious to write and say. I also do music there, but refrain from calling it a ‘home studio’.)
Some of it was almost certainly written, or at least revised, in Debrecen, in eastern Hungary in November 2017, either on an iPad or by hand in a notebook. I had a week of dental visits there, and was unable to eat solids much, so no restaurants, and alone in a pension with few amusements other than reading or writing. I probably also wrote some during an earlier trip away, in September that year, to Isla Canela, in Spain. I always write when on holiday, anyway.
What were your writing habits while writing this work- did you drink something as you wrote, listen to music, write in pen and paper, directly on the laptop; specific time of day? I write anytime of day, or night. If I’m in the mood, I write all night. I sometimes drink tea or coffee when writing, but it’s not a feature, and time often passes without my noticing I need a drink – I sometimes make a drink just to get up and stretch and procrastinate. I never drink alcohol when writing; no real reason – it’s just not my habit.
I sometimes listen to music, either specifically chosen from mp3s on the computer or on the radio. There is usually some point at which either my choices or the radio irritate me, and I switch them off. I also realise I’ve been listening to the same thing on a loop, but without really listening to it. I’m relatively disciplined, and not too easily distracted.
What is the summary of BLUE COAST MYSTERY ALMOST SOLVED? In A Blue Coast Mystery: Almost Solved, a London nurse narrates the story of a drifter she latches onto in a public hospital. Henri is in permanent recovery, not only from his heroin addiction but from the 1960s, (Above Right) a decade that invited the unwary to the biggest party in history, then discarded them. She is curious about his past life on the Côte d’Azur (Above Left) with a French countess, hanging out with the Rolling Stones (Below Right) in their exile.
Henri dismisses that story; it’s an old one. Instead, he tells her about a couple he knew in Nice, the man an Armenian with the convenient name Armen, and his wife, Luciana, originally from Bessarabia, a forgotten battleground of Europe, subsumed into the bigger countries around it. They are gamblers who continually made and lost small fortunes.
When a series of catastrophes robs Henri of his friends and his countess, his days on the Blue Coast are numbered, and soon he is back in his native England, in and out of London’s hospitals. There are signs that his luck has not been all bad: Henri may have salvaged some of the fortune his friends lost, and the narrator feels close to a solution to a final mystery from his time on the Blue Coast when she deduces that he is not as adrift as he seems.
Please include just one excerpt and include page numbers as references. This one excerpt can be as short or as long as you prefer.
[From chapter 6, pp24-26]“I threw my wedding ring out there.” She nodded into the darkness over the dump. “One time we argued about my slamming the doors. It was a foolish… gesture. You are a young man,” she pointed out. “You will make many foolish gestures.” She nudged him, and almost laughed, and said, “But my advice is… don’t.”
Henri laughed, and protested, “Nothing wrong with foolish gestures.” His whole life often felt like one. He recounted that, just that morning, he had picked up the phone at home to hear the voice of his countess’ father. There had at one time been a regular… rigmarole, members of her family feigning Gallic surprise that a stranger should be answering the phone, pretending wrong numbers, saying nothing, even, vanishing with a click or slam. Henri’s insistence on simply picking it up when it rang again had put the kybosh on that. That morning the father had asked, with his usual distaste, to speak to his daughter. Henri had never met him, nor ever would, he knew by then. He called him the archduke, for his own amusement – the countess had either not got the obvious joke, or disapproved of it – but that morning Henri had broken the joke out into the open, said, “At once, your highness,” just to annoy him. “The little man striking back,” he recalled for Luciana. “A little victory. A little… Guillotine, just taking off the end of his aristocratic fingernail for him. Did you get it back?”
“What?”
“The ring.”
“The ring?” Luciana made a brief, ladylike snort. “Of course not. Once a thing is out there, it’s lost forever.”
“What did Armen do?”
“Do?” Luciana looked puzzled. “What was there to do?”
“Did he forgive you?” Henri knew the answer, was just making the conversation of a devil’s advocate.
“Of course he did. I couldn’t live with a man who didn’t forgive.” She thought about something, said, “Armen forgave the burning of his city.”
“True.” Henri had only vaguely heard of Smyrna before he met Armen.
“He forgave the genocide of his people.”
“Genocide?” Henri considered the word in some discomfort. He thought of those persecutors and oppressors, from the highest-born to the lowest of the low, driving Armen’s clever people into deserts, and into seas lit brightly with flames. He confessed later to the countess – and it was a failing, for sure, he knew – that he only wanted to discuss genocide with people who had seen it in old newsreels, not with people who had lived through it; that just wasn’t right: what were you expected to say? To Luciana, he said something lame about a wedding ring being an important… thing.
She said, “After genocide, no… thing is important, no… trinket.”
“Marriage is a convenience,” Armen said from behind them. He came into the room, shutting the door gently. He passed Henri, patted him on a shoulder, and went and stood by Luciana. “It’s a passport, a way to get a name on an identity card, or on a licence to drive. The killing of women and children by great powers, sanctioned by other great powers, and by influential men who own newspapers, makes a lie out of the claim that marriage is some kind of sacred or social duty.”
Henri looked down, dejected. The couple made noises of concern. Luciana’s now now was almost laughed out.
“Don’t make foolish gestures.” Armen held up his hand, and showed his own wedding ring. He grinned, said, “Or, if you do, make sure you are with somebody who doesn’t, so that at least one of you has a ring left to pawn.”
Why is this excerpt so emotional for you as a writer to write? And can you describe your own emotional experience of writing this specific excerpt? It seems disingenuous to say so, but I tend to approach my writing fairly dispassionately, so I tend not to think in terms of my emotional response to my own work – others’ books, films, paintings, photos? Certainly.
This excerpt sums up a few of my book’s main themes, in a way. It has the contrast between things of seeming value, such as a wedding ring – and a wedding itself – with those that are truly valuable: safety, and freedom to live without fear of the great powers that bring genocide into being. There is also the main character Henri’s relationship with his French countess girlfriend, and her family’s disdain of his status as an Englishman and a junkie, even though she is a junkie, too. Henri as a character often drifts into situations, and I didn’t want to the reader to mistake this for his lack of agency, so every now and then I remind the reader that he is adrift, but also has his own personality and determination. I think it’s sometimes tempting for readers to feel sorry for characters who have weaknesses, such as Henri’s near-fatal liking for heroin.
The actual scene, of a couple having a row, was one I witnessed in my teens. The couple upstairs from us had their daughter and her recently-wedded husband staying with them while they sorted themselves out. Voices carried between the flats, so we could often hear them arguing. One argument ended abruptly. The next thing I saw José, the husband (actually an Irishman called Joseph, but he’d spent some time in Cuba, and kept the affectionate name the locals had given him as a token of their esteem) out in the road in front of the building, looking for something. I went out to ask him what: it was his wife’s wedding ring, chucked out in anger. I helped him look. I now can’t remember whether we found it or not. I just thought it was a good domestic scene to write. I didn’t have a close relationship with José, or his wife Louise – they were a bit older than me – but I still remember them with some affection.
I remember the first time I understood the word ‘genocide’; it was while watching a documentary about the Nazis’ Final Solution when I was about 11. 
I was shocked that there was a such a thing, but perhaps not for long – went on with the usual things an 11-year-old boy does. I wanted to mark this hearing about genocide in the abstract – Henri knows of it from newsreels he saw on Pathé News – with getting a degree closer to it by meeting somebody who witnessed and escaped it.
I never have, really, though I have known a few people from ex-Yugoslavia who endured terrible things during the wars there in the 1990s, and, talking to them, I got a jolt of reality – a mere glimpse of the horror they endured, not to be compared to their experience, of course.
Were there any deletions from this excerpt that you can share with us? And can you please include a photo of your marked-up rough drafts of this excerpt. I don’t think there were any deletions. I can’t find a marked-up draft, I’m afraid. I usually don’t keep the typed-up drafts – it’s just a matter of space. As far as I remember, I thought of this passage early on, knew what would be in it, and wrote it more or less straightforwardly, with little need to finesse it.
I’ve enclosed some photos from the notebook stage, but I can’t find the one for this excerpt. I may have just written it straight into Word.
Biography of Nick Sweeney: “I'm a writer of fiction, mainly, and have published short stories, many of them finding a home in Ambit magazine. I also write novels, and my first one was published in April 2011 by Unthank Books.
It's called Laikonik Express, and follows two American slackers on a haunted jaunt around Poland in search of a woman one of them has met. The Laikonik Express is the name of the train taking them on their way, which runs from Krakow in the south, to Gdynia in the north, on the Baltic Sea.
In the summer of 2018, I had my second-longest piece of work, The Exploding Elephant, published by Bards and Sages under its Society of Misfits outlet. Also set in Poland, this time in Gliwice, the town where I lived in 1993, it's a piece of speculative fiction centring on a young opportunist whose bad choices are gradually coming home to him. At around 20000 words, it's a 'novelette' - a bit shorter than a novella.”
To pre-order BLUE COAST MYSTERY ALMOST SOLVED click on the link below:
https://histriabooks.com/product/a-blue-coast-mystery-almost-solved/
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Rolling Stones in their exile,
genocide, it’s survivors, and
people from places that no longer exist.)
BLUE COAST MYSTERY: ALMOST SOLVED
by Nick Sweeney
