Some characters have a lot of sex

This is pretty incontrovertible, but I'm thinking specifically of fiction here. The thought is prompted by Stieg Larsson's Millennium Trilogy, which I recently finished. Before he became bestselling novelist, Larsson was also a crusading journalist. His protagonist, Blomqvist, is also a crusading journalist. Blomqvist is a rumpled middle-aged man, beginning to run to seed (hey, aren't we all?). This doesn't stop every bloody woman in the trilogy finding him devastatingly attractive: most of them end up sleeping with him. The age range of his conquests runs the gamut of early twenties to early sixties, and he even gets a complaisant cuckold to give a nod of approval to his relationship with a long-term mistress. There's clearly a strong element of wish-fulfilment here (or, less plausibly, autobiography). Larsson no doubt had a lot of fun in this aspect of the trilogy but as a reader I found it somewhat irritating. Might the series not have read better if somewhere in Scandinavia there was a woman who found Blomqvist a seedy lecher? I enjoyed the series (although I found each book progressively less interesting) but this rather crass insertion of the author* did jar.

It's something we all as writers need to be aware of; it's very easy to put a "Mary-Sue" in your novel. One of my readers noted that all the women in The Last Free City are implausibly beautiful (although even my protagonist, a notorious womaniser, doesn't sleep with all of them). There's a balancing act between creating an attractive fiction, the expectations of your genre and what you can pull off in the way of rounded characterisation. The writer needs to have a degree of empathy, of identification, with all his characters; there is a real risk of becoming too close to the protagonist. There are several amusing online tests to determine of your main character is a Mary-Sue, but if you're a heterosexual male the only questions you need to ask are: "Are woman attracted to your protagonist as a matter of course?" and "Does he sleep with most of his female acquaintance over the course of the novel?". If the answer to both is "yes", you probably have a Mary-Sue on your hands.

The Millennium Trilogy, of course, is one of the publishing success stories of the decade, but what makes the books quirky and distinctive is Blomqvist's co-protagonist, Lisbeth Salander, the emotionally-damaged computer hacker. Salander is as implausible (in a different direction) as Blomqvist, but she is such great fun that the reader embraces the implausibility.

My piece of advice for today is this; if you're going to put yourself in your novel (not necessarily a disaster), try to make sure you don't sleep with too many more people than you might in real life.

* "Mary-Sue" is the term often used

If you like The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo...

A Scandinavian mystery, in which old records eventually reveal the solution to a crime a generation old. If you read yesterday's blog entry you'll probably think I'm talking about The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo. Instead, I'm thinking of a novel with a different tone, but reminiscent of Larsson in many ways. This is Barbara Vine (aka Ruth Rendell's) quiet but immensely absorbing mystery, Asta's Book. Reading The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo put me in mind of it once again - a book that I've admired for nearly 20 years.

It's the story of Asta, a Danish immigrant settling in London in the early 20th century. Asta is lonely in her new home, and her husband Rasmus is not a great help. She begins to keep a diary, but she is an archetypally unreliable narrator, and she has one particular secret she does not share even with her journal. She also writes about a contemporary murder, and seventy years later her granddaughter comes to realise that the diaries hold the key to solving it.

Vine neatly captures Asta's loneliness:

When I went out this morning a woman asked me if there were polar bears on the streets of Copenhagen. She is one of our neighbours and she stands behind her gate waiting for people to go by so that she can catch them, and gossip. She thinks I must be savage and half-witted too because I'm not English and don't speak English well and stumble over words.

It's hardly suprising that Asta withdraws into herself, and her diary, at once direct and duplicitous, becomes a reflection of her character.

I don't write in this book every day. This is partly to keep it a secret from Hansine -- she would try to guess what I am doing and think of something grotesque, letters to a lover perhaps. Imagine it! -- and partly because it's not only a record of what I do but also of what I think. And it's about people.

Asta's Book is both thriller and character study. Vine nails Asta's voice to perfection, and marshals the complex plot with the skill of a career crime writer. Whether writing as Vine or Rendell, all of her work is worth reading -- but Asta's Book is head and shoulders above anything else she's written.