In one of his many classics,
Paul McCartney famously asked, “All the
lonely people, where do they all come from?”
Well let’s see now. DAVID
BUCHANAN is from Castlemartin in Mid-Ulster; MARY SKEFFINGTON is from Bath; JEAN
SIMPSON and JEAN KERR – yes that’s the two
Jeans - are childhood best friends from Matlock in Derbyshire; JOHN
HARRISON is from Scotland. All are in their late teens - so late, in fact, that
they will soon leave them and (hopefully) their innocence behind.
I started work on this book a
long time ago, as was the case with the other two books in what has turned out
to be The Castlemartin Trilogy. The first two were located in Castlemartin, a
fictitious village, located about four miles away from (the very real)
Magherafelt, on the shores of Lough Neagh in Northern Ireland. All three books
are set in the mid-1960s. In One of Our Jeans Is Missing, however, David
Buchanan, the main character, moves from Castlemartin to London and… well
perhaps there’s a wee bit of: you can take the man out of Ulster but you can
never take Ulster out of the man.
David meets up with Mary, John,
Jean and Jean and they start to enjoy each other, and music, and each other a
bit more, and then one of them disappears. At least two of remaining quartet
start to consider what might be the perfect murder.
I had the
title from the get-go for this book. This isn’t always the case for me. Tanita
Tikaram an artist I was managing at the time visited China for a holiday. She
took her two best friends with her. Both of her friends were (in fact still
are) called Gillian. One day Tanita
telephoned me from China in a panic.
“One of our
Gillians is missing,” she gushed.
I laughed.
In my defence I laughed, not so much at the fact that one of her best friends
was missing in a foreign land, but more at the way she had put it.
“No PC,”
Tanita pleaded, “she’s seriously missing!”
When I set
the phone down and had got D.I. Christy Kennedy, Inspector Starrett and
McCusker, on the missing Gillians case, I started to think that ‘seriously
missing’ - as opposed to ‘casually missing,’ or even just, ‘missing’ - would be
a great title for a book, but for some reason or other when it came time to
write it up in my wee ideas book I only wrote, ‘One of our Gillians is missing.’
Sometime
later when I had the idea for this story of David Buchanan and his four fellow teenage
exiles in 1960s’ London, the title presented itself to me at pretty much the
same time. In fact the original working title for the book was, One of Our
Gillians is Missing. Then I started to date a lady called Gillian (yet another
one) for a while, and so in order to protect the three Gillians I changed the title to One of Our Jeans is Missing
a.k.a. OOOJim (pronounced ‘Oh Jim!’
Apart from
being exiled from the home you grew up in, another of the main themes of the
story is how music, big pieces of music, become very important as soundtracks
to parts of our lives. I suppose the other important point to mention here is
that we are all equally passionate about the music we dislike as we are about
the music we love. A lot of the music references in the book – Dylan, John Lee Hooker, The Spencer Davies Group,
Taste and Stevie Winwood – have all had major influences in my life and, along
with quite a few other artists, helped me during my move from Ulster to London
in 1967. Yes, music certainly helped me deal with the potentially debilitating
illness known as homesickness. Even today every time I listen to Neil Diamond’s
classic, I Am… I Said, I can still recall vividly the intensity of the
helplessness of the bed-sitter days. With hindsight if I had been a doctor I
would have prescribed a twice weekly listening session of I Am… I Said, one or
Mr Diamond’s most soulful statements.
Just to know that others had
suffered and where suffering from
your ailment could be a comfort. With
the benefit of that same hindsight I would probably add a thrice weekly visit
from Jean Simpson into the potent healing mix. Hopefully you’ll see what I mean
should you visit the pages of One Of Our Jeans Is Missing.
This is my
first title to be published by Fahrenheit Press. I found main man Chris McVeigh refreshingly
straightforward to deal with. His view
seemed to be that if he read the book and liked it (and assuming that I could
spell Fahrenheit) he would publish it without any publisher interference, fuss
or delay. His only other observation
was, “If you want to be treated like a delicate little
snowflake we're definitely NOT the publisher for you - try Faber & Faber, they're lovely.” That was
certainly good enough for me.
That's it until the next time. Next one soon.
Cheers
pc
