My Character Obession

I care. Perhaps I care too much. But I get invested in my characters. Why shouldn’t I? I mean, my readers get invested in them, so I owe my readers that. I care about the lives of my characters, all the details of their backstory and all their hopes and dreams, some of which only I will know.

But no death dates. Never death dates. Because they are still alive to me. My medieval noir protagonist Crispin Guest is over 600 years old. Somewhere. Tim Badger and Ben Watson will never be gone.

I haven’t been writing Crispin Guest stories for some years now after I concluded the series, so it makes sense that I feel closer these days to my Victorian characters in my Sherlockian pastiche, a cozy Victorian mystery series following the Sherlockian canon but with my own characters, one a former Baker Street Irregular. I do feel closer not only because I am currently writing them, but because they are close; oh so close to modern times. I can almost touch them, walk along those cobblestoned streets with them, pass the vinegar at the table to them from the castor set. 1895 is only five years from 1900. 1900 was the century in which I was born. I can touch and own Victoriana. I can use items that people used over 100 years ago. It’s so much closer than we think. (The atom bomb was only 15 years before I was born, for instance. A mere smattering in the timeline. Kitty Hawk was only 60 years before the moon landing. That’s technology speed-dialing.)

I love these characters. I love writing stories with these male friendships, this “band of brothers”. They enjoy their friendship, value it, depend on it in a crisis, look out for one another. Because they know that the world can be cruel to a man alone who isn’t in the right social strata…or has the “right” color of their skin.

Even now I worry about Badger and Watson. Thank goodness Sherlock Holmes stepped in to mentor them and help them financially when being on their own just wasn’t cutting it. They were two young men who needed that chance and would never have gotten it otherwise. Tim Badger, a bloke from the East End, a Cockney orphan with no extended education other than a bit of reading and writing and a few sums, and hired as one of Holmes’ Baker Street Irregulars when he was a child, until he aged out at eighteen.

Ben Watson at least had a family and a family business…that unfortunately went bust, and then his father died, leaving him — a black lad of seventeen — to make a living for himself and his mother. Only self-taught in several disciplines, he had a mind for science and though he had only been hired as a menial for a chemist, he took it upon himself to learn compounding chemicals and what they cured after hours. But when the chemist found out, he was sacked and went in search of that job again that could be intellectually satisfying. Meeting Tim and taking a chance on his absurd idea of becoming detectives like Sherlock Holmes was the best thing to ever happen to him…once Mr. Holmes stepped in with financial help.

These are fully realized characters, improvising their way through deductive reasoning in their investigations; navigating their way around the new women of the day who want equal rights with men; living in a stratified society that didn’t take kindly to the way Tim talks, or the color of Ben’s skin… though with growing well-deserved fame, and slowly improving their love lives.

But I worry over them when World War I hits.

In 1916, the age of conscription in England was 18-41 years old. Badger would be 41 in 1916 but might just squeeze by, whilst Watson would be 42. Even as the war went on, they took soldiers up to 51 years old in 1918, but I am hoping the British government may have decided that they were too valuable at home as detectives, much like Holmes and Watson. I don’t plan on writing them into the 1900s, so I can relax a bit.

Is this obsessing? Yes. Am I able to stop. No.

The fact is, that if I believe it, you will believe it. It’s the joy, and perhaps the curse, of writing characters who live and breathe.