But How Do You Work That Into The Narrative?

I shall start with a disclaimer: I am actually really enjoying what I’ve read (some three chapters) of P. D. James’s An Unsuitable Job For A Woman, which I’ve never read before, despite the fact that it was published in 1972 and I’m a big fan of certain sorts of detective fiction.

(I’ll be honest: I think part of what I like about it is that Cordelia dislikes Adam Dalgliesh as much as I do. Of course, she hasn’t met him, so that might change, but I do hope not.)

But what really fascinated me about the character so far is that when Cordelia is asked what her father did, she replies, “He was an itinerant Marxist poet and an amateur revolutionary.”

Really? Because that’s a complicated back story for a character who is dead before the book starts. It’s not that implausible: Cordelia’s twenty-two in 1971, so while her father may be too young to remember the rise to influence of the Fabian Society in the Edwardian period, he is certainly old enough to have been permanently inspired by the participation of some English left-wing sympathisers in the Spanish Civil War.

Or, you know, he could just have strong left-wing sympathies because he read Das Kapital at an impressionable age.

There’s just something about this that made me think, “Well, what a complex back story for a character who, as far as I can tell, is never going to appear in the book.” (If this is P. D. James’s foray into zombie fiction, don’t tell me. I want to be surprised.)

So, just in case I ever write a novel, I’ve come up with some pick-and-mix sentences that I can drop in to the narrative when someone asks my protagonist what her father does for a living.

• He was a chiropodist, but it was really just a way for him to get paid for being a foot fetishist.

• He provided freelance flower illustrations for amateur gardening magazines and on weekends scoured antique shops to try and improve his collection of Victorian apostle spoons.

• He tried working as a waiter once, but apparently he had some kind of phobic response to damask.

• He was a turtle fancier by inclination, but my mother talked him into becoming a chartered accountant on the grounds that the work was less seasonal.

• He mostly subsisted on the loose change he found down the back of friends’ sofa cushions.

• He shouted at the managers of struggling suburban theatre companies until they agreed to stage one of his series of five-act tragedies about Charles Babbage’s Difference Engine.

• He had a shoe-shine stand near the station until he developed an unshakeable conviction that it was possible to buff suede. Actually, we don’t really like to talk about it.

• He’s actually a highly paid mercenary in a war as old as time itself, fought across the dimensions and in the shadows of planets, bringing humanity and every other species in the universe to the brink of destruction without their knowledge or understanding—but we used to tell people that he managed a strip-club so they wouldn’t ask too many questions.

• He claims he’s a steward on the Titanic, so we’re not actually quite sure what he’s been doing for a living since 1912. Really? It’s never seemed that implausible to us.