“Brother, a dead body can’t run from
a coffin, but their spirit sure as hell can try.”
The origins of my Bajan detective, Joseph Tremaine
Ellington and the genesis of Heartman were born on a different
continent. In the autumn of 2003 I had travelled to New York and then took a
flight on to the state of Louisiana and New Orleans. The two American cities
could not be more different. Manhattan feels huge and modern, it is an iconic
place and even after visiting on numerous occasions, amongst all the wonder of
its skyscrapers and iconic municipal buildings, I still find its vastness
intimidating and impersonal. New York has always given me the ‘Joe Buck’ –
Midnight Cowboy kinda of feeling,
Like I was a fish out of water in a city that’s way
too fast for me. New Orleans is the polar opposite. Its French Quarter to this
day still has back streets that, when you walk down them, give off the aura of
bygone, hedonistic southern times. Live oaks, palms and Cyprus moss hang from
the ornate balconies of the veranda gardens of elderly buildings. There is
heady tropical scent that permeates every part of the quarter and whether it be
dusk or dawn you get a strong and eerie feeling that the ghosts of the American
civil war are never more than a hairs breath away from you as you are drawn
along its time worn sidewalks. Both New York and New Orleans have seen their
fair share of crime over the years and crime writers have took inspiration from
the mutually seedy criminal underbellies that can be found in both cities. This
old port town on the edges of the Gulf of Mexico with its creepy aura and
timeless feel helped me to create the foundations of my book, Heartman.
I found my inspiration in the Abbey Bar in Decatur
Street in the French quarter. J T Ellington was born on a real hot day and in a
heavy storm that was hitting New Orleans one Tuesday afternoon in September
2003. Outside the streets ran with rain and I was happy to be sitting out of
the downpour with a long-necked bottle of ice cold Dixie beer which had been
served to me by a diminutive but hard looking Louisianan bar man who was sat
across the bar from me dressed in a grubby white vest and who was happily
reading a Harry Potter hardback. Brownie McGhee’s Good Morning Blues was playing on the juke box and I had a copy of
James Lee Burke’s Neon Rain for company. On my travels I’d always took a couple of
Burke’s Dave Robicheaux crime novels along for the ride and now in New Orleans,
home state of my favourite crime writer it seemed only fitting to be reading
one of his books. But in that New Orleans bar, rather than read, I found myself
writing.
I seem to remember that the bare backbones of
Heartman’s story came to me quickly, a flash of inspiration that was born more
from the copious amounts of Dixie beer I was drinking than through artistic
endeavour. I wrote my ideas in pencil, in the back of a small black day-to-day
diary that I’d been carrying in the back of my rucksack. I wrote for a good
hour, and forged from my booze addled imagination what was to become my wily
Bajan inquiry agent. I called him Ellington after the great jazz musician, Duke
Ellington and I set the story in my home town of Leicester, which in later
years became, Bristol, a city with a vast and rich Black émigré and Caribbean
history.
Outside on that ‘Big Easy’ street, the rain had
stopped, I knocked back the rest of my Dixie beer, put my diary back in to my
bag then walked out of the bar into the sunshine and then quickly forget about
J T Ellington ...
But some things, people or ideas are hard to keep
locked away. My wily Bajan detective for instance refused to stay in the shadows.
Nearly fifteen years later I find myself about to
publish the final part of my planned trilogy that began in 2013 with Heartman.
Restless Coffins sees Ellington still struggling to make ends meet.
Life is tough for the reluctant Bajan private eye. He is still trading in
favours, helping those scared of the police or trying to stay one step of the
law. Tragic news arrives in the form of a telegram, its unwelcome contents
informing J.T of the death of his younger sister, Bernice. A ghost from Ellington’s
past requests he returns home, back to Barbados to settle family affairs. It’s
a fearful journey home that Ellington never expected to make, an unwelcome walk
in to the dark side of Caribbean island life where J.T must once again
reluctantly face the demons of his sad past.
I write in the first person, through Ellington and his
voice, reasoning and attitudes to the unsavoury social mores of the many white
characters (some nefarious) he meets in Restless Coffins and the two
previous novels are very much the understandable attitudes of many Black men
and women at the time. The latest book is set in 1967 and I hope those
unsavoury and at times shameful bigotries and racist attitudes, so prevalent
during the era (and long after) are captured authentically and honestly. In a
literary sense I have been influenced by the writing of Ross MacDonald,
Dashiell Hammett and Raymond Chandler and of course I tip my hat to the
brilliant LA Noir crime writer, Walter Mosley. But despite those great
influences I hope readers of the three novels will see J T Ellington as being a
character that stands out very much on his own. He is not super human, he is a
man who struggles with self-doubt but at the same time on the street, has an
out ward cocky confidence that hides insecurities. He is plagued by the demons
of his past and misses the Caribbean life that he has been forced to leave.
Ellington is Barbadian, an ex-colonial police officer, and a man with secrets
who is barely existing in a country he really does not want to live in.
The sense of prejudice and hostility to both
Ellington’s colour and his past as a disgraced police officer permeate through all
three of the books. This was deliberately structured from my early drafts in
all three novels and I hope has added to my detective’s personal sense of
social and cultural isolation. As a character, Ellington has lived with bigotry
and intolerance for as long as he can remember and this is reflected within my
novels. The ugly face of racism in the 1960’s in Britain towards the immigrant
population is never far away in Heartman, All Through the Night and now, Restless Coffins. Its
unwelcome presence will be a reoccurring theme in my fourth Ellington novel, Rivers
of Blood. To recognise and address such truths within my stories is
both important to me as a writer and I hope it keeps the books grounded in both
social and historical fact.
Telling it how it is (or was back then) is
something I know would dearly matter to my man J T ... and I know that I’d be a
damn fool to upset him.
The J.T. Ellington series is publish by Black and White Publishing.
The audio books are brilliantly narrated by Ben Onwukwe. Available from Bolinda Publishing Pty Ltd
