On Conception, Characterisation and Consistency
Since this story has taken around twenty years to develop from a vague idea to a complete work\, it's hardly surprising to find some things in there don't quite add up. When I started on the story no one had heard of the internet. Mobile phones, if they existed, were regarded as yuppie toys rather than the almost ubiquitous items they are today.
Since various bits of this story were written at different times over twenty years there's the odd inconsistency in the text. A nit-picker might, for example, take issue with the sires of a certain string of racehorses, but those were moderately successful sires when that part was being composed, so there they are.
The story itself owes its origins to a series of conversations in the side bar at the Grandview, and anyone familiar with my social circle at the time would be able to identify a number of characters in the story. It's fairly obvious that Gordon Jeffrey equates pretty well to the late John Lester, and David Herston shares a number of interests and character traits with the author.
There are fairly obvious real life equivalents for Hopalong Cassidy, Sandy McNab, His Lordship and The Duchess, Dagwood and Blondie and other characters scattered through the narrative, but in most cases the way in which those characters are portrayed reflects the needs of an entirely fictional plot line. Conversations about ways of winning the Lotto were commonplace in that particular environment and the means through which it is done was one that I floated as a possibility at the time. Lack of computer programming skills stopped it in its tracks, but the idea was there and started me wondering what would happen if such a mechanism had paid off.
Those thoughts led to a scenario that owes a great deal to the Blandings novels of P.G. Wodehouse with alcoholic elements from a series of paperbacks titles MASH Goes To (Insert Exotic Location Here) which found their way into my library during the seventies. Having worked out a basic premise, fleshing things out by turning to familiar figures would come as no great surprise, and in most cases the roles they play are incidental to the unfolding narrative, though I should note some significant departure from anything resembling reality.
Given the two blokes with a pile of money scenario it's easy to come up with a two or more parties interested in getting a share of it. In this case it's a mother and daughter looking at a double wedding, though it could, in a future episode, be a pair of lesbians aiming to take over The Crossroads for a wymmins cooperative and expropriate a large part of the Jeffrey/Herston fortune to fund same.
Some of the characters who turn up were put in there to see what happens. The crew from the tug boat get far more coverage than they need, but I had a couple of intrigues involving them pencilled in, including the possibility that Jeffrey might avoid the wrath of a vengeful Olga by escaping to sea as an unofficial passenger. They also provide an excuse for Jeffrey to overhear certain confidences.
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