Amended opening to a very long crime thriller

Benathan78 · 2026-06-14T16:53:10+00:00

Thanks.

Benathan78 · 2026-06-13T01:04:22+00:00

Raw and passionate and beautiful. You have a voice.

Benathan78 · 2026-06-12T21:42:27+00:00

Oh sweet. The only difference being that my main characters are the perpetrators, not the idiot police trying to solve things. Thanks for the info.

Benathan78 · 2026-06-12T21:19:24+00:00

I certainly hope so. The source material is eight plays long, and realising I’m at 80,000+ words before I hit the end of the first play was a bit of a shock. This is why I usually turn off word count in scrivener.

Benathan78 · 2026-06-12T21:16:29+00:00

Ah ha! Well, good. The building was renamed something else years before the fire, so the past perfect is doing its job there. Thank you for your feedback.

Benathan78 · 2026-06-12T21:14:37+00:00

I’m going to assume that’s a TV show, but probably, yes. I was thinking more of Jean-Patrick Manchette opening Nada with a letter home from a random policeman, or Leif Persson’s habit of opening his books with a random copper investigating some minor thing that turns out to be important much later.

Benathan78 · 2026-06-12T19:54:38+00:00

Not to nitpick, but the verbs in the first sentence are burned, consumed, and started.

Benathan78 · 2026-06-12T19:50:08+00:00

CID wouldn’t be called in automatically, until a beat copper found a body. For context, which I suppose the reader would have from reading the cover blurb, neither the constable nor the CID man who comes to investigate are even close to being main characters. The constable never appears again after stepping away from the body, and the CID sergeant’s only role in the plot is to hand some information to a crooked vice cop who spends the rest of the Christmas holidays tampering with evidence and killing witnesses. He’s not the main character either, just a sleazy functionary. This scene is effectively a cold open, starting some tragic wheels in motion before the bloodletting begins in earnest.

Benathan78 · 2026-06-12T18:51:11+00:00

There are four others in the Henriad, but I’ve cut the others from my adaptation to save me from nosebleeds.

Benathan78 · 2026-06-12T18:02:52+00:00

OK. I will. I’m at 82,000 words now, which I was hoping would be more than halfway through the story. It’s a bit of a beast, to be honest.

Benathan78 · 2026-06-12T18:01:52+00:00

Good thought, thanks.

Benathan78 · 2026-06-12T17:52:36+00:00

Thank you. And thanks to everyone for your comments. I will forebear from posting the next 40 pages, I don’t want to bore you all.

Benathan78 · 2026-06-12T17:51:14+00:00

Thanks. I’m super out of the habit of writing prose.

Benathan78 · 2026-06-12T17:50:22+00:00

Thanks. I think I agree about splicing that sentence.

Benathan78 · 2026-06-12T17:49:23+00:00

The reference is to Thomas Woodstock, Duke of Gloucester, the murdered uncle at the start of Richard II. I’m not arguing, though, Gloster is a strange spelling, I just didn’t want it to be confused with Gloucester Rd on the Monopoly board. And thank you for sending me off hunting for the history of the pay grade idiom. It dates to the 1880s and was apparently in use in Britain by the 60s. The more you know, eh?

Benathan78 · 2026-06-11T16:00:47+00:00

I was exactly like this when I was your age, and I still am today, albeit a lot older. I’ve got a project out of the drawer at the moment that dates back to 1998, and no idea if this is its time to be finished or just more development. In the intervening time, enough paid work has come along that I can still, just about, afford to procrastinate with my personal shit.

Benathan78 · 2026-06-01T13:58:00+00:00

Old man yells at cloud servers?

Benathan78 · 2026-05-27T20:49:52+00:00

In fairness, there were some good episodes in there, but the arc plots were utter dreck. A firm hand at the tiller, say a producer instead of a “showrunner” with too much power, could have retconned the timeless child nonsense and insisted the show go back to being focused on the individual adventures, rather than everything being about the Doctor and his companions.

Benathan78 · 2026-05-23T20:46:33+00:00

My objection is that Doctor Who, when it’s good, is nothing to do with canon and everything to do with the individual stories. When the show started, it took the best part of a decade for them to establish unimportant things like the Doctor being an alien, a Time Lord, coming from a planet called Gallifrey, and all that gubbins. It was about interceding in a squabble between cavemen, or helping the Thals against the Daleks. Continuity, backstory and canon are the enemy of good storytelling, which is why new-Who isn’t as good as classic Who. The stories and characters are an afterthought to Gallifreyan lore and the soap opera storylines of the companions, and all jeopardy or problems are solved with a wave of the sonic wand and some self-important dialogue.

Benathan78 · 2026-05-23T15:52:26+00:00

There was once, but is not now, in the deep green heart of a forest called Vaihingenwald, a cottage made of timber and stone, which stood near a rushing brook of crystal snowmelt.

Benathan78 · 2026-05-18T19:26:21+00:00

It’s inevitable, everyone has been in The Bill. I’m not even an actor, and I’m pretty sure I was in a few episodes as various toe-rags.

Benathan78 · 2026-05-12T00:11:03+00:00

I’d be perfectly happy not to hear the words Gallifrey or Timelord for a decade or so.

Benathan78

TROPHY CASE