same time I realized that it was as though I had set the twist up all along; I really didn’t have to change anything in the rest of the book. It was as if my unconscious mind had been setting it up the whole time; once I saw it, it seemed not only logical but actually inevitable. And yet it was invisible to me until that moment. As Geoffrey Rush says in Shakespeare in Love, “It’s a mystery.”
H: Why do you think that is?
CE: Well, my mind was relaxed. The very act of running always jolts something loose in my brain. I would get my best ideas while jogging or mountain climbing or riding my bike up there. Of course, I was engaged all day long in struggling with the problems of writing the book, so my brain was primed, as it were, to come up with solutions, but I was always struck by how those solutions would present themselves at the most unexpected time. In this case, I didn’t even know I was looking for a big twist at the end until it popped into my head. But the minute it did, there was no question about it: I recognized the rightness of it.
H: How do you balance being a novelist and playwright? Is it hard moving back and forth?
CE: Actually, I find it refreshing. I feel like some stories are just begging to be plays, while others really need the pages of a novel in order to be properly explored. And then others strike me as screenplays. For instance, I just finished a screenplay about magicians. The title is The Assistant.
H: Doesn’t each form have its own challenges?
CE: Absolutely. Transition in a screenplay is a whole different technique than transition in a novel, or even a play. But I find it stimulating to move between the different forms. In a novel you have so much space, you can gas on about this and that (within reason, of course), whereas a screenplay is like an epic poem—so condensed, so streamlined. It’s story in its most essential form. And you have to think visually, which is great discipline for someone like me. I think one of the greatest dangers to a writer, by definition someone who loves language, is to be drunk with words. Danger, Will Robinson! That can lead to undisciplined, flaccid writing. Screenplay forces you out of that quickly; you’re always looking how to condense, condense, condense. And when you’re writing a play you have to show everything through dialogue and character interaction. I think it helps you to write better scenes when you’re working in prose fiction. You try to make your dialogue character-specific and pithy, just as you would in writing a play.
H: You write music, too, isn’t that right?
CE: Yes. I was trained as a classical pianist and singer, and Anthony Moore, my boyfriend at the time, was a composer. (His great uncle was Douglas Moore, the opera composer). Tony had a show done at Yale School of Drama, and he taught me how to do music manuscript so I could help him transcribe songs. One day about a year later I decided to write a musical, a kind of Faustian tale, and I just sat down at my piano and wrote a song. I called him out at his house in Cutchogue and played it for him over the phone. There was this long silence and I thought he hated it, but then he said, “That’s really good. It’s really interesting.” And I knew it was something I could do. I grew up playing the Great Composers, Bach, Beethoven, Brahms, etc., so it never occurred to me until then that was something I could do. I thought they lived on a whole other plane of existence—which was only reinforced by my classical training. I never studied theory or anything like that, but when Tony said he liked my song, I knew it was something I could do. He is a very gifted composer, so I trusted his judgment. And the only thing I enjoy more than writing is writing music. It is an amazingly joyous and completely engaging, sensual thing to do. I’ve written four complete musicals and am working on a new one, 31 Bond Street, about a real life murder that took place in the 19th century on Bond Street in New York. It was the O.J. Simpson of its time: a media circus, and was referred to as The Crime of the Century. Jack Finney has written a very good nonfiction book about it called Forgotten News: The Crime of the Century and Other Lost Stories.
H: You mentioned Shakespeare a few times. Is there anything special you would like to say about him?
CE: Oh, well, you know, he’s the Big Kahuna, isn’t he? What can you say . . . the man wrote the most exquisite poetry, dealt with The Big Questions in a way rarely equaled. My only consolation is that he wrote some real stinkers. The Merry Wives of Windsor is a wretched, boring play. Thank god.
H: Are there any questions or topics about you, your book, and your life that you would wish to stay away from?
CE: No, my life is an open book. Ha.
SHERLOCK’S BIG FINISH, conducted by M J Elliott
AN INTERVIEW WITH NICHOLAS BRIGGS
There is no doubt that Nicholas Briggs loves the Sherlock Holmes tales. Known around the world as the voice of the Daleks in the phenomenally successful television revival of Doctor Who, he also masterminds a range of Who audio productions released by the company Big Finish. Briggs writes, directs and performs in many of the dramas (which are available as CDs or downloads from the Big Finish website), appearing alongside the stars of the original series. With 168 Doctor Who releases available at the time of writing, you’d think he would have enough on his plate ... but the allure of the adventures of Sherlock Holmes is just too strong.
“I think there are some similarities,” Briggs observes, “because the Doctor and Holmes in many ways fulfil the same function in the plots of their respective genres. And quite often, Doctor Who stories feel a bit like Sherlock Holmes stories in the sense that some terrible thing has happened and the Doctor comes in to solve the mystery, and, of course, that’s what Sherlock Holmes does. I’ve always seen Doctor Who as a kind of mystery thriller, and I think it works brilliantly when it’s like that. Quite often, my Doctor Who audios follow that mystery thriller format. That is the similarity, and the fact that Holmes is this very singular person, slightly obsessive, with all that information in his brain, and again that’s similar to the Doctor.”
Big Finish began its association with Holmes when it produced recordings of David Stuart Davies’s one-man plays, Sherlock Holmes—The Last Act and The Death and Life of Sherlock Holmes (the one man in question being actor Roger Llewellyn, who has toured the world with both productions and re-created them in the studio for Big Finish). But for their third audio drama, Briggs took the role of Holmes in a multi-cast production of Holmes and the Ripper, another adaptation of a stage play, this one written by Brian Clemens, architect of the Emma Peel era of The Avengers. Having already starred in a revival of the production, this was the natural début for the Briggs incarnation of the world’s greatest detective, alongside Richard Earl as his faithful Doctor Watson.
In the gap between this series and the next, there followed a dramatisation of one of Conan Doyle’s most famous stories, The Speckled Band, narrated in large part by Earl (who plays both Watson and the villainous Grimesby Roylott). Briggs explains: “That’s what gave me the idea to do this series like this—to take out all the ‘he said’s and ‘she said’s, but still keep the narration as a very important part. I just wanted to see how that went, and we had a lot of fun with it. I wanted this to feel as authentic as possible, especially in the light of the BBC’s new Sherlock series (which I really love). But I wanted people who want really proper authentic Sherlock Holmes to have the opportunity to hear dramatised versions. I don’t even want to put an extra twist in it, or find a clever way of adapting them. I want, in the case of the Conan Doyle ones, the Conan Doyle voice—I want Watson narrating, I want it to be as authentic as possible.” The narration is a very important element for Briggs: “When you’ve got an audio, you have to find ways of telling the story differently, and if you can’t have Watson’s voice narrating, you probably have to bend the plot a bit to make things clearer, which is a valid approach. But we don’t need to do that, we’re being more straightforward. I felt in my gut that was the right thing to do—not
