Liner Notes for The Alexandrine Tutor

 

Liner Notes for The Alexandrine Tutor

So I began doing some research on Alexandria in 1900 and the slightly unofficial British protectorate of Egypt at the time. I was looking for somewhere I could slide in a mystery, a puzzle, a fun setting, a cool character. And then time caught up with me and I needed to get writing. So what if instead of going to Alexandria, our characters just pretended to? This was an easy way to deal with the unsorted and contradictory information I’d got – just have characters claim that’s what’s there and never have to reveal a truth.

It's shortcuts and tricks and covering over the gaps all the way down. I would apologise but you came to the Liner Notes, you wanted to know what’s going on beneath the surface.

So, someone runs away to Alexandria. I’d had Schneemann in Egypt in a flashback sequence in one of the novels, he’d been on the run, trying to get across the desert from the Nile to a Red Sea port. So his memories of Alexandria were not exactly rosy. Yet it is reasonable to assume that if you have enemies in a place you will have – perhaps not friends but at least people who do not like those enemies. Who will assist you, either from spite, for money or a favour, or from simple humanity.

Of course the way to build a mystery is to have a variety of characters, each with their own idiosyncratic interests and desires. If you are looking for information or action from them you need to take that into account. The lazy way to build an obstacle in a story is that if our protagonists are searching for X, then there is someone in the way who doesn’t want them to get X. A more interesting method if have someone in the way who wants Y – and won’t give up X until they’re helped to get Y.

You need to keep that under control though, otherwise you find yourself four sets of favours deep and have forgotten what you were looking for in the first place. That’s why I bypass it entirely – for now. I’m laying out bits for myself to pick up later, maybe in the season finale in December. Will I pick them up? I don’t know, I’ve not written it yet!

With a short story there’s room to lay out the problem, find a complication or two, discover a solution, and then figure out what do with the solution – and not much more. I could write longer – but would that in fact be padding? Perhaps so, the concision is a virtue as much as a constraint. Anyway here’s a young man who wants to mend violins, but his family (society) wants him to work in finance and marry a flighty young woman. What to do with that?

A mystery to me.