Bernard O'Keeffe's Blog

There’s something about a mask. Not the ones we wore in the pandemic for protection, but the full-face ones we wear for...well, for what, exactly? Disguise? Fancy Dress? Criminal Acts?

I hadn’t given masks much thought until I went to a concert in 2019 at Shepherds Bush Empire with my wife. It was to see Nick Lowe and Los Straitjackets. Nick Lowe we were familiar with (I’d been a fan since his Brinsley Schwarz days) but we didn’t know much about Los Straitjackets. It came as a surprise, then, to discover that they performed in Mexican wrestling masks. And it came as a particular surprise for my wife, who chose this night to reveal to me a lifelong fear she had hitherto kept to herself. You’ve guessed it. Masks. My wife had a lifelong fear of masks.

Apparently it’s not that unusual, and there’s even a name for it. Masklophobia. It’s an irrational fear of masks, mascots and people in costumed clothing, and symptoms associated with the condition include sweating, screaming, shaking and crying. Luckily my wife displayed none of these that night at the Shepherds Bush Empire (had she done so it might have been construed merely as a Beatlemania-like enthusiasm for Nick Lowe) but it did make for an interesting evening.

And it did start me thinking about masks.

During the pandemic the mask became an everyday object. Omnipresent. Functional. Necessary. I made no connection between the things we carried with us everywhere and the Mexican wrestling masks of Los Straitjackets.

But when, after the pandemic, I chanced upon the TV programme ‘The Masked Singer’ my thoughts went back to that Nick Lowe concert and the germs of an idea for the next Garibaldi novel were planted.

What about a Masked Band?

Why not take the idea of The Masked Singer – individual celebrities singing in disguise – and extend it to The Masked Band – a group of celebrities playing in disguise?

And as it was to be a DI Garibaldi novel, why not make those celebrities Barnes residents, and why not have them playing a small-scale local venue, like The Bull’s Head.

So that’s what I did. A band of celebrities playing in masks to keep their identities hidden. They’ve performed under a variety of names and in a variety of masks but for the gig which starts the action of ‘The Masked Band’ they’re wearing masks of Mick Jagger, Bob Dylan, Paul McCartney, David Bowie and Debbie Harry and they’re calling themselves The Okay Boomers.

The next morning a man is found dead at the house where they held their post-gig party. It looks like murder, and Garibaldi has some questions to ask. Why was the dead man wearing the Mick Jagger mask? And why have the rest of the masks disappeared?

When members of the Okay Boomers are attacked by someone in those very masks, Garibaldi closes in on the celebrity group, and discovers other things they’ve been hiding.


The Masked Band is out now.

'A thrilling incursion into suburban low life.
The Masked Band will stay with the reader
long after turning the last page.' (Daily Mail)

'Perfect comfort reading' (The Times)


https://www.audiobooks.com/promotions...

“This novel is entirely a work of fiction. The names, characters and incidents portrayed in it are the work of the author’s imagination. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or localities is entirely coincidental”

We’ve all read them – those disclaimers in the front of novels that tell the reader that what follows isn’t ‘true’. A novel, they say, is made up. It’s invented, a work of the imagination in which characters and events are the creations of the writer rather than representations of real people and events.

But despite these prefatory warnings (or maybe because of them), readers still like to speculate and look for similarities. “That journalist in your book, it’s Tom, isn’t it?” “You’ve based that lawyer on Nick, haven’t you?” “Is that murder victim a thinly disguised Sarah?” “That character – it’s me!”

Most readers confine their speculation to polite questioning, but some are so angered that they go further. For many this means legal action, but some go to more extreme lengths. Take Fitzhugh Coyle Goldsborough, for instance. When he read The Fashionable Adventures of Joshua Craig (written by David Graham Phillips and published in 1909) Goldsborough was so convinced Phillips had based one of the characters in the book on his sister in an attempt to defame her that he didn’t bother to question him or go to court. Instead, he shot the author six times.

Writers are quick to deny accusations, but they know the relationship between fiction and reality is never as simple as they claim. Where else can they get their inspiration for characters and events if not from their observation of the real world and the people in it? That’s why they look closely at what’s around them. That’s why so many carry a notebook to jot down things they hear people say, or trawl the news for real stories that could spark an idea for a plot.

Thinking about this tricky relationship between fiction and reality (and of Fitzhugh Coyle Goldsborough) gave me the idea for Every Trick in the Book, the third novel in the Garibaldi series. Its starting point is the murder of Liam Allerton, a retired teacher who has taken up crime writing. He has recently published his first novel, Schooled in Murder. Here’s its blurb -

'When the body of Alex Ballantyne is found in Barnes Pond police are baffled. Who would kill the newly retired teacher? Investigations reveal that Ballantyne had been blackmailing several of his colleagues. Sex. Money. Drugs. It seems that Ballantyne knew all about his victims’ secrets, and they were prepared to pay to buy his silence.’

What’s alarming about the murder of Liam Allerton is that he has been killed in exactly the same place, and in exactly the same way, as the victim in his book. This eerie similarity between the death of the writer and the death of his character directs DI Garibaldi and his team to the pages of the crime novel, where they discover more connections with real life. Liam Allerton taught at a school which seems to be very similar to the one he describes in his novel. Could the characters he describes be similar to the teachers who work there? Could Liam Allerton, like the novel’s murder victim, have been blackmailing them? And, most importantly, could the key to the writer’s murder be hidden within the pages of his own novel?

'Every Trick in the Book' is a metafictional murder mystery, a crime novel about a crime novel in which the detective and his team swivel their gaze between the pages of a book and the real world.

The novel has at its heart the murder of a retired teacher who has taken up crime writing. As it happens, I too am a retired teacher who has taken up crime writing, but it would be wrong to assume that victim is a version of me. And the same can be said of my fictional detective.

Whenever I’m asked how much DI Garibaldi is based on me I always given an honest answer. Garibaldi lives in Barnes. So do I. Garibaldi can’t drive. Neither can I. Garibaldi is of Irish-Italian ancestry. So am I. Garibaldi likes country music. So do I. Garibaldi is a QPR season ticket-holder. And so, alas, am I.

So my honest answer is always the same – Garibaldi isn’t like me at all. Any resemblance, as the disclaimers put it, is entirely coincidental…

I hadn’t planned to turn to crime  when I stopped teaching but, to my surprise, it’s what I’ve ended up doing. Not committing it, you understand, but writing it – something that still, in some people’s eyes, comes to much the same thing. I’m still not exactly sure how this  happened, but I think the explanation may lie in a few discoveries made  in the years I spent as an English teacher.  

The first is  that what keeps us reading – reading anything - is the desire to find answers to questions. Who? What? Why? These are some of the ones we  ask as we read – maybe not consciously and usually (although this wasn’t always the case with my students) not out loud. The more we want to find the answers the more we turn the pages, and the more the writer withholds those answers the quicker those pages turn. Some 'literary' novels have this page-turning quality but, as I discovered in the classroom, many don't. Some, let's face it (and many of my students did) can be pretty hard work.

 All writers know how their novel will turn out (even if they might not when they start writing it) and could choose to reveal everything from the very beginning. Who lives. Who dies. Who marries whom. Who ends happily. Who  ends unhappily. Some novels do precisely this, but the majority choose not to, holding things back, withholding information, inviting the reader to turn pages to find out what happens next .  In crime fiction this technique is more central than it is in other types of novel. The very terms ‘whodunnit’ and ‘mystery’ show that readers of crime fiction are driven  by the desire to discover hidden truths.

The second discovery I made is  that a lot of the texts I was teaching could be seen as versions of crime fiction.

Take Jane Austen, for example. She might not be the first writer you think of when you think of crime fiction – in fact, she’s probably close to being the last — but in Emma she has written one of the great detective novels. There’s no body. There’s no murder. There’s not even any crime as we generally understand the term (the closest we get is the gypsies’ harassment of Harriet Smith and some poultry theft). But that doesn’t mean there aren’t mysteries to solve or there isn’t a detective on the case.

The detective in question is Emma Woodhouse. Like most modern detectives, she has her problems – in her case ‘ a tendency to think a little too well of herself’ and a habit of arranging other people’s lives, or more specifically other people’s marriages. When she tries to do this for her protegee Harriet Smith, the problems start. And the problems start because Emma can’t see what’s in front of her. There are plenty of clues as to what’s going on but Emma can’t see them because she sees what she wants to see rather than what is actually happening.

The great trick that Austen pulls is to deploy a subtle narrative technique in such a way that we, the readers, make the same mistakes as Emma. We have to read very carefully not to be drawn into Emma’s misreading – and, as with the best crime fiction, it’s only on rereading the text that we truly appreciate the writer’s skill in placing the red herrings while also revealing enough for the astute reader to work out the truth.

The only crimes in Emma’s world of Highbury are social ones, but in its strictly coded etiquette, in its world of a clearly understood sense of hierarchy and propriety these are crimes enough. Disappearing to Kingston – apparently for a haircut but in reality for something else. A hidden engagement. Saying something mean to an old lady. Having a piano delivered. Word games.

It’s hardly serial killer territory but the revelations at the climax of the novel are akin to the detective’s unravelling of the mystery and the identification of the killer. *

And what about Hamlet? Talk about a murder mystery. Is the Ghost right when he says Hamlet’s dad was murdered? And if he is, what’s Hamlet going to do about it? Poisoning, stabbing, subterfuge, set-ups, spying. Hamlet has it all. And if you want corpses you won’t be disappointed – at the end of the play the stage is littered with them.

At the heart of it all is Detective Hamlet. He wants to find out the truth but his problem is he can’t stop himself asking questions . When he should be tracking down the criminal he’s side-tracked by philosophical speculation (‘To be or not to be…’ etc) which may be interesting to him but isn’t doing much to make a dent in the crime stats.  Like some Line of Duty police force there’s something rotten in the state of Denmark and Hamlet’s given the task of cleaning it up. He just about manages, but it finishes him off, knocking on the head any ideas of a series.

And then there’s Great Expectations. What better example is there of withholding information, of the big reveal, than the news (spoiler alert!) that Pip’s benefactor is not Miss Havisham but Magwitch?

 In his essay ‘Why Crime Fiction Is Good For You’ Ian Rankin rightly observes that ‘many literary novels use the exact same tropes as crime fiction’. He also makes a claim which chimes with the third discovery I made in my teaching career - that 'all readers are detectives'.

In my time in the classroom I stood in front of many detectives completely baffled by their current case. Those questions – who, what, why, where, when, wtf – were never far from their lips and their eyes were often glazed with confusion, especially when faced with a particularly tricky poem. I used to reassure them that reading was not a case of code-cracking, not a matter of looking for clues that would reveal a hidden meaning, but I realise now that was merely another in the long line of untruths I delivered to my charges.

There may now be less snobbery about crime fiction than there was in the past, but it’s still there. I’ve been asked several times whether I might do any ‘proper writing’ but I’m happy to stick with crime, using some of the tricks of Austen, Shakespeare and Dickens and trying to write books where readers want to know what happens next rather than how many pages they still have to wade through.

*(Only after writing this  did I realise that P D James has already invited us to consider Emma as a detective novel – in 1998 she gave a talk to the Jane Austen Society’s AGM at Chawton, entitled ‘Emma Considered as a Detective Story’. Honest, guv!)

'Private Lessons', the second crime novel featuring DI Garibaldi, is out now.

Find out more about it here -

https://bernardokeeffe.com/

https://tinyurl.com/yr594b2k

Here's where the idea for Garibaldi came from -

https://bernardokeeffe.com/introducin...

And here's what inspired 'Private Lessons' -

https://bernardokeeffe.com/private-tu...

The inspirations behind my first DI Garibaldi novel, ‘The Final Round’

The first thing that came was the name - Garibaldi. As in the biscuit and as in the key figure in the unification of Italy. I knew about the historical figure from distant memories of History O Level and I knew about the biscuit from my enthusiastic consumption of them when I was a kid - those currant-filled thin oblongs we used to call ‘squashed flies’.

But it was more recent events that led me to name my detective after the hero of Italian unification and the Peek Frean’s treat. When my wife was researching her family tree she came across a relative born in the East End in 1861. He was called Joseph Baker – a very English name in what the records showed to be a very English family. What was surprising, though, was his full name – Joseph Giuseppe Garibaldi Baker.

Why were Joseph Baker’s middle names those of the Italian nationalist hero? The discovery led to excited speculation that there might be Italian ancestors in the family, maybe even a mysterious Italian lover. The truth may have turned out to be less romantic, but it was equally fascinating.

It turns out that Giuseppe Garibaldi was a very big thing in Victorian England. When he landed in Southampton in1864 the country was seized by what would now be described as Garibaldi-mania. The upper classes vied to host him, the London working class turned out in their thousands to greet him. A romantic hero, a freedom fighter and a champion of the underdog, Garibaldi had universal appeal, inspiring veneration and almost cult-like adoration. People adorned their walls and mantelpieces with pictures of him. His image appeared on plates, cups and tankards.

Such enthusiasm for the Italian hero might explain why my wife’s ancestors, and maybe many others, chose to give their son the middle names Giuseppe Garibaldi. It’s certainly one of the reasons why I chose to give his name to my new-born literary detective.

Another big influence on the creation of Garibaldi was Inspector Montalbano. When I came upon Andrea Camilleri’s Sicilian detective I fell in love with him. And when I learned that Camilleri didn’t publish the first Montalbano novel until well into his sixties I loved him even more. I’d always wanted to write a crime novel so now that I had stopped teaching what was there to stop me? And that name. Montalbano. There was something about it – four syllables, and with that pleasing stress on the third. Just like Garibaldi.

My detective wouldn’t live in Sicily. He’d be located much closer to home – in Barnes – a quiet London ‘village’ beside the Thames between Hammersmith and Richmond where I have lived for nearly thirty years. He’d have a few of my traits (a love of books and country music, an inability to drive, and a long-suffering attachment to QPR) and he would, like me, be half-Italian by descent. His complicated personal life, though, would be a far cry from my own.

Equally influential on the creation of Garbaldi was Inspector Morse. I read Agatha Christie and Conan Doyle in my youth, but it was Colin Dexter’s Oxford - based novels that really ignited my interest in crime fiction. Garibaldi may have as little in common with Morse as he does with Montalbano (though they do share a certain grumpy cerebrality) but the Oxford inspector made a big impact, as did his creator.

When I was teaching near Oxford I invited Colin Dexter to speak to Sixth Formers about Morse and detective fiction. A former teacher himself, he knew how to hook an audience. He introduced his talk by saying that it would contain three deliberate mistakes and that whoever identified them at the end would win a prize. It was a surefire way to grab attention and one that I would have emulated in my own teaching career were it not for the fact that I generally made more than three mistakes in my lessons and none of them were deliberate.

Like Dexter, I’m a big crossword fan but, unlike Dexter, I’m not very good at them. Whereas he was a seven-times UK crossword champion I do a lap of honour if I manage to complete half the Guardian cryptic. Dexter was often asked whether there was a link between a love of crossword puzzles and the urge to write detective fiction but Dexter attributed the urge to something more general – ‘this business of wanting to know’. It’s something I share with him, together with his desire to set his novels in a place he knows well and his emphasis on character and plot.

DI Garibaldi may not have much in common with the historical figure whose name he shares. Nor may he have much in common with the fictional detectives that inspired him. But I still like to see him as the bastard son of Morse and Montalbano.

And that’s an idea that really takes the biscuit.

My new YA novel '10 Things To Do Before You Leave School' is published on April 4th. Find out more about it here - https://bernardokeeffe.com/

Elena Ferrante, I apologise. Last summer I read the first of your Neapolitan Novels, 'My Brilliant Friend' and I was underwhelmed. I wrote about it in a round-up of my summer reading. http://www.bernardokeeffe.com/?p=838

I am not usually worried by being out of sync with majority opinion but In your case something was nagging at me, so I went back to 'My Brilliant Friend' and re-read it This time I read it in book form. My summer reading had been on a Kindle and I now realise that this had made it difficult (given my technological limitations) to flick back to the cast of characters you helpfully include at the beginning of the book. Even on second reading I still found it difficult to keep track but it was certainly much easier with my finger stuck in the front (it was a bit like how I watched 'Dickensian' - with an A-Z of Dickens characters open on my phone). And yes, Elena, I enjoyed it much more second time round - there were bits I really loved.

I was still, though, puzzled by that wretched comma splice, that thing where you need either a full stop or a semi-colon, where you run-on one sentence into another, that thing I have to correct in my students' work (and, Elena, I have been teaching for over thirty years - can you imagine how many times in my life I have had to ring the comma and write 'p' for punctuation or 'S' for sentence or even, once I've explained the term, 'CS' for comma splice in the margin?). If anything, this feature of your prose (surely not a problem of translation) irritated me even more on this second reading.I still couldn't buy my colleague's helpful reference to the critic who wrote - 'anyone who thinks innovation in prose is at an end should look at the use of the comma splice in Elena Ferrante'.

But then, Elena, with something still nagging at me, I started the second of your Neapolitan Novels, 'The Story of a New Name', and I was not far into it when I came across the following, in which the narrator is describing her friend Lila's prose style -

'Usually the sentences were extremely precise, the punctuation meticulous, the handwriting elegant, just as Maestra Oliveiro had taught us. But at times, as if a drug had flooded her veins, Lila seemed unable to bear the order she had imposed on herself. Everything then became breathless, the sentences took on an overexcited rhythm, the punctuation disappeared.'

The scales, Elena, fell from my eyes - everything suddenly made sense and I got the idea that you definitely knew what you were doing. So apologies from this English teacher pedant who is loving, really loving, 'The Story of a New Name' and who is delighted there will still be two more of The Neapolitan Novels left to read when he finishes it.

PS In between numbers two and three of The Neapolitan Series I read your earlier novel 'Days of Abandonment'. In it I found this - 'Hold the commas, hold the periods. It's not easy to go from the happy serenity of a romantic stroll to the chaos, to the incoherence of the world.'

Aplogies again, Elena. You clearly know what you're doing.

I have recently spent several long weekends with Leonard Cohen. Not in person, you understand, but even so I feel I now know him much better than I did. In the unlikely event that we were ever to get together for a real-life weekend (and time and circumstances seem to make this increasingly unlikely) I’m sure we’d get along like a house on fire (but more of his house later).

The first of these weekends was spent in the company of ‘The Complete Studio Albums Collection'

When the box set arrived I announced to the world that I was going in to my room and that I ‘may be some time’. From the enthusiastic social media response (one RT and two likes) it seemed that most regarded this statement as mere acknowledgement of the size of the box set rather than a knowing reference to Oates walking to his death at The South Pole. To spend a weekend with ‘Laughing Len’ and his ‘music-to-slit-wrists-by’, I was suggesting, was to be thrown into some profound depression from which, like my room, I was unlikely to emerge.

How wrong I was. Listening to Cohen’s work chronologically (topping up the box set with ‘Old Ideas’) turned out to be a far from depressing experience. In much the same way that you feel purged after witnessing the suffering of a great tragedy, I finished the experience feeling strangely uplifted. OK, there are many songs that can’t be accused of looking on the bright side, but there’s also a lot of humour there, not all of it dark. In fact, I would suggest that a chronological Cohen - listen should be available to all on the NHS. It remains one of the great secular pilgrimages of our time.

The other long weekends with Leonard were spent in the company of Sylvie Simmons’s ‘I’m Your Man’.

There are too many highlights to mention here but several stand out. I was intrigued by the revelation that in his early teens Cohen acquired a book called ’25 Lessons in Hypnotism – How to Become an Expert Operator’ - a telling indicator of the spell he was destined to cast over several future generations of listeners. That the first use he should put his skills to was getting the family maid to undress seems an equally telling indicator of the spell he was to cast over future generations of women. Simmons also sheds interesting light on ‘Hallelujah’ - it took Cohen five years to write ( he kept eighty alternative verses and discarded many more) and it has two different endings, one downbeat and one full of life-affirming bravado.

Of most interest, though, was the importance of the Greek island Hydra to Leonard Cohen. Hydra was the first place I went on holiday to with my wife, and it has always held a special place in our memories. That it should be so much associated with Cohen means that he, too, has held a special place in our lives. My wife, in fact, felt so close that she wrote personally to him (including a photo of us together on the island) saying that we had a real soft spot for Hydra and would love to stay in his house any time he wasn’t there and it was free. For some strange reason Leonard failed to get back to her, but we’re heading back to Hydra soon and haven’t ruled out the possibility of bumping into him and enjoying a proper long weekend with Leonard Cohen in person.

One of the questions I’m most frequently asked about ‘No Regrets’, is to do with how much the novel is based on real events. I can usually answer this quite confidently. I have never undertaken a bet to accept every invitation I receive for a year, I have never joined a running club, all my games of Scrabble have been perfectly innocent, my wife has not left me for a PE teacher and I would never subject my children to the embarrassments that the novel’s central character Rick Matthews (see, nothing like my name at all) chooses to inflict on his.

There is one part of the novel, though, which those who know me think must be based on real events. Rick has a student son, Danny, who is a stand-up comedian. I happen also to have a son who is a stand-up comedian, and this, for many, is enough to prove that this part of the novel must be based on the details of my own life.

In my defence I point out that I wrote the novel some time ago when my son, a sixteen-year-old, had only attempted stand-up once. The fact that he, like Danny, went to Oxford and that he continued to perform stand-up is mere coincidence. What’s more, I say, I have never seen him perform.

That, though, has now changed. I have just come back from Edinburgh where, for the first time, I saw my son perform stand-up, an experience which has led me to reflect further on the relationship between truth and fiction. The fact is that this ‘real-life’ experience was far more embarrassing than the version I imagined at my keyboard all those years ago. To see your son describe his Boomerang Kid status, to hear him describe father-son tussles over the TV remote and ponder the Oedipus Complex, not to mention seeing him imitate conflict-resolving monkeys performing sexual acts on each other, proves several things conclusively. The first is that Rick Matthews escaped lightly. The second is that truth can, indeed, be stranger than fiction.