… the genesis of Jack Calder… an Author’s case study on how a main character is sculpted…

…I’m delighted to be part of the initial trio of promoted thrillers from the Crooked Cat Publishing stable this week, along with my writer pals, David Robinson and Vanessa Knipe… their masterpieces, The Handshaker and The Pill Wars respectively sit alongside the first of the novels in my own Jack Calder series, The Violin Man’s Legacy… initially brought to the Great God Amazon seven years ago in my self-publishing beginnings to this wunnerful scribbling gig, it introduced the main man, Jack, to a readership which has blessed this ol’ Jurassic with mind-boggling support since day one… a common question regularly asked of me, and I’m sure of many of yeez Lads and Lassies of Blog Land who write, is, ‘how much of yer characters are from ‘real life’?… (aren’t they all, Mabel?)… every one of the ‘people’ who populate my books are as alive to me as anybody I’ve met in the flesh… and I defy the majority of Authors to deny they’re more acquainted with their imaginary folks than the physical manifestations of the human race around them… I have the usual, frequent, notorious debates in my head… the literary committee meetings, which, of course, the players always dictate and drive… but, back to Jack Calder… where did he come from?… the ubiquitous ’they’, as in ’they say’, say yeez should write about what yeez know… fifteen years ago, one of the corporate trouble-shooting engagements I undertook in the Far East was the turnaround of a stricken shipping company in the Philippines… part of the ‘corporate surgery’ necessary was the firing of six hundred trade union workers on the Manila dockside… at the same time, several local policemen and local mayors up and down the country were also removed from the ’shadow payroll’ from their supposed duties of safeguarding the company’s well-being… net result was NOT my promotion to the top of their respective Christmas Card lists… real and present danger in the form of death threats were relayed to me… that translated to the need for a reinforced, three-tonne, armoured car with a squad of armed bodyguards to prevent my Scots a*se from being used for criminal target practice… the guy who ran the security firm which looked after me was an ex-SAS (British Special Forces) officer… he personally trained the men on my detail… he was yer typecast, muscled, tight-black T-shirted, don’t-f*ck-with-me, in-yer-face kinda man… hence the idea for the storyline of International Security Partners (ISP)… retired, no-nonsense, SAS men forming their own firm… the persona of Jack Calder himself was easy, too… Jack’s a product of my tough, native, Docklands Govan environment in Glasgow... I needed a six-foot-two, blue-eyed, fair-haired representation of Jack… so I just looked in the mirror… what?!!  who’s that laughing back there?!!!… there’s also, May-Ling, a beautiful female Chinese partner for Jack… a-hem… yours truly at one time had such good fortune to be wed to a Hong Kong lass… now as for all the killings, and heavy-duty, black operations stuff that permeates the novels, I could tell yeez if these are true or not, but then, I’d have to kill yeez… right?… see yeez later… LUV YEEZ!…

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