Roderick Easdale, author
Interview by Richard Hinchliffe
8th May 2024
The latest release from Brindle Books Ltd, Roderick Easdale's Summer At Tangents, takes us into new territory as a publishing house. Our output to date has comprised mainly of Action Adventure, Thrillers, Dark Fantasy/Sci-Fi and True Crime. Most of the manuscripts, or the pitches that we receive from authors fall within those genres.
It was a surprise then, to be confronted, a few months ago, with a comic novel. It's not the sort of thing that I had read much of before, nor had I really given much thought to publishing anything outside of the above mentioned genres.
Still, I decided to give it a go. Whenever I have the time, I do try to read at least three chapters of any new submission. With Summer At Tangents, however, I didn't stop at three chapters. I carried on. As soon as I had read the manuscript, I was determined that we would publish this book.
It had been a long time since a manuscript actually made me laugh - (at least, for the right reasons) - and this one did. In Summer At Tangents, Roderick has managed to create character-driven humour which is funny without ever being cruel - something that many modern authors fail to do. It is, I imagine, his experience of living in the world of his characters that makes it possible for him to poke fun in such a warm and affectionate manner.
I managed to catch up with Roderick to put a few questions to him about the book and his writing process:
In three sentences, what is your book about?
Tangents is a decaying village with a poorly attended church and a struggling golf club. Now the church is threatened with closure. So the vicar’s good friend, a wily golf club committee member, acts to save the church in ways which also benefit the club and his friends and involve duping almost everyone along the way.
When did you first start to write?
Gosh. Very young – but don’t we all? We are made to write stories in school English lessons aren’t we, and get examined on this – it’s how we pass our English exams. A lot of my work at school and university involved essay writing, as I went down the arts and social science routes. Then after university I became a journalist. So I have been writing most of my life.
What is it that drives you to write?
A love of words I think. I also compile crosswords and that definitely stems from a love of words.
What is your writing process - do you have a fixed schedule or method?
No. As a journalist, I have learnt to write anywhere, anytime. I am freelance and no freelancer likes to turn down work; nor can they risk missing deadlines if they want to continue to be commissioned!
How much research did this novel require?
Hardy any as it is a world I know well. It was a case of ‘write about what you know’. One of the characters in the novel has moved to a new part of the country where he knows no-one and gets to know people through the golf club, which mirrors one of my experiences. I have been a member of six golf clubs, so can write about golf-club life with confidence. The club in the novel is the main meeting point for its village as it serves as the local pub and restaurant, and non-golfers use it. I have also been a member of such a club.
There are some hidden, I’m not sure you would call them jokes so much as references to things which if readers do no pick up on them – and most will not – would not detract one iota from the story, but are there for a bit of fun, an added bonus for those who know the history, for example, of the Beatles or Leeds United. These required me double-checking some facts. There are also various references to other writers’ work. When quoting from literature I had to check I was not misquoting through my faulty memory; not that it matters that much as the character who does most of the quoting is somewhat indifferent to accuracy anyway. But when the vicar quotes from the bible I had to make sure he was getting it spot on!
Is that why you set a lot of the action at a golf club – your familiarity with that world?
Yes, that and also the beauty of golf clubs is that all sorts of people mix there. It is hard to think of places where people from different walks of life socialise together, become friends and acquaintances. The advantage for a novelist is that this is a natural setting for where you find people who would not naturally come into each other’s orbit, let alone socialise with them, doing exactly that.
Towards the end of novel a character reflects on a treasured friendship: “If you add up the hours I have spent with him – I have just been having a wee stab at it – I reckon it comes to years. Literally. All of them at the golf club. If it wasn’t for golf I would never have known him.”
You say you have referenced other writers’ work in your novel, which authors are your biggest influences?
I have written a book on PG Wodehouse’s novels, so it is perhaps inevitable some of his craftwork would have rubbed off on me, if only sub-consciously. Not in terms of writing style but in the way he formed his plots.
His early success was not as a novelist but in musical theatre. He described his novels as musical theatre without the music and how he would imagine in his novels that he was writing for a cast of actors. He believed major actors have to be given enough to do, and if they appear in a scene they had to have an important role in it. So, for example. PG Wodehouse rewrote part of Leave It To Psmith to give the Efficient Baxter a scene where he ends up lobbing flowerpots through Lord Emsworth’s bedroom window, as Wodehouse realised that Baxter’s was a more major part than the novel scenario had allowed for, so he added in this episode to boost Baxter’s part.
I wrote a conversation involving the membership committee chairman, as it suited the plot at that point. I realised that this was a character who would be fun to write for, so I had to give him other things to do and involve him in other scenes. His ended up being the part I probably most enjoyed writing, in fact.
Once Wodehouse had the idea for a plot of a novel he would write out a detailed structure, often as much as a third of the length of the finished work. Into this he would also set down bits of dialogue in skeleton form to be written up later. (He claimed that he always thought that in writing the book he was wasting valuable time, as the difficult part of writing was drawing up the plot.)
I also wrote up sections of dialogue in advance. However I was far more free-wheeling as regards the scenario. I did not have a rigid structure to follow, rather a destination and various stopping-off points. This means at times I can think ‘hang on, what if such-and-such happens now, so that person does this in response and that means…’ and from this you can get a new idea, maybe a subplot, or just a humorous incident or a simply a funny line.
I have always worked this way, much to the ire of one of my Politics A level teachers. She was firm in her view that the only way to write essays was to start with about a six-line pr̩cis of what you were to write and then you follow this outline to write the essay. I was far more free-flowing Рyou write something and another idea pops into your head from this, so you include that also; or you realise the flow of your argument means that something you were going to introduce later should be brought in now, and so on.
To mollify her, I would leave the first seven lines blank, write my essay, and then do a précis of what I had written in this blank space at the start. My B grades from her turned to A grades as “your essays are much better now that you are structuring them properly”. I never let on.
An analogy: if you meet up with friends in the pub say, or for dinner, do you know what you will be talking about three-quarters of an hour in? Of course, not. You will know in advance the topics you are likely to talk about during the course of the evening, maybe some news you want to impart, or a question you wish to ask; but your conversational topics are not rigidly structured or pre-determined in advance.
What are your future plans?
That may not be up to me! I bumped into an acquaintance I’d not seen for a while, who asked what I had been up to. I said I was having a comic novel published. He looked at me sternly and replied: “It’s up to the reader to decide if it is a comic novel, not you.”
Summer At Tangents is available now in eBook and Paperback, and can be ordered from all good book shops
Alternatively, you can click HERE to purchase from Amazon,
or click HERE to purchase from Blackwell's
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