Jon explains the inspiration and ideas behind his writing.
WINTER’S TRILOGY
The Last Train Home
I was on Broadway in Nashville one cold December night. It was a few weeks before Christmas and I was leaving to fly back to the UK a few days later.
People were however already getting into the holiday mood.
Earlier that year I had walked through the trail called Holston Road, between Gallatin and Hartsville. It’s an old wagon road from 1787. There’s a small cemetery with gravestones from years gone by. That whole area is full of history, it is very spiritual and is also the influence behind my song Ghosts of Tennessee, on the Country Tales and Hobo Trails CD.
As I left Broadway driving home I saw the Music City Star train and the whole story just seemed to fall into place. By the time I got home I had the story line and wrote the story over the next couple of days. I have to admit I love the story.
Murder in Music City
It seems that everyone in Nashville is a songwriter. I love that actually.
The slogan for the wonderful Nashville Songwriters Association International is “It all begins with a song.” I agree but it seems that songwriters, just like scriptwriters in Hollywood, come quite low on the ladder of acceptance or importance and yet with the song there is no record.
Craigslist was peaking a couple of years ago and that was the site to network for musicians, songwriters and singers in Nashville and yet it seemed potentially unsafe. A girl answers an ad for a singer, goes along in good faith, ends up in a not nice situation. Not always of course but there are many many people out there who prey on people’s dreams.
There is a great print, that shows a couple of country legends sitting at the bar, (based on Gottfried Helnwein’s Boulevard of Broken Dreams, which in turn was his take on Ed Hooper’s classic Nighthawks).
So I had the bar, the songwriters, the singers, the slogan and then I had the story.
The Dead of Winter
Jackson Woods, private detective, has been a bit of an enigma to me and I am still trying to find out exactly who he is.
Loosely based on my uncle Glyn who really was a private investigator in Cardiff, during the fifties and sixties, and who worked with my dad on many cases.
I have lovely images of Christmases from my childhood, growing up in Cardiff. The rows of terraced houses leading down to Albany Road, with Christmas trees in their windows, log fires burning in the front room.
I recall going shopping for presents with my dad. We’d go through the town centre, through the indoor market, inevitably ending up at the second hand record store.
The image I had for this story was the Christmas trees on sale at the entrance at the back of the market that led out to the Hayes, past the fish mongers. The image is as strong now as it was all those years ago.
So I had Jackson looking for a present for his best friend, occasional lover, business partner and love of his life Rosie but also had the idea of him being hired to ‘find’ Jesus - Jesus in this case turns out to be a gold figure from the nativity scene at a local church, and is worth a fortune.
Finally, as it is a Christmas story after all I gave Jackson another client – a young girl who asks him to find out if Santa really exists. The reason for her request is down to her mother not having any money for presents.
As we all know, Santa does exist.
SPRING: A TRILOGY
To Kill The Dead
The perfect crime? No honour amongst thieves? They were the starting point for this story.
I envisaged this run-down motel in Mexico as the meeting place for the two characters who have planned and seemingly got away with, the perfect crime. No-one hurt, life insurance paid out, but as always, there are unknown factors that come to light as one of them tries to betray the other.
Interestingly, a couple of months after writing this story there were two stories in the news that echoed the method of ‘death’ in the story, and only yesterday my son told me of the same thing almost happening to his brother’s dog at the weekend. The moral is ‘don’t get too close to the cliff edge………’ and could you really trust your partner?
Counting Mississippi
One summer we drove down from Tennessee to Florida. Driving through Georgia suddenly we hit a storm; no, not a storm, torrential rain. The interstate came to a standstill as you could not see a foot in front of the car, the wipers useless. The same thing happened to us just outside Key Largo when we had to stop, and another time, fog descended upon me whilst driving high in the hills about Monte Carlo (the same road that Grace Kelly perished on).
Memories of these have stayed with me. One night I was driving home, aware that a really bad storm was behind me, catching me up; I needed and wanted to get home before it caught me. It got me thinking, “who else was on the road, running ahead of the storm?” And what were they running from?
There had been a story on the television of some guy who had had a ‘relationship’ with someone online and it turned out that the person he’d been writing to, even talking with, didn’t actually exist, it was a lovely older woman pretending to be someone else, a younger girl.
There have also of course unfortunately been other stories involving social network sites and murder.
I put all these together one stormy night, waiting for the thunder to come after lightning. Of course the thunder and lightning actual happen at the same time, it’s just that we hear the thunder seconds later, how many seconds depends on the distance it is away from us, hence “One Mississippi, Two Mississippi” and so on, and wrote the story in one night, with a rewrite the next couple of days.
Sleeping with your Eyes Open
As a lawyer my father originally specialised in divorce, hence working with my PI uncle. When I was about eight there was an item on the local news in Cardiff about a hostage situation in a house just off Newport Road. A husband was holding his wife hostage, and her lawyer, my dad! Luckily it was resolved without anyone being hurt. The thing I remember is a few days later my father telling my mum that his client, the wife, had gone back to her husband!
My dad would often despair at clients who argued and fought over who was going to get the knives and forks or the dog, more so than the children they shared.
He would also despair of the women who went back to their abusive husbands time after time after time.
Domestic abuse is still an unspoken about part of many people’s lives. People stay in relationships for many reasons; love of course, (misplaced love), for the sake of the children, but also due to their own insecurity, they don’t want to be alone. Even is their partner has cheated, betrayed them, lied, they’d prefer to pretend it didn’t happen. They are weak, but people are stronger than they think we they are usually.
I had the title of this story first and then a brief outline and then the story again practically wrote itself. I waited for the ending to come, which it did a week or so later.