Big on Style

‘Narcolepsy,’ Rossi said.

‘Can happen any time,’ Sleeps confirmed, ‘anywhere. You don’t even have to be tired.’

‘Tired? You’re asleep half the fucking day.’

  ‘It’s not proper sleep. Mostly it’s like you’re sleepwalking.’ Sleeps thought about that. ‘You never wondered where I got the name?’

‘I got better things to do,’ Rossi growled, ‘than give a shit about where people got their fucking names.’

-- Declan Burke, The Big O

Karen, Ray, Rossi, Madge, Doyle and Frank …

What’s in a name? There are six main characters in The Big O, and one of the most important things I wanted to establish about them, from a writing point of viewing, was that the names were short, and preferably composed of one syllable. I have no idea how the Russians managed to remember the story they were trying to tell whilst constantly spelling out those half-paragraph names …

Seriously, short names were very important to me. I’m Irish, and the setting, although non-specific, is composed of various places I’ve lived in Ireland. But, having already written a novel (Eightball Boogie) set specifically in Ireland, in my hometown of Sligo, I was very conscious when writing The Big O of wanting to tell a story that could be plausibly accepted as taking place in any English-speaking medium-sized city, and the names I chose were a large part of that.

Also, I wanted to use names that would sound plausible if they turned up in an Elmore Leonard novel. ‘Madge’ is the exception there, I think.

On another level, the short names are intended as representative of what I was trying to achieve with the book as a whole. They’re not exotic names, and nor do they call attention to themselves. With apologies to anyone called Karen, Ray, et al, they’re very much functional names. And I very much wanted The Big O to be functional in the way a machine is utterly functional for a specific task, in this case bending the familiar tropes of crime fiction into a story that was, first and foremost, fun. Hey, if you can put the fun into functional …

Short names also have the benefit of being unobtrusive. In an ensemble piece, you’re very often going to have a number of characters thrown together, and in The Big O, a lot of the action takes place via dialogue. In that context, short names have less to do with signifying character than providing inconspicuous guides to direction as the reader slaloms down the page through the dialogue. “Bring me my blunderbuss,” blustered Lord Bertie Carrington-Smythe the Younger … is not a sentence you’re likely to see in any of my books any time soon.

Of course, once you’ve read the book, and you’re prepared to give it any thought,

there’s humour to be mined from the names used. Frank, for example, is a sleazy

plastic surgeon plotting to kidnap his ex-wife who proves to be anything but frank

with his various associates. Doyle, a lady detective, may well have been

mischievously named for Popeye Doyle, although if she was it was

purely a subconscious thing – I’m not even that big a fan of the

French Connection movies.

But, short as they are, the names, and naming, offer a little more than appears on the surface. Early in the novel we are introduced to Madge, 51-years-old and about to be divorced from Frank, and the mother of twins who are about to head off to college. Adrift and struggling to find something to anchor herself to her new reality, Madge lists nine names by which she has been known at various stages during her life.

Madge, she thought. Was that even a name? It sounded, if you said it a certain way, like some kind of stain, strawberry jam squished into the carpet … As a divorcee Madge would be expected to revert back to her maiden name. The thing about that was, Madge wasn’t sure she would respond to anyone who called her by that name. It was so long ago since she’d used it that Madge felt the name belonged to someone she had sat beside in school but hadn’t seen, or wanted to see, in half a lifetime.

The first time we meet Rossi he is introduced by his full name, Rossi Francis Assisi Callaghan, a name that, for a kid growing up in an orphanage, was something of a millstone, at least until Italy won the 1982 World Cup, Paolo Rossi scoring six goals in the process. But, given Frank’s love of Italian opera in general, and Rossini in particular, is the Francis part of his name more relevant to his history than Rossi? Perhaps, but if it is, Rossi won’t be the one winkling out the subtleties.

‘I got better things to do,’ Rossi growled, ‘than give a shit about where people got their fucking names.’

Ray’s name, once he comes to Detective Doyle’s notice, becomes something of an obsession for her, mainly because Ray is tall, single and friendly. Ray is short for something, certainly, but what? She and her junior partner, Sparks, try to discover who the mysterious Ray Brogan is, first via police records, then via google search.

‘So what have we tried?’ Doyle said.

‘Raymond, Raphael, Ralph, Ray and Reynaldo. And Rainier, naturally, in case he’s an illegitimate prince from Monaco. You’re sure his second name is Brogan?’

Karen too is fascinated by Ray’s name. When Ray, over lunch, tells her how a bully broke his arm three summers running as a kid, Karen asks why.

Ray shrugged. ‘He just wanted to do it. Although,’ he conceded, remembering, ‘he did say he didn’t like my name.’

‘The fuck was wrong with your name?’

‘With these guys? Reasons are bullshit. I mean, if I had the same name and was bigger than him, my name wouldn’t have been such a problem.’

The names, and how they’re exploited, misunderstood or misrepresented by the characters, are by no means essential to the outworking of The Big O’s plot. In one sense they’re no more than a sideline, a little piece of tongue-in-cheek soap opera melodrama in which the true names, and their meanings, when finally revealed, add another bit of red herring fun to the story.

On another level, however, the inability of some of the characters to forge a successful path in life can be directly related to, or indirectly inferred from, their inability to come to terms with who they really are, to understand and accept their identity in the world they live in rather than waste their time and potential chasing an elusive identity they would prefer to inhabit.

Of course, the fact that no infant has any control over what he or she is named suggests that living up to a name, or trying to live one down, is a pointless exercise akin to the heroes of Greek tragedy trying to buck the implacable Fates.

Still, it’s fun watching them try …

:: The Big O is published by Hag’s Head Press

:: Declan Burke blogs at Crime Always Pays

"Of course, once you’ve read the book, and you’re prepared to give it any thought, there’s humour to be mined from the names used"

-- Declan Burke