A Little Romance (Or the Joys of Secondary Characters)

DEBORAH CROMBIE: All summer, when it was a hundred degrees in north Texas, I was moaning and groaning over trying to imagine myself in London in November and December. Well, miracles occur, it's now December again and I'm STILL writing Kincaid/James #19, so maybe there are a few benefits to being a tortoise.

Here, just to put you in the mood, is my last photo from my very last night in London last year. It was two days before Thanksgiving, and this is Oxford Street with all the Christmas lights up. And that's my favorite department store, John Lewis, which always has the most wonderful Christmas window displays. It was bitterly cold that night and spitting with rain. I nearly froze to death waiting for my bus--which was not the one in the photo!

There might be a different bus, however, on the cover of the book-in-progress. A fabulous photo taken by my London photographer friend has gone to the publisher's art department, and my editor and I are very excited about it. Hopefully, I'll have something to show you soon! Along with the title!

But I can share a part of a scene I've had fun with recently. One of the things I love most about writing multiple viewpoint, series novels is having the chance to develop some of the secondary characters. They can hang about, doing their job of moving the plot along in the background, and then suddenly they stick their hands in the air and say, "Look at us! We have stories, too!"

In this case, it's two of the characters from several previous books; Dr. Rashid Kaleem, the dishy Home Office pathologist (unless that's an oxymoron...), and Detective Inspector Jasmine Sidana, the second-ranking and uber professional officer on Duncan's murder squad. They are both in their mid-thirties, and single. But that's about all they have in common. They come from different cultures, different backgrounds, different religious upbringings. Sidana, especially, is a bit of an enigma. She feels she was passed over for Duncan's job, she doesn't like anybody much, and she lives with her parents and her granny. I had to wonder why.

Here's a snippet from a scene with the two of them. Sidana has just attended the post mortem of the murder victim.

Dr. Rashid Kaleem’s office was not what Sidana had expected. It was a windowless room at the end of a long basement corridor, but it wasn’t a clinical cubicle. Colorful graffiti covered any bare expanse of the concrete walls not hidden by bookcases. The piles of books and papers on his desk seemed to be in a pitched battle to oust the large computer monitor. One stack precariously supported an old-fashioned shaded library lamp, the warm pool of its light counterbalancing the overhead florescent fixtures.

Kaleem had slipped a white lab coat over a t-shirt that she thought had said Play safe or I will see you naked, but she couldn’t very well ask him to give her another glimpse. She must have looked askance because he glanced at his chest and shrugged apologetically. “I don’t usually see the paying customers. Pathologist’s humor.”

“I wasn’t—” She stopped, flushing. She couldn’t say she hadn’t been staring.

He nodded toward a coat stand behind the door, where a pale blue button-down shirt hung neatly on a hanger, draped with a suitable conservative red-and-blue dotted tie. “I can look presentable if necessary.”

“I didn’t mean…” Trailing off, she sank into the chair Kaleem offered her. It was, in fact, the only chair other than the one behind his desk, and there was barely room for it in the small space.

He must think her a dreadful stuffed shirt. She knew black humor for the defense mechanism it was, but she’d never been very comfortable with it, even in the police.

Before she could dig herself in any deeper, he said, “Have a coffee to warm you up. It’s the least we can do.” He waved a hand at the counter behind his desk, where a state-of-the-art espresso machine and a jar of coffee pods were nestled in between more stacks of books and some very unpleasant-looking anatomical models. “There’s even milk,” he added, pointing out a tiny fridge below the counter. “I promise I don’t keep specimens in there with it, and I run the mugs through the autoclave.”

“I’d like that. The coffee, I mean.” She snapped her mouth shut before she babbled on. Why did this man make her feel so bloody awkward?

“I was just kidding about the autoclave,” he said as he popped a pod in the machine and retrieved a mug emblazoned with a large red heart between the words ‘I’ and ‘forensics.’ I wash them in the staff room.” The machine rumbled and hissed as the mug filled.

When he’d added a splash of milk to the coffee and handed it to her, she said into the silence, “Dr. Kaleem—”

“Please. Call me Rashid.” He sat behind his desk, looking suddenly less like a rock star and more like the expert he was.

“Rashid,” she said carefully, cradling her mug, “what else can you tell me about Sasha Johnson?”

I'm not sure where this is going, but I might see a way that it can mirror the main plot. However it turns out, I want to know more about these two.

REDS, do you enjoy writing secondary characters? And READERS, do you enjoy glimpses into the lives of characters that aren't the main focus of the story?