I’m recently back from a five-day visit to New York. Research for a Big Apple-set book I have coming out in 2026. With a bit of Iron Maiden at the Barclays Center thrown in. (We also caught the NYC Marathon, walked the Brooklyn and Manhattan bridges, ate cheesecake at Junior’s and tiramisu in Little Italy.)
But . . . did I need to go to the expense of visiting New York? There must have been easier ways of getting the authenticity I wanted, right?
Perhaps, but first I need to offer some context.
I was born and live in Cumbria. That’s the northern most county in England (if I wanted to, I could walk to Scotland from my house. I don’t, but I could). Cumbria is the third largest county in England and the second least populated. It’s rural. Sparse. Lots of mountains and lakes and forests. Evidence of prehistoric history and ancient history is everywhere – we have over a thousand stone circles, barrows, standing stones and henges, and Cumbria is where the Roman Empire ended, hence Hadrian’s Wall runs through the county. It’s where William Wordsworth was born and where Beatrix Potter settled. There’s a running joke that Cumbrian murders are notoriously hard to solve as the victims have no teeth to check against dental records and everyone has the same DNA.
In 2013, after being shortlisted for the Crime Writers’ Association Debut Dagger for unpublished and un-agented authors, I decided to try my hand at a first-person novel. I hadn’t yet settled on a style, and I wanted to explore everything. Having just met Lee Child at the Daggers awards ceremony (he was being honoured with the Diamond Dagger that year), and because I’d read everything he’d ever written, I settled on an action thriller set in the US, a country I’d been to a few times, but never outside the tourist traps of Vegas and Orlando.
You must understand that this was never supposed to be seen by anyone. It was just for me. An intellectual exercise. I beavered away at it during my lunchbreaks (in 2013 I was still employed as a probation officer) and finally finished Fearless, a thriller where, due to a (real) medical condition, the protagonist is incapable of experiencing fear. At that point I decided the first-person POV wasn’t for me. I preferred third person, limited POV, past tense. I put Fearless in a figurative drawer and promptly forgot about it.
Spin forwards a few years and I’m now a full-time author. I’ve won international awards for my Cumbria-set Washington Poe series. I’m a Sunday Times bestseller. Because of this, Little, Brown (my current UK publisher) has bought my first (Avison Fluke) series from Caffeine Nights, my first publisher. My editor enquired as to whether there were other ‘works’ out there that she would later have to pay over the odds for. I told her about Fearless. She read it, and tacked it on the end of a Washington Poe contract. And, just like I had, we all kind of forgot about it again. The loose plan was to do a paperback-only release under a pseudonym. At an aggressively grey time of the year. Maybe February. And February in Cumbria is Grim. Capital G.
Fearless went through a light edit. And that was that.
Only it wasn’t. There was an editor in the US who was a big fan of the Poe novels. She had been looking for a way to add me to her list. This novel ticked some of her boxes. Only, she was American, and the book was American, and I was from the most rural county in England.
That meant there were problems.
You see, because the book was never meant to be read by anyone other than me, I hadn’t bothered with any in-depth (or, let’s face it, even basic) research. To put it bluntly, I had guessed at things. She said if she added me to her list, it would mean a major rewrite.
I agreed.
And the fun began.
On her side, mainly.
She had lots of said fun explaining that no, you can’t drive across Texas in just two hours. No, Washington State and Washington D.C. aren’t the same thing. And no, Guy Fawkes Night (a celebration of a failed plot to blow up the Houses of Parliament, complete with bonfires, fireworks and burning effigies) definitely isn’t a thing in the US.
Lots of things I didn’t know that, as an author writing American-set book, I should have known. (At the time of writing this, the Flatiron offices are closed for Thanksgiving, whatever that is. A quick bit of Englishman in New York-type research reveals it is mainly so you guys can eat turkey in consecutive months.)
Then there were the smaller things. And it’s in the smaller things that the Englishman in New York can become unstuck.
I had made the decision that, wherever possible, I would use US names for things. Brits grow up watching American TV and reading American books so know what a sidewalk is (it’s a pavement in the UK). They know water comes out of a faucet rather than a tap, and that Americans don’t queue, they stand in line.
Other words are more problematic.
Fanny is an obvious one. The informal US term for buttocks is vulgar slang in the UK for a woman’s genitals. Pat someone on the fanny in the UK and people (quite rightly) shout at you. Grab someone by the fanny, you go to prison. You certainly don’t get to be Prime Minister.
‘Pissed’ is another odd word for the Englishman in New York to get his head around. In the US, pissed means angry. Fed up. Unhappy. In the UK, pissed is the most used word for drunk (although pissed off, does sort of mean what pissed does the in the US). Like the Inuits having a hundred words for snow (I don’t know if this is true and like we’ve already established, research isn’t my strong point), Brits, being a nation that drinks like a pirate, has a thousand words for being drunk. Shitfaced. Bladdered. Steaming. Pie-eyed (possibly my favourite). Wrecked. Hammered. Wankered . . . And, as piss is also slang for urine, a Brit on a Friday night might go out on the piss (go to the pub) with their mates, get pissed off (angry) listening to rubbish music on the jukebox, get pissed (drunk) because they drank twelve pints of cask ale instead of eleven, only to wake in the morning to find they’ve pissed (been to the toilet in) their pants.
Piss puts in a shift in the UK. It works hard.
So, the Englishman in New York, when writing a book for both US and UK readers, has to consider these potential hand grenades.
Other things are less obvious and can’t be easily researched. They have to be learned one at a time. This isn’t like me thinking you could drive across Texas in ninety minutes, or that Washington D. C. was the capital of Washington State. It’s the small things. Like how you say the time. It is more natural for the Englishman in New York to say it’s a quarter to four rather than say three forty-five. It’s how we ring people on our mobile phones, and you call people on your cell phones. I built things with my Meccano set when I was a child; the American me would have built the same things with his Erector set. It’s how we carry books in a rucksack and you carry them in a backpack. Eggplant or aubergine; cilantro or coriander; ass or arse. Cups instead of weight for measurement. You say bathroom when you mean toilet, cooties when you mean lurgi, and Kool-Aid when you mean liquid diabetes. You guys don’t eat black pudding for breakfast (what’s wrong with you? Fried pig’s blood with little cubes of glistening fat is the food of the Gods), but you do eat pancakes and . . . er . . . this can’t be right, surely, bacon and maple syrup? What the hell?
Small things; big differences.
Good differences. Great differences. Spending five days in Brooklyn’s Boerum Hill was like a shot of American, right in the jugular. A hockey puck to the face. It got me fired up to revisit my New York-set novel. To get down the stuff you only get from living and breathing in the same place you’re writing about.
So, yes, I did need to go to the expense of visiting New York. I think the research trip was worth its weight in gold.
Or should that be cups?
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