The first in my new series called The McLaren Cases is out.  Siren Song deals with ex-police detective Michael McLaren and the cold murder case he agrees to investigate.  My friend David Doxey, detective-superintendent of the Derbyshire Constabulary (ret.), helped me develop McLaren over a period of many weeks and numerous emails.  I owe David more thanks for his suggestions and insight than I can express.  McLaren turned out to be an interesting character – at least I hope you agree!

McLaren shares one of my hobbies: folk singing and playing the 12-string guitar.  It was easy to put McLaren into this world because I have sung with a folk group and as a solo act in England and the U.S.  I just shut my eyes now and I’m back in the audience or on stage at various folk clubs and concerts in the Bolton and Manchester areas.  I place McLaren in similar clubs and pubs, either as the featured headliner act at a club or performing during open mike nights at pubs.  The feel of performing pretty much stays with you, even if it is a few years since I’ve sung in public.  I was part of a group here in the St. Louis area – six young women (we were all young!) singing Kingston Trio, the Dillards, Ian & Sylvia, Brothers Four, Mike Seeger….  When I came back from a summer in the Bolton area, I introduced my group members to songs I’d heard at the pubs and clubs, from the records I’d brought back.  My love of British folk mushroomed.  I discovered the great Scottish folk group The McCalmans and the legendary Martin Carthy, whose distinctive guitar style held me spellbound.  I learned songs from Chris Foster records, from Horden Wakes records, from June Tabor records, from the Wolf Tones records, from Planxty records.  Having learned the songs and tried as best I could to imitate the singers’ accents, I researched the songs, finding out the history behind them and the variations.  The songs claimed me, pulled at me, as though the music were physical and anchored me to some wild, ancestral spot in the Highlands or Derbyshire dales.  I felt the generations speaking to me; I could feel the loves and pains and hardships and joys of these lives.  I could feel the wind and rain and sun as I immersed myself in the songs.  Maybe I was too fanciful.  Maybe I imagined it all, my writer’s inner soul taking over and inventing this.  But I think that’s what a good song – and a good performance -- does.  You should be able to connect with the song’s subject.  Why else do these songs live if not to remind us of something, link us to something, so that we do not wander through our lives without touching others?

I don’t know yet how McLaren learned to play the guitar.  Nor do I know when.  Or why he formed a folk singing group.  But as the series grows, we will both learn this.  I can see him very easily, sitting in the back room of his ancient home that was his parents’.  He sits in the half-light of early evening, the Martin 12-string on his lap, his large hands chording and strumming.  He has a fine baritone, a rich full sound that fills his body and travels the length of his tall frame.  He plays well but doesn’t take himself too seriously even if he and his group do have aspirations of cutting CDs and appearing on stage at local festivals.  I think he will search out the lesser-known songs and shun the ‘Whiskey in the Jar’ type popular songs.  He wants to be unique, to offer something refreshing to his audience.  So he haunts the Internet and the Child ballads and the collections of 16^th and 17^th century broadsides.  He’ll do well with his hobby.

I don’t know yet how McLaren learned guitar, but I began in the folk music-crazed days of the 1960s, when everyone I knew was trying to be another Mike Seegar or Judy Collins.  I learned on a nylon string Goya guitar, bought new at Baton Music in St. Louis.  Learning was a vicious circle: my fingertips hurt from pressing down on the strings, so I didn’t practice.  But if I didn’t practice I would never build up calluses, which would deaden the pain of pressing down on the strings….  Determination prevailed and I endured the aches in my fingertips and the sharp stabs running periodically up my left forearm.  The human spirit is amazing at times: ask me to put as much resolve into learning high school math, and, well….  You understand, I’m sure.  So I’ll have to think of a back-story for McLaren’s guitar learning.  I know he prevailed: I hear him singing in pubs as I type this!

This will be fun to develop.  I know quite a few things about McLaren, but I’m sure he’ll tell me more about his life as we go through the years together.  He’s got some surprising things in his past – maybe some not so nice, but all in all he’s a nice guy.  And one whom I’d buy a used car from.  Or ask to solve a cold case that touched me.

More later….  Jo