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Welcome to the first part of the writer’s commentary for THE LEVELS. I hope it’ll be interesting or informative, but I kinda expect it’ll be like most director/crew/cast commentaries on DVDs: a few scattered gems amongst a mountain of mostly affable pap. “Did you know she was walking around with a 1940s lampshade attachment in her pocket the whole time we were filming?” the director asks. “No,” says the star. “Was it screw cap or bayonet?” “Bayonet, I think,” says the director. “I told her, the first day, ‘Do you have to have that?’ Wouldn’t listen.” And there’s you, the viewer, thinking, gee, so that’s what it was like to work on THE GODFATHER.

So, expect very little and I’ll see if I can live up to it. Behold brief musings on the first five equally brief chapters of the book. Enjoy.

I.

The first chapter’s a tricky beast. You’ve got to open at speed, yet still set up the characters involved and the stage they’re acting on. Harder too in a story like this. Ideally, there’d be more than a fleeting mention of the Levels here, since until the book gets there, this could be just another ordinary thriller, but you can’t do that, not yet, because you’ve got to see Turner’s “ordinary world” before you take it away.

I must have tweaked this bastard thing a thousand times, and I’m still not 100% sure it’s there. I know I’d probably take out the TV news italics – they were an experiment in showing the tone of death newscasts, but everything around it changed slightly and they don’t sit right for me any more. And there’s a “himself” instead of a “him” and an additional “he”, both copy editor changes, that I regret passing. How sad is it that half a dozen words can irk you like that? I guess in part it’s because this was the first thing that was written (albeit in a RATHER different first draft), before the style and tone of the book had set in my head. Kate’s opening chapter was written after the end of Turner’s entire story and for me it reads a lot more slickly.

(That, by the way, is a really fucking stupid way of organising things, writing-wise. It makes matching your two threads up afterwards a real bitch unless you’re some kind of wonderfully adept planner. THE LEVELS was written mostly on the fly so I didn’t have that luxury.)

Incidentally, this is the only place (I think) anyone uses Turner’s first name to his face. Somehow on my agent’s mail-around cover email “Nathan” twisted into “Nate”, which I fucking HATE. Consequently, it crept into the early drafts of the jacket copy – which I corrected more and more psychotically every time it happened – and things like the Amazon description. Just to reiterate, I fucking hate “Nate”. Hate hate hate hate hate stab stabbity urk death.

II.

I mentioned I thought this was neater, didn’t I? Big pile of backstory, which we need for Kate probably more than Turner since her arc into events is a bit more forced upon her and we can’t really have it come up in regular conversation or show through the course of coming events like we can with his. (Is that true? Or just my excuse? I don’t know.)

The exact nature of Kate and Logan’s relationship – when and whether she left him, how she felt afterwards, how willing she’d been to go along with what he was doing (even, at one point, an ill-advised attempt to switch what he was up to from drugs to something less “evil” and consequently far harder to explain) – was kicked around a lot in the early days. I think, on balance, we’ve got it right as it is here. It’s not a big thing in terms of how much it comes into the story, but it’s an important part of character establishment.

Techy research note: I have no idea whether a taser would do that to a motorbike, incidentally, and I don’t really care (would a bike act like a Faraday cage like a car, would current ground out through its kickstand, etc.). You’ve got to get your kicks where you can find them and I’ve always liked the idea of electrocuting things.

III.

I like this scene. It was a hard thing to do – writing a crowd cat and mouse pursuit is a damn sight harder than doing it in film (I assume), at least without repeating yourself – but I think it works nicely. Lots of random little details I got to throw in as well – the biohazard box, the chillies and kids’ toys, etc. The market itself is based partly on movies – the Blade Runner street scenes jump to mind – and partly on memories of fighting my way through a street market in Tel Aviv (and to a lesser extent Jerusalem’s Old City; there’s a sheep’s brains reference here that comes from there) on vacation. A lot more cramped than the big markets in, say, London, even though the area’s not as built up, vertically speaking.

First pub reference here, incidentally, not that you’d know unless you knew the pub. There’s a few dotted around.

IV.

Kightly is one of my favourite characters to write. He gets some great lines. A kind of vile, abrasive cock with a heart who ends up in the mentoring role to Kate. They had to have a dynamic which worked – she finds him pretty crass, but at the same time, likeable in a rough sort of way. Not like Thorne – Thorne starts off by blackmailing one of the protagonists into working for him. He’s just an arse, from the greasy pantomime villainy school of being an arse. If Brad Dourif could pull off the physical presence to go with the slime, he could play Thorne. He’s a dick. Kightly, though, is gold. “He smiled like a dog with sunstroke.” One of my favourite lines, and I don’t even know exactly what I meant by it.

Do the views on marriage in this chapter have anything to do with my own? Well, I’ve never been married, so how could they? There’s probably an element of them in there; being stuck in an obviously flawed relationship does strike me as pretty hellish.

V.

Harry Bishop’s almost as fun as Kightly to write. He’s a bit of a deus ex machina type, someone who can kinda shuttle things in the right direction without me needing to come up with masses of complicated reasoning as to why he can. I mean, he obviously knows his shit, right? And he’s (supposed to be; you be the judge) charming with it. He’s also the only semi-Brit in the book, too; I’m probably not far off the mark if I suggest his mannerisms were in part at least inspired by some of the iterations of Constantine from HELLBLAZER.

That couple of paras of backstory about Turner’s Australian friend Gray was a late addition. In earlier drafts, the exact nature of Gordon Parkham’s blackmaily hold over Turner was never explained. Which, looking back now, would’ve been a bit shit if I’d left it like that. Especially since it also serves as a little insight into the kind of thing Turner actually does for a living without making him out to be (a) a private investigator (which would take us galloping up Ridiculous Alley pretty damn fast) or (b) Jack Reacher.

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So there we go. Five chapters in and we haven’t even hit the Levels yet. It all gets weirder after this, but as I think I mentioned further up – the mescaline seems to have robbed me of my eyesight and the keyboard appears to be full of screaming shrews in heat so I’m damned if I’m checking now – you’ve got to show the Ordinary World before you can whisk it away like a man pulling a tablecloth from under a vase of flowers. Except, I suppose, from what we know of Newport and the lives of our two protagonists so far, the vase is made from asbestos and it’s full of cat sick.

Stay tuned for the next instalment, or, you know, choose life.

- Sean C., the Ides of January.

P.S. The original plan was to throw this together as a PDF for both regular computers and ereaders, and/or maybe an audio version using my rich, deep baritone. Time’s ticking a little so it was a choice between put it out now in some kind of form, or wait potentially forever to do it right.