It's all in the name

For the moment, at least til I get my mega book deal (!), I have a day job. From Monday to Friday, I am a business travel consultant which involves booking travel for businessmen, funnily enough, and associated travel which is not a glamorous job but for the most part, I enjoy it and the people I work with.

Last Monday afternoon, a colleague said something to her customer on the phone and it eventually brought my train of thought around to how we writers name our characters in our fictional worlds. Clare was booking a hire car and offering the customer the hire car company's top up insurance, something they call max package. It made me think it could be the name of a porn star and if I ever have cause to need a porn star in any of my writing, he will be called Max Package!

So that brought me round to how I named my 'people'.  Obviously, I should start with Sarah Delvecchio, my protagonist in Malavita and her continuing traumas in Too Close To The Sun.  She was 'born' about 1989 after a throwaway comment made by a former colleague of mine. She was having a particularly bad day, more than one agging customer and as she passed me on the stairs in the shop, her words were - "I wish I was a gangsters moll, then I could do away with people that pi**ed me off." Naturally, I don't condone murder but her words stuck with me. So when I conceived of Malavita, I felt I owed it to my former colleague Sarah Goodchild to name my feisty female lead after her. So thank you, Sarah.

I don't know where the name Delvecchio came from, I think I may even have heard it for the first time on Only Fools and Horses.

Marco Delvecchio came about, not from the former Italian football player who played for Roma (I much later discovered) but because I thought the name Marco conjured up a devilishly handsome, naughty but lovable rogue. Not that my Marco is much like that and some might argue that he is a nasty piece of work.

Most of my characters have a little piece of someone I have met along the way. A passing chat with a man in a pub (Harry Pilgrim), a friend from long ago (Andrea Bremann) and sometimes even based loosely on my own character traits - although I would rather not say which trait or which fictional person.

But all of them, in my head, I know who would play them when I get my movie deal!!!