Hogan’s A Pleasure and a Calling introduces readers to William Heming, destined to become one of literature’s most diabolical bad guys; he’s a real estate agent in a quaint English village who likes to keep the keys to the houses he sells.
As the creator of William Heming, a smalltown real estate agent who creeps into other people’s homes and snoops through their private affairs, I am often asked, even by people who know me: “So is this character based on you?”
If only. By that I mean, there’s an undeniable appeal of not having to make someone up out of nothing. But even fictional characters who superficially resemble their authors (the philandering, lying protagonist of my first novel was, like me, a male journalist and family man with a Yorkshire accent working in London—that was a mistake) diverge from reality when their story suddenly requires them to, say, ride a horse or witness their children being hacked to death. I think fiction, especially of the outlandish sort, is mostly imagining.
And when I say “the creator” of William Heming... well, it’s not as if I had him fixed in my mind and chipped away until he appeared, with his tweedy English ways, large collection of house keys, and unusual yearnings. I’m not Michelangelo.
I pretty much knew what my character would need to be capable of once he was made. But who actually was he? What eventually became clear was that Heming would have to do his own explaining—reveal himself to the reader. This had the immediate advantage that I wouldn’t need to pretend to be a behavioral scientist (a multitude of authorial shortcomings can be hidden in a first-person narrative). Incidents in Heming’s childhood go some way to accounting for his urgent needs, but who among us—even those with the best-concealed fetishes and disorders—can really say why they turned out as they did? Even non– behavioral scientists understand that hardboiled cause and effect is the stuff of physics rather than psychology. Heming presents his tale with candor, but if his insights look too maddeningly like guesswork or lack rigor, well, that’s no worse than the rest of us. I suppose what I’m really saying is, blame him, not me.
My crucial aim, in trying to inhabit a character weirder than myself, was to persuade the reader that there was nothing weird about him at all—to keep faith with Heming in his cheery pronouncements and deeds, to be his unjudging proxy.
I was surprised, and happily so, when readers described A Pleasure and a Calling as “blackly humorous” and “creepy.” Hunkered down in the writing of the book, I sought no such end—that is, I didn’t allow myself the luxury of wondering how Heming’s plea to the reader might be going down at any given moment. I didn’t want to have him playing to the gallery, though I can see now that there are wry laughs to be had in Heming’s mistaken assumption that his audience, once in possession of all the facts, will be with him all the way. For me it was challenge enough to have the reader spend quality time in Heming’s company despite their ethical differences, to not want bad things for him, and—who knows—perhaps even discover the maniac in themselves.
