Behind the Story: Why and How I wrote A Matter of Execution.
Why I wrote A Matter of Execution:
Sydney Carton, from Charles Dickens novel, A Tale of Two Cities, has long been one of my favorite literary characters. He always struck me as the epitome of a complex, morally gray character. A brilliant man whose struggles with alcohol prevent him from achieving at a level commensurate with his ability, Carton is a sad man. And his passion for Lucie Manette seems hopeless, misguided, even a bit inappropriate.
In the end, though, Carton proves to be an unexpected and emotionally stirring hero. When I first read A Tale of Two Cities as a young man, Carton’s final speech struck me as extraordinary and the best of Dickens’s many memorable lines of prose.
Thirty years or so after my first encounter with Sydney Carton, morally gray characters grew increasingly fashionable. I’d hear my friends and family rave about the Tony Starks and Severus Snapes of modern storytelling. But whenever I tried to add Sydney Carton to the conversation, I would inevitably be met with blank stares. “Who?” they’d all say.
It both shocked and irked me that Dickens and A Tale of Two Cities had fallen into obscurity. A retelling which highlighted Sydney Carton’s complexity seemed in order. But how to build a story around this forgotten, yet poignant character? Then, during a casual lunchtime conversation with a close friend, I stumbled across a plot that could tell Carton’s story while featuring him as the protagonist instead of relegating him to the minor role he plays in most of A Tale of Two Cities. I’d tell you more about that conversation—but the content would spoil my novel.
Nevertheless, that casual conversation sparked the basic near-future plot of A Matter of Execution. I jotted down some notes and set the story aside for future consideration. But then a personal tragedy altered my life dramatically. Someone I loved dearly died of a heroin overdose. Suddenly, my eyes were opened to the hidden epidemic that is taking so many lives across our world.
I’m tempted here to climb on top of a soapbox and start dropping tragic facts about this horrible problem. My gut, though, says to leave that to you. But trust me, it’s a problem that’s closer to all of us than many people suspect, and we are not doing enough to thwart it.
My newfound awareness of the world’s opioid epidemic, however, brought my ideas for a Carton-inspired story to the forefront, and my flawed hero, Chief Inspector Sidney Carter, was born. Grief filled my pen with purpose and helped me climb into Carter’s troubled character. And once I fully embraced Carter’s flaws, the words just started flowing out of me. I had a story to tell. One I hoped would shake my readers in meaningful ways. Whether it’s the widespread addiction in the story (https://nida.nih.gov/research-topics/trends-statistics/overdose-death-rates), or the great famine that underpins the story’s troubled near-future (https://www.npr.org/sections/health-shots/2023/10/26/1208760054/food-insecurity-families-struggle-hunger-poverty), Carter’s story is a cautionary tale of troubles that already lurk in our world.
How I wrote A Matter of Execution:
Usually, my fantasy and sci-fi stories require me to do significant world-building. A Matter of Execution, though, was different in that it takes place in a future version of our world—in a specific city that currently exists. This should have made matters easier for me, right? Unfortunately, not in my case. I live in the United States and have never been to London. Given the ties to Dickens and A Tale of Two Cities, I couldn’t justify moving the story to a city I knew better, so I settled on London.
I’m sure this choice created problems in unanticipated ways, and I apologize if my descriptions of London are inaccurate, or I somehow butchered the use of British idioms. But travel to London was never an option for me, especially since A Matter of Execution was finished during the COVID crisis. So, I did the best I could with the tool I had. The Internet. From my home across the pond, I walked through London with Google maps. Visited real apartments and houses via real estate listings. And constantly used the Internet to try to write the story with a British English feel. Eventually, I made one conscious concession for readability—to use American spellings instead of British.
For anyone who’s curious, the opening quotes from A Tale of Two Cities that start each chapter were found by using search tools to scan a public domain version of Dickens’s novel for each chapter’s themes until I found quotes that seemed to be a good match. Furthermore, I tried to make every named character in my story have a connection to the character names in A Tale of Two Cities.
Parting thoughts:
I last read A Tale of Two Cities from cover-to-cover nearly thirty years ago. Before I began writing A Matter of Execution, I took a look at the last chapter of A Tale of Two Cities to make sure I remembered Sydney Carton’s final words correctly. Besides that and the searches I performed to find quotes or character names, I avoided interacting with the original story. I hoped to tell a story that was uniquely mine despite its Dickensian inspiration. That said, when I wrote the epilogue for A Matter of Execution, I was surprised to see how well my story matched Sydney Carton’s vision of the future. Rereading his final speech made me feel I had written a story that needed to be told…and shared with the world.