Writing About a Pandemic… During a Pandemic

Writing about a pandemic… during a pandemic

In 2016 I sat down to write a crime novel set in Edinburgh, a city that already has its fair share of crime novelists. Ian Rankin, Quintin Jardine, and Kate Atkinson had all made good use of the streets of Scotland’s capital city, with evil deeds occurring on every cobbled byway. I could have decided to move location, choose one of Scotland’s less iconic sites, but I was born here, and lived here, and knew the city inside out. Dammit, I wanted to stay!

Then I had a thought – what if I wrote about an Edinburgh that was perhaps a little bit different? What if I changed just one thing about the area, and gave it a distinctive enough spin to stand out? I decided that in my Edinburgh, my own, special, city, everything would be exactly the same, except for the fact that there would be a killer pandemic raging. 

This was an interesting premise for a writer. It gave me an opportunity to explore how people might react to being suddenly vulnerable. How would they cope? What crimes would spring up to take advantage of this vulnerability? How would the government respond? And what restrictions would we see on our civil liberties?

These questions served me well, and I flew through the first four novels in The Health of Strangers series, which were centred on the North Edinburgh Health Enforcement Team, a hardy bunch of souls who hunted down anyone who missed a monthly, mandatory, health check. My detectives dealt with pandemic-related murders, thefts, misappropriations of public funds, and numerous different conspiracies. I congratulated myself on my foresight in choosing such an outlandish background for my novels.

Right up until March 2020. Book four in the series, Murder at the Music Factory, was released in April 2020, into a world that was far from ready for a darkly comic take on a killer virus. I spent the first lockdown watching the issues I had written about play out in real time. Hoarding? Yup, got that one right. An increase in domestic violence? Sadly, also right about that. The government paying people to stay at home rather than work? Actually, the UK furlough scheme would have seemed a fiction too far, until we were actually faced with the realities of a pandemic.

I did what any sane individual would do under the circumstances. I took a break from the series. Focussed on other things, not least, the joys of home-schooling. But two years on, with the vaccine in place, and the virus becoming considerably less deadly, it felt like time to pick up the story again. My characters were still there, safe in their toybox, waiting for their author to come along and take them on some adventures.

And the premise of the novels still stood. Unscrupulous people did take advantage of the vulnerable during Covid. Politicians did behave badly, awarding contracts to their friends in a way that was far more blatant than anything in my novels. But how to deal with the things in my fictional world that differed from the real world? And how to cope with the army of armchair experts who now understood so much more about how pandemics work than they did in 2016? Would they pull my work apart?

I stuck to my guns. In the books, the pandemic in question was influenza, and I had made the (optimistic) assumption that once someone had the virus, they were then immune to catching it again. Also, in my fictional world there was no vaccine, as I assumed (even more optimistically) that once a vaccine had been invented the virus would be brought to a swift halt, thus ending the series. In many ways, my world was much better than reality, but how to let readers know that these differences weren’t just inaccuracies?

Fortunately, in an earlier book I had invented the Edinburgh Museum of Plagues and Pandemics, a fictional museum that someone needs to make a reality sometime soon. As a reminder to readers about how my virus worked, the characters, helpfully, popped into an exhibition there which outlined the key features of the virus, and how the government was dealing with it. So, no inaccuracies here. OK, well maybe a couple, but nothing that should trigger a 1* review for my ignorance.

I was tempted to skip over a lot of the other stuff that Covid had brought to light. After all, I had managed to ignore the whole Brexit debacle, without any particular impact on the story. I restrained myself to putting a bit more emphasis on the fact that a vaccine was under development, and inflicted one further indignity on my characters. Yes, dear readers, I made them have their first Zoom meeting.

Would I recommend writing a book set in a pandemic? On balance yes, although I dare say it is easier if you are writing about the realities of Covid, rather than a slightly off-kilter version of an existing virus. As writers, we want to reflect the world around us, and the emotions and stresses of lockdown and social isolation are the stuff that novels can help us make sense of.

My fifth Health of Strangers novel is now complete and scheduled for publication in July 2023. The one remaining question for me is, when my latest book baby is released into a post-Covid world, will there be an audience keen to read it?  

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Lesley Kelly has worked in the public and voluntary sectors for the past twenty-five years, dabbling in poetry and stand-up comedy along the way. She has won a number of writing competitions, including The Scotsman’s Short Story award in 2008. Her first novel, A Fine House in Trinity, was published by Sandstone Press in 2016, and was longlisted for the William McIlvanney Prize. Her Health of Strangers series is published by Sandstone Press. ​She lives in Edinburgh with her husband and two sons.

Find out more about her on her website https://www.lesleykelly.co.uk/

Twitter: @lkauthor

Instagram: @lesleykellyauthor

Facebook: @lkellyauthor

MURDER AT THE MUSIC FACTORY

The body of Paul Shore toppled onto him, a stream of blood pooling around them on the concrete. Bernard lay back and waited to see if he too was going to die.
An undercover agent gone rogue is threatening to shoot a civil servant a day. As panic reigns, the Health Enforcement Team race against time to track him down – before someone turns the gun on them.

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