Category Archives: Alter Ego

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Kate Worsley is Commander Ericson from The Cruel Sea

CRUEL SEA
The Cruel Sea

Kate Worsley was born in Preston, Lancashire but now lives by the sea. Her debut novel, She Rises, is set in 1740s Harwich (memorably described by one character as the ‘arse of Essex’), and is all about press gangs, love, sex and the salty, seductive allure of sea faring. Kate Worsley’s filmic alter ego is Jack Hawkins as Commander Ericson from The Cruel Sea (1953). Eithne Farry

‘The men are the heroes. The heroines are the ships. The only villain is the sea, the cruel sea, that man has made more cruel,’ explains Commander Ericson of convoy-escort HMS Compass Rose in the opening voiceover of the classic second world war film The Cruel Sea. Ericson (Jack Hawkins) is the biggest hero of them all: he’s all corrugated, oiled hair and furrowed brow, noble self-control and tortured conscience, his only recourse a large pink gin.

From its very first gut-churning opening shot of Atlantic swell, this 1953 film (based on the Nicholas Monsarrat novel) conveys the horror and heroism of war at sea like no other. It’s a pathetically brave world of duffel coats and roll-neck jumpers, speaking tubes and cocoa served in enamel mugs. Ericson’s mission, to protect Allied supply convoys in the Atlantic from hordes of German submarines, seems doomed from the start, when he is assigned a bunch of laughably inexperienced officers (a second-hand car salesman, a barrister, and a journo).
After only three weeks, though, he has them in hand and they scan the ocean for years, everywhere from Russia to Gibraltar. In the end, he sinks only two subs. But it’s the kind of man Ericson proves himself to be that earns the enduring loyalty of his men, particularly Second Lieutenant Lockhart (the journo), who turns down his own command to serve with him a second time.

When they make their best contact with a sub it is directly beneath a dozen shipwrecked, bobbing men. Ericson gives the order to plow through them and bomb the sub – the consequences of which we see in a series of appalled reaction shots. He then realises that there was no sub there after all. Three previously rescued sea captains come to his cabin that evening, their consolations stilted but immensely kind: ‘There is no blame. But there may be thoughts. And for thoughts, there is gin.’ Make mine a stiff one.

Kate Worsley

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Beatrice Hitchman is Irma Vep from Les vampires

Irma Vep 2
Les vampires

Beatrice Hitchman was born in London, studied in Edinburgh, lived in Paris for a year and then headed back to the UK to work as a documentary film editor. Her debut novel, Petite Mort, is set in the languorous Deep South and Belle Epoque Paris, and features a mysterious silent movie, with a missing scene, an ambitious seamstress, a starry actress and an illusionist husband. Petite Mort (Serpent’s Tail) is out now at £12.99 (ebook/hardback). Beatrice Hitchman’s filmic alter ego is Irma Vep from Les vampires. Eithne Farry

Paris, 1915: the city is in the grip of a deadly band of criminals, Les vampires. A severed head is found in an air duct! A stage performer is murdered with a poisoned ring! A hundred aristocrats are sent to sleep with gas and their jewels stolen! And at the epicentre of this dizzying crime spree is anagrammatic mistress of disguise, ringleader Irma Vep.

In an early scene, Irma’s dressed as a Breton maid, complete with lacy head-dress – a look that takes guts, I’m sure you’ll agree, to pull off. In this outfit she infiltrates the apartment of the useless journalist who’s trying to unmask her, Philippe Guérande, and then makes a midnight escape out of his bedroom window. He’s too frightened to follow, and stands shaking his fist at her as she retreats. Later, she’ll expand her costume repertoire to include: exotic dancer, secretary, cat-suited sneak thief and – in a too-brief scene that set my cold heart racing – 1915 men’s lounge wear. But through it all, Vep is instantly recognisable – the eyes have it, flashing at the camera, utterly distinctive, utterly threatening, defying us to outwit her.

But it isn’t about the fabulous outfits. It’s not even about the enviable way Paris becomes Irma’s personal playground: a world of sliding bookcases, vertical climbing and operatic hideouts. It’s that, although Vep is a woman surrounded by men, she doesn’t seem to notice, or care. She’ll just keep on doing what she’s going to do – stealing, cheating, upsetting people – indifferent to who’s watching, and with complete conviction. When she creeps away from Guérande’s apartment across the rooftops, Breton headgear shining in the light of the moon, she doesn’t look down once.

Beatrice Hitchman

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Travis Elborough is James Mason in The London That Nobody Knows

The London That Nobody Knows

Cultural historian Travis Elborough has written witty, brainy books about the vinyl records, the British sea side and the double decker bus. Now he’s turned his attention to London Bridge in America with The Tall Story of a Transatlantic Crossing, which stars London Bridge, fleet street shysters, stiff-lipped bureaucrats, Disneyland designers, a gun-toting sheriff and the Guinness Book of Records. His filmic alter ego is James Mason in The London That Nobody Knows. Eithne Farry

These days practically everybody knows The London That Nobody Knows – Norman Cohen and Brian Comport’s 1967 cinematic version of Geoffrey Fletcher’s wonderfully idiosyncratic study of the capital’s lesser regarded corners and inhabitants. But there was a time, not that long ago, when the film lay almost as neglected as parts of the city it depicts. Or certainly that was how it seemed to me when I first saw it in the early 1990s. And on television at an obscure hour of the afternoon when probably some tennis or horse racing had been rained off.

Thinking about it now, it’s quite possible that I may actually have got the idea of horse racing from James Mason’s attire. Mason, who stars as kind of a stand-in for Fletcher as our peripatetic proto-psychogeographical guide, wears a flat cap and tweed jacket – the mufti of race-goers in his native Yorkshire, if not the world over.

Armed with a rolled umbrella, frequently wielded like a sword, Mason is captured tramping, arrestingly wearily, about a mostly crust-on-its-uppers London – a London whose streets look less swinging for the 1960s than scrofulous with bomb damage. Whole areas appear shabby with torched boxwood and putrefying cabbages and are roamed by packs of terrifying feral meth drinkers. Foraging through the wreckage of the Bedford Music Hall theatre in Camden and the crowded stalls at Chapel Market, Islington, Mason is as quizzical as Sherlock Holmes. And if I’ve ever really wanted to be anyone on screen it is probably him here, poking about in the ruins of a London long since lost.

He can be flaky, insouciantly busking the odd line here and there, and at times a touch too imperious. Meeting toothless down-on-their-lucks in a Salvation Army shelter in Whitechapel, one still rueing the consequences of the crash of 1929, he comes across as a visiting royal killing an hour before cutting the ribbon on a new civic centre elsewhere in the day. But his on-screen presence. And that voice – honeyed as cognac, soft, melancholy, almost viscous with fatalistic languor in parts – who wouldn’t want that?

Travis Elborough

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Jack Wolf is Blade Runner’s JF Sebastian

Blade Runner

Jack Wolf wanted to be a singer, but he got waylaid by faerie tales. His debut novel, The Tale of Raw Head and Bloody Bones (Chatto & Windus) is a dark and deliciously twisted Gothic tale of goblins, mental instability and love. Tristan Hart, who’s the bloody heart of the novel, is a young 18th-century physician, who has a penchant for pain; neatly encapsulating the tenor of the times, Hart is a complicated blend of Enlightenment forward thinking and the violent superstitions of the past. This explains his love of gore, and philosophy. His filmic alter ego is JF Sebastian from Ridley Scott’s Blade Runner. Eithne Farry

If I were a film character, who would I be? I’d be JF Sebastian from Ridley Scott’s dystopian sci-fi vision of the future, Blade Runner. I first saw this film when I was a teenager, and the question that runs through it – ‘what is real?’ is one that has excited me creatively and philosophically ever since.

JF Sebastian is a hopeless loner, like me. He is socially awkward, like me, and again like me he prefers the company of those friends he has made for himself. Of course, my friends, in that sense, are characters in my novels rather than genetically engineered creatures, but I think my point still stands. Who’s to say that in some different universe I am not a genetic engineer doing exactly that?

In this world, however, I am a writer. And because I am a writer, and my creations cannot physically exist in this world with me, I have one great advantage over JF Sebastian. My characters cannot blame me for what befalls them. Unfortunately for JF Sebastian, however, his creations are alive; and his greatest creation, Roy, comes back to kill him –by killing his creator acting out a metaphor for the inexcusable human hubris of ‘killing God’. But was JF Sebastian ever truly God? Clearly not, although, certainly in Roy’s eyes, he obviously seemed to have usurped the divine power of creation.

Poor JF Sebastian. Perhaps he did not truly understand the implications of the work he was doing for the Tyrell Corporation. But when do any of us really get the chance to comprehend the full significance of the things that we create? If we could see that, perhaps we would be – almost – godlike. But would we ever choose to create anything?

Or perhaps JF Sebastian did know, and knew better than anyone else in the film (he is supposed to be a genius, after all) – and chose creation anyway. Publish and be damned, they used to say in the book trade. In his case, perhaps it was always going to be a case of publish and be killed – but to die at the hands of his greatest triumph was perhaps not so bad an exit.

Jack Wolf

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Tanya Byrne is Clarice Starling

The Silence of the Lambs

Tanya Byrne, who has been short-listed for the New Writer of the Year Award at the Specsavers National Book Awards was born in East London, in the hospital where her mum and dad met. She went to an all-girls school, studied law, and then ended up working in events for Radio 4. Her dark and daring debut novel, Heart Shaped Bruise (Headline) tells the story, in diary form, of Emily Koll, who is in a young offenders institute, awaiting trial for a violent, revengeful crime. Her filmic alter ego is Clarice Starling in The Silence of the Lambs. EITHNE FARRY

If you’ve read my book, then you won’t be surprised by the character I’ve chosen. It was actually much harder than I thought because liking characters like Tyler Durden and Napoleon Dynamite is a very different thing from wanting to be them. OK. Being Superman would be amazing. Who doesn’t want to fly, right? But I’m a horrible liar so I couldn’t do the double life thing. Plus, I’m addicted to Twitter, so I’d probably get drunk and tweet ‘LEX LUTHOR, COME AT ME, BRO’ one night and the jig would be up. And being Ferris Bueller would be awesome, but only if I could be him on that day. Having to grow up again would suck. I didn’t want to do it the first time. Then there’s Randal Graves and Keyser Söze and The Dude and Jack Torrance and yeah, you get my point.

Plus, I wanted to pick a woman, but again, Clementine Kruczynski, The Bride, Holly Golightly, Ripley, all fantastic characters, but I wouldn’t want to be any of them. Being stranded in space being chased by aliens like Ripley? No thanks.

So I opted for Clarice Starling. That will probably horrify most people (when I asked Twitter, responses ranged from Gandalf to Cher Horowitz). Most people are captivated by Hannibal Lecter (as am I, of course), but it’s Clarice’s relationship with him that intrigues me. So if I had to be anyone else, I would be her. She’s bright and brave and while she’s out of her depth at times, she overcomes her fears in the end, which is all any of us are trying to do. Besides, if I couldn’t write about bad guys anymore, chasing them wouldn’t be so bad.

Tanya Byrne

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Sam Hawken is Selene from Underworld

Underworld: Evolution

Born in Texas, author Sam Hawken now resides in Washington D.C. He was a historian before becoming a novelist who favours gritty realism with a cinematic slant. His debut, The Dead Woman of Juárez, was inspired by the alarming number of female homicides on the Mexican border. His second book, Tequilla Sunset (Serpents Tail) heads into gangland territory, with murderous consequences. Below, Sam Hawken explains why his filmic creature alter ego is Selene from Underworld. Eithne Farry

When I first got the request to pick a ‘creature’ alter ego, my initial reaction was, ‘Huh? What?’ but then I got to thinking about it one particular creature came to mind. Not only that, but it was a creature that would seem not to fit me at all. The creature is a vampire. And a woman. Her name is Selene.

You probably know this already, but Selene was the heroine in three of the four Underworld movies. She was quick and strong and determined and more than a little of a romantic. She also had very little in common with the traditional view of vampires. This was no Eastern European noble seducing women in the night and turning them into sex slaves, but a bona fide ass-kicking machine with no equal in the toughness department. And it didn’t hurt that she was extremely easy on the eyes.

After The Dead Woman of Juárez, my first book, came out, I was asked a lot of questions about ‘manly man’ topics like boxing and, on more than one occasion, I was taken to task for not including enough women in the story. What would those people say if I told them that Selene was my alter ego? That I was feminism in a catsuit, handy with guns and blades and absolutely ruthless? You gotta wonder.

I don’t harbour any secret ambitions to swap genders or species in real life, but if left to my own imaginary devices I wouldn’t hesitate for a second to step into Selene’s butt-stomping combat boots. I’d hunt werewolves with a fiery passion and I’d hone myself into a living weapon. Nobody would want to get on my bad side, because I would put them away in a heartbeat. I’d look darned good doing it, too. Watch out, (under)world.

Sam Hawken

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Will Wiles is Martin Blank

Grosse Pointe Blank

Will Wiles composed his darkly comic debut novel, The Care of Wooden Floors, on his daily tube commute from London to the suburbs. Heading away from the centre of town he was guaranteed a seat and a peaceful interlude, before heading to his day job as deputy editor on Icon, a monthly architecture and design journal, where he’s written about everything from Pot Noodles to Jumbo Jets. He’s now a full-time writer, and his filmic alter ego is Martin Blank from Grosse Pointe Blank. EITHNE FARRY

‘When you were young and your heart was an open book, you used to say, live and let live, you know you did you know you did you know you did …’

We don’t see what Martin Blank is seeing. He stops his black town car by the kerb and climbs out, mouth open, clearly agitated. After 10 years, this man without a past has returned to the Detroit suburb where he grew up and has decided to revisit his childhood home.

Then we see what he is seeing. His childhood home is gone, replaced by an ULTIMART convenience store. He peels his sunglasses from his face unable to comprehend what has happened. We see again. ULTIMART. Home is gone. Face like thunder, Blank stalks towards the store.

Nostalgia is a form of sickness, a bilious reaction to curdled memories. In Grosse Point Blank (1997), John Cusack’s contract killer has no real desire to attend his 10-year high school reunion, but is bullied into it by his personal assistant. Once he is back on his old turf, he gets nostalgia in a bad way, things ain’t what they used to be. His old house is gone, and his mother cannot remember who he is. Having spent a decade kicking over his own traces, he now finds his prehistory almost completely obliterated – a fact that makes him very angry. And, not being able to talk about his work, he doesn’t have a present to compensate.

It’s a nicely drawn crisis in narcissism. Blank had a completely one-sided deal with the past. He wanted to change completely and reject everything that made him him, but he expected everything in Grosse Point to be just the way he left it. And this deal turns out to be an illusion. He might have killed the president of Paraguay with a fork, but his vulnerability to the mundane facts of his upbringing make Blank an appealing everyman. He can’t go back, none of us can.

Will Wiles

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Kerry Hudson is Working Girl Tess McGill

Working Girl

Kerry Hudson was born in Aberdeen. Growing up in a succession of council estates, kiss-me-quick seaside B&Bs and caravan parks provided her with a sharp eye for idiosyncratic behaviour, and a love of travel. Her raw, funny debut Tony Hogan Bought Me an Ice-cream Float before He Stole My Ma began life as a collection of short stories, based on tales told to her by her mother and grandmother, but was honed into book form over a six-month stint in Vietnam. She lives and writes in East London. Below, she tells us why her cinematic alter ego is Working Girl Tess McGill. EITHNE FARRY

I ask you, which of us hasn’t quoted the immortal lines ‘I’ve a head for business and a bod for sin’ while tanked up on tequila and anti-histamines? Or prepared for the meeting of our lives by repeating ‘do not fuck it up, do not fuck it up, do not fuck it up’ like a mantra? Maybe cradled an ice-cold Coors on the commute home after an awful day? OK, maybe that’s just me but it’s for all these reasons, and so many more, that my cinematic alter ego had to be Tess from Working Girl. That’s right, the ultimate sister doing it for herself, a girl from the wrong side of the tracks with a funny accent, big dreams and a night school diploma; Tess McGill I salute you!

As a child of the 80s, also the period my debut novel is set in, I enjoyed Working Girl a few years after release from the comfort of my own living room; there was Tess, trying to get promoted with her giant hair, shoulder pads and frankly sublime hosiery (seriously, re-watch and marvel…) and when following the rules didn’t work, Tess decided to play them at their own game. But she wasn’t faking it. She was faking the accent and the outfits (clearly happier with her mega-teased bouffant and 27 bracelets up each arm than with the Maggie Thatcher blouses) but everything else was her ‘just hittin’ em with the smarts’.

Sadly I don’t possess Miss McGill’s ability with equity markets, backcombing or infiltrating tropically themed society weddings but, like her, I do often feel I’ve entered a world where I don’t entirely belong. So while my book is on the shelves now and sometimes I get invited to a party or two, like Tess I’m really just that blonde cradling a Coors on the 149 bus, hoping my smarts will see me right and I’ll win myself a monogrammed lunchbox too.

Kerry Hudson

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Tom Pollock is Jurassic Park’s Dr Henry Wu

Jurassic Park

Tom Pollock is a graduate of the Sussex University creative writing programme and a member of the London-based writers group. His advice to aspiring writers, as told to Un:Bound?: ‘Just read widely and write often. I can tell you how I do it (in a public place with headphones in, in 1K bursts, 4-5 times a week) but realistically you aren’t going to use my way, you’re going to use yours. And the only way you’ll find it is practice’. Tom has lived all over the place, from Scotland to Sumatra, but it’s the ‘peculiar magic’ of London that makes it home. It’s also the setting for his debut novel, The City’s Son (Jo Fletcher), the first instalment in the Skyscraper Throne trilogy. His cinematic alter ego is Dr Henry Wu. Eithne Farry

When it comes to mutation, only one character is a cinematic match for my DNA: Jurassic Park‘s Dr Henry Wu.

Surely you remember Henry Wu? No? The guy in the white coat who helps hatch the baby Raptors? That’s him. Why Henry? Because I write urban fantasy stories.

Stick with me on this.

Henry’s business – as the only named character in JP’s genetics team – is bringing dinosaurs back from the dead, and he’s badass at it. He takes ancient and resonant and almost (if not quite actually mythical) things and slams them claws first into the modern world. Urban fantasy writers do the same. While Dr Wu’s busy resurrecting Velociraptors in contemporary South America, Neil Gaiman’s populating the Midwest with Norse gods and Charlaine Harris is filling Louisiana with vampires. For my part, I’m importing ancient ghosts and spirits into 21st-century London, making the once inanimate city a sentient one – a place that can you can bargain with. Or fall in love with. Or be hunted by…

Like Henry, urban fantasy writers often find that the cool stuff we want to resurrect doesn’t quite work in its original form, so we’re forced to change it – splicing it in with something more current. For Henry, that’s completing his patchy Dino genome with frog DNA. For me, it’s shearing a dryad from her tree and popping her into a streetlamp instead. Either way, our resurrected idea evolves to fit the modern world.

We all know what happens next, right? ‘Nature finds a way.’

The ideas breed, multiply and mutate. Suddenly, wholly unexpected monsters are rampaging around the corridors of the story while I cling to the butt of my shotgun, listening to the click of their middle-toe claws on the floor.

Tom Pollock

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Elizabeth Wilson is Wicked Lady Margaret Lockwood

The Wicked Lady

Elizabeth Wilson is best known for her commentaries on feminism, fashion and popular culture. A visiting professor at the London College of Fashion, and a crime fiction author, she is currently working on the idea of ‘glamour’ – ‘what it is and how it differs from celebrity’. Set in 1951, her latest novel, The Girl in Berlin (Serpents Tail), is about secrets, spies, the Special Branch and betrayal. Her treacherous alter ego is Margaret Lockwood. EITHNE FARRY

The ultimate 1940s British film star, Margaret Lockwood, played one of the great femmes fatales in the Gainsborough Studios melodrama The Wicked Lady. She was insane with wickedness, but how she enjoyed it! Poaching her best friend’s fiancé, the aristocratic Sir Ralph Skelton, was just for starters. Bored with provincial married life, she impersonates the notorious highwayman Captain Jerry Jackson. During a successful hold-up she meets the real Jackson and they become lovers, although in the meantime she has fallen for a handsome neighbour, Kit Locksby. Intoxicated by her double life, she murders a guard during another ambush, poisons a family retainer who discovers her secret, betrays Jackson when he is unfaithful and is eventually killed, making a deathbed declaration of love to Locksby.

In The Man in Grey, Lockwood played a cold and heartless husband stealer and murderess (again opposite James Mason), a far cry from the exuberance of Lady Skelton, but both films perversely lend romantic passion a Gothic twist. Lockwood and Mason enact the Fallen Woman and the Fatal Man, hero and heroine of the Romantic Movement, but their love appears as an engine of crime and betrayal, destroying those who suffer from it, rather than as a source of redemption or tragic loss.

Secretive myself, I am drawn to the idea of persons who dare to live double lives, whose motives are occult and perverse, reminding us that all lives are ultimately secret and unknowable, that each of us, to some extent, wears a mask.

My first crime novel, The Twilight Hour, turned on an impersonation. My second, War Damage, featured a woman whose dubious past comes back to haunt her – always a hazard for those who lead a double life or reinvent the past – and my new one, The Girl in Berlin, includes a cameo of Anthony Blunt, who spied for the Soviet Union. His was not so much a double life as a double personality. And while to ‘live a lie’ may be immoral, isn’t it also daring – a defiant gesture against normality?

The Girl in Berlin is published by Serpents Tail.

Elizabeth Wilson