An off-kilter noir photo at Off the Cuff

(Photograph by Peter Rozovsky,
your humble blogkeeper)

Once again Dietrich Kalteis and friends sit for a chat among authors at Kalteis'  Off the Cuff site, this time to talk about character, dialogue, and dialect. Here's a sample of the discussion:

"Back to the accent/dialect question: you can do more with it - with perhaps more reader interest - than simply using a typical vocabulary or syntax of a place. You can use dialect-like giveaways and ‘verbal tics’ to reveal many aspects of character, while also making your characters separate and distinct from one another."

Read the complete discussion at Dietrich's place under the heading Off the Cuff 5.

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Kalteis demonstrates once again that the right side of his brain works as well as the left. He's a novelist, he also has an eye for photography, and he again illustrates Off the Cuff with one of my noir photo (left).  Here are the first two noir shots of mine that he used (click the link, then scroll down)  and, if you're on Facebook, here are all my noir shots.

© Peter Rozovsky 2014

Ian Sansom has a good ear

I noted in an early post about Ian Sansom that engaging author's tendency to have the characters of his novels set in Northern Ireland use the word just at the end of a sentence. I contrasted this to the usual North American English practice of placing just before the word or phrase it governs. This feature of Sansom's dialogue, I wrote, "punctuates the novel and lends it a suggestion of authenticity."

Today I am pleased to be able to report that people in Northern Ireland really do adhere to that pattern, as in the following, from the taxi driver who took me from Cookstown this afternoon to view the stone circles of Beaghmore:

"I'm from an island a mile that way just. Originally."

And why shouldn't a visitor enjoy a country's speech as well as its sights? My favorite of many examples on my current trip has been this exchange between a man and a woman on the bus to Cookstown:

"It's the wet season in my country."

"End of the summer." (Understanding nod)

"A lot of tropical storms there."

"Oh, aye."

 Why did I like this so much? Because the woman who uttered that ubiquitous Northern Irish interjection/affirmation "Oh, aye" was from the Philippines.

© Peter Rozovsky 2008

How do characters talk?

A distinctive feature of Ian Sansom's The Case of the Missing Books for this North American reader was its characters' use of the word just. They often place the word at the end of a sentence, as against North American English's tendency to place it before the word or phrase it governs. Thus, in Sansom:

"So what is it you'll have?

"A mineral water just?"

where we in Canada or the U.S. would reply "Just a mineral water."

I don't know if this quirk of speech is Irish, Northern Irish, English, characteristic of one or another social class, or just a favorite of Ian Sansom's. (On second thought, I may have seen it in other Irish writing.) I do know it punctuates the novel and lends it a suggestion of authenticity or, God help me, texture.

Certain varieties of Indian speech use the word only in similar fashion. I first noticed this tendency in H.R.F. Keating's stories, where characters say things like "I am a simple policeman only." It was easy for me to condescend to Keating, to feel just slightly uneasy with this white Englishman's imitation of Indian speech.

Then I found that Vikram Chandra has several of his characters use the same speech pattern in Sacred Games. More recently, as I have read blogs from India, I find that the tendency to end sentences with only appears to be a living feature of Indian English, at least around Kolkata (Calcutta) and Mumbai (Bombay). This was a rich education for me, not least because it made me repent my own ignorance in having felt morally superior to H.R.F. Keating.

But this is a crime-fiction blog and not a confessional. I'll close with some questions: What role does speech play in creating setting? How far is too far when it comes to trying to capture the flavor of "ethnic" speech? How do authors strike a balance between maintaining an illusion of everyday speech on the one hand and creating memorable dialogue on the other? What happens when authors give up the effort at maintaining a balance? Who are your favorite writers of dialogue, and why?

© Peter Rozovsky 2008