The Tyranny of Convention and Other Stories

By Charlie Taylor

In Bellington Hospital For The Criminally Insane one of its inmates, Ray, is taking creative writing lessons. He writes on a laptop under the supervision of a mild mannered tutor and two burly warders. Tyranny Of Convention is the story Ray writes about the act of creative writing itself, with insights into his violent past and with predictions about his violent future. He writes in a jumble of styles, mixing narrative with dialogue between himself and his tutor, Peter Hunt. He conflates past and present and he involves his tutor so deeply in the narrative that he becomes complicit in Ray’s planned killing of the warders.
The story is an unusual examination of the social norms that constrain us, each and every day They make us who we are and how we act, and they, too, are just as much creative fiction as Ray’s story. If only we knew it!
I’ll Tell You What follows the daytime meanderings of two Irish down-and-outs in a town in the north west of England. They are intent on hiding from Constable Bradley, a constant thorn in their flesh. They are the very best of friends. At least, they give the impression they are, right until the last moment when revelations about a murder lead to betrayal in the blink of an eye.
Market Forces is a duologue between a detective and a suspect in a murder case. The victim is a Conservative Councillor who drowns whilst sailing his yacht with the suspect. The suspect calmly and clearly explains to the detective how the death occurred and, in doing so, reveals how his decision-making, during the course of the sailing trip, was perfectly consistent with the political philosophy of the deceased. Are political decisions the true murderers in a case like this which is so beset by moral dilemmas? And in other cases?

• Language: English
• Publisher: Charlie Taylor
• Release date: Feb 28, 2014
• ISBN: 9781311235947

Charlie Taylor

Charlie Taylor lives in the south west of England with his wife and a spaniel. He is a retired senior police officer, a sociologist with a PhD from Lancaster University, a sailor, a photographer and a writer with numerous publications under various names. He has two sons who surprise him at regular intervals by being decent, personable and, each in their own way, talented young men. He loves the spring-time and hates the inevitable feeling of disappointment when autumn comes around. He has a small circle of very good, trustworthy friends who make him laugh and he does not crave any new ones. More than anything, he detests the short-term egocentricity of humankind and its unceasing willingness to indulge in undignified squabbling, and worse. He loves the arts and regards such human activities as the only things that raise people out of the daily gutter. He dislikes winter even more than he dislikes autumn.Charlie's latest publication, The Tyranny of Convention, will be available on Smashwords soon!

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The Tyranny of Convention

And Other Stories

Charlie Taylor

Copyright 2014 Charlie Taylor

Smashwords Edition

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Table of Contents

The Tyranny of Convention

I’ll Tell You What

Market Forces

About Charlie Taylor

Other Works by Charlie Taylor

Connect with Charlie Taylor

The Tyranny of Convention

Scene: A room containing school-type desks and chairs, and with a blackboard on an end wall. The room is bare-looking and quiet. Two uniformed guards stand by the only door in the room. A slight-figured man in his late 30s sits at a large table in front of the blackboard, eyes closed, bored. The only other person in the room is a man in his late 20s/early 30s who sits at a small desk as far away from the blackboard as he can get. On the desk in front of him is a laptop computer, open and switched on. His face is lit slightly by the glow from the screen. He leans back in his chair, stretching, his hands behind his head, elbows out at right angles. He stares at the ceiling for a minute or two before leaning forward. He begins tapping at the keyboard …

It’s the tyranny of convention.

What is?

The way things are supposed to be written. Show, don’t tell; use dialogue rather than boring narrative; first or third person, never second; make sure there’s a beginning, middle and end; resolve the storyline; a duologue only works for a short story, not a full length book; ensure there’s conflict on the first page; boy finds girl, boy loses girl, boy finds girl again, or the equivalent ...

So?

I can’t do that. It’s not the way things happened.

It never is. You want to write a novel, not an essay, right?

No, I want to tell it like it is ... like it was.

Warts and all?

Yes.

Be my guest!

Warts and all?

Especially the warts.

I can’t write it from anybody else’s perspective.

It doesn’t matter. It’s your story.

As it comes?

As it comes.

OK, here’s the attention-grabbing opening: I never set out to be vicious and cruel. I mean, I never intended to be that way because I never recognised it as being out of the ordinary. I didn’t really have a choice, I wasn’t aware that there was a choice, and therefore I had no intent. That’s just the way things were. That’s what we did, that’s how we lived. It was as easy and natural for us to kick someone senseless, to put bricks through someone’s front windows, to key a car, to poison their dog, to burgle their granny as it was to eat fish and chips out of a newspaper three times a week. Actus non facit reum nisi mens sit rea? My mind was rarely guilty and my crimes never those based on the good old notion of strict liability. Oh no, responsibility for my crimes, yer ‘onour, was dependent, to large degree, on the mental element exhibited at the time of their commission. And, as my few mates would be willing to testify, I am nothing, absolutely nothing, so much as M.E.N.T.A.L, whether committing crimes or otherwise. And if my mind was attuned to the normality of the committing of certain acts that I, in all honesty, considered to be normal, usual, acceptable (within my daily frames of reference), how could I be guilty of said crimes? Let me put it simply for you fuckers: such acts might well appear as crimes to YOU but, to ME, and to others involved in the circus, the charade, the daily struggle for top-of-the-bill spot in our own little Beggar’s Opera, they were acceptable. In fact, I’ll go further than ‘acceptable’ - they were fucking well essential! And, left to our own devices, there’d have been no problem. As it happened, though, the interfering middle class fuckers, the so-called chattering classes, the fucking lawyers who stood to make money out of it all, the fucking weak-as-piss-vote-buying fucking politicians, they couldn’t resist interfering and guess what? They really fucked it up for everybody, didn’t they! Me included. Why don’t people realise when they’re onto a good thing and learn to mind their own fucking business?

Well, it’s a good, strong start. You’ve made a bold statement there, that bit about the tyranny of convention - I rather like that phrase - it has resonance - and you’ve got lots of conflict in there at an early stage in the book - it will pique the reader’s curiosity…

The reader’s sense of fascination/revulsion, you mean.

Maybe, maybe - although I have to say that, as a point of personal taste, do you have to write it with quite so many obscenities? Everybody nowadays swears like a trooper so ‘fuck’ has lost its shock value, you know. And it might just detract from the value of the writing.

It’s the voice, though. That’s my natural voice. You keep telling me to ‘find my voice’. Well, that’s it, that’s my voice and my voice swears like fuck.

Yes, well, it’s a great pity. I like your voice, minus the obscenities, that is. It’s surprisingly formal, quasi-academic, almost, for a man with your background, if you don’t mind me saying. I quite like it.

I don’t mind at all. You’re the Teach so you can comment and criticise as much as you fucking like.

So, where’s it going now?

What, the story?

Yes, the plot, the story-line. Where’s it going?

How the fuck do I know? I’m just writing the first thing that comes into my head.

Yes, but it’s