Golff Noir

 

Finally. It’s finished. At least 5 years after I started thinking about writing a novel. It is finished and published. I should be feeling excited, elated. I’m not. It’s just relief. Pure unadulterated relief. Finished. God it’s been painful.

I read that you should “Write what you know”; Mark Twain. I did. I wrote about golf, Wales, and private detectives. I also wrote about “things that you don’t know”; Brian Klems. I chose angels, the supernatural and the Book of Enoch. I chose the genre I’m most familiar with – film noir crime fiction in the style of a 62 part box set cult series. I mixed in some advice from the New Yorker with the words of Steven King, “If you want to be a writer you must do two things; read a lot and write a lot”. I do. The result was my first novel – a golff noir, Taff noir, crime thriller fantasy fiction entitled ‘Mynydd Eimon: Private Hell’.

There are some excellent golf books – biographies mainly – by Mark Frost, James Dodson and some wonderful golf writers in general – Bernard Darwin for instance. But when it comes to writing fiction around golf the results are as embarrassing as watching a film combining a story and a football match. Cringingly bad. This is the type of PG Wodehouse writing that I’m certainly not familiar with on a cold, windy day stuck at the top of West Mon.

The book I ended up writing combined (chucked together, some would say) a number of the elements that make up Golff Noir, a phrase evolving from film noir, to Nordic noir, to Taff Noir to golff noir (and yes the double ‘f’ is important).
This is my first attempt and I hope it entertains you. I hope others will try this approach and, who knows, we could end up with a little Celtic enclave of Tartan Noir.

 

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