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Writing The Sackville Street Caper

by Alan Nolan

“Here, Alan,” said my Granny, tossing a book in my direction, “you like the scary stuff, don’t yeh?” I made an effort to intercept the fast-moving paperback missile, but like every GAA ball, rugby ball and basketball that had ever been thrown to me, I fumbled the catch and the book hit the floor. I picked it up, looked at the cover, and was immediately sorry that I did.

The cover was an illustration of a white faced, shiny-haired fright of a man, with red rimmed eyes, jet-black hair and a wide open mouth filled with razor sharp teeth. His overall demeanour suggested that he was quite willing to bite the fingers of any hand that dared to pick up the book whose cover he graced. In short, a nice sort of chap. Written over this demon’s head were three words: Dracula, Bram and Stoker.

I was 10 years old when I first read Dracula, and I became almost as infatuated with Bram Stoker as I was with my other literary love at the time, Charles Dickens – the difference being that the works of Charles Dickens didn’t leave me waking up with screaming nightmares at 3am in the morning (Thanks, Granny!).

Bram was a Dubliner and I remember pleading with my long-suffering Dad to bring me to Bram’s childhood homes at Marino Crescent in leafy Clontarf and slightly less leafy Buckingham Street, so I could see where he played and imagine what he had been like as a child. I even inveigled my long-suffering father to bring the family on a summer holiday to Scarborough in England, just so we could visit the pretty harbour town of Whitby, a little further up the coast, and the place where Count Dracula landed in the book, emerging from his Transylvanian-earth-filled coffin to take his first evil steps on British soil.

But I loved Charles Dickens too and over the years I had often wondered what Dublin would have been like in Dickens’ day; I had read so much about Dickensian London, with the Artful Dodger, Ebeneezer Scrooge and Uriah Heep, et al roaming the streets, but I had never read anything about Dickensian Dublin. Until, that is, I came across a book about Dickens in a second-hand bookshop. The book was old, big, full of illustrations, and, best of all, only a fiver. I picked it up and it opened on a spread with had a reproduction of a playbill from when Dickens had visited Dublin in 1858, performing dramatic readings from his books at the Rotunda Round Room.

Dickens had visited Dublin!

I immediately thought again of Bram Stoker. How old would he have been in 1858 when Dickens visited? Only 11 years of age! Was there a chance he would have gone with his family to see Dickens perform? Or maybe he was a bit of a rebel who may have ditched his family and gone with his friends … I could feel a story coming.

Now, what friend or friends could I give Bram in this story? Bram was upper-middle-class, one of the ‘Quality’, well-educated and well cared for, a sporty boy with an unshakeable ambition to be a writer and a thirst for adventure. The friend would have to be the polar opposite: a poverty-stricken orphan, one step away from the workhouse, a girl who lived by her wits, without any adult supervision or help. I already had Bram and Dickens, two well-known characters, why not have Bram’s pal being the best-known Dublin character of all – a person whose name is sung by countless voices, the length and breadth of Temple Bar, on a nightly basis; a fictional character whose name is known far and wide but whose story has never been told? A legendary girl who I might be able to bring to life-alive-oh?

Yup, the one and only Molly Malone.

In my story, Molly would be 11 years old like Bram, a part-time fishmonger (as she is in the song) and a full-time sneak thief. She would meet up with Bram, become best friends, and they would have the most amazing adventures around Dublin, visiting places that the reader can still visit today. To this end I took long exploratory walks around the city, scouting for possible locations – locations that eventually ended up driving the narrative of the book. There was Molly’s tumbledown shack beside the Royal Canal at Newcomen Bridge, where she and her pre-teen gang of young thieves, The Sackville Street Spooks, stored their ill-gotten gains. There was the Debtors’ Prison where, in a pre-MABS 1858, people who owed money were locked up – we could have a jailbreak there. There was Smithfield Market, the site of a monthly horse fair and carnival. Maybe there would be sideshows at the carnival with strongmen, dog-faced boys and, oooh, fortune tellers!

The only location that ended up featuring heavily in the book but doesn’t exist today is the much-missed Nelson’s Pillar – in its place in O’Connell/Sackville Street now stands the Dublin Spire – but my Granny had told me enough stories about climbing the 168 steps to the viewing platform under Admiral Horatio Nelson’s imposing statue, and the amazing views over the rooftops of Dublin and out into the bay, that I felt I could bring it to life.

But every story needs a villain – who might the villain of The Sackville Street Caper be? Who would be capable of terrifying and terrorizing the master of macabre himself, the great Bram Stoker? Well, maybe a Transylvanian Count might do the trick. A creepy Count might also inspire the 11 year old wannabe author in my book to write his greatest work! So, Count Vladimir was added to the Sackville stew; a hissing, covetous, Scrooge-like old sinner, intent on stealing the Irish Crown Jewels from Dublin Castle, and desperate to recruit the best sneak thief in Dublin to help him do it. Will his evil plan succeed, or will Bram, Molly and the Sackville Street Spooks thwart his wicked scheme? Weee-eeell … the book is now available in bookshops, libraries and from www.obrien.ie, so yiz can all find out for yizzerselves!

This book, from start to finish, has been a joy to work on, being so rooted in the books of my childhood, and in the history of my home city of Dublin; I loved working again with my amazing editor Helen Carr; I treasured every trip I made and every precious page of research I pored over.

And I have my Granny, Nanny Gigg, and her good aim to thank for it.

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Alan Nolan on World Book Day, Writing, Illustrating, Animals and Rock Star Grannies

Ahead of World Book Day 2019 on Thursday, 7 March, I chatted with Alan Nolan about his World Book Day book, Sam Hannigan’s Rock Star Granny, and the world of books, writing and illustrating!

What’s your favourite thing about reading?

A good book will put you directly in the shoes of the characters, helping you see the world through their eyes. That’s my favourite thing about reading – understanding and empathising with others.

What’s your favourite thing about writing and illustrating?

I love storytelling, and writing and illustrating are two great ways of telling a story. I enjoy them both equally, and I try to get them to work together and complement each other. I tend to think visually – if a character pops into my head, I have to draw them immediately; if a scene comes into my head, I reach for a pencil and get drawing. Then I’ll write some notes about what I’ve just drawn around the sides of the sketch. It always happens in that order: idea, drawing, writing.

Who is your favourite character to illustrate?

I love drawing Ogg the caveman from Conor’s Caveman and the Sam Hannigan series. I had a lot of trouble getting him right at the design stage – I knew he was huge and that he wore caveman furs and had chunky, hairy arms, but I just couldn’t get his face quite right. His big, stubbly chin worked, but there was something too open and modern about his eyes. Then I hit on it: a huge, bushy monobrow would hide his eyes, making him more enigmatic, and it would also make him look more Neanderthal-like. Ogg is an easy character for kids to draw as well – I can show them how to draw a very convincing caveman with only twelve pencil lines!

Sam Hannigan is a great character. What was your inspiration for her?

When I was a kid, I wanted to be a dog. My granny, Lizzie Bunn, lived with us (as did her mum, my great-granny), and she helped me achieve my doggy dreams. She made me a pair of doggy ears out of stuffed brown socks that she stitched onto a Healy-Rae flat cap, and a furry tail that I tucked into the back of my trousers. Sometimes when she’d call us down for dinner, I’d insist that she put mine on the floor. I would eat it on my hands and knees, my ‘tail’ (actually, my bum) wagging happily as I chowed down without the aid of a fork, knife or spoon, my doting granny looking on. Of course, this only happened when my mother was at work. She would have marmalised me and my poor granny if she knew these canine capers were going on every second day. So I think Sam Hannigan was based partly on me – a dreamer with a lightly loopy grandmother.

Continue reading “Alan Nolan on World Book Day, Writing, Illustrating, Animals and Rock Star Grannies”

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Alan Nolan on Sam Hannigan’s Woof Week

Author and illustrator Alan Nolan chats about writing, illustrating and the inspiration for Sam Hannigan’s Woof Week!

Sam Hannigan began life in one of my battered sketchbooks as a sketch of a young girl with freckles, playing an oversized guitar and wearing a cowboy hat. As with most of my characters, she came into my head in the middle of the night, cowboy hat and all, and I scrambled at the side of my bed for a sketchpad and a pencil to get her down on paper before she pulled up the bedroom window blind and escaped. As usual, to avoid waking my wife, this was drawn almost completely in the dark – when I woke up in the morning I had to make sense of the manic, spidery scribble, which I’d jammed into my shoe so I’d remember I’d done it in the first place.

Beside the sketch I had written ‘Brianna Buckley, plays guitar, eats dog biscuits, best friend is a boy, bully brother, parents country music fans = Dolly and Kenny, big dog, brain swap’.

I pitched the idea to The O’Brien Press. They loved the character of Brianna Buckley, but didn’t much like the name Brianna. They also thought the storyline – with Brianna as an X-Factor-like contestant brain-swapping with a dog and competing in the TV programme against her parents, Derek and Dodo, whilst trying to save (a) her house from being repossessed and (b) an international Russian supermodel and an emperor penguin from the clutches of a gangster called Terry the Thump ­– was a little convoluted and not overly child-friendly. ‘Think about who you are writing for,’ said Ivan. ‘Are you writing for children or for yourself?’ Continue reading “Alan Nolan on Sam Hannigan’s Woof Week”

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How I wrote Fintan’s Fifteen

AlanNolanAuthor Alan Nolan talks about how he wrote and illustrated Fintan’s Fifteen, the first illustrated novel about hurling.

The Idea

A couple of years ago I pitched some book ideas to O’Brien Press head honcho Michael O’Brien and their in-house graphic designer Emma Byrne. They were mostly ideas for detective or murder mystery books for younger readers, and these became the ‘Murder Can Be Fatal’ series and The Big Break Detectives Casebook. I was always interested in detective novels – Sherlock Holmes, the works of Agatha Christie, the Agaton Sax books by Nils-Olof Franzén and the incomparable Tintin series by Hergé were some of my favourites – and I had a background in comic strip illustration from writing and drawing my own self published comic book, Sancho, so the most natural way to approach these books was as graphic novels.

At that meeting I also pitched an idea for a sports book – it was to be the story of an U12s hurling team, the Ballybreen Terriers, who were on their uppers, languishing at the bottom of the league, with half their players walking out. The idea would be that they would convince an inspiring child bainisteoir to come out of self-imposed retirement and back to hurling. This new manager would recruit players from different sports, each of which would bring their own particular skills to the hurling team, and this would bring a sense of fun back into the team and allow them to slowly climb back up the league. Being such a fan of detective books, I also had to get a bit of intrigue into the story involving some long-lost priceless emeralds and a stolen trophy! This book became Fintan’s Fifteen.

F15_original_sketch

The Characters

I had previously done a two page cartoon strip for the Irish Times soccer World Cup supplement, featuring a young Brazilian-Irish boy who goes to the World Cup and ends up playing for Brazil. This character’s name was Ray ‘Rusty’ Arantes and I thought he would make a fantastic narrator for the book – he was a great soccer player, there was no reason he wouldn’t be a great hurler too.

PELEThe other main characters were the titular Fintan, a couch potato ex-hurler, washed up at 12 years of age, who discovers his mission in life is to resurrect the good name of the Ballybreen Terriers and to turn their fortunes around, and Katie ‘Dinger’ Bell, the Terrier’s number one fan and an accomplished majorette who becomes Fintan’s right-hand girl.

The remaining characters who make up the Fifteen include golfing prodigy Rory Sweeney, acrobat Liam Chang and Dominic ‘Mansize’ McLean, a wresteler and Scottish Highland Games enthusiast.

But my favourite character is Ollie the dog, the team mascot and the original Ballybreen Terrier. Ollie has the role of assistant narrator, giving a dog’s view of the action, and bringing the narration into places that Rusty physically can’t go! As well as that, we can have fun with him as he chases cats, sniffs other dogs’ bottoms, and generally behaves like… well, like a dog!

ollie_JUMP_sml

The Book

I started the book with a back-of-the-book type blurb and some character sketches, which I pitched at the initial meeting. (Both this brief synopsis and the sketches would change considerably in the writing!) Michael liked the idea, so I developed the blurb into a storyline which I submitted a couple of weeks later. Once I got the go-ahead on this, I started to try to figure out how I would go about writing the book.

I decided that Rusty would be a great narrator, as he would give a straightforward and honest account of what was going on, almost like he was keeping a diary.

Then, to add some fun to it, I came up with the character of Ollie the dog, named, incidentally, for my brother’s dog who had sadly passed away. Ollie would tell his side of the story in a witty, somewhat world-weary voice, and best of all, he would tell it in a cartoon strip – I knew I wanted to have plenty of illustrations in the book, but I also wanted to have cartoon strips, and it was the character of Ollie gave me the perfect opportunity to do that! While Rusty and the team were concentrating on having fun and trying to win the cup, super-canine-sleuth Ollie would be unraveling rival bainisteoir Séaneen Brannigan’s plans to steal the same trophy. The cartoon strips were great fun to do – I simplified my usual style to make it look like Ollie had drawn them himself!

F15_0_web

F15_1_web

As well as all that I decided to add pages from Séaneen’s diary outlining his evil plans, and cut-out sports reports detailing the Terrier’s amazing comeback. I used photographs of actual torn out pieces of paper for these parts, using a handwriting script to simulate Séaneen’s diary pages, and replicating newspaper layouts for the news reports.

F15_3_web

When I had the book written and the illustrations and cartoon strips penciled out, I sent them to my editor Mary Webb. While she was going through it with a fine-tooth comb, I started inking the illustrations, and by the time I was finished, so was she! The book was approved and went off to print early this year.

A couple of weeks ago, I got my advance copy in the post. This is a worrying time for an author, as if we spot any mistakes, it’s too late to change them! Happily, the book was exactly as it should be and I am delighted with it. Now I can’t wait for you to read it too!

book_stackAlan Nolan is a comics writer, graphic designer, artist and co-creator of the horror series Sancho. He is the creator of The Big Break Detectives Casebook, a graphic novel for younger readers, and the ‘Murder Can Be Fatal’ mysteries. Born in Dublin, he studied at the National College of Art and Design. He lives in Bray, County Wicklow, with his wife and three sons.