Pick a name, any name

How do you decide what your characters in your story are called? Carefully, I hope. If your book works, that choice will live with you for years. My stories usually take place in foreign countries and often with local characters. My first published book, finished thirty years ago this year, Semana Santa, now rereleased as Death in Seville, was set in southern Spain. It’s a part of Europe I know well. But when I started the story I didn’t have the time or money to go there to research the thing, or any inkling it would be finished, let alone published. So I worked from my memory of writing travels books in Andalucia several years earlier.

The book opens with a curious old aristocrat called Caterina, which sounded a pretty decent Mediterranean name, played in the movie of the book by that classic Italian actor Alida Valli in her last performance. In Italy Caterina works fine. But I came to realise that in Spain its equivalent is Catalina. That’s a flying boat to most people in the UK, not a woman’s name at all. I got it wrong, and if I’d got it ‘right’, using Catalina instead of Caterina, it would have sounded weird and probably got turfed out by the editor. So in the rereleased version she’s called something else altogether.

Character names need to sound true, and that can be tricky. It’s easy enough to pick a common first name – Jack or Harry, Jill or Jane. No one is going to find that strange. But if you then combine that with a very popular surname people will scratch their heads. Jack Smith? Jill Jones? They sound too plain.

Nic Costa got his name by the easy route. I wanted something short and simple, and a little unusual too, to mark out the fact that he’s a little different to his peers. When I started writing those books I’d no idea they’d be published anywhere outside the UK. It never occurred to me they’d be sitting in Italian bookstores in translation one day. So I wanted a name that was easy to pronounce in English and sounded a touch international. Nic’s father appeared in the first book. He was very much a man of the world, not a parochial Roman. I could imagine he would have been happy with that.

That said a more accurate Italian rendition would be 'Nico' not 'Nic'. And just to complicate matters further that would be short for 'Nicola' which is a man's name in Italian and a woman's in English. You see the pitfalls here?

People sometimes say to me, ‘But isn’t Costa Spanish?’ Yes, there are plenty of people called Costa in Spain. But there are lots in Italy too, and I even know roughly where they live. You can check out the geographical distribution of any surname in Italy on the internet. You’ll find lists of popular first and last names on Wikipedia, broken down country by country. There are scores of genealogical sites out there which you can plunder for inspiration. Some software – Scrivener for example – comes with a name generator. Use these resources. None of them existed when I was writing Semana Santa, otherwise I would never have made that mistake about Caterina.

The first book in the Arnold Clover, series, The Medici Murders introduces a rather nasty upper class English historian who is, in some ways, the villain of the piece. After much casting around I came up with the name Marmaduke Godolphin for him. Godolphin is an old, aristocratic name from Cornwall. Marmaduke, usually shorted to Duke, was the name of a posh chap I worked under decades ago. They seemed to fit.

In the Costa series, the sidekick Peroni came from the beer, which was largely unknown in England when I invented him and is now actually brewed here. Nor did I ever see the link that people would make between Costa coffee and my young Roman cop – that chain was a lot smaller back then.

There’s no way you can pick a series character name and hope to avoid such coincidences years down the line. If I were starting a new series now, though, I’d try to stick to some basic rules:

• Choose simple names.

• Make them memorable and easy to pronounce.

• Visit a cemetery and look at headstones. Headstones are always a fantastic source of good names, especially if you want them to be regional.

Oh – and one final thing. Whatever you call someone you will, before long, get an email from a real person with the same name asking, ‘Why did you steal me for your book?’ And here let me conclude with a curious true story of synchronicity, something that happens from time to time in this strange trade.

In 1957 the actor Lex Barker starred as a character called David Hewson in a very noir movie called The Girl in Black Stockings. I was four years old at the time. How on earth did someone come up with that name for a character? Actually I know. The movie was based on a story by a South African writer called Peter Godfrey. In the early 1980s when I was a reporter on The Times a very interesting and knowledgeable old sub-editor introduced himself to me there. None other than the same Peter Godfrey, now doing a bit of subbing on the side.

‘I used your name in a movie once,’ Peter told me one day when we were talking about books (I was already itching to become a writer at the time and he had lots of useful advice on the subject).

‘Where did it come from?’ I asked.

Peter thought for a moment and said, ‘Made it up, of course.’