Conan Doyle and names

There was just a snippet on the radio about authors naming characters; apparently, Conan Doyle used the names of cricketers for his characters! Sir Arthur Ignatius Conan Doyle, most famous as the creator of Sherlock Holmes and a host of supporting characters, was also a very keen cricketer and used to play for the MCC (Marylebone Cricket Club. For those of you who know anything about cricket he was a right hand bat and a right arm slow bowler. In one game against Cambridgeshire he took 7 wickets for 68 runs, that means he got seven batsmen out and they only managed to score 68 runs. Conan Doyle also found inspiration for the names of his characters from cricketers he either played against or knew of; Sherlock Holmes was inspired by two men,  Mordecai Sherwin and Frank Shacklock who played for Nottingham. There was also a Derbyshire cricketer named William Mycroft, the name of whom Conan Doyle used for Sherlock’s brother. Conan Doyle used many other crickets names for his characters, maybe as many as 250… what a lot of cricketers, what a lot of characters!

Conan Doyle was later in a cricket team of writers, and another player was Pelham Grenville Wodehouse – the creator of the Jeeves and Wooster stories, and guess what? Percy Jeeves was a county cricketer of great promise, but tragically he was killed in the 1st World War.In the radio programme this morning, Val McDermid,  a writer of detective stories and psychological thrillers, revealed that she used architectural terms for her characters, including Norman Undercroft!

I sometimes come across names which lodge in my mind, names I see on signs, or memorials, or in the newspaper, but I don’t consciously use names in that way. The only time I can think of when I sort-of did it was with a character in ‘A Strong Hand From Above’; I taught with a very handsome man called John Hilton… I ‘borrowed’ his face and he became Hilton O’Brien in my novel. The actor Neal McDonogh’s portrayal of David McNorris in ‘Boomtown’ was facially an inspiration for Neil Cameron in ‘Night Vision’… but that is such a tenuous link, isn’t it.

I usually create names for my characters…. and although I’m sometimes criticised for that, at least I know there is no other Deke Colefox or Bavol Polglass  in the world!