It’s writing group next week and the topic for us to be creative about is ‘alibi’. I must admit my mind is an absolute blank – trying to be original is the tricky part, trying to write something which has a satisfactory ending, a believable ending and true to the rest of the story, but something unexpected – I have six days to come up with a tale to impress my friends in the group – or at least to not make me look feeble.
As well as the usual meaning of alibi, that you can prove you were somewhere else when something heinous happened, there is also the surname – although it is spelled differently, Alibhai. The most famous person I know of is Yasmin Alibhai-Brown, a journalist and author, who has columns in national newspapers, mostly writing about immigration, diversity and multiculturalism issues. So I could write about a person with the name or a person who has an alibi – a thought which doesn’t take me much further.
There are a couple of books with the word in the title – I’ve just bought ‘Alibi’ by Linda la Plante so maybe i could read it and write a review – but I think my writing friends would thing that’s rather feeble.
Identical and brutal assaults on three women. One woman survives to give a detailed description of her attacker.
The police arrest a suspect, Damon Morton, confident he is their man. But three of his employees admit to the crimes, and Morton’s wife and girlfriend each provide him with an alibi. They all declare Damon Morton innocent. The police know he did it. But if people lie under oath in a court of law – who can the jury believe?
There’s another book with the same title by Joseph Kanon:
The year is 1946. A stunned Europe is beginning its slow recovery from the ravages of World War II. Adam Miller has come to Venice to visit his widowed mother and forget the horrors he witnessed as a US Army war crimes investigator in Germany. But when Adam falls in love with Claudia, a Jewish woman scarred by her devastating experiences during the war, he is forced to confront a Venice haunted by atrocities it would rather forget.
Beneath the dream-like façade he discovers a city in which everyone was compromised by occupation, not least Gianni Maglione, the suave and enigmatic Venetian who is both his mother’s new suitor and the man responsible for much of Claudia’s suffering. When the troubled past erupts in violent murder, Adam finds himself at the centre of a torturous web in which the most valuable thing is not a stone-cold alibi, but the truth itself.
I will update you when I actually think of something to write – I just hope it won’t be on Tuesday night, which of course also happens to be quiz night!
Lois Elsden 