Falls the Shadow

Coming up with the right title

Photo by Amador Loureiro on Unsplash

One of the things about writing novels that always causes me hours and hours of blank gazing into the middle distance, is coming up with the right title. If there is anything more important than the first line, it’s the title. I’ve bought books on the strength of the title. And not bought books that I should’ve because the titles weren’t exciting. Titles set the scene. They hint at what’s to come.

Genre titles are particularly catchy. Often they’re short (Truth, Moth, Perfidy, Devil’s Peak) but it’s the longer ones I particularly like. How about George Pelecanos: Down the river where the dead men go. Or Lief WG Persson: Between summers longing and winter’s end. Or Kurt Ellis: In the midst of wolves. Or James Sallis: Death will have your eyes. You just have to read those books.

Which is why it is worthwhile agonising over a title. Often during the writing there are work-in-progress titles but mostly they never last the course. The number of times I’ve come up with a title that makes it to publication early in the process could probably be counted on a single finger. The thing about book titles is that you seldom get them immediately. Usually it takes ages to land the right one, and sometimes somebody else - agent, publisher, editor - gets there first.

I was going through my notebook the other day because I suddenly couldn’t remember how I’d got to the title “Falls the Shadow”, only to find that I’d had four earlier versions. Somewhat into writing the first draft I hit on “Z88”, which is the name of the handgun used by the South African police. And as the protagonist’s first name is Zara and she’s a cop, I thought this was a nice Z association.

But wiser counsel - my agent - told me it meant nothing outside South Africa. So I came up with “The Cape of Terror”; or dropping the article to “Cape of Terror” or perhaps simply: “Cape Terror”. None of those stuck and the next iteration was “Gangster Cops”. This worked because the cops in the story are, well, gangsters. But even this was eventually jettisoned for “Bandit State”. I was clearly still not happy as eventually the title became Falls the Shadow.

Probably the twenty-two mentions of “shadows” in the book were the clues that steered me in that direction.

There is a reference to “the fall of Zara’s shadow”. Later Zara thinks that, “Always someone comes hissing out of the shadows”. Then one of the characters sees “shadows in the backyard” and feels these are the shades of his ancestors gathering. There is a sangoma, Luna Maplewood, who tells a cop-client seeking greater insights from a throw of the bones: “The shadows are all around us”. She warns him of one who “stands in the shadows. She will not reveal herself.”

That’s how the word manifested in the story but there were other pointers too.

1: During the writing of the last novel in the Fish & Vicki series, the book that preceded Falls the Shadow (the title is Hammerman - A Walking Shadow), a lot of shadows started flitting around. The reference in the title was snitched from Macbeth and the famous line, “Life’s but a walking shadow”.

2: I had become rather fascinated (or should I say bewitched) by Macbeth and the witches and the Shakespeare story casts a shadow in Falls the Shadow - but more about that in another Substack one day.

3: On a different tack entirely, I have a considerable liking for most of the poetry of T S Eliot. When I first read his work, it gave me a way of seeing the world that made sense. His poem “The Hollow Men” felt particularly relevant. Those allusions to the stuffed men; the dead land; the cactus land; the broken jaw of our lost kingdoms; the hollow valley; let alone the world ending not with a bang but a whimper, all resonated. To a young twenty-year-old suddenly realising the actuality of the apartheid-police state, these terms made perfect sense.

Eliot wrote the poem in the 1920s in the aftermath of the First World War. It expresses a profound disillusionment, the breakdown of meaning in a fractured world. And it contains the line: falls the shadow. In the poem the shadow is a failure to achieve a meaningful existence.

It certainly is a depressing poem. I did not want to write a depressing story - crime novels aren’t depressing anyway, they’re a lot of fun - but I did want Zara’s shadow to fall over the fractured land that is South Africa.

4: Lastly, the title only dawned on me after I’d written the second novel in the series. Suddenly, there in my notebook is a pencil scrawl: use Falls the Shadow. Beneath that is a list of wines I was about to order. (Notebooks contain some surprising entries sometimes.) After that flourish - and no doubt some wine - the title stuck.

Interestingly, in the German edition (btb Verlag) the title is Die Schakalin - which indicates a female jackal. Because Zara is called a jackal by her adversaries, it works well. And, because I tend to think of jackals drifting like shadows across the veld, the title describes the book.