My unwritten masterpiece

A few years ago, I wrote the first page of what was intended to be a lucrative blockbuster thriller and never got any further. I've decided to share it here for no particular reason. 

I’m aware that this first page is not evidence of a remarkable lost literary talent - quite the reverse. It's probably representative of the thousands of attempts to write a thriller that are scuppered by the lack of a plot. When I wrote the piece (in 1996) I had a great idea for a scene and an opening but no idea how to turn them into a novel. I thought the process of writing the first page would help – it didn’t. Enjoy:

On 19th March 1996 a man calling himself Nigel Lawrence asked for a room in the Green Guest House, Tsimshatsui, Hong Kong.  After a brief series of questions and answers, the bored owner, Rajind Shah took a weeks money in advance and gestured towards a room at the end of the corridor.    To Mr Shah, Nigel Lawrence appeared little different to the stream of travellers that constantly entered and left his small set of rooms.  A week’s money in advance was perhaps unusual but even this caused no more than a few seconds of flickering interest.  Rajind Shah did not see himself as an observer of people and had no interest in any of his guests.  But then, the Green Guest House bore little resemblance to the grander international crossroads clustered on Kowloon and across the water on Hong Kong Island.  It was situated in Chunking Mansions, a hellish warren of small guesthouses hostels on the upper floors and restaurants and electronic shops on the lower.  The Green Guest House consisted of one corridor with five window-less boxes on either side.  Each contained a bed, chair and had a tiny shower room attached.  Decked almost entirely in white tiles, the rooms were clean but lit with a harsh fluorescent strip that made them feel like interrogation cells.

This mattered little to the steady stream of western travellers like Nigel Lawrence.  In fact even having a room to oneself would be seen as a luxury by many backpackers and the steamy maze of Chunking Mansions offered a certain flavour of romance, intrigue and excitement to some.  But there was no romance in the place for Rajind Shah who wondered whether the steady living he made for him and his family justified a life without sun or space.  And there was no romance for Nigel Lawrence who was certainly not short of intrigue or excitement.

Yet Nigel appeared like any other traveller.  He was tall (but not too tall), tanned with unruly long hair, stubble and a ring through his nose.  He wore a tie-dyed T-shirt and battered blue jeans and carried a large backpack with a water bottle attached.  In his hands he carried a well-used copy of Lonely Planet's "South East Asia on a Shoestring" which he juggled with an equally tatty money belt.  Once inside the interrogation cell he did what travellers the world over do when they reach a new place - stretch, examine their surroundings, have a shower, then out again to explore a new territory.

There comes a point when an actor lives a part so comprehensively that he almost ceases to be acting and on that day in March Nigel had long ago reached that point.  He had spent two months in Thailand before he flew to Hong Kong that day.  He had done the usual traveller things in the usual traveller places.  He had trekked in Chaing Mai and Mae Sot, smoked acres on grass in Ko Tau and Krabi and met other twenty-somethings, students and assorted drop outs from all over the world.  On reaching the Green Guest House he was part of the subculture with a thousand checkable stories and sightings to prove it.  Yet that day in Chunking Mansions was also the day the acting stopped and the game begun.   

Comments

[M arcus]

Keith, this is not bad. Not bad at all. So you can't come up with any more? Well, it's Thailand and Hong Kong, right? Would it not be almost compulsory to go for drugs, an appropriate amount of sex, and brutal violent death? Easier said than done, I know. Why not try to make it into a short story?

[James]

Classic thriller opening – easily assimilated setting and instant narrative 'hook'. Who is Nigel and why is he pretending to be a backpacker? (Philosophical subtext: when does a person actually become the thing they’re pretending to be? Makes me think of Laurence Fishburne in Deep Cover: ‘All this time I thought I was a cop pretending to be a drug dealer, when I was nothing but a drug dealer pretending to be a cop.’) The hotelier, Shah, has ‘civilian casualty caught in the crossfire’ written all over him.