I found James McLevy in the British Library; he was falling to pieces at the time.
I had been commissioned by BBC2 for a film in which Conan Doyle (Frank Finlay) meets a dubious cove (Richard E. Grant), who claims to be Sherlock Holmes. This occurs inside a locked room and then all hell breaks loose.
In the research I came across mention of an actual Victorian detective called McLevy who was one of the first practising policeman to write a diary of his experiences on the streets of Edinburgh, Leith in particular.
The requested book arrived reluctantly but finally lay before me, pages curled and yellow, gnarled cover warped and arthritic, all held together by a dingy white ribbon tied in a bow. I pulled gently on the ribbon. A puff of dust, and there was James McLevy. He and I, like Holmes and Watson, have been partners ever since.
The writing was anecdotal: street crimes that McLevy solved blindfold within four or five pages, but the boundless appreciation of his own worth as well as the soaring flights of his idiosyncratic philosophy came shining through.
I had recently won the Radio Times Drama Award and took the idea for a Radio 4 drama series to the BBC. They were somewhat sniffy until Brian Cox fell in love with the idea, came on board and announced,,it shall be so.
Siobhan Redmond brought some much-needed elegance in her role as Jean Brash and I was persuaded to play the part (I have a certificate which proves that I can act) of McLevy’s long-suffering boss, Lt Roach.
We’re in our fifth radio series, a television version is mooted and when Polygon approached me to write a novel, Shadow of the Serpent, it seemed a natural and welcome expansion. The second novel, Fall from Grace, is now to be published and in the novel-writing process McLevy has been emphatically reinvented; a synthesis of my imagination, the original character, and Brian’s full-blooded portrayal of him.
I even grafted my own religious schism onto the man, being myself the son of a Protestant Communist father and a Catholic mother. Luckily McLevy took it in his stride.
I lost an earlier sibling when my mother (kept in the most profound obscurity by her own zealously chapel-going mother), miscarried over a washing wringer. By the time I came along she knew better and the day she told me, we both cursed such West of Scotland blind, bigoted ignorance. But I always wondered what it would have been like to have a brother. Perhaps I found one that day in the British Library, bound with a white ribbon. His wild humour is mine, his madness is my own and his spitting anger at injustice is a feeling that we all share but rarely let see the light of day.
We tend to keep such things between ourselves.
© David Ashton
April 2007
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