Output details

The Doll Makers

This is the third book in the series and moves from pure whodunit to psychological thriller but still within the commercial fiction envelope. The area of private investigation work is now focussed on the insurance fraud. The theme is the uncovering of secrets from the heroine’s childhood. The Doll Makers is the only book in the series written completely from the heroine’s point of view, taking her through a range of experiences in real-time, including unconsciousness and the effects of hard drugs.

The research for unconsciousness and concussion was drawn from personal experience including working in healthcare. The specific effects of different drugs were researched via interviews with ex drug takers. The scenes set in Argyll and Glasgow were researched by personal visits and by interviews with people living in the area to learn the details of such things as local attitudes to tourism and the schools system.

This book involved experimentation with the techniques developed in the basic research into commercial fiction structure, where constructs were applied in different ways e.g. by fragmenting components and weaving them across several chapters.

This novel also made more use of specific methods such as archetypes, foreshadowing, collocation, and use of words or sentence structure to achieve specific effects such as surprise, menace or humour.

Following publication of The Doll Makers, the research on structure together with techniques for using the components to create a work of commercial fiction were written up and published in The Writers’ Toolkit: a handbook for writers of commercial fiction (Grubb P & Reah D. Fantastic Books Publishing. 2012. ISBN: 978-1-909163-07-2).