What’s In a Name?

[Adam Colclough]

How do you choose your books? My guess would be that if you aren’t buying them on the instructions of a reading list the title probably plays a major role in the choice you make.

Putting on the hat of a sometime literature student with a well developed talent for stating the obvious its clear a book’s title shapes our expectations regarding its content.

For example The Big Sleep entices and excites me far more than The Unpleasantness at the Bellona Club does, and not just because I prefer Raymond Chandler to Dorothy L Sayers.

Both titles play on euphemisms for death, or more accurately murder, but in very different ways.

Sayers seems to suggest that death is something impolite to be dispensed with quickly so that she and her readers can get on with the important business of solving a nice clean puzzle where nobody gets hurt.

For Chandler death is altogether more visceral, the colloquial title suggests its right there next to you madam and might reach out for your throat at any moment.

All of which brings me by a roundabout route to my latest project, a short story with the cheery title The Man Who Unsettled Himself, due to appear on Associated Content within the next couple of weeks.

Now what does that title say about the story’s content? Not, I hope, that all the loose ends are going to be neatly tied up over tea at the vicarage.