For reasons… I’ve been playing around with character cameos for Instagram… Which admittedly is partly procrastination. As I am making them anyway, I’ve decided you, dear readers, may enjoy seeing them, with a little background on the characters featured.

Todays offering is another of those characters who grew in the telling. Henrietta ‘Hettie’ Clarkhurst, formerly an engineering officer in the Royal Air navy, from the Hannibal Smyth novels or as her friends have been known to call her ‘Spanners’

Hettie first appears in a short story called ‘The Cheesecake Dichotomy’  written for the first Harvey Duckman Anthology This story is an episode from Hannibal Smyths life that took place before the first novel ‘A Spider in the Eye’ which I had almost finished writing at the time I wrote cheesecake. She began life, in the writers mind, as no more than the reason for Hannibal’s somewhat infamous LSD fuelled dual on Hampstead Heath. But, as characters do, as the story came together she became far more than merely a two dimensional femme fatale that leads to the protagonist fighting a dual.

Like most female characters in Hannibal’s stories Hettie is anything but a mere background character, and definitely not a damsel in distress. Anything but in fact. She is a strong capable woman who knows her own mind, and is quite happy to bludgeon aside any mere man who stands in her way. Some where in the writing she managed to create a new verb, a verb with duals meanings. As such a man getting  good ‘spannering’ from Hettie could mean a couple of different things, though it will be sure to leave an impression either way…

While originally there was no great intention on my part to bring Hettie back in the novels, she managed to bludgeon her way into the third novel ‘A Squid on the Shoulder’ because she is such an interesting fun character to write, and she is much liked by readers. But then Hettie was never going to just fade into the background after ‘Cheesecake’ no matter what the scribe may have thought at the time.  Indeed while Hannibal has been off getting involved in shadowy government ministry’s and international anarchist conspiracies, Hettie has been off having strange adventures all of her own, as Hannibal is about to discover…

These cameos were build for Instagram, if you would like to follow me there the link is www.instagram.com/markhayes6/