I am something of an enthusiastic plotholer, which is not unlike a potholer but with plots instead of deep warren-like holes in the limestone hills of the west riding. This is to say I weave convoluted webs when I write. Things are seldom as straight forward as a reader might perceive, because what finally sees the light of day is seldom where it all began.

Main characters are bad enough, but the incidental characters that hang around the edges get more often than not have their own lives that morph and change as they go from a one chapter, one scene, body with a plot point nailed to it, to someone with a complete back story and who has had their own weird adventures of stage…

If I had the time and the column inches I could explain in detail how Viviane ‘Bad Penny’ Verne, daughter of Jules, came to be such a central pillar of the Hannibal. But briefly, before she was Viviane Verne, before Hannibal started calling her ‘Bad Penny’, to the inevitable reply of “That’s not my name…” she was initially just known as ‘the maid.’ and was not supposed to survive the first novel, Indeed, I only wrote her in because I needed someone to accost Hannibal when he found himself on board ‘The Indian Princess’ and after that she could have easily slipped out of the book. Her only role initially apart from hitting Hannibal on the head was to introduce Saffron Wells into the story.

Bad Penny was just known as The Maid for quite a long time, while she quietly grew in my imagination, and became the hellcat she is. She grew into herself as she keep coming back whenever I needed someone to do a thing. By the second novel she was interictal to the whole story, by the third she was as much centre stage as old Harry himself.

Why am I telling you all this. Well in the latest Harvey anthology Feral and Fae, Fellow Harvey main stay Ben Sawyer has written a story about one of the Hollyiverse supporting cast, and written a detailed explanation of how it all came to be. Something other writers and perspective writers as well as readers may find fascinating, I know I did.

You should go read it…