I've never worked in a shop. A pub, a hotel, a factory, yes, but never a shop. But the other day, I was thinking about Simon Retsky.
He runs the superette - the small supermarket - where Magali gets a part-time job after her divorce. He's a nice man, gentle-mannered and attentive, and they get on well together. He only features in the first of the series, One Green Bottle, and even there he doesn't have a lot to do. His name occurs just ten times. He knows everyone in the village, though, and is a good source of gossip. For a private investigator, there's nothing like knowing the secret life behind a stranger's face.
Retsky is one of those minor characters that populate all novels. But however minor they may be, they all have to come from somewhere, and Retsky comes from Reg Lloyd.
When I was a boy, Reg worked in my father's shop, selling paint and door hinges and screwdrivers. It was the local ironmonger's, later to expand to agricultural machinery. Reg was old, with a shock of white hair, and slow, ponderous movements. He probably wasn't efficient, but he'd been there when it was my grandfather's, and to Dad, loyalty was more important than efficiency. And Reg had the same gentle manner as Simon Retsky.
That's it. No other trait unites them, and Retsky is far less ponderous than Reg. But though he's never described, in my mind Retsky is a younger, slimmer version of Reg Lloyd. Reg was such a nice man that as soon as I had that spark from which to create Retsky, I knew he'd be a nice man too.
As for the superette, in the novel it's a Spar, but the one we have down the road is a Petit Casino. They belong to the same group in fact, a multinational which started in 1898 with a single shop in Saint-Etienne. Today there are many hypermarkets too - Géant Casino - but the Petit Casino remains the core activity.
All my characters, major or minor, come from a similar place. I don't mean my father's shop but the curious maze of memory. Sometimes it's the distant past, sometimes only yesterday; often all I take is a physical feature - a hairstyle, a mannerism, or a particular way of walking. Then begins the process of adding more features, some imagined, others found elsewhere in my memory, till a complete enough person emerges to fulfill their allotted purpose in the book .
I have a soft spot for Retsky - no doubt because of Reg. Sometimes I think I'll put him in another novel, give him a larger role. But I don't know. He's never pressed me to change - he's happy enough where he is, stacking his shelves, chatting to customers, getting the local gossip. Just like Reg.
Meet Simon Retsky in One Green Bottle, first in the Magali Rousseau series, available free here.