Solicitor by day, comedy author by night. Mary Claire Kelly is a superheroine to be proud of, having co-wrote two comedy volumes whilst working full time for Shelter. She tells the Firm the secret of her success.

---

As the Firm Fiction Prize proved over the last year, lawyers love to write.  From Henry Fielding, to Lorca and all the way to John Grisham, practitioners of the law frequently turn to the practice of the scribe. Comedy and law are less obvious companions, although both John Cleese and Bob Mortimer have shown it can be done. Nevertheless, can you easily name a lawyer who has written a humorous book? (aside possibly from the inadvertent sniggers aroused by Grisham….)  It is a pretty thin field but, right here in Scotland, Edinburgh based Mary Claire Kelly is one half of a duo who have authored not one but two illustrated comedy volumes, blowing the air out of some of the eccentricities of Britain today in their ‘Spotter’s guides,’ “I see Modern Britain”, and its companion piece, “I See Christmas.”  With law being a profession that seems to shelter more than its fair share of creative literary talent, perhaps as yet waiting undiscovered in embryonic anticipation, The Firm thought we would catch up with Mary Claire and find out what got her off the ground and safely rolling on the rails of publishing.

Kelly’s creative partner Norman Ferguson does not work in the law, so we can’t take all the credit. Mary Claire is a full time solicitor with Shelter in Scotland where she works as a litigation practitioner. The idea of the “I See” books, seemingly so simple in execution, but with a fiendishly difficult balance of knowing satire that is hard to achieve, came simply, and the success flowed from the strength of the premise.

“I’d always wanted to write, but we had a great idea good enough to send to a publisher.  We worked it up into a proposal and didn’t think twice about it,” she says.

“We summarised the book as being a spotters guide to modern Britain, looking at elements of modern society that have become common but that people may not have noticed. We got together about eight sample pages, then thought about who would want to read the book, our target audience. We were always pretty confident, and we thought it was hilarious.”

Initially, the proposal was just to write and illustrate one book, but the publishers quickly saw the potential for two, and set a very tight timeframe for the preparation and delivery of both. Given the investment of time and effort required even to work up the idea to proposal stage, it is unsurprising that so few would-be authors may be put off by the uncertainty of following up on their idea. However they were buoyed by their shared sense of belief that the proposal would work.

“I didn’t see it as being a gamble,” Kelly says.

“Either it was picked up or it wasn’t. There were two of us. If you are one person finding something really funny, you might be on your own.  We kept coming back to the idea. You have ideas all the time, but if it stuck in your head as being a really good idea, that adds a bit of certainty to it.”

Kelly, no doubt like many other humourists, did not always harbour comedy writing ambitions, believing her talents were orientated more towards traditional prose fiction writing. Living and working in Edinburgh helped nourish the spark of creativity that became the focus of the book.

“Being based in Edinburgh, most of the photographs we took were in Edinburgh, and Bruntsfield where I live, and the city centre where I work. The publishers are in London, so it had to be a book that everyone in the UK could relate to. If you are from Edinburgh you will see Edinburgh in it, but if you are from somewhere else I don’t think you’ll be able to necessarily pick up where the book is set.”

“If there is a point which I am trying to make, and I hope this comes across in the book, some of the targets are unusual; we are writing about people at every level of society. We were careful that it wasn’t to be about basing the usual targets of modern Britain. We tried to be conscious of that.  That was the only serious thought we had – we didn’t want to be picking on the usual groups that are picked on.”

In the books you’ll encounter repetitive strain injury, Polish plumbers, oblique Oscar Wilde references, vomit and a man on the toilet with a laptop.  All tastefully illustrated with the authors’ own snaps, aiming for a three gag target per ‘spot.’ And yes, it works.
“You just have to carry a camera with you all the time, and you do really strange things, running after things,” she says.

“I was going out at lunchtimes and furtively taking pictures of people that I thought we could use in the book. We took thousands of pictures that never made it into the book. Getting the pictures was the best, fun part. Especially the Christmas pictures.”

With the publisher commissioning the work in October, and a deadline fixed of the Ides of March for completion of the whole project, the pressure was on, made all the more demanding by the fact that the authors both had full time jobs.

“It was very intense. They wanted the actual pictures by the end of the year. It was full on. I made sure I had one night a week where I could go out with friends, but I used my annual leave to do the book, but I really enjoyed it. It was tiring, but I didn’t think I wouldn’t do it again. It is funny material. I had a laugh while I was doing it, and as soon as this had been released, we are thinking certainly, ‘What next?’”.

Creative souls who are frustrated by their desk work, yet heartened by Kelly’s breakthrough can also remind themselves that soaraway successes such as The Beatles and JK Rowling were turned down initially before achieving their goals. In Kelly’s case, persistence was a part of the recipe, but at its heart was the conviction that the idea itself was strong enough to find an outlet.

“I know a lot of solicitors who are interested in creative pursuits.  The best thing is, just do it. It is a lot of work, and you have to come home from work and do something else when you have probably had a tough day at the office. But you just have to do it,” she says.

“With this type of pursuit, we were quite lucky to be picked up quickly, but I think we would have kept going with it.  If you think it is a good idea, somebody else probably will too. At the end of the day the publishers want to make money. As part of our proposal we said that we could see X amount of people buying this book, and why. If you do research at that stage you save yourself a lot of work.”