Posted on 01st December, 2022
What’s in a Name?
Characters’ names can be tricky for authors. You need a lot in the average novel, but where do you find them? When I first started out, my local library still had shelves of telephone directories, both UK and international, that I could consult and farm for names – always changed slightly; you don’t want to get sued by the real John Doe, particularly if you’re a crime writer and you’ve made the character, say, a mad axe murderer.
The phone directories are long gone now, but there are other sources of names. In my Cremona Mysteries series, my detective is called Antonio Guastafeste, a very unusual Italian name that came to me by a bizarre route.
Many years ago, (my memory is hazy about the exact date) I watched a BBC documentary about the conductor André Previn. There was a scene in the programme when Previn was talking fluent German to some visiting dignitaries (for lovers of trivia, Previn, of course, was born Andreas Priwin, in Berlin, and German was his first language).
Then he reverted to English and talked about the richness of different languages and the melting pot of American society and he mentioned, in passing, that the principal double-bass player of the Chicago Symphony Orchestra was called Joe Guastafeste, which he translated – a bit unflatteringly, I think, but very affectionately – as “Joe Wetblanket”.
I thought, what a great name for a character in a book, so I stored it away in my brain and when I came to write Sleeper (US title:The Rainaldi Quartet), I used it for my detective, changing the Christian name to Antonio. I did a check on various data bases to make sure there wasn’t anyone in Cremona called Guastafeste, particularly a police officer, and found no one. A few years later, after the book had been published in America, I found out why.
I got a letter from Joe Guastafeste, asking me where I got the name from as, to his knowledge, his family were the only ones in the world called Guastafeste. I explained how I came by the name and he told me the story of its origin.
Back in the nineteenth century, the Mother Superior of a convent in Sicily went to the front door on a feast day and found a baby abandoned on the step. Her first reaction was to cry out, “Guastafeste!” (literally, Feast Spoiler) so when the nuns took the baby in, they christened him Giuseppe Guastafeste. When the child grew up, he either emigrated to America – or his son did, I forget the exact details – and, in time, Joe Guastafeste was born.
A couple of years after hearing from Joe, I received a letter from his brother, Al Carmen Guastafeste – also very musical, a pianist who’d studied at Juilliard and wrote a memoir about his time as accompanist/music director for Marilyn Monroe’s famous tour of US troops in Korea during the war there – asking me the same question: where did I get the name Guastafeste from? I sent him a message back, saying: Ask Joe.