No, I haven't taken up campanology. It's just that at the moment I seem to be out at least one evening a week running murder mystery evenings or giving talks – which is great, because not only does it allow me to introduce crime fiction fans to a whole new bunch of authors they can try, it also gives me the opportunity simply to talk to people about crime fiction – one of my favourite topics.
In fact, one of those conversations often leads into the other – like this:
“Hey, what a wonderful selection of books! But how can I choose? I’ve never heard of these authors.”
“Maybe not now, but you will – they’re all debut authors when they come to us, but even Lee Child/Ian Rankin/Kathy Reichs/Patricia Cornwell was a debut author once, and look how famous s/he became.”
“Really? What a wonderful thing to do. But – how can I choose?”
“Why don’t you tell me which well-known authors you enjoy reading? Then maybe I can suggest one of ours that you’d enjoy just as much.”
Then we go through their favourite authors, and I point out a Crème de la Crime author who occupies roughly the same bit of the marketplace. Adrian Magson if they like Lee Child or Harlan Coben; Maureen Carter if it’s Reginald Hill or Ian Rankin; Roz Southey or Chris Nickson for C J Sansom fans; Kaye C Hill for Janet Evanovich. And so on.
It doesn’t work every time, but that’s a useful side-effect: we find out where the gaps are in our list. Agatha Christie comes up pretty well every time, of course, and I have to explain that golden age crime fiction is hard to replicate because authors of that vintage had their own style, and they simply aren’t around any more. And Kathy Reichs and Patricia Cornwell weren’t just random choices in the list; they come up quite often too. An awful lot of readers go for the graphic path lab descriptions, but for some unaccountable reason it’s a sub-genre with which my submissions pile is underwhelmed. Fortunately we’re not short of blood and guts; a couple of our authors – well, one – gets a little carried away when the blood starts fountaining and bits of body get gouged, and I actually have to start reining back. A little like a story Val McDermid tells about a torture scene involving a dog. The problem wasn’t the torture – it was the dog. Apparently readers can take any amount of agony inflicted on a human, but animals are a different matter. Anyway, that’s a scene you won’t find in that Val McDermid novel.
This isn’t exactly a plea for a deluge of manuscripts which give Reichs and Cornwell (Turow and Grisham too – legal is another gap in our list) a run for their money. But if anyone out there was thinking of sending us their magnum opus, you might want to know that for the time being we’re fine for police procedurals, and OK for quirky private eyes, especially historical ones from the 18th century.
Not that we’re about to turn down something in any of those areas which is so brilliant that tennis, football, eating and sleeping are all put on hold while we finish it. (Aaaargh! I can’t believe I said football! It gets everywhere!) But crime fiction encompasses a wide variety of sub-genres, and we like to be able to please most of the people most of the time.
