One of the perks of being a publisher of crime novels is that the need to stay abreast of trends gives me an excuse to read even more of the things than I would anyway; two a week is a pretty good average, and that’s in addition to the manuscripts. I have my favourites, of course – Phil Rickman, J D Robb, Val McDermid, Mark Billingham to name just a few of them – but in an attempt to put my money where my mouth is, I try to interleave the ones that feel like falling back into my own bed after a couple of nights in a Travelodge with new or new-ish names who I may or may not connect with. Sometimes I don’t, but often I find a new name to look out for. Since my favourites usually only produce one new book a year and if my maths is right I seem to read about a hundred books a year, the ones to look out for aren’t thin on the ground; so I think it’s fair to say that a lot of the authors I read are authors I might, if circumstances had been different, have actually published.
Occasionally those circumstances centre on the book itself. Maybe it’s too long. Crème de la Crime specialises in tight, pacy four-hour reads: the one you read on the long-haul flight and pass on to your travelling companion, not the doorstop that lasts through a fortnight of lying on the beach. So however brilliant the 150,000 word manuscript is, it’s not for us. Or maybe I just don’t connect with the story. There’s a market out there for fast-moving thrillers with a vicious punch-up or other nasty incident on every other page, and I’ll happily concede that some of them are well crafted, well written and excellent of their kind. But sorry, guys, it’s a kind I can’t relate to. Unrelenting violence just doesn’t do it for me – and that is a whole different blog post; watch this space!
The most common circumstance is the obvious one: they didn’t send me their debut novel in the first place. Which in a lot of cases is a very great pity, but mainly for me. I have to be honest and self-aware here, and point out that if Penguin or Random House pick up a talented debut author, that author almost certainly has more chance of making the big time than if they’d come to me; Penguin and Random House actually have a marketing budget, and though we’d all love to believe that cream rises by itself and all that’s really needed for success is prodigious talent, the cold truth is that even prodigious talent needs to have its trumpet blown loud if it’s going to be noticed. So while Penguin’s gain could be my loss, the author is the winner, which can only be a good thing.
