Isn’t it strange that two days after you get back to normal life after a couple of weeks away from it all, normal life has closed around you and the break feels a hundred years ago? This time last week I was exploring the ancient cellars of the wine market in Beaune, a beautiful small town in Burgundy which has become France’s capital of wine and chocolate (well, that’s how it struck me). At this exact hour a week ago I was in the process of tasting fifteen different wines. At the end of the process I bought a case of a sixteenth, which wasn’t even on the tour, (tasted that as well, and some crème de cassis) and somehow walked out in a straight line, back into the glorious sunshine, and got it back to the car intact.
And now…
It was raining when I woke several hours ago, and hasn’t stopped since. I’ve been wrestling with a knotty work-related problem for most of those hours when I’d far rather have been writing this blog post, and really should be dealing with another right now instead of indulging myself. And my life, which in theory was supposed to become a lot less complicated when we returned home, seems to be even more convoluted than usual. Normal life is suddenly a whole different kind of normal from when I left for my Burgundian idyll.
Big change, I said last week. Big news, I hinted. OK, here goes.
Crème de la Crime is a small independent publishing company no more. As of a couple of weeks ago, the name has been acquired by Severn House Publishers, and will become an imprint under their umbrella, still publishing top-class crime fiction, but no longer because it was me that found it unputdownable. The formal announcement to the press will be made next week, but the news was made known informally while I was on my wine-and-chocolate-fest, so it may come as no surprise to some Dead Guy followers.
It all happened very fast, and things are still in the sorting out and settling down phase, but of one thing there is no doubt: the future of Crème de la Crime is now a lot more solid. Running a small publishing company is a precarious, one-day-at-a-time business; determination and strength of will (or sheer bloodymindedness if you prefer) play as large a part as the books (though they were pretty great as well), and in among all the mixed emotions swirling around my head is a large measure of relief that someone else with better resources will be taking the strain from now on.
I’ll still be involved in a smaller way; the backlist will remain on sale for a few months, and four titles will be launched in the USA over the next few months. And I’ve already been offered my first freelance editing job by Severn House, so I’m not going too far away.
So how do I feel, apart from relieved that I don’t have to worry about Crème de la Crime’s survival any more? To be honest, I’ve been so busy dealing with the fallout – there’s always fallout, and I don’t mean that in a bad way – that there’s been no time to feel. I set it to one side while I was away, and since I came back, between 450 accumulated e-mails and seven loads of post-holiday/vacation laundry, I’ve hardly had time to fit in everything else I had to do, so analysing my emotional state has had to wait its turn. But I’m not losing sleep – well, maybe one night – and I haven’t broken down in unexpected floods of tears, so I don’t think there are any deep-seated regrets.
I’ll miss it, of course; the hard work and relentless routine were punctuated by moments of pure pleasure, most recently like the days I read Roz Southey’s Broken Harmony, and Chris Nickson’s The Broken Token – do I sense a theme developing there? – and realised I had discovered historical crime fiction that would stand up with the best. And there was joyous laughter, like the day I read Kaye C Hill’s Dead Woman’s Shoes. And air-punching triumph when we got starred reviews in Publishers Weekly, Editor’s Choice slots in Historical Novels Review, and what amounted to an ongoing love affair between Sharon Wheeler and Maureen Carter’s inimitable Detective Sergeant Bev Morriss.
But in the long run, I wanted the best for the authors I discovered and helped along the way; and maybe a little recognition for the work I put in, and the best way to achieve both was to hand it over to someone else.
So now I can take a pace back, slow down a little, and watch Crème de la Crime flourish under a new regime. And I’m still a crime fiction nut, so Dead Guy will still be an important part of my life, one way or another.
