Hey, There's A Dead Guy in the Living Room

I’ve never seen Star Wars...

Lynne Patrick

That heading is, in fact, literally true – but that’s only peripherally where this post is going.

There’s a radio show over here in the UK called I’ve Never Seen Star Wars. It briefly became a TV show as well, with exactly the same premise.

A well-known person, usually a rather more interesting one than the average D-list celeb, is asked to name three things s/he has never done – and then is asked to do them, and provide his/her reaction in each case. Nothing dangerous, or even off the wall: just ordinary activities which they’ve sidestepped over the years.

Those reactions are predictably mixed. One magazine editor had never made a cake; he did so, with some success, and his kids enjoyed it. One actress had never eaten lobster; she did, and discovered there were sound reasons for avoiding it.

One TV presenter had never read The da Vinci Code, citing an acute aversion to over-hyped bestsellers as his reason; he read it, and gratifyingly, reacted pretty much as I did, which could be why I remember that episode so vividly. He said he couldn’t stop reading; it was a terrific page-turner. But after he’d finished it, he felt very uncomfortable about having devoted so many hours to such... yes, well, I’ll leave you to fill in your own description.

And there endeth the preamble. Now you can see where this is going, can’t you?

There are lots of crime writers whose work I’ve never read. Lots whose work I have read too, witnessed by the fact that husband is, at this very moment, ordering a new wall-full of flatpack bookshelves to accommodate the overspill which has been accumulating for weeks. But probably far more I’ve never even sampled.

And quite a few I’ve dipped into, and dipped straight out again.

This isn’t take-a-pop-at-authors-I-don’t-like time, any more than the radio show is about pouring scorn on popular films. I know it’s all a matter of taste.

But try as I might, I can’t work out why I’m fine with some renditions of blood, gore and excessive violence and not with others.

Or why, since I can’t connect with Scandinavian or Italian cops, it was love at first reading with a French one the other week, and I’m instantly at home with most things American.

And why it is that, though character comes first with me, and watching a series character grow, develop and have a life is my greatest reading pleasure – I just adore Jack Reacher, who goes from book to book, adventure to adventure, unchanged and never moves on in any sense other than geographical.

I try to give every book I pick up the 50-page test, but when the first 30 contain two brutal murders, a lot of graphic bad-guy-induced agony and a pointless car chase that wreaks havoc through the middle of a small, peaceful town I don’t always make it. On the other hand, an elaborate reconstruction of a mediaeval torture instrument used to wreak a terrible revenge held me riveted.

I really did try with Sweden and Sicily, but nothing struck any chords.

And Jack. I was hooked from the outset, and I didn’t even start with the first in the series.

These are just examples, of course. I must have said many times right here in this blog that I’m a sucker for great writing, but as long as the prose doesn’t clunk along at snail’s pace or contain so many glitches or clumsinesses that I can’t see anything else – neither of which happens often, since commissioning editors are mostly as picky as I am – I don’t usually have a problem getting into the story. And as I said the other week, a gripping story is half of what it’s about for me. For much the same reason vis à vis commissioning editors, there’s usually a character I can empathize with, which takes care of my other main reading criterion.

So why some books and not others?

Now, that really is a mystery.

The devil's in the detail

Lynne Patrick

After all the activity of the past few weeks – short holiday in Guernsey, visits from family and new American friends, a larger than usual complement of theatre and book reviews – I had time to take a few deep breaths last week, and do a little future-contemplating.

Now that paid work doesn’t take up my entire week, the income associated with it has fallen as well, so in order to maintain a level of disposal income which adequately feeds my book habit, I’ve been looking at ways to cut business expenses.

One expense which seems to have increased disproportionately in the past two or three years is the fee for the post office box I use as a business address: my way of keeping home and work separate since my workplace is only twenty yards from the house. When I started Real Writers, my editorial consultancy/appraisal service more than twenty years ago, everything travelled by post, and it made sense. But now technology has taken over the world, and the P O box is empty more weeks than not; most projects have arrived by e-mail or via the website for a couple of years now, so I’ve come to the conclusion that it’s time to bow to the inevitable and make the service online and e-mail only.

Which requires a few changes to the website. Which in turn has filled my mind with thoughts about some of the authors I’ve had contact with over those twenty-plus years. Which is a very long preamble to a post which is something of a godsend in a week which has been a little bare of other activity.

So – first of all the essential disclaimers: if I’ve edited or appraised your work, and you think you recognize yourself in this post, it’s safe to say it probably isn’t you I’m talking about. Experience has shown that the problematic authors I’ve dealt with mostly had no idea what the problem was – or even that there was a problem. Most authors I’ve dealt with were – are – competent and professional.

Very, very few were less so. On a couple of occasions I’ve pulled back from working with an author at all because some sixth (or seventh or eighth) sense told me we would disagree to an extent that would affect the quality of the work I carried out. And I can recall just one occasion when I pulled the plug, and said I couldn’t edit a certain author’s work any more. But I’ve found that the vast majority of authors are all too aware how useful a dispassionate pair of eyes on their work can be.

I think that vast majority would agree that there comes a point when you’re so involved with what you’re writing, so connected to the characters and tangled up in the plot, that you don’t see the wood for the trees. It’s hard to step back far enough without laying the work aside and doing something completely different for a few weeks, and sometimes those weeks aren’t available.

That’s when those fresh eyes come in useful.

It’s amazing what you miss, or remember wrongly, or are so sure you know you don’t bother to research.

And that, of course, is a large part of an editor’s job: to spot the errors before they escape into the public domain and embarrass the author.

The editor as safety net: now, there’s an interesting concept. Here are a few of the glitches I’ve caught over the years:

In one book, two characters had been childhood classmates – but when the story took place one was twelve and the other was nineteen.

In book seven of an established series, the protagonist appeared to have moved house, without any reference to such a major life-change in the text. In fact the author had misremembered the street name from one book to the next.

In an historical, the characters visited a place of entertainment which existed in real life – but not until ten years after their visit.

In another historical, a character who lived in what we would call dire poverty suddenly had a pile of spare clothes, having had just one of everything until that moment.

In yet another historical, sort of, set decades ago but within living memory, police cars had sirens, which were still twenty years in the future.

It’s so so easy to do. Every one of those details is minor, and didn’t affect the plot or the outcome. But minor factual errors are like misplaced apostrophes: each one pricks a tiny hole in the willing suspension of disbelief. Also, if the reader notices one, s/he is constantly on alert for the next, which distracts from the real substance of the narrative.

I was recently revising a novel of my own which first saw the light of day a dozen or so years ago, and there, slap bang in the middle of a page, was a glaring typo which I’d failed to pick up in the course of countless reworkings and half a dozen proofreadings. So far I haven’t noticed any factual or continuity errors like the ones listed above – but then I wouldn’t, would I?

I dread to think what else is in there waiting to trip me up.

Old places, new friends

Lynne Patrick, deputizing for Marilyn.

If I learned one thing from yesterday’s highly enjoyable visit with Marilyn and her family, it’s that the two of us have so much in common that you may not even notice it’s me posting today and not her. Mystery fiction aside, we both struggle with technology, especially mobile phones, have menfolk who hate standing in queues, take a resigned philosophical view of the weather, don’t ever plan to get old... and that doesn’t even scratch the surface.

Marilyn and her family are currently in deepest Scotland, having set off for Edinburgh from Derbyshire in the early evening and spent most of last night experiencing the worst that the British railway system could throw at them. Between damaged rails which caused single-file traffic, broken-down trains which blocked a whole station, none-too-sober late-night revellers and temperatures in low single figures, it was not a good journey. And to cap it all, there’s no reliable internet access where they’re staying. Wouldn’t you think that the UK could contrive a warmer welcome for its guests from across the water? Sometimes I wonder if my country really wants people to think well of it.

To cut a long story short, it made sense simply to swap posting days. Especially since much of what Marilyn would have posted about involved me too. So she’ll be back on Wednesday in my place, internet connections permitting.

Local conditions aside (Derbyshire did its cold, wet, windy worst, giving our guests an insight into why the British complain about the weather), we had a truly lovely day. We began at the parish church in my home town, with its famous twisted spire and nine centuries of history. It’s four miles from my house, but over twenty years since I visited it; amazing, isn’t it, how you only get to see the local sights when there’s someone to show it to? It was a real pleasure to see it again in such enthusiastic company.

The church has been there since the twelfth century, and there is, of course, a story about how the spire got its twist. Actually two stories, one scientific, the other far more interesting. But I have to leave Marilyn something to recount!

Next up was lunch, at a lovely country pub my own family had never sampled before – always a risk, taking visitors somewhere unfamiliar, but it paid off. Flagstoned floor, elderly polished wood furniture, delicious home-cooked food, no music or slot machines – and a small flock of rogue sheep in the car park, though if I’m honest I have to say we heard about them secondhand. We needed two cars to accommodate us all, and ours arrived just too late!

We had hoped to spend the afternoon walking in the beautiful countryside which we visit far too rarely – you don’t, do you, when it’s on the doorstep? But every time we stuck our noses out of the car, down came the rain. Fortunately we had a Plan B: the home of the Duke of Devonshire (hundreds of miles from Derbyshire, but I expect there’s a story there too), Chatsworth House, familiar to movie buffs and Keira Knightley fans from Pride and Prejudice, Georgiana and probably others I don’t know about, being neither buff nor fan myself. And would you believe that in more years in the neighbourhood than I’m willing to admit to, I’ve walked in the grounds, eaten in the restaurant, even attended a reception in one of the rooms, but until yesterday I had never taken the tour? (See above regarding local sights!) So it was as new to me as to Marilyn and her family.

The house dates back to the sixteenth century, and opulent doesn’t begin to describe the furnishings, the art, even the structure of the building. I won’t even try; it was Marilyn’s day, so I’ll leave it in her capable hands. I’ll just say this. On one thing above all others we were agreed: we wanted to move into the library and stay there forever. So this post may not have a lot to do with crime fiction, but neither of us ever strays far from books!

Laying aside the weather, it was a day of delights. There were lambs in the fields and bluebells in the hedgerows as we drove back. And I feel I’ve made a new friend.

Making sense of place

Lynne Patrick

We did get to Guernsey, for four delicious days. We walked on the cliff path, explored old haunts, found one or two new ones, watched a sunset, walked some more, ate far too many scrumptious things that weren’t at all good for us and came home yesterday feeling relaxed and recharged. I love Guernsey.

Something else I did was indulge in a long catch-up chat with a friend who lives there, and today’s post comes out of that conversation, albeit in an oblique kind of way.

She’s working on a project that relies heavily on her knowledge of Guernsey, which is encyclopaedic and all-enveloping. And talking about it with her made me think about the way so many TV crime dramas rely on evoking the place in which they’re set and the particular characteristics of the people who live there.

It became something of a cliché for British crime writers a decade or so ago: set your series in a beautiful place and selling it for TV serialization will be a doddle.
Midsomer Murders, based in a kind of generic Cotswold village location, is still going strong, even though it hasn’t had much to do with Caroline Graham’s novels since the first series. Wycliffe, set on the stunningly beautiful Cornish coast, pops up regularly on satellite channels, dated by the huge monitors on the computers and the brick-sized mobile phones. I’ve never seen one of W J Burley’s novels even in the library, but he gets a credit on every episode.

And of course there’s Morse and his spinoff Lewis, set among the ancient dreaming spires of Oxford with its conveniently ever-changing population of students and academics.
There’s even a Morse walking tour now, taking in the picturesque city centre locations the cameras lapped up.

I’ll probably be shot down in flames, or possibly sued, for saying this, but I do wonder if the books would have gained the fame and fortune they did without the TV adaptations. Moving pictures on the TV have a way of getting inside your head and making you come back for more, especially when they’re counterpointed by murder and mayhem in the plot.

That said, creating those pictures in words on the page is a talent some authors have in abundance. I’ve just finished reading a mystery set in the Dordogne (south-west France for the benefit of geographically challenged blog-followers), and I really felt as if I was there. And when I extrapolated on that thought, I began to wonder if one reason I can’t get along with Scandinavian crime fiction is that the authors are too damn good at getting it right; they make it feel so grey and depressing that I simply don’t want to know!

I’m conscious that, aside from the above para, I’ve focused on British crime writers and locations here. That’s because all the examples I could think of of novels turned into picturesque TV series happened to be British. And also because I know them better than their American equivalents: certainly not because America lacks beautiful places. Or writers who set crime novels in them; Tony Hillerman is well represented on my bookshelves, and a certain E J Copperman has introduced me to the Jersey Shore, which I plan to visit one of these fine years.

So now we come to the point I’ve been leading to. I may have said this before, so apologies if I’m repeating myself, but what worries me a little about gory crime set in beautiful places is the credibility factor. It was with a sharp intake of breath that I saw that Ann Cleeves, one of my favourite Brit crime writers, had been persuaded to write a fifth Shetland novel. I heard Ann speak about the Shetland Quartet several times, and she always said that crime in general and murder in particular is so rare in the Shetland islands that even four books pushed credibility a little far. And now there’s a fifth. Will there be a sixth, seventh and eighth? Do I hear the rattle of shekels in the counting house? Who said publishing was run by accountants?

Enough for now, lest I use my soapbox as a ladder to climb on my high horse.

I hate to do this, but...

Lynne Patrick

I seem to be having one of those days. Weeks. Months. But especially days.

It just goes to show, it doesn’t do to get complacent. Especially about technology. Mine, such as it is, has been behaving impeccably for months: e-mails have got through, websites have fired up, I’ve even survived the demise of MSN and its marriage of convenience with Skype (well, more or less). But just when I thought it was all going smoothly...

The guy on the helpline called it an intermittent access problem, and since last time I looked intermittent meant it comes and goes (which is in fact exactly the problem), there isn’t even any guarantee I’ll be able to post this, um, post.

So if you tune in to Dead Guy on Wednesday in any regular way, I apologize. I know I’m a sad case, and a complete technological disaster area, but I’m giving in. I may even curl up in a corner and cry.

If the helpline guy, or some other technological genius, can solve the problem, I’ll be back next week, and I’ll try to have something interesting to post about. Unless I give up altogether and stay in Guernsey, where I’m supposed to be going on Friday. If we ever get there. We didn’t last time we tried.

Sigh.

Crossing over

Lynne Patrick

I went to the theatre last night. Not an unusual occurrence – I review for the local newspaper, and it’s a rare week when I don’t; sometimes I go two or three times.

The reason last night was a) worth mentioning, and b) a suitable subject for a Dead Guy post is that the play was an adaptation of a murder mystery novel, one of a popular series which had already been adapted for TV.

Anyone remember Cadfael? It’s fifteen years since the last TV adaptation, and I don’t know if the series ever made it to the US. He became something of an institution here in the UK – a mediaeval monk who solved mysteries using his knowledge of healing as a form of early forensic science, supplemented, of course, by being an all-round super-observant, hyper-perceptive sort of guy.

Last night, a theatre I sometimes visit was staging a ‘world premiere’ of an adaptation of one of the books. Someone I know was in the cast, and anyway it seemed like a good idea. I booked seats.

Modified rapture.

At first it was hard to tell exactly what was wrong. The dozen or so actors (unusually large cast for a small company) did just fine, give or take a villain who swashed a buckle or two too many and a good guy with the same problem. I didn’t even mind that Brother Cadfael himself wasn’t wearing lovely Derek Jacobi’s face as he did on TV; the guy who played him did an excellent job.

The company had clearly laid out a substantial amount of cash on sets, elaborate special effects for sound and weather, period music and costumes. The script...

Right. Yes. That’s where things began to come apart. Lots of short scenes, each in a different, heavily staged location. Not a problem in itself; short scenes and jump-cuts work fine on TV, but this wasn’t TV. There were long-drawn-out scene changes carried out by backstage staff dressed as monks and covered by endless mediaeval-sounding music. The pace, an essential component of murder mystery fiction in any form, was shot to pieces. It dragged.

As it progressed, I realized the whole concept wasn’t working. It was too ambitious. They were trying to cram a whole 80,000-word book, characters, locations, historical background, atmosphere, subplots, everything, into a couple of hours of dialogue. They used back-projection for some linking scenes – do they call it multi-media? – and it simply didn’t fit with the mediaeval setting. A couple of elaborate pieces of scenery were brought on for one scene, which could probably have been cut anyway. And when the stagehand monks wheeled (yes, wheeled) the trees on for the eighth time, I was hard pressed not to laugh.

The denouement, when it finally came, seemed tacked on; solving murders is what Brother Cadfael does, so there had to be one, but most of the story had been about finding out who was responsible for beating up a monk who had little to do with the rest of the action and the dead nun had somehow taken a back seat.

And I was left wondering, as I have on other occasions, whether it’s ever possible to make a success of adapting a novel into a stage play. And if it’s going to work, whether the trick is to move a long way from the original, and not be afraid to lose subplots and detail.

TV adaptations can be made to work, because TV has the facilities and money to go for realism. Dickens is great on TV; his intricate descriptions of locations, often pages long in the books, can be visually portrayed in seconds, and the move from one location to the next is almost instant. These days theatre almost by definition has to be stylized; the days of true-to-life drawing-room sets are past. This production with its large cast, lots of scenery and lavish effects clearly wasn’t cheap, but throwing money at a problem doesn’t always provide a solution.

Two of my two favourite leisure pursuits in one package: a murder mystery, and a visit to the theatre. On the face of it, a great way to spend an evening. Maybe it can be done; maybe I was just unlucky with this one.

Motives

Lynne Patrick

The first of May. How did that happen? It’s clearly the time of year when I start to fling my hands up in horrified amazement and ask where the days/weeks/months have gone and how has it got to nearly halfway to next Christmas without my noticing.

There are those who would say it’s because I spend most of the time with my head in a book, and though I might challenge most (a girl has to eat, sleep and carry out whatever freelance projects are dropped on her desk, and there’s been some good drama on TV lately), I have to plead guilty pretty much as charged.

The one I’m reading at the moment has a protagonist who reads even more than I do – sometimes two books a day – and talks in terms of pulling the current one over her head and disappearing into it. I know that feeling well. It usually comes when the book I’m reading is part of a well-worn series; after four or five outings, the character set feels like a group of old friends, and getting to the end is akin to waving goodbye to them as they set off on a year-long journey to some place I can’t contact them.

Which puts me in mind of Meriel’s stand-in post last week, while I was failing to get to Guernsey for a few days’ break now that spring has finally sprung. (Long story – fog, cancelled flights, overnight stay at airport hotel, long drive home in heavy traffic after second cancellation. You really don’t want to know; I certainly didn’t. The plan is to try again in a couple of weeks; watch this space.)

Where was I? Ah yes, Meriel’s post. It got me thinking, as all the best blog posts do. What pulls me into a book, I asked myself. Why do I choose a particular author’s work, or if it’s someone I haven’t sampled before, keep reading beyond the 50-page test?

(Have I done this before? It’s hard to believe that in six years of Dead Guy I haven’t touched on the subject. Apologies for repeating myself if I have; I doubt much has changed.)

Is it, as Meriel says, the puzzle?

No, not really. I quite often arrive at the big revelation scene without the smallest idea whodunit, and that’s absolutely fine. In fact, if I’ve worked it out ahead of the sleuth, I feel a little cheated; they’re supposed to be the clever ones. That’s one reason I prefer reading mystery fiction to seeing it on TV. You sort of know who it is before the last (or even the first) commercial break, not because you’ve applied your mind to untangling the threads, but because everyone else is dead or too obvious, or there’s a ‘name’ in the cast who doesn’t have much else to do. In a book the bad guy doesn’t have a famous face, and if the plot is properly constructed there’s that delicious ‘Of course! Why didn’t I see it?’ moment. Unless you’ve seen it already.

Usually I haven’t. Not just because my mind doesn’t work that way, though there’s a strong element of that. It’s mainly because I’m not looking for it. I’m enjoying the ride, and getting to know the characters.

That’s what keeps me reading: the storytelling, and the characters.

The quality of the storytelling is what makes me, or doesn’t, as the case may be, hunt down more of the same author’s work. The characters are what make[s] me (is it possible to get the grammar right there?) seek out more of the same series. Two examples you may want to check out: Reginald Hill, still much missed, and Phil Rickman, who has just been longlisted, hurray, for the Dagger In the Library, the Crime Writers’ Association’s annual award to an author nominated by librarians for a body of work popular with borrowers.

I came to Reg Hill by the route most people take – Dalziel and Pascoe. I started mid-series, as I often do, and decided from the outset that Ellie Pascoe was someone I wanted for a friend. Then I found he wrote standalones as well...

Phil Rickman’s Merrily Watkins was someone else I itched to sit and have coffee with – still do, but she’s probably too busy. Vicars usually are, and she’s no ordinary vicar. I’ve just finished book eleven in the series, and when two regular characters almost came to grief, I found I was holding my breath until I found out whether they were OK.
And when I found an omnibus of two Rickman standalones at our holiday cottage last summer, seventh heaven doesn’t begin to cover it.

Two great character sets, two brilliant storytellers. That’s what does it for me.

Malice Domestic

Meriel Patrick, guest blogging on behalf of Lynne

Some time ago, I started reading a crime novel that had been on my to-read list for quite a while. Within a few pages, it became obvious that the first victim was a small child, and my heart sank. In fact, I still haven't finished the novel.

Now, on the face of it, there's nothing particularly odd about this. Child murder is a horrendous thing. But then, any murder in real life is a horrendous thing, and I quite happily read fictional accounts of all sorts of people meeting untimely ends - is fictional child murder really so much worse than the adult version?

As I pondered on this, I remembered something I heard at a crime fiction conference a few years ago: as a crime writer, you can bump off as many people as you like, and your readers will cheer and ask for more. But kill a cat - or worse still, a dog - and the chances are you'll get angry letters.

So what's going on here? Why are normal, law-abiding citizens happy to read about grisly deaths of fellow humans, but are shocked and outraged if the victim is a pet?

It struck me that in my case at least, my reactions to animal deaths and child victims in crime novels are very closely allied. It's partly that they're both helpless casualties of events beyond their control, but it's not wholly that.

The main reason I don't like these kinds of deaths in crime novels is that the victims aren't involved in the story in the right kind of way. They generally just happened to get in the way, or (particularly with animal deaths) were killed as a warning to someone else. You can't hope to solve the crime by finding out about the victim.

This all finally clunked into place in my head when I encountered the term 'malice domestic', used to describe a particular sub-genre of crime fiction. This is an umbrella term used of works where the crime is, in the broadest sense, domestic - where the victim(s) and killer know each other, and the key to the puzzle lies in figuring out the relationships between them.

This, I've realized, is a large part of the essence of what makes something a good crime novel for me: a delicate balance of a nice chewy intellectual mystery to solve, and some well-developed characters whose lives I can be drawn into. If those key relationships aren't there - if the central murders are in some way impersonal - there isn't the right kind of tension to keep me really interested. I may admire a high-octane thriller or a well-crafted serial killer novel, but the chances are it won't suck me in in the same way.

Given that there are plenty of people who do like thrillers and serial-killer novels, this is clearly at least partly a matter of personal taste. But I don't think I'm alone. That perfect blend of characters to love and puzzle to solve is a heady mixture!

Second time around

Lynne Patrick

Spring has finally sprung, complete with daffodils, many of them at last, waving in the stiff breeze – the proverbial March winds have arrived a month late – and dark murmurings about digging the lawnmower out of the back of the garage.

It arrived over the weekend, announcing its presence somewhat soggily; apparently when warm air moves in to oust the cold, the consequence is rain. We were on the road, en route for and back from a family weekend, and a minor detour in each direction took us to a little piece of heaven on earth for book lovers: a small town called Hay-on-Wye, which holds the UK’s biggest literature festival over ten days every May, and where every other shop is a bookshop all the year round.

Mostly secondhand books, but books nonetheless. I’m not safe to be let loose with a debit card in a bookshop of any kind; I confess I bought, and not just one or two. Twice.

The hours we spent there passed in a golden haze. I think lunch figured at some point, but I don’t remember much about it. At the cash desk I simply handed over the plastic and filled my shopping bag with the loot. It wasn’t until I arrived home and examined my haul in detail that I found there was comparatively little I need to apologize for to living authors. So buying secondhand isn’t necessarily a sin. Though blog-followers may think differently, of course; I’ll try to duck the hail of verbal bullets.

Buying secondhand can be like buying from the supermarket discount shelves, or worse, from a remainder shop when the title is still in print. I try not to do the latter, though I have succumbed to temptation on a very few occasions. The former I admit to. Mea culpa as many times as you like, and I don’t suppose it really makes it any better that I only buy books by people for who writing is a lucrative day job in that way. Many of my favourite authors aren’t in a position to give up whatever day job pays for food and shelter and shoes for the kids, and I figure if I pay full price in a real bookshop for their books, their publishers will be shamed into continuing to pay decent royalties, and the whole bookshop concept will survive the onslaught of Amazon for a little longer.

So how did I justify the foot-high stack of secondhand paperbacks I stowed away on our return yesterday afternoon? The big question, of course, is, can there really be any justification for not buying new and ensuring the author gets his/her rightful cut, or am I just making excuses? Let’s see.

Six were by dead authors, and I’m pretty sure two of them have been dead long enough for the books to be out of copyright, so it’s unlikely they’d receive royalties anyway.

Of the other four, two were by my late dear friend Douglas Hill – and believe it or believe it not, they were the first books of his that I’d ever seen on bookshop shelves. Libraries occasionally, and nearly six years after his untimely demise he’s still up there on Amazon. But never before in a bookshop. I don’t think royalties paid to his estate would benefit anyone in great need; so how could I resist?

That left five authors who, to my knowledge, are alive and well. Three of the books are early titles which by any non-online route aren’t easy to come by.

Which leaves two. One is by an author who I’m hoping will become one of my Names to Look Out For, and I’m pretty sure my daughter will like it as well. Can we call that one an investment? The other... well, I have a feeling the movie won’t be long, so maybe the author won’t miss the sixty pence or so he won’t be getting from me. And I do have several of his other books, all bought new and at full price.

Am I making excuses? In need of forgiveness from authors everywhere? Or just a hopeless book addict who can’t walk emptyhanded out of a shop whose shelves groan with goodies and exude that inimitable and habit-forming aroma of well-loved paper and print?

Getting started

Lynne Patrick

Anyone who has ever dipped even briefly into my posts is probably aware that I have a penchant for series fiction. At a conservative estimate, about half the books in my house – and that’s a lot of books – form part of a series.

And it’s a truth universally acknowledged that all good things must have a beginning. So today’s question is, where, when, how did I first get hooked?

It’s an interesting one. In a lot of cases I simply can’t remember. Which says something about the state of my brain, but also a little about just how many series I follow.

Mostly, though, the first forays seem to fall into four categories: gifts, recommendations, meeting the author at a convention or some other way, and giveaways – goody bags or review copies.

Gifts should work best. People who know me know that a book is pretty much the best gift they can give me, so it follows that they should also know which book. Oddly, though, after a quick trawl along the shelves, I find that that appears to be the smallest category of the three. It’s balanced by the number of follow-ups and later volumes I’ve received with great gratitude; but surprisingly few introductions to series came by that route.

Recommendations are a different matter. Here’s a sample.

I make no apology for mentioning Ruth Downie’s delicious Ruso series again; I was hearing good things about it long before I dipped in and became a firm devotee.
Julia Spencer-Fleming’s Clare Ferguson is another who was imprinted on my consciousness by her other admirers.

I was introduced to J D Robb’s Eve Dallas by one of the first authors I published.

Years before I picked up one of the books, I was aware of Reginald Hill’s Dalziel and Pascoe through TV; but the books came because several people kept telling me how much better they were than the televised versions. They were right
.
Phil Rickman, now up there in my top five authors, first came to my attention when my daughter brought the first Merrily Watkins when she came on a visit home, and said, mum, you must read this. I borrowed her copy – and ironically, it’s now the only Merrily I don’t possess!

And there are more. Many more.

Meeting and getting along with the author also accounts for a sizeable slice of the action. Let’s think.

Mark Billingham: generous with his time, fun to be around.

Stephen Booth: an all-round thoroughly nice guy.

Gyles Brandreth: urbane and witty, just like his Oscar Wilde-as-sleuth series.

Jeff Cohen: need I say more?

Ann Cleeves: kindness itself to a rookie publisher scrabbling for a foothold.

Zoë Sharp: vibrant, shrewd, sensitive, like her series character, and someone I’m delighted to count as a friend.

There are many more in that list too. Unfortunately it can work the other way too: meeting and not getting along with the author makes me disinclined to sample their work.
No names there.

Goody bags. Now, there’s an interesting one. How often has a book landed in your lap at a booky event, or as an unsolicited review copy, and started a whole new proclivity, if that’s the right word? In my case, more often than I realized.

Elly Griffiths’s wonderful Ruth Galloway series springs to mind right away; would I ever have discovered her if I hadn’t found the first one in an event book bag?

And now I think about it, that’s how I encountered Zoë Sharp’s Charlie Fox, months before I met Zoë herself.

John Harvey I was familiar with, but I found his short Frank Elder series for the first time in a goody bag.

Peter Robinson. I think.

Those four gave rise to at least two dozen paid-for books on my shelves, and there are others I came to by the same route. So just in case you were wondering, giving books away as a marketing ploy does work, at least on me, and I like to think I’m pretty well immune to marketing ploys.

Review copies: I’ve reviewed several books in the past few weeks which have the hallmarks of first in a new series. There’s at least one I’ll be following up. A D Garrett. Remember the name.

All the above rely on other people to come up with the goods. In case you were wondering if I have issues about trusting my own judgement - I don’t. Sometimes finding a new series to enjoy is as easy as trawling a shelf in a bookshop. I do that too; online book shopping may be cheaper, but it simply doesn’t cut it when it comes to that delicious sense of discovery.

Where did you find your favourites?

PS Daffodil update. We have open blooms! And there was no frost this morning! Sssh - don't scare it away.

Spring, the sweet spring...

Lynne Patrick

Don’t get too excited, it’s not here yet. But the weatherman on the TV says it might arrive next week, and the icy pavements have cleared so I’m back in morning exercise mode. And there are daffodils. And crocuses. (Should that be croci? I’m never sure.) Not many, and not outside my window yet, but I’ve spotted a little row of miniature yellow trumpets and a small purple clump in other people’s gardens.

And the work famine is over, at least in the short term. I’ve nearly completed one editing job, and another is waiting in the wings. Not to mention a positive plethora of theatre reviews, some of which may even prove to be the kind of show I’d actually choose to see.

Which segués neatly into something I’ve been thinking about posting about for some time.

People are fond of telling me, with particular reference to the theatre reviewing, what a great job I have, and how I get to see all these shows for free when they have to pay astronomical ticket prices. And yes, sometimes they’re right.

Sometimes.

Not always. In fact a long way from always. But...

I’m fortunate in that I live in a town with its own small theatre, and within a half-hour drive of a larger town with two quite classy theatres. Those three venues mainly play host to the shows I review.

I’m even more fortunate in that the local theatre has strong links with several small but extremely talented production companies. Which means I do indeed get to see a lot of good shows. And yes, some less good ones too, and surprisingly often those are the ones with big names in the cast.

What tangent has she flown off at now, I hear you ask. What has this to do with crime fiction? Stay with me. It all links up.

Some of those good shows are sort of accidental: the kind of thing I probably wouldn’t see from choice, especially not after a long day at the typeface, but in the event well worth the effort of brushing my hair, changing out of my jeans and getting the car out when all I really felt inclined to do was slump in front of some undemanding TV.

And coincidentally, or possibly not, the same applies to editing. (And most of what I edit is crime fiction, so you see it did link up. Kind of.) OK, so some of the projects are a little workaday, and one or two border on think-of-the-fee. (Essential disclaimer: if I’ve edited you, and you think you recognize yourself or your work in the above, it’s probably not you I’m talking about.)

They’re balanced by others which I know will be a pleasure: authors I’ve worked with before, whose work I rate, and who can be relied on to turn in a clean manuscript in need of only a few minor tweaks to ensure it’s a worthy addition to an already exemplary canon. And sometimes an author returns with a second or third project which shows real progress, and allows me to believe I’m actually offering useful advice after all.

And occasionally there’s an unexpected gem. On average about once a year my editorial consultancy turns up a manuscript which blows me away, and which, if I were still publishing, I’d pounce on in a heartbeat.

That was why I went into publishing. I suspect that’s why most people in publishing went into publishing. Which is why it’s so sad that it now seems to be all about hype and sales figures and bottom lines and egos, at least among the market leaders.

So it sometimes comes as a relief to don my other hat, head for the local theatre for one of those small-budget shows, and find that imagination, creativity and passion for the way they’ve chosen to spend their lives are still higher priorities than fame and fortune.

Actually I think that applies to most writers as well. It’s further along the line that those priorities have got skewed.

Call me naïve. Call me a dinosaur. But I think these things matter.

Good book weather

Lynne Patrick

Gazing through my window on this supposed sixth day of spring at a thick blanket of white over the lawn and air filled with fluttering flakes, I feel I should apologize to poor old Jeff on behalf of the UK, which offered him such a chilly welcome last week. It wasn’t just bonnie Scotland; it’s been snowing here in the middle of England as well, and the two-fleece-two-shirt outfit seems to be the latest fashion. Apparently it’s all the fault of the jet stream, which is in the wrong place for the time of year.

It’s not always like this, Jeffrey my friend. In fact, the weather forecasters on TV have been gleefully reminding us that this time last year we were sweltering in the warmest March on record. It was just about the last warm weather we had all year, but they’ve forgotten that.

It should be the time of year when new things are burgeoning. I should be smiling at the profusion of daffodils behind my office, shedding my woolly scarf and hat and beginning to think about cutting back on the choc chip cookies so I can still fit into my shorts if the sun really does come out at some point. And new ideas should be starting to stir as I stride up the hill on my morning walk.

I should be so lucky. The daffies are still cowering in their frostbitten stalks, I made a fresh batch of cookies at the weekend and I haven’t had a walk for days because the pavements (sidewalks) are covered in trampled-down snow which turns back to ice every night.

On the plus side, it’s ideal weather for curling up in an armchair with a good book. There have been a lot of good books in my life recently. Some of them have even involved snow.

I mentioned A D Garrett a couple of weeks ago. That was only the start, and what a cracker it proved to be. Everyone Lies, it’s called, and I really hope it turns out to be the first of a series. Police procedural with added politicking; a hefty dose of complex forensics, brought down to earth by a cop with a knack for cutting through the jargon; lots of interesting minor characters, and pleasingly complex major ones; a plot with lots of skilful misdirection and several just-when-you-thought-it was-all-over moments. And the mean streets of Manchester. In the snow.

After that came one of Maureen Carter’s Sarah Quinn series, which I confess I haven’t taken to as strongly as the Bev Morriss series I published, but Maureen’s ability to draw me in and keep me turning the pages means I go right on looking for them. No snow here, though.

Next up was Stephen Booth, who writes about the Peak District right here on my doorstep. Well, almost; it’s a short drive away, though not at the moment, since it’s probably under a lot more snow than we are. Dead and Buried is the latest in a long-running series, and the characters feel like old friends: I have a great affection for Gavin Murfin, stuffing his face as usual, and of course the leading players Ben Cooper and Diane Fry who seem to inhabit different universes but still strike sparks off each other. It’s set at the height of summer, but there’s still snow; the victims in the case went missing in a blizzard. And the ending is one of those shocks which feels like a punch in the chest until you realize it had to be like that.

Then there was Semper Fidelis, the fifth in Ruth Downie’s delicious Ruso series, set in Roman Britain. I’m picky about historical fiction, but Ruso is well worth a few hours of anyone’s time, and I was delighted when a far-sighted independent publisher picked him up when he was inexplicably dropped by one of the giant conglomerates. Downie has a rare talent for combining great writing, razor wit and detailed historical research, and weaving them around a sharply drawn character set in a way that brings two thousand years ago into focus as clearly as if it was yesterday. If that makes sense. It probably doesn’t. But at least there was no snow. Just rain.

And finally – I’ve just finished All Fall Down, by Louise Voss and Mark Edwards, who, unlike many writing partnerships, actually admit on the cover of the book that there are two of them. I can’t say too much about it because I’m reviewing it and the review hasn’t appeared yet, but think page-turning thriller and multiply by three. And since it’s set at the height of a Californian summer, it kept me warm right through a sub-zero weekend.

Not all bad, then. Another plus is that reading real books needs both hands, so there isn’t a spare one for the cookie tin. And you never know, maybe next week the daffodils will be out and I’ll get my morning walk...

On the other hand...

Lynne Patrick

A week or three ago I posted about series fiction, a topic in which I have more than a passing interest. When I was publishing, the potential for a series was a criterion I found myself applying to every debut novel I was offered; as a result I’ve copy-edited eight series and done a deeper development job on five. Now I have more time to read for pleasure, at least half the books on my shelves (and there are many, both books and shelves) form parts of series. And as recently as last week when offered a choice of books to review for a mystery website, I leapt on the much-delayed latest in a series I’ve been following since it began seven years ago. If I listed the authors whose latest-in-series I actively seek, I could probably fill my usual Dead Guy space with nothing but their names.

Start looking at long-running series and some of the greatest names in crime and thriller writing come up. Rebus was finally laid to rest after book seventeen, and reappeared (by public demand?) five years later. Jack Reacher is eighteen not out, and that’s if you don’t count the Kindle novellas. Dalziel and Pascoe made it to twenty-four plus a short story or two, and would surely have continued into the uncharted future had the grim reaper not intervened.

And I don’t even need to mention the authors’ names, do I?

These three have something in common aside from writing best-selling series. Their careers all began some years ago, when publishing was a different world: a world which laid less emphasis on instant gratification and short-term planning. A world in which series weren’t cancelled after book two if they didn’t sell in six figures, but were given a chance to take root in readers’ minds and build a following.

Last time I delved into this topic I expressed reservations about the credibility of some series. I stand by that; four murders a week in a civilized university city takes some swallowing, a series set against the kind of photogenic backdrop where shoplifting makes headlines in real life even more so. But ground a series in sound common sense, as did all three of the above masters of the art, and it can run and run.

If it’s allowed to.

And thereby hangs today’s mini-rant, as much on the state of the world as on the state of publishing.

In another post a week or two ago I shared a snippet of advice I was given years ago, and which I’ve passed on whenever the occasion arose: when a piece of writing is ‘finished’, put it away in a drawer for six months, and when you revisit it you’ll find it’s not finished at all.

These days that’s impractical on several levels – but most importantly because everything has to happen now! Warp speed is the order of the day; no one wants to wait, to allow success to build.

One publishing convention that seemed to work for a long time was the one book a year principle; now, though, some publishers want the next in a series after a few months. But it’s still a rare piece of writing that doesn’t benefit from, if not six months in a drawer, then at least a little distance between first draft and final version. Some authors can pull it off, but speed and quality don’t always go hand in hand.

My concern is not about smelling the roses, though that’s important too. It’s about giving things time to grow. The instant gratification approach may pay in the short term, but it’s built on flimsy foundations.

Take your partners

What to post about when nothing has happened all week.
I could have a rant about the way spring stuck its head above the parapet a couple of weeks ago, then ducked out of sight to avoid the Arctic wind that began to blow yet more snow in from the Russian steppes. But if I did, this would be a very short post.
I could also rant about the parlous quality of copy-editing from even large, well-established publishers who you’d think would have a reputation they wanted to maintain. Everything I’ve read recently without exception has been littered with minor errors and inconsistencies that any kind of editor should have picked up. But if I did that, this post would be very long and very boring.
Or I could... No, that won’t work either.
Ah. I know.
I thought the book I’m currently reading was a debut. I’m fond of debuts, especially if there’s a chance they could turn out to be the first of a new series I may want to collect, and I’d say this one has distinct possibilities.
But when I looked closely, I found it’s not a debut at all; it’s a collaboration. The author is not one person but two: an established crime writer and a high-profile expert in forensic investigation.
I’m always intrigued by this way of writing, partly because I’ve tried it myself a couple of times and found it didn’t really work. For me, writing has always been a solitary occupation. If there are other people around, I have problems producing anything more demanding than a shopping list. Even the possibility that someone may appear at my office door is enough to play havoc with my concentration and focus. Every writer of fiction will be familiar with the way we lose ourselves in the imaginary worlds we’re creating, sometimes to the extent that we wonder where the heck we are when the real world pulls us back suddenly.
So how on earth do two people inhabit the same imaginary world simultaneously, in a way which allows the story to grow?
Another no-no for me when I’m writing fiction is starting with someone else’s idea. I tense up and go all non-committal when someone at a party says, ‘Oh, you’re a writer; I have a good story for you.’ And when I was starting out and attending workshops, my mind invariably stayed quite blank when we were given one of those exercises where the tutor gave us a skeleton scenario and told us to turn it into a story. I know it can be done; I’ve provided those skeletons to countless workshop groups, and marvelled at the variety of narratives that people produced. But I can’t do it myself.
I know it’s possible to work in tandem with someone else. Nicci French does/do it. And P J Tracy. I’ve enjoyed every one of theirs I’ve read, and both partnerships sell lots of books, so something must be working for them. And so far, A D Garrett, the one I thought was a debut, is holding up with the best of them.
But laying aside the process of writing which, for me at least, requires my own brain to provide the spark of an idea, then long periods of uninterrupted solitude to add the fictional layers – don’t they argue, or at least pull in different directions? Writers tend to be protective of their work, and rightly so; however valuable an editor’s input, it’s still the author’s name on the cover. So what happens when there are two authors, and one wants to go in one direction and the other has a different view?
I was going to suggest that maybe it’s easier when the two people are family; Nicci French is a married couple, and the Tracys are mother and daughter, so maybe they find it easier to climb inside each other’s minds. But the two people who make up A D Garrett aren’t related as far as I know; and there are probably other writing partnerships with neither blood nor marital affection in common.
Maybe I should stop trying to understand how they do it, and get on with enjoying the books.
And maybe, sooner or later, it will stop snowing, and publishers will start paying more attention to detail again.

Practising what I preach

Lynne Patrick

After a pretty good couple of years back on the freelance trail, everything seems to have gone quiet. So, just for the record, any rumours you may have heard of my retirement are greatly exaggerated. Such editing skills as I possess remain at the disposal of aspiring or established authors with work in need of any attention from major revision to a little extra polish; and of publishers large or small in need of a little freelance input. CV available on request. All at very reasonable fees, of course.

Meanwhile, since that spark of whatever it is that gets the new work going is also conspicuously absent (clearly the Muse of contemporary fiction also thinks I’ve retired!), I’m taking the opportunity to look back over my archive, AKA the five boxes of dog-eared papers beginning to moulder in the cupboard in the far corner of my workroom. And let me tell you, revisiting old projects can be an eye-opener.

If it’s shown me anything, it’s that the theory I’ve lived by for ftymumble years, that every writer needs an editor hold up. In fact, it doesn’t just hold up; it should be blazoned across every magazine, website, convention programme, anywhere writers might see it. Seen through the end of the telescope formed by the passing of the years, I can be almost as dispassionate about my own writing as about a complete stranger’s; and though some of it doesn’t appear at all bad, if you’ll pardon just a tiny preen, absolutely everything I’ve looked at NEEDS WORK!

And now, with the measure of impartiality which distance offers, I even know what kind of work it needs.

In some cases, there’s some overwriting which needs to be pared away. Sometimes the concept of show, don’t tell seems to have escaped me. And occasionally... OK, more than occasionally, a whole novel needs to be completely restructured. And typos. There are always typos.

In short, I can now see exactly why these works of unmitigated genius, or so I firmly believed at the time, met with rejection from an average of eight publishers apiece.

Nine novels I wrote, over more years than I care to admit to. Lots of other things as well: short stories, feature articles, reviews, ad copy, brochure text, press releases, a lot of which found its way into print; that’s how I justified calling myself a writer. And reams of teaching materials which almost wore out, they were used so much. But always, always a novel in progress. Not a one of them published.

It wasn’t for want of trying. The first couple sank without trace, much as I do when I try to swim (must be a metaphor there), and are probably irretrievable; but when I sent the later ones to seek my fortune, the most common response I received was along the lines of, we like your writing, but this one doesn’t quite work; we’d be glad to look at something else. Which means everything and nothing, especially when there are no pointers as to why it doesn’t quite work. (That isn’t a dig at busy editors and agents; I entirely understand why they don’t give pointers.)

And now, years and in some cases decades later, the flaws and issues and yes, major problems I failed to spot at the time are leaping off the page and giving me a good shake, showing me the value of the other theory I’ve preached to aspiring writers for many of those years and in some cases decades: when you think you’ve finished a piece of writing, put it away in a drawer and do something else for at least six months; when you take it out again, you’ll see all kinds of things wrong with it which you can set about dealing with.

I’m not claiming the editing skills I’ve been honing for a couple of those decades will knock any of all of those oeuvres into the kind of shape which will blow the next editor away; the writer isn’t yet born who sees every flaw, every problem, even every typo in his/her own work, and besides, what an editor likes isn’t something anyone can predict. But even from my very personal and completely biased standpoint, I think it’s fair to say that distance has lent not enchantment, but much clearer vision.

I have a picture on my office wall of a woman wearing three hats; a friend gave it to me years ago because that was how he saw me then. These days I mostly wear my hats one at a time, but over the past few weeks I’ve felt as if I’m wearing two. And it’s... interesting.

Progress - or just change?

Lynne Patrick

I think I must be getting old.

I was watching a sitcom on TV the other night, and a boy of about twelve unearthed some old 78 records in his grandmother’s attic. He asked, ‘What are these round things, gran? Place mats?’

It gets worse. She replied, ‘They’re what we played music on before CDs.’ And the kid replied, ‘What are CDs?’

Technology is out of date before you can carry the new gadget home from the shop. And everyone’s at it: banks are trying to phase out cheques; train companies use Twitter to update passengers about delays; publishers haven’t known what to do with paper manuscripts for years. The world is moving so fast that when I stand still I’ll feel it rushing past me like a 70 mph gust of wind.

In my own life, the local theatre seems to have been taken over by blinkered bureaucrats who don’t even live in the town. The local newspaper is moving out of the office it’s lived in since Adam was in short trousers, and into a building designed by someone with a mirror fetish. And the landscape around my house is set to change if ‘relaxed’ planning regulations have their way. Yes, folks, the developers are back, and this time they’ve brought in the big guns.

I don’t know whether to run away and hide from it all, or climb on the roof and yell at the top of my voice, ‘S-L-O-W down a little and just THINK about this before you change everything out of all recognition.’

Because they don’t, do they? At least, that’s how it looks to me. I ache to quote Native American wisdom to them: the bit about thinking through the consequences of their actions unto the seventh generation. In fact, the next generation would be good. Better than at the moment, anyway; they don’t seem to look beyond the next balance sheet.

It’s all about money. And worse, it’s all about money now. Take the theatre.

Last week the place was packed out; the show was a popular genre, and had a couple of well-known faces in it. But it was very... average. Tedious, in fact, as if the cast had learned it by rote and weren’t really interested. People left at the interval. Quite a lot of people. So the theatre’s coffers were full for a week, but its reputation for quality work plummets; those people won’t be back, and will tell their theatre-loving friends not to bother. It wouldn’t have happened when the woman in charge actually knew her audience, many of them by name because they did come back, every week.

Short-term thinking benefits no one further than the eye can see.

And don’t get me started on the criteria publishers use to select new titles... (Not all publishers, Ben. Some of you have the right priorities. I like to think I did; maybe that’s why I couldn’t make it pay.)

I’ll stop ranting now. I’m sorry this post has nothing to do with crime fiction – just the kind of day-to-day real-life low-level crimes against humanity that are perpetrated in the name of progress.

Progress? Yeah, right.

Previously on Wednesday's Dead Guy...

Lynne Patrick

In the absence of much else of moment in my life this week, I thought I’d expand on a theme I began to play with a few weeks ago, especially since Jeff’s post yesterday reignited the theme in my mind. His point about a series making promises and its author having a responsibility to keep to the original premise hits the nail squarely on the head. He also talks about growth and change, and that’s where I’m going to pick up the baton.

I’ve never attempted to write a series, not even of short stories, so what insights I may have to offer are solely from the point of view of the reader. And I don’t really have insights – just questions about how it’s done, and a lot of admiration for authors who do it well. I discovered early in my seven-year publishing career that booksellers, and therefore publishers, like series fiction, largely because it generates sales and keeps the backlist alive; it follows as night the day that the reason for this is that readers, aka book buyers, also like them.

So my first question is, what makes a reader latch on to a series and keep coming back for more?

For me one answer stands head-high above anything else: a protagonist I can warm to. It doesn’t matter where I pick up the series: first title, most recent or somewhere in the middle; if the lead character is someone I feel I’d like to know, to have a conversation with and look for common ground, maybe commiserate with when their personal life goes pear-shaped (Merrily Watkins, Alison Kerby, Bev Morriss), or trust to get me out of a sticky situation (Jack Reacher, Eve Dallas, Andy Dalziel and possibly Peter Pascoe), or is just the kind of person who exerts a strange fascination (Tony Hill, Temperance Brennan), I go in search of other books in the series, or look forward to the next one when I’ve caught up. The ones I’ve listed are only examples; I can think of upwards of a dozen other series on my current wishlist which fit the bill. It helps if there are other characters I care about too, but it’s always the leading player who reels me in.

Or doesn’t.

More than once I’ve been hooked by one series by an author, and less than entranced by a second or third. One of my favourite authors was persuaded to abandon a series which made me laugh and cry, and for me the replacement doesn’t have the same grab factor.

It’s sad, because it could work against the author: if a reader comes to the less attractive series first, the other one may never get a look in. Fortunately it doesn’t happen often, at least not to me.

My second question requires a little more thought: how does the author of a series ring the changes, make each book different without compromising those ongoing elements which keep pulling the reader back?

Different authors achieve it in different ways. Some keep ramping up the gore factor: not my favourite approach by any means; it strikes me as lazy. But then I probably wouldn’t be reading many of the series anyway. Others introduce new ongoing characters to the mix, and bring them centre stage now and again. Yet others find something new for the character to do each time – stating the obvious, maybe, but harder than it sounds, especially with police procedurals. (Check out Mark Billingham’s Tom Thorne series as a prime example of how to get it right.) Maverick heroes have it easier in that regard.

Occasionally an author realizes that a particular series is self-limiting, and stops before it loses all credibility. I had to admire Ann Cleeves when she called a halt on her Shetland quartet without being tempted to stretch it beyond the four she intended, despite its having won awards and plaudits, not to mention a TV series. A series of murder mysteries set in the kind of place where shoplifting is crime enough to make headlines can only be strung out so far, but at least there were several different islands she could make use of. When I heard there’s now a fifth title, I blinked a little; it will take an author of Ann’s calibre to make it work.

That’s the trouble with series, isn’t it? Credibility. Big-city police procedurals with a high body count I can swallow; and itinerant PIs or maverick heroes cover a lot of distance, so the bodies can be well spaced out. But for many years, the joke around Oxford was that, with four murders a week when the TV series was running, Inspector Morse made this civilized university city the most dangerous place in England. Now they’ve even retired Morse’s sidekick, so Oxford residents (of whom my daughter is one, so I have a vested interest) can lie easy in their beds.

And don’t get me started on the sleepy villages of Midsomer, where the local constabulary must work an eight-day week to solve all the suspicious (and ingenious) deaths. I’m sure the US has similar places where no self-respecting fictional character would want to set foot in case s/he becomes a victim of random slaughter. I do seem to come across a lot of serial killer novels set in Arizona...

I think the real answers to my two questions are that there are no definitive answers. I know what works – and what doesn’t – for me. Maybe for you it’s something different entirely.

Begin at the beginning

Lynne Patrick

I started to review for a mystery fiction website a few months ago, and when I was checking out this month’s list of books on offer, something struck me. All but one of the books I’ve reviewed so far have been debuts – and I wouldn’t cite the one that wasn’t as the best of the bunch.

Twenty-some years ago I set up an editorial consultancy with the intention of helping unpublished writers move towards the point at which they might become debut authors. Ten years ago I set up a small publishing house with the express purpose of giving debut crime fiction authors a springboard. Now I’m extolling the virtues, because mostly that’s what they make me want to do, of debut authors on the web. It seems to be a habit I can’t kick!

Not that I’m complaining. It means I’ve read a lot of debut fiction over the years, and a surprisingly high proportion of it has been remarkable. I’ve just finished the fifth novel by a writer for who, wearing my editorial consultant hat, I predicted success several years before her first went to an auction involving four major publishing houses and made number one in the bestseller lists. Several of the authors I published are still going strong with larger publishers; one in particular is also on his fifth, and the fourth was shortlisted for a major award last year.

I claim no credit; I was just there when it all began for them.

These days, of course, the discerning reader has to take care. Amazon has ensured that there’s now a high chance debut could mean self-published, and though some self-published books attain the heights of quality, not all do; statistically there’s still a higher chance of that if a rigorous selection process has taken place. And no, I’m not going to apologize for that opinion, though in the interests of avoiding litigation I should make it clear that it’s mine, and only an opinion.

Actually, that opinion doesn’t really matter; since I don’t read eBooks, my chances of coming across self-published debuts are pretty small. They’re not hard to spot in print; the copyright info page usually says something like Published by Appletree Cottage Books, which doesn’t exist on Google. So I can avoid them if I choose to. Maybe I miss out occasionally, but I’ll take that risk.

Which brings us back to that rigorous selection process. In company with every unpublished novelist I’ve ever encountered, I used to harangue publishers (not to their faces; that’s a self-destruct button) for their lack of perception when they spent their resources on yet another a celebrity biog, instead of on my debut work of indescribable genius. (Another entirely subjective opinion, you understand.) Then I crossed to the other side; I became that publisher, and made a vital discovery: publishing is a business, and in order to stay in business, a business has to make money. At least enough to cover its operating costs, and preferably enough to pay for an occasional vacation and Sunday lunch somewhere nice in the country; job satisfaction is good, but sometimes a person needs a little more out of life. And the bigger the business, the bigger the infrastructure it has to support before anyone gets a vacation or lunch. And celebrity biogs sell better than debut crime fiction. Go figure.

And in case there’s anyone reading this who wasn’t around last time I quoted the following true but little-known (and even less believed) statistic: on average, publishers are likely to make no more than seven per cent profit on any book; most debuts are lucky to break even, and more often than not make a loss. Which brings us back to that rigorous selection process. The book trade has always been a jungle, with thousands of books vying for attention; these days that jungle is positively... amazonian. In order to succeed, a book has to stand head-high above the competition. A debut, without the author’s reputation and track record to hold it up, has to stand head and shoulders high. So it has to be really special.

Yeah, yeah, I know what you’re going to say: if publishers marketed the debut fiction... And I’m not disagreeing. The system’s not perfect; that’s why so many people are resorting to the Amazon eBook model. (Though don’t forget that Amazon is a business too, and a very big one.) But even that isn’t infallible; for every E L James there are thousands, which sink without a trace.

But for the moment, I’m more than happy to trust other people’s judgement, and read debuts which have been through a tough selection process which I’m now all too familiar with from the other side. Every novelist’s career has to begin with a single novel; with proper nurturing, who knows where it may lead?

History? It's a mystery!

Lynne Patrick

Last night I went to see a play which first saw the light of... day? lighting rig?... back in the 1960s. Not that I saw it then, you understand. Of course not. I was too busy not being born/playing with dolls/studying for exams at high school (delete as you feel appropriate.)

Anyway, my point is, that play has now become a period piece; the set was littered with ‘60s icons like colourful beanbags, early Bond movie posters, a chirrupy phone and one of those uncomfortable leather couches with a button-back. And the equally iconic pre-curtain and scene-link music... suffice to say I almost became that woman who knows all the words and sings along.

The train of thought it set in motion was, in fiction terms, where does contemporary end and historical begin?

It depends who you ask. At a weekend workshop I attended several aeons ago, someone suggested history was anything earlier than midnight last night. I had a problem with that even then. According to the Ellis Peters Award, the UK’s leading historical mystery prize, it’s thirty-five years before that year’s closing date, which, if my arithmetic gene is working, comes out at the late 1970s at the moment. That makes more sense.

When I was publishing, I steered clear of anything post-1960s and pre-whatever year we were in. This was partly because I have a problem with calling my own lifetime history, but mainly for marketing reasons. Ask any bookseller where they shelve a book set in 1998.

In fact, when we were starting out and ran an X-Factor-style contest to find our launch titles (do you have X-Factor in the US?) one of the finalists was rejected purely on that basis: it was one of the best of the bunch: well-written, tightly plotted, with great characters and... you get the picture; but it was set in the 1990s, for reasons which made it impossible to rework into the 2000s.

But I’m now beginning to wonder if, as a marketing strategy, this is becoming outdated. The speed of progress seems to be increasing exponentially; my three-year-old laptop is practically an antique. And the publishing world has changed out of all recognition, even in the two years or so since I moved on. In my last year at the helm of a small indie, eBooks accounted for such a tiny proportion of the big companies’ sales that little guys like me could afford to ignore them. Today, the UK’s last remaining bookshop chain has reported an operating loss of many millions; add that to the way indie bookshops continue to tumble like dominoes and look for a cause, and the answer has to be... eBooks.

And the assault of technology on the book trade must have had an effect on the average age of readers. The reading demographic used to be something of a mantra. How did it go? Eighty per cent of books are bought by women between the ages of forty-five and seventy; and eighty per cent of library members are over sixty. I don’t know how accurate that was, but someone must have gone to the trouble of studying the marketplace, so surely there was some truth in it.

But now that so much reading is done not from a thick chunk of paper you keep in your backpack, but from a gadget you carry in your pocket, are those numbers changing? I know a lot of 60-plus people who have an aversion to gadgets, but I can’t think of a single acquaintance under 40 who doesn’t carry a mobile phone. To be fair, a lot of those over-60s do too, and some of them even own e-readers; but the level of resistance to technology does seem to rise in proportion with age.

I’m sure I’ll get lots of protests along the lines of ‘My 90-year-old mother is part of an online poker syndicate, and Skypes me every day from her iPad’; I’m equally sure that mother exists, and more power to her. All I’m saying is she’s not in the majority among her age group. My point is that the marriage of reading and technology has given reading a new spin, indeed a new buzz, which possibly makes it more appealing to younger generations.

Which, in turn, means that history can begin more recently than thirty-five years ago. To me, a play set in the 1960s doesn’t quite qualify as period drama. To someone born in the 1990s, 1980 is a whole different world.

Anyone know a good dentist?

Lynne Patrick

One of the first experienced-based pieces of advice I’ve always given to aspiring writers who seek my help at workshops or through my editorial consultancy is take care of your teeth. It’s a very rare and exceptional writer who doesn’t need strong ones, because we get kicked in them so often. Another equally useful tip is grow a couple of extra skins.

Unfortunately, as age creeps up on us, along with all the other bits which shrivel up, develop holes or otherwise cease to function as they should, teeth begin to hurt, and the extra skins seem to fall away.

So now I have another piece of advice, based on more recent experience: don’t delay or procrastinate; do it now, while you can still absorb the punches.

Quite a few writers have passed through my life over the years, and some of them were, still are, hugely talented. The ones who had that something special needed no help from me or anyone else, though some of them thought they did. What they really needed was someone who would urge them to go for it, do it, take the knocks and persevere.

I like to keep an occasional eye open for familiar names. The ones with the strong teeth and extra skins as well as talent are still around; they’re the ones who made it. Plenty of others, just as talented, have quietly faded out of my world. I can only assume they fell victim to something I’ve recently detected in myself.

Cowardice. Or possibly the ageing process. Even more possibly, one leading to the other.

There are currently two finished pieces of work on my computer. Well, finished insofar as any piece of writing is ever finished. Let’s say they’ve arrived at the point at which I need to step back if I’m not to spend the rest of my life tinkering. I like them; I gave them my best shot, and feedback from people I trust leads me to believe they work well. I have places in mind to send both of them. But every day I put them on the screen and stare at them, change a word here and there and do nothing else. A couple of times I’ve composed query e-mails. But that’s all.

Well, almost all. It doesn’t help when people don’t respond to tentative can-I-send-you enquiries. Especially when they’re people I had reason to believe were primed to at least take a look. There was a time when I had no problem following up on a dilatory reply; my brain seemed to be wired to reach for the sorry-I-know-you’re-busy-but-I-wondered-if-my-email-had-gone-astray format after about a month. These days it stops at sorry-I-know-you’re-busy – if it ever gets that far – and my teeth start to hurt for no obvious reason.

But people have always not responded; in the past I just moved on to the next target on my list. So that can’t be the real reason those two pieces remain unsubmitted. The truth is that the courage, chutzpah, brass neck, whatever you want to call it, which, not so very many years ago, helped me persevere and build a not insignificant track record of short story and feature article publication appears to have deserted me.

Maybe seven years on the other side, doing my best to let people down gently, has taken its toll.

Or maybe it’s just that it isn’t just physical teeth and skin that wear out.

An anniversary tribute

There’s inches-deep snow outside; the freelance editing side of life may well pick up as the year progresses, and could even provide a certain amount of rant material, but things are quiet at the moment; and my personal muse is exhausted after a spell of activity last week. So I know you’ll forgive me if I take the opportunity to pay tribute to a great man who died about a year ago.
A comment on a post a couple of weeks ago suggested that getting hooked on a series can lead to other things, such as exploring the series author’s other work – especially when that author is Reginald Hill. I agreed wholeheartedly. It’s a great sadness to me, and I’m sure to many others, that the supply of books by this master of his craft is now finite. It’s just over a year since he died, and though it may take a while to track down and read his fairly extensive backlist of early standalones, and I haven’t even read all the Dalziel and Pascoes yet, I will eventually reach the end of the list.
Like all series, Dalziel and Pascoe have their high and low spots. But unlike some series, there doesn’t seem to be an indisputable upward trajectory. Coming in towards the end of a well-established series means there are lots of early titles to catch up on; I’ve been doing exactly that lately, and I’ve discovered some gems which stand proud alongside the later masterpieces.
The four main players, Dalziel, Pascoe, Wieldy and Ellie, are all there, fully formed, from an early stage; maybe not all of them in the first one, but by book three they’re firmly in place. (Not that taking a couple of books to assemble the pieces is so very unusual: I recently read Tess Gerritsen’s first Rizzoli and Isles, and Isles doesn’t even get a mention, though both names are on the cover. And I forget exactly when Peabody makes her first appearance in J D Robb’s In Death series, but I don’t think it’s book one. Someone will correct me if I’m wrong.) And the little quirks and markers that always made Hill stand out from the crowd are there from the get-go: the humour, the wry observations, the words that make you wrinkle your brow and wonder whether to reach for the dictionary or just go with the flow. (I soon learned to go with the flow; half those words aren’t even in the dictionary.) But it’s more than that. Right from the start, there’s a sense of something special, something indefinable which transcends genre and renders irrelevant any attempt to classify him.
So when I find those early standalones, which, be assured, I ultimately shall, I know I won’t be disappointed, even though some of them go back forty years.
I’m already going back twenty-five. A few years ago, before I’d discovered Hill for myself, I (or possibly someone else) bought my husband one which was first published back in the 1980s. It’s set during World War 2, which is not a period of history I normally choose for entertainment, so when he was done with it we filed it on the shelves under H, and it became so much part of the living room décor that I almost forgot it was there. I don’t even know what made me take it down a few days ago.
But I’m glad I did. Everything I read Reginald Hill for is in situ: a wonderful cast of scratch-them-and-they-bleed characters; flashes of wry humour; evocation of background which makes you wonder if there are actually several Reg Hills, inhabiting different time-frames and environments and gathering experience to feed back to the one sitting at the computer; and above all a quality of writing which any editor would kill to find on her desk on a dreary Monday morning.
So I know I still have a bundle of treats in store.
I’ve said it before, but it bears repeating. One of the most brilliant writers that ever lived died far too soon.

The film of the book

Lynne Patrick

I don’t often go to the cinema; live theatre floats my boat far more effectively, and to my mind requires a lot more ingenuity and imagination, and only marginally less technical skill.

But the pantomime season is still with us, and there’s only so much Behind You! and Oh no it isn’t! a girl can take. So the movies it was last week.

The Hobbit is part of my childhood, much like Winnie the Pooh, Heidi and What Katy Did. I’m not alone in that; running the junior library at high school, I must have logged it out as many times as every other book put together; it never stayed on the shelf longer than a few minutes.

Lord of the Rings followed after a few years, and was all the richer for having sampled Tolkien’s mighty imagination earlier. And though in adult life films of much-loved books have often proved a disappointment, I have to say that Peter Jackson made a jolly good fist of bringing Middle-Earth to life on the big screen. Three chunky volumes, several interleaved storylines, villains of various shapes and types: he had plenty to work with, and he made it work.

When I saw he was filming The Hobbit, I thought, OK, he can make this work too. The reservations didn’t kick in till I saw he was turning it into two films. When the announcement came that it would be three, I felt much the same as when the rumour began that Tom Cruise was going to play Jack Reacher – and don’t get me started on that!

But unlike the Reacher movie, which, much as I love the books, I have neither desire nor intention to go near, curiosity sent me to the multiplex last week, to see exactly how Peter Jackson was going to turn one not-especially-long volume into three films.

It started promisingly enough. The Hobbit is a simple adventure story, but there’s plenty of additional Middle-Earth history in Tolkien’s other writings, and it looked as if they were putting it to good use. Bilbo Baggins is the part Martin Freeman was born to play. The scene in which the dwarves arrive for tea and eat Bilbo out of house and home was clever and witty. And I enjoyed the warp-speed rabbits.

In fact it was doing pretty well right up to Rivendell. Which I think was about halfway.

I deliberately didn’t re-read the book before seeing the film, but if memory serves, all the bad guys except the dragon are incidental. Trolls, goblins, wargs, even Gollum (arguably the best thing on the screen) are just obstacles along the way: not symptoms of an overarching evil as they are in Lord of the Rings. That doesn’t work in a movie, and especially not in a trilogy of movies. The Hobbit part one hinted at a really bad guy; in fact he made a brief appearance. He does get a few passing mentions in the book, and I suspect he’s going to take up a lot of the second movie. Which is why I’ll probably go to see part two: I’m curious to see what Jackson has woven out of those passing mentions and whatever he’s found in Tolkien’s archive.

I’m not in the least curious to see any more hordes of orcs fall off precarious bridges and precipices, nor to have my ears blasted by an hour of relentless big-action-scene background music. In Lord of the Rings, Jackson told the story and told it well. The problem with The Hobbit is that there isn’t enough story to make three movies, so what there is is spread very thin and diluted with lots and lots and lots of high-octane action. If I want to see an action movie, I’ll choose James Bond; CGI may be involved there too, but it’s not so obvious and in-your-face.

Or maybe I’ll just re-read the book.

The woman who has everything. Almost.

Lynne Patrick

It’s traditionally men who are impossible to buy gifts for, but I freely confess that I’m probably more difficult than the most difficult man you know.

I don’t collect china figurines or anything to do with owls. I don’t have the kind of social life which justifies jewellery or clothes made of silk or cashmere. I prefer a brisk shower to a two-hour soak in a scented bath. I’m one of those rare people whose brain doesn’t isn’t wired to connect with music; I'd far rather sit in a quiet room. And if I want to watch a DVD, I rent it, because I’m unlikely to want to see it more than once.

There, now you know all my secrets. And while I certainly can’t claim to be the woman who has everything, I’m definitely the woman who would hate you to waste your money on a gift that quite possibly wouldn’t make it out of the packaging.

So here’s the challenge: what, apart from chocolate, do my husband and daughter give me on the big present-buying occasions?

Daughter has a knack for noticing what is wearing out or running low, and coming up with something appropriate and welcome. Husband and I have reached an agreement. He’s as impossible as I am to buy for, so we pool the money and either upgrade our holiday plans or indulge in an extra few days somewhere warm and relaxing.

But really, when you think about it, the solution to that little package to open on the day, whatever the day is, is an easy one.

Books.

Since however many thousand are published every year, and I have a list of favourite authors which expands every time I discover a new one that blows me away, this has to be the gift that goes on giving. The recently-passed festive season added half a dozen to my to-read pile, and I just may indulge myself with a couple more from the wishlist in the not too distant future.

And of course, gift-receiving occasions offer an ideal opportunity to fill the backlist gaps.

My Christmas hoard was made up thus:

One by an author whose work I’ve never sampled, but the review I read of her current novel intrigued me.

The first in a series by an author I discovered last year, though the world at large discovered her some time ago; I’ve read two more recent entries in the same series, and am looking forward to catching up with the backstory.

Two of Reginald Hill’s Dalziel and Pascoe series, which I’ve read in completely the wrong order, but hey, they’re all brilliant, and there are still three I don’t have.

Two early-ish titles by authors whose series I’ve dipped into and enjoyed.

There may be more; I’ve already run out of bookshelf space, so they’re not exactly well-organized. And that list doesn’t include the slightly smaller pile Santa brought husband, or the four I didn’t get around to reading earlier.

Did you detect a theme developing? All but one of my half-dozen form part of a series, mainly early titles because I almost always seem to jump in halfway through. A similar theme seemed to permeate my 2012 books-of-the-month lists too. Looks like I really am becoming a creature of habit.

In fact, I think I’ve just spied the ghost of blog posts yet to come. What is it about series? What makes me, and a lot of other readers, latch on to a series character and keep coming back for more?

Watch this space!

Books of the month 2012, part the second

Lynne Patrick

Happy New Year, everyone; hope the hangover has abated.
As promised, here’s the second half of that list.

July
A Room Full of Bones Elly Griffiths

When I first discovered this series I was put off briefly because it’s written in the present tense: something I tend to associate with the more pretentious kind of litfic. But after a couple of chapters I ceased to notice; no books could be less pretentious. These days I can hardly wait for the next one. This time I especially enjoyed the suggestion of the supernatural at work, and the way the scientific explanation doesn’t quite fit with what happened. There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio...

August

I spent half the month on the kind of holiday which includes a lot of lounging around with a good book, so one book of the month was never going to be enough. I’ve whittled it down to four.

The Fear Index Robert Harris

This was before the holiday. I wasn’t going to read it, but husband persuaded me. Half of me is glad I did; it’s gripping, well written, a terrific story. The other half... well, it’s a seriously scary concept, and all too possible, and there are some things I’m more comfortable not knowing...

On Beulah Height Reginald Hill

My first holiday read. Someone told me it was even better than The Woodcutter (see January) though earlier, and part of the Dalziel and Pascoe series, not a standalone. It’s complex, full of landscape and the lives of the lead characters, and as wonderfully written as ever, so I was all set to agree – until the end. Maybe I’m a bear of very little brain, but for me it was a tad too subtle; a clue or two more as to the murderer would have made it Hill’s greatest triumph. Still up there, though.

Crybbe Phil Rickman

I’m a huge fan of Rickman’s Merrily Watkins series, so finding this early non-Merrily on a bookshelf in our rented holiday house was a great treat. There are bodies, so it counts as crime, but mainly it’s about dark forces – but handled with such immense skill that every twist is all too credible.

The Invisible Ones Stef Penney

After The Tenderness of Wolves, it was hard to know what this extraordinary writer would do next. What she did was prove she’s no one-trick pony. She transported me into a world few people know much about, and made it live and breathe without letting the research show. No mean feat.

September
Sworn Secret Amanda Jennings

I was given this debut novel to review, or I might never have found it. It’s kind of crossover mystery/women’s fic/possibly even YA, and deals with grief in a way which reduced me to tears without resorting to sentimentality. I’ll certainly be looking for the author’s next one.

October
Good As Dead Mark Billingham

Mark Billingham probably qualifies among my top ten favourite authors, but it’s been a while since I read a new book of his. This one reinforced everything I’ve ever thought: he has a huge talent for making each take on the basic crime fiction theme quite different from all the previous ones, without compromising on any of the basic elements which made me go on seeking out his books after the first.

November
I read my usual quota with a modicum of pleasure, but nothing in particular grabbed me. Well, there has to be an occasional bad month.

December

When I started this list, I told myself I wasn’t going to include an author more than once. But sometimes events overtake intentions, and when I made that decision I hadn’t read Susan Hill’s The Betrayal of Trust.

I said the series gets better and better when I read The Shadows in the Streets, book 5 in her Simon Serrailler series. Book 6 made that true tenfold. It blew me away. Not so much the crime Simon Serrailler is tasked to solve, though that’s full of twists and misdirections. It’s the background, and the other issues the book explores, as Simon finally, cataclysmically, falls in love. And it leaves delicious loose ends for book 7. Or possibly 8 or 9. What a finale to a great year for new books!

Looking back over the entire list, I realize only four out of the fourteen are by authors I don’t habitually go in search of; and only two are by authors I’d never sampled before.

I did read other stuff, and quite a lot of it; it just didn’t grab me the way these did.
Does this say something about the quality of the other books I read? Or have I become a creature of habit?

Yes, it's one of those end-of-year lists

Lynne Patrick

About this time last year my former blogmate Dale Spindel (hi, Dale; hope you had a great Christmas, if that’s what you celebrate) declared December Read a New Book Month.

I read at least one new book every month, which made December a normal month for me, at least in that particular respect. But it gave me an idea. So I made a New Year resolution. And whaddya know, I’ve kept it!

At the end of January I made a note of my book of the month: the stand-out title out of everything I’d read that month, with a couple of lines to remind me why. In February I did the same, and March, and... you get the picture.

So since not a lot else happens at this time of year to interest blog-followers, here are my first six books of the month 2012. The rest will follow next week, when even less will have happened, since the UK shuts down between Christmas and New Year.

January

The Woodcutter Reginald Hill
The brilliant and totally delightful Mr Hill died in 2012, to the enormous sadness of a huge number of people. Rumour hath he’d delivered a new Dalziel and Pascoe, which we’ve been promised in 2013, so this stupendous standalone wasn’t quite the great man’s swan song. But it’s a soaring triumph of a novel nonetheless. I’d go as far as to say it’s the best of the best; I’ve read about seventy percent of his output, and I’ve never read a better. He’ll be sorely missed.

February

My Dear, I Wanted to Tell You Louisa Young
This isn’t a crime novel; I do read other stuff. I’d planned to give it to my mother, but a quick flick through it got me hooked, and anyway I concluded it’s not really her kind of thing. It was nominated for awards, which I normally find a turn-off, but I’m very glad indeed that I read it anyway. I enjoy books about the 1914-18 war, and this was a new twist on a familiar subject, with characters I wept for and didn’t want to leave behind.

March

The Shadows in the Streets Susan Hill
This series goes on getting better. Her minor characters live and breathe, and the leads feel like old friends; what woman with normal instincts could fail to fall a little in love with Simon Serrailler? It had an ending that made me hold my breath in horror.

April

New York to Dallas J D Robb
Every new Eve Dallas is a treat; this stood on the shoulders of the others. Sometimes the familiar rises to new heights.

May

One Was a Soldier Julia Spencer-Fleming
This too. Julia reached a new level with this one. She’s not afraid to show all the warts of her lead characters, and we like them the more for it.

June

Old Haunts E J Copperman
This was a fun read, just when I needed one. Back from a fortnight’s holiday, unexpectedly jetlagged, the ironing pile looking mountainous – and I could escape to the Jersey Shore. It was like being back on holiday, give or take a murder or two. Thanks, E J.

More next week.

Aaaaaaargh!

Lynne Patrick

It began last Wednesday evening. I’d covered a mediocre ice show for the local newspaper, written and filed the review, drunk a cup of cherry cinnamon tea (try it – it’s delicious) and was in the bedroom climbing into my PJs when the gentle sound of cussing floated up the stairs. Husband was down there, performing the nightly ritual of garbage-carrying and door-locking. Except one of them wouldn’t. Lock. The door, I mean.

The next half-hour was filled with language inappropriate for most ears, so we’ll gloss over it. But you may like to know that if your door won’t lock, a stool set against it and piled with heavy books to a level which prevents the handle from moving is a useful makeshift way of discouraging opportunistic burglars. Not that we heard any, but I’m sure it would have worked.

A call to the house insurance company next morning brought a locksmith hotfooting before midday; apparently our household emergency cover includes not being able to lock the door, on the grounds of keeping the house secure. He replaced not only that lock but also the one on the other door, which had been temperamental for a few weeks and would apparently have played the same trick on us very soon, possibly next week, which would have been far more of a pain.

All’s well that... except...

Cut to Sunday.

Mid-afternoon was when we noticed it, sitting with the weekend newspaper mountain and post-lunch coffee. Not very warm in here, is it, said husband. He’s thin-blooded and feels the cold, so I thought little of it. But a little while later he decided to tour the house – and found that every single radiator was stone cold, and the green light which tells us the central heating boiler is working was on a no-glow.

The temperature dropped quite fast after that. Cue childhood memories of ice on the inside of the windows, and crossed legs because visits to the arctic bathroom were as infrequent as possible.

Our friendly local plumber was with us next morning, within an hour of the desperate pre-breakfast phone call. I love that man. Showering in the now-arctic bathroom was delayed till he’d found the problem, got the system running again and given it half an hour to take the chill off.

All was well again.

Husband, never the most optimistic of souls, began to wonder what would be the third breakdown. I tried to tell myself, and him, that two was enough, and there was nothing else to go wrong, but I don’t think I was really kidding either of us. These things always go in threes.

And sure enough...

One of our least favourite domestic chores used to be defrosting the deep-freeze. So a couple of years ago we invested in a deep-freeze which is supposed to defrost itself. Mostly it does, but occasionally, like most technology, it stamps its little feet and demands attention. We went to the supermarket this morning, tried to pile some stuff into the deep-freeze, and—

Ice builds up behind the back panel, the panel bulges outward and the door won’t close. Needless to say, the panel is fixed and can’t be removed. The only solution is to defrost the damned thing. And it’s the holiday season, so it’s full to bursting.

He emptied it while I sought out every duvet, sleeping bag and other insulating item I could lay hands to cover the contents, then I was banished to the computer, since there’s only room for one person to aim hot air at that back panel. Last time it happened the built-up ice was still melting six hours later.

What is it John Lennon said? Life’s what happens to you while you’re busy making other plans. (Which reminds me – I need to make my list of those last-minute tasks that make Christmas happen in this house.) I suppose we got off fairly lightly; at least none of the above happened during the Great Seasonal Shutdown. I still want to scream, though.

And finally, an apology for my ignorance, as evidenced in last week’s post, and for which Jeff C soundly and justifiably berated me. I always thought you spelled it Hanukah! It’s not a word which crosses my path too often, especially not written down, and when I’ve heard it spoken that’s how it’s always been pronounced. And when my daughter’s primary school class were given the task of researching the winter festivals of different faiths, she got Diwali. I can spell that.

Dear Santa...

Lynne Patrick

The sun is sparkling on the frost outside my window, and my calendar keeps reminding me it’s that time of year again. Less than a fortnight to go to the Big Day for those of us whose winter festival begins with C.

So it’s time for my annual letter to the white-bearded spherically challenged guy in the red suit.

Dear Santa

First of all, thank you for an OK year. Nobody died, no one among my nearest and dearest was whisked into Accident and Emergency, the floods and hurricanes and general meteorological mayhem passed by some distance away. We enjoyed a couple of good holidays (sorry, vacations) with only the odd mishap; I saw some great shows, read some great books, made contact with some friends I haven’t seen for a while. And we chased the developers off our beautiful field.

What I’d really like to ask for is more of the same. I’ve come to the conclusion that excitement can be overrated, and usually has to be paid for in some way. Of course, if you could arrange for a publisher to take off the gloom-coloured glasses and realize that my novel is a stunningly-written masterpiece with a gripping storyline and the potential to outsell Fifty Shades... , that would be wonderful. But first I have to check it comes within a million miles of that description. And raise the courage to send it out again.

And while we’re being unrealistic, here are a few more things you might dig around in your sack for.

Peace in the Middle East. There’s been a dire need for that for a few years now.
Decades, even.

A little common sense in the places Britain, Europe and America seem to feel a need to pass judgement on and send troops. Don’t get me started on that.

A little more common sense among bankers, politicians, anyone who is in a position to exert influence on the way the world turns.

Enough food, medicine and rain in Africa. Please.

OK, let’s be sensible. All I really want, apart from world peace and an end to hunger, is a happy life for the people I love. And bestsellers for all my writer friends.

And for booksellers and librarians all over the world – a better year than the past two or three. I can see a certain benefit in eReaders, but there are few pleasures greater than wandering between aisles of real books, touching the spines, reading the blurbs and first pages, feeling a little overwhelmed because there’s so much good stuff to choose from. And a strong base of people who buy books will help with the bestsellers request.

For everyone still picking up the pieces over in New York and New Jersey, it would be good if you could manage a positive attitude, swift action on insurance claims and plenty of good weather to expedite the repairs.

On the family front, a little, no, a lot less stress for my beleaguered sister, who has not had a good year. For my husband, anything he wishes for himself. For my brilliant daughter, the same thing I always ask for: health, happiness, a job which stimulates and rewards her as she deserves, and enough spare time and energy to allow her to get down to writing that bestseller. And lots of calorie-free chocolate.

And if you could find some stronger glue for my dentist, that would be good. He keeps repairing my teeth (too many sweeties from my grandpa's shop when I was a kid – let that be a warning to you, children!) and the repairs keep falling out despite his best efforts.

Oh dear – this all sounds awfully serious, doesn’t it? Let’s add plenty to smile about to the list. For everyone, not just me.

I think I’ll leave it there. Don’t want to be greedy. Would you prefer chocolate chip cookies to mince pies this year, Santa? You only have to ask.

Wearing another hat

Lynne Patrick

When I joined the Dead Guy team a few years ago, one of the links in the idea-to-bookshelf chain was a reviewer. (Hi, Sharon; I’m guessing you still check in from time to time, even if it’s a while since we heard from you. Give me a call sometime.)

That role hasn’t been filled recently, so this week I thought I’d take the opportunity to plug the gap, if you’ll pardon the expression. I recently started reviewing a book a month for a website, and they’ve used everything I’ve submitted so far, so I think I’d qualify even if I wasn’t a voracious and reasonably discerning reader as well.

So far I’ve reviewed three books, sent one back because I couldn’t connect with it at all and am reading another at the moment. Of the three, one was in danger of becoming a well-kept secret: a beautifully written heart-tugger which explored the nature of grief as it moved through the puzzle which caused the grief. I would never have found it if it hadn’t been on the list available for review, but I’m very glad indeed that I did. It wasn’t an intellectually demanding read, but it made me wipe away a tear or two.

One was a kind of adventure-romp: lots of galloping around the world, a couple of feisty female characters and a sexy hero, one of the world’s enduring mysteries to solve and a rising body count along the way. It was fun, decently done tosh, and I read it in a couple of sittings.

I described the third as dense, chewy and ultimately satisfying, which is probably about right. It was historical, which isn’t always good news for me, and the author had done a lot of research, which can be very tricky to blend into a storyline without getting bogged down. But his characters drew me in and I think he pulled it off.

The one I couldn’t connect with was so badly written I simply couldn’t get past the first page. I have a feeling it was self-published. And it’s reappeared twice on the list available for review. Go figure.

The one I’m currently reading is... interesting. It’s set in the 1960s, and judging by the little stabs of nostalgia it’s giving me, not all of them entirely comfortable, the author has either done his homework or he’s been there, done that.

OK. Now for today’s question. Does any of the above affect in any way at all your desire to read any of these books? The brief of the website I’m reviewing for is to support crime and mystery fiction, which means reviewers are required to say what’s good about the books and not harp on about what doesn’t work. I think my three-line summaries above are a little more realistic; so far the only real turkey I’ve chosen is the one I didn’t even attempt to review, but nothing’s perfect.

I’m interested to know to what extent my single, untutored opinion is likely to make people buy or not buy the books I’m allowed to pontificate about. And not just me; do reviews actually count for anything?

And how about those best of... lists that proliferate at this time of year? I have a vested interest here, kind of: my good friend Chris Nickson was recently delighted and flabbergasted in equal measure to find the audio version of his first Richard Nottingham novel, The Broken Token (which was the one I spotted, folks; big buzz for me too), on a very short list of best audiobooks of 2012 alongside J K Rowling and Ian Fleming in one of the UK’s leading national newspapers! Does that make you want to read it? Or does it put you right off?

I ask because I’m interested. If I’d known the secret ingredient that makes people buy one book and not another when I was still in publishing, I might just possibly not have given it up. But I’m still interested.

A Who the hell am I? moment

Lynne Patrick

This isn’t an insecure existential (or whatever) crisis about the nature of identity or the meaning of my paltry existence. Typepad won’t let me put italics on the title. It should read Who the hell am I?

So skip the existential bit, and the stuff about identity and existence; the question is, who do I think I am to question someone else’s vision of their own work?

I was at the theatre earlier this week, reviewing a play I’d been looking forward to seeing. It first saw daylight about twenty years ago, and was turned into a hit movie; I’ve seen both the film and the stage version, and greatly enjoyed both. This was a new production, big-budget with a starry name or two – well, maybe not starry, but at least known – and I’d heard good things about it.

Which just goes to show that if you don’t raise your expectations too high, you won’t be disappointed. It had a high spot or two, but mostly it simply didn’t work. It wasn’t so much that they did it badly; more that the approach they’d taken, the concept if you like, didn’t seem to get the play’s message across.

And that’s pretty much what my review said.

It was a touring show, so out of curiosity I looked up reviews at other venues on Google – and give or take a mutter or two about relatively minor details, every one I found sang its praises. A couple even said the setting, which was integral to that concept I couldn’t get along with, was a stroke of genius.

I’ve been reviewing theatre for a long time now, and I stopped being insecure about my own credentials for the job a lot of years ago, even when the critics I’m at odds with are from the big national papers rather than the much smaller regional one I was writing for. A theatre critic is only the man or woman in the stalls, and I’ve seen more than enough live theatre to qualify. Our job is to watch the show from that point of view, and give our readers our opinion; it’s up to them whether they decide to buy a ticket, or not, on the strength of that opinion. Disagreeing with fellow reviewers doesn’t worry me in the least; we’re all individuals who bring our own experience and taste to the job, and there’s no reason on earth why we shouldn’t form different views.

But it didn’t end there. Until I’d written and filed my review, I’d only glanced at the programme (I think American for that is playbill) to check the names of the cast members who weren’t so familiar. When I looked properly, I found that the author, a hugely experienced and respected playwright, was also the director of this particular production – which meant the concept which felt so wrong was actually his idea.

That’s when I had my Who the hell am I? moment.

Had I missed the point? Had I simply failed to latch on to what he was trying to say? And in the light of those other reviews, was I pretty much the only critic in the UK who didn’t get it?

OK, so my own view of how it should be approached chimed with the directors of the movie and the previous stage production I’d seen. But hey, two people among so many; maybe they missed the point as well, and maybe the author wasn’t around to tell them they’d got it wrong.

Or maybe...

Theatre is like reading in many ways; the most significant (and relevant to this post!) is that they’re both two-way processes. What the audience member/reader gets out isn’t necessarily what the author thinks s/he has put in. If that sounds too deep and complex for a damp Wednesday morning in November, I apologize – but it’s really quite simple, and goes back a few paragraphs to where I described reviewers: individuals, who bring our own experience and taste to the job.

To my mind, that description kind of sums up the entire human race.

Which is why that Who the hell am I? moment has passed. Maybe I got it wrong, maybe I just got it... different. I’m only human after all.

Just a thought...

Lynne Patrick

I’m not often given to whimsy, but an odd little thought has been perambulating around my head this morning.

What is it about agents, small publishers and... stairs?

I suppose it was triggered by Josh’s post yesterday about Mimi and Rodolfo and his new Upper West side garret, but wherever it started, it won’t go away. So this is an attempt at exorcism. Or maybe I mean excisement. Something like that, anyway.

It’s not just Josh. In a ftymumble-year career as a writer, editor and publisher, I’ve had cause to visit the office of an agent or seven, and quite a few publishers too.

Maybe I’m suffering from selective memory syndrome, but I can name a few agents whose offices were, and probably still are, up at least two flights; the prevailing image in my mind of those visits is of a long climb followed by a few minutes to let the sweat dry and my breathing settle before going about whatever business took me there.

I’ve sometimes wondered if that location is part of the test authors have to pass before being taken on by an agent. Authors need physical stamina; one of my favourite quotes from a deliciously witty writer called Keith Waterhouse who died a couple of years ago describes the process of writing a novel as akin to digging a small quarry with a teaspoon. So if you can’t make it up those stairs without needing oxygen at the top, forget it.

I don’t have huge experience of large publishers’ premises, at least not book publishers. Actually only one, and just half a dozen steps up to a large foyer. For the Big Six publishers it’s serried ranks of desks in open-plan offices, only discernible from insurance companies or the head offices of large conglomerates by the cover proofs and piles of newly-delivered review copies. And lifts (sorry, elevators) to the upper floors.

Small indies, though – that’s a different matter. The cover proofs and printers’ boxes are still much in evidence, but we’re talking old houses with converted attics; a pair of rooms above laundromats or newsagents; in one case a maze of narrow passageways and cubby-holes just large enough for a desk and chair. And magazines, before they were all rationalized into one tall glass building, seemed to inhabit the dusty space above an old-fashioned arcade of little shops selling watches, bric-a-brac and antiquarian books.

Sounds like a different world, doesn’t it? A 1950s time-warp, rather than the streamlined production line operation which at least for the time being continues to turn manuscripts into delicious-smelling hardbacks, and will soon only turn computer files into different computer files with no smell at all except that faint ozone aroma that hangs around electricity.

For now, though, until all the big publishers merge into one computerized operation and subsume or bankrupt most of the little ones, that little world does still exist, and I hope will continue to do so, if only as a part of an agent’s selection process.

Preserving little bits of the past as the future rolls inexorably towards us... I said it was whimsy. I must be getting old.

It's all in the timing...

Lynne Patrick

Interesting post from Jeff on Monday. He usually makes me smile, and this week he made me think as well.

Yes, of course Haunted Guesthouse #5 will need to take Sandy into account; that’s a no-brainer. But what about Haunted Guesthouse #4, which will hit the bookstands only a little over three months after the event? It’s too late in the publishing process to make major changes, so in the absence of hair-tearing and yowls of dismay from our friend E J C, I’m assuming the action took place before the end of October.

Which leads me into the way Jeff’s post has been directing my thoughts for the past couple of days.

Where a book takes place is a vital part of the tapestry which makes up a piece of fiction. But what about when?

Sometimes it’s easy. A historical novel, whether you define history as a long time ago or any time before midnight last night, can be placed with a degree of precision, especially if a specific event is key to the plot. C J Sansom used the sinking of the Mary Rose (more familiar to us Brits than you over there across the water – sorry about that.) And two authors in whom I have a particular interest, Roz Southey and Chris Nickson, have both researched aspects of the 1730s in such detail that their books make you feel you could follow their characters around the streets.

But for authors of contemporary fiction it’s less straightforward, as I discovered on my own account recently when I attempted to revise something I started writing back in the mid-90s. I thought I’d come up with the definitive version in 2002, but a couple of publishers didn’t agree (a tough time for debut authors, hard to place this kind of thing in the current difficult market, not sure how we’d pitch it; nothing changes, does it?) and then I crossed the fence and started my own publishing company and somehow there wasn’t time...

Anyway, I picked it up again a few months ago, and whaddya know, ten years on there’s a whole lot of stuff that doesn’t work any more.

Sometimes it doesn’t matter; a lot of books are made to be read once, then either treasured forever because that’s what you do with books, or sent off to the charity shop as soon as you know whodunit, depending on your point of view. But sometimes it’s not so easy. In these days of galloping technological advances the latest piece of cyber-kit is out of date practically before you’ve bought it, so mentioning it in fiction dates the story in a heartbeat. Which can make things a tad tricky in a series, even if no specific time period is, um, specified.

The march of technology is a bump in the road which two of my favourite series authors (and probably a whole lot more I haven’t taken in) have hit a time or seven, largely because the action in the series takes place over a far shorter period of time than it’s taken to publish the books.

Reginald Hill’s Dalziel and Pascoe made their first appearance an astonishing forty-two years ago. In real time Pascoe would be a happily retired grandfather, and Dalziel... well, yes, OK, probably wouldn’t have survived his bad habits. 1970s technology consisted of manual typewriters and a phone you could use to inflict blunt trauma – yet more than half the books make use of the Police National Computer and Wieldy’s internet skills, so the years have clearly telescoped more than a little.

And so far J D Robb’s In Death series, set half a century in the future, has managed to stay a step or two ahead by resorting to Star Trek holo-technology and flying cars alongside computers that seem to behave not too dissimilarly to the one I’m using right now. She seemed to invent the smart-phone right at the start of the series (which began in 1995 – Bill Gates, eat your heart out) but it hasn’t noticeably moved on.

I’m not suggesting this little problem mars my enjoyment in any way at all; I keep reading the books because I love the characters and the writing, and the plots aren’t bad either. I’m always impatient for the next Eve Dallas, and I expect I’ll weep when I run out of Dalziel and Pascoe backlist to catch up on. The same applies to a whole lot of authors whose work I enjoy. But how to keep pace with the real world must surely be a conundrum for authors.

PS On the subject of technology, I've just availed myself for the first time of one of the wonders of Typepad - it adds links to further information on request. Can I just say I have absolutely no idea what you'll get if you click on those links.

Only connect

Lynne Patrick

It’s over, then. Not the post-Sandy clear-up, which will take a few weeks, months, years yet. I mean the election. No delays for major recounts, disputes or mechanical failures this time. When I went to bed last night the polls were beginning to close, and when I woke this morning the right guy had won.

What’s that you say? I’m four thousand miles away so it’s nothing to do with me? Maybe, but I can’t help having an opinion, and our own news media have been almost as full of it as yours for the past few weeks; the world gets smaller every day.

My opinion, for what it’s worth, is that Barack Obama is that rare oxymoron, an honest politician whose heart is in the right place; and Romney... isn’t. I have scant evidence other than my own perceptions for either view, and if lawyers’ letters begin to fly across the water I’ll probably regret and withdraw the second one, but based on simple observation it’s what I think.

I also think that no man (not even a woman) can be expected to clear up an almighty economic mess and get a large country back on its feet in four years, especially not when he had to spend the first year getting used to a whole new lifestyle and the last one defending his position so he can continue what he started for another four years. So whoever had won back in 2008, there would have been no quick fix. Fortunately, enough people saw that, and voted to let Obama continue what he started.

Enough of that. The circus is over, and the real business of living goes on. And I was planning to post about something completely different today anyway.

Last week’s seventh circle of American hell is still too fresh in the memory for a lighter approach; I’ll save that for another week, when your east coast is feeling less fragile and battered. A few slightly more serious thoughts have been assailing my brain, including the way familiarity, or personal connection, makes any kind of disaster more real, and not just another news item about something that happened far away. In world terms, Hurricane Katrina was huge, but I didn’t feel it personally the way I’ve felt Sandy – and yes, Jeff, you’re right; we should find scarier names. Sandy is the stray dog in Annie, for goodness sake!

I suppose finding a local connection with a national or international event is a journalistic trick, but it’s one which works. As long ago as 1988 I recall my local newspaper leading on the Lockerbie bombing, not because my home town is anywhere near Lockerbie, but because one of their reporters just happened to be stuck in the resulting traffic jam and could give a first-hand account. And in 2004 when the tsunami hit southern Asia, they followed the disappearance, and fortunately the rescue, of a local family who were working out there. Both stories brought home that sense of there but for the grace...

And, if I’m allowed to invoke Graham Greene’s icy crystal in the heart of every writer, and edge a little way back towards the stated function of this blog without sounding callous and dismissive (which I’m certainly not – I ache for you guys without power or clean water), this particular journalistic trick is one which transfers neatly to fiction.

A while ago I read a crime novel which included an account of a terrorist bombing in a city centre. It wasn’t the first of its kind I’d read, but it was the best, and I wish the name of the book hadn’t receded into the mists of memory. Sometimes that kind of scene feels second-hand, as if the author has watched it on TV and doesn’t have much idea how it actually feels. This one showed the protagonist stumbling around in debris and body parts, disorientated, his hearing temporarily gone, unable to recognize streets and buildings which had been familiar only a hour or so earlier. It felt right. It felt genuine. It felt as if this was how it really was, and as if the author had been there, done that himself. Or possibly herself; I don’t recall.

I don’t recommend seeking out terrorist bombs as a way of giving fiction an extra layer of reality, but it works on a simpler level too. Sometimes you just know the author is genuinely familiar with the place the story is set; and sometimes you know s/he isn’t.

I wonder if the next Haunted Guest House mystery by your friend and mine E J Copperman will include a scene in which Alison gazes helplessly at a pile of rubble (please, not hers!), or begins to direct a guest to that demolished rollercoaster, then suddenly remembers...

Blow, ye winds

Almost exactly twenty-five years ago a weatherman on good old BBC TV announced that rumours of a hurricane in the south of England were greatly exaggerated.
Next morning the country awoke to news reports of fallen trees, blocked roads, crushed cars, buildings in ruins, roofs blown off houses... you get the picture.
The high winds continued all day. In the afternoon in my own little part of the country, which isn’t even the south, a huge tree nearly four hundred years old blew down and crushed a building at the local secondary school (you’d call it high school, but that means something different over here), and some kids had vacated the place only a few minutes earlier; I went through a tense few minutes between hearing the news and seeing my own eleven-year-old daughter walk up the path to our front door.
Then far fewer years ago, 2007 I think, we got the floods. Rivers overflowed; the middle of the country was under water for a week; at least two small towns were devastated and are still recovering; a good friend watched her car slide off the edge of a collapsing road and sink to the bottom of a lake.
Those two occasions are probably the only ones in my lifetime that the UK will come close to what New Jersey and New York went through on Monday night. While I don’t pretend to feel what you’re feeling, or even to appreciate a fraction of it, I can sympathize, and to a small degree empathize as well.
Here I am, four thousand miles away, in the safety of my fairly robust single-storey office with its rain-spotted windows through which the only visible weather is a lot of low cloud and a few tumbling leaves. So while I don’t think I shall rest entirely easy until I know my friends over there in the thick of it, and my cousin in the blizzards assailing Maryland and Virginia, are safe and well, I can take a pace back and be a little philosophical.
The thoughts running around my head range from maybe now the global warming sceptics will be a little less scathing about the power of nature to kick back when she’s abused, through to if it was me in that situation, what, aside from family and friends, would I be moving to a safe height to ensure its survival?
In fact, this morning as I mused over what to post about today, this last idea came out on top.
But you know what? What Marilyn said on Saturday was bang on the money. Somehow I can’t make light of it, take a less serious view. Because scary is what it is. Especially if global warming (about which I am definitely not sceptical) means this is the shape of things to come.
So I think I’ll leave it there, and go back to sending positive thoughts and energy winging their way across the Atlantic.
Hang in there, guys.

The triumph of good

Lynne Patrick

I think it was an Irish or French philosopher who said it; maybe someone will fill the gap in my knowledge.

All that is required for evil to triumph is for good men to do nothing.

Yesterday afternoon good men (and quite a few women) stood up and did the right thing – and evil did not triumph.

It’s something that means more in the UK than in America: the preservation of green space, and refusal to allow selfish opportunists to exploit their sole agenda, making a quick buck, by filling that space with houses no one can afford to buy at the moment.

Over in the US, you have more space than you know what to do with. Our island is crowded, and growing ever more so day by day. But overcrowding is no excuse for covering the little countryside that remains, the lungs and heart of the land, with concrete and brick, joining one village to the next, overloading the drains and local facilities such as schools and shops. We need to retain a little green beauty in our lives.

I’d better backtrack a little, before my three readers go away to chat among themselves. Eighteen months ago a developer decided to seek permission to build houses in a beautiful field, currently the home and all-day buffet of half a dozen horses. The field happens to be right opposite my house, but that wasn’t the only reason we fought it. It was just plain wrong, in every possible way.

We sought support from all over the village, and we got it. We talked to the planning officials and found they were on our side. There are huge tracts of land not far away, previously ugly, dirty industrial sites, which are being cleaned up to enable far more attractive houses, schools, shops, everything that’s needed, to be built there; since so few people are buying houses at the moment, the officials want to direct them towards that development, not smaller ones designed with no other purpose than to put money in the builders’ pockets.

The developers backed off – but we soon found they had only retreated to gather their resources. They reapplied for permission in June this year, and we’ve spent most of the summer fighting the battle all over again – and yesterday, at least for the time being, we won. The local council’s planning committee voted unanimously – yes, I did say unanimously – to refuse permission.

Good men and women did something. Evil did not triumph. After the vote - did I mention it was unanimous? it slunk away with its tail between its legs, bemoaning the waste of the six-figure sum it spent on putting together its grubby little proposal.

OK, it has nothing to do with crime fiction. But it would have been a crime against humanity. And it’s occupied my mind almost exclusively for the past few days, and someone once told me that blogging is about what occupies your mind. And besides, I want to celebrate in every possible way, and that includes spreading the glad news every way I can.

And anyway, isn’t crime fiction all about the triumph of good over evil?

Words, words, words

Lynne Patrick

A confession: about eight Wednesdays out of ten, I sit at the computer to compose my Dead Guy post without the smallest idea what I’m going to post about. Occasionally, though less so recently, something has happened during the week which puts me in rant mode. Sometimes the main focus of everyday life yields up something which may be of interest. But mostly I sit and stare at the screen until a random thought coalesces into a few hundred words.

If the result is a lot of posts which you prefer to gloss over en route for Jeff’s wit or Erin’s good advice, or the far-more-gripping-than-mine thoughts of Marilyn, Jessy, Josh or Ben, I apologize. Do feel free to chat among yourselves till Thursday.

In fact it’s a constant surprise to me where those random thoughts come from. One moment there’s a blank screen; the next, my fingers are on the keys and something is appearing in front of me.

I have a feeling that this means I may still be a writer at heart, regardless of things I’ve said in the recent past about leaving all that behind. The most common question writers are asked by non-writers is that old chestnut where do you get your ideas from? And the only answer that ever made sense to me was they’re just kind of... there; if I didn’t get the ideas, I wouldn’t be a writer.

Somehow, when a writer sits at the keyboard or picks up a pen, words happen. Not always the best possible words. Far too often not even words they/you/we want to keep; when writing, rather than editing or publishing, was my main focus, the majority of the words I produced finished up in the waste paper bin or that place out in the ether where stuff goes when someone presses the delete key. But words, words, words, lots of them, a small proportion of which survived to be honed and polished into a shape I wasn’t too embarrassed to send out to seek my fortune.

And sometimes they’re not even the words I set out to write. (There, see, I’m using the present tense. That writer gene must still be active.) Today, for instance, I was going to post about the role played by chance and coincidence in crime and mystery fiction. The seed of that idea lay in oddest place you could imagine, and somehow the post began to morph into ideas in general, and what triggers them. And that morphed into... well, you can see where it went.

Which possibly serves as an illustration of the notion that writers don’t necessarily have total control over what they write. Sometimes it just runs away and does as it likes.

Some famous author or other, I think it may be Fay Weldon, is known to deny hotly that this happens. More specifically, she refuses to acknowledge that characters in fiction sometimes behave according to their own rules and don’t do what the writer wants them to. She creates the characters and the plot, she claims, so her characters do exactly what her plot requires of them. It clearly works for her; she’s a lot richer and more famous than I’ll ever be. But I still think the other way works too. And that element of never being quite sure what’s going to happen certainly adds an edge of excitement to a writer’s life.

If this is one of those posts that makes you chat among yourself till Thursday, I apologize again. But not knowing what was going to happen next has made my morning a little more interesting.

Does that sound like a handy hint for crime writing, or am I kidding myself?

When is a crime novel not a crime novel?

Lynne Patrick

When my adventure in crime fiction was still in the planning stages nine or ten years ago (pause for clichés about time flying and seems like yesterday – it’s me age, you know) something we decided to explore was the possibility of crime fiction with elements of other genres. Not cross-genre exactly; that’s a self-destruct button waiting to be pressed, since wholesalers, bookshops, libraries, Amazon etc seem to have a pressing need to stick labels on things, and if your sales outlets don’t know where to file your books, there’s a good chance they simply won’t stock them. But we decided we wouldn’t be averse to elements of other genres: a supernatural strand here, a bit of romance there, a touch of horror now and again, quite a lot of history – just enough not-crime to ring the changes and keep things interesting.

Plenty of conventional sleuthing and police work as well, of course, but to a great extent we succeeded. We discovered a brilliant author writing something we called futurecrime, a little in the J D Robb mould but edgier, and without the great sex. We developed a series set in a parallel world. On-off, will-they-won’t-they relationships figured in a lot of books. We even dabbled in erotica (albeit lesbian, not BDSM) long before the current fad raised its dubious head. And overall nearly a third of our output was set fifty or more years ago.

And every single one was totally, categorically, without question, a crime novel.

Recently, though, I’ve read several books which, sometimes literally, bore the label crime and mystery, but whose content led me to wonder why the publisher had decided to present it in that way. And that led me to wonder if, at bottom, it’s all about our old friend marketing.

Here in the UK, and I daresay in parts of the US and the rest of the world as well, crime and mystery fiction is unequivocally the best selling genre. It’s a rare bookshop that doesn’t have a dedicated crime and thriller section, and in some shops it takes up a third of the shelves. Last year it overtook romance as the most borrowed genre in libraries.

So in marketing terms, it makes sense to call a book crime and mystery if there’s the smallest justification for doing so. But here in the real world, isn’t that just a teensy bit misleading?

I won’t reiterate my feelings about S J Watson’s bestseller Before I Go to Sleep; I did all that a few weeks ago. Let’s just say that, good book though it is, I still think calling it crime is, well, stretching the definition somewhat.

A couple of years ago I was asked by a crime fiction magazine to review a book whose title now escapes me. On the cover were words like action-packed thriller and edge of the seat drama, and the cover art was dark and gloomy and involved guns. But I was told as it was handed to me, It’s not crime; it’s romance. And romance is what it turned out to be: three romances and a bit of history, woven together skilfully enough. It began with an action sequence which had no connection to the main narrative except to explain why one of the main characters wasn’t in his usual job; and a thriller element which was referred to at length on the cover finally made an appearance about fifty pages from the end and still wasn’t the main focus. Crime and mystery? Not really.

Much more recently I read a book described as a family mystery. And yes, there was a mystery – but there’s mystery in a lot of non-crime-and-mystery fiction; it’s called building narrative tension. There was even a suspicious death, and if it had ever been properly resolved, crime might have been an appropriate slot for the story. But it wasn’t, and far from being one of those obscure, unsatisfying endings you find in some modern litfic, it was exactly right in context. But that context wasn’t crime fiction.

The big question, of course, is does it really matter how a book is labelled, and if so, why?

In the great scheme of things it probably doesn’t matter at all – but I think it can matter to some people. Just one example is my mother, who is advanced in years and like many in her age group somewhat, um, fixed in her opinions. She decided long ago that crime fiction is not for her – which means that she won’t give houseroom to any book which carries that tag. She would certainly enjoy the third of that short list I’ve just described. She might well enjoy Before I Go To Sleep. She might even enjoy most of the one that turned out to be three romances. But not one of them would get past her preconceptions. Her loss, maybe, but also three lost sales.

And if you multiply that by a lot of elderly readers and a lot of mislabelled books...

EBook pricing and other myths

Lynne Patrick

I wasn’t really in publishing long enough to become fluent in the language; I just picked up a smattering here and there, enough to kid myself, and occasionally other people, that I knew what I was talking about.

So when I read about the current developments and disputes in the trade, I have, at best, an imperfect understanding of what’s going on.

Agency pricing, for instance. What’s that all about?

What I have managed to pick up on the subject is that a lot of people think eBooks are far too expensive. And the favourite excuse that’s thrown out for this somewhat disingenuous view is there are no printing costs.

Pardon me for a moment while I indulge in wry laughter.

Whenever I read a press article or newsletter item around this subject I’m reminded of a meeting I went to long ago, at which a hundred or so authors harangued a panel of people from publishing houses about the paucity of their royalties – because, of course, since they were only getting ten percent of cover price, the publishers had to be pocketing the other ninety percent and living the life of Riley.

Yeah, right. And eBooks cost nothing to produce.

The fact – and it really is a fact, not an excuse – is that publishers pocket a very small percentage of the cover price of most books; and printing accounts for twelve percent at most of the total costs of turning manuscripts into those books – and eBooks generate other costs which go some way towards making up the difference. Some time ago I posted a breakdown of my own costs; if memory serves, those costs added up to something between 40p less and 40p more than the cover price. Reduce the cost of an eBook by more than 50p or so, and the publisher is working for nothing. And few publishers operate as charities.

So to anyone who actually works in publishing and knows how things really are, setting the price of an eBook at about the same as a paperback makes perfect sense – and since that’s the case, if hardback is the only print version available there’s no real reason an eBook shouldn’t match the hardback price too. Every book needs to sell a certain minimum number of copies in order to cover its production costs, and since people will buy either the print version or the eBook – rarely both – offering three versions instead of two isn’t going to affect that minimum number at all.

The real problem, of course, is the huge numbers of eBooks which have become available free of charge or for a derisory price either because they’re self-published or as a marketing incentive. This leaves book-buyers’ perspective distorted, and generates tetchy questions about the real cost of producing a book which nobody seems to be addressing. At the moment eBooks still have a novelty value, and the eReader market is still some way from saturation point; a time will come when prices will settle at a sensible level because selling eBooks for peanuts will have become counterproductive.

But that’s still some way in the future. Meanwhile, can I make a plea for some common sense? I may not be completely conversant with the language of publishing, but I can do basic arithmetic – and all the grumbles about eBook prices simply don’t add up.

I wish I'd...

Lynne Patrick

Last week I had an attack of nostalgia. It happens. This week I’m back in the real world, midway through one of the least demanding editing jobs I’ve ever done.

And it’s making me look just a little way back, just a couple of weeks, no more nostalgia, I promise, to a post which threatened to go off on a riff about books which should have been edited, if not better, then at least more. And I’m now wondering why this is. Is it that the person who did the editing didn’t know that there were errors? Or could it be (as has happened to me on a couple of memorable occasions, of which more in a para or two) that the editor was conscious that s/he was only a backroom person, and hesitated before interfering with the work of a Big Name with a Big Reputation?

I do have a certain sympathy with that less than confident editor who can’t bring him/herself to dispute with a well-known author. I edited short stories by some pretty famous names when I published a collection in support of a breast cancer charity a few years ago. One contribution (I’m certainly not going to specify which) was a brilliant story, but littered with typos. I corrected them and kept quiet, telling myself that the author probably relied on an editor to take care of such trivia. The other was an equally great story, but occasionally the voice of the narrating character slipped; a few changes to the choice of words was all it took to get it back on track, but I sat there for hours staring at the screen, asking myself who the hell I thought I was to criticize the work of Author X. I gritted my teeth and did the deed, and in the event, X agreed with me and made the changes. But my poor old teeth have never been the same.

But from here on I’m talking about books I’ve only read: books I’ve had no editorial connection with at all. Two stand out, possibly because they were both set against the same background, though they were quite different in every other way. It’s a background with which I have a certain familiarity, and which I would have expected at least one of the two authors to know even more intimately. Unfortunately, his/her knowledge was about twenty years out of date; things have moved on – and an essential plotline depended on the very aspect which has moved on most.

That time I chickened out, kept my own counsel, whatever you want to call it. The book was generally regarded as not that author’s finest hour, so with a little luck it will be overshadowed by other titles set on much more solid ground and the author’s enviable reputation won’t suffer.

The second time the book was the first in a series, and the background was just background, not integral to the plot, so I took a deep breath and jumped in, contacted the author and diffidently (I hope) presented my case. The reply was a brief but perfectly civil thank-you. So I offered to run through future titles in the series with a view to straightening out any remaining glitches. The reply to that was distinctly cool, so I didn’t pursue it. In fact it left me thinking I’d probably done the right thing first time around.

Both times when I finished the book I thought, I wish I’d edited that. Whether I’d have had the courage to move the authors towards solving the problems is, of course, another matter.

There have been other books I wished I’d got my hands on before they went to print: sharp characters and great plots, but punctuation and sentence structure which affected the pace and done the storyline no favours at all. And I still ache when I recall a short story of my own, published years ago in an anthology; the editor had littered it with unnecessary commas, which slowed it to snail’s speed. I took them out when I proofread it, but they were back with interest in the printed copy.

I just hope all those things happened because the editor was inexperienced.

So, having stirred these less than comfortable memories, when I’ve posted this, um, post, I’ll be glad, and not a little relieved, to get back to editing a manuscript which so far has offered up a small handful of typos, about half a dozen very minor queries about continuity and absolutely nothing which could cause dissent between editor and author.

The incredible shrinking world

Lynne Patrick

I went to a book launch last week.

Not exactly a momentous event in the life of an editor, you might think; don’t book launches play a significant role in the life of anyone connected with the book trade?

Well, yes. At least they used to. There was a time in the not too distant past when I not only attended book launches, but played quite a large part in organizing them. But these days going to a book launch is actually quite an occasion for me.

This particular book launch was great fun. It heralded the UK publication of Come the Fear, the fifth in my good friend Chris Nickson’s Richard Nottingham series, which will reach the US sometime early next year. There were songs and storytelling as well as readings from the book, and the event took place in a church in Leeds which Nottingham could well have been acquainted with, since it’s been there since 172something.

But much as I enjoyed the evening, it left me feeling a little sad. Nostalgic if you like. Because pulling out of publishing has meant the end of a few other things too.

I’ve been reminded all week of one thing that’s missing, as one Dead Guy after another has mentioned Bouchercon; apparently five out of seven of us will be there. Have a great time, guys. Such a pity I have to be one of the other two; the B’con I attended in Baltimore back in 2008 was one of the memories I cherish of my seven years in the crime and mystery business. Four of us were there that year, and having lunch together felt like a meeting of old friends. Two have since moved on, but Jeff C will be there again to maintain the continuous thread this blog has spun since (I think) 2006.

Last week’s was the first book launch I’ve attended since March 2010; that, coincidentally, was Chris Nickson’s too, for Richard Nottingham’s first-ever outing. I’ve hardly been to a single crime convention or book festival since early 2010 either. Just one festival and one book fair, the first briefly as a speaker and to run a murder mystery evening, the second for a day, to sell leftover backlist before our agreement with the new owners cut in to call a halt. (We still have a few books left, but now we have to give them away; we’re not allowed to market under the name of the imprint. Actually I’m not even sure I’m allowed to mention it here, so I won’t.)

I suppose there’s nothing really preventing me going to Bouchercon or Left Coast Crime if I could find the money for the air fare, to join in the fun and catch up with old acquaintances. But somehow it feels different now. I’m not part of all that any more. These days I edit a few books, read a great many more, still have a passion for the crime and mystery genre – but it’s no longer my world in the way it used to be.

They say your life shrinks as you get older. I didn’t really think it was true. I still go to the theatre half a dozen times a month, and not just the little local one. Over the past year I’ve travelled to several parts of the UK I’ve never visited before, and returned to a few familiar ones; and I’ve seen new parts of the USA and France. But for seven years being in publishing was what I did; it defined me and gave my life structure, and it pushed the boundaries and extended my comfort zone more than a little. I can’t help missing that.

Not that I’m sorry I got out of the business; the book trade has changed out of all recognition in the past two years, and the only way I want to be involved in what it’s becoming is as a reader. (And an editor, of course, for as long as I go on being allowed to do the job properly.) Someone said in a TV soap the other night, sometimes the world is moving too fast and I’m struggling to keep up. I know how she felt.

But just once in a while I look back at the life I lived for seven years as the owner and operator of a small indie publishing company and feel a little homesick for it.

So what does an editor do, exactly?

Lynne Patrick

Once upon a time the label I attached to myself when people asked how I spent my working life was writer. In those days I’d get the usual questions and comments: are you famous? should I have heard of you? where do you get your ideas? oh, I keep thinking my life would make a book.

Then for a while the label changed to publisher, which made me very popular with would-be writers but kept being confused with printer by the rest of the world; about once a month I was asked, hey, can you make me some business cards?

The muse went off to harass someone else when I crossed to the dark side, and hasn’t been seen since; and the publishing company now belongs to someone else. But I still seem to spend most of my time in front of a keyboard. And the question I’m asked most frequently is what does an editor do, exactly?

I know I’ve posted on editing before and if I begin to repeat myself, I apologize. But since I’m in editing mode at the moment (one book finished and delivered, another in the final stages and a third awaiting my ministrations), the question keeps pinging like a corner shop doorbell in the back of my mind.

I’ve edited various different things at various different levels over the years. Novels, some of which needed a light copy-edit to iron out the minor glitches no one ever spots in their own work, and others which required, well, let’s say more detailed attention. Short stories, for a magazine I was briefly involved with, and also for a collection. Prose in all its varieties, for the small editorial consultancy I run.

So what, exactly, does that editing entail?

There’s the first read-through, when I ask does the plot work? Are the pace and tone right for the genre? Are the historical details correct, or at least credible? Is there anything that makes me uneasy? Sometimes that takes a day, and the rewrites come back by return; far less often I’m still conferring with the author after a week or more, and the rewrites take a month.

Then, once those issues are sorted if they need to be, there’s the detailed line-by-line work. That’s when I flag up repetitions, changes of eye colour, small inconsistencies; and deal with misplaced commas, slightly clumsy language, typos, words that don’t mean what the author thinks. (It does happen; I once had an author who didn’t know the difference between voracious and avaricious, which made for some interesting sex scenes.)

The final result should be that the author has written the book s/he intended to. That, at its most basic, is an editor’s job, and that’s what I try to do. I know I don’t always get it right. A couple of books I’ve edited have received reviews which made me cover my face in shame because they pointed out some factual errors I’d completely missed. And proofreading always used make me bang my head on the wall, since it invariably revealed a whole list of glitches I’d missed at the line-editing stage. But I do try.

One of my great sadnesses as a reader is that I see books which have not received as much editorial attention as they needed. Which is a whole different post, and an issue I just might take a look at next week, if nothing else catches my eye in the meantime.

Back at the keyboard

Lynne Patrick

It’s me again, guys, back in harness after two great posts from Chris Nickson – great guy, great writer, and far too modest. After all the recent hoo-hah about authors (one author in particular) who crossed to the shady side of self-promotion, isn’t it refreshing to find one who doesn’t even grab the opportunity to big up his own books in a blog?

Looks like I’ll have to do it for him.

Back in 2007 when I was still a publisher, I saw Chris’s first historical crime novel and refused to publish it. Not because I didn’t like it, and certainly not because it didn’t reach the high standard I tried to set. Completely the opposite. It was bursting with richly drawn background and characters I really wanted to know about, and the plot was intricate without being tortuous. And the writing simply flowed: near-invisible style of the best kind.

But by then I was all too well aware that only one of those one-in-a-million strokes of luck was going to turn around a near-zero marketing budget and relatively small print runs and create a bestseller for my tiny enterprise – and Chris’s work had the smell and feel of the big time. As I read the manuscript I kept thinking, C J Sansom, eat your heart out. So I told Chris to go away and try it out on some of the major publishers.

His answer was that he wasn’t out to make a fortune, and preferred to work with someone he could form a connection with.

Five books later, I’m still his editor, and the series has got better and better. They’re available as eBooks as well as print; the fourth, Come the Fear, is just out in the UK and will shortly appear in the US. I’m about to start editing the fifth – well worth coming back from holiday for!

There. Justice done. And thanks, Chris, for filling in so thoughtfully while I was on holiday. See you next week at the launch.

The holiday? Oh yes, the holiday. I’ve been back three days and it’s already a distant memory. Two things stand out, for opposite reasons. One: don’t ever break your car windscreen in France. Would you believe there’s no emergency repair service, however good your travel insurance? We lost three days, spent a couple of hundred euros we could have put to much better use, and went through a lot of stress.

Two: if you’re ever in Franche-Comté, seek out the Bistrot de Port-Lesney. It’s tucked away in a tiny village called, yes, you guessed, Port-Lesney, and the meal we ate there was possibly the best we’ve ever had in ftymumble years of holidaying in France. French food is somewhat legendary, and this bistrot shows exactly why that is. Three courses, perfectly cooked, exactly the right quantities (I won’t list all the dishes, since all four of us had something different), and a waitress who was an absolute delight. See for yourself here. Or look them up on TripAdvisor.

And now... The laundry is sorted, the junk e-mails are deleted and husband has gone to the supermarket, but just thinking about everything on this month’s to-do list makes me need another holiday...

If it ain't broke...

Lynne Patrick

Warning: major rant approaching, and it’s nothing to do with crime fiction. But I have to get it off my chest.

All around me people seem to be intent on changing things.

Maybe it’s a sign that I’m getting old and set in my ways, but my default reaction is – why? If the existing way/system/version works, what, exactly, is the point of changing it? It confuses people, upsets established routines, sometimes even affects the balance and harmony of the universe, which may sound pretentious, but could actually be why so many things go wrong in the world.

The changes around my life have certainly affected my own balance and harmony. A few examples:

The developers we spent last summer fighting, the ones who want to build houses in the beautiful green field opposite our house, came back with a vengeance a couple of months ago. We’re fighting again, of course we are – but the government have changed the legislation around planning permission for new houses because they claim there aren’t enough to go around. What planet are they living on? The ones people want to sell are hanging around for years, and many lie empty; mortgages are almost impossible to find. Don’t get me started on that one...

The small theatre in my home town, with which I’ve built strong links over the past twenty years, has fired the manager and engaged a new one who won’t talk to anyone, has completely redesigned the programming and hiked the seat prices to counter-productive levels, and seems set on editing plain old-fashioned drama out of the equation in favour of comedy nights and musical concerts. I have nothing against either of those – but the previous manager spent a lot of time and energy building solid audiences for high-quality productions by small companies: the lifeblood of theatre, just as small publishers are still the lifeblood of the book trade, regardless of the prolific (but evidence-free) claims that publishing is dead. I suspect the rationale behind this particular change is our old friend cost-cutting.

The newspaper for which I write theatre reviews has been completely redesigned courtesy of a new editor who wasn’t born when I started doing the job. It’s less than a year since the previous editor, also new at the time, gave it a major facelift which was actually a big improvement and didn’t involve much outlay of extra cash. This time consultants were involved... Need I say more? The new version is harder for the staff to work on, much harder on the reader’s eye, and seems to mean less space for anything that matters.

And then to cap it all, the lovely face cream I’ve used for ftymumble years has become almost impossible to find, and I’m afraid it may be about to be discontinued. Go on, laugh if you want to.

None of the above were broke. Why do people insist on fixing them? A lot of the time it’s called rebranding, which as far as I can see is marketing-speak for finding something to do to ensure marketing people stay in a job. There must be more rewarding ways of earning a living, surely.

You will gather from the above that I’m feeling stressed and out of sorts. I probably need a holiday. So I’m taking one. For the next two weeks my deputy blogger will be a guy called Chris Nickson brilliant author of a series of historical crime novels which, if you haven’t discovered them yet, you really should go out and find. I’ll leave it to him to tell you about them.

Back in a few weeks, guys.

Oh dear, what can the matter be?

Lynne Patrick

I’m worried about the book trade, and getting more so.

Not because eBooks seem to be taking over – well, not entirely because of that. Eventually I suppose I’ll succumb, join the Star Trek age and buy an e-reader, and anyway, as long as people buy good books, in the long run it doesn’t really matter what form they take. I do worry that schemes like Kindle self-publishing mean that there’s more second-rate stuff than ever flooding the market, but hey, it keeps some people happy, and at least it doesn’t involve chopping down trees.

No; what’s really worrying me is what’s happening at Waterstone’s, the UK’s last remaining big bookshop chain. Less than a year ago I joined in all the hurrahs and celebrations when a real bookseller became CEO, and, for a while at least, it looked as if he was moving back towards a common sense approach: fewer silly discounts which made publishing untenable for all but the big houses, more autonomy for individual shops, the way the chain used to be when it started out.

Then a few months ago it all seemed to start unravelling. First, for some reason no one could quite get their heads around, that apparently sensible, good-guy CEO decided to get into bed with the enemy. Bookshop after bookshop, including the lovely little indie that used to flourish right here in my home town, has cited Amazon’s discounting policy as a reason for its demise. Then the way they approach eBooks, making it impossible to buy from them for any e-reader but their own Kindle, doesn’t affect bookshops directly but it doesn’t make for variety and choice in bookselling in general.

But Waterstone’s announced that they were going to be selling Kindles in their shops, and providing a means of buying Kindle eBooks in-store. What was that about?

Then last week it got worse. A new head office directive was announced. What happened to autonomy for individual shops, asked a lot of people who had been monitoring the situation? And they asked a lot more specific questions too – because the directive effectively banned hand-selling by authors. With very few exceptions, in-store author events were to be cancelled forthwith.

When I was in publishing, the best promotional tool we had was the authors themselves. (This was before Facebook and Twitter took over the world and became necessities of life for, apparently, everyone except me and one of Josh Getzler’s clients, and it still works.) Our authors used to set up opportunities to spend a day in a specific bookshop, chatting to customers and persuading them that they really, really wanted to sample their books. Bookshop managers loved them; their sales totals for the day would rocket. There were few occasions when the author’s sales didn’t reach double figures; usually they topped two dozen, and a few wonderful times they hit sixty-plus.

There’s a skill to it. The author has to be personable, have something interesting to say, and know how to get into conversation with a complete stranger without being pushy. Not everyone can do it. But when it works, it can work spectacularly well.

And the bookshop can’t lose. The author doesn’t need any special attention other than, maybe, a small table display of his/her books, an occasional cup of tea when someone’s making one anyway, and access to the staff’s comfort facilities. Usually s/he is happy simply to hang around in the crime section (or whatever is appropriate) and wait until a customer or seven (or eighteen or seventy) shows an interest. The sale-or-return system has a built-in convention that if the stock is ordered for a specific event, any surplus can be returned immediately afterwards. And if it’s done right, books fly out of the door. What’s not to like?

So now I’m beginning to wonder what dark and mysterious game-plan Waterstone’s have in mind for the future. First they form an alliance with arguably their biggest competitor. Then they ban one of their most effective promotional tactics.

Will someone please explain where this is going?

When is a review not a review?

Lynne Patrick

When I was publishing I used to read reviews almost compulsively: not only of my own authors’ books, but those of big-name writers and a lot of less well-known ones whose work I liked to think we were matching for quality.

These days not so much. People I know, and favourite authors whose new books I look forward to, but nowhere near the wide and eclectic selection I used to home in on.

A bad review of a book I had/have a vested interest in always made/makes me bang my head on the table – not, I’m glad to say, that there were ever many of those. But regarding the others, it’s hard to know to what extent the reviews I read and used to read affected my reading habits. I’m certainly not going to miss out on a new J D Robb or Phil Rickman because a reviewer tells me s/he didn’t find it as gripping as the previous one; and nor will a glowing review persuade me to read something by an author I know I don’t get along with.

So I’m left with the question, to what extent do reviews actually change things? I’ve known authors hurl the newspaper/magazine/mouse (though never the computer itself) at the wall in disgust if a reviewer appears to have missed the point. As a publisher I was tempted to do the same once or twice when the reviewer seemed more interested in his own clever way with words than in the book itself, but I suppose I was a few steps further back from it than the author, and some of the comments were actually quite useful for future reference.

All of which leads me to another question: what is the purpose of reviews?

I was given an interesting take on this a few weeks ago when I reviewed a book myself for a mystery fiction website. The brief was this: Our purpose is to promote mystery fiction; if you don’t like the book, send it back so someone else can review it.

I thought about this for a long time. Is this a valid approach to reviewing? Shouldn’t reviewers just tell it how they see it, lest they get accused of promoting their friends and slagging off their... not-friends?

The conclusion I reached was that it’s something I can live with, under certain conditions: one, that the brief is made clear up front; and two, that I don’t review books by people I know. When I checked the website I found the first condition was met; the home page actually says it’s dedicated to the promotion of crime fiction. So the long list of favourable reviews serves a purpose which is not only valid but stated. And the second is easy: I get a list of the books available for review, and it’s first come first served, so I simply don’t choose anything by an author I’m personally acquainted with, or whose work I know I’m going to hate.

I duly reviewed the book I’d requested. It wasn’t great literature, the kind of crime fiction that uses the genre to say something important about the human condition, but that wasn’t what I was expecting. It was a pacy adventure story with lots of action and some engaging characters, and it took a premise which interested me and wove a coherent plot around it. And that’s what the review said, more or less. A basic tenet of journalism is to tailor the work to the market, and this is how my inner journalist is asserting itself for this purpose.

I’m OK with that, and will be happy to do the same again in future.

Which isn’t to say that any book I ever review for any magazine or website will receive the same treatment. Sometimes you have to tell it how you see it.

Back where I started

Lynne Patrick

Before I launch into what I really want to post about today, I need to say this: I’m very glad indeed that Saturday isn’t my Dead Guy day. On Saturday I think I was in shock, along with most of the USA’s population. Dale said what was needed, and I have little to add, except to me the solution is so clear: get rid of the guns. That’s what happened here in the UK back in 1996, when a badly disturbed gunman mowed down sixteen children in a Scottish primary school. The law was changed to make it illegal to own a handgun, and shotguns became even more carefully regulated.

OK, so it doesn’t solve the problem completely – but making guns harder to come by surely has to have some effect.

I guess I’m only allowed to say this because I’m not American. But for me it’s stating the obvious. Like banning nuclear weapons, not hitting kids and assuming (not granting) that all people are equal but different.

Enough of the proselytizing. Today’s topic was going to be rejection, and how to deal with it. More specifically, how I’m dealing with it right now.

I thought I was done with all that. A not-at-all-bad track record of published short stories and magazine features and a still thriving mini-career as a newspaper theatre critic is more than a lot of wannabe writers achieve. And somehow, when I turned my attention to other people’s writing, the ideas stopped flowing as readily, and I sort of gave up on the quest for bestsellerdom.

All the same, nine completed but unpublished novels in the attic and a boxful of half-developed ideas in the bottom of the cupboard, and now, in the absence of a small business to run, time to do something about them... One of those novels in particular wouldn’t let me go. Feed me, it cried, like a kind of literary Audrey Two; revise me; improve me; send me out again – I’m the one that really meant something, and who knows, I may make your fortune.

So I fed it. I asked for some feedback (ouch! Sorry.) from two people whose judgement I trust. One of the perks of having been in publishing is having those people in my life: people whose agenda is would I put time, effort and money behind this book? , not how would I have written this book better? The feedback made sense; my reaction was why didn’t I see that before? , not she’s completely missed what I was trying to say. In fact, it helped me resolve a problem which I always knew was there, but had repeatedly failed to find a solution for.

So I fed it, revised it, improved it – and sent it out again.

And it came back.

With the gentlest, most complimentary, supportive, positive and helpful rejection I’ve ever had in my life for anything. But a rejection nonetheless.

When I get a client for my editorial consultancy who really has what it takes, I try hard to be all those things myself – but I also point out that the first thing an aspiring writer has to do is grow very strong teeth, because s/he is going to be kicked in them. That’s the nature of the business. And now I’m racking up my own dentist’s bills all over again.

So what am I doing about it, apart from checking that I have good insurance?

If more years than I’m admitting to in this business has taught me anything, it’s this: try not to take it personally, and listen.

The first gets easier as time passes. It’s always harder when the book that’s being rejected is the one you really needed to write, the one that wouldn’t let you go, that kept demanding Feed me! Your head tells you nobody died and you never even met the person who turned you down, but when your heart’s buried deep in the work, it has trouble taking the necessary step back. But all the same, when it’s happened a few (hundred) times a couple of extra layers of skin have had time to form.

Listening shouldn’t be hard at all. Every writer I know has a streak of insecurity; the problem many of us have is knowing who not to listen to. Ask six people what they think of your work, they’ll all sound as if they know far more than you do, and you’ll get seven opinions. Though they may all have something useful to say, it won’t necessarily chime with what’s in your own heart. The secret, I’ve found, is to listen for that chime.

But then I don’t really need to say any of that, do I?

I apologize if I’ve been preaching to the choir today, but it’s been a while since I went through this process, and it feels almost new again.

Maybe it’s time to draw a line under that part of my life and stick to editing. At least that pays the dentist’s bills.

PS Remember last week, and the TV talent show? The contestant who knew better than the experts? He was voted off last night. Yay!

And the winner is... everyone

Lynne Patrick

When I embarked on an adventure in publishing back when the 21st century had yet to reach stroppy adolescence, I gathered around me a small team of editors whose brief was to polish off the raw edges of authors who had talent by the bucketload but little experience of the process. Actually as much experience of the process as I had myself – which was why I made sure those editors had a lot more.

And because they’d been doing the job for a long time, and all the books we published for the first year and quite a few afterwards were by debut authors, I decided that if I was asked to arbitrate a dispute between editor and author, my default position would be, tactfully, of course, to support the editor.

Mostly it worked. It wasn’t so much – actually not at all – that authors retreated, browbeaten into submission. Rather, they realized the editors knew what they were doing, and were glad of the guidance.

Later, as the authors gained experience, the differences of opinion became less black and white. But mostly the editor still prevailed, and also mostly the author was (eventually) convinced that it was the right decision.

Earlier this week two things reminded me of that time in my life. First I began to watch the latest TV talent hunt for someone to star in a new musical (yeah, OK, I know, but everyone’s allowed a fix of trash TV now and again). Then something happened when I started to copy-edit a new novel by an author whose work has become very familiar over the past few years.

The boys in the talent hunt are coached and drilled between programmes by a team of professionals; the viewers see little snippets of the training, and it’s instructive to watch the boys’ performances in the light of the advice they’re given. Mostly they accept and follow it – but there’s always one who thinks he knows better than the experts. And so far – this is the fifth of these shows on UK TV – this contestant has not been the winner.

And the moral of that is...

Let me hasten to say that a) I wouldn’t dream of setting myself up as an expert on other people’s writing; and b) the overwhelming majority of authors I’ve worked with are easy to deal with, receptive to editorial suggestions and grateful when bits of knowledge I’ve picked up over the years coincide with gaps in theirs. But occasionally I’ve encountered a situation in which the author’s vision hasn’t quite chimed with the editor’s. The reason – the only reason – the book I’m currently editing reminded me of those early days is that there was a small disagreement about a character’s age. Not with me. This time it was the publisher who wanted the adjustment; I’m only copy-editing. My task was to wait till the matter was resolved, then amend the text accordingly. Or not, as the case may be.

So why did the publisher want the author to make this change? The reasons cited were ‘commercial’, which roughly means her way would help the book to sell better.

In the quaint old-fashioned world some of us still remember with nostalgic sighs, the world before publishers became the bad guys and authors were encouraged, nay urged, to take on the entire job themselves, the author did the writing, and the publisher’s side of the bargain was (still is in most cases, thank goodness) to make sure the book is in the best possible shape, then get it out before the public eye and take some steps towards persuading people to sell it. If some part of the writing, be it style, content or some little detail, works against the second part of that process, it’s part of the publisher’s job (usually by choosing the right editor for the task, though in small companies the two roles often overlap) to guide the author towards rectifying the situation.

And since the author has yet to be born who wouldn’t prefer his/her book actually to sell, those li’l ole commercial reasons can be pretty pressing. So this particular author gave in, with a certain reluctance, but he saw where the publisher was coming from.

If only it was always so painless. An editor’s lot is not always a straightforward one.

But that’s a whole different post.

First impressions

Lynne Patrick

I’ve just been asked – literally, just a few minutes ago – to cast an editorial eye over the submission package destined (or at least intended) to make the fortune of a client of my editorial consultancy. It was timely. A few minutes before that, in the middle of a damp week which is far too cold for July (looks like New Jersey’s getting our share of summer as well as its own) and in which absolutely nothing out of the ordinary has happened, I’d been staring at the screen asking myself what on earth I was going to post about today. Thanks, Richard.

Long, long ago when I was starting out, submitting short stories to magazines and one dubious novel opening after another to publishers, the rules were clear and simple. Write a great story, and write it brilliantly. Then double-space it on white paper, unbound, one side of the page, keep a copy, don’t hassle the editor for at least six weeks. The brilliance of the content was what made it stand out from the crowd, not the way the package looked. Typewriters offered no choice of font. Pictures had to be drawn freehand, pasted to the page or paid for with a second mortgage. Postage costs made up a large portion of a wannabe writer’s business expenses. Yes, dear reader, there was a time before e-mail. There was even a time before computers. Some of us still remember it.

But it was, admittedly, long, long ago. These days there don’t seem to be any rules. But making the submission package stand out from the crowd? The truth is, these days I don’t know any more. Not because I’m out of the loop, or I don’t keep tabs on what’s happening in the book trade, but because the requirements keep changing. And they vary so much from one publisher to another. I tell clients that publishers want submissions by e-mail – then I find a publisher’s website – a website, mark you – which states categorically that they only accept hard copy. So it goes.

And don’t get me started on the way self-publishing has suddenly become respectable. Actually I think Erin and her commenters covered most of those bases a few days ago, so I’ll just say this: not so very long ago the line I have self-published this book in a query letter would have guaranteed that the package was hurled at the wall; after Fifty Shades of Grey I don’t think editors can afford to take that risk any more.

So what did I tell the consultancy client? What wise pearls did I drop at his eager feet?

Just this. Read whatever guidelines you can find, and if you're going to spend money, spend it on editing. (Yeah, OK, I know.)

He, sweet old-fashioned thing that he is, was planning to take the ‘conventional’ approach: prepare an eye-catching package, with the help of a friendly and not too expensive local printer. The usual letter, CV and one-page synopsis, sent as hard copy to half a dozen hand-selected publishers in the hope that one would ask to see the first three chapters. He’d also produced some striking illustrations to put alongside the synopsis; that’s where the friendly local printer came in. I told him, yes, OK, sometimes that might work. But before you send out a single word, check what the publisher wants.

I’ve been thinking long and hard about this whole process, and the only rule I’ve come up with for this brave new world is this: if you’re going down the ‘conventional’ route, first impressions count. They always did, and probably always will.

For a lot of people conventional publishing will remain the way to go for a long time yet. It’s not the money, or the handing over of the technical bits to experts. It’s a matter of credibility and self-belief. All self-publishing does is get your book in print, and maybe sell a few copies. OK, sometimes a few thousand, even million. But it doesn’t tell you whether or not it’s good. What a lot of aspiring writers want more than anything is someone to tell them that – someone who isn’t friend or family, or a Kindle owner who downloads everything that costs less than a pound. Someone whose opinion has been counting for something for some years. So conventional publishing isn’t dead.

Despite what I read on the web, it doesn’t even have a summer cold. I suspect it will survive and outlive a lot of trends. The death of the novel has been heralded for as long as I can remember, and I don’t think anyone serious expects the funeral notice any time soon.

OK. Sorry. I wasn’t going to rant about self-publishing. And conventional publishers do sometimes, notoriously, follow the money, so as a criterion of excellence even that route is flawed.

But the question remains. How does an aspiring author make that first impression?

Happy July Fourth!

I think I’ve just discovered my true purpose on the Dead Guy team. As the sole remaining Brit, my job is to keep the boat afloat while my six American co-bloggers take a day off to enjoy street parties, set off fireworks, play loud music and whatever else goes on across the pond in celebration of your release from bondage to the good old British Empire. (Yeah, OK, I know you fought a war over it, actually beat the metaphorical pants off us, but indulge us; we’d still like to think we had some choice in the matter.)
Coincidentally, my most recent visit to your fair shores took in the place where the Revolution began, or at least gathered pace. I didn’t actually get to the site of the Boston Tea Party – it’s a long, long way down the Freedom Trail, and I seem to have inherited my grandmother’s feet – but we did explore the Faneuil Hall, took the grand tour of the State House, complete with statues and paintings of notable figures, and gazed in awe at Paul Revere’s house, still standing after all these years.
All of which has very little to do with the subject of this week’s post, except that Boston has a Barnes & Noble as well as a whole lot of historical sites, and since I’m physically incapable of walking past a bookshop we spent several hours in there.
Not that I was really planning to post about B & N either. But bear with me; it will join up eventually.
The thing is, we went to the supermarket this morning. (There, now you’re really confused, aren’t you? Where is the woman going with this? I hear you groan.)
Let me elucidate.
I bought two books. I didn’t wholly approve of myself for doing it, but I’m afraid I did it anyway. I seem to fall into temptation every time we do the big grocery shop, despite the guilt which lasts for, oooh, hours afterwards. My justification is that I only buy books which have earned (or will earn) enough for their authors so that I’m not taking food from their children’s mouths by not paying the full cover price.
Even though I do it, I don’t approve of buying books in the supermarket at all, for reasons I probably don’t need to explain, but will anyway, and then you’ll see the connection with B & N.
Large supermarket chains, like large bookshop chains (see?), have a lot of buying power. They only buy the titles and authors they can be sure of selling, and they buy them in industrial quantities – which means they can screw the publishers to the wall on price. Which in turn means that they can sell them at below half cover price, thus playing havoc with the profit margins and therefore survival of the small independent bookshops we all know and love.
So if you want to put me in the stocks and hurl rotten fruit at me (that's metaphorical too, of course; four thousand miles is a long way to throw a tomato) on account of the two bestsellers I brought home with the cheese, frozen fish and anti-bacterial spray, I shall understand entirely.
But there is an upside. Really there is. Maybe less so in the case of Barnes & Noble, who, along with most booksellers, still operate the iniquitous sale or return system; but at least here in the UK (and I think also at WalMart) the books are supplied on a firm sale basis, and in sufficient quantity to allow the publisher to spread the production cost quite a bit thinner. And books on supermarket shelves sell. They reach a whole different market. Far more people visit supermarkets than bookshops, and some of them would never think of visiting a bookshop; if even a small percentage buy books they wouldn’t otherwise have picked up, the effect on sales figures is significant. In some cases it’s huge.
Which is why I don’t feel quite as guilty as you probably think I should. When I was publishing, one single title taken up by a major supermarket chain could have been the start of something which could have taken me off in directions I only ever dreamed of. If it didn’t bankrupt me first; some of the prices I saw today would have needed some pretty hefty sales to avoid leaving me with a profit margin in minus figures.
So although I still don’t entirely approve either of myself for buying books with the groceries, or of the supermarket buyers for beating down the price to a level few small publishers can live with, I’ll probably continue to do it.
Partly because I’m weak and feeble and unable to resist temptation. But also because, surely, any book sale is good.

Before I go to...

I don’t get jetlag.
Correction. I’ve never had jetlag before this year.
My journeys across the Atlantic reached double figures some time ago if you count there and back again as two, and aside from a depressed appetite (no bad thing!) and a couple of very early nights at the beginning of each vacation and a twelve-hour zonk-out the first night home, I don’t seem to have reacted much at all to the time changes, even when they were the eight-hour variety.
But, perish the thought, I must be getting old. Or something. This year, a week after the return journey, if sleeping were an Olympic sport I’d be a gold medal hope. And the time change was only five hours.
I expect I’ll get over it. Meanwhile, on the subject of sleep, there’s this book. Before I Go To Sleep. S J Watson. You may have heard of it. It keeps winning awards; the latest nomination is for the McCavitys. And, oh yes, my daughter posted about it a couple of weeks ago while I was away.
Actually it was that same daughter who gave it to me. Like her, I wasn’t going to read it. I have an inbuilt resistance to books that win awards; when I’ve been persuaded to read them in the past, I’ve far too often found them, well, let’s say a tad on the pretentious side.
But Meriel and I often have similar tastes in books, and she’d actually paid out money for the copy in my birthday book mountain a few weeks ago. I decided to give it a whirl.
And I’m glad I did. For the most part I have to agree with Meriel’s up-sum: tight plot, well realized characters and writing to die for. I’d add good setting to that list. What more does a book need?
Anyone who knows me knows I’m a sucker for good writing, by which I mean the kind that’s so in tune with the subject matter that you hardly notice it’s there. This qualified.
But... You knew there was a but coming, didn’t you?
The thing is, I don’t understand why it’s been up for all those crime fiction awards, first here in the UK and now in the US. The Desmond Elliott Prize, OK – that’s for a first novel in any genre. The TV Book Club also doesn’t discriminate. But it’s also won five major crime fiction prizes and is nominated for two more which are yet to be announced.
Because for me it’s not a crime novel.
It’s not even a thriller, certainly not in the fast-paced, action-on-every-page style of thrillers I’ve been reading recently. And though it explores the workings of the human mind, I’m not even sure that it’s a psychological thriller. And the more I think about it, the more I’m moved to wonder whether the author intended it to be one.
I’m sure he’s delighted it’s won all the plaudits and is still clinging to the bestseller lists. I certainly would be in his shoes. But as I read it, with great absorption, in three or four sessions while I was on vacation earlier this month, I had a growing sense that I was reading quality literary fiction. Not the artsy kind that’s all clever ideas and look-at-me writing: the real quality kind, in which something actually happens and you can connect to the people it happens to and the writing is just plain good. I’ve read examples of both kinds recently (my tastes do sometimes veer outside the realm of the triumph of good over evil) and this book was quite definitely my kind – but still it came over as litfic, not mysteryfic.
This view even seems to be supported by evidence. S J Watson is quite proud of the book’s origins: he took a course in creative writing run by one of the UK’s foremost small-ish literary publishers. Think T S Eliot. William Golding. Gunter Grass. Kazuo Ishiguro. So I can’t help feeling he was steered, not unwillingly, towards the literary end of fiction rather than the less lofty genre side that we Dead Guy bloggers revel in.
Don’t get me wrong; I’m not saying this matters. I still enjoyed the book, certainly don’t begrudge S J his very healthy sales figures. I wish the guy every success as he pursues his new career and shall be looking out for his next book.
I suppose what I am saying is something along these lines: when it comes to literary awards, crime and mystery fiction is cast as very much the poor relation. So what’s a literary novel doing winning crime and mystery prizes?

Back at the typeface. Just.

There are times when I’m grateful for small things, like the five-hour time difference between the UK and the eastern side of the USA. This is one of those times. It’s past six pm UK time, but still early afternoon over there, so I’m not so very late with this week’s post. Though I don’t promise it will make a lot of sense.
This time yesterday I was on autopilot, emptying suitcases, making piles of grubby clothes, trying to remember where the freezer was, wondering if my brain would ever work again... Today after eleven hours’ sleep I’ve felt pretty much OK all day, but you should see the state of my in-box! My philosophy of life has always been everything has its price, and the price of two weeks’ vacation in one of the prettiest parts of the USA appears to be a small mountain of laundry and an awful lot of spam. I spent something like two hours just deleting the stuff this morning, and I’ve been filling and emptying the washing machine all day.
So my brain is still on go-slow,and this will therefore be short. The need to make sense aside, real life has kicked in with a vengeance, and all that laundry now has to be ironed...
First of all, a big public thank-you to my beautiful and brilliant daughter Meriel, whose posts are always a lot more interesting than mine. If the Dead Guy team ever decide they’ve had enough of me, they’ll know where to go for a substitute. I especially enjoyed the one about Before I Go To Sleep, which I see is nominated for yet another award. Coincidentally I was reading it at the time. So that’s next week’s post sorted... Thanks for that too, Mez.
I may have observed before that when I go on holiday, something always happens. One year Saddam Hussein invaded Kuwait. Another time Ronald Reagan died. I was in France when the world’s economy went into meltdown. Last year Paul Newman breathed his last.
This year the Queen had her diamond jubilee, which wasn’t exactly a disaster, and we knew about it before we left. We managed to miss every flag-wave, even on TV. Apparently it poured with rain most of the time, which was sad for all the street parties, but honestly, what did they expect? It was England, and June!
So this time no major disaster seems to have overtaken the world while I’ve been away, unless you count all that rain (yes, Paul Newman’s death was a major disaster!), but Ray Bradbury died at a ripe old age, so I suppose the jinx hasn’t quite lifted. Maybe next year.
Oh dear. This blog is about crime and mystery fiction, isn’t it? Not a lot about it so far. Sorry about that. Here goes.
Old Haunts by a certain E J Copperman is now on my to-read bookshelf. (Whaddya mean, why haven’t I read it? I only bought it on Monday!) Alongside it are a J D Robb three-stories-in-one, and a Lee Child I didn’t know existed. A browse in Barnes & Noble is an essential component of any visit to the USA.
And there I think I’d better call it a day. My brain thinks it’s four in the morning for some reason, and four in the morning only exists in other people’s imagination (or when my husband has eaten a bad clam – I suppose that could qualify as this year’s disaster).
I’ll try to be back in synch next week.

PS. The Ben and Jerry’s tour in Waterbury, Vermont, is great fun. The ice cream’s not bad either.