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

My top ten

Sharon Wheeler – keeping PJ Nunn's seat warm!

OK, so this might be jumping the gun a tad, but my excuse is that I'm just leaping off the substitutes' bench today to replace PJ Nunn, and I'm not sure when I'll be picked for the first team again! And I can't possibly pass up the opportunity to select my top ten books of 2009. Yes, I know there's another month to go before the end of the year, and yes, I might well find another gem during that time (although if you'd seen what's in my review pile, you'd understand why I'm feeling a tad pessimistic). And anyway, if 'best of' lists are good enough for some of the UK national papers before the end of November, they're good enough for Dead Guy!

So, here goes … The books are in no particular order, complete with brief cryptic comments. I've linked to my full reviews on RTE in case anyone's interested.

The Girl Who Played With Fire

The Girl Who Kicked the Hornet's Nest – Stieg Larsson

It's pretty unusual to have two books released by the same author in the same year (unless you're the wonderfully prolific Ken Bruen), but this is no ordinary series. Just in case you happen to have been living in a cave for the past couple of years, Larsson's trilogy featuring a Swedish journalist and an anti-social computer hacker was published posthumously and has quite rightly gone supernova.

Flipping Out – Marshall Karp

Karp's good-humoured series features a couple of wise-cracking Los Angeles cops, whose cases seem to have a movie or literary theme. The doctor should prescribe them when readers are feeling down.

If It Bleeds – Duncan Campbell

The title's from the old newspaper adage – if it bleeds, it leads. And Campbell, a veteran UK journalist, takes us on a highly enjoyable romp through the life of a permanently bemused crime hack who's finding all this new technology just a bit too much.

Winterland – Alan Glynn (review to come next week!)

This is a second novel for Irish writer Glynn, and it's tremendous. It takes us on an intense journey through modern Ireland, where politics, business and crime all collide.

The Dark Vineyard – Martin Walker

Walker's debut novel, Bruno, Chief of Police, was on my 'best of' list last year. The second in the series, set in deceptively idyllic rural France, shows a dark side beneath that relaxed village life.

Sanctuary – Ken Bruen

I'd read Ken Bruen's shopping list – and, come to think of it, he'd tell a better and sharper story on it that a lot of writers do in 300 pages. Sanctuary is the next instalment of the Jack Taylor series. Noir at its total best.

A Tribute to Zed Beddington – Nick Wray

A gem of a crime debut novel, published by a small indie UK publisher. I can do no better than point you the – for once – uncannily accurate blurb: "… a tale of sex and drugs and Transit vans, motorways, amplifiers, ripped-off lyrics, creative accountancy, Mozart, life after death, home improvements and finding love where you least expect it."

Midnight Fugue – Reginald Hill

Hill's 24 books into his Dalziel and Pascoe series, and his footwork is still as deft and fancy as ever. He should teach masterclasses in how to retain your enthusiasm.

The Redeemer – Jo Nesbo

Another example of class storytelling from the creator of maverick Oslo cop Harry Hole. After reading it, you'll want to steer clear of vacuum cleaners …

There were near-misses for John Connolly's The Lovers and Graham Hurley's No Lovelier Death. And I promise to keep my bottom ten books of the year to myself!

Goodbye to all this . . .

Sharon Wheeler

It's an appropriate day to be going out with a bang, as it's Fireworks Night in the UK. Knowing me, it'll be more like a damp squib …

You know, I was never going to blog. I'd got too many better things to do, and anyway, why would anyone care about my train being late, or the row I'd had with an annoying colleague, or the fact I'd pitched the latest willy-waving thriller against a wall? But then along came the silver-tongued Jeff Cohen, and I found myself one of the Dead Guy gang.

Over the course of almost three years (erk!), I've tried to stand up for the poor beleaguered reviewer. We're not all mean, nasty creatures who kick defenceless moggies or nick choccie from small children. Most of us care deeply about the genre and review for the love of it.

And I've had a ball ranting about the art of reviewing, self-publishing, BSP, religion, the state of GLBT writing, religion, self-publishing, trains, BSP, genre clichés, religion, sloppy grammar, religion, men with funny-shaped balls …

I did talk about crime fiction some of the time, honest! And I detect a thread in my blogs when it comes to my affection for European crime fic, small indie presses and my guilty pleasure in the form of a pristine Dick Francis novel just waiting for me to wallow.

It's time now, though, for me to take a break and concentrate on my new adventures – a PhD in modern British drama, a playwriting course and a new journalism book for Routledge. And I'll still be reviewing and acting as editor-in-chief for RTE. So I won't be giving up writing any time soon …

It's time now for me to hand over to the lovely Kim Malo, who a lot of you will know through her reviews and the excellent Crime Thru Time site. I know I'm leaving you in good hands, even if I don't think she's a rugby fan! Thanks to all my fabulous Dead Guy blog mates, past and present, and to everyone who's read my ramblings and taken the trouble to comment. I've promised Jeff that I'll still be available for weddings, bar mitzvahs and when someone sneaks off on their hols ('blogger emeritus' sounds sooooo sophisticated!), so it won't be goodbye for good …

Oh look, someone else lining up to save the world in 45 minutes . . .

Sharon Wheeler

Every couple of months, Nick Hay, one of the RTE reviewers, turns up on my doorstep to liberate his next batch of review books. After we've had a pleasant lunch and caught up on each other's news, I settle down to enjoy the free floor show as Nick takes his life in his hands and sorts through the latest books.

Nick's a long-suffering and very tolerant reviewer, but it's virtually impossible to keep a straight face watching him read the blurbs on the backs of books. Oh look, here's a mad monk running around mittel Europe in search of a religious icon. And there's another, with added Freemasons at no extra cost. Yes, and there's yet another, with a beautiful woman to help our intrepid hero track down said mad monk. If the writer's feeling particularly radical, there'll be a mysterious library in there somewhere.

After Nick has employed a bargepole to avoid that little lot, he then encounters our next batch, which are willy-waving thrillers where the former military hero charges around America and, if we're very unlucky, mittel Europe as well for extra air miles, to save the world in 45 minutes. Most of the time our chap will be a loner; sometimes, heavens to Betsy, he has a family to protect.

And speaking of which, that's our third category that gets piled in a corner by the poor, beleaguered Mr Hay. Mr Average lives a quiet life in a small American town (no mittel Europe this time). But he has to turn into the Terminator when his idyllic family life is threatened in some way…

I'd say that a good half of the books Nick sorted through belonged to one of these three categories. Yes, we know publishers like trends and bandwagons. But hell's bells, the same books re-packaged get old ever so quickly and reviewers start to edge away and mutter excuses as to why they'll be busy until at least next Easter.

I haven't been quite so lucky as Nick. I've got two books on the go at the moment – the new Dan Brown, and a debut novel by Andrew Grant. We'll gloss over Mr Brown, but all you need to know about the latter is that he's the brother of Lee Child and that Even features a former Royal Navy loner in a race against time. I am assuming the Child clan have a sister hidden away somewhere who'll soon present us with an anti-social Royal Air Force chap who's going to save the world …

The only consolation is that there's nothing in Mount To Be Read that fits category three. But that's only because I saw off the latest Linwood Barclay not so long ago…

 

Passing as a native

Sharon Wheeler

One of the things that used to drive me demented on the generally admirable DorothyL discussion list (aside from the relentless BSP from a cabal of writers who clearly don't bother with mundane things like eating, sleeping and going to the loo) was that of language. Every so often someone would bleat that they were reading a book from Outer Mongolia, and they didn't understand the vocabulary and could some kind soul please define the following 750 words that were impairing their enjoyment of the novel.

A friend of mine, who should perhaps remain nameless, used to foam at the mouth so much that she'd send me emails all in capitals shrieking "WHY THE F**K CAN'T THEY USE GOOGLE?"

I was in full agreement with her, although I often did take pity on the reader if it was a UK word that needed translating. But it did occur to me that in the time it had taken to type the email to DL, they could just as easily have used Google.

Half the fun for me of reading books set in other countries, alongside seeing other cultures portrayed, is getting to learn some of the expressions. And if I'm caught up on the story, I really can't be bothered to set it down, go to the computer and start rooting around for definitions. I can't say I've ever come across a plot that hinged on an unfamiliar word. And there are such things as context…

I was reading a Janet Evanovich book some time ago and was stumped by what were obviously three brand names. It didn't matter to the plot – I was just being nosy. An American friend happened to be online, and confirmed swiftly that one was a make of handbag, another was a painkiller and the third was some sort of foodstuff.

I'm a great fan of Marshall Karp's exuberant Lomax and Biggs adventures. I'm three books into the series and I've always wondered what a teamster was – it's the expression Karp uses an awful lot to describe Lomax's interfering father. And when I reviewed Flipping Out, I commented that the word cropped up slightly too much and that though I had no idea what it meant, I could probably guess.

Turns out my guesswork was about as good as my maths – terminally lousy. Marshall was kind enough to email and fill in the gaps in my US English education. And yes, of course I should have practised what I preached and looked it up before I wrote the review…

I had happily assumed it meant a large, over-bearing bloke who spends most of his time with a beer in his hand, surrounded by his mates – you know, one of the team! Um, no… I was way off-beam. I'd never have guessed that cultural reference in a million years, even if Big Jim does run his own transport firm. And I'm still rather fond of my definition!

Oh, and if you want a translation job with a difference, go for this one. Ma Glesca isnae bad, but no' good enough tae pass as native…

My new adventure

Sharon Wheeler

I always swore I'd never do a PhD . . . So how the hell did I find myself completing the enrolment forms for one about half an hour ago?

Rewind at some speed to the summer, where my cash-strapped day job employers launched into a redundancy process. I lost one day a week's work, but as part of the deal got to sign up for a PhD. So, for the past of couple of months, I've alternated between being insanely excited and really rather scared about my new adventure.

I completed an MPhil about 15 years ago and, in best journalist tradition, left most of the writing up to the end. I think it's fair to say I had a busy summer! I've always had this at the back of my mind on the occasions when I've wondered about doing a PhD.

When I started lecturing in universities, no one cared whether I had a PhD or not – I was being employed for my media expertise. And my much-missed colleague Peter Widdowson told me very briskly to keep writing books and forget the PhD.

I've kept writing chapters and books (and yay, a contract for the next one has just arrived!), but the past year I've still harboured a vague longing to immerse myself in a topic. And now I am.

It's not journalism (that's for the textbooks) and it's not even crime fiction (that was my MPhil) – it's British drama since 1956, which is my other big area of interest. So my already shambolic front room has play texts and theatre books piled in odd corners.

They're going to come in useful for the second part of my new adventure – a playwriting course with the Open University. It's a ten-week one, so I shall be writing like a maniac between now and Christmas. Nothing new there, then.

I'm sure I'm going to be panicking and cursing and doubting my own sanity a lot over the next seven years of the PhD. So pat me on the hand and feed me chocolate if you find me gibbering in a corner . . .

 

Awards kerfuffle

Sharon Wheeler

I can't say that I'm that fussed by awards – they're never likely to influence my decision to read or to ignore a book. But boy, are they good for entertainment value sometimes. Pass me the popcorn and Coke …

Starring at the end of the pier every night this week is the saga of the Lambda awards. For those of you who haven't come across them, they're annual awards for GLBT writers. And now the organisers are stipulating that writers have got to be gay, lesbian, bisexual or transgender to enter.

I admit my first thought was whether they'd be doing bedroom spot-checks to ensure the rules were strictly adhered to. Apparently not – it's being done on trust. So any cad and bounder breaking the rules can expect to be pointed at and roundly harangued up and down the internet.

In case you're wondering whether there's a sudden influx of straight writers entering gay awards, the answer is yes. I present to you, ladies and gentlemen, the m/m brigade.

These are mainly straight women, many of whom come from the world of slash fiction and who write what are basically romances about two men in love. In the past year or so, they've been moving from the underground to the more vocal. And they want to enter their work for the Lambda Awards.

Apparently the Lambda board have spent the past year pondering what to do. And their solution is to tighten up the eligibility rules. This has, as you might expect, gone down like a lead balloon in m/m quarters. There has been bleating about how the awards are just bound to be downgraded this year now the m/m crowd can't enter.

That sense of entitlement is, in the end, what swung it for me in favour of the Lambda board's decision. And it's their competition – they make the rules. Most awards are very precise in who they're aimed at, hence why you won't find an American writer winning the Booker prize, or a male novelist taking home the Orange Prize. And damn, there won't be a Pulitzer for me, either. I reckon eyebrows would have been raised at some speed if we'd been told white writers were entering – and expecting to win – awards for black writers.

And, to be brutally honest, I don't call what the m/m writers are producing gay literature. Their work doesn't address the gay experience in any way. It's basically fetishising gay men for a straight female audience. I'm sure some gay blokes read the books, but largely the novels are there for women to drool over pretty/handsome/well-hung eye candy, with not a lot in the way of plot. I've read a fair bit of m/m stuff, and I wouldn't be lining up to give most of it any awards. A lot is being self-published or from small publishers whose editing values aren't what you'd call high.

Of course straight writers have won Lambda awards in the past, and they will do in the future. I predict a sudden 'coming out' as bisexual for those m/m/ writers who feel that an award validates what they're producing.

It strikes me that the m/m brigade might be better employed concentrating their energies on getting the various romance writing organisations to be substantially more welcoming of work that doesn't fit into the tired old 'girl meets boy' box.

The dilemma of review copies

Sharon Wheeler

I discovered very early on in my journalistic career that you don't make a living from reviewing. A fairly well-known sportswriter confided to me that the book and theatre reviews he wrote for one of our national papers were just a sideline and brought in peanuts. And it's been the same for me for the past 20 years with book and gig and album reviews. Great fun, but I won't be retiring on the proceeds.

For most reviewers, the perk is the book or the CD or a ticket to see the band. I suppose it depends how desperately you want to be in print if you're prepared to buy them yourself and review them. I've done it once years ago when I was trying to get a foot on the music-writing ladder. I wouldn't do it now.

All this is by way of musing over an email we had from a publisher during the week. They're a fairly small indie set-up and, like the rest of us, are feeling the pinch from the recession. So, instead of sending out review copies of books, they're proposing to send PDF files instead to the reviewers.

I can totally understand why they do this. Publishers must spend a small fortune in sending out review copies to countless publications, many of which will never review the book. I know that some, not surprisingly, want to trim their distribution lists.

The RTE big cheeses (well, me and Yvonne Klein) discussed the email from the publisher and in the end decided that we couldn't, in all conscience, expect reviewers to work from PDF files. A lot of people don't like reading on-screen (I have PDF versions of at least two of the Julia Spencer-Fleming books which I'm rather intrigued to read, but have never got past page 20 of the first one, because it's so damn eye-numbing reading from a computer screen). And it would cost the reviewer  a chunk of change in paper and inks if they chose to print the PDF out. Seeing as they're reviewing for the love of it as it is, we can't ask them to do that. And, to be honest, selling the book at some stage is the only way a lot of reviewers make any dosh out of reviewing.

I think the indie publishers are in a tricky situation. But for many of them, the only reviews they're likely to get are on sites like RTE, simply because we review 40 books a month – your average newspaper, if they've still got a book review page, are likely to have space for four a month (and those are probably from the big publishers).

We've suggested to some publishers that they don't send us books on-spec any more, but instead email with new releases and we will attempt to match up the book with a reviewer. This isn't a flawless plan, as many publicists will be too busy to email editors individually. And it loses that element of lucky chance, where an unusual book arrives in the post and catches an editor's eye.

But until reviewing ebooks becomes the norm, rather than the exception (and I can't see that happening terribly quickly, particularly in the UK – there's still no sign of the Kindle appearing here, and I bet Waterstone's staff haven't been mown down in the rush for the Sony reader), I think publishers just have to budget for review copies and keep their fingers crossed that they get a reasonable hit rate for their money.

Dangling from The Wire

Sharon Wheeler

 

I have got withdrawal symptoms like you wouldn't believe. After five months, the BBC have finally finished screening all five series of The Wire. And I am bereft.

I have the concentration span of a gnat, and almost never stick with TV shows. But it's a tribute to the sheer power and the glory that was this stunning drama that I didn't miss a single minute of any of the 60 episodes. And, after a short period to regroup, I intend to watch it end to end again, thanks this time to the DVDs.

The Wire's been called the best drama that no one's ever seen, due to it being screened on some small cable channel. BBC2 did it no favours, scheduling it in the graveyard slot of 11.20pm, and not showing it on the same nights every week.

It was a sprawling, lush, deep feast of a show which never patronised the audience but, instead, treated them like intelligent adults and expected them to do some work. At times it felt more like a novel than a TV drama – and it’s perhaps no surprise that some of the top crime writers, including George Pelecanos, Dennis Lehane and Richard Price were on the writing team.

I do owe Pelecanos a small but not terribly heart-felt apology, as I have no regrets about watching a lot of the episodes with the subtitles on. And it's not a matter of black or white characters – I couldn't understand a word they said in The Sopranos (except for "you fat fuck!") An American friend of mine watches Dr Who and Torchwood with the subtitles on. If you are devoted to a show, you don't want to miss a single grunt…

Almost a week on from the final episode, and I am still trying to marshal my thoughts. So here are some scattergun early comments on why The Wire kept me glued to the sofa for five months when usually I'm leaping up and wandering around after five minutes…

• One of the show's greatest strengths was the way it blurred the moral boundaries. Which may account for why I reckon Omar, the unconventional gangster, is the coolest thing on the planet…

• It acted, too, as a window on American society, ripping away the bullshit and examining social, political and cultural issues with a merciless eye. If you want to be simplistic, you can say that series two was about the docks and series four the education system and series five focussed on newspapers.

• Series two was probably my favourite, with series four a very close second – some of the scenes about the waste of children's lives were absolutely heart-breaking. Ironically, the newspapers one was patchy for me. I adored the media angle – particularly from a UK vantage point where we don't have the fixation on winning awards – but found some of the serial killer storyline somewhat eye-rolling.

• Whatever Clarke Peters (Lester Freamon) is on should be available on the NHS – I remember seeing him in the TV show The Professionals 20 years ago, and he hasn't  aged a scrap. And kudos to those British and Irish actors (Dominic West, Idris Elba and Aidan Gillen) for making believe they were an American cop, a Baltimore drugs baron and an Italian-American politician respectively.

• The theme tune was different versions of the Tom Waits gospel-style song Way Down in the Hole. Best by miles was the dance-tinged one in series four, done by an unknown young Baltimore band Domaje. My least favourite was that by Steve Earle (a musician whose work I've enjoyed in the past) as he sounded like he was singing it off an autocue.

• I believed in every one of those characters for every moment on the 60 episodes. And that’s the mark of great drama.

 

 

 

 

 

My moment as modern art

Sharon Wheeler

 

Well, I've written stories in some very weird places (under tables, in toilets, freezing my appendages off at remote rugby grounds), but I think being perched on a plinth 20-something feet above Trafalgar Square at 1am in the morning probably takes the biscuit.

 

For those of you who've missed the back story to the saga, no, I wasn't drunk or doing it for a dare. I won a place up there as part of sculptor Antony Gormley's fourth plinth project where 2400 people (chosen from more than 33,500 applicants) from all over the UK are given carte blanche to do what the hell they like up there for an hour.

 

After all my agonising over what to do up there, I went in the end for the chance to highlight the depressingly high number of journalists killed worldwide whilst doing their jobs – 109 last year and 50 so far in 2009. And I was also determined to get as much copy out of the occasion as I could.

 

When you turn up in Trafalgar Square an hour and a half before your slot, you suddenly realise what a humungous project this is. You're given stacks of paperwork to sign (Sky TV are filming it, the Wellcome Trust are archiving it, and if you fall over the edge it'll be your fault), then you're whisked off by a member of the friendly production crew to be interviewed in-depth for half an hour about who you are, why you're doing this, and what makes you tick. You realise then that it's not just modern art, it's also a social history project.

 

Just before the hour, a cherry picker transports you across Trafalgar Square, plucks the previous person down and lets you onto the scarily narrow plinth. After this, you're on your own for an hour, with just the relentless London traffic and assorted spectators, drunken revellers and passers-by in the square for company.

 

So there I was, standing like a lemon up there and realising to my horror that I'm scared of heights. It had never really occurred to me that that might be a problem – I was obviously successful in erasing a trip to the top of the Euromast in Rotterdam, and one of the walkways at Kew Gardens from my mind!

 

This rather put the kibosh on my plan to arrange the disks bearing the dead journalists' names and nations in a circle around me, as I truly didn't fancy spinning around to place them on the floor – I could see myself toppling over into the safety netting, which would have been ignominious, to say the least. So I placed them in front of me in rows, and read out a brief citation for each.

 

Once that was done, I took a deep breath and sat down. This gave me chance to start my writing – and to appreciate what a truly surreal experience it all was. It was a pleasantly mild night, the rain had stayed away, and I was really rather comfy on my perch watching the buses and taxis rumble by.

 

I'd made sure to do shout-outs for my blogmates on Dead Guy, as well as friends on LiveJournal and Facebook. But it occurred to me suddenly that I should probably explain to everyone else listening in (you're miked up before you go up there) on TV and the webcam what I was writing in my trusty writing journal. And I can safely say I've never kept up a running commentary as I've written a feature (sent off to my local paper) and blog entry (before your very eyes) before. I even made a start on a one-act play, thanks to the encouragement of my playwriting colleague Rebecca.

 

I was wired as all hell when I got taken down at 2am, to be replaced by a Scottish folk singer, and was still wide awake three hours later! It really was a totally unforgettable experience, and I've been babbling madly about it to everyone ever since.

 

I went back to Trafalgar Square on the Saturday morning, as the team had forgotten to take my photo for the records when I came down off the plinth. That was quickly done, and I spent a very pleasant hour and a half chatting to some of the other participants, enjoying the sun and watching people's reactions to what was going on.

 

The really rather addictive One and Other site has hosted some heated discussions on its blog about whether people have made the best use of their hour. There have been some truly memorable participants – there was the performance artist who erected a tent up on the plinth, threw inflatable sex dolls over the edge, stripped his clothes off, released a live chicken, and ended his hour by jumping down off the plinth and running away across Trafalgar Square like something out of Keystone Cops!

 

I adored Pauline, resplendent in a gorgeous red polka dot dress and carrying a matching flag, who declared a republic. And the person up before her, whose name I sadly didn't get, had the fabulous idea of asking friends for their favourite poems, typing them onto A4 paper and then turning them into paper aeroplanes. Watching the kids in Trafalgar Square chase the planes and then settle down to read their treasures was a special moment to add to my own memories from the night before.

 

If people want to stand up there and text their friends for an hour, or take a kip, or sit up there starkers, that's their choice. If it gets folk arguing about what constitutes art or talking about the cause that the person was espousing, even better.

 

If anyone's interested, my video is here. It doesn't seem to be loading at the moment, but I assume a technie person with a big hammer will sort that out…

Withdrawal symptoms and sticky-backed plastic

 

Sharon Wheeler

Please will someone send a carrier pigeon. Either that or two Coke cans and a length of string. My broadband has been down for a fortnight and I am suffering withdrawal symptoms. The new router, which may or may not solve the problem, is missing in action somewhere between Rochdale and Cheltenham.

 

So I am currently reliant on a very temperamental dongle for my internet access. Damn thing crashes more often than it lets me on. I'd cheerfully drop-kick it through a window sometimes. Let it be a warning to you … If you have an Apple Mac, don't go for a Vodafone dongle – they appear to argue with each other.

 

This is by way of explaining my unscheduled absence last week (that and a yukky bug which saw me griping and feeling sorry for myself). So I'll save the blog post where I raved about recent reads for a sunny day.

 

Speaking of which, I'm hoping for one of those at the weekend, as it's my moment pretending to be modern art in the early hours of Saturday morning. Between 1am and 2am I'll be standing on the fourth plinth in Trafalgar Square in London and hoping that it won't be tipping it down with rain and that there won't be too many drunks on their way home from the pubs and clubs to take the piss.

 

I still haven't totally decided what I'll be doing. But it will involve making people aware of the horribly high number of journalists and media workers who are killed worldwide whilst doing their job – 109 in 2008 and almost 50 so far this year.

 

I've been watching some of the other plinthers on the webcam, and there are a scary number of very creative artists taking part. I'm one of the most unartistic people there is – I once drew a straight line, but it involved the use of my trusty em ruler. So I may chicken out of my original idea, which involved a gutted umbrella, CDs and some psychedelic sticky-backed plastic (yes, of course I was brought up on Blue Peter – and for my overseas friends, this is a long-running children's show where lots of wholesome presenters turned cereal boxes into works of art using the aforementioned sticky-backed plastic, and double-sided sticky tape for speed).

 

I keep reminding myself that I'm a writer and should focus on that for the hour. I like the idea of seeing how much copy I can wring out of the occasion – a news story, a feature and a blog entry for certain, and maybe some Tweets if the evil dongle plays ball. And I like the idea of trying some fiction, even though I doubt I'll have any short story writers or playwrights looking over their shoulders nervously. Several people have suggested I use the time to catch up on writing reviews. It's tempting – maybe the night air and panoramic view will help me say something nice about a new and much-hyped book which bored the pants off me!

 

 

Dangerous dykes? I must have blinked and missed them …

Sharon Wheeler

 

I was going to quietly ignore this opinion piece from the Independent on the grounds that I'm probably starting to sound like a broken record on the topic and that the handful of people who read the poor old sinking Indy had probably skimmed over it. But the more I thought about it, the more irritated I got by the smugness and inaccuracy of the piece.

 

My first action was to check the date on the piece – it read like something from the 1980s and early 1990s when publishers such as Women's Press were publishing lesbian crime fiction regularly. That was when I found Val McDermid's wonderful Lindsay Gordon series and was instantly re-energised by the genre. Manda Scott, the author of the article, and Stella Duffy, who's also mentioned, were among some of those early pioneers.

 

Since those heady days 20 years ago, though, lesbian crime writing is in the doldrums. Those three names mentioned above are happily still writing, but they're sure as hell not turning out lesbian crime fic. Good grief, heavens to Betsy, I'm all for writers writing what they want, and trying different challenges. And I'd be a bit damn worried if McDermid was still fixated on Greenham Common. But I find it intriguing that McDermid and Scott only become big names when they moved to large publishers and started writing 'straight.'

 

I'm a huge fan of McDermid, who has never made any secret of her sexuality, is a trenchant supporter of the genre and almost always has GLBT characters in her supporting cast (as does Nastasha Cooper in her Trish Maguire series). But then it's not unusual to pick up a crime novel now from straight writers and find the same thing. And that's how it should be. I'm sure now most publishers – certainly in the UK – don't give a damn about the sexual preferences of their writers (look at how successful Sarah Waters is). But I bet they do twitch if confronted with a book with a gay or lesbian central character (unless they're one of the ever-shrinking GLBT publishers or a self-publishing set-up which depends on the writer getting their chequebook out – and a fair few gay writers have gone down that road, sadly).

 

I went and browsed the reviews on RTE to see which lesbian crime fic we've reviewed lately – and it's all American and from small publishers such as Alyson (who, I believe, have been bought out). The two most recent I could find in the UK were from a bloke – Ed O'Connor's Primal Cut (2007) – and Tracey Shellito's Personal Protection from my blog mate Lynne Patrick's Crème de la Crime in 2005. O'Connor's book was published by Allison & Busby, another smallish indie publisher.

 

Duffy's last adventure for London PI Saz Martin was in Mouths of Babes in 2005. Hostage to Murder the last outing for Lindsay Gordon way back in 2003 – and published under the name VL McDermid. Scott's Stronger Than Death, featuring lesbian vet Kellen Stewart, dates even further back to 1999.

 

There's a world of difference between lesbian writers and lesbian writing. Scott is talking about the former. And it doesn't alter the fact that lesbian crime writing is in a parlous state. Kudos to Scott and Co for coming out publicly, but don't pretend you're at the cutting edge of lesbian crime writing, because you're not.

It'll end in tears …

Sharon Wheeler

Which books have made you cry? I only ask, as I'm having trouble remembering any that have made me blub . . .

Poetry and music, though – they have the potential to start me off, and I'm not a particularly tearful sort of person. I can't believe, though, that I've been reading novels for the best part of 40 years and haven't snivelled at some in that time. Damned if I can think of any, though!

But I cried my eyes out when I read Poet Laureate Carol Ann Duffy’s poem Last Post about the deaths of World War I veterans Henry Allingham and Harry Patch, both of whom died within weeks of each other.

Allingham was the last founder member of the RAF and the final survivor of the Battle of Jutland. Patch was the last 'Tommy' – one of those men who fought in the trenches in France.

Both were remarkable men, but Patch, in particular, struck a chord with many people. He didn't talk about the horrors he'd seen until the later years of his long life, but when he did, he visited schools and gave interviews to try to get across to a new generation the utter futility of war. His funeral at Wells Cathedral was attended by more than 1000 people – and the coffin was escorted by soldiers from Britain, France, Germany and Belgium. Apparently it was his wish that none should carry any sort of weapon for the occasion. And yes, I cried when I watched it on the news.

My friend John L Murphy views the matter from an Irish-American perspective in his blog. And he talks about related WW1 literature and songs – and that promptly reminded me of music which reduces me to tears.

Top of the list would be two folk songs – The Green Fields of France, written by Scottish/Australian songwriter Eric Bogle, and Mick Moloney's Kilkelly. I've linked you to YouTube versions, but with the former in particular you'll find better versions on albums. I'd go for The Men They Couldn't Hang's cover.

I remember lending the Bringing It All Back Home double album, on which I first heard Moloney, Jimmy Keane and Robbie O'Connell perform the song, to a work colleague. He handed it back to me a week or so later and his first – and only – comment was how that song had made him cry.

Maybe a lot of it is due to the stripped-down nature of both Duffy's poem and Moloney's song – you get to concentrate totally on the power of the words. You have one thing to focus on and that inhabits you for the life of the song or the poem. With books and films, perhaps there's too much else going on. Yes, I spot sad scenes or passages, but everything seems to move on too fast. Poems and music are an intense, brief experience.

I tend not to get too attached to TV shows, and the only tears I shed when favourite characters such as Stephen and Captain Ryan in Primeval, and Ianto in Torchwood, were killed off were tears of rage at what the bloody writers had done to two erstwhile unmissable shows. Oddly enough, I did snivel a bit when Owen and Tosh got bumped off in series 2 – I didn't care much for either of the characters, but the killer line was Tosh's "Because you're breaking my heart" when Owen asks her for one good reason why he should stop screaming. Mark it down as a tribute to Burn Gorman and Naoko Mori's acting.

And, 650 words later, I still can't think of a book that's made me cry. That's just plain weird and faintly disturbing.

Me as modern art

Sharon Wheeler

I am about to be a piece of modern art . . . Possibly.

You see, I went and entered the draw to win a place on the fourth plinth in Trafalgar Square, never expecting that I'd be one of the 2400 people to get lucky. According to the site there have been more than 30,000 applicants. I won't even try to do the maths on that one, as I'll run out of fingers and toes.

My mother thinks I'm mad (but then she's thought that for years in any case, so no change there). My friends have been much more enthusiastic and are threatening to log into the live webcam – or, in some cases, turn up in person!

I've got the 1am – 2am spot on Saturday September 5. Spooky . . . how did they know what hours I usually keep? And I bet there'll be plenty of drunks around in central London at that time to keep me company.

So what the hell am I going to do up there? My initial suggestion of regaling the late-night revellers with Pogues songs got the thumbs-down from all and sundry. My second idea would no doubt be eye-catching but probably also blasphemous, so I reluctantly shelved that as well.

Then I thought I had a plan with a hat, as my friend Jill would say – lighting a candle for all the British soldiers who've been killed in Afghanistan. And then I logged in to the webcam last night and realised how breezy it's likely to be up there at 1am. And the plinth's not that big (4.4m x 1.7m – erk!), so fitting getting on for 200 candles up there is probably a non-starter.

So I'm now pondering what would encapsulate me. I had to sum myself up in three words for the One and Other website (no, not stroppy, loud and opinionated, before anyone says) – I went for lively, enquiring and off-beat. But that's got me no nearer thinking of what to do eight metres above Trafalgar Square for an hour.

I've logged in to the webcam a few times to see what other people do. I don't think I can rival the fantastic swing dancer who was up there a few days ago. There was a bloke up there yesterday making bird boxes. Another woman cut up lengths of white fabric and draped it over the flagpole that you can apparently choose to have up there with you. Someone else seemed to spend the hour texting friends. And I did like the flashy suit that an artist appeared to have made for the occasion (there do seem to be a lot of them about – artists, not flashy suits!)

There are lots of causes that I believe in, so I maybe I should go for something to publicise one of those.

Or, I sit up there and write for an hour. After all, that's what I am and that's what I do.

What’s your point?

Sharon Wheeler

All reviewers have their pet peeves. I can’t stand dialogue dumps, where the reader is confronted with a large, indigestible lump of information, obediently parroted by a character which sounds about as convincing as Tony Blair trying to persuade us he doesn’t do god. But the thing above all that makes me twitch and mutter is point of view – and I never cease to be amazed by how many writers can’t grasp it.

I’ve just started my summer hols, so I’m catching up with a pile of review books that would make the Eiffel Tower feel inadequate. But sometimes it feels like every other damn one I read has me clutching my forehead as the writer boomerangs around the characters’ viewpoints – often on the same page (and, in one hideous case, in the same paragraph and three times on one page).

So why the hell does it matter so much? And why don’t editors stamp on slips from a great height? 

Firstly, inability to deal with point of view confuses the reader. If you don’t know who’s telling your story, how am I supposed to keep up with you? One minute you’re in Jane’s head, the next Joe’s. Here’s a very bad for instance, written by me:

Jane knew she had to be tough and not to show the bastard how much he’d got to her. So she stared straight ahead. Joe grinned, realising that finally he’d got a rise from the ice maiden. He ran his fingers through her hair, enjoying feeling her flinch. At that moment she hated him more than anyone in the world and knew she’d do anything to be rid of him.

The second problem with bouncing point of view, especially when there are a number of characters milling around, is that you can never get close enough to any of them. The book that made me want to blog about the issue was a UK police procedural with about a dozen officers featured – and almost that many points of view. Admittedly it was a debut novel (one that read like a first draft, at that – even though it was from a usually fairly reliable small publisher). But even big name writers don’t seem to be able to grasp the issue.

Locking a book into one point of view means you’re with the protagonist every step of the way, be it out on the job, having a shower or eating breakfast. Spreading it around – and done properly in defined sections or chapters – can cross-cut between characters and therefore provide different intensities and experiences.

Reviewers’ Law no. 12: Never believe a writer who claims they’re doing omniscient point of view, just like Charles Dickens did. Most of them wouldn’t know what it is, even if it jumped up and bit them on the arse.

My five minutes of fame

Sharon Wheeler

Thanks to all of you dear friends and family who sent text messages and emails pointing and laughing after my brief TV appearance last Friday. Yes, the hairdresser did get to finish the cut. And no, Ayo Onatade and I didn't confer in advance on what to wear …

Me and my partners in crime Ayo, Adrian Muller and Lizzie Hayes were called in to help comedian and writer Sandi Toksvig discover just why the British are so infatuated with crime fiction. Critic Barry Forshaw and writer Andrew Taylor were also there to add their expertise.

Filming took place in the grand setting of Addington Palace in Surrey which had drawing rooms aplenty in which to skulk and to bump off unsuspecting passers-by – and to gawp at men in scary lemon-coloured shorts (which really were a crime) playing golf.

The segment on BBC1's The One Show obviously only encapsulated a brief extract of what we talked about – we'd probably still be yakking now if we hadn't have been packed off home mid-afternoon. I got to pontificate on whether solving the mystery was important – and people are still asking me why I said I was more interested in the plot and the characterisation than working out whodunit.

One interesting thread that didn't make the cut was which book we'd recommend to someone new to the genre. I cheated a tad and dithered between two – Patricia Highsmith's The Talented Mr Ripley and Stieg Larsson's The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo. The others all went for classic novels.

I know what got me started reading crime fiction – Dorothy L Sayers' The Nine Tailors. We read as part of the syllabus for English Literature O Level at the age of 16. I don't remember much about the GK Chesterton we also read, and I've always enjoyed the Sherlock Holmes stories (and particularly the Jeremy Brett TV version). But for some reason the Sayers really stuck in my mind.

About ten years later, when I went back to crime fiction in a big way, it was writers like Sara Paretsky and Val McDermid who got me hooked. I've read and enjoyed many of the classics, but never get the urge to re-read them, whereas I reckon I've read each of the books in Highsmith's series at least four times, and I intend to go back to the Larsson after the final part of the trilogy is released.

I can't remember exactly what I said on the BBC recording, but if you want a sound-bite rationale for each choice, Highsmith is a masterful writer whose cool, measured prose pulls you into the life of the amoral Tom Ripley, while Larsson's awesome debut novel presents a truly original and flawed heroine.

So what book would you use to entice a crime fiction virgin into the genre?

A nasty dose of déjà vu

Sharon Wheeler (swapping days this week with Lynne Patrick)

The past few months, all I seem to have had to review are yet more clones of the sodding D*****i C**e (Sharon’s Law No. 17 – if the blurb mentions religion, the bible and lost icons, run like hell) and books where Queen Victoria, Sigmund Freud and Oscar Wilde combine to discover who murdered Shakespeare. Or something.

And, with a nasty dose of déjà vu (for which the doctor can give you an ointment), I checked my email a few minutes ago and what do I get from a publisher but notification of the upcoming Dan Brown book – which is called The Lost Symbol. Excuse me while my head and my desk connect several times.

Having deleted that email with all speed, I shall turn my attention to a pile of about 20 books which I've been working my way down over the past month. Several kept me company on the long train journeys around England – I can confirm that both Reginald Hill and Mark Billingham are on top form. Hill's Midnight Fugue takes place in the space of 24 hours. And there's a welcome return for DI Tom Thorne in Billingham's Blood Line.

I'm intrigued by two authors where there's been a buzz around the books. Adam Creed's Suffer the Children is a debut novel and police procedural set in London. I'm about 50 pages in and certainly interested enough to keep going. China Mieville, meanwhile, is better known for his work in the fantasy and science fiction fields. He's come over to play in our genre sandpit with The City and The City – and it's next up on my pile.

Lynne Patrick will be pleased to know that the Crème de la Crime short stories anthology Criminal Tendencies was a hit with me – among the names supporting the charity project are Messrs Hill and Billingham. All I can say is that you should buy it. And Lynne assures me that my copy of the new Maureen Carter book, Blood Money, is on its way to me. Once it does, I shall have great difficulty not promoting it up the queue.

I don't know how other reviewers work, but I do try to prioritise the books in the order they're being published (and, to some extent, the order in which I've received them). But some do queue-jump – and Stephen Booth, John Connolly and Dan Fesperman are all about to do that. The first two are additions to existing series, whilst the latter is another standalone from one of our foremost thriller writers.

I do keep an eye out for certain publishers. Crème de la Crime is one of them. Akashic, Quercus and Bitter Lemon also tend to be very reliable, and I have a stack of Dutch, Spanish and South American books from the latter and several city-focused short story collections from the former.

It feels at the moment that my favourite authors are like buses . . . You wait an age for the blighters to get a new book out, then a whole load of them come along together. Not that I'm complaining, mind!

Think before you Twitter

Sharon Wheeler

I was going to spend today’s blog happily raving to you about the gems in my review pile which have kept me gainfully employed on my train journeys around the exotic hot-spots of the UK. But you’ll have to tune in next week to hear about what you should be reading, as I really couldn’t resist sticking my oar in over the saga of Alice Hoffman and her bad attack of hair-trigger Twitter.

For those of you who’ve missed this latest little saga of author entitlement, Hoffman’s latest book received a lukewarm review in the Boston Globe.

Instead of realising that it goes with the territory, Hoffman threw a hissy fit, flounced over to Twitter and slagged off the reviewer and the paper – and then proceeded to hand out the reviewer’s phone number and email so that any sheep-like followers could email her to complain.

Since the ensuing row kicked off, Hoffman’s Twitter post has been pulled down, and she’s given the usual passive-aggressive “I’m sorry if I offended anyone” response. Actually, you’ve behaved like a spoiled brat and what you’re encouraging people to do smacks of harassment.

I read the offending review, and good grief, it really isn’t a hatchet job. Hoffman whined about the reviewer giving too much of the plot away. It’s hard to tell whether that’s the case without reading the book (and no, I won’t be bothering, thanks). But it’s why I restrict my summary of a plot to one paragraph and why I’m so anti reviews that are basically a précis of the novel. That way, no one can complain that you’ve ruined their enjoyment of the story.

I’m trying to see this from both sides of the fence. Authors have sweated blood over their darling, and it obviously hurts when it’s not met with glowing praise. But, like I’ve said here before, a reviewer has a job to do – and that’s not to cheerlead for a writer. If you don’t want your work criticised, don’t publish.

Anyone who follows any sort of online media must know that there’s the potential for a minor spat to blow up into something much bigger – look at how people used Twitter to put the pressure on Amazon in the row over rankings and GLBT books. A lot of us have learned by experience not to fire off emails when you’ve got steam coming out of your ears. A few people might want to transfer that rule to Twitter and Facebook.

The online world of Twitter, Facebook, Crimespace and the like is a constant cacophony of “me, me, look at me, buy my book!” from writers who are desperate to be noticed and for their novels to sell. They’ve suddenly got all these cybertools at their disposal and many still haven’t worked out how best to use them. In the old days, probably the worst a writer could do was to get pissed at a meet and greet, or signing. Shit sticks in cyberspace.

The whole saga has shades of Anne Rice’s classic line to a reviewer about interrogating the text from the wrong perspective! What it boils down to, though, is that any writer who insults and patronises readers and reviewers is an idiot and that they’ll find both have long memories.

Let the train take the strain

Sharon Wheeler

If you want to see a cross-section of the British public at its most eccentric, travel by train.

First we had the wanker who spent the two hours from Preston to Birmingham answering his phone every four or five minutes and yelling: “I’m on the train!” Whether it was to the same person or to everyone in his mobile phone directory, I couldn’t say. Whichever, by the time the train got to Warrington, I had the urge to shove the phone where the sun don’t shine (which, come to think of it, is Warrington …)

Then we had the strange woman who appeared to have spent a king’s ransom so that her handbag could travel in comfort on the seat next to her. Opposite her, a little old dear wittered all the way from Preston to Crewe about this fact after I’d made it politely but abundantly clear that the train was absolutely heaving and I wanted that seat.

And then there was the girl going to rehab (yes, yes, yes – I know because she told me) with two of the heaviest cases you have ever seen. These cases were wedged into the wheelchair slot, and every time the train lurched (which was often, as it was being driven by Driver Kangaroo), they fell over in slow motion, trapping unsuspecting passers-by. She and I managed to heave them off between us at some tiny station in the middle of Hampshire, but I had visions of them jamming the train door and us all being stuck there ‘til the next Millennium.

I count myself lucky to have returned from my annual work trek around the UK without developing swine flu, given the generosity of my fellow passengers when it came to sharing their germs. And considering it’s not yet the school holidays, why were there so many sprogs on the trains, and why do most of them engage in nostril gardening when they think no one’s watching?

OK, you have me bang to rights … I read a lot on my journeys, but I also stared around a lot. I’m a journalist; I’m paid to be nosy. And I always want to know what the people around me are reading. Except most of them weren’t. There were a couple of blokes in suits reading dungeons and dragons-type fantasy. A fair few women were flicking through magazines. But a high proportion of people were either working on their laptops or had iPods clamped to their ears (note to the wanker on the way to Portsmouth: playing Coldplay that loud is a crime against humanity and will be reported to the relevant United Nations committee).

Me, I had Marshall Karp and Mark Billingham for company, and very congenial companions they were too. More next week on why I’m like a pig in the proverbial with my present reading matter …

My beloved editors

Sharon Wheeler

About the only thing I write that doesn’t get edited is my shopping list. So let me introduce you to my much-loved and trusted team of beady-eyed editors who find themselves roped in to knock my prose into shape.

Yvonne Klein, my co-editor in crime over at RTE, is charged with the task of toning down my more sarcastic comments in book reviews, and also curing me of my life-long addiction to ellipses and exclamation marks …!

Mafalda Stasi and Wayne Gunn look over my academic writings. Wayne’s a retired Eng Lit professor from Texas. Maf is Italian, lives in Paris and speaks at least three languages fluently. Both of them immediately see the wood from the trees.

Fortunately for the unsuspecting world, I don’t write fiction very often. But when I do, it’s shovelled in the direction of my friends Linda and Fiona. Linda can spot a plot hole and character glitch at 20 paces. Fiona is the cheerleader every writer wants. But no discrepancies or vague phrases sneak past her.

You don’t acquire trusted editors and mentors overnight. You learn early on that some friends can’t bring themselves to criticise what you’ve written, so instead give you the written version of a pat on the hand. Thank them prettily and don’t push them – it’s not worth losing a friendship over if you force them outside of their comfort zone.

If I edit for people as a favour, I ask them at the outset how honest they want me to be. Some want you to read and then gush over every word. Others genuinely want you to go through with the finest of toothcombs and are quite happy for you to murder their darling. Sometimes you just know that it won’t end well, so best to discover an urgent deadline which precludes you from helping out.

All this is by way of remembering the two best mentors and editors I’ve had. Joan Martin, a retired Californian schoolteacher, died in 2006. She oozed calm and quiet competence and would say with a twinkle in her eye: “I’m just a sweet little old lady.”

People seemed to know instinctively that she wouldn’t take crap off anybody. And she could fillet leaden prose quicker than anyone. I didn’t get to know Joan until she was over 70, and we met up three times – I went to California twice and she stayed with me in the UK once – but we spoke on the phone several times a month and emailed constantly.

I dedicated my Feature Writing for Journalists to Joan – and will be dedicating the next book to Professor Peter Widdowson, who died last week. Peter was a much-loved colleague in the English department at the University of Gloucestershire, and was the man responsible for kick-starting my research.

When I got the job at UoG, several colleagues in other universities said reverentially: “Oh, Peter Widdowson’s there!” So I was fully expecting some god-like figure who didn’t consort with the hoi polloi. After all, Peter’s publication record stretched halfway to the moon.

In fact, I found a sparky, witty man with an unbounded enthusiasm which he passed on to colleagues and students. I remember my first years enthusing over a grammar and punctuation session he’d done with them. I tried not to gawp with amazement at an academic with Peter’s reputation taking such a basic study skills class – but he made those essential rules fun and accessible.

I hadn’t been at UoG long when he sat me down and asked me about my research record. I muttered that I’d come from a teaching university and anyway, I was a journalist and kept busy with that, thank you very much. He looked at me over his glasses and said that we’d see about that. I then admitted that I’d been toting round a book proposal which three publishers had politely declined, and would he mind taking a look at it and telling me what was wrong with it.

“How honest do you want me to be?” asked Peter. “Totally,” I said. And he was – the proposal came back to me coated liberally with red pen, and I could soon see why none of the publishers had mown me down in the rush. From then on, he looked over my book proposals, jabbed me in the ribs to do research seminars, and provided advice whenever it was needed. And my academic publishing went from nil to one book, a co-edited book and chapters in two other books within five years.

Me and my historian colleague Penny agreed that Peter would be the one man we’d take to a desert island. Never mind all these young hunks with nothing between the ears – Peter had a brain the size of a planet, a cheeky schoolboy sense of humour and could discourse fluently on seemingly any subject. You’d never be bored in his company and would come away realising you’d learned something new each time.

I shall miss Peter’s sense of fun, his enthusiasm and his ‘you can do it’ motivation. And most of all I shall remember the hilarious emails (we had a bizarre double act going which stemmed from both the Carry On films and that well-known quote: "I have in my hand a piece of paper …") As he himself used to sign off: Yours ‘til hell freezes over.

Nostalgia ain't what it used to be . . .

Sharon Wheeler

It’s been a busy few weeks with end-of-term marking and meetings, so forgive me if I rush in, smile manically at you all, twitch a bit and then scarper in a cloud of dust. Here’s the product of my scrambled brain:

1. The ongoing saga of British MPs and their dodgy expense claims is exactly why we should be fighting to preserve our newspapers. Can you imagine TV stations or online sites putting in the amount of time and resources and legal toothcombing that the Daily Telegraph has? I don’t think so …
2. I now know why reality TV should be re-named ‘train wreck TV.’ Over the years I have managed to dodge various manifestations of Big Brother, Celebrity Come Dancing, Pop Idol and the like (but still remain tediously up-to-date on them through the occupational hazard of reading the British red-top tabloids!) But this weekend, thanks to my ten-year-old nephew and six-year-old niece, I ended up watching one of the semi-finals of Britain’s Got Talent. Actually, that’s a slight fib, as some of the time was spent in the kitchen when the ten-year-old poppet started bawling when she forgot her words. I have a low embarrassment threshold. And while adults should know just what they’ll be getting themselves in to on shows like this, kids (especially if they’re aided and abetted by pushy parents) sure as hell don’t. Keep the under-16s well away from the circus …
3. Doesn’t the discovery of 47 million-year-old Ida piss on the Creationists’ strawberries? And will she get her own reality show?
4. Nostalgia ain’t what it used to be! But there should be a law decreeing that The Specials re-form every 25 years when the country’s going to the dogs. I seem to be humming Ghost Town ever such a lot these days (and doing the sound effects for the spooky bits). Two-Tone, your country needs you!
5. I’ve never had much time for those internet sites where wankers roar out “RTFM!” every time some bemused newbie dares to ask a question. But I am seriously thinking of developing a template email for the writers/publicists who email asking us to review their latest religious mystery ebook from a self-publishing company. Um, that’s why we have a very clear link on the home page which says: “For guidelines on how to submit books for review, please go to the  ABOUT section of our site.” And guess what, the ABOUT section provides dos and don’ts for submitting review copies. Gah!
6. Why is it that authors who teach on creative writing courses are the ones who have no idea how to handle point of view?
7. Are there any humorous Scandinavian crime novels? If not, would someone like to remedy the situation to save what’s left of my sanity?

Speaking in tongues

Sharon Wheeler

Regular visitors to Dead Guy Towers will know that I read and rave a lot about European crime fiction. Small indie publishers like Bitter Lemon Press and Arcadia have done us a huge favour by bringing the best French, German, Italian, Dutch and Spanish writers to our attention. And now most of the large UK houses have a respectable roster of Scandinavian writers. And thereby hangs a small problem for reviewers . . .

If you haven’t read the book in the original language, how do you tell if the translation is any good? I can manage books in French at a fairly sedate pace (and my admiration for the team who translate the excellent but idiosyncratic Dominique Manotti knows no bounds), but my one year of Old Icelandic at university isn’t what you’d call useful for reading the likes of Arnaldur Indridason and Yrsa Sigurdardóttir in the original.

At first, when I reviewed, translated books, I carefully never mentioned the translator. It was only when I’d been the recipient of some electronic hard stares by Yvonne Klein, my co-conspirator over at RTE, and a translator herself, did I finally click what a humungous role they play.

I read a very intriguing feature a year or so back in Crime Time where a group of translators were interviewed about their work. And very revealing it was as well. I should warn you that it’s a bit of a plod, as they’ve put each question to each of the translators. But stick with it …

Apparently one of the biggest menaces are authors who know just enough English to quibble over the use of slang – a French writer was adamant that flic should be translated as bobby! And the translators are divided on how much contact they want with the writer, but the consensus appears to be that having someone willing to answer questions is essential. They’re not always complimentary about reviewers, although Laurie Thompson takes it as praise if the translator isn’t mentioned!

A comment from Ian Monk particularly caught my eye: “I think I am well placed to translate crime work because you need to have learnt the language in the country. As I often say, I learnt my French in books and bars, so this means I have a better grasp of slang and real spoken French than University professors in the UK!”

As a reviewer, one of the things I’ve learned to look for in translated novels is up-to-date slang. One or two (no names, no pack drill) appear to have been rendered by someone who now lives up a mountain and last visited the UK in 1955! And yes, I do take Adriana Hunter’s point in the interview that sometimes the idiom depends on the age of the character and the situation. But I’m talking about younger, streetwise characters who have been given clunky, dated slang to spout.

In the end, about all a reviewer can do is acknowledge the work the translator has done and to keep an eye out for uneven text. We’re helped where more than one translator has worked on a series, such as with Henning Mankell. That way you can start to develop a feel for what’s the author’s own voice and what’s the translator’s head popping over the parapet.

Once more with feeling

Sharon Wheeler

A Freecycler came round the other day to collect a lamp and give it more TLC than I’ll manage – and did an impersonation of a guppy when he spotted the mountains of books propping my house up.

His first question – and that of many visitors – was “have you read them all?” I said I hadn’t, but spared him my usual follow-on explanation of ‘that’s the must-review pile, the one behind it is the might reviews and the one behind that the do not touch with a bargepole. Oh, and the poetry and theatre books are much-loved and dipped into often. The sports books are for work as well as pleasure, and the foreign literature section is to make me look learned.’

Sadly no one’s fooled by the latter, and my brother uses it as ammunition to remind me that when we shared a house about 15 years ago, Calvin and Hobbes had pride of place in front of Camus, Sartre, Grass, Bulgakov and Solzhenitsyn – and visitors always dived for the comic books!

The friendly Freecycler then said that he was a fan of thrillers and often re-read them. I replied that I rarely re-read books for the simple reason that there are too many unread ones in my house and too little time in which to get through them. And generally I have no urge to go through crime fiction books a second time, as the element of surprise at the end has gone (not that that’s the only reason for reading them in the first place, I hasten to add).

This week, though, I’m re-reading some Reginald Hill books (sssh, don’t tell my RTE co-editor Yvonne Klein, as I should be concentrating on the backlog of reviews) for some research I’m doing. The fact that even 20 years on I can remember the endings of most them doesn’t matter a bit, as I’m wallowing happily in Hill’s wit and characterisation.

Where I’ve adored a book, I’m also too nervous to re-read it in case it doesn’t stand up to my memories of it. It took being dug in the ribs by my book group to suggest Mary Doria Russell’s The Sparrow as a monthly read – and part of  my rationale for selecting it was to see if I liked it as much as when I’d first read it ten years previously. I did.

Patricia Highsmith’s Ripley series is one of my all-time favourites, and I’ve probably read each book three or four times. As with Hill, the plot doesn’t matter, as they’re books you read for more than wondering whodunit and whether you’ll be smart enough to suss it out before the investigator does.

A friend of mine re-reads War and Peace once a year. I’m still trying to read it for the first time. And even though I’m loving the time I’m spending with Hill again, I can’t imagine my well-developed sense of reviewer’s guilt will allow me to stay away from the review piles for long. But it’s good to be reminded occasionally of just why you fell in love with a book or author.

Children’s classics

Sharon Wheeler

You know me, any excuse to start compiling a list. So this week’s choice of classic children's books selected by five top writers has given me an excuse I certainly don’t need to go and yank kids’ books off the shelf and start re-reading and muttering and scribbling half-remembered names and titles down on the back of an envelope.

So here’s what I remember from when I was little. Arthur Ransome’s books were peopled by smug little middle-class gits and I lost the will to live after Swallows and Amazons and Swallowdale. Enid Blyton’s Secret Seven were boring wimps, but I devoured the adventures of the Famous Five and the Five Find-Outers. Malcolm Saville hardly gets mentioned now, though he wrote cracking adventure stories and the thought of a scene in Rye Royal still gives me the creeps, 30-something years on!

I lapped up the horsey books by the Pullein-Thompson sisters, although the nearest I got to the saddle was riding a placid donkey called Flash round the stable block at Stratford-upon-Avon racecourse. And I adored school stories – Blyton again with her Mallory Towers books, the Chalet School series by Elinor Brent-Dyer (any girl of a certain age who tells you she never read them is a fibber!) and Anthony Buckeridge’s hilarious Jennings series, which pre-dated JK Rowling by a good 50 years.

I’m glad to see, though, that Michael Morpurgo nominated something by Blyton. Of course she’s un-PC if you apply 21st century values to the book (so were Captain WE Johns’s Biggles stories, but they were damn good yarns). Blyton could tell a thoroughly engrossing story – as can Rowling, who doesn’t appear on the lists.

I reckon I’ve read more children’s books since I’ve allegedly grown up that I did when I was in the age range. I swiped my dad’s adult library ticket at the age of about 11 and proceeded to run through Cheltenham library’s stock of Agatha Christie, Dick Francis and Jean Plaidy. The less said about how I got hold of copies of The Godfather and Valley of the Dolls, the better …

My late friend and mentor Joan Martin, a former schoolteacher, provided me with a list of ‘must read’ children’s books about ten years ago. That’s how I discovered Susan Cooper and Diana Wynne Jones, amongst others.

Half the fun of these sorts of lists is deciding what you’d have chosen had the call come. So here’s mine, in no particular order:

1. His Dark Materials by Philip Pullman
2. A Traveller in Time by Alison Uttley (every time I hear Greensleeves I think of this book).
3. The Dark is Rising by Susan Cooper (forget the terrible American film and read the original books!)
4. Tom's Midnight Garden by Philippa Pearce
5. Pennington’s Seventeenth Summer by KM Peyton (this series would probably seem dated to today’s teenagers, but it seemed edgy to me in my early teens. Peyton’s Flambards series is also fabulous and spawned an impressive TV version).
6. The Silver Sword by Ian Serraillier
7. Cue for Treason by Geoffrey Trease (I think this book started my fascination with Shakespeare and the theatre).

For a lot of these, I have an inspirational teacher to thank. Mrs Wanless taught us English when we started at secondary school and she seemed to know instinctively which books would keep stroppy 11-year-girls hooked.

So my reserve list could easily include Cynthia Harnet’s The Wool Pack (we got taken to Witney to see the carvings in the church commemorating the wool trade), Rosemary Sutcliff’s Eagle of the Ninth which captures Roman Britain better than many adult books, Alan Garner’s truly creepy The Owl Service, TH White’s Mistress Masham's Repose, E Nesbit’s The Railway Children (even if my abiding memory is the film version with Jenny Agutter waving her red knickers at the train!), Frances Hodgson Burnett’s The Secret Garden and Carrie’s War by Nina Bawden.

OK, so who have I forgotten?

Why the kids aren’t all right

Sharon Wheeler

I don’t particularly think policemen look young these days – but the same can’t be said for the stars of TV shows.

Regular visitors to Dead Guy Towers will know that I have a soft spot for ITV science fiction show Primeval. It features a motley bunch of scientists, geeks and civil servants trying to discover the secret behind anomalies (rips in time which are allowing dinosaurs and sundry scary creatures through).

It’s one of those shows where you don’t want to start picking holes in the plot, or it’ll do an impersonation of a loose hem and fall down when you’re trying to look suave and sophisticated. It is what it is . . . escapist Saturday night TV which appeals as much to my nine-year-old nephew as it does to me.

One thing you learn early on with Primeval is that you don’t want to get attached to your favourite characters, as they’ll all get bumped off. And series three has taken the show in such a weirdly different direction that it bears little resemblance to the previous two series (mind you, I remain to be convinced that bad writing isn’t to blame for some of this …)

And they appear to be aiming at the younger audience this time, with the focus shifting to the UST between cute 20-somethings Abby and Connor. Even the Special Forces army captain looks like he hasn’t started shaving yet (and I have it on the best authority that 25 is too young to be in that position of responsibility).

One of the reasons I gave up on the totally ghastly Demons after 20 minutes was that I had no interest in seeing these young kids running around with their tops off (well, OK, Philip Glenister’s wandering American accent didn’t much help).

And I can see myself drifting away from Dr Who as well, following the casting of Matt Smith in the main role. I had great fun joining in the speculation beforehand and would quite happily have seen either Robert Carlyle or Paterson Joseph get the lead part. But with Nu Who, the reincarnations seem to be knocking ten years off their ages each time, like coy movie leading ladies, with 40-something Christopher Eccleston becoming 30-something David Tennant who at the end of the this year will turn into 20-something Smith.

A friend of mine said briskly: “Those of us over 40 aren’t Dr Who’s target audience.” And we’re probably not Primeval’s either. But if a show’s being marketed as a family one, then the writers need to bear in mind that the older end of the market want to see characters they recognise. And it’s certainly the adults who’ll stick with a show they enjoy, unlike the fickle and wandering youth market. After all, they make up Who’s dedicated fan market who lobbied so hard and so long for the show to come back. Writer Russell T Davies and his successor Steven Moffat are both 40-something fanboys as well. Presumably the casting director isn’t …

How to turn a crisis into a disaster

Sharon Wheeler

I’m usually a great believer in the cock-up rather than conspiracy theory, but this week I’m willing to make an exception for Amazon.

The row over book rankings and homophobia at the internet sellers is the textbook example of how not to deal with a crisis. All the best crisis management advisers will tell you to apologise if necessary and get your story straight. Amazon’s response to what happens suggests strongly they couldn’t organise a bunk-up in a brothel and that they might like to send their senior management for some urgent media training . . .

Theories and counter-theories have kept the blogging and news communities babbling frantically – was Amazon systematically hacked by religious bigots or was it a surreptitious campaign to go mid-market or was it some poor sod pushing the wrong key on the computer in a room in France? First it was claimed that the American site was the only one affected (and some quick searches I did on Amazon UK and France suggested this might be the case), then it was said the whole of the retailer’s world-wide operations were affected.

What did look more than a tad suspicious, though, was the fact that GLBT books were the ones hit hardest, even those with no sexual content, while explicit or violent ‘straight’ material stayed put. Hence why the conspiracy theory looks the most likely to me, and why Amazon are finding it hard to wriggle out of this one . . .

One thing it does show, though, is how quickly the internet community, such as it is, can mobilise. Last week I wondered about the value of Twitter. The #amazonfail campaign proved conclusively how people can use it. And it proves, too, how companies need to take control of PR disasters from the start. Amazon took their eye off the ball badly by allowing rumours to circulate and by not having a senior manager heading up a clear response. Any big organisation that doesn’t have a crisis management plan in place is just asking for a bad press when something like this happens …

Once an organisation has copped that sort of negative publicity, it can take months or even years to recover. It’s the 20th anniversary of the Hillsborough disaster this week, when 96 soccer fans were crushed to death at an FA Cup semi-final. The Sun newspaper reported at the time how Liverpool fans had allegedly looted the bodies of the dead and dying. The story was untrue – and The Sun’s sales on Merseyside have never recovered.

As for Amazon, mud sticks. And it’s probably given a lot of people pause for thought as to where they buy books, CDs and DVDs. I’d decided I’d suspend all ordering from Amazon until they came clean about what had happened. So last night I went out and ordered some DVDs that I’d had in my Amazon basket for a while from Sendit where they were almost ten quid cheaper. In the scheme of things my £40 isn’t much, but if others decide to vote with their feet, that near-monopoly of online bookselling isn’t looking so comfortable any more.

Networking cautiously

Sharon Wheeler

I finally got around to joining Facebook a week or so back. It had been on my to-do list for ages, but I’d been studiously avoiding it, as I could see myself wasting as much time on it as I do on Live Journal and other blogs …

In the end, the ‘do as I say, not do as I do’ double standards finally persuaded me. I’d been telling students what a useful tool it could be for contact-making – just so long as future employers wouldn’t come across vomit-splattered personal photos when they were doing an online trawl!

So far I haven’t sussed out all the bells and whistles, but it’s been an interesting exercise watching how friending works. I haven’t gone looking for old school and university mates, on the grounds that I’ve pretty much stayed in touch with all the ones I liked. So far I’ve linked up with people I know . . . and yes, that probably defeats the object of it, as I talk to or email or see a lot of them regularly. There are a few former colleagues that I’m now back in touch with, though – including someone who has moved twice round the world, which is how we managed to lose contact originally.

But I thought I’d watch and wait before rushing out and friending – or accepting friending requests from – lots of people I either don’t know or am peripherally acquainted with. Fortunately I’d been warned about those who trawl ‘friends of friends’ lists for BSP purposes.

So far I have about a dozen friending requests sitting in an inbox. I either don’t know the people at all (no note from them on why they’re friending me) or suspect their motives.

My strategy, such as it was, on joining Facebook (and other networking sites such as LinkedIn and Twitter) was to get chatting to people. But I want it as a two-way process so that I’m not constantly bombarded by authors wanting me to buy their latest masterpiece – I get enough of that in unsolicited emails, thanks! I’m still working out how best to use the site – I’m sure people don’t want an update on every cough, spit and fart from me (and I can live without that from them as well!)

My guess is that in the long run, LinkedIn will be more useful for contact-making and Facebook will be fun for personal chats. As for Twitter … I have no idea. Ask me again in six months.

Right to The Wire

Sharon Wheeler

I admit freely that I have a PhD in Cynical from the University of Central Cynical. Every time a book or a TV programme or a film is hyped, I either roll my eyes or smile tiredly and wait for it to crash and burn spectacularly.

Just occasionally, though, it’s nice to have that cynicism given its marching orders. Stieg Larsson’s crime novels, published posthumously, totally blew me away to the extent that for one mad moment I wondered if I could ever learn Swedish quickly enough to read the third book which hasn’t yet appeared in the UK!

And there’s The Wire. It’s been described in the UK as the best drama that no one has ever seen. Until this week it had only been screened on the cable channel FX – and in the UK people don’t automatically subscribe to cable or satellite. And then the BBC bought it with much beating of drums and blowing of trumpets.

Except the silly sods shoved it on at 11.20pm, which is fine for night owls like me, but probably not so good generally. They’re running the whole series back to back on consecutive nights, which looks like it’ll be a cunning plan, as it keeps the momentum going. It kicked off on Monday with 600,000 viewers (a fairly respectable eight per cent of the total audience in the time slot).

I was fully expecting to like The Wire, given David Simon’s previous outing on the totally awesome Homicide: Life on the Street. I won the box sets of the first three series on DVD late last year, bought the other two cheap on Amazon, and then got cold feet about watching them, in case it didn’t live up to the hype.

So far it has (we’re three episodes in to series one), and it looks like doing what disappointingly little crime fiction does – concentrating on real, believable people and focussing on issues that could have come off the front page of a newspaper. The first episode took a bit of getting into, but the next evening I realised I’d been sitting in the same spot for an hour, totally transfixed.

So The Wire passed my 20-minute test spectacularly (this is the TV version of the 50-page test in books, incidentally). I have the concentration span of a gnat and frequently sit down to watch something and after ten minutes am at the computer checking emails or writing frantically with the TV show forgotten.

In stark contrast, I lasted barely 20 minutes with the ghastly Demons a few weeks back before turning over to watch archaeologist Neil Oliver’s luxuriant hair grow. I’d heard enough to be sure that it was a total load of pants, and that Philip Glenister’s American accent had taken a hike and never come back.

Speaking of which, though, I want to know one thing from my American friends who have watched The Wire. Is Dominic West’s accent actually any good? It sounds to me like a Brit trying – and nearly succeeding – to nail an American accent. But what do I know?

Gushing, picking nits and cryptic lists

Sharon Wheeler

As most journalists will tell you, muttering under your breath and staring at a blank Word document waiting for inspiration to strike comes with the territory. But if you write for a living, you can’t have any truck with so-called writer’s block.

A writer friend of mine always says briskly that she can’t afford to have writer’s block. After all, if you don’t write, you don’t get paid. That thought concentrates the mind wonderfully.

I was catching up writing some reviews this week and for some reason was finding them awkward to complete. I had half a dozen album and a couple of book reviews to finish like yesterday. My usual approach to writing is to get ideas down on the page, be it words or phrases that have leapt into my mind, and then edit later. So there was a list of seemingly unrelated statements on the screen and not a lot in the way of fluent prose.

Half the problem was that I liked both of the books, and most reviewers will tell you that those are the worse reviews to write, as you don’t want it to sound like you’re gushing constantly, but you also don’t want to appear to be picking insignificant nits …

The albums were a different matter, and served to confirm my friend Lee’s theory that no decent music comes out of Canada! So I was having to send my sarcastic gene off with its case packed for a holiday … Even then, it was a matter of trying to balance the considerable negatives (why the hell does what the Canadians call indie music sound like 1960s UK prog rock bollocks?) with the faintest sliver of a positive.

In the end, I knocked off six album reviews in an afternoon and evening (that included listening to them as well as writing, in case you’re wondering what took me so long!), and polished the book reviews the next morning. And at times it did feel like I was keeping a shopping list, as I typed cryptic words or phrases onto the page – Virgin Mary, lift music, garden shed, spaghetti western and tinnitus all made perfect sense to me, honest!

I did make one discovery, though. Beware of multi-tasking while you are reviewing albums. There I was, listening to a deeply bizarre but really rather good album called The House on the Causeway and wondered why it had a spoken word bit which sounded like an advert for air fresheners in the middle. But then it was a strange album, so I shrugged and started adjusting my review accordingly. And then I realised it was something on the ITV site which I had open in the background. Quite what it all had to do with an online interview with the actor Ben Miller was beyond me …

Vote with your feet

Sharon Wheeler

I read this article in the week where the writer was bemoaning the fact she had to get to an obscure corner of France, and that the only way to get there was by Ryanair – and she then proceeded to list the airline’s considerable shortcomings. She then finished the piece by saying that of course they had no choice, but to use Ryanair as no other airline flew that route.

I was heard to mutter “actually, you have three choices apart from that. One, don’t go. Two, go by car (there’s a very convenient tunnel connecting the UK and France, in case you haven’t twigged). Three, go by train (ditto point two, with the addition of Eurostar and France’s very efficient railway service).”

OK, so that was maybe a bit flippant, but I get heartedly racked off with people whining about poor service and not voting with their feet. I decided ages ago that I’d never use Ryanair, which treats its passengers like shit and, to coin another bodily function phrase, constantly takes the piss. The airline’s latest delightful dodge is to close all check-in desks and charge people for checking in online before they leave home. Very helpful if you’re not online, or have a knackered printer …

Some good friends of mine have a house in a fairly remote part of the Dordogne, and have invited me to stay. And yes, the only airline that flies anywhere near is Ryanair. So I’ve plotted out the route using Eurostar and then trains from Paris to the nearest town. Good grief, they even have buses in France for the last leg . . .

It’ll no doubt work out a bit more expensive (not much, though, once you take into account Ryanair’s list of hidden charges) and take a bit more time. But it’ll make me feel better. And I’ll have all that train time to catch up on reading.

If something or someone pisses me off, I vote with my feet. I’ve changed banks twice as a protest against bad service. And I get fed-up with people saying ‘oh, it won’t make any difference if I stop flying Ryanair/shopping at Tesco/giving British Telecom my custom.’ Yes it will, just so long as other people decide they’re no longer rewarding bad service.

Those of us of a certain age will remember the boycott of Barclay’s Bank in the UK as a protest against its investments in apartheid era South Africa. It worked – mainly, I suspect, because the company realised that students boycotting the bank and voting against having branches of it on campuses across the country was going to be a major problem when the next generation of professionals had taken their custom elsewhere.

And in case you’re wondering what the hell this has got to do with books, the same applies to authors. We’ve blacklisted four writers on RTE because of unacceptable behaviour. And when they or their publicists have asked, we’ve told them why. Not being reviewed on one website probably won’t hit their sales hugely, but three of the four were mid-ranking writers who don’t get reviewed much elsewhere.

Anything that makes people think before they behave like arseholes is fine by me …

Listing heavily

Sharon Wheeler

Regular visitors here will know I have a weird fetish about lists (my excuse is that my brain goes down and not across, as those who have seen me trying to timetable classes will testify). So I couldn't resist the challenge that came round recently where you were presented with a list of 100 books and where you had to indicate how many you'd read, how many you intended to read, and how many you loved.

I'd read 63 – an English Lit degree and Masters, plus a fixation with European lit, have a lot to answer for (the bumpf with the challenge claimed that the average adult had only read six of the top 100 books on the list). There were a couple I honestly couldn't remember if I'd read or not – Anne of Green Gables and The Bell Jar. And I may be one of the few people on the planet who hasn't read Lord of the Rings and has no intention of doing so! It's failed my 50-page rule on two separate occasions and I now have far too many other books to read to bother with trying again. And no, I haven't read the bible either . . .

If you're feeling anally-retentive, here's the list – see how you do:

1 Pride and Prejudice - Jane Austen
2 The Lord of the Rings - JRR Tolkien
3 Jane Eyre - Charlotte Bronte
4 Harry Potter series - JK Rowling
5 To Kill a Mockingbird - Harper Lee
6 The Bible
7 Wuthering Heights - Emily Bronte
8= Nineteen Eighty Four - George Orwell
8= His Dark Materials - Philip Pullman
10 Great Expectations - Charles Dickens
11 Little Women - Louisa M Alcott
12 Tess of the D'Urbervilles - Thomas Hardy
13 Catch 22 - Joseph Heller
14 Complete Works of Shakespeare
15 Rebecca - Daphne Du Maurier
16 The Hobbit - JRR Tolkien
17 Birdsong - Sebastian Faulks
18 Catcher in the Rye - JD Salinger
19 The Time Traveller's Wife - Audrey Niffenegger
20 Middlemarch - George Eliot
21 Gone With The Wind - Margaret Mitchell
22 The Great Gatsby - F Scott Fitzgerald
23 Bleak House - Charles Dickens
24 War and Peace - Leo Tolstoy
25 The Hitch Hiker's Guide to the Galaxy - Douglas Adams
26 Brideshead Revisited - Evelyn Waugh
27 Crime and Punishment - Fyodor Dostoyevsky
28 Grapes of Wrath - John Steinbeck
29 Alice in Wonderland - Lewis Carroll
30 The Wind in the Willows - Kenneth Grahame
31 Anna Karenina - Leo Tolstoy
32 David Copperfield - Charles Dickens
33 Chronicles of Narnia - CS Lewis
34 Emma - Jane Austen
35 Persuasion - Jane Austen
36 The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe - CS Lewis
37 The Kite Runner - Khaled Hosseini
38 Captain Corelli's Mandolin - Louis De Bernieres
39 Memoirs of a Geisha - Arthur Golden
40 Winnie the Pooh - AA Milne
41 Animal Farm - George Orwell
42 The Da Vinci Code - Dan Brown
43 One Hundred Years of Solitude - Gabriel Garcia Marquez
44 A Prayer for Owen Meaney - John Irving
45 The Woman in White - Wilkie Collins
46 Anne of Green Gables - LM Montgomery
47 Far From The Madding Crowd - Thomas Hardy
48 The Handmaid's Tale - Margaret Atwood
49 Lord of the Flies - William Golding
50 Atonement - Ian McEwan
51 Life of Pi - Yann Martel
52 Dune - Frank Herbert
53 Cold Comfort Farm - Stella Gibbons
54 Sense and Sensibility - Jane Austen
55 A Suitable Boy - Vikram Seth
56 The Shadow of the Wind - Carlos Ruiz Zafon
57 A Tale Of Two Cities - Charles Dickens
58 Brave New World - Aldous Huxley
59 The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time - Mark Haddon
60 Love In The Time Of Cholera - Gabriel Garcia Marquez
61 Of Mice and Men - John Steinbeck
62 Lolita - Vladimir Nabokov
63 The Secret History - Donna Tartt
64 The Lovely Bones - Alice Sebold
65 Count of Monte Cristo - Alexandre Dumas
66 On The Road - Jack Kerouac
67 Jude the Obscure - Thomas Hardy
68 Bridget Jones's Diary - Helen Fielding
69 Midnight's Children - Salman Rushdie
70 Moby Dick - Herman Melville
71 Oliver Twist - Charles Dickens
72 Dracula - Bram Stoker
73 The Secret Garden - Frances Hodgson Burnett
74 Notes From A Small Island - Bill Bryson
75 Ulysses - James Joyce
76 The Bell Jar - Sylvia Plath
77 Swallows and Amazons - Arthur Ransome
78 Germinal - Emile Zola
79 Vanity Fair - William Makepeace Thackeray
80 Possession - AS Byatt
81 A Christmas Carol - Charles Dickens
82 Cloud Atlas - David Mitchell
83 The Color Purple - Alice Walker
84 The Remains of the Day - Kazuo Ishiguro
85 Madame Bovary - Gustave Flaubert
86 A Fine Balance - Rohinton Mistry
87 Charlotte's Web - EB White
88 The Five People You Meet In Heaven - Mitch Alborn
89 Adventures of Sherlock Holmes - Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
90 The Faraway Tree Collection - Enid Blyton
91 Heart of Darkness - Joseph Conrad
92 The Little Prince - Antoine De Saint-Exupery
93 The Wasp Factory - Iain Banks
94 Watership Down - Richard Adams
95 A Confederacy of Dunces - John Kennedy Toole
96 A Town Like Alice - Nevil Shute
97 The Three Musketeers - Alexandre Dumas
98 Hamlet - William Shakespeare
99 Charlie and the Chocolate Factory - Roald Dahl
100 Les Miserables - Victor Hugo

I was pretty stingy with books I loved – only His Dark Materials, the Complete Works of Shakespeare, Cold Comfort Farm and Midnight's Children made my list. But there was only one on there that I'd never even heard of – Mitch Alborn's The Five People You Meet In Heaven.

It did occur to me, though, that there should be a category on the list for books started and not finished – that would include Lord of the Rings, Catch 22, War and Peace, Anna Karenina, Ulysses, The Shadow of the Wind and Brave New World.

I've no idea why I've never finished The Shadow of the Wind – I got about halfway through, was enjoying it well enough, but it didn't quite grab me enough to keep going. I intend to remedy War and Peace, though, and it's next up on my TBR mountain. Any offers out there for so-called classics you've always been meaning to read?

A few days later a similar one with films did the rounds. I'll spare you that one – not least because I'd only seen about six of the 100!

A tribute to Barbara Franchi

Sharon Wheeler

It's been a week where I've felt numb. Barbara Franchi, the founder and publisher of RTE, died on Saturday after a long illness. She'd fought so hard and so long against the cancer that I'd convinced myself she was invincible.

I first met Barbara and her husband Rudy about six years ago. She'd set up the site in 2001 when she realised there was a gap in the market for a crime fiction review site. And it just growed and growed, thanks to Barbara's boundless energy and the enthusiasm of reviewers and publicists from the big publishers in the US, UK, Canada and Australia.

Barbara had a well-developed bullshit detector, a wickedly dry sense of humour and she missed absolutely nothing. We soon found we were on the same wavelength and I looked forward to hers and Rudy's visits to London when we'd go clothes shopping and sample the city's unusual restaurants. They even found me a Chinese restaurant that served good vegetarian food and where the waitress didn't bat an eyelid when I said I didn't eat egg!

When they were back home in the States (first Boston, and later Los Angeles when they moved to be nearer family), Barbara and I emailed constantly, swapping rants, gossip, jokes, cartoons and recipes. Oh, and we kept the website ticking over very happily. We were both thrilled to bits when the site was nominated for an Anthony Award in 2007. Barbara's response to the news that we hadn't won was typically brisk: "Jim Huang deserved it. Have you seen all the things he does for the mystery community?" She was right.

The respect and affection Barbara was held in by the crime fiction community was obvious in the avalanche of lovely emails I received from publicists, writers, reviewers and readers, all saying how much she would be missed.

And Barbara will be missed, too, in the antiques world where she and Rudy were regulars on the Antiques Roadshow in the States. A non-crime fic friend of mine squealed with delight when I said I knew the Franchis, and said they were her favourite experts, with Barbara's quiet, non-nonsense manner perfectly complementing Rudy's flamboyance! Many people also knew them via their online movie memorabilia business.

Barbara passed away on Saturday evening. Rudy, her daughters Jill, Susan, Regina, her son-in-law Tony and her grandson Bennett were at her bedside. For those in the Los Angeles area, the family will be sitting Shiva on Sunday March 8 at Jill's home, 3725 Mountain View Avenue, 90066 (310 398 3105). Contributions in Barbara's name can be made to Beit T'Shuvah, 8831 Venice Blvd., Los Angeles, CA 90034.

Save our subs!

Sharon Wheeler

Once a sub-editor, always a sub-editor, that's my view. I can't read anything over for people without a pen gripped in my right hand, or 'track changes' selected in Word. My late best friend Ian never forgave me for editing a letter he was sending to his bank manager. In my defence, m'lud, he did shove it under my nose when I was tunnelling my way through a pile of student work.

Poor old subs have always been undervalued. Whoever said they were just failed reporters needed a jab in the eye with an em ruler. That'll be the subs who turn turgid prose into polished English, spot legal howlers that would land the paper in court, and write snappy headlines . . .

That's why I am still rolling my eyes a lot after reading the article in Monday's Guardian newspaper which was responding to a blog from Roy Greenslade. He's a man who has developed some very strange views after moving from editing newspapers to being a meeja commentator.

Greenslade reckons that there's a case for sub-editors to stay on national newspapers, but not on magazines or local papers. I am still scratching my head over his cock-eyed logic. Clearly it's a long time since he had to bash cryptic offerings from 'correspondents' (i.e. non-journalists) into shape or save a reporter from their own ignorance when it comes to knowledge of your patch or ensuring that a technically-complex article in a magazine is accurate.

We all know there's a revolution under way in the media, and that cost-cutting can be better described as massacring across the sector. Multi-skilling – something which those of us who started out 20-odd years ago turned our delicate noses up at – has now become a necessary fact of life.

But I raised an eyebrow at the following quote from Greenslade: "There are other things to take on board too, such as the inflow of a "new wave" of highly-educated, well-trained young journalists with digital knowledge. I might be idealistic, but I do believe their work - on camera, on video and in text form - will need less scrutiny than used to be the case."

Journalism training has changed hugely in those 20 years. Newspapers and magazines have more or less handed it all over to universities in the UK. The course I teach on turns out some damn good young journalists – but their work still needs editing, be it text or image-based. My work needs editing, for heaven's sake. And according to the last line of the Guardian article, so does Greenslade's!

Everyone needs an editor. One sports desk I worked on, we boasted one of the best sports journalists in the UK as a contributor. Lovely guy, but his stream of consciousness column needed editing with a pick axe. The sports editor never cottoned on why the old hands used to hide in the loos until some long-suffering casual had been allocated the column to sub.

You'll understand now why I have such an aversion to those amongst the self-published brigade who claim they don't need their beautiful prose touching. Yeah, yeah, in your dreams . . .

Feeding my addiction

Sharon Wheeler

I bought a glossy magazine on Monday – and promptly felt guilty. I know I can confess it here amongst friends, but I'm a magazineaholic. Must be the smell of the paper and the perfume samples that niff like loo cleaner and the moment when you rip the usually tacky free gift from the front cover . . . Ooh, lovely, another umbrella that'll turn inside out in a faint breeze, and look, more mascara that I'll never wear, and oh goodie, another chicklit book that I'll hide in a pile somewhere round the house and never read.

In the past I've spent the gross national debt of Columbia on magazines. Yes, I do need them for work, no, I can't claim them back on expenses, so yes, they are rather an indulgence. Music, sport, women's, cult TV, current affairs … I can't resist the blighters.

I'd decided, though, that they were an indulgence too far when money was tight in a credit crunch. And I was very proud of myself last time I went into Border's in Bristol, which is the magazine emporium of the western world, as I walked out without a single one.

I might not be the only one as well. Recent circulation figures for UK magazines show a mixed story, both with advertising and sales of the magazines, particularly in the house porn market. Presumably people don't want to dribble over homes and posh furnishings that they don't have a cat in hell's chance of affording at the moment. Interestingly, though, Conde Nast are planning to launch two titles over the next couple of months, so they obviously have faith in people wanting their glossy monthly treat.

It's not only my magazine addiction that's had to be cut back. I'm lucky enough to get review copies, but I still buy a lot of non-crime fiction books. Increasingly, I'm costing out whether it's cheaper to buy them from AmazonMarketplace than through the main site. And yes, I know any authors reading this will be on my back for this. Sorry guys, I've got a bank manager on my tail. But those 'three for the price of two' deals in High Street bookshops or heavily-discounted titles in supermarkets look increasingly attractive. When I do buy, though, it's not hardbacks.

I'm buying far fewer CDs as well – and when I do it's usually by an old favourite, or where I'm confident of liking the album. There's no more 'take a chance' buying just in case I might like it. And yay for iTunes, where it makes economic sense to download a track and try before you buy . . .

People still want treats in a recession. They might be cutting back on overseas holidays, or deciding that the aging sofa is going to have to last another year. But paperback books, chocolate and takeaways (a couple of the takeaway chains announced this week their figures were up) are feel-good extras when everything around you is hideously gloomy.

How to avoid the little green men

Sharon Wheeler

Some people seem to take delight in being disgusted and offended. You know the ones, who sit through television drama and then phone up the TV channel to complain about the bad language/filth in it. Presumably their hand was frozen solid on the remote control . . .

I'm a firm believer in the "if you don't like something, don't read/watch it" mantra. And I dislike those who are given ample warnings, and then whine later. My eyes rolled at a scary speed a while back when someone won a gay crime novel in an RTE draw and then proceeded to complain that it had men snogging in it and that she was going to throw it on the fire. She was unable to explain why she'd entered a competition to win a book that was well-labelled when it came to content.

Having said that, I'm not a fan of warnings up the wazoo. I'm in an online writing group, and there seems to be an ethos of giving too much away at the top of the story when people post stuff they're working on. I don't want my reading spoilt by unnecessary hand-holding.

I admit I do read the summaries (not the reviews!) at Amazon and the back cover when I'm in a bookshop before buying the book. And I'm as susceptible to a good sales pitch as anyone – even if I often do wonder later if the person who wrote the blurb had actually even read the book or realised that they'd given away a humungous chunk of the plot.

This way, though, I get to avoid religious books or talking cats and dogs or little green men science fiction. After all, there's a limit to how much a woman has a right to moan!

Hey oop, it's Warren Clarke!

Sharon Wheeler

Some years ago I remember rolling around the floor laughing when a music writer drew readers' attention to the Slapheaded Chanteuse Act. This made it illegal for any Irish band to release a record without Sinead O'Connor warbling over the top of it.

I am now wondering if someone has drawn up legislation which forbids any northern cop show from taking place without Warren Clarke's wonderfully craggy features gracing the screen -- and no, this doesn't back up my friend Joey's theory that there are only 12 actors on British TV. I told her she should watch Aussie shows – they've only got six, and Jim from Neighbours appears to have decamped to the US.

Let's face it, Clarke was born to play Dalziel in the TV versions of Reginald Hill's series. And he's one of those actors who immediately adds backbone to any drama. Apparently he's a Lancashire lad, but his Birmingham accent (a hard one to nail without sounding like you're taking the piss) was inch-perfect in the dramatisation of David Lodge's Nice Work (why do they never repeat classy dramas like that?) So doing Yorkshire must be a doddle.

Clarke is on-board for Channel 4's forthcoming Red Riding, which promises to be a big 'un. It's based on David Peace's dark 'Years' series which looks at policing in Yorkshire in the 1970s and 1980s (think the miners' strike, the Yorkshire Ripper . . .) And there's a cracking cast to back up Clarke, including David Morrissey, Mark Addy, Jim Carter and Lesley Sharp (let's gloss over Sean Bean, Sheffield's answer to Sean 'why would I bother to change my accent to suit my role' Connery. Ah well, at least it won't matter this time around!) Nip over here if you want a preview (of the drama, not SB's 'it's grim oop norf' routine).

Peace, who's got to be one of the most versatile writers around (his most recent series is set in Japan) also has another of his books being dramatised. This one, The Damned United, is all about soccer and the controversial manager Brian Clough and his short stay at Leeds Utd – and is in my top ten favourite books of all time. Michael Sheen, who captured Tony Blair to perfection in The Queen, and is also David Frost in the new Frost/Nixon film, looks like he's got Cloughie off to a T as well. You can get a sneak preview of it here.

Elsewhere in TV cop land, you might want to keep an eye open for Whitechapel, the latest offering from ITV. The first episode aired on Monday night and while it didn't offer anything drastically new (posh cop with OCD, common as muck DS, gormless, crotch-scratching DCs, and the Jack the Ripper tale for good measure), it was suitably creepy and delivered with panache.

It was scheduled up against BBC1's Moses Jones, featuring a black cop in London and his young sidekick (played by Matt Smith, the new Dr Who). The reviews of this were considerably less enthusiastic than those for Whitechapel, muttering about it being confusing, although the incidental music was apparently the star of the show. It's written by playwright Joe Penhall, who adapted Jake Arnott's The Long Firm for TV. And for that reason alone it sounds like it might be worth a look on the BBC's 'watch again' site.

Handing in your genre membership

Sharon Wheeler

I had the email equivalent of a beady stare the other day from Yvonne Klein, who's currently editing the RTE site. I'd sent her two reviews, one of which muttered a lot about the writer of the book maybe wanting to give crime fiction a rest. Yvonne demanded to know whether I was wearying of the genre, as it was the second time recently that I'd suggested an author should perhaps go straight, as it were!

I was quick to put Yvonne's mind at rest, assuring her that I'd got three rave reviews up my sleeve, having inhaled at some speed The Girl Who Played With Fire by Stieg Larsson, John Morgan Wilson's Spider Season and the audio CD box set of CJ Sansom's Matthew Shardlake series.

But it was a fair question. About 15 years ago I burned out on the genre big-time. I'd just finished an MPhil on feminist and gay and lesbian crime fiction and absolutely couldn't face another book with ever so arch references to the PI tradition or those from tiny lesbian publishers in Buttsville, Idaho, which were seemingly only published because of the author's sexual orientation and not because she could actually write …

It took me eight years to be wooed again by crime fiction. I was in Los Angeles in holiday and needed some books for the plane home. Someone had recommended a writer called John Morgan Wilson. I bought the first three books in his Benjamin Justice series, read them back-to-back, and promptly saw the light again!

Periodically I do wonder if I read too much crime fiction when I roll my eyes and get arsy about another genre cliché (ooh, surely not the boathouse at midnight again, or no, no, carry on your phonecall and tell the person what it is you know – you really don't want to answer the doorbell, honest!)

What made me wonder whether a couple of very good writers should be going straight, though, was the fact both presented the reader with a raft of wonderful characters and an inventive and vivid world around them, but were a bit wobbly on the plot front.

Morgan Hunt's Tess Camillo is one of my favourite characters in crime fiction. She's a resourceful, optimistic woman who's pushing 50 but still holds out dreams of Ms Right appearing. I love the slightly leftfield world Hunt has built around her. But in my review of Blinded By the Light, I felt the rather sketchy plot was secondary by quite some way.

I raved about Tana French's debut novel In The Woods and also got pretty enthusiastic about her latest, The Likeness. But in the review I commented that I thought her inventiveness as a writer was being held back by the constraints of the genre.

I'm just about to break one of the rules that my first editor drummed into me – as a journalist, don't ask questions, answer them. But I'd like some comments from the floor, please! Do writers get pigeonholed? Once you've gained exclusive membership of the crime fiction guild of writers and have perfected the funny handshake, are you there for life? Will people point and laugh if you try other things? Does your publisher pat you on the hand and humour you if you talk about branching out? Well, unless you're Sara Paretsky or Dennis Lehane … And do writers go into crime fiction because they reckon it'll be easier to get published? Except, boys and girls, we know it isn't. And we know, as well, that you can't just knock out genre fic because it seems easy (remember that bloke I blogged about last May who needed dosh quickly . . .)

Some idiot suggested after Harold Pinter's death that he couldn't write poetry. Having been in the audience at the Cheltenham Festival of Literature some years ago when the great man talked about his work and read some poems, I can confirm that said idiot was talking out of his back passage. Pinter delivered the poems with the pacing and menace that characterised much of his playwriting.

I bet his publisher never told him to restrict his pregnant pauses and three dots to the stage …

Get your hands off my text!

Sharon Wheeler

Philip Pullman is a man after my own heart. Aside from the fact he's got no time for religion, he's also a realist when it comes to how readers interpret his books. Take a look at this link and see what I mean.

Mind you, I'd like to know how the hell the chap from Belgium found that the trilogy affirmed his own belief in god. Amazing what you can read into a text if you're so inclined . . .

And actually that's the point of it. As Pullman says: "Once a book is in your hands, ITS INTERPRETATION BELONGS TO YOU. You can read it in any way you like, and take away any meaning that makes sense to you. That's the great freedom of reading.

"But the idea that the author is sternly watching every single reader to make sure that they're reading in the RIGHT WAY belongs to some nightmare of authoritarian mind-control. Reading is a democracy!"

Those words should be stapled to the foreheads of a few authors. They're the ones who berate readers for skipping the prologue, or sneaking a look at the last few pages to see whodunit. Once I have a book in my hands, I can do what the hell I like with it. I can hurl it at the wall if it winds me up. I can rip out pages and turn them into paper aeroplanes if I want to. I can subject it to a queer studies Marxist/Leninist critique if the fancy takes me.

If authors don't like that, the answer's simple – don't get published. Keep your writing in your bottom drawer, or save it for your mates.

There's a time, though, when the author can legitimately tell the reader to back off and keep their snout out of things – and that's before the novel hits the bookshops. And I certainly shan't be arguing with the formidable Russell T Davies on the matter!

For any Americans who might not have encountered him, he's one of the best scriptwriters working on British TV. He's the man behind the awesome Queer as Folk (the UK version, not whatever it was the Americans did to it) which gave TV drama a much-needed kick up the … Yes, well, moving swiftly on, he's also the man we have to thank for getting Dr Who back on our screens.

Now those of you on the other side of the pond might not understand the significance of the Doctor and his Tardis. If you're of a certain age (oh, very well, 40 and above), a key part of your childhood was hiding behind the sofa when the Daleks appeared. Yes, we know the original show was lo-tech when compared with American science fiction programmes, but we didn't care. It was an integral part of Saturday night teatime, to be consumed alongside toast and butter, and Cadbury's mini rolls with the chocolate picked off and eaten last.

A run of fairly duff doctors saw the BBC plonk the Tardis into cold storage. And then Davies, a real fanboy if ever there was one, thawed it out and sent it spinning into space again with Christopher Eccleston and then David Tennant at the controls.

I'm currently immersed in The Writer's Tale, a fascinating book about writing and also the show itself, told via emails between Davies and journalist Benjamin Cook. One comment from Davies made me gurgle like a drain: "Creating something is not a democracy. The people have no say. The artist does. It doesn't matter what the people witter on about; they and their response come after. They're not there for the creation."

How about a deal? Us readers won't tell authors what to write – but you don't tell us how to read.

Hallelujah – we have some spirit!

Sharon Wheeler

If you're in the UK, you'll have found it difficult to ignore Alexandra Burke and her foghorn voice massacring a true classic.

The winner of X Factor took Leonard Cohen's wonderful Hallelujah to the number one spot in the charts over Christmas. It was just a shame she had no understanding of what she was singing. In fact, she might just as well have been bellowing out the telephone directory.

Laughing Len's classic has a long and distinguished pedigree. Aside from the man himself's rather kitsch 1980s version, it's a toss-up as to whether John Cale, Jeff Buckley or kd lang has done the definitive version. After extensive research, I have settled on Cale, as his clipped Welsh tones, accompanied by the piano, are just perfect for what's an epic in more ways than one.

And he understands just what he's singing. Unlike Burke. The words are in the right order (ah, well, maybe they aren't, considering how much of the song got cut). But her version is all sound and fury, signifying nothing …

I've had the book versions of that countless times, and boy, are they pigs to review. On the surface, they're technically OK – the author's fluent, keeps the story going at a fair pace, presents us with plausible characters and gets the punctuation in the right place. But you get to the end and something feels slightly off. When you come to write the review, though, it's the equivalent of a shrug. And sadly that doesn't take up 300 words.

Sometimes it's down to a lack of emotion. You get the feeling the author has spent so long polishing the story that they've stripped every centimetre of feeling from it. So the reader coasts through, never quite engaging with the characters or the plot.

Or you get the Burke syndrome, where everything's been thrown at the book except the kitchen sink. They teach you on journalism training courses that under-writing, rather than over-writing works. But that ever-so-useful tip hasn't filtered through to all writers.

Sadly no one told Alexandra Burke that the same generally applies to music as well. Unless of course you're Freddie Mercury doing Bohemian Rhapsody.

A list, a list!

Sharon Wheeler

Does anyone care about 'best of . . . ' lists? According to my blog mate Jeff Cohen, the damn things are all the same anyway, as reviewers refuse to break ranks. So is it just self-indulgence when we pontificate about our gems and turkeys of the year?

I always read people's lists, mainly because I'm nosy, but also so that I can roll my eyes at some of their weird choices, or grab a pen and start scribbling when someone mentions a book I haven't come across. And I'm grumpy enough to think that I don't go with the pack as a rule. I'm not a very clubbable person – I'm with Groucho Marx when he said that he'd refuse to join any club that would have him as a member! And given that I ensure I read and review a large number of books from small publishers, I can always guarantee a mix of the mainstream and the less well-known in my lists.

So … For those of you who are interested here are my books of 2008. For those of you who aren't, go and finish off the turkey, or eat the toffees that always seem to get left at the bottom of any box of chocolates.

The list is in alphabetical order by author, I've included a brief comment by each, and they've all been reviewed on RTE by me with the exception of the Richard Stevenson:

Sacrifice – SJ Bolton
A very creepy debut novel set in Shetland which mixes folklore with what, in the wrong hands, could have been a clichéd plot.

The Reapers – John Connolly
The focus moves in this book from angst-ridden PI Charlie Parker to his mysterious sidekicks Angel and Louis – and is all the better for it, as it exudes darkness and menace on every page.

Bad Traffic – Simon Lewis
This novel from small UK publishers Sort Of Books, featuring a Chinese detective adrift in England trying to find his missing daughter, has the feel of a noir movie.

The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo – Stieg Larsson
OK, so I bet this book will be on a lot of other 'best of' lists – and it thoroughly deserves to be. It was hugely hyped, but delivers in style with its two contrasting leading characters and its rich and intelligent storytelling.

Lorraine Connection – Dominique Manotti
A standalone from the author of the Daquin series and another look at the seamier side of France as a PI gets tangled up with deadly goings-on at a Korean-owned factory.

The Turnaround – George Pelecanos
This is a crime novel without police and not much in the way of crime either. But it's another formidable book as Pelecanos again turns a searing eye on American society.

The Crazy School – Cornelia Read
Read had a lot to live up to following her debut novel A Field of Darkness. This one, set in a school for disturbed teenagers out in the sticks, is even better – it's funny, scary and full of what you might call unusual characters!

To Dream of the Dead – Phil Rickman
Rickman's Merrily Watkins books are heavyweight efforts which often skim the line between crime fiction and horror. Whatever, they come from a master storyteller and this one featuring a TV archaeologist and a couple of gruesome murders is no exception.

Death Vows – Richard Stevenson
A welcome and overdue return with a new small publisher for the author of the PI Don Strachey novels. As usual Stevenson combines humour with tight plotting and a story straight from the headlines.

Bruno, Chief of Police – Martin Walker
A quirky, witty but deceptively dark book featuring the chief of police in a small southwestern French town. Threatening the seemingly idyllic lifestyle is wartime history and racial unrest.

And, seeing as I can see into the future (hasn't helped with winning the lottery, though), I can tell you my top book of 2009 – Stieg Larsson's The Girl Who Played with Fire. Oh, well, OK, so I've just read the ARC. Rumbled again!

Happy new year, everyone, and may 2009 be a good 'un for you.

A flying visit

Sharon Wheeler

*Taps glass* Ladies, gentlemen and dead guys . . . unaccustomed as I am to public speaking . . . *Drops papers on the floor*. Ah, sod this for a game of soldiers! Let's forget the formalities . . .

Allow me to interrupt briefly your festive activities, whatever they may be, to wish you all season's greetings. I'm beetling off for two days with a pile of books stashed about my person. There's Joseph O'Neill's Netherland (I want to see how someone can mix 9/11 and cricket), the Killer Year anthology which has finally reached the UK, Akashic's new Paris Noir anthology (blimey, there are some French writers in there by the look of it!) and the new Dennis Lehane.

So enjoy your turkey, nut roast and mince pies, eat any chocolate that comes your way, and I'll see you on New Year's Day when I get to mull over my books of the year.

Your very good health, all!

Beware of low-flying book

Sharon Wheeler

Do you like your books to be a comfortable maintaining of the status quo, or do you want them to reflect real life where things really do move on and change.

I only ask as I am currently contemplating a dent in my wall where a book hit it at speed this week. It wasn't a crime fiction one, but the question could apply equally well to genre stories (especially if you want to think about cosy mysteries, for example).

The book that did GBH to the wall was Naomi Alderman's Disobedience. It won the Orange Award for New Writers in 2006. All I can think is that it must have been a weak year, or that the judges were blinded by the too clever by half prose that reminded me of a writing exercise (oh, look, Alderman did the Creative Writing MA at University of East Anglia. I rest my case.)

I'd better warn you that humungous spoilers will follow, just in case you are bored enough to want to read Disobedience . . .

A lapsed Jewish woman returns to London following the death of her eminent rabbi father. She has a high-powered job in New York and has been shagging a married man. Back in the UK she comes across a former lover (female – ooh, daring!) who is now royally screwed up and hitched to the rabbi's bumbling prodigy. LJW riffles through her father's house to find some candle sticks that remind her of her late mother, encounters some deeply weird people from the congregation, has a bit of angst over her relationship with the former lover, then pushes off home when the nasty synagogue bloke waves a large cheque at her because she's seen as an embarrassment. Former lover has lots of angst over her sexuality, goes and gets pregnant after having sex with hubby for the first time since dinosaurs walked the earth, and proceeds to win over the congregation despite them knowing about her affair with LJW and having hated her for all of the book. Erm, that's it.

The book reminded me of a soufflé – it looks substantial on the surface, but once you stick a fork in it, it deflates to nothing. There's lots of flashy prose on Orthodox Jewish traditions but the character development is so flimsy it'd blow away in a breeze, and there's absolutely no attempt to provide a believable story arc or to deal realistically and consistently with the sexuality angle.

I think the thing that made me the most angry, though, was the ending. Alderman provides virtually no sympathetic characters during the book, and is particularly heavy-handed with the congregation members. All of a sudden, though, there's this nauseatingly cutesy page and a half to round the book off where LJW skates over her sexuality and lack of religious belief and a patriarchal religion in a "oh, it's OK to be gay and I’ll always have faith" way. Erm, right, I see, where did that come from?

When it boils down to it, the book is deeply conservative and actually really rather homophobic. LJW goes back to America and nothing has changed in her life. The former lover has a baby and stays with the bumbling prodigy which suggests strongly that you can't be happy if you're a lesbian and all they need to sort them out is a bloke shagging them.

If ever any book reinforces the status quo, Disobedience does. That status quo may be comfortable. But it also makes for dull, frustrating and almost offensive reading.

Meeting a hero

Sharon Wheeler

I met one of my heroes last week. If you're a UK photographer or journalist of a certain age (over 40) you will have grown up alongside Don McCullin's searing battlefield images.

His photographs from The Congo, Vietnam, Biafra, Northern Ireland, Cambodia and Beirut defined a generation. And he was the man who was refused media accreditation by the government during the Falklands War for fear of the images he would certainly have brought home.

McCullin has seen horrific sights that most of us will fortunately never have to witness – read his autobiography Unreasonable Behaviour and you'll see why he is such a seminal figure and why it meant a lot to me to be introduced to him.

I'm a lousy photographer, but one of the reasons I became a journalist was because of the power of McCullin's images on the pages of the Sunday Times (this was in the days when it was a newspaper worth reading and not one that gave paperboys and girls hernias).

McCullin is now in his 70s and lives in Somerset where he's taken breathtakingly atmospheric photos of the Somerset Levels. He was being awarded an honorary doctorate by the University of Gloucestershire last week. His speech was humble, moving and brimful of humanity. I sat there thinking 'oh god, oh god, I can't cry, oh damnit, I will cry …"

After the ceremony, where my luvvies also received their degrees, I glued myself to Kim, my colleague who teaches Photojournalism, and wheedled an introduction. And I'm so glad I did, as the speech reflected the man in person. I've often been nervous in the past about meeting people I admired, in case they turned out to be blithering idiots. In this case I needn't have worried. McCullin was charming, modest and gracious enough not to be fazed by me gabbling like an idiot!

And while I was talking to him, I told him about my friend Ian. Ian died six years ago and I miss him every damn day. He was a photographer and when he died, I inherited a lot of his books, including some of McCullin's work. Ian would have been as excited as I was to meet one of photography's true greats.

Of book proofs and head measuring

Sharon Wheeler

It's a flying blog visit from me this week, as I have meetings at what feels like every minute of the day, book proofs to read, an index to put together, a backlog of reviews as long as the M5 to write and a graduation ceremony to attend. Oh, and I do teach now and then . . .

The book proofs have been ever so exciting, as it's my first solo flight as an author – previously I've either co-edited or been in edited collections. So when a courier delivered them into my hands, I did rip the package open with rather indecent haste. And what emerged was starting to look like a book, with snazzy lists and fancy graphics – and the words wot I wrote!

Since then, with the assistance of my retired schoolteacher mother, who has a scary eye for detail, we've been reading through and trying to collar the errors and I've been resisting the temptation to squawk loudly, throw the whole lot up in the air and demand a wholescale rewrite.

There are still some wibbles with the graphics to be resolved. Both a newspaper and a magazine article are going to be reproduced in the book. The former happily sent over an electronic version; the latter for some reason wouldn't play ball, so we're working from a not top-quality photocopy, which is rather annoying.

But I'm encouraged by the fact the copy editor didn't have too many queries, and the proof reader just half a page of glitches to iron out. And it all seems much more real now. Or will do when I've done the index. I said I'd do it on the grounds that bad indexes drive me bonkers, and how difficult can it be to do one. I have a very nasty feeling I may soon find out that it's not as easy as it looks. So if anyone has any tips, please send them my way!

Now, excuse me while I head off to the graduation ceremony for last year's students. I’ll be the one glowing with pride when my luvvies step up to receive their degrees. Yes, I shall be wearing a silly hat and gown. I hope to avoid a repeat of last year's incident where I put my hat on, it fell over my eyes, and the bloke from the company who supply the robes informed me that it looked like "a bleedin' wastepaper basket!" Moral: never let an English Literature professor armed with a strip of paper and a six-inch ruler measure your head.

A Saturday job that sucked

Sharon Wheeler

I'm feeling whiny and sorry for myself, as I've been laid up for nearly a fortnight with a very grotty violence that has left me feeling like a woolly mammoth is sitting on my head and digging its tusks in . . .

And any smart-alec who says "oh, you must have caught up on soooo much reading" will need to side-step a jab in the ribs. I must be ill – I haven't wanted to read at all.

So I've been keeping in contact with the outside world via online and Teletext. And I spotted this story that made me very faintly nostalgic – if only for the memory of their pick and mix, which we always had as kids when we went to the cinema.

My first Saturday job when I was at school was in Woolworth's. I did my stint on the tills, including a ghastly Christmas Eve when the whole of town seemed to want to do their festive shopping at 5pm, but the cold meat and cheese counter and the staff canteen were the placements from hell. The former undoubtedly helped along my becoming a vegetarian, and I soon discovered with the latter that Woolies' staff were far more obnoxious that any of the customers. I never went as far as spitting in the food, but I kept schtum when I grated part of my fingernail into the cheese for the lunchtime salad . . .

The positively Victorian hierarchy between the mainly male management and mostly female shop floor staff was immensely depressing, so you couldn't see me for dust when I was offered a Saturday job in the town library.

I acquired so many useful skills through that library job. I now know where to look for information. I can break up fights (and that was just between two eccentric members of staff, although getting between battling OAPs and the new Catherine Cookson book should have involved danger money). I can prick the pomposity of any celebrity (we had one particular 1970s TV personality who wasn't in fact the avuncular old cove he seemed on the small screen and had a tendency to use the "don't you know who I am?" line to which the response was "no, and your book's overdue, so that'll be 25p please.") And I can arrange books just so on a shelf so that they come raining down on people's heads when they remove one.

The biggest perk of all, of course, was being able to take out as many books as we wanted. And we could convince ourselves that we were doing the librarian a favour, as the place was so over-crowded that you couldn't fit all the books onto the shelves. Mind you, I'll never forget the look on her face when half a dozen of the Saturday girls all returned about 30 books each the weekend after our A Level exams had ended. Sadly she got her revenge when we had to shelve them all …

It’s a game of two halves, Brian

Sharon Wheeler

I’ve been a sports writer – I know all about clichés, thank you. It’s a game of two halves, Brian, but at the end of the day the lads gave 110 per cent but I’m sick as a parrot that we didn’t sneak it early doors.

And now I’m peeved that I didn’t come up first with the idea for a book of irritating phrases! Researchers at Oxford University have put together the wonderfully-named Damp Squid, the result of monitoring books, papers, magazines, broadcast and the internet.

Apparently the top ten stinkers are as follows:

1. At the end of the day
2. Fairly unique
3. I personally
4. At this moment in time
5. With all due respect
6. Absolutely
7. It's a nightmare
8. Shouldn't of
9. 24/7
10. It's not rocket science

Yep, can’t disagree with most of those. Although I admit to using number six (usually with bloody in the middle of it for added emphasis) and I just stopped myself from using the last one in a lecture on Monday.

Numbers two and eight bring out my big grammar stick, and with number five I usually have to resist the temptation to jab the speaker on the nose, as you just know that the dreaded phrase presages something rude or snotty . . .

Incidentally, I found out not so long ago what rocket science is. Apparently where there’s a push, there’s got to be a pull. So maybe it’s not so complicated after all! Given the difficulties I’m having at the moment persuading some of my students to read theoretical textbooks (if any of them are reading this, You Know Who You Are!), maybe the phrase should become ‘it’s not print journalism.’

Speaking of which, I’m going to blame broadcasting for most of these horrors, rather than newspapers, magazines and the internet. You hear these phrases being trotted out, and they stick in people’s minds. And it’s a mix of the sound-bite generation, wanting to sum things up in a phrase, and people being interviewed wanting to sound important in front of the cameras (why else would you keep parroting something like “I personally, at this moment in time …”) If you’re ever interviewed for any part of the media, then remember the old KISS theory – keep it simple, stupid!

I assume this research from Oxford University is continuing, and no doubt in a couple of years’ time there will be some text message and email clichés to annoy us. I’d like to insist that the very wonderful OMGWTFBBQ is exempt from any list. Thanks to Live Journal, this is now my new expression of surprise. And at the end of the day, you’ve got to admit it’s fairly unique.

Failing the friendship test

Sharon Wheeler

Can't remember how I found the site now, but the Bechdel Test made me nod vigorously – and then wonder if it applied to books.

It's named after the brilliant lesbian cartoonist Alison Bechdel, who created the Dykes To Watch Out For strip and also an outstanding autobiographical graphic novel, Fun Home.

In a nutshell, a film or a TV show must fulfil the following criteria: It includes at least two women … who have at least one conversation with each other … about something other than a man. 

As regular visitors know, I'm no expert on films, but I can't think off-hand of a TV drama which passes the rule. And come to think of it, a worryingly high number of crime fiction books wouldn’t either.

And that's odd in a genre where there's a high proportion of women writers. It reminded me of a writing course I went on about 15 years ago. The tutors were two British crime writers, Sarah Dunant and John Harvey. On the first day they set us an exercise where they gave us a detective’s surname and asked us to form a story around it. Almost all the people on the course were women; all of us made that character male. Sarah Dunant commented how depressing that was – and she was right.

Even now, when female detectives take a leading role, a book won’t pass the test. That’s because there’s often conflict between two main female characters (if, indeed, there’s a second one anyway). And you can almost guarantee that if they do talk, it’ll be about how much they love DI X or hate DS Y.

The PI and amateur markets aren’t exempt either. Don’t female reporters have women colleagues? They all seem to be loners or in need of a male figure to protect them. And I can’t think of a book where a female PI has a proper conversation with another woman where men aren’t mentioned. Even Marcia Muller, one of my absolute favourite writers, has Sharon and Rae talking too damn much about their blokes.

Surely there must be cosy writers who have women characters talking about other subjects, even if it is cats or quilting! Or are they all too busy burbling about the handsome cop who won’t them interfere in his murder case?

OK, so we get a load of strong female characters in crime fiction. But we don’t see often enough those realistic friendships with other women. I spend hours on the phone or online to girlfriends. We go out for an Indian, go shopping, tell each other smutty jokes, whinge about work, the universe and everything. And you know, I’d like more of that and less of the solitary woman who doesn’t seem to have a single female friend.

Email pals and a farewell to Evil-E

Sharon Wheeler

Various family and friends tell me with monotonous regularity that I spend too much time online and need to get out more and get a life. My stock response is that I get out lots, thank you, and as a result have a very nice life – mainly thanks to the internet.

If it wasn’t for the internet, I wouldn’t have met half a dozen of my closest friends. And I certainly wouldn’t be blogging with some fine, upstanding citizens from at least three different countries! I wouldn’t have collaborated on book ideas, writing projects and conference papers, or had the chance to edit RTE.

When you think about it, you meet like-minded people on discussion groups and fora, so there’s a strong chance you’ll have plenty in common when you meet face-to-face. I don’t frequent chat rooms, and I suspect they are a totally different kettle of fish – presumably it’s where you get all your weirdos claiming to be Orlando Bloom but who are really 50-something sleazebags just looking to get their end away!

I’ve only met one online person face-to-face who I found hard going – and later discovered I wasn’t the only one. If you’ve been chatting via email to people for months or years, I reckon you build up a pretty good image of what they’re going to be like in person.

It reminded me of when I was little and had loads of penfriends. Do kids still do that, incidentally, or has the internet put the kibosh on those laborious letters about how the dog had been sick again, your little brother had fallen off the top of the climbing frame and how you’d been chosen for the school first XI at hockey? I must have had about a dozen penfriends in my teens from various parts of the globe, but only one endured – Liz in New Zealand. We’re still in touch now and have met up a number of times. And the same applied – we hit it off the moment we met, probably because we’d spent about 15 years talking about anything and everything.

All this is avoidance tactics, you understand, so I don’t have to confront the fact that Elaine Flinn died this week. Elaine was one of a kind, and a very dear email friend. I think what’s upset me the most is that now I won’t get to meet her – and I’d convinced myself that we would meet up at some stage.  Elaine’s emails always cheered me up. They were gossipy, funny and bursting with personality. And her Evil-E column was an absolute hoot.

She was also a damn good writer. I don’t go for cosies on the whole, but the Molly Doyle series was a total delight. Barbara Franchi, a hard taskmaster when it comes to books portraying the antiques world, always says that Elaine was about the only person to get it spot-on (not surprising, given her background in the industry).

I always had this image of Elaine holding court in a bar, cigarette in hand, adoring audience surrounding her, as she told scurrilous tales. From the photos I’ve seen on various sites, I wasn’t far wrong. I’m just heartbroken that I never got to be part of that audience.

I've finally seen the light

Sharon Wheeler

It took me a while to warm to Phil Rickman's books. My inbuilt mistrust of anything religious was one factor, but blimey, he didn't half waffle. As my mother would say, he'd been inoculated with a gramophone needle. And the horror element didn't help either.

Some years ago someone – good job I can't remember who, as I have a memory like an elephant and bear grudges – convinced me I had to read Rickman's horror books written as Will Kingdom. Suffice it to say they put me off reading anything else by him for quite some time. I suspect they weren't badly written – it's just that horror makes me want to laugh or roll my eyes most of the time.

Then I started reviewing crime fiction and Rickman's series starring vicar Merrily Watkins became rather difficult to ignore. I ploughed through a couple, whining as I did so about the excess verbiage, and wondering aloud why a seemingly intelligent woman like Merrily would want to have anything to do with the Church of England.

But then I became a convert, so to speak (despite not being able to put Dawn French and the blasted Vicar of Dibley out of my mind every time Merrily was mentioned!) And now I look forward religiously (sorry, couldn't resist) every autumn to the next addition to the series.

The new one, To Dream of the Dead, is out, and I lapped up every word of it. And what I liked most about it, aside from the usual fabulous world building and the character progression, is that it's doing something genre fiction doesn't always do – making the reader think.

I don't know what Rickman's religious views are, and I don't care either. He's not out to proselytise. But what he does do is to persuade the reader (and his characters, for that matter) to examine their spiritual stance, whether they're a believer or not. Yes, there's a strong dose of woo-woo in his books, but it's never over the top or unconvincing – it's rooted firmly in British history and legend.. The mystical element is one of the things that makes this series so unusual and so fascinating.

Rickman is like John Connolly in that he's not afraid to play around with the genre boundaries, or to make the reader do some work. It also took me a while to warm to Connolly, some of whose earlier books are also a touch bloated in places, but now he's near the top of my must-read list. And it's no coincidence that they're two of the most innovative writers in the crime fiction field, both producing character-driven, ambitious and highly intelligent books that challenge the reader to look within.

Excuse me while I have a wheee (and a waah!)

Sharon Wheeler

It's been one of the weeks where I seem to be either foaming at the mouth or howling with laughter. So allow me to present my 'waaah' list while I let off some steam:

1. People entering a competition to win a gay crime novel – and then complaining that the prize has scenes in with two men snogging. Um, yes, that'd be the definition of gay . . .

2. Idiots leaving soccer matches ten minutes before the end. You've shelled out 30 quid for a ticket, eaten some of the worst pies in the universe and sat in front of the Brain of Britain who's kept up a running commentary in your right ear for 90 minutes. Serves you right for leaving early when you miss three goals and a sending-off in injury time.

3. People reading novels set in the 1920s and then whining that most of the characters smoke . . .

4. Wankers in the quiet carriage on trains who don't seem to think that the no mobile phones rule applies to them.

5. And while we're on the subject of trains, brats who scream solidly from Burton-on-Trent to Cheltenham (about an hour and a quarter) aren't my idea of good company.

6. My lovely colleague Rachel is leaving for a new job in Coventry. Good luck, Rach – and I'm going to miss you loads!

And now for a good wheee, so to speak:

1. A trip to London this weekend with half a dozen of my bestest girlfriends to go to the British Museum and the Natural History Museum.

2. The new Phil Rickman book. Yep, of course it's overlong. But I want to wallow.

3. A very sweet email from the copy editor assigned to my feature writing book, who thanked me for an entertaining read and for taking such care with the manuscript and as a result he only had two sides of queries.  I resisted the temptation to squawk with embarrassment at there being that many, but I'll take it on trust that that's actually not too bad . . .

4. A weekend of trash DVDs is pending, thanks to the arrival of the box set of Dante's Cove. Bit worried about all that bonking on beaches, though – doesn't sand get into your intimate bits?

5. A new album on the way from the very wonderful Oysterband. They've been going 30 years (definitely old enough to know better!) and have revisited some old favourites for the acoustic The Oxford Girl & Other Stories. I hope to catch them at Gloucester Guildhall, and make myself seasick by jumping up and down for two hours on the sprung floor.

6. My new archaeology course. I'm going to have to write essays again. I think that's a wheee and a waaah!

Playing the interview game

Sharon Wheeler

I have a toleration threshold in minus numbers of authors behaving like arseholes in interviews. Fortunately it doesn't happen too often, but when it does, it leaves a bad taste in the mouth.

What tends to make it even more infuriating from the journalist's point of view is that the pressure for the interview might well have come from a pushy agent or publicist. And I'm never sympathetic when celebrities moan about 'having' to do interviews. If you don't want to be famous, go and keep geese in the Shetland Islands, or tend your roses in mid-Wales.

I'm not a violent woman, but I always had the urge to slap former England soccer player Alan Shearer's smug face very hard. He spent an admittedly illustrious career behaving like a complete dick every time he was interviewed, and took huge delight in giving the most bland and unhelpful answers possible. And now, of course, he's a media pundit on TV. Yeah, well, whatever . . .

Just over a year ago we started an interview column on RTE called 'Sixty seconds with . . .' where we fire a dozen questions at an author. I'd had the idea in the back of my mind for a while, but wasn't sure how it would gel with what's firmly a review site. But a chat with the lovely John Connolly persuaded me to give it a go – and it's been a success. We currently have interviews stockpiled into January 2009.

What's interesting, though, is how authors respond to the off-beat questions. Out of the four dozen or so interviews we've featured, only one writer seemingly couldn't be bothered to play ball. One or two others have been a touch dull. Most have entered into the spirit of things and provided witty and interesting answers (looks admiring in the direction of the very wonderful Reginald Hill who, I'm told, doesn't usually do interviews, but clearly made an exception for our email one . . .)

My blogmate and PR guru PJ Nunn has advised in the past on interview etiquette. Here's a journalist's view of it:

1. Don't set up an interview with a reporter, and then arrive late or not at all (or not unless there's a life or death reason behind it).
2. Don't offer the journalist a ten minute-chat – that's pretty much a waste of both sides' time and is unlikely to yield a worthwhile article. If I'm doing a profile of someone, I'd prefer to chat for 45 minutes to an hour. I can make do with 30 minutes at a pinch. If you really can't offer that, see if the interview can be done another time, perhaps by phone. 
3. Don't sit there looking stupendously bored. Reporters spend their lives interviewing bores, and have developed the ability to look fascinated. You can do the same.
4. Don't spend the interview texting or answering your mobile. Turn the damn thing off before the journalist inserts it where the sun doesn't shine.
5. Don’t sigh loudly when you're asked biographical questions and tell the reporter to read the press release or look in the cuttings files. Press releases are notoriously inaccurate, and once duff info works its way into features, it hangs around for evermore. Journalists are taught to check, check and check again, so humour them and help them out.
6. Don't drone on with the same old anecdotes you've trotted out on automatic pilot since dinosaurs walked the earth. Most journalists will have worked hard to tailor their questions to you and not just ask the same ones they use for every Tom, Dick or Author. And they want their feature to have a new angle.
7. Don't be paranoid. Most journalists aren't out to stitch you up – they're too busy and too professional. In my experience hatchet jobs only get done on the arseholes who truly deserve them.