Christmas Day, 2008
First of all, what are you doing, sitting here looking at your computer today, of all days? Surely you should be eating and drinking and making merry?
I'm writing this on Christmas Eve. As soon as I realised that I had the dubious honour of posting on Christmas Day this year, I've been trying to think of something suitable for the occasion. I don't do sentimentality well, and this time of year holds very mixed emotions for me.
So, I thought I'd focus on the ridiculous instead.
With this firmly in mind, I asked all my fellow 'Rati three questions: What's the Best, Worst, and downright Weirdest presents you've ever received. Or, what would be your Dream present.
Pari
DREAM GIFT: "My fantasy present would be a writer's month or two on a gorgeous island where all my meals were taken care of, I'd have an endless supply of paper and reference books, wi-fi, a computer in every room but the bedroom, a comfortable bed and absolutely no responsibilities beyond writing for hours daily. Oh, and I'd like to be paid a reasonable amount of money for being creative, too.
"So, someone would have to take care of the kids at home, make sure the cleaning and the cooking were done and that my husband wasn't too lonely (notice the 'too' part of that last one. A little loneliness makes the heart grow, um . . .), pay the bills, etc. Then I could write without feeling guilty or like I should be doing something else."
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Weekend, 20-21 December 2008
Now You Don't See It − Now You Do!Every now and again I come across these extraordinary examples of 3D pavement art by a guy called Julian Beever. Not only am I in awe of Mr Beever’s skills as an artist, but of his abilities to create a distorted image that, viewed from the right angle, produces a perfect 3D effect.
You have to admit that, from the viewing side, the optical illusion is amazing. It’s only when you step sideways that the truth of the picture becomes apparent. Take the globe he produced in Edinburgh for the G8 summit, for example. It looks like a spherical object until you shift your viewpoint, and then you realise that what looked absolutely round is actually an elongated oblong nearly forty feet in length.
And the giant lobster entitled Babyfood. From the wrong viewpoint, it’s quite difficult to tell what the picture is. From the right side, the perspective is perfect.
Dashed clever, isn’t it?
Telling a good mystery story relies very heavily on viewpoint. By that I mean that the writer tells the story from such a position that the reader often cannot see the identity of the villain until everything is correctly aligned. Of course, not every mystery relies on a final reveal in order to hook the reader’s interest, and some follow the villain as the main protagonist, but you get the idea.
Nevertheless, you create an illusion and only at the end of the story do you position the reader in the correct place to see the whole picture in its entirety. The trick is to feed the information in, bit by bit, to allow the picture to form at the right pace, without leaving too much explanation required in a lump at the end, nor giving away too much too early on, and spoiling the gradual unfolding of the story.
And, just as with Julian Beever’s remarkable pictures, you create an illusion, a group of people who do not exist, placed into an impossible situation of your own devising, and then you coax the reader into viewing them in just the right light, and hope that the magic works.
This week’s Word of the Week is ignoramus, which has come to mean someone of low intelligence, but it was originally a legal term. In Latin, ignoramus means ‘we don’t know' (why this case was brought) and was stamped on legal documents for cases that were thrown out of court for being badly thought out.
Weekend, 13-14 December 2008
Her Master's Voice
When I pick up a book by a new author − one that’s new to me, I mean, rather than a debut novel − somehow I know within the first page if the book’s going to hold my attention or not. I think most of us, whether we do it consciously or not, make that same snap decision.
And although I’ve talked before on these pages about the importance of opening lines and of finding the right jumping-off point for your story, there’s more to it than that.
It’s the voice.
Every writer has their own distinct voice. You might think of it as their style, but there’s more to it than that. It’s something to do not just with the choice of words, but with the way they’re put together on a fundamental level, the rhythm and the flow of them. It’s the way the writer breaks up sentences, paragraphs, chapters. And it’s something that’s very difficult to assess in your own work.
An old friend from my old writing group has a wonderful lyrical style of storytelling. She could read out of a phone book and you’d sit entranced and listen. But whenever we would go to meetings and she’d bring along printouts of her latest piece of work, my comments would be the same. "It sounds brilliant when you read it out, but what you’re reading is not what’s actually on the page."
As the author, you know where the emphasis should go, the pauses, the inflections. I’ve often said that I’m a visual writer. While I’m writing a scene it’s like I’m watching a movie being played inside my head, and all I do is write down what I see. Then, when the reader picks up that same scene, I hope that they feel they’re watching the same movie I was, when I wrote it.
But how do you know?
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This week’s Word of the Week is sincere, which means pure, unadulterated, genuine, free from pretence, the same in reality as in appearance. The derivation of this word comes from cere, which means to cover with wax. If a sculptor was working on a marble statue and they made a mistake, they would fill in the error with wax to obscure it − marble being a very expensive material to simply throw away and start again. However, if a work of sculpture was completed without the necessity for this, it was sincere − without wax.
Weekend, 6-7 December 2008
Sex, Drugs and Ultra Violence
After freezing fog and subzero temperatures in Northern Ireland last week, we got back to snow in the Eden Valley, which looked very pretty for the first day, but has now been trampled into mush that froze solid overnight and has turned our unploughed and ungritted lane into an ice rink. Just walking down to the post-box this morning became a test of balance and agility.
It was great to get confirmation this week that I’ve been invited back to the Harrogate International Crime Writing Festival next July, on a panel entitled Sex, Drugs and Ultra Violence. I can’t think why they’ve picked me for that one . . . except for the fact that all three elements crop up to varying degrees in Third Strike, of course!
Violence in books is always an interesting topic, particularly combined with sex and drugs. One reviewer for Third Strike made the comment that he found the casual violence in the book disturbing, but to me there was wasn’t a great amount of described violence, and nothing casual about it. Charlie is very matter-of-fact about her more lethal skills, and that downbeat way of describing what’s going on is very much a part of the character. She’s not squeamish, nor does she revel in the power of bringing death or serious injury to other people, so the narrative style reflects that.
Stuart MacBride, who very kindly stepped in for me last week, made the point recently on his blog that he’d had a lot of horrified letters about the described level of violence to the victims in his latest Logan McRae crime thriller, Flesh House. People − who should know better with one of Stuart’s books by now − apparently said they felt they were reading a horror novel. But, Stuart makes the excellent point that all of the processes he describes, actually take place to animal carcasses in the meat industry. And hardly anybody bats an eyelid. This is a brilliant narrative device, I feel, and lifts the book to a much higher level, giving you something to really think about. I can’t wait to read it.
This week’s Phrase of the Week is gone doolally, which comes from the former British Army military base in Deolali, 100 miles north of Bombay. Not only was there an asylum there for battle-weary troops, but it was also the place soldiers were sent before being shipped home. As boats for England only left between November and March, some troops had to wait months for their passage home, leading to extreme boredom and some eccentric behaviour. This would be explained, after they got back to Britain, as being due to the man having ‘gone through Deolali’ and by 1925 the phrase ‘gone Doolally’ had passed into military slang.
Weekend, 29-30 November 2008
By the time you read this, I shall be in Northern Ireland on a series of photo shoots and, as I'm going to be out of email contact until next week, Stuart MacBride has very kindly offered to come to my rescue and step in as guest blogger.
If I say that Stuart is huge, that's not a comment on anything other than his literary status. He's been topping the UK bestseller lists since his first book, Cold Granite, hit the shelves. He is the recipient of the CWA Dagger in the Library and the Barry Award, and has also just won the ITV Crime Thriller Award for Breakthrough Author of the Year for Broken Skin (Bloodshot in the US).
All in all, he is a gentleman, a scholar and an acrobat − not necessarily in that order. (See, he searches out the most embarrassing bit he could possibly find from one of my books, and proceeds to read it out loud in front of 450 people at Harrogate, and what do I do? Say nice things about him. Mutter, mutter . . .)
This week’s Phrase of the Week is to dree one's weird, to suffer one's destiny. Dree is also an adjective meaning tedious, dreary, doleful, difficult to surmount. Weird has many meanings but in this context signifies the principle, power or agency by which events are predetermined, hence fate or destiny.
Weekend, 22-23 November 2008
Looking Forward to Mayhem in the MidlandsIn the course of our travels we’ve visited over half the states in the mainland USA, but have never been to Nebraska. Well, next May I’m very pleased to be putting that right because I’ve been invited to be the Caroline Willner International Guest of Honor at the tenth annual Mayhem in the Midlands mystery convention.
Mayhem is organised by the Omaha Public Library and that makes me even more delighted to be able to attend, because I’m a huge fan of libraries. I know some authors who mutter about doing library events, because people who come to them tend to listen to what you have to say and then borrow rather than buy the books, but I’d rather someone borrowed a book and enjoyed it, than didn’t feel like taking a chance on buying one.
So, next year looks like being a busy one. I’ve already been invited to attend the Reading Festival of Crime Writing and that’s not until September (11th-13th), not to mention CrimeFest in Bristol in May and the Theakstons Old Peculier International Crime Writing Festival in Harrogate in July.
Meanwhile, I’ve got my nose to the grindstone working on the new Charlie Fox book. I’ve just had a pause in the writing to summarise the book so far. Normally, I do this as I go along, but for some reason the task slipped through the net this time. Just going through and picking out the main points of dialogue and action in each chapter really helps me to see if the book seems to be going in the right direction, or if I’ve contradicted or repeated myself. And, if I have, where it’s best to remove those repetitions or correct those mistakes. This allows me to modify my outline as I go along, adding new strands as they appear and trying to work out where the whole thing’s going to tie together later.
Usually, when I start a book, it all has something of a disconnected feel to it. You add things in without necessarily knowing where they’re leading. And, as the story begins to unfold, I know when it starts to work by when those apparently disconnected elements suddenly start to knit together. And I think that’s just started to happen with this one. But I’m still keeping my fingers crossed . . .
This week’s Phrase of the Week is parting shot, a final blow, which comes from the natives of Parthia in ancient Persia. They were noted for being skilled warriors who had the habit in battle of appearing to retreat, but then the mounted archers would twist round in their saddles and discharge arrows at the pursuing enemy. Such was their accuracy using these tactics that the phrase Parthian shot had appeared in English literature by the 17th century, gradually becoming corrupted into parting shot.
Weekend, 15-16 November 2008
'Tune in Next Week . . .'
More years ago than I care to recall, I used to watch a regular TV drama called The Champions about three agents for a shadowy international law enforcement agency called Nemesis! In fairness, the exclamation mark may not have been part of the official title, but every time anyone said the name, it definitely seemed to have one attached. Nemesis! were based in Geneva. You knew this because of a badly back-projected shot of the cast against the giant Geneva fountain, the Jet d'Eau, in the opening credits.
The basic premise was that in the first episode, three agents of Nemesis (just take the ! as read, will you?) Richard Barrett, Sharron Macready and Craig Stirling, played by William Gaunt, Alexandra Bastedo, and Stuart Damon, are in a plane crash in the Tibetan mountains. They are rescued by an ancient sect of monks who not only nurse them back to health but, for reasons of their own, also bestow upon the trio various superhuman talents. ESP, precognition, superior strength, speed, etc.
So, every week this fearless trio undertook a different vitally important assignment in a different corner of the globe. The assignment always saw them utilising their unique powers, whilst hiding their abilities from their enemies and their incredibly dim-witted boss, Tremayne. "So, Craig, exactly how many minutes did you manage to hold your breath under water . . .?"
(Stick with me on this − I think I know where I’m going with it, honest . . .)
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This week’s Word of the Week is borborygmus, which is the rumbling sounds made by the stomach, caused by the movement of food, gases and digestive juices as they migrate from the stomach into the upper part of the small intestine. The average body makes two gallons of digestive juices a day.
Weekend, 8-9 November 2008
Winter Arrives with a Bang
Winter seems to have well and truly arrived. It’s cold, wet and miserable outside, and the grass is withering under the onslaught of falling leaves. No sooner do we go round and hoover them up with the lawnmower, along comes a gusty night and the whole thing’s covered again. Plus, the little beck that runs along the bottom of the garden has gone from its usual trickle to a raging torrent.
The good thing about this time of year is Bonfire Night every November 5th. I love fireworks and this year we went, for the third time, to the Carlisle Fireshow in Bitts Park. Not only did they have a giant bonfire, but also the most spectacular fireworks display, as you’ll see from the selection of pix I’ve included here.
Winter is also the ideal time for writing, I find. No outdoor temptations to lure you away from a nice cosy computer screen and warm drinks on tap.
I’m now progressing reasonably well into the new Charlie Fox book. Although I do start off with an outline, and a good idea of where the whole thing’s going, inevitably it surprises me. This book has proved no exception. Some people seem to breeze through thousands of words a day on their first draft, but for me there’s a strange feeling of edging forwards in the dark, trying to find the right way, a few inches at a time.
So, I set myself what I think is an achievable target, but still leaves room for some vacillation over the plot. I’d rather work out a scene in detail beforehand, and write it once, otherwise I struggle to alter the course of a conversation once it’s down on the page. On the other hand, I know if I’ve wandered round the point a bit, that will be taken care of when I make a final pass through the typescript, trying to cut out every extraneous word. There’s something very satisfying about that − spending a week or so trying to lose as many words as you can, rather than trying to add them.
It’s also good to have a bit of time at home to get stuck in to the new book, as we have quite a bit of travelling coming up, including to the Readers’ Day at Chesham Town Hall next Saturday, November 15th. I’ll be taking part in a panel discussion at 11:20 am on the art of fictional crime, called ‘Blood On Their Hands’, with Patricia Hall and Priscilla Masters, and hosted by Sarah Harrison. It should be a lot of fun, so please join me if you can.
This week's Word of the Week is wonderclout, meaning something that is showy but quite useless.
Weekend, 1-2 November 2008
One of the things I love about reading any book is picking up those little snippets of inside information. Any information − it doesn’t matter what it is, as long as it’s something that isn’t obvious, that dispels a commonly held belief, or is just one of those nuggets you store away for future use.
Toni did a wonderful post recently about Writing What You Know, in which she detailed − quite beautifully, I might add − the sensations and feelings and knowledge that you collect in the filter of your daily life. You might not think it’s the stuff thrillers are made of, but it is. It’s the glue that holds the whole thing together. The aspect that gives a work heart as well as flash.
The bits that make the whole thing ring true.
In the course of my own writing career, I’ve picked up all sorts of obscure knowledge − how to dislocate someone’s shoulder; how to tell if a mirror is in fact one-way glass; how to steal a motorbike; how to tell immediately if a Glock semiautomatic has a round in the chamber, even in the dark; what to add to gasoline to make the perfect Molotov cocktail; what style of suit to wear on a close-protection detail.
All useful and highly entertaining stuff.
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This week's Word of the Week is onomatomania, which is the vexation of being unable to find the right word.
Weekend, 25-26 October 2008
Bouchercon − It's All About the Food!My last non-Murderati blog was just a collection of pictures from the Bouchercon World Mystery Convention in Baltimore, and I promised that I’d get around to putting words to them, so now’s the time to do it.
It was a very memorable convention for various reasons, and I think it has to be the busiest I’ve ever been to. I had to carry round a little itinerary to remind me where I was supposed to be at any one time, with the result that I actually got to see very few panels.
There’s a very interesting phenomenon happens at mystery conventions, that I call Friendly Face Syndrome. It means I seem to get to talk to more UK authors in the States than I do at home, and more US authors when they come over for UK events. I wonder if it’s perhaps something to do with the fact they’ve seen me at both and are happy to find someone they know, off their home ground.
As it was, I got to spend quite a bit of time with UK authors Sophie Hannah and Stuart MacBride, as well as having a very enjoyable dinner with Peter Robinson at an excellent restaurant called Ixia, which boasted the strangest gothic decor, and Astroturf in the restrooms − on the walls.
his full attention to the deep fried dill pickle.
We usually try to find a gun range whenever we go to the States, and Baltimore was no exception. The motley crew we gathered for this experience included Tasha Alexander, Myles Alfrey, Tom Cain, Andrew Grant, Martyn Waites, as well as Andy and myself. Sadly, the guy at the gun range put the wind up Tom and Martyn by telling them the airport explosive detectors were now so sensitive they stood a chance of being strip-searched if they were flying within 72 hours. The rest of us decided to risk it anyway, and as far as I’m aware, we all travelled home without incident. Mark Billingham was very disappointed to have missed out and we had to make solemn promises to include him on the next outing.
It was nice to have our be-holed targets to decorate the front of the table for the Kick Ass panel, ‘Janie’s Got A Gun’ which Tasha and I both took part in on Thursday afternoon. Did it make any of us look any more kick-ass? I don’t think so. But maybe it stopped any smart-ass questions heading our way . . .
There were a lot of highlights for me, not least of which was being able to revive the light-hearted self-defence panel with Meg Chittenden on Saturday morning − ‘In These Shoes? I Doubt You’d Survive!’ Meg and I haven’t done this for a while, so we snuck off early to practice and she soon picked up the moves again. In fact, I think I may have to get a T-shirt for next time that reads, ‘Meg Chittenden kicked my ass!'
Speaking of T-shirts, Andy found that wearing the latest Crimespree Magazine T-shirt outside the convention hotel gained him mixed reactions. The Crimespree logo on the back was fine, but it was the front that caused a few raised eyebrows. It read: ‘Got Bullets?’
We were also lucky enough to get a T-shirt from Frances Neagley, who appeared as a Boston private investigator character in Second Shot, and has also appeared in several of Lee Child’s books − to the extent that people are starting to ask, ‘Who is Frances Neagley?’ Which is exactly what Frances had put on the shirts. Maybe we should start listing the book titles and year of publication on the back, like a rock band concert tour?
It was also great to spend some time in the bar with Terry O’Loughlin, who appears as a Houston lawyer in Third Strike, and I managed to have a sit down and a brief chat with BG Ritts, who bid in the auction to be a character in the next book. I jotted down a few details and some alternative variations on her name. Should be fun to include her.
Amazing who you end up chatting to − and what about. A chance conversation with January Magazine editor, Linda L Richards, revealed she had inside information on the Synanon cult. Considering that I'm currently doing research on California cults for the next book, it proved a fascinating exchange. I shall definitely be picking her brains more later!
The panel I moderated was causing me a bit of concern because of the dual possibilities of the title − ‘Six Days on The Road’ − which could be either tales of touring, or places and locations the various panellists’ books are set. In the end I think we had some fun with it. It was interesting to find out that Glynn Marsh Alam has done an archaeological dig in the Andes but never set a book there, while Marcia Talley sets her books in Annapolis, but in real life spends part of the year living on a sailboat in the Bahamas. Barry Eisler admitted to owning a book on Contingency Cannibalism, billed as ‘the ultimate survival guide’ but wouldn’t own up to trying out any of the recipes, and Jonathan Santlofer talked us through the Santerian cleansing ritual he’d once undergone in Spanish Harlem, which involved having egg yolks poured down the back of his neck, and gladioli mashed into his chest. But, he reckons it did clear his headaches.
It’s always fun to remind people of selective parts of conversations at previous conventions. Hence causing Charles Benoit some alarm by introducing him with the words, ‘This is Charles. He duct tapes his underpants to his legs.’ Which he won’t forgive me if I don’t explain goes back to his time in Ronald Reagan’s presidential guard, which required his uniform to be utterly immaculate and quite a bit of duct tape was employed to ensure a lack of creases . . .
I’m not sure Tom Cain will ever quite forget being told Paula J Matter’s ‘Sweet ‘n’ Low’ joke.
We had a great sushi meal with Russel McLean, Steve Lee from Heirloom Books, Stuart MacBride, and Sophie Hannah, spoiled only by the rowdy group at the next table, to whom I passed my best Paddington Bear hard stare on the way to the ladies’ room. And don’t worry, Sophie, I was never going to let you dunk that banana fritter in soy sauce and wasabi . . .
Stuart MacBride (that man seems to turn up a lot, doesn’t he) took Andy, and a couple of others, to Hooters girlie bar down by Baltimore harbour . . . for the food. Apparently they do extremely good wings. At least, that’s what they told me. Just to prove it, we went back there the following day for lunch, which included deep fried dill pickle. And, they were right − the food was great. Strange . . . but great!
And another meal − why do all my memories of Baltimore seem to revolve around food? − we had with the Brit crowd on the last night, in the bar at the convention hotel. My actual food in that case wasn’t brilliant. In fact, it went back twice before I gave up, but the company more than made up for it. We inducted Murderati commentator, RJ Mangahas, into the delights of having salt and vinegar on his French fries. And Meg Chittenden returned somewhat nonplussed from the ladies’ room to report she’d just pushed open the door to one of the cubicles only to find a female couple making out in there. Meg being Meg went for the practical approach. ‘If you’re going to do that in here,’ she said, ‘you really should lock the door.’
So, all in all, another good fun convention. Long may they continue!
This week's Word of the Week is hyperglast, who is a person who won't stop laughing. Much like the rest of us when listening to Mark Billingham do his turn as toastmaster at the Anthony's and the opening ceremonies.
Weekend, 18-19 October 2008
Well, I was intending to do another of those blogs about What I Did At Bouchercon, because there were a few stories there that deserve telling − getting mugged by a paramilitary evangelist in Baltimore Airport, for a start. And the museum exhibit designer we met on the plane on the way out, who turned out to be one of those people you instantly take to.
But then I read Dusty’s comments from yesterday about Not Another What I Did At Bouchercon Report, and realised I was going to have to come up with something new. And fast.
Aw, rats.
So, hello to everyone we met. It was a convention of delights for me. There are people I’ll never forget − mostly for the right reasons! And instead I’ll move to Monday night, New York City. We had dinner with Lee Child, SJ Rozan, and new Brit crime thriller author, Andrew Grant − who also happens to be Lee’s little brother. And the subject of location came up over goat biryani (don’t ask). “There have been very few series that have been truly successful in the States,” Lee said, “that haven’t been set here.”
Now, your first instinct is to deny this. But the more you think about it, the more it seems to hold true. There are the occasional exceptions, of course. Sherlock Holmes, for one. And Golden Age crime seems to demand an English country house setting, some time between the wars. But more recently . . .?
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I have a trio of nice Words of the Week this week. The first is apricity, which is the warmth of the sun in winter. The second is balter, which is to dance clumsily. And the last − and I’m horrified to think this happens often enough to have its own word − is lant, which means to add urine to ale to make it stronger.
Weekend, 11-12 October 2008 at Bouchercon in Baltimore, USA
Snapshots from BoucherconWell, here we are, still in the US, surviving on very little sleep and lots of adrenalin. So, just to keep you going until my brain finally recovers, here are a few piccies!
for book dealer Charles Neddo.
at the Heirloom Books booth.
managed to squeeze in. Great atmosphere!
Second Shot and the UK and US editions of
Third Strike all together.
Look out for my impressions of Bouchercon − the best yet − when I return home later this week!
Weekend, 4-5 October 2008
Baltimore BeckonsNext week it’s the Bouchercon World Mystery Convention in Baltimore, with the catchy title
of Charmed To Death. Co-chaired by crime aficionado Judy Bobalik, and Jon and Ruth Jordan,
the force behind Crimespree magazine, it looks like being one of the biggest and best
yet.
It will certainly be one of the busiest. As I look at all the scrawled notes in my pocket diary − cell phone numbers of all the people I’ve promised to meet up with, appointments and get-togethers − I realise that there’s very little blank space left for actually going to panels. Even my own!
This year, I’m lucky enough to have been invited to participate in two-and-a-half. The first is 4:40pm on Thursday afternoon, entitled ‘Janie’s Got a Gun’ (Aerosmith) − do you need to kick ass to be kick ass? − with own JT Ellison in the moderating chair, plus Tasha Alexander, Robert Fate, Cornelia Read, and Greg Rucka. This should be a very interesting topic because of the amount of perception involved in whether people pick up a writer’s book or not. Does it help if the reader believes the author actually capable of the things they’ve written about? Does it matter?
The second is 8:30am Friday morning. This one’s called ‘Six Days on The Road’ (Dave Dudley) with me taking the hot seat this time, and Glynn Marsh Alam, Barry Eisler, NM Kelby, Jonathan Santlofer, and Marcia Talley all bravely agreeing to rise at that hour of the morning. After some discussion we seem to have split this topic into two distinct subjects − using location in the writers’ work, and tales of touring. I’m sure everybody has horror stories of the Tour from Hell and I can’t wait to hear them.
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This week’s Phrase of the Week is knuckle under, which means to submit. It comes from the drinking taverns of 17th century London, where arguments raged. A person admitting defeat would knock on the underside of the table with his knuckle. There’s also some suggestion that it comes from bare-knuckle boxing, where the fighters would keep their fists up in front of them if they still wanted to fight, and down, with their knuckles behind their hands, if they’d had enough. Also corrupted into buckle under.
This should not be confused with knuckle down, which means to concentrate or apply yourself to a task, and comes from the game of marbles. The rules state that a player’s knuckle must be placed in the exact spot where the player’s previous marble came to rest. Those not paying attention, and allowing their hand to come off the ground are told to put their ‘knuckle down’.
Weekend, 27-28 September 2008
The Burning of the LeavesHere we are, nearly in October. ‘Now is the time,’ wrote Lancaster-born poet, Laurence Binyon, ‘for the burning of the leaves.’ The Bouchercon World Mystery Convention is less than a fortnight away and, before we know it, it will be Christmas. And, yet again, I wonder where the time went, and what I did with it.
This might seem like the kind of thing that springs to mind in December as you look back at the year past, but I feel compelled to do so now, when there’s still a chance to wring a few more drops out of 2008.
Because between now and New Year’s Eve, I have a huge To Do list. Top of it is the next Charlie Fox book − currently still a work-in-progress. I aim to have the first draft completed by the end of December. After all, the onset of autumn, and the gloomy slide into a British winter, is a very good time to be indoors, in the warm, sitting in front of a computer screen with music playing, and the rain − or the snow, come to that − hitting the window outside.
And, though I try not to let it intrude, the process of writing one book seems to stimulate another part of my mind towards formulating the next. Ideas are swirling for the project that will come after, however much I try to ignore them. In fact, I’ve long since learned not to bother trying to push them back down into the subconscious. Any new idea has a file on the computer called Notes. Into it goes all the disconnected thoughts and snippets, of dialogue or scenes, or pieces of action, or themes that will eventually come together to make up the finished book. As I’ve mentioned before, anything that helps take away that terrible blank-page feeling when you sit down to work on something new, has to be a good thing!
Although I’ve had a bit of a break from the new Charlie book, at least coming back to it is not quite so daunting because I’ve got a solid start that not only I am happy with, but it’s had my agent’s seal of approval as well. And the right launch point into the story, as I know to my frequent frustration, is often half the battle.
All I have to do now is write the rest of it . . .
Meanwhile there’s the US launch of Third Strike in hardcover, and Second Shot in mass market paperback looming on the horizon. The latest e-newsletter has just gone out to an ever-increasing list, and I’m vaguely beginning to think about what we might need to take with us on our trip to Baltimore.
You might think that business cards and promotional pens are the most important things on the list to take with me to conventions. And they are, but even more vital than that are breath mints and eye drops. The former is fairly self-explanatory. The latter is because staying in the bar until the wee small hours − even if you don’t drink − and being in constant air conditioning, leaves me with eyes like two fried tomatoes. Not a pretty sight!
This week’s Phrase of the Week is Dead Ringer. In medieval Britain, the principle of a coma was misunderstood, so that people were often thought to be dead when they were really unconscious. It was not uncommon for exhumations to reveal the ‘corpse’ had come round in their coffin and attempted to claw their way out. This mistrust of the medical profession led to some people − those wealthy enough to afford it − to bury loved ones with a string attached to their wrist leading to a bell above ground, which could be rung in case of emergency. There were recorded cases of this actually working and people who were ‘exhumed’ going on to lead normal healthy lives.
Weekend, 20-21 September 2008
I make no apologies for this post. It's something I wrote back in June 2005 after our first visit to New York since 9/11. It was just some jumbled-up impressions, made because the place hit me hard, and I wanted to remember it afterwards. It's never been published anywhere before. It wasn't my turn to post last Thursday, on September 11th, but I wanted to mark the date anyway. And when I rediscovered this file on my computer and read what I wrote, three years ago, I thought this seemed fitting.
It’s June 2005 and we’re going to New York. Sounds good, doesn’t it? Sounds better than good. Use up all those useless Air Miles on seven hours crated like a veal calf in a BA 767 with the romantic name of the Chatham Naval Dockyard. Over-fly Central Park and Manhattan on the way in with my nose pressed against the glass, abandoning all attempts at playing it cool.
Rice paper-thin upholstery on worn-out seats on the bus from the airport. When the hell did they put in sleeping policemen on the freeways? Oh . . . are the roads always this bad? The bus drops us in front of Grand Central Terminal − not Station, if you don’t mind. What happened to door-to-door service to our hotel? "It’s only three blocks down and one over. You walk." Here we go. Big city rip-off starting early. The last time we came here was ’89 and we got stung hard enough to put us off coming back. Same again?
No. The hotel is, indeed, only three blocks in the soggy heat. Judy Bobalik’s there waiting for us on the corner. Big smiles. Big hugs. Maybe this trip’s not going to be a repeat performance, after all. The temperature has a mass all of its own. Why did I bring so many black clothes?
Hotel’s Italian-owned and run. Even I, a professional photographer for seventeen years at this point, can’t work out what kind of lens they used to make the rooms look so much bigger on the website. Damn Photoshop. Still, most of the lights work and, more importantly, so does the air con, even if you can’t hear the TV over the top of it. And who needs that promised view? We’re only going to be sleeping in there, after all.
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Weekend, 13-14 September 2008
A Perfect WeddingLast weekend, we went to a wedding.
Not just any wedding, but that of McKenna
Jordan, manager of Murder By The Book in Houston, and David Thompson, who as
well as being a mainstay of MBTB, is also publisher at Busted Flush Press.
As both bride and groom live in Texas, you might think this meant a trip to the
States, but McKenna and David had decided to get married at the ruined 12th
century Dryburgh Abbey in the Scottish borders. And, to our delight and
surprise, we were invited.
I have to confess, though, driving up through Hawick in horrendous rain, Andy and I were a bit anxious about the event. We’d received our pre-invitation, and then invitation, from McKenna’s mother, Brenda, all very formal and beautifully presented. We had visions of being two of a hundred or more guests, all of whom were total strangers to us except the bride and groom. Plus we had a photo shoot in Newcastle the following day, necessitating a fairly early start, so we planned to stay until the dancing started, then make a graceful exit.
Dryburgh Abbey, near Melrose, is a superb place, and not just for a wedding. Surrounded by the most magnificent trees − including several giant sequoias − it’s stood as little more than a skeleton since the mid-1500s, but the Chapter House proved a highly atmospheric and intimate setting, despite the weather. The piper helped.
As it turned out, including us there were only eleven guests at the service itself, including fellow crime writers Allan Guthrie and his wife, Donna; and Donna Moore and her chap, Ewan. The minister’s words were old-fashioned and moving, and the happy couple’s vows somehow sounded more poignant spoken in an American accent. And McKenna looked stunning.
Afterwards, we all made for the Roxburghe Hotel near Kelso for an excellent leisurely meal with the guests that nicely took up the rest of the evening, with not a disco in sight. Perfect. We were the last to leave and eventually got home at about quarter to one in the morning. I felt for the poor photographer in all that rain, though − at one point he apparently had to retire to go and blow dry his cameras.
Just goes to show, you should never assume anything!
This week I have a LadyKillers’ event at Saltaire Bookshop in Shipley, starting at 6:30pm on Tuesday evening, September 16th. It’s the first one I’ve done in a while with Carla Banks (Danuta Reah), Lesley Horton and Priscilla Masters, and we’re looking forward to seeing the crew again and catching up. The event is part of the Saltaire Festival, now in its sixth year. The Festival takes place from September 11th to the 21st, and is a community event offering music, street entertainment, stalls, displays, shows and a carnival.
Just as long as they don’t expect me to sing . . .
Weekend, 6-7 September 2008
Perfect Timing
Yesterday, I went out and planned the best way to kill a man. Nothing new in that, of course. I can’t remember how many people have died by my hand over the years. They’ve been shot, stabbed, overdosed, strangled, torched, blown up with a variety of Improvised Explosive Devices (IEDs), been run over by moving vehicles, pushed down staircases, ridden off the edge of cliffs, had their throats cut, and their skulls shattered with blunt instruments. Or, on more than one occasion, finished with a single empty-handed blow.
And, let me tell you, it’s been fun.
But yesterday I went and walked the actual killing ground, which is something I haven’t done in a while. So, what was different this time?
Everything.
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This week’s Word of the Week is deadline, which was used for years in the newspaper business, where writers had to have their copy filed by a certain time in order to make the following day’s paper, or the story was considered dead. It’s a word that strikes terror into the hearts of authors everywhere, which is rather appropriate to its original meaning − it was supposed to. During the American Civil War, the prisoner of war camp at Andersonville used a white painted line instead of external walls or wire. Marksmen placed around the perimeter had orders to shoot any prisoner who attempted to cross that white line, no questions asked. Hence, you were allowed to go right up to the deadline, but woe betide you if you went over it.
I know the feeling . . .
Weekend, 30-31 August 2008
What's In a Name?
There’s been a bit of discussion floating about this week about titles for books. Some authors go through a huge number of suggestions before finally hitting on a title that everybody’s happy with.
I must admit that I would find that very difficult. Often, the title is the first thing that arrives, and on occasion, the title has arrived quite a long way ahead of any kind of idea for the plot!
But, I always try to have some kind of tie-in between the title and the story, and that’s just as true of short stories as novels. In fact, if I’ve been asked to write a short story for a particular anthology, I’ll often try and reference the title of the anthology in the story itself.
important when competing for attention on the bookstore shelf.
When I wrote my first Charlie Fox crime thriller, Killer Instinct, I had no idea what the finished book was going to be called. The title actually came about because of a line of dialogue. A bouncer at the night club where Charlie’s working security looks at her after she’s objected to the violent methods he’s just used to break up a fight, and tells her she just doesn’t have the killer instinct for the job. ‘Ah-ha!’ I thought, dithered for a while over whether I should keep an initial ‘The’ on the title, but decided against it.
By the time Killer Instinct found a publisher, I was already well into writing the second in the series, which concerned tensions between two neighbouring run-down housing estates, escalating into riot. As the conflict is being fuelled by various parties for their own ends, the title Riot Act seemed very appropriate.
After that came Hard Knocks. In this book, Charlie agrees to go undercover in a bodyguard training school in Germany. It turns out very much to be the school of hard knocks so, once again, the title seemed to fit from the start.
First Drop went through a number of different titles at the planning stage. I seem to remember that I considered both White Knuckle and Thrill Ride at one point. But then I realised I’d got the perfect title staring me in the face, from a line on the very first page. The book starts on a rollercoaster, so I felt the first drop analogy was a good one. After all, once you’ve reached the top of the lift hill and hit that first drop, there are no brakes and no chances to get off. You just have to hold on tight to the end of the ride.
After that came Road Kill. The whole idea of the book was that it would be about the dangers Charlie and a group of bikers face on a road trip round Ireland. As both the location for danger, and to anchor the book, the title stayed with me. It’s been the only one so far that’s come close to being changed, though, as a movie called ‘Roadkill’ came out around the same time I delivered the typescript.
Second Shot had two alternative titles before that one stuck. When I originally came up with the plot, it was under the working title Cold Cuts, which I felt had all kinds of connotations of revenge and meat and butchery. In the end, though, it seemed to indicate a buffet dinner more than a crime thriller, and I discarded that in favour of Fall Line. As part of the action takes place on the edge of a ski resort in the White Mountains in New Hampshire, this grabbed me much better. The fall line, as every skier knows, is the fastest way downhill. Then came the request from my US publisher for a numerical title to follow on from the first US-published book, First Drop. And, again, the answer was to be found on the first page, when Charlie gets shot . . . twice. It also had some nice echoes in the fact that even after she apparently fails in her duty, she gets a second chance to protect her principal from danger.
By the time the next book was at the planning stage, I already knew I needed a Third Something, for a plot which revolved around Charlie having to bodyguard her own parents. Originally, I really liked the idea of calling it Blood Lies, which worked on a lot of different levels, involving family ties and untruths. But, in the end I went for Third Strike, which tied in to Charlie’s surgeon father, who’s accused of gross misconduct. If a UK doctor has his license revoked, he’s struck off, and I liked the link to Charlie’s feelings, before the book starts, that her parents have washed their hands of her.
And now I’m in the midst of the next instalment, Fourth . . . ah, well, I might just wait a little bit before I reveal that one.
I keep a file of interesting quotes and phrases that would make great titles for books. There’s one I’ve had for ages, though, and I’m really struggling to come up with a suitable story to go with it. It’s the famous stage direction from Shakespeare’s ‘A Winter’s Tale’ − Exit, Pursued By A Bear. Any suggestions?
This week’s Phrase of the Week is short shrift, which has come to mean to reject someone’s ideas in a fairly brusque manner. The shrift part is a confession given to a priest, deriving from ‘shrive’, meaning to hear a confession. In the 17th century, convicted criminals were usually taken to a place of execution directly from the courtroom after the death sentence was passed. They would have only a few moments with a priest, usually on the gallows platform itself, to confess their sins and attempt to save their souls.
Weekend, 23-24 August 2008
"I'm Mad About My Flat!"
If you’re a Brit, the title of this piece will have a completely different meaning than it does for an American. To an American, "I’m mad about my flat," means, "I’m very annoyed about the puncture to my car tyre." (Or should that be ‘car tire’?) To a Brit, on the other hand, it translates as, "I’m very excited about my apartment."
And then there are all the other phrases that are ripe for misunderstanding. If a Brit says somebody’s ‘pissed’, he or she means they’re very drunk. To be annoyed is to be ‘pissed off’.
On this side of the Atlantic, a ‘sorry ass’ is a donkey that’s feeling under the weather, a ‘fag’ is a cigarette, and I’d be extremely careful before you remark on the pertness of a young lady’s ‘fanny’, as you’re liable to get a proper smack in the mouth.
If someone ‘jacks’ your car over here, they’ve lifted it off its wheels rather than stolen it, although if you’ve had your wallet ‘lifted’ that does mean stolen. If a person is ‘lifting’, however, you might want to stay firmly upwind of them.
Confused? You will be.
Whoever said we are two people separated by a common language got that dead right − and I’m not just talking about the way words are spelt − or should that be spelled?
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This week's Word of the Week is hijack. Although it’s come to be associated mainly with airliners, the origins come from old English highwaymen, who would rob horse-drawn coaches at gun point, and of whom Dick Turpin was the most famous example. The traditional opening gambit to the occupants was a shout to "Hold ‘em high, Jack!" meaning everyone on board should stick their hands in the air while the robber took control.
Weekend,16-17 August 2008
Less Is More
Normally, the process of writing a book is all about slowly building up a total of words, building the story, watching it grow. In fact, one of the things that I find most encouraging is watching that total gradually increasing, week by week, until the book reaches its final tally. It makes me really feel like I'm getting somewhere.
So, it's been a slightly odd experience to have spent this week doing my best to lose as many words as possible. I need to slice out about 20,000 of them, which is a bit of a daunting prospect. After all, if I hadn't thought I needed all those words, I wouldn't have put them in to begin with.
The trouble is that I don't tend to go into reams of description when I write. There aren't pages lovingly describing the history of the town the characters are driving through, the interior of someone's house, or what they keep on their desk. Although I've identified a bit of slack in the first third, mostly I'm having to try and achieve this paring down by removing a superfluous word here and sentence there.
Working out what's superfluous, now that's the tricky bit. Obviously, anything that doesn't move the story forwards in some way is fair game for the red pen. But what about sections whose only purpose is to expand the character that little bit more, or add that nice little touch, that extra bit of flavour? There is the terrible fear that, by being too ruthless, I'm going to lose what I might consider to be all the nice bits. Those little flourishes and turns of phrase which especially pleased you when you came up with them. But strictly necessary? Well, probably not.
At the moment, I've managed to strike through just over 6000 words out of the first 25,000 and I'm not at all sure, on balance, if taking them out isn't harder than thinking them up in the first place!
The other bit of news this week is that Third Strike had a great review in Publishers Weekly. Their reviewer said: 'Sharp expertly captures the frenetic energy of New York without sacrificing her trademark British wit. Charlie is as tough as she is damaged, and readers will kill for the next installment.'
This week's Word of the Week is actually a phrase − mealy mouthed, which has come to mean a person who is unwilling to speak their mind for fear of causing offence. It comes from a phonetic translation from the Greek, melimuthos, meaning honey speak.
Weekend, 9-10 August 2008
The Mass of Expectation
It’s five A.M., winter, and a bitter rain is beating against the glass. Outside the covers, the room is as cold as the inside of a meat locker. Your husband/wife/lover is a soft embrace with a comforting heartbeat only a thought away across the pillow, and you want nothing more than to tuck in, hold on, go under.
But your alarm has just gone off, an hour and a half before you know you HAVE to get up for work. There seems to be no reason good enough, right now, to deny yourself another ninety minutes lying here. It’s safe, it’s easy. And nobody expects you to want or do anything different.
But you get up anyway.
You struggle into unwelcome clothes and stumble down a darkened staircase, trying not to put on the lights, trying not to wake the house. You totter out into the wet and the cold, and you force yourself onward against a fierce wind that seems determined to tangle itself around your legs and weight your feet like clay, against great flung coins of rain that pelt into your face at every stride, denting your skin and stinging your eyes until you have no idea who you are or where you’re going.
And you run.
At times like these you not only wonder why you got started on this madness, but how. Maybe it started out as little more than a half-formed whim expressed out loud. “One day,” you said, “I want to enter a marathon.” And maybe someone else, someone close to you, said, “Well, what’s stopping you?”
If you were lucky.
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This week’s Word of the Week is more of a phrase − cold feet. A common expression for loss of nerve, the expression comes from the German author, Fritz Reuter. In 1862 he wrote a scene in a novel involving a game of poker. One of the players realises he’s going to lose but doesn’t want to throw in his hand and thus lose face, so he complains that his feet are so cold that he cannot concentrate on the game. This gives him the opportunity to leave the table with his honour intact.
Weekend, 2-3 August 2008
Just when I thought I was off to a decent start writing the new Charlie Fox crime thriller, I find things are not quite as sorted as I thought they were.
I sent the opening 10,000 words off to my agent and discovered that I haven't quite nailed the first chapter. I was planning on using much the same narrative device as in Second Shot, where the opening chapter is a scene from later on in the book. In that case, the story opens with Charlie lying shot and injured in a frozen New England forest, while her erstwhile principal, Simone, is charging around in the trees with a gun.
Now, a couple of people admitted that when they first started reading Second Shot they thought that opening scene must be one that came fairly close to the end of the book. After all, what can a protagonist who's always been something of an action-heroine do when she's barely out of hospital, and on crutches? Well, quite a bit, as it turns out. Without wishing to give anything away to those who haven't yet read Second Shot, there's plenty happens after that point, and one of the whole ideas behind the book was to see how Charlie coped with a sudden lack of mobility and loss of her usual self-defence skills.
Having gone for a more linear opening to the story in Third Strike, I wanted to revisit that flash-forwards narrative device for the new book. It felt right in the context of the plot, to give the reader a little taste of the trouble that was in store for Charlie further down the line. The problem is, it seems that the scene I've chosen is too far down the line − too close to the end of the book.
So, back to the drawing board.
It takes me quite a while to find what I feel is the right jumping-off point for each new story. In some cases, it can take me as long to write the opening three chapters as it does the rest of the book, so it was a bit of a jolt to find that I may have missed the mark this time.
After all, what is the opening chapter supposed to do? For me, it has to serve many purposes, both for the first-time reader and the returning fan. In a first-person narrative, it has to introduce the main character, and by that I mean it has to show what they're made of in some way. Not necessarily an action scene, but some indication of their capabilities, or the way their friends, colleagues or enemies regard them, or how they react to danger, or when things go bad. Enough to intrigue the new reader so they want to know more, and to reassure the returning reader that this is the character they've come to know and love.
And all that is before you've even started to think about where to dip the reader into the plot itself. But, after a weekend of distracted pondering, I think I may have come up with an alternative. One that still gives a taste of what's to come, but not quite so far along the storyline. With any luck, I may even be able to incorporate the scrapped first chapter into a later part of the book. With a bit of judicious pruning, of course.
That's the nice thing about this job − nothing's ever entirely wasted.
This week's Word of the Week is havoc, meaning general destruction, devastation, chaos; to lay waste. It comes from the old French expression havot meaning plunder. During the Middle Ages, it was used as a signal to the victorious troops that the battle was won and the looting and pillaging could begin.
Weekend, 26-27 July 2008
How To Kill Someone With Small Change
I suppose, first of all, I need to start with an apology. I’ve been singularly absent from the comments section to posts on this blog since. . . well, since my last post, to be honest.
Summer is the silly season as far as the day-job goes. Not that it seems to rain less, exactly, in the British summer for location photo shoots, but the rain’s certainly warmer. And the last month or so, what with the run-up to the CWA Dagger Awards and trying to plunge into the new Charlie Fox book, well. Let’s just say things have been a little hectic. Spending six days out of seven on the road does not make for a good ‘Rati member, I freely admit. So, apologies again, and I’ll try harder. In fact, when JT originally asked me for a title for my blog, I so very nearly used Must Try Harder instead of Changing Feet. Sometimes it would have been very appropriate. Whenever I do get the chance to catch up, I find you’ve all been having superb posts that I really would have liked to take part in.
Anyway, my last bout of rushing around the country took in the Theakstons Old Peculier Crime Writing Festival in Harrogate . Not quite the glamorous location of NYC for the recent ThrillerFest, but Harrogate still has a fine traditional connection with crime writing. When Agatha Christie did her famous eleven-day disappearing act in 1926, it was in the Harrogate Hydro Hotel she was eventually found.
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This week's Word of the Week has to be hominoid, an animal of the family Hominoidea, comprising man and the modern apes and their extinct ancestors.
Weekend, 19-20 July 2008
Firstly, many apologies that this blog is so delayed. We left the house last Tuesday morning to head down to the Bodies in the Bookshop event at Heffers in Cambridge, and thence on to the Harrogate Crime Writing Festival (of which more on Murderati at the end of this week) and, to be honest, we haven't stopped since. Sleep has been very much at a premium.
Also, in a prime example of bad timing, we had two photo shoots over the weekend, and it takes a bit of doing to get your mind firmly into gear when you were still in the bar (albeit stone cold sober) at 3:45 AM.
So, just a couple of quickie points:
- I recorded an online interview with the charming Sarah Walters of the Yorkshire Post for their OutLoud series
(editorial article and podcast available
here)
- I also took part in a discussion with Chelsea Cain, Simon Kernick and Stuart MacBride with Mark Lawson for BBC Radio 4's Front Row arts programme. This will be broadcast on Wednesday evening (23rd July), at 7:15 PM (BST) or available on their Listen Again service for a week afterwards.
And, to top all that, we arrived home to find the first US review out for Third Strike − on Sarah Weinman's highly respected Confessions of an Idiosyncratic Mind blog. I'm delighted by her reaction to the book, although I keep getting the urge to apologise that it should have had such an effect on her. . .
This week's Word of the Week is chiliarch − the commander of a thousand men, from chiliad, the number 1000; 1000 of anything; a period of 1000 years or a millennium. Also, chiliagon, a plane with 1000 angles, and chiliahedron, a solid figure with 1000 plane faces.
Weekend, 12-13 July 2008
Life, and Other Addictions
Today [Thursday] sees the announcement of the Crime Writers’ Association Duncan Lawrie Dagger Awards. The top prize, for the Duncan Lawrie Dagger itself, is £20,000 − a sliver under $40,000. Tonight I shall be putting on a posh frock − Alex’s wonderful description of ‘stunt dressing’ springs to mind − and mixing with the great and the good at the swanky Four Seasons Hotel on Park Lane in the Aston Martin area of London. Sadly, I shall not be doing this because I’ve been nominated for anything, but because for the last four years I have been the Press Officer for the CWA.
And this is my last time.
They’re a nice bunch, the CWA, and I look back on previous Chairs with great affection, but a couple of recent minor nudges made me suddenly realise that the time has come to stand down. It’s not just the putting together of the 50+page press packs to be handed out on the night, the numerous press releases, and the mammoth task that is the gathering together of comments, synopsis and biog information on up to ten shortlisted authors for each of eight different awards. On top of fielding every day press enquiries, there’s also the shortlists and results for the Ellis Peters Historical Award, made towards the end of the year, and the announcements for the Cartier Diamond Dagger, awarded each May. Of course, the only time anyone contacts you about any of this is when you’ve made a mistake, but that’s just human nature and I expect and accept that as part of the job.
No, the realisation finally dawned that I’m trying to do Too Much and I need to shed some load. To coin a nautical phrase − better jetsam than flotsam.
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This week's Word(s) of the Week are jetsam and flotsam. Only a slight difference between the two, but an important one, I feel. A piece of jetsam is an object jettisoned from a ship in an attempt to prevent it from sinking, whereas flotsam is an object that has floated off a ship as it goes to the bottom.
Weekend, 5-6 July 2008
This week I was invited to attend a local reading group meeting. The members had been reading one of my books, and I was asked to go along for the post mortem, as it were. Not without a little trepidation, I agreed. The thing that surprised me most, though, was that it wasn't either of the latest two books the group had been reading, but Road Kill. I'd made a point of briefly boning up on both Second Shot and Third Strike, but the one before those two seemed like a long time ago.
The group organiser, Angela, explained that they'd wanted to read something that had a more local setting and, as Road Kill takes place partly around Lancaster, Caton, Wray, and the Lune Valley up to the famous bikers' haunt of Devil's Bridge at Kirkby Lonsdale, that was what they'd picked.
Not only are they a very nice bunch of people, but it was an interesting evening for several reasons. For one thing I was amazed at the bits of all of the books that they could remember − probably rather more than me! It was also fascinating to know what sections of the book particularly stuck in their mind, and for what reasons. At one point in Road Kill, Sean comes to Charlie's (verbal) defence when she's accused of overreacting with violent efficiency to a threatening situation. One of the group commented that she'd seen this as a metaphor for the attitude to the military as a whole − sent to do an impossible task and then condemned for doing it as well as they were able.
My most overwhelming feeling, however, was an immediate, 'Oh, if I was writing that book again now, I'd do it so much better.' And I have to try and ignore such sentiments. It's like looking at old photographs of yourself. You may not like the fashions − or the hairstyle − but at the time they were perfectly acceptable − trendy even. Equally, the books you write are a snapshot of yourself, your views and abilities, at the time you wrote them, and trying to go back and re-imagineer them is, I feel, something of a mistake. You have to look forward instead, and try and make sure you've learned something from each book, gained a bit more craftsmanship that will take you forwards and improve the next one.
Which is something that's pretty up front in my mind at the moment, as I'm going through my usual 'first three chapters battle' with the latest book. It can often take me almost as long to get the opening to a book right in my head, as it does for me to write the rest of it entirely.
I've mentioned before how important I think openings to books are. And not just the first three chapters, but the opening page, or the opening line. If you don't get that right, then what comes after is almost immaterial. While you would always hope that returning readers have invested enough in the character and the continuing themes of the series to stick with it, new readers have no such expectations. You're trying to hook people who might not have the patience to read on if you haven't impressed them by about page fifty at the latest.
For me, the first few chapters have to accomplish several tasks. The opening has to intrigue without being annoyingly cryptic, and it has to drop you into exactly the right point of the story, which is frequently not at the beginning. In a crime thriller, the book rarely, if ever, starts at the beginning of the story. Otherwise there would be no mystery element to it − you'd know exactly what was going on. It starts at the point where the story intersects with one or more of the characters involved.
And their initial reaction to events gives you a snapshot of who they are, and what to expect from the rest of the tale. So, something in the first chapter has to allow the main character to show their colours, even if, by the end of the book, they've evolved in some way to meet the challenges they've faced in the course of the story. In fact, I feel they must learn something from the tale. Charlie Fox has changed and grown slightly with each of her adventures. Or should that be misadventures? Her parents, who feature strongly in Third Strike, will be forever changed by the events of that book.
But, as the old saying has it, you can't please all of the people, all of the time. We went to see an old friend recently to whom we'd recommended a particular author who's a real favourite of ours. Not just the series character, but the way that author writes and the way the stories rattle on. He'd decided to give the author a try and had picked up, quite by chance, what's possibly our favourite book of the series.
And put it down again. He said he mainly didn't care for the main protagonist; he also didn't like the way it was written. Me? I'd read this author's shopping list. Like I say − you just can't please everybody . . .
This week's Word of the Week is manqué, (pronounced móng-kay) which means unsuccessful or frustrated; unfulfilled. Used after the noun, as in an artist manqué. Its origins are from the French, manquer, to fail, to lack; from the Italian, mancare, from manco, lacking, defective; and from the Latin mancus, maimed.
Weekend, 28-29 June 2008
Second Henchman From The Left
The main protagonist of a crime thriller − in fact, of any novel − may be the one who gets the star billing, but for me it’s so often the supporting players who make or break a book.
And I’m not just talking about the sidekicks, either. They deserve a whole separate section to themselves. What I mean is the real minor characters − the walk-on extras of the literary world. The ones who may only have a few lines of dialogue, but who completely steal whatever scene they happen to be in.
Sometimes, in a few broad brushstrokes, those are ones who jump off the page to become real people, quite out of proportion to the role they were supposed to play in the story. The ones who most stick in my mind after the final page is done. The characters who really should have had a chapter all of their own, or maybe even an entire novel.
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This week’s Word of the Week is camaïeu, originally a cameo; a painting in monochrome or in simple colours not imitating nature; a style of printing pictures producing the effect of pencil-drawing; a literary work or play that is monotonous or lacks interest. And thus, cameo, which among its meanings includes that of a short literary piece; a small role in a play or film that often gives scope for character acting. Adj miniature, small and perfect of its kind.
Weekend, 21-22 June 2008
Although I travel around the country a good deal by car, I must admit that I’ve never listened to many audio books. I think it’s because for me time in the car is good writing time, or if not that, then good talk time with my Other Half, which is when most knotty plot holes get sorted out. Listening to an audio book requires silence on the part of the listeners, and attention.
Nevertheless, one of the nice things about the recent CrimeFest event in Bristol was the fact that, in each of the book bags, was an audio book as well as the usual paper variety. And because of the swaps table, we came away with one or two extra. A 600-mile round trip to London gave us the ideal opportunity to try one of them out, particularly as it was a book we’d both already read and enjoyed, so we felt we could make a better judgement on how the book sounded in spoken word format, and how well abridged it was.
Most of the time, you couldn't really tell where the book had been tightened up, although the odd little bit had been removed that I remembered and thought was important to the storyline. Interesting to discover what the abridger thought was surplus to requirements, and also that your mind seems to be able to work on a much larger scale when it's dealing with the written word.
The only trouble was, the narrator did different voices for the various characters, and the voice he put on for the main protagonist was almost cartoonish in its Clint Eastwood ‘Dirty Harry’-style graveliness. For me, it didn’t gel, and I almost gave up before we were halfway into the first track, never mind the first disk. Fortunately, the narrator seemed to relax a little as he went on. By the end of it, we thoroughly enjoyed the adaptation. I still winced just a bit at some of those accents, though.
But it did get me thinking about the pitfalls of spoken word. I have a much clearer idea of how Charlie Fox sounds than what she looks like. Writing in first person means I look out through her eyes all the time. Unless she spent a lot of time looking in mirrors, I hear her voice more than I see her face. The whole of the narrative is in her thought and speech patterns. If the rhythm of her voice is wrong, it will knock the whole book off kilter.
And it does happen. Talking to fellow crime writers at a CWA party last week, one author mentioned how one of her born and bred Yorkshiremen suddenly acquired a Liverpudlian accent at the audio book stage. Another had written an historical novel in which one character was described as a war veteran, having joined up as a boy soldier and retired in his early thirties. Unfortunately, the narrator had latched onto the word ‘veteran’ and read all that character’s dialogue in the voice of a crusty old man. And that’s before we get onto the topic of unusual names being mispronounced.
With any luck, I should soon have a copy of Second Shot on audio book. I had a bit of a shock when they sent me a clip of the narrator, Clare Corbett, reading another book, as the voice was not quite what I had in mind for Charlie at all! However, some frantic digging around unearthed a clip of Clare being interviewed and she sounds great. I could see that voice as Charlie without any problem. But I’ll still put that first CD into the player with a certain amount of trepidation, even so . . .
Just a reminder, also, that this Wednesday − June 25th − I'll be giving a talk at Morecambe Central Library at 7:30pm. Do come along if you're in the area!
This week’s Word of the Week is not really a word, more of a phrase: it’s force and fear which is a Scottish legal term, meaning that amount of constraint or compulsion which is enough to annul an engagement or obligation entered into under its influence.
Weekend, 14-15 June 2008
Music & Lyrics
Last weekend I attended the CrimeFest convention in Bristol, which was great fun, with some highly entertaining panels, not least of which were given by the guest of honour, Jeff Lindsay − he of Darkly Dreaming Dexter. I was particularly interested to hear of the initial reaction from publishing professionals to Jeff’s serial killer anti-hero protagonist.
It also made me realise there’s another point I should add to my DO/DON’T list for conventions: ‘If you spot someone you want to talk to, and they’re in the midst of a conversation with somebody else, DON’T just barge in and start speaking'. It happened several times over the course of the weekend, and I can’t tell you how annoying it is.
The final panel of the event − Laurie R King moderating Simon Brett, Natasha Cooper, Jeff Lindsay and Ian Rankin − included in the title ‘Sex, Drugs and Rock and Roll’. Laurie dispensed with the first two items on that list fairly smartly, but the third has stuck in my mind, mainly because two of the panellists said that music played no part in their writing at all. Now, I can’t help thinking that’s a great shame, because it plays a huge part in mine, even if it never appears on the page.
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This week's Word of the Week is seric, meaning silken, or with a silky sheen.
Weekend, 7-8 June 2008
This is going to be a very brief note, as this weekend has been a frantic one. We're at the CrimeFest event in Bristol, organised by Left Coast Crime maestros, Myles Alfrey and Adrian Muller. A bustling, brand new convention, with a good ratio of readers to authors.
It was the first time I'd heard Jeff Lindsay, of Dexter fame, speak about his work − and thoroughly entertaining it was, too, although I think the highlight must have been listening to Al Guthrie read out some of his bucolic erotica on Donna Moore's panel. I'll never look at a Massey Ferguson − or a turnip − in the same light again. But perhaps that's a 'you had to be there' moment . . .
Meg Gardiner effortlessly moderated my Friday panel, on women in crime fiction, with fellow panellists Helen Black, Maureen Carter and Priscilla Masters. Then it was my turn on Saturday afternoon to take the moderator's chair, for my panel on the modern private eye. This time I had to keep order among Declan Hughes, Jim Kelly, Ken McCoy and Martyn Waites. And very well-behaved they were, too.
I even spent a few minutes on Saturday talking on camera for the team from Cactus TV about six famous crime authors they're currently doing documentaries on, but whether my comments make it to the final cut is another matter!
It's now Sunday morning and there are only a few more panels, including the closer with Simon Brett, Natasha Cooper, Jeff Linsday, Ian Rankin and Laurie R King. Then we're off to South Wales for tomorrow's photo shoot, and back home via Ansdell Library in Lytham St Annes on Tuesday evening for a talk there.
And then, I really must get on with the new book . . .
Weekend, 31 May-1 June 2008
The Constant Journey
I was beating seven bells out of a large rock with a pickaxe when the courier arrived. He was Polish − the courier, not the rock − although that fact has no bearing and I mention it purely for colour. The rock was pure Cumbrian. Solid, taciturn, and not for shifting without the judicious application of a little brute force in tandem with a lot of dead ignorance. Gardening would be so much easier round here if we were allowed to use just a small amount of explosives.
The Polish courier had tracked down our almost impossible address to deliver a box bearing the label of the distributor for my UK publisher. Even with the seals intact, I knew what it contained. And, for the first time, I found myself strangely reluctant to open it.
The new book.
It’s often the case that, by the time a novel finally comes out, you’re a bit fed up with it, but this latest one just won’t stay down. As I think I might have mentioned, the copyedits were a nightmare, and just when I thought it was done and dusted, I’m currently wading my way through yet another set of page proofs that contain strange additional bits of text, the origins of some of which are a mystery to me.
Then I opened the box.
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This week's Word of the Week − an accidental find caused by a surfeit of vowels during a game of Scrabble − is anomie, meaning a condition of hopelessness caused or characterised by breakdown of rules of conduct and loss of belief and sense of purpose. Also, anomic − lawlessness.
Weekend, 24-25 May 2008
Things Left Undone
I don't like the end of the month. Comes round twelve times a year − and worse in December − and it only serves to remind me of Things Left Undone. I look back to the beginning of the month, when I optimistically wrote myself a list of Things To Do In May. And then I look at the few days left and realise that unless I'm prepared to forego sleep entirely, there simply isn't enough time remaining in which to do them all.
Partly, I blame the weather. Why not? I'm British, after all. We blame the weather for everything. But at the beginning of May it suddenly took a dramatic turn for the better and all those photo shoots that we'd been putting off suddenly became feasible to carry out in a far less soggy manner than previously.
We even hoped that we might be able to re-roof the garage, and got as far as sorting through and restacking a huge pile of slate to see if we had enough for the job. (Which we did, incidentally.) And that's about as far as we've got. Although I have to say that the two wooden crates the slate came in have made extremely fine compost bins, and are sitting at the bottom of the garden, part filled with grass clippings and vegetable peelings as we speak.
Andy very generously bought me an iPod for my birthday at the start of May, and the idea was that I'd download much of our huge CD collection onto it, bit by bit. A couple of disks a day, and it's done before you know it. Well, I don't know if it's the fact that I'm a PC user, not an anor-Mac, but I can't get the bloody thing to play ball at all. I've already had to do a factory reset once. I must try and get the hang of it before the audio book version of Second Shot comes out in July. Apparently it's complete and unabridged, and comes on ten CDs. Being able to put the whole thing onto an iPod would be a much more easily transportable option. All I need now is to find an average nine-year-old to show me how to do it . . . Not that I'm feeling old or anything. Argh!
I had also hoped to have a significant start made on the new Charlie Fox book, provisionally titled Fourth Day. And there I suppose I have made progress. At the start of the month all I had was the flap copy outline − barely half a page of the gist of the plot, as you'd find on the inside flap of the finished book. This is now nine pages of detailed outline, and every time I go over it again, it builds up another layer, with the different bits of the plot starting to interweave in a way that makes me think the whole thing might just hang together.
And today we have a photo shoot that's just far enough away for me to have some quality thinking time in the car, which I'm determined to try to use for making the notes that will finally propel me into getting started. I tell you, even after all this time, that first blank page is still a scary proposition.
This week's Word of the Week is fulminate, which means to thunder or make a loud noise; to detonate; to issue decrees with violence or threats; to denounce; to inveigh; to flash − to cause to explode. Hence fulminant, meaning detonating (often dangerously); developing suddenly or rapidly; a thunderbolt; an explosive. And fulmineous or fulminous − relating to thunder and lightning.
Weekend, 17-18 May 2008
What's My Name Again?
I’ve just written that title down and realised that it would be a good one to do about pseudonyms, which wasn’t actually my intention. After all, a writer’s name is vital. It is who we are. And speaking as one who often gets both parts of my name misspelt − an extraneous ‘e’ tacked onto the end of Sharp and pick where you like for people to put the dieresis. I’ve even had those who hover one dot over the ‘o’ and the other over the ‘e’, just to hedge their bets.
Anyway, I digress. Where was I going with this again? Ah, yes, I know − memory! That was it! I remember now . . .
I’m the first to admit that I have a dreadful memory. Faces? No problem. I even recognised an old colleague from a local paper we briefly worked for in northern England twenty years ago, who I spotted sitting on a bench at a theme park in Florida, so not quite in context then. But names? Hopeless. I regularly go upstairs and forget what it is I went for. And shopping without a list is a nightmare.
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Oh, and before I forget, this week’s Word of the Week is eidolon, which is an image, a phantom or apparition, a confusing reflection.
Weekend, 10-11 May 2008
Last week, on May 1st, it seemed somebody flicked a switch and we went from winter to summer almost overnight. And, me being English, I promptly sunburnt myself thoroughly on the first day I spent out in the unaccustomed sunshine. Doh!
There's certainly been plenty happening recently. My Spring e-newsletter went out, complete with cover images for the hardcover debut of Third Strike and the UK mass market paperback of Second Shot. We arrived home after several days away this week to find a parcel containing the large print edition of Second Shot waiting for us. I only discovered the book was going into large print at all a few weeks ago, and here it is already.
Back in March I went down to London − OK, it's the capital city, so I know it should be up to London − to Spirit Studios to record a Meet The Author video clip for Second Shot. I'm delighted to say that's now up and running. After advice from Chiara Priorelli, my publicist at Allison & Busby − "less is more" − I made sure to keep things short and sweet, so it's only around sixty seconds. I do hope you'll take a look.
I spent part of last week in London (again) to attend the Cartier Diamond Dagger event at The Gore Hotel in Kensington. This Dagger, awarded by the Crime Writers' Association for sustained excellence, went to Sue Grafton for the alphabet series featuring her California private eye, Kinsey Millhone. I remember reading one of the early Kinsey Millhone books years ago and being hooked from the start, so it was good to see her receive such a prestigious award.
I was also one of the observers for the final judging selection for the CWA Duncan Lawrie Dagger, which took place at Duncan Lawrie's offices in Hobart Place. Nearly two hundred books were submitted for this award, from which a longlist of twenty-three was whittled down to a shortlist of just six, including an eventual winner. Fascinating − and educational − to watch the judging process at work.
Speaking of educational − groan, terrible segue − last Friday saw me delivering my plenary lecture on 'Creating a Sense of Place: Location in Creative Writing' as part of the Continuing Education section of Lancaster University. Rather more informal than the description suggests, it was a fun morning. I also got to sit in on the following lecture, given by historical author George Green, which was extremely interesting.
As for future events, my next outing will be CrimeFest in Bristol, which runs from June 5-8, and should be well worth attending. Do check out my Book Tour page for other updates.
This week’s Word of the Week apropos of nothing, is accipitrine, which means relating to or associated with hawks.
Weekend, 3-4 May 2008
The Peripatetic Scribe
It’s that time of year again. The time of year when I start to think about The Tour. Last September, with Second Shot fresh out in hardcover and First Drop gleaming in a brand new coat of mass market paperback, we undertook what felt like the Mother of all Tours. Andy and I covered just over 17,000 miles by land and air in 23 days, taking in twelve states, and visiting thirty libraries and bookstores for events and drop-ins, hooking up with nine other authors along the way. Including Murderati fellow blogger, JD Rhoades.
And in October, with Third Strike due out in the States, we’re contemplating doing the whole thing again. Oy vay . . .
Whether it’s worth doing something on quite this scale is always going to be a debatable point. Yes, First Drop hit the top spot on the IMBA paperback best-seller list for September, and Second Shot, from memory, was placed in the top five jointly with Stephen Hunter and Kathy Reichs. But it meant 23 days away from home − and therefore work − and an enormous logistical exercise, planning hotels, flights and journey times.
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This week’s Word of the Week is peripatetic, meaning an itinerant; walking about; a teacher who is employed to teach at more than one establishment, travelling from one to another; an Aristotelian. Hence peripateticism, the philosophy of Aristotle, as he was said to have taught in the walks of the Lyceum at Athens.
Weekend, 26-27 April 2008
Been rushing around a lot this week, as always, so the scribbling has been pushed
even more into the cracks than usual.
Had some good news as well, though, including a file from George Easter, editor of Deadly
Pleasures Mystery Magazine, showing I'm on the front cover of the next issue, with a review of Second Shot inside.
I also had an excited phone call from my US editor at St Martin's, telling me I had a very nice mention in Publishers Weekly. And, to cap it all, I found out that Second Shot is due to come out in Large Print from Isis in May.
I also had an unusual public speaking engagement, having been invited to be the guest speaker at the annual dinner held by the Lancaster Magistrates' Association, in the presence of the Lady Mayoress and her Consort, and the local MP. Quite an easy one to do, actually, though it involved more dressing up than usual. Andy even wore his suit − something he usually only does for funerals.
I had to speak for only fifteen or twenty minutes instead of the usual hour, and not until ten o'clock in the evening, by which time everyone had finished eating and drinking, and were, I felt, somewhat more easily entertained than my usual crowd! And I even had another invite from one of the attendees to speak to their book group later on in the summer.
Next month I have a plenary lecture to deliver at Lancaster University as part of their Day School series. I'm speaking on May 9th on Creating A Sense of Place: Location in Creative Writing. Should be fun.
Events and Appearances
It has been mentioned that people would like to be kept better informed about events and appearances, so we've updated my page on the Book Tour website. Anyone who's interested in tracking my appearances can request an email update from Book Tour every time a new event is added.
And speaking of which, it's that time of year again − with Third Strike due out in the US around the time of Bouchercon in October, I'm starting to put together plans for the next US tour. It looks like being another wide-scale trip and we can't wait to get back over there. I'm particularly looking forward to getting together with friends at Bouchercon, including fellow author Meg Chittenden. The pair of us have collaborated on our slightly light-hearted self-defence demonstration at previous conventions, called You Can't Run in High Heels, and there was some talk of a repeat performance in Baltimore. But, I was saddened to learn that Meg has recently been very ill with a serious blood clot, so I am beaming all good thoughts for her speedy recovery through the ether.
This week’s Word of the Week is plenary, which means full, entire, complete, absolute, having full powers, to be attended by all members or delegates. But it also means unqualified, which I thought was a marvellously apt description for my lecture!
Weekend, 19-20 April 2008
Light and Shade . . .
A hero is only as good as the villain he or she faces.
Sounds obvious when you put it like that, doesn’t it? But when you think of the most fun movies, who can forget baddies like Alan Rickman as Hans Gruber in Die Hard, Hannibal Lecter in The Silence of the Lambs, Tommy Lee Jones’ William Stranix in Under Siege, or even the mysterious − and largely absent − Keyser Soze in The Usual Suspects? And it’s not just the actors themselves. Jonathan Pryce came across as a genuinely nasty piece of work in Ronin but was almost laughable as the chief bad guy in the Bond flick, Tomorrow Never Dies.
I like the duality of villains. I like light and shade. I like quiet menace. I like the good-looking guy who smiles while he’s threatening unspeakable acts, and I like the notion that it might not always be the enemy who tries to stab you in the back.
But do I plan out every character trait and flaw of my villains before I begin a new book?
Erm . . . no, not really.
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This week’s Word of the Week (in keeping with my Murderati topic) is vitiate. It means to render faulty or defective, to spoil, to make impure, to deprave, corrupt, pervert, debase, to violate or rape, to adulterate. From which we also get vitiator, and vitiosity − the state or quality of being vicious.
Weekend, 12-13 April 2008
This week's seen a lot of rushing about the country, mainly heading north. Having put off several trips to Scotland because of the recent bad weather, we finally made it as far up as Aberdeen, where we spent an entertaining evening with fellow crime writer, Stuart MacBride and his good lady, Fiona, eating Japanese food in the middle of the granite city. The following day we called in on Russel McLean at Waterstone's in Dundee. Russel is not only a bookseller with a particular enthusiasm for crime − as the eclectic mix on the shelves will testify − but will also have his first crime novel out later this year.
The next night we were in Edinburgh, braving the construction chaos that the new tram system is causing, for an Indian meal with reader and reviewer, Chris Sagar. Then on Friday evening we were back in the middle of the city again to meet up with another of the tartan noir brigade, Al Guthrie, for Thai food this time. Three good fun nights out in a row, and fascinating to drive through Edinburgh after dark. The city has a real sense of history and grandeur to it, mixing its ancient and modern buildings with such aplomb.
Of course, the main purpose of the trip was the day job, and we've come home with over 1300 images to be sorted and converted and burned to DVD-R. And we only got seriously rained on twice! All in all, a worthwhile few days away.
'A Hell of a Woman: An Anthology of Female Noir' published by Busted Flush Press
Last week I also managed to finish the Charlie Fox short story I was writing. Called 'Off Duty', in theory this is to go in the back of the US mass market paperback edition of Second Shot, which will be out over there in early October. Writing short stories is something I do only occasionally, but there seemed to be enough of them to deserve their own page on the site, so click here to read a taster of each of them so far.
Weekend, 5-6 April 2008
Confessions of a Serial (Comma) Killer . . .
Sorry if I’ve been a bit quiet this last week or so, but I’ve been somewhat out of circulation, if you know what I mean. Been doing a bit of time − hard time, as it turned out, for crimes against the English language.
I’ve spent the last ten days in the custody of the Punctuation Police.
They didn’t so much ask me to help with their enquiries as kick my door down at 2:00am, yank me out of my placid complacency and bundle me, hands tied, into the back of an unmarked car. Then it was a short rough ride to the station, where I believe they may have thrown me down the stairs on the way to the cells, but I can’t be sure about that. Sleep deprivation does strange things to your short-term memory.
All I know is, I’ve acquired some strange psychological bruises that I can’t seem to account for, and a general feeling of having been thoroughly battered.
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So this week’s Word of the Week, therefore, is stet, meaning to restore after marking for deletion. From the Latin, third person singular present subjunctive of stare to stand; written on copyedits or proof sheets with dots under the words to be retained.
Weekend, 29-30 March 2008
This week, I went to give a talk at the library in Leyland, a little place tucked away next to Tesco's on Lancaster Gate. A very interested crowd who asked some good questions, including one of the old perennials − 'Where do you get your ideas?'
I've heard other authors give varying answers to this question. From the outright hostile, 'if you have to ask, then obviously you will never be a writer,' to the glib, 'www.plots-R-us.com,' or simply, 'Walmart.' I just said − somewhat inadequately, when I look back − that if you open your mind to the possibilities, you end up beating the ideas off with a stick.
The lady who'd asked the question didn't look convinced by this, but it's true. As soon as you alter your mind set to start looking at information with a view to creating a fictional story out of it, you'd be amazed what comes up. News reports, snippets from documentaries. It's all out there, waiting to be drawn upon. It's just that, most of us have a very effective filtering system that means we don't pay attention to things that aren't important to us.
A few years ago, we decided we were going to change our car and buy a Volkswagen Golf GT TDi. A Mark IV, preferably the two-door version and preferably in silver, as we know from past experience that it takes a very long time for a silver car to actually look dirty. You don't have to wash them until you can no longer see out of the windows. (If you're not a rabid washer and a polisher, don't ever buy a white car, is my advice.)
Anyway, having vaguely made this decision, suddenly they were all over the place. Every second car we passed, it seemed, was a silver Mark IV TDi. There were hundreds of them. Now, despite the fact that the model was originally called a Rabbit in the US, I don't believe for a moment that they'd suffered a sudden population explosion overnight. It was simply down to the fact that we'd never noticed them before.
It's the same with ideas for books.
I've just been reading an excellent non-fiction story about shipwrecks around the British coast. There's one section in this book that absolutely cries out to be turned into a fictionalised account of a particularly inglorious period in our history. It ticks every box and, if it wasn't for the enormous amount of historical research involved, I'd be making some serious notes as we speak. And yet other people I know have read the same book without it striking any chords at all. I don't know what it is that makes my brain work this way, but it does.
I am a great believer in the power of the subconscious. That I can set my upfront-brain a task it rushes round frantically trying to complete, flustered, panicky. Meanwhile, the backroom-brain takes the problem away and quietly mulls it over, finally coming up with the solution hours or even days later. Hence, I'll be racking my brains trying to remember, say, in what other roles we've seen some minor actor in the film we're watching, and the answer will come to me out of the blue while I'm loading the dishwasher two nights later.
For some bizarre reason, I picture the upfront-brain as a collection of yuppies in striped shirts and braces, in a high-tech open-plan office filled with computer monitors, strident phones, and mirrored glass. The backroom-brain boys, on the other hand, are old blokes in long brown warehouseman coats and flat caps, with a pipe wedged firmly in the corner of their mouths and a cup of tea always on the go. They shuffle round in their tartan slippers in a giant storeroom, shelved to the rafters with every little piece of information I've ever known, every snippet that might make a belter. It's all there somewhere −it always has been − but it's just a question of finding it.
This week's Word of the Week is tenebrific, meaning producing darkness. Also, tenebrio, a night spirit or a night prowler. A person who lurks in the dark.
Weekend, 22-23 March 2008
The Book Is Dead . . .
On Tuesday afternoon, at 5:37pm, I finally finished the book I’ve been working on for what seems like an age. Not so long, I suppose, when you look at it in terms of continental drift, say, or the evolution of a species, but I’ve broken off to write other books in the meantime, so the time scale seems unduly stretched.
And it’s been an utter pig to write.
There have been times when I’ve hated this book, I don’t mind admitting it. I mean proper ‘take it down a dark alley on an equally dark night and beat its brains out with a baseball bat’ kind of hated it. Times when I would have watched it die bleeding in the gutter with a song in my heart.
Let me tell you, that’s been pretty scary.
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This week’s Word of the Week, incidentally, is exsanguination, which means to bleed out. From the Latin ex "out of" and sanguis "blood", so literally, "out of blood". Exsanguination, as every vegetarian will tell you, is the means most commonly used to slaughter animals for the meat industry. The captive bolt to the head first merely renders them incapacitated and unable to struggle while their throats are cut, except in countries where the mercy of the captive bolt is forbidden. In humans, exsanguination is a mode rather than a cause of death, and can be dramatically external, or entirely internal, depending on what brought about the bleeding in the first place. So, educational and icky!
Weekend, 15-16 March 2008
It's been a busy old week this week, what with high winds sweeping the country and everything from bright sunshine to snow up here in the wilds of Cumbria. Not that we've been here much.
To celebrate World Book Day, I went over to Leeds on March 6th to do an event at the very impressive Lawnswood School in Headingley, speaking to a bright collection of 11-13 year-old students who came up with some great questions. Everything from, "Do you need sub (split) personalities to write?" to, "Do I need to get an agent before I can get a publisher?"
Then it was over to the lovely library in Poulton-le-Fylde for an evening talk to the library readers and reading groups. A good fun crowd. I've always enjoyed library events, and now it's about the only place where people can find copies of my first book, Killer Instinct, which has been out of print long enough to fetch amazing prices on the second-hand market.
I also went down to Spirit Studios in London to film a slot for Meet The Author, which was a slightly nerve-wracking experience, and for the life of me I can't remember exactly what I said in front of the camera. Let's just hope it turns out all right in the end.
Then Andy and I had a very enjoyable lunch with all the crew at my UK publisher, Allison & Busby, where I got to see the latest version of the cover for Third Strike. Not quite ready to release yet, but definitely getting there! Plus I picked up the copy edits for the book, so I've that to work on over the next couple of weeks.
Then, after a quick photo shoot for the day job near Gatwick, it was back up north, battling the high winds that blew trucks over and shut bridges. Fortunately, time in the car is always good writing time for me, and I managed to get another three scenes written of the latest book. It's only four or five scenes away from the end now, so it's really starting to pick up speed towards the finish. Either that, or it's careering out of control towards the inevitable disaster. I haven't quite decided which . . .
This week's Word of the Week is scapegallows, which is a person who deserves hanging, as opposed to scapegrace − how appropriate − which is an incorrigible rascal.
Weekend, 8-9 March 2008
Must Try Harder . . .
Coincidences happen every day. They’re a fact of life. And while there are a few of us who still firmly believe that instances of déjà vu are nothing more than a glitch in the matrix, they happen, too, often in a way that’s really quite corny. I’m rapidly coming to the conclusion that real life is a lot more badly written than an average novel.
Can you imagine sitting down with your agent or editor, and explaining to them the idea for your next book. A courtroom drama that unfolds after a beautiful eighteen-year-old model is found murdered just yards from her front door after a night out with friends. She’s been stabbed seven times and brutally raped. The police question her boyfriend, but his DNA doesn’t match that found on the body and the case goes cold. Then, nine months later, a man is arrested after a scuffle in a pub. His DNA is taken as a matter of routine and fed into the system. Twelve days later the police arrest him for the young model’s death and he goes to trial. In court, his defence is that he found the teenager lying on the ground and assumed she was passed out drunk so he, "took advantage of the situation", not realising she was dead until afterwards. Yes, you tell your agent, this is going to be his defence, under oath, in a court of law.
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This week’s Word of the Week really ought to be mesmoronic, as mentioned in my comment to Louise's Murderati blog, but we made that up so it doesn't really count. Instead, it's actually outfangthief, which is the right of judging and fining thieves pursued and brought back from outside one's own jurisdiction.
Weekend, 1-3 March 2008
A sneaky kind of guilt is one of those facts of life as a crime thriller writer. It's not something that's mentioned much in the How To books, but it's there nevertheless. Why? Because no experience, however terrible, is ever truly wasted. You never know when it's going to come in useful for a plot somewhere.
A few years ago when I was planning out Second Shot, which opens with Charlie having just been shot twice, I was talking about the subject of research at a literary event and I mentioned that while I felt the Internet was a wonderful tool for finding things out, there was no substitute for actually talking to someone with personal experience. A chap in the audience looked very interested at this, and afterwards asked me if I'd like to talk to him about his experiences. I said, "Of course, tell me more!" He said, "I was shot in Turkey." And I'm almost ashamed to admit that my first reaction was, "Oh good!" Not exactly the most sympathetic response.
But finding someone who's been through much the same experience as your main character can be an invaluable opportunity to find that word, that phrase, which adds that extra degree of verisimilitude, which is kind of this week's Word of the Week. It means to have the quality of seeming real, an appearance of truth or reality, or a statement that merely sounds true rather than necessarily being true.
In this case, the reader knows that you have not steeped yourself in your craft like a method actor and actually gone out and got yourself shot in the pursuit of absolute authenticity, but the closer you can get them to the genuine experience, the better. The more involved they can become in the little world you have created around your story and your characters.
So, when we were building the house and I managed to get my finger in the way of a rather large chopsaw, the way the blood spattered onto the floor was more interesting to me at the time than the actual consequences of the injury. This tends to work much better if I myself am the injured party, however. Andy's had the odd mishap over the years and in those instances I've found it much harder to concentrate on anything other than dealing with the situation at hand.
Funerals tend to figure in crime novels and while attending that of a friend in a proper little country church rather than the slightly sanitised production-line version you tend to get at the local crematorium, I couldn't help taking mental note of what was going on around me. I suppose that by taking yourself out of your surroundings as a participant, and taking on the role of observer instead, it's a way of distancing yourself.
And the reason this has popped into my head today? A close member of my family was rushed into hospital this week, and we've made several visits. And sitting in the ward of an NHS hospital is an experience all by itself. I would write it in a book, but I fear I'll have to tone it down a bit, or no-one would believe me . . .
Weekend, 23-24 February 2008
It Was a Dark and Stormy Night . . .
I'm fascinated by opening lines. It's a question I always ask other writers: "What's the opening line of your last/latest book?" and it's amazing how often they can't quite seem to remember, or maybe they're just a little embarrassed to be able to quote it verbatim off the top of their head.
For me, nothing is harder to write than that first sentence. I'm reminded of the famous quote − can't remember who originally said it − that goes: 'After three months of continuous hard labour, he thought he might just have a first draft of the opening line.' Always gets a laugh, but the terrible thing is that it's not far off the truth.
I just can’t go forwards until I have a start I’m happy with. Maybe it’s because when I pick up a book by a new or new-to-me author, the first thing I read is the opening paragraph. It says everything about the pace, the style, the voice. It basically tells me if I want to go on with the rest of the book, almost regardless of anything else.
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This week’s Word of the Week, appropriately enough is persue. Not only is this an obsolete spelling of pursue, but it derives from the French percée, the act of piercing. It was used by Spenser − and I mean Edmund the English poet, rather than Robert B Parker’s detective − to mean a track of blood.
Weekend, 16-17 February 2008
I logged on to Murderati this morning and found JT Ellison put up a very interesting post yesterday about what she calls the yips. Not a word we'd use over here, I don't think, but it basically means to have the jitters, to have lost your bottle. Professional sportsmen and women get it when they convince themselves they can't make that shot and the mental doubt transmutes into a physical tic that prevents them doing just that.
As JT pointed out, every time a writer sits down to begin a new book, we almost inevitably get the yips. You can't quite remember how to do it, and you convince yourself that you probably can't. That the last (insert suitable number here) previous books were all an entire fluke, and now you're finally going to be exposed as the fraud you are.
Everybody deals with this secret fear in their own way, soothing themselves into the next book. I usually have the flap copy outline for the next one done before I've finished the current one. That short little synopsis of the plot that you find on the inside flap of the hardcover. I deliver that to my editors and see what they think of it. It's my first contact with the story and sets everything about the pace and tone.
Long car journeys also work wonders at letting my mind trawl through bits of plotting, and I find if I'm really stuck I abandon my lap-top in favour of my neck-top. Making pencil notes on bits of plain paper gives me something to work with when that cursor is at its most taunting.
In the case of the next Charlie Fox book (Third Strike, due out in the UK in June, in the US in September), the idea for the opening scene arrived well before I'd finished the last one, so I wrote it down in its entirety. It puts me in the comforting position of not having to open up a completely empty file on my computer with nothing in it but 'page one, chapter one'.
Even when I'm into the middle of a book, I hate opening up a new file with nothing in it. The page is blank and there's a horrible tendency for my mind to go the same way. And the way cursors blink at you is downright mocking sometimes. The only thing worse than having to break off in the middle of a scene to go and do something else, is breaking off just at the end of one, without having the opportunity to make at least a few notes about where the story was going next.
Of course, the real secret is to start writing one book almost immediately after finishing the last, so you never get the chance to wonder if you can do it again or not . . .
I came back from a trip to Sheffield this week not only with a sheaf of notes for the next bit of the book − always a plus − but also a strangely spooky photo. In the very first book I wrote (Killer Instinct), I invented a nightclub in Morecambe called the New Adelphi, which I described as having risen from the ashes of the old Adelphi, a crumbling Victorian seaside hotel. As is usually the case with these things, although I used genuine locations in the area for other aspects of the story, I invented the nightclub because I intended having Bad Things happen there. No building like the old Adelphi actually existed in the town.
And then, driving through the back streets of Sheffield, I came across the building pictured above.
It could have jumped straight out of the pages of the book, even down to the fact that, judging by the tacky lettering on the facade,
it's clearly also been turned into a nightclub at some point before it finally closed its doors for good. I just had to stop the car
and take a photograph. Sometimes these things are downright weird.
And on a slightly different note, the Mammoth Book of Best British Mysteries is just out from Constable Robinson in the UK and Running Press Books in the US, edited by Maxim Jakubowski. I'm proud to say my story 'Tell Me' was chosen for inclusion, and in very fine company I find myself!
Word of the Week: umbra, which means a shadow or, more specifically, the darker part of a shadow; a shade or ghost; an uninvited guest who comes with an invited one. Hence umbrage, which not only means offence, as in to give or to take umbrage, but also suspicion of injury; and something that casts a shadow.
Weekend, 9-10 February 2008
My third Murderati blog has just been published and has already generated a cascade of comments:
Conventional Behaviour
I enjoy going to conventions. Sounds pretty obvious, but I know not everybody does.
I went to my first one in the US almost by accident. We had some car photo shoots lined up in Daytona Beach, Florida around Spring Break, and discovered that Sleuthfest was the weekend after. It seemed rude not to go. I sought advice from Brit author Stephen Booth, who’d been to a lot of these things. He was encouraging, and got in touch with ex-pat author Meg Chittenden − once a Geordie (from the northeast of England) but now living in Seattle.
I arrived at Sleuthfest not quite knowing what to expect, only to be pounced on by Meg who said Stephen had asked her to look after me. What a welcome! I can’t think of a nicer person to have holding your hand at such a time. And later, as a sign of this mutual affection, Meg and I would attempt to stab and strangle each other at other conventions all around the country. (Long story.)
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Weekend, 2-3 February 2008
As I sit at my computer this morning, there's snow outside the window. Hardly surprising − it is February, after all − but we still don't get enough of the white stuff to really cope with it properly in the UK. The snow began in earnest yesterday morning and by the evening news, the main cross-Pennine route − the A66 − had been closed and numerous stranded drivers had to be rescued from their vehicles. Only the day before, high winds had been blowing trucks and camper vans over.
And come the summer, give it more than a week of sunshine and we break out in hosepipe bans as lawns across the southeast of the country go gently brown in the heat. For something that's supposed to be an English obsession, we're just not prepared for the weather, almost regardless of what it is.
Weather and temperature are aspects I try to bear in mind when I'm writing. They're as much a part of setting a scene for a book as the location itself. When I wrote First Drop it was Charlie's first visit to Florida, her first experience not just of that kind of heat, but the humidity that goes with it.
I still remember my first visit, flying in from Dallas to Miami and arriving in the dark, lulled by the air conditioning until the final set of doors opened out of the terminal building. And yes, the hot wet heat really did hit me in the face like a sneezing dragon.
And face-numbing winter skiing in New England. It was there, with our rental car stuck on an icy slope late at night, that I first experienced the kind of cold that can kill you. That dazzling cold that knifes straight through whatever warm clothing you think you've put on and plugs directly into your bones. They seem to remember it, so the next time you venture out you're chilled down to that level in half the time. The danger Charlie faces in New England in Second Shot somehow would not have worked as well for me, been as vivid in my head as I wrote the book, if it hadn't had that icy backdrop.
So, this week's Word of the Week, appropriately enough is verglas. A wonderful word that describes a thin coating or film of ice on rock. What kind of a climate do you have to live in to have a special word for that? I wonder how many different descriptions the English really have for rain?
Weekend, 26-27 January 2008
This week was the second of my Murderati blogs, so here it is:
Am I Missing Something?
We don't have TV. Not connected to an outside means of receiving broadcast programmes, at any rate. This state of affairs is not entirely from choice, but more down to the topography of the valley in which we live, which means terrestrial TV is a non-starter. We also have a clump of very large sycamore and ash trees at the southern end of the garden, complete with preservation orders attached. I don't mention this on the off-chance you happen to be a keen arboriculturist, by the way, but because they stand precisely where a satellite dish would need to point. According to the engineer who called not long after we moved in, we might just about get a signal in the winter, but as the dish relies on line of sight, by the time the summer foliage was in full bud, all we'd see on our TV screen would be snow.
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Weekend, 19-20 January 2008
Anyone who writes a series faces the dilemma of how much to allow their main characters to grow. Robert B Parker started writing about his Boston PI, Spenser, in 1973 and is still going strong 35 years later, by which time Spenser should by rights be in a retirement home, not still being the wisecracking hero who has regular fisticuffs with the bad guys. He hasn't aged, has barely changed, and neither have any of the supporting characters. For me, it's one of the enduring strengths of the series.
Sue Grafton has approached the passage of time slightly differently in her California PI series about Kinsey Millhone. Kinsey is ageing, but at a slower rate than reality, so although a book a year is being published the events portrayed take place less than a year apart. Kinsey is slowly slipping further into the past with each successive instalment, and Grafton has announced her intention to take the books all the way through the alphabet to Z, by which time her character will just have reached 40.
I suppose I'm doing something similar with my main character, Charlie Fox. She is getting older, but at a very slow pace. The events of First Drop, for example, take place over the Spring Break weekend at the end of March. Road Kill was set later that same summer, and Second Shot the following winter. I don't consciously spread them out, but some plots require long hot days and some seem to work better in the cold and the dark.
The character of Charlie is changing, too, I feel, but at a snail's pace and only slightly. As a bodyguard she's gaining expertise in a difficult and dangerous profession, and I feel happier if she learns something from the experiences she's had and goes forwards. But that doesn't mean someone who reads and likes the character in the first book wouldn't recognise her in the latest one − I hope. The basic underlying personality remains the same.
But as to whether Charlie will still be leaping tall buildings in a single bound, so to speak, while I'm shuffling around on my Zimmer frame, remains to be seen. . .
Weekend, 12-13 January 2008
On Thursday I began the first of my bi-weekly blogs on Murderati.com under the heading Changing Feet. I thought I'd start by giving a bit of history, so here it is:
All Roads Lead To . . .
I took a weird path into this game. Is there a normal one? I wasn't a noted student, opted out of mainstream education at the age of twelve and did correspondence courses until I was legally old enough to get a job. The local authority sent me to see a careers advisor when I was fifteen or so. I told him I was interested in writing. He said, "We'll put you down for clerical. . ."
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Weekend, 5-6 January 2008
I'm a sucker for the news items on AOL. Call it a form of procrastination when I should be writing, if you like, but I can't resist following the links. And to me it's all research anyway. I always want to know the story between the lines, what's going on underneath. The dead TV presenter in the bath; the mysteriously resurrected canoeist; the man who set fire to his carpet because he couldn't stand being in his home any longer; the woman whose body was found on the M53 motorway. They're here one minute, something to fill a few pixel inches, and gone the next. But I want to know how the story got to that point, what events combined to produce those unique circumstances where everything went wrong?
And what happened next?
That's the trouble with news items. Take the list above. This morning, when I checked the news pages, the man who'd set fire to his carpet was clearly listed. Now I can't find it and I wonder where it went, and why? OK, so it was a quirky piece to start with, but who made the decision to drop it? And the writer in me starts to weave all kinds of a tale around those meagre facts. I just can't help it.
That's one of the things that's so satisfying about being in the fiction business. You get to find out what happened and if you don't know, you can make it up. In fact, making it up is part of the job description. So, the reader always gets to find out who did it. And, most of the time, that the bad guy gets what's coming to him. Justice of sorts. But until then, it's always going to bug me − why did that guy set fire to his carpet?
Next week, I start blogging on Murderati, alternating every other Thursday on a kind of job-share scheme with US author Brett Battles. Murderati are a wonderful group of crime writers and I was honoured to be invited to join. Brett and I tossed a cyber coin to see who'd go first and I forget which of us won or lost, but he took first swing at it this week and wrote a very entertaining piece on how he got started. I just hope I can keep up the standard next week, or maybe it'll be me setting fire to the carpet . . .
Zoë Sharp