“Ya Wanna Do It Here Or Down The Station, Punk?” Peter James

Yep, it’s rubber-hose time, folks: a rapid-fire Q&A for those shifty-looking usual suspects ...

What crime novel would you most like to have written?
Brighton Rock by Graham Greene. Set in my home town of Brighton, it is the book that made me want to become a crime novelist.

What fictional character would you most like to have been?
Gary Soneji, from the early James Patterson novels. He’s the shrewdest, smartest villain ever created and it would be fun to be evil in a fictional world.

Who do you read for guilty pleasures?
I don’t know if you’d call it a guilty pleasure or rubbernecking! But I love dipping into Vernon Geberth’s massive tome, Practical Homicide, packed with no holds barred crime scene photographs.

Most satisfying writing moment?
When I figure out how everything is going to fit together.

If you could recommend one Irish crime novel, what would it be?
Brian Moore’s Lies Of Silence. It has one of the most brilliant human dilemmas I’ve ever read in a novel.

What Irish crime novel would make a great movie?
Brian McGilloway’s Hurt.

Worst / best thing about being a writer?
Worst thing: being stuck in a room, forcing yourself to write. Best thing: shutting out the outside world and writing in peace.

The pitch for your next book is …?
A girl disappears from an underground car park in Brighton. On the same night, the 30-year-old remains of a young woman are unearthed by builders. Has Brighton got its first serial killer in 80 years? Has Roy Grace finally met his match?

Who are you reading right now?
I’m reading Patricia Highsmith and finding her fantastic! I have seen Strangers on a Train and The Talented Mr Ripley, but never read her novels. She is such a brilliant writer.

God appears and says you can only write OR read. Which would it be?
Write. I’ve been a compulsive writer since I could first hold a pen. But I think that would make him a very cruel God indeed to force that choice on someone!

The three best words to describe your own writing are …?
Character. Research. Plot.

Peter James’ YOU ARE DEAD is published by Macmillan.

“Ya Wanna Do It Here Or Down The Station, Punk?” Joe McCoubrey

Yep, it’s rubber-hose time, folks: a rapid-fire Q&A for those shifty-looking usual suspects ...

What crime novel would you most like to have written?
It would have to be ROSES ARE RED by James Patterson. This was one of his early assignments for Alex Cross, and was delivered with such tension that Patterson hooked a generation on his works. The twists and turns of the story, coupled with the down to earth detective having to struggle with the usual fist of domestic problems that face us all, was a blueprint for the way authors should develop their characters.

What fictional character would you most like to have been?
I’d go for Sherlock Holmes. Imagine having all that deductive reasoning? I like the idea, no matter how fanciful, of taking a cursory look at a crime scene and being able to pinpoint exactly how it happened and, more importantly, who did it. These days we’re overloaded with CSI teams, which kinda has the poor old crime writer scrambling to keep up with all the latest forensic technologies.

Who do you read for guilty pleasures?
Believe it or not, it was Jane Austen who got me hooked on reading! From the moment I started into PRIDE AND PREJUDICE there was no turning back. These days I settle for the inimitable works of Vince Flynn, David Baldacci, and Lee Child. I’ve got to say though that over the past few years I’ve enjoyed a collection of new Indie authors, such as Andy Scorah, Ian Graham and Mel Comley. My current cycle of reading has taken me into the world of Irish authors – what a great collection of books just waiting to be read! I’ve started the journey with Robert Craven, Laurence O’Bryan, Paul O’Brien, Louise Phillips, and a certain Declan Burke! I passionately believe that Irish authors are getting set to rule the world!

Most satisfying writing moment?
It was the moment I brought my first novel SOMEONE HAS TO PAY over the finishing line. I had been working on the story, off and on, for almost 20 years, so it was a big thrill to close it out.

If you could recommend one Irish crime novel, what would it be?
I hate being put on the spot when there are so many great Irish novels to choose from. I remember reading Gene Kerrigan’s THE MIDNIGHT CHOIR some years ago and was struck by the sweep of the topics covered. This was a clever montage of crime that Kerrigan managed to bring together in one of those reads that you want to have at your bedside for long, wintry nights.

What Irish crime novel would make a great movie?
There’s a lot of great material out there that would easily transfer to the big screen. One possibility is the recently released RED RIBBONS by Louise Phillips. It’s got all the ingredients – a serial killer targeting schoolchildren, a criminal profiler trying to get one step ahead, and a few twists and turns to keep everyone guessing.

Worst / best thing about being a writer?
The best thing about writing is letting my characters take me into situations I hadn’t planned for them. Getting them out of there - and realising the story has just gotten better as a result of the detour – is what makes the overall writing journey worthwhile. The worst thing about being a writer is not getting the time to be constantly at it.

The pitch for your next book is …?
ABSENCE OF RULES sees the return of Mike Devon. To some people Devon is a highly trained counter-terrorism operative. To others, he’s little more than a Government- sanctioned assassin. Either way, he always takes the line of least resistance to get the job done, particularly when he’s faced with two al-Qaeda leaders preparing to unleash a new terror campaign against America and its European allies. But Devon also has to deal with a sinister Russian oil billionaire, pulling the strings in a determined bid to return to the days of East-West conflict. He has to fight his way through a plot to blow up the Eiffel Tower, and stop the assassination of some of the world's leading businessmen in a roller-coaster that becomes highly personal. The stakes couldn’t be higher

Who are you reading right now?
THE FORGOTTEN by David Baldacci. It features his latest hero, Army CID operative, John Puller, who is trying to solve the murder of his aunt and stumbles into the sleazy world of people-trafficking. Authors like Baldacci rarely let you down when it comes to a page-turner.

God appears and says you can only write OR read. Which would it be?
That would be cruel. I’m totally split between both, but if push came to shove I would have to opt for writing. When I got my first portable typewriter, some forty years ago, I haven’t stopped dancing my fingers across a keyboard ever since. I can’t imagine an existence without the ‘fix’ that creating words on a page does for me.

The three best words to describe your own writing are …?
Fast and Furious!!

Joe McCoubrey’s ABSENCE OF RULES is published by Master Koda Select Publishing.

The Woman Who Cried Wolf

Off I toddled to the Merrion Hotel a couple of weeks ago, to interview Jodi Picoult (right), who was in Dublin promoting her latest opus, LONE WOLF. I’d been expecting a very slick and seasoned pro, given that Jodi Picoult is a runaway best-seller, the kind of writer who - in person - can talk forever without actually saying anything worth quoting.
  Well, Jodi Picoult is certainly very professional, but she was also terrific fun to talk with, not least because she was very happy indeed to offer forthright opinions on hot-button topics such as sex, politics and religion, and was also gloriously indiscreet about some of her fellow scribes.
  The interview was published in the Evening Herald, and can be found here, but the version I sent in was cut off at the end, presumably for reasons of space. What follows is what Jodi said when I asked her (we’d been talking about her previous novel, SING ME HOME, and how gay characters are perceived in mainstream fiction) about how likely it was that she’d alienate some of her readers by insisting that her novels can’t just be entertainment, but need to deal with serious issues too. Quoth Jodi:

“I was on Twitter before you came in,” she says, “reading an interview in the Wall Street Journal with James Patterson, and thinking, ‘God, this guy’s killing me here.’ Basically, he wrote 13 books that are coming out next year.”
  That’s ‘wrote’ in inverted commas, of course.
  “Exactly. He gives an outline, and he gives a writer notes on it, and off it goes. And he says, look, this is commercial fiction, it’s not rocket science and I’m not a student of the craft. But I argue that you can be a writer of commercial fiction and a student of the craft. If I were to write a Patterson novel, I’d probably shoot myself in the head.
  “There’s room for all of us on the bookshelves, even the purest of escapist fiction,” she continues. “But I do believe that if you are fortunate to have a podium, you really need to think about what you’re saying. And maybe for Mr Patterson it’s okay to simply entertain, but I would always want to do more than that.”

How NOT To Be A Writer

You may, if you’re an aspiring writer and you’ve perused the interweb for more than five seconds at a time, stumbled across a blog post titled, ‘How To Be A Writer’. There are variations on this theme, the bolder ones being titled, ‘How To Be A Successful Author’, but generally speaking the song remains the same: someone you’ve never heard of saying things like, ‘Work hard’ and ‘Don’t give up’ and ‘Try to marry someone who thinks you’re a genius but who doesn’t actually know a good book from an elephant’s left testicle’. And so on, and so forth.
  For some reason, you never come across posts about ‘How Not To Be A Writer’. Which is a little bit odd, really, because wanting to be a writer is a disease, a sickness, and most people (yours truly included, very probably) are never going to get well, aka make it as a successful author. Which means, in turn, that all these helpful bloggers are not unlike enablers in a perverse take on Alcoholics Anonymous (‘Be sure to drink booze every day’; ‘Set yourself a number of drinks, for example ten, and try to drink them all in one sitting, although don’t beat yourself up if you only manage nine.’).
  Funnily enough, very few of these posts about how to be a writer start off with (or mention at all) the need for some talent. ‘Before you begin your soul-shrivelling journey into oblivion, first ensure you have a flair for swilling martinis at 3pm in the afternoon, every afternoon. Your wife believing that you are a useless booze-hound simply isn’t enough.’
  Anyway, given that being a writer is a tough gig, but wanting to be a writer is that soul-shrivelling experience, and particularly if you lack talent, and that I’ve spent the last two decades embarked on such a journey, I hereby present for your delectation ‘Declan Burke’s How NOT To Be A Writer’ (© Declan Burke, 2012). To wit:

How NOT To Be A Writer

1) Read, read, read, read, read. And keep on reading. What’s the worst that could happen? An education?

2) Write every day. Especially on Twitter. Blogging helps too, and especially guest posts on other author’s blogs and unpaid self-promo gigs masquerading as op-eds in your local newspaper. If you’re of an ironic bent, you could specialise in ‘How To Be A Successful Author’ pieces.

3) Develop an obsession with honing your craft. An extreme example of this is Ernest Hemingway, who learned to write by typing out entire books by writers he admired. The trick here is to read back over these manuscripts once they’re typed up, accept that you’ll never in a million years do any better, acknowledge that there’s few enough trees in the Amazon rain forest anyway, and go read some Hemingway.

4) Express yourself. Many people turn to writing as a cathartic exercise, a means by which they can purge their inner demons. But why waste your time impressing complete strangers with your lunacy? It’s much more fun to allow your anger to build and build, then terrorise your nearest and dearest with irrational outbursts of (preferably inarticulate) rage.

5) Learn to delegate. Come up with story ideas and then hand them over to someone else to turn into a novel. If you’re very good at this, you’ll come up with the same story every single time. If James Patterson sues, great: you’ll be so busy fending off his lawyers you won’t have time to scribble so much as a Post-It note.

6) If at first you don’t succeed ... immediately accept that repeating the same action over and over again and getting the same result while expecting a different response is a kind of madness, albeit not a madness sufficiently interesting to be worth writing about. (see Number 4).

7) Shoot for the moon. Aim to be the next James Joyce, Mary Renault or Raymond Chandler, et al. If you’re useless, that should keep you locked away in a shed working on your first manuscript for at least forty years. If you’re halfway good, you’ll give up immediately. If you’re as brilliant as you think you are, you’ll pack it in after three pages, consumed by self-loathing at how close you came to stooping to compete with the likes of raggedy-ass Joyce, Renault and Chandler, et al.

8) Learn from the experts. Sign up to every creative writing programme in town. Literally. Not only will you be too busy attending classes to do any actual writing of your own, the conflicting advice offered by the internationally renowned, prize-winning and critically acclaimed authors hosting said programmes will melt your brain to the point where even your special brand of lunacy is left smouldering in the ashes.

9) Identify your target demographic. Don’t go writing any old tat in the hope people will find it interesting. Do some research and find out what it is people actually like to read (the NYT best-seller list may be of some use here), and then write that and publish it under the name of James Patterson. He’ll hardly notice one more, will he? And even if he sues, we’re back to Number 5 again.

10) Get a life. No, really. Make some friends, have a kid or two. Go for a walk. Play some ball. Travel the world, swim with the dolphins, stalk James Patterson. Start living first-hand rather than through the mirror darkly. What’s the worst that can happen? A life?

The Girl With The Midas Touch

Stieg Larsson, eh? “I LOVE HIM!” “BUT I HATE HIM!” Etc, ad nauseum.
  But what do crime writers think of Stieg Larsson? I had a piece published a couple of weeks ago in the Irish Examiner, in which I asked Val McDermid, John Banville, Colin Bateman, Stuart Neville and Eoin McNamee why they believe Stieg Larsson became such a runaway phenomenon, and what they think of his work themselves. It ran a lot like this:

The Girl With the Midas Touch: The Stieg Larsson Phenomenon

Ask any tattoo artist and they’ll tell you that demand for dragons has gone through the roof. The reason, of course, is the phenomenal success of Stieg Larsson’s ‘Millennium’ trilogy of novels: THE GIRL WITH THE DRAGON TATTOO, THE GIRL WHO PLAYED WITH FIRE, and THE GIRL WHO KICKED THE HORNET’S NEST have sold almost 30 million copies in over 40 countries.
  Larsson’s popularity is about to go truly stratospheric, however. The second movie based on the travails of investigative journalist Mikael Blomqvist and computer hacker Lisbeth Salander opens August 27th, a Hollywood adaptation of the first novel will star Daniel Craig, and there are rumours that Larsson’s former partner, Eva Gabrielsson, is currently writing a fourth novel based on an unfinished story Larsson left behind before his untimely death.
  As has been the case with best-selling crime authors Dan Brown, James Patterson and John Grisham, however, Larsson’s work has sharply divided his fellow writers. Some hail the Millennium trilogy as a new departure for the crime fiction genre, while others dismiss it as derivative, clunky and overblown.
  “I read the first volume when on holiday and found it ‘very readable’, which as well as an encomium is a sort of insult, in my lexicon,” says John Banville, who writes crime novels under the nom-de-plume Benjamin Black, the latest of which, ELEGY FOR APRIL, is published this month. “I thought it greatly over-written - it could have fitted very nicely into 175 pages or so - and simple-minded in its plotting.”
  Val McDermid, who recently won the ‘Diamond Dagger’ for lifetime achievement awarded by the Crime Writers’ Association, and whose latest offering is TRICK OF THE DARK, places the ‘Millennium’ trilogy in the wider context of best-selling novels. “What I think Larsson has done is similar to what JK Rowling did so spectacularly well,” she says, “he’s synthesised the most successful elements of other people’s writing into something that has the ability to reach a mass market. There’s nothing especially revolutionary about his work - it’s unusual to see a man writing with such strong views on misogyny, but women thriller writers have been doing that for a long time now without generating such amazement.”
  “I think the trilogy succeeds despite itself,” says Eoin McNamee, whose ORCHID BLUE will be published in November. “The work is rife with banalities and clichés - the major plot lines clunk, the male protagonist is a twitching bundle of liberal political fancies, and illiberal sexual fantasies, sometimes sad and sometimes deeply uncomfortable. You find yourself stopping dead at points and wondering how an editor could have let particular sequences through.”
  Meanwhile, Stuart Neville, whose sophomore novel COLLUSION was published last month, is not impressed by Larsson’s reputation as a campaigning novelist. “I’ve seen the screen version of THE GIRL WITH THE DRAGON TATTOO,” he says, “and listened to the audio book, and I’m not a huge fan of either. In particular, I find it hard to square what I’ve seen and heard with Larsson’s rep as a liberal feminist. Lisbeth Salander seemed more like a schoolboy fantasy to me, and there were parts of the film that struck me as out-and-out misogyny.”
  Colin Bateman, himself a perennial best-seller, is less critical of the film. “I started the first book and didn’t get anywhere with it,” he says, “but I can say that about a lot of books. Then I saw the first movie and quite enjoyed it, though to tell you the truth subtitles tend to lend an intellectual quality to movies they probably don’t deserve - it could quite easily have been an extended episode of a British cop show, with added S&M.”
  So why have the novels been so phenomenally successful?
  “The books,” says McNamee, “have the quality that distinguishes great crime writing - atmosphere. It’s not so much the physical as the psychic landscapes evoked. The air of fatigued Calvinism and social progressivism gone past its usefulness. The themes of sex and family that you find in the genre from John D. McDonald to James Lee Burke. Beneath the sometimes overwrought architecture of the books, there’s a feeling of real harm abroad, of transgressive whispering in the shadows. You have the sense of an absent God, innocence abandoned, of children being sinned against in the darkness.”
  “I think he’s a terrific storyteller,” says McDermid, “and he’s created a pair of protagonists who really have the power to make us care what happens to them. I like his ideas, and I wish he’d lived to explore further the issues he was clearly so passionate about. I also wish he had lived long enough to work with an editor to make the books sharper and less baggy. What I think is excellent news for crime writers is that it has woken up a wider audience to the power of the contemporary genre.”
  “I think it’s based on a reversal of genders,” says Banville, “the hero is a feminine type but acceptable to men, and the heroine is far more ferocious than any man, but justifiably so. Also, she is the irresistible nemesis that we all secretly long to be. And, of course, the back-story is one of horrifying and almost unimaginable violence, which is something we glory in. Future generations may dub ours the Age of the Wests, Fred & Rose, and wonder at our taste for vicarious blood-letting.”
  McNamee also identifies Lisbeth Salander as the crucial element in Larsson’s success. “You can almost hear the gear change in the first book as Larsson realises that she’s much more interesting than the male protagonist,” he says. “The character manages to rise above the hovering banalities of the spiked and tattooed punkette, and raise a skinny fist against an indifferent universe. She’s not Marlow or Lew Archer but she has the gravitas of those solitary, compromised figures, moving easily from the bed-sit world of misfit computer hackers to the shadowed big houses of the well-got. That’s the genius of the trilogy - it’s all very modern, very Calvinist, very noir.”
  Bateman, whose latest ‘Mystery Man’ novel DR YES is published later this month, has a typically idiosyncratic take on the Larsson phenomenon. “With all their ‘Blumquists’ and ‘Rhomohedrons’, the novels aren’t always an easy read,” he says, “so I suspect they are THE BRIEF HISTORY OF TIME of crime novels, purchased but not always read. Whereas I’m just not purchased.”

  This feature first appeared in the Irish Examiner.

The Digested Read: DON’T BLINK by James Patterson

Being the latest in the 300-word chuckle-fest digests, regurgitated by yours truly. This week: DON’T BLINK by James Patterson. To wit:

DON’T BLINK
by James Patterson and Some Typist

Chapter 1
OHMIGOD! I can’t believe the Janjaweed are trying to kill me in Darfur! Boom!!!

Chapter 2
Whew, that was a bit too close for a magazine journalist who once nearly won a Pulitzer. Back in boring old NY, now.

Chapter 19
FYI, my gorgeous editor and BFF Courtney is engaged to Richard, the richest man in NY. She’s blonde. He’s evil.

Chapter 24
Oh no! There I was having lunch in boring NY with a mysterious baseball player, and a Mafia lawyer gets his eyes gouged out at the next table!

Chapter 35
Lucky I had my tape recorder running, eh? Pulitzer prize, here I come!

Chapter 46
By the way, I’m in love with Courtney. Sob.

Chapter 49
Like, NO WAY! Someone killed the mysterious baseball player!

Chapter 58
Am I next?

Chapter 109
Police protection, Chief? I don’t need no stinkin’ police protection! I nearly won the Pulitzer once. The TRUTH will protect me!

Chapter 1002
CRASH! BANG!

Chapter 1003
WALLOP!!!

Chapter 1004
Sorry, just fell down the stairs a bit there.

Chapter 1309
OHMIGOD! I can’t believe Richard did the dirt on Courtney!

Chapter 1457
Did I mention my niece? The feisty blind 14-year-old? No? Well, she LOVES baseball. And she’s soooooooo brave. We could all learn a thing or two from --

Chapter 90210
Oh no! I’ve been kidnapped by dastardly Mafia types! Am I about to … DIE?!!

Chapter 200,001
Golly-gosh, that was a lucky escape.

Chapter 451,357
Jings! Someone blew up my car!!!

Chapter 1,000,004
Phew! Guess I’ll just amble on out to the ’burbs where my sister lives with my feisty blind 14-year-old niece. They’ll never find me there.

Chapter 1,000,005
Well, who’d a thunk it? Bad people. In the ’burbs. Run away!!!

Chapter 4,00,098
Oh well, back to NY. Courtney needs me to pick up the shattered pieces of her blonde heart.

Chapter 9,234,343
Boom! Kablooey! Rat-a-tat-a-tat!!!

Chapter 11,345983
Bish-bash-bosh. And, indeed, more bosh. The End.

The Digested Read, Digested: Blink and you’ll … Oh.

  This article first appeared in the Evening Herald.

Nobody Move, This Is A Review: The Irish Times’ Crime Beat Round-Up

The latest of yours truly’s crime fiction review columns appeared in the Irish Times yesterday, featuring Stuart Neville, Tana French, Alan Furst, Karin Fossum, Ruth Rendell and James Patterson, among others. To wit:

Lennon Takes the Lead

In the context of Northern Ireland, ‘collusion’ is an ugly word denoting state-sponsored murder during the Troubles. In COLLUSION (Harvill Secker, £12.99, pb), Stuart Neville takes pains to illustrate the extent to which collusion ‘worked all ways, all directions’, and continues do so in the murky world of covert operations. Belfast Detective Inspector Jack Lennon, a minor character from Neville’s debut THE TWELVE, takes the lead here as he investigates the fall-out from the slaughter that accrued when ex-paramilitary Gerry Fegan went on the rampage. The novel has the page-turning quality of Neville’s debut, which recently won the LA Times’ Mystery / Thriller of the Year, but it’s Neville’s clear-eyed appraisal of the real-politik of the post-Ceasefire Northern Ireland that gives it real heft.
  In FAITHFUL PLACE (Hachette Books Ireland, £12.99, pb), Tana French also gives prominence to a minor character from a previous novel. Undercover cop Frank Mackey appeared in both IN THE WOODS and THE LIKENESS, but here he is the narrator, sucked back into his former life when the corpse of the girl he’d once planned to elope with to England is discovered on his old stomping ground, Faithful Place in inner city Dublin. As always, French is as exercised by the psychology of criminality as she is by the investigation of the mystery, and the result is a gripping, literate thriller laced with black humour.
  The latest in her Inspector Sejer series, Karin Fossum’s BAD INTENTIONS (Harvill Secker, £11.99, pb) is another novel that trades heavily in the psychology of the criminal mind. Fossum sets up a scenario in which no actual crime is committed when a young man steps off a boat into a lake, to subsequently drown, but explores instead the morality of those who were with him as they finesse the details to their own advantage. Tautly told in a crisp translation from the Norwegian by Charlotte Barslund, the story is a riveting exploration of the consequences of crime, a whydunit rather than the traditional whodunit.
  Two aging brothers are murdered within hours of one another in RIVER OF SHADOWS (MacLehose Press, £18.99, pb), the debut from Italian author Valerio Varesi. Commissario Soneri investigates against an atmospheric backdrop of a wintry northern Italy, as the Po floods its banks. The plot neatly explores the ramifications of the Italy’s internal Fascist-Communist struggle during WWII, and Joseph Farrell’s translation is appropriately poetic, but Soneri himself is rather less fascinating, being yet another in a long line of urbane, sybaritic Italian detectives. Surely there are Italian policeman who are not obsessed with their stomachs?
  Equally atmospheric is Alan Furst’s SPIES OF THE BALKANS (W&N, £18.99, hb), the 11th in his ‘Night Soldiers’ novels, which are set in Eastern Europe prior to and during WWII. Set in Salonika in 1940, undercover policeman Costa Zannis awaits the inevitable invasion of Greece by Italian forces, and finds himself drawn into establishing an underground railway for Jewish refugees fleeing Germany. The literary style belies a deftly paced plot in an old-fashioned spy thriller more reminiscent of John Le Carré and Graham Greene than Ian Fleming. Highly recommended.
  Jeff Lindsay’s DEXTER IS DELICIOUS (Orion, £12.99, hb) is the fifth in his series about a homicidal Florida psychopath who harnesses his urges and only kills for the good of society. The twist here is that Dexter, who can barely describe himself as human, has his entire life overthrown when his wife gives birth to a baby daughter. Struggling to deal with emotions for the first time, Dexter has to deal with the appearance of his equally homicidal brother, all the while helping to investigate what appears to be a cannibalism spree. Lashings of gallows humour help to sugar the pill, but even though the tale moves swiftly towards its climax, it’s difficult to ignore the nagging thought that Dexter might well have outlived his novelty.
  DON’T BLINK (Century, £18.99, hb) is the latest offering from James Patterson, co-written with Howard Roughan. Magazine journalist Nick Daniels is plunged into peril when he goes to interview a former baseball player at a New York restaurant, only to witness the Mafia lawyer at the next table get his eyes gouged out. The usual Patterson tropes of very short chapters and cliff-hanger endings help to move the action along at a furious pace, but the characters couldn’t have been more crudely drawn had Patterson and Roughan used crayons and cardboard. The story somehow manages to be utterly implausible and entirely predictable, and has all the literary merit of a laundry list. If you’re in the mood for a migraine, this is the book for you.
  Ruth Rendell is one of the few authors who can claim to be as prolific as the James Patterson factory, although, despite publishing her first novel in 1964, she has yet to learn how to pander to her readers. TIGERLILY’S ORCHIDS (Hutchinson, £18.99, hb) features a host of characters, all of whom live in or near the flats of Lichfield House in north London, most of whom have their lives impacted by a number of crimes that occur in the locality, ranging in seriousness from identity theft to marijuana farming to murder. It’s by no means a conventional crime novel; in fact, it’s much more a social novel that incorporates criminal activity. That the tale succeeds brilliantly on both levels is due to Rendell’s telling eye for detail when it comes to characterisation, a quietly elegant style, an acerbic take on modern Britain and an irrepressible delight in storytelling that results in a novel bursting at the seams with ideas, narrative digressions and twists and turns that are as heartbreaking as they are unexpected. In a nutshell, a wonderfully satisfying novel. - Declan Burke

  This article first appeared in The Irish Times

On Writing For Fun, And Other Lunacies

Maybe it’s just me, but a chart of this writer’s writing life would probably look a lot like a seismograph during a quake hitting 7.2 on the Richter Scale, or a polygraph attached to Janet Evanovich during an interrogation during which she was asked if she really believed - like, seriously now - that four of her novels were worth an advance of fifty million dollars, or thereabouts.
(What bugs me about the Evanovich demand for $50 million advance - I’ve never read any of her novels, so I’m in no position to say if she’s worth it, although it’s fair to say that you’d need thumbscrews to truly convince me - is that if she’d only asked for $49 million, there’d still have been a spare million left over to divide up between a thousand or so other writers, giving them not necessarily a living wage but the hope that some day, they might just be able to earn a crust from this gig. And you’d have to imagine that, out of that thousand, at least one would be able to come up with something a little fresher than a tired reworking of a raddled old post-feminist parody. But I digress.)
  Anyway, that seismograph chart - the life of a struggling wannabe writer is one of rapid and violent ups and downs, and far more downs than ups. That goes with the territory, puts fire in your belly, and if nothing else, gives you an overwhelming desire to succeed even if it’s just to prove the bastards wrong.
  The last week or so has been pretty much typical. A little birdie whispers the very bad news that one of the best Irish crime writers has had his / her American contract cancelled for lack of sales. Shameful stuff, totally unexpected and utterly depressing, given that he / she is a terrific writer who is never less than entertaining and also pretty illuminating about the world we live in right now.
  That’s the biz, I suppose.
  For me personally, it’s been a decent week. I got a green-ish light on a project I’ve been working on for about two years, of which more anon. I also heard that there are two US publishers taking a good long squint at BAD FOR GOOD, and that initial reactions have been very positive. Not that that amounts to a molehill of beans, in real terms, but still, it’s good to know that someone out there is reading it, and liking it.
  I’ve also been doing quite a bit of writing, largely because I joined a ‘writing group’ last month. Four people, decent skins all, coming together to pool resources and give one another a helping hand over the various humps and hillocks that get in the way of putting words on paper. We all have our own agendas, and we’re all at different stages of the publishing game, which will be very healthy, I think. For my own part, my needs are threefold. One, that said decent skins apply shoe leather to my skinny white ass and get me writing again; two, that that process will help me rewrite a novel currently labouring under the weight of its 149,000 words into something more taut, elegant and accessible; and three, that I can get back to writing the way I used to write in the good old days before I ever got published, and start telling stories just for the fun of it.
  That might sound a little naïve, but during the last two years or so, I’ve started at least five different novels, investing anything between 10,000 and 30,000 words in each. Every time I came grinding to a halt, worn down by the constant process of second-guessing the industry, particularly the bean counters to whom most editors have to answer these days, worrying if what I was doing was commercial (very probably), or commercial enough (hard to say), or if I wouldn’t be more profitably employed shouting down a well (very probably).
  Fun. Not a word you hear very often when people talk about writing in particular and the publishing industry in general. But it’s why I started writing, way back when, those halcyon days when the process of putting words in their best order was enjoyable for its own sake. A very serious kind of fun, of course, given that writing is a serious business, whether or not the business takes you seriously. But fun.
  My little girl arrived home yesterday from crèche with a paper folder full of drawings and doodles and paintings and sparkly stuff, my favourite of which you can see above. Bright, colourful, bold, fun. Was Lily worried about what anyone thought about her picture when she was painting? Hardly, given that she’s only two years-and-a-bit old. Had she any idea that when her silly old sentimental Dad saw it, his heart would feel like it might explode? Probably not. Did she just get stuck in and splash the paint around and do the best job that fun would allow? I’d imagine so. Will anyone ever pay for it? Not that I’d ever sell it, but no.
  The ‘writing group’ met for the first time last month, and the plan is that we assemble in mid-September with 2,000 words each to show for our efforts this month. The good news there is that I’ve already racked up 15,000 words in the last three weeks, although the bad news - given that I’m supposed to be rewriting the damn thing - is that said 15,000 words are all brand new and freshly minted. Mind you, the process of writing that section has allowed me to identify not only a massive, glaring flaw in the novel, but also how to rectify it. I’d say that that 15,000 words will save me about 40,000 by the time I get into the heart of the story.
  Anyway, good news / bad news. This week it’s mostly good, and high-ho for upward and onward, at least until next week, when I’ll very probably plummet off the precipice again.
  The main thing, though, is that it’s all good, that I’ve started to rediscover that sense of fun again. Maybe, given the fact that none of my previous offerings have overly taxed the boys ‘n’ gals at Nielsen, I’ll have to send out the redrafted novel under a pseudonym, as I’ve discussed before. And maybe (very probably) it’ll never see the light of day, because I’m already a beaten docket as a published writer at the age of 41.
  And so what? What I get from writing - fun, joy, self-worth, all the good stuff you tend to forget about after too long at the coal-face - is far too precious to entrust to the publishing industry, or at least the publishing industry in its current, ultra-conservative incarnation. As the quote from Isak Dinesen I’ve tacked to my PC monitor says, “I write a little every day, without hope and without despair.”

  Lately I have been mostly reading: DEXTER IS DELICIOUS by Jeff Lindsay; COLLUSION by Stuart Neville; FAITHFUL PLACE by Tana French; RIVER OF SHADOWS by Valerio Varesi; DON’T BLINK by James Patterson; TIGERLILY’S ORCHIDS by Ruth Rendell, STARTED EARLY, TOOK MY DOG by Kate Atkinson, and THE DOGS OF ROME by Conor Fitzgerald.

It’s Not Quite Dead Yet

I don’t know about you, but I like good books. I’m not too demanding: a gripping story, fascinating characters and an inventive use of language are generally enough to make me happy. Like, say, Adrian McKinty’s debut, DEAD I WELL MAY BE, which at the time I read it seemed not entirely unlike a Bourne novel rewritten by Cormac McCarthy.
  The folks at National Public Radio seem to like it too, given that the novel has been chosen as one of its ‘Killer Thrillers’ - “the 100 most pulse-quickening, suspenseful novels ever written”, according to the NPR.
  Marvellous news for McKinty, and for Tana French and Ken Bruen, both of whom are also flying the Irish flag. Or so you’d think. Quoth McKinty over at his interweb lair:

“Somehow DEAD I MAY WELL BE has been long listed as one of National Public Radio’s ‘Killer Thrillers’. I say somehow because unlike every other book on the list DEAD I WELL MAY BE isn’t even in print anymore.”

  Now, between you and me, the fact that DEAD I WELL MAY BE went out of print isn’t just a disgrace, it’s something of a metaphor for how rotten is the state of Denmark, if we can in turn accept ‘Denmark’ as a metaphor for ‘the publishing industry’. In fact, so disgraceful is it that I can’t muster the requisite anger and indignation - it’s kind of bone-crushingly depressing, to be honest. I can rant and rave about the fact that I can’t get published, and people are perfectly entitled to say, ‘Listen, mate, you’re actually not very good - get over yourself.’ They can’t say that to McKinty, because the man is a brilliant writer, and has the critical kudos and awards to back him up.
  What to do? Well, you can vote for DIWMB over at the NPR site here - the poll closes on August 2nd. And once you’ve done that, you can hoppity-skip-jump over here, because it appears the good folk who decide such things are reprinting DEAD I WELL MAY BE. And not a moment too soon, even if it is (or appears to be) a POD edition.
  God bless your cotton socks, NPR.

The Fallacy Of Millions; Or, How Ledgers Have Become The Publishing Industry’s Preferred Reading

Laura Miller wrote a piece on e-publishing for Salon.com during the week, during the course of which she railed against those aspiring authors who are already celebrating the impending demise of the traditional ‘gatekeepers’ - agents, editors, publishers - of the publishing industry.
  The ‘gatekeepers’, she argues, perform an invaluable service to readers by filtering an occasional diamond from the vast numbers of manuscripts that constitute the ever growing slush pile. In abandoning the traditional publishing model and going straight to (electronic) print, she says, authors are simply exposing readers to the slush pile. The net effect of ‘civilian’ readers being so exposed, she says in a rather apocalyptic finale, is one of “crushing your spirit instead of refreshing it … How long before you decide to just give up?”
  As it happens, I broadly agree with Laura Miller on e-publishing. Any business conducted without some form of quality control won’t be in business for very long.
I did take exception, however, to one word in Miller’s piece, and it’s contained in the following excerpt:

“Digital self-publishing is creating a powerful new niche in books that’s threatening the traditional industry,” a recent Wall Street Journal report proclaimed. “Self-published books suddenly are able to thrive by circumventing the establishment.” To “circumvent” means, of course, to find a way around, and what’s waiting behind all those naysaying editors and agents, the self-publishing authors tell themselves, are millions of potential readers, who’ll simply love our books! The reign of the detested gatekeepers has ended! - Laura Miller

  That word, as you’ll probably have guessed given the title of this post, is ‘millions’.
  Before I started this blog, back in 2007, I knew no more than a handful of writers. At this point, I probably know hundreds. Some of them have had one book published, others are bestsellers.
  I also have friends who are aspiring writers. In fact, I met two of them on separate occasions during the last week, and while we talked about other stuff, as you do, just to be polite, the general thrust of the conversations centred on books and writing.
  The theme was largely one of frustration: not being able to find time to write (pesky children); not being able to find an agent; not being able to get our books published. The usual war stories. And then there’s the other frustrations: the idea that won’t behave itself and sit quietly on the page; the virtues, or otherwise, of excessive plotting; the words that come, okay, but like Yeats’ peace, dropping slow; the conflict between establishing a compelling pace while still maintaining quality on a word-by-word basis. And all the other issues of craft that tend to pop up when you’re spitballing over a cup of coffee.
  Here’s the thing, though: in all the years I’ve been listening to writers, publishing or aspiring, small, big or mid-list, I’ve never once heard the phrase, “I’d love to sell a million copies.” Neither, for that matter, have I ever heard a reader say, “I want to read a book written by a writer who’s sold a million copies.”
  Maybe I’m hanging out in the wrong coffee shops, but the writers I know talk about interesting ideas, about different ways of telling a story, about phrasing and style, about the use of language.
  Readers - and I’ll always be more of a reader than a writer - tend to talk about good books, interesting characters, moral dilemmas, beautiful writing.
  The industry, meanwhile, is at another table, very probably in another coffee shop, talking about bottom lines and sales figures and marketing and promotion and million-selling behemoths.
  I’m not naïve. I understand publishing’s economies of scale. And I do appreciate that we’re living through a global recession. But it seems to me that there’s an ever-widening disconnect between the publishing industry and the people - writers and readers - it depends upon.
  Good books are still being published, certainly, but there’s no getting away from the fact that the quality control ‘gatekeepers’ are these days more interested in maximising profits from the likes of Dan Brown, James Patterson and Stieg Larsson than they are in investing in novels and authors that are unlikely to sell a million copies per book.
  Yes, I understand that such writers finance a publisher’s speculative investment on an unknown writer. But the inexorable logic of the current model is that more and more funds must be pumped into the brands and franchises to keep the ledgers balanced, with the result that investment in aspiring, new and mid-list writers is drying up. If you don’t believe me, ask Charlie Williams.
  Rob Kitchin, himself an aspiring author, blogs about yours truly over at The View From the Blue House. In effect, he’s bemoaning the fact that CRIME ALWAYS PAYS, the sequel to THE BIG O, is only available via e-publishing. Which is nice, but Rob isn’t really writing about me. He’s writing about authors who are, as he says,

“ … marginalised by an industry that is increasingly seeking to de-risk their investment by judging authors and their works against a narrow set of criteria, rather than nurturing and supporting them. There are plenty of authors and bands who have worked away producing acclaimed work for years, perhaps not making mega-bucks but nonetheless not losing anyone money, before going stratospheric. If a condition of a writing career is immediate success then there is every danger of producing an entire generation of one book authors, killed off and demoralised before they’ve had chance to blossom into mature, successful writers with an established reader base. It’ll also work to reproduce a certain kind of formulaic writing and stifle creativity and risk-taking – think of Hollywood film making at the minute.”

  Laura Miller is correct to suggest that a lack of regulation, or quality control, is likely to bedevil the coming boom in e-publishing. By the same token, the evidence of bookstores - and certainly the bigger chains - suggests that when the publishing industry uses the phrase ‘quality control’, it’s control rather than quality that’s uppermost in their minds.
  If the industry is truly concerned about readers giving up on reading, then its big problem is not e-publishing. It’s the wall-to-wall bullshit lining bookstore shelves from New York to Sydney.
  Lashing out at scapegoats might temporarily deflect attention away from the fallacy at its core, but if the industry truly believes that stamping its feet on the little people represents progressive thinking, then we’re all - readers, writers and ‘gatekeepers’ alike - in bigger trouble than anyone imagined.

Cassidy’s Boy

Yet another interesting debut to watch out for: Yvonne Cassidy’s THE OTHER BOY, which flashed across the CAP radar late last week. The early word is that it’s a literary psychological thriller, and the name ‘Tana French’ leaps to mind when perusing the blurb elves’ witterings below. To wit:

“‘You know that moment between sleep and waking? I read somewhere that the first thing that comes into your head is what you desire or fear the most. I don’t know if that’s fully right though because for years when I opened my eyes I used to think of Mark.’
  “I’m JP Whelan and I said that, the thing about Mark, to my shrink. He’s always trying to get me to talk about what happened all those years ago, when we were just kids.
  “I wasn’t always seeing a shrink, I wasn’t even always JP, I used to be John-Paul. Here’s where I’m supposed to tell you about all that, about my life with Katie and Abbey in London or before then, back in Dublin, with Dad, listening to the Beatles and how those were the only times I really felt safe.
  “But then I’d have to tell you about my brother Dessie and what happened with Mark.
  “But it doesn’t all fit into some neat little box, my story. I wish it did. So if you really want to know the truth, you’re going to have to find out for yourself, because even now I’m not sure what the truth is.”

  Hmmm. I don’t know about you, but that sounds like a lot of hard work to me. “If you really want to know the truth, you’re going to have to find out for yourself …”. You think James Patterson and Dan Brown got richer than Croesus by asking people to find stuff out for themselves? Eh? And it’s not like life isn’t busy enough without having to down tools during a book and go finding stuff out. Gah, grumble, rhubarb, etc. …

“Ya Wanna Do It Here Or Down The Station, Punk?”: Andrew Gross

Yep, it’s rubber-hose time, folks: a rapid-fire Q&A for those shifty-looking usual suspects ...

What crime novel would you most like to have written?
THE SILENCE OF THE LAMBS.

What fictional character would you most like to have been?
Shakespeare’s Henry the Fifth.

Who do you read for guilty pleasures?
Cookbooks and the obits.

Most satisfying writing moment?
First seeing my name atop the NYT bestseller list. (Though it followed James Patterson’s).

Worst / best thing about being a writer?
Worst: touring. Best: the commute. (Okay, fan mail! Actually, people checking in from my past who have read my books.)

The pitch for your next book is …?
A doctor looks into the suicide of his brother’s son, discovering it may not be a suicide after all, but the latest in a string of revenge killings for a youthful betrayal that took place forty years ago.

Who are you reading right now?
Stieg Larsson 2, HELTER SKELTER on Manson (for work), latest Linwood Barclay.

God appears and says you can only write OR read. Which would it be?
Hands down - I’d write.

The three best words to describe your own writing are …?
Pace, reversals, heart.

Andrew Gross’s RECKLESS is published by William Morrow.

Justice, Where Is Thy Sting? Oh, There It Is …

Lazy bugger that I am, I’m about four months late in telling you that the third in Cora Harrison’s ‘Burren Mysteries’ series is THE STING OF JUSTICE, which, as always, is set in mediaeval Ireland and features her Brehon judge Mara. Quoth the blurb elves:

The autumn has come to the Burren, it’s a time of harvest: of gathering for the winter to come. The end of summer for most and the end of life for others. When Mara attends the funeral of a local priest of the Burren, the last things she expects is another corpse to be found on the church steps - a man stung to death by bees. Sorley the silversmith was a greedy and distrusted man: there would be no shortage of people who wanted him dead but who really stood to profit from his murder? As Mara investigates, she must use all her cunning and prowess as a lady judge to bring the sting of justice to a killer with hatred in their hearts and murder on their mind.

  Meanwhile, and by contrast with your indolent host, Cora Harrison has been busy-busy-busy. Not only has she written another two novels in the Burren Mysteries series, she has also written the YA novel I WAS JANE AUSTEN’S BEST FRIEND and the first in a Victorian crime series for children called ‘The London Murder Mysteries’, both of which are due in March 2010 along with the fifth in the Burren Mysteries series. Crikey. James Patterson, eat your black heart out …

Nobody Move, This Is A Review: THE LOST SYMBOL by Dan Brown

I’ve damned Dan Brown fairly liberally in these pages in the past, not least by lumping him in with John Grisham and James Patterson as some kind of unholy trinity that gives crime writing a bad name. So I wasn’t expecting much when I was commissioned to review THE LOST SYMBOL, although I did crack the pages with as open a mind as I was able to muster. And whaddya know, it was fun. Hokey, schlocky fun, for sure, but fun. Is there room in the world for fun books? God, I hope so … Anyway, herewith be the review:

“If you’re out to describe the truth,” Albert Einstein declared, “leave elegance to the tailor.”
  Elegance may be at a premium in Dan Brown’s ‘The Lost Symbol’ but there is – theoretically – no end to the truth to be uncovered by symbologist Robert Langdon when he gets sucked into an anti-Masonic conspiracy set in Washington, D.C.. Called to America’s capital by his good friend and mentor, the high-ranking Mason Peter Solomon, Langdon quickly finds himself in possession of a coded pyramid and pursued by the CIA. Decoded, the pyramid promises knowledge of the Ancient Mysteries the Masons have for centuries hoarded on behalf of all mankind; but Mal’akh, a sinister, tattooed eunuch, is determined that mankind will never experience true enlightenment.
  Unsurprisingly, ‘The Lost Symbol’ offers many of the features that made ‘The Da Vinci Code’ a phenomenal best-seller. The story takes place over a few hours; short chapters and teasing cliff-hangers create a propulsive momentum; the twists and turns are drip-fed in the form of information dumps by the polymath Langdon. Word games, secret societies and global conspiracies all figure, with Langdon, by turns hapless and brilliant, something of a flesh-and-blood philosopher’s stone who transforms the apparently blind alleys of Washington D.C. into the shimmering glories of Classical Rome.
  The prose is clunky, certainly, and Brown has an irritating penchant for italics, while the excessive use of exposition makes a mockery of the dictum, ‘Show, don’t tell’. The storytelling is preposterously melodramatic, and all but very few of the characters appear to have been borrowed from wherever it is they store the Bond villains who weren’t quite villainous, insane or megalomaniac enough to make a worthy adversary for 007. That said, there’s no denying that the story is as addictive the next cigarette. You know it’s not good for you, and you’ll probably feel bad afterwards, but hey, one more hit won’t kill you …
  If the backdrop to ‘The Da Vinci Code’ was largely based on ‘The Holy Blood and the Holy Grail’, the backbone of ‘The Lost Symbol’ is Fritjof Capra’s ‘The Tao of Physics’. Here Brown seeks to blend the mysticism of Far Eastern, Egyptian, Classical and early European societies with the latest advances in quantum physics and the ‘metaphysical philosophy’ of noetics. He invokes a number of eminent scientists – Newton, Spinoza, Bohr – in the process, although none are more name-checked (or misrepresented) than Einstein, who spent the latter part of his career in a fruitless attempt to justify his claim that God does not play dice.
  It’s an entertaining romp, if you’re prepared to ignore some of the more outrageous assertions about the links between, say, the Upanishads and string theory, but there is a crucial difference between ‘The Lost Symbol’ and ‘The Da Vinci Code’. In the latter, Brown was taking aim at one of the western world’s most sacred cows. Here he is bent on rehabilitating the reputation of one of its most tarnished icons, that of America itself. Whether that perverse spirit of anti-iconoclasm is sufficient to drive ‘The Lost Symbol’ to sales of eighty million copies remains to be seen. – Declan Burke

  This review first appeared in the Irish Times

No, You’re A Snob. No, YOU!

Apparently John Banville (right) created a bit of a to-do at Harrogate last weekend when he said that he writes the Benjamin Black novels a lot faster than he writes his John Banville novels. Stuart Evers blogs about Banville’s snobbery here, and Sarah Weinman writes about it here … No one, apparently, asked Banville himself.
  The truth about the difference between crime fiction and literary fiction, even if it’s an unpalatable one for most crime fiction fans, is that literary fiction tends to be written with more style and panache; and for those who are offended by the fact that crime novels don’t win the Booker Prize, say, well, that’s because the Booker is generally given to writers who are eloquent stylists.
  Yes, there are superb stylists writing crime fiction, just as there are wonderful storytellers writing literary fiction; but – and it’s a broad generalisation, I know – crime fiction fans tend to favour character, plot and narrative over the inventive use of language. When was the last time you read of a crime fic fan recommending an author or novel on the basis of how well it’s written? And – for the record – how well a novel is written should ALWAYS be important, regardless of what kind of novel it is intended to be.
  But aside from all of that, what’s all this nonsense about being offended because John Banville writes Benjamin Black novels quicker than he writes John Banville novels? Are crime writers and readers so insecure in their choice of reading that they need to be flattered by the literary crew? Are they so delicate in their reverse snobbery that they can’t accept criticism, be it implied, perceived or otherwise? Are they so narrow-minded that they can’t take on board a contrary point of view without resorting to name-calling and pigtail-pulling?
  To paraphrase Raymond Chandler, yet again: there are only two kinds of books, good books and bad books. And to paraphrase John Connolly: 95% of crime fiction is shit, because 95% of everything is shit.
  Anyone who knows anything about the business of writing crime fiction knows that there is one bottom line, and that’s the almighty dollar: and it’s this bottom line that results in so many functional, practical, fast-paced but ultimately bland crime fiction novels in the genre. Take a look at the best-sellers – John Grisham, Dan Brown, James Fucking Patterson.
  Seriously, people – when those three ‘writers’ are the biggest and best in the genre, don’t you think the literary crew are entitled to sneer?

UPDATE: Crime Fic Reader Rhian was at the John Banville / Reginald Hill interview at Harrogate, and took notes. If you’re interested in what was said, clickety-click here.

The General Reading Public: Morons?

I got a pretty depressing email yesterday, from a guy who is a terrific writer (names not mentioned, for courtesy’s sake), the gist of which ranneth thusly:

“I have pretty much decided to treat fiction writing the way I did before I started making a living at it (appropriate, since I no longer am), which is to just do it for my own amusement, if it gets published and I get a little check once in a while so much the better.”

  Which followed hard on the heels of a very similar email from another terrific writer, who’s pretty down in the dumps about his latest book, which is marvellous, but which he reckons might well be his last, because he’s a grown man with real responsibilities and who the hell can waste time writing brilliant novels when there’s kids to be fed and roofs to be kept over little heads …?
  Meanwhile, the publishing world is agog with rumours that there’s record printings of Dan Brown’s latest waste of a rain forest.
  There’s something not quite right, folks. Either the general reading public are morons, which I very much doubt, being one of said public, or the people running the industry are the morons.
  But I have to say, while writing novels ‘just for my own amusement’ is the best reason in the world to do it, writing novels for fun because no one wants to buy them, while the likes of Dan Brown, that plank Grisham and Waistoid Patterson sell by the barrow-load … Actually, hold on – scratch the paragraph above. The general reading public are morons.
  This blog will self-destruct in 10 seconds. 10, 9, 8, 7, 6, 5 …

James Patterson: Evil Genius?

Courtesy of ReadWriteWeb comes this little nugget about James ‘Blofeld’ Patterson’s latest instalment in his bid for world domination, to wit:

Best-selling crime author James Patterson will release a new kind of novel next month - one that’s been collaboratively written with the crowd. Called AIRBORNE, the upcoming novel will feature 30 chapters, each written by a different author except the first and last - those will be written by Patterson himself. With the release of this book, it appears the Web 2.0 movement of collaborative writing is about to hit the mainstream.
  Earlier, Borders Australia and Random House held a contest to find twenty-eight writers who would be able to write the bulk of the book. The chapters they produce will need to be less than 750 words so, obviously, this book will be a little lighter than Patterson’s other novels.
  Once complete, AIRBORNE will be released electronically, one chapter at a time, starting on March 20th. Later, a print edition will be published, but only as a prize of sorts for the participants in the competition - it will not be mass produced.

  AIRBORNE – as in virus, right?

Books And The Stealing Thereof

A nice little piece in the Times this morning, about books and the stealing thereof (possible chief culprit, pictured right). Quoth the Times-ish person:

Crime books are extremely popular. According to PLR records, James Patterson, who mostly writes cop thrillers, is the most borrowed author from libraries. And books about crime are also frequently stolen - hence the works of Martina Cole, a prolific crime writer, appear high on the list. Her books are also among those most read in prisons, and she claims to be perfectly happy to be a target for thieves: “I think it’s great, personally. If people want my books badly enough to go and steal them, it’s a compliment, really.”

  Nice one, Ms Cole. The Big Question: Have you ever stolen a book? Feel free to use the ‘anonymous’ button when leaving a comment …
  I have, by the way. Actually, I stole my very first Chandler novel. In that case, at least, you’d have to say the end justified the means. But feel free to flay me with your moral indignation.

Yep, It’s The Latest ‘Dear Genre’ Letter

Given the way the global economy is going – not so much a downward spiral as a lemming-like suicidal plunge – we’ll all be reading and writing by the flicker of animal-fat tallow candles in caves this time next year. Well, everyone except those writing genre fiction, apparently. Quoth the Sacramento Bee:

The editors at Forbes magazine know a thing or two about great wealth, if only from reporting on it. The magazine, which bills itself as “the Capitalist Tool”, recently compiled its annual “World’s Best Paid Authors” list. Those making the most dough between June 2007 and June 2008 – via book sales, advances and movie deals – were:

• J.K. Rowling, $300 million
• James Patterson, $50 million
• Stephen King, $45 million
• Tom Clancy, $35 million
• Danielle Steel, $30 million
• John Grisham and Dean Koontz, tied at $25 million
• Ken Follett, $20 million
• Janet Evanovich, $17 million
• Nicholas Sparks, $16 million

  Funnily enough, I’ve only read two of the authors on that list, and one was so bad I had to stop reading after my brain shrivelled up and made a desperate dive for freedom through my left ear. The Big Question: Who’s the worst writer on that list? Over to you, people …

Cecilia, You’re Breaking Our Hearts

The Irish Independent carried a piece last weekend previewing the Dublin Book Festival, the gist of which ran thusly:

‘Aspiring Irish writers hoping to follow in the footsteps of Cecilia’
Speaking ahead of this weekend’s Dublin Book Festival, Sean O’Cearnaigh, President of the Irish Book Publishing Association, said that the market was alive and well here. “It’s certainly in a state of change, but publishers here have around 15pc of the market of books that are on sale in shops at the moment.” And the success of the market is all down to the talent of Irish writers, he added. “Irish writers are our secret weapons,” he explains. “We have everything from big writers to chick-lit authors to sports writers. There is a lot of talent. We have a lot of up-and-coming writers coming through as well, writers who have their finger on the pulse. Ireland is changing a lot and it’s just a matter of reflecting that, which many of the writers do.”

  And these writers with their fingers on the pulse, reflecting a changing Ireland? Declan Hughes, Arlene Hunt, Ken Bruen, Brian McGilloway, Ingrid Black, et al … They, unfortunately, were all too busy beavering away reflecting a changing Ireland to get along to the Festival. In fact, no Irish crime writer could tear him or herself away from the desk long enough to give a talk or attend a panel, lest removing their fingers from the pulse for even a moment might result in a national tragedy. The Festival did, of course, have a panel of true crime writers talking about crime and Ireland, but for the most part these were crime journalists promoting one-off books about a specific crime.
  Crime fiction writers? Pshaw, sir! Fie! And this despite the fact that the big news stories in Ireland over the last month were the brutal murder of two Polish men in Dublin; the ongoing farce in which an taoiseach (aka prime minister) Bertie Ahern attempts (and largely fails) to explain to a tribunal his, erm, idiosyncratic accounting procedures back when he was Minister for Finance; the largest drug haul in the history of the State; the murder of a young mother by her husband, who allegedly modelled his modus operandi on that of a previous killer; etc., ad nauseum. In other words, anyone writing fiction in Ireland today who is not dealing with crime is writing escapist fiction.
  And yet, if you walk into any Dublin bookstore today (other than the wonderful Murder Ink on Dawson Street), you’ll be faced with a bank of James Patterson’s 7TH HEAVEN, which is the worst apology for a sick monkey of a half-arsed first draft the Grand Vizier can remember reading. ‘Fingers on the pulse’, eh? Meanwhile, the Cecilia in whose footsteps Irish writers are hoping to follow? That’ll be the ever-lovely Cecilia Ahern (right), a creator of women’s fiction so insubstantial, frothy and sickeningly sweet that cotton candy may yet sue. Who just so happens to be the daughter of an taoiseach (aka prime minister) Bertie Ahern, who is attempting (and largely failing) to explain to a tribunal his, erm, idiosyncratic accounting procedures, etc., ad nauseum.
  Laugh? We nearly emigrated.