IT'S A CRIME! (OR A MYSTERY...)

See you in September...

My best to you all & see you in September!

Please come back in September...

... this blog is about to take very certain break, until September...

my very best to you all,

CFR

Well, I say...

The Guardian Book Blog has hosted a few articles lately, where authors have "had a go" at the state of publishing today - and yes, it's true: only the tip of the iceberg gets published, with an even smaller tip attracting a marketing budget that leads to their name "being out there".  Other hopeful authors have added their empathy and readers have also added their two penneth worth of chagrin in the comments.  Then someone suggested that a publisher answer to the charges.  And The Guardian obviously took up the baton...

Step forward the delightfully brave Louise Tucker, who works at one of "the Big Four" publishers.  It's good to see some generosity on that blog, too (comments are often snipey).  At the time of writing, 100+ comments had been attracted, most providing decent counter arguments, with few having a go at Tucker personally.  Many comments are long.  Many feel passionate about their thoughts.  Readers hate the lack of availibility of a wide range of books, all at decent prices - something I've mentioned before, on here.

But let's get back to the argument that Tucker presents.

Two interesting takes...

from The Inpdendent about the Harrogate Crime Writing Festival.

How good to read Mark Timlin being kindly about the festival on August 7, especially after Paul Vallely - surely a crime fiction virgin - thought it "Murder most horrid" on July 30.

A snippet from Vallely:

"This, I think, is the gravest charge against much modern crime fiction. Like the Sunday gutter-press it offers a titillating, vicarious pleasure from what it purports to expose and condemn, turning violence into a kind of pornography and contributing to the coarsening of our national sensibilities."

A snippet from Timlin:

"All in all, the Harrogate crime festival 2007 was a great success. Old friends were greeted and old enemies avoided, and I'm pleased to say on what was probably the biggest weekend in the entire history of book publishing, no one mentioned Harry Potter."

Of course, if you travelled by train there were many to be seen, deeply entrenched in their new Potters, on the way home...

Also in the news...

Here's another site to keep an eye on: CRIMEFEST 2008.

Organised by the people who brought Left Coast Crime to Bristol in 2006, this is a new international crime convention, also to be held in Bristol (June 5-8).

Currently, authors attending include Lee Child; Natasha Cooper; Karin Fossum; Donna Moore and Ian Rankin.  I'm sure the line up will be brilliant, so this is well worth page-marking.

Zoë Sharp and The Writers' Holiday

I met up with the delightful Zoë Sharp last week.  She was in south Wales to teach crime writing to the lucky attendees at this year's Writers' Holiday* in Caerleon.

Zoë quickly started talking about errors in novels and proved that she knows a great deal of detail about a wide range of topics: guns; helicopters; scuba-diving included.  All the sorts of things you'd expect in a good crime novel or thriller...

Also, Zoë  joyously gave me a recap on the Saturday event she did at Harrogate, which unfortunately I missed.  It starred Caroline Carver, Simon Kernick (who has a wonderful new look on his website), Michael Marshall, Zoë and was chaired and organised by Stuart MacBride.  She told me that it was run like a gameshow and it sounded like I missed a lot of fun.  One lasting memory for Zoë will be of the bearded man reading a sex scene from one of her novels - written from a female point of view, as her protag Charlie Fox is female, of course.  That was, I believe, the "missing word" round where the author had to guess the missing word from a piece of their own work.  MacBride also had the authors carving pieces of soap on the stage for one round.  It sounded, very definitely, a different type of event.