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

Writing Crime Fiction: Making Crime Pay – Janet Laurence

[Second edition reprinted by Aber Publishing in 2011, first published in 2007 by Studymates.]

Without doubt, crime fiction is popular and commercially successful.  Many enjoy reading it and many harbour ambitions to write it.  If you are starting out, it’s worth taking a look at this guidance from Janet Laurence which covers the necessary basic building blocks from the writing to the selling of your completed manuscript.  Writing Crime Fiction’s chapters include areas such as plotting, settings, characterisation and motivation, dialogue, narrative style, whether or not to use outlines, specialist knowledge, research, pace, opening hooks and denouements.  Carefully, Laurence illustrates her points with examples from her own work and from those of other crime authors, as well as dropping in quotes of guidance and observation from UK names that you will recognise.  She also sets exercises to get the juices flowing.  So if you can’t afford Faber Academy or the new Guardian Masterclasses, fear not.  You can bounce around some ideas using this book and learn a few things along the way.  To her credit, Laurence also makes it very clear that this is a business and any writer with hopes of being published needs to be aware of what that means.

But there’s more.  You can also assess the business by looking at the content of the book from another angle where this book was first published a mere four years ago.  Those names I mentioned are the first key.  Ask yourself where they are today?  Are the big names still big names and if not, why not?  If yes, what is responsible for their career trajectory?  If not, who has replaced them?  What makes success and what makes enduring success?  Secondly, which names were at early stages of their careers and where are they now?  Investigate that also. 

Making the writing pay is more than just the writing, so to get the bigger picture take a look at this book.

Available on Amazon here.

Janet Laurence has written two series of crime novels: the Darina Lisle culinary mysteries and three Canaletto mysteries. She has run a number of writing workshops, including ones for the Arvon Foundation and the Cheltenham Spring Festival. She has also been a Visiting Fellow/Writer in Residence three times at Jane Franklin Hall College, part of the University of Tasmania.

All Yours - Claudia Pineiro

Now and again a surprising little gem comes along.  This summer it has to be All Yours by Claudia Piñeiro (translated by Miranda France) published by Bitter Lemon Press.  A novella rather than a full length novel, All Yours certainly packs a punch with its tale of infidelity leading to murder.

Kicking off with narration from Inés, the wife, this is compulsive reading.  She takes you straight into the heart of the problem and her identification of the symptoms in her marriage (in the bedroom).  Her tone intrigues.  Could she be highly perceptive and a little sarcastic in her recollections?  Or is she so obsessed with the values drummed into her by her mother that she is deluded?  We know the symptoms but can we have confidence in the accuracy of her diagnosis and treatment selection?

When Inés follows her husband Ernesto she sees an unfortunate accident and a death.  She decides that to protect her marriage and her family life she must don the armour plating of strategic support and take control and direct the situation.  In doing so, Inés sets off a row of falling dominoes where nothing is really as she imagines and no one responds as she expects.  The result is pure tragedy.

Piñeiro’s style marries the unreliable narration of Inés with telephone conversations of her daughter Lali to other parties, and with after the fact reports from an investigation.  All work well together to build to a curdling denouement.  Piñeiro gives us characters who will remain in the mind long after reading: Inés, Lali, Ernesto, and Inés’s mother who never appears in a scene but is only mentioned.

Sometimes the package may be smaller but the contents deliver very strong liquor.  All Yours is all that in book form.

To be published on August 4, available on Amazon.  More about the book and the author on the publisher’s site.

Herring on the Nile – L C Tyler



Continuing this award-winning author’s entertaining pastiche of the late, great Dame Agatha’s work, Herring on the Nile takes novelist Ethelred Tressider and his literary agent Elsie Thirkettle down the murderous waters of the Nile.  And here we have a spot-on update to contemporary times with a plot involving a terrorist angle.

Ethelred, in need of performing some research to write his latest novel, has booked a Nile cruise and his latest paramour Annabelle, Lady Muntham has dropped out at the last minute.  This provides Elsie with an opportunity to spend some time on a well-appointed paddle steamer.  Well she would, wouldn’t she?  How could she possibly resist?  But as Ethelred notes:

If I’d noticed any references in the tour brochure to a dead body floating in the Nile or to the cold barrel of a gun pointing at a spot precisely midway between my eyes, I might have decided south Wales in a blizzard was in fact much the better option.  But perhaps they’d hidden that sort of stuff in the small print, along with the fuel surcharges.  They often do, I find.

Yes, it’s not long before Ethelred’s life is threatened and what follows involves mistaken identity, perceived mistaken identity, misunderstanding, stretching truths, downright lying and a little bit of violence.  Also, being trademark Tyler there is humour and some of it focuses on a writer’s life.  In Herring on the Nile, Elsie has set up a number of interviews for Ethelred which he conscientiously completes by email even where the questions are inappropriate.

Reading the next Herring is like meeting up with old friends and enjoying a good banter, with a good many laughs along the way.  The Herring on the Nile was simply a novel that had to be written for this series: a classic updated in Tyler’s own unique style.

I hope we will read even more of Elsie and Ethelred in the future and I’d like to see two things happen: less dialogue in the prose where Nile occasionally felt like it was flowing into the waters of a script; more of Elsie actually doing her job as opposed to talking about it.  Wouldn’t it be fun if Elsie was in the middle of a frantic auction at the same as an investigation?

Herring on the Nile: best read for pure enjoyment, escapism and R&R. Panama hat optional, laughter not.

The book is published on 1 July.  Signed HBs are available at Goldsboro Books, usual stocks at Amazon.  The novel is also available on Kindle on the same date, at a price comparable to the HB.

A Lily of the Field – John Lawton

Sometimes an author simply blows your socks off.  Back in the 90s, a wander down Chiswick High Road led to a foray into WHSmith where I picked up a novel called Blackout in a 3 for 2 deal.  Shortly afterwards, I was back on the High Road, in another store, buying the second novel in the series, Old Flames.  I introduced a then friend to the novels who said of Old Flames, ‘I felt I was in the House, seeing Churchill walking down that corridor’.  And that comment is key, for I don’t believe any other author I’ve read evokes time, place and culture to the level of Lawton.  Back in the 90s, I thought Lawton might be a male ‘Mary Wesley’, writing of his own wartime experiences in old age.  I was wrong – he’s considerably younger – making the evocation even more startling and impressive.  Along the way, I may have lost touch with the ‘then friend’, but my bond to the ‘Troy’ series of novels remains as strong as ever.

A Lily of the Field is the latest in the series, published by Atlantic Books (for a new Grove Press imprint), a new publisher for the author in the UK.  ‘Lily’ is set in the period that Lawton has made his own: during and immediately after WWII.  Lily is certainly a novel that can be read alone, but it also draws on the other novels in the series, and their characters, some previously minor.  And Lily is, at this stage, perhaps Lawton’s most ambitious and rich novel, calling on various previous strands and curating them into a wider, global picture.

Death on the Marais – Adrian Magson

Let’s start with a bit about the author.  I fear that in some quarters Adrian Magson may be better known for his contributions to Writing Magazine, but in Magson we have a prolific writer.  He wrote short fiction and features for women’s magazines, contributing over the years to worldwide publications, as well as writing comedy material and stories for BBC radio before turning to crime thrillers.  By the time Crème de la Crime was sold to become an imprint of Severn House, Magson had notched up five novels with them.  Then, last year, in the space of only two months Magson launched two new series: the Harry Tate spy thriller series with Severn House and the Inspector Lucas Rocco mystery series with Allison & Busby.  Here, the focus is on the first Lucas Rocco mystery, Death on the Marais which comes out in paperback in May 2011; the second in the series, Death on the Rive Nord follows in August.  The Rocco series is set in France in the 1960s.  Magson’s prolific skill for such a venture stems from time the author spent living in northern France in the late 1950s.   And now for the novel…

Cold Rain – Craig Smith

Published by small independent press Myrmidon Books in the summer of last year, Cold Rain makes for an absolute gem of a surprise.  This is good solid, atmospheric writing piled with suspense and tension.

David Albo is an associate professor of English at a mid-western university.  To the outsider his life looks idyllic: a perfect wife; an adoring and adored stepdaughter; a plantation-style mansion and no obvious money worries.  But Albo wrestles with a problem with alcohol and as the novel opens he’s about to return to work after a sabbatical, having managed to keep off the demon liquor for two years.  Where the garden to which he returns should be experiencing spring and getting rosy, Albo soon finds it descends into a version of hell.

‘I turned thirty-seven that summer, older than Dante when he toured Hell, but only by a couple of years…’

Albo finds himself the subject of a sexual harassment claim and is soon trying to make sense of the conspiracy betrayal and jealousy around him.

An unusual strand to this novel comes in the form of Albo’s childhood memories and how his late father’s second hand car salesman philosophies and principles shaped him.  And with a plot that holds nothing back from Smith, we have a story that exposes just how evil people can be.

Craig Smith is an author to keep logged into your search engines for the next one.  Myrmidon Books have already published other novels from the author: The Painted Messiah and The Blood Lance and a further novel, Every Dark Place, follows in July 2011. 

Links: the author’s own pages; the author at Myrmidon Books; Cold Rain at Amazon UK.

Treblinka: A Survivor’s Memory – Chil Rajchman (MacLehose Press)

To coincide with Holocaust Memorial Day in January of this year, MacLehose Press reaffirmed its commitment to publishing works of literature aimed at keeping the flame of remembrance alive. In an interview, publisher Christopher MacLehose said ‘I think there has to be a real literary response to the tragedy of the Holocaust… The priority I think is to educate the next generation and their children. And the more that the books we publish are real and of irreproachable quality the more you can give them to be read.’

In 2011 the theme of Holocaust Memorial Day was ‘untold stories’. Until very recently Rajchman’s account of his experience of Treblinka, as one of its few survivors, remained untold. He recorded his story in a notebook even before the war was over. This remained in the possession of his family and has been published for the first time in English by MacLehose Press this year.

This is a book that should be read. Indeed I hope it is at least as broadly read as Anatoly Kuznetsov’s Babi Yar: A Document in the Form of a Novel.

The Garden of Betrayal – Lee Vance

As part of their promotional activities, Corvus Books in the UK selected this novel as their ‘Thriller of the Month’ for August last year.  It looked like a debut, so I did a little investigation and discovered and that it was not eligible for the CWA New Blood Award.  It’s the author’s first novel published here, but there was one previously which can be imported from the US via Amazon.

Fifth Victim - Zoë Sharp

I cannot let March come to a close without highlighting my recommendation of Zoë Sharp's new instalment of Charlie Fox thrillers, Fifth Victim, published now by Allison & Busby. This is another tense, well-plotted and immensely readable adventure, and one that will be welcomed by loyal followers.
 
Hired to protect rich Long Island socialite teenager Dina Willner from a perceived kidnap threat - which is a reality that has already seen three of Dina's friends experience a taste of captivity - Charlie has to work without the close support of long-term partner Sean Meyer, who still lies in the coma brought about by events in a previous case.
 
An outsider on the inside, Charlie soon realises that there is far more than meets the eye with the series of kidnappings which she is intent on foiling. Why have the police not been involved, and why were the three victims' families so keen to keep quiet and avoid publicity?
 
With the added stress of reigning in her emotions, as no change in the news of Sean's condition comes from his hospital bed, Charlie is supported by Parker Armstrong who, along with Sean, runs the close protection agency in New York that is now Charlie's base. This is a clever move by Sharp, and one that adds to the tension in ways that slowly become clear. Never known for taking it easy when embroiled on a case, Charlie is soon racing full-throttle to beat escalating odds and to keep her charge safe; risks are taken, danger is faced and surmounted and, just when the reader thinks a resolution is reached, Sharp gives us one more of those most unexpected twists for which she is becoming so well-known.
 
The Charlie Fox series is unique in so many ways, with a strong female lead character who has had to adapt so many times to her changing circumstances, not least to a move from the UK to the US for her most recent outings.  If a male reader of a different generation is able to so easily identify with Charlie Fox, then Sharp is most definitely doing a heck of a lot right.  So, fingers crossed that we don’t have to wait too long for more of Charlie!

Written by ScotKris.  [With thanks.]

Signed first editions are available from Goldsboro Books in London and online; hardbacks at Waterstone's, Allison & Busby, and Amazon UK.

Darkside – Belinda Bauer

CWA Gold Dagger Winner Bauer is certainly carving out her niche in the realm of dark themes and psychology within the crime genre.  Could she be an early contender for taking the mantle of ‘Queen of Psychological Crime’ from the esteemed Minette Walters?

Darkside is what is it says on the label and it opens with a harrowing scene, in effect the second chapter, where one of society’s most vulnerable is murdered.  Following an accident with a horse, the elderly Margaret Priddy was left paralysed from the neck down.  For what remains of her life, she lies immobile in bed, unable to communicate with any efficacy at all, and her body is the subject of 24/7 nursing care at home (for as long as the family funds will last).  One day she wakes to a strong light and believes her time is up, that she is dying.  But the light is a torch and the sensation of pressing that follows its appearance alerts her that she is actually having the life taken from her.

In the closed Exmoor village of Shipcott, first encountered in Blacklands, the local bobby Jonas Holly is shocked by the death of Priddy.  Knowing such a case is beyond his remit, Holly calls in the top guns and we observe the arrival of DCI Marvel from Taunton: a man who proves to be an extreme irritant to Holly’s well meaning efforts, rendering them hapless at every opportunity and sucking away at Holly’s self esteem.

Soon, it becomes apparent that someone aims to remove from Shipcott all of its most vulnerable and dependent: the elderly and the ailing, or a combination of the both.  Within this, Holly’s wife Lucy, a housebound sufferer of MS, seems a prime target.

Darkside, with the staccato nature of its prose will quickly scoop up any reader into the journey of the story and not let go.  It is vibrancy with vibrato.  Bauer’s characters are portrayed from under the skin, with an electric feel of dependable reliance; but for some more than others.  Her ability to draw you into the depths of darkness while adding humour is commendable.  As with Blacklands, Bauer’s massive strength lies in characterisation.

However, even though I feel this second novel, Darkside is superior to Blacklands, again the denouement suffers due to plotting.  In Darkside it is too abrupt and would have benefited from a more subtle build and with more exploration of certain characters’ backstories.  Bauer remains one to watch.

UK first edition, signed, lined and dated copies are available from Goldsboro Books for collectors.  Or there’s Waterstone’s for the hardback published on 6 Jan 2011.

More on the author here.