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

Today is John Baker's Day

Today, I am pleased to welcome John Baker as he flies in on his virtual tour to promote his current novel, Winged with Death.  The next post is John's and the following one contains my thoughts on his novel, for which I wish him every success.

GUEST BLOG: Jeri Westerson, author of Veil of Lies, medieval noir

Here, Jeri tells the tale of how she came to write her medieval mystery series and how she came to be published.  A big welcome to Jeri as a guest blogger:

Writing Medieval Mysteries
 
The pleasures of reading were introduced to me early in life. My mother always spoke of getting "lost in adventure." And she was right. When our eyes track words on a page, our brains transport us somewhere else, into the minds of these characters and on to rich Manhattan apartments or lowly alleyways, slick with the darkness of wretched souls.
 
When I sat down and decided to write novels for a living some fourteen years ago, there was little decision to be made. I would write historical fiction. Why? Let's go back a bit.
 

Guest Blog: Katherine Howell (fresh from winning The Davitt Award)

Frantic recently won the Sisters In Crime Davitt award for best crime novel by an Australian woman in 2007. Katherine says "It was a great thrill to win and to attend the awards dinner in Melbourne". On the night, however, the expression 'you can take the medic out of the job but never out of the medic' proved itself true when a dinner guest staggered from the bathroom calling for help and Katherine had to provide some emergency care in the stairwell. A retired nurse came to help in time for Katherine to make it back to the stage to be presented with her award. As a very senior police officer, Judge Liz Gaynor and forensic pathologist Dr Shelley Robertson were also in attendance, it was commented later that if the young woman had been unfortunate enough to not survive her episode, the autopsy, investigation and legal proceedings could have been undertaken without anyone leaving the room.

Says Katherine:

Guest Blog: BLEEDING HEART SQUARE. Where the novel came from, by Andrew Taylor

Like a river, a book must start somewhere.  Like a river, it sometimes has more than one source.  Bleeding Heart Square had three.  The sources didn’t appear at the same time but slowly and coyly.  But I couldn’t start writing until they flowed together, mingling so quickly and thoroughly that I find it hard to know when and where one idea ends and the others begin.

One was the Moat Farm Murder of 1899, a real-life case with which my grandmother had a remote connection - I’ve blogged about this elsewhere.

Zoë Sharp talks about her protagonist Charlie Fox

It was both a delight and an honour to be asked to guest blog on It’s A Crime, and I’m so pleased to be here. I’m even more pleased, however, to see the reactions from Rhian and Chris to the latest exploits of Charlie Fox - Second Shot and Third Strike. With both books I knew that I was about to step out on something of a limb as far as a series character was concerned, and I admit that initially I wasn’t too sure if I could really pull it off.
 
I remember explaining to an audience at Left Coast Crime in Bristol, back in 2006, that I intended to open Second Shot with Charlie lying in a frozen forest in New England, having just been shot twice. The room actually gasped, and a part of me thought, Uh-oh, is that a good thing or a bad thing that just happened there?
 
Whenever you step outside the conventions, there is the chance that you’re going to misjudge the mood. I took a chance with Charlie herself. Not the standard private eye or police officer of conventional British crime fiction. Not quite the standard amateur sleuth, either. I wanted a strong female lead who would not scream and fall over and wait to be rescued. And I wanted to explore the killer inside her, the deadly instincts that she initially tried to suppress, but at the same time never to lose sight of her human edge.
 
Men who kill are the norm in crime thrillers. It’s almost expected of them. Women who kill, however, are so often portrayed as psychos or cold-blooded assassins. Charlie is neither and I strove to make her more rounded, more real. She doesn’t go looking for trouble, but working as a bodyguard she can be forced to kill in the line of duty, to defend her principal or die trying. And when that principal is her own father, as in Third Strike, things get somewhat complicated.
 
In that book I wanted to bring to a head a lot of themes that have been rising for a while in the series. The main one was Charlie’s ongoing difficult relationship with her parents. I felt that Charlie’s father in particular always stole every scene in which he’s appeared. So this time I wanted to bring him much more to centre stage, to confront him with his own killer instinct and see if he was still able to take the moral high ground, as he’s tended to do in the past. This is a book about respect, the search for it, the attempt to regain it.
 
And it leaves Charlie - not to mention her parents - in a very interesting place. Bringing her back from that in the next one presents a whole new set of challenges!

[Our thanks to Zoë.  You can find out more about her work here and sign up for her newsletter.  If you have any questions for her, please post them in the comments.  She's on a tight schedule at the moment, but hopes to be able to access the net later today and tomorrow to be able to reply to any comments.  And hopefully later...  We culminate tomorrow with Chris's review of the latest novel: Third Strike.]

GUEST BLOG: Brian McGilloway

It seems somehow appropriate that the second Devlin book is released this month. It is two years since I first heard that Macmillan New Writing was accepting Borderlands for publication. Indeed it is also the 2^nd Birthday of that imprint; Borderlands marked its first birthday and Gallows Lane the second. And these events follow on from the second birthday of my younger son, Tom, following whose birth I wrote Gallows Lane.

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Macmillan New Writing came in for some criticism upon its inception, with regards to its decision to read unsolicited manuscripts and the terms (slightly misrepresented in the media) under which they accepted novels. In my two years experience with MNW I have been incredibly impressed and very proud to be part of the imprint. Founded on the belief that massive advances and the end of slush piles were limiting the number of new authors being given a chance to build a reputation without undue pressure to earn back huge payments, the imprint published one novel per month by a hitherto unpublished author. They were the only publisher willing to take a chance on the Devlin books, following a number of rejections from publishers and agents (some, it seemed, from publishers to which I hadn’t even submitted the book).

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One of the big complaints about the imprint was the failure to pay an advance on the books signed. To me, this was never an issue. During your initial training period for teaching, you spend a number of months working in schools, unpaid. This apprenticeship is a necessary part of the process and I viewed MNW on those same terms. It was, to my mind, an opportunity to get my work in print. As a result, Borderlands was short-listed for a CWA Dagger, and will be published in the USA, Germany and Japan within the year. I have been signed up with Peter Straus of Rogers, Coleridge and White through whom I had a Devlin short-story broadcast on Radio 4. None of this would have happened without my involvement in MNW. These achievements carry more value to me than a nominal advance.