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

Competition Time – more rollover than a lottery & in time for a crime-packed summer!

It’s that time of the year again.  By next weekend the cows – as well as Charles and Camilla – will have vacated Harrogate and the Great Yorkshire Show will give way to the annual crime writing festival, now in its ninth year.  We’ve had, and are still having, plenty of lottery rollovers so it’s time to offer up a competition taking inspiration from both.  Thanks to those lovely people at both Faber & Faber and Pan Macmillan I have two sets of prizes to offer you from two outstanding crime authors and you can enter for both.  I am particularly pleased with these prizes as both authors have pushed boundaries with their work.

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.

The Apprentice – Week 9, Episode 10

Needing to strike the scalpel to produce the final five, this episode asked our candidates to go sell from wholesale and build the business on the evidence of bestselling products.  Simple, yes?  Well only if you’re Lord Sacch, Nick or Karren.  The candidates (some of them) may have seen this task differently.  Mistakes were multiple this week and quite serious.

The Apprentice 2011 – Week 8, Episode 9

Written while viewing on iplayer…

Gosh, don’t they look different without make up on?  And the tiredness is showing too.  Even on Karren’s face!  So, it’s make a new biscuit time and it’s off to Wales to do some baking; who knew they had biscuit development boffins in Swansea?  The land of my fathers is the home of the science of crunch.

Let’s take a look at the teams first now we’ve had a little stir of the pot again.  Helen who has worked in the food industry leads Jim and Natasha.  Zoë who has done the same and takes a rolling pin to flatten Susie at the first opportunity leads Susie (nemesis alert), Melody and Tom.  Recapping, that’s Zoë, Susie, Melody (the harpie clan) and The Real Mr Nice, Tom.  This one is set for crumbs at dawn by shooting pistol.  Something tells me that Helen will pull a money-from-rubbish-week and handle with aplomb.

Er, did I hear that correctly?  Zoë said ‘Don’t take this the wrong way but I’m probably more happy working with Susie.’  I think that probably translates as ‘I can walk all over Susie as I have done before, but Melody is one scary woman.  I can cut her off by sending her to the bakery and have her at the end of the mobile.  What’s more, if the product turns out to be crap, I have the bitch to land it on and get rid of her pronto in the boardroom.’  Ooh, I am tense already.  This is more on the edge than Luther and it’s even about biscuits…

Movie: Taken (2008)

 
Director: Pierre Morel; Writers: Luc Besson, Robert Mark Kamen; Stars: Liam Neeson, Maggie Grace and Famke Janssen.

According to Empire Magazine Taken raked in 'north of $200m from a budget of $25m' and in March of this year it reported that Neeson had ‘all but signed on the dotted line for a sequel’.  That’s a sign it’s a good one, yes?

Publishing News: R N (Roger) Morris

The news is out.  Roger Morris has signed a two book deal with Kate Lyall Grant at Severn House for their Creme de la Crime imprint.  It will be the start of a new series featuring a character called Silas Quinn, set in Edwardian-era London.  Roger has already written a couple of short stories featuring the character and he's looking forward to 'putting him in the bigger canvas of a novel'.

As R N Morris, Roger has published a Porfiry Petrovich quartet with Faber & Faber and, as Roger Morris, he burst onto our shelves with a novel called Taking Comfort with Pan Macmillan's MNW imprint.

Congratulations to Roger!

The Voice of Stephanie Plum (Lorelei King) and Janet Evanovich's Smokin' Seventeen

 Also in hardcover in the UK since 21 June.

The Apprentice 2011 – Week 7, Episode 8

 
‘Ello, ‘ello, ‘ello, it was time to take some leading edge British product innovation to some chic shops in Paris; time for some young and rare business roast beefs to get the grenouilles on board.  Now down to the last eight ‘crème de la crème’ of budding entrepreneurs, our faux amis needed to hide their innate and developed froideur and just get on with it.  Difficult though eh?  (As can be seen in the pic above.)  We may have suffered endless opening streams of their raison d'être for being on the show, where they have professed their savoir-faire with no attendant humility, but now it’s the practical and the talons are out.

Crime Scene at the Natural History Museum

So, how did you spend your evening on the last Friday in June 2011?  Down the pub?  At an indoor BBQ when the rain came? Some of us were at a crime scene.  Some of us inadvertently trampled all over a crime scene compromising forensic evidence and thus could have hindered the estimation of time of death of a victim.  (Yes, that one was me only.  I was trying to stay out of the rain.)

You may have noticed I posted about the National History Museum’s Crime Scene event just over a week ago.  Well, I just happened to be in London that day and decided to go.  This event offered not only an introduction to forensic sciences but also some hands on experience. And how did all pan out?