Jack Reacher, VI Warshawski, Harry Hole ... Leading crime writers reveal how they came up with their most famous creations, what it's like to live with them over decades and if they'll last the distance
Our new feature links to interesting blogs or articles posted online, which will help keep you up to date with what's going on in the book world:
Points: 0
Jack Reacher, VI Warshawski, Harry Hole ... Leading crime writers reveal how they came up with their most famous creations, what it's like to live with them over decades and if they'll last the distance
"I've been doing it 24 years now and I couldn't do it any more," says Lee Child as he hands over the reins of his Jack Reacher series to his brother Andrew Grant. He's not the first to tire of his most famous creation. By 1938, Agatha Christie had grown entirely sick of Hercule Poirot, asking: "Why did I ever invent this detestable bombastic, tiresome little creature? Eternally straightening things, eternally boasting, eternally twirling his moustache and tilting his egg-shaped head." And nearly 50 years earlier, Arthur Conan Doyle was equally wearied by Sherlock Holmes: "I think of slaying Holmes ... winding him up for good," he told his mother.
Creating a long-running series featuring a much-loved character can be both a blessing and a curse. As time passes in the real world, the writer has to decide how to deal with a fictional timeline. Is it best to age a hero in real time - Ruth Rendell had Inspector Wexford still solving crimes in his retirement - or to let the world move on but keep your hero young, as Patricia Cornwell does with Kay Scarpetta, who remains around 40 years old for ever ? And how does the character develop as social mores change?
Points: 0
Like everyone in the book industry, writers have experienced considerable change over the last few months. Although they might be used to working from home, being forced to do so has impaired creativity and made it nearly impossible for some writers to focus. For others, being under lockdown has provided just the right push for them to finally finish their book project and research agents and publishers.
For those writers who are able to work at this time, questions loom:
- If they're writing fiction, should they adjust their story to reflect current events?
- If they're already published, can they effectively promote their book through social media?
- What's the best way to help fellow writers, booksellers, and others who may be struggling?
Points: 0
For years, RWA's members of color had felt stigma and hostility like that experienced by Huguley and Malone; they'd felt unwanted, disrespected, or simply shut out. So had the queer members, and the poly members, and everyone else who didn't quite fit into the traditional romance mold. And in December 2019, all those years of slights, of aggressions both micro and macro, of implicit and explicit bias, would finally become impossible to ignore.
RWA imploded in a spectacular public meltdown, an imbroglio that led to the resignation of the president, executive director, and, eventually, the entire board. It was a wildly convoluted controversy that involved secret backroom committees, public denunciations, and no small amount of schadenfreude from popcorn-munching onlookers in publishing and media.
There's an unkind stereotype that romance novels are for sex-starved spinsters with too many cats. So to those observing on social media, the spectacle of one romance figure after another toppling like dominoes appeared to be coming out of nowhere. "Who knew that romance novelists were so wild?" was the general response. But the chaos was the culmination of a long-simmering culture war within the insular world of romance publishing, one that played out for years through microaggressions, attempts to censor queer authors and storylines, and the refusal to recognize the work of authors of color.
Points: 0
Black Lives Matter is reverberating around the world, triggering a fresh reckoning with the racist global history of colonialism and slavery. While Confederate statues began to tumble across the American South, in Bristol, England, a diverse group felled a statue of a slave trader that has long provoked offense. Statues of colonial conquerors of Africa and South Asia have followed, along with a robust discussion of the ways in which such actions make history rather than erase it. These movements abroad are not merely echoes of BLM; BLM itself is global.
The shared impetus is a common opposition to racism, of which anti-Black racism has been the most lethal and traumatic. But the history of policing also bridges them. No historical figure makes this clearer than George Orwell, whose name has been increasingly bandied about in recent weeks - by those fretting about the erasure of history as well as those calling out the euphemistic language around policing, such as the use of "nonlethal" bullets against protesters.
Points: 0
Now more than ever, as the Black Lives Matter movement appears resolute on toppling racist and imperial structures, we need the words and radical ideas of black poets - to reimagine the kind of world we want to arise once the ash has settled.
Kadish Morris
It was clear to me early on that there are no black editors at any of the larger publishers which have poetry lists. My books were rejected from those major presses, and read in a reductive, isolated way. I kept being told my books were about identity, then I'd read books by white poets, and think, how are these not about identity? I was being told theirs were about nature and philosophy, but mine were also about those things. I wasn't allowed that complexity, just given this unimaginative pathology. I'm proud to be part of the Black Writers' Guild, who are addressing how this racism is systemic in many ways.
Raymond Antrobus
Points: 0
Book publishing is unlike many industries in that its fundamental product, the writing, is not, for the most part, an in-house commodity. Publishers wait for their next new bestselling authors to arrive on no known date, writing about no pre-arranged topic, and in many if not most cases as people previously unknown. A Nielsen- or NPD-style point-of-sales tracking system of each authors' progress is impractical. The rankings of book sales on retail platforms like Amazon can offer only clues to how titles are navigating a bottomless marketplace of millions of books.
- 64 percent of respondents say they anticipate losses because of postponed publications of their work
- 40 percent of respondents say they anticipate losses because of postponed contracts and reduced advances against royalties
- 97 percent of respondents say they have experienced a "high loss" of income primarily because of canceled appearances including lectures, workshops, and readings
- 60 percent of respondents say they'd classify the effects on author income as "very" to "extremely" severe
Points: 0
Jhalak Prize co-founder Sunny Singh has called out the industry's "moral failure" to reflect diversity at every stage of publishing.
Speaking in a video conference panel discussion on the future pipeline of publishing, held on Friday (26th June), Singh said she could "no longer believe the industry thinks it's acting in good faith" where championing diversity is concerned.
Singh urged the industry to confront the problem structurally. "We need to see agents, publishers, writers, sales and marketing people of colour. Why aren't we seeing people of colour at the executive level? I want to see those changes at the top of the ladder. Just one person is not good enough. For the publishing industry to convince me that they're doing something, I want to see those changes at the top, not just, ‘Oh we've recruited another batch', who will all end up leaving in five years because they're burned out, exhausted and frustrated. That's what I need the publishing industry to do."
Points: 0
This is what we know: More than once, Toni Morrison was a woman picking her way through a reinvention of her life.
She'd been Chloe Wofford in Lorain, Ohio, the daughter of a mother who loved books and a ship-welder father who taught her the pride of a craft well done. She'd been Toni Wofford, a drama-loving English major and homecoming queen at Howard University, and then she was Toni Morrison after getting married, adopting her husband's surname and becoming a mother.
Then she became the Toni Morrison when, as a Howard University professor, she started penning short stories in an intensive faculty writing group. She was pregnant with her second son when her marriage dissolved in 1964 and she moved to New York City to start her new life with her boys and her next career as a book editor at Random House. Again and again, she fire-baptized new versions of herself with change.
Points: 0
As lockdown eases around the world, George RR Martin has revealed he is currently isolating in "an actual cabin in the mountains" and hopes to finish his long-awaited fantasy novel The Winds of Winter "next year".
Martin said he was spending "long hours every day" working on the book, which will be the sixth in his series A Song of Ice and Fire. Set in the fantasy kingdom of Westeros and its environs, peopled by warring factions, occasional dragons and direwolves, the bestselling fantasy series was adapted by HBO into the television series Game of Thrones. Although the television storyline concluded a year ago, fans have been waiting for The Winds of Winter, the penultimate book in the series before A Dream of Spring, since the publication of A Dance With Dragons in 2011.
Points: 0
For most of my life, I didn't want to call myself a writer. Not when I was a kid, scribbling at night in my notebook, writing stories about dogs with wings, or changing the endings of Disney films (what if Princess Jasmine just ran off with her tiger?). Not when I was a teenager, trying my hand at thinly-veiled satires of my parents and friends. Not when I was in college, taking workshop after workshop, talking myself into an independent study with a novelist I admired, amassing copies of The Paris Review and taking copious notes, writing for and editing two different campus publications.
The problem with me was that I loved books so much that I thought being a writer was basically the best and most important thing anyone could possibly be. I considered Writing to be a magical, elevated calling - and had decided, in some deep and inaccessible place, that only Nabokovian geniuses and Morrisonian stylists and Plathian poets should be allowed to claim that lofty mantle.
Don't worry: I was cured of this lame and romantic notion as soon as I left college. The agent of my healing? Yes, you guessed it: it was the horrible, glorious internet.
Points: 0
Edgar Allan Poe's life and works have been widely dissected and analyzed by literary scholars almost from the first, that being his untimely, premature, and somewhat mysterious demise in 1849. Rufus Griswold, Poe's executor, was that first, and his fiercely negative account set the tone for confirming and denying major biographical details and personality traits. The list of biographies and critical studies numbers in the hundreds. There will almost certainly be more written about Poe in the future.
What Symons wanted was to untangle the Gordian knot holding together Poe's tumultuous life and fragmented personality with his body of work, ranging from passable, even plagiarized, to outright genius. He decided the only way to do so was to separate Poe's life and his work in discrete sections. As biographical strategies go it is strangely audacious, since, as Symons reflects in his book's coda, "We are bound to ask, almost more urgently than of an other creator, how did this life produce this work? And what sort of artist was he?"
Points: 0
After Hamlet has had his first meeting with what he's pretty convinced is the ghost of his recently departed father, he's none too enthused about the task that his understandably miffed old man sets him to. "The time is out of joint," Hamlet wails, before having a bit of a grumble about what rotten luck it is that it seems to be up to him to set things right.
Has there ever been a time when our trade was more out of joint? I struggle to think of one. I've been in the book trade since I started as a bookseller at Blackwell's in 1983 - although my first job in the trade was a "Saturday kid" at Wolverhampton Public Library in 1976 for the princely sum of £6. Those were the days of Banks's mild at 20p a pint and John Richards gracing the hallowed turf of the Molineux - but back to the book trade, and specifically the UK book trade.
"The virus has exposed the fragility of a supply chain for print books that still largely relies on speculative printing"
Points: 0
A report commissioned by the Centre for New and International Writing at the University of Liverpool has highlighted a stark lack of diversity within poetry publishing and, particularly, poetry criticism.
The report found that although the rate of coverage by black and ethnic minority critics, and coverage about black and ethnic minority poets, has more than doubled since 2017, the reviewing sector is still overwhelming "too white".
In a joint statement the report's authors said: "Although we have seen tremendous change since 2017, critical culture must continue to expand to accurately reflect an increasingly inclusive poetry culture. For a granular reading of our data on a magazine-by-magazine basis see our extended online report. The disparities between each publication are, we believe, as crucial as our over-arching observations.
Points: 0
Like every other business, the publishing industry suffered a major blow during lockdown.
Even as the demand for reading books in print, digital and audio, from War and Peace to Sally Rooney, surged, so bookshops had to shut.
Supplies were halted and publication dates have been shifted, while festivals, launches and book fairs have been largely either cancelled or moved online.
As we come out of lockdown and physical bookstores have just reopened in time for Independent Bookshop Week, how are the players, big and small, planning the next phase?
The Literary Agent
Jonny Geller, Chairman, Curtis BrownSee Curtis Brown listing
As literary agents, it's been hard to do our normal job, which is to see into the future and take a punt. Normally when you're digging down, you'll rebound ferociously and take bigger risks, so I think when that happens, the bounce back is going to be massive, creatively as well as commercially. But it also makes it almost impossible for fiction writers. Do they include Covid, and we've moved on next year so it feels out of date, or do we not want to be reminded of it, which is more likely? And if writers do ignore it, then how do they properly represent our times?
Points: 0
The Hero's Journey was first described by Joseph Campbell. Campbell was an American professor of literature at Sarah Lawrence College. He wrote about the Hero's Journey in his book The Hero with a Thousand Faces. More than a guide, this book was a study on the fundamental structure of myths throughout history.
Through his study, Campbell identified seventeen stages that make up what he called the Monomyth or Hero's Journey. We'll go over these stages in the next section.
Here'ss how Campbell describes the Monomyth in his book: "A hero ventures forth from the world of common day into a region of supernatural wonder: fabulous forces are there encountered and a decisive victory is won: the hero comes back from this mysterious adventure with the power to bestow boons on his fellow man."
Points: 0
The Women's Prize Trust is launching Discoveries, a writers' development programme offering aspiring female writers of all ages and backgrounds "encouragement and support" at the beginning of their creative journeys.
Discoveries will be launching in honour of the 25th anniversary of the Women's Prize for Fiction and "in recognition of untapped diverse and exceptional writing talent across the country".
Kate Mosse, novelist and founder director of Women's Prize for Fiction, said: "Somewhere out there, our Women's Prize winner of the future is considering whether to pick up the pen-to her I want to say: do it. 'Discoveries' is here to help you on your way. For 25 years, the Women's Prize has championed female writers to tell their own stories and make sure as diverse and wide a range of voices are heard. Whether you're 88, 48 or 18, the beginning of one's writing journey is a crucial time and the authors of tomorrow, whoever they are, wherever they are, deserve support today."
Points: 0
"Our ambition is very simple," says SCELF director Nathalie Piaskowski. "We want to entrench and entwine the two events. We want to make the rendezvous a fixture - and export it to other markets and festivals."
And so on June 25, Shoot the Book will kick off this year's edition with a morning pitch session - spotlighting 10 literary properties selected by an industry jury - and return in the afternoon for a three-hour meeting platform that will bring together publishers and producers and allow them to book direct discussions with one another.
"I think producers today see adaptations in a different light than they did a few years ago," says Didier Dutour of the Institut Français. "The problems and risks are different now. They know that adapted properties are in fact advantageous for platforms.
"We've heard this directly from Amazon and Netflix," he continues. "Far from being a problem, adaptations are enormously advantageous to them.
They develop faster and they bring in an existing fan base. So independent producers know they can attract the attention of an international streamer more easily with an adaption."
Points: 0
Back in the mid-1990s I spent four years covering criminal courts for Florida's largest newspaper. It was like being handed free tickets to the greatest shows on Broadway-well, not the musicals, but there was plenty of both tragedy and comedy. I wrote about bumbling hit men who got lost on the way to kill their target, a serial killer who was nailed thanks to a dog named Princess Penny Pickles and a bigamist whose defense was "I forgot I was married" (it worked!)
The one downside was that seeing real courtroom drama forever ruined my enjoyment of a lot of fictional courtroom drama. My wife and I would be watching some TV or movie display of dazzling cross-examination and suddenly I would be compelled to blurt out, "That wouldn't happen in real life." (My wife, a patient woman, never objected to my repeated objections.)
The most famous fictional lawyer is Perry Mason, who's getting a stylish reboot on HBO this week in a series starring Matthew Rhys. I covered about sixty murder trials, and I swear that during jury selection for every single one, either the prosecutor or the defense would say, "This isn't like Perry Mason."
Points: 0
Almost 4m books were sold in the UK in the first six days after bookshops reopened last week - a jump of over 30% on the same week last year as desperate readers returned to browse the aisles for the first time in three months.
Bricks and mortar bookshops in England were able to open to shoppers on 15 June for the first time since they closed their doors in March, in response to the coronavirus pandemic. According to the UK's official sales monitor Nielsen BookScan, which has not been able to report sales figures since 21 March "due to the unprecedented temporary closure of bookshops", 3.8m print books were sold in the week to 20 June, for a value of £33m. This is up 31% in both volume and value compared to the same week last year, even with bookshops in Scotland and Wales still closed over the period. It is the highest value performance for the year's 25th week since 2003, when Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix was released, according to the Bookseller.
Revisiting? Don't forget to sign in!