This year marks the 50th Anniversary of Bouchercon, North America's premiere mystery convention, an event that brings together authors, publishers, and readers alike to celebrate the wide world of crime literature. Bouchercon is much more than a convention with a funny name (in case you were wondering, the "Boucher" part is for legendary mystery critic, editor, and writer, Anthony Boucher)-it's a prime opportunity for fans to gather together and celebrate the wide world of crime and mystery.
Links of the week October 21 2019 (43)
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:
28 October 2019
Alex Segura (nominated for Best Novel-Blackout): I'm not interested in crime novels that don't grapple with the world as it is today. The best crime novels, for my money, also serve as cutting social commentary-they put a mirror up to our world, and show us how we live and are, warts and all. I don't think crime novels should-or can, really-come up with solutions to all of society's ills, but they should damn well try to show us a world that is like our own, so readers can at least take their vitamins with their dessert.
Asked to explain "Why the novel matters", my first question is: "Well, does it?" As soon as I typed that sentence, I then thought that the second logical question would probably have to be "Has it?" But, after typing that, I opened my browser and went to look at the news because I was a little concerned that tanks might be rolling down the Mall in order to disperse pro-democracy protesters. After all, it was 10 September and the night before Boris Johnson had prorogued parliament - illegally as it later turned out - so I, along with plenty of others, was feeling rather like the chair had just been kicked out from under the feet of this country's democracy. I feared, because this had been allowed to happen, we were on the way to a future in which anything might become possible.
In my moment of media-mediated and media-medicated fright, it didn't occur to me to reach for my copy of The Unbearable Lightness of Being, or The Handmaid's Tale or Doctor Faustus rather than the flashing screen and the - necessarily somewhat undigested - prose produced by journalists in the rolling 24-hour news cycle. Without the distraction of the news feeds, I fear my brain will fill up with imagery that frightens me and leaves no space for the words and stories I have spent my life surrounded by.
Les Cowan, author of the David Hidalgo crime thriller series, considers the importance of setting
Are you a country girl or a city boy? Would a week in Las Vegas be a dream or a nightmare? What about a holiday in the Highlands? Is the city exciting and full of possibilities or a world of dangers just waiting to pounce? As in life, so in art - place is important.
Character and plot are often seen as the two sides of the fiction coin. Both are vital, but proportions vary depending on author, genre and style. We may learn little about the protagonists of crime novels beyond the characteristics required by the plot.
But what about sense of place? I would suggest it's also vital, and maybe much overlooked.
First, place is key to authenticity. As readers, we are primarily looking for emotional engagement with a good work of fiction. We want to feel involved and have our imaginations lit up. How better to do this than with strong locations? A burning, lifeless desert. The corrupt and decaying underbelly of the city. A windswept promontory looking out to sea. When these are authentically described we can find ourselves almost immediately in the shoes of of the character. We are there - burned by the sun, looking round for signs of danger, gazing across the waves wondering if the little boat will survive.
There was a spat the other week about a children's book, Equal to Everything: Judge Brenda and the Supreme Court, which is about an encounter between a little girl called Ama and the nation's pin-up, Brenda Hale. The book's author is the Guardian columnist Afua Hirsch. It's written in vague rhyming couplets with the worst illustrations I've ever seen in a book for children.
In a newspaper report about the book, Iain Duncan Smith, the former Tory leader, was quoted saying ‘This looks like deliberate propaganda to bend the minds of children', while MP Andrew Rosindell said that ‘she is being painted into some kind of hero in this book aimed at children'.
Ye-es, Mr R. That's the idea. That's what an awful lot of children's literature is about now: generating role models for woke children. For anyone who reviews, publishes, sells, buys or reads children's books, the move to children's lit as consciousness-forming propaganda has been evident in Britain since at least 2017, when Good Night Stories for Rebel Girls took off. This was a collection of inspirational mini biographies with pictures, about Malala, Maya Angelou et al. At the time it struck me as identical to the saint stories I read as a child, modern hagiography, only with Frieda Kahlo and Michelle Obama instead of Joan of Arc and St Agnes. The impulse is precisely the same: forming young minds.
The next Rebel Girls spin-off is immigrant women who changed the world. There now exists an entire family of spin-offs, from Stories for Boys Who Dare to be Different to Kate Pankhurst's Fantastically Great Women. They lifted sales of non-fiction books for children by 30 per cent last year.
The audio technology company Voxnest owns the podcasting platform Spreaker. The Italy-based StreetLib is a digital book distributor. Last week, they teamed up for a symbiotic relationship that will let StreetLib's book publishers create podcasts and Spreaker's podcasters create and distribute digital books or audiobooks.
It's yet another example of the impact ripples left by the sharp rise of digital audio in the publishing industry. Audiobooks and podcasts alike have been booming across the past few years: Audiobook revenues rose 24.5% over the previous year in 2018, hitting $940 million - it's the seventh year in a row of double-digit revenue growth, by the Audio Publishers Association's estimate.
Getting cozier with podcasts is a smart move for publishers. Everyone's smartphones are omnipresent and thanks to a glut of streaming video services and addictive social platforms, everyone's eyes have a lot to take in. By piping books into audience's ears through the medium of audio, publishers can catch readers' attention during moments when they wouldn't have the time to read a physical book or even watch video - like during their commute or their gym break
About 10 years ago, as the anxiety and hype around digital publishing began to build, I had a lot of conversations about the future. Publishers looked up from the constant churn of new books and projects to examine the far horizon. Big, existential questions were raised and, at least in part, addressed.
It didn't feel absurd for publishing to question every aspect of what it did, how and why. It didn't seem strange to reimagine what it could do. Although this phase was often accompanied by bouts of unreasoning excitement and at times hysteria, these were fascinating and important discussions.
What has happened since? The wave came and went; digital found its niche, but print asserted its ongoing value. Publishing rebounded from the financial crash. Book sales started tracking up; profits boomed. And, for the most part, the blue sky conversations stopped.
The most popular books genres in the UK
It turns out we're a nation hooked on crime and thrillers, with over a third of Brits reading these genres regularly. Mystery and drama follow in third and fourth position, with 34.9% and 32.9% of the population selecting these as their favoured genres.
Both autobiographies and biographies also made the top ten, suggesting life stories to be real page turners.
The most popular books genres in the UK
It turns out we're a nation hooked on crime and thrillers, with over a third of Brits reading these genres regularly. Mystery and drama follow in third and fourth position, with 34.9% and 32.9% of the population selecting these as their favoured genres. Both autobiographies and biographies also made the top ten, suggesting life stories to be real page turners.
Go to the Book People's site to see this information presented in an excellent graphic.
If you spend much time on the internet, you may have heard that mystery novelist and former prosecutor Linda Fairstein was officially canceled earlier this year, when Ava DuVernay's miniseries When They See Us exposed her role in the railroading of the Central Park Five. Last November, the crime writing community got a preview of this drama when the Mystery Writers of America honored Fairstein with the prestigious Grand Master Award, only to rescind it a few days later. (I played a small role in this controversy: I wrote an essay on Fairstein and the award for the Los Angeles Times after Attica Locke-who in addition to writing amazing crime novels wrote on When They See Us-took the MWA to task on Twitter.) This incident caused a bit of a reckoning in our corner of the world, showing the fault lines in our community.
When I was a freshman in college, I took a class on American Detective Fiction with Professor Joyce Moser, a just-for-fun class that introduced me to Raymond Chandler, Dashiell Hammett, and Walter Mosley, and for better or worse completely reconfigured my life path. Fifteen years later, I still remember a particular lecture on form, in which Professor Moser described crime fiction as a "Cconservative" genre. She didn't mean "conservative" in the political sense of the word - only that mystery novels are structurally conservative, often starting with two or three or several seemingly unrelated plotlines that converge, in the end, toward resolution.
After completing eight books (in a series that was initially supposed to be a trilogy), Eoin Colfer thought he was finished with Artemis Fowl, his devilishly naughty anti-hero, when his last adventure released in 2012. Not quite. Colfer returns to the Fowl universe with a new series featuring Artemis's younger brothers, 11-year-old Myles and Beckett, "the first recorded nonidentical twins to be born conjoined," boys who are as different as night and day...We spoke with Colfer about revisiting his popular characters in The Fowl Twins, out next month from Disney-Hyperion.
When Artemis first came out, the combination of lore and science fiction plus fantasy, I presumed hundreds of people had done that before but I have become known for that and it's a nice place to be, to straddle those worlds. I mean, there are plenty of writers who combine fantasy with something else. Neil Gaiman is already doing that pretty well, and Rick Riordan adds mythology, and J.K. Rowling is doing okay, too.
21 October 2019
Overall visitor numbers were up at the 2019 Frankfurt Book FairWorld's largest trade fair for books; held annually mid-October at Frankfurt Trade Fair, Germany; First three days exclusively for trade visitors; general public can attend last two., where rights trade was brisk and events addressed timely topics including Brexit, feminism, racism, and climate crisis.
Big Weekend Crowds Boost Attendance Figures If you thought the the 2019 Frankfurter Buchmesse seemed more crowded than last year, it wasn't your imagination. Security personnel imposed periodic crowd hold-backs on escalators and at major doorways and thoroughfares for safety and the numbers now prove why: Messe Frankfurt was packed.
Frankfurter Buchmesse reported that on the trade visitor days - Wednesday, Thursday, and Friday, October 16, 17, and 18 - attendance was up 1.8 percent, even though the number of exhibitors actually declined a bit - from 7,503 exhibitors from 109 countries in 2018 to 7,450 exhibitors from 104 countries this year.
Writing well is hard. All writers know this. So why don't we talk about it more? But we do, I hear you groan. All writers do is complain. Well, true. But it's also true that most of that complaining comes after said writer has achieved some modicum of success. The back pages of the Best American Short Stories anthologies, for example, are replete with different versions of one tale told over and over: facing constant rejection, a writer wrestles with the prospect of giving up, then a phone call comes at the last minute, telling her that everything she's ever dreamed of is suddenly about to take place.
When the prospect of failure lies just over the horizon, we don't like talking about our unfinished drafts, rejected submissions, or impossible-to-fix manuscripts quite as much. The well intentioned rejections from literary magazines and the "no" emails from agents-sure, they make great dinner party fodder after pub day, but not when we're still waiting for somebody, anybody, to recognize our hard work. Even in this, the era of "fail fast and fail often," for many writers, to admit to not having gotten there yet feels like acknowledging the very real possibility that we might not ever get there at all.
A mini-scandal lit up Twitter last month when the Cut featured a tell-all essay by 27-year-old writer Natalie Beach. In the piece, Beach exposes her seven-year relationship with her friend Caroline Calloway, who scored an agent and a reputed $375,000 book deal for her memoir. Beach, who ghostwrote the book, says her former bestie bought Instagram followers after being told by literary professionals that "no one would buy a memoir from a girl with no claim to fame and no fan base."
Platform has always been key when putting together a nonfiction book proposal. But back in the not-so-very-distant past - a mere dozen years ago! - publishers were throwing six figures and two-book deals at anyone who had a half-decent story and a clip in the local newspaper. These days, a huge following on social media, particularly Instagram, is a must for a book deal.
The moment agents or editors hear an author has a small following or no following, it's over. Yes, there are exceptions. Still, worthy authors are overlooked every day - in favor of a young woman with a photo of macarons that went viral? Now her friend the ghostwriter has CAA shopping rights to her story? Which era is crazier?
You don't expect an author with more than 100 million copies of her books sold into 36 languages and 120 countries to tell you that she's out on a limb.
But Patricia Cornwell tells Publishing Perspectives in an interview from London that one of "the challenges I did not anticipate" in writing her new novel Quantum (October 1) was a lack of the structure that has effectively served her through at least 29 New York Times bestsellers, starting in 1990 with Postmortem.
With her long-running main character, the medical forensic examiner Dr. Kay Scarpetta, "I've had an in-built formula called a procedural," Cornwell says. "And in the course of that, you might get a huge dose" of storytelling energy "from a forensic fire investigation.
"But I don't have a procedure for this. This is going to have to segue more into the world of spying and dealing with the enemy that can harm you remotely, someone you can't seen, not the guy crawling through your window."
The book follows the dormouse from Alice's Adventures in Wonderland as he finds himself in an enchanted New York City and becomes friends with a hard-working bodega cat, a lizard, a rat, an opera singing frog, and a troupe of tap-dancing cockroaches. Together, they fight to save the city from a gang of weasels in porkpie hats who want to stop time. I also wrote songs for the audiobook, which were scored by Em Goldman.
Writing the book had broken me open, filling me with a giddy joy. I dreamed about underground libraries, and the flower district, and cats talking to queens in Chelsea. I wandered around the Lower East Side singing songs about how beautiful New York City was; as soon as I finished Bernard, I started writing a novel about a frog who played the harmonica and his cousin who studied at the Sorbonne. And while I felt a happier writing these books, while I loved getting lost in their worlds, none of this was a departure for me. On the contrary, the happiness I felt was one of returning.
Deborah Levy's The Man Who Saw Everything is out now from Bloomsbury, so we asked her a few questions about the writer's craft, beloved books, and advice.
Who do you most wish would read your book?
I don't think I could write a book with this question in my mind. Reason is, I would be slyly trying to slip things in that I imagine might please my heroine and punish a bully. That would really be an impossible way to write, don't you think? Mind you, I would have loved Lee Miller and Leonora Carrington to have read my books.
Actually, my fantasy is that we are all three of us just lazing around, lying on the floor, reading, drawing, writing. Lee would be taking photographs. There would be a bottle of champagne chilling in the fridge. Perhaps Anais Nin would turn up for a glass and relay her latest sexual adventures. After a while, she too would laze around and write up her journals. I like this atmosphere, but it's not the same as writing books-which requires solitude and stamina and more solitude.
Being a teenager isn't easy. That's been the case for generations, but it's arguably truer than ever in a world growing increasingly complicated. What's also true is that publishers of YA fiction are striving to amplify a variety of teen experiences and engage and entertain a large, diverse readership. We spoke with editors about three areas of expansion.
The YA fantasy genre continues to expand at a steady clip, allowing characters who may have previously been relegated to sidekick status, or not represented at all, to move into the spotlight. "It's so exciting to see underrepresented characters take center stage in worlds that we haven't already explored thousands of times in YA," says Sarah Shumway, executive editor at Bloomsbury.
Joyce Carol Oates brings me joy.
I first met the author at a book signing. We had traded tweets about our pets beforehand, and she'd given me a story for my Anthony-finalist anthology Protectors 2: Heroes. But when she saw me, she leaned over to her friend the artist and author Jonathan Santlofer and exclaimed, "have you met Thomas? He's a lovely kitty man."
I am a large and hirsute man, a "temperate yeti," in the parlance of a witty friend, and the "kitty man" nickname brought a few laughs. I have since embraced it; as a big goon with a nose smashed flat from fight training, it's been a good icebreaker at readings.
As one of the most daring writers working (in my opinion), she began writing regularly when she was fourteen, and was gifted a manual typewriter; she won a Scholastic award in her teens, the National Book Award for her novel them at age 32, and was given the National Humanities Medal by President Barack Obama in 2010. With her husband Ray Smith, she published The Ontario Review literary journal until his death in 2008. She writes in many genres including Gothic and crime; if any would doubt she is a crime writer at heart, one of her formative literary moments was after reading the horse-whipping scene in Dostoevsky's Crime and Punishment, which defined her duty as a writer: "Uplifting endings and resolutely cheery world views are appropriate to television commercials but insulting elsewhere..."
BEST-SELLING author Martina Cole has just ordered me to strip. "Get it off, get it off now!" she commands, her rasping voice loaded with authority.
BEST-SELLING author Martina Cole has just ordered me to strip. "Get it off, get it off now!" she commands, her rasping voice loaded with authority.
For a moment I'm terrified. When the "Queen of Crime", who counts London gangsters such as Krays' rival Eddie Richardson as friends, gives you an order it would be foolish not to listen. But thankfully she was only telling me to take off my soaked jacket after I was caught in a downpour heading to meet her and she was worried I'd get pneumonia. That exchange sums Cole up. She's intense and fierce when she wants to be, but caring and kind as well.