littorally

Sale to Hitchcock’s

Concentrating on novel-length stuff means that I’ve been doing very little with short stories in the last year, so it was good news to hear this weekend that Hitchcock’s have bought my story ‘A Walk In The Park’.

Lessons learned, noir, and a new start

Dave Zeltserman’s running a series of articles on his blog, Lessons Learned From The Trenches, about everything he’s learned in the sixteen years since he started taking writing seriously. Congratulations too to Dave on the news that the French house Rivages have made an offer for Small Crimes.

Elsewhere, Peter at the ever-interesting Detectives Beyond Borders is asking his readers what they talk about when they talk about noir.

And here…well, after six months of frustration and blank sheets of paper, one morning of inspiration and frantic scribbling has come up with the plan for the next novel. The amusing thing is, it’s nothing like any of the ideas that I was playing with, it’s not even in the same genre. But who cares.

Review: NO MORE HEROES by Ray Banks

NO MORE HEROES, the third novel by Ray Banks to feature sometime PI Cal Innes, finds Cal serving eviction notices for Plummer, a slum landlord. Cal spars and bickers with his colleague, Daft Frank, is as offensive to Plummer as he can be and still keep his job, and just tries to get on with life without ending up too hurt.

But one eviction job turns into something very different, and Cal ends up a local hero after rescuing a child from a house that’s been set on fire. Cal walks out of his job, but ends up taking Plummer’s money again to investigate whether the English National Socialists are behind the arson, and whether there are more burnings to come. The investigation is hampered by the enthusiastic help of Daft Frank, a student protest against Plummer’s business, a looming race-riot, and Cal’s ever-present struggle with his back pain. The amount of codeine he takes is getting out of hand (try Tramadol Cal, it’s better). Cal justifies this a number of times throughout the novel by talking about his ‘medical condition’, but Banks very deftly makes Cal’s self-pity and dependency come into sharper and sharper relief, and the other characters - and the reader - can see what Cal cannot or will not see for himself.

Innes makes a very reluctant hero. He’d rather be at home with a bottle of vodka, and doesn’t have a lot of time for most of the people he meets in the novel. And yet for all his cynicism, there’s a faint echo of Chandler’s man on the mean streets who is not himself mean, and never more than at the point in NO MORE HEROES when Cal decides the hell with it, someone’s got to do something so it might as well be him.

Having just moaned about locations, it’s good to see that Banks offers a Manchester which is vivid and sharply drawn, and the world of slumlords, dodgy backstreet garages and racist politics is well-drawn and convincing. Banks resists descending into caricature: the plot, characters and setting are compelling and drive the story on, but the novel still tells the truth about what twenty-first century Britain can be like. It’s good to see writing like this which shows that you can tell a story that keeps the reader turning the pages, without trying to pile high-concept on high-concept to the point at which reality quietly excuses itself and leaves the room. It would be a mistake though to think that this means NO MORE HEROES is po-faced social commentary , as there’s a strong thread of humour running right throughout the novel. This is particularly effective for often being so well understated.

We could perhaps have done with seeing a little more of the characters who turn out to be behind the fire; that we don’t does make them a little opaque, and harder for the author to make their motivation convincing as it could be. First person narration always always makes this harder to achieve though, and as Cal’s voice is one of the best things about the novel, maybe it’s a trade-off worth making, at least in part.

There’s a shocking surprise in the ending, and I’m looking forward to seeing what implications it has for the next Cal Innes novel, and how Banks handles this, because things will never be quite the same for Cal. A brave move, and one that steps aside from some of the usual cliches that the genre can throw out for effect.

While I’ve enjoyed the previous novels, there’s something different about NO MORE HEROES. This is a writer who has really found his voice - there’s a confidence about the writing that shines through. Ray Banks is in total control of his characters, his plot, he’s writing at the top of his game, and NO MORE HEROES shows that on every page.

Relocation, relocation, relocation

Obviously taking its queue from my recent post about fictional cities versus real cities, the Guardian books blog gets in on the act.

Location, location, location

Well, the last month has been strange and no mistake. Circumstances have meant the world has been rather dreamlike and unreal. Can’t believe it has only been a month, too. So much seems to have happened…and yet much of it doesn’t feel like it has really happened at all.

So, onwards.

Location seems to be a big selling point in some crime fiction these days, the city or town concerned receiving prominent coverage, usually on the cover with something like: ‘Puts Sheerness on the crime fiction map’. I’ve heard comments too that a new location is one of the first things that agents and publishers look for.

I have a couple of problems with this. One is, a drive for originality that means it might be that much harder to sell an Edinburgh novel, too mined by Rankin, or Oxford, too exhausted by Dexter’s Morse. And so many cities now have the writer that everyone associates with them. So you see the settings spread out to other cities, towns, locations that maybe aren’t quite the right setting, not big enough, not plausible enough for the crimes at hand. But hey, they’re new, no-one’s walked that beat before, and besides, it puts Hartlepool on the crime fiction map.

Other than the choice of location, the other problem is that having put that location at the heart of the novel, it’s very hard for the writer to avoid showing it off. After all, it’s what the readers are going to expect. Not a bad thing at all, to have the story grounded in vivid, compelling detail. But I’ve read a few too many where the writer puts you on an open-topped tour bus, and takes you to see the sights. Over here, on the left, the famous steps. There’ll be a chase here, later. If you look to your right now, you will see the museum. We won’t be going in there, too dull. But we’ll stop for lunch in this pub I know, for no other reason than well, I know it. But if you look now, down to the river, you will see the famous bridge, and of course it’s going to show up in the climactic scene. How could it not?

While I like reading novels with a setting that’s fresh, or a perspective that’s new (which is why I’ve read so much Eurocrime over the past year, I can hardly say otherwise), there’s a danger that so much attention is paid to the novelty of the setting that the essential honesty of the novel suffers. That you get a novel which spends so much time showing what Dorking that the people pale beside the scenary. Swap one set of landmarks for another, and you could be anywhere. Or nowhere.

Some of my favourite novels are set in places of the writer’s own invention, and don’t feel any less real for it. Sometimes, they feel more real for it. Perhaps the writers have spent less time on getting it accurate, and more time on getting it right.

Authenticity is over-rated. No, forget that. Authenticity is vital. It’s reality that is over-rated. What matters most is what is true, and good writing shows us this just as well in a place of the writer’s own creation as it does in any place you’ll find on a road atlas.

(Do you have any preference, either as a reader or a writer?)

FX: Tumbleweeds

Hello. Been a while, I know. I blame Christmas and holidays and other such distractions. Yeah, I know it’s nearly the end of January. I’ve spent the last couple of weeks floating on a soft fluffy cloud of some really rather good painkillers, on account of the ruptured disc at the bottom of the spine deciding to take industrial action by holding a sit-in on a nerve. At the hospital on Monday to see the spinal surgery people: four years ago when this first happened, I decided against an operation, but this time I might go for it, if offered, as I am bored of ‘managing’ it, and wondering when it’s going to go next.

Am still stuck in a rut with plans for the next novel. Have a dozen ideas, but don’t like any of them enough to get excited about it, or to feel that they’ve got enough in them to go the distance across 90,000 words.

In news elsewhere, Mark Lawson is not keen on the idea that you have to have chemically-induced brain damage in order to lower yourself to writing crime fiction.

Every writer struggles with point of view now and then; third person omniscient can be a particular challenge.

The opposite of shoplifting? Shopdropping.

Congratulations to Olen Steinhauer. If you haven’t read any of Olen’s novels yet, do yourself a favour. They’re fantastic.

Are you a half-crazed liquorish nonagenarian? Michael Berry offers five lessons that writers can learn from HP Lovecraft (link courtesy of John Baker).

And finally, surely some of the finest examples of the wax dummy maker’s art.