A Siege of Bitterns with Steve Burrows

Today’s guest blog is by Steve Burrows who is the author of the novel A Siege of Bitterns. It was named Globe and Mail 100: Best Books of 2014, won the 2015 Arthur Ellis Award for Best First Novel and was shortlisted in 2015 for the Best Mystery Kobo Emerging Writer Prize.

Having spent a long time shaping their novel into a complex, multi-layered story, considering how they can condense it into a tiny fraction of its original size probably isn’t high on any writer’s list of priorities. But perhaps it should be.

When I looked down the ‘to-do’ list my publisher sent me in the lead up to the release of my first novel, A Siege of Bitterns, one item set the alarm bells ringing immediately; produce a series of synopses that captured the essence of the work. And do it in ever-decreasing word counts. Five-hundred, one hundred and twenty-five, thirty, even. Imagine it, a tweet to convey the major points of a full-length novel. It would be easier to create a cast of a hundred and forty characters for your novel.

So where to start? Clearly I had to outline the book’s scope. The series sub-title helped. But A Birder Murder Mystery still left plenty of ambiguities. Are the birders the murderers, or the murdered? Both? Neither? And what about the birding aspect? Do readers need to be birders to enjoy this murder mystery? (No). Do they need any special knowledge about birds or birding? (Again, no.) Is it primarily a murder mystery, then, with birding as merely a sub-theme? (Exactly. Glad you asked.)

After that, it was a case of trying to anticipate what people might want to know about my book. But, of course, this varies wildly from reader to reader. I have a friend who always reads the last page of a mystery first. He wants to know whether the resolution is worth the effort of getting to it. (For the record, I don’t understand this approach either, but I saved him the trouble in this case, and simply told him the answer was a resounding YES). Other friends wanted to know whether the book contained gratuitous violence (no), excessive foul language (no) or sex (yes, in that each character has one).

Still others had specific questions about a particular aspect of the book. Why, for example, did I choose to set my novel in a picturesque seaside village on the north Norfolk coast? There was a reason; three of them, in fact, but they are inextricably tied to other aspects of the story, and offering any sort of a lucid explanation would run well beyond my allotted word counts.

Most, though, acknowledged that the engine of a good murder mystery is a compelling plot, filled with twists and turns and surprises. How did mine stack up? If there’s a formula for answering this in a hundred and forty characters or less, I never found it. All I could do was ask people to read the book and let me know. Many have. I hope you will, too.

In the end, I decided to concentrate my synopses mostly on the characters. After all, if things continue to go well (three Birder Murders completed already, and another three commissioned), it’s the characters who are going to endure, with whom the readers are going to connect, and in whose lives they are going to invest their leisure-reading hours. So I told people about the young transplanted Canadian Detective Chief Inspector, who has achieved marvelous things already in his short career but now must prove himself all over again to a bunch of skeptical, seasoned coppers in his new posting. And how this task is made all the more difficult since he would really rather be birdwatching than solving crimes. I moved then to the main character’s girlfriend; smart and sassy and very much in love with her man, even if she’s totally befuddled by this birding nonsense of his. The birding doesn’t make much sense to the older sergeant assigned to the new DCI, either. But he recognizes a special talent when he sees one, and he’s prepared to give his new boss all the support he can. He’ll even introduce him the ways and by-ways of the local area as a bonus. The protagonist’s DCS is a smart, savvy politico who recognizes the benefits of having a poster-boy media star on her crew, and so is prepared to indulge his eccentric lines of questioning and his ever more eccentric theories. But not indefinitely.

In the end, I never did manage to convey all this in the thirty words that were allotted to me, or even in one hundred and twenty-five, or five-hundred. But I hope I’ve just demonstrated how it might be done in seven hundred and fifty.

A SIEGE OF BITTERNS by Steve Burrows is published by Point Blank, paperback £7.99.

Domenic Jejeune is a reluctant police hero but an enthusiastic birdwatcher. After he's promoted to a post in the heart of Britain's birding country, his first case involves the murder of an environmentalist. Torn between loyalties to his job and his hobby, Jejeune faces mistrust from his colleagues and self-doubt as he works to solve the case.

More information about Steve Burrows can be found on his website. You can also follow him on Twitter @birddetective and find him on Facebook.

Sherlock Holmes Season at the University of Hertfordshire

UHArts and the University of Hertfordshire present A Study in Sherlock, a season of films and presentations throughout March 2016. The season continues this week with:

The Private Life of Sherlock Holmes (1970), with special guest speaker Ian Edginton, author of Self Made Hero¹s Sherlock Holmes graphic novels. 3 March, 7:30pm (doors: 7pm).

Followed by:
Sherlock Holmes - A Game of Shadows (2011), 17 March 
Mr. Holmes (2015), 24 March

Tickets: £4
Location: John Lill Theatre, B01, FMM building, College Lane Campus, University of Hertfordshire AL10 9AB Online booking: 
http://www.ticketline.co.uk/venue/bo-1-fmm-building#the-private-life-of-sherlock-holmes-1970-bo-1-fmm-building-2016-03-10-19-30-0o 

Ticket line: 0844 8889 991, or buy on the door.

For the schedule of remaining events, see:
http://www.herts.ac.uk/about-us/arts-and-galleries/whats-on/film

Are Thrillers Literature? - Yusuf Toropov

I came to the thriller genre innocent as a newborn baby.

In fact, I didn’t even realise I was writing one until I was more than 10,000 words into my novel Jihadi: A Love Story. Beta readers kept telling me I was writing a thriller, and at first that left me a little confused. I had no idea what the definition of a thriller novel was. I looked that up and found that International Thriller Writers considered a thriller to be a novel driven by ‘the sudden rush of emotions, the excitement, sense of suspense, apprehension, and exhilaration that drive the narrative, sometimes subtly with peaks and lulls, sometimes at a constant, breakneck pace’. Another definition told me that a thriller matched a resourceful human protagonist, often cut off from his or her support network, against one or more better-equipped villains out to destroy the protagonist, his or her nation, and/or world stability. I had no problem with any of that, so I kept on writing. But some questions kept nagging at me. Why do thrillers – novels from a genre that had apparently chosen me, rather than me choosing it – get so little respect? What was I getting myself into with this book? Why do we so often think of thrillers as something you read on a long airplane flight, to distract yourself and then set aside, as opposed to something you read to for joy, for learning, for growth as a person?

The answer came back (and it was my own, nobody else’s): Because thrillers aren’t real literature.

Yes. I’m ashamed now that this thought flashed across my brain pan. And yes. I know it isn’t true. I promise, I didn’t speak those words out loud when I thought them, and I promise I haven’t spoken them out loud since, and I promise that the first time I’ve had the courage to type them is right now, for this blog. I typed those five disgraceful words out as a means of full, repentant disclosure. I really don’t know what came over me.

I do know thrillers can be real literature. By ‘real literature’, all I mean is a book that an intelligent person would want to at least consider reading twice. (Edward Wilson’s A Very British Ending comes to mind.) Here are three things I did in my novel in the hope of helping it to fall into that category.

I tried to emphasize character development. The protagonist of my story, Thelonius Liddell, also known as Ali Liddell, is a US intelligence agent accused of terrorism, held in a secret overseas prison. We follow him from boyhood into his mid-forties, and he is manifestly not the same person at the end of the book as he is when we see him as a youngster. The story gives us his major life decisions, his lessons, and his attempts to atone for the mistakes he feels he’s made. In short, his character arc. It is meant to be a broad arc. I meant him to go on a journey of transformation.

I chose big themes and tried to explore them in depth. A novel has to be about something, and even though mine might appear from a distance to deal exclusively with topical issues, I actually wanted it to operate along lines that would still be relevant and important fifty, a hundred, or two hundred years from now. These included justice, love, striving, authenticity, and the influence that one’s own perspective has on the search for truth. If any of that sounds elitist or high-minded, I don’t mean it to. I still wanted to write a page-turner. Given that a good story always carries some thematic message, though, I think a thriller is likelier to reward the reader, and inspire a second look, if it chooses big themes and follows them wherever they may lead.

I chose metaphors and images with care. Hemingway put forth something known as the ‘Iceberg Theory’, under which the metaphors and images chosen by a writer are held to be capable of carrying far more of the meaning of the story than the more commonly relied-upon narrative elements of description and dialogue. Thus a character’s holding a cigarette with a long ash that’s about to collapse may say more about the smoker’s fragile mental state than any number of descriptive sentences about the character, or than something the character says. I tried to write the novel bearing the Iceberg Theory in mind.

It’s a bit pretentious, I know, appealing to the status of ‘literature’ for any book one has written. That’s really for someone else to decide, not me. All I am sharing here is what I understand ‘real literature’ to be – that which one would be inclined to read again, having finished it – and my conviction that, despite that dark lapse in thinking I shared earlier, of which I am heartily ashamed, and which I will not type here again, great thrillers can indeed come under that heading. At any rate, I tried to write one that did.

You can find more information about Yusuf Toropov on his website.  You can also follow him on Twitter @LiteraryStriver and you can find him on Facebook.

Chris Pavone on The Endless Pitch

Chris Pavone's first novel The Expats won both an Edgar Award and an Anthony Award for Best First Novel. 

I still remember the first time I saw Jacqueline Onassis pitching a book. We were in Doubleday’s conference room, in a newly constructed skyscraper whose architecture was meant to evoke the prow of a ship, with a glass triangle protruding from the façade, jutting out into Times Square. If you stood in the floor-to-ceiling-windowed corner of the prow, you could imagine you were flying. Like DiCaprio and Winslet, but this was a half-decade earlier, and in the real world.

Perhaps forty people were in this seasonal launch meeting, arrayed around a big table as well as chairs that lined the perimeter of the room, salespeople and marketers and publicists, production and design and me, a twenty-four-year-old copy editor.

Each acquiring editor took a turn to stand and present his or her books for the season’s list, the thirty new hardbacks that would be going on-sale a half-year or more in the future, books that had already been acquired, written, delivered, edited, accepted. This was the editor’s opportunity to convince the publishing house that each of her books was original, or notable, or unique, or beautiful, or whatever was special about the project, whatever was the reason the thing was going to exist in the world. Most importantly, it was the editor’s obligation to convince her colleagues that the book was saleable.

I don’t remember the titles that Mrs. Onassis pitched. What I do remember was how hard she tried, how impassioned she was, entreating about how some author had been working on the manuscript for years, how good the book had become, how much it deserved a place in the world. Some colleagues were skeptical; they challenged her with questions.

There were a few things about this episode that were revelatory to me. First was that this woman, arguably the most famous in the world, was in this circumstance just another editor, someone who came to work and did a job.

Second was that Jackie Onassis’s job, like many others, entailed asking other people for something, day in and day out. For book editors, it’s asking for attention for her books. It’s pitching.

Third was that the pitching never ends. I’d thought these books had already been pitched to death. An author had pitched an agent. Agent had pitched acquiring editor. Acquiring editor had pitched her colleagues, I’d like to take on this project, could you give it a read? Then editor maybe pitched an editorial board, a publisher, may I have permission to offer 10, 50, a million? Publisher may have pitched CEO.

Then the book was acquired, contract signed, advance paid. At this point, I sort of assumed the pitching was over.

Absolutely not. Then came the pitching for endorsements. Pitching inside the publishing house—for an aggressive marketing budget, for sales goals, for production bells-and-whistles. Pitching for the trade publications to review, for catalogs to carry, for book clubs to adopt. For newspaper reviews and magazine features, for TV-morning-show segments and radio interviews. For a mass-market-paperback subsidiary-rights sale, film adaptations or television, foreign translations, audio or large-print licensing agreements. Pitching to libraries and wholesalers, book chains and independents, newsstands and grocery stores, huge corporations and mom-and-pop businesses, pitching in hotel ballrooms with microphones and in small offices one-on-one.

All before a single copy is in the hands of a single reader.

Until, ultimately, after hundreds or even thousands of pitches, there she is, one reader is standing in one bookshop. She’s appraising the cover, running her fingers over the embossed spot-laminated type that the editor pitched to spend the money on, reading the endorsement from a famous author, one of dozens of luminaries whom the editor pitched, but only a few responded; these authors get pitched hundreds of times per year. This book landed on this particular display table because the sales rep pitched the bookstore buyer who pitched the merchandising director, who said, Okay, we’ll give it a couple of weeks, see how it sells.

The reader turns to the bookstore clerk. “What’s it about?”

The clerk knows this book’s pitch; he’s heard it before, more than once. “A travel writer,” he begins, “who becomes a spy . . .”

The Travelers by Chris Pavone is out on 10th March (Faber & Faber, £12.99)

The Travelers by Chris Pavone

Will Rhodes is an award-winning correspondent for The Travelers, on assignment at a luxury Argentinian resort - fine wines and gourmet food, polo fields and the looming Andes.  But Will's life is about to be turned upside down when a new flirtation turns into something far more dangerous, and he only realises too late.   Turns out he's been targeted, he just doesn't know why. He doesn't know what these people truly want and how far into his life they will reach, to his friends and his colleagues, to his boss and his wife. He doesn't know that they will stop at nothing in their pursuit, and he doesn't know about the secrets he has already been keeping...

More information about Chris Pavone and his books can be found on his website.

Deal Noir - Saturday 2nd April 2016

9.00      Registration

9.25       Welcome by Susan Moody

9.30       There’s A Time And A Place For Everything
Guy Fraser-Sampson, Daniel Pembrey, Linda Regan and William Shaw
moderated by Craig Sisterson

10.25      New Blood  (Sweat and Tears)
Alison Bailie, Simon Booker, Susi Holiday & Sarah Ward
moderated by Andy Lawrence

                Coffee

11.35       Around The World In 80 Slays
Piergiorgio Pulixi, William Ryan, Yrsa Sigurdardottir,  Edward Turner
participating moderator by Quentin Bates

12.35       May The Force Be With You
Lisa Cutts, Michael Fowler, Matt Johnson, David Videcette
moderated by William Horwood

                Lunch

2.00       Agatha Christie Cover Story
Dr John Curran and David Brawn

3.00       Watching The Detectives
Simon Brett, John Harvey, Susan Moody, Andrew Taylor
moderated by Ayo Onatade

               Coffee

4.25        Leading Ladies
Elly Griffiths,  Elizabeth Haynes,  Sarah Hilary,  Alex Marwood
participating moderator Allison Joseph

5.25                           TBA

5.45        Announcement of Flash Fiction Award and Closure by Susan Moody

Tickets can be booked here.

Newcastle Noir Programme

Fringe: 25th -28th April
Monday 25th Talk: Murderous Newcastle – Fact and Fiction Pat Lowery 6pm Free
Tuesday 26th Workshop: Valerie Laws 6-8pm £10/£7*
Wednesday 27th Talk: Gail-Nina Anderson – Bodysnatchers 6pm Free


Festival Launch Friday 29th April

The Festival will be launched by Ann Cleeves who will be talking about and reading from her work 7pm – Free

Saturday 30th April 2016

Time: 09:30
Activity: Crime Workshop*
Participants

Time 11:00 – 12:00
Activity: Panel 1- Icelandic Noir
Participants: Lilja Sigurđardóttir, Yrsa Sigurđardóttir, Sólveig Palsdottir and Antti Tuomainen

Time: 12:30 – 1:30
Activity:  Panel 2- Novellas and Short Stories
Participants: Quentin Bates, Daniel Pembrey, Paul Gitsham, and Cath Staincliffe

Time: 2:30pm – 3:30pm
Activity: In Conversation With
Participants: Élmer Mendoza and Mauricio Montiel Figueiras

Time: 4:00pm – 5:00pm
Activity: Panel 3 – Historical
Participants: Frances Brody, Kate Griffin, Clare Carson, and Luke McCallin

Time: 5:30pm – 6:30pm
Activity: Panel 4 - Thriller
Participants:  Paul Hardisty, Yusuf Toropov, Michael Grothaus and Craig Robertson

Time: 7:30pm – 8:30pm
Activity: Panel 5 - Supernatural
Participants: AK Benedict, Lucy Cameron, Alexandra Sokoloff, and Oscar de Muriel

* £10/£7 (or £20/£10 for both workshops)

Sunday 1st May 2016
Time: 11:00 – 12:00

Activity:  Panel 1 – Brit Noir
Participants: Susi Holliday, Sarah Ward, Helen Cadbury, Barry Forshaw and Amanda Jennings

Time: 12:30 – 1:30
Activity: Panel 2 – Nordic Noir
Participants: Mari Hannah, Gunnar Staalsen, Kati Hiekkapelto, and Jónína Leosdóttir

Time: 2:30pm – 3:30pm
Activity: Panel 3 – Writing Everywhere
Participants: Alex Shaw, Barbara Nadel, and Michael Stanley

Time: 4:00pm – 5:00pm
Activity: In Conversation With
Participants: Val McDermid and Gail-Nina Anderson

Time: 5:30pm – 6:30pm
Activity: Panel 4 – New Blood
Participants: Graham Smith, Col Bury, Alison Taylor-Bailie, Amit Dhand

Time: 7:30pm – 8:30pm
Activity: In Conversation With
Participants: Sophie Hannah and Sheila Quigley

Time: 9:00pm – 10:00pm
Activity: End of Festival Quiz

 

 

 

 

 

ES Thomson on the History of Medicine

Today’s guest blog is by E. S. Thomson who has a PhD in the history of medicine and works as a university lecturer in Edinburgh.  She was shortlisted for the Saltire First Book Award and the Scottish Arts Council First Book Award. Beloved Poison is her debut novel.

The history of medicine is a splendidly bizarre and shocking source for the historical crime writer to draw upon.  From Rose Tremain’s fabulous Restoration, to the dazzling complexity of Iain Pears An Instance of the Fingerpost, medicine and medical matters have provided a rich gothic pallet for the historical and crime novelist’s art.

For me, medical history offers too much that is unusual, macabre and extraordinary to be left between the pages of history books.  For my novel, BELOVED POISON, the dark and exciting history of early nineteenth century medicine offered an evocative, alarming and inspiring world.  Individuals provide us with a way in: John Hunter, anatomist extraordinaire, amassed one of the largest collections of anatomical specimens in the whole country – along the way testing the idea that gonorrhoea and syphilis had the same origins by smearing infected pus onto his own penis.  Hunter was unofficially in cahoots with the resurrectionists, taking bodies in at the back door of his home-cum-anatomy-school, while his wife opened the front door to society ladies.  Once dissected – organs sliced and pickled in formaldehyde, arteries and veins injected with coloured resin to preserve their filigree pathways – Hunter boiled up the bodies in a great copper cauldron til their bones were clean – as good a place as any to hide a murdered corpse, surely?  Others, such as toxicologist Robert Christison, tried numerous poisons on themselves, with an emetic standing by so they could induce vomiting once the symptoms had been noted.  A thrilling, risky approach to medical and scientific discovery, it is also one in which murder might be concealed as accidental overdose.   

Along with Hunter and Christison, men such as Joseph Lister (pioneer of antiseptic surgery) William MacEwen (the man who put doctors into white coats), Robert Knox (disgraced by the Burke and Hare scandal) and Joseph Bell (the doctor Sherlock Holmes is based upon) all had reputations or notoriety that I drew upon to flesh out the characters in my novels.   What would it take for the ambition and jealousy of such individuals to spill over into murder?  How might those who have been schooled in the art of life and death abuse their power?  How difficult might it be to uncover the truth once such men had taken a life rather than preserved it?

Aside from those at the top of the profession, history gives us a unique view of the people at the bottom:  the patients.  Riddled with diseases for which there was no cure, or with minds and bodies ravaged by syphilis – both the pox and the clap (incurable before the twentieth century) offer us limitless potential for madness, horror and death – the patients, of whatever class, were at the mercy of those who purported to treat them. 

Consider too what we might call the ‘ancillary services’: resurrectionists have been the stuff of fiction since … well, since Burke and Hare.  How many innocent citizens ended up on the anatomists’ tables via foul means?  The tools of the grave robber would be familiar to most medical students prior to the Anatomy Act of 1832.

And what of the atmosphere of the historical crime novel?  Public health and sanitary reform might be words of the dullest hue, yet to any writer worth their salt they conjure up an atmosphere that, quite literally, reeks of death.  The stink from decaying matter, the great quantities of human and animal waste that gathered in pits and pools, in mounds and middens – so many opportunities to kill, to asphyxiate, to drown, to bury alive in a mountain of stinking refuse.  Falling (or being pushed) into any body of water in the city – the Fleet Ditch, the Thames, the Westbourne to name but three – would almost certainly result in death.  Drinking water drawn from a street pump could signal a painful and undignified end for hundreds if the cholera was in town.  Such a fate might be an occupational hazard for those living in the metropolis, but it might also be an opportunity for murder that might easily go undetected.  The history of medicine is a giant topic of limitless potential to the historical crime fiction writer.  How lucky we are to have such material to inspire us.

Beloved Poison by E S Thomson is out now (Constable £14.99)