Cover Story: The Life of Crime – by Martin Edwards

Writers like me hate to admit it, but when it comes to selling books, the cover artwork is just as important as the contents. Booksellers make judgments about what to stock based on the cover artwork they see in publishers’ catalogues. Book buyers, too, are drawn to some covers rather than others. And the same is even true online, where the ‘thumbnail’ image of a book poses special design challenges. So when I was working on my history of crime fiction, The Life of Crime, I kept wondering how my publishers, HarperCollins, would approach the question of the cover.

I was truly delighted to be told that the brief had been given to Steve Leard. Steve is a freelance graphic designer based in Plymouth, specialising in book design, branding and illustration. After initially getting his break in the publishing world by working at Bloomsbury, he now regularly designs covers for publishers both large and small and around the world. I was already familiar with his meticulous approach because he’d designed the wonderful artwork for a previous book of mine. This was Howdunit, a book about the art and graft of crime writing which I put together to celebrate the Detection Club’s ninetieth birthday – so it contained essays by ninety different writers.

‘Sometimes,’ Steve explained, ‘the challenge itself is actually the key to solving the design problem. With so many names to fit on one cover, a device was needed to carry them all. Crime covers often use certain tropes to identify the genre, so using a fingerprint on a crime cover isn't exactly ground-breaking, but trying to use it in a different way to give this book a twist seemed like a good idea and could help to house all of the names. I liked the idea of seeing the cover from across the bookshop or as a small thumbnail on Amazon and initially seeing something suggesting a fingerprint, but then the closer you look you realise it’s actually made of lots of names.’

The practicalities are all-important, Steve explained: ‘I initially created the design on the computer using Illustrator. From early on in the process I was keen to create a rubber stamp to physically print the design, which would add to the feel of it being an actual fingerprint. This could have been achieved to a degree on the computer, but for me, you can’t beat physically producing work away from the computer to achieve a better result. It may seem like a small detail to some, but those details mean everything really. Once the cover had been approved by the publishers, I contacted Blade Rubber Stamps in London, who turned the design into a rubber stamp, which I then printed and scanned back onto the computer.

 I suggested to him that another challenge was to retain the simplicity of the design, which is what gives the cover its strength. ‘Yes,’ Steve said. ‘It’s quite unusual in trade publishing to have no hierarchy on the cover, so not clearly having the title of the book large and clearly defined. Credit for this has to go to Claire Ward – the Art Director at Harper Collins. I’m still not sure how she managed to get this cover approved without any major changes, but I’m very pleased she did!’ Me too. The book proceeded to win the H.R.F. Keating award and was nominated for four other major prizes in Britain and the US.

The Life of Crime is a very different book, in that the contents are all my own work, rather than a combination of pieces by ninety different authors. Given that the scope of the book is wide-ranging, it made sense for Steve to focus on a relatively simple (yet eye-catching) image to give a flavour of the book, rather than trying to reflect the complexity of the genre’s evolution since the late eighteenth century, since that might risk creating an impression of clutter.

‘After the success of Howdunit,’ Steve says, ‘I wanted The Life of Crime to feel part of the same design family, so when the design had been approved I once again had a rubber stamp made to give that textured feel that worked so well on the previous book. Like Howdunit, the challenge with this cover was creating something that fits into the crime/thriller market, but not heavily relying on genre tropes and cliches. I wanted this book to feel big and iconic, to reflect the fact that it is the first major history of crime fiction in 50 years.’

As I’m writing this article ahead of publication, I’ve no idea how critics and readers will react to The Life of Crime. But at least I’m confident of one thing. It looks good on the shelf!

The Life of Crime by Martin Edwards (HarperCollins) Out 26th May 2022.

In the first major history of crime fiction in fifty years, The Life of Crime: Detecting the History of Mysteries and their Creators traces the evolution of the genre from the eighteenth century to the present, offering brand-new perspective on the world's most popular form of fiction. Author Martin Edwards is a multi-award-winning crime novelist, the President of the Detection Club, archivist of the Crime Writers' Association and series consultant to the British Library's highly successful series of crime classics, and therefore uniquely qualified to write this book. He has been a widely respected genre commentator for more than thirty years, winning the CWA Diamond Dagger for making a significant contribution to crime writing in 2020, when he also compiled and published Howdunit: A Masterclass in Crime Writing by Members of the Detection Club and the novel Mortmain Hall. His critically acclaimed The Golden Age of Murder (Collins Crime Club, 2015) was a landmark study of Detective Fiction between the wars. The Life of Crime is the result of a lifetime of reading and enjoying all types of crime fiction, old and new, from around the world. In what will surely be regarded as his magnum opus, Martin Edwards has thrown himself undaunted into the breadth and complexity of the genre to write an authoritative - and readable - study of its development and evolution. With crime fiction being read more widely than ever around the world, and with individual authors increasingly the subject of extensive academic study, his expert distillation of more than two centuries of extraordinary books and authors - from the tales of E.T.A. Hoffmann to the novels of Patricia Cornwell - into one coherent history is an extraordinary feat and makes for compelling reading.

More information about Martin Edwards and his work can be found on his website. You can also follow himon Twitter @medwardsbooks and also on Facebook.