Talking with Whyte Python’s author Travis Kennedy

 

Very rarely have I enjoyed reading a debut novel [that contained such an absurd plot] as I did last week with The Whyte Python World Tour by Travis Kennedy.

It kept me reading with my hands glued to the cover as if my life depended upon reaching the end.

It provoked thought and reflection, while it constantly made me smile and at several points - laugh out loud. It also made my eyes moist as I considered [and contextualised] my own life.

In a crazy world that depresses me and fills me with anxiety whenever I view the TV News – The Whyte Python World Tour – became an antidote as it made me feel good – it put a big smile on my face as it held me in its grip.

Without going totally hyperbolic – this debut novel was / is life-affirming.

I was first made aware of this extraordinary debut by Publisher Rowland White during the Michael Joseph Crime Party, held in February [Crypt at St Martins-in-the-Fields Trafalgar Square in London].

This year [2025] marks the 90th anniversary of the formation of Penguin Publishing.

Michael Joseph was a bestselling author before he turned publisher in 1935 – the same year Penguin paperbacks were launched. In 1985, exactly half a century after their mutual founding, Michael Joseph became the commercial imprint of Penguin Books. And now, it forms an important part of the PenguinRandomHouse Global Publishing Conglomerate.

Read More HERE

So what is The Whyte Python World Tour all about?

Set in the late 1980s, the author weaves the collapse of the Soviet Bloc into the era of peak heavy metal with the rise of a fictitious Los Angeles rock band Whyte Python. The band consists of four weird misfits - on Vocals Davy Bones (aka Lawrence Barkly), on Bass Guitar Spencer Dooley, on Lead Guitar (Robert) Buck Sweet and finally on Drums Richard Henderson aka Rikki Thunder.

Whyte Python is managed by the wimpy British producer Kirby Smoot for Andromeda Records and unbeknownst to the band, manipulated by the American Central Intelligence Agency’s Asian Intelligence Division [AID].

It appears that the Deputy Director of the CIA Ed Lonsa is reluctantly tasked to orchestrate a Cold War Psychological Operation against the Soviet Bloc. The Psy-Ops entitled Operation Facemelt is born, peopled by agents undergoing ‘disciplinary process’ though only three of them are aware that they are in this process. Firstly we have Amanda Price [aka Shawna Peppers] who works under the identity of rock and roll journalist Tawny Spice who is tasked with manipulating Drummer Rikki Thunders [from his band Qyksand] into joining Whyte Python. The other CIA agents being the insubordinates Catherine Stryker and Daryl Boone with the more conformist Bradford Mancuso.

As a thriller it is outstanding.

When I put the book down, I sat in silent contemplation and then downloaded the audio book narrated by Wil Wheaton as I wanted to revisit this crazy world again.

Read More HERE

After I put the book down, I had a few questions for the author Travis Kennedy, who kindly agreed to answer my queries.

I smiled during our dialogue, because it was little surprise to discover that I share the author’s enthusiasm for reading, including a passion for the works of Dennis Lehane - which I was unaware of when I read the book – and which may help [in part] to explain my own admiration for Travis Kennedy’s writing ability.

Ali: Welcome to Great Britain’s Shots Magazine.

Travis: Thank you for having me!

AK: We’re excited to introduce you to our readers, as this novel took over my life for two days as I read it over two sittings – is this really your first published work?

TK: Well, yes and no. It’s my first traditionally published novel, but I’ve had several short stories placed over the last dozen years or so - and I have been writing for my whole life. For many years, my career in public service demanded all of my creative energy, and I had to take a break from writing for myself. I was able to find my way back about twelve years ago, beginning with short stories and humour pieces. Believe it or not, this is chronologically the third complete novel that I have written.  My team made a decision to lead with THE WHYTE PYTHON WORLD TOUR, in part because of the speed of development on the film adaptation - but you will see the others!

AK: From your acknowledgements I see you come from a family that values books, libraries and reading. So would you care to tell us a little about your childhood and your reading?

TK: Oh, absolutely. Reading has been coded deeply into my personality since I was four years old. It’s the hobby that I love to do most. It makes my brain happy! My parents recognized this trait in me very early – especially my father, who I inherited it from. When I was very young, my family lived on a lake in New Hampshire. In many pictures from that era, you can see my parents and brothers playing in the water while I’m off in the distance, happily sitting under a tree with my nose in a book. When I was six years old, we moved to southern Maine, just outside of the City of Portland; and that first week, before all of the bags were unpacked, my father brought me to the Portland Public Library and signed me up for a library card. “There,” he said. “You’re home.”

What’s remarkable to me now as a dad myself is seeing the same quality in my own kids. My daughter is nine years old as I write this, and she is just like me. She reads relentlessly. Her school backpack is very heavy, because she never has fewer than two novels stuffed in between her lunchbox and schoolwork. Needless to say, she is delighted that her dad works in the publishing business now. She travels with me to book stores when I go in to sign stock, and she keeps a record of each store and what she found special about it. My son is six, and so he’s less impressed by Dad’s new line of work; it’s not strange or exciting to him at all, it's just what I do for a living. But reading came to him even more naturally than it did for me. Our house is absolutely littered with books.

AK: And of that time can you tell us which novels / stories were you favourites and why?

TK: I was an absolute book vacuum. I loved books across all genres, and had countless favourites. But I gravitated the strongest toward storytelling that put kids in the middle of adventures with genuine stakes. I probably loved Roald Dahl’s books the most. I read CHARLIE AND THE CHOCOLATE FACTORY at least a dozen times throughout my childhood – in one instance, three times in a row. There’s a real ominous feeling in his work, that the little heroes actually might not make it out okay. I loved the film The Goonies for the same reason. Stories that took their child heroes seriously.

AK:….But what books was/were the one[s] that made you want to pick up a pen / pc and write yourself?

TK: Jumping ahead to the modern era: think the two biggest inspirations for me as an adult to really GO FOR IT and dedicate myself to writing were Elmore Leonard and Dennis Lehane. When reading Elmore, you always get the feeling that he was smiling on the other side of his typewriter. There’s so much charm to his work, a sense that he’s enjoying himself. Elmore made it clear to me that you’re allowed to have fun with writing, and to let that sense of fun and joy in the exercise make its way onto the page. And then I picked up A DRINK BEFORE THE WAR by Dennis Lehane, and that voice just grabbed me with both hands in the first chapter and wouldn’t let me go. He was rewriting my own inner monologue in Patrick Kenzie’s sly Boston accent. I had to try to do that, too. I got such joy from reading both of those writers’ work, and I felt a kinship with them in how my own mind likes to tell stories, and together they pushed me into going for it.

AK: Who do you read now days?

TK: I’m still a vacuum! I still bounce around from genre to genre, fiction to non-fiction and back. I love great crime thrillers that break the standard mold. Every Michael Koryta book is a must-read for me. There’s a great writer who is also from Maine named Ron Currie Jr, who wrote an amazing crime fiction book called THE SAVAGE, NOBLE DEATH OF BABS DIONNE that has that grand, operatic feeling of Dennis Lehane and Don Winslow’s work. But I read everything. On the other end of the spectrum, I loved ATMOSPHERE by Taylor Jenkins Reid. John Scalzi’s WHEN THE MOON HITS YOUR EYE. Chris Whitaker, Fredrik Backman, Benjamin Stevenson, Richard Osman, Stephen King. I love Percival Everett. The book about Lorne Michaels was great.

AK: So onto The Whyte Python World Tour…..the central premise is what could be described as ‘Cherry’ - the CIA using a Heavy Metal band in the 1980s to influence disaffected East Europeans fed of Soviet Oppression…where did this weird idea come from?

TK:   Good question! I’ve had a longtime fascination with that specific era of music called “glam metal,” the party-themed rock anthems played by so-called “hair bands” of the 1980s. I was just a kid when they were on top of the world, and so they were really comical in my eyes. Like feral real-life muppets, wearing leather and spandex with makeup and wild hair and singing these infectious, harmless anthems. About twenty years ago, I started to read autobiographies of some of the big stars from that time – Slash, Motley Crue, Poison, etc – and I discovered that more often than not, the rock Gods on stage often came from challenging childhoods and were misfits until they found each other through music. They were overlooked and underappreciated, and then playing in these bands unlocked their superpowers. It seemed like there was a fun story in that; the idea that they had these secret identities that you only saw when the stage lights came on.

Then five years ago, I listened to a podcast called “Wind of Change,” produced by the very talented investigative reporter Patrick Radden Keefe. He was chasing a pervasive rumour that the CIA wrote the song “Wind of Change” for the hit German metal band The Scorpions, as a psyop to usher the Eastern Bloc’s youth into democracy at the end of the Cold War through the power of soft metal. He couldn’t prove it, of course; and I suspect that it isn’t true. But the concept married perfectly with the theme I had been chewing on, on and off, for almost twenty years about the glam metal guys having secret powers. This was it! And as a fiction story, divorced from any responsibility to tell the truth, I could make it whatever I wanted. 

AK: And so did you plot extensively or run with the idea until you had a narrative that could be licked into shape? And end-to-end how long did it take to physically write the novel?

TK: Before I wrote a word, I wrestled with the idea of how to tell the story. I wanted it to be a first-person narrative, like you’re reading a rockstar’s autobiography; but I also wanted the readers to understand pretty quickly what was going on, unbeknownst to our hero, Rikki Thunder. I didn’t really let myself think about the arc of the story until I figured out how to tell it, which took a little time. Once the solution came to me that the correct way to write this book is to break all narrative rules – it can be first person sometimes, and third person sometimes, and occasionally told through music montage – the book poured out of me as fast as I could keep up with it. Because breaking all the rules is metal! The unique format didn’t just allow me to tell the story how I wanted to tell it; it made it FEEL more like a frenzied, rule-breaking hair band video. The first draft took about three months. But that being said, I’ve worked more on this book than anything I’ve done in my life. There were, easily, twenty rounds of revisions; the first several by me alone, then a bunch with my agent and more again with my editor at Doubleday. So, while the first draft happened fast, the book took a little over two years to truly complete.

AK: I consider a major strength in the narrative are the [very] minor characters, who you define so very deftly, but yet they sit up straight on the page, such as Bass Guitarist Spencer Dooley’s [possibly] imaginary friend ‘Kevin’ or the East Berlin shopkeeper Josef Weidermann, or the Plumber Ben Pratt and Rikki’s old school friend Ron……less is more….would you care to comment?

TK: First, thank you! That compliment means a lot to me, because there is definitely some risk in introducing a large cast of characters in a novel and asking your readership to try to keep them all arranged in their minds. I’m glad to hear it worked for you. I think if you’re going to create a character, you owe it to them to make them unique and feel lived-in, and cared about. I think the old writing adage of “show, don’t tell” is CRITICAL when you’re creating minor characters who still need to feel real; we don’t need to know everything about Ron and his personal backstory, but we feel like we know it anyway only because of how he looks and dresses and moves. Same with Ben Pratt; the minor details (clean shirt, soft voice, big, pawlike hands) tell us he’s a gentle giant, and give us the warm feelings toward him that Rikki feels and remembers. That should be enough for the reader to get an imprint without feeling smothered by description about someone they’re not going to spend much time with, especially because I’m going to ask you to keep track of a lot of supporting characters more thoroughly.

AK: Are you a follower of Heavy Metal yourself? And if so, which bands do you rate form that genre?

TK: I am – but not at all exclusively. Music is very much like books to me – I love it if it’s done well, and spend time in whatever genre that matches my mood. I’ve mellowed quite a bit in my 40s now, but writing the book has been a really fun exercise in reconnecting with these musical roots from my youth! The fun thing about “metal” or “glam metal” or “hair bands” is that they’re all such flexible terms, and a lot of music aficionados love to fight over your exact question:

what qualifies? Because Poison is so different from Guns N’ Roses, which is so different from Van Halen or Motley Crue, or Def Leppard, or Iron Maiden, or Motorhead or Metallica or Bon Jovi and so on. Fans of all of that music – which is an enormous spectrum of sound – love to fight over this. I think that when we think of the era, we qualify bands with these titles (metal, glam, hair, etc) based on the look and the attitude, more than the melodies and the themes. We see massive hair, defying gravity thanks to cans of Aquanet; and ripped jeans, and spandex, and makeup, and we say “that’s metal.” It’s a time and a place and a vibe, more than a uniform style of music.

AK: So what’s next for Travis Kennedy?

TK: Lots! I’m plotting out a new novel now – it’s not in the world of Whyte Python, but I have a strong feeling that those muppets will be back eventually. I’m also supporting the work of the film adaptation of the book, and I have a few other film projects in various stages of development. I’m incredibly fortunate to be able to write full-time now, and it feels like I finally have time for all of the ideas that have been scrambling over each other to get to the front of the line. It’s a very exciting time!

AK: Thank you your time and insight.

TK: Truly, it’s my pleasure. Thanks for reading!

Shots Magazine would like to thank Publisher and Senior Editor Rowland White and from Publicity Lily Evans at Michael Joseph imprint of PenguinRandomHouse UK

For more information > https://whytepython.com/ and https://traviskennedy.com/

Promotional Photos / Images are © Brian Fitzgerald / Fitzgerald Photo / Travis Kennedy / PenguinRandomHouse / Little Brown Publishing / Ali Karim / Audible

Where True Crime Meets Jane Austen, by Jessica Bull

The Miss Austen Investigates series is my tribute to Jane Austen, telling the story of her life and work through the format of a murder mystery. I really wanted to capture the vibrant, witty, and joyfully irreverent woman I believe Austen was. I also wanted to tell her story, because it’s tempting to conflate Austen with her more privileged heroines and imagine her path to success was easy. 

All the things that stand in the way of her investigations are the same obstacles she faced in becoming a published author, and the unique qualities which enabled her genius in real life (such as her sense of justice, an innate understanding of human nature and a determination to succeed) allow her to solve the mysteries in my novels.

In this second instalment, a broken-hearted Jane Austen travels to Kent to look after her brother Neddy’s children and further her writing. She soon realizes it’s imperative she uncovers the true identity of a mysterious young woman claiming to be a shipwrecked foreign princess before the interloper can swindle Neddy’s adoptive mother out of her fortune and steal the much-anticipated inheritance all the Austen’s rely on.

As well Austen, there is another fascinating historical figure who inspired this novel. In 1817, a former servant girl, Mary Baker (née Willcocks), persuaded a Gloucester magistrate and his wife she was Princess Caraboo of the fictional island of Javasu in the Indian Ocean, and that she had been captured by pirates and escaped by jumping overboard in the Bristol Channel and swimming ashore.

Her ruse was eventually discovered but, rather than prosecute, Mary’s benefactress gave her some money to start afresh in America. Everyone who knew Mary said she loved to tell stories. It made me wonder, if Mary had been born into the class of women who were fortunate enough to receive an education, would she be remembered as another Jane Austen?

A Fortune Most Fatal will be published by Penguin Michael Joseph on 27 March 2025. Who are you, Miss Austen, but a young lady of little experience and no consequence?’ Welcome to Godmersham Park, 1797. Following many years apart, Jane Austen is set to spend the summer with her estranged brother, Neddy. As heir to wealthy widow Mrs Knight’s fortune, it is imperative that Neddy stays in his benefactor’s good graces. But upon arrival in Kent, Jane quickly realises Neddy is in dire need of her help. For a mysterious young woman named Eleanor currently resides with Mrs Knight – a stranger who threatens to swindle the inheritance for herself. Jane must uncover who Mrs Knight’s guest really is, to protect the fate of her entire family. When she discovers a series of threatening letters meant for Eleanor, her investigation takes an unexpected turn. Because the dangers aren’t just within the walls of Godmersham Park. Jane knows someone else is out there watching, waiting – but for what? Is this curious Eleanor friend, or foe? And can Jane solve the mystery, before danger comes for them all?

Jessica Bull lives in Southeast London with her husband and two daughters. A former librarian and communications consultant, she studied English literature at Bristol University and information science at City, University of London. A Fortune Most Fatal is the second novel in the Miss Austen Investigates series.

More information about Jessica Bull can be found on her website. You can also find her on Instagram @ jessicabullnovelist, on Facebook @JessicaBullAuthor and on Bluesky @jessicabull.bsky.social

Buy your copy: https://uk.bookshop.org/p/books/a-fortune-most-fatal-jessica-bull/7703849?ean=9780241642115

The Last Orphan Q & A with Gregg Hurwitz

 

Ayo:                Hello Gregg how lovely to see you after such a long time. How are you?

Gregg:            I am doing well. It is always good to see you. Always a highlight.

Ayo:                I am so pleased to get the opportunity to do interview this evening as I have loads of questions. What I wanted to start of with first of all with is one of things that you seem to have gathered with the Orphan Series is the fact that you have this huge swath of new fans. How did you come up with the Orphan X concept?

Gregg:            Hmm, well I do a lot of research with many of it with sketchy characters. I have interviewed outlaw biker gangs; I have gone undercover in a mind control cult and one of the community's I am pretty close with are former spies or spec ops guys. A lot of friends in the Navy Seals community and they are always talking about these “black programmes” right buried deep in the DoD (Department of Defence). I was always interested in how they ran the money, how they work, how they function. And I just thought, look what if there is a programme called the Orphan programme where the Government were taking these kids. They want to train basically US assets to go places the US cannot go and do things that the US cannot legally do.  And what they want is expendable weapons.  They want disposable people that no one is going to miss. Okay, well that is a notion that is not wildly unheard of. David Morrell played in that sandbox – La Femme Nikita and so that was the starting notion of it. 

What would that be like and what would that kid be like? But one of the big things that turned the corner for me was when I thought what if his handler who takes him out of this foster home, In Evan Smoak, Orphan X is the smallest kid in the whole foster home.  Jack Jones(?) who is his handler his CIA handler picks him because he tells Evan you know look you got knocked down the most time as the smallest kid but that also means that you got up the most times. He wanted a kid with grit. And it turns out that Jack actually loved this kid and that for me is where it started to take on a little bit more depth and humanity. Not only was joining the Orphan programme one of the most crazy and difficult things that Evan is going to encounter to be a twelve-year-old who is now trained to be an assassin, but it is also the best thing that ever happened to him.  Jack is the first person whoever treated him like a human being. And Jack even says to him, and this for me is the key line around which the whole series coalesces, he says to him the hard part is not going to be making you a killer, the hard part is keeping you human. And I thought okay, well now we have something because that collision between being trained to be a killer and trying to stay human with Evan being trained under these very very strict rules of the assassins ten commandments that gives me a template of a series that I can keep writing on and forward and that was the opening kernel for it.

Ayo:                Following on from that did you expect it to become such a well-loved series? Because everyone just loves the Orphan X series.  Did you expect it to go down that route or did you just think oh, just let me write this series and see where it goes?

Gregg:            I think I have been doing this long enough not to have that be an expectation for sure. I think that was certainly the hope. I mean, look, I was afraid to write this book. I had the idea for it. I wrote four other standalone thrillers first. I kept back burning it, developing it more in my head, letting it simmer. Because if I was going to step off on this stage you know and think about trying to create a character that might one day have a place in a pantheon with Reacher, Bourne and Bond I better really figure out what it is that is going to make this unique. That is going to make every plot, and every bit of dialogue, every action sequence feel like that it is an Orphan X not, like it could just be anyone else that has done it. Because we all know that Reacher has a particular feel. We all know Reacher dialogue, we all know Reacher fights, we all know that kind of style of dry wit that Lee is so masterful at and now Andrew. But I really wanted to get this character three dimensionalised before I sat down to do it and a lot of other pieces had to come into focus for me before I was willing to do that.

Ayo:                So, when Evan broke free and became the Nowhere Man so that he could use his skills for those in dire need did you expect the response that you received? Because it just appears that with The Nowhere Man the action went up a notch.

Gregg:            Uh um, Look I mean if you raise someone to be a human and to also be a killer it’s just not going to work. One of the ways that I think of Evan is that it is almost as if he was raised and trained to be Pinocchio, but he wants to be a real boy. Right, I say he never learned to speak the strange language of intimacy.  So, this series it’s really about his process of becoming. Why he was raised totally outside of society. He was trained one on one in dojos, he was drown proofed, psych ops training, he learned foreign etiquette right, so that he could blend in in Eastern Europe and commit all these acts. Hand to hand combat, knife fighting. Everything that he was trained in, but he never learned to know what is was to be real or to be in a real family. And so, I think of him always that he has his face up to the glass and that he is like looking in on other people leading these ordinary lives that he himself can never but at least he can protect it for him. He is like the wolf that is going to hunt other wolves. And so with The Nowhere Man, part of what happened was when he became the Nowhere Man which was one of his operational aliases he put the full focus for the first time, his whole operational ability and strategy and all of that was put finally in a position where it was aligned with his moral compass and so there was greater force for that and greater willingness to do anything he had to do to help somebody who no one else can help.  It is always somebody who calls that encrypted number whose got nowhere to turn but are in a desperate place and they are just being terrorised by another human or group of humans.

The complete interview with Gregg Hurwitz can be found on the Shots website at the following link.

The Last Orphan by Gregg Hurwitz (Penguin Books) Out Now.

The world needs a new hero, and Evan Smoak - aka Orphan X - is here to help in this electrifying new adventure perfect for fans of Lee Child's Jack Reacher series. As a child, Evan Smoak was plucked out of a group home, raised and trained as an off-the-books assassin for the government as part of the Orphan program. When he broke with the program and went deep underground, he left with a lot of secrets in his head that the government would do anything to make sure never got out. When he remade himself as The Nowhere Man, dedicated to helping the most desperate in their times of trouble, Evan found himself slowly back on the government's radar. Having eliminated most of the Orphans in the program, the government will stop at nothing to eliminate the threat they see in Evan. But Orphan X has always been several steps ahead of his pursuers. Until he makes one little mistake.  Now the President has him in her control and offers Evan a deal - eliminate a rich, powerful man she says is too dangerous to live and, in turn, she'll let Evan survive. But when Evan left the Programme, he swore to only use his skills against those who really deserve it. Now he has to decide what's more important - his principles or his life.

 ©Ayo Onatade (2023)

Ragnar Jonasson and Katrin Jakobsdóttir, Prime Minister of Iceland jointly write crime novel to be published by Penguin Michael Joseph

 

Penguin Michael Joseph acquires REYKJAVIK by Ragnar Jonasson and Katrin Jakobsdóttir, Prime Minister of Iceland

Penguin Michael Joseph has acquired Reykjavik by Ragnar Jonasson and Katrin Jakobsdóttir, Prime Minister of Iceland.

Publisher Maxine Hitchcock and senior commissioning editor Rebecca Hilsdon acquired UK and Commonwealth rights from David Headley at DHH Literary Agency. PMJ have previously published Outside, The Girl Who Died, and the Hidden Iceland trilogy, all authored by Jonasson alone.

Ragnar Jonasson is the first Icelandic author to become a Sunday Times bestseller and has been described as ‘a world-class crime writer’ by The Sunday Times and ‘a landmark in modern crime fiction’ by The Times. Worldwide, he has sold over 3m copies, and is a number one bestseller in France, Germany, Australia, and his native Iceland. 

Katrin Jakobsdóttir has been Prime Minster of Iceland since 2017. Hailing from a family of prominent Icelandic poets and academics, she wrote her Master’s dissertation on Icelandic crime writing. She and Jonasson are longtime friends, who first worked together nearly ten years ago as part of the jury for an award for best crime fiction in translation in Iceland.

Reykjavik is a dual-narrative crime novel, following two strands of a mystery 30 years apart. In August 1956, a 14-year-old girl called Lara disappears from the island of Vidney,  just off the coast of Reykjavik – and becomes Iceland’s most infamous unsolved case. In 1986, as Reykjavik celebrates its 200^th anniversary tabloid journalist Valur digs into her death.

Ragnar Jonasson said: ‘In early 2020 I had lunch with Katrin Jakobsdóttir, Iceland's Prime Minister, and suggested that it might be fun writing a crime novel together. We have really enjoyed working on this story, set in Iceland in the 1950s and 1980s, and are looking forward to sharing it with readers. It's been a dream come true to work with Penguin in recent years, and I am so excited that they will be bringing this story to a wider audience, with the help of our wonderful translator Vicky Cribb.’

Katrin Jakobsdóttir said: ‘It was a real pleasure and a thrill to write this crime novel set in Iceland in the year 1986 with my friend Ragnar Jónasson. When the world is full of extreme challenges it can be quite beneficial for the soul to stay for a moment in a fictional world belonging to another era and write about sordid crimes.’

Maxine Hitchcock said: ‘We are so delighted to have another incredibly atmospheric and thrilling novel from Ragnar Jonasson -who is fast becoming one of the world’s most acclaimed crime novelists - and to welcome Katrin Jakobsdóttir to Penguin Michael Joseph. Both Ragnar and Katrin are devoted aficionados of the crime genre and combining their voices has added up to a novel that will enthral readers across the globe. The publication of REYKJAVIK will be a true event.’

Reykjavik will be published in the UK in August 2023.

For publicity enquiries please contact -

 Sriya Varadharajan at svaradharajan@penguinrandomhouse.co.uk.

Penguin Michael Joseph Launches New Prize

 

Penguin Michael Joseph, an imprint of Penguin Random House, have today (Friday 23rd September 2022) revealed details of their new writers’ prize, following PMJ MD Louise Moore announcing that it was in the pipeline as part of her keynote speech at London Book Fair earlier this year.

The Penguin Michael Joseph Undiscovered Writers Prize aims to find new authors from underrepresented backgrounds who the division can bring to the widest possible readership. 

The inaugural prize (2022/2023) focusses on the crime and thriller genre, with budding writers being invited to submit tales of mysteries, crimes, jeopardy, action or adventure. 

The prize is aimed at unpublished writers aged over 18 who are currently a resident in the UK or ROI, and who are from a background that’s currently underrepresented in publishing – that includes ethnicity, sexuality, gender identity, disability or socio-economic background.

Entries – which initially need to be submitted as a 200 word synopsis and 2000 word extract – will be judged by a panel of judges led by PMJ’s Crime and Thriller publisher Joel Richardson. 

He said,

‘We’re so excited to be launching this new prize, seeking out the brightest and best new voices in a genre I absolutely love. I hope it inspires people who have always daydreamed about writing a book to finally give it a go, and I also hope it plays a role in broadening the range of voices we see in crime/thriller writing – the UK’s biggest book genre.’ 

Joel’s fellow judges are: bestselling author Amy McCulloch; award-winning freelance crime fiction critic/commentator, moderator and blogger Ayo Onatade; Waterstones’ Head of Fiction Bea Carvalho; award-winning bookseller, owner of Goldsboro Books and MD and agent at D H H Literary Agency, David Headley, and Syima Aslam, the founder and Director of the Bradford Literature Festival - the most socio-economically and ethnically diverse literary festival in the UK.

The winner of the Penguin Michael Joseph Undiscovered Writers Prize will receive a publishing contract with PMJ, worth at least £10,000, and representation by the DHH Literary Agency. All shortlisted writers will also receive one-to-one editorial feedback and guidance from an editor or agent. 

Applications will open on 30th September and should be submitted via

https://www.penguin.co.uk/penguin-michael-joseph-undiscovered-writers-prize. All further details and T&Cs can also be found here https://www.penguin.co.uk/undiscovered-writers-prize-faqs

The deadline for submissions is 30th November 2022, and the winner of the Prize is due to be announced in August 2023.

Why We Listen to Psychopaths: The compelling testimony of the smartest, coldest figures in literature

“You caught me because we’re very much alike. Without our imaginations, we’d be like all those other poor dullards. Fear is the price of our instrument".

Hannibal Lecter delivered those lines to Special Agent Will Graham while supposedly helping him to catch a serial killer (and actually trying to get him and his family killed by said killer. Classic.) 

What Hannibal engages in here is some textbook psychopathic manipulation. He begins by telling Will that they are they are different and special, with their own bond. He gives Will the ultimate compliment in telling him he is a psychopath like him. He must be, because it takes a psychopath to imagine how another’s mind might work. 

But Lecter’s comment says more than this, too. It sums up, neatly, the particular draw that the psychopath has on all of us. They provide a vividness and imagination that is anything but dull. Time spent with one is, at first at least, addictive and enthralling and enlivening. It throws everything else into the shade – but it comes at a cost. 

In fiction, that cost can range from the small – like having to live with someone who might just decide to kill you – to the major. We’ll call this worst option “They kill everyone you know and then either kill you, or frame you.” 

For some reason, despite the obviousness of this cost, we can’t get enough of psychopaths. From Villanelle in Killing Eve to Amy Dunne in Gone Girl; from Tom Ripley and all his talents, to Moriarty in Sherlock Holmes. From the Marquise and Visconte in Liaisons Dangereuses, to the dark antics of Dexter: we are fascinated by them. And of course there’s Hannibal himself, the most-quoted psychopath of them all, and the reason Antony Hopkins rarely gets invited to kids’ parties. 

It isn’t just that we like to watch them do their evil misdeeds. It is, I think, more profound than that. We crave their insight, because they have an ability to cut through all the layers of social conditioning and say piercing truths that none of us are willing to. They are, in literature at least, always profoundly smart. 

And there’s a small part of us that wants them to be redeemable, too. We are desperate for them to turn out to be the charming, likable version of themselves that they put forward when it suits them (usually right at the beginning or just as you are about to tell them “no”). We want them to genuinely see the main character as special in the way that they claim, and to go out of their way to save them from harm. 

I was certainly conscious of all this when writing Keely, my very own psychopathic young woman, in Little Sister. She is someone who seems to have been willing to sacrifice anything to get what she wanted, including her own younger sister Nina, and in the early chapters, sits opposite DCI Jonah Sheens, telling him that he needs to play her game or never see Nina alive again.

The problem for Jonah is that, like so many of those who encounter a psychopath, he doesn’t know whether to believe what she is telling him; or to treat her as you might a snake. And every sudden rush of belief in her as human comes up against her biting sarcasm – or against what seems to be cold, hard reality. 

So why does Jonah keep trying, and why do all of us want to hang in there, too?

Intellect without empathy

The strange thing about our belief in psychopaths is that we look to them for an understanding of human nature. It’s strange because these people lack empathy, the one quality necessary to really understand the people around us. In its place, psychopaths have (in fiction at least) pure intellect, which has allowed them to learn how to manipulate people. They may not have always grasped complex emotions, but they have recognised what ordinary peoples’ grubbier desires are and how to control them. And though they lack any morality, they are quite happy to use other people’s desire to be moral for their own ends. It immediately gives them a starting bonus. Think Iago in Othello, mocking his superior for his “foolish honesty” and using it to destroy him. 

And yet, in spite of their lack of empathy, these villainous psychopaths so often deliver exactly the kind of insight that makes us feel like they’re voicing all the thoughts we’ve had but not been able to put into words. Take, for example, Amy Dunne’s glorious rant about “cool girls” in Gone Girl. 

“Men always say that as the defining compliment, don’t they? She’s a cool girl. Being the Cool Girl means I am a hot, brilliant, funny woman who adores football, poker, dirty jokes, and burping, who plays video games, drinks cheap beer, loves threesomes… Men actually think this girl exists. Maybe they’re fooled because so many women are willing to pretend to be this girl… You are not dating a woman, you are dating a woman who has watched too many movies written by socially awkward men who’d like to believe that this kind of woman exists and might kiss them.”

If you’re anything like me, it’s impossible to read that as a woman and not feel as though Amy Dunne has cut to the heart of your own discomfort with this kind of woman: a woman held up as an ideal, but who is acting with only the male gaze in mind. It’s wonderful to have that behaviour exposed. Liberating.

The same can be said for the Marquise de Merteuil’s reflections on the status of women in Les Liaisons Dangereuses: 

“I already knew that the role I was condemned to, namely to keep quiet and do what I was told, gave me the perfect opportunity to listen and observe… I became a virtuoso of deceit. It wasn't pleasure I was after, it was knowledge. I consulted the strictest moralists to learn how to appear, philosophers to find out what to think, and novelists to see what I could get away with. And in the end, I distilled everything to one wonderfully simple principle: win or die.”

Like Amy, she rages against how society is attempting to make her and other women behave, and chooses another path. But such observations are also part of the psychopath’s toolkit. By revealing them to us, we’ve been drawn into a feeling of fellowship with Amy, and with the Marquise. We feel that we might sympathise with her. We might even like her. 

These thoughts may also, perhaps, not be quite true. Just like Lecter’s reflections on Will or Clarice, those harsher thoughts of ours about “cool girls” – those tired-and-fed-up judgements that she is echoing – may be no more the right answer than the ones wrapped in social norms and empathy. People are complex, after all. They might like the things they claim to like more than Amy Dunne understands. And the Marquise’s thoughts about being condemned to “shut up and do as she was told” are perhaps belied by the way other clever women of her generation lived their lives. 

I had Keely Lennox paint a similarly harsh portrait of human nature. She tells Jonah:

“We all have the same savage possibility in us. I know I do. Mine got stripped pretty bare by everything. To find my sister, you have to look in the mirror, and actually see what’s there. Have a good delve into all the dark places. At all the times you’ve chosen your own interests over someone else’s. All the petty or selfish things you’ve done. 

Isn’t it weird how, with all those things, you can still hold it all together and tell yourself you’re a good person? That’s because you didn’t have the same pressure I did. You know, I’d probably be a lot like you if all the bad stuff had happened later. It wasn’t really child-appropriate, any of it. The trouble is, nobody’s overseeing this stuff, and life just does its thing. It has basically no respect for ratings.”

It’s persuasive and engaging, and like Hannibal Lecter’s words to the officers who come to see him, it puts Jonah and Keely on a level to a certain extent. But is it honestly true?

In both Amy and the Marquise’s cases, there were other courses of actions open to them than the destructive ones they took. Amy might simply have exposed her husband’s affair, instead of framing him for murder. The Marquise might have sought a partner who saw her as an equal and gathered like-minded people around her. But that was never their game. 

Playing nicely wasn’t Keely’s game, either. But it isn’t clear to Jonah or his team whether that happened out of choice – or out of necessity. And I won’t spoil the surprise here by revealing all…

The hope of redemption

And so we come on to the other incredibly appealing side to the psychopath: that strange hope in all of us that the bad will be redeemed. It is a trope seen over and over again in literature: most commonly in the bad boy turned good, but only because of the love of a particular person, or the friendship of another. 

It is this trope that underlies the draw of The Silence of the Lambs, and still more so the Hannibal TV spin-off. We have seen Will Graham and then Clarice Starling finally get to Hannibal. They have each of them become a soul-mate. An equal. Someone with a bond that goes beyond the normal. Instead of simply voicing a recognition of them in order to manipulate, Hannibal has in each case become emotionally entangled with the investigating officer. It is never more clear than when, in the series, Hannibal asks Will Graham, “Do you think you can change me as I’ve changed you?” We know that Will is right when he replies that he already has.

We see it clearly in Villanelle’s relationship with Eve, where the psychopathic assassin is suddenly drawn to care for and protect the woman she becomes besotted with. And once again, this obsessive care is reserved for Eve and Eve only. Her husband and friends are no more than collateral. 

We see it in the development of Joe Goldberg in Caroline Kepnes’s You series, and even in Humbert Humbert in Lolita. We see it in Amy Dunne’s bloody return to Nick after he calls to her on-air in Gone Girl; and in the Visconte Valmont’s respect and love for Madame de Tourvel in Les Liaisons Dangereuses - while he continues to treat Cecile Volanges as though she is worthless. 

The fascinating side to all of this is that we all of us appear to identify with the main character in these scenarios. We take satisfaction from seeing the psychopath not only become to a very limited extent good, but more importantly, besotted. Even when the psychopath still treats others with as little care as ever, and perhaps almost because they still do, we find ourselves drawn to them and this new close relationship.

There’s a real question to ask, here, about what makes this so fascinating. The answer seems, to me, clear. We’re all of us, when becoming absorbed in these books or films, seeing ourselves in those main characters. And that means that we have been singled out as special by the psychopath. That manipulative, charming man or woman with their promise that we meant something has suddenly decided that we really did mean something. This hardest of people to please and reach has actually come to like and respect us.

And somehow, this is the very best prize of all.

Little Sister by Gytha Lodge is published on 28th April by Penguin Michael Joseph. 

Two sisters went missing. Only one of them came back... Detective Jonah Sheens is enjoying a moment of peace and quiet, when a teenage girl wanders out of the wood. She's striking, with flame-red hair and a pale complexion. She's also covered in blood. She insists she's fine. It's her sister he needs to worry about. Jonah quickly discovers that Keely and her sister, Nina, disappeared from a children's home a week ago. Now, Keely is here - but Nina's still missing. Keely likes to play games. She knows where her sister is - but before she tells, she wants Jonah's full attention. Is she killer, witness, or victim? And will Jonah find out what Keely's hiding, in time to save Nina?

You can follow Gytha Lodge on Twitter @theGyth. You can also find her on Facebook