Partners in Crime: How not to kill Your Collaborator

We’ve been collaborating for several years now, and people (especially other writers) constantly ask us how we’ve managed to write five novels together without killing each other. It’s a good question. Our collaboration began as all good things do, after one too many beers, and we wrote our first novel, the satirical horror The Mall, with the purest of motives: for fun and to see if we could. Our latest novel, Under Ground, is a whodunnit (and whydunnit) set in a luxury survival bunker – the kind of place rich, paranoid, apocalypse preppers invest in on the off chance that things really do fall apart. And when the spectre of disaster looms in the form of an ebola-style plague, our characters discover that far from fleeing to a safe location, they’re sharing their underground sanctuary with a psychopath. Out of all the novels we’ve written, this one should have tested the limits of our relationship, as its success depended on a far more rigid plot structure than we’re used to employing. But we made it through, and although it sounds smug, we somehow did it without so much as a hissy fit.

With this in mind, here are our top five tips to avoid literary bloodshed when co-authoring a crime novel:


1. Choose the right collaborator

This is an obvious tip, but we know of several writing partnerships that have imploded due to personality clashes or work ethic differences. On paper, our partnership shouldn’t have worked: one of us is a literary author; the other is the South African literature scene’s trashy cousin. Luckily, we’re both fairly laid-back, and never sulk or badmouth each other (at least to each other’s faces), and it helps that like most authors we’re seething monsters of self-doubt, so ego is kept to a minimum.

2. Set a deadline

 Knowing there’s someone waiting for your chapter is a great way to keep procrastination at a minimum, which in our case involves Googling food porn (Louis), or car porn (Sarah). As we share a fear of missing deadlines, we tend to work quickly with an average first-draft chapter turnaround time of three or four days, which is tight enough to keep panic and adrenaline at just the right level to ensure the words keep flowing.  There’s nothing better than seeing your partner’s chapter zinging into the inbox and finding they’ve written something unexpected that might take the story in a new direction. In the early days, when we wrote our first novel, The Mall, we had a great deal of fun writing each other’s characters into tricky corner – a literary version of exquisite corpse.

3. Don’t sweat the small stuff

The last thing you want is a co-writer who’s going to have a conniption every time you misplace a comma. You have to be prepared to show your co-author your first draft in all its clunky glory, which for most writers is the equivalent of walking naked through a mall. We still sometimes write long caveats when sending a chapter to the other, but we’re getting less precious about this these days, because we know we’ll tidy everything up when the time comes.




4. Play to each other’s strengths

We’re lucky, our strengths and weaknesses balance each other out: One of us is great at sex scenes; the other one would rather sandpaper her eyes. One is skilled at atmosphere and description; the other gets her kicks plotting and world building. One of us hates backstory, the other loves it.  It also helps when it comes to publicity: One of us is terrific at social media, while the other is an antisocial old fart; one doesn’t mind writing online content and guest blogs, whereas it’s not the forte of the other. Another bonus is that we’re currently in two different continents, which means that we can literally be in two places at once and field twice as many interview requests.

5. Honesty is the best policy

It may sound harsh, but neither of us bothers with compliment sandwiches anymore when giving feedback. We may have fragile egos, but the writing comes first. The number of rewrites on Under Ground went into the double figures, and by the end of it we both felt like we’d been locked in an underground bunker with a psychopath. But it was worth it (we hope).

S.L Grey are Sarah Lotz and Louis Greenberg. You can find more about the writing on their website.  You can also follow them on Twitter @SarahLotz1 and @louisgreenberg.  They can also be found on Facebook.

Under Ground

THEY THOUGHT THEY WERE SAFE ...The Sanctum is a luxurious, self-sustaining survival condominium situated underground. It's a plush bolt-hole for the rich and paranoid - a place where they can wait out the apocalypse in style. When a devastating super-flu virus hits, several families race to reach The Sanctum. All have their own motivations for entering. All are hiding secrets. But when the door locks and someone dies, they realise the greatest threat to their survival may not be above ground - it may already be inside ....

Under Ground is by and is published by Pan Macmillan (£12.99)

Forthcoming books to look forward to from Atlantic and Corvus books

Rome, 1605: a city of grand palazzos and frescoed cathedrals. But for the poverty-stricken artist Caravaggio, the city shows her other face, that of rough bars and grubby whores. Suddenly the Pope himself notices his talent, and Caravaggio is the most celebrated artist in Italy. But when he falls for Lena, a fruit seller, society is outraged. Discredited, but desperate to defend the honour of the woman he loves, Caravaggio is forced into a duel and kills a member of nobility. Even his powerful patrons cannot protect the lowborn Caravaggio from the death sentence and the artist is forced to flee. Exiled in Malta, his paintings continue to tell of his love for Lena. But before he can return to her, Caravaggio, Italy’s most famous artist, simply disappears …. A Name in Blood is by Matt Rees and is due to be published in July.

He play’s the oldest children’s game in the world, hide and seek. He plays it with your sons and daughters, but in his own way, with his own rules. The Eye Collector begins by killing mothers, then abducting children; he gives fathers 45 hours to find them. When time runs out, he kills the victim and removes the left eye as a grisly trophy. His method never varies and the Eye Collector never loses , until now. Just before the latest deadline expires, a mysterious witness comes forward. Alina Gregoriev is a physiotherapist. She is also blind and yesterday , she may have met the Eye Collector …. The Eye Collector is by Sebastian Fitzek and is due to be published in August.

The Divine Sacrifice is the second in the Dark Age Mysteries series featuring Malgwyn ap Cuneglas by Anthony Hays. Welcome to fifth-century Britain: the Romans have left, the Saxons have invaded, the towns are decaying and the countryside is dangerous. Malgwyn ap Cuneglas, an embittered ex-soldier who lost a limb in the Saxon wars, has become the trusted counsellor to Arthur, High King of all Britannia. So when a monk dies in horrific circumstances in Glastonbury Abbey, the Abbott calls for Malgwyn to investigate. His search for the truth will draw him into an intricate web of religious, economic and political deceit – and a conspiracy that could endanger everything Arthur has fought for. The Divine Sacrifice is due to be published in November.

The Blind Goddess is the first book in the Hanne Wilhelmsen series by Anne Holt. Somewhere in the grimy outskirts of Oslo, a drug dealer has been battered to death. Meanwhile, a young Dutchman, wandering the city is covered in blood, is taken into custody. He refuses to talk, except to the woman who found the body: lawyer Karen Borg. Days later, a notoriously shady lawyer is found dead. Is there a link between the two killings? It’s Homicide Detective Hanne Wilhelmsen’s job to find out. Hanne is a lone wolf, disdainful of her bosses and prone to dangerous shortcuts. But in a world where the Goddess of Justice is blindfolded, she always gets to the truth. The Blind Goddess is due to be published in December.

Lisa is a plastic surgery addict with severe self-esteem issues. The only hospital that will let her go under the knife is New Hope: a grimy, grey-walled facility dubbed 'No Hope' by its patients.  Farrell is a celebrity photographer. His last memory is a fight with his fashion-model girlfriend and now he's woken up in No Hope, alone. Needle marks criss-cross his arms. A sinister nurse keeps tampering with his drip. And he's woken up blind... Panicked and disorientated, Farrell persuades Lisa to help him escape, but the hospital's dimly lit corridors only take them deeper underground - into a twisted mirror world staffed by dead-eyed nurses and doped-up orderlies. Down here, in the Modification Ward, Lisa can finally have the face she wants... but at a price that will haunt them both forever.  The Ward is by SL Grey and is due to be published in December.