Special Guests: Crime Fiction & True Crime
A Success in Any Language: Stephen Booth
Last week British international best selling crime writer Stephen Booth was in Dublin to speak to The Literary Society at Trinity College Dublin. Freelance journalist Vanessa Baker caught up with him as he stepped off the stage.
Stephen Booth started his writing career in the newspaper business in Cheshire, in 1974. A specialist rugby union reporter, working night shifts as a sub-editor on the Daily Express and The Guardian, his fiction career didn't kick off until 1999. Then, in rapid succession, he was shortlisted for the Dundee Book Prize and the Crime Writers' Association Debut Dagger competition for new writers, then won the £5,000 Lichfield Prize for his unpublished novel The Only Dead Thing, and signed a two-book contract with HarperCollins for a series of crime novels.
In 2000, Stephen's first published novel, Black Dog, marked the arrival in print of his best known creations - two young Derbyshire police detectives, DC Ben Cooper and DS Diane Fry. Black Dog was the named by the London Evening Standard as one of the six best crime novels of the year - the only book on their list written by a British author. In the USA, it won the Barry Award for Best British Crime Novel and was nominated for an Anthony Award for Best First Mystery. The second Cooper & Fry novel, Dancing with the Virgins, was shortlisted for the UK's top crime writing award, the Gold Dagger, and went on to win Stephen a Barry Award for the second year running.
In addition to publication in the USA, Canada, Australia and New Zealand, translation rights in the series have so far been sold in fifteen languages - French, German, Dutch, Italian, Swedish, Danish, Finnish, Norwegian, Spanish, Portuguese, Russian, Czech, Romanian, Bulgarian and Japanese.
Despite this huge success, Stephen Booth revealed there were only two books in the Blackpool, UK house where he grew up – the Bible and a book about fortune telling – and he devoured every word of each as soon as he learned to read. Inspired by the fictional worlds he went on to discover at the local library, the young literary enthusiast completed his first novel at 12. Looking to earn a living from writing, when Booth took his first job in journalism, he continued to write fiction in the evenings.
When his first novel, Black Dog was published in 2000, Booth told me that the publisher immediately assumed he was working on a sequel. Though he hadn’t originally conceived the novel as a series, he says he felt he wasn’t done with Derbyshire Detective Constables Ben Cooper and Diane Fry, and wanted to see where his protagonists would take him next.
After his second book about the pair, Dancing with the Virgins, came out in 2001, he quit his job as a journalist to write novels full time. Booth has since released a book from the series each year, with the twelfth, Dead and Buried, scheduled for release this summer.
He told me he doesn’t outline his plots before writing, but begins with characters, letting them drive the story : “When I feel very confident about who these people are, I’ll put them into a situation where they’re under pressure and see what they do. It’s their job to go off and find out what happened, not mine. They’re the detectives, I’m just the writer. I have entire faith in my characters to do that for me. Somehow it all comes together, and I don’t really know how that happens.”
Booth admits his characters often surprise him, taking the story in directions he hasn’t anticipated. But he wouldn’t necessarily recommend writing without a plan, it’s just what works for him.
Releasing a book every year can be difficult, he says, because he can be promoting one book and editing another while exploring ideas for yet another.
He says he doesn’t know how many more books are left in the series. There is currently no contract for a thirteenth book and Booth says he has not begun working on one. He explained, “You can tell when an author’s run out of ideas or lost interest in characters. I’ve always hoped I’d know when that happens to me. It gets harder every time. I wish it didn’t, but there are all these pressures. That first book just poured out of me.”
Booth says he has a lot of contact with fans from all over the world who often hold very strong opinions about the series, which he tries not to let influence him. “The good thing is, no two readers ever agree with each other.”
Another concern is that he’ll find himself writing a book he’s already written.
Booth attributes his initial success to writing about young protagonists when many crime writers wrote about alcoholic, middle-aged men with failed relationships, and choosing to uncover the darkness of a rural setting when most crime stories were set in cities. His stories have been described as “rural noir,” a term he says didn’t exist when he chose Derbyshire as his setting.
Aspiring writers are often advised to write what they know, but Booth argues the opposite. “It’s far more interesting to write about a new subject you’ve just discovered. That’s the journalist in me.”
As a journalist, he says he was often required to write about topics he knew little about, even working as a television critic for a period of time despite not owning a television. But working in journalism, he says, was the best experience because it taught him to turn his head at everything and honed his awareness for interesting facts and experiences that could later prove significant in his writing.
Booth revealed that he does a lot of research for his novels, talking to the police and reading non-fiction crime books, though he never bases his novels on real crimes, and has never interviewed a murderer. He doesn’t describe crimes or violence in any graphic detail, instead allowing readers to paint ideas of what happens in their own minds. “A writer’s most powerful tool is the reader’s imagination. If you can tap into that, you’ve tapped into a goldmine.”
A fan of crime fiction, Booth names Peter Robinson, John Harvey and Ruth Rendall as some of his favourite authors, but admits he doesn’t read much fiction when he’s writing because he finds it difficult to bounce back and forth between his own fiction world and someone else’s. “One downside of what I do now is that I don’t get a lot of time to read novels.”
Booth says about half of his day is devoted to things like corresponding with fans, dealing with agents, and handling publicity. “I find it quite frustrating that most of my focus is not on writing because that’s what I started out wanting to do.” Everyone has their own creative time when they are able to work best, he says. For him, it’s in the evening, admitting he isn’t a morning person.
He doesn’t give himself a word count goal or devote a specific amount of time to writing, but just lets himself go wherever his writing takes him.
One of the great things about the crime genre, he says, is that it gives an author the freedom to write about any topic but still centre it around an interesting story that makes people want to read to the end. “I think some of the best writing about contemporary social issues is happening in crime fiction right now. It’s such a wide genre, you don’t feel like you’re reading the same thing over and over. Half of English literature is crime fiction when you think about it.”
Booth tries to make his writing as contemporary as possible, which he says can be a challenge when writing a book a year before it will hit shelves.
A television series based on Booth’s books is currently in development. His next book, Dead and Buried, will be released 21 June 2012.
(c) Vanessa Baker February 2012
Vanessa Baker is a freelance journalist and M.Phil Creative Writing student at Trinity College Dublin. She holds a Bachelor of Journalism with Combined Honours in Human Rights from Carleton University in Ottawa, Canada. She can be reached through her blog: http://bakervan.wordpress.com/ or via Twitter: https://twitter.com/#!/vanbakes.
If you read or write crime, catch up some great Irish crime writers here:
- Niamh O'Connor - Risky Business
- Jane Casey, The Reckoning
- Arlene Hunt's The Chosen
- Colin Bateman, Criminally Funny
- Declan Burke - Absolute Zero Cool
- Stuart Neville, Serial Thriller
- Cometh the Hour, Cometh the Fowl
- Melissa Hill has Crime in Mind
- 12 Hours with True Crime Writer Abigail Rieley
Also check out our international Special Guests:
A Kind of Cruel. Sophie Hannah
Niamh O'Connor, best selling Irish crime writer and True Crime Editor of the Sunday World newspaper, talks to crime writing legend Sophie Hannah for writing.ie
So the first time I ring Sophie Hannah, she can’t talk because she forgot her son had chess club. And this is the first issue I want to tackle when we catch up. What is it that draws an academic and a poet, the daughter of a Marxist scholar and a Whitbread nominated mother, whose son is ... let's face it ... genetically predisposed to grandmaster glory, to write about the worst aspects of human nature?
But of course I’ve underestimated the psychological thriller writer who’s an expert at subverting the plot that readers thought they’d seen coming. And if I thought she was going to say, ‘crime books are commercial,’ I couldn’t be more wrong.
"I’m not one of these literary writers who looks down my nose on crime writing," Hannah says. "I love every aspect of the genre. From the age of twelve or thirteen, I loved Agatha Christie. It’s very important to me to absolutely comply with every rule of the crime genre and not be ambiguous about it. I try to play fair within the rules while being as inventive and different as possible and thinking up stories readers cannot guess. And anyway, I’m not an academic. No way am I an academic. [She was a fellow commoner in creative arts in Trinity college, Cambridge and a research fellow of Wolfson college, Oxford!!!] I only scraped a 2.1 in my degree because the 98pc I got in creative writing which pulled me up."
Lee Child on Writing, Reacher & The Affair
So there’s this guy called Jack Reacher (no middle name) whose mother was French, who’s ex US Army Military Police, who travels across the USA with nothing except a toothbrush. He’s 6’5’’and weighs 220-250lbs, has dirty blonde hair, ice blue eyes. And he knows how to kill people.
And then there’s this guy called Lee Child (not his real name) who is originally from Birmingham in the UK, who lost his job in TV and went to New York, with possibly not much more than a toothbrush. He’s damn close to 6’5’’, had sandy blonde hair and ice blue eyes. And he writes books. About a guy called Reacher who knows how to kill people.
But these aren’t just any books, Lee Child’s Reacher series began with The Killing Floor which won the Anthony Award in 1998, and have gone on to sell in their millions. Child became the Visiting Professor at the University of Sheffield in 2008, and in 2009, funded 52 Jack Reacher scholarships for students at the university. In 2009 too, he was elected as President of the Mystery Writers of America.
Each one of the now sixteen Reacher novels is a standalone, enabling a reader dip into the series at any stage. And each one is guaranteed to keep you hooked from the opening line and will astound you with detail, plot twists and masses of interesting information. Reacher is a character who is larger than life, a true comic book hero, but who, like Child, has a logical mind that retains facts, facts he uses in true Holmesian style to inform him in every situation....
Mark Edwards on Killing Cupid
Chances are, you’ve already heard about Mark Edwards and Louise Voss. The biggest self-published e-book success story to date on this side of the Atlantic, the clever duo pushed two novels – Killing Cupid and Catch Your Death – to the top of Amazon.co.uk’s bestselling fiction charts and then inked what was reportedly a six-figure deal with Harper Collins. Even more impressive is that they did all this within a matter of months.
To coincide with the launch of her new blog, Self-Printed right here on writing.ie, Catherine Howard took time out to talk Mark Edwards, to find out exactly how he and Louise worked their magic.
Welcome to Writing.ie, Mark. How did you come to decide to self-publish? Walk us through the decision.
My writing partner, Louise Voss, and I have spent a very long time trying to 'make it' (whatever that means!) as writers. About 8 years ago, we wrote our stalker novel, Killing Cupid. At that time, Louise had a publishing deal and an agent, but neither of them were interested because they didn't want Louise to write thrillers. We managed to sell the TV option, but it never got made…
Will Carver's Perspective
Detective Inspector January David was introduced by Will Carver in his debut novel Girl 4. The first of many surprises in this book was that January is neither American nor female as the name would suggest. Will spoke to Mel Sherratt of High Heels and Book Deals about his journey to publishing, shifting narrative perspectives and the future of DI January David in his forthcoming release, The Two.
This is your first novel Will, tell me about your journey to publication?
Apparently it was a relatively short journey, I am told. It felt like a hundred years to me. It started with a book I wrote at university. My, now, agent read it, liked my style but told me it needed tweaking. I rewrote it all. She got it on editors’ desks.
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