Authors Electric

There’s a marina not far from our house – Aqueduct Marina near Church Minshull – where Andy and I often go for a Saturday brunch. It’s rather relaxing to sit and eat and watch the narrowboats come and go. There’s a bookcase there, stacked with second-hand paperbacks, and a collection tin to donate to keep the waterways moving. I often buy and donate paperbacks (and I left copies of my own books there once or twice as well). Last weekend, I found a copy of Gillian Flynn’s Dark Places , which I bought for the princely sum of one pound. No, the writer will get no benefit from this onward sale, but at least she’ll get a warm fuzzy glow from knowing she’s helped with the upkeep of Britain’s canal system. *** SPOILER ALERT *** If you haven’t read this book, intend to read it, and don’t wish to either be affected by my opinions or find out the ending, please click off this page and go and do something more productive. Write something, maybe? Watch tv? Whatever. But don’t read th...

Phenomena like the Fifty Shades of Grey trilogy are a constant fascination to me. What they seem to show is that no one has any idea at all why some books take off and some don’t. Quality doesn’t seem to have anything to do with it at all. Crap novels become best sellers, wonderful novels become remainders. The big publishers throw money at some of their titles, and they still bomb. Word of mouth is meant to be king, yet everyone I know who has read Fifty Shades etc (or claims to have done so) is lukewarm. How many sold? Twenty million? Thus I now crave your indulgence as friends, real and virtual, to name two books by two authors you won’t have heard of, and give you tasters of their work. This is done, naturally, with their full permission, and I have absolutely no commercial interest in either of them. One is a friend called Margaret, the other a friend called John. John’s book is a police procedural called No Place for Dinosaurs, and the other a weird and wonderful shor...