Authors Electric

     I’ve recently been thinking about what constitutes a series in crime fiction. I started to think about this after describing my Dundee books at the recent launch of Missing Believed Dead , and whether I was right in labelling the three Dundee crime books as The Dundee Crime Series.      You see, in my books the police are not the main characters, they are secondary characters. The main characters are either victims, suspects or perpetrators, and they are completely different in each book. So, because my main characters are different in each book, does that make the books standalone crime fiction rather than a series?      Julie, the main character in Night Watcher , disappears into that space all characters go to when we, the writers, are finished with them. Admittedly she appears in Dead Wood as a distant memory, but she’s not there in the flesh.      Kara, my feisty single mother, who...

          I want to talk a bit about the different genres of my published books. I have 3 published novels on sale, one paperback and two e-books. Dead Wood and Night Watcher are dark crime novels which some readers describe as scary, although I don’t necessarily agree with this. Maybe I’m immune. This sticks me in the crime writer genre box. However, I have also published my historical family saga, A Salt Splashed Cradle , and two books of short stories which include horror. So which genre box am I in now?           So what’s with this genre box thing? Well, an author who is lucky enough to acquire a publishing contract is immediately put into a little box that defines which genre he or she will publish. So if the first accepted book is crime, you become a crime writer.           Many authors are dissatisfied with this but find it impossible to...