Authors Electric

I grew up writing fantasy. I say that literally – I wrote my first novel aged 15, and by 18 or so, I was well into a fantasy novel. I remember at about age 10 or 11, finding a paperback of Robert Heinlein’s Stranger in a Strange Land on the bookshelf of a family friend; I borrowed it and I was hooked. That and a passage from Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World in English at primary school gave me a love of everything fantasy and science fiction, and in my teenage years I worked my way through all of Heinlein, Wyndham and most of the Robert Hale yellow-covered hardbacks in the library.  My first short story sale was fantasy. Fairly mainstream fantasy that was ‘normal’ enough for Bella magazine in the early 1990s. Most of my short stories after that ranged from outright horror, through dark fantasy and into science fiction – I have a collection of stories available in Maniac & Other Stories . The lead title story is the one from Bella magazine. It won second prize in their twist ...

 June is Crime Reading Month! The Crime Writers' Association has joined forces with The Reading Agency to promote it. There are lots of events up and down the country and you can find out more by going to  crimereading.com  . It's seventy years since The CWA was created so there's plenty to do. And of course, I've arranged something too. This is the perfect time to launch Murder In Merton: Crime Writing Events. First up, this coming Saturday 10th June 2-4pm at West Barnes Library, we have a Crime Authors Fair. With Sarah Clarke, Lucy Martin, Biba Pearce, Amer Anwar, Alex Khan and ML Rose. The authors will be free to chat with readers, with a more formal talk from Amer Anwar at 3pm. Books will be available to buy and there will be refreshments at a small cost. Entry is FREE and no booking is required. There will be a competition too! On Tuesday 20th June 7-8.15pm at Wimbledon Library, I'll be interviewing Robert Gold, Olivia Kiernan and Saima Mir about their latest n...

  After a few months delving into the classics, I’ve now gone back to reading more in the genre I write – when asked, I usually say ‘crime’ as that’s easier than saying, ‘Well, it’s a mix of dark psychological thriller with occasional horror thrown in, plus a bit of action and adventure on the side.’ The truth is, as I suspect for most of us who write, it’s hard to pigeonhole oneself into a specific box. I write stories; that’s the more honest answer, but give that as an answer and you get a frown, followed by, ‘Well yes, but what sort?’ For me, writing is a way to tell a story. That’s my motivation. It’s a way to explore topics I’m interested in. The genre I write in is secondary to that. I generally choose crime, as I enjoy reading it, and I understand the structure. But another writer may take the same idea and approach it from the opposite direction, with equally valid results. I think the same holds true for the reader – each reader’s life experiences will shape their percep...

I have written horror and crime for some years now and I do have a reasonable library of books to fall back on but sometimes those little details need to be checked, and it is so easy to do that online.  It occurred to me this week, however, that the browsing history of the average writer must ring bells somewhere on some watcher-server in some secret place.   It goes as no surprise to those who know me that I own up to being a compulsive researcher, spending hours looking into small details that are a sentence – nay half a sentence.  Now on occasion that could be classed as classic displacement activity  -  but then again it never hurts to check. In a recent read the female protagonist catches her skirt on the mistletoe. That sentence pulled me up sharp. Was she tiptoeing through the tree tops? Not that I could see.  A quick search confirmed that mistletoe varieties native to the UK are to be found growing on trees.  A minor p...

What is it with crime? We’re obsessed with it – or the people committing it. I admit I’m probably slightly biased in that I work in law enforcement and so my day job usually concerns crime in one form or another, but at least I have an excuse to be a crime writer! My first crime novel was inspired by the day job; having spent a few years investigating heroin importations, I wanted to look further down the chain at street drugs and how they might affect lives. And so I found my teenage Michael, dumped by his girlfriend in a club on his seventeenth birthday, and I needed to tell his story … But look at the best-seller lists. On Amazon or in your local bookshop of choice. In my case, there is no choice: Northwich has WHSmith and that’s it, unless you count the remaindered stock in The Works – and really, I just don’t get how I can find remaindered stock of books that were only published a mere two months ago! The shockingly short shelf-life of the mid-list trad-published author do...

Authors Electric guest poster, |Seb Kirby Despite the widely held opinion that male authors don't create convincing central female characters, there are some notable exceptions in literary fiction: Daniel Defoe - Moll Flanders , Thomas Hardy - Tess of the d'Urbervilles, Gustave Flaubert - Madame Bovary , Truman Capote - Breakfast At Tiffany's , Kazuo Ishiguro - Never Let Me Go , Ian McEwan - Atonement. Proving that it can be done and done well. But when it comes to male authored crime/thriller fiction, women protagonists are in more short supply. Of course, there are a great many very good and highly successful crime/thriller novels with female protagonists that are written by women (a list too long to mention). And there is a large number of male authored thrillers with strong female characters. A good example is Lisbeth Salander in Steig Larrson's Millennium series. But where are the male authors in this genre when it comes to internalising a view of the wor...

However, not just big guns but little ones, antique ones, homegrown and foreign. Not just guns either, but swords, daggers and hand grenades. There is no limit to the places a crime writer will go to get a real feel for his or her book. Ensuring accuracy is crucial, or so I told myself as I found myself winding my way north to visit an armoury. I think my books are somewhat unique in that my Detective, DI Shona McKenzie, and her team run around the streets of Dundee with guns in their hands. This despite the fact the Scottish police are not armed. Never let the truth get in the way of a good story. Before you write to say I shouldn't do this, Police Scotland themselves told me I should.  So, back to the armoury. I, and several other crime writers, spent the afternoon getting to know about, and handle, weapons of all shapes and sizes. I was particularly enamoured by the hand grenade. This is not fully loaded I may add, in fact it wasn't loaded at all but it was real. In...