A book-less life

I have just spent an inspiring couple of days at the St Hilda’s Crime Weekend. Listening to writers talking, among many other things, about the books they grew up with and that had influenced their own work made me wonder what my life would look like, and who I’d be, if I’d never read any books.

First of all, what else would I have done with all that time? I often had many solitary childhood hours to fill on holidays and weekends in a small village in the Eden Valley. I was happy to read any book that came to hand (I still have the compendium volumes of John Buchan and Leslie Charteris). Otherwise, in pursuit of the most obviously active element in the landscape, I went bird-watching. There wasn’t a lot else to do. I’m not musical and can’t draw. It was only on occasional sufferance that girls were allowed to join in the cricket played on the village green. I could have played more Patience, or sewed or cooked or picked and helped my mother bottle more soft fruit, or taken even longer walks on the fells, but where would I have gone in my mind?

My sense of who my parents and older brothers were was informed by picking up and reading the books they put down. If ever I whined that I was bored, I was told to read a book. Dad liked historical biography and crime fiction. The younger of my two brothers was into 1960s sci-fi and P.G. Wodehouse. While I was ten and eleven, my eldest brother was studying ‘A’ Level English. Desperate to impress him, I struggled to understand Gerard Manley Hopkins and D.H. Lawrence. Most of it went over my head, but the mystery and richness of their language made me long to understand what sort of thinking they were doing when they wrote like that. (My eldest brother remained unimpressed.)

My mother was only an occasional reader, but I first came across the word ‘homosexual’ on the back cover of a Muriel Spark novel she was reading in a hotel room on a trip to London. I was, again, probably aged about ten, so this was before decriminalisation in 1967 and I had to nag her a bit to explain what the word meant, which was itself unusual. I think I tried reading a chapter or two of the novel and didn’t find it terribly interesting, but, because my mother’s taste in fiction was influenced by literary reviews in Sunday newspapers (this was when colour supplements were still new and exciting), I grew up benignly associating the word ‘homosexual’ with a grown-up urban world that seemed chic and smart.

Choosing my own books either on fortnightly visits to the library with my Dad, or spending birthday and Christmas book tokens, became a way to strike out for independence, and so I would deliberately select books none of my family would be likely to read.

There are certain authors (Georgette Heyer!) I will forever associate with certain friends. It was a young man I rather liked at university who encouraged me to read widely across nineteenth-century Russian literature. Anything I have ever learnt since about Russian landscape, art or politics is inevitably coloured by that rather intense period of reading. During the Nixon era, thanks to another boyfriend, I discovered the long-gone Compendium Bookshop in Camden which offered a subversive range of contemporary American writing that has helped prepare me for the current administration.

And on and on, until I cannot conceive of who I could possibly be without all the books I’ve read. And even if I could somehow subtract them from my head, I can’t imagine what would have taken their place, not only to fill the time but also to create an alternate understanding of the world and its history, geography, politics, people, relationships and emotions. I certainly can’t believe that I would ever have become a writer of fiction. I suspect I would have branched out from bird-watching and become a naturalist. And then written about that.

 

On the naming of names

Beginning a new novel means dreaming up new characters. Some will play very minor roles, others may evolve to carry the heart of the story, but they all need names.

This will be the third book in a series featuring Detective Inspector Grace Fisher, following on from Good Girls Don’t Die and Shot Through the Heart (published March 2016). When a name for a new character popped easily into my head, but then felt rather too familiar, I realised that I needed to make a list of all the character names I’ve already used – and was amazed to find there are already well over fifty on the list just for these three books.

If I look back over five novels and almost fifty screenplays for film and TV drama, that’s a lot of people I’ve dreamed up. Enough to populate a small village.

Some I can barely remember. Others still feel as vivid as friends or colleagues I’ve lost touch with but who nevertheless remain a part of my life, of me.

Naming characters is an odd business. Often a name just doesn’t sit right, which seems to prevent the character quite coming into focus. When that happens, finally hitting upon the right one feels satisfying and important.

When the police have to name an operation, they apparently consult a list compiled from dog breeds, American rivers, English coastal towns or exotic birds. I have used names connected with Shakespeare’s Globe or Victorian watercolourists, and also, when setting something in Manchester, pulled out a class list for a long-ago school reunion. Once, when requested, I named a character in memory of a friend’s mother: it took a while to find a minor character whom I felt really deserved her name.

Quite often I’ll look at lists of pop, movie or sports stars who were in the news the year a character would have been born – the kind of associations meaningful to my character’s parents – and choose something that helps me to keep in mind the world they were born into, the style and aspirations they were brought up with.

As Alfred Hitchcock is said to have remarked, you have to know what your characters keep in their cupboards (dead bodies, skeletons and all). Their name is what has to be written on the door.

Lies, damned lies and data

At the Theakstons Old Peculier Crime Writing Festival in Harrogate last weekend, I gleaned two very interesting and significant insights into two of my earlier posts –  Which novels ought we to like? and Cooking with data.

The first concerns the data released by Kobo that seems to suggest that the winner of the 2015 Bailey’s Prize, How To Be Both by Ali Smith, was only finished by 34% of readers. However, in print, readers would purchase one of two versions of the novel, each with the book’s two parts in alternate order. Yet someone from Apple told me that digital platforms include both versions, in which case the figure of 34% is highly misleading – and very unfair.

The second insight came from the Harrogate Festival’s amazing interview with screenwriter Paul Abbott. Asked how subscription channels such as HBO or Netflix affected the way he works, he said that Netflix’s policy was to commission work (presumably on the basis of their viewing data), hand over the money, and then not interfere until the drama or series was delivered. Get it wrong, and they’ll never use you again – fair enough. But presumably Netflix are confident enough of the winning combination of their data and the experience and track record of the talent they commission to stand back and not second-guess the creative process. Which supplies one possible answer to the question of what kind of expectations will be placed upon writers by the growing influence of data.

Screenwriter William Goldman is famous for saying of Hollywood that nobody knows anything. But that was before this kind of data meant that subscription channels do know certain kinds of things. If the Netflix approach becomes the working model for commissioning – in film, TV or fiction – then bring it on.

Which novels ‘ought’ we to like?

Does it matter if a majority of readers give up before they get to the end of a novel that wins a prestigious literary prize? It’s a pretty harsh question, but one raised by the data collected by Kobo and – I can only assume – other ebook retailers.

Last month I took part in a debate on Amazon and the Civil War for Books with Ellah Wakatama Allfrey, Erica Wagner and Andrew O’Hagan as part the National Conversation, a series of events organised by the Writers’ Centre Norwich.

We all agreed that telling and hearing stories – regardless of the form in which they are told – is intrinsic to human nature, and that perhaps the most pressing current concern is to ensure that everyone, especially new readers, has access to the widest possible range of stories.

I’m particularly interested in how the stories we tell – and how we tell them – will come to be influenced by the data gathered from digital platforms – the Writers’ Centre Norwich invited me to blog about it here. Amazon is reticent about sharing the data they glean from how people use their Kindles, but today’s Guardian carries fascinating data from Kobo about how readers are getting on with the Baileys Prize shortlist (the winner will be announced tonight).

The data shows not merely which of the six novels was the most purchased, but also how some failed to hold their readers’ attention to the end, while others proved un-put-downable. The Bees, a debut novel by Laline Paull, proved the “most gripping”.

I know from many walks on Hampstead Heath with Laline that it was always her intention to write a thriller set in a beehive, and she must be delighted that not only book sales but also the data analytics demonstrate the success of her literary instincts.

Kobo’s data on these six particular novels show that the number of sessions it took to finish reading varied from 17 to 36. This in itself doesn’t matter – whether I want a slow or a fast read is a combination of taste, reading environment and my desire for variety – but data on why (and at which point in the story) readers might abandon a book altogether must surely be of huge interest to publishers and authors. It certainly would be to me.

The publicity given to literary prizes plays a vital role not only in marketing books but also in telling us what books we ‘ought’ to like. Once the cascade of this kind of data really gets underway, should those who award literary prizes start to pay attention to how readers do actually read? It’ll be an interesting, scary and brave debate.

On being a door-to-door salesman

On Saturday I took part in the awesome KillerReads CrimeFest15 organised by Sam Missingham, Head of Audience Development at HarperCollins. Bloggers, former cops, ex-offenders and dozens of crime and thriller authors – including such legendary names as Ian Rankin, Ann Cleeves and Val McDermid – all took part in online events on Twitter and Facebook and also in store at Waterstones.

My Q&A with Sarah Hilary centred on writing for TV versus writing fiction. The pace on Twitter was fast and furious, and got me thinking about what the most fundamental difference actually is between the two.

And I reckon it’s this: before a script gets anywhere near production, it has to be a sales document in a way that a proposal or first draft of a novel very seldom is. Between a first verbal pitch and the first day of principal photography a screenwriter is grilled many times by different people on what the story is, who the characters are, why they do the things they do, why an audience will engage, etc etc. In other words, a script is a strategic document designed to convince other people it’s a good idea to spend hundreds of thousands of pounds – if not millions – making it, and then to motivate a small village of other highly skilled people to devote months of their time, often far away from home, to bring it to life.

The process has its drawbacks: way too many cooks … As much can go wrong as can go right, but when it all comes together, it’s magic.

And, by the time I deliver a final shooting script, every single line, scene and end-of-part hook has been tested to destruction. As have I as a writer.

In contrast, the freedom and autonomy of fiction, feels – to quote the actress Mrs Patrick Campbell – like the deep, deep peace of the double-bed after the hurly-burly of the chaise-longue. I’m loving it.

And am now working on the follow-up to Good Girls Don’t Die featuring detective Grace Fisher.

House of Cards and the Fourth Wall

In honour of today’s launch House of Cards Season 3 on Netflix, this post is brought to you by Frank Underwood, a master of how to break the Fourth Wall and get away with it.

Kevin Spacey’s sly looks to camera (and of course those of the late Ian Richardson in the original BBC series), and his asides to us, the viewers, all add immensely to our appreciation of the character. It means that we, too, have directly experienced his charisma and been seduced by it.

House of Cards has proved that, on screen, breaking the Fourth Wall can deliver big results. But if the viewer is ever reminded that they’re merely looking at a TV set, then the magic is destroyed. Frank Underwood’s audacity lies not only in his invitation to collude but also in the huge risk he runs that our suspension of disbelief will be shattered, bringing the whole meta-fictional house of cards tumbling down: we feel what it’s like to walk that political tight-rope.

In prose fiction, a deliberately unreliable narrator can add suspense and mystery or, as in Wuthering Heights, a complexity of sympathy and interpretation. Get it wrong, however, and an unintentionally slippery point of view quickly induces queasiness in a reader.

Some writers creatively exploit the possibilities of a first-person narrative, others find it constricting, but either way it removes any confusion about what other characters know or might be thinking. In a third-person narrative, however, it’s all too easy to jump in and out of different characters’ heads, sometimes even between paragraphs, breaking the Fourth Wall and leaving the reader unable to settle down and identify with, or care about, any of them.

Point of view needs to be tightly patrolled. On screen, POV is constructed by who the camera is looking at while dialogue or action is happening, and can radically alter the meaning and intention of a scene. We identify most strongly with the person for whom there is something at stake. I think there’s a fundamental weakness in the opening episode of House of Cards Season 3, for example, (I saw it last night at the gala preview in London) because we share the POV of Doug Stamper far more viscerally than that of either POTUS or the First Lady.

That vital emotional investment in a character has to be there on the page, too. If a reader can effortlessly stay with a character, and get to know them by understanding what they notice and how they think – hopes, fears, self-delusions, denials and all – then they’ll be there, walking that tight-rope right along with them.

Dead Women Sell Books

I was recently invited by Shots Blog – the blogspot for Shots Crime & Thriller Ezine – to write a guest post. Here is my piece, continuing the debate started five years ago by Jessica Mann about the levels of violence against women in crime fiction, especially in novels written by women. Others who have written about women’s voices in crime drama and fiction are Boris Starling and Nicci Gerrard.

 

DEAD WOMEN SELL BOOKS

A girl is missing … a vulnerable woman is being stalked … a girl is found brutally murdered … Dead women sell books.

So should I really be adding to a genre that glamorises the violent and sadistic victimisation of women?

My answer is ‘yes’ because the fact that dead women DO sell books is very interesting.

Good Girls Don’t Die, my first crime novel, centres on the tense relationship between the police and the media during a big murder enquiry, and – as happened at Soham and Ipswich – the additional pressure that a highly competitive, 24-hour rolling news industry places on a police investigation.

Dead women, of course, also sell newspapers: the more lurid, titillating, gruesome and voyeuristic the details, the better. So, woven through my story is how and why dead women get served up by the media for avid public consumption.

On television, believe it or not, far more men get killed than women, just as they do in real life. But male characters tend to be blasted, blown away, the fallen comrades of either side. And they will almost certainly die fully clothed. When a man is the prey, he’s likely to be hunted down because of something he wants or has done, not simply for his male body. Female victims are presented very differently – as they are on book jackets – with the camera lingering over separate, helplessly exposed, body parts. Blood, bruised flesh, torn garments, sprawled limbs: why?

Perhaps it’s partly because, on a good day, only about 25% of TV writers (of which I am one) and directors are women. It’s even worse in film. Which means that, on screen, more than 75% of the time, men are left to speak for and about women. No wonder that so few Hollywood movies pass the Bechdel Test, which is that two female characters have to be in at least one scene where they talk to each other about something other than a man.

It matters that a balance of women’s voices is heard, especially when it comes to violence against women: thankfully, the gender mix in crime fiction is very much healthier.

Mary Beard has talked about the public voice of women, showing how, since the Odyssey, women have been told to shut up. Mary and I were undergraduates together (at an all-women college where she is now Professor of Classics) and we are of the generation who fondly believed that we had earned the right to be heard.

And of course we have. But this year Mary was targeted by online trolls making disgusting and extremely violent personal threats against her simply because she voiced her opinions. Assertive female executives still report being labelled as shrill, bossy or up-tight ball-breakers. Rape victims are asking for it because they dare to wear short skirts or get drunk. The message is clear: Good Girls Don’t Die.

I also wanted to write about the men who victimise and kill women. Murderers are seldom singular and intriguing serial killers; all too often they’re just sad blokes who suck up a misogynistic culture and assume that women should shut up and do what they’re told. Or are too inadequate to know how else to express their desperate need of women except by aggressive blaming and shaming.

I wanted to explore what such misogynistic attitudes really express; what kind of fear of – or longing for – women they conceal; what miseries they cause to both sexes. And what it’s like for women to be expected to play roles dictated by a culture in which glamorised dead women provide entertainment.

I also had to work out how to give my central detective character, Grace Fisher, a compelling and attractive voice. The noir tradition of male detectives decrees that a brooding, wounded, hard-drinking loner is per se rugged and noble. He can rescue or avenge women and children simply because he’s a man, while a female detective’s motives are more closely examined, and her vulnerabilities risk making her either a recovering victim or just a bit sad and flaky.

I wanted to show how well, or badly, Grace Fisher deals with the difficulties she encounters, with the labels used to shame her, when, as a police officer, she can’t or won’t shut up.

Excitingly, an organic tradition of modern female detectives is now evolving thanks to all kinds of crime writers of both sexes, and I’m thrilled to add to their characters’ wonderfully different voices.

 

 

An e-book is not a book

Yesterday the nominations for this year’s Emmy awards were announced. As the New York Times reported, Netflix and HBO each received more nominations than some of the long-established TV networks. Delivery platforms have changed. As a result, audiences are bingeing on long-running series, and TV drama is as good now as it’s ever been. I’ve not heard any screenwriter wax lyrical about the good old days when it was so much better to write for an audience who had remote controls and TV sets too heavy to lug from room to room.

No screenwriter has been harmed by the advent of subscription streaming services. Quite the opposite. So why do so many authors choose to be sniffy and uninformed about what new delivery platforms can do for them?

It’s not screenwriters who are competing with Netflix or HBO for viewers, it’s the traditional US networks. And it’s publishers, not authors, who are threatened by Amazon (whose own dominance of the download market is, in the US at least, beginning to slide).

The recently leaked New York Times Innovation Report pointed out how the Huffington Post is managing to get way more traction out of content created by the NYT than the paper is itself. The report pointed out that NYT staff – especially senior editorial staff – are digitally unengaged. I strongly suspect the same is true of most publishing houses. It reminds me of long-gone days when senior (male) CEOs thought they’d never have to use a computer because they had secretaries. How many people in publishing think they don’t need to know how an algorithm works because they employ some digital guy for that?

I buy and read hard-copy books all the time, but, as an author whose e-books hugely outsell my paperbacks, I’m liking e-books a lot. So I want to know why the big publishing houses left it to Tesco to set up a really bright and attractive online bookstore that, with its TV and movie counterpart, is a perfect one-stop-shop for all storied content? Why bookshops can’t attract those customers who want to read a book on a device designed by Jony Ive by adopting a design ethic closer to that of an Apple Store?

Netflix and HBO use dramas such as Game of Thrones or House of Cards to create and enhance their own brand identity. Why haven’t publishing conglomerates used their various imprints to create If-you-liked-that-then-you’ll-like-this digital brands (for crime or poetry, for instance) that readers can immediately identify with as go-to sites? Or maybe team up with a global brand such as the BBC to deliver books via the iPlayer? Why not?

The e-book is not a book. Amazon is not a bookshop. Its algorithms have absolutely nothing in common with the traditional business methods of the booktrade. The algorithm – how to feed it, how to read the data it produces, how to surf its waves – is how authors get their work in front of readers. We all of us need to know this shit.

Sure, there’s still a very big argument to be had over pricing so that writers can actually afford to write, but meanwhile there’s also a crying need for publishers to ramp up their digital engagement and to view the e-book not as a pale imitation of the real thing – a print copy – but as a separate concept. There’s a reason, after all, why iTunes didn’t call itself iRecords or iCDs.

In Marrakech once I watched the storytellers in the main square use snakes to attract their audience. Snakes, ink and paper, e-books, they’re all in the same business – finding people to tell stories to.