Category Archives: Crime writing

Crime fiction in a world turned upside down

Posted on by under Crime writing, Life and stuff

We now live in a world where lies are considered to be the equal of truth, cruelty is the norm and old friends are being stabbed in the back. Diplomacy now consists of shouting louder than the other guy and breaking all your promises. Malignant narcissism is in fashion.

My late wife was a historian and she was especially interested in the English Revolution (popularly known as the English Civil War). ‘The World Turned Upside Down’ was a popular ballad at the time and was also the title of her favourite book. My wife thought that it a good description of the time when a King’s power was absolute. Many thought that these powers were oppressive and groups such as the Diggers and Levellers tried to build a world where everyone had certain inalienable rights. They were, of course, hounded and oppressed by the King for daring to say such things. Many suffered greatly at the King’s hand and so chose to leave England behind and look for a land where they would be free of absolute rulers. These men and women founded the United States of America. Considering that the USA has now elected a King, I find that there is some irony in this.

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The ups and downs of self-publishing

Posted on by under Crime writing, Self publishing, Writing process

So, you’ve written your book, had it read and done the rewrites. At long last it’s time to push the ‘Publish’ button on the Amazon KDP site. So, what happens now? A huge booming silence usually. You next have to kick start your book sales by doing some marketing. I won’t go too deeply into this as what might be effective for your book might not be effective for mine and vice versa. All I’ll say is that you will need to advertise in some form so it’s important that you do your research and choose the options that best suit your book and the demographic that you’re aiming at.

Okay so your marketing is now working and you’re looking at your KDP book sales and ‘pages read’ to see what happens. Your book sales go up – Yippie! Then they go down again. Then up, down and all over the place. What’s happening? If you expected to be able to fine tune your marketing strategies by looking at your book sales, I’d forget it.

Let me explain.

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Just published – the first DI Biddie O’Sullivan mystery

Posted on by under Biddie O'Sullivan, Crime writing

You can now find my latest crime novel, Murder At Shark Island, on Amazon books. This has been something of a new departure for me as so far all of my crime novels have featured retired murder specialist Mac Maguire. It would be fair to say that Biddie is a little different.

She’s a Garda detective working out of Cork City, Ireland. She’s also six foot three inches tall and a black belt in Tae Kwon Do. She is currently unattached but wishes that she wasn’t. Her son has just moved out and is enjoying his university life while she is rattling around an empty house. Work becomes everything to her and, in this her first case, she gets the job no-one wanted…

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Don’t rush to publish – create a process and stick to it

Posted on by under Crime writing, Self publishing, Writing process

This is some advice that I wished had been given to me when I was publishing my first book The Body in the Boot. The big problem was that, now that I had a completed book burning a hole in my hand, I desperately wanted to get it out there as quickly as possible. And so I did. However, since that time, I have had to re-edit and republish the book several times in order to get it anywhere near to a reasonable standard. However, I was lucky in that most of my readers forgave me for the typos, poor editing and formatting saying that they liked the story. However, more than a few also pointed out its shortcomings which, although it stung a little at the time, in the end proved to be immensely helpful.

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My new detective – Biddie O’Sullivan

Posted on by under Crime writing, Life and stuff, Mac Maguire, Writing process

As a writer, I try to make plans but I’ve learned that, sometimes, such plans can very quickly go out of the window. I was halfway through Mac Maguire’s fourteenth adventure, A Murdered Crow, when a new idea hit me pretty much out of the blue. It was all Mac’s fault really as I had him reviewing some crime novels as part of his investigation into a murder and, in order to give him some clues, I had to invent a couple of authors and their fictional detectives. One of these fictional characters was called Detective Inspector Biddie O’Sullivan who works out of Cork City, Ireland. As I say, Biddie was invented just to help Mac’s plot along but, somehow, she stuck in my head.

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Writing about what you don’t know

Posted on by under Crime writing, Self publishing, Writing process

Writing about what you know is probably good advice for any writer. However, if you’re writing a series, sooner or later you are going to have to try something new. This happened to me by book six, Two Dogs. Part of this book, by necessity, had to be set in Paris so I was somewhat taken out of my comfort zone. In subsequent books, The Chancer and The Eight Bench Walk, I take the reader to the North-West of Ireland and then to Cyprus. I can’t say how well I’ve achieved this, as only the reader can judge that, but I’ve certainly had no adverse reviews as yet regarding the locations of my books.

Getting facts about a location wrong can seriously annoy your readers so let’s see what resources you can use to ensure that this doesn’t happen.

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My Top Ten crime movies

Posted on by under Crime writing, Life and stuff, Writing process

I was recently thinking about how movies have been a constant backdrop in my life and how crime movies, especially film noir, have contributed in leading me into a career in crime writing. There are loads of Top Ten lists around and I began wondering what my Top Ten of crime movies might look like. You can see them below and they are in no particular order.

Please note that I don’t claim that any of these are the best crime movies ever, they are just the ones that I like most.

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The recipe for a good murder mystery…

Posted on by under Crime writing, Mac Maguire, Writing process

I’ve been reading one of Miguel Barclay’s cook books and I really like the simplicity of his recipes. The book is based on the notion that you can eat well for just one pound ($1.20) a portion but, besides the fact that they taste good and are nutritious, the real appeal for me is that all the meals are quite quick to cook. To explain, I used to love cooking and found it to be something of an antidote to the stress that had built up during a long working day and commute. I didn’t even mind if the recipe was complicated, it just gave me more time to unwind.

That was great when I had the energy or spoons to do it but now I’m finding that, by the time I’ve cooked the meal, I might not have enough energy left to enjoy it. So, Miguel, with his quick recipes, has helped to restore my love of cooking by allowing me to spend less energy in the kitchen thus allowing me to enjoy the eating part too. I was looking at one of his recipes yesterday and I started wondering what would be a good recipe for a crime story. This is my take on that…

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Do it yourself book covers – Part 4 – Ebooks and paperbacks

Posted on by under Crime writing, Self publishing, Writing process

Once upon a time, books were precious objects and meant only for people who could afford them. They were mostly leatherbound and often with tooled gold leaf such as this first edition of Dicken’s classic Christmas novel. Books like these were put on display and were as much a status object as having fine paintings or furniture. Even more, perhaps, as it implied that their owners were of a sensitive and literate disposition.

Although a sort of dust jacket was in use as early as the 1820’s, it was a century later that they became ubiquitous. Publishers also found it cheaper to produce ornate dust jackets than ornate tooling and binding and so the book cover was born. Now, books became a display item in shops and visual information about the book was immediately available to a purchaser.

Paperbacks were being produced in the 1840’s in Germany so they are hardly a new idea. However, they took off in the 1940’s with Allan Lane’s Penguin books. These tended to be mostly reprints of existing titles but in the 1950’s the paperback revolution really kicked off with original titles being published en masse for the first time. These were books that just about everyone could afford and original genre fiction such as romance, science fiction, westerns and, of course, crime became wildly popular.

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Do it yourself book covers – Part 3 – Using images

Posted on by under Crime writing, Self publishing, Writing process
herat is a lonely hunter cover

While there are some book covers that don’t use images like the one on the left, I’d guess that these are in the minority. However, in this case, the stylised 3D font used in the title is a sort of image anyway. So, the first question you might want to ask is, does my book cover actually need an image? If the answer is yes then read on.

If you search in Amazon books for a particular genre and scroll down the covers then you will see that the huge majority of book covers use an image. If the search is for crime novels then you will also see that many of the covers are quite similar; dark colours with a solitary figure usually in silhouette. Of course, the plus point of this is that this is useful visual shorthand for telling the reader what genre they’re looking at. While I’ve read that putting a human figure on a cover sells books, I’ve never actually found any hard evidence to support this. There’s a lot of information out there about what makes the best cover and a lot of it is quite contradictory. So what’s the best course to take?

I’ve honestly got no idea. Anything I say in these posts is just my take but, for me, my covers are an integral part of the book. While I obviously want people to read my books, none of them have been written with commercial considerations in mind. I’ve just tried to write the stories that come to me as best I can. I feel the same about my covers. I don’t want a gloomy cover with a solitary figure unless that’s what I feel the story needs. If you look at my covers, you can see that they’re all quite different but, hopefully, they all reflect something of the story inside. I’ll use three examples to illustrate this.

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