The Jonathan Miles Show,  |
| Accepting my prize and paying tribute to some authors. Theakstons' Old Peculiar Crime Writers' Festival, Harrogate |
On Wednesday, 23rd February, novelists David Hewson and Ann Cleeves appeared at the Gateshead City Old Town Hall Performance Hall to promote their new novels, The Blue Demon (Nic Costa #8) and Blue Lightening (Shetland Isles Quartet #4).
Anyone with aspirations of being a crime writer would be remiss in studying her work, let alone pass up the opportunity to actually meet her. So when this budding novelist learnt Barbara Vine--aka Ruth Rendell--would be making an appearance to mark the publication of her new novel, he made sure to book the ticket weeks in advance.
St. Mary's Church, in Battersea, was perfectly chosen to host the event.
It was only lacking in a chalk outline and George Baker frowning as the SOCO taking their samples to make it a scene from one of her own novels.
One of the joys of living in London is that it is just such a location as this which might actually end up in a novel. Certainly, it was on the lips of the mainly female audience that St. Mary's would be ideal for a hanging.
Anyone who attends these sort of events will tell you with a wry grin that the readership for crime fiction are ninty per-cent female. Certainly this author was in the minority, being one of only four other men present. And that included the gentleman from Waterstones', there to set up for the book signing, afterwards.
The evening began with Dame Rendell reading the first chapter of the book. It was an interesting experience to hear it read in the author's own voice. Finding your narrative voice is the subject of countless books (I have at least four on my own shelf). It crossed my mind, as I sat listening, why anyone would waste their time buying them. Dame Rendell captivated the entire church from the first word until the last. But it was her skill as a suspense writer, knowing how to tease the reader, being aware of the relationship between author and reader, that made us as one mutter a collective 'Ooh!' when she reached the end. How she does this was the question I had come to ask.
"I discovered I had a natural ability to make people keep reading," she was heard to have said, on a TV trailer for ITV's Thriller season. If only I could ask her *how*, I remembered thinking.
It was too good to be true.
"Most new writers," she said, smiling at me, once I had explained my ambitions, "make the mistake of giving the reader everything upfront. If you want the reader to stay with you to the last page, you have to make them work for it. You do this by keeping things back." Read any of her novels, whether it be a Wexford, a stand-alone or, in this case, a Vine, and you'll see it done. Read the first page and she'll make you ask who? Why? When?
There's more to it than this, of course. Dame Rendell is a craftsman (person?) who knows how to use all the tools in a crime writer's box, dialogue, clues, descriptive powers, characterisation, and the ability to empathise with the lead character, and that of the villain.
Forget all of the HOW TO WRITE books. Go directly to the crime fiction section of your local Waterstones. Find the Rs. Begin with Doon Til Dusk. Find the Vs and start on The Minotaur (my personal favourate).
You will learn all you need to about writing and atmosphere within those pages a lot sooner than you would in the reference section! And you'll have a much better time, too.
