Hi everyone!
In this Issue:
Why are crime writers so happy?
News and events
SJW recommends
The Writers’ Lodge
Why are crime writers so happy?
I’m just back from Harrogate, where I attended the Theakston Old Peculier Crime Writing Festival (a bit of a mouthful, which is why everyone just ends up calling it ‘Harrogate’) and interviewed crime writer Tess Gerritsen (pictured above with me and Denise Mina, who chaired this year’s event). It was wonderful to return, as I haven’t been for a few years. The pandemic scuppered 2020’s event, as it did everything, last year the festival ran but at limited capacity, and for several years before that I just found myself busy so couldn’t attend.
I’m glad I went, though. I was reminded, once again, of what a fantastic festival it is, and also what a wonderfully supportive, friendly and entertaining bunch of people crime writers are. Despite writing books that are often blacker than black, filled with murder and betrayal, crime and thriller writers laugh more, and have more fun, than almost any other group of people I can think of.
It’s a strange one, isn’t it? They say comedians are often crying on the inside, despite spending their days trying to make people laugh, and it seems the opposite is true of crime writers: We’re trying to terrify people, while laughing hysterically on the inside1. In fact Tess herself has a quote on her website from the Chicago Tribune:
“She has an imagination that allows her to conjure up depths of human behavior so dark and frightening that she makes Edgar Allan Poe and HP Lovecraft seem like goody-two-shoes...”
Yet, in real life, Tess is one of the loveliest, kindest people I’ve ever met, both in and out of the crime-writing community. You’d never guess she spends her days writing about murder and death. And she’s not alone in this. I’m not sure why writers in this particular genre are so… happy. Perhaps by spending so much of our time examining the darkness, and trying to make sense of it, once we step away from our desks it’s out of our system. Perhaps. Maybe our work gives us a place to put the negativity? Yet (in my opinion at least) crime and thriller books, though dark, aren’t particularly negative. Usually they end on a note of hope. The good guys win in the end, the bad guys get their comeuppance, the victims are fictional and (usually) justice is served.
Maybe crime and thriller writers tend to be happy because so many readers love our work? Surveys regularly show that crime is the most popular genre (often neck and neck with romance). It’s an undeniably good feeling to know that what you do connects with so many people, and a wonderful privilege to be able to entertain and bring joy, particularly in dark times. But the next question is, why is this? Why do so many people love reading about murder and death?
Again, I think we circle back to that important point. Not only is it fiction, a made-up story, something you can pick up and put down at will, but crime fiction also gives shape and meaning to events that in the real world feel huge and meaningless and just.. desperately sad. I love watching true-crime documentaries and listening to true-crime podcasts, but they don’t fulfil me in quite the same way as reading crime fiction does. At the end of a true-crime story I often feel lost and anxious, I need a break, I want to process the story I’ve just heard. True-crime throws puzzles at us — is X guilty? Why did Y do what they did? What really happened? — and we get hypothesis after hypothesis. But unlike with fiction, there’s no guarantee that we’ll get an answer in the final episode, and in fact usually we don’t. Even when we do it’s usually controversial, upsetting, and tragic; the puzzle is solved but we know there were real victims, real people whose lives were lost or ruined. It can be upsetting.
Which is not to say we shouldn’t watch these shows or listen to these stories. I think we need to be prepared to think about what people are capable of doing to each other, we have to examine what it means to be human. But maybe that’s part of the reason people love crime fiction. As well as the puzzle — the fun in trying to follow the clues left by the author, in attempting to work out who did what and why — we can look at the darkness within, safe in the knowledge that this is a made up story. No one actually died.
Maybe the answer is in the other half of that Chicago Tribune quote on Tess’s website:
“In Gerritsen's cool, capable hands, even the bleakest horrors can be probed and eventually explained."
I suppose that’s the difference…
News and events
I’m working on two new books at the moment, both of which I hope will be finished by the autumn, and hopefully will see the light of day next year. They both have titles, but I’m superstitious about sharing them too soon. Watch this space…
I’ll be appearing at the Capital Crime Festival 2022, at Battersea Park in London. I’ll be on the panel “Hook, Line & Twist: Entering the warped minds of crime fiction’s ‘big idea’ authors”, along with Tim Weaver, Alice Feeney, Stuart Turton and Hervé Le Tellier. Take a look at the full schedule here.
SJW recommends
In the opening pages of this expertly paced thriller we meet Sophie, first in flashback as a child recently moved from Massachusetts to London with her mother, Amelia-Rose, and then in the present-day as an adult receiving a letter from Matty Melgren, a serial killer incarcerated in Battlemouth Prison. He writes that he wants to see her in the few weeks he has left before he dies...
Read my full review here.
The Writers’ Lodge
“Chock full of brilliant insight and advice. It’s things like this that help to keep the flame alight.”
Are you a writer? Do you want to write?
In the last couple of issues we’ve been looking at:
How to get going when you’re not in the mood to write
Working with an agent
Getting the book right
Knowing where to send it
Translation rights
The Writers’ Lodge is a nurturing and supportive newsletter for anyone who is writing, or who is considering embarking on a writing project and wondering whether they have what it takes, or may even just be considering their first tentative steps into writing fiction.
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Happy reading/writing!
I’m not being entirely serious here, but you get my point.