Crime is a many GENRE thing! - Linda Strachan

About 6 months ago I joined three other crime writers, Anne Cassidy,  Keren David and Gillian Philip to start up a new group blog called CRIME CENTRAL   www.crimereading.blogspot.com

What is rather strange is that I never really thought about becoming a 'crime' writer.

In fact I never expected to find myself writing crime novels for young adults,  I was more acustomes to writing for young children. It was more surprising to discover that the books I was writing were quite dark. I was giving my young characters quite a nasty time of it. Perhaps that is not exactly true, they pretty much did it to themselves.

But where did all that come from? I honestly have absolutely no idea but once I started the situations and characters presented themselves, and off I went.




Both Spider and Dead Boy Talking are set in the modern world with realistic settings and modern teenagers but when we talk about writing crime it all depends on your particular taste as to which genre of crime you write.





The fascinating thing about Crime is that is exists in almost every genre. It all depends on your taste.


If you like Science Fiction you may enjoy classics like ASIMOV's The Caves of Steel where Detective Elijah Baley invesitgates the murder of an offworlder in Spacetown or perhaps more recently written or stronger stuff?






If you like historical crime you might like   Eleanor Updale's Montmorency series or perhaps  Joan Lennon's Victorian The Slightly Jones Mysteries  or Mary Hoffman's The Falconer's Knot.   There are lots to choose from.


Perhaps you prefer fantasy or horror crime novels, or thrillers or romance with a criminal edge?     

What is your favourite crime genre?

Since we started CRIME CENTRAL we have been joined by a host of fascinating writers blogging about their type of crime novel.

So why not drop by and see what they have to say or perhaps let us know (on the blog) if you would like to write a short blog for us.- whether as a writer, reviewer or reader.



----------------------------    DON'T FORGET  ----------------------------
Just one week to go until the ABBA Lit Fest           Saturday 9th and Sunday 10th July   
Check out the full programme of blogs, videos and giveaway competitions!


Don't miss the video blog of Linda Strachan and Cathy MacPhail discussing tutoring  a 'Writing for Children' week at the Arvon Foundation centre at Moniack Mhor  



Linda Strachan  is an award winning author of over 60 books for children of all ages from picture books to teenage novels and also a  writing handbook  'Writing for Children' 
website www.lindastrachan.com
blog  Bookwords

The Next Big Thing by Keren David

Trend-setter

Dystopia is the new paranormal. So says The Bookseller magazine, reporting on the Bologna Children’s Book Fair.  Publishers’ stands were still full of vampires, angels and ghosts, but agents and publishers were haggling over rights for Young Adult books about imagined worlds and deadly disasters. 

Publishers' Weekly quoted Random House UK’s Becky Stradwick: “I literally had six dystopian novels land on my desk a week before the fair. People are feeling the need to create a feeding frenzy, a ‘book of the fair.’

The trend started with the deserved success of Suzanne Collins’ Hunger Games trilogy, in which the government of Pan-em, an imagined America, makes teens fight to the death on television.  Big advances, film rights and a lot of hype followed for several other writers of high concept dystopian tales. Their books will be heading up publishers lists, getting the biggest share of marketing spend and prominent placement on bookshop shelves next year.

Woo! Exciting! Shelve that sexy vampire story and start dreaming up a world with no energy sources. A planet without water? A regime in which half the population is imprisoned by a tiny elite? Dystopia gives writers a great opportunity to take a premise wherever they want to, to tackle contemporary and universal issues in a futuristic setting.

But wait. Dystopia is already on the wane. According to The Bookseller article spring 2012 is already saturated with apocalyptic tales. Francesca Dow, managing director of Penguin Children's, said there had been a wave of dystopian trilogies from the US, ‘and we are being very selective.’

The glut of dystopia books coming next year won't start the next fashion. That’ll be reserved for some other book that slipped through the net and got published even though its chances were severely limited by not being on-trend. Publishers' Weekly runs through a few ideas for the next Next Big Thing. Books for younger readers! Time travel (the anti-dystopia, apparently) And I'm glad to say that there's even hope for the realistic novel. PW spoke to another Random House editor, Beverly Horowitz who said “Everyone’s asking if I think the realistic novel is coming back. ‘It’s never gone away,’ I tell them. These books are still selling, they’re just not getting the same attention.”

 My imagined world -  my utopia -  is one where the world of publishing isn’t so quick to follow  one best-seller with more of the same. Where story, characters, plot and writing matters more than genre. Where publishers say things such as ‘Readers need a wide range of books about all sorts of subjects.’ And ‘We value originality more than anything else.’ And ‘We judge every book on its own merits, not on its similarity to books by other authors.’  There are editors, sales and marketing people, booksellers who believe this and act accordingly. And those people start trends rather than follow them.

The London Book Fair starts today. Good luck to all those YA dystopian writers. And even better luck, this year, to everyone else. 

Tired of Vampires? Miriam Halahmy

Two weeks ago I did my first event for my new novel HIDDEN at Portsmouth University for their Multicultural Staff and Student Forum. The organiser, Maricar Jagger, had contacted me over Twitter when I started to Tweet about setting my novels on Hayling Island next to Portsmouth. It was a lovely event to kick off with. Blackwells University Bookshop stocked my novels and Chris, pictured here, a member of the Forum, is the very first person to buy my book in a bookshop! HIDDEN is officially released on March 31st.

I was invited to speak at this Forum because HIDDEN is about asylum seekers and covers current immigration policies and human rights issues in the UK today. Although the audience was quite small, we covered a huge amount of ground from the inspirations and background to the writing of the novel, all the way to the conflict between the Israelis and the Palestinians and the initiatives I am involved with to promote dialogue and peace.

But perhaps the most interesting response I had to my novel came from two women who both had 16 year old daughters. My book is marketed for the 11+ age range and the protagonists are 14. Generally we are told that young people prefer to read about characters older than themselves. So I hadn't thought it would be of interest to older teens. However both  women said that their daughters were fed up with a diet of vampires and romance and were looking for fiction which was more challenging. They felt that HIDDEN could offer them this kind of read.

It is always difficult to predict trends in any market but I have felt from talks and articles generated by the industry over the past four years when I have been writing and submitting HIDDEN, that this kind of book is probably not the most marketable to teens. Of course only time will tell but I certainly felt uplifted to hear that there were sixteen year olds out there looking for an alternative to some of the more recent popular themes.

I have recently  joined a group of authors who are writing gritty contemporary fiction for teens and we are hoping to participate as a group to promote our particular style of writing. We are setting up a blog - so watch this space. It certainly feels like my novel is coming out at a time when there might just be a bit more space for it in the current market trends.

Literary Genres by Marie-Louise Jensen

I've just read an interesting piece on Stephen Hunt's website, about the invisibility of genre fiction on World Book Night and its general invisiblity in the media. The discussion was mainly about adult fiction, but so many of the points seemed to me to be relevant to the world of young people's fiction, that I feel impelled to look at a couple of them here.

Of course our starting point is that children's fiction is already the Cinderella of the fiction world. But let's leave that aside for now. Martin Amis' offensive remarks have already been responded to thoroughly here.

The general bone of contention is that so-called genre writers feel they are looked down on, ignored and passed over for writers of contemporary fiction. In children's fiction, I would personally refer to that as 'issue fiction' for reasons I will explain presently.

When I first started reading and studying fiction for young people and looking at reviews and esecially prize lists back in about 2004, it struck me immediately that the majority of the books that make those lists are issue fiction. This is particuarly true of the Carnegie prize, where it's rare to see genre fiction, unless it's suitably dark and adult.

Historical fiction is sometimes taken seriously, but woe betide any writers who have the poor judgement to include a love story, because that will relegate them to the trash pile at once. A group of us have recently found that to be true when we considered joining a newly-established history association that has allegedly banned all works of romance from their august and select group.

But is issue fiction intrinsically better or more worthwhile than science fiction, fantasy, historical fiction, horror or chicklit?

The answer has to be: of course not. There will be 'good' and 'bad' books in all genres. So why is it so over-represented? It isn't what is read most or sells best. The prize for that would probably go to fantasy, spy books or chicklit publications for that. Any children's author probably knows that it's fantasy that sells best in the foreign rights market, for example.

Chicklit is contemporary fiction, and yet is just as ignored as any science fiction books. This is why I earlier drew the distinction between issue fiction and contemporary fiction. In fact the Queen of Teen award recently drew some most ill-considered remarks from a well-known writer for young people who ought to have known better. She suggested most strongly that it was all trash and criminalised the reading of it.

So why would that author - who is not alone in her position by any means - lift her voice against her sisters in fiction-writing and denounce their work?

I do believe that this snobbishness spreads into our world of children's fiction. That many people like to look down on genre fiction - and chick lit above all is considered fair game by almost everyone. (I noticed Stephen Hunt didn't defend or mention chicklit in his rant. Even he, the defender of genre fiction, probably secretly likes to look down on it; the exploration of women's feelings and relationships a fearful, unknown world to him!)

What I can't explain is why. I think all the genres have an equal amount to offer the population and are all of value, each in their own way. I certainly read the whole lot when I was growing up. From Enid Blyton, to pony stories, to Tolkein to a huge selection of the classics. And I'm quite sure I was all the better for it.