Last night I made my way- nervously- to the inaugural meeting of First Monday Crime, a new monthly crime fiction night at City University, the brainchild of David Headley and Harry Illinworth of Goldsboro Books, Katherine Armstrong of Little Brown and Bill Ryan, Lecturer on the City University Crime Thriller MA course. The idea is for these meetings to be a mix between a social event and a festival-style panel of writers, with everyone piling off to the pub afterwards, in this case, The Peasant (I'm reaching for a joke here, but it evades me).
I felt like I was back at uni as I located the correct entrance, then made my way along drab corridors to the lecture hall and wondered where to sit- near the front, but not the front row- and looked around for any familiar faces. I stared longingly at a box of tiny fairy cakes, before reminding myself that I was greedy and too clumsy to be allowed to eat in public and eschewing a cup of wine for the same reason (both included in the amazing £5 entry ticket). There was also a calico goodie bag including a proof of Jane Corry's `My Husband's Wife', due out in August. I started reading it on the tube going home and was instantly gripped.
The panel was chaired- with the lightest of touches- by Barry Forshaw, who has written a number of guides, including `Brit Noir' and `Nordic Noir'. There were four writers: Leye Adenle, a Nigerian debut novelist writing about a British journalist and a `Pam Grier-esque Blaxploitation heroine' (who shares traits with the writer's sister) who get involved in Lagos' seamy underbelly, when a woman's mutilated body is dumped near a club; Elly Griffiths (half Italian, half Welsh, but still can't sing), an established writer with several series under her belt, promoting `The Woman in Blue', featuring Dr Ruth Galloway, a forensic archaeologist (the writer's husband is an archaelogist); Amanda Jennings, whose haunting psychological thriller, In Her Wake, is her third crime novel. She was very amusing about her second, `The Judas Scar', which she views as a troublesome middle child and feels extremely protective of, as it didn't do as well as the others. The final panellist was Mary Paulson-Ellis with her debut novel, `The Other Mrs Walker' who talked with delightful insight about her writing and the search for identity as a theme in life, as in fiction.
What did I learn? Firstly, that I'm a coward, as I didn't go to the pub afterwards.
Before the event I spoke to the charming Katy Loftus, now Commissioning Editor at Viking, whom I first met when she gave a talk at the Curtis Brown Creative course. I admired my other neighbour's teal nail polish and caught up with Claire McGowan who also lectures on the Crime Thriller MA and spoke compellingly at the York Writing Festival last year.
I was exhausted- that's my excuse. My Christmas-present-from-the-husband Fit Bit is part of the reason, as I'd already clocked up 13,000 steps by then and longed for home. Also, for the first time ever I had 108 active minutes. I think it tracks your heart rate, so it shows how truly anxious I was, as I didn't even go to the gym yesterday!
Leye Adenle doesn't own a desk, but feels the need to tidy up all his papers before he can sit down to write. Us therapists call that `displacement activity'. He suggested we all give up writing and just buy his book. Elly Griffiths' editor tells her to cut the adverbs and stop anthropomorphising the cat; Mary Paulson-Ellis advised us to ignore the advice of other writers and just write what felt right and believe in oneself; and never show your manuscript to family. Amanda Jennings said to power on through to the end on a first draft, before you start editing little bits or you never get anywhere. She's been known to change the sex of the protagonist halfway through, but even that doesn't stop her forging on. Also, she once tried to write romance, but killed off the protagonist after 8 pages. So- stick to one genre, I guess, although several of them seemed to have zombie apocalypse novels just waiting to burst out.
Next time I'll leave my Fit Bit at home and definitely go on to the pub, although I've no idea how they fitted everyone in...
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