Erin Kelly's Launch of `He Said, She Said' and Pitch DHH

The email I’d been waiting for finally pinged into my Inbox the week before Easter: I’d been successful in my application to meet Broo Doherty, an agent at DHH, for a 10 minute slot in their three hour #pitchDHH session. Each of the five agents had selected 12 people from the 500 plus who’d sent in a synopsis and the first three chapters of their work.

I had the first ten minute slot and gathered with the other four writers in the entrance of The Library, a hip private members’ club on St Martin’s Lane, around the corner from DHH’s offices in the basement of Goldsboro books in Cecil Court. My fellow writers had all come from out of town- me from Cambridge, others from York, Birmingham and even Cornwall for the day. We were all nervous and unsure what to expect, but Emily Glenister was valiant in her efforts to put us at ease, escorting us up the stairs at the allotted time, making introductions and thoughtfully supplying water. Apparently, one writer arrived with home-baked caramel shortbreads for the agents, a creative improvement on an apple for the teacher!

Broo was very professional and had prepared a long page of comments. I’d prepared a pitch, but was more interested in what she had to say, so didn’t get past the first part of it. The ten minutes flew by. She liked my central character and the ingenious murder, said I had a strong opening, but felt I needed to unveil the mystery more slowly, layer by layer, and not introduce too many viewpoints too soon.

She asked me for my ten word pitch and my mind froze for a moment. She gave me a pen to jot down her comments, but it didn’t work, probably due to the copious amounts of sweat I’d produced in lieu of coherent speech. When we parted, she gave me the (unannotated) print-out of my chapters to keep, but what I really wanted were those notes of hers!

To have someone experienced take your writing seriously and devote their precious time to considering your efforts is the biggest inspiration any aspiring writer can have. I’ve been feeling grateful, invigorated and curiously exhausted ever since…

Another person who took my writing seriously was Erin Kelly, who was our fabulous tutor on the Curtis Brown Creative course I completed. I’ve been a big fan ever since. Last night saw the launch of her new book, `He Said, She Said’, at the Waterstones on Tottenham Court Road. The book is set in the `eclipse chasing community’. A young couple in 1999 are at a festival and later become the star witnesses in a rape trial, so it’s also partly a courtroom drama. According to the recent Guardian review: `She steps it up a level with this creepy, tangled, disturbing tale’ and it certainly looks set to be a huge success.

Ruth Tross, Erin’s new editor at Hodder and Stoughton, opened the proceedings. Someone shouted from the back that they couldn’t hear, to which she replied: `Yes, I’m small. No, I’m not going to stand on anything.’ She had definite `stage presence’ and the room fell silent as she spoke warmly about Erin’s talents- her clever plotting, her devastating twists, her impeccable use of language.

Erin, in turn, thanked Ruth, whom she felt was like a heat-seeking
missile, targeting any weakness of plot or phrase, but also recognising all that was good in her writing. She also thanked Sarah Ballard and Eli Keren at United Agents for sticking with her even in the years when she wasn’t earning them any money, perhaps referring to the period when she was doing a lot of teaching, which interfered with her deadlines.  Finally, Erin thanked her husband, without whom none of her success would have been possible.

I didn’t know whether the bonny baby being passed around a group of people who might have been Erin’s relatives was hers or not. I do know she’s taken herself off Twitter to finish her next book, so maybe there have been several successful acts of creation recently.

April First Monday Crime, Part Two

 

Talking about her writing at the First Monday Crime evening on Monday, Denise Mina declared that swearing adds to the rhythm of her language. She grew up in Glasgow with parents who were very strict Catholics. She was allowed to smoke and drink from an early age, but swearing was absolutely forbidden, so she confessed that she revels in it now. Apparently, `cunt' is not particularly offensive in Scotland. You might say to your kid: `Hurry up. you wee cunt!' In America, however, it's a real no-no, so her American publishers only allow her one `cunt' per book. I feel there's a joke in there somewhere…

Liz Nugent uses a multiple voice narrative. She says it comes from her acting training. She even manages to have three characters speak in the first person, which seems quite an achievement. She revealed that the new Paula Hawkins book has 14 different voices, which seems to break all the rules I’ve learnt about having a maximum of 5 different voices or the reader gets confused. In `Lying in Wait' Liz talked about having a male narrative voice and how in some ways this made the writing easier, as she was able to think: how would he respond to this situation, as opposed to, how would I, as a woman, respond? This was very `liberating'.

Mick Herron's character, Jackson Lamb, who features in his novels, started off life as a two word note `drunken has-been' but has (actually) been so popular that his publishers have decided that his books are now `Jackson Lamb' novels. This, despite the fact that Mick has a full cast of other characters. His publishers also had a stab at hiding his sex, calling him M Herron on the dust jacket, as most readers of spy/crime novels are female. He said that in Holland men actually change their names to women’s to sell more books. 

Sabine Durrant found the two books she wrote for teenage girls (`Cross Your Heart' and `Having It and Eating It') the hardest thing she ever achieved, particularly as girls change so much between thirteen and fifteen and what would be too explicit for one (certainly no `cunts'!) might be too tame for the other.

There was a good-natured and witty discussion about the future of crime novels. Liz Nugent has 21 nieces and nephews and said that all but one had stopped reading by the age of 14, although older generations in Dublin continue to read voraciously.

Is ‘grip lit’ dead? Everyone agree that it is not, that crime is where the good stuff is being written. Readers find things in books the authors aren’t even aware of. As Denise Mina said: `A book is different every time you read it’ (and for every reader who reads it).

The discussion moved to words to be weeded out, when editing. Each writer had personal favourites that had to be eliminated: `just’, `realize’, `really’, `so’ and from Liz Nugent: `penis’. I would add the word `then’, having been advised to read Jonathan Franzen’s `Farther Away: Essays’ in which he states ``Comma-then is a disease specific to modern prose narrative with lots of action verbs.’

Finally, Emily Glenister finished off the round of questions by asking what the assembled company were reading. Often it’s something that is not yet out for general consumption or a foreign writer I’m ashamed never to have heard of, viz: Delphine de Vigan (an award-winning French novelist), Shirley Jackson (an American writer who died in 1965), Lucy Atkins’ `The Night Visitor’ which comes out in June and, finally, Jane Casey’s `Let the Dead Speak’, which came out in March this year. Interestingly, they are all women.

April First Monday Crime, Part One

Last night I again found myself climbing the grand staircase inside Brown’s restaurant, St Martin’s Lane, to the magnificent Judge’s Court, formally the main courtroom of Westminster County Court, from which convicted felons were sent down to the cells below (now the wine cellars). The room even has the original Judge’s bench, a fitting venue for the latest First Monday crime event and their one year anniversary. As I waited for the four writers: Denise Mina, Liz Nugent, Sabine Durrant and Mick Herron, with Barry Forshaw- aka `Mister Noir’- as chair, to arrive, I cast my eye over the old black and white photos of London, adorning the walls of this splendid, wood-panelled room.

Suddenly I heard the most terrible scraping whine. Everyone looked around and clutched their ears, as if we'd just been locked in a room with a particularly sadistic serial killer. Fortunately, it was just the mikes on a feedback loop and the torture soon ended.

The proceedings opened with the promotion of St Hilda's, Oxford, Mystery and Crime Conference 2017 in August (`a crime festival in the garden of Eden') with authors such as Mark Billingham, MJ Carter, Yrsa Sigurdardottir and, of course, Val McDermid.
(For more details, 
see www.mysteryandcrime2017.eventbrite.co.uk.)

We were then introduced to the four writers:

The first was Liz Nugent, whose debut novel, `Unravelling Oliver', was the winner of the IBA Crime Fiction Book of the Year in 2014. She's been hailed as Ireland's answer to Gillian Flynn. Her latest book is called `Lying in Wait' and is a Richard and Judy Spring pick for 2017. In a former life she described herself as a `really bad actress'. She had a brain haemorrhage in the past, as a result of which she can only type with one hand, which means she doesn't like to waste words, she declared with a smile: `It's such an effort to write!'

Sabine Durrant's new book is called `Lie with Me', so there was much amusement that `Lying' or `Lie' is the new `Girl' in crime titles. Sabine Durrant's first psychological thriller `Under Your Skin' was published in 2013. She described herself as having been a journalist, which was good training for meeting deadlines and `getting the story down'. She's also extremely modest, since she was actually the assistant editor of the Guardian and the literary editor of the Sunday Times. Her important advice to fellow writers was: `Don't read reviews. That way madness lies.'

Denise Mina won the Theakstons Crime Novel of the Year twice in a row. Her latest book, `The Long Drop' she describes as `making sense of the nonsense of life'. `William Watt wants answers about his family's murder. Peter Manuel has them. But Peter Manuel is a liar. One December night in 1957, Watt meets Manuel in a Glasgow bar to find out what he knows.' The book is based on real life murders. Denise Mina wrote a play about them and the book, she said, is `the story the pensioners told me after they saw the play'.

Denise did a law degree although she found lawyers very stuffy and wasn't sure she wanted to practice, so went on to start a PhD. `I was a rubbish academic, I was just having a laugh'. She `misused' her PhD grant to write her first book and the rest is history: `I was shite at everything except this.'

Mick Herron's spy novels have won the CWA's Gold Dagger and apparently he has a cult following. His novels have been ingeniously described as John le Carre meets Joseph Heller, although Barry Forshaw thought he was perhaps closest to Len Deighton and described them as `off-kilter espionage'. He replied, drily: `I just write the books I can write'.

Part 2, tomorrow