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.