the left room

I wasn’t going to do this, but hey – I’m bored, you’re probably bored (why else would you be here?), we’re all bored. And it was a sad day, in terms of another blog post by another writer, which we’ll get to in a minute. So I’m going to do it after all. Hang onto your hats.

I started thinking about the Curzon Group again yesterday. To be clear, I thought about them a bit when they formed, and then I’ve thought about them sporadically in the time since. Most of the time when my idle mind turned to them, the thoughts it had were generally derisory but had no real malice. And that’s still the case. I don’t dislike these people, because I don’t know them. And I don’t dislike their books, because I haven’t read them. Individually, all things being equal, I wish them well.

Collectively, however, I do have a slight problem.

Before we start, I don’t have any problem at all with writers banding together. There are loads of groups, collectives and ‘squads’ out there, and I can see how it makes total sense. Most of us don’t get very much, if anything, in the way of a publicity budget – paradoxically, the bulk of that money tends to go to the sure-fire writers who’ll make the bestseller list regardless. It’s one of the odd facts about the publishing industry you learn very quickly. Similarly, you can buy new titles from well-known authors for around £8.99 in hardback, whereas – to sample an unknown like me – you’d need to shell out upwards of £18.99. Faced with that choice, I know how you’d spend your money, and – frankly – I don’t blame you. The explanation is simple: that well-known author will sell many copies anyway, so his or her book can be priced more cheaply (and therefore becomes more appealing to an impulse purchaser). As Kurt Vonnegut would say: so it goes. But in such a climate, it makes total sense for authors to promote themselves as heavily as they can, and if you group together you can do that more efficiently: an event with five mid-list authors is going to be far more appealing to organisers than five separate events with one author each. And so on. These days, even best-selling authors often do events together. I get it. It’s sensible. It’s fine.

And it also fits in with something you’ll often hear said at crime writing festivals. “Crime writers are like a gang”. I can’t remember who coined it. Mark Billingham? Ian Rankin? Whoever, it’s an appealing image. However much the noir crowd might dislike the generic, formulaic serial killer books, or the fainter-hearted might dislike the violent stuff, or people who actually write their own books might have a pop at the James Patterson brand, or the way everyone hates the much-maligned-but-rarely-actually-ever-seen cat mysteries – we’re all ultimately in it together. There’s a communal atmosphere at crime fiction festivals. We all get on. We even tolerate the people who don’t drink.

So why is the Curzon Group different? Why does it annoy me? Simply because, as it was originally formulated, it flies in the face of all that. Actually, I’ll go further. It pisses in the face of all that. Their website is here. Their blog is here. On the face of it, you’ll notice no obvious piss, but some history is required. The Group was started by the top three writers listed on their website, based on the mission statement you can still find on the site. It says this:

From Wilkie Collins to John Buchan, Eric Ambler to Hammond Innes, Ian Fleming to Alistair MacLean, and from Len Deighton to Frederick Forsyth, the British thriller is one of the richest traditions in world literature.

But in the last decade the British thriller has fallen into a sad decline. The market has been colonised by production line American thriller writers.

… likes of James Patterson, Dan Brown and John Grisham have taken over the market.

The Curzon Group is dedicated to reviving the traditions of Buchan, Fleming, MacLean and Forsyth, bringing the British thriller bursting back to life in the twenty-first century. Formed by Matt Lynn, the author of the military thriller ‘Death Force’: Martin Baker, the author of the financial thriller ‘Meltdown’: Alan Clements, the author of the political thriller ‘Rogue Nation, The Curzon Group is dedicated to Five Principles:

1.    That the first duty of any book is to entertain.
2.    That a book should reflect the world around it.
3.    That thrilling, popular fiction doesn’t follow formulas.
4.    That every story should be an adventure for both the writer and the reader.
5.    That stylish, witty, and insightful writing can be combined with edge-of-the seat excitement.

At its best, British thriller writing combined pace, humour, drama and insight to create stories that were of their moment yet timeless: that could capture a snapshot of history, yet could keep reader awake for half the night. Through competitions, promotions, publicity, talks, and, most of all, through our own writing, The Curzon Group is dedicated to restoring its finest traditions.

Do you see my problem? Well, maybe not. It’s not that they were promoting themselves – with the initial patronage of perjurer and all-round fucking scumbag Jeffrey Archer – but that they were doing so at the expense of other writers. They were going to ‘save’ the British thriller – as though it was ever in decline – from the invasion of allegedly crap US-style writers, which you, the great British public, were either stupid or brain-washed enough to buy. From the beginning, it was very transparently a marketing strategy that had nothing to do with quality – or even those five ‘principles’, which any writer worth his or her salt would endorse, but which, looking at some of the titles and descriptions, you might wonder whether the Curzon Group itself actually does. Because they don’t look that fucking different or exceptional to me.

Anyway. You’ll notice the website now lists eight members of the Curzon Group. And two more have joined: Zoe Sharp and Elizabeth Corley. I quietly weep. Yet the whole enterprise becomes ever more transparently ridiculous. Who else will join? Is there a limit? What would happen if Simon Kernick or Lee Child requested to join? They’re both best-selling British thriller writers, after all. Would they be welcomed in the Curzon Group’s quest to save British thriller-writing from … well, ultimately their own writing? It’s tedious to point this out again, but – just for clarity – I have nothing against the individual writers here – just the mission statement they’ve drawn themselves together under. Saving British thriller writing: by replacing what’s popular, and which apparently is shit, with – well, themselves.

Today, the crime writer Declan Burke wrote a moving piece on his blog, Crime Always Pays. Declan is the author of two great crime novels. But – rather than ever solely promoting himself – he’s used his blog to promote the best of Irish crime writing (and beyond: he also included an interview with me). Scroll through his site, and you’ll find the same thing, time after time: the promotion of other writers; discussion, disagreement; but never a real hint of overt negativity when someone else succeeds  - because it’s not about that, is it? Or it shouldn’t be anyway. Quite the opposite. And yet, as you’ll see when you read that piece, he literally can’t afford to write anymore, not even in his spare time.

So I guess my current thought is this: when people like Declan, along with other great writers like, say, Ray Banks and Allan Guthrie, are storming the bestseller charts, maybe then I’ll start worrying about the plight of certain self-promoting writers bleating about the state of the industry. Whose fucking books can be found on the shelves in Asda.

Okay?

Okay.

… and relax.

I found a nice review this morning. It’s a review of Cry for Help, and it appears in Publishers Weekly here. When I mentioned this on twitter, someone pointed out it was also a starred review, and I – naively, but semi-honestly – asked if that was a good thing. I don’t think I’ve ever been reviewed in Publishers Weekly before.

Anyway, this isn’t just flag up the fact that someone liked my book (although, having not found Still Bleeding in a single Leeds bookshop this afternoon, that alone would be good enough for me), it was the first sentence of the review that caught my eye, and also the curious eyes of a few curious friends of mine.

In Mosby’s powerful thriller, set in what might be Nottingham, England, the police are baffled by an unknown killer who’s been tying up young women and leaving them to die of starvation and thirst.

Nottingham? My first thought was, well, no. It just isn’t. I have a passing knowledge of Nottingham city centre, but only from occasional trips down to Rock City with a couple of mates, usually – as it happens – to see The Wildhearts, before crashing on another Nottingham-based friend’s living room floor. But I wouldn’t dream of setting a book there. Then again, my second thought was … well, I think I actually did go to Nottingham while writing Cry for Help – to see Nine Inch Nails this time, if you’re interested – and so maybe something seeped in there without me realising. And my third thought was that I keep banging on in interviews about deliberately not setting my books anywhere in particular, so that “might” is all it takes. It might be set in Nottingham. In fact, if that’s what you think as you’re reading it, then it is. Although I suppose could is more what I’m after.

But why Nottingham? Not to single out this particular reviewer – whom, it’s entirely realistic to say, I actually love – but the emphasis on realism in crime fiction has always interested me. Fiction in general, I guess, but crime fiction in particular is an absolute bugger for it. I’ve forgotten too much about Cry for Help to be sure, but all I can think is that it’s the mention of Staunton Hospital that did it, as there’s a place called Staunton near Nottingham. At least, I think there is. In truth, the hospital is loosely based on one in Steeton and Silsden near me; I called it Steeton in my working draft, then just knocked the middle out and round. The irony is I did this to stop the story being anchored to something that happened to me in a particular place. And all I can think is someone took the invented name (free, in my mind, from associations) and threw down an anchor somewhere else, to bring the story to rest. 

I guess that’s part of the whole reading process: that every reader anchors it for themselves. But I do think it’s interesting that people look for real places in which stories are set. They want to bring a story down to earth: not just so it exists in their heads but so it exists somewhere real, as though these made up people doing their made up things must be doing them in a place that isn’t made up. And in crime fiction, there’s a special emphasis on that. I don’t know why. Perhaps it’s because of the whole crime versus literary fiction debate, where the front-runners seem to earn their medals on the basis of depth of social commentary. And there are certainly a hell of a lot of crime writers who focus on individual cities or areas, to the point they’re indelibly associated with them – and can even be seen as writing about those places as much as the imaginary characters wandering about in them.

(There’s also a special emphasis on police and forensic procedure too. You often hear writers say “You’ve got to get the procedure right – readers are so savvy these days”. And, of course, they’re not. It’s just that tons of crime novels use procedure, and what’s presented there gets absorbed into the overall narrative of crime fiction as a whole. But it isn’t like many readers have done courses in forensics. Reminds me of what Jeffrey Deaver said once: in one of his books he had a SOCO put elastic bands around her shoes to distinguish her prints from the others in a dusty room; totally made-up; sounds realistic; made its way into CSI. And even if readers were savvy, isn’t this insistence on realism leaning dangerously close to the alleged crossword puzzle of Golden Age crime fiction?). 

I haven’t really worked out how I feel about all this yet, or even what I think. One of the most difficult bits of Still Bleeding, and I’m using ‘difficult’ in context here, was pinning it down to the UK. I just couldn’t do it any other way without inventing a country name – and given my record I’d only have made one up that already existed. I don’t like pinning it down. But I do occasionally get it in the neck (again, in context). I had emails about The 50/50 Killer saying “there are no woods like that in the UK!!”. Well, I know. It’s not really happening in the UK. It’s just a story: existing solely in the words on the pages  between two covers, and then in the images in your head those words create. It’s a story about fairytale notions of love. Hence the fairytale forest. Sometimes, my thinking is even more obscure. In The Third Person, there’s a place called Asiago. It’s a corporate-sponsored recreation of an old fishing village, designed to inspire affection and nostalgia, but it’s ended up going the same way as the genuinely old fishing villages did. It was sort of about how, if you had the chance to relive supposedly happier times, you’d only make the same mistakes again. Asiago is actually a place in Italy. It’s called that in the book because an old girlfriend had a road-sign for Asiago, stolen by her father, on her wall at University, and the association was there for me while I was writing the scene because of what happened between the two of us afterwards. Meaningless for anyone else, in this case. The book’s not set in Italy. 

As I mentioned in the Black Static interview, the realism thing genuinely puzzles me because my brain doesn’t work that way when it comes to stories. They’re fiction. All fiction is fantasy by definition. Either it actually happened, or it didn’t, and naming a real place isn’t going to change that. There is no definitive scale there, or not one that I can see, anyway. So Cry for Help isn’t set anywhere in particular. It’s set in a place that doesn’t really exist, which means wherever you want it to be set while you’re reading it. And it’s about a murderer who ties your friends up and leaves them to die from lack of caring – and then blames you for not being there for them the way you always said you would be. It’s kind of a metaphor, I guess. But whatever – serial killers like that don’t really exist either. Even in Nottingham.