As life inches back to something like normalcy, we have the launch of a terrifying new short story anthology for you, the hard questions for Louisa Scarr as the second in her terrific Butler & West series is published, some online resources our writers find useful, and a round up of what books have been blowing our minds lately.
Today sees the publication of Afraid of the Shadows, the third short story collection from the CWA Dagger-shortlisted Afraid of the Light team. Out just in time for Halloween, the stories are tinged with spookiness and horror.
There are a host of big hitters on board, with a foreword by Peter James and an exclusive Tilly and Poe story from M.W. Craven, as well as chilling contributions from T.M. Logan, Trevor Wood, and Matt Wesolowski. Plus, stories from the usual crew, including Phoebe Morgan, Victoria Selman, Rachael Blok, James Delargy, S.R. Masters, Clare Empson, T.E. Kinsey, and more.
As with all of the Afraid of the Light anthologies, everyone works for free and every penny of profit goes to charity. Alongside the authors, there are unsung heroes who work behind the scenes.
Miranda Jewess, Editorial Director at Viper Books, corrals and edits the stories, but also opens her little black book to secure the big name guest authors for each volume.
Claire Ward, Creative Director at Harper Collins, provides the stunning artwork (and puts up with a lot of last minute umming, ahing, and alterations).
Priceless support in spreading the word was provided by Capital Crime, particularly Lizzie Curle.
Afraid of the Shadows is out now on Kindle (£1.99), with a paperback to follow shortly. Every single penny of profit goes to the charities supported.
Louisa Scarr is the author of the Butler and West police procedurals, published by Canelo Crime. Under a Dark Cloud, the second in the series, has just come out in paperback and eBook. The first, Last Place You Look, is already out.
Someone publishes the first proper thing you wrote, without consulting you first. Do you celebrate or hide in a hole forever?
Hide. Over 100k words of dire exposition and clunky dialogue. I still like the concept and the characters, so maybe I’ll revisit it someday. But, good grief, it is terrible.
What's the weirdest thing about your writing process?
The pages and pages of photos of actors blutakked to my wall. These are the visual representations of the characters in my books, although some may claim I just like looking at attractive people all day. I will neither confirm nor deny.
What’s the worst review you've ever had?
Marion – still remember her name, bless her – claimed the “author” (speech marks her own) had a problem with her mental state. Thanks, Marion. I’m fine. But you should really see what I’ve written since.
You're sentenced to solitary confinement for the rest of your life and are allowed to take the complete works of one writer with you. Who do you pick?
Stephen King – for two reasons. Firstly, he has an extensive back catalogue, and I hate being bored with nothing to read. Secondly, I grew up with his books (yes, I know, it explains a lot) so re-reading classics like The Stand and Misery would be a wonderful wallow in nostalgia.
What writing cliché would you send into space?
Describing books as ‘absolutely thrilling’ or with a ‘shocking twist’. They’re used so often they’re meaningless.
You’ve found a way to commune with the dead. You can channel the mind of one writer for as long as it takes to write a book and pass it off as your own. Who do you choose?
I know she’s not dead, but can I borrow Maggie O’Farrell’s brain for a bit? I love her writing. I haven’t even read all her books: I own them all but I eke them out, one little bit of wonder at a time. A snippet of brilliance saved for when I need inspiration the most.
Congratulations, you’re the new education secretary. Who’s always on English Lit curricula and shouldn’t be? Who do you replace them with?
My formal English lit education never went past GCSE, so I’m not really qualified to comment. But all this talk of fronted adverbials baffles me. Why can’t kids just be creative? Sure, teach them how to use an apostrophe, but let them use their imaginations; take joy in the way sentences sound and evolve. Don’t dissect the English language like a lobotomised frog pinned to a corkboard.
Which fictional character would you leave your partner/children/dog for?
If I’m going to go with the egotistical approach with one of my own creation, I would have to go with PC Max Cooper, from the DS Kate Munro series. I love him so much I named my dog after him. He is the only male character from my books who is completely sane and balanced, plus devastatingly handsome, of course. I also have a soft spot for DS Robin Butler, but that is taking narcissism to a new level as he is partly based on me.
You have to live for a year as a character from a book of your own – who do you choose?
My love for police procedurals must come from a frustrated desire to be a cop. But a fictional one: none of that annoying paperwork or bureaucracy or dealing with pesky members of the public. So stick me in as DC Freya West and I’ll be happy – hanging out with Robin, solving murders, and going home with [redacted – spoiler!] at the end of the day. Sounds good to me.
Think of one of your favourite writers and tell us something hugely problematic about their writing.
Helen Fielding. I adore Bridget Jones, she was my first love in literature, but reading it back now I do wish she’d had a bit more sense and self-confidence. My brief, but enjoyable, period in my twenties, soaked in lime Barcardi Breezers and Marlboro Lights, was 100% down to Bridget, and my lungs and liver will never recover.
What do you most deplore about your own writing?
That I have a short attention span and an odd, dark sense of humour. I love books that dig deep into the characters and their lives, pulling you in to their carefully crafted worlds. Books like Blue Sky by Kate Atkinson and Breath by Tim Winton, with gorgeous metaphors and subtle dialogue. Instead, I write conversations about characters putting traffic cones up their arses, and kill off characters the moment I get bored.
Why do you want to write?
For the sheer joy of capturing the stories and visions and characters and conversation in my head and sculpting them into something that someone else can have fun with. I love nothing more than talking about my books, so if one person says they’ve enjoyed the world I’ve created than that’s my day, made.
If you couldn’t be a writer, what would you be?
I did a degree in Psychology, and in my final year I was debating applying for a PhD with a view to go into Clinical Psych. But instead, I decided I wanted a Real Job. 15 years later, I realised that HR was shit and moved to a career where you can wear pyjamas and hang out with your imaginary friends all day, which is definitely not a Real Job at all.
You’re writing a dystopian novel – what’s your idea of a world gone horribly wrong?
I hate to say it, but global warming, Boris in charge, NHS on its knees? We’re not exactly excelling with this one. (Pessimist? Me? Never!)
What was your favourite book as a child?
My mother says I was a voracious consumer of books. I assume she means I read them, rather than ate them, but I was a strange child so can’t be too sure. Either way I remember loving those books on tapes, reading along and turning the pages with the beeps. I remember Lady and the Tramp, Dogger, Mog, and everything by Roald Dahl being a favourite. We spent a lot of time at the library.
Would you rather be stuck in the past or the future?
The future, definitely. Even if it turns out to more Bladerunner than Futurama, I think I could survive pretty well in a dystopia. My love of being alone, coupled with the rage induced by being denied regular food at hourly intervals would serve me well. As long as I could stockpile enough Dairy Milk, I’d be fine.
Would you rather sell millions of copies of a terrible novel or a handful of copies of a masterpiece?
A million copies of a terrible novel. It would be a new experience; I’ve already done the latter.
CLOSE TO HAND
Writing retreats, research trips, and runs to the coffee shop might provide essential fuel for projects, but the tools a writer uses most often are usually found around their desk, or in their computer. We canvassed our writers about the most useful online resources they use everyday.
oed.com The Oxford English is the most common dictionary of choice, with over 600,000 words defined with comprehensive citations and etymologies. Nobody admitted to using the unwieldy 20-volume 20,000 page second edition, but its digital cousins (which is fully searchable, and so can be used in various thesaurarial fashions) are popular. The CD-ROM has been out of print for several years, but subscriptions are available for the online service.
Green’s Dictionary of Slang Jonathon Green’s is the essential lexicon of English slang terms through history, compiling 125,000 entries with exhaustive citations illustrating usage. Inspired by Eric Partridge’s seminal Dictionary of Slang and Unconventional English, Green published his multi-volume work in 2010. It is now out of print, and fetching a pretty penny second hand, but Green has published the whole work, fully updated, online and made it freely accessible. Crucial.
British Newspaper Archive Another subscription service, this time offering access to a vast collection of local and national British newspapers, fully digitalized and searchable. Of particular value to writers of historical fiction.
There are a bevvy of satellite-imaged map services online that everyone knows about, but there are also great options for historical maps. old-maps.co.uk offers a comprehensive collection of maps from different sources, including various Ordnance Survey archives and UK maps compiled by the KGB during the Cold War. Each map can be viewed in low detail for free, but there are charges for accessing zoomed-in images. However, the National Library of Scotland offers Ordnance Survey maps from 1840s-1970s for free, and their excellent viewing tool allows you to overlay the images on contemporary maps to see how things have changed. A similar free service is available on a wide selection of maps of the capital at Layers of London, including the London County Council’s colour-coded Bomb Damage Maps from the Second World War. An invaluable resource for anyone writing about mid-century London.
The Met Office has published its daily weather summaries from 1860 to date, if you absolutely need to get the weather right on a particular day. Elsewhere, Time and Date will help you with sunrise/sunset times in any place on any day, along with phases of the moon.
Hands up who hates thinking up names. British Surnames is for you, offering breakdowns on popular names in Britain by demographics and by county (from the 1881 census), so you can concoct the perfect character names. There’s also a random name generator if you simply cannot be bothered.
British History Online is the digital library of the Institute of Historical Research, including over 1300 volumes of primary and secondary content, 40,000 images, and over 10,000 tiles of maps. Some premium content requires a subscription (more reasonable than a lot of services, the top tier package is less than a fiver a month), but there is also a vast selection of freely accessible content (including the entire Survey of London, an in-depth history of the capital’s buildings and architecture).
In a forthcoming issue, we’ll detail some of the books our writers refer to on a regular basis, for information on crucial subjects like criminal justice, body decomposition, and symbology.
A round-up of our recent reading, including outlaw vampires, political noir in Mexico City, heists in Harlem, heroin-trafficking cabbages, and Lakota vigilantes.
ROVERS (Richard Lange)
Vampires aren’t what you expect from Richard Lange. Having established himself as one of the most exciting voices in American crime with This Wicked World, Angel Baby, and The Smack (along with his excellent short story collections Sweet Nothing and Dead Boys), it might have given fans pause when the V-word showed up in publicity for his new novel, Rovers.
There was no reason to be concerned. Whatever you might imagine Rovers to be, it is more; Lange has written an outlaw classic. The vampires here are stripped of any gothic splendour, and pretty much any supernatural trappings. Other than rapid regeneration, they don’t possess any extraordinary physical abilities, and Lange presents them as people who periodically require the consumption of human blood to survive, and who are violently adverse to sunlight; two characteristics that naturally push them to the criminal hems of society. Drifters, who must keep on the move to avoid detection as they select victims from other marginalised groups.
Rovers shifts between three groups of characters: two rover brothers (with an Of Mice and Men dynamic, the older brother looking after his simpler sibling, both a century old now, though they have grown to hate each other as much as they rely on one another) who become involved with a human bartender; a gang of biker rovers, who have ridden together for decades, believing in safety in numbers, hiring themselves out for wet work to a powerful ages-old vampire; and the human father whose son was murdered in what he comes to believe was a rover attack.
A common comparison for Rovers has been Kathryn Bigelow’s 1987 biker vampire cult classic Near Dark, and they certainly mine similar gritty, outlaw veins. Lange excels at getting his characters in motion, pursuing and revolving each other, even if they aren’t quite sure what forces have set them in motion, so for those who’ve never read him before, imagine Near Dark crossed with Robert Stone’s Dog Soldiers, but rewritten by Denis Johnson, and you’ll be halfway there.
VELVET WAS THE NIGHT (Silvia Moreno-Garcia)
The nimble, genre-hopping author of Gods of Jade and Shadow (historical fantasy) and Mexican Gothic (gothic horror), Moreno-Garcia here proves just as adept turning her hand to noir. 1970s Mexico City is a heady dream of violence and political tumult, with secret police and state-sanctioned thugs cracking down on student protestors and revolutionary groups.
Maite, a daydreaming legal secretary racked by romantic longings, is asked by her mysterious neighbour to look after her cat while she’s away. But the neighbour never returns and Maite finds herself involved in intrigue surrounding a missing roll of film sought by agents on both sides of the violence engulfing the city.
Switching back and forth between Maite and Elvis, a young member of a squad of “Hawks” (unofficial squads of goons organised by the state to agitate and escalate protests into riots, occasionally using lethal force doing so), Moreno-Garcia not only paints a compelling and drippingly authentic worm’s-eye view of people in the grip of a Cold War political crisis, as well as a dark and intimate noir thriller, but makes the two indistinguishable from one another; you’re left with the impression it is a novel only she could have written.
HARLEM SHUFFLE (Colston Whitehead)
The two-time Pulitzer Prize winner (for The Underground Railroad and The Nickel Boys) has previously toyed with genre (see his post-apocalyptic zombie novel Zone One), but seems so at home with his first crime novel that you wonder why he hasn’t written on the subject before. In Ray Carney, a furniture store owner who doubles as a backroom fence in 1960s Harlem, Whitehead has created his most human, most authentic character.
Always a gimlet-eyed observer of human systems, Carney’s role straddling legitimate and black markets—the straight world and the crooked—makes room for his usual sociological and historical purposes (particularly capitalism in all its forms), but knits them deftly into his plot work as he sketches a portrait of Harlem in triptych. The novel’s three sections operate both as discrete capers, and an intricately bound study of character and place, exploring how a city like New York changes over the years in some ways (low-rise buildings coming down and moneyed towers going up), and not at all in others (white police officers killing young black men with impunity). Crime feels a fertile locus for Whitehead, and it would be no surprise to see Ray Carney return in the future.
KEEPING THE HOUSE (Tice Cin)
What Whitehead does for Harlem in the 1960s, Cin does for the Turkish community in 21st century North London. Who even thought the Great Tottenham Novel was a thing? Experimental in tone, ambitious in scope, it is at once a sweeping, nonlinear saga detailing a wild decade for three generations of single-mother Ayla’s family, a bildungsroman about her daughter Damla, and a crime thriller that peels away the layers surrounding the heroin route from Turkey into London (and the complicity of the nefarious cabbage…). Shaggy, oblique, and idiosyncratic, it is exactly the kind of crime fiction that we don’t see enough of.
WINTER COUNTS (David Heska Wanbli Weiden)
Yesterday saw the UK publication of one of the best American novels of last year, Weiden’s hard-boiled look at life on the Rosebud Reservation, home to the Sicangu Lakota Nation. Following Virgil Wounded Horse, a for-hire vigilante who operates in the vast spaces left by a broken criminal justice system that leaves 40% of all felonies committed on the reservation unprosecuted, Winter Counts uses the forms of noir and recasts them as an illuminating and propulsive thriller highlighting the rampant social problems facing people on reservations, without ever being preachy or didactic. Another important recent entry into a burgeoning indigenous canon, joining the likes of Stephen Graham Jones, Louise Erdrich, Marcie R. Rendon, and Kelli Jo Ford. A very welcome sequel is forthcoming.
