Crime fiction and series fatigue

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This post is sponsored by Grammarly, the free online plagiarism checker.

I’m a big fan of crime series. There’s something particularly enjoyable about opening the pages of a brand new book and encountering a familiar face, a familiar world, a familiar cast of characters. Take John Rebus, for example: while Ian Rankin’s non-Rebus thrillers are perfectly well written and exciting bits of crime fiction, there’s a Rebus-shaped hole all the way through them (he’s back in Rankin’s latest, Saints of the Shadow Bible, and there’s a delicious bit in it where Rankin’s clearly spotted a way to keep him around the police: Rebus was written in real time, and was forced to retire just like real policemen).

It’s not just Rankin. There’s a tingle of anticipation when I’m about to start a new Tim Dorsey and discover what Serge A Storms has got up to now. I’m really excited about the third in Malcolm McKay’s superb Glasgow Trilogy featuring hitman Calum MacLean. I was sad to see the end of Ray Banks’ Cal Innes novels, and I’m always a bit disappointed when Michael Connelly brings out a legal thriller instead of a Harry Bosch one. But sometimes familiarity brings not delight, but disappointment.

I’ve just given up on the latest Peter Robinson book, Children of the Revolution. It’s one of his DCI Banks books, and it suffers badly from two related problems: the crime and its investigation isn’t very interesting, and the hero’s a bit of an arse. I’d noticed the arse thing in previous books – like many fictional detectives, Banks appears to be at least partly an exercise in authorial wish fulfilment: he’s the super-smart man who all the laydees want to have sexy time with because he has an awesome record collection and an interesting car – but I’m usually enjoying the ride too much to get too irritated by it. This time out the ride wasn’t much of a ride.

I suspect publishing may be rather like the music business used to be: there’s a certain timetable to follow, a treadmill of write/release/tour/write/release/tour that can mean product must be produced even if the product isn’t quite there yet. That often resulted in dreadful albums – the famous “difficult second album” written on tour about how horrible it was to be on tour – and I’m sure it’s the cause of dreadful books too. That, and the other danger of success, which is of course ego. If you’re going around the world, playing to packed rooms – rooms where people are actually paying to see you – that’s bound to mess with your head a little. “The little people lap this shit up!” the author might cry as he bashes out another bestseller.

I wonder how authors avoid it. Ian Rankin seems to have managed it – the books are still superb and he appears to remain one of the nicest, most well-liked people in publishing – and there are countless other examples, I’m sure. Any names spring to mind – and if they do, any explanation for why they didn’t go off the boil?

“The papers tell of rape and murder, everything that you want to hear”

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My friend Paul Douglas posted this to Facebook earlier. It’s been doing the rounds of social media, and sadly it isn’t a spoof. Those cover lines are real.

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This is something I’ve been meaning to blog about for a while. The supermarket tabloids appear to be going aggressively downmarket and becoming incredibly lurid. This one’s bad, but it’s not unusual: the current issue of Chat has child murder, child sex slavery and wife murder on its cover, Pick Me Up a predatory hypnotist, another title the former girlfriend of LostProphets’ lead singer and an accompanying headline about paedophilia, and they’ve reached the point where I’m terrified my daughter will see them: she’s 6, reading absolutely everything and full of curiosity. I know she’ll discover all the horror of the world eventually, but not now. Not like this.

[The title's a New Model Army lyric. It's from Frightened.]

You’re brilliant, and everyone else is an arse

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I wrote a wee piece about impostor syndrome for .net, and it’s made its way online.

The satirical website The Daily Mash has a great slogan on one of its T-shirts. “I’m brilliant,” it says, “and everyone else is an arse.” It’s the perfect motto for anyone working in a creative industry, because there’s a very good chance that they feel the exact opposite.

 

If it looks like a slippery slope, and sounds like a slippery slope…

In 2011, BT was ordered to block access to Newzbin2, a Usenet archive. “It’s the first time BT has been ordered to use its Cleanfeed porn-blocking system to block non-pornographic content,” I wrote at the time. “It won’t be the last… [this] turns ISPs into censors, and of course copyright infringement isn’t the only kind of content people would like to block. We’ve had calls to ban sites that espouse extreme political views, sites that promote anorexia, sites that discuss ways to commit suicide. If BT can block Usenet archives, why can’t it block everything that anybody thinks is unpleasant or undesirable – like WikiLeaks, or anti-Scientology sites, or anything that isn’t appropriate for under-fives?”

Inevitably, more blocks followed. The Pirate Bay is (in)effectively banned by UK ISPs. There are blocks on 1337x, Abmp3, BeeMP3, BitSnoop, Bomb-Mp3, eMp3World, ExtraTorrent, FileCrop, FilesTube, Monova, Mp3Juices, Mp3lemon, Mp3Raid, Mp3skull, NewAlbumReleases, Rapidlibrary, TorrentCrazy, TorrentDownloads, TorrentHound, Torrentreactor, and Torrentz, and many more.

And now, we’re going to start blocking things that the government thinks are unpleasant or undesirable. Today, The Guardian reports that “the government is to order broadband companies to block extremist websites” and identify content “deemed too dangerous for online publication.”

The proposed blocking will follow the same model as the blocking of illegal pornography – a model whose aims are obviously laudable but whose processes have attracted criticism over false positives (where legal content is wrongly identified and blocked) and secrecy. In effect, we’ll have a secret, unaccountable organisation looking at the internet and silently blocking “extremist” content.

What does “extremist” mean? Well, it means pretty much anything you want it to mean. Over the years, our governments’ definitions of extremist have included climate change protesters, the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament, the anti-apartheid movement, animal rights activists, environmental activists and the Occupy movement. The word terrorism appears equally flexible, so for example it can be a synonym for journalism and used to detain the partners of journalists who embarrass the government, and it can be used to arrest students too.

I know it’s cliched to talk about slippery slopes, but when you can feel the ice underneath you and you’re shooting downwards, the phrase seems pretty accurate.

Quite a long post about New Model Army

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I got into New Model Army in Kilbirnie Library, in the late 1980s. I was going through a bit of a punk/new wave thing at the time, and the library’s collection of vinyl LPs included one whose cover was a painted leather jacket, the words “only stupid bastards take heroin” disguised but still recognisable on the shoulders. That’ll do me, I thought.

God knows how many times I played that record, or rather my illegally recorded cassette of it. It hasn’t aged particularly well, but then neither have I.

Lots of bands get described as quintessentially English – Blur, The Smiths, Pulp and so on – and I think it’s a shame that New Model Army don’t tend to get that kind of credit. Where famously English bands tend to be English in a metropolitan sense – chippy Mancs, boisterous cockneys (or mockneys) and so on – NMA are from another, different England. It’s more rural, I think, rooted in being miles away from “that which beckons to us all”, the lure of the cities when you live in a place where all too often Friday nights end up with friends “bleeding, yeah, queuing in casualty; staring at those posters we used to laugh at, never never land, palm trees by the sea.” NMA often connected with me in a way that more critically lauded bands didn’t.

(The lyrics I’m quoting are from Green And Grey, one of my favourite songs.)

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Don’t upgrade to Apple’s Pages 5.0…

…until you’ve checked that features you depend upon haven’t been removed.

Apple’s done its software thing again: it’s released what’s supposed to be a brand new version of an existing program, but really it’s a brand new program using a familiar name. As this support discussion shows, upgrading to Pages 5.0 means losing a lot of features. And by “a lot”, I mean A LOT.

The ones I’ve noticed so far are the removal of the ability to see a character count including spaces (something I need when I write for MacFormat), the removal of the status bar and its persistent word count (something I need in almost every document I do), the removal of the ability to change the default zoom level (again, something I need on each document), the ability to select non-contiguous blocks of text. It doesn’t remember if you close the formatting panel, the Autocorrect preferences are gone, the two-page view is gone, the… you get the idea.

“There is nothing worse than an empty fridge”

A fantastic guide to the “6 kinds of unacceptable refrigerators” by Samsung:

There is nothing worse than an empty fridge. An empty refrigerator is the epitome of how disappointment, regret, depression and trauma feel all at the same time. It is hard to continue to write about this particular section, because I’m afraid I might go through a downward spiral for the rest of the day.

Sometimes workshops work

I’ve been pretty quiet about my fiction writing lately, and there’s been a good reason for that: I haven’t been doing any fiction writing.

The sequel to Coffin Dodgers has stalled because the central crime I came up with was too horrible for a fairly light-hearted read, and the other, more serious book I was doing stalled too. That latter one stalled for various reasons: motivation, confidence, plotting issues, worrying what the hell I’d write after it was finished, obsessing over Breaking Bad, making music, jumping around the room shouting “this is shit! I am shit! Everything is shit!” and so on.

Hurrah, then, for the Bloody Scotland crime writing festival. I dropped £80 on a day of writing workshops, and over the course of the day the events – a workshop by Liam Murray Bell, another by Alex Gray, a panel featuring agent Jenny Brown and a keynote by Val McDermid – unlocked various book problems in my head. The best way I can describe it is like picking a lock: each bit of the day picked another tumbler until the entire lock was picked.

I’ve spent the last year looking at this word count menu, which has been stalled at 13,000 words. Since Bloody Scotland:

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Still a long way to go, but progress at last. I’m excited about it again.

It’s worth noting that I hate workshops, being in a room with other people, having to act like a responsible adult and so on – so if a miserable sod like me can get something out of a writing workshop, then more normal people might benefit even more.

 

Aye, have a dream*

I’m loath to get into politics, but just in passing: with less than a year to go before Scotland votes on independence, one oft-repeated fallacy is really doing my head in: it’s the idea that voting for or against independence is voting for or against the SNP.

The referendum isn’t about party politics. It’s about the entire political system. An independent Scotland may well elect majority SNP governments, but it might equally elect a Labour government, or a coalition, or – and I admit, this one’s pretty unlikely – Tories.

An independent Scotland would arguably have a much more representative democracy than we do now, where we’re governed by a coalition that Scotland didn’t vote for. Devolution has softened that somewhat, but we’re still largely ruled from Westminster.

That’s what we’re being asked to vote on. We’re not being asked to decide whether we like Alex Salmond or David Cameron. We’re being asked how we want to elect their successors.

* Not my pun, I’m afraid. It was one of the placards at the weekend’s pro-independence rally.