Yes, We Have No Booker Prize

Peter Murphy has long been a friend of Crime Always Pays, and his debut novel, JOHN THE REVELATOR, is a very fine offering indeed. It put me in mind of Pat McCabe’s opus THE BUTCHER BOY when I was reading it, albeit with a tad less execution by pig-stickers.
  Anyway, JOHN THE REVELATOR is in the running for The Guardian’s innovative ‘Not the Booker Prize’ award, which will be given to the novel that should have been on the Booker longlist, and wasn’t, and you – yes, YOU! – can vote for it. Clickety-click here for all the details …
  Next week - Not the Orange Prize: In which you – yes, YOU! – get to vote for all those books that didn’t qualify for the Orange Prize because they were written by blokes …

John Banville Vs The World # 1,017: Ruth Dudley Edwards Steps In

Ruth Dudley Edwards (right) gets in touch to see if I’d be interesting in hosting her version of events in Banvillegate (See what I did there? It was John Banville, right, at Harrogate, and … oh. Okay). Erm, Ruth? Yes, please. To wit:

“Tony Benn never opens his mouth without switching on his tape-recorder, and after this business with John Banville, who represented me as saying the precise opposite of what I believe, I fear he is wise. At the risk of being balls-achingly tedious, my historian’s instincts make me want to set the record straight.
  “Banville got up the noses of the Harrogate audience by – no doubt unwittingly – giving the impression that he was rather embarrassed by his Benjamin Black persona. It’s is hard not to bristle when you hear that because Banville agonises over every sentence that he does well to write 100 words a day, but Black merrily bashes out 2,000.
  “Being an out-and-proud crime writer myself, who misses no opportunity to assail those who disparage the genre, I displayed my irritation when moderating the Emerald Noir panel the following morning by asking Declan Hughes whether he thought Banville was denying that he felt he was slumming it, although he really believed he was. Dec, being more streetwise than me, refused to get involved in this fight.
  “In the Daily Telegraph on 28 July, Jake Kerridge got the wrong end of the stick by saying: ‘The writer Ruth Dudley Edwards commented at one event that “he may insist he’s not slumming it, but he’s slumming it.’ On the Guardian books blog this turned into: ‘”He’s slumming it,”’ author Ruth Dudley Edwards said the following day. “He says he isn’t, but he is.”’ Which in Banville’s Guardian article on 1 August - which was trailed on the front of the Review section as ‘’John Banville: ‘I’m not “slumming it” as a crime writer’ - became ‘Another blogger did a survey among attendees [of the event where he and Reginald Hill were interviewed by Mark Lawson]. One of them, Ruth Dudley Edwards, a good writer who should have known better, allowed herself to be quoted as saying that I was slumming it as Benjamin Black. The inevitable implication of this is that Dudley Edwards considers crime writers to be slum dwellers.’ He then proceeded to defend crime writing against me and people like me.
  “Mind you, if he’d stayed for Emerald Noir he wouldn’t have got this wrong. And if he’d looked at my website, he’d have found some impassioned defences of crime writing. But, hey, as Reg Hill wrote when I moaned to him about this: ‘There’s nothing like a good misunderstanding for promoting misunderstanding among people.’” - Ruth Dudley Edwards

  At the risk of getting splinters up my fundament, I genuinely think what’s happening here is a misunderstanding. Mind you, I’ve no problem with a good old-fashioned literary spat, either, especially when crime writers are pretty much universally nice people. I mean, seriously, crime writing festivals can get a bit Stepford at times, no?

Everything Goes Better With An E

All three regular readers of CAP will be aware that I’m planning to upload a book to Kindle in the very near future, so I’m more exercised by the whole e-book / e-reader phenomenon at the moment than I generally would be. Still, even the luddest of Luddites should be intrigued / alarmed / horrified by a couple of interesting pieces that popped into my email this morning. The first was from the Guardian:

In the first Terminator movie he tried to extinguish all human life. Now, as governor of California, Arnold Schwarzenegger wants to make textbooks history in favour of digital formats.
  Schwarzenegger, trying to plug a budget hole of $24.3bn (£15bn), thinks he can make savings by getting rid of what he decries as expensive textbooks. The governor is serious about an idea that might make Gutenberg turn in his grave. He appeared in class yesterday to push an idea he set out in the San Jose Mercury News newspaper.
  “It’s nonsensical and expensive to look to traditional hard-bound books when information today is so readily available in electronic form,” Schwarzenegger wrote. “Especially now, when our school districts are strapped for cash and our state budget deficit is forcing further cuts to classrooms, we must do everything we can to untie educators’ hands and free up dollars so that schools can do more with fewer resources.”

  The second piece was from Reuters:

The recent Book Expo publishing industry convention held in New York accelerated the impression that the industry is rapidly embracing new technology. Many attendees remarked that e-books pervaded every discussion they had on the convention floor. “It has tipped,2 tweeted Todd Sattersten, president of Milwaukee-based 800-CEO-Read, an influential online source of business books. “Buckle in for the ride.”
  Indeed, the last few weeks have seen a flurry of announcements across the book-to-technology spectrum. Amazon (AMZN) informed users of a small-but-meaningful tweak to the Kindle that now allows users to export their reading notes. Google (GOOG) revealed its own e-book distribution system, publishers launched book-specific iPhone apps in the United Kingdom, and computer makers unveiled new ways to incorporate e-ink technology into highly portable but robust computing devices [ … ]
  So with all of this fast-paced activity, are we hurtling into a brave new reading world where authors deal directly with their readers and keep more of the profits? Not yet. For all of the publishers’ fumbling with e-books, they retain one important advantage highlighted by all of this activity. There’s a blizzard of standards out there that only a big company can manage. Without an established standard, size matters in the supply chain. Publishers have it; authors don’t.

  Dang, there goes another get-rich-quick scheme.
  Speaking of get-rich-quick schemes … I’d no sooner announced that I was thinking of uploading THE BIG EMPTY, the sequel to EIGHTBALL BOOGIE, to Kindle, when a publisher stepped in and asked to see it before it goes to Kindle. Which was nice. And this morning, I got a call from a movie producer guy saying he’d read THE BIG O, and was keen on optioning it, and was I free to sit down for a meeting next week …?
  Guess I’ll have to postpone washing my hair next week ...

The Revolution: Will Be Downloadable, Apparently

Gah! Scooped yet again. As reported first – as always – by Gerard Brennan on Crime Scene Northern Ireland, The Artist Formerly Known as Colin Bateman has launched an innovative little marketing ploy, by which the first chapter of his latest opus, MYSTERY MAN, can be downloaded by texting ‘MYSTERY’ to 64888. Now, I’m not sure if that applies only to UK mobile / cell phones (those in the Republic of Ireland can text ‘SUMMER’ TO 53705), but either way it’s a nice little idea, and a good example of a writer and / or publisher using technology in a proactive way, rather than wasting their time wailing about the demise of the traditional book format.
  Speaking of which, says he, segueing unsteadily into a kind-of related topic … Writing in The Times yesterday, Nicholas Clee had a very interesting piece about the impact of technology, and particularly digital technology, on the publishing industry, a sample of which runneth thusly:

“Practices that have been normal in the book industry for years are becoming unsustainable … This is where digital technology, such as the EBM [‘Espresso Machine’] and electronic devices, including the Sony Reader, comes in. Printing thousands of books that sit in warehouses or on booksellers’ shelves, only to be pulped, is unsustainable. But remember the long tail: there may be a demand, albeit “niche”, for these texts. It makes sense to create digital files that can be downloaded or printed according to demand.”

  It’s a long-ish piece, but well worth the time of any writer …
  Speaking of which, says he, segueing unsteadily, etc., The Guardian this week also had a smashing piece on how the future is going to look for writers, suggesting that the impact of the interweb means the era of the ‘gifted amateur’ is about to return. To wit:

“A misleading idea has arisen, however, that writers generally can earn enough money to do nothing else. The idea is ignorant of history, of TS Eliot keeping himself comfortable on academic stipends and a publishing house directorship, of Angus Wilson superintending the reading room at the British Museum. It may be that we have it because authorship is now so visible, with the author turned into a small celebrity. But we can all be authors now and publish ourselves on the web. What you might call the moral and aesthetic case for writing - to think, imagine and describe and then communicate the result to an audience - can be satisfied online. It just doesn’t make any money. The age of the gifted amateur is surely about to return.”

  So – no change there for yours truly, although I might want to work a little on the ‘gifted’ side of things. Sigh, etc. Ah well, upward and onward …

McGilloway Or The Highway

Brian McGilloway (right): mild-mannered teacher by day, exquisitely-mannered crime writer by night. You don’t want to mess with him, he’ll give you detention … at the school of hard knocks!!! (dum-dum-DUM, etc.). Anyhoos, to celebrate the launch of his latest fine novel, BLEED A RIVER DEEP, Brian had his Top 10 Irish Crime Novels on The Guardian’s blog today. Quoth Brian:

“Crime fiction has taken off in Ireland over the past few years with a number of our best writers winning awards and making an impact on the international scene. If anything marks out the movement it’s the sheer diversity of sub-genres, from PI novels to police procedurals, by way of political satire and screwball comedy. And that’s not including John Connolly’s Charlie Parker series which is absent here only because it is set in the USA. Many of the recent group of Irish crime writers (myself included) cite Connolly as the inspiration that got them writing. As an introduction to this recent growth and range in the genre, here are 10 of my favourites from the past decade.”

  As you might well guess from the fact that I’m featuring said Top 10 on CAP, Brian had the extraordinary good taste to include our humble offering THE BIG O in his list. The Big Question: Did Benny Blanco (from the Bronx) make it? To find out, clickety-click here …
  And then come back here and tell us all what novel(s) Brian left out that should have made it in …

Ready, Amis, Fire …

Just when you start to believe that today’s writers are only in it for the Ferraris and hot chicks, along comes Ronan Bennett (right). In a piece in Monday’s Guardian, the author of ZUGWANG takes Martin Amis to task in no uncertain terms for what Bennett believes are Amis’s inflammatory remarks about Muslims. Bennett, who was wrongly convicted of murdering an RUC officer in 1974, and spent 18 months imprisoned in Long Kesh, was subsequently arrested in London in the mid-’70s for the now-legendary offence of “conspiring to commit crimes unknown against persons unknown in places unknown” and tried at the Old Bailey in the so-called ‘anarchists’ trial’. Acquitted after defending himself in court, he has perhaps more capacity than most for the ‘imaginative sympathy’ he believes is lacking in the West for a persecuted minority. The gist, proceeding by excerpts, runneth thusly:

What do you make of the following statement: “Asians are gaining on us demographically at a huge rate. A quarter of humanity now and by 2025 they’ll be a third. Italy’s down to 1.1 child per woman. We’re just going to be outnumbered.” While we’re at it, what do you think of this, incidentally from the same speaker: “The Black community will have to suffer until it gets its house in order.” Or this, the same speaker again: “I just don’t hear from moderate Judaism, do you?” And (yes, same speaker): “Strip-searching Irish people. Discriminatory stuff, until it hurts the whole Irish community and they start getting tough with their children.” The speaker was Martin Amis and, yes, the quotations have been modified, with Asians, Blacks and Irish here substituted for Muslims, and Judaism for Islam - though, it should be stressed, these are the only amendments. Terry Eagleton, professor of English literature at Manchester University, where Amis has also started to teach, recently quoted the remarks in a new edition of his book IDEOLOGY: AN INTRODUCTION. Amis, Eagleton claimed, was advocating nothing less than the “hounding and humiliation” of Muslims so “they would return home and teach their children to be obedient to the White Man’s law”. […] The views quoted by Eagleton first appeared last year, in an interview Amis [right] gave to Ginny Dougary of the Times. That they passed with virtually no comment at the time says a great deal about the depoliticised state of intellectual debate in Britain. While a great deal of media time and energy is spent discussing the latest translation of WAR AND PEACE or the artwork in the refurbished St Pancras station, there has been, with a few notable exceptions, a puzzling lack of effort when it comes to something as critical as expressing support for an increasingly demonised minority in our society. Martin Amis should have been taken to task by his peers for his views. He was not. […] This is a community under attack, and not just by novelists. By every official index, violence and discrimination against Muslims have increased since 2001. The victims of physical violence will always be a minority – although Asian people are twice as likely to be stabbed to death than they were ten years ago – but what the majority experience in their daily lives is much more insidious, the kind of coded rejection that in this more enlightened age takes the place of outright expressions of racism. And, of course, hanging over them are threats of control orders, curfews, arrest and extended periods of detention without trial. Just as the 1974 Prevention of Terrorism Act left the Irish community in Britain feeling like a suspect nation, so the infinitely more repressive anti- terrorist legislation – including 28 days’ detention without charge rather than the old seven when the IRA were active – of today intimidates, alienates and inflames Muslims. […] I can’t help feeling that Amis’s remarks, his defence of them, and the reaction to them were a test. They were a test of our commitment to a society in which imaginative sympathy applies not just to those like us but to those whose lives and beliefs run along different lines. And I can’t help feeling we failed that test. Amis got away with it. He got away with as odious an outburst of racist sentiment as any public figure has made in this country for a very long time. Shame on him for saying it, and shame on us for tolerating it.

Ronan Bennett wrote the screenplay of THE HAMBURG CELL, a film about the 9/11 hijackers. His latest novel is ZUGZWANG.