Hi everyone. Russel’s away in Paris
for the week, eating too much Wild Boar and slowly turning into Obelix. He
asked me to pen a few words to fill the space he left behind.
First the promotional bit. My debut
novel, Natural Causes, is coming out on May 9th in the UK, published by Michael
Joseph. A lot of people have already read it, though, because I self-published
it as an ebook just over a year ago.
The wonderful thing about fairy
tales (and I hasten to add Natural Causes is not a fairy tale) is that they do
occasionally come true. I had no great hopes for my book being a huge success.
If I had a goal at all it was to sell perhaps a thousand copies of it and its
sequel, The Book of Souls, over the course of a year. As it happened, through the
clever marketing wheeze of giving Natural Causes away for a bit and hoping
people would then pay for The Book of Souls, I shifted over three hundred and
fifty thousand copies of both books on Amazon alone in the six months before
the good people at Michael Joseph made me a very tidy offer for the rights.
This post isn’t so much about that.
(Though please excuse the shameless bragging. I am, as you might say,
cock-a-hoop.) I mention it only to suggest that many people have read the
opening chapter of Natural Causes. Some have read no further. I know this
because they have written me one star reviews to that effect, and sent me
emails berating me for the sickness of my mind. Just this week I’ve had another
one on Amazon, under the title ‘Sick’:
“The graphic detail in the opening chapter
made me feel sick, I couldn't read any more of it. A poor choice for me on this
occasion.”
They may have a point, even if they
are in the minority. You see, the opening chapter, though just a shade over
five hundred words long, is a graphic depiction of the gang rape and ritual
murder of a young woman, written from the point of view of the victim.
Some of you have judged me already,
I can tell. Those of you wondering what the fuss is all about might like to
take a moment to go and read the offending piece. You can do so here.
I’ll wait until you get back.
When the print edition of the book
comes out in May, however, that offending and offensive-to-some chapter won’t
be there. We have decided, my editor and I, to remove it to the back of the
book, with a little covering note explaining why.
The reasons for doing this are many
fold. Perhaps the most obvious and least defensible is that with such a graphic
and disturbing opening chapter, the supermarkets may shy off stocking the book.
It’s sad but true that supermarkets are where most people buy their books these
days, plucked from the shelf at random and thrown in the trolley with the
ready-meal horse lasagna and bottle of cheap Australian Chardonnay.
Supermarkets can be fickle about what they stock, and not making it into Tesco
can be the difference between a bestseller and a flop.
That’s not the only reason for
removing it, though. I’ve had my own reservations about the opening for a
while. It is an undeniably graphic and horrible description. It was designed to
shock, and I think succeeds. It also doesn’t really fit with the tone of the
rest of the book.
To understand why it’s there, I need
to explain the history behind Natural Causes. I’m a late-comer to crime
fiction, some might say something of a charlatan in the genre. I wrote my first
attempt, a short story, in 2005 after my good friend Stuart MacBride had
suggested I do like him, which was to stop pissing around with fantasy and SF
and try my hand at something that might actually get published. He’d been given
similar advice by a departing agent, and it seems to have worked out well for
him. I wrote a half dozen short stories featuring a detective I’d created for a
comic script, pitched unsuccessfully to 2000AD in the early nineties. Natural
Causes was, I think, the third one. It was published as a short story by
Spinetingler in late 2006. By then I’d already started the process of rewriting
it as a novel, and Sandra Ruttan suggested I might submit it for the CWA Debut
Dagger.
You only get 3000 words and a
synopsis for your Dagger entry, so they need to count. The novel originally
opened in the same way as the short story, with DI Tony McLean stumbling upon a
crime scene already being investigated by another, more senior detective. I
wanted something to grab the judges’ attention, and since the book revolved
around a ritual killing from the past, what better way than to describe that
killing as it happens?
It must have worked. Natural Causes
was short-listed for the Debut Dagger in 2007. It didn’t win, though, and
neither did the exposure gain me a publisher or agent. So I put it to one side
and got on with writing the next book. When I self-published last year, I
thought long and hard about that opening chapter, but decided again to keep it.
If nothing else, it would get people talking about the book.
But it still bothered me. Crime
fiction by its very nature deals with the nastiness and violence of life. Bloody
murder and the worst of human nature are our stock in trade. But there’s a big
difference between describing a horrific scene to explore the reactions of your
characters, and doing it to impress a set of award judges. Or just to shock
your readers into talking about your book.
The opening scene in Natural Causes
occurs sixty years before the events that make up the bulk of the book, long
before DI McLean and his team are even born. It’s in the present time, when the
body is discovered walled up in a basement of a derelict mansion, that we begin
to explore the effects of the crime on those investigating it. There are a few
other scenes in the book that are quite graphic and unpleasant, but they are
necessary to drive the story forward, to motivate the characters and add a
sense of peril. The opening scene is gratuitous, for all that I still think it
is, technically, a strong bit of writing. And for that reason alone it had to
go.
Looking at the books I have written
since Natural Causes, I can see what to me looks like a toning down of the
visceral shocks; the guts and gore stuff. The latest has a couple of gross
moments, but most of the truly horrific I leave to the reader’s imagination,
which is far worse than anything I could ever write. More importantly, what is
there is relevant to the characters within the book, rather than simply put in
to get a reaction from the reader.
The first is good storytelling,
whatever the genre. The second is just torture porn.
3 comments:
I like where you went with this. I'm a big believer in giving the audience as much detail as is needed to kikc off their imaginations, whether it be for sex or violence. No one can gross you out--or titillate you--like yourself.
Read the intro. While it was graphic, have read a lot worse. I could not read novels with chapters of this content / style, but I think it did do what you were initially trying to accomplish. Best of luck!
I really liked this post. I just had a bad experience with a book I really liked in every other way, except for way too much graphic violence (for me). I read your intro, and although it is graphic and uncomfortable, it did not bother me that much. I can take some graphic violence if it is there to establish something and it not repeated over and over.
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