Stop Me by Richard Jay Parker

I will occasionally review a book that I would like to bring to your attention. I will never be negative in my reviews. I know what it takes to produce a novel, the time and effort that are required. I will never review a book that I didn’t like, what’s the point? There may be certain things that I didn’t enjoy within a book, that I otherwise enjoyed, but as it is an opinion and therefore subjective there is again no point in highlighting it as it you may love those things. There may be small “spoilers” within my reviews but I’ll try to keep them to a minimum.

Today, I’m having a look at Stop Me by Richard Jay Parker. This is Richard’s first novel and it has already garnered an impressive following on Amazon, in particular in sales for the Kindle.

The story is about a serial killer but Richard has approached it from an unusual angle. The hero is not a police detective, instead Leo Sharpe is the husband of one of the killer’s victims. The killer in question is called the Vacation Killer and picks targets while on holiday in various parts of the world. A chain letter is e-mailed which will save the person from death but only if it gets back to the killer within a week. When the killer fails to receive the mail, the cleaned jawbone of the murdered person is sent to the police.

Leo’s wife disappears and is believed to have been taken by the Vacation Killer but the police never receive any proof of her death. Leo is left to wonder what happened to her, has she been killed or is she still held captive? A man in Louisiana called Bookwalter claims to be the killer but as he has never left the States. Leo begins to correspond with Bookwalter when a picture of his wife appears on a website set up by the American.

At this point in the book the reader is in the same position as Leo, unsure whether Bookwalter is killer or crank. Bookwalter is making money off his website and it was then that I thought of the parallels of the phone hacking scandal in Britain. Readers of the News Of The World were partly to blame for what happened by continuing to buy the paper with all its salacious details of people’s private lives, driving the journalists to get more lurid stories. In the book, the visitors to Bookwalter’s macabre website are feeding both his distorted view of the world and generating advertising revenue for this vile individual and his family.  At one point Richard writes, “How much of their lifestyle was skimmed off the back of shattered lives and events they had no connection to?” The statement could equally apply to a certain kind of journalist and how we react to what they produce.

The book is full of twists and turns, including a sub-plot about Mrs Sharpe’s employers who try to help when she disappears. The climax brings the book to a very satisfying and enjoyable conclusion. If you’re looking for something a bit different in the crime genre then this is the book for you. An ideal summer read that at least for me, provoked some interesting thoughts. 

Stop Me by Richard Jay Parker

Ego or Alter Ego?

At one of the library talks I gave in Glasgow recently, I was asked if the hero of my books, Craig Campbell, was my alter ego. The question surprised me and I answered it as well as I could at the time. I have thought a little more about it and would like to try to put those thoughts into words. 

The first thing about Craig, he is considerably younger than I am (and he has more hair!)  Am I hankering after a lost youth? Possibly, but in truth I had made a conscious decision that my detective would not be a middle-aged man. I felt that because he was a private-eye he didn’t need to be in the age range of a senior police detective. It gave me the opportunity to make him less world-weary, less cynical.

Craig is braver than I ever could be. He faces down criminals with a confidence that I could only dream of. He does not bow to threats and is prepared to defend himself no matter the provocation. These are, of course, essential qualities in the hero of a book, I only wish I could have his sense of valour.

There are other ways in which my hero does reflect his creator. He has, I hope, the same moral compass. He feels for the victims and is stubborn in his pursuit of the perpetrators. This comes from a sense of decency that runs through him and is a key part of his personality.

He is loyal to his friends and has a strong relationship based on good foundations with his girlfriend, Carol. I felt that these were qualities that were important, I wanted him to be likable, even if I enjoy books where the main character has few friends and is a failure in any relationship. Whether these traits are reflected in my own character would be for other people to judge. 

I’m not sure how other writers would answer the question, I’m sure that everyone puts a little of themselves into their protagonist. I would imagine many would feel that their lead character has at least a little of the writer in there somewhere.

No matter whether it is ego or alter ego, Craig is a part of me and a little bit of me is a part of him.

"The Killing" travels well

I watched the first two episodes of the U.S. version of "The Killing" on Channel 4 last night.  The original Danish version was shown on BBC 4 earlier this year and I was a huge fan.
I tuned in last night wondering how this atmospheric show would translate across the Atlantic. I need not have worried. From the choice of the city, Seattle, to the casting of the actors, the American production team have stayed true to the atmosphere and philosophy behind the original series.
The lead actress, Mireille Enos (Sarah Linden) has captured the intensity that so defined the performance given by Sofia Gråbøl (Sarah Lund) in the original and it will be interesting to see if Enos can continue to portray her character's obsession with the same energy.
My main concern for the long-term success of the show will be how it handles the political subtleties that were so integral to the Danish version. Danish politics is a very different animal to the two party system in the U.S. and it may be that it will not travel as well but time will tell.
My only small criticism of last night's programme was that there was one scene that wasn't as captivating as in the Danish version. The scene where the parents of Rosie Larsen tell her brothers that she has died was good but didn't move me to the same degree as the original. From my own experience, I know how difficult that task is and it was the Danish actors who were better at conveying that particular agony.
That was a minor in quibble in an otherwise fantastic evening's viewing. Despite knowing who the murderer is, I will continue to watch this excellent crime programme. For those of you in the UK who missed it, you can catch it on 4od.

A self-published author’s comparison of publishing for the iPad and the Kindle

The iPad and the Kindle represent the two biggest markets available to independent publishers. They are the key markets in distributing your ebook and are the best ways to reach potential readers. I have found some frustrations publishing for both of them and I would like to share them with you.

Initial submission

In this area Amazon is definitely the easiest and quickest option. You simply sign-up for an account and submit your book as a word document. My book, ‘The Good Girl’ was available on Amazon.com; Amazon.co.uk and Amazon.de within two days of submission. The only down side is that the author has little control over how the text of the book will appear to the reader and, in my case, it meant having to create styles in Microsoft Word from a file exported from my writing software.

To submit files to the iBookstore you have to go through an aggregator. An aggregator is a third party that collates your information and packages your book before passing it to the iBookstore. I submitted ‘The Good Girl’ on June 21st, it is still not available for the iPad as I write. This is obviously very frustrating as it makes launching and marketing the book a lot more difficult. The upside is that I can submit a fully standards compliant ePub file that I exported from my writing software that requires no further editing and it allows me more control of how the book will look on the device.

Pricing

This is an area where I find Apple to be the better company to deal with. The price I set when I submit the file is the price the customer will pay when they buy the book. That may appear to be obvious but it is not the way it works with Amazon.

The price I set for ‘The Good Girl’ was $1.79. On the first day it appeared, the price on Amazon.com was $3.34. This makes it virtually impossible to have any real control over the price when you wish to run a special promotion, say in the run up to the holiday season. It’s difficult to advertise a price if you don’t know what it will be when the customer attempts to buy the book.

The time that the aggregator takes to pass on a change of price to Apple means that it is also problematic trying to run a promotion for a specific time. I have found this to be particularly frustrating, surely if you only wish to change the price it should not require the full review process. If the ePub file is the same then the change should be instantaneous.

The cover

You might think that this is a strange heading but the truth is the Kindle is not a great device to view images on. The iPad’s full colour display means the cover of my book looks exactly like the cover of the paperback, indeed the cover I designed. However, due to the limitations of the greyscale e-ink display used by the Kindle, I had to create a different cover for ‘The Reluctant Detective’ as the impact of the cover was lost for anyone browsing the Kindle store on the device rather than a computer. Sales of my first book only really took off on the Kindle when I changed the cover.

Royalties

Amazon pay royalties based on the price you set. If your book if less than $1.99 or £1.99 you will receive 35% of the price you set. The royalties rate is 70% if the book is priced at a higher level. You do not receive any royalties until your books have made at least £100.

With Apple you get paid at 70% regardless of the cover price. You also get royalties paid through your aggregator every month, thirty days after the month ends. These payments start when your book begins to sell and you don’t have to wait to reach a certain figure to trigger payment.

As the market for ebooks develops it may be that many of the little frustrations I have encountered will be ironed out but for the moment I will have to work my way through them to bring the Reluctant Detective mysteries to my readers.

"The Killing" - BBC Four

As part of a series of articles about crime drama on TV, I thought I would start with a Danish series that started on BBC Four on Saturday.

The Killing (Forbrydelsen in Danish) is a twenty episode series, dealing with the murder of a teenage girl. Unlike the 'solved in forty-two minutes' approach of the likes of CSI, this is a slow-burning account of the police's attempts to find a killer. Although I can't vouch for the accuracy, I would imagine that the portrayal is closer to the real-life struggles of detectives as they try to solve the crime. In CSI and some other series, they seem to be increasingly able to solve a murder before real-life crime scene techs would have completed their initial collection of evidence.

The featured detective in "The Killing" is Sarah Lund. Played by Sofie Gråbøl, she is the mother of a pre-teen boy and is due to leave Denmark for a new life in Sweden with her son and boyfriend. She delays her departure for Sweden as she becomes involved in the search for the girl and then her murderer. Judging by the first two episodes she is sensitive and emotionally aware, the perfect foil for her temporary police partner, the gung-ho Jan Meyer, played by Søren Malling.

In the first two episodes the connection to a politician is established and a possible suspect identified, the story is beginning to boil up nicely but it is the way the victims family are portrayed that was interesting to me. The scene where the parents of the victim have to tell her little brothers that their sister was never coming home was well played by the actors and was a poignant reminder to me of my own similar situation.

If it continues as it began, The Killing, will be a fascinating addition to Saturday night viewing, if you don't mind subtitles. You can see the first two episodes on the BBC iPlayer.

Test Of Character

Where do your characters come from?

It is a frequently asked question that many people are keen to know the answer to. The possibility intrigues people, that something of someone they know or maybe even something of themselves appear in a character.

The characters in the Reluctant Detective have many sources, some of them rooted in reality, others purely figments of my fevered imagination.

The person who is closest to a real person is the office cleaner. She is very strongly influenced by a cleaner we had when I worked for Railtrack. Other characters can be inspired by a simple gesture, tick or habit of people I have met in passing. The two women in the scene in Costa coffee are a subset of a group of women I watched laughing and talking as if they had reverted to their teenage years. It was a positive image that stuck with me and before I knew it they had made a cameo appearance in the story.

Some characters are an amalgam of people, little bits pulled from the edges of a person to come together like Frankenstein's monster, given life by a series of taps of the keyboard. Stumbling into creation and slowly coalescing into, hopefully, a believable person. It is a fine balancing act, bringing the traits together to make a complete fictional being.

The majority of the antagonists in the book are where my imagination is allowed the greatest scope. I have been fortunate in life to have met few people that I dislike, therefore creating a fictional villain has to come from the darker parts of my imagination. I hope that the people in the book, even the bad guys, have traits with which the reader can empathise or at very least sympathise with. Only then will they be engaging characters that you can relate to. A large portion of crime fiction is now populated by villains that are portrayed as being purely evil but there are, thankfully, very few truly evil people. I have tried to make criminal behaviour be grounded in the circumstances that people find themselves in or the mistaken belief that they were doing it for good reasons.

I hope that you find the cast of the novel to be interesting. I would like to know which characters you think are captivating and which are maybe not as believable as they should be. 

Influences - Part 3

Having looked at inspirational authors from both the U.S. and U.K., in this final part of my influences, I thought I would look to Europe.

Sweden is fast becoming one of the top producers of crime writers. At the top of the pile stands Henning Mankell. His chief character, Kurt Wallander, has helped to make him one of the most successful authors in the world. Wallander is another senior detective who lacks in social skills but it doesn't stop him being a fine policeman. Mankell creates a vivid and occasionally grim picture of life among Sweden's criminal fraternity but it is never less than compelling.

Stieg Larsson didn't live to see the phenomenon that his Millenium Trilogy would become. The protagonist, Lisbeth Salander, is surely one of the greatest characters ever to appear in any crime novel. As "The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo" plots her way through life, the reader swings between sympathy, to disgust, to admiration as she deals out justice in her own inimitable way. With her journalist partner, Mikael Blomqvist, she takes on the corruption in the Swedish political and business system. If you haven't read them, I would heartily recommend that you do.

Another shining light of Swedish crime writing is Håkan Nesser. His books are set in a fictional North European country, that encompasses Dutch, Swedish Danish and German influences. The main character, Van Veeteren, begin as a Chief Inspector but retires during the series to become the owner of an antiques shop. Both the setting and the career path of the policeman, makes the series an interesting change from the majority of detective fiction.

My final European is a little bit of a cheat. Michael Dibdin was born in Woverhampton but his detective series was set in Italy and featured Aurelio Zen. A member of the Italian State Police, Zen is called to cases across the country. Dibdin's skill was to evoke all of Italy's contradictions. The history, the buildings, the beauty of the landscape, the corruption, the political machinations and organised crime. If you love Italy, you'll love Dibdin.

That brings an end at my look at the people who have influenced and inspired me, I hope you enjoyed it and it inspires you to read something new, after you've read The Reluctant Detective, of course.