If at first you don't succeed...

Some writers make an impact with their very first novel. Others have to pay their dues, writing plenty of books before they achieve the recognition they deserve (yet others, of course, never win great acclaim and sometimes give up on the genre, or find that impatient publishers give up on them before they manage a real breakthrough.)

Minette Walters was an instant hit, and so was Patricia Cornwell. But Ian Rankin, Val McDermid, Andrew Taylor and Peter Robinson are among the best-sellers of today who had to keep the faith for a number of years, and plenty of books, before their talents were at last widely recognised (I think this is a fair summary, even though Andrew's very first book did win an award, and all these writers were critically applauded before they hit the commercial jackpot.)

So what happened to change things for these writers? In some cases, it’s fairly easy to spot the turning point, in other cases less so. Rankin’s Black and Blue was his breakthrough book; it won the CWA Gold Dagger and the rest was history. McDermid’s pivotal moment was probably similar, with the winning of the CWA Gold Dagger for The Mermaids Singing. Taylor’s The American Boy was chosen by the TV show Richard and Judy, and not long afterwards his brilliant Roth Trilogy was televised as ‘Fallen Angel’. With Robinson, the explanation is less straightforward. He once told me that he believed that the key was finding an editor who really believed in him, and a publisher who was prepared to back that judgment by investing real money in promotion.

The rise to prominence of Ann Cleeves, whose White Nights I have featured in this blog lately, is again largely due to the CWA Dagger effect. Interestingly, her Dagger-winning Raven Black opened her fourth distinct crime series. She began with a pair of amateur sleuths, George and Molly Palmer-Jones, in books which had an ornithological background. She tends to be self-deprecating about these early efforts, but I liked them, even though I’d never had much interest in bird-watching, and I was delighted when she contributed to an anthology I edited which reintroduced George in a story called ‘Owl Wars’. Later came a police series set in the North East and featuring an appealing cop called Stephen Ramsay. Vera Stanhope, said by some reviewers to remind them of a female Dalziel, first appeared in The Crow Trap; the book was conceived as a stand-alone, but Vera was too good a character to let go after only one outing. And finally Ann struck gold with her first novel about the Shetlander Jimmy Perez.