#Youdunnit - tweeting about murder, and other crime stories with a gimmick

#Youdunnit is a slim and interesting volume published as a giveaway by Penguin, and it's a very good example of the inventive way in which crime stories can be written. As the hashtag suggests, this is mystery in the age of Twitter, and is the first, as far as I know, "crowdsourced" crime story - or rather, three stories, for the book contains longish short stories by Nicci French, Tim Weaver, and Alastair Gunn.

A prefatory note explains that this book was a collaboration between Penguin and Specsavers (who have lent much support to the genre in recent years). Crime fans in the Twitter community were invited to come up with plot ideas, and 1000 tweets and nearly 700 plot suggestions later, the three authors got to work. It's a very interesting concept, and not entirely a surprise that, despite the common starting point, the writers came up with three very different stories.

Of these, I enjoyed "The Following" in particular. This came from Nicci French,  a husband and wife writing duo whose psychological novels of suspense I've admired for some years. Recently, they have turned to writing a series, which I haven't yet tried, and I'm not sure why they made the change, though I suspect they have made it with aplomb. This story is told in the first person by a woman, in classic French fashion, and is very nicely done. Weaver's story gives a cameo role to David Raker and is set in South Africa, while Gunn focuses on the bicycle plot element provided by crowdsourcing.

All in all, this little book is an enjoyable experiment, and it's worth recalling that it's just the latest in a long line of games played by crime writers. The "challenge to the reader" was a popular feature of many Golden Age novels, while I've always had a soft spot for "clue-finders" at the end of whodunits.Combining crime novels with jig-saws enjoyed a brief vogue in the Thirties. I like playing these games myself, and my first published short story, "Are You Sitting Comfortably?" was a sort of trick story. "An InDex" played with the idea of indexes and mystery, while "Acknowledgments" was a bit of fun aimed at those worthy but sometimes ludicrous pages of acknowledgments that take up an increasing number of pages in so many books these days. I'm always keen to hear of other examples of games played with the genre - please let me know of any games or gimmicks that strike you as especially interesting, either in concept or execution.

Saturday Selection - Tom Bradby, Barry Eisler

Tom Bradby is the political editor of ITV, which must be a very demanding job (influential, too, as he is said to have been instrumental, through his reporting, in David Cameron’s elevation to leadership of the Conservative party – blimey!) Somehow, he also finds the time to write thrillers which evidently sell very well indeed. I confess that I haven’t yet read any, but they look interesting.

Now I have received a review copy of his latest, Blood Money (Bantam). The press release says: ‘A banker lies dead on Wall Street and rookie cop Joe Quinn is assigned to find out how he got there’. Yes, you guessed it – the setting is 1929, and amidst economic turmoil, bankers are not the most popular people around. So – a historical crime novel, but perhaps with relevance to the present day. I must get round to reading this one.

Another writer on my shamefully long list of those I haven’t read at all is the American Barry Eisler. Like Bradby, he has an intimidatingly impressive CV- he worked for the CIA’s director of operations before moving to Japan and earning a black belt in judo. So even if I didn’t enjoy his work (perish the thought) I’d be inclined to keep very quiet about it.

Eisler’s latest is Requiem for an Assassin (Penguin), the fifth book in a series featuring an assassin called John Rain. It looks like a thriller crammed with authentic background detail.

Are book launches a good idea?

An obituary notice I was sorry to read today reminded me of a lunch in London fifteen years or so back, and a discussion about whether book launches are worthwhile. The obituary was of Tony Mott, a publisher once of Penguin Books; he later moved to Transworld, where he was involved with publishing Bantam paperbacks prior to his retirement more than a decade ago.

My first four books were published in paperback in the UK by Bantam (the deals were done by the hardback publisher Piatkus, which didn’t have a paperback imprint at the time.) I had a female editor and she invited me down to London for lunch one day. At the last minute, however, she couldn’t make it, and I was greeted at the restaurant by an affable chap who introduced himself as Tony Mott. I’d never heard of Tony, but I think that in fact he was my editor’s boss, so I was quite honoured.

Certainly, it was a most agreeable lunch. It was immediately clear that Tony knew a lot about publishing. He was obviously a good person from whom to seek advice. What I remember most of all is when I asked Tony for his number one tip for authors. His response was immediate: ‘Don’t get excited about book launches. They don’t help to sell books.’

This had never even occurred to me, not least because at that time neither Piatkus nor Bantam had ever proposed a launch. Since moving to pastures new, though, I’ve had a number of launches. I mentioned one or two in my post about London bookshops yesterday, and 2008 was a bumper year, with no fewer than three launches, for Waterloo Sunset, Dancing for the Hangman, and the CWA anthology, M.O..

I think Tony was right that launches don’t make a major impact on sales, unless you are already a best-seller, and I suspect he’d grown weary of authors who have unrealistic expectations of them. But I’ve enjoyed both my own launches and those of a number of writer friends. Launching a book is a good excuse for a party. They might not be commercially beneficial, to any measurable extent, but they certainly can be great fun.