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News from the Farm!

And then, all of a sudden, it was November.

Please accept my apologies for the lateness of this newsletter. I always intend to get them done by the beginning of the month, and then something happens to get in the way of that. Usually my forgetfulness, but sometimes work. Still, it's here now, and they do say absinthe makes the tart grow fonder ...

Welcome once again to my (almost) monthly newsletter of random musings. If you're reading this, you must have signed up for it, even if you have no memory of that whatsoever. I understand. I get blanks too. I understand buyer's remorse as well, so if you're having second thoughts you can unsubscribe from the link at the bottom of this email. Or you can hit reply, delete this message and replace it with a request to unsubscribe. I'll remove your details and promise not to judge.

The reply email address comes straight to me, so if you've any burning questions you want to ask, observations you want to make, offers of film production or the like, feel free to get in touch. I try to answer every email that needs answering, even if it sometimes takes me a while. Oh to have minions to do all these things for me.

But if you do get in touch, for whatever reason, please spare a thought for my inbox and delete the contents of the original email (this newsletter) that appends itself to your message. My poor old Mac Mini is getting old, and struggles with multiple large files.

One Good Deed

This book is still available for free for anyone looking for something to read. Putting it all into one easily-downloadable file is still on my to do list. Sorry about that.

One Good Deed - landing page

Paperback Writer!

Paperback sales of Bury Them Deep continue at a satisfying pace. We hit 10k sales in short order, which is good news. Hopefully the tail will be long on this one.

Book sales are up across the board during these trying times, I'm pleased to report. The Sunday Times top ten hardbacks sales for the week before I began typing this totalled almost 150,000 books, or so I'm told. Clearly books offer an escape from the horror that binge watching the latest Netflix series cannot. Long may that last.

If you click on any of the book images in this newsletter, you'll be taken either to that book's Amazon page or the book page on my website with links to multiple purchase options. I'm a big fan of Amazon - it kickstarted my writing career after all - but there are plenty other places to buy books, many of which could use your custom a lot more than Jeff Bezos. If you're in the UK or Ireland, this handy little link will show you where your local independent book shop is. Do please support them if you can. http://www.indiebookshops.com/indie-bookshops-uk-and-ireland/

Writing News

I'm not sure if I've covered this in the newsletter before, but the topic came up recently on that there Twitter (my only social media these days) about whether there was any prospect of a TV adaptation of the McLean books, and if so who might play Tony McLean.

Alas, at present there is nothing in the works. I sold an option to ITV Studios many years ago, but it lapsed without getting anywhere near production. Telly is a strange old game, with almost every new crime fiction series getting optioned at some point or another, and very, very few of them ever ending up on the screen. The rights are back with me now, as are those for the Con Fairchild and Benfro series, so if you know any production companies looking for something different, do put them in touch.

But should a production company come calling, who would play Tony?

I get asked this a lot, and the simple answer is I have absolutely no idea. When I first started writing his character he was in a comic script, so you'd think there'd be some description for the artist to work with. I had to go deep into the archives to 1993 to find the script so that I could check, but there's really nothing at all. He appears at the scene of a truck crash (a theme that I used for The Gathering Dark, many years later) along with a long-forgotten Constable Andrews. Here it is, the final frame on page seven of chapter one:

Frame 5
The emergency services are swinging into action. Two Policemen are on the scene. One is young, Sergeant Andrews. The other older, Inspector McLean, has his shirt-sleeves rolled up and is doing his best to help. Andrews is staring at the dead girl who has just screamed at nothing it seems.

McLean: LEAVE HER ANDREWS, SHE'S GONE. COME AND HOLD THIS BANDAGE.

For the whole of that story he is never described, and neither does he get much better treatment in any of his later cameo appearances in a succession of unpublishable novels.

By the time I came to write him as a lead character, I'd developed the style that persists in my writing to this day of telling the story from a close third person point of view. Thus, we see the world through Tony's eyes for much of each book, the only alternative point of view being either a victim or the killer. This style makes it very hard to describe your main character, for the simple reason that they know what they look like and are unlikely ever to remark on it. One of my writing bugbears is the mirror scene, or the getting dressed in the morning scene, or any of a plethora of devices used to try and disguise the fact that the narrator is describing themselves. People don't do this in real life, so why make them do it in books?

I'm not a big fan of the omniscient narrator approach either, even if it is very common in novels. For me as a reader, each step away from the character experiencing whatever is happening in the plot lessens the impact of that experience. The Con Fairchild books are entirely first person, present tense, so you are Con and they're happening as you read them. That's pretty much as close to the action as you can get. The McLean books are once removed, in that they are a report of what he did - McLean watched the sun sink below the rooftops, painting the clouds in darkening shades of orange and pink. I try to keep his internal monologue close, though. There's a subtle difference between writing 'McLean wondered what the weather would bring tomorrow' and posing it as an unquoted (so implicitly unsaid) question: 'what would the weather bring tomorrow?' 'Wondered' or 'thought' are alarm bells for me, as they signal a step back from sitting behind the character's eyes, although sometimes it helps to take that step.

Another thing I don't like is paragraphs describing anything as if it were a voiceover in a movie. They pull you out of the moment, so I try to avoid them. It's also important to try and avoid characters describing to each other things that they already know - that's a clumsy way to introduce information into the narrative. Sometimes it seems like there's no other way to do it, but I usually find the more I Iook for a clean way to drop the information in, the more I realise that information isn't really necessary. Less is more, as they say. It's surprising just how much you can get away with not describing at all. Eleven books in, and I've still not described Tony McLean. He looks like whatever you, the reader, think he looks like.

Which makes it hard to decide who would play him in a TV adaptation.

I've also written nine of those eleven books in the last seven years. In that time I've also written two (and a half) Con Fairchild books, two books in The Ballad of Sir Benfro series and three quarters of a standalone novel I'll get around to finishing one of these days. I've revised and edited five other books I'd already written, and I've lost count of the short stories, blog posts, articles for newspapers, Q&As and all these newsletters I've produced since becoming a published author. In short, I've been too busy to watch much TV, so I've really no idea who any suitable actors are.

In the end, however, I'd not complain whichever actor they got to do the job. It would mean the series was going to be on the tellybox, after all.

US and Canadian eBooks!

Sales of US and Canadian eBooks took a bit of a nosedive in the past month or so. They're still good - I'm not complaining, and they've started to pick up again now - but it's interesting to see. Apart from this newsletter and the occasional mention on Twitter, I do no marketing for these titles. My aim with publishing them was simply to make them legally available so people didn't have to either pay over the top prices for imported UK print editions, or chance the pirate sites for illegal copies.

I might experiment with price drops, or maybe a little bit of paid promotion, just to see what happens. I don't have the rights to the first three Inspector McLean books, though, and it's always best when trying to entice new readers to price drop the first in the series. The new Inspector McLean - What Will Burn - should go live at much the same time as its UK edition in February next year, so it will be interesting to see what effect that has on sales of the other titles.

Click on any cover image for a link to purchase options.

Farming News

It's been a quiet time on the farm, with Diuc the bull away from the ladies now, and the rest of the crew eating grass on the back of the hill. They were on the hill itself for a while, and I've noticed a curious thing over the years. When the weather is really bad, the cows always take to the high ground.

We don't get much in the way of flooding here - it's all too steep for one thing. There are boggy patches that become increasingly pond-like if it's been raining for a while, but by and large even the lower fields are fine after a deluge. And yet every time the cows have been grazing the field that includes the summit of the local hill, and I go out to check them after a heavy rainstorm, they are always right up at the summit.

Maybe it's a survival instinct, or maybe they have some unspoken agreement among themselves. 'See an' the weather turns bad, Morag, an' you cannae find your mam. Head up thon hill an' keep going til ye cannae go up any mair.'

There's a kind of logic, I guess.

Anyway, after a month or so of having to go out on the quad bike, since the buggy can't get to the top of the hill and I'm far too lazy to walk, I went around last week to find them all standing around in the field to the south. Perhaps tired of mountaineering, one of them had managed to slip the rope off and undo the gate between the fields - I don't think this was a case of a forgetful walker, although that does happen far more often than I'd like. They all seemed happy (the coos, not the walkers), so I left them to it. I'll move them back onto the hill in December, when they start getting supplemental hay and biscuits.

In the meantime, Diuc is down at the field closest to the house, with G'Bernard and Wee Hamish for company. He's also got some sheep in with him, as my neighbour is trying to establish a flock of Swiss Valaise Blacknose. They're very friendly, and hard to take seriously at all.

I had a surprise package recently, that turned out to be this rather fine piece of art made by my chum Stevie Robinson. Readers of the McLean series might recognise the name of 'Call me Stevie' and Teflon Steve, but the real Stevie Robinson is much nicer! And, it turns out, multi-talented. I absolutely love this Heilan Coo, made from sea glass found on the beach near his home. You can see more of his work, buy stuff or commission him to make something personal by clicking on the picture, or going to https://www.facebook.com/CastleShadowSeaGlass/

(the wee terrier sketch was done by a little old lady who lived next door to the house where my parents lived when I was born. Apparently when I was a few months old I managed to escape the garden and crawl out into the main road. She saw me and snatched me up before I was squished by a truck coming round the corner at high speed. The dog was hers, although I don't remember it, and only have the vaguest recollection of her.)

What I'm Up To

It should have been Iceland Noir at the end of November, but that's gone the way of all the other festivals this year. They're promising to hold it next year and in 2022 to make up for it - it's normally biannual. I'm sad, but I'd probably not have risked the flight anyway this year. Here's hoping next year is better.

The lack of events and festivals means I've signed very few books this year, so signed copies of Bury Them Deep are rare as hen's teeth. I'm toying with the idea of making them available through my website (and all the other books), but the devil is the cost. Amazon sells at a big discount, and even the book shops can usually negotiate delivery rates because they have high volume. I could do bookplates, I suppose, since they're cheaper to post. I don't feel they're the same though. I know some authors have an arrangement with their local bookshop, and pop in regularly so that there is always signed stock. Toppings in St Andrews would probably be happy to do that, but I don't often visit the home of golf even though it's fairly near by. Then again, I don't often visit anywhere, recluse that I am.

My hair is now a month longer than it was a month ago. I could probably get it cut, but why bother when you look this good?

What I've read

I've mostly been reading What Will Burn, over and over again, but I have had time to fit in a couple of advance proofs. I also found a couple of boxes of comics that I thought I'd read which it turns out I hadn't, so I've been working my way through them too. Instead of boring you with all that, this time I'll dig into the archives and recommend some things I really enjoyed a while back.

This is a tricky one to find, although secondhand editions are available. It's the first in a series of what might be called fantasy crime novels, featuring Dubric Bryerly, head of security at Castle Faldorrah. There are elements of ghost story (hence the name), elements of (very) grimdark fantasy, and elements of procedural crime novel, all set in a horrible claustrophobic post-magic-apocalyptic world. Tambo Jones has begun self-publishing later novels in this and parallel series, presumably because publishers can't see what a wonderfully unique voice she has. I'd recommend starting at the beginning if you can, though. These are wonderful books.

The first of Jen Williams' Copper Cat trilogy introduces us to Wydrin of Crosshaven, Sir Sebastian and grumpy Lord Frith. This is old school fantasy, except without taking itself too seriously, following our unlikely heroes as they first cock things up in potentially world-shattering fashion, then set about the difficult task of trying to undo their mistakes. The joy of this and the other two books is in the interplay of the main characters. It's also a rollercoaster ride of a thing that is just a delight to read. The series continues with The Iron Ghost and The Silver Tide, both of which are just as good as the first one.

It's possible I might have recommended Emma Newman's Split Worlds books before in this newsletter. If so, my apologies, but they deserve it. I mostly listened to these, narrated by the author herself, but I have read a couple of them too, including this the first one. The central conceit for the series is of three worlds - the mundane we all live in; Exilium, the world of the fae, filled with magic and danger; and in between them the nether, where time has stood still since the Regency. The society of the nether revolves around powerful families, each tied to a particular fae lord and constrained by rigid social conventions. It's a marvellously inventive backdrop, but it is the characters Emma creates to inhabit it that make this series so wonderful.

Full disclosure - links on this page are to Amazon and use Amazon Affiliates so that I get a small payment from any sale made through them. Other online and High Street retailers are available. You might try Hive.co.uk if you are in the UK, for instance. Or if you're in the UK or Ireland, you can look to see where your nearest independent bookshop is at this rather wonderful site - http://www.indiebookshops.com/indie-bookshops-uk-and-ireland/

Well, that's probably more than enough from me for now. If you've made it this far - well done! I hope you enjoyed it. And if you're looking for the unsubscribe button, it's a bit further down past this rather striking fellow.

Hopefully by the time I remember I'm meant to be writing the next newsletter we'll be emerging from the shadows and into the light. Until then, stay strong, and remember - if it all gets too much, lose yourself in a good book.