Blog tour: Limelight by Graham Hurley. Today we have a Guest Post from the author himself on 'Is there life after crime fiction?'
Huge thanks to Rachel's Random Resources and Severn House publishing for inviting The Crime Warp to participate in the Limelight Blog Tour. Also huge thanks to Graham Hurley for this totally brilliant blog article :'Is there life after crime fiction?'
Limelight Blurb
Life is dangerous. No
one survives it. Enora Andressen makes a series of mind-blowing discoveries
when her friend disappears.
Actress Enora Andressen is catching up with her
ex-neighbour, Evelyn Warlock, who's recently retired to the comely East Devon
seaside town of Budleigh Salterton. The peace, the friendship of strangers and
the town’s prestigious literary festival . . . Evelyn loves them all.
Until the September evening when her French neighbour,
Christianne Beaucarne, disappears. Enora has met this woman. The two of them
have bonded. But what Enora discovers over the anguished months to come will
put sleepy Budleigh Salterton on the front page of every newspaper in the land
You can get your copy here ...
http://severnhouse.com/book/Limelight/9121
https://www.amazon.co.uk/Limelight-Andressen-thriller-Graham-Hurley/dp/072788980X
https://www.amazon.com/Limelight-Andressen-thriller-Graham-Hurley/dp/072788980X
So, here's the article Graham wrote for us. A thoroughly entertaining piece that will have you clicking on one of the purchase links straight away.
Is There Life After Crime Fiction?
After leaving
Pan Macmillan, I found a perch at Orion, who commissioned two more books in the
same genre before summoning me to London for what they termed ‘a career
review’. They liked what I was giving them, they believed in me as a writer,
but sales were disappointing and the price of another contract was a change of
authorial direction. Instead of penning International Thrillers, how did I feel
about Crime Fiction?
In truth, I’d
read very little crime fiction, largely because it felt formulaic, but Orion
were honest enough to admit that this was my only option and so I said yes. We
had three kids, and a life to lead. It was my job to keep the fridge at least
half full and if crime fiction brought the groceries, then so be it. By the end
of that meal in London, we’d agreed a three-book contract.
The real
challenge, I sensed, was exactly where to start. What was I going to write
about? And what, more importantly, did it feel
like to be a cop? I’ve always put
enormous faith in research, which basically means talking to people. My wife,
Lin, and I had the immense good fortune of living in Portsmouth, aka Pompey, a
rough old city which turned out to be the crime novelist’s best friend, and
thanks to a conversation or two I ended up with an observer’s desk in the
biggest of Pompey’s CID offices.
As an ex-documentary-maker, I’ve always revelled in getting alongside
people, winning their trust, and then trying to work out what life must be like
inside their heads, but this was the toughest assignment ever. To a man (and a
woman), these cops were exactly what it says on the tin: suspicious, wary,
clever, unhelpful to the point of near muteness. After a couple of weeks I was
on the verge of jacking the whole thing in and returning the contract to Orion but
then – by simply watching and listening – I began to pick up on some of the
sub-plots that tormented these people, and from that point on, I sensed I was
on the verge of something seriously interesting.
These cops dealt in what they called ‘Volume Crime’, which makes up
ninety percent of their workload, and the jobs that came over the desks in the
CID office exactly reflected the city they were doomed to police: shoplifting,
vehicle theft, low-level social nuisance, pub assaults. This very definitely wasn’t
the world of serial killers and high-speed car chases which fuel most TV cops,
but the notion of crime in the minor key was more than intriguing. And so I
beat a retreat from the CID office, reviewed my mountain of research notes,
invented a couple of lead cops, and set to work. The fact that I’d never paid
any serious attention to other writers’ crime fiction turned out to be a major
blessing. My stuff, Orion quickly concluded, had the smell of something new.
Largely because it felt so real.
Over the next decade and a half, I wrote sixteen crime novels, twelve
set in Portsmouth (the Joe Faraday series), and a quartet of books set in the
West Country featuring D/S Jimmy Suttle. These books were adapted for French
TV, and went into numerous translations, but in the end, I’d had enough. Not of
writing, but of cops. Hence my World War Two series, The
Spoils of War, and – more recently – Enora Andressen.
The Enora books, from my point of view, offer light relief from the
heavier challenges of imagining myself into the counsels of the mighty through
seven long years of conflict. They’re written in the first person through the
eyes of a 39-year-old Anglo-Breton film actress, beset by a mix of family and
medical challenges. The process of overcoming both, in the shape of an ugly
divorce and an even uglier brain tumour, gave Enora more than enough to fill
the launch title, Curtain Call, but now I’m on my third
contract (books Five and Six), I belatedly understand the raw reader-appeal of
crime fiction.
Put a cop on the first page of your book, and you’re guaranteed all
kinds of mayhem – because that’s what a cop does for a living. Try and
sustain the same narrative pace with a middle-aged actress, and you risk
stretching reality to breaking point. Just how many dodgy, life-threatening
situations can a gal reasonably expect to have to deal with?
This is a question I recently asked a local Enora fan who happens to be
our town’s bookseller. So far, in four busy novels, my heroine has had to cope
with a violent divorce, a brain tumour, a teenage son off his head on Spice, a
kidnapping, the attentions of a County Lines drugs gang, a young loony with a
taste for disembowelling middle-aged women, plus the backwash from a mercy
killing that went badly wrong. Be honest, I asked my bookseller friend. Isn’t
this all a bit of a stretch?
She stared at me for a moment. The previous day, as it happened, she’d
sold three more Enoras.
‘You couldn’t be more wrong,’ she
said. ‘What you’re selling here is jeopardy. Get her right, make her real, and
books like these walk out of the shop. She doesn’t have to be a cop. All she has to do is attract trouble.’
Beautifully put.
Graham Hurley is an award-winning TV documentary maker who now writes full time. His Faraday and Winter series won two Theakstons shortlist nominations and was successfully adapted for French TV. He has since written a quartet of novels featuring D/S Jimmy Suttle, and three WW2 novels, the first of which – Finisterre – was shortlisted for the Wilbur Smith Adventure Writing Prize. The first three titles in the Enora Andressen series, Curtain Call, Sight Unseen and Off Script, are also available from Severn House. After thirty years in Portsmouth, Graham now lives in East Devon with his wife, Lin.
You can connect with Graham here ...
https://www.grahamhurley.co.uk/
https://www.goodreads.com/author/show/135794.Graham_Hurley
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