3 Shortlists for Rain Dogs....

Rain Dogs has just been shortlisted for the 2016 Ned Kelly Award and the 2016 CWA Ian Fleming Steel Dagger Award. This is the first time in 10 years I've made the Ian Fleming Award shortlist and I'm really honoured to be on the Ned Kelly shortlist again. Rain Dogs was also shortlisted for the Theakston Old Peculier Crime Novel of the Year Award but I didn't win that one...Anyway the point is I'm up for several big time awards for what it is clearly one of my better efforts, so for God's sake people, look for this book! It's the only book to be on the Theakston Crime Novel of the Year shortlist, the Dagger shortlist and the Ned Kelly shortlist. Seriously, give it a chance. It's got a nice, punchy short title and there's a doggy on the cover...
...
the dagger shortlist: 

When Writers Cop Out

So I'm on the plane back from London to Melbourne and I'm watching Deutschland '83 which is about an East German agent infiltrating NATO command in yup, 1983...I'm watching episode 4 and our young, handsome Soviet agent has compromised a NATO General's secretary by leaving a bug under her desk which has been discovered by a cleaner. The agent's handler tells him to recruit the secretary or kill her. He takes her swimming and thinks about letting her drown in the river when she gets cramp but instead he saves her tells her he loves her and then explains that he's a Stasi agent. She thinks things over and decides to run away. He catches up with her in the woods. This is where the writers copped out and I stopped watching the show. Instead of having him kill her, she gets killed sort of accidentally by running in front of a car. Our hero is robbed of his moral choice by a Deus Ex Machina BMW. The writers did this because they thought we would lose sympathy for our hero if he kills the plain, decent, nice secretary.* In other words the writers don't respect you or me the viewer. They don't think we're intelligent enough to have two conflicting emotions in our head at the same time: revulsion at our hero's actions, but interest in seeing what happens to him next. Funnily enough almost exactly the same thing happened in The Crying Game 23 years ago. The writer, Neil Jordan, didn't actually have the IRA man kill the captured British soldier...instead after a run through the woods he is knocked down and killed by a big Deus Ex Machina Land Rover. Neil Jordan was afraid we wouldn't be able to watch the rest of the movie if Forrest Whittaker was actually shot in the head execution style the way the IRA actually killed all their captured British soldiers and policeman. 
...
Bizarrely almost exactly the same death happened in another German production The Lives of Others - woman tormented by Stasi runs out of apartment and is killed by a tram. This, folks, is utter bullshit. Alfred Hitchcock knew this was bullshit 50 years ago when he had that scene in Psycho where Marion's car momentarily doesn't sink in the swamp as Norman Bates tries to get rid of the evidence. We are deliciously on Norman's side with our heart in our mouths as the car sits there in the quicksand not sinking...this despite the fact that we hate Norman Bates for what he's done to the lovely Janet Leigh. Hitchcock knew that audiences are capable of holding several different emotions in our heads at the same time loving and hating the hero protagonist. We're not dumb we'll still watch the movie if the hero makes some terrible moral choices. Indeed our hero wrestling with his or her morality is what makes books and movies interesting in the first place. Just read a Graham Greene novel some time - that's what they're all about and they're bloody fascinating. An unconflicted hero is boring. Unlike the rest of the world I never dug The Shawshank Redemption precisely because there was no actual redemption - Andy was innocent and virtuous all the way through...Ugh. 
...
So yeah don't let writers pull that crap on you and call that shit whenever you see it. You need to be treated with more respect than that. Deutschland '83 you lost me as a viewer when you treated me like an idiot...

*I knew she was doomed, by the way, because she wasn't as pretty as the other female lead on the show. I've been watching Stranger Things and it does the same thing: killing the plainer female characters but letting the prettier ones live...this is some more bullshit right here but that's a discussion for another day...

Are Long Titles A Good Idea?

...not the actual cover, the actual cover is much cooler but I'm not allowed to use
it yet cos they havent quite got the colours and the car sorted...

No. They're not. My new Duffy novel has a nine word title. This is most unfortunate. Everybody hates long titles: book buyers, publishers, editors, marketers, amazon, audible, book reviewers. . .you name it. If your book has a long title, especially in genre fiction it is a sign of amateurism. I was at the Harrogate Crime Writing Festival last week and when I told a prominent English reviewer the title of my next Duffy book she visibly winced. My editor was with me and she gave me a knowing look after the wince. My editor and pretty much everyone at my publishers have been trying to talk me out of the new Duffy title for months now in the nicest possible way. They are all wonderful smart, intelligent people and they all, of course, are quite right about the title. Crime fiction is not literary fiction where you can get away with long titles. (Unless that is you're doing a long title as a mode of Spencerian signalling telling customers that your book is so bloody good that you can even throw away the title.) Some of my favourite books with long titles are Blood Meridian or The Evening Redness in the West; By Grand Central Station I Sat Down And Wept; I’ve Been To Sorrow’s Kitchen And Licked Out All The Pots; Another Bullshit Night In Suck City, but all these books are literary fiction. Crime fiction mostly has two or three word titles often with the words “blood” “death” or “girl” in the title. Long titles are off putting. But  then everything about my fiction is off putting. I set my books in Northern Ireland rather than in reader friendly Scandanavia, England or Scotland. I usually have long titles. I almost always begin my books slowly with description and with weather rather than action (in strict contradiction of the rules for writers laid down by Elmore Leonard and Stephen King). What all this self sabotaging does is winnow my audience to a core fanbase. No one casually grabs an Adrian McKinty novel at the airport. And you know what? that’s fine with me. If you get me you get me and if you don’t you don’t. If you're a crime author from Scandinavia you can write any old shite and the punters will buy it. Where's the challenge there, Sven? I’m sorry about the long title, I really am, but that’s the book that was inside me and that’s the book that wanted to come out. And to potential readers out there....if the long title or the Troubles setting or the boring beginning prevents you from becoming one of my readers that’s entirely ok with me – we weren’t destined to become simpatico and there are plenty of other books on the shelf at WH Smith called The Girl From....that you'll prefer. Please read one of those instead. We'll both be much happier. 

Crime Fiction Predicted Brexit Literary Fiction Did Not

Literary fiction in the British Isles is a product mostly made and consumed by upper middle class people. In England it is disproportionately a product of a Metropolitan elite who live - largely - in North London. The majority of these people went to private school but, of course, 93% of the population of the UK went to state school. Private school and Oxbridge followed by a house in Islington do not give you a particularly good grasp on what your fellow Britons are thinking outside of London unless you really try to make the effort. Apart from its outsider voices like Zadie Smith, Jeanette Winterson, Monica Ali, David Peace etc. British literary fiction has generally been pretty moribund and dull for the last 30 years IMHO but crime fiction in the UK has never been better with regional voices, women, ethnic and religious minorities at the cutting edge of an exciting ever-changing genre. Crime fiction too is pretty much the only place in British letters where you get authentic working class voices represented, not just (as in the old days) as criminals and victims but increasingly as detectives. CFL just published a great list of 12 regional crime fiction novels which shows you the diversity of the genre. I've only read half of this list so I really have some catching up to do. But what I have read has been illuminating. It's in British regional crime fiction that you see reflected the seeds of discontent that led to Brexit, not in the dull lives of wealthy Hampstead sophisticates. When I saw Will Self and Eddie Izzard on Question Time lambast the Brexiteers as racist, Little Englanders, I winced at how out of touch they were. Literary fiction has singularly failed to capture the Zeitgeist of a discontented England but crime fiction with its finger on the pulse of working class culture has been talking about the seething anger of a lost generation for a decade now. If you want to know whats really happening in UK society read some regional British crime fiction not the poncy whitterings of some posh people in Belsize Park. 
...
And then, of course, there's science fiction. Dave Hutchinson's Europe In Autumn predicted Brexit and the fences between Hungary and Serbia etc. five years ago when no one else was even thinking about such things. And one of my favourite crime novels of the last decade China Mieville's The City and the City was all about the borders of the mind and the geography of difference both real and imaginary. A sophisticated exploration of frontiers, boundaries, immigration and sovereignty.

Ben Wheatley Rated

My favourite new British film director rated in the standard A,B,C,D, F format. The occasional F grade, by the way, is a very good thing for a film maker because it shows you that they're willing to make non conformist non mainstream stuff that appeals to them but probably to nobody else. I'd rather watch a director who gets a lot of F and A grades and avoids B, C, D. (If I may be permitted to go a little off piste here, Spielberg and Scorsese for example have been B, C, D directors for the last 25 years or so. Nothing spectacularly good, nothing spectacularly bad.) Anyway back to Mr Wheatley. I've reviewed only his films not his TV work. 

Free Fire (2016) TBD

High Rise (2015) B

A Field in England (2013) F

Sightseers (2012) A

Kill List (2011) A

Down Terrace (2009) A

New Duffy Coming In Jan 2017