UK blog tour

The UK blog tour for Fatal Act begins today! Thanks to Crime Book Club. 
Fatal Act Blog Tour

Visit to Birmingham

A few photos from a weekend in Birmingham. Thank you to W H Smith's in Birmingham and Solihull for inviting me along, and to all the readers who stopped for a chat and bought copies of my books. Particular thanks to fans who came especially to meet me, and travelled to Birmingham or Solihull for signed books. I hope you enjoy reading them!

Road Closed

How lovely to receive this email from a new fan who came across my books in a bookshop. He wrote: "I have many books on my shelves ready to read. I started to read Road Closed ahead of time. It was a joy to read,the pace was spot on the character detail not too intense,and the story pace brilliant,with a good plot and twists. I look forward to reading the other books and will now be hunting out Cut Short and your future writings. Thank you Leigh for giving me the material that helps me relax and free the mind." 
Now that's what I call a nice email! 
And I noticed that Road Closed is currently number 34 on kindle. Nice to see it finally coming into its own after it trailed behind my other titles for so long.
Road Closed on kindle

PRESS RELEASE

This week my publishers asked me to send them 50 words describing how I felt about writing a spin off series for Geraldine Steel's sergeant. This was for a press release about COLD SACRIFICE, the first in my new Ian Peterson series.

'Well, that won't be difficult,' I thought. Off went my response: 'No worries. It will be with you this afternoon.' After all, to someone who habitually writes 2,000 words a day, 50 words should be 'a walk in the park'. (Excuse the cliché but it seems appropriate. My debut CUT SHORT, which was inspired by a (literal) walk in the park, has recently been published in French with the title (in English) MURDER PARK.)

Not only is the typing relatively fast, I write "psychologically acute" crime novels (to quote Marcel Berlins, writing in The Times.)

So, I write fast and seem to have the ability to worm my way inside my characters' minds ("taking readers into the darkest recesses of the human psyche" according to a review by Barry Forshaw.)

Yet I'm sitting here, struggling to find 50 words to describe my own thoughts and feelings...

It seems that my fingers slide effortlessly over the keyboard when I'm writing fiction. (Well, relatively effortlessly - I'm making a point here.) But when called on to write something 'real' I find it's not so straightforward. What should I say? What if I get this wrong?

There's only one way to tackle this. I'll have to treat myself as a character in a book..... a character who is an author. Her publisher asks her to write a spin off series based on one of her characters, Ian Peterson. How does she feel? "...wildly excited at the opportunity to explore Ian Peterson's future... "

COLD SACRIFICE will be published in September in print, and is scheduled to be available as an ebook  this month.

Inspiration

Here's the scene that inspired Cut Short. If you expand the photo you can see a figure on the path. I didn't notice it when I took the picture!

It was a strange feeling, revisiting the scene I had recreated in the novel!

Taglio Netto

I know what 'Cut Short' is in Italian!

Special Edition

For my last signing of 2012 at Waterstones Hemel Hempstead my publisher sent a few of the hardback copies of DEATH BED. Only 200 were printed, and that's all there will ever be since this is a special limited edition, signed and numbered. They are usually only available directly from my publisher here Limited Edition Death Bed but here it is in the bookstore. It's a really lovely edition!

Back in time for Christmas

A little piece  of good news - after selling out on amazon (just before Christmas - typical!) CUT SHORT is now back in stock. This time it's the brand new edition, and there's still time to order before Christmas! Click on CUT SHORT on amazon if you'd like to introduce a friend to the series, and contact me directly on Leigh Russell website if you'd like me to email a personalised inscription.

Large Print Cut Short

CUT SHORT is now available in Large Print. It is really nicely produced. If you are buying it as a xmas present and would like a personalised inscription contact me on http://leighrussell.co.uk
The link for the Large Print edition is also on my website above or on
http://www.largeprintbookshop.co.uk/cut-short-p-258682.html

Fighting Back ;-)

Fighting back! Scandinavian fans of crime fiction buying UK books!

Interview with L.C.Tyler

Leigh Russell in conversation with L.C.Tyler

L.C. Tyler writes the brilliant and witty ‘Herring’ series featuring crime writer Ethelred and his agent Elsie. He was raised in Essex and studied Geography at Jesus College Oxford, before going on to study systems analysis at City University in London. Subsequently he worked for the British Council in Malaysia, Sudan, Thailand and Denmark, before becoming Chief Executive of the Royal College of Paediatrics and Child Health, then turned to full-time writing. His books were nominated for Edgar Awards in 2010 and 2011, and The Herring in the Library won the coveted Last Laugh Award in 2011. This year has seen Tyler’s books published in the US and translated into French. In addition to a busy writing career, L.C. Tyler finds time to appear at many literary festivals. He is a member of The Crime Writers’ Association committee, and a judge for the CWA Short Story Dagger Award.

Q What originally attracted you to writing light hearted crime fiction?

A I stumbled quite accidentally into crime. I’d intended to write literary fiction, a bit like that Sartre guy, but then the bodies started piling up from chapter two onwards. Once you’ve been labelled a comic crime writer it’s difficult to go straight.

Q At first sight, crime and humour might seem an incongruous mixture, yet they work so well in your books. How do you account for this, and for the popularity of crime fiction in general?

A Thank you. I get asked a lot how you can make crime funny - and the answer is of course that you can’t. Crime is human nature with everything good extracted. It’s greed, envy, lust, pride, wrath, gluttony, sloth and, quite possibly, sock-puppetry, all in one neat package. What you can make jokes about is the detection of crime. That’s largely what I do. I don’t know why crime fiction is so popular - except that it always has been, pretty much from its inception. The traditional crime novel is, when you think about it, an elaborate puzzle that just happens to revolve around a murder. I think it’s the intellectual challenge that appeals to most readers, though obviously that's not the whole story. On the whole I’m just pleased that people do still want to buy the sort of novels that I write.

Q The genre is so popular that readers are familiar with its conventions. Authors can exploit this to raise expectations that are later fulfilled or confounded. To what extent are your own plot twists suggested by conventions in the genre?

A. Oh, quite a lot. In The Herring Seller’s Apprentice, the narrator explains many of the devices that he uses as a crime writer, allowing the reader to pick up on these comments as possible clues in the story. The Herring in the Library toys with the conventions of the locked room mystery (without necessarily claiming to be one). In Ten Little Herrings, all of the suspects are made to assemble in the hotel lounge, though things do not then go quite the way they usually do for Poirot. Herring on the Nile mirrors to a certain extent the plot of Death on the Nile, but again with a very different outcome. Intelligent readers (and all my readers are, by definition, intelligent) seem to enjoy this type of thing.

Q Tell us how you work out your plots.

A I’ve never had anything I could describe as a method. The Herring Seller’s Apprentice came to me bit by bit as I wrote it. I started with a narrator admitting to having committed a crime and wrote the book to find out what he had done. The end was as much a surprise to me as anyone else. With the later books I had generally worked out - and indeed written - the last chapter quite early on. It was the middle sections that were the problem. For The Herring Seller’s Apprentice I did no research and made no notes of any sort. For some of the others, conversely, I have copious jottings showing how the plot changed as the book progressed, together with notes on firearms or poisons or whatever I needed to kill off my characters. When John Curran published Agatha Christie’s notebooks, I was delighted to see that hers were as chaotic as mine, and that we both kept records of books we had read and had jotted down the occasional shopping list in between plot outlines.

Q The CWA describe my books as ‘Agatha Christie with a darker plot line’ and The Times describes your work as ‘a darkly funny tribute to Agatha Christie and the golden age of crime fiction.’ Are you a fan of Agatha Christie, and how would you account for the enduring appeal of her books?

A I think the first crime book I ever read was an Agatha Christie - The Body in the Library. I still have it, though it is now falling apart, having travelled with me as I moved around the world. The high humidity of Kuala Lumpur followed by the hot desert air of Khartoum finished off a lot of my paperbacks - only the very toughest crime novels survived. I know plenty of Christie fans who have read everything she wrote. I guess I’ve read about half. She was never that good on characterisation and you can pick holes in most of her plots, but she was a great story-teller and hasn’t dated half as much as some of her contemporaries.

Q Do you think there really was a ‘golden age of crime fiction’?

A Back in the seventies, Colin Watson examined the Golden Age in his book Snobbery with Violence, and concluded that it was golden only in terms of quantity. Most of the best selling names from the 20s and 30s are largely forgotten now. There’s a danger of judging it on the basis of the undoubtedly fine output of Christie and Sayers and Allingham and ignoring how much rubbish was produced alongside it. In terms of the quality and variety of crime fiction, I’d say we were in the middle of a golden age right now.

Q. Your books are not only humorous, they are also quintessentially English. Do you think this poses a particular challenge for a translator? Were you pleased with Étrange suicide dans une Fiat rouge a faible kilometrage as the French title for The Herring Seller’s Apprentice?

A I’ve been very impressed by everything about my French publisher, Sonatine Editions. I love the simplicity of the red, white and black cover. In one sense, it’s difficult to judge the translation itself, because humour tends to lie in subtle nuances that I could easily miss in the French version. Reviews have started to come in however and are, so far, very favourable - so I guess the translator (Julie Sibony) might be said to have risen to the challenge very well! The title is brilliant. I so wish I’d thought of it myself.

Q What impact do you think the rise in e-book sales might have on books set in a ‘bygone era’.

A My books are, with the exception of a few flashbacks and excerpts from Ethelred’s own writing, set in the present day. It is one of my two narrators who is stuck in the past - August 1959 or thereabouts. Ethelred would dearly love to live in a world with no mobile phones or internet and a maximum of two  television channels. Thinking about it, though a writer himself, he has never mentioned e-books. He may be completely unaware of them. My other narrator, Elsie, is an agent and is very interested in the impact of anything on sales - but again, I have never heard her pronounce on e-books. As for me, I’m not sure I understand where publishing is going any better than anyone else does. For what it’s worth, I don’t think the rise of e-books will affect the genres we read, though it may impact a lot on format - e.g. there is no reason why an e-book has to be any particular length and we will be able to buy sagas, novellas or single short stories with equal ease. That would be good.

Q How would you answer Elsie’s charge that “producing sequels is the sure sign of the second rate author”?

A If that’s what Elsie claims, then it must be right. As Ethelred says “to tell the truth, I rarely contradict Elsie on anything these days”.

Q Can you tell us about what you are currently writing?

A No. Like a lot of authors I am slightly superstitious about talking about what I am working on now. It’s not another Ethelred and Elsie though …

Books in the Ethelred and Elsie series are:

The Herring Seller’s Apprentice (2007) Ten Little Herrings (2009)

The Herring in the Library (2010) Herring on the Nile (2011)

http://www.lctyler.com

This interview was first published in Mystery People ezine