It's bloody out there!

OK, so the whole Bloodsport thing kicked off with a great piece in the Sunday Times Atticus column … which was swiftly followed by the pre-publication interview on The Rap Sheet (which should also link to the story itself from around 4.00pm London-time on Monday onwards) … and a bunch of blogs and trade-sites like Sarah Weinman’s Confessions of an Idiosyncratic Mind and Booktrade.info.

And so far – touch wood! – the tooled-up lads from Scotland Yard’s Counter Terrorism Command, otherwise known as SO15 haven’t come crashing through the door on one of their 4.00am raids. So that’s a relief!

To me, what the whole experience illustrates is that authors today must accept that they are going to have to take responsibility for generating their own PR – which, I guess, the very existence of the Curzon Group proves. Publishers simply have too many books fighting for the attention of their PR staff, who are working in a media environment that could not give a damn about any author who is not famous, cute (esp. if young and female), or blessed with a personal tragedy so harrowing that it makes good copy, even in the absence of fame or looks.

So there’s nothing to do but fight a guerrilla campaign. Take risks. Work in ways that corporate publishers either do not understand or actively dislike. Because if you don’t – and this is a lesson I learned the hard way in the States – nothing happens at all … and then you’re really in trouble.

Plus you can have a lot of fun, writing short sharp stories and getting them out there – online or n conventional media – in a fraction of the time it takes to go through the process of publishing a book. Having spent almost 30 years, on and off, in Fleet Street, I love the buzz of getting a commission at lunch, writing it by 5.00pm and seeing it in the paper over breakfast the next day. Meanwhile a book idea can grow stale before ones eyes.

Last year, for example, I was thinking of doing a Carver book set in the City and/or Wall Street. It involved a gigantic international conspiracy to make stock markets and banks collapse … and while I was mulling over this notion, bugger me, that’s what went and happened for real … before Samuel Carver could stop it.

At roughly the same time I wrote a short story for the Daily Mail, based on Lord Carlile’s warning that Britain was in danger of terrorist attacks from the air. That was three days from commission to publication, and was probably read by 10, even 20 times as many people as have ever bought one of my books.

I guess what it comes down to is that the business of writing fiction is going though radical changes before our eyes.

And if we don’t adapt, we die.

Harrogate: hellhole of murder and vengeance!

So there I was, standing in the Gents at the Crown Hotel Harrogate, when two blokes came in and took up their positions to my right. One of them said to the other, ‘When did you know you were going to murder me?’ To which the other said, ‘Just before it happened.’

The men in question were Mark Billingham, who had just been the victim of a murder staged for the benefit of diners at the Theakston Old Peculier Crime Writing Festival and his supposed killer Martyn Waites. In actual fact, I probably had a better motive for murder than Martyn, since Billingham had two days earlier beaten me and 12 other writers) to the Theakston’s Crime Novel of the Year Award. Sadly, I was unable to be there to plaster an embittered, insincere smile on my face and applaud vigorously as he took the prize. In fact, I had to fight hard to prize the engraved glass tankard, handed out to all the nominees, from the grasp of Transworld editorial director Selina Walker, who had collected it on my behalf and was, I strongly suspected, thinking of keeping it as a handy ornament, pencil holder or, indeed beer-mug.

Harrogate is my favourite of all the festivals to which crimewriters traipse off, in the hopes of getting a bit of publicity, flogging and signing a book or two (or thousand, if you’re Lee Child and pull queues like the Harrods sales to your signings), or simply getting extraordinarily drunk.

I actually fail miserably on all three scores wherever I go. Quite apart from anything else, I’m not nearly a heavy enough drinker and I like to get to bed early, to give myself the maximum amount of time in which to lie awake, doped out of my mind on some form of prescription hypnotic, yet unable to get to sleep. At American festivals, like Thrillerfest or Bouchercon (the biggest of them all, even if it has the strangest name), matters are made even worse by catastrophic jetlag.

But anyway, Harrogate is at least in the same time-zone, it is hugely enlivened by the humour and relentless piss-taking so common among British writers but so absent from Americans (when on public panels, at least: they’re funny enough in private), and it has the big advantage that only one event or panel takes place at a time. So audiences number in the hundreds, not the tens, and everyone ends up being able to join in the post-event bar-chats because they’ve all been to the same things.

Also, Harrogate is now free of the legendary Norwegian sex-pest, an over-ardent fan who harassed women at previous events until grabbed by the throat, shoved up against a wall and told to desist by James Twining, one evening last year. Female scribes are still swooning about it, and Twining, to this day. Damn him!

Oh, and if you’re wondering what happened to Bloodsport, the online short story I wrote about last week, in which Samuel Carver hunts down the Prime Minister and strikes down upon him with great vengeance and furious anger (as the saying goes). Well, it ran into a little hitch. Some people weren’t entirely happy with the concept. On the other hand, other people absolutely love it. So it will be published, one way or another … and soon.