It's Halloween this week and we love a spooky theme. So, for the next couple of days, we'll be posting up some of the best bits from some of our best books - including crime and thriller writing, detective fiction and all things Gothic.
If Halloween has got you thinking about writing your own ominous thriller, then The Arvon Book of Crime and Thriller Writing is right up your street. It contains contributions from lots of high-profile writers including Ian Rankin and Lee Child. In the extract below Ian talks about his journey from student to best-selling crime novelist....
'I never set out to write crime fiction.
I’d always been a writer though. As a kid, I would fold pieces of paper in half to make little four-page booklets, filling each side with strip cartoons, emulating the comics I was devouring at the time. Around the age of eleven I began buying pop records and decided to start a group of my own – in my head and on paper. They were called Kaput (and, later, The Amoebas). The singer was Ian Kaput. I wrote all his lyrics. In our English class at secondary school, we were made to write short stories and poems – no hardship for me. I wrote a story called ‘Paradox’ about a man who thinks he is the US President but is actually an inmate of an institution. The teacher wanted to know why I’d chosen that title. I told him it was the name of a song by Hawkwind. He sent me home after school to look up the word in a dictionary. At seventeen, I entered a poem called ‘Euthanasia’ in a competition. It won second prize. So I thought of myself as a poet when I arrived at Edinburgh University. I kept writing – poems, song lyrics, short stories. I was ‘gallus’ (Scots for daring) and would read my work aloud at gatherings, while garnering a fair collection of rejection letters from magazines and the BBC.
I was a postgraduate, working towards a PhD on the novels of Muriel Spark, when I wrote my first novel. It was a black comedy set in a Scottish hotel. A few more rejection letters went into the drawer. My next attempt, The Flood, found favour with a small publishing house in Edinburgh. An agent contacted me and asked if I was working on anything new.
My PhD research had taken me in interesting directions: from Spark to Miss Jean Brodie and from there to Brodie’s supposed ancestor, a real-life Edinburgh character who had been gentleman by day and housebreaker by night. William Brodie had inspired the writing of Doctor Jekyll and Mr Hyde. I was intrigued by the theme of the doppel-gänger and the nature of evil. I’d also been reading contemporary Scottish Literature and had relished William McIlvanney’s novel Laidlaw, featuring a dour, philosophical Glasgow-based detective. I had read only a very few crime novels in my life, but I could see that the figure of the detective allowed the author access to many layers of society, from the highest echelons to the marginalised and disenfranchised. I invented a cop called Rebus (the word means a type of puzzle), and gave him a doppel-gänger who is out to destroy him. The crime would be solved with the help of a literary theorist at Edinburgh University. The whole book would be playful as well as visceral.
That book was meant to be a one-off, but Rebus himself had other ideas. He refused to vacate the premises. Gradually I learned the crime novel’s manifest strengths: sense of place; the potential to tackle big moral questions; pacing and plot. Every theme I wanted to explore could best be contained within the crime novel, with the figure of John Rebus as my guide.
I’m thankful he found me, and decided to stick around.'
Ian Rankin, born in Fife, spent three years writing novels when he was supposed to be working towards his PhD in Scottish Literature. His Rebus novels have brought him awards including the Gold Dagger, the OBE, and several honorary degrees.
The Arvon Book of Crime and Thriller Writing, by Michelle Spring and Laurie R. King is now available to buy.
We will be posting up another extract from this excellent book tomorrow. Follow us on Twitter to keep up with all our latest blog posts!
Happy (spooky) writing
Jenny Tighe
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