Illustration by David Foldvari
There’s nothing quite like the Provincial Library Book Event to remind a writer of their place in the scheme of things. Novelists, you know the drill. You agreed to do it months back. And now here it is, looming in your diary like a trapdoor to hell. “Why does one agree to these things?” Kingsley Amis pondered before answering himself: “the usual reasons – curiosity and vanity.” You rock up and nurse your glass of Bulgarian merlot – setting your features to “benign smile” (no small feat in my own case) – while the audience of 18 people and a dog filter in. Only three of them will have read your work. One of which is the dog. “I can’t understand it,” one of the organisers will say. “We had 18,000 in here last week for Lisa Jewell/Ian Rankin/Whoever.”
More than anything else, a Provincial Library Book Event reminds you of what the Great British Public really like to read.
CRIME.
You’ll probably do the event in the crime section of the library surrounded by towers of crime books while facing a group of people wondering why they’re not at a crime event.
Man, George Orwell had it just about right. He is worth quoting in full:
It is Sunday afternoon ... the wife is already asleep in the armchair, and the children have been sent out for a nice long walk. You put your feet up on the sofa, settle your spectacles on your nose, and open the News of the World. Roast beef and Yorkshire, or roast pork and apple sauce, followed up by suet pudding and driven home, as it were, by a cup of mahogany-brown tea, have put you in just the right mood. Your pipe is drawing sweetly, the sofa cushions are soft underneath you, the fire is well alight, the air is warm and stagnant. In these blissful circumstances, what is it that you want to read about? Naturally, about a murder. (Decline of the English Murder, 1946.)
I say “just about right” because, George, there’s been no decline since you wrote this. That’d be like talking about the “decline” of the English Traffic Jam. Or the mobile phone. Or vapes. It’s all crime around here these days, mate.
I happened to be on the bill at a Provincial Book Event with a Big Crime Writer a few months back. We did our signings side by side. While I was delighted enough to meet 30 or 40 of my beloved readers (oh jeez, folks, you have no idea how beloved you are), the BCW signing queue is probably still going on somewhere. There were women in the queue nursing infants in the hope they would one day be able to keep the family place in the queue. It stretched to Milton Keynes, where I will undoubtedly soon be appearing in a public library to 18 people who have yet to hear of me.
To give you an idea – dear, gentle, beloved reader – whenever anyone borrows one of your books from a library, under a scheme called PLR (public lending right), you get something like a billionth of a penny. (OK fine, it’s about 11 pence.) Some years back I wrote a book called Cold Hands, the only vaguely crime/thriller type novel I have ever written. Every year, it comfortably earns me more in PLR than all the other books put together. Why? Because librarians stick it in the “CRIME” or “THRILLER” section and then in come the wee old ladies. I came to understand this a few years ago when I accompanied my 82-year-old mum to her local library and she asked the lad: “What new thrillers do ye have?”
Basically, it’s gimme my genre and author be damned. Indeed, like Kingsley Amis in his dotage, my mum staunchly refuses to read a novel that does not begin “A shot rang out.” Or to watch a TV programme that doesn’t begin with forensics dudes coming out of a house in hazmat suits. Of course, as someone chiselling away at the hardest novelistic coalface there is – non-literary, non-genre fiction – you entertain the stray thought. Wearily, I picture the publicity statement ...
Harsh Buggery Books of Inverness signs new John Niven crime series I WILL SOLVE YOUR MASSIVE CRIMES, which introduces DI Humpfer McGlumfer, a hard-bitten Glasgow detective on the trail of Barry the Nonce. John says, "I’ve always longed to write a crime novel and I can’t wait for readers to meet Humpfer ..."
My mum staunchly refuses to read a novel that does not begin: ‘A shot rang out’
To be clear – I am not dissing my crime bros. I would dearly love to be able to do it. But it reeks a bit, doesn’t it – and I’m naming no (Tony Parsons) names here – when a novelist has run out of steam/ideas/sales in whatever genre they occupy, and they turn around and give it, “I am delighted to introduce Humpfer McGlumfer.” Are you? Are you really, you sick, greedy bastard?
At this point you might not unreasonably ask: “John, why did you write Cold Hands, your one crime/thriller adjacent book?” (And my mum’s favourite, obviously.) Because the needs of story dictate tone, which dictates genre. As soon as I knew the story revolved around a child murder, I knew tonally the book couldn’t be a LOL-Romp. And the stories that occur to you, well, if you’re me, you’re just lucky when they come. Whatever they are.
It reminds me of when my daughter said – “Dad, you should write a Harry Potter kind of book. It could be big. Bigger than, you know, what you do.” Oh really, do you think so darling? YOU DON’T THINK THAT IF I WAS CAPABLE OF THAT I’D DO IT FASTER THAN I COULD SHIP YOU OFF TO A BASTARD ORPHANAGE YOU UNGRATEFUL LITTLE SHIT?”
You get asked these astonishing kinds of things on a regular basis. And not just by kids. I was asked something like it in a meeting with a TV production company the other week. As the meeting was breaking up (“Great! Let’s stay in touch!” etc) the exec said the dread words: “Hey John, got any good ideas for a detective show?”
Oh, hang on a sec. I know this is a pretty crowded field and all, but you know what, in the 15 seconds I’ve got between here and the door, let me just, yes, let me bend over, get this fist right up there and literally pull something new and original out of my arse. Tell me – how do you feel about Detective Humpfer McGlumfer?
As a writer, your preoccupations are your preoccupations and that’s that. For some of us, yes, it is indeed crime and criminality in all its manifestations. For others it is love – the human heart in all its perilous, tender glory. And for some of us it’s, well … As Elvis Costello once said, “the only two things that motivate me are revenge and guilt”. Many years ago, I set about writing what I thought was a very commercial novel about a group of old ladies who rob a bank. It was an attempt to do a kind of Ealing Comedy through a Tarantino lens. Stick Helen Mirren and Julie Walters in the movie and we’re off to the races. By the time the thing was done, it was all a little different ...
The plot kicker involved one of the old ladies’ husbands dying and the revelation that he was an adulterous sex addict who had left her with a mountain of debt. Naturally, I had him expire in a sex dungeon impaled on a 2ft dildo. Well, your preoccupations are your preoccupations.
My German editor rang me after reading the manuscript (The Sunshine Cruise Company, Random House, 2014) and I can still recall the elegiac quality of his sigh as he said “Always with the ass, John. Always with the ass,” which has now become a family catchphrase to cover my predictability. Even the kids say it. “Always with the ass, dad.”
I struggle to fill those libraries for other reasons too. I’m a man. Women buy a lot more novels than men do, to the point where being a male writer working in non-genre fiction is looking increasingly like being a poet. Or a penny farthing manufacturer. A snuff-maker. These days it’s all I can do not to flounce into readings – or meetings – and, like Richard Tull in Martin Amis’s The Information, proclaim: “I, SIR, PLY THE SCRIVENER’S TRADE!”
But you know what? I cannot complain. Because as I sat in that library patiently answering questions (most of the folk turned out to be real fans, of course) my mind drifted back nearly 25 years, to when I was writing my first novel. If you’d told me back then, when I was toiling over what seemed doomed to for ever remain an unpublished manuscript, that one day I would be able to summon a crowd of 18 people on a wet November day to discuss something I’d done – without being in a court of law – I’d have danced a jig. So, really, I’m very happy with my place in the scheme of things and I want for no more than I hav –
Ah fuck it.
Satan’s Nutsack Press are proud to announce the publication of John Niven’s CRIME CRIME CRIME STICK IT ALL UP IN YOUR CRIME HOLE that introduces hard-bitten Inverness private eye Hamish McTeats. Niven said yesterday ...