Rome can be a dangerous city to write about. There’s so much culture and raw information tied up in the city’s streets, buildings, and monuments, that it’s easy for a writer to get distracted from the job in hand. In The Creator’s Map, author Emilio Calderón has trouble setting aside the guidebook and concentrating on the story. Read the full review >>

What marks out a new detective series? There’s the era, of course, with historical crime fiction becoming ever more popular. Then there’s the character of the detective, whether an alcoholic Ethiopian tramp in a Roman suburb or a forensic anthropologist in Canada, and then there’s the nature of the crimes to be investigated.

Finally, there are the tools of justice; crime stories don’t always have to end with the amateur sleuth peering over the bridge into the torrents below (where a top hat can be seen being tossed to and fro in the foam), or handing their prey over to an obliging if misguided constable. For example, in The Widow’s Secret, Brian Thompson has created Bella Wallis, a nineteenth-century sleuth who settles her quarries’ hash by ruining their reputations through thinly veiled caricatures in sensation novels. (more…)

While the love of a favourite author can sustain a reader’s interest through a more in-depth biography (for example, I wouldn’t give up my copy of Ian MacNiven’s 800-page monster on Lawrence Durrell for the world), it’s not really practical to read one of these for every author who takes your interest. You can get some information from Wikipedia but—potential inaccuracies aside—there’s only so much detail you can get from a web page (and you can’t read them in the bath, or on the beach). Enter the new Brief Lives, a series of bite-sized author biographies from Hesperus Press… (more…)

Many of the manuscripts that cross my desk are written in the present tense, which isn’t necessarily a good thing. The present has a lot of pitfalls, especially for new writers. It’s a bit tricky and unnatural, so while it can be used to good effect in a brief passage, over the course of an entire novel it can be tiring. It’s also hard to get the grammar right, especially when you start bringing in things like the past perfect. Finally, it’s often seen as an early danger sign of amateurish prose.

Ninety-nine times out of a hundred, I find myself advising the writers to drop the story back into the past tense.

It was interesting, then, to read Blackmoor, published last month. It’s the debut novel from young British author and UEA graduate Edward Hogan, and substantial pasages are written in the present tense. (more…)

Today’s news and links include paranormal detectives, the latest Amazon controversy, and some good new blog posts… (more…)

One of the areas where I think even some of the best book blogs let themselves down is in their outbound links.

Nowadays, I tend to ignore links in book blogs. I’ve just come to expect them to lead to either the Wikipedia entry or a page on Amazon. It’s not that I disapprove of those websites; I just already know that they’re there. They’re easy to find, and if I want the information they carry, I can go straight to them and get it for myself.

When I’m reading somebody’s blog, I’m really looking for something new. This can be what’s written in the blog itself, of course, but the outbound links are part of that, and it’s really a shame how many blogs waste these opportunities to improve their readers’ experience. (more…)

This week’s literary news includes the publication of an unfinished Nabokov novel, a computer game based on the life and work of the Brontës, and a bizarre mistake in a new biography (more…)

This Telegraph article, claiming to list the 50 best cult books, is causing much puffing up of chests over missed classics, and sniping at overrated ones.

With book bloggers queuing up to argue over their favourite titles, it’s worth a read. (That said, I’m not sure I can wholeheartedly recommend an article that seems to favour John Fowles’ awful Durrell lite The Magus—which even its own mother couldn’t love—over The Alexandria Quartet; or that thinks the UK still had rationing in 1957…)

A couple of months ago, somebody shoved something called Monocle under my nose. Some kind of style magazine, it didn’t really interest me until I found its tiny books section. (Sadly, I mean a tiny section about books.)

One of the titles mentioned was The White Room, from the new independent publisher, CB editions. It was unusual to see a small press book mentioned in a glossy magazine (or anywhere else, for that matter), and so I looked online and started to find out more about them. What I discovered was very interesting…

More about CB editions in a future post; for now I want to talk about one of their books, Days and Nights in W12 by Jack Robinson (more…)

Peanuts is something you come back to. You revisit it in progressive stages, as you would an elderly relative; when you’re a child, they’re just a warm, friendly hug and the biscuits. When you’re a teenager they’re somebody who complicates family gatherings and about whom things are said in the kitchen, and then later they become an incredibly fascinating person with a unique life and a hundred stories…which you’ll never hear, because they’ve just passed away. (more…)

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