Posted on 13th November, 2024
Déjà vu – but not like this
There are key events in everyone’s lives that we remember with vivid clarity: the day we got married, for example, the day our first child was born or, more sadly, the day a loved one died. For an author, selling your first novel is right up there with those life-changing memories.
I recall the day well. It was 1992. I was in the offices of my then agents, Curtis Brown, on Haymarket in London, talking to Julia Kreitman who handled the film and TV writing that was my main occupation at that time. A few months earlier, she’d given the manuscript of a novel I’d written to one of the book agents at the firm, Peter Robinson, and she told me that Peter had some news for me. Together we trooped down the corridor to his office, me thinking, “Is it good news? Or bad.”
It was good. Elizabeth Walter, who edited the Harper Collins Crime Club, liked my book and had made an offer of publication. The advance was very small and non-negotiable, Peter said, but the money was irrelevant to me. All that mattered was that, after eleven years of trying and six or seven previous novel attempts that had gone nowhere, I was finally getting published.
The book was An Exceptional Corpse, the first in what became my Mike McLean Series of thrillers set in the Peak District and South Yorkshire, featuring a tenacious investigative journalist.
Soon after that momentous day, and still on a high, I met Elizabeth Walter for lunch and got an immediate wake-up call about my prospects as a novelist. “I always advise my new authors,” she said phlegmatically, “that, if they’re lucky, they might be able to support themselves after ten novels, but certainly no spouses or children” – a sobering thought given that I had ambitions of making a living from my work (as it happens, it didn’t take me ten books, but only because I jumped publishers to one that paid better).
She asked if I had any thoughts about the cover and explained that they liked to use photographs of people on the jackets, but only their extremities, never their faces as that cost more. Sure enough, when the book was published in January 1993, the photo on the cover showed a man in a body bag, his lifeless arm lolling out to one side but his face conveniently hidden.
Two more Mike McLean books followed – A Nasty Dose of Death and Toxin. At the time, the Crime Club (an imprint, of course, not a club that anyone had to join) published forty-eight books a year in hardback, mainly for the library market, but only four of those would then go into paperback. As many of the existing Crime Club authors were well-known and with an established readership, the chances of mine being among those four were slim. And they never did go into paperback.
Until now.
All three books have just been reissued by Endeavour Publishing, who have also reissued six other novels of mine, originally published by Little, Brown and Company but long out of print.
Unholy Trinity – a political thriller set in contemporary Italy, about neo-fascists, the Vatican and Mussolini’s long-lost gold.
Shadow Chasers – a gripping thriller about the EU’s elite anti-fraud unit tackling cigarette smuggling across the continent.
Genesis II – a timely, compelling thriller about a flu virus jumping species with the potential to kill in epidemic proportion.
Oracle Lake (originally published in the UK as Flash Point) – a thriller about Tibetan monks searching for the next Dalai Lama while the Chinese army try to hunt them down.
Enemy Within – a disturbing, highly plausible thriller about the 21st century surveillance society in which we live.
The Rainaldi Quartet (originally published in the UK as Sleeper) – the first of my Cremona Mysteries about violin-maker Gianni Castiglione and his detective friend, Antonio Guastafeste, in which they try to find a priceless missing violin, the sister to the fabled Stradivari “Messiah”.
To buy the novels, just go to the relevant book page on my website and click the link to Amazon.