Maxcrime: The Countdown
Maxim Jakubowski

I wanted to partly retire, take it easy, And look what happens: I have nine books out this year alone, and already have three under contract for 2011 publication already! And all because I can't say no...

And as if the writing, reviewing and editing isn't enough (and by the way, not all those books come under the umbrella of crime, if that's any reassurance to you...) I get a telephone call out of the blue from John Blake to offer me an opportunity I just couldn't refuse!

I'd known John on and off throughout the years. When I was still in the business of rock n 'roll, running Virgin Books, he was a canny Fleet Street journalist who'd written one of the best books around on the Rolling Stones, and later set up his own independent publishing house and made a major success of it by issuing many books other houses were too precious to contemplate: gritty true crime memoirs, personality memoirs (OK, so he's to blame, partly, for the Jordan/Katie Price industry...), sports books, etc... A real entrepreneur and anything but a snob; in 2009, John Blake Publishing even placed a record ten titles in the bestseller lists, more than many so-called reputable mainstream houses; as I write this mid-February 2010, they are already up to two titles with a similar top 20 record.

John and I had lunch and he revealed his dirty secret to me: he's always been a great fan of crime and thriller writing. It's all that he reads for pleasure in fact, and would I be interested in setting up a crime list for him? Did I jump or was I pushed?

It's now 9 months later and the pregnancy is over: MaXcrime launches early in March.

Basically, we agreed on the parameters and tailored the list to suit the publishing company's strengths and reputation. MaXcrime is a commercial mass market list, which will be aiming at placing large quantities of books on the shelves of the chains and supermarkets with whom they already enjoy such a good relationship. Commercial as we old publishing hands know so well does not exclude quality, and John and I agreed from the word go that the list should be as diverse as possible. We would publish hardboiled and cosy, procedurals and PI tales, historical and contemporary and, even, translations. Naturally we haven't the budget to initially compete with many of the big boys but then neither do we want to lure writers away from other houses through use of the cheque book. So, I had to find good authors who had either been neglected by other editors and houses, or encourage people I admired to move into crime.

My first port of call was Tara Moss. For the past few years, I had been dumbfounded by the fact she was not published in the UK and briefly for a couple of titles so badly in the USA. Tara is the biggest crime author in Australia; forget about Peter Temple, Peter Corris and others, she outsells them by the bucketload, At Xmas she was, with her new novel SIREN, up at nr 3 on the Oz bestseller list just behind Dan Brown and James Patterson, to give you an idea. Add to that the fact she is an ex-model with spectacular looks (see her website at www.taramoss.com), a Unicef ambassador, has snakes as pets, trained in weapons, dropped skydiving from planes, rides a motorcycle and we had little hesitation at featuring her on the cover of HIT, the first of her 5 novels we will be publishing. Her heroine is a Sydney female PI, Mak Vanderwall, with grit and attitude, and dare I say modelled on Tara herself. This is Sara Paretsky and Sue Grafton for a younger generation. High octane adventures with a sexy angle, and a no-brainer as one of our launch titles. Dare I reveal that waiting for the contract to be signed for Tara's books, I was rather nervous someone else would jump in and gazump us. A major find!

Accompanying Tara on our first venture onto the shelves is a debut novelist. But not any beginner, by a long way. Think movies: think GET CARTER and PULP, both with Michael Caine, FLASH GORDON, BLACK RAINBOW, CROUPIER and I'LL SLEEP WHEN I'M DEAD, the last two featuring Clive Owen, and many others. What do they have in common: they were all directed by British filmmaker Mike Hodges. Mike, who has been a good friend for some time, decided in his early 70s, that a novel afforded more opportunities than yet another film script and came up with WATCHING THE WHEELS COME OFF, a delightfully dark and witty black comedy about a con man in an English seaside resort much like Blackpool who encounters the day from hell. Like Christopher Brookmyre with added vitriol and belly laughs!

We will be issuing a further 9 books in 2010, to include a major South London novel stand alone by the inimitable Mark Timlin, a gothic Italian thriller by Italian author Barbara Baraldi (as striking in the flesh as Tara Moss, I daresay...), the first novel to be published in the UK by multi award-winning US author Kristine Kathryn Rusch, a roar out loud caper by Scotland's Donna Moore which I think will establish her as our first home-grown Janet Evanovich in the sassy, subversive stakes, an actual novel by Kate Kray, the first, dark dark dark crime novel by leading Manchester horror author Conrad Williams, and much more.

Initially John and I had agreed that Maximum Crime would be a good name for a list, but when it came to designing the first set of covers (and I can say immodestly they are all stunning), we found that it was too long for the logo to fit across the spine, so we changed to MaXcrime!

I've been editing crime short story collections for well over 20 years but it had been even longer, since my full-time publishing days (Blue Murder, Black Box Thrillers) that I had been given a chance to work with full-length novels, and the experience has been great, and much of that is due to the enthusiastic support for the list from John Blake himself, the hard work and co-ordination by in-house editor and contact point John Wordsworth, publicity supremo Ailsa MacAlister and our supreme copy editor Peter Lavery, another retiree who's come off the bench to keep himself busy (he was previously the editorial director at Macmillan). A great team.

And now for the first test of the marketplace...

Posted at 12:57PM Monday 22 Feb 2010