It was a career move which didn’t start out too well for Isabel Allende. When she made the move from literary fiction to crime, she was following what has become a popular trail in recent years, abandoning her genre of choice for the one which is supposed to be the most lucrative. From Kate Atkinson to JK Rowling, big-name authors have been jumping on the bandwagon, maybe of their own volition, maybe because some agent or publisher was whispering encouragement in their ear.
Allende’s crime, certainly as far as crime readers and book sellers were concerned, was to go public on her disdain for the genre as whole, thereby neatly slitting her own throat and guaranteeing herself no invitation any time soon to popular fan conventions like Bouchercon, Crimefest and Harrogate.
Some well-known authors have been successful at genre-hopping. Susan Hill has earned a keen following for her Serrailler novels. Less successful was Joanne Harris – best known for the rather whimsical Chocolat – who dipped a toe in the bloodied waters with Blue-eyed Boy, her only novel which earned almost as many one-star Amazon reviews as five-star. The book won her a coveted slot at the Harrogate festival, but in a pre-appearance interview, she showed her hand. ‘My link with crime is only tenuous,’ she said, and within the year, she’d retreated to the fantasy camp, where the five-star reviews immediately returned.
Maybe genre-hopping is a two-way street. I’ve met many crime authors who yearn to be taken seriously, to write an ‘important’ novel or have a shot at the Booker Prize. Perhaps for every author attempting the leap into crime, there’s a crime-author desperate to shrug off the label.
Does that apply to me? Now I’ve finished the first series of my Fat Man novels, I’ve welcomed a little time to let my pen roam free. I wrote a few short stories, which I enjoyed doing, and I played with ideas for novels which involved no corpses. I had some pretty good ideas, I thought, but a short way in, my pen stalled. Not once, not twice, but three times, I ended up with beginnings I didn’t want to pursue.
So are crime writers born, or made? There’s a piece of advice authors regularly dish out to fledgling writers – advice I’ve been known to hand out myself. Write a book you’d want to read, a book you’d enjoy. So what do I read? Mostly, crime. The conclusion’s obvious.
My reason for writing the Fat Man books was very simple – with the exception of Jeffrey Siger’s and Paul Johnston’s, I struggled to find any crime novels set in Greece. I’ve got my new big idea now, and – no surprise at all – it’s a crime novel set in Greece. I could have run with one of those non-crime plotlines, but readers would have rumbled me instantly. Like Isabel Allende and Joanne Harris, my heart wasn’t in it.
What’s the punchline? Publishers and agents, please take note. You can’t write crime just for the money. It’s got to be in the blood.
Anne Zouroudi this week won the Murder & Mayhem category of the Coventry Inspiration Boko Awawrds for The Bull of Mithros. For more information: www.annezouroudi.com.
