The Name of the Prose

Business - Overheard at Bouchercon in Florida last month: "I don't write series *or* standalones; I write books." Do you love/hate/mind/notice/use/ignore the publishers' and booksellers' classifications of your work?

by Catriona

When I first met my good friend Eileen Rendahl (aka Lillian Bell, Kristi Abbott, and Eileen Carr) eight years ago, we were mutually intimidated. She hated me before she even clapped eyes on me because I was European and she thought I'd be toffee-nosed (she might not have used that exact phrase) and I was dumbstruck by the answer she gave to my first question.

"What do you write?" I asked.

"Urban fantasy, romantic suspense and chick lit," she replied, revealing that not only did she write in three genres but she knew what they were.

My elevator pitch for my first book was "It's about some people". 

We're over it now.

I always knew I was writing crime fiction and was happy proud to be included in the venerable list of Scottish crimewriters: Robert Louis Stevenson, Arthur Conan Doyle, William McIlvanney, Val McDermid  . . . My little country punches far above its weight. It took a while to be able to call myself a mystery author with the same confidence, but now I'm completely bilingual.

Inside the genre, things were always less certain. If someone unconnected to publishing asks you what you write, I think it's better to name some names and set yourself among them than to bamboozle with sub-sub-sub genre titles. So I'll say "Do you like Dorothy L Sayers? You might like Dandy Gilver." Or "Do you like Janet Evanovich? You might like Lexy Campbell."

But if someone from the publishing and writing world asks what you write, it's a bit daft not to know and it's a wee bit precious to make out that your work defies classification, isn't it? I'd be nervous of claiming wild originality for anything I wrote in case there was a well-known and identical book that I'd somehow not heard of.  Like that time I wrote a time-travel love story and thought surely no one . . . then Audrey Niffenegger published The Time Traveller's Wife. (I've still not read it because I'm still sulking.)

If I was the boss of all this - and I'm not; I'm barely the boss of me - I'd say Dandy Gilver was in the tradition of the presposterous 1930s detective genre. That should be a real category.

And I'd say Lexy Campbell and the Last Ditch were crime capers. I much prefer that title to "humourous mysteries" because "humourous mysteries" is such a humourless expression.

When it comes to the standalones I can't improve on what I do call them, when forced to. "They're those crime suspense domestic noir psychological thriller things. You know the ones I mean." And guess what. People usually do.

my new mystery, coming later this month

My new crime novel, also coming later this month

Just Add Elvis.

"How do you come up with titles? Do they change during the writing process?'

By Catriona.

Like Cathy yesterday, I'm sticking to titles because the process of naming characters is so different from the process of naming books. A character name comes while I'm writing, like the fourth name of the cat, from profound meditation and rapt contemplation. (see T.S.  Eliot's "The naming of cats" here).

The name of a book, in contrast, comes once the book's written. And it comes in various ways.

A: from a message exchange between me and Terri Bischoff (Midnight Ink) that goes like this:

C: Hang My Hat okay?
Terri: Sales don't love it. What else you got?
C: Lexy, Last Ditch, Last Ditch for Lexy, Caledonia Dreamin', Lexy and The Last Ditch.
Terri: Nah.
C: I dunno. A pun?
Terri: Likes of plaid, tartan? Are you serious about the Jimmy Wig? Even with no hat in the title?  I like the woman floating in the pool.
C: I do love a drunk woman in a duct-taped inflatable. Oh! Oh! Oh! Loch Ness Monster inflatable!
T: LMAO. What's the title.
C: Oh yeah. Scot Free? Forget I said that.
T: YES!
C: No way. I was just thinking aloud.
T: I love it.
C: Oh God.

B. A short text exchange between me and Krystyna Green (Little,Brown) that goes like this:

K: House.Tree.Person is the worst title I've ever heard. It's just three random words. Can you give me something better in twenty minutes?
C: Ha!
C: (twenty minutes later) Angels Unaware, The Dance of Angels, The Weight of Angels.
K: Weight of Angels! Ta.

Coda:
C: (emails Terri Bischoff): London is calling HTP The Weight of Angels. Waddaya think?
T: Won't work in the US market. Buyers will think it's real angels.
C: Real angels?
T: Inspirational Christian fiction.
C: Oh, jeez. It's really not.
T: House.Tree.Person is a great title.

C: Phone call with Francine Toon (Hodder & Stoughton)

F: Dandy word, crimey word, plotty word.
C: Dandy word, crimey word, plotty word.
F: Dandy Gilver and a Dandy word . . .
C: And a crimey word . . .
F: Dandy Gilver and  . . . unseemly, appalling, dreadful, distressing.
C: fearful, frightful, rather.
F: corpse, death, body, murder, crime, clue. And a plotty word.
C: Nun, convent, orphan, habit.
F: Ooooh, habit!
C: Dandy Gilver and The Rather Unseemy Habit?
F: But church people with bad habits? And an orphanage?
C: OMG. No way. That's dreadful. So not unseemly, or distressing, appalling and all that if it's habit.
F: Mysterious.
C: Misleading.
F: DANDY GILVER AND A MOST MISLEADING HABIT!

(Note: this book has been called The Nuns in every email since that day. )

The only one I still pine for was my working title on a book that ended up being called Growing Up Again. It was a time-travel caper - think Forrest Gump joins Friends Reunited on Groundhog Day - and I called it SAVE ELVIS. which is job one for a time traveller. Well, the publisher wasn't having it. I tried. I even handed out questionnaires to the core demographic readership asking which title they preferred. (They preferred Save Elvis.) But the publisher thought Elvis was a forgotten and,  even if remembered, then a sad, old, dead man. No good for a caper.

When Growing Up Again was published there had just been a self-help book out called Growing Up Again: parenting our children, parenting ourselves. Deeply caper-free. And at the launch event, the bookshop staff - in all innocence - set me up in front of a display for a new Elvis biography. Oy. God bless my mum for her sense of humour too. She always bakes a book cake. Here's the cake for Growing Up Again:

I'm still glad it happened, though, because no title change since then has had the power to hurt me. Whether it's a skoosh like the upcoming Go To My Grave. which was my working title and is a go in the UK and US, or a struggle like Lexy Campbell Bk 2 (watch this space) it rolls off me like split mayo.

Scot Free: 8th April (US only) Midnight Ink
Go To My Grave: 23rd October Minotaur (US) Little,Brown (UK)
The new Dandy? We're still having Dandy word, crimey word, plotty word phone calls.

"Dozy Daisy Dreamboat" grows up

The garret I starved in.

Miss Shaughnessy - my primary one teacher (and how's that for a name five-year-olds have to learn to spell?) - dubbed me "Dozy Daisy Dreamboat" because I spent more time looking out the window and making up stories than I did trying to . . . do whatever the rest of them were doing. I wouldn't know.

And she was right. My Godmother, Aunty Doreen, lived opposite the school and said she used to see me, chin in hands, leaning on the windowsill, totally oblivious  to everything in the classroom behind me.

On parents' night, my report was "over-imaginative and too full of nonsense".

Again, fair comment. I made up many stories when I was a wee girl. Some I wrote down, but most I just doled out to my family: I've gone blind! There's a snake in my bed! And the worst: A strange man followed me home! (Sorry, Mum. Sorry, Dad.)

I remember the day it stopped. I was fourteen and a careers adviser visited the school. She asked what I wanted to do when I grew up. I said I wanted to be a writer. She said: "Don't be daft. You're a clever girl. You could stay on and go to university, get a good job."

So I stayed on at school, did an MA and a PhD and got a good job, as a university lecturer. My degrees weren't even in English literature. I did one year and reckoned I'd never enjoy reading another novel as long as I lived unless I switched courses. That year of literature even made me hate Jane Austen (for a while).

Twenty years in all I spent not writing, unless you count essays, a thesis and lectures. The last five of them were utterly miserable. I worked in a School of English with an atmosphere like dementors' breath, teaching linguistics, watching more students fail to find any joy in studying literature.

Then one night, in a cinema carpark, moaning to my pal about how much I hated my job, it all came back. I wanted to be a writer. I wanted to leave school. I didn't care if it was daft. I wanted to rip off my grey cardigan and reveal the spangly costume of Dozy Daisy Dreamboat.

So I resigned, we sold our house and moved to a dilapidated farmhouse with a peppercorn rent (see above) and I got stuck in.

Book one went in a drawer after forty rejections. Book 2 was the first in a series about a 1920s detective, channelling the golden-age authors I've always loved. Skipping ahead a bit, I'm expecting the page proofs any day now for the twelfth in the series. It's in development for television and there's a radio adaptation in the works.

As well as those twelve novels in the series, I've written five contemporary standalones in the psychological thriller/suspense sub-genre. I'm currently working on number seven and emailing back and forth about jacket copy for number six.

All my books are set in Scotland (except one foray a hundred miles over the border, to Yorkshire) but I've just finished the first in a trilogy that take place in the US. We're currently discussing titles, taglines and jackets. It's probably going to be SCOT FREE: a Last Ditch Mystery "the lighter side of the dark underbelly of the American dream". But it's probably not going to have an image of a woman floating in a pool dreaming of a Highland Cow standing in a loch.

My sharpie sketch of a possible jacket

That was the other big swerve in my life so far. In 2010 at the age of forty four, I left Scotland and moved to Davis, CA. It was always the plan, when I gave up academia, that I'd chum along if my husband got a job somewhere. Could have been Aberystwyth, or Wagenigen. Turned out it was California. Heigh-ho.

I have no regrets about the twenty years, nor even about the five years of crying in my office in between lectures, because nothing makes you surer you're finally in a round hole than the memory of spending decades in a square hole, picking out splinters and dabbing yourself with rubbing alcohol.

Besides, I think the only way to get where I am is the way I came. And there's nowhere else I'd rather be. Dozy forever!