With Criminal Intent?

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Amy Lloyd, Good Housekeeping Novel Competition, Luigi Bonomi, Margaret Kirk, P D James, Penguin Random House, Red River, Sandra Parsons, Selina Walker, Shadow Man, Simon Kernick

Do you yearn to be the next P D James? If so, I understand that The Daily Mail First Novel Competition offers a previously unpublished crime writer a prize of £20,000 plus a publishing deal with Penguin Random House, one of the world’s most respected publishers.

Judges will be top crime writer Simon Kernick, leading literary agent Luigi Bonomi (who will represent the winner), top publisher Selina Walker (who will publish the winner) and Daily Mail literary editor Sandra Parsons (who, presumably, will provide publicity in her paper).

They’re asking for your first 5,000 words, a 600 word synopsis, and a covering letter about yourself. The deadline is May 5 and your entry needs to be POSTED, so give yourself extra time to visit the Post Office. The book, which must be for an adult readership, needs to be completed by November.

If you don’t read The Daily Mail and missed this do check the full terms online at dailymail.co.uk/crimenovel

This contest was launched last year and had more than 5,000 entries. The winner, Amy Lloyd‘s crime thriller Red River, has already been sold to publishers all over the world and film rights are currently being negotiated. It was published in January.

Ninevoices have two members working on crime novels, and a third whose short story about bodies buried on Tunbridge Wells Common was shortlisted in a magazine competition.

Competitions like this don’t come every day, especially ones that are FREE. In 2016 Scottish writer Margaret Kirk won the Good Housekeeping Novel Competition with her book Shadow Man and is now an established writer. The Good Housekeeping competition, incidentally, is open until the end of this month. See details in our post of February 9.

If you feel you’ve set yourself an impossible task with your writing, be encouraged by this, from Simon Kernick:

“It took 30 years, numerous unfinished projects, two unpublished novels and about 300 rejection letters before I finally got a publishing contract. Since then, I’ve written 15 crime thrillers, and I can honestly say I enjoy the process as much now as I did when I first began.”

Only thirty years and three hundred rejections? Why are we dithering?

 

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Does Historical Fiction Require Purple Prose?

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crime writing, Dame Hilary Mantel, Georgette Heyer, Good Housekeeping Novel Competition, Jessie Burton, Margaret Kirk, Shadow Man, The Miniaturist, Writing Historical Fiction

Here’s a question – should I use ‘colourful’ language to convey life in the eighteenth century?

The prologue of Jessie Burton‘s debut novel, The Miniaturist, about to hit our TV screens on Boxing Day, is as rich as an embroidered sleeve and transports you to the affluence and dissipation of her chosen time and place:

‘words are water in Amsterdam, they flood your ears and set the rot and the church’s east corner is crowded…guildsmen and their wives approach the gaping grave like ants toward honey… The church’s painted roof…rises above them like the tipped-up hull of a magnificent ship. It is a mirror to the city’s soul; inked on its ancient beams, Christ in judgement holds his sword and lily, a golden cargo breaks the waves, the Virgin rests on a crescent moon.’

Okay, I can’t hope to match that, so would I be safer sticking to plain. twenty-first-century English, which can be equally gripping?

A world away from eighteenth-century Holland is the taut opening of Margaret Kirk‘s psychological thriller, Shadow Man, which won the Good Housekeeping Debut Novel Competition in 2016 and is set in contemporary Inverness.

‘By midnight there are bodies everywhere. Her tiny flat is crammed to bursting, but people are still stumbling through the door, waving packs of Stella or Strongbow and wrapping her in Cheerful beery hugs.
She doesn’t remember inviting them all – doesn’t recognise half of them, when she stops to think about it – but so what. For the last four years, she’s been juggling coursework with her shifts at the all-night garage, slogging away at her degree while it felt like the rest of the world was out getting laid, or legless. Or both.’

Using minimal description, this writing convincingly evokes a student party. There’s also that clever ‘bodies everywhere’, hinting at further – dead – bodies to come.* No wonder the novel grabbed the judges’ attention.

Yet few of us are familiar with Georgian London, so how am I to write my own book, The Maid’s List, without sounding like a pastiche of Georgette Heyer? Dame Hilary Mantel has written of ‘the need to broker a compromise between then and now’. Easier said than done, if you’re neither Mantel nor Burton.

On this blog we write about books, about reading and about writing, but never share our own draft efforts. Perhaps we should, since I believe it helps to see how others struggle to get their stories onto the computer screen. I’m therefore giving you an extract from The Maid’s List, complete with a touch of purple that I’m still working to eradicate.

‘I’m convinced these men are no better than my master, and wonder afresh what they do gathered around that table, with voices that seem to haggle like those of market traders. Silk-stockinged men, with gold-topped canes, sprawled in the worn leather chairs, with their knees spread wide and lace frothing at their cuffs. I rattle the glasses on my tray, to warn them I’m at the door. One of them has taken the pot from the cabinet and is pissing into it. He glances up from the yellow stream and grins as if to say, you’ll have the privilege of emptying this. Which, indeed, I will. Probably while it is still warm.’

As always, I suppose it’s down to the individual write to do the best she/he can. After all, the more variety there is in books, the richer the reader experience.

 

 

*Spoiler alert: having recently started Shadow Man, I could be jumping to conclusions here!

Read the Winning Entry in the Good Housekeeping 2016 Novel Competition

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Giovanna Iozzi, Good Housekeeping Novel Competition, Luigi Bonomi, Margaret Morton Kirk

I’ve just learned that the current edition of Good Housekeeping Magazine contains the opening of Margaret Morton Kirk‘s winning entry, Shadow Man, a gritty Scottish crime novel. Margaret has won a publishing contract with Orion worth £10,000 and will now be represented by Luigi Bonomi of LBA.

The first runner-up, who won an Acer Switch laptop, was Giovanna Iozzi, who impressed the judges with a domestic noir thriller, Black Worms.

Both books could well be gracing our bookshelves in the not-too-distant future and prove that entering competitions can make that all-important difference. If nothing else, they really help your productivity: pushing for the competition deadline had me churning out over a thousand words a day at one point, which wasn’t a bad consolation prize.

Well done to these two talented ladies, and to all those who made it onto the short list! Good Housekeeping Magazine is on sale now.

Be Still My Beating Heart…

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Giovanna Iozzi, Good Housekeeping Novel Competition, Simon Mawer

We’re going to get SO big-headed at Ninevoices. First, Ed gets a personal response from Simon Mawer on his great review of the excellent THE GLASS ROOM (do buy it). Now, the talented Giovanna Iozzi has become one of my followers on Twitter (@maggiedavieswr1), presumably following our piece on June 5 about her win of the Good Housekeeping New Novel Competition.

Contact with such talented writers must rub off on our own efforts. Mustn’t it?

Think I’ll go and lie down in a darkened room for a bit.

The Rejection Diaries

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Good Housekeeping Novel Competition, rejection

Apparently the ten shortlisted writers for the Good Housekeeping Novel Competition were contacted this afternoon.

Ten ecstatic people – and something like four thousand deeply disappointed ones!

I’d got quite hopeful about that competition, thinking my opening chapters promising, however my synopsis was written in a rush and I knew it was second-rate. Lesson learned: never send out anything but the polished best.

Time for chocolate and red wine…