Telegraphing Their Intentions

Britain’s Telegraph newspaper has recently been rife with interesting tidbits about the world of crime fiction. Among the gems:

• Norwegian writer Jo Nesbø, who is making his first trip to the Harrogate Crime Writing Festival next month to promote his latest Harry Hole thriller, Nemesis, is a generous and thoughtful person, according to Mark Sanderson:

Jo Nesbø, whose Nemesis is one of the best crime novels published so far this year, has announced, without any government prompting or meddling, that all the proceeds from his fourth thriller, Headhunters, just published in his native Norway, will be donated to a campaign against illiteracy in children.

• Sanderson also reports on the latest paperback issue from Irish author (and Hemingway fan) Adrian McKinty:

Adrian McKinty’s new novel, The Bloomsday Dead, is, naturally enough, being published by Profile tomorrow--16 June, for non-readers of James Joyce, is the day on which the action of Ulysses takes place.

The thriller involves a race against time to rescue a kidnapped girl and features an arresting scene at Dublin airport. McKinty knows of what he writes: he was once strip-searched at the airport on 16 June.

• Meanwhile, Sanderson’s colleague John Sutherland has written an interesting article about how crime writers hook their readers with “signature” titles:

In today’s book world it’s the title which has to grab any prospective purchaser by the eyeballs and close the deal before the book alongside gets its shout in.

In crime fiction, there’s a nifty gimmick that one can call ‘the signature title’. ‘Me again,’ it says. Oddly, it seems to have taken hold in the crime genre only.

The practice goes way back. If, for example, you saw a title beginning The Case of ..., and knew your crime fiction, you’d apprehend instantly it was a ‘Perry Mason’ by Erle Stanley Gardner. And you’d know exactly--down to the final in-court confounding of D.A. Burger--what to expect.

Much subtler were Raymond Chandler’s signature titles. For example: The Little Sister, The Big Sleep, The Long Goodbye, The High Window. What do they have in common? Measurement. Chandler’s out-of-step title, The Lady in the Lake, is subtler still. The lake in question in that novel is--wait for it--Big Bear.

Why Chandler titled his works this way is inscrutable. But it stamps his novels with a distinctive, Chandlerian, hallmark.

Similarly witty in his titling practice is Chandler’s most eminent disciple in L.A. Noir, Walter Mosley, with his Easy Rawlins novels.

The series began with Devil in a Blue Dress (a Bill Clinton favourite). The next four (in as many years) were A Red Death, White Butterfly, Black Betty, and A Little Yellow Dog.

Easy to see the signature theme. But why the palette-play? Because Easy Rawlins is the genre’s most famous African American PI, and Mosley’s the genre’s pre-eminent author of colour. QED.

The rest of Sutherland’s commentary can be found here.