The Stars Come Out at Harrogate, Part I

Harrogate alumni Jane Gregory, Laura Wilson, Simon Kernick, Val McDermid, and Mark Billingham.

(Editor’s note: This is the first part of British correspondent Ali Karim’s report from the recent Harrogate Crime Writing Festival, held in the North Yorkshire spa town of Harrogate. Additional installments will roll out over the coming days.)

My life has been hectic over the last couple of months, what with the troubled world economy creating havoc in my day job, CrimeFest in Bristol, the Crime Writers’ Association’s Dagger Awards presentation, and then Heffers’ Bodies in the Bookstore event. Oh, and of course I have to squeeze a life with my family in between all of this excitement. So you’ll have to pardon my tardiness in reporting back from the latest Harrogate Crime Writing Festival.

This year welcomed the sixth annual Harrogate festival, though it seems like only yesterday that I arrived at the town’s Majestic Hotel just in time to have dinner with Sarah Weinman and Simon Kernick and celebrate the start of the inaugural Harrogate Festival. That was a great time, in 2003, to be kicking off a new crime-fiction convention in England. Dead-on-Deansgate had by then truly died, with the last such event having been held in Manchester in 2002, and people were looking around for a replacement. Thanks to the efforts of novelist Val McDermid (Beneath the Bleeding, A Darker Domain) and literary agent Jane Gregory, the Harrogate event got off in grand style, with American writer Jeffery Deaver serving as one of the first guests of honor. I may remember that convention best, because of Deaver’s participation. He told me back then about the latest book he’d been working on--a historic thriller called Garden of Beasts, which would become one of my favorite thriller novels of all time, right up there with Geoffrey Household’s Rogue Male, David Morrell’s First Blood, and Alistair MacLean’s Puppet on a Chain. (An excerpt from Garden of Beasts can be found here.)

But I digress ...

I knew that attending this year’s Harrogate festival was going to be a challenge, for I am a book collector as well as a reviewer and writer. With so many high-caliber authors participating from around the world, it would be difficult to pack along all of the volumes I hoped to have signed. In 2006 I attended Harrogate with Shots editor Mike Stotter; last year I brought along my entire family. This time, with my wife and daughters unable to attend, only my son, Alexander--who has become an enthusiastic crime/thriller reader, as well as a budding reviewer--would be able to accompany me to Harrogate, and help carry the many pounds of books I was toting with me.

Due to my work obligations, we had to miss Thursday’s gala opening party. Instead, we set off from home at 5 a.m. on Friday, hoping to beat traffic on the notorious M62 motorway, and arrived at the festival hotel--The Crown--in time for a full English breakfast. During our meal, we were met by Jane Gregory and novelist Joseph Finder (Power Play). They informed us that Stef Penney had been presented with the 2008 Theakstons Old Peculier Award the night before for her first novel, The Tenderness of Wolves. (Since Penney was the only one of the nominees who wasn’t male, that might have been quite a surprise to some observers.)

More relaxed after the drive, and fully sated, Alex and I bumped into Simon Kernick, who had been tapped as this year’s programming chair. I’ve known Kernick ever since he debuted with the novel The Business of Dying (2002), and we have become friends over the years. On this particular morning, he looked rather worse for wear, which was not surprising as he’d been up late the previous evening celebrating. Alex and I followed Kernick to the main convention room, were he was scheduled to interview British-born Canadian novelist Peter Robinson (Friend of the Devil, All the Colours of Darkness).

One of the most appealing features of the Harrogate convention is its single track of panels (as opposed to multiple, overlapping events). This ensures that panel presentations have huge audiences, with many of them sold out. The downside, of course, is that there are fewer opportunities for writers to participate in such panel discussions, as there aren’t so many of them. It’s tough for newer authors to win panel seats--especially as the panels are sponsored mostly by publishers, to highlight their own writers.

Alex and I were lucky to find seats for Kernick’s conversation with Robinson. A highlight of their interview pivoted on both Kernick’s and Robinson’s relationships with Canada; apparently, Kernick lived in Canada for a few years, while Robinson has made that expansive country his home for decades. The latter also noted that he didn’t see his Inspector Alan Banks series really hit its commercial stride until the 10th installment, In a Dry Season (1999), and Robinson went on to ponder aloud how daunting it is for new writers to establish themselves nowadays, what with mammoth commercial pressures weighing on publishers. Kernick and Robinson agreed that writers will have a hard time making a go of novel-writing careers, if they can’t attract huge readerships early in the game. Robinson went on to explain that along his own road to success, he’d had to change publishers in the United States and the UK, and that he had been fortunate to have been given time to establish himself and his fiction. But he also made clear how hard he’d worked, touring and promoting his books on both sides of the Atlantic, believing that those efforts would one day establish his Inspector Banks series as a staple of bestseller charts.

Even before Kernick and Robinson received a huge round of applause for their exchange, Alex and I were out the door and on our way to the book-signing room. The way Harrogate operates is that after each event, authors are escorted to the signing room, which is an annex of the Waterstone’s bookstore located inside the hotel. As a Harrogate vet, I’ve learned to leave five minutes before any panel presentation is completed, in order to be at the front of the queue. Because believe me, those signing queues are something to behold.

After having our books inked, my son and I dashed off to the nearby Holiday Inn where we were staying, checked in, and then found our way back to The Crown in time for a quick coffee before the next festival presentation.

The event this time was a “New Blood” panel discussion moderated by Laura Wilson (Stratton’s War)--who, incidentally, is set become next year’s Harrogate programming chair. One of the reasons for my interest in this discussion was to hear Swedish writer Johan Theorin (shown at left), whose debut novel, Echoes from the Dead (2008), really haunted me. (If you appreciated Stieg Larsson’s The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, you’re going to love Theorin’s work.) I also wanted to listen to Andrew Gross, who I think is a very talented writer, but one who is often referred to as living in the shadow of mega-seller James Patterson. I first met Gross at ThrillerFest in 2006, where I found him to be modest but erudite and extremely well-read. I enjoyed his first solo novel, The Blue Zone (2007), and have been looking forward to digging into the follow-up, The Dark Tide. Joining them at the front of the room were two former TV writers with whom I was not familiar--Kolton Lee and Claire Seeber--but whose latest books have found places in my towering to-be-read pile.

Wilson proved to be an excellent moderator, drawing out the experiences and frustrations of these first-time novelists. At one point, though, Gross pointed out that he was appearing under false pretenses, as he’s published six novels with the aforementioned Patterson. In fact, Gross was the first co-writer Patterson took on. He recalled that turn of events last year in an interesting essay for Shots. Gross explained in the piece that his partnership with Patterson had started with an unexpected phone call:

“Can you talk to James Patterson. He’d like to have a word with you.”

“I think I can fit him in,” you say, counting to five before fully committing as not to appear too desperate. (Okay, three.)

The call that changed my writing life.

Completely unbeknownst, the top editor (now president) at one of [the] houses who rejected me, didn’t chuck my book in the circular can. Instead, she passed it along to her top-selling author, Patterson, sagely noting, “This guy does women well!” (Something my wife’s been insisting ever since is a gross overstatement.)

Six books later, all #1 bestsellers, I’d written about women crime fighters in San Francisco; an inspired innkeeper in France in the fourteenth century who becomes a court jester to search for his abducted wife; a likeable loser in Palm Beach thrust in the center of a multiple homicide; and a single mother whose son is murdered in retaliation by a vicious mobster--and who sets out to find her revenge. I grew accustomed to seeing my books read as the morning paper on airplanes, my name atop the bestseller lists, even receiving a check or two from projects sold to film. As a writer, I was about as lucky as one of my own characters, leaping the span of a rising drawbridge on a motorcycle, knocking off the bad guy, finding the girl.

Meanwhile, Johan Theorin recounted how, as a journalist, he came across the story in Sweden that would evolve into Echoes from the Dead. It seems that on a small insular Swedish island, there was a murder, and everyone knew that the killer was a sociopathic young man. The killer’s parents were an elderly couple, who used up their life-savings to bribe a ships’ captain to take away their son before police came to arrest him. The postmaster of their village noticed several months later that postcards from all over the world started arriving for the elderly couple, but they were all blank. Everyone conjectured that they were sent by the sociopathic son as a means of indicating that he was fine. Then one day, a coffin arrived on the island and inside was the body of the sociopath and alleged killer. There was a funeral that only the parents attended. And then two months after the burial, the postcards started to arrive again. ... Theorin told his audience that he couldn’t vouch for the authenticity of this tale or the significance of the postcards, as no one on the island would tell him very much more; but that vignette haunted him for many years, until he finally used it as the seed for Echoes from the Dead (originally published in Sweden as Skumtimmen). Last year, Skumtimmen was acclaimed the Swedish Academy of Crime as the Best First Mystery Novel of the year, and it has since been translated into 12 languages. Let me just say that it’s a novel not to be missed.

After listening also to Kolton Lee and Claire Seeber recount their transitions from television work to writing novels, Alex and I headed back to the signing room. And then it was on to cocktails and a buffet, sponsored by Transworld Publishing in honor of Simon Kernick’s latest thriller, Deadline.

We were due a break, after all.

(Part II can be found here.)