The Words-Wise Web

Two important reminders from B.V. Lawson’s In Reference to Murder. First, that Baltimore novelist Laura Lippman is now two installments into The Girl in the Green Raincoat, a 15-part crime-fiction online serial--starring a pregnant (!) private eye Tess Monaghan--that she’s writing for The New York Times Magazine. Lippman follows here in the footsteps of Elmore Leonard, Michael Connelly, and Ian Rankin, all of whom have serialized stories in the Times Magazine over the last couple of years.

Second, it seems that British writer Alexander McCall Smith, best known for his No. 1 Ladies’ Detective Agency series, has just begun penning his own serial novel for The Daily Telegraph’s Web site. It’s called Corduroy Mansions. Installments will appear each weekday through February 13, 2009. In an introduction to this “digital novel,” Smith says he enjoys the discipline forced upon him by writing fiction at such a rapid clip, but is looking forward, too, to some daily interaction with his newspaper audience.

“Readers will also be able to contact me with suggestions as to how the plot should unfold,” Smith explains, “as at any time in the publication of the novel I shall only be about 20 episodes ahead of the one that is published that day. This should make the novel interactive--to some extent at least. I obviously have my own ideas of what will happen, but I shall be open to persuasion.”