Evening Times coverage for Wilderness

A great write up for my debut crime fiction novel ‘Wilderness’ in the Evening Times

Emerging from Wilderness to Amazon success

For the last few weeks I’ve been talking a lot about my book. To anyone that will listen in fact. I suppose that’s part of the gig. Without the might of a publisher self promotion is something that is inevitable when you decide to self publish your book.

I’m glad to say that the last seven days has been something of a watershed for my debut crime novel ‘Wilderness’. The Daily Record kindly agreed to publish a short synopsis in their weekly Book Club page (see below)

 

This featured above an article on a competition that Scotland’s crime fiction festival, Bloody Scotland, was running, and all in all was great exposure for the book to an audience with a vested interest in my chosen genre.

It was also good for sales, with numbers doubling in the space of the week, propelling the book to Number 3 in the Amazon Noir chart – a fantastic result.

For self published novels the importance of doing your homework and finding slots which suit your book are invaluable in helping the slow process of building an audience. It will pay to be persistent and use every channel you can to push your work into the public domain. Although I haven’t had feedback from new readers directly yet (that’s the scary bit involving Amazon reviews) I’m hoping to hear back from at least some of the people who were kind enough to spend a little time in the world of DI John Arbogast.

Check it out on Amazon.

Thanks for reading.

 

Scotland’s newest crime writer comes in from the cold with ‘Wilderness’

‘Wilderness’, the debut novel from former BBC journalist Campbell Hart was inspired by the bitterly cold winter of 2010 when temperatures dipped as low as -12c for weeks on end. Out of work and with time on his hands Campbell realised a long held ambition to craft a crime fiction novel in the tartan noir tradition, writing the first draft in just six weeks.

“The engine was still running but the coach was going nowhere. The services’ last passenger was resigned to sitting out a long, cold night. Under the faint light from the cubicle at the back of the bottom deck the woman could see her skin was already turning blue. ‘I hope they come soon,’ she thought, ‘surely the girl will be fine?’ Curled up in a ball with the metal toilet bowl pressed against her skin she stopped shivering and focused her attention on the engine as it purred away reassuringly in the background, this lonely tourist’s constant companion these last few hours. Suddenly the noise stopped and the coach shuddered violently into silence. She was alone now, lost in the wilderness.”

Based on his experience as a journalist in Lanarkshire the story was inspired by a blizzard which engulfed Lanarkshire in 2000. A bus had got stuck in a snowdrift near a prison. Two guards used a snowplough and shovels to rescue three people on board. When they arrived the driver had given his jacket to a girl who was travelling with her mother. After 10 hours stuck on a freezing bus the story had a happy ending but the circumstances inspired a ‘what if’ starting point with the rescuers finding the woman alone and handcuffed while the girl and the driver were missing. The public’s reaction to a suspected paedophile on the run opens out to up to include the international sex trafficking trade and organised crime. Good and bad swap sides with sometimes frustrating frequency, motivating readers to keep turning pages and think about the development of a complex yet intensely human plot. A genuine page-turner, this is Campbell Hart’s first novel with a further two books already in planning.

Campbell (39) said: “We’ve all been to the party where you meet the guy who says he’s got a book in him. For about ten years that was me but after a decade working in radio news, I felt I had something to say about modern Scotland.

“The eruption of Scandinavian Noir has been a big influence, with its common theme of exposing the grim reality beneath a supposedly perfect society. In Scotland we’re currently being told the exact opposite – that our society is ‘broken’ but that we have the chance to transform it through independence. That’s a dynamic which interests me and this book is the start of a planned trilogy looking at international crime, nationalism, and the referendum.

“As a reformed punk, the DIY ethos of self-publishing was instantly appealing. Why wait for an agent to sift through a dusty pile of submissions when you can do it yourself. When you’re out and about you see more and more people are using e-readers and it’s those people I’m looking to connect with.”

Campbell Hart’s debut novel ‘Wilderness’ is available from Amazon in paperback and e-book.

Wilderness (Kirk o Shotts)

Kirk o Shotts graveyard in a blizzard

Does dialect matter?

In the early 1990s the world of Trainspotting came as something of a revelation. Irvine Welsh brought Edinburgh to life with his snarling ensemble with that motley collection of ‘radge bastards’ moving nationwide at an alarming rate. By the time the film came along pretty much everyone knew what to expect. What was novel for this book for me was the dialect. The pattern of speech was unfamiliar but seemed more real as I knew it was authentic to the East Coast. Much of Irvine Welsh’ work is set in a familiar universe but should the role of speech be essential for the successful telling of a regional story?

The danger for me is being bogged down in colloquial slang. The depth of writing I think can suffer from an over reliance on the shock factor of continual guttural prose which can get bogged down under its own weight. Yes it’s authentic. Walk down a street in Glasgow at midnight any given weekend and you will hear firsthand the rythym of the city. But do we really need it for prose – should it dominate the story and if it does is this extra character too all encompassing?

I think for books to be read within their own communities then the inclusion of heavy dialect can be a bonus but does tend to skew books towards the ‘ned chic’ end of the market. Scumbag stories about scumbags isn’t something I’m really interested in. A tatty stabbing which could find pride of place on the front cover of a tabloid may intrigue and outrage readers in equal measure but at the end of the day the tragedy is often avoidable and altogether undramatic – if you walk the streets at night looking for a knife fight and find one the consequences should come as little surprise. Yet there are real stories in every community and I don’t think dialect needs to play a part in telling the story.

Every reader has their perception of an area and will read this into any story they take time to get to know. More important to me is the landscape and the issues affecting people – for these are mostly universal. So what’s the point I’m making here? While blown away reading ‘Scottish’ in print through Trainspotting (and the copycats which followed) in the end I am more interested in the story. While dialect can play a part it’s the attention to detail that counts – if you can’t get this right then there will be few reasons to care.

Do you think regional books need to be written with a regional accent or do you prefer to create your own interpretation? Let me know in the comments below.

Thanks for reading.

The trouble with writing

The trouble with writing…is writing. The first major hurdle I had to beginning my first novel was to actually start hammering away at the keyboard. My first attempt ended in abject failure. From memory I wanted to write a political thriller around the petrol crisis of the early 2000’s. I only got as far as creating the main characters and then stopped. The main reason was having no time alongside a lack of experience. As a 20 something looking to build a career in journalism I really didn’t have the time to devote to out of hours writing and the project failed.

14 years later and with changed priorities and a different set of circumstances the opportunity arose to put pen to paper (as it were) a brief stint ‘between jobs’ offered the chance to do something I had always wanted to do – write that book.

I will remember that time well – using an event from my time in journalism for a ‘what-if’ scenario I built up a list of characters and ideas and wrote a first draft in six weeks. I was pretty astonished I’d managed to do it so quickly but by making myself write 3000-4000 words a day the story pretty much wrote itself.

The temperature was -12c for a large part of that 6 weeks so sheltering in my flat in Glasgow what would become ‘Wilderness’ quickly took shape. The fact I had no other distractions was a definite bonus. I was also helped by a former DCI from Strathclyde Police who put meat on some of the ideas I had. Research is easy with Google a lifeline to a world of information with people and places easy to imagine. I managed to place myself in Istanbul for some of the story through streetview – it’s a city I’ve never been to but i felt as if I knew it by the time the story ended.

The important point was discipline – sitting down with a target and writing. The big problem came when I returned to work. New deadlines and priorities meant the editing stage of the project lasted another 3 years – not something I’m proud of and a problem I need to deal with as I begin work on novel number 2.

Whether the novel finds an audience remains to be seen but at the end of the day the personal satisfaction of seeing a fully formed novel emerge from your own efforts is a feeling that’s pretty hard to beat. I’ll certainly be making more time for crime!

Do you struggle to find the time to write? Perhaps you have tips that have helped you break the cycle of work to write at night or through the day? Let me know your thoughts in the comments below.

Thanks for reading.

Not another blog!

Hello there!

Welcome to crimewriter2000 – the UK’s latest blog for crime fiction. You might not have heard but Scotland’s reputation as an international centre for crime writers has never been better. With a long list of big names ranging from the godfather of tartan noir William McIvanney (welcome back to print!), to Val McDermid, Ian Rankin, and Alex Gray (to name but a very few) Scotland already has a dark fraternity of crime writers to pick from. Dark tales from the underbelly of Glasgow, Edinburgh and Aberdeen have become commonplace in the shelves of the nations bookshops, while websites like Blasted Heath have been blazing a trail for the next generation of talent through the e-book revolution.

So why bother when there’s so much competition? Well I think there’s still plenty more to say and given Scotland’s now in the middle of a debate about its very future this seems as good a time as any to delve deeper into the national psyche.

In the course of the next few weeks I’ll be looking at crime books, news stories, exploring ideas and motivation, while also trying to dissect certain aspects of the common themes that find their way into crime fiction at every level. Whether that’s love, hate, deceit or betrayal – all have a part to play in piecing together a great read.

I hope you like what you see. If you do please feel free to share the content or let me know your thoughts in the comments section.

Thanks for reading.