From LBF: the crime writers speak

Though for most authors, going to the London Book Fair is actively discouraged (for good reason, because everybody is running around selling foreign rights or getting into heated debates about the future of the industry, blah blah blah) for some it’s a chance to launch your book bigtime. That’s certainly the case for Karin Slaughter, as her UK publisher Century used LBF to get people talking about her upcoming standalone, TRIPTYCH. And one of the ways was to have a lunchtime panel featuring Slaughter, Mark Billingham & John Connolly talking about series vs. standalones, different kinds of crime writing and other pertinent topics, as the Bookseller reports:

Billingham said that he had tried to write standalone novels before,

but his character DI Tom Thorne kept “elbowing his way in”. His next

novel but one, after this May’s Buried (Little, Brown), will not be

part of the Thorne series, however, while Connolly also said that he

was aiming “to do something different every two or three books”.

The

top crime trio concurred that neither readers nor publishers demanded

series any more, and also railed against “cosy crime–cat, cooking,

golf and quilting mysteries”.

They

bemoaned the tendency of readers to complain about the content of their

books. “You can write about hideous atrocities,” Billingham said, “and

they ask you to tone the language down.” Connolly agreed that

particularly for a US audience: “You can kill anything at all–but

don’t touch the dog.”

I thought the title was TOUCH NOT THE CAT, but same goes, really…