Free Mortification: Writers’ Stories of Their Public Shame by Robin Robertson Page B

Latin proverb
Val McDermid
    Writing genre fiction is a calling more prone to humiliation than most fields of creative endeavour. Yes, we face the same rejections from agents and publishers, the mortification of being asked if we write under our own names, the shame of events where only two people turn up. But we also face the indignity of being one of a bunch in the review section’s crime round-up. And possibly worst of all, the perennial question: ‘Have you ever thought of writing a proper novel?’
    You’d think after fifteen years, nearly twenty novels and a slew of awards I’d be inured to it. But it still stings to be treated like the unfortunate member of the family who’s a bit mentally defective.
    Picture the scene. A Sunday morning at one of the country’s most prestigious literary festivals. To protect the guilty, let’s call it Wheat-on-Rye. I had crawled out of bed at the crack of dawn to drive myself and a fellow crime writer from Manchester to the middle of nowhere to take part in a panel with a literary novelist who had written a novel that ‘subverted the conventions of the crime novel’. We’re used to this sort of thing. It usually translates as, ‘I’m a literary novelist, so it doesn’t matter if my detective procedure bears no relationship to reality and my plot has more holes than Blackburn, Lancashire, because I am writing deep and meaningful prose.’
    With some misgivings, we settled down in front of a packed house. The moderator’s first question was to my colleague. ‘So, you write about a police officer. Do you actually spend time with real police officers to find out about their work?’ Next question to me. ‘You’ve written about a psychological profiler. You must have had to do a lot of research to find out how they do the job.’ And to the literary writer? ‘You’re clearly very concerned with language and style. What made you want to experiment with form in this way?’
    And so it continued. Patronizing questions to the crime writers that allowed little or no discussion of our craft or the wider ideas that inform our work. No suggestion that we might be writing something that went beyond the crossword puzzle with the neat resolution. And fawning questions about literature and society to the literary novelist (actually a rather nice man who had the grace to look embarrassed about the whole thing …).
    By the end of the panel, I was inches away from physical assault on the moderator, who was only saved by the Q&A session. The audience at least understood that crime fiction as it is currently practised is light years away from Agatha Christie and Dorothy L. Sayers, and asked the sort of questions a reasonable moderator might have thought of. By the end of the hour, my blood pressure had almost reached normal levels.
    But as usual, just when you think it’s safe to go in the water, something comes up and bites you on the bum. We were whisked away from our tent to the Green Room. As we entered, our festival escort drew in her breath sharply. There, sitting round the central coffee table, was a group that included Stephen Fry, Michael Ignatieff and Steven Berkoff. Clearly, we couldn’t be allowed to contaminate such an intellectual gathering. So with breathtaking chutzpah, she steered the scuzzy crime writers away from the heart of the room to a little table in the corner where we could wait for our fee without tainting the high tone of the gathering.
    Really, I was astonished that we were paid our fee in champagne. Given the flavour of the rest of the morning I fully expected a crate of brown ale.

‘A fly, Sir, may sting a stately horse and make him wince; but one is but an insect, and the other is a horse still.’ Samuel Johnson
William Boyd
    The writer is on leg four of his seven-leg book tour of the USA. He has done New York, Washington DC and Boston and is about to head for Cleveland, Ohio, when he receives the bad news. His latest, ambitious, big novel has received