In other words, it's as if the genre comes complete with an utterly depressing Cheat-formula: you establish a mystery in the first few pages and – just as long as you solve it by the end – you can merrily fill the intervening space with Infectious Unintelligible Arsewipe and still be confident that a lot of your readers will push-on to the final page. It's a shitty setup, and in all-too-many cases it encourages the writer to display a shocking contempt for their audience. 'They don't care… Nor will I.'įor instance: following a good-natured curryhouse disagreement some time ago, about the distinction between atheism and agnosticism (Dansak and Divinity go surprisingly well, for the record) I sent this book to a fellow Comic-Writing chum by way of the Last Word. Sub-retard vocabulary, sudden leaps in perspective even abrupt shifts in tense (as if the narrator's been casually time-travelling and couldn't be arsed to sort it out). What unites this dreary underclass – marked 'Bad But Successful' – is that in each case, fuck-dreadful clichés and all, the reader is dragged on towards the end by nothing more than the desire to Get It Over With. It's often said the engine of a really good story is a hunger to learn 'What Happens Next?', and this is no different… It's just that the reader is desperately hoping what happens next is, well… The End. In one particularly suckgasmic offering I diligently read 3 pages out of every 20, and still felt vaguely satisfied by the conclusion. I didn't appear to've missed anything important. The big problem with this sort of Genre Osmosis is that a lot of best-selling crime novels are, for the record, really badly written.

It's like visiting a tan-booth before going on a sunny vacation: an act of acclimatization so you don't look like an out-of-place Albino. As long as you don't leave it there so long it goes crusty, you're fine. Whodunits, whydunnits, howchatchums all the better to exorcise the lingering tendrils of the various (but uniformly Odd) stuff I'd been working on before. This is the Positive face of being impressionable: dunking the pizzle of Intention into the juicy Meat-sheath of Oeuvre. The idea was to strive for something a little more commercially approachable than my last book, so for a month or so before starting-out I guzzled through a teetering pile of Bestsellers. For instance: this slab of prosey evil I've been squeezing out of my fingertips for the past couple of months is – notionally speaking – a Contemporary Crime novel.

Scepticism Inc by Bo Fowler