In mid-2009 I had the idea to start a blog with crime writers posting weekly essays about crime, politics, corruption, police, courts, crown prosecutors, publishing, and writing. We started out with Matt Rees, Colin Cotterill, Barbara Nadel and myself. Over the years others joined our ranks, including Jim Thompson, Margie Orford, John Lantigua, Matt Rees and Colin Cotterill after many essays moved on. In our most recent reincarnation, our mainstay and the exceptional survivor from 2009 Barbara Nadel has continued to write essays for this website. In addition to Barbara, Quentin Bates, is another of our long term authors who has gone the distance. Barbara, Quentin, along with Jarad Henry, and Susan Moody, are our current team. I’d like to thank each of the current authors and those who wrote for us in the past. Like our readers, I have great admiration for your essays.
2009 seems light years away from the present. The world we started writing about is now a foreign place. Our 2014 world, at least in my part of it, has moved away from support of essential freedoms including free speech. But that is not the reason for saying goodbye. Let me explain why a decision has been made to close International Crime Authors Reality Check.
Writing a weekly essay is relatively easy for most professional writers. That is, for the first few months. Indeed it is exciting and a welcome alternative to writing fiction. Sustaining that excitement for years is more of a challenge. The months turn into years and the weekly demand becomes a burden, interfering with other obligations. It’s easy to get burnt out after a few years of weekly essay writing. This is no doubt why Oxford and Cambridge undergraduates are putting through the weekly essay writing ordeal for three years and then released from those chains with a degree.
Each of us at International Crime Authors Reality check have sought to bring you essays that stimulate, entertain, challenge, provoke, and expand your own world view as well as ours. We are collectively feeling weary from the weekly demand. Some of us are running out of topics and fear repeating ourselves. It is, in other words, time to for all of us to move on.
We are all active novelists and that is a full-time preoccupation. Freeing ourselves from the essay writing will allow us to pay more attention to our research and fiction writing. That is where we make our living. The essays have always been a way of giving back something to our readers in between novels. It has been a way to stay in touch. To let you know how we think about a variety of issues. I believe the website has given each of us a great opportunity to expand the range of our interests and our writing, and to say things that are difficult to work into fiction.
We will leave the website up as an archive to the five and half years of essay writing. We thank our readers for their comments and opinions and for stopping by and reading our latest essays. You are truly special to us. You are the people who buy our books, so we won’t be disappearing anytime soon. You will find us where you’ve always found us—inside the enigma called fiction, sending along our vision of life, crime and society.
Regards,
Christopher