I have a Twitter account under the name “Bangkok007.” Exhibit A in a future trial to prove my maturity stalled like a glider in a sudden updraft. Every so often I find a notice in my email inbox that someone has decided to ‘follow’ me. As I rarely tweet anything, I wonder why anyone would bother. I suspect there are lists that people choose names from like one of those Sukhumvit Road buffets: olives, imported cheese, bread sticks, mashed carrots, lamb—you get the idea. There’s always room on the plate for a tab of @Bangkok007 as he’s pretty quiet and the name and number looks rather nice between the salad and meat dishes.
Yesterday I received a notice of a new follower David Harry who has written two novels set on S. Padre island which I gather is somewhere in the hurricane path off Texas. One of his titles, The Padre Puzzle, is the top selling book on the island. If every man is an island, then every island needs a writer to record the toiling of the bell. I can’t promise David Harry much by way of “twitter wisdom.” A term that sounds vaguely as if belongs in the same category as military intelligence. Today I received yet another follower who describes herself as an “eBook novelists of historical thrillers & foreign intrigue.” These two new Twitter followers may be the beginning of a trend for Bangkok007, and trend or not are a good enough reason to fulfill my Friday blog commitment.
When a writer decides to set a series of crime fiction on an island (Britain and Australia being exceptions) there is a risk of a local bestseller but one that doesn’t bring in droves off non-islanders to queue at the local bookstore (if one still exists in the readers’ neighborhood). The same kind of problem I faced when determined against all market research to set my fiction in exotic foreign locales such as Thailand, Burma, Vietnam and Cambodia (you start to see an emerging pattern: Bangkok007, exotic locations, no long queues at the bookstore, and not enough imagination to pick an island).
The hardcore reality is that while people love to dream about a holiday on an island with one of those funny red drinks with a tiny bamboo umbrella and staring at the sea, or in visiting different countries with unusual languages, customs, food and elephant polo matches, their armchair interest isn’t necessarily matched with their armchair reading interest in crime fiction.
Crime fiction really has no middle. The body is absent. But it has two long tails. Crime fiction is basically the skinny tail and the fat tail. That makes for a funny looking snake. But there it is. What biology can’t contemplate, capitalism creates out of pure imagination. One end of that tail (the under-nourished, shivered-up end) sells loads of books to the locals who can’t wait to read about each other, places they know, and crimes and lapses of morality that have happened in spitting distance from their old high school. The problem is there are only a handful of locals and most of them borrow books or buy them secondhand. The other end of the tail (where the champagne and Cuban cigars wait) is the bestselling crime fiction authors who continue to mine ore from the old coalfaces in London, Edinburgh, New York, and Los Angeles. Lesser cities trail like vapor from these fast moving city super jets. You almost never find them writing about islands.
There is, however, a wild card. Like a lottery winner who is your neighbor and know longer talks to you. This happens in fiction, too. That parochial crime novel with its local setting and local story ignites an international imagination. It rattles like a freight train with the brakeman dead and the dead man’s throttle malfunctioning. Everything in its path—reviewers, readers, postman, and booksellers—become a series of railway ties on the way to the bank. Read the press and you find how these elements of the book trade spread themselves out on the tracks. They celebrate in a unified voice how glad that this postage stamp of a place has become an irreplaceable part of their literary lives.
Then Alexander McCall Smith comes along with a series set in remote dusty village in southern African village and sells millions of copies. Or Stieg Larsson is buried just as his Swedish crime fiction set in a remote town in Sweden hits like a giant vacuum cleaner, sucking millions of dollars from the pockets of readers around the world. How these writers mutated from skinny tail to fat and rich cat tail remains an evolutionary mystery. They are examples of how the long tail at the extremely profitable end of crime fiction is a creature sprung from the jaws of the quantum uncertainty principle.
If David Deutsch (The Beginning of Infinity, which is not a crime fiction novel) is right, then somewhere in the infinite multiverse you are selling crime fiction as if you were Alexander McCall Smith or Stieg Larsson, and they are selling fiction to audiences like that of David Harry, myself, and a thousand other skinny tailed crime authors. The beautiful thing about David Deutsch’s theory of the multiverse is you don’t have to do the hard work of actually writing that crime fiction novel, you only have to think about writing it and imagine yourself a bestseller, with complimentary fruit baskets and flowers in your hotel suite, groupies hounding you for autographs, and a waiting limo to take you for a guest appearance on the Daily Show. That is already happening to one of your “you’s” in one of the infinite multiverses. The Padre Puzzle has been Number 1 on The New York Times Bestseller list for 638 weeks in one of those places, and so is yours.
Now we’ve established that crime fiction publishing is really about monsters that suddenly appear out of the shoals without warning, raise their heads and sink their teeth into your wallet. Don’t resist. Fork out the fee for being bitten. Read the book. Or at least the 50 first pages. We can relax as writers, readers, reviewers, publishers and the rest of those interested in crime fiction because somewhere in one of the universes, your monster has just washed up on a big shore and is devouring readers like killer whales feeding on shrill.
As a novelist you’ll find your choices are limited to one of two classes: the killer whale or a shrill, depending on which universe you find yourself. Get use to the fact that because you’re a shrill in a huge cloud of fellow shrills fleeing the mouth of a killer whale, and in that other universe invisible at the end of your fingertips you are that killer whale. Take that piece of wisdom and reduce it to 140 characters. And remember Bangkok007 doesn’t ever tweet much about anything and that’s why he continues to attract legions of new followers who are bestsellers somewhere in the multiverse.
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